ABSTRACT
I was foolish enough to propose to Pauline O’Callaghan—who, as chair of the Scientific Committee of APPI, was kind enough to grant my request—to present Seminar XVIII to you, a seminar that I worked on quite a bit in the 1980s and the early 1990s, but that I hadn’t returned to since then. A published edition having recently appeared (Lacan, 2006c), thanks to the efforts of Jacques-Alain Miller, I figured that proposing to speak about the seminar would force me to reread it a couple of times and formulate a few ideas about it, which is often far more difficult, in my experience, than one might think it should be. This is truer regarding Seminar XVIII than certain others, in part because Lacan was away for a couple of months during the course of it and even apologizes at the very end for the somewhat “truncated” and unsustained character of the work presented in it. 1
