LACAN—THE UNCONSCIOUS

REINVENTED
THE CENTRE FOR FREUDIAN ANALYSIS
AND RESEARCH LIBRARY
Series Editors:
Anouchka Grose, Darian Leader, Alan Rowan

CFAR was founded in 1985 with the aim of developing Freudian and Lacanian
psychoanalysis in the UK. Lacan’s rereading and rethinking of Freud had been
neglected in the Anglophone world, despite its important implications for the
theory and practice of psychoanalysis. Today, this situation is changing, with
a lively culture of training groups, seminars, conferences, and publications.

CFAR offers both introductory and advanced courses in psychoanalysis, as well

as a clinical training programme in Lacanian psychoanalysis. It can provide
access to Lacanian psychoanalysts working in the UK, and has links with
Lacanian groups across the world. The CFAR Library aims to make classic
Lacanian texts available in English for the first time, as well as publishing
original research in the Lacanian field.

OTHER TITLES IN THE SERIES

• Lacan and Lévi-Strauss or The Return to Freud (1951–1957)
by Markos Zafiropoulos
• The Trainings of the Psychoanalyst
by Annie Tardits
• Sexual Ambiguities
by Geneviève Morel
• Freud and the Desire of the Psychoanalyst
by Serge Cottet

[Link]
 LACAN—THE
UNCONSCIOUS
REINVENTED

Colette Soler
Translated by
Esther Faye and Susan Schwartz
First published in 2014 by
Karnac Books Ltd
118 Finchley Road
London NW3 5HT

Copyright © 2014 by Colette Soler

The right of Colette Soler to be identified as the author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with §§ 77 and 78 of the Copyright Design and Patents
Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored

in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A C.I.P. for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN-13: 978-1-78049-099-1

Typeset by V Publishing Solutions Pvt Ltd., Chennai, India

Printed in Great Britain

[Link]
CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix

ABOUT THE AUTHOR xi

INTRODUCTION xiii

PART I: THE UNCONSCIOUS, REAL

CHAPTER ONE
Trajectory 3

CHAPTER TWO
Towards the Real 17

CHAPTER THREE
Lalangue, traumatic 25

CHAPTER FOUR
From the transference towards the other unconscious 39

v
vi CONTENTS

CHAPTER FIVE
The royal road to the RUCS 49

CHAPTER SIX
The Borromean aleph 55

CHAPTER SEVEN
The parlêtre 61

PART II: ANALYSIS ORIENTED TOWARDS THE REAL

CHAPTER EIGHT
The end pass 69

CHAPTER NINE
The time that isn’t logical 75

CHAPTER TEN
Terminable analysis 85

CHAPTER ELEVEN
Identification with the symptom or … worse 99

CHAPTER TWELVE
The identity at the end, its aporias 107

PART III: A RENEWED CLINIC

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The status of jouissances 117

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Symptom of the real unconscious 131

CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The father and the Real 143

CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Towards the father of the name 153
 CONTENTS vii

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Love and the Real 163

PART IV: POLITICAL PERSPECTIVES

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Dissidence of the symptom? 175

CHAPTER NINETEEN
Psychoanalysis and capitalism 189

CHAPTER TWENTY
Malaise in psychoanalysis 199

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
What does the psychoanalyst want? 211

REFERENCES 219

INDEX 225
ACKNOWL EDGEMENTS

This volume takes up, orders, and problematises some of my

contributions from over the last ten years. They are all linked to my
seminars held during this time in the School of Psychoanalysis of
the Forums of the Lacanian Field. When it seemed necessary, I have
provided endnotes to give details of the date and place of publication.

Colette Soler

The translators gratefully acknowledge the invaluable assistance of

Claire Dumans, Leonardo Rodríguez, and Chantal Degril.

Esther Faye and Susan Schwartz

ix
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Colette Soler, holder of the University Agrégation and a psychoanalyst

trained by Jacques Lacan, practises and teaches psychoanalysis in Paris.
She is a founder member of the School of Psychoanalysis of the Forums
of the Lacanian Field, and the author of What Lacan Said about Women
(Other Press, 2003), Lacanian Affects (Routledge, forthcoming), as well as
numerous other publications.

xi
INTRODUCTION

I am going to question the foundations of the trajectory of Lacan’s

teaching. After the excitement of his staggering intervention at Rome
in 1953 with “Function and field of speech and language”—which
renewed Freudian vocabulary for the first time in France—his contin-
ual advances have always made students and readers uneasy. In this
teaching that extends over twenty years, there is not a single halt, but
additions, revisions, and indeed even reversals.
It is true that some sentences persist and endure over time—
“the unconscious, it speaks”, “the unconscious is structured like
a language”—but, and there is a “but”, these sentences no longer
signify the same thing from one end of his teaching to the other. From
the intersubjective speech of the 1950s to the “I speak with my body”
of the 1970s, there is a world of difference that involves a redefinition of
the unconscious itself.
Hence the rich and colourful texture of the small world of those who
call themselves Lacanian. How can one situate oneself amongst the
upholders of pure speech—who, indeed, are in competition with the
psychotherapies that borrowed it from them long ago—or those who
swear solely by object a, or by jouissance, or by the clinic and nothing but
the clinic, or by topology, or by the Borromean knot, etc.?
xiii
xiv INTRODUCTION

It is a strange result. In fact, did not Freud himself advance in

successive stages, contesting in 1916 his first theory of anxiety in its
relation to the symptom, renewing in 1920 his definition of the uncon-
scious by emphasising repetition and the death drive and revising his
doctrine of the psychical apparatus? This did not produce the idea of a
first, a second, or even a third Freud and the unity of his enunciation is
not in doubt as it is with Lacan. Is it because the difficulties in reading
Freud are not less but more masked by a style that is always systemati-
cally didactic? With Lacan, on the contrary, the difficulties are on the
surface, while the logic of his successive steps remains implicit.
It is a fact that Lacan proceeded by assertion rather than by explana-
tion, multiplying surprising formulas and apparent paradoxes over the
years. Some saw this as the sign of a mischievous character seeking to
impress. I see rather another form of didacticism: Lacan tried to wake
up his audience. He had reasons for believing them asleep, he who had
experienced, to his cost, the entropy of Post-Freudian analytic thought.
Moreover, his success remains quite uncertain, for after the first burst of
incredulity the most striking of his formulas became all the more prone
to repetition, to being transformed into what he called “pretty fossils”.
These surprises in transmission would not garner so much attention
in other fields. Who would reproach the poet, the painter or artists in
general for producing something new, like the conjurer who draws a
rabbit out of the hat? Psychoanalysis, however, is not art, but a social
bond governed by rules for which the analyst is responsible and the
effects of which on the analysand are not independent of the manner in
which the experience is formulated. There is no place here for whim or
gratuitous invention.
Freud invented the procedure that allows what he named the uncon-
scious to be explored. A strange thing, indeed, that only responds to
the one who summons it. Certainly there are dreams, slips, bungled
actions, and above all symptoms, all these formations that, since Freud,
reveal the unconscious, but in such enigmatic forms that they do no
more than pose the question of what it—the unconscious—says, what
it wants. Moreover, these “formations of the unconscious” can be
ignored. That’s precisely what was done in previous centuries when
dreams were already interpreted, but differently, as the voice of gods or
of destiny. Since Freud, those who have received his message may think
that in ignoring them one will suffer the consequences, that symptoms
and repetition will be rife. But that’s because they have already decided
 INTRODUCTION xv

on the unconscious as cause. Here we touch on the extent to which the

unconscious is not a thing like any other: its ex-sistence is only verified
in a relatively convincing way in the practice that establishes it—thus,
not without the act of the analyst. “Ontically, then, the unconscious is
the elusive” (Lacan, 1981b, p. 32): it does not conclude, as if it were
awaiting interpretation. Hence Lacan was quite justified in saying that
the status of the unconscious was less ontological than ethical.
The position Lacan took in psychoanalysis is clear in his “return to
Freud”: it involved taking a fresh look at the new experience invented
by Freud. He did this in a way that was closer to the scientific spirit,
and also more comprehensive, having understood that the practi-
cal direction of this experience is a function of how it is formulated.
The opposition theory/practice, clinic/concept has no value here,
and despite the boastings of those who declare themselves to be pure
clinicians in psychoanalysis, theory cannot dispense with the facts that
emerge in practice—and it is not so sure that things are so very different
in science. This is why the desire of the psychoanalyst, at work in each
treatment, operates no less at the level of the “praxis of theory” (Lacan,
1990a, p. 99).
So I will be questioning the trajectory of Lacan as analysand of
psychoanalysis itself, the logic of his contributions and their conse-
quences for the direction of the treatment. I am not going to explore
the possible affinities, sources or differences with his contemporaries
for the delectation of the history of ideas. Neither is it a question of his
desire: I do not aim to interpret Lacan. Rather, I will be questioning the
mainspring of his successive developments. Indeed, I eventually saw
that the constant revisions of his elaborations, however inventive they
are, have nothing capricious about them and are at every step based on
reason—analytic reason—for it is the unsolved problems of the previ-
ous step which orient his progress. Except that he only rarely explains
the impasses to be resolved and it is up to the reader to sweat a bit in
order to grasp them.
I’m not going to deal with the whole of Lacan’s trajectory but only
those steps that led him to assert an unprecedented formula, the for-
mula that says against all expectation that the unconscious—until then
always described as symbolic—is real. Once established, the thesis
has immense practical and clinical consequences, which are far from
always being recognised and which, because of this, struggle to pass to
the act—the analytic act.
 PA RT I
THE UNCONSCIOUS, REAL
CHAPTER ONE

Trajectory

L
acan himself did not fail to question his own trajectory and to
reappraise each one of his steps. The new formulas as well as
the theses of this reappraisal are striking theoretical rectifica-
tions (Soler, 2008a). Ultimately, we have a Symbolic which is no longer
language but langue, to be written lalangue (I will come back to this);
an Imaginary which is not signification subordinated to the Symbolic
but is essentially form and representation; finally, a Real outside of the
Symbolic whereas its previous definition located it at the limit points of
linguistic formalisation.
Why? The question is not intended to mark out a periodisation, to
chart a first, second, and third Lacan. Chronology is in itself inert and
presents a drawback that is not entirely innocent: indeed it elides the
One that links all the textual variations. This One is not at the level of
theses but at the level of what I call the choice that grounds a unique
saying [un dire unique], beyond the variations of statements [les dits].
With chronological sequence, whether one knows it or not, One-saying
[l’Un-dire] is surreptitiously divided up into successive textualities, and
in the name of a methodical reading it becomes so multiple that in the
end it is simply resorbed.

3
4 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

In fact, it is this One whose value Michel Foucault, to his credit,

highlighted in 1969 in his lecture “What is an author?”, at which Lacan
was present. In it he emphasised how much this dimension of the
One of the author was ineradicable. I say to his credit, for the moment
belonged to a certain structuralism that announced the death of the
author and its reduction within the supposed laws of textuality. Today,
of course, this notion has misfired and we are instead in an era where
there are more authors than real texts.
The trouble with chronology is, as we say, that the enunciation driven
out through the door returns through the window and no less so than in
the authorised argument. The oft-repeated “Lacan said that”, followed
by random quotations, then obscures times that were initially distin-
guished and ushers in the most confusing indistinctness. In this way, the
splitting of the name from the saying that carried it takes place. From
then on, this teaching is transformed into a vast pantry from which each
one takes a sample as he pleases. The result is that the more that readers
multiply, the more the coherence that animates the movement from one
step to the next evaporates.
Lacan was in fact by no means adept at chronology, but the contrary
is not the case either. In order to characterise what he was doing, he
liked to use the notion of clearing a path, clearing a path by breaking
through the barriers in a field resistant to thought or movement. Clear-
ing can proceed in a discontinuous way, with its fertile moments and its
times of stasis and assimilation, but the notion suggests the continuity
of an effort which constitutes an oriented whole, creating furrows in the
field in question.
I will therefore approach the logic of changes with the one enunci-
ation that produces them together. They do not have the same status,
for the enunciation is contingent and thus unpredictable. In this sense,
despite the logic of the passages, a second time cannot be purely and sim-
ply deduced from a first, even if the former is not without deriving from
the latter and—as is well-known—will shed light on it retroactively.
It will thus be a matter of grasping what of the analytic experi-
ence exceeded each thesis and hence what grounds each advance.
This means that the mainspring of this work in progress, to which
only death gave the word “end”, owes nothing either to linguistics—
even if revisited through poetry as Jakobson did—or to structural
anthropology.
 T R A J E C TO RY 5

Structuralist?
Yet, effectively, the name of Lacan remains associated with the struc-
turalist trend of the 1970s. It is true that he explored the structuralist
path methodically, seeking to establish that the unconscious belongs
to a rational order that has its own laws. But is it enough to acknowl-
edge that a symbolic order simultaneously govens the social groups
studied by anthropology, the language structures of linguistics, and the
discourse of the unconscious, for the—ism of structuralism to be war-
ranted in psychoanalysis? I do not believe that Lacan was ever a struc-
turalist, even at the time of metaphor and metonymy. The subject of
psychoanalysis is not structural man, if I may use this expression, and
has never really been so at any moment in Lacan’s elaboration.
This is seen at the level of the premise—as it is for the object of every
discipline—a premise not necessarily made explicit.
By hypothesis, linguistics and structural anthropology, which take as
their object the compositional laws of the structures that concern them,
posit a subject who is no more than the pure subject of a combinatory.
The analytic hypothesis is different. The fact that Lacan had strongly
emphasised that psychoanalysis knows no other subject than that of
science, and made of “this special mode of subject” what he calls “the
crucially important mark of structuralism” (Lacan, [1966] 2006, p. 731),
must not mislead us on this point. Psychoanalysis certainly knows no
other subject than this non-incarnated subject, the subject that is only
“the navel” in the pure combinatory of the mathematics of the signifier,
a navel that even logic cannot manage to eliminate. But this subject is not
the object of psychoanalysis. The subject that psychoanalysis receives
and deals with is the one who suffers. And not from just anything, but
from a suffering tied to truth, the truth that involves the object of his
phantasy and even a bit more: the living being marked by language.
Lacan found a word to designate it: “analysand”. Without him, there
is no psychoanalysis, whereas the study of myths can take place quite
happily without the “mythand”, as Lacan calls him by analogy with
analysand. Likewise, the splitting of a mask is nothing other than sym-
bolic and elides the bearer, just as the ritual assumed to be homologous
with the economy of mythemes rejects “from the field of structure the
agent of the ritual” (Lacan, [1966] 2006, p. 732). The difference is imme-
diately recognisable.
6 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

One could certainly speak of a structuralist moment in Lacan to

designate the time when his elaborations borrow from the linguis-
tics of Saussure and Jakobson, or from the structural anthropology
of Lévi-Strauss: the time when he emphasises what psychoanalysis
may share with these disciplines—namely, the laws of composition
of the unconscious that Freud taught us to decipher, which have the
subject of science as a correlate and which, like the elementary struc-
tures of kinship, operate without the knowledge of the psychological
subject.
However, considering the matter more closely, it is not difficult to
confirm the constancy, from this moment, of what I call the objection to
the structuralist reduction, the objection inherent to psychoanalysis as
conceptualised by Lacan. Let us acknowledge this objection from the
first step. The laws of speech, Lacan said, and a big deal was made of
this. Yes, but Lacan could say at the same time that speech is an act, and
this act is unthinkable with just the subject of science. And yet we have
“The Purloined Letter”, which in spite of its chronology Lacan wanted
to place at the start of his Écrits, precisely to accentuate the structural
element of our experience. “The programme traced out for us is hence
to figure out how a formal language determines the subject” (Lacan,
[1956a] 2006, p. 31). What apparently could be more structuralist than
this expression? But the objection follows: the programme cannot be
fulfilled, he says, other than by a subject “contributing willingly”, and
this implies “a subjective conversion” (Lacan, [1956a] 2006, p. 31) often
connected to a dimension of drama. So we say farewell to structuralism.
I will not multiply the examples here: they are to be found through-
out Lacan’s seminars and writings, consistent with the idea of a subject
who, unlike the pure subject of science, is credited with a position and
with a responsibility toward that position—in other words, a subject
more ethical than “pathematic”.

The structuralist moment

From the structural moment, we can extract a very precise definition of
the Symbolic.
I won’t dwell on the time needed by Lacan to disinvest the term
“symbol”, so popular then, and to substitute “signifier” for it, thus
clarifying from the outset that the signifier in psychoanalytic usage
is not necessarily verbal, and that it is only homologous with the
 T R A J E C TO RY 7

linguistic signifier through its differential character and its laws of

composition.
The Symbolic is thus not reducible to the signifier even though it
presupposes it. That is why, at the start, there is a whole vocabulary of
access to the Symbolic, more or less realised or not, achieved or not. And
Lacan evokes, for example, access to a genuine symbolic relation, as if
the Symbolic had its chosen ones and that if all speaking beings shared
language, they didn’t all share the Symbolic. This vocabulary of access
is obviously suspect. It had initiatory implications which many people
became mired in but which are unsatisfactory in terms of the require-
ments of rationality and the ideal of transmission. Over a whole decade,
Lacan worked to reduce this idea and to provide a conceptually rigor-
ous definition of the Symbolic.
This definition makes of the Symbolic a specific mode of organisation
of the signifier via metaphor, the signifying chain’s synchronicity. The
thesis is well known but it requires precision. In fact, Lacan defines the
Symbolic through the conjunction of three metaphors, which he intro-
duced in the seminar The Psychoses: the metaphor of the subject and the
metaphor of the symptom formalised in “The agency of the letter in the
unconscious”, and then the metaphor of the Father in “On a question
prior to any possible treatment of psychosis”. The first question to ask
is if there is an interdependence between these three metaphors, or even
an order of determination.
The metaphor of the symptom is the metaphor of the trauma of the
first encounter with jouissance. It is one of the forms of the unconscious
as signifying chain, and thus of the unconscious as language, which
Lacan reformulates thanks to this linguistic tool, and that Freud called
repression and the return of the repressed. This is a shorthand way of
saying it, because it is necessary to distinguish, as Lacan did, the use of
metaphor in repression and its poetic or rhetorical usage, but the basic
thesis remains the same. With his two expressions, “repression” and
“return of the repressed”, Freud left in suspense the question of know-
ing where the repressed element subsists. How did it remain active in
readiness to make a return in spite of its disappearance? Freud, who
did not publish his “Project for a scientific psychology”, knew there
was a problem here. The metaphor of the symptom responds to this
question: the signifier remains metonymically latent in the signified of
current discourse and remains accessible, decipherable from the excess
of signification it produces.
8 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

The metaphor of the symptom, identical to repression-return of the

repressed, is not for everyone, and in particular, Lacan specifies, not
for those subjects for whom the signifier returns in the real, outside the
chain (the unconscious revealed, as Freud said), those very same ones
for whom, we can hypothesise, the metaphor of the father has failed.
The metaphor of the symptom must thus be seen as subordinate to that
of the father and excluded in psychosis.
This metaphor of the father also formalises the synchrony of a chain
of signifiers, but once these are taken as those of the Oedipus—father,
mother—and thus inseparable from the significations of relationships,
love, and procreation—beyond the relation to jouissance, it will engage
and order the social link between the sexes (man/woman) and the gen-
erations (parents/children).
But what is to be said about the supposed subject of the unconscious
chain who, if I may say, is in some way its real signified, irreducible as
much to the signifiers of the chain as to the significations it engenders?
Would it be elusive? Elusive, unless it is a specific metaphor that allows
it to be pinned down and which Lacan clearly calls the metaphor of the
subject, thanks to which “his ineffable and stupid existence” and the
x of his being are inscribed, but not without a cost. Lacan illustrated it
in his commentary on Victor Hugo’s poem, “Boaz Asleep”, where the
fertility of his “sheaf” does not go without the sickle.
So we have three linked metaphors that allow the metonymic drift
of discourse to be anchored, and thus the whole imaginary of signifi-
cation to be shaped by “induction” from the signifier. From the Sym-
bolic to the Imaginary an order of determination is thus established,
from which another cliché is born, to be added to the one about access
to the Symbolic. The same old cliché of the possible, even necessary,
surpassing of the imaginary passions of the analysed subject. A cli-
ché that is maintained in spite of the whole of analytic experience, as
well as Lacan’s explicit objections and in total disregard of his later
elaborations.
I will leave aside the steps that follow so I can refer to the trajectory’s
endpoint, to the moment when Lacan uses the formalism of the
Borromean knot. This knot where three rings of string, representing the
three di(said)mensions [dit-mensions] of the Symbolic, the Imaginary,
and the Real, are knotted as three in such a way that if any one of them
is cut the knot is undone.
 T R A J E C TO RY 9

