1

Nottingham French Studies 53.1 (2014): 118

DOI: 10.3366/nfs.2014.0069
# University of Nottingham
www.euppublishing.com/nfs

LACAN WITH BECKETT*

SUZANNE DOW
Prepared for publication by Edmund Chambers
I.
My aim in this paper is something very modest: to say something of what Jacques
Lacan has to say about Samuel Beckett. This should, by rights, make for a very
short paper, since Lacan in fact says, to borrow from the title of Simon Critchleys
well-known book, Very Little . . . Almost Nothing about Samuel Beckett.1
Certainly he says very little compared to what he says about Shakespeare, Paul
Claudel, Andre Gide, Marguerite Duras or Edgar Allan Poe, and he says almost
nothing at all compared to what he says, more pertinently to this paper, about
James Joyce.
The idea for this paper came from my disappointment at not finding Becketts
name on the contents page of an edited volume, published in 2006, entitled
Lacan: The Silent Partners.2 It seemed to me that this was something of a missed
opportunity on the part of the editor, Zizek, since the book was an attempt to set
up some pairings between Lacan and other thinkers and writers beyond the usual
suspects of Freud, Hegel and Joyce. And so what I want to say today, very simply,
is that Becketts name does in fact belong on the list of Lacans silent partners in
much the same way as he might also be thought of as a silent partner of Joyce.
But this latter silent partnership between Joyce and Beckett is less the one a
biographer might reference (Beckett as Joyces apocryphal amanuensis during the

1.
2.

This article constitutes the text of a paper given by Suzanne Dow on 4 June 2010 at
Regents Park College, Oxford, as part of the University of Oxford/University of
Northampton Samuel Beckett: Debts and Legacies seminar series. The paper and the
discussion that followed are available in audio format on the Backdoor Broadcasting
website at < http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2010/06/suzanne-dow-lacan-with-beckett/ >
[accessed 7 November 2013]. It appears here by kind permission of Maureen Dow and
the seminar organizers, John Bolin, Matthew Feldman and Erik Tonning. As the
quotations from Lacans writings and seminars in this paper differ from the existing
published English translations of the texts in question, all translations from the original
French quoted herein are presumed to be Suzanne Dows own. The original French
quotations and references for Dows sources have been included in the footnotes.
Simon Critchley, Very Little . . . Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature (London:
Routledge, 1997).
Lacan: The Silent Partners, ed. by Slavoj Zizek (London: Verso, 2006), pp. vvi.

SUZANNE DOW

period of research for Finnegans Wake)3 than that suggested by the difference
between the loquaciousness of the Joycean textual economy and the minimalism
of Beckett, of which we know Beckett himself to have spoken as the difference
between addition and subtraction, omniscience and ignorance, omnipotence and
impotence. It is that most ostensible difference between the Wake and Worstward
Ho, say: the one, according to Beckett, that we have only to look at their proofs to
see. I have in mind two quotations. The first is this:
With Joyce the difference is that Joyce is a superb manipulator of material
perhaps the greatest. He was making the words do an absolute maximum of work.
[. . .] The kind of work I do is one in which Im not master of my own material. The
more Joyce knew the more he could. Hes tending towards omniscience and
omnipotence as an artist. Im working with impotence, ignorance. I dont think
impotence has been exploited in the past.4

The second is from a well-known interview with James Knowlson:

I realized that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more,
[being] in control of ones material. He was always adding to it; youve only to look
at his proofs to see that. I realised that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack
of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than in adding.5

Before I say anything specifically about what Lacan says on Beckett, I want
first to provide some context for these admittedly scanty remarks by saying
something of the place literature holds within Lacans teaching more broadly
and of the unique place he accords to James Joyce within it. Although this is
arguably something he himself does not always achieve, Lacan certainly strives
not to instrumentalize the literary text by using it simply to illustrate extant
psychoanalytic concepts, but rather to position literature as the repository of a
knowledge that psychoanalysis currently lacks and of which it can make use in its
own practice that is, in the clinical setting. Lacan is highly critical, for example,
of Freuds discussions of art wherever they serve a purely expository function.
Those of Freuds readings of literature of which Lacan approves are always
those that generate new psychoanalytic knowledge rather than confirming already
well-mapped clinical concepts and structures. Lacan is also extremely scathing
about the kind of psychoanalytic literary criticism that indulges in crude
psychobiography, that treats fictional characters and all their authors as real
3.
4.

5.

James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, 2nd edn (London:
Bloomsbury, 1997), p. 98.
Samuel Beckett, interview with Israel Shenker 5 May 1956, in Samuel Beckett: The
Critical Heritage, ed. by Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman (London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1979), pp. 1469 (p. 148).
Interview dated 27 October 1989, in Knowlson, Damned to Fame, p. 352.

LACAN

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BECKETT

people: that is, as analysands on the proverbial couch. And so if he does say very
clearly that commenting on a text is like doing an analysis in Seminar I,6 he also
says just as clearly in his 1958 essay on Gide that psychoanalysis, in the proper
sense of the term, can only be applied as a treatment, and thus to a subject who
speaks and hears.7 We do not, then, psychoanalyse a text, much less its author
through the text. Rather, Lacans comparison of the act of reading literature to that
of doing an analysis should be understood in the very precise sense that the
analysand, rather than the analyst and here Freuds hysterical female patients of
the late nineteenth century are the paradigmatic examples is herself always
positioned as a source of knowledge from whom the analyst can and must learn.
Lacans most explicit pronouncement on the relationship between
psychoanalysis and literature dates from 1971. In a piece entitled Lituraterre,
which is a written-up version of a session from his eighteenth seminar, referring
back to his treatments of literature contained within the 1966 Ecrits, Lacan makes
an unambiguous denunciation of what the academy would generally understand
psychoanalytic criticism to be, referring to it as this literary smoochy-woochy
with which the psychoanalyst who is short of ingenuity denotes himself.8
He goes on to refer specifically to his 1956 seminar on Edgar Allan Poe which
we will also be returning to by clarifying his purpose there and in his treatments
of literature more generally:
My criticism, if it gives grounds for being called literary, could only bear, I try my
hand at it, upon what Poe is doing as a writer in formulating a message about the
letter. It is clear that in not saying it as such, it is not insufficiently, but rather all
the more rigorously that he avows it. Nevertheless, the elision could in no way be
elucidated through some feature of his psychobiography [. . .]. Its certain that, as
usual, psychoanalysis is here in receipt from literature, albeit taking within its own
jurisdiction a less psychobiographical idea of repression. For myself, if I offer
psychoanalysis the letter as somehow undelivered [en souffrance], it is because
this is where it reveals its failings. And that is how I enlighten it [that is,
psychoanalysis]. If I thus invoke the Enlightenment, it is to show up where
[psychoanalysis] forms a hole.9

