Jacques-Alain Miller

Analysis is nothing but the live experience of desire as it entails a “protest against what the subject undergoes, forever segregated.

The Experience of Desire Here is a book of six hundred pages divided into twenty-four chapters1. The thickness makes it difficult to summarize, especially since all its value lies in the analysis of details. The book—like the others of Lacan’s Seminar—is not a treatise. It does not constitute a statement of a definitive design. It is not a text whose end is contemporary with the beginning. It is a text that needs to be read taking into account its temporal fabric, which is academic. From one lesson to the next there are advances, corrections, and changes of perspective that need to be considered, noted, and signified each time. Also, there are Lacan’s formulas—at times sharp—that appear definitive, and will nevertheless not be repeated by him, either in another Seminar or in writing. It is therefore up to the reader to know each time if what is read is a nugget, a term worth disseminating and developing, or as a sideline—a slip that will be subsequently rectified.

[...]

From this mass of signifiers, I’m going to pull a thread—just one. It is a thread, which is very thin at the beginning of the Seminar. It is lost in a web but, as the process develops, the thread thickens and finally becomes a cord that cannot be ignored. The thread is that of the fantasm.

The Seminar is entitled Desire and its Interpretation. In the beginning it deals with the interpretation of desire but, as the Seminar unfurls, it becomes different. It changes continuously. As seen in the topological figures, it changes shape without tearing. In the end, it delivers a configuration significantly different from its beginning. There is no book like this one, I do not see any one comparable. This book is of a very special kind. This Seminar includes and develops the first logic of the fantasm that Lacan constructed.