Re-evaluations
I’m noting the opposition between the new and the old formulas with-
out justifying them for the time being. Knotting is substituted for the
metaphoric function. What Lacan first of all divided up with the binary
of the metaphor of the father functioning or foreclosed, with its corre-
sponding signifiers—the signifier in the chain of the symptom versus
the signifier in the real, and hence outside the chain—is then replaced
in the Borromean knot with the opposition: knotted or not knotted in
a Borromean way. This is so true that in 1975 he said that the Name-of-
the-Father is the Borromean knot. With the addition of the operation
of knotting, the symptom—which as a “sexual substitute” in Freud’s
terms knots together Symbolic and Real, signifier and jouissance—binds
itself to the meaning of the phantasy, produced between the Imaginary
and the Symbolic.
I

J-Sense
a
R S

Borromean knot

That Lacan’s first formulations can be resituated in the vocabulary of

the Borromean knot shows us that with the knot Lacan was on the path
to a more inclusive schematisation, one which allows a formulation of
the facts of both neurosis and psychosis. This is already an advantage,
but a generalised theory is only of interest due to the new aspects of the
Real that it allows us to approach. And indeed it is really that which is
in question.
As a supplementary function, the knot, which Lacan will later name
“sinthome” and which he adds to the three consistencies of the Imagi-
nary, the Symbolic, and the Real, requires at first that these latter be
rethought in terms of their autonomy, their equivalence that Lacan
would repeatedly assert, and even their knotting in twos.
10 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

The Symbolic that is written in the knot is therefore no longer a

linguistic chain. Lacan himself made this explicit. I refer to two striking
formulas from amongst many others: “Contrary to what I have said”,
he states, “the signifiers S1 and S2 do not make a chain”. It’s categori-
cal. And again: “The unconscious does not have a grammar”. In other
words, the unconscious does not have a syntax that produces grammat-
ical signification. The unconscious is certainly conditioned by language,
by the fact that it speaks, but it is not language, making sentences, making
“propositions”. It is rather langue, that is, an inconsistent multiplicity of
differential elements that do not fix meaning. We have thus arrived at a
Symbolic without metaphor, which Lacan introduced at the same time
as his considerations on lalangue, written as one word and which is not
language. And indeed, we can see Lacan methodically challenging one
by one the metaphors previously elaborated with so much care.
The definition of the symptom changes: it is no longer a function of
metaphor (thus of the chain), but the function of the isolated one-letter
[la lettre-une] that he writes as f(x). His comments allow for no ambigu-
ity: f is the function of jouissance, the jouissance of any element of the
unconscious (x) that from now on he calls “letter”. This is a return to a
variant of the signifier in the Real, outside the chain, through which he
at first defined the central phenomenon of psychosis.
Here, a digression. These new formulations certainly do not abolish
the symbolic as language, but require it to be thought of as a super-
imposed structure, necessitating a supplementary condition added by
discourse. This condition is that of linguistic science itself, but more
essentially for us, it is that of psychoanalysis, as it operates in each treat-
ment in order to extract from the analysand’s speech his own uncon-
scious language. In other words, the symbolic as language is already an
effect of discourse. I will come back to this.
As for the function of the Name-of-the-Father, it is no longer a func-
tion of the signifier, nor even a function of the letter. It is a function of
knotting, from a nominating saying [dire de nomination] that can cer-
tainly have symbolic effects, but which in itself is an existential and not
a symbolic function. Clinical consequences follow from this.
Finally, the metaphor of the subject exits in favour of the proper name
as the unforgeable signature of the living being that speaks.
From then on, what becomes of the category of the Imaginary that
is not essentially knotted to the Symbolic? The Imaginary, governed
and established by metaphor, was defined as signification. These
 T R A J E C TO RY 11

significations went from narcissism and the relations with one’s

counterpart right up to phallic signification. Hence the idea, formulated
at that time, that without the Other the subject could not even situate
himself in the position of Narcissus.
Ultimately, Lacan says that the Imaginary is the body. To understand
this it is necessary to add: the body without phallic signification, and
thus the image, which has its own consistency, that of form: the adored,
but also sometimes, abhorred image. In this way he returns to a pri-
mary mirror stage. This image will be colonised by the representations
which langue conveys and which Lacan qualifies as idiotic to emphasise
their existence outside-meaning.
As for the Real, it ex-sists. Ex-sistence outside. This is very differ-
ent from knocking up against a limit to formalisation in the symbolic
combinatory, against an impossible to write. This latter limit, according
to Lacan’s expression, is a “function of the real” in the Symbolic, and
to be distinguished from the Real outside the Symbolic, which is rather
on the side of the living being. This is a living being about which we
have no idea, which cannot be imagined and about which the Symbolic
knows nothing—despite the life sciences.
The re-evaluation is thus quite general. But what made it necessary?
Or at least, because it is not a matter of necessity, what grounded it in
the contingency of Lacan’s saying? In what way was the theory of the
Symbolic as metaphor insufficient?

“Real” subjects
I have never doubted the inadequacies of the thesis about the
subject—as supposed, as split and as “want-to-be” [manque à être].
Though perfectly convincing at the level of the logic of the unconscious
signifying chain, this thesis is perfectly incapable on its own of account-
ing for the whole of analytic experience, because the speaking being, the
one affected by the unconscious, is not reducible to the barred subject of
the unconscious. Hence my interest in the various supplements which
Lacan brought to the notion of the subject over time, to return to what
he calls in 1975 the “real subject”, defined as not merely supposed.
I’ll start with a well-known formula: “A subject supposes nothing,
he is supposed”. It is from 1967, where it was used to introduce the
matheme of the transference. Indeed it can be said that once there is
a signifier, a subject is supposed. If there are hieroglyphics on a stone,
12 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

a subject is supposed. S/subject. There is nothing to add here. What is

this subject? In the chain he can only be determined as a signified. But
remaining distinct from the signified, the supposed subject—I would
have to say: the sub-posed [le sous-posé] subject—instead makes a hole
in the signified. This is why we can write it as (−1) in the matheme of
the signifier and the signified:

S1
→ S2
s //(−1)

Or, we can state, as Lacan does again in Encore, that “his being is
always elsewhere”. We can certainly already say of this subject that he
is real, but in the sense that it is impossible to reduce this structure of
supposition in the field of language.
Lacan undertook an extraordinary emptying out of the obvious facts
of experience. First of all, that of the experience of the counterpart: far
from being evanescent, human beings are well and truly there; they are
noisy and they take up space, to say the least. A whole generation of
Lacanians brought up on the mirror stage got into the habit of automati-
cally referring this to the Imaginary, as if that sufficed to make the facts
vanish into thin air.
It is not only true in the experience of the counterpart but equally
at the level of interpretation: the subject of the text supposes nothing,
but all the same there needs to be someone to make the supposition.
Champollion in front of his hieroglyphics is not a supposed subject;
it is he who supposes. And what? Not the subject, but first of all the
signifier, since he supposes that the pattern of lines on the stone is
writing.
I evoke Champollion, but I could take Freudian deciphering. Short-
circuiting the subject of intentionality, it implies another subject, the
one supposed to the deciphered chain and which, since Lacan, we call
the “subject of the unconscious”. Freud called this unconscious desire.
But he is only supposed by a Freud who supposes, who treats the ana-
lysand’s speech precisely as material: that is, as a text, in accordance
with his tradition of writing. To treat the unconscious, to treat speech
as a text, is to suppose that the unconscious is a knowledge. Such was
the step taken by Freud. In this sense, Jean-Claude Milner (Milner,
2006) can say that Freud is in the field of what he calls “modern
knowledge” [“savoir moderne”]. Opposed to speech, this knowledge
 T R A J E C TO RY 13

does not speak, it says nothing to anybody: it excludes any message. It

is constructed from little fragments, from “surplus knowledge” [“plus
de savoir”] added to “surplus knowledge”, according to the expres-
sion he uses. Freud’s difference, however, which means that we cannot
simply include him in the company of those Milner calls the “Jews
of knowledge”—assuming that one agrees with his definition—is that
this unconscious text is not reducible to absolute “surplus knowledge”
since it is concerned with quite another thing: for Freud, the drives,
conspicuously absent from Milner’s book. Whether it is Champollion
or Freud, what would the one who supposes the signifier be called if
he were not called a subject? Not to mention the idea of that which
“suffers” [“pâtit”] from the signifier, according to the expression in The
Ethics of Psychoanalysis.
The one who speaks is divided between what he is as a supposed
subject, a subject made of absence whose being is always elsewhere, and
what he is as presence. I could say, presence of the speaking individual.
The question is the following: what determines this subject, enough to
convert this game of hunt the slipper into a hic et nunc, in the here and
now? I said presence of the individual: it is Lacan’s phrase. He uses it
in Encore and then on the subject of Joyce whom he calls the individual
[English in the original]. Indeed, it was necessary to wait for Encore for
Lacan to put forward his hypothesis: this subject and this individual
are the same. Did he ever doubt it? I do not believe so, but the ques-
tion was not a philosophical one about the essence of man. It was a
question about analytic practice: how could one catch this supposed
subject who slides in the chain with a process reduced to speech? In
other words, how could one access the referent, the Thing itself? And
isn’t this exactly what all interpretation aims at? To stop the sliding,
to end deciphering, and to say what the ballast is, to aim at its heart?
Lacan’s line of thought on this point is instructive.
From the start he sought a principle for the mooring of the being
that interpretation could target, but to this end he at first explored the
resources of language. All his developments on the quilting points that
stop the sliding of the chain, on the primordial signifier, and on the
phantasy as absolute signification, are so many attempts at answers.
The possible formulas of interpretation follow, because that is what is in
question: interpretation as approximated signification, or interpretation
that delivers the primordial signifier of a subject moored by the three
metaphors I discussed earlier.
14 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

Could he have stopped there? Surely not, if one believes that the
signifier and its order is not only causal but just as much caused.
I could use the Freudian metaphor here which differentiates the work
of the entrepreneur who handles the rules of manufacturing from the
investor, the one who lays down the capital without which there would
be nothing, not even the slightest dream, not to mention symptom. It
is what Lacan seeks to return to and what he calls by different names
over the course of time, designating at each moment what interpreta-
tion targets.
The first of these terms—and one which marks a moment of
transition—is the Thing. The Thing is a fixed kernel of being, which no
signifier represents but which may have a proper name; then the object
as central cause, that he will write as the a-thing [l’achose]; then finally
the parlêtre. These are so many names of a real subject that responds
in the hic and nunc, let us say, in its libidinal or jouissive presence, and
which the seminar The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis situ-
ated in their separation from the signifying chain.
However, this presence is not disconnected from speech for this thing
speaks, it speaks the truth and cannot do otherwise even if it lies. But
it cannot speak the truth of the real, of what it is as real, even though
truth aims at the Real. Hence the formula in “L’étourdit” that marks
another point of transition by inverting the first thesis of the dominance
of the Symbolic. I quote: “The saying [dire] comes from where the Real
commands truth”. It is a reversal which substitutes a Real master who
commands the subject for the hypothesis of the Symbolic master. Hence
the title I used in 1997, “The commandments of jouissance” (Soler, 1998,
pp. 15–25).
This re-evaluation displaces the conception of the Real itself in sanc-
tioning the impotence of language to do anything other than make a
fiction/fixing [fi(x)ion] of the real, if I may say this using Lacan’s word-
play. From then on the Real is split, as I have said, between the Real
belonging to the Symbolic and the Real outside the Symbolic which
only the Borromean knot allows to be inscribed. The first of these is
reducible to the impossibles over which the Symbolic presides. First,
the core of the subject of science that is impossible to eliminate (−1),
which I just mentioned. On this point I recommend Gabriel Lombardi’s
work on Cantor, Gödel, and Turing, L’aventure mathématique. Liberté et
rigueur psychotique (Lombardi, 2005), which studies very closely this
question of the real scar of the subject that cannot be eliminated from
 T R A J E C TO RY 15

any order of language. Then, the impossible to write of sex, let us say
it without playing on words, the at least two (le moins deux) of the part-
ner who would make the sexual relation. Finally, with the knot, Lacan
seeks a framework which allows the clinic of the “real subject” to be
approached. He says it explicitly and I have had the opportunity on
several occasions to insist on this. This subject who not only makes a
hole in the chain, who is no longer solely mentality, but who has bodily
substance—that is to say, the parlêtre, whatever his clinical structure, let
us say, generic man, the individual, precisely according to the expression
applied to Joyce (Lacan, [1975b] 1987, p. 28).
CHAPTER TWO

Towards the Real

I
have jumped from the structure of language to the Borromean
knot so as to situate the underlying framework of the Lacanian
trajectory, but this is only intelligible and justified if it follows the
development step by step.
It is in so far as psychoanalysis as a practice of speech mobilises the
Imaginary and the Symbolic, namely the field of semblants, that the
Real is brought into question, and one can wonder if it is not a delire-à-
deux, as Lacan ultimately put it. This is obviously a major question.
The Real can emerge in speech and limit the infinite drift of both
deciphering and meaning. Lacan put forward three successive
elaborations of the Real that imply, moreover, three definitions of the
final pass of analysis and not just one. What animates this quest?
On this question, the popular thesis according to which all these
advances are so many efforts at thinking the relations between the sig-
nifier and jouissance is not adequate. No doubt these relations were
reformulated over time, but the real questionis: why go beyond the
first consistent construction on this theme, mainly elaborated in the
1960s, that of the object a? For this already allowed the whole of ana-
lytic experience to be rethought from the perspective of the economy
of jouissance, since this object, to put it succinctly, is simultaneously
17
18 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

the main effect of language that mortifies jouissance and the remainder
which conditions all our surplus jouissance. With this object, Lacan writes
both the jouissance that is lacking—let us say, Freud’s lost object—and
that which remains condensed in the objects of surplus jouissance. And
this sheds light on the “destitution” at the end of analysis and the pro-
cedure of the pass is established, set out in 1967 in the “Proposition on
the psychoanalyst of the school” (Lacan, 1995).

What functions as Real?

Let’s start with a sentence from “Radiophonie” which seems to me to
be especially instructive for it evokes the relation of truth to the Real.
The truth which speaks and which is articulated in each analysis, what
is its aim? It is situated from “the supposition of what functions as real
in knowledge, which is added to it (to the Real)” (Lacan, 1970b, p. 95).
We see the splitting of the notion of the Real here: a Real internal to the
Symbolic and a Real to which knowledge is added. In both cases, it is
clear that it is not unconscious knowledge that is said to be real.
At the outset, unconscious knowledge is so barely thought of as Real
that it is simply “supposed”. It is the definition of the transference: the
distress—let us say the symptom, whatever it is—which brings some-
one to analysis, and which can be written as a signifier that Lacan called
the signifier of the transference, S. From the moment it is addressed to
analysis, it supposes that there are other signifiers, unconscious signifi-
ers that can give it meaning. And in fact the effects of deciphering prove
the supposition, at least partially, but this does not allow us to conclude
that the unconscious is real.
On the contrary, what functions as real in knowledge are, let us say,
the “negativities” of structure. This term is a way of designating what
the structure of language renders impossible. These limit points are
hence trans-structural, setting out the inevitable limits to analytic elabo-
ration, which correspond to what is Real within the Symbolic.
The first impossible situated by Lacan stems from the incompatibil-
ity of speech and desire. This may make desire an articulated signified,
yet it is nonetheless inarticulable. The object that causes it, although
incarnated in four “episodic substances” (Lacan, 2001b, p. 309)—oral,
anal, scopic, and invocatory—is still impossible to say. It is in this sense
that the object could be classed as Real, as Lacan did for a time. In other
words, articulated truth is powerless to say the real that governs it: the
 TO WA R D S T H E R E A L 19

truth never concludes but it persists. We repress it and it returns; we

gag it and it speaks elsewhere; we ask it to say the last word, the final
word, as I expressed it not long ago, and it only half-says. However, its
repetitive insistence provides a glimpse of the real of the unnameable
cause that animates it. In this way, Lacan first took phantasy to be that
which functions as the real by virtue of the impossible to say of this
“object that lacks”, this object which one “no longer has”, even though
it provides the surplus jouissances through which desire is linked to jou-
issance. Appealing to logic, he made it homologous with an axiom, the
irreducible constancy of which constitutes the nucleus of all that can
be articulated of the unconscious, which analysis allows to be seen in a
lightening flash.
This did not yet produce a knowledge of the impossible. On the con-
trary, a “vain knowledge of a being that slips away” was the verdict in
1967. “Vain knowledge of a being that slips away” marks a limit that
may produce an unpleasant surprise in a practice where the transfer-
ence, beyond therapeutic hopes, has made the prospect of knowledge
seem enticing. But there is no knowledge of object a. It is inferred
from what we decipher of desire, it is imagined corporeally, orally,
excrementally—but psychoanalysis cannot be a science of the object
(Lacan, [1966] 2006, p. 733).
In the next step, Lacan is searching for what functions as real in
knowledge, following the model of logic and the impasses to formalisa-
tion. He now evokes not induction as with object a, but writing: more
precisely, the impossible to write. This heralds a transition and a con-
clusion through a logical demonstration of the impossible, the premise
being that via analytic saying something writes itself. Undoubtedly,
with the question of knowledge comes the question of what “to write
itself” means in a practice that has no other instrument than speech.
A joining of speech to the Real, and not simply to truth, is posited
here. Through chatter, something of the real is reached, Lacan will say.
The saying in analysis leaves traces of writing that are relative to the
analytic discourse. Lacan now reformulates the classic definition of
logical modalities—the possible, the contingent, the necessary and the
impossible—to include time: the time of what stops for the contingent
and the possible, or the time of what does not stop for the necessary
and the impossible. What “stops not writing itself” is the definition of
contingency. The expression indicates that analysis not only explores
what we might believe to be already there, but produces something
20 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

new that can now write itself. What “does not stop not writing itself” in
a psychoanalysis is the impossible which occupies the place of the real.
What is it then that stops not writing itself via the race for the always
half-said truth, through the inaccessible mirage, if not the traces of its
powerlessness? In terms of structure, language only writes the one and
even the one on its own. It is the One in all its forms: the Ones that the
unconscious ciphers, the One of phallic jouissance: that is, the One fallen
under the blow of castration “which makes a function of the subject”
(Lacan, 1975d, p. 9), the one of saying of the One on its own. Hence
the famous “there is the One” [“y a d’l’Un”], the One and none other,
repeated by Lacan for a whole year. Analysis has no other product.
This insistent contingency of the one that does not stop writing
itself demonstrates indirectly the real “specific” to the ciphering of the
unconscious: that is, the impossible of writing the supposed two of sex,
the two that is not, that “does not stop not writing itself”. This is as
“inaccessible” as the two of the series of whole numbers in the absence
of which “there is no sexual relation”, no relation between the jouissance
of the One and the Other. Consequently, the phantasy and its object
appear as an imaginary suppletion to the Real, to the foreclosure of the
sexual relation.
Demonstrating this happens not on paper but in the treatment, case
by case, and precisely by putting love life into question. It is a special
demonstration, founded, says Lacan, on insistence (Lacan, 1975c, p. 17)
and lasting until this reiterated One takes on the value of the demon-
stration of the impossibility of two. I could say that it is a pass to the
One and nothing else, or also a pass “to the not [pas] two”, with all the
equivocation of this expression.
Until now, we see not the real unconscious but only what functions
as real.
For a long time I wondered what made Lacan take the step in the
seminar Encore of going beyond the emphasis he placed for years on the
structure of language, its logic and its topology, to emphasise the effects
of lalangue (written as one word), an unheard of thesis in relation to
what had come before: the unconscious as “lucubration of knowledge”
(Lacan, 1998, p. 139). This latter unconscious, he specifies, is “situated
on the basis of its deciphering”, the one which we try to grasp from the
work of association in the transference, and which he had claimed was
“structured like a language”.
I note that this new chapter is strictly contemporary with his first use
of the Borromean knot, and which is immediately followed with the
 TO WA R D S T H E R E A L 21

emphasis from 1970 in “Lituraterre” on the function of writing as another

mode of the speaking being. This conjunction is not an accident.

