What is a Cartel?​

"The cartel is a modality of group invented by Lacan when he founded his School in 1964, three years before he invented the pass. [...] By being registered in the NLS catalogue, the cartel creates a direct link between its members and the School. The School is itself constituted by a hole in knowledge, and it is first of all the numerous products of the cartels that line this hole and make it live, next to the pass and its teachings." -Frank Rollier

Jacques Lacan invented the "cartel" in 1964 as one of the three pillars of psychoanalysis most aligned with the transmission of psychoanalytic teaching. It consists of work with three people, plus one​, who have each oriented themselves toward the production of "bits of [psychoanalytic] knowledge" in transference to the School.  It is open to any one and every one.

The "plus one" is not a place of representation, neither a comrade nor a schoolmaster, but a function of "hystericization" aimed at disrupting the hierarchical and fraternal group effects. 

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"The plus-one must come with question marks [...] and make holes in heads. This implies that he refuses to be a master who puts to work; to be the one who knows; to be an analyst in the cartel; and this in order to be that agent provocateur from where there is a teaching." -Jacques-Alain Miller.

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