6.

7.

8.
9.

Commenter un texte, cest comme faire une analyse. Jacques Lacan, Le Seminaire
livre I: Les ecrits techniques de Freud, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Editions du
Seuil, 1975), p. 87.
La psychanalyse ne sapplique, au sens propre, que comme traitement, et donc a` un sujet
qui parle et qui entende. Jacques Lacan, Jeunesse de Gide ou la lettre et le desir, in
Ecrits, 2 vols (Editions du Seuil: 1966; repr. 1999), II, pp. 21742 (p. 226).
[Ce] frotti-frotta litteraire dont se denote le psychanalyste en mal dinvention. Jacques
Lacan, Lituraterre, Litterature, 3 (1971), 310 (p. 4).
Ma critique, si elle a lieu detre tenue pour litteraire, ne saurait porter, je my essaie, que
sur ce que Poe fait detre ecrivain a` former un tel message sur la lettre. Il est clair qua` ny
pas le dire tel quel, ce nest pas insuffisamment, cest dautant plus rigoureusement quil
lavoue. Neanmoins lelision nen saurait etre elucidee au moyen de quelque trait de sa

SUZANNE DOW

In other words, at its worst, psychoanalytic literary criticism merely seeks to

explain or explain away the literary text, with recourse to psychoanalytically
informed biographism. At its best, it is psychoanalysis, rather than literature, that
always stands to gain. Literature and literary authors, like Freuds hysterics, know
something that the analyst does not yet, and it is psychoanalysis that needs
literature and men and women of letters and not the other way around.
Furthermore, if the literary is always identified by Lacan as a site of knowledge, it
is a knowledge more precisely about the letter as an area in which psychoanalysis
often comes up short.
In more ways than one, it is the Joycean text, and James Joyce himself, that
is the clearest example of this. Lacan first met Joyce in person in 1921 at the age
of seventeen and attended the first public reading of Ulysses.10 This reading
gave rise to a lifelong fascination with Joyce and Joyce scholarship under the
Mephistophelean tutelage of Jacques Aubert, who fed Lacan with new works
of Joyce criticism and encouraged him to speak publicly on the subject.11
The first published trace of this enduring fascination occurs, however, in the
aforementioned 1956 seminar on the Edgar Allan Poe short story The Purloined
Letter, which opens the Ecrits. Lacans allusion to Joyce is here no more than a
passing one to the pun from Finnegans Wake The letter! The litter! And the
soother the bitther!12 Lacan here cites the first half of the pun only in the
following terms: A letter, a litter. Theres been some equivocation within Joyces
circle on the homophony of these two words in English.13 Following which we
find a misspelt footnote to the 1929 Shakespeare & Co. edition of Our
Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress,14 in
which there appears the Litter to Mr. Joyce by one Vladimir Dixon, to which
Lacan here refers.15 So it is possible, but by no means certain, that Lacan had read
something of Becketts obviously his Dante. . . Bruno. Vico.. Joyce by 1956,

10.
11.
12.
13.

14.
15.

psychobiographie [. . .]. Il est certain que, comme dordinaire, la psychanalyse ici recoit,
de la litterature, si elle en prend du refoulement dans son ressort une idee moins
psychobiographique. Pour moi si je propose a` la psychanalyse la lettre comme en
souffrance, cest quelle y montre son echec. Et cest par la` que je leclaire: quand
jinvoque ainsi les lumie`res, cest de demontrer ou` elle fait trou. Lacan, Lituraterre, p. 4.
Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan (Paris: Fayard, 1993), p. 31.
Ibid., p. 479.
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake [1939] (London: Penguin Books, 2000), p. 93.
A letter, a litter, une lettre, une ordure. On a equivoque dans le cenacle de Joyce sur
lhomophonie de ces deux mots en anglais. Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire sur La Lettre
volee , in Ecrits, I, pp. 1161 (pp. 256).
Ibid., p. 26.
Vladimir Dixon, A Litter to Mr. James Joyce, in Our Exagmination Round His
Factification For Incamination of Work in Progress, ed. by Samuel Beckett and others
(London: Faber and Faber, 1929), pp. 1934.