The navel
My hypothesis is that Lacan is led beyond his conception of the uncon-
scious through his elaborations on the structure of language. A decisive
formula in this progress, dating from the 1969 “Report on ‘The Analytic
Act’”, states that the unconscious is “knowledge without a subject”
(Lacan, 1984b, p. 19). It corresponds to the notion of the “subject sup-
posed to know” which defines transferential belief. I take it as a kind of
navel on which everything that is re-elaborated from then on is based.
The unconscious is certainly a knowledge since it is deciphered,
but why without a subject? Because of linguistic structure: the signi-
fier, which we write S1, can only ever represent the subject for other
signifiers, written S2, which is knowledge. Where Lacan had for many
years written the knotting of signifiers in the chain S1→ S2—a knotting
which seemed appropriate to explain the meaning produced between
interpretation and free association—he now uncovers an impossible:
the impossible copulation of the representative or representatives of the
subject with knowledge. This impossible is attributable to the funda-
mentally differential structure of the signifier that is only isolated as
one by its difference from others. Jakobson opened up this path with
his phonology at the level of the a-semantic signifier. From then on the
structure of the representation of the subject is recurrent: whatever the
signifier that represents him might be, it leaves him irremediably sepa-
rated from other signifiers. We could then say, although it might not
please Freud, “There where knowledge without a subject was, I cannot
come to be”. Challenging his first formulations, what Lacan ultimately
elaborates is that the signifiers of the unconscious do not form a chain
with those of the subject.
An unconscious “knowledge without a subject”. How could it be the
subject’s if not by the mediation of what, in structure, is not language:
that is, the enjoying substance of the body, the body the subject has and
which he needs in order to enjoy? This unconscious can be said to be
the subject’s since its signifiers are those extracted from his symptom
through deciphering. If, before being deciphered, they do not represent
him, they nevertheless affect his jouissance as an event of the body.
This is the Lacanian hypothesis emphasised in 1973 at the end of
Encore (Lacan, 1998, pp. 141–142), but to me it seems consistent with the
22 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

very notion of “knowledge without a subject” that Lacan formulated

well before then. This implies that the signifier itself is at the level of
jouissance, that it is “the apparatus of jouissance” (Lacan, 1998, p. 55). The
living being is its “point of insertion”, as he said from the start of the
seminar The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. In other words, “knowledge
without a subject”, more than the object, is the apparatus of jouissance
that presides over the jouissance that is as well as over the jouissance that
is not.
From now on, there is a question. Where do they, these intrusive sig-
nifiers which are not the S1s representing the subject, this subject whose
“being is always elsewhere”, come from (Lacan, 1998, p. 142)? The ref-
erence to lalangue provides the answer: from nowhere else than from
lalangue, where the battery of signifiers in its differential structure is
present but without yet constituting a language. “Knowledge without a
subject” requires the emphasis on lalangue, written as one word, which
is the place from which differential signifiers can pass over to language.
For that to happen, the signifier One, and not just any old one, must be
extracted and differentiated from some of the other ones of lalangue.

The two unconsciouses

From now on, the notion of unconscious knowledge is split. Lacan
uses the pejorative term “lucubration” in order to say that the uncon-
scious deciphered in terms of knowledge always remains limited—one
only knows a bit of it—and secondly, that it is hypothetical in relation
to the knowledge deposited in lalangue, which is itself impregnable.
I quote: lalangue “articulates things by way of knowledge [de savoir] that
go much further than what the speaking being sustains [supporte] by
way of enunciated knowledge” (Lacan, 1998, p. 139). Lacan concludes
more generally that language does not exist, that it is just what we try
to know of langue. He even describes linguistics itself as a lucubration:
in other words, as a “delusion” with a scientific goal.
We must understand that this disparity of two knowledges—the
knowledge of lalangue and the knowledge deciphered in language—
would not be conceivable without the differential structure of the
signifier, or else the thesis would itself be lucubrated. The act of
deciphering consists in extracting a signifier or a series of signifiers
from the analysed material of the symptom. Lacan put it explicitly: by
deciphering, an unknown signifier of knowledge that did not represent
 TO WA R D S T H E R E A L 23

the subject but that governed his jouissance in the symptom, an S2

therefore, call it sign or letter—in other words, a signifier as cause and
object of jouissance—becomes S1, a signifier acknowledged as master of
his jouissance. A change of status of the master signifier thus occurs. This
“incarnated” signifier, S1, is differentiated from the S1s borrowed from
the Other of discourse which can range from the Ideals of the Other
to the phallus, but is also differentiated from the other signifiers of
lalangue, for the structure of representation of this new S1 in relation to
knowledge is recurrent and not reducible by deciphering.
It is what the following schema shows: (S1 (S1 (S1 → (S2)))) (Lacan,
1998, p. 143). It is homologous at the level of the unconscious to the
subject’s division from knowledge.
The subject His unconscious
S1 S2 unconscious knowledge
→   
$
(
S1 ( S1
S1 ( → (S2 ))))
deciphered S2 S2 o f lalangue

From now on, lalangue appears as the vast reserve from which deci-
phering extracts only some fragments. This should be noted in relation
to identification to the symptom: the lalangue-unconscious remains as
an impregnable knowledge whose effects exceed us.
CHAPTER THREE

Lalangue, traumatic

W
hy write it as one word? The references are numerous, and
Lacan explained it in this way: it is because of its homophony
with “lallation”. “Lallation” comes from the Latin lallare,
which the dictionaries say designates the act of singing “la, la” to send
infants to sleep.1 The term also designates the babbling of the infant
who does not yet speak but who already makes sounds. Lallation is
sound separated from meaning, but nonetheless, as we know, not sepa-
rated from the infant’s state of satisfaction.
Here a small digression. An apparently enigmatic and hardly even
serious remark in the lecture “Joyce, the symptom” is now clarified
(Lacan, 1987, p. 35). Speaking of the symptom as an event of the body,
he calls it “tied to that which: l’on l’a, l’on l’a de l’air, l’on l’aire, de l’on
l’a”. One can even sing it. The implication of this remark is the link of
lalangue with the symptomatic body.
Lalangue evokes the speech that is transmitted before syntactically
structured language. Lacan says that lalangue, as one word, means the
mother tongue: in other words, the first things heard, to parallel the
first forms of bodily care.
A second reason is that a single word in the singular designates a func-
tion that is not to be confused with the multiplicity of diverse langues
25
26 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

in the sense of idioms. They cannot be completely separated, and it is

possible to speak of lalangues as one word, for in each langue in its differ-
ence from others we find a function of lalangue as translinguistic.

A-structural lalangue
What distinguishes lalangue from langues is that in lalangue there is no
meaning. Lacan formulates this in Television: langue only provides the
cipher of meaning, as each of its elements can take on any meaning
whatsoever. This is why Lacan can say elsewhere that lalangue has noth-
ing to do with the dictionary (Lacan, 1971–1972, 4th November, 1971,
p. 4). Each langue, however, is guaranteed by the dictionary. The diction-
ary lists the elements one by one—let us say, the signifiers—and shows,
via quotations, the meanings that usage has determined. That meaning
is determined by use proves that each langue comes from discourse: that
is, from what is said, from diction, in any given historicised social bond.
The quotations of the dictionary can ground use, even authorised use.
I won’t dwell on the other uses defined by their not being authorised—
the different slangs and other registers of langue—which correspond to
the fact that social links are never homogeneous and that use varies
as a function of class, social circle, education, etc. What is called a liv-
ing langue is an evolving langue. The dictionary, in introducing words
and new locutions, in abandoning obsolete words, etc., tries to fix at a
given moment the way that words are tied to their meanings. To say
that lalangue has nothing to do with the dictionary is precisely to say
that what is lacking in lalangue is this tethering of words to any agreed
meaning.
Unlike the Symbolic, lalangue is thus not a constituted body but a
multiplicity of differences that have not taken shape. There is no (−1)
of lalangue that would make it a set. There is no order in lalangue. It is
not a structure of language or of discourse. For language, order is the
ordered pair of the subject that inscribes it S1 → S2. It is the basis of
the transference as a link to the subject supposed to know and it also
structures free association and all its effects of meaning. For discourse,
order is the semblant, written at the top left of Lacan’s mathemes, which
orders the social bond. Every discourse is thus an order. This is not the
case with lalangue, which is the a-structural level of the verbal appara-
tus. Could one say that lalangue is a pulverulent proliferation? No, for
that would not designate lalangue itself but a usage of lalangue outside
 L A L A N G U E , T R A U M AT I C 27

discourse. Lalangue is rather the “set of all equivocations” possible,

which nonetheless does not make a whole.
Hence the problem Lacan raises of knowing how one moves from
these ones of pure difference to the signifier One, written with a capi-
tal, S1 or even to the swarm of S1s that it may form, and that I invoked
just now, like a new master signifier inscribed in the field of jouissance.
Where are we to find the unit-element? Jakobson insisted that the
phoneme is a differential unit that has no meaning. But neither does
the word, Lacan remarked. Since lalangue comes from speech that
has been spoken and heard, any word that is heard can take on any
meaning. A famous example would be “Nom-du-Père” (Name-of-the-
Father) and “non dupe erre” (non-dupe errs) that are only distinguished
through writing. Lalangue is made up of ones that are signifiers but at
a basic level of pure difference. It follows that the One incarnated in
lalangue—I emphasise incarnated—the one that is fused with jouissance
and is not simply one amongst others, this One, I quote, “is something
that remains indistinct [indécis] between the phoneme, the word, the
sentence, and even the whole of thought” (Lacan, 1998, p. 143). It is the
whole problem of the uncertainty of deciphering. Lacan will certainly
speak of the letter one of the symptom—I will come back to this—but
“indeterminate” means that we cannot identify this One with certainty.
In other words, we do not know it. The unconscious as lalangue has
effects at the level of jouissance, but it remains essentially unknown.

Lalangue cemetery
Lalangue is nonetheless linked to discourse. I quote from “La troisième”
(Lacan, 1975a): lalangue “is the deposit, the alluvium, the petrification in
which is marked the way a group handles its unconscious experience”.
Unconscious experience implies the effect of speech and discourse on
the substance of the body. It is what discourse, in a given social bond,
has ordered and conveyed historically of the jouissance that is deposited
in a langue. And when I say “discourse”, this includes its most trivial
and most banal productions as well as its most sublimated and original
inventions in poetry and literature. Here we would pose the question,
to which I will return later, of the private discourse from which the sub-
ject has been constituted.
We could say here that a langue is permanently impregnated by the
jouissance that governs speech and its enjoyed signifiers. But a term such
28 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

as “impregnated” which evokes life would be misleading. A langue is

rather a cemetery. I translate in this way what Lacan notes: even when it
is said to be living, even when it is in use, a langue is always a dead langue
for it involves “the death of the sign” (Lacan, 1975a). What it gathers is
the jouissance that has passed over to the sign, or to the letter, a mortified
jouissance that “presents itself as dead wood”. A cemetery, but a
constantly updated one, just like a real cemetery. Some new signs are
admitted, signs that I would be tempted to say are excorporated from
lived experiences. These signs, passing over to the word, secrete new
words, expressions, equivocations, which, though it might not please
academics, wait for no dictionary in order to be in use, and “in use”
here means “use of jouissance”. Some other signs, in contrast, become
obsolete, inappropriate for the jouissances of their time, and hence out-
side use. Langue is dead, but it comes from life and the whole problem
is therefore to know how a dead langue can operate on the living being,
traumatically.

The effects of lalangue

Lalangue is an impregnable knowledge, but not without effects, and
indeed, otherwise there would be no reason to be interested in it. These
effects are those of affects: lalangue affects jouissance.
This thesis is different from the question of the jouissance of lalangue.
That one may enjoy lalangue is proven by the existence of the poet
and the writer, and also by the schizophrenic who dispenses with the
symbolic but not with lalangue. The later Joyce is proof of this.
What demonstrates that lalangue affects the living jouissance of the
speaking being? How do we know it? This question needs to be posed
since the thesis is far from being accepted by everyone. The twentieth
century, said to be the century of language, is not the century of the
effects of langue. In fact, it is the opposite, paradoxically, since it is widely
believed that language is itself a product of the brain. Look at Chomsky
and so many other upholders of neuronal man. I therefore appeal to
Lacan’s texts to tell us what proof there is that lalangue, in its difference
from language, affects the living being. I’ll set out the arguments.
That experience, with its lived jouissances, goes towards lalangue is
certain, since a langue evolves according to living communities. It is
interesting to note here the current problem of English and the major
difficulties of translation between the English of England, the United
 L A L A N G U E , T R A U M AT I C 29

States of America, and Australia. We shouldn’t forget the fourth

English, disastrous perhaps but for us significant, the international
English reduced to its usage as communication, for which it is built,
but at the cost of a quite obvious impoverishment in relation to the ver-
sions of English I mentioned above. This impoverishment even shows
that the function of communication is neither primary nor fundamen-
tal, and that a langue evolves by collecting words that arise from exist-
ence [l’existentiel]. Affect, in the sense of the feeling of the unsayable,
produces words, a thesis that was already present in “On a question
prior to any possible treatment of psychosis”. We would also have to
study the failure of Esperanto. That was an attempt to distance diplo-
matic langue from national powers and create one that was politically
neutral. Its failure must be seen in the light of the rise of this interna-
tional English, which as impoverished as it is, is not politically neutral.

Proof by affect
Another argument from Encore, closer to analytic experience, could be
called “proof by affect”.
We know that the effects of langue exceed anything that can be
known of them, as we see from the fact that the speaking being, Lacan
says, has all sorts of affects that remain enigmatic. This should be a
warning to those who imagine that at the end of an analysis the subject
would no longer experience discordant affects but only affects syntonic
with their current situation. That was never Lacan’s thesis: at the end of
analysis, the subject remains “subject to unpredictable affects” (Lacan,
1970a, p. 26).
One of these affects is another satisfaction, linked to verbal chatter,
to blah blah blah. This is satisfying—albeit in a strange way—in that
something is both said and not said, and without us knowing why. This
has nothing to do with the satisfaction of communication, of pseudo-
dialogue. We have evidence of this, for example, in the fact, patent in
analysis but also in everyone’s experience, that a dream can change
one’s mood for the whole day, in one or another direction. A lapsus
may delight or appal you quite independently of its consequences, etc.
Satisfaction is obviously not jouissance. It is a phenomenon of the sub-
ject affected by speech, not a phenomenon of the body. It “responds”
however (this is Lacan’s term) to jouissance, more precisely to the
enjoyed knowledge of lalangue that inhabits speech. The enigmatic
30 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

unpredictability of the affect—I would say, its discordance—is a sign,

according to Lacan, of what its cause is in the enjoyed knowledge of
lalangue, a knowledge which exceeds anything one can know of it.
Here there is a major addition to the classic psychoanalytic theory of
affects. The affect is neither an instrument for deciphering nor a com-
pass for interpretation, as I often say. The thesis is Freudian, linked to
his conception of repression: the affect is not reliable because it is dis-
placed. And “not reliable” means that it does not reveal unconscious
knowledge. A paradox, since for the affected subject nothing is more
significant than what he experiences and which he often confuses with
his truth. Lacan argued that metonymy is the norm for affects, but here
we see something different: precisely as enigmatic, the affect becomes
an epistemic index. Certainly it does not reveal a knowledge, but it
does make a sign, a sign that an unknown knowledge which causes it is
there. We are in the register of proof by affect.
At this point Lacan extends to the affects of blah blah—what he calls
“other satisfaction”—his thesis about the affect of anxiety in the semi-
nar he devoted to this theme. He recognised a special affect in anxiety,
as I have shown, the only one which rightly has epistemic value, sig-
nalling the presence of the object a of desire as an a-phenomenological
object. Incidentally, on the basis of this he paid homage to Kierkegaard,
contra the complete trust of Hegel in absolute knowledge. The experi-
ence of anxiety arises in circumstances when, confronted by the enigma
of the Other, the subject finds himself about to be reduced to this object,
threatened by the imminence of what I have called a “wild subjective
destitution”. Some years later Lacan, taking account of the Real outside
the Symbolic, broadened its function once more and redefined it as “the
typical affect of every advent of the Real” (Lacan, 1975a).

Proof by treatment of the symptom

The main argument establishing the effects of lalangue—and for me,
the most elaborated—is found in Lacan’s 1975 “Geneva lecture on the
symptom”. Here it is a proof by treatment of the symptom.
That we can shift the jouissance of the symptom through speech, the
first step of analytic experience, implies that it is in “the encounter of
words with [the] body that something takes shape”. Indeed, we must
suppose a coherence between the method that operates on the symp-
tom and the moment that the symptom itself is constituted. We have
 L A L A N G U E , T R A U M AT I C 31

to link the fact that, on the one hand, it is during an early period of
childhood that symptoms crystallise, and on the other, that we do not
analyse without the associations of the subject (see Lacan, 1989, p. 12).
The method in question is the one that Freud invented and elabo-
rated in the series of texts, The Interpretation of Dreams, The Psychopathol-
ogy of Everyday Life, and Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious. The
method does not proceed via symbols or archetypes of discourse, as
Jung believed, but through the subject’s own, always unique associa-
tions. Interpretation relies on the material specific to each subject.
Now, if one evokes the work of Freud and reads the paragraphs
devoted to the meaning of symptoms in the Introductory Lectures
on Psycho-Analysis, this meaning is only interpreted accurately—
“accurately” means with some effects of reduction of the symptom—in
terms of the first encounters with sexual reality. That speech and sex are
the two key elements of an effective interpretation allows us to conclude
that there is a “coalescence” between these two fundamental givens.
They represent two distinct heterities [hétérités]. That’s why Lacan
adds the trauma of lalangue to what Freud took to be the trauma of sex
(Soler, 2008c).
Firstly, sexual reality. Freud called it autoerotic, but Lacan disagreed
with this thesis. This reality concerns the encounter with the erection,
the little prick. “Encounter” means that it is not autoerotic but hetero,
foreign. This is a first proof of an anomalous jouissance in relation to the
body which, Lacan says, bursts the screen (a reference to Mishima who
was so stunned by it). It bursts the screen because it does not come from
the functional interior of the screen, which is silent. It is sometimes the
object of a rejection when the subject is scared of it, as was Little Hans,
for example, who made a phobia out of it.
Lacan makes a big deal of the fact that the child receives discourse
before this very early period of life. But be careful, this is not an appren-
ticeship. It is an impregnation. “The unconscious is the way that the
subject was impregnated by language, and bears its imprint”. The term
excludes mastery, active appropriation, and discrimination. It refers
to this foreign thing, but we can note that without any doubt, before
being able to compose sentences, the subject reacts correctly to complex
expressions whose literal meaning he does not understand and does
not know how to use. There is something here like a bizarre sensibility.
From this receptivity to the otherness of lalangue, what Lacan calls the
“water” of language, “some detritus” remains. The water of language
32 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

connotes fluidity, the sonorous continuum of the a-structural heard.

Detritus, debris (elsewhere he says deposit), all these terms that denote
scattered discrete elements refer to something that is anterior to the use
of quilting points. This debris is the Real, outside meaning, in the form
of a sonorous One, received from what was heard. For do not forget that
language is acquired through the ear. And it is, I quote, “some debris
to which will be added later on the problems that are going to frighten
him” (Lacan, 1989, p. 16).
Lallation, melody, the noise of sounds deprived of meaning but not
of presence, operates before the quilting of language. This obviously
raises the question of what those subjects who do not have access to
sound—the deaf—find as a substitute. And they need to find some-
thing since they have access to language.
There is a coalescence between the impregnation by discourse and
the moment of encountering the sexual, here the phallic. “It is in the
way in which lalangue has been spoken and also heard by this or that
individual in his particularity, that something will then emerge again in
dreams, in all sorts of stumblings, in all sorts of ways of saying” (Lacan,
1989, p. 14). Such is the “motérialité of the unconscious” which accounts
for the symptom.

