This essay first appeared in Turkish. The English version is my own. Lacan is cited in the French originals; page numbers of the seminar refer to the Seuil edition, as given in D. Gaudin’s article cited below. A note on Turkish grammar from the original has been kept.

Ou je ne pense pas ou je ne suis pas.

Jacques Lacan, La logique du fantasme (1966–1967)

I

The autumn of 1966 was a high point for Lacan. In October he had spoken in English at the conference at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, to which he had been invited with his pupil Guy Rosolato; in November Seuil published Écrits, which gathered thirty years of his teaching. In the same month, at the École normale supérieure, he began his fourteenth seminar: La logique du fantasme, the logic of fantasy. It has remained one of Lacan’s most difficult and least read seminars. Its official French text appeared only in 2023, in the form established by Jacques-Alain Miller, together with Premiers écrits, the collection of Lacan’s pre-war writings; the English translation by A. R. Price came out in the spring of 2026.1

The difficulty of the seminar comes from Lacan’s undertaking that year to rebuild psychoanalysis with the instruments of logic, in particular set theory and algebra. But the seminar has a little-known text that opens a door for the reader. Lacan himself wrote a summary of the lectures he gave at the École pratique des hautes études for the institution’s yearbook for 1967–1968. These few pages are among Lacan’s densest writings; but they give all the seminar’s main theses, in Lacan’s own hand and in the order he chose.2 This essay uses the summary as a map to follow the seminar’s four great moves.

II

The first move is a new cogito. Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am” is the founding sentence of modern philosophy and, for Lacan, of the subject of modern science: thought and being are tied together in a single subject by a “therefore”. Lacan had questioned this tie before. In 1957, in “L’instance de la lettre”, he had rewritten the cogito in the light of the unconscious, saying that the subject is not where he thinks and does not think where he is.3 In the fourteenth seminar Lacan goes a step further and turns the sentence into an alternative: either I do not think or I am not. In the summary he calls this “the reversed ergo of a new cogito”.4

This “either... or” is no ordinary alternative. Lacan places it in the same mould as the structure of alienation he had described in 1964 in the eleventh seminar, a forced choice. His example then was the robber’s demand: your money or your life! Whoever chooses the money loses everything; whoever chooses life is left with a life deprived of the money. The choice is between two forms of losing, and one option is only less bad than the other. In the alternative “either I do not think or I am not”, too, the subject, for Lacan, chooses the least bad: not thinking. The subject who chooses “I do not think” saves his being; but this saved being is, in Lacan’s words, a false being. It is the being of a subject who fixes himself as an ego by giving up thinking, by wanting to know nothing.

In this seminar Lacan also redefines alienation. In 1964 alienation was the subject’s being represented in the field of the Other, of language, his losing his own being in the signifiers of the Other. In 1966 Lacan says something different: the fact of alienation is not that we are taken up, represented in the other, but on the contrary that it is essentially founded on the rejection of the Other.5 Descartes could ground his cogito in God, in an Other who guarantees all truths. For Lacan this foundation in faith is no longer tenable for us; as he says elsewhere in the seminar, in our age everyone, from the most devout to the most libertine, is an atheist.6 The new cogito is the cogito of the modern subject who has lost the guarantee of the Other. It is a first form of a thesis Lacan would systematise over the following decade in the formula “there is no Other of the Other”.

III

The second move is to show that these two negations, “I do not think” and “I am not”, correspond to two places in Freud’s psychical apparatus. Lacan draws the two sets as two intersecting circles and, by negating their intersection, with a reference to De Morgan’s laws of logic, obtains two “clipped” regions. On the side of “I do not think”, where the subject saves himself as an ego, lies Freud’s Es, the Ça in French, the id in English. On the side of “I am not”, the unconscious.