LACAN

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BECKETT

albeit something by his hand about Joyce.16 And at this early stage in Lacans
career what interests him about Joyce is the equivocation between the two English
words, letter and litter, in which Lacan finds a particularly succinct rendering of a
knowledge about the letter that he also gleans from Poe.
This story, The Purloined Letter, is the tale of a piece of written
correspondence addressed to a queen that goes missing and which it falls to a
hapless detective, Dupin, to retrieve before it falls into the wrong hands. In the
story the content of the letter is never revealed; we know only as readers that it is
in some way compromising for the queen.17 Part of Lacans point in his reading is
that it is in no way necessary to sustain the dramatic tension for Poes readers to
know what the letter says and yet this inscrutable letter makes its rounds,
animating the characters and their relationships one to another. In this way Poe
formulates a message about the letter, Lacan says, and that message is of course
this: A letter always arrives at its destination.18 In other words, Poes The
Purloined Letter takes its course within the textual world much as the inscription
within the unconscious does, as a written and yet to the subject illegible trace
which animates her and shapes her path. I do not need to know what the letter
says for it to be furnishing structure. It will do so nonetheless as surely as a stamp
guarantees passage to the relevant address, albeit often taking its time.
And so when Lacan cites Joyce in 1956, it is to underscore the fact that this
letter which at one point in Poes story is tossed into the wastepaper basket is
mute, empty, yields nothing, but that it takes on value within the Symbolic order
of exchange by virtue of its absence therefrom as an object of knowledge (rather
like Lacan says, the book that is missing from the library shelf).19 So it is in this
sense that Poes The Purloined Letter is a sort of litter, a throwaway scrap, that
paradoxically governs the textual world from its subordinate position where its
content barely appears to count and yet accounts for everything by not actually
appearing. It is this that Joyce also appears to acknowledge in his equivocation:
A letter, a litter. If Poes text and Joyces pun can provide psychoanalysis with
some knowledge about the letter, it is, in the most general of terms, that the
unconscious is structured like a language insofar as it is a receptacle, rather like a
dustbin, for the letters as litter about which the subject herself knows nothing but
which nonetheless animate her existence through the symptom. This is why the
symptom is often figured by Lacan as a kind of envelope in which a letter is
enclosed. At this stage in Lacans teaching he considers the symptom as an

16. Samuel Beckett, Dante. . . Bruno. Vico.. Joyce, in Our Exagmination, pp. 122.
17. Edgar Allan Poe, The Purloined Letter, in Selected Tales, ed. by David Van Leer
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 24965.
18. [Une] lettre arrive toujours a` destination, Lacan, Ecrits I, p. 41.
19. Lacan, Ecrits I, p. 25.

SUZANNE DOW

unconscious formation along Freudian lines as a message to be read, a message

addressed to the Other, where the subject speaks through her body.
But if Joyce makes a cameo appearance in this Poe seminar, it is not until the
early seventies that Lacans mining of the Joycean text really gets going,
beginning in Seminar XVIII and reaching its apogee in Seminar XXIII, entirely
devoted to Joyce, entitled Le Sinthome, although allusions are also made to him in
the intervening years and continue thereafter. In Seminar XVIII of 1971, in the
session that became the published text Lituraterre, where Beckett appears, Joyce
is evoked in terms that conform to the way in which Lacan generally treats
the literary namely as a kind of analysand who knows something the analyst
does not yet know about the letter but with a crucial twist: Lacan here
recalls the fact that Joyce was once offered an analysis by some nameless
well-wisher and with Jung to boot as one might offer a shower.20 Joyce
passed up the offer and rightly so, in Lacans view, since he would have gained
nothing from this little game of ours, going straight to the best that one can expect
from psychoanalysis at its end.21
In his engagement with Joyce at this point, then, what intrigues Lacan is the
way in which Joyce manages through writing to create something that enables
him to circumvent the analytic process. That something is first identified in his
writing as a kind of jouissance associated with the symptom but which bypasses
the creation of meaning that is, sens and this is a kind of jouissance that
Lacan will go on to term term jouis-sens or enjoy-meant, as it is often
translated.22
Indeed Joyces achievement initiates a new phase in Lacans teaching
regarding in what exactly the end of analysis might consist. This shift is, broadly
speaking, away from the end of analysis as a sort of cure towards pragmatism, and
is to be understood in the context of Freuds trajectory in his thinking of the
symptom. By the end of his career, Freud had reached the conclusion, following
the failure of so many analyses successfully to liquidate analysands symptoms,
that psychoanalysis may need to be a lifelong process. This is the theory advanced
in his Analysis Terminable and Interminable, of course.23 Lacan, for his part,

20. On se souvient quune messe-haine a` lui vouloir du bien, lui offrait une
psychanalyse, comme on ferait dune douche. Et de Jung encore . . . Lacan, Lituraterre,
p. 3.
21. Au jeu que nous evoquons, il ny eut rien gagne, y allant tout droit au mieux de ce quon
peut attendre de la psychanalyse a` sa fin. Lacan, Lituraterre, p. 3.
22. See Jacques Lacan, Television, in Autres ecrits (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2001),
pp. 50945.
23. Sigmund Freud, Analysis Terminable and Interminable, in The Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXIII (193739): Moses and Monotheism, An Outline
of Psychoanalysis and Other Works, transl. by James Strachey in collaboration with

LACAN

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BECKETT

becomes in one sense more optimistic than Freud; in another, still less so. If Freud
had suggested that analysis was in some way interminable, then perhaps it was
rather this endpoint itself that required rethinking. What Lacan finds in Joyces
writing is precisely something that functions like a neurotic symptom but which is
not a symptom at least as Freud had understood it insofar firstly as it does not
seem to be a cause of suffering for Joyce but rather of enjoyment, and, secondly,
as the Joycean sinthome is precisely not meant to be read, as it is in some sense
unreadable (and, in that sense, not a message to the Other). He thus positions
the writing of James Joyce, a latent psychotic, as yielding new knowledge on
the neurotic symptom which leads Lacan no longer to consider it as in any
straightforward sense pathological and which should be entirely eradicated
through the interpretation of its message in analytic treatment,24 but rather, as
clinician Veronique Voruz succinctly puts it, structural [. . .], a necessary residue
of the very fact that we speak.25
In short, with the encounter with Joyces writing comes, for Lacan, the
possibility of transforming the symptom into something positive, which will
give Lacan in time a new formulation for the end of analysis: namely not the
liquidation of the symptom but a kind of know-how (savoir-faire) on making do
(savoir-y-faire) with the symptom, and even the identification therewith. It is
now, following the encounter with Joyce, that Lacans consideration of literature
sees a shift away from literary creativity as sublimation (as he had previously
theorized it in the late fifties in Seminar VII)26 towards literature as symptom.
Here, by symptom, Lacan no longer understands a ciphered message addressed
to the Other but rather, according to a new definition thereof given in Seminar
XXII, the way in which each subject enjoys his unconscious insofar as it
determines him.27 Moreover, what Lacan calls Joyces sinthome, according to an
archaic orthography of symptome, is of the order of what he calls the not that,
understood according to the collocation anything, but not that.28 So the sinthome
is that which is most intimate, most precious to the subject, and upon which she

24.
25.