The holophrastic unconscious

I would like to emphasise the step taken in this move from the causal
incidence of language to lalangue.
The unconscious structured like a language was an unconscious
made up of signifiers, but signifiers were not necessarily words. Lacan
has for a long time insisted on the idea, based on the model of linguis-
tic structure, that every discrete and combinable element functioned as
a signifier. He gave the example of the slap that has become a signi-
fier, and that runs through discourse from one generation to the next.
Lalangue may certainly gather images from discourse, but its knowledge
is nothing more than the ones of its motérialité, and the unconscious is
conceived as the direct effect of these elements—one by one, word by
word—that predate the child’s own sentences. This is the first point.
The second point is that this passage does not exclude the function
of the Other, which Lacan spoke of up till then and which is more well-
known. Lacan takes it up again in this same lecture and elsewhere.
I quote: “Parents mould the subject in this function that I call symbolic.
 L A L A N G U E , T R A U M AT I C 33

[…] The way in which a mode of speaking has been instilled in him
(he is instilled with what impregnates him) can only bear the mark of
the mode in which his parents have accepted him” (Lacan, 1989, p. 13).
That strongly resembles the classic thesis that desire (including that of
the parents) circulates in speech. But with motérialité, we are prior to
the distinction signifier/signified, for the sounds that are distinguished
from each other precede the meaning in what is heard: la, la, la, like
one precedes any two in the chain. For this reason, the enigmatic ones
in the song of what is heard have a direct effect when they are linked
to the enigma of sex. Lacan hammered home often enough that there is
no preverbal for the one who speaks, but there is pre-language in the
sense of syntax. The song—or better still, the “melody”—of the parents
is not the message of the Other and exceeds it, just as the unconscious
as lalangue exceeds the unconscious as language. It is indeed why we
must add, as Lacan did, the way in which the child hears to the way
in which the Other speaks. What determines it? The analysand often
asks “But why?” of this thing he cannot get rid of. No other reason than
the irreducibility of contingency. There is also an encounter [tuché] in
the way one hears, which greatly limits the responsibility of parents
towards their children.
We could introduce here some considerations on transmission, which
psychoanalysis has contributed so much to exalting. The objection to
any mastery of transmission—a mastery that is the ideal for the educa-
tor while being the drama and the powerlessness of parents—an objec-
tion that Lacan first tackled through unconscious desire, is to be related
more fundamentally to the primary antecedence of lalangue.
I will pause on Lacan’s formulas: “a way of speaking” where previ-
ously he used to say “discourse of the Other”: there is nothing vague in
this notion. The signifier is heard [s’entend]; it’s not between the lines.
What is said between the lines, in the signifying interval, is interpreted
and is called desire and phantasy. On the other hand, “a way of speak-
ing” is a vague expression; it’s both more general and broader, and we
would be hard pressed to reduce it to terms of structure. It is no doubt
necessary to take account of the fact that it is in a lecture addressed
to an unspecified public. But I do not believe that this is the funda-
mental reason. A way of speaking includes the structure of language
but adds something to it. In the structure of language, singularity is
indexed through particular signifiers and the specific phantasy, both
of which are relatively graspable. “Manner of speaking” adds to this
34 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

something like the style of speaking—including phrasing, rhythm,

breathing—that occurs at the level of the heard which itself involves the
body, and sometimes partially raises speech to the dimension of theatre.
In the relation with counterparts and in the judgements of sympathy
or antipathy, this di[t]-mension is both very present and very difficult
to define. This is why I used the word “song” of the Other to designate
what is lallated—if I may make up this term from the Latin lallare—
what is lallated in the emission of speech articulated by the Other.
Yet we must remember what I mentioned previously: in lalangue the
One is indistinct. It comes from sound but nevertheless it is not reduc-
ible to the phoneme: it can go as far as the unity of a sentence function-
ing as a One. In other words, be careful: the holophrase precedes the
sentence. The holophrase is defined as a soldering which suppresses the
interval between the S1s and S2s of the sentence, and as a result makes
the sentence function as a One. This is the holophrase which Lacan said
in Seminar XI that it was specific to a whole series of cases extending
from retardation to psychosis. Well, we can deduce that it takes on a
broader and more basic function from these developments on lalangue
in the mid 1970s. There is no more reason to reserve it for psychosis. The
first spoken words can function as an enjoyed holophrase distinct from
any message. To receive the message and to receive lalangue are two
linked but different things, as are their respective effects.

What trauma?
Where is the traumatism in all this? Are the marks left by the coales-
cence of the debris of language with the trauma of the phallic sufficient
for us to call lalangue traumatic, even when those who may have the
feeling of being traumatised by it are scarce? On the contrary, many
suffering subjects can say that they have found their salvation through
words. We don’t need to evoke Joyce here: Elfriede Jelinek, winner of
the Nobel Prize in literature, testified to it in a recent interview pub-
lished in Le Monde des livres. This is not a unique case. There are subjects
who find something like a salvation at the level of lalangue.
The analysand complains about the discourse of the parental
Other: on this point there is no exception. He complains about what
the Other has and has not articulated, about what he has received
from the Other and about what he has not received, or at least what
he believes he has or has not received. Hence the emphasis on the
 L A L A N G U E , T R A U M AT I C 35

transmission of the symbolic effects of speech from figures of the

Other across generations. Conversely, he only rarely complains of
langue.
In putting the emphasis on lalangue, Lacan does not reject the impact
of the Other—particularly in the form of the parents as I have said—
but he displaces the point of impact. From the weight of the discourse
of the Other (articulated in language) Lacan moves to the weight of
the lalangue of the Other, the langue heard from the Other. Well, it’s a
passage from the Symbolic to the Real. Lalangue is not Symbolic but
Real. Real, because it is made of ones outside the chain and thus outside
meaning (the signifier becomes real when it is outside the chain), and
of ones which are enigmatically fused with jouissance. On the one hand,
lalangue operates on the Real which the body enjoys and “civilises” it as
symptom, Lacan would say. On the other, storing the signs left by expe-
riences of jouissance, it itself becomes an object of jouissance. This is one
of the main theses of the seminar Encore: to speak is in itself a jouissance.
It’s a subversion of the cogito: “I think thus it enjoys itself”. The singular
lalangue which comes to the subject through the Other is not without
carrying the trace of the jouissances of this Other. Hence the obscenity
of lalangue, about which one could say that it marks the subject with
enjoy-signs [jouis-signes] both enigmatic and unprogrammable. From
the very beginning, language entails for everyone who speaks a bond
with the Other: not an intersubjective bond—one would even hesitate
to qualify it as strictly speaking social—but a bond which has its roots
in a singular bath of obscenity and which can later emerge as symptom,
dream, and lapsus, etc. This is no doubt what allowed Lacan to evoke a
sexual relation between generations, which is quite a different thing to
the incestuous act.

The analphabetic symptom

Where Lacan relates the passage of the lalangue heard in childhood to
the symptom through its fusion with jouissance, let us take the opposite
path so as to see what the thesis implies concerning access to the uncon-
scious in analysis.
I’ll start once again with the symptom. At the beginning of analysis,
it presents itself as a hole in meaning. Analytic work is driven by
nonsense, a term used by Lacan in reference to Jaspers: it is generally
the non-sense of a formation of the unconscious that challenges both
36 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

understanding and will. But there is not only the symptom: there is
the lapsus, the bungled action and the dream, so many phenomena
that constitute units outside meaning. The analytic work of association
consists in connecting this unit outside meaning with other associated
signifiers that give it meaning. We thus pass from the erratic One that
has surprisingly appeared to the chain of language. An analysis, Lacan
said in 1973, delivers to the analysand the meaning of his symptoms, an
always particular meaning, antithetical to shared common sense. The
snag is that meaning does not resolve the symptom but can even make
it worse. The symptom’s resistance to the elaboration of meaning, and
specifically to Oedipal meaning, was noted very early on in the analytic
movement which seemed to be traumatised by the depreciation of its
results. Freud was ironic on this point: something resisted, the uncon-
scious closed up. Registering this, the analytic movement turned then
to the analysis of resistances, which did not help. Only Lacan came to
the conclusion, and again later on, that the analytic path was not that
of meaning. When I say the path, I refer to that which leads to the fixa-
tion of the symptom as well as to that which leads to its reduction, the
idea being that it’s in fact the same thing. If the kernel of the symptom
comes from the Real outside meaning of obscene lalangue, it can only be
resolved through this same Real.
The symptom indeed comes from the Real, and doubly so: from the
real of the substance of jouissance and from the real of lalangue. We grasp
now how Lacan was able to arrive at a redefinition of the unconscious
as real, as outside meaning. It concerns the unconscious as the “spoken
knowledge” [savoir parlé] of lalangue, a knowledge that is at the level of
jouissance. As I pointed out, there is the lucubrated unconscious, that is,
deciphered, which allows the subject to appropriate some ones of the
letters of his symptom—in other words, “to know a bit about it”, but
only a bit. And then there is the unconscious as lalangue, which is not of
the Symbolic, but Real, ungraspable. In Encore, Lacan evokes “the mys-
tery of the speaking body” (Lacan, 1998, p. 131), in the sense of the mys-
tery of the body affected in its jouissance by the knowledge of lalangue,
affected in an always singular, and I would add, incalculable way. In
this sense, if the subject as speaking is inscribed in the genealogy of
discourse, the symptom that divides him as an “event of the body” has
no genealogy, even if it carries the imprint of maternal lalangue. With
the event of the body, we are neither at the level of logic or of language,
 L A L A N G U E , T R A U M AT I C 37

nor even of the phantasy, but at the level of an accidental encounter

between the word and jouissance, produced according to the contingen-
cies of the first years of life and which, having stopped through the
encounter not writing itself, will henceforth no longer stop writing
itself, and which the subject will assume or not. If we consider Freud’s
example where, through linguistic equivocation, the glance at the nose
and the shine on the nose become equated one, this shine became fixed
as the condition of erotic choice.
I can reply here to a question that I raised some years ago and left
in suspense, a question concerning the analysis of those analphabetic
subjects that quite young children are, still in pre-language.
I would ask today if there is anyone who isn’t analphabetic among
analysands? What must be said is that the symptom, being written
in letters of the unconscious as lalangue, is always itself analphabetic.
It knows nothing of orthographic writing. It is writing without spell-
ing or syntax, it is the letter that comes before this dematernalisation
of langue that is the learning of spelling. Thus the symptom is always
misspelled, by definition.
This is why dysorthography is on the whole a quite special symp-
tom. Today, it would be worth reflecting on its increasing frequency
in our culture. And rather than incriminating the new inefficiency of
schools, we would perhaps then see that its powers at the time of the
Belle Époque of the Third Republic came to it from somewhere else.
Dysorthography—or if you prefer, sinn-graphic [sinngraphique], with
the two ns of sinn that evokes “sin” in English from which Lacan
picked up the term sinthome. As we know, there are no other sins than
jouissance, nor ortho-sin either. I would conclude that to analyse is to
seek the analphabetic. This is not the same as saying to seek the infan-
tile, for the thesis does not imply that the child is infantile: on the con-
trary, just closer to the real. It is the adult who dreams wide-awake. We
aim to lead the subject right to his point of analphabetism. And write
analphabêtisme with the circumflex accent so as not to forget that the sig-
nifier is stupid [bête], which means contingent and outside meaning.
We can apply the schema that Lacan used for the lapsus to the symp-
tom. In 2006 I commented on the remarks that open the “Preface to the
English-language edition” of Seminar XI. In terms of the definition of
the unconscious, these remarks are at odds with the first chapter of the
seminar on the unconscious. Applied to the symptom they say, if I may
38 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

put it briefly: when the signifier—the One of a symptom—no longer

carries any meaning, it is only then that we are sure that we are in the
unconscious, the real unconscious, the enjoyed unconscious.
We see to what this reference to the real unconscious responds in
its distinction from unconscious meaning: conceptually, the real uncon-
scious contrasts with the unconscious supposed by the transference,
and practically, in the diachrony of analysis it is in position as the end
of the transference.
I said that Lacan did not stop looking for a way to conceptualise what
could stop the flow of analytic blah blah under transference, as well
as the endlessness of deciphering which, in its recurrence, can always
tolerate one more cipher. He sought an end that did not reproduce the
Freudian bedrock.
This is what led him to formulate, beyond the schema of the pass via
the object, presented in the “Proposition of 9 October 1967 on the psy-
choanalyst of the school” (Lacan, 1995), what I have called “the pass to
the Real”, which he gave, I believe, a reduced model in 1976 in the first
sentence of this text. We still need to consider the impasse to which it
responds: that of the transference.

Note
1. There are many references: Encore, Television, “La troisieme” (end of
October 1974), The Geneva lecture on the symptom (October 1975),
and then some further comments in “L’insu que sait d’l’une bevue s’aile a
mourre” and “Le moment de conclure”.
CHAPTER FOUR

From the transference towards the other

unconscious

“The unconscious is a fact inasmuch as it is supported by the

discourse which establishes it”

The transference, a name of the unconscious

To say “impasse”, to bring up the necessary “fall” of the transference if
not its “liquidation”, should not lead analysts to chant the well-known
refrain about the detrimental effects of the transference, especially as
this critical note is dominant in contemporary discourse where it is only
spoken about as a power likely to obscure reason and paralyse the will;
a sort of public danger that is often confused with that of sects. This
should already alert us and above all put us on our guard.
Indeed, we must not forget that analysis owes everything to the
transference: there is no psychoanalysis without the postulate of the
subject supposed to know. Everyone agrees on this. What is apparently
less well understood is that without this postulate there is no uncon-
scious either, for the unconscious, as I have said, is not just one thing
among others. It is the transference that makes it supposed. Lacan
produced a matheme for it, written in accordance with the algorithm
signifier/signified (Lacan, 1995). The subject supposed to knowledge,
39
40 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

a knowledge itself supposed from the signifiers of the unconscious,

is written at the place of the signified of the analytic address. In this
sense, the transference is a name of the unconscious, but the uncon-
scious as supposed; hence the fact that it is essentially tied to belief. We
could even say that it is in essence itself belief. This is indeed, outside
analysis, what it is reproached for: its credulity. The term “supposition”
was a way of giving epistemic dignity to the transference by raising it to
the status of a scientific hypothesis. The term, introduced in the seminar
The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Lacan, 1981b), should
be paired with another expression from the same period, the “position
of the unconscious”, which already shows that it is not enough to sup-
pose the unconscious in order to position it. The supposition belongs to
the analysand, the position to the analyst. The analytic act—whatever
its manifestations—is this: to position an unconscious, which in itself is
not positioned, and from this fact the analysand will be able to suppose,
for supposition is a retroaction of positioning. Hence the idea—which is
not paradoxical if we know the link of the unconscious to speech—that
psychoanalysts are responsible for the unconscious.
But, you might object, the dream, the lapsus, the bungled action, not
to mention the symptom, are they not obvious expressions of the uncon-
scious? No doubt, but only in the retroaction of Freud’s act, he who
first posited them as such in claiming that a truth was at work there.
The specificity of Freud is that with him the supposition and the act of
positioning were linked. Between the manifestations I just mentioned—
called “mistakes” [“méprise”] by Lacan—and the assertion of the uncon-
scious, there is the saying of Freud. And that is why psychoanalysis
remains appended to this saying. The result is that when confronted
with those who hold these expressions of the unconscious in contempt,
those who thus scorn the mistake [qui méprisent donc la méprise], there is
no convincing argument, nor can so-called clinical demonstration con-
vince them or make them agree.
The series of mistakes—lapsus, bungled action, symptom—should
be completed with free association. Association, according to Freud, is
a way of speaking uncoupled from intentional mastery, and which aims
to make the intrusion of unexpected signifiers possible: a way of speak-
ing in which the subject accepts not knowing what he is saying. We
know that a subject who does not accept this register of “I am speaking,
but I do not know what I am saying” renders any interpretation ineffec-
tive. This is why I so often say that the call for confessions, testimony
 F R O M T H E T R A N S F E R E N C E TO WA R D S T H E OT H E R U N C O N S C I O U S 41

or opinion, so prized today, and about which statistics are created, is in

itself a denial of the unconscious, since testimony is a form of speaking
reduced to saying what one knows, or believes one knows.
Lacan insisted, following Freud, that free association is the knowl-
edge supposed to the analysand subject and not to the analyst. At the
start, the analyst knows nothing about the unconscious of his patient.
All he knows is to make it appear through speech and it is only at the
end of an analysis that he will know a little bit about it.
The analysand presents himself beneath a signifier that Lacan calls
the signifier of the transference. What is it if not simply what the subject
presents to the analyst? It is what is unthinkable or unmasterable for
him, and which thus makes a hole in what he thinks he knows about
himself, as well as in what he thinks he can “manage”, as people say
nowadays, regarding his suffering and helplessness, for the symptom
resists management. The transference, beginning with a signifier out-
side meaning, establishes the supposition of knowledge. This is why it
appears in the analysand who is affected by the non-sense of the symp-
tom, in a temporality of expectation: expectation of the knowledge that
will provide a solution to the hole produced by the subject’s mistakes,
and specifically a solution to his symptom. It is this expected knowledge
that is in a way transferred onto the side of the analyst and somehow
expected from his interpretation. The transferential signification thus
oscillates from one partner to the other: the analysand expects from the
analyst via interpretation the very knowledge supposed to free associa-
tion by the analytic procedure. From the phenomenology of the pro-
cedure, we see what is constant—the supposition of knowledge—and
what varies—the subject to whom it is imputed.
The effect of free association on the supposition of knowledge is
rather ambiguous.
I said expectation of knowledge, but in what form is this expectation
presented? Each, let us say naïve, analysand does not refer directly to
knowledge. What he expects over and above therapy is to make sense
of nonsense: in other words, to find the truth that it contains. The expec-
tation of knowledge actually takes the form of the expectation of mean-
ing. We should recognise the importance of this fact in order to connect
Lacan’s formulas to the analytic experience itself. The expected mean-
ing is latent in the series of associated signifiers that emerge in the ana-
lysand’s speech, and can be taken as the response of the unconscious
itself.
42 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

In fact, as Lacan said in the “Introduction to the German edition of

the first volume of the Écrits”, analysis delivers to the analysand the
meaning of his symptoms. Indeed, but the meaning is singular, specific
to each person. It does not constitute a transmittable knowledge. There
is no shared meaning of any symptom, only particular truths. Truth
and meaning are nonetheless linked. They have in common, firstly, that
both are phenomena of the subject (there is meaning or truth only for
a subject), and secondly, that neither can add up to knowledge: truth
because it can only be half-said, meaning because it flees, irreducibly.
Analytic discourse, as Lacan formulates it, puts knowledge in the
place of truth. This means, firstly, that in the speech of the analysand
there is no solution to the half-said. It certainly happens that a subject
gets fixated on some production of truth and gives it a consistency to
the point of making it his last word, but essentially the more that the
saying of truth occurs, the more it accumulates, the more the analyst
receives them as so many fictions of truth, not a signified truth that
would be equal to knowledge. There is thus an impotence of truth. Sec-
ondly, however, the half-said of truth would not exist without the signi-
fiers of the unconscious, not without its motérialité. Hence the strange
and disconcerting formula in the “Preface to the English-language edi-
tion” of Seminar XI that the unconscious function—and he is speaking
here of the real unconscious—“fiddles with the truth” (Lacan, 1981a,
p. viii). The term “fiddle” is sexually suggestive, implying that it [the
truth] does not go as far as the consummation of the wedding night.
Free association is a tantalising structure. On the one hand, it sup-
ports the transferential supposition through the recurrence of the emer-
gence of truth; on the other hand, it contests this supposition through
its equally recurrent powerlessness to find the other half of half-said
truth. A mirage of truth, Lacan says, to emphasise that it never arrives
at the oasis of completeness, at the whole truth, but rather gets lost in
what he rightly called the “desert of analysis”.
What is shown in the analysand’s speech is that there is no mar-
riage between the subject’s articulated truth and knowledge, and that
knowledge itself has no boundary. Cantor, help us! But the analysand
is not Cantor, and the series of associations is not the series of trans-
finite numbers. The more that truth is articulated, making the mean-
ing of the symptom emerge—and that’s the product of the elaboration
of the transference—the more that unconscious knowledge is proven
to be real, ungraspable. Lacan suggests this well before 1976. In 1970,
 F R O M T H E T R A N S F E R E N C E TO WA R D S T H E OT H E R U N C O N S C I O U S 43

in “Radiophonie”, he already said that the more that discourse is

interpreted, the more it is confirmed as unconscious. And later, that to
elaborate the unconscious is to make it even more unconscious.
We can already conclude from this that the transference, which sup-
poses a subject to expected knowledge, is also a kind of denial of the
unconscious, as the unconscious is precisely “knowledge without a
subject”. That there is a divergence of supposition between the trans-
ference and the unconscious was pointed out in 1967 in “The mistake
of the subject supposed to know”. I said that science has prepared us
for this idea of knowledge in the real, but the difference is that it is pre-
cisely in psychoanalysis that knowledge without a subject fiddles with
the truth, that is to say, with the subject. It even “dreams” of the truth,
Lacan would say. The whole problem is to move to the real unconscious
through the work of the transference.

