ABSTRACT
Lacan revisits the question of Witz, or jokes, in the first few sessions of Seminar V, The Formations of the Unconscious. Most will remember his long analysis of Heinrich Heine’s joke about the famillionaire—neologising familial, familiar, and millionaire—that Freud had used as the paradigmatic Witz. Moving further and further away from the traditional register of jokes as metaphor and meaning towards their more disruptive function, Lacan looks not only at how the Witz condenses and economises language in uncanny, upsetting ways, but also how jokes reveal the object as diverse and arbitrary, but also potentially dissolvable in language. This investigation into the mechanisms of metaphor and metonymy, furthermore, leads us in two directions important for psychoanalysis: towards a concept of transmission and a concept of cure. Seminar V, stretched between the object relation and the question of desire and its interpretation, read closely, provides a surprising look at some of the most supposedly famillionaire concepts in Lacan.