26.
27.

28.

Anna Freud (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1964),
pp. 21653.
Jacques Lacan, Le Seminaire livre XXIII: Le sinthome, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris:
Editions du Seuil, 2005).
Veronique Voruz, Acephallic Letter as a Phallic Letter, in Re-Inventing the Symptom:
Essays on the Final Lacan, ed. by Luke Thurston (New York: Other Press, 2002),
pp. 11140 (p. 116).
Jacques Lacan, Le Seminaire livre VII: Lethique de la psychanalyse, ed. by
Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1986).
Je definis le symptome par la facon dont chacun jouit de linconscient en tant que
linconscient le determine. Jacques Lacan, Le Seminaire livre XXII: R.S.I. (Seminaires
du 11 et du 18 fevrier 1975), Ornicar?, 4 (1975), 91106 (p. 106).
[C]elle du mais pas ca, comme on dit tout, mais pas ca. Lacan, Seminaire XXIII, p. 14.

SUZANNE DOW

will not yield for anything. Something with which she most closely identifies as
testifying to the mode of enjoyment proper to her, that is, to her singularity.
II.
Given all of this, it is striking that although Lacan says nowhere near as much
about Samuel Beckett as he does about any of the writers thus far mentioned,
particularly Joyce, both of the two brief mentions Lacan does make of Beckett
occur in the run-up to and concurrently with his early engagement with Joyce, and
specifically in contexts where Lacan is attempting to think through the question
of in what psychoanalysis consists, and particularly its end point. It is also
noteworthy, I think, that whilst Lacans allusions to Beckett in one sense conform
to his tendency to identify creative writers as possessing a knowledge that either
coincides with or can advance that of psychoanalysis, there is one exceptional
feature of the Beckett references. Here, rhetorically at least, Lacan positions the
Beckettian text as a site of knowledge but with Lacan himself, rather than
Beckett, on the side of the analysand.
The first time Lacan namechecks Beckett is 13 November 1968 in the
opening session to Seminar XVI, entitled From an Other to an other, and it really
is no more than a passing allusion. Lacan has just announced the theme for the
years work as a theorization of psychoanalysis as discourse (that is, as social
link) and the political consequences attaching to the emergence of psychoanalysis
both at the precise historical juncture at which Freud first made his discoveries
(after Hegel) and in the contemporary period (in the late sixties, just after the
events of May 1968).29 Lacan opens by writing a succinct definition of
psychoanalytic discourse on the board: The essence of psychoanalytic theory is a
discourse without speech [parole].30 He then goes on to make a brief
acknowledgement of Francois Wahl, the editor of Lacans recently-published
Ecrits, for having both put these writings of Lacan into circulation along with
those contemporaries known at the time as structuralists and for having secured a
new venue for his seminar. Lacan refers to Wahl here tongue-in-cheek as a
publiciste and goes on to say that being lumped, or rather dumped, in with these
fellow structuralists is perhaps no bad thing:
Ive just spoken of a publiciste [publicist]. Everyone knows the wordplay Ive
indulged in around poubellication. [Poubelle is the French for dustbin.
Publication: poubellication.] And so here we all are in the same dustbin by
whose grace we have our weekly service. Theres worse company to be in. In truth,
those with whom I find myself conjoined here being only people whose work I hold

29. Jacques Lacan, Le Seminaire livre XVI: Dun Autre a` lautre, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller
(Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2006), p. 11.
30. Lessence de la theorie psychanalytique est un discours sans parole. Lacan, Seminaire
XVI, p. 11.

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in the highest esteem, I cannot consider myself badly off. As for the dustbin
[poubelle], in these times dominated by the genius of Samuel Beckett we know a bit
about that. Personally, having inhabited three psychoanalytic societies over the last
thirty years, in three stints of fifteen, ten and five years, I know a bit about what it is
to cohabit with household waste.31

These well-known puns to which Lacan here refers on the near-homophony in

French between publication and poubellication (publishing as rubbishing,
we might say) are the kind of humorous throwaway remarks no pun intended
by which Lacan often betrays a little Joycean anxiety as to the longevity
of his work: whether his Ecrits would merely be consigned to the dustbin of
psychoanalytic history or whether they would succeed in doing anything. This
anxiety is all the more clear here for the fact that Beckett is evoked in terms that
reference his recent consecration by the Nobel Prize committee. If the times are
ones dominated by the genius of Samuel Beckett, it is presumably because the
announcement of his having been awarded the Nobel Prize for the year 1969 had
just been made the month before.32 If Becketts name crops up here, it is perhaps
in part because he is a writer whose star has definitively risen from disciple
status as a member of Joyces circle whilst similar recognition for Lacans
work, relative to Freuds, still eludes him. These puns on poubellication, however,
also no doubt owe a little something to Joyces equivocation between letter and
litter in the Wake and thus evoke a theoretical question that is becoming
increasingly insistent in Lacans teaching of this time: namely that of the doing of
analysis as clinical practice, and particularly of what an analysis purports to be
able to do at its end with regards to the poubelle of the unconscious and the
symptom as message.
In the seminar of the previous year, Seminar XV, Lacan had offered his first
theorization of the end of analysis, from which he borrows the terms of his
reference to Beckett as someone who knows a little something about the poubelle.
In Seminar XV, Lacan sets down his understanding of the point at which someone
enters analysis as an entry into the transferential relation of analysand to analyst,