Reduced model of the pass to the RUCS

Lacan took the trouble to provide a schema of what I call the pass to the
Real in the “Preface to the English-language edition” of Seminar XI to
which I have just referred.
I’ll pause at the first sentence: “When the l’esp of a laps, that is, since
I only write in French: when the space of a lapsus, no longer carries
any meaning (or interpretation), only then is one sure that one is in
the unconscious. One knows” (Lacan, 1981a, p. vii). I have already com-
mented on this sentence several times since 2006. Lacan is giving,
I believe, a reduced model of what we call the fall of the subject sup-
posed to know, namely a pass to the real unconscious that I will from
now on write as RUCS, to get rid of the usual signifieds of the term
“unconscious”.
I leave aside the implicit and ironical allusion to Kant’s transcen-
dental aesthetic of time and space, as well as the play on writing with
its resonances in what is heard. A lapsus, a blunder, is the moment of
intrusion in the subject’s guarded discourse of a signifier that all of a
sudden—laps [lapse]—usurps the place, esp. [space] of the word the
subject intended to say. It is quite simple. But its status, between a sim-
ple error and lapsus, is ambiguous, for one could think it were nothing
if not for the transference.
What is the space of the lapsus? Nothing other than what is joined
to it: the chain of associations through which the subject tries to give
44 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

meaning to this incongruous signifier. Lacan’s topology had always

linked space, understood as extended, to the deployment of the
signifying chain, and hence his first approach to the subject in terms of
a surface, albeit moebian. To associate in order to give meaning is to try
to reappropriate the “intrusive” signifier, to try to make it a signifier of
one’s truth by connecting it to other signifiers. In other words, it is to
attempt to reduce the mistake. Free association moreover has in general
this double function: to allow signifiers to make a surprise appearance
and then to appropriate them by giving them meaning through the
addition of other signifiers.
The space of the lapsus is in fact the space of the transferential work
that supposes a subject of the lapsus and that attempts to reach its truth.
This is the space of the “hystorisation” of the subject. It is in this space
of giving meaning that the unconscious fiddles with truth, which is
always the subject’s truth. This could be written synchronically with
the matheme of the transference:

Laps [lapse]
s(S1, S2, … Sn)

Except that in the text I am commenting on, Lacan formulates it in

terms of a temporal sequence, corresponding to what happens in the
analytic elaboration and adding a moment of time that is not written in
the matheme of the transference.
Three times, then:
1. laps. 2. space of laps. 3. the real unconscious.

The third time is there to say that when this space of hystorisation no
longer carries any meaning, we exit this transference and enter the
unconscious, the real unconscious. I said, this transference, for it is the
transference grafted onto the lapsus. What then remains of the laps?
Only its word, an element of knowledge which has not only emerged
in spite of the subject, without his consent, but which finally remains
in its facticity, as an isolated signifier disconnected from the articu-
lated truth of the subject. Outside the chain and hence real, it testifies
to the unconscious working all alone, outside meaning but not out-
side jouissance, quasi neological. The real unconscious is neological if
neologism consists in giving to words the weight of an ineffable and
personal jouissance. Made of signifiers outside the chain and implanted
 F R O M T H E T R A N S F E R E N C E TO WA R D S T H E OT H E R U N C O N S C I O U S 45

in the field of jouissance—that the lapsus shows without deciphering—it

is the psychotic kernel of every speaking being. I will come back to
this.
We could say that the real unconscious is not constructed in the way
that the unconscious as phantasy is, and we encounter it at the moments
when it makes surprising appearances.
In the matheme of the transference, the unconscious only figures as
supposed. The word of the lapsus can ultimately be said to be real, first
as a signifier that no longer calls any S2, and hence quite isolated and
disconnected. This is the first definition Lacan gave of the signifier in
the Real, in relation to psychosis. But there is more: it is also real in
that the signifier is situated at the level of jouissance. This is the the-
sis of the seminar Encore. And doubly so, because it affects jouissance
by negativising it on the one hand, transporting it metonymically—the
Other of the signifier also has its place in the living body where it has
its effects—and on the other, the signifier is itself enjoyed. This is what
Lacan argued from 1973 on: “The unconscious is the fact that the being,
by speaking, enjoys” (Lacan, 1998, p. 105). This word of the laps outside
meaning, real and in the Real, does not fiddle [tripote] with the truth.
I would say rather that it knocks about [fricote] with jouissance. And
here we could evoke the expression that Lacan uses, “impact of mean-
ing” [portée de sens], which is not identical to “effect of meaning” and
which—beyond the production of meaning—connotes the satisfaction
attached to meaning and to truth.
Where in this sequence are we to situate what in 1964 Lacan called
the Freudian unconscious, this Euridycean unconscious of pre-
ontological status that makes a surprise appearance in subjectivity?
I think it should be situated it in what he calls the space of the lapsus.
Let us say that this is the unconscious as truth, which of course does not
go without the structure of language. But the unconscious of 1976 is not
simply the unconscious as truth. Like it, no doubt it speaks, but elevat-
ing speech to the status of the operator that governs jouissance it makes
the “parlêtre”, who speaks “with [his] body”. How could we not rec-
ognise the radicality and novelty of this thesis compared to the earlier
formulas that had become canonical? It is true that Lacan invoked the
real from the start of his teaching, but not in the same sense. What he
situated as real at this moment was the real of the cut, an unconscious
as truth that came into being in the gap of the subject, in the repetition
of the cut.
46 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

Let’s go back to the 1976 text. In time 3, one is therefore in the

unconscious, namely, there where there is no subject. The “one” is thus
well justified. It would not be possible to say, “I am in the unconscious”,
since the real unconscious is knowledge without a subject.
I rewrite this sequence that goes from the transference to the real
unconscious:

Lap s (Space off associated Signifiers) Signifier of the Lap s

1. ; 2. ; 3.
s (meaning, hystoris
o ation, UCS as truth) RUCS (outtside meaning)

So, at first, the laps with its supposed subject; then the space of the
transferential hystorisation with its effects of meaning; lastly, the
reduction of the laps to a signifier, outside meaning, detached from any
supposition of a subject. This is why I say that it is a reduced model of
the fall of the subject supposed to know, a fall that makes the signifier
of the laps emerge as real.
But caution, this is not a place where one can get settled. I quote: “But
one has only to be aware of the fact to find oneself outside it”. Indeed,
awareness—at least that’s how I understand it—is a phenomenon of
the subject, an expression of his opening to the world, which in itself
poses questions. Bringing back the question of the hole in meaning, it
reopens the space of transferential associations, which means starting
this process again, “like the sea, always starting again”. So to be in the
unconscious does not promise the subject any knowledge of the uncon-
scious: the place is not a tourist attraction. There is no friendship that
will last.
When one is there, “one knows”, says Lacan. The verb is “to know”
[savoir], but that does not constitute a knowledge [un savoir] (here, the
substantive) that can be elevated to the level of the universal. It is the
major and radical objection in these years around 1976 to the ideal of
complete transmission, linked to science, on which Lacan had for such a
long time wished to model psychoanalysis. The unconscious as lalangue
implies rather a complete non-transmission: “The analytic thing will
not be mathematical” (Lacan, 1998, p. 117), says the seminar Encore. In
other words, the real unconscious is not teachable, and is only veri-
fied for each person in the singular experience of the elaboration that is
their analysis. There are two conditions here: that the unconscious is at
first presupposed (transference), and that the analytic act supplies “the
partner who has a chance of responding” (Lacan, 1975c, p. 16).
 F R O M T H E T R A N S F E R E N C E TO WA R D S T H E OT H E R U N C O N S C I O U S 47

Before an analysis one may be in transference, in the unconscious

as supposed, but not in the real unconscious. This unconscious is only
experienced in an analysis, and nowhere else, but one cannot cap-
ture it, one cannot recognise oneself in it, one cannot communicate it,
and it won’t result in any “friendship”. This is another way of saying
that there is no desire for knowledge. We are at the limit here of what
analysts can exchange with those who do not have this experience. The
discourse on the unconscious is not only a discourse condemned in
advance, but also a discourse that excludes the unconscious. This is the
whole problem of educational courses on psychoanalysis and it would
be better not to forget it when we wish to speak to other discourses, and
especially to those of the neurosciences!

The flaw of the subject supposed to know

In analytic experience, unconscious knowledge without a subject begins
where the supposition of the subject stops. Flaw, Lacan says. The fallacy
of the supposition of a subject to knowledge is revealed here. Note the
different terms he used over the years to speak of this fallacy: trans-
ference is only a signification, thus imaginary; an unreal; a postulate;
lastly, a lure. But neither the subject nor knowledge is imaginary; what
is imaginary is the supposition of their union.
Flaw here is not a vague metaphor: it is very precisely the flaw
between the subject and the unconscious. On the one hand, a subject
who runs after truth but misses it because truth is never whole, the
awareness of which reveals the lie. On the other hand, this knowledge
manifests itself as affecting being through its intrusion, but it does not
belong to the subject. The flaw points to an impossible conjunction of
the impasses that mark the two edges: on the one hand, speaking the
truth, I miss it; on the other hand, the real unconscious can be neither
subjectivised nor exhausted.
However, this flaw does not herald the end of the transference.
It is only a necessary condition. Besides, is there ever only One end
to the transference (whatever the phenomena outside the transference
may be)?
We see this first at the level of the sequence, since attention to
the unconscious inevitably brings back the transference. Only just
denounced, the lure of the subject supposed to know is reconstituted.
And how can attention not be focused on this “without a subject”, since
48 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

it belongs to the subject and does not leave him indifferent, shearing
through his thought, his will and his body? This sequential balancing
between elaboration of truth and real unconscious is thus reproduced
in analysis. Approaching the unconscious destitutes the supposed sub-
ject yet summons it as well.
This occurs not only in the experience of an analysis, since any real
knowledge raises the question of the place it occupied, this “noth-
ing but knowledge”. We are back to Descartes, summoning God as
guarantor of his arithmetic, but also to Cantor. It is the thesis of “The
mistake of the subject supposed to know”: the subject supposed to
know is latent in every theory. Since to theorise is to seek a knowledge
that gives an account of a real, a knowledge which is not yet available
but which one supposes is there to capture. Such is the transference.
This allows us to understand how the transference can be spoken of in
the case of the analysed analyst, provided that we distinguish between
the analyst who operates—by his act—and the analyst who thinks or
tries to think the analytic experience. The certainty of the act is no doubt
outside the transference. Within transference, when it comes to the act
there are only passages to the act. But the analyst who tries to think
psychoanalysis, to theorise the experience, is necessarily under trans-
ference: in other words, an analysand.
CHAPTER FIVE

The royal road to the RUCS

I
n following Lacan’s trajectory, I realised that his references to the
formations of the unconscious changed over time.
We could say that he commented on them all methodically. We
have the main developments on the dream, the Witz, the lapsus, the
bungled action, the forgotten word, etc. Then there comes a time when
he has more or less finished with his return to Freud and where he
evokes the triad: dream, lapsus, and joke. There are many examples
in the texts of the 1970s: “L’étourdit” (1973), “Introduction à l’édition
allemande des Écrits” (1975c), and later in others.
Then we have the famous text I have just referred to and at which I
paused, the “Introduction to the English-language edition” of Seminar
XI where the lapsus appears on its own. We are in May 1976, just before
the start of the seminar “L’insu que sait d’l’une bévue s’aile à mourre”
which emphasises the unconscious as lapsus. Lacan notes that a blun-
der [bévue] is difficult to define, but the definition he gives of it is after
all still “one word for another”.
I asked myself why the lapsus would be privileged as the gateway
to the unconscious since the formations of the unconscious are not the
unconscious but only the roads that lead to it. It seemed useful to tackle
this question in order to gauge what it is that changes with the RUCS.
49
50 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

Motérialité of the unconscious

“When l’esp of a laps, namely the space of a lapsus, etc.” This handling of
“motérialité” to which Lacan devoted himself in the last years, this frag-
mentation, trituration, this play between sonority and written form—as
in the title “L’insu que sait d’l’une bévue …”—is generally attributed to
Joyce. But Joyce himself follows the mode of unconscious processes,
those that Lacan seeks to illuminate in these last years in particular.
He never uses them, as far as I can see, without a precise intention,
and here he distinguishes himself from Joyce, for whom word games
are directly connected to jouissance without passing through meaning,
which obviously gives them an enigmatic status.
I see two very different intentions here.
The first one, inconspicuous and introduced quietly thanks to the esp
of the laps, is epistemo-political. Lacan extracts a single syllable by frag-
menting the two words “space” and “lapsus”. I would not say a single
phoneme, since in French “lapse” [laps] is itself a word that has a mean-
ing. The laps refers to time, even a measure of time, next to space.
The beginning of this sentence thus evokes, in the latency of its sig-
nifications, the two categories of space and time of Immanuel Kant’s
transcendental aesthetic, through which Kant tries to give an account of
the universality of Newtonian physics in his Critique of Pure Reason.
In the background are the multiple developments of Lacan’s contin-
ued contestation of Kant’s transcendental aesthetic. We can ask: in the
name of what and of whom? Einstein and quantum physics, no doubt,
but above all Freud. With regard to the first, the argument is developed
in response to the second question in “Radiophonie”. With regard to the
second, how many times will Lacan need to repeat that the topology
of the unconscious made it necessary to revise Kant’s transcendental
aesthetic. He is severe with it, going as far in “L’étourdit” as describing
it as inept and idiotic.
Now, for Lacan, epistemic debates always have a political dimen-
sion. With regard to Kant, this is made explicit in the “Introduction
à l’édition allemande des Écrits” where, speaking of common sense
which dominates politics, he says: “I do not have to remind you of it
speaking as I am to the German public which has traditionally added
to it the meaning of critique”—Kant here again—“Without it being use-
less to here recall where it led to in 1933” (Lacan, 2001b, p. 555). I do not
believe that it was to rekindle an old quarrel, but rather so we do not
 T H E R OYA L R OA D TO T H E R U C S 51

forget that to think proceeds via an ethical path and always involves
politics, whether outside or inside psychoanalysis. Thus whether to
think or not to think the unconscious has consequences.
The second aim is more analytic.
In his act of breaking up the words “space” [“espace”] and “lapsus”,
Lacan reminds us of what he had already proposed years previously,
even before Encore: that the phoneme is the minimal sonorous unity of
lalangue and thus of the unconscious. When we read that in a text from
1976 we should not be amazed for he did not discover it there.
It dates from the time of the seminar “The formations of the uncon-
scious”. He picks up the point again in 1968 in “From an Other to the
other” (Lacan, March 2006, pp. 51ff) in the session of 27th November,
where he takes up his graph of desire (Lacan, [1960b] 2006, p. 692). He
insists on what he had proposed in 1958, citing his text, that his graph
with its two horizontal lines of the signifiers of the Other and the signi-
fiers of the unconscious, and the retrograde curved line which inter-
sects them, is made up of three signifying chains (contrary to what is
often said) when we make the retrograde curved line the line of the

S(A) $◊D
Unconscious chain

s(A) Chain of phonemes

A
Chain of statements
(semantemes)

Graph of the Witz

52 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

signified crossing that of the signifier, as is the case in the structure of

speech. Lacan corrects this reading as if in anticipation: it concerns three
signifying chains but with two states of the signifier.
On the lower horizontal chain is the signifier as semanteme, that is
to say, defined by a rule-bound even if never univocal use: thus, words
which have a meaning. Let us say that this is the line of the dictionary,
of the langue we exchange. On the curved line, he says, the signifier is at
the level of phonemes, in themselves devoid of meaning and recombin-
able without consideration for the rule-bound uses of the dictionary.
It took me quite a long time to grasp the grounds for this assertion. In
fact, the thesis is there for a precise reason, Lacan tells us, but without
further explanation. It is necessary in order to explain how jokes are
possible: these specific blunders that seem to be calculated. Thanks to
phonemes, a second chain may be latent in the chain of semantemes,
that is to say, in statements. Here then is what opens up the question of
a differential assessment of blunders, for all the failures through which
the unconscious comes to us do not all perhaps have the same value.

Failures that do not have equal value

The dream and the lapsus are only ever of value to the extent that they
elude a particular person’s consciousness. They pertain to one’s irre-
ducible singularity, and their interpretation only has value for one indi-
vidual, although that may not please Jung. Among the formations of the
unconscious, the joke, on the contrary, has the particularity if not to col-
lectivise at least to function beyond the particular, at least for all those
who share a language and a culture. It thus offers the general model
of the possible latency, to use the Freudian term, of the unconscious.
Functioning at the level of common speech, on the lower chain of the
graph, the joke testifies to the possible presence of another discourse
within speech, the latency of another saying within vigilant speech. The
laugh, as it surprises us, indicates that the combinatory of the ones of
lalangue—let us say, the ciphering of the humourist—has opened the
door of the unconscious.
However, to quote a remark from 1967, it’s the door “beyond which
there is nothing more to find”, and the laugh authorises the “way that
has been spared” [chemin épargné]. I had always wondered about this
sentence and I understand it better with the 1976 text that I commented
on above. The way is that of transferential space.
 T H E R OYA L R OA D TO T H E R U C S 53

It is not a particularity of the lapsus to open the transferential space.

It is the case for every “symptomatic formation of the unconscious” to
“demonstrate [the] relation to the subject supposed to know” (Lacan,
1990b, p. 43). Indeed, every blunder may be treated like the One, the
one lacking meaning since it emerged without being summoned by
consciousness, and from that time on it opens the space of the call for
meaning.
The particularity of the Witz is that rather than opening transferential
space it contracts it in a punctual effect of meaning, closing as soon as it
is opened. And we know that any gloss kills it. Beyond laughter there
is no meaning to find. In other words, we are immediately at the end of
the reach of meaning.
The lapsus, in contrast to the Witz does not spare us the way of the
transferential elaboration of the search for meaning, at least when the
analyst is there to support the transferential quest. As for the speaker’s
intention, a blunder opens the door of the space to pass through, the
space, let us say, of its reading. This reading stops on the threshold of
the door beyond which there is nothing further to find, when there is
no longer any scope for meaning. This is the door to which the Witz led
directly and which opens onto the real unconscious.
What then remains? Nothing other than an emergence of this knowl-
edge without a subject that inhabits lalangue, the knowledge that works
on its own without a subject but not without effects. Impossible to
master, it is “without a master”. The defeat of Descartes: the subject
of psychoanalysis is perhaps the Cartesian subject of science, but the
knowledge of the unconscious is not the knowledge of science.
So in what way would the lapsus be superior to the dream as a mani-
festation of the unconscious?
The lapsus—which is like the dream but unlike the Witz in that it is
specific to a given subject—is a purely linguistic phenomenon, situated
entirely at the level of “motérialité”. This is not the case with the dream.
The dream is not purely linguistic. Without a doubt Lacan, following
Freud, made every effort to show that in spite of its imaginary scenarios
the dream was a ciphering, and that provided it was deciphered it could
be read differently. In this sense, Freud totally renewed the traditional
approach to the dream.
But note first that this did not stop Jung from searching for the key
to dreams, which, moreover, had been sought long before psychoanaly-
sis. Analysts may very well turn their noses up at this, but if it exists
54 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

and withstands time it is because it is possible, and if it is possible it is

because the dream lends itself to it. On the other hand, no one could
imagine that there would be a key to the lapsus, with its own vocabu-
lary and interpretations.
A second remark: deciphering, from which we deduce the linguistic
nature of the dream, is always risky. To decipher is firstly to determine
the vocabulary before later extracting the message. The operation is
always “problematic”, liable only to lead to lucubration, as I said.
The lapsus, in contrast, is not lucubrated: it is epiphanic because it
is in itself a ciphering. It makes an unexpected sign emerge in speech,
not programmed by vigilant speech. A blunder is always possible:
a chosen word stops writing itself to the benefit of another that imposes
itself. It is not deciphered but actually given meaning, by recombination
through association with other ciphers that have come from conscious-
ness, up to the point of the exhaustion of meaning.
Does this mean that the space of the dream has no end? That could
well be the case. We would not exit from the interpretation of a dream
for it can always be deciphered differently, and sometimes over a whole
lifetime.
I was intrigued by a remark of Lacan’s at the beginning of “L’insu
que sait d’l’une bévue s’aile à mourre” which marks the dream’s differ-
ence from the lapsus. He notes that the dream is a blunder, except—my
emphasis—that we can recognise ourselves in it. Idem for the Witz. Here
then is another sorting principle between the aforementioned failures.
If as a manifestation of the unconscious the advantage remains with
the lapsus, it is precisely because we do not recognise ourselves in the
lapsus, which has no more scope for meaning. It places us in the heter-
ity of the real unconscious, outside meaning, and without the subject
that constitutes the speaking being.
I will conclude. The dream is the royal road to the Freudian uncon-
scious. I would add that this road goes no further than the truth signi-
fied by the signifiers extracted from it. More than the dream, the lapsus
is the major manifestation of the Lacanian unconscious, the real uncon-
scious. If Freud distinguished the dream from all the other blunders
as the royal road, it is because it occurs when consciousness sleeps,
testifying to another psychical activity. But with the lapsus of langue,
if I may say, the spoken knowledge of lalangue is revealed in a blunder
that testifies to the real unconscious in pure form.
CHAPTER SIX