What Lacan says of the id is one of the most striking theses of the seminar. The id, for him, is not a silent, formless reservoir of drives; it is everything in discourse, as a logical structure, that is not I, the whole of the rest of the structure. Lacan explains at once: by structure he means logical structure, and by logical structure, grammatical structure.7 There is, for Lacan, no other way of making the I work in its relation to the world than by passing through grammatical structure, and this grammatical structure is nothing other than the essence of the id.8

Lacan tests this thesis against Freud’s 1919 paper “A Child Is Being Beaten”. In that paper Freud reconstructs three phases of a fantasy his patients often reported: “My father is beating the child whom I hate”; “I am being beaten by my father”; and finally an impersonal sentence, “A child is being beaten”. Freud stresses that the second phase, “I am being beaten by my father”, is never remembered, never becomes conscious, and can be inferred only as a construction in analysis.9 For Lacan this is the clearest sign of the grammatical structure of fantasy. All the transformations of the fantasy, from active to passive voice, from “he” to an indeterminate subjectlessness, are grammatical operations; but in none of them does the “I” appear. What lies at the centre, yet is never said and can only be reconstructed, is the “I” itself. In fantasy, the subject’s “I am not” is written in the form of a sentence.10

IV

The third move is to show how this structure orders the course of an analysis. Lacan places the alternative “either I do not think or I am not” at the corners of a quadrangle and reads its sides as the operations of a Klein group, the four-element structure of mathematics in which each operation is its own inverse. In the summary he names the two arms of this quadrangle alienation and truth; the diagonal joining their ends is transference. To find the diagonal, Lacan says, it is enough to notice that, just as in Descartes’s cogito, what is at stake here is only the subject supposed to know.11

The fourth corner of the quadrangle shows where an analysis may arrive. Lacan says that the two circles, “I do not think” and “I am not”, will fold over each other with a twist, will cover each other. In this overlap the id comes to the place of “I am not” and turns it into a positive sentence, “I am that” (je suis ça); in the opposite direction, the unconscious comes to the place of “I do not think”.12 The formula offers a new reading of one of Freud’s most famous sentences, “Wo Es war, soll Ich werden”, “where id was, there I shall be”. In Lacan’s reading the end of analysis is not the conquest of the id by an ego, but the subject’s being able to recognise himself in the place of the id, in the structure of his own fantasy: I am that. The unconscious coming to the place of “I do not think”, for its part, is the subject’s realising himself, in place of the false being saved by giving up thinking, as a lack, in the subjective experience Lacan calls castration.

In the summary Lacan also stresses that this structure has no point of closure. In a Klein group, applying an operation twice leads back to zero, to the starting point; but in the operations of analysis this return is impossible. Lacan shows it with three formulas: there is no Other of the Other, that is, no metalanguage; it is not possible to say the true about the true; there is no transference of transference.13 These three impossibilities show that the operations of analysis cannot guarantee themselves, that each takes place within a time Freud called repetition. Repetition, for Lacan, is not a command of the past but an act by which a difference in the signifier inscribes itself in time: what has been, repeated, differs.

V

The fourth move is perhaps the seminar’s most resonant formula: there is no sexual act. Lacan put it forward in 1967 as the forerunner of the formula “there is no sexual relation”, which he would place at the centre of his teaching a few years later. In the summary he says that the formula must be read in the gap between two opposed sentences. The first: there is no sexual act, that is, none weighty enough to affirm in the subject the certainty of being of one sex. The second: there is only the sexual act, that is, one against which thought has good reason to defend itself, since in it the subject is split.14

The tension between these two sentences gives the core of Lacan’s theory of sexuality. No act, no sexual experience, can tell a subject with certainty that he or she is a man or a woman; and precisely for this reason sexuality is something that divides the subject, against which his thought must constantly defend itself. Lacan proposes leaving biological bisexuality to the legacy of Freud’s friend Wilhelm Fliess: what is at stake is the incommensurability of the objet a with the unity required by the subjective demand for the conjunction of two beings of opposite sex. To show this incommensurability Lacan turns to the golden ratio, and argues that it can be resolved only by way of sublimation.

This part of the seminar has been reread in recent years for one aspect in particular. In the summary Lacan writes that this year, for the first time, he stressed that the place of the Other is not to be sought anywhere but in the body; that it is not intersubjectivity but scars on the body’s surface, appendages plugged into its orifices to serve as handholds, ancestral and technical artifices that gnaw at it.15 The sentence is far from the Lacan of the 1950s, who defined the Other as the place of language, of the law and of an intersubjective dialogue, and very close to the theory of the speaking body of the 1970s. In this respect one could say that the transformation attributed in Lacan studies to the late period began in 1967, within the logic of fantasy.

