From Pascal's Wager to Lacan's Formulas of Sexuation
From Pascal's Wager to Lacan's Formulas of Sexuation

Summary/Abstract: In his XVIth seminar (1968-1969), the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan engaged with a number of modern or contemporary thinkers (Pascal, Hegel, Marx and Freud, among others) in an effort to create a discourse "without words", reduced to an almost algebraic form, which would dispense with any Freudian supporting myth, in order to better describe the structure of the subject. Mixing Marx's surplus value, Pascal's wager and Hegel’s master-slave dialectic with close readings of Freud, Lacan builds a structural form of the discourse with a minimal number of elements, placed on the main base of the concept of jouissance. This model will also evolve into the “theory of the four discourses”, elaborated in the next year's seminar, as a reaction to the events from '68, describing types of discourse as "social links". It will also transform into and inform, a few years later, Lacan's “theory of sexuation” in his seminar Encore. The article describes the avatars of this elaboration, using as a guiding thread the discourse of the hysteric.

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