The Borromean aleph

A
fter the period in which the unconscious is formulated in terms
of language, the signified of which is sought, it was a major
step to uncover the real unconscious made of “incarnated”
ones, outside the chain and outside meaning, challenging the idea of
the unconscious as symbolic. The RUCS is a-structural: far from being
constructed or interpreted, it is encountered in emergences that are
always punctual and which defy both awareness and communication.
Let’s remind ourselves of the steps that led to this thesis: they go
from the structure of signifying representation stemming from the lin-
guistic conceptualisation of the Freudian practice of deciphering, to the
unconscious “knowledge without a subject” implied by this same struc-
ture, a knowledge which if not determinant of the subject determines
his jouissance. This was first thought of in terms of object a, as the lack-
ing object or as the object of surplus jouissance, then in terms of lalangue
as the place of this “spoken knowledge” [savoir parlé] which civilises
jouissance by giving it its linguistic form.
Such an advance could not fail to affect the entire Lacanian corpus,
in a series of cascading re-workings of all the notions previously used:
the opposition between the real and meaning, a devaluation of the lying
truth, the promotion of the notion of the parlêtre as another name for the
55
56 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

real unconscious, a new light thrown on interpretation, the aims, means

and end of analysis, a re-evaluation of clinical categories, the function
of affect, the nature of love, transmission, etc.
To weigh up these repercussions, we need to take into consideration
the new analytic questions introduced by the reference to lalangue and
its effects. The crucial point for me is that lalangue is what I would call
an uncertainty principle. As I have stressed, the One of jouissance that
would not be merely one among others is uncertain, hypothetical, for
the “spoken knowledge” of the unconscious challenges any capture in
knowledge. To put it another way, the part of knowledge that emerges
from analytic work appears in deficit in relation to knowledge of the
real lalangue and, besides, is liable to be only imaginary.
At one time, Lacan would encourage questioning the unconscious
until it gave an answer that was not ineffable, in the form of the phan-
tasy or the signifiers spelled out from the symptom. A nice programme,
but tricky for the unconscious as lalangue, which is never wholly deci-
pherable and whose deciphered part remains hypothetical.
How can this unconscious respond? If the effects of lalangue go
beyond us, and we can agree with Lacan that they do, then is not psy-
choanalysis brought back to the double pitfall of the ineffable and
uncertainty? This is the failure of the matheme, as Lacan notes in Encore.
He who had made such a big deal of the “mathematics of the signifier”
states, as I have said, that “The analytic thing will not be mathemati-
cal”. Poetic perhaps? Except that the poem is already composed, every
analysand being a poem more than a poet, but a poem that is impos-
sible to read in its entirety. With lalangue, it is nota question of either
mathematics or logic but of the signifier in the real that is not possible
to exhaust.
After the fragmentary responses that are deciphered from it—let us
say, its letters, since the letter is defined as a fusion of jouissance with a
linguistic element outside meaning—how are we to approach this real
unconscious?
Lacan’s focus on the real, as I have said, comes well before the con-
cept of the RUCS. Since the flow of speech and the endlessness of deci-
phering do not have any full stop, Lacan at first referred to the barriers
that “function as real” in the analysand’s speech in order to formulate
the finiteness of the analytic process. As I said, we can follow the suc-
cessive formulas by which he defined the real. The first two bring up
 THE BORROMEAN ALEPH 57

the logical category of the impossible: the impossible to say, then the
impossible to write.
The real unconscious is something else. It can’t be proved, it is not
reached through logic; it emerges. That’s why I have used the Joycean
term “epiphany”. The real unconscious has its home in lalangue and
does not stem from the structural approach that precedes it in Lacan’s
teaching. The effect of lalangue is doubly real: its Ones are outside the
chain and thus outside meaning. They have passed into the field of the
Real outside the Symbolic, that of the living substance. The snag is that
this unconscious spoken knowledge makes knowledge fail—an uncer-
tainty principle, as I have said.
The recourse to the new framework of the Borromean knot—
introduced at the same time as the emphasis on the function of
lalangue—responds in part to this difficulty and finds there, I believe,
one of its strongest justifications.
The linguistic matheme, S/s, whereby the unconscious as phantasy
could be formulated, did not allow for the Real of the living being to be
situated, the Real which is outside the Symbolic and outside the Imagi-
nary, which is not a signified and which owes nothing to the subject.
“The Symbolic only makes things phantasmatically”, Lacan will say.
Now, symptoms are not phantasmatic but well and truly inscribed in
the Real “which the body enjoys” (Lacan, 1975a). As we see through
analysis, their enjoyed motérialité points to both the real of lalangue
and that of the living being. In representing this Real, which is truly
unthinkable despite the efforts of the life sciences, Lacan performs a
kind of Cantorian operation—his own aleph zero—with one of the three
rings of string of which the knot consists. For with the knot, this abso-
lute referent, without being known, becomes theoretically manipulable.
The Borromean knot is an instrument with which to formulate the Real
that is neither imagined nor thought, in order to reveal its place and
possible function.
To the interlocking of the two dimensions of the Imaginary and the
Symbolic, first approached by Lacan within a linguistic framework, the
knot adds their three-fold interlocking with the Real. As I said, he pre-
supposes the autonomy and equivalence of these three dimensions, and
a renewal of the definitions of these three dit-mensions is thereby opened
up. Between Imaginary and Symbolic, there is meaning, the unconscious
as phantasy, what Lacan is going to call “mentality”. Mentality is thus
58 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

a combination. It is no longer that of the hierarchical signifier and

signified of the period of “The agency of the letter”. Instead, it implies
a knotting of these two dimensions. This mixture that chattering
involves—whether in psychoanalysis or not—made up of representa-
tions and signifiers, is described by Lacan as feeble-minded—“man
thinks feeble-mindedly” [l’homme pense débile], he said to indicate that
we have no purchase on the Real outside the Symbolic.
It also opens up a new combinatory, that of possible knottings and
their effects. In fact, Lacan spent years studying possible ways of knot-
ting in the hope of discovering their translation into the clinic.
The real jouissance disconnected from the subject must be knotted to
the word, between Symbolic and Real, in order to be decipherable in
analysis. Marked by lalangue, which fragments, partialises, and absorbs
it, it is spliced [se schize] purely in schizophrenia, leaving the subject in
the isolated autism of his jouissance.
If this real unconscious is knotted to the Imaginary it becomes
fixed, while in turn it “limits” the Imaginary, mooring it sufficiently
for the subject not to be completely in the delusion of mentality. It is
not a coincidence that from 1975 onwards Lacan developed the notion
of mentality from which he produces a new diagnosis—“the illness of
mentality”—to designate an Imaginary without the ballast of the Real
and which rambles along ruled by circumstance.
The necessity of a new framework that allows the unthinkable Real
to be situated is not in doubt. However, handling it is not without dif-
ficulty when it is a question of thinking about the analytic experience.
This difficulty is due to the fact that a knot presents a synchronic
structure whereas analysis takes place within time. In its diachrony,
which proceeds only through words, the real of the unconscious, as I
have said, is approached as an end and limit point of the sayings of
truth. This is what allows us to assert that the joke spares the way, or
that Joyce, with his treatment of lalangue, went directly to the best of
what we can expect from the end of an analysis. With the knot, Lacan
tried to retranslate what happens in the time of an analysis, no longer
in terms of metaphor and metonymy with their anchoring or vanishing
points, but in terms of a knot being made, being transformed, being
undone, etc. Hence the expressions such as the knot “is already made”,
“lapsus of the knot”, suture, splicing, knot of paranoia, etc., which refer
to the knottings that are altered through speech, in its diversity.
 THE BORROMEAN ALEPH 59

This change of paradigm becomes a bit clearer if we think that a

metaphor is a stitching together of signifier and meaning, this meaning
that Lacan places exactly in the knot between Imaginary and Symbolic,
a stitching that occurs through speech but not without the contribution
of jouissance. However, there is nevertheless a “but”; no one has as yet
produced, for example, the knot of the entry into the transference, the
knot of the exit, the knot of what Freud called working-through, or of
the time it takes, etc. That could be a project.
On the other hand, the clinical fecundity of this new framework
is judged by the new contributions it inspires. It has produced a lot,
and allows us to rethink the classic notions of inhibition, symptom
and anxiety; to distinguish the symptom from the sinthome, as well
as the real symptom from meaning; to theorise differently the classic
clinical structures—neurosis, psychosis, and perversion; to introduce
a new category of psychosis—the illness of mentality; to rethink the
suppletions [suppléances] of psychosis; to resituate the Father function
as sinthome; and also to replace the various types of interpretations. In
this re-evaluation, I will begin with the introduction of the new term
“parlêtre”.
CHAPTER SEVEN

The parlêtre

T
his term echoes the emphasis on the function of lalangue, its link
with the real of jouissance, that is constitutive of the real uncon-
scious. It is preceded by the introduction of the new Borromean
framework, basically starting from Encore. It does not get rid of the
notion of the subject as want-to-be, but adds to it by indicating that the
subject only has being from what comes through the incarnated effects
of lalangue.
The term parlêtre is introduced in the second lecture on Joyce pub-
lished in 1979 in the volume Joyce avec Lacan (Lacan, [1979] 1987). The
date of the writing of this lecture has not been established, but I am
sure that it is contemporary with the seminar on Joyce and is prob-
ably even a bit later. I note, indeed, that the introduction of lalangue
and the Borromean knot in Lacan’s teaching immediately follows a new
emphasis from 1970 on writing and the letter.1
With the periodisation of Lacan’s teaching, a prejudiced read-
ing occurs which suggests several, successive Lacans: first, the one
of speech and language, then, that of the object a, finally, that of
jouissance and of the Real. Not the Real as the limit of formalisation—
“which does not stop not writing itself”—but the Real that is well and
truly there, as it is inscribed in the Borromean knot. A facticity outside
61
62 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

the Symbolic, thus also outside meaning, and even outside enjoyed
meaning, outside “I think, therefore it enjoys itself”, this is the Real
that is not all, not universal, resistant to representation. But with this
term “parlêtre” we immediately see that the function of speech that was
present at the beginning is still there at the end.

Inventoried speech
Is it a question here of a return to speech? I do not think so because it had
never been forgotten. But perhaps it is not the same function of speech.
Periodisation, leading us to expect what will come at the end, sometimes
has a pedagogic value, but it does not respect what to me seems to char-
acterise Lacan’s epistemology. This certainly brings together startling
speed and progress, but in an elaboration that proceeds by continually
revising the previous set of notions, without negating them. Sometimes
it even keeps the formulas, but can also render them unrecognisable by
changing their framework in the style of a generalised theory, showing
a coherence that shifts and renews itself in a spiralling progression.
The speech referred to in “Function and field of speech and language”
is a speech of solution. Constituting the unconscious as repressed speech
which returns, the “full speech” restored in analysis gave the quilting
point that at the end of analysis assured one’s identity with one’s being.
Thus analytic experience was situated entirely in the triangle of stifled
speech, the “it speaks elsewhere”, and full, restorative speech.
This speech of solution quickly fizzled out in Lacan’s teaching.
The major text here is “The direction of the treatment”, which con-
cludes on the impotence of speech. You chatter and chatter … The text
re-elaborates the Freudian thesis of unconscious desire as the signified
of all that is expressed through the speech of the subject and his forma-
tions of the unconscious, but it asserts “desire’s incompatibility with
speech” (Lacan, [1958] 2006, p. 535). As signified, desire haunts speech.
It gives it its meaning, the meaning of the inexpressible object, but full
speech is useless. Desire, the effect of speech and that which consti-
tutes the being of the subject, is in itself inarticulable. The indestructible
unconscious, as Freud said.
With the notion of the parlêtre new powers of speech are revealed.
The text of the last lecture on Joyce establishes this. I quote: “Whence
my expression of the parlêtre which will be substituted for the UCS of
Freud (unconscious, we read it): move over, it’s my turn now. To say
that the unconscious in Freud when he discovers it—it is discovered
 T H E PA R L Ê T R E 63

all at once, still after the invention the inventory has to be done—is
a knowledge that, as spoken, is constitutive of LOM (MAN)” (Lacan,
[1979] 1987, p. 33). This spoken knowledge is certainly that of lalangue,
for elaborated knowledge is ensured through writing and can do with-
out speech.

Calculated dysorthography
The first paragraphs of Lacan’s lecture gives the theoretical con-
text for this thesis. He is engaged in an exercise of pastiching Joyce.
To do this, he needs to play on the letter, specifically by undermining
orthography, disconnecting what is heard from its agreed written form:
L O M [l’homme-man], eaubscène [obscène-obscene], Hissecroibeau [Il se
croit beau-he thinks himself beautiful]. That’s not all, but I will pause at
l’escabeau [stepladder]. The stepladder forms an image, a talking image,
if I may say, for all that allows one to emerge as an individual—the
individual that Joyce quite particularly incarnated. Here there is an
echo of what Lacan, at the beginning of his teaching on the mirror stage,
situated as the function of stature, and even of the statue on its pedestal,
raising the erect and rigid form of the body to the One of the Imaginary.
The stepladder of the last years is much more than this: it concerns this
real subject that I am speaking about, affirming himself through his
desire and his being of jouissance.
Stepladder: Lacan writes hessecabeau with the h of “homme” [man]
and the esse of “être” [being], in order to say that the escabeau [step-
ladder] makes the man. Why this play of calculated dysorthography?
There are others that are possible as well, as I noted long ago in my
previous studies on Joyce. We could just as well write: est-ce cas beau?
[is this case beautiful?], or es-ce cabot? [is it a mutt?], to show the imagi-
nary and narcissistic dimension, or even, as Lacan does, S. K. … beau by
using the letters that get rid of meaning, etc.
The interest of this trituration of motérialité through writing only
takes on its sense and its significance when we link it to the real uncon-
scious, the unconscious as “spoken knowledge” [savoir parlé].
It uses the difference between speaking and writing to illustrate a
specific use of writing as distinct from speaking. Lalangue only exists as
spoken and thus also as heard. The signifier is indeed heard in lalangue,
but lalangue is like chewing gum, a multiplicity in which, I remind you,
the unit elements are problematic (from the phoneme to the proverb).
Dictionaries exhaust themselves making inventories of already
64 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

established usage. The signifier that is heard in speech is only isolated

by the letter, the “localised structure of the signifier”, the “precipitation
of the signifier” in its link with jouissance. Here then is the undoing, or
redefinition, of the classic quilting point of the signifying chain as the
direct knotting of the word with jouissance. I said “renewed function of
speech”, but it is speech that somehow calls for the renewed reference
to writing as an instrument with which to isolate its problematic ones.
But of what value are these painstakingly deciphered letters of the
unconscious if they are only a “lucubration of knowledge”? As I said,
Lacan’s thesis applies even to linguistics for signifier/signified, S/s,
suppose writing, and a fortiori the unconscious “structured like a lan-
guage” which results from the effort to isolate and differentiate the ele-
ments as units.
The question is thus to know what “parlêtre”, as the name of the
unconscious, adds or changes to the Freudian unconscious defined as
the meaning of desire. Lacan did not reject this definition, still referring
in Television to “The unconscious, namely the insistence through which
desire manifests itself […]” (Lacan, 1990b, p. 8).
“Parlêtre will be substituted for the Freudian UCS (unconscious, we
read it)”. He thus contradicts his own Television in which, questioned
about the term “unconscious”, he said that Freud had not found a bet-
ter one, and added: “it’s not to be revised”. The new term brings back
the question of knowing what the unconscious is, for it is not only the
times that have changed in the last decades of the century but also the
orientation that Lacan gave to psychoanalysis.
Does that mean that the Lacanian unconscious is different? This is a
big question. Lacan could sometimes say: “The unconscious is Lacanian”,
but the text I chose states otherwise: what is discovered is discovered in
one go. The invention is Freudian; then comes the inventory of its condi-
tions, its manifestations and what it is. No one could say that Lacan is
showing off in crediting himself with a more thorough inventory.
For all that however, he does not minimise his contribution: move
over from there, it’s my turn now! The formula evokes neither the ide-
alisation of sublimation nor the narcissism of the stepladder. Rather it
signals a reduction to emulation and competition, in line indeed with
our time. But if the “there” of the “move over from there” marks the
place of the unconscious as thing, we can see how after taking stock of
its effects the name of the thing may change.
The UCS is “a knowledge in as much as it is spoken constituting LOM
(MAN)”. It is knowledge, most certainly, since it can be deciphered,
 T H E PA R L Ê T R E 65

but knowledge harboured in spoken lalangue. In this it is very different

from the knowledge of science that only comes about through writing.
Now speech, unlike langue, is not dead speech, it is, on the contrary,
obscene, as I said. As spoken, knowledge is at the level of jouissance. It is
jouissance that the term “parlêtre” in fact suggests, the parlêtre who is not
the subject but rather the jouissance being of this subject as want-to-be.
Should we then suppose that in Lacan’s teaching, the effect of jouis-
sance of the 1970s is substituted for the effect of desire of the 1960s, to
give a chronology that negates at each step the one that has preceded it?
I do not think so: the reference to knotting does not result from the work
of negativity. Besides, isn’t object a inscribed at the heart of the Bor-
romean knot? This latter would not be of any analytic use if, besides the
three dimensions, it did not knot the various successive elaborations
by Lacan, if it did not condense the stages of the inventory which was
not created all at once. It is neither science that only knows its present,
nor is it the negativity on the move of Hegelian history. It is therefore
not about choosing between the want to enjoy [le manque à jouir], first
designated as the effect of the symbolic, desire, and object cause.

The mystery of the speaking body

We grasp the reason why Lacan evokes LOM, Borromean man, if I may
call him, constituted as One from the knotting of the three consistencies
and which the writing in three letters almost visualises. The definition
of the parlêtre is thus itself Borromean: speech, until now defined as a
vehicle of meaning, is, via the ones of knowledge that it articulates, con-
nected not only to enjoyed meaning [sens joui], but also to the field of
the Real, to real jouissance.
Lacan had stated: “The unconscious is what the being in speaking
enjoys”. Yes, but how, since I the speaker know nothing of this enjoyed
spoken knowledge? Lacan’s reply is: “I speak with my body”. Man has
a body, he speaks with his body; “he is a parlêtre by nature” [il par-l’être
de nature]. I recall this sentence from Encore that on first reading is so
surprising: “The Real is the mystery of the speaking body, the mys-
tery of the unconscious” (Lacan, 1998, p. 131). But it is only surprising
if the body is reduced to its imaginary form and if we forget that the
Symbolic, without which there would be no unconscious, has effects
on the Real. The first step of this thesis dates from The Ethics of Psy-
choanalysis, from the Thing defined as “what of the real suffers from the
signifier”. Lacan insisted: “I speak without knowing it. I speak with my
66 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

body and I do so unbeknownst to myself. Thus I always say more than

I know” (Lacan, 1998, p. 119). “La troisième” took this up literally: “The
unconscious [is] a knowledge which is articulated from langue, the body
which speaks there only being knotted to it by the Real which it enjoys”
(Lacan, 1975a). In other words, the jouissances of the body are speaking
ones. Obviously, we are in a totally different function of speech here.
And that’s not all, for the speech that we say is of the subject is “enjoy-
ing speech”. There is a satisfaction in the blah blah blah, in what is or
is not stated in the ordinary sense of the term. It responds, on the side
of the subject, to the jouissances that lalangue civilises on the side of the
substantial body.
I speak with my body. The thesis would require a return to the func-
tion of the symptom as message, but even more so, to the drives as the
effect of the speech of demand on needs (Lacan, [1958] 2006, [1960a]
2006), and thus, as Lacan later formulates it, “the echo in the body of the
fact that there is a saying”.
Indeed, what responds to the question of the subject in analysis,
what enables us to deduce what I want in what I say, if not the drive,
either in metonymy or in act, and the symptom as “event of the body”?
“To speak with one’s body” goes together with the Lacanian hypothesis
I have often emphasised. The subject is not a being because his being
is always elsewhere—there is no Dasein here—but there is the being of
the parlêtre who has a body to enjoy. That does not make an ontology,
however unpleasant this might seem to Heidegger.
It remains to be seen whether this may make a “jouilogy” [jouilogie],
or an economy of jouissance, as the notion of “the Lacanian field” from
the seminar The Other Side of Psychoanalysis might have led us to hope.
Lacan himself gave the answer: there is no energetics of jouissance. Nei-
ther the figure nor the letter is equivalent to the numerical constant that
defines energy in the field of science. There is no more a science of jouis-
sance than there is a science of object a. From that I conclude that inter-
pretation still has a future!