VI

All these moves converge in the term in the seminar’s title, fantasy. Lacan’s thesis on fantasy in the summary is short and sharp: for the subject there is no entry into the real other than fantasy. The first conclusion the clinician will draw from this, Lacan says, the clinician who knows that his patients’ discourse repeats his own every day, is that a fantasy is a sentence: a sentence on the model of “a child is being beaten”. The second is that the same fantasy can be found in very different neurotic structures.16

Here Lacan defines the function of fantasy with a term taken from logic: at the level of interpretation, fantasy functions as an axiom. In each structure, neurosis, perversion, the laws of deduction that determine the reduction of symptoms differ; fantasy is distinguished from them by figuring in a constant mode. An axiom is not proved within a system; it is the proposition that makes all the system’s deductions possible, while itself not obtained by deduction. To think of fantasy as an axiom is to say that in analysis it cannot be “dissolved” by an interpretation, but only reconstructed, that its sentence can be found. Freud’s finding the sentence “I am being beaten by my father” not as a remembered memory but as a construction of analysis is precisely an example of this.

Lacan draws the clinical consequences of this thesis clearly in the summary. The neurotic approaches fantasy only through a telescope, from afar, because he spends all his energy sustaining the desire of the Other, keeping it breathless in various ways; the psychoanalyst, Lacan warns, should not become the servant of this task. The pervert, by contrast, is much more closely confronted with the impasse of the sexual act; he uses the nets of fantasy as an apparatus of conduction through which he steals, by short circuit, a jouissance from which the place of the Other separates him no less. What distinguishes the two structures is their distance from fantasy.

VII

The publication of La logique du fantasme as a book, more than half a century late, also raises the question of why the seminar should be read today. Perhaps the strongest answer lies in Lacan’s own diagnosis: in an age in which everyone is an atheist, in which the guarantee of the Other has collapsed, the subject still wants to hold on to an Other, to a guarantee. The new cogito is the cogito of the subject of this age: a subject who saves his false being by rejecting the Other, by giving up thinking, but who carries within this saved being the sentence of his own fantasy, a sentence he himself has never said.

Analysis is the place where this sentence is found. Lacan’s formula “I am that” is neither an ego ideal nor a promise of cure; it is the subject’s encounter with the structure of his own fantasy, with the axiom that orders it everywhere in the same way. Its French publication in 2023 and its English publication in 2026 have allowed this seminar to take its place among the volumes that close the great gap in Lacan’s teaching in the mid-1960s, the years of the École normale. But as Lacan’s own summary reminds us, to read this text is not to memorise its formulas, but to consent to look for the sentence of one’s own fantasy, at the point where it functions like an axiom.

Notes

  1. J. Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre XIV: La logique du fantasme (1966–1967), ed. J.-A. Miller, Paris: Seuil, 2023; in English as The Logic of Fantasy, trans. A. R. Price, Cambridge: Polity, 2026. Page numbers of the seminar in this essay refer to the Seuil edition, as given in D. Gaudin’s article cited below. ↩︎
  2. J. Lacan, “La logique du fantasme. Compte rendu du séminaire 1966–1967”, Annuaire de l’École pratique des hautes études, 1967–1968, pp. 189–194; reprinted in Autres écrits, Paris: Seuil, 2001. According to the yearbook, the outside speakers at the seminar that year were Jacques-Alain Miller, Roman Jakobson (1 February 1967) and André Green (15 March 1967); the date of Miller’s talk is printed in the yearbook as a date that does not exist, “31 November 1966”. ↩︎
  3. J. Lacan, “L’instance de la lettre dans l’inconscient ou la raison depuis Freud” (1957), Écrits, Paris: Seuil, 1966: “je pense où je ne suis pas, donc je suis où je ne pense pas”. ↩︎
  4. Lacan, “Compte rendu du séminaire 1966–1967”: “Ou je ne pense pas ou je ne suis pas, avancer en cette formule l’ergo retourné d’un nouveau cogito”. ↩︎
  5. Lacan, La logique du fantasme, p. 121: “Le fait de l’aliénation n’est pas que nous soyons repris, représentés dans l’autre, mais il est au contraire essentiellement fondé sur le rejet de l’Autre”. Quoted in D. Gaudin, “Logique du fantasme (2/2)”, Mensuel (EPFCL), 175, 2024. ↩︎
  6. Lacan, La logique du fantasme, p. 138; quoted in Gaudin, op. cit. ↩︎
  7. Lacan, La logique du fantasme, p. 124; quoted in Gaudin, op. cit. ↩︎
  8. Lacan, La logique du fantasme, p. 125: “Il n’y a d’autre façon de faire fonctionner le Je en tant qu’être au monde, sa relation au monde, qu’à en passer par la structure grammaticale, qui n’est pas autre chose que l’essence du Ça”. Quoted in Gaudin, op. cit. ↩︎
  9. S. Freud, “Ein Kind wird geschlagen. Beitrag zur Kenntnis der Entstehung sexueller Perversionen” (1919). Of the second phase Freud writes that it has never had a real existence; it is never remembered, it has never succeeded in becoming conscious; it is a construction of analysis, but is no less a necessity on that account. ↩︎
  10. A small addition for the Turkish reader, kept from the original: in the Turkish verb dövülüyorum (“I am being beaten”), the “I” is present not as a separate word but as a personal suffix, a syllable added to the end of the verb. In the Turkish of Freud’s second phase, Babam tarafından dövülüyorum, Lacan’s invisible “I” is hidden within the word itself, within a suffix. ↩︎
  11. Lacan, “Compte rendu du séminaire 1966–1967”: “De l’équerre qui se dessine ainsi, les bras sont opération qui se dénomment : aliénation et vérité. Pour retrouver la diagonale qui rejoint ses extrémités, le transfert, il suffit de s’apercevoir que tout comme dans le cogito de Descartes, il ne s’agit ici que du sujet supposé savoir.” In the following year’s seminar, L’acte psychanalytique, Lacan would describe the scheme, lacking a return operation, as “half of a Klein group”. ↩︎
  12. Lacan, La logique du fantasme, p. 127: “c’est le Ça qui va venir à la place du Je ne suis pas, le positivant en un Je suis ça” and “en sens inverse, c’est l’inconscient qui vient à la place du Je ne pense pas”. Quoted in Gaudin, op. cit. ↩︎
  13. Lacan, “Compte rendu du séminaire 1966–1967”: “il n’y a pas d’Autre de l’Autre, autrement dit pas de métalangage”; “que ne dit-il le vrai sur le vrai ?”; “il n’y a pas de transfert du transfert”. ↩︎
  14. Lacan, “Compte rendu du séminaire 1966–1967”: “il n’y a pas d’acte sexuel, sous entend : qui fasse le poids à affirmer dans le sujet la certitude de ce qu’il soit d’un sexe”; “il n’y a que l’acte sexuel, implique : dont la pensée ait lieu de se défendre pour ce que le sujet s’y refend”. ↩︎
  15. Lacan, “Compte rendu du séminaire 1966–1967”: “ce lieu de l’Autre n’est pas à prendre ailleurs que dans le corps, qu’il n’est pas intersubjectivité, mais cicatrices sur le corps tégumentaires”. In an article published in 2025 the Italian psychoanalyst Domenico Cosenza reads this aspect of the seminar as a movement of “corporisation”, in which the Other is located in the body: D. Cosenza, “The logic of fantasy and the psychoanalyst’s studio: a small introduction to Seminar XIV”, Phi/Psy, 5(1), 2025. ↩︎
  16. Lacan, “Compte rendu du séminaire 1966–1967”: “elle suppose qu’il n’y a pas d’autre entrée pour le sujet dans le réel que le fantasme”; “un fantasme est une phrase, du modèle d’un enfant est battu”. ↩︎

References

  • Cosenza, D. (2025). The logic of fantasy and the psychoanalyst’s studio: A small introduction to Seminar XIV. Phi/Psy, 5(1).
  • Freud, S. (1919). Ein Kind wird geschlagen. Internationale Zeitschrift für ärztliche Psychoanalyse, 5.
  • Gaudin, D. (2024). Logique du fantasme (2/2). Mensuel, 175. EPFCL.
  • Lacan, J. (1966). L’instance de la lettre dans l’inconscient ou la raison depuis Freud. In Écrits. Seuil.
  • Lacan, J. (1968). La logique du fantasme. Compte rendu du séminaire 1966–1967. Annuaire de l’École pratique des hautes études, 1967–1968, 189–194.
  • Lacan, J. (1973). Le Séminaire, Livre XI: Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse (1964). Seuil.
  • Lacan, J. (2001). Autres écrits. Seuil.
  • Lacan, J. (2023). Le Séminaire, Livre XIV: La logique du fantasme (1966–1967). Seuil.
  • Lacan, J. (2026). The logic of fantasy: The seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XIV (A. R. Price, Trans.). Polity.