31. Je viens de parler dun publiciste. Chacun sait les jeux de mots que je me suis permis
autour de la poubellication. Nous voila` donc un certain nombre reunis dans la meme
poubelle de par la grace de qui cest loffice. On pourrait avoir plus desagreable
` la verite, ceux avec qui je my trouve conjoint netant que des gens pour le
compagnie. A
travail desquels jai la plus grande estime, je ne saurais men trouver mal. Pour ce qui est
de la poubelle, en ce temps domine par le genie de Samuel Beckett nous en connaissons
un bout. Personnellement, pour avoir habite dans trois societes psychanalytiques depuis
aujourdhui quelque trente ans, en trois sections de quinze, dix et cinq ans, jen connais
un bout sur ce quil en est de cohabiter avec les ordures menage`res. Lacan, Seminaire
XVI, p. 11.
32. Knowlson, Damned to Fame, p. 570.

10

SUZANNE DOW

where the analyst is cast in the role of the subject supposed to know something
about the symptoms of which the analysand complains, and who is apt to make it
all better, as it were. If the analysis aims at the production of truth, however, it is
not one of which the analyst is the repository and which he dispenses to the
analysand as might a master to a disciple. Rather, Lacan formulates the end of
analysis here as predicated upon the dissolution of this transferential relation of
analysand to analyst, in terms that amount to the liquidation, or rather elimination,
of the analyst as she or he who knows.
And so at this stage in Lacans teaching, analysis aims at disinterring the
residue, remains or leftovers that animate the subject via the symptom, and it does
so by deposing, or eliminating, the subject supposed to know. This elimination,
moreover, is to be understood quite literally, for Lacan describes the process of
analysis as one of the production of dechets (litters) in the interest of what we
might think of as the trashing of the subject supposed to know. In other words,
as Lacan goes on to put it somewhat less decorously still, the end of analysis is
marked by the analysands rejection of the analyst as a turd.33
From this we can glean that when Lacan evokes Beckett in the opening session
to Seminar XVI as someone who has something to teach us about the poubelle, he
is following his tendency to situate literary authors as being in possession of
a knowledge that either coincides with or advances that of psychoanalysis but
that is also rhetorically positioning Beckett as a kind of subject supposed to
know rather as the analysand does the analyst at the start of analysis. He goes
on to do something fairly similar a little over three years later, this time
incorporating a good deal of his teaching over the intervening period, not simply
on analysis as clinical practice but also as social link: that is, as he writes it here in
Seminar XVI, as a discourse without speech.34
This second occasion where Beckett gets a mention is 12 May 1971 in
Seminar XVIII entitled Of a Discourse that Would Not be of Semblance, in a
session that would be published in written form as the text that I have already
mentioned, Lituraterre. It is mainly to the written version that I will refer here.
The context is, once again, a discussion of psychoanalysis as discourse, of the
status of the letter and of James Joyce. Lacan opens by justifying the eponymous
neologism Lituraterre with reference firstly to the Joycean equivocation from
Finnegans Wake and, secondly, a little recreational etymology: The word
[lituraterre] owes its legitimacy to the Ernout and Meillet: lino, litura,
liturarius.35 Dany Nobus has followed up Lacans references to the French
33. [Comme] une merde. Jacques Lacan, Seminaire XV: Lacte psychanalytique
(Unpublished manuscript, 196768).
34. Lacan, Le Seminaire livre XVI, p. 11.
35. Ce mot se legitime de lErnout et Meillet: lino, litura, liturarius. Lacan, Lituraterre,
p. 3.

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etymological dictionary of Latin whose authors, Ernout and Meillet, inform us

that, as Lacan himself acknowledges more explicitly in the seminar than in the
published text, the association of letters and litters is a witticism of Joyces and
Lacans entirely devoid of etymological justification. The Latin littera which
gives us both the French litterature and the English literature refers to a letter of
the alphabet, a written character, all kinds of written work, literature, culture and
instruction. Lino and litum, on the other hand, mean respectively to coat and a
coating, which produce in turn subsidiary meanings of deletion, correction,
erasure and spot or stain. The last word that Lacan invites us to look up,
liturarius, means that which shows deletions, which is homophonic with
litorarius, meaning shore or coast, and it gives us the French littoral, which
means coast.36
Lacan says quite clearly in Seminar XVIII that he could not care less that
letters and litters have, historically speaking, nothing to do with one another.
What interests him is rather the slippage that Joyce makes between the two that
can occur in speech through their near-homophony in English and that, in turn,
between that which shows deletions and shoreline in Latin that provides him
with a pun of his own. What interests Lacan here is thus what Joyce is doing when
he makes that pun in Finnegans Wake just as what interested him about Poe
back in 1956 was what Poe was doing as a writer in formulating such a message
about the letter. Now that doing in Joyces case is something Lacan here terms
faire litie`re la lettre literally, to make a litter of the letter and goes on
rhetorically and somewhat obscurely to wonder whether that is something Joyce
owes to Thomas Aquinas.37 The French expression faire litie`re la lettre is rather
ambiguous. Translatable as to litter or to make litter of, it is often taken in
readings of this piece to mean simply to reduce to nothing. But since litie`re can
mean both litter, in the sense of that which lines a cats litter box or a stable, for
example, and, in its archaic usage, a portable bed rather like a sedan chair, the
phrase faire litie`re de connotes a use of the letter that makes of it something one
might just as well sit or lie on as shit on. The Aquinas reference, meanwhile,
alludes to Aquinas famously having given up writing following some sort of
vision, at which point he wrote in a letter to his secretary: All my words are like
chaff to me compared to what I have seen.38
Lacan is here playing on a possible misconstruction of his meaning that
Joyces pun [fait] litie`re la lettre, in the sense of its having straightforwardly
reduced the letter to litter, or following his own gleanings from the etymological

36. See Dany Nobus, Illiterature, in Thurston (ed.), Re-Inventing the Symptom, pp. 1944.
37. Lacan, Lituraterre, p. 3.
38. Thomas Aquinas, as referenced by Nobus, Illiterature, p. 39.

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dictionary, reduced littera written character, culture, instruction to

lino spot, stain thereby making of his own lettering a kind of erasure or
deletion; a writing out that amounts to a whiting out, if you like, or indeed
publishing qua rubbishing of the unconscious as a poubelle. In other words,
Lacan is here framing the question that he will not answer for another four years
as to how Joyce manages through his use of the letter, taking support from it as
one might from the second sense of litie`re to achieve something that
psychoanalytic practice also aims at: namely to trash or erase the letters in the
unconscious enveloped within the symptom.
Lacan next alludes to a lecture, the text of which has been lost, given during
the events of May 1968 in Bordeaux, in which he had said, according to his own
summary of it in rather Beckettian terms Civilization is the gutter.39 As if to
account for the provocation, he goes on in the following terms to evoke Beckett
for the second and last time:
I should probably say that I was then weary of the dustbin [poubelle] to which Ive
riven my fate. We know that Im not the only one to, as split [pour partage], admit
as much. To admit [avouer] or, pronounced according to the old convention, to have
[avoir], of which Beckett fashions a scale for the have to [doit] that trashes our
being, saves the honour of literature and relieves me of the privilege that I
apparently believe to hold my place.40

Textually speaking, there is a great deal going on here indeed, there is

something of the unreadable about it but in the most general of terms, Lacan
here brings together his theoretical work of the previous three or four years. In
saying Civilization is the gutter, Lacan reduces civilization to that which fails to
contain litter, waste, that which belongs in the bin. Such a statement references
what he had theorized in Seminar XVII of the previous year as the discourse of the
master,41 which is identified with that of the unconscious. This discourse of the
master here is framed as a discourse with speech, in the sense that it functions
by the superegoic imperative vocal command that is the effect of the entry into
speech, or what Lacan calls the master signifier S1. It is the one that functions
by the kind of do this, do that; the discourse that functions through the creation
of symptoms. In articulating this as such, Lacan also performatively evokes

39. La civilisation, y rappelai-je en premisse, cest legout. Lacan, Lituraterre, p. 3.

40. Il faut dire sans doute que jetais las de la poubelle a` laquelle jai rive mon sort. On sait
que je ne suis pas seul a`, pour partage, lavouer. Lavouer ou, prononce a` lancienne,
lavoir dont Beckett fait balance au doit qui fait dechet de notre etre, sauve lhonneur de
la litterature, et me rele`ve du privile`ge que je croirais tenir de ma place (ibid.).
41. Jacques Lacan, Le Seminaire livre XVII: Lenvers de la psychanalyse, ed. by JacquesAlain Miller (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1991).

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psychoanalysis itself as the discourse that emerges at a particular historical

juncture as the other side, or mirror image, of the master discourse.42
Following this, Lacan goes on to say that, in so saying, he was weary of the
poubelle to which he had riven his fate rhetorically to mimic the discourse of the
analysand, who enters into analysis by articulating a complaint to an analyst, thus
constituting the symptom as symptom through what is known as the demand for
analysis as in: This or that is not going too well for me. Why? Help! Indeed,
as Lacan himself then says, he would be neither the first nor the last to admit as
much that is, being weary, tired of his own shit or, following the archaic
meaning of the French verb avouer, namely to recognize or acknowledge as ones
lord and master, to be as a slave to ones unconscious, thereby becoming split a
split subject (the original French partage means divide or split).
In that next paragraph, Lacan makes a Joycean equivocation of his own
between the verb avouer to admit or confess to and, in its archaic
pronunciation avoir to have a having of which Beckett makes a weighing
scale in which to get the measure, as it were, of the doit, or have to, that lays
waste to our being. Here Lacan evokes once again the discourse of the analyst,
casting Becketts writing as a site where having is put to work as a counterweight
to the very same kind of speech (parole) evoked back in Seminar XVI that
characterizes the masters discourse as nothing more than the work of the
unconscious and which instantiates the subjects fading beneath the master
signifier S1 that stands in for him.
Lastly, Lacan suggests that in so doing, Beckett saves the honour of literature
and relieves Lacan of the task, or, following the second interpretation, relieves
him as split subject of the privilege that is, primary or master signifier just as
psychoanalysis as clinical practice at least in this stage in his teaching seeks
to do at its end. Now this last surprising claim, Beckett saves the honour of
literature, must be understood in light of some of Lacans closing remarks in the
seminar of the previous year where he appears to lament the shamelessness of
contemporary civilization and insists that psychoanalysis as clinical practice has a
role to play in bringing back shame in the interest of upholding the notion of
honour. This apparently scandalously reactionary remark, far from being a
straightforward endorsement of the kind of shame one might experience upon
being caught in the act of some affront to good morals, however, alludes to a shift
in contemporary civilization as Lacan sees it (the seminar in question being given
in the aftermath of the events of May 1968) whereby the gaze of the Other which
might confer shame upon the subject is being eclipsed. What this means for Lacan
42. Transcribers note: at this point in her presentation Dow displays the two diagrams with
which Lacan represents these discourses. Diagrams for all four of Lacans discourses can
be found on the first page of the second session of the seminar (Lacan, Seminaire VII,
p. 31): the masters discourse is marked M, while the analysts discourse is marked A.

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is that these are times when the master signifier S1 is no longer being
acknowledged as the subjects lord and master, where the subject no longer
believes herself to be a split subject represented by the master signifier as that
which occupies, holds, or secures her place within speech. Consequently, the
contemporary subject is one who seldom dies of shame, as he says in the
opening to the session, to the extent that she no longer conceives of her life as in
thrall to a master as an index of its value, thus depriving her of the kind of noble
cause for which such a death might appear necessary, in defence of honour.43
Jacques-Alain Miller has articulated the problem that this cultural shift poses for
the contemporary psychoanalytic clinic as follows: It is no doubt a question, in
The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, of separating the subject from its master
signifier in the analytic operation. But this assumes that he knows he has one, and
that he respects it.44
Thus in suggesting that Beckett has saved the honour of literature, Lacan
positions his writing practice as a kind of doing that is like the doing of an
analysis, insofar as this latter discourse without speech seeks to separate the
subject from his or her master signifier: that is, the oppressive, imperative or vocal
command that governs her. So Becketts writing, according to Lacan, is on the
side of the discourse of the analyst as counterweight to that of the master, to the
extent that this writing emulates the analytic process by which the subject is
relieved of his or her master signifier having first acknowledged, of course, that
she has one, and having respect for it.
Beckett is someone for whom the practice of writing testifies to the singularity
of the subject, insofar as that subject is determined by his unconscious through the
master signifier. Beckett is, in other words, using the letter, even as he might
appear to be shitting all over it at times, reducing littera to lino, rather like an
analyst does in occupying the position of the objet a in the clinic (that is, the
position of the turd). This is quite a different claim, then, to the one Lacan
makes both of other literary authors and of Joyce. If Beckett is a kind of silent
partner to Lacan, it is not just in the most obvious sense that Beckett is someone
who is somehow important to Lacan, but about whom he says very
little . . . almost nothing compared to Joyce. Beckett is Lacans silent partner in
the more specific sense that he functions in the period 196871 as a figure aligned
with psychoanalytic discourse as a discourse without speech that is, the
obverse of the discourse of the master and this is all the more significant for the
fact that these references occur in the run-up to Lacans clinical revision of what

43. Lacan, Le pouvoir des impossibles, in Seminaire XVII, pp. 20923.

44. Jacques-Alain Miller, On Shame, in Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of
Psychoanalysis: Reflections on Seminar XVII, ed. by Justin Clemens and Russell Grigg
(London: Duke University Press, 2006), pp. 1128 (p. 21).

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the discourse of analysis should be aiming at (a revision that will take place, of
course, through his engagement with Joyce, not Beckett).
III.
Of course, it would be easy to overplay the silent partnership between Lacan and
Beckett and it is undeniably Joyce that plays the pivotal role in Lacans teaching.
Nonetheless, it does seem significant that Lacan positions Beckett in his very
minimal engagement with him as a writer who knows something not so much that
the analyst does not yet, as is more usual with his treatments of literary authors,
but rather that the contemporary subject does not. And it is this absent knowledge
on the part of the contemporary subject, moreover, that appears to render an
analysis redundant, whilst for Joyce, according to Lacan, it actually was.
One thing we might say about Lacans minimal engagement with Beckett is
that it identifies his writing practice as an act, in the ethico-political sense, of
psychoanalytic practice itself, as Lacan comes to theorize it over this period.
Here, it is not so much reading the Beckettian text, as more usually for Lacan, that
is like doing an analysis, but rather writing it, and where Beckett himself is on the
side of the analyst in a transferential relation that aims to relieve the subject of the
S1 by eliminating the subject supposed to know from the equation as a litter or
turd. The very least we can say here, then, is that Lacans all-but-missed
encounter with Beckett does not yield anything like the new knowledge about the
letter and the symptom that his enduring fascination with Joyce does, but that it
does at least anticipate the terms in which that encounter will take place.
Becketts writing is a kind of doing that is like that of the clinical analysis that
Joyce himself did not need. And so Lacan already makes of Becketts writing,
before he gets to this in Joyce, a place where something is being made through the
letter that analysis itself strives for.
The significance of this is no doubt greater for Beckettians than it is for
Lacanians, however, to the extent that the silent partnership of Lacan with
Beckett never yields a new clinic, as does Lacans more voluble dialogue with
Joyce even if we might speculate that had Lacan pushed his reading of Beckett
further back in 1968, he might perhaps have come to theorize the discourse of the
analyst a little sooner than he actually does, finding it already at work in Becketts
writing (Beckett the writer preceding the analyst, as it were) just as he will do in
the mid-seventies with Joyces savoir-faire of the sinthome. For Beckettians, what
Lacans reading of Beckett if we can even call it that does is to historicize
and politicize Becketts writing practice and to make a little more sense of what
Beckett is doing in his writing relative to Joyces. If Joyce is, in Becketts words,
on the side of addition, omniscience, omnipotence and mastery, or in Lacans,
on that of know-how, with Beckett on that of subtraction, ignorance, impotence
(etc.), then this practice, following Lacan, works to produce a knowledge that
the contemporary shameless subject lacks. This knowledge, to reiterate, is a

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knowledge of the S1, or master signifier, as determining the singularity of the

subjects position within speech, and which causes her fading or division beneath
it as the price of subjecthood as such. This knowledge, incidentally, is one of
which we might find a succinct rendering in Becketts the subject dies before it
comes to the verb from the Texts for Nothing.45
So Beckett, following Lacans minimal reading of him, comes to look like a
writer whose practice generates a knowledge that is equivalent to the knowledge
that is a necessary precondition of the demand for analysis: the understanding that
somethings not working is broken and that incites a subject to turn to a
subject supposed to know a little more about that to fix it. Ultimately, however, as
the second Beckett reference underscores, Becketts writing ejects that subject
supposed to know, that master, from his exulted place, relieving the reader-viewer
of the master signifier in the process. In this sense, we might say that Becketts
writing generates, like clinical analysis, a knowledge of the poubelle that is
uncoupled from the S1, a sort of savoir. Here, we can think in particular of
Becketts unmasterly refusal to utter anything much on the subject of the meaning
of his works, preferring to delegate the task to us bastards of critics and to [let
us] provide [our] own aspirin for the self-induced headaches of academic
interpretation.46 This is, needless to say, quite a different thing from the stance of
Joyce, who took fiendish delight in generating as many of those headaches as
possible, thereby occupying those critics for the next three hundred years.47 It is
also worth noting in passing that Lacan need not have wondered, of course, in
Becketts case, how he might have arrived at such knowledge as this without
recourse to an analysis since Beckett did, of course, have one. This was
something of which Beckett spoke, or rather wrote, with something that might at
best be described as ambivalence, having described it in a letter to Tom
McGreevy as an expensive canular [practical joke].48
On the other hand, Beckett did also experience a kind of Joycean-Aquinian
epiphany, allegedly, if not through psychoanalysis, then in the form of what he
talked of sometimes as this revelation in his mothers bedroom shortly after the

45. Samuel Beckett, Texts for Nothing and Other Shorter Prose, 19501976, ed. by
Mark Nixon (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), p. 8.
46. Samuel Beckett, letter to Alan Schneider, 29 December 1957, No Author Better Served:
The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider, ed. by Maurice Harmon
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 24.
47. Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, 2nd edn (New York: Oxford University Press, 195982),
p. 703.
48. Samuel Beckett, letter to Thomas McGreevy, 10 March 1935, in The Letters of Samuel
Beckett, 4 vols, ed. by Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Lois More Overbeck et al. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009-), vol. I: 19291940, pp. 25664 (p. 259).

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end of World War II.49 Now, this famed revelation, about which much ink has
already been spilled, is the moment at which Beckett says that all his published
words did indeed come to seem like chaff to him, the moment at which he
renounced his disciple-like relation to Joyce the master and found his own way as
lying in subtraction, impotence, etc. If, from this point onwards, we start to see
Becketts writing as a liturarius as that which, relative to the Joycean
manuscript, shows deletions then it is perhaps in the sense that Lacan by
1975 will describe Joyces sinthome as something manufactured through the
artifice of writing that [fait] litie`re la lettre, in the sense not just of deleting or
rubbishing that which went before, but rather of putting to work the letter as litter
in such a way as to achieve something his analysis evidently did not.
In this way I think it plausible to talk of something like the Beckettian
sinthome what Beckett referred to as his syntax of weakness.50 This
Beckettian sinthome, needless to say, functions quite differently from Joyces.
If Joyces was about a process of addition, of jouis-sens, Becketts seems rather
about subtracting Joyces savoir-faire, a writing practice that is all about, on the
contrary, a not-knowing-how-to-do, a ne-pas-savoir-faire, of the kind that
Malone produces from his litie`re that fails to produce enjoyment of the kind
hes after What tedium, as the refrain goes.51
Lacans references to Beckett can, I think, help to punctuate the two most
well-known of Becketts remarks on his own aesthetics and ethics: the first from
the 1937 letter to Axel Kaun, the second one from the 1973 interview with
Charles Juliet. Back in 1937, as we know only too well, a rumbustious young
Beckett sets himself the lofty goal of [drilling] one hole after another into
[language, through his writing] until that which lurks behind, be it something or
nothing, starts seeping through.52 Having blushingly dismissed all this to Ruby
Cohn as German bilge, by 1973 he is speaking to Charles Juliet rather more
modestly of giving form to the formless as an aesthetic solution to the impasse
that sees him unable to make any kind of value judgement and yet unable to
escape the fact that the very act of writing itself implies an ethics.53
One of the things that Lacans passing allusions to Beckett suggest is that this
transition from the drilling of holes in language as a veil to the Thing-in-Itself
towards giving form to the formless is about the manufacture of a sinthome.
49. Knowlson, Damned to Fame, pp. 3513.
50. Samuel Beckett, as quoted by Lawrence Harvey in Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic,
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), p. 249.
51. Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies, ed. by Peter Boxall, rev. edn (London: Faber and Faber,
2010), p. 11.
52. Samuel Beckett, letter to Axel Kaun, 9 July 1937, in The Letters of Samuel Beckett, I,
pp. 51221 (p. 518).
53. Charles Juliet, Rencontres avec Samuel Beckett (Paris: P.O.L, 1999), pp. 356.

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This symptom the sinthome, rather gives form to the otherwise formless
singularity of the subject as fixed beneath the S1 in the discourse of the master.
It marks a shift, moreover, from the early Becketts deciphering of the message to
get at the Real behind rather like the Freudian or early Lacanian clinic toward
a kind of making-do that Lacan himself will later come to formulate, through his
encounter with Joyce, as the end of analysis.
This use of the letter by the later Beckett is to be understood as rather more
modest than that outlined in the letter to Axel Kaun in that very precise sense of
the opposite of shameless. It is one that [fait] litie`re la lettre, not in the sense
of reducing it to nothing, but rather that lifts a curtain on the doit, or have to,
that lays waste to our being as long as we are in thrall to the discourse of the
master by confronting us with the spectacle of the embarrassing excess that the
other side of psychoanalysis, the discourse with speech, produces.
It is in this sense, finally, that Beckett can be thought of as a silent partner not
just to Lacan but also to Joyce. Where Joyce puts the letter as litter to work in his
writing (the better to cancel his subscription to the unconscious, as Lacan puts it
in Seminar XXIII 54) Beckett is all about working with litter in such a way as to
shame us into acknowledging the filth on which our civilization is built. We can,
of course, only speculate as to what Lacans reading of Beckett would have
yielded for the psychoanalytic clinic had he given him anything like the attention
that he gave to Joyce. But it is a nice coincidence for this modest reading of
Beckett, in light of Lacans all-but-missed encounter with him, that back in the
autumn of 1968, whilst Lacan was saying practically nothing about him and
preparing to wax lyrical about Joyce, Beckett, for his part, was quietly at work on
Breath.55

54. Lacan, Seminaire XXIII, p. 164.

55. Knowlson, Damned to Fame, p. 565.