Note
1. With “Lituraterre”, first, and then Encore, where he described writing as
“an Other mode of the speaker in language”, and RSI with its redefini-
tion of the symptom as a function of the letter, and also the postscript to
the Four Fundamental Concepts.
 PART II
ANALYSIS ORIENTED TOWARDS
THE REAL
CHAPTER EIGHT

The end pass

I
come now to the consequences of the RUCS regarding analysis
and its end. If there is no end to the possibility of the transference
and no end either to the real unconscious, how therefore is an end
to analysis possible? There is no end to the transference, but in its
space there may be several passes to the real, of which the lapsus offers
us the reduced model. What would the end pass then be? This question
runs through all of Lacan’s teaching. It was at stake in his construction
of object a, it remains at stake in the RUCS, which could not leave the
pass of 1967 unaffected.
I will take things from the side of the symptom, for if there were only
the lapsus things would have been easier for Freud. Actually, the word
of the lapsus is homologous in the diachrony of speech to the letter of
the symptom in its synchrony. But more than the lapsus, the symptom
is what best shows us that the real unconscious, outside meaning, has
a use value—that of jouissance—but no exchange value. With the real
unconscious, the “no dialogue” [“pas de dialogue”] does not even have
its limit in interpretation.
And yet, we can apply to it the reduced model constructed for the
lapsus. Every time a parasitic element surfaces in intentionality, it will
summon the associative work that produces meaning by revealing the
69
70 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

phantasy. But here we are in the real unconscious. At the entry into
analysis we speak of the analytic symptom. It is not just any old one:
it is a symptom under transference, that is, elevated to the status of an
enigma to be solved. It is a symptom, as we say, that poses a question.
We question it because we wonder where it comes from, what it wants,
and what it means. It is thereby elevated to the status of the signifier of
the transference. It is thus the symptom which we believe in: we sup-
pose that it can say something. It’s what is more commonly called sub-
jectivisation of the symptom.
The space of the symptom can be defined exactly like that of the lap-
sus. It is the range of its association with other signifiers that gives it
meaning. This is the space of hystorisation where it fiddles with truth.
When this space no longer carries any meaning, the symptom is discon-
nected from all subjective truth: it is real, unhooked from the transfer-
ential postulate. So what remains of it? The intrusive element (the letter,
Lacan said in 1975) lodged at the level of jouissance. It’s why I could pas-
tiche and say: when the esp. of a sympt. no longer carries any meaning,
we are in the unconscious, the real unconscious, outside meaning. The
symptom has been reduced to its neological kernel. Clinically, let us say,
it is the end of questioning and a shutting down of the transference. We
should no doubt raise here the question of interpretation according to
whether it is adjusted to the scansions of truth—as Freudian interpreta-
tion essentially was—or whether, in making instead a hole in meaning,
it aims at the real unconscious. I will leave this point on hold.
But if one is no longer in transferential expectation, if one no longer
believes that the symptom can say something, is this because it has said
everything?
Is it that it could not say still more or something else? Ad infini-
tum. Yet to suppose that it has fallen silent, won’t it begin to speak
again? This is the perspective of analysis without an end or of analysis
resumed. This question is justified. It is structurally based, which is why
it re-emerges repetitively. It is based on the fact that the unconscious as
lalangue is inexhaustible, and that even what is isolated as the letter of
the symptom is only ever hypothetical. And there’s no possibility that
the unconscious can tell us how far to go in its own exploration. It’s not
it that will mark as the last signifier any of the signifiers surfacing in a
blunder or insisting in the repetition of the symptom. The unconscious
no doubt speaks but it does not conclude. Between the lie and the mis-
take, at the level of language there is no inherent end on the side of
 T H E E N D PA S S 71

the subject to hystorisation, and no exhaustion of the unconscious as

lalangue thinkable on the side of the real.
So what decides the end? Neither the RUCS nor truth but the third
partner that is added, one that is not of the linguistic order. In this 1976
text, it is called “satisfaction”. We see the paradox in relation to any
structural definition. This reversal of everything that comes before in
Lacan’s teaching is very late. We can consider that he introduced the
real unconscious in Encore, but we have to wait until this “Introduction
to the English-language edition” of Seminar XI for the idea of an end
by a specific satisfaction. The term does not figure in the “Proposition
of 9 October 1967 on the psychoanalyst of the school” on the end by
the pass. And not even in “L’étourdit” where admittedly he evokes a
mourning that ends in a “substantial” therapeutic effect (Lacan, 1973,
p. 44), after passing through a rather manic-depressive phase, but with-
out invoking this term “satisfaction”. Now, indeed, as I noted previ-
ously (Soler, [November 1989] 2000, p. 429) the so-called passants who
agree to make a testimony in the procedure of the pass, do not speak
about this depressive moment but rather about a satisfaction at the end.
I had hypothesised that this could be an artefact of the procedure, but
Lacan’s text gives it a foundation.
The flaw seen in the subject supposed to know ensures the real
unconscious but is not sufficient to ensure the end of analysis. The
additional condition for a conclusion to be possible is on the side of
the affect generated in the sequence that ensures the pass to the real
unconscious. Indeed, the analysis is at its point of closure when there is
no longer, let us say, any “analysand libido”, since “analysand libido”,
caused by the object which is lacking, is that which runs after truth.
Out of gas, we could say. If I am not mistaken, I already emphasised
this point long ago. It is why I was interested in Ferenczi’s remark that
“the analysis must die of exhaustion” and not through a decision. This
could very well be another one of Ferenczi’s brilliant anticipatory intui-
tions. For in fact, “exhaustion” like “satisfaction” is not in the register
of elaboration.
Why this term “satisfaction”? Up to that point we had the end by the
object. It referred to jouissance since a is the object lacking to jouissance;
then the end by the symptom which also refers to it. The term “satisfac-
tion” can be found in Encore in the form of what Lacan calls “another
satisfaction”, that of speech. Satisfaction (just as well as dissatisfaction)
is the affect that on the side of the subject responds to jouissance. Once
72 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

the coalescence of the signifier and jouissance was postulated—without

which moreover no literature would be thinkable—Lacan can propose
that there is a satisfaction obtained from speech and that this satisfac-
tion of the blah blah blah is what responds to phallic jouissance (Lacan,
1998, p. 64). Satisfaction and dissatisfaction define the reverberation
in the subject of what is happening on the side of jouissance, the side
that is not that of the subject. Likewise, in the expression “identification
with the symptom”, the term “identification” designates the response
of being. The modality of jouissance reverberates in subject effects. And
this thesis applies to transferential speech.
What then is the satisfaction at the end? It can only be situated in
relation to the satisfaction of the journey. It is different from “the other
satisfaction” which Lacan speaks about in Encore. The transference
sustains the satisfaction obtained from truth and even in the race for
truth, which, between lack and expectation, mimes desire and makes
what Lacan calls “the mirage of truth” glitter. That satisfaction has no
more a principle of limitation than the truth that speaks, except the sat-
isfaction at the end—“to be provided urgently”—that is expected to put
an end to the mirage of truth and the satisfaction of the race. In other
words, it ends the “love affairs with truth” that the “Note to the Italians”
attributes to Freud. This is coherent. But it should not be imagined that
the end of the love affairs with truth is the start of the love affair with
the unconscious. There is no friendship there!
The expression “identification with the symptom” also designates a
point of arrest of the analysand’s libido, of the love addressed to knowl-
edge. For the benefit of an acquired knowledge, if you wish, but only
because of the unconscious, because there is the unconscious. It does
not go further than that. It is not a knowledge about the unconscious
since the snatches that we get hold of would not exhaust it: in a word
lalangue objects.
I stress how much, in invoking this fall of satisfaction in the race
for truth, Lacan introduces a factor that challenges any idea of a fixed
ending. In 1967, Lacan stated that the algorithm of entry into analysis
corresponded to the algorithm at the end. In 1973 he provided a model
of the pass to the Real through the repeated fall of meaning. But the new
thesis here is that this is never enough to ensure the end of analysis.
What must be added is a change in the subject’s satisfaction. Now on
what does the factor of satisfaction or dissatisfaction depend? It defines
 T H E E N D PA S S 73

being, but it is incalculable and thus unprogrammable. It is in vain that

some go to a great deal of trouble in analysis to seek out some origin
in the past, and that, outside analysis, the whole politics of prediction
is an attempt to foreclose the unconscious. This incalculable side of the
subject, that we can call ethical, justifies Lacan in saying that the request
for satisfaction at the end is urgent, but that “one is not sure of satisfy-
ing it”. And he adds: “except to have it weighed”. This term “to weigh”
is very interesting. Whatever the case, to weigh is not to calculate.
This weighing aims to anticipate what is expected beyond the “point
where every strategy vacillates”, this point structurally guaranteed
because of the gaping hole of truth and the real of the impregnable
unconscious. Beyond this point, there is no supposed knowledge, just
the quantum of satisfaction. It is the point of challenge for the cartel of
the pass: the subject is incalculable and remains so. The type of satisfac-
tion for a given subject, namely, the type of affect that answers to this
structure, does not pertain to any calculation, with the consequence that
we can neither predict the satisfaction at the end nor the analytic act.
I would also conclude that it is the incalculable of the ethical subject that
makes the procedure of the pass, with its paradox, necessary. We expect
from a passant that he testify to the lying truth: in other words, that he
hystorise his analysis. And it won’t be enough that he lists the produc-
tions of truth that have punctuated this analysis, for that would only be
the novel of an analysis. It would be necessary for him to show how the
lie glimpsed in truth has cured him of the mirage and made him sick of
the race for truth, and that even when in order to say it he has no other
medium than speech with its lying truth.
So what can it be to weigh the request? I think that Lacan is refer-
ring here to the preliminary interviews which he saw as so important,
and which are handled badly when they are prolonged and not distin-
guished from the associative work that ought to be reserved for what
follows. I do not think that to weigh the request means to evaluate
it, since the incalculable would block this as well. Hence, indeed, the
imposture or illusion of the diagnostics of analysability on entry. To
weigh it would rather be to make sure of the actual weight on entry of
an expectation of something other than truth.
A last essential point: if the satisfaction at the end is incalculable
and un-programmable, what is the weight of the analytic act and of
the mode of interpretation on the production of this fall of love affairs
74 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

with truth, without which there is no end, and which an insight into
the structural fault is not enough to produce? Can the analyst wash his
hands of it in the name of the incalculable?
Speaking of transference love, Lacan defines it as “love addressed
to knowledge”. The expression condenses the two aspects of the trans-
ference, epistemic and sentimental, which are closely intertwined and
inseparable. Phenomenologically, the mixture differs greatly from one
subject to another. It oscillates between two extremes: some are aston-
ished at not experiencing transference love, and others love but are
astonished at not seeing the relation to knowledge.
Lacan asserts that this love is a subversive love. But not because it
would go towards knowledge, quite the opposite, it goes very well with
hatred of any interpretation that disturbs the love affairs with truth.
Only in analysis is this form of love subversive. I have stressed the dis-
tinction between two loves, the commonplace and the transferential—
the love of the One, well spotted by Freud, and the love of the S2 of
knowledge—but in reality the difference is less essential than discur-
sive. If it is subversive in analysis, it is because “it gives itself a partner
who has the chance to respond, which is not the case in other forms”
(Lacan, 1975c, p. 16). In fact in the other forms, between parents and
children, or between lovers, how could the partner respond with the
effect of the pass to the unconscious?
This thesis of the “partner who has the chance to respond”, applied
to analysis oriented towards the Real, refers all the responsibility of this
reduction of the mirages of truth to the analyst, even though he is not
the master of it and even though he cannot anticipate what in the sub-
ject is going to respond. Thus the question arises of the specific means
that an analytic technique oriented towards the Real can employ. Inter-
pretation and the handling of time are at stake here.
CHAPTER NINE

The time that isn’t logical

T
he essential part of Lacan’s elaboration concerning the time
of analysis was in the framework of his return to Freud, and
focused on the analysis that Freud had introduced, that is, an
analysis oriented towards articulated truth, a truth that speaks in the
structure of language through the analysand’s words but also through
the symptoms of his body. It is the dialectical time of rambling speech
which the variable length session corresponds to. It is the time of the
chain which produces the surprise return of the repressed, the time of
the future anterior of the subject, stretched between anticipation and
retroaction, and governed by the quilting points of his discourse, which
will allow him to retroactively refind the marks of the first contingen-
cies of his life.
However, the real unconscious is not dialectical and calls for other
modes of intervention. I would ask if the Lacanian short session and
the length of time needed for analysis do not share the same causality,
even if in practice the generally long duration of analysis seems sepa-
rate from that of the sessions which vary greatly depending on current
practices.
It is in so far as psychoanalysis as a practice of speaking mobilises the
Imaginary and the Symbolic—namely the field of semblants—that the
75
76 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

Real becomes a question. We can wonder whether, as Lacan stated at

the end, it is not a “shared delusion” [“délire à deux]”. I noted the differ-
ent steps which aimed at the Real and which led Lacan to question the
metaphors of his early teaching one by one, passing from the signifier
to the sign and to the letter, from language to lalangue, and to question
at the same time the scientific model of psychoanalysis as the condition
of transmission.
Lacan put forward three elaborations of this real that could emerge
in speech and that could put an end to the infinite drifting of both truth
and deciphering. These elaborations involved three definitions of the
final pass and not just one. In the three cases we have a principle of
conclusion by a real: that of the impossible to say for the pass to the
object, that of the impossible to write for the pass to the Real of the non-
relation, “specific” to the unconscious, and that of the outside meaning
for the pass to the RUCS. So should we say that in these three cases the
time needed—which we find so long—is the time of access to the epis-
temic conclusion by the Real? Certainly not.

The non-epistemic variable

From 1949, with the notion of the “time for understanding”, unantic-
ipatable as it can never be reduced to a thought process, Lacan had
marked out the place of what I call today the non-logical variable. It is
absolutely clear with the real unconscious: without even evoking the
symptom, how many lapsus linked to the real will there have to be in
an analysis to go beyond the mirage of truth and to recognise the real
unconscious?
This is because another non-epistemic variable is at play in every case.
It’s why, indeed, the ways to a conclusion via the act are never simply
those of the necessities of logical deduction. Thanks are due to Gödel
on this point, and to Lacan who made this clear at the end of his school,
when he said that everyone would conclude “according to his desire”.
And there we have one of the names of the variable which decompletes
logic, so that the concluding that resolves the complaint of impotence
will involve a leap. In other words, concluding at the end from the per-
spective of the epistemic conclusion is only ever a possibility.
It is not the absence of a principle of concluding that makes analysis
so long: it’s that in every case the principle of concluding is unbearable,
protected by “the horror of knowing”. From an insight into the frame
 T H E T I M E T H AT I S N ’ T L O G I CA L 77

of the phantasy, whether in a lightning flash or not, to the conclusion of

the impossibility of the relation, to the real unconscious of lalangue as
unknown knowledge, the knowledge acquired is the knowledge of an
end to the aspiration to knowledge: the synonym for castration. From
now on it comes up against a refusal, an “I don’t want to know any-
thing about it” which resists the conclusion. “It needs time to get used
to being” [“se faire à être”] as Lacan said in “Radiophonie”. In this con-
text it would mean: to be the object that is in internal exclusion to the
subject. The “to get used to” evokes “to make do with” [s’y faire] and
suggests the patience to bear, to accept the Real which elaboration of the
supposed unconscious brought to light.
An index of this non-logical variable, and of an end that is only pos-
sible, is found also in subjects who, as I’ve noted, having come to the
end of the relation to knowledge that is the transference, are alleviated
of their own “horror of knowing” by converting it into hatred (Soler,
2008b): hatred of analysis as well as of its henchmen, Freud and Lacan,
and certainly also of one or more of those who have accompanied them
on the journey. There are many other indices of the non-logical variable
whose place Lacan always marked and which he in fact inscribed with
the word “ethics”.
This suggests that with this non-logical variable one cannot antici-
pate the time an analysis will require. “One” is not only the analyst: it is
the subject as well. And how many times will we not be surprised that
the resolute analysand at the beginning is the most recalcitrant at the
end? The opposite is also true and one may see the sceptic at the begin-
ning become the most resolute at the exit.
The epistemic principle of the end by the Real is required in order
to close an analysis, but that it is required does not make it sufficient.
An additional and necessary condition is a response of being that does
not belong to logic. We could rightly call it ethical if the term were not
so debased today. A clear sign of this condition is indeed to be found in
the time of mourning that marks the end of analysis, as Lacan explicitly
noted in the “Proposition of 9 October 1967 on the psychoanalyst of the
school”, as well as in “L’étourdit”: it follows the moment of the glimpse
of the Real, pushing beyond the end of an analysis.
This response of being, which determines the fundamental options
of a subject in relation to the Real and which may or may not over-
ride his horror of knowing, is the only thing to introduce the margin
of freedom without which everyone would only be the puppet of their
78 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

unconscious. It is not only unpredictable, as I have said, but also unable

to be expressed as a statement and only allows itself to be approached
through signs. Lacan would ultimately place these signs on the side of
the affects generated by the pass at the glimpse of the Real, and for that
he himself needed time.

Didactic affects
From that point on, it is not enough for an analysis to have gone to
its epistemic end to make an analyst. The desire of the analyst is not
deduced from acquired knowledge. This is the thesis of the “Italian
Note” of 1973 and the “Introduction to the English-language edition”
of Seminar XI in 1976.
According to the “Note”, there is an analyst when the analysed sub-
ject, the one who has situated his very own horror of knowing, has
moved to enthusiasm. Others, on the contrary, can move from horror
to hatred. Experience shows this. But there are other alternatives as
well, the most frequent being the move from horror to forgetting. The
lightning flash of revelation, when it occurs, is generally short-lived
and the descent into therapeutic ends is an ever available and handy
accomplice.
In 1976, slightly shifting his terms, Lacan proposes that the pass eval-
uate not enthusiasm but “the satisfaction that marks the end of analy-
sis”. The definite article indicates that it is not contingent, that without
it there is no end and that it is constitutive of the end. It emerges when
there is no longer any satisfaction taken in lying truth. Could this be a
change of taste, a satisfaction taken in the outside meaning of the real
unconscious that would come to limit the satisfaction taken in truth?
This is also to say that with this principle of evaluation that bears not
on the didactic effect but on a response of being to the didactic effect of
analysis, we are very far from the idea that every analysis taken to its
end point produces an analyst: in the sense of an analyst who enjoys
the Real. There is no automatic enthusiasm or satisfaction at the end.
Beyond what is prudently called the clinician, it is only the non-logical
variable that makes the analyst possible.
We must consider the change of perspective that Lacan introduced
and the double devaluation it implies: of truth in relation to the Real,
and of logical structure in relation to the position of being. This can-
not be without practical consequences. The hard-working analysand
 T H E T I M E T H AT I S N ’ T L O G I CA L 79

is an analysand who enjoys inconclusive truth, with his hystorisation

with a “y”, and this is a euphemism: for to be hystorised and to enjoy
one’s phantasy are one and the same thing. This is why Lacan says that
the analyand consumes phallic jouissance and that the analyst makes
himself consumed. From then on, the love of truth appears for what it
is, symptomatic and defensive—the profusion of chatter, the saying of
endless stupidities sustained by a satisfaction that defers the moment
to conclude.

A session adjusted to the real unconscious

Hence the question of the means to be adopted by an analysis oriented
towards the Real and the responsibility of the analyst. If he favours the
movement towards this destitution of truth, what can he do?
Here I return to the problem of the Lacanian session and also to that
of the specifically Lacanian interpretation. Regarding the Lacanian
short session—I have already spoken about this in the text “A practice
without chatter” (Soler, 2007b)—I will just say that it targets the Real at
which Lacanian analysis aims.
The question is not to object to Lacan that the unconscious demands
time to articulate itself, as he was indeed the first to have explored
this in all its forms. It is rather a question of knowing if the pulsating
opening/closing movement of the unconscious that is produced in the
transference is isomorphic to the alternation—within a session/outside
a session: in other words, to the presence of the analyst. The whole of
analytic experience shows that this is not the case.
Take the commonplace example of the analysand who arrives quite
animated to his session and who says that he has been speaking all
day and night to his analyst, but once he’s actually there all his lucu-
bration collapses, or he is silent or he hears himself saying something
completely unexpected. Conversely, once outside the door, an empty
session often generates some new and important material. The time of
the unconscious and the time of the session, whatever its duration, can-
not be superimposed.
The short session—and this is the crucial point—in no way pre-
vents as some say, the articulation of the elements of the unconscious,
scrap by scrap. Scrap by scrap is the effect of the scansions. These
effects are in some respects incalculable, but the elements which are
produced and which scansion allows to be extracted, are limited and
80 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

can be objectified. The difference—and there is one obviously—is not

the capacity of either the one or the other to elaborate the unconscious.
They both do. Beyond this, we are no longer in psychoanalysis but in
the large field of “psy” with which it should not be confused.
The difference is that the Lacanian short session makes the cut
function as an interpretation of that which inhabits the truth articulated
by the subject. But why not then put this interpretation into words?
It is not forbidden, except that the other satisfaction, precisely, always
risks reducing the effects of the interpretation to the satisfactions of the
blah blah blah. The cutting of the session that cuts into words is the
“finger pointed” towards the jouissance that ballasts the hystorisation
of the subject in analysis. The analysand who told me that the short
session is like coitus interruptus did not realise how well she put it. In
“The direction of the treatment” Lacan had put forward the idea of
a silent interpretation, the finger pointed towards the signifier of the
lack in the Other (Lacan, [1958] 2006, p. 536). At the end, it is the finger
pointed towards the Real that comes into this place.
But actually, I think that what counts in a session, be it variable or
short in length, is its end, as it is moreover for the analysis as a whole.
There are conclusive ends of the session that bring out a quilting point
that generally satisfies; ends that question by emphasising a term that
revives the transferential question; and then there are ends that I have
called suspensive [fins suspensives], that neither conclude nor question
but which cut the chain of speech and shear through meaning. The
quasi-punctual, short session practised by Lacan adds to this by realising
the razor of the cut between the space of what’s said, semblants, and
real presence.
The first two—conclusive or questioning—push towards the hys-
torisation of truth. The second two, in contrast, push towards the real.
These have affinities with the Lacanian apophantic interpretation
which, like the oracle, “neither reveals nor hides, but makes a sign”,
a sign of what ex-sists to the hystorisation of the subject. Hystorisa-
tion is brought about through the times of the so-called opening of the
unconscious in which truth unfolds. This theme is well-known and has
made the times of its closing seem negative. But the Real, whatever its
definition, manifests itself in the times of the closing of the unconscious,
even in that of the rejection of the chattering unconscious, Sicut palea [as
dung]. The real unconscious is a closed unconscious, closed on its ones
of jouissance, autistic and neological, as I have said.
 T H E T I M E T H AT I S N ’ T L O G I CA L 81

However, we do not have to choose between the unconscious as truth

and the real unconscious. There is no analysis without the hystorisation
of the subject. In diachrony, the Real is at the end of the process, that
of the session as well as that of the analysis, where it functions as the
limit and thus as the end point of the lying truth, the fall of meaning.
In synchrony, the Real and truth are, let us say, knotted, which rules
out the possibility that one can escape from truth completely, however
much it is devalued. “Analytic discourse puts truth in its place, but
does not shake it up. It is reduced, but indispensable” (Lacan, 1998,
p. 108). Moreover, the real unconscious “fiddles” with the truth, Lacan
says. This is so true that at the very moment that he asserts the real
unconscious, he reiterates the idea that the pass consists of testifying to
the lying truth.

The satisfaction at the end

Here is what allows the satisfaction at the end to be clarified. It does
not simply substitute a satisfaction that would be taken from the
Real outside meaning for one taken from truth in the process of free
association.
What then of the affect at the end, the famous satisfaction of this pass
to the Real? Satisfaction or dissatisfaction, it is what responds in the
subject to a state of jouissance that is not of the subject but of the body.
Lacan spoke positively of gay sçavoir but we must not be deceived.
If the Real is in the right place, the satisfaction at the end refuses gay
sçavoir as much as it does sadness. Moreover, we could already deduce
this from Television if we read it carefully. Why? Because the jouissance of
deciphering that defines gay sçavoir returns us to sin in every case, says
Lacan: in other words, the relapse into guilt and sadness that it gener-
ates and that prevents us from locating ourselves in the unconscious.
Indeed, in deciphering we do not locate ourselves: we drift endlessly
in phallic jouissance. This assertion is consistent with the idea that the
love of knowledge that is the transference—the love that sustains the
deciphering aimed at meaning—does not sustain the desire to know.
An end of analysis is also the end of the joys of deciphering.
The satisfaction at the end is acquired with use, the use of a particu-
lar, Lacan says. There is thus no point in trying to give it a definition
that holds for everyone. We can only say what conditions it, and its
function.
82 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

This is linked to the logic of language. It is this logic that determines

that, as a user of analytic work, I will repeatedly experience two limits
after the satisfactions taken in the mirage of truth and in the moments
of waking up to the Real. Firstly, the lie of truth that Freud described
with his proton pseudos, that is, its powerlessness to touch the Real—
the real of jouissance—and to conclude. With truth I never get there:
castration is guaranteed. On the other hand, the unconscious without
a subject imposes itself and exceeds me, working on its own, outside
meaning, in each of its fixions of jouissance.
We can describe the affects generated by the race after truth and by
the emergences of the RUCS. On the one hand, the expectation and
hope that evolve in a time that moves from enchantment to disappoint-
ment: truth speaks, but does not go beyond a half-saying which makes
a mirage of the half that isn’t said. On the other hand, the affects of
the emergence of the real, from the lapsus to the symptom, oscillate
between astonishment, in the strongest sense, to anxiety. Anxiety is the
typical affect of any advent of the real.
How could a double despair not emerge from these two ordeals—
reiterated over the course of so-called free association—as the subjected
[asujetti] subject does his work: or if you prefer, a despair with two
sources. We can see this in the final phases of analysis—or at least where
the pass lays down the requirement for an end of analysis. Indeed,
a thwarting of the transferential expectation occurs as these two ordeals
are revealed by analysis, and we know from experience the protests
that this stirs up. However, these pitfalls are not necessarily dead ends.
The exit that is possible depends on the way in which the entan-
gled pitfalls of truth and the real oscillate, says Lacan. I understand
this to mean that it is through passes to the outside meaning of the
Real, moments of awakening on the model of the lapsus that I have
described, passes which put a stop to the fictions of truth; and con-
versely, through the rebounding of truth in successive fictions, which
each time produce the expectation of a subjectivisation of the uncon-
scious, the truth and the Real alternately object to or rather counterbal-
ance the satisfaction that each engenders—awakening or hope—each
compensating in alternation the dissatisfaction produced by the other.
From there, with use, a third satisfaction emerges, one which is not due
to the beauty of their symmetry. It alone is the sign that the subject has
acknowledged the real unconscious that resists any capture by knowl-
edge. In acknowledging the Real, we lighten its burden, while at the
 T H E T I M E T H AT I S N ’ T L O G I CA L 83

same time ending the false hopes generated by the mirage of truth.
So this pass truly belongs to the Lacanian field and is different from the
pass of 1967. Let us say that it supplements the latter with the Real that
was lacking there. It is remarkable, indeed, that it changes its temporal-
ity. Where the first evoked the instant of perception, the lightning flash
of the breakthrough, the second involves a long period of reworking
jouissance that is quite different from the discontinuities of the cut.
Yet perhaps we should qualify this. All the constructions of 1967 on
the pass and the act that it conditions already situated the end of analy-
sis in reference to jouissance. But this was only conceptualised through
object a, which Lacan called real. Why didn’t Lacan stick with that?
What made the steps that followed necessary for the Lacanian field to be
established? Chronology is not enough: we must find its mainsprings.
Lacan was not able to stick with the elaborations of 1967 for a funda-
mental reason, which he himself perceived and formulated in various
ways (I will not list them here): that object a, the a which is in the posi-
tion of cause in the subjective economy and the analytic bond, is pow-
erless to put an end to the half-saying of lying truth, in other words, to
the flight of meaning, of enjoyed meaning. Rather, it is this object that is
always fleeing through the hole of discourse, and its installation in the
place of the semblant in analytic discourse does not make the latter a
discourse of the real. There is no discourse that is not of the semblant.
There is certainly a topology of object a, but what topology locates as
most real are holes. This is at least how I understand Lacan’s strange
sentence which says that analysts who authorise themselves only from
their dislocation [égarement]—thus the opposite of the analyst oriented
by the real—will find their happiness in topology (Lacan, 2001a, p. 314).
I think that this verdict of inadequacy was indeed present in the “Prop-
osition” when Lacan says: “The vain knowledge of a being who slips
away [se dérobe].” It cannot be said of the RUCS—however unknown
and without a subject it is—that it slips away, since it appears not in the
flight of meaning but in the very tangible modalities of jouissance.
Now I believe that the conceptualisation of this Real is necessary in
order to see what triumphs in capitalist discourse, and even to counter
it. Lacan was in tune with his times, doubtless knowing that the Sym-
bolic never wins against any Real, and that the alternative is played out
between the real unconscious and the real of capitalism.
However the question that remains is that of the subject produced by
analysis beyond any possible final pass.
CHAPTER TEN

Terminable analysis

Separation identity
The question arises of what analysis leaves the analys and beyond its
therapeutic effects. The problem of identity is posed not only at the exit
but also at moment of entry into analysis. However, the question goes
far beyond the analytic framework and is useful to determine its gen-
eral framework.

The names of identity

I have chosen to begin with its relations to the name and to nomination.
I am not starting from nothing since there is already a thesis according
to which the symptom is the name of the subject’s identity, his true and
proper name which usurps the patronymic name.
I am not going to run through this thesis but will just make two
remarks. We can find a simple indication of it in the fact that some sub-
jects manage to rename themselves through their work. But what else
is a work than the product of the knotting between a desire and a mode
of jouissance? It is the same for both the subjects’ deeds and misdeeds.
Thus we say: a Fragonard, Gödel’s Theorem, Zorro the Avenger, but

85
86 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

also Jack the Ripper and, of course, Joyce the Symptom. From there it is
only a small step to the idea that an analysis aims at finding one’s true
proper name. But this is also to suggest that each subject has at least two
proper names: his patronymic name, which obviously has major subjec-
tive resonances, and his private name, that of his being of jouissance.
The patronymic name is received from genealogy: it is a transmit-
ted name. Let us say that it comes automatically from the Other. Patro-
nymikos, indeed, comes from pater and onoma, as if language recorded
paternal genealogy. We know however that this attachment to the father
is not universal; there are matronymic rules of nomination. Moreover,
the practice of generalised nomination for all subjects is relatively recent
in history, because for a very long time, since Ancient Greece, the pat-
ronymic name was reserved for great families. There are also atypical
cases where it is the social body which names: for example, foundlings,
or those born with an X. It is as if today the obligation to register birth, to
inscribe each child with a name in the State register of births, marriages,
and deaths, had, beyond an obvious function of social control, that of
welcoming each new living being, a function in some way homologous
at the secular level with Christian baptism.
Unlike the common name whose referent is generally a class of
things, one expects from the patronymic name that it index an exist-
ence and one only, independently of any quality other than descent
and sex. Within this limit, the patronymic name is not a signifier for it
tends to designate independently of any attribution. Certainly a patro-
nymic name can have a meaning: Mr or Mrs Baker, Miller, Beauregard
[the name indicating a class position], and why not Soler, which in its
original language refers to the ground whereas to the French ear it is to
the sun! But in every case, in its function as proper name, meaning is
elided.
The first name, which is added to the patronymic name, is quite a
different thing: it is not transmitted automatically but inscribes a choice.
It is always the mark of the desire of the Other towards the new arrival,
a signified of the Other (s(A)) which carries the trace of his/her dreams
and expectations—look how many Venuses, Ophelias, and Marilyns
there are!—or the trace of mournings when it is the first name of the
dead child or of the lost grandparent, or when it is a unisex first name
that deletes the actual sex. Subjects know this so well that some, reject-
ing the mark, decide to change their first name in spite of the require-
ments of civil status.
 T E R M I N A B L E A N A LY S I S 87

The practice of first names, and even of plural first names, also
obviously aims to increase the identifying power of the patronymic
name. However, its discriminatory power is conspicuous in its poverty.
Witness the majority of homonyms to be found in directories and the
practice of changing one’s patronymic name when it is felt to be ridicu-
lous or offensive, or even dangerous. Unless it is simply, in some places
at least, that in being a woman one becomes a wife. In short, the proper
name in the ordinary sense is insufficiently identifying and does not
succeed in fulfilling the program of the true proper name: to allow one
and only one individual to be identified.
This impotence of patronymic names indeed reflects the difficulties
inherent in defining a proper name in relation to its referent, what I am
going to call the “named”. We assume that we name something that
“there is”. Remember the Genesis story: God, after having created each
thing gives them each a name. But if one names what there is—thus
a referent—several questions immediately arise. This “there is”, how
does one distinguish it from every other thing—in other words, how
does one identify it in its unicity? Is it even in existence, since it is possi-
ble to speak of that which, such as Pegasus, does not exist or only exists
in imagination? Hence the wish of Willard Quine for an “ontological
immunity” which does not speculate about existence but which sticks
solely to the question of identity: this “there is”, what is it? These ques-
tions, which I am simplifying, have led to considerable elaborations in
logic. John Stuart Mill had already stressed in A System of Logic that with
the name, denotation and connotation are separated. Later elaborations
roughly divide up in two groups. The first, that of the so-called descrip-
tivist theories that begin with Russell—and are extended with Frege,
Searle, and Strawson—comes from Russell’s theory of descriptions. It
consists of linking the function of the proper name to a description, fix-
ing an essential property of the referent, or a bundle of properties. The
example given by Russell himself is of Sir Walter Scott, the author of
Waverley. Or again, Kripke’s example of Nixon, president of the United
States of America in 1970; or Hitler, the man who killed the greatest
number of Jews. There we see that it is a matter of supplementing the
patronymic name with an identifying trait of singularity, which allows
the One of identity to be reached without any possible confusion.
Now, let us not forget that these questions which might seem to be
quite abstract in fact have a very concrete import, as is always the case.
Think, for example, of the police investigation where we cannot do
88 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

without the distinctive traits that allow an unequivocal identification.

The identity card, for example, which adds a series of traits to the pat-
ronymic name, is related, without knowing it, to descriptivist practices:
date and place of birth, and also the individual signs, as we say, to des-
ignate bodily marks such as fingerprints, which are not of the subject
but of the body, today supplanted by DNA thanks to science. There
are other more ambiguous marks between body and subject, sought at
first in phrenology and then in writing, where the written form makes
a singular and unfalsifiable trace, especially in the signature, and simi-
larly with science, the frequencies of vocal emission beyond the audible
accent. Why not add here the inimitable and unknown style detected by
the feminine eye that Lacan evoked in his seminar with “the professor’s
shoes” (Lacan, 1992, p. 296).
The second group aims, on the contrary, at eliminating every con-
notation. Kripke is its most eminent and innovative representative, and
he tries especially in Naming and Necessity to split the proper name from
any identifying property, from any singularising trait. What he calls
a pure “rigid designator” separates reference from any meaning, and
identifies a referent without saying what it is. It is difficult, however, to
arrive at an identity name without any property. The singular statement
of pure existence creates a problem and it is very difficult to hold to this
view in psychoanalysis.
I will pause at the first of Lacan’s developments on the proper name
in “Subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire”. There the
proper name designates what of a being is not identified and is not
identifiable by the signifier. If the subject is represented by the signifiers
that he assumes, these signifiers are however only representatives that
do not say what he is in himself, outside of representation, which thus
remains an x. The proper name is precisely not a signifier that repre-
sents the subject but the index of what he is as “unthinkable”, what of
him does not pass to the signifier. The two names of this unthinkable in
Freud are “libido” and “drives”; in Lacan, at first, “desire” and “symp-
tom”, then the specific Borromean knotting which defines a parlêtre that
he calls sinthome. In this way, the proper name is more the name of the
thing than the subject. And when Lacan says of the neurotic that he has
a horror of his proper name, that he wants to know nothing about what
he is as thing, he is reformulating what Freud called neurotic defence as
fundamentally the distance taken thanks to the signifier from the place
of the Real.
 T E R M I N A B L E A N A LY S I S 89

The name “symptom” is a true name of identity insofar as it names

from the point of one and only one singularity. It is the case in the exam-
ples I mentioned at the start. And this takes me back to the renowned
(renommee). This is the word for celebrity. The fact of being famous
(fama) evokes a second operation of nomination, “to make a name for
oneself” when one has one already. The “renowned” name brings off
what fails with the first name: that is, to jointly index an existence and
its traits of unicity, in knotting the patronymic name to a distinct singu-
larity. It is difficult to consider it as a simple “rigid designator” denoting
an existence without connoting anything of its specificity; it is, rather,
the only name that can fix an identity as singular. What could one call
this singularity that appears in works or in notable deeds, good or bad,
if not symptomatic singularity? Provided of course that we remember
Lacan’s last elaboration which names the symptom not as an anomaly
but as the knot specific to each person that allows the body, jouissance,
and the unconscious to hold together. To rename oneself thus always
has a Borromean function, and it is through it that a subject signs with
his unfalsifiable signature. Proof by Joyce.
For him, however, there is a specificity to his symptom name, besides
his genius. Lacan did not say Joyce les langues, or “l’élangue” as he put it
in the seminar of 18th November 1975. That would have been to name
him by his symptomatic relation to language, the rather maniacal style
that peaked in the writing of Finnegans Wake. With “Joyce the symp-
tom” he names not the symptom that he has but the symptom that he is:
that is to say, the fact of “accomplishing himself as symptom” (Lacan,
[1979] 1987, p. 35). The infinitive “to accomplish” implies time and effort
maintained asymptotically towards his symptom being. This symptom
being consists in renaming himself and thus deploying the Borromean
function to make up for the deficiency of his father. By doing this, he
adds a name—“the necessary son”—to the series of Names of the Father
(Lacan, [1979] 1987, p. 34), which does not stop writing itself as “the
uncreated spirit of his race”.
I would like to explore the basis of Lacan’s shift, in the years around
1975, from the Name-of-the-Father to the Father of the name, for I do
not think that it is only a taste for punning that inspired him. The “to
make a name for oneself”, which seems to leave all the responsibil-
ity for the name to the subject himself, must not conceal from us the
fact that there is no auto-nomination. This means that a proper name,
even that of the symptom, is always linked with a social bond. In every
90 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

case, there has to be what I am going to call the offer of nomination,

the positioning of the subject [la mise du sujet]. But look at Freud’s case
of the Rat Man: we can say that “rat” comes from his unconscious as
the name of a jouissance situated in his phantasmatic relation to the lady
and to the father, but it required Freud to designate him as the Rat Man,
and thus to give him his name of entry into analysis. Likewise, it is
Lacan who names Joyce the symptom. It is also the case for the name
that he first gave himself: the artist, who to exist, had to be confirmed
by the public: let us say, the century. Without this bond, he would only
have been the megalomaniac Yeats had seen in him when he met him in
his youth. This means that the name is at the mercy of the uncalculable
encounter. It thus involves, in part, a contingency—just like love.
Who has access to the power—it is a power—of nomination? Since
contingency is at play, the power to nominate becomes relatively
dispersed.
Think of the hateful insult. It is an attempt at a forcing towards the
name of “jouissance” but which does not really make a name, for it is
immediately refused. There are also unworthy names imposed by the
Other without consent, such as M. the Accursed [the French title of
Fritz Lang’s film M]. And then, above all, there is the love that names.
This theme runs through Lacan’s teaching. He begins with the notion
of full speech inhabiting intersubjectivity: “If I call the person to whom
I am speaking by whatever name I like […]” (Lacan, [1953] 2006, p. 247)
he will answer me until “there is love only of a name” (Lacan, 2004,
p. 390).
The poets saw this long ago. I have already quoted Claudel in Partage
de midi [The Break of Noon]: “If you call me by a name that you know
and that I am ignorant of […] I would not be able to resist” (Claudel,
1967, p. 1005). The love that names raises the anonymity of the object
cause of desire to the elective unicity of the bond. We see here to what
extent the name is bequeathed, but it in no way fixes a specificity of the
one named. Let us think of Marguerite Duras with “your name of Venice
in deserted Calcutta”, etc. There are certainly other types of nomina-
tions: those made from “properties” of the named that are skills, in the
same way that we name a responsibility or reward outstanding behav-
iour (an order of merit, as we say). These are socialised and socialising
nominations that inscribe the being identified in the social bond. When
it is love that names, on the contrary, the properties of the named are
not evoked: the received name is not the name of the symptom of the
 T E R M I N A B L E A N A LY S I S 91

loved one, but on the contrary of the lover, the name of the symptomatic
object that I am for the other. The “you are my wife”, says it plainly.
These names say more about the one who names than the one who is
named.
The question is obviously raised here as to what specifies the Father
who names. I will come back to this. It is clear that his saying is not
limited to the saying of heterosexual love. Like this latter, he names
a woman as the symptomatic object, but his half-saying adds another
object to it that is the issue of this woman-mother, thus knotting together
the ties of sex with those of generation, those ties about which current
scientific advances suggest are not so inscribed in nature that they can-
not be undone.
The Names of the Father, announced in the plural, went well with
this function of saying, for saying is an existential function, thus contin-
gent and pluralisable. This function of the signifier in the singular, that
of the Name-of-the-Father that Lacan never rescinded, can be inscribed,
but it is not a signifying function. The plural Names of the Father are in
fact the names of various different sayings bearing the function. Lacan
gave a few examples. Woman, Wedekind’s masked man, and I add here,
thanks to Joyce, the necessary son. We know the interest Lacan had in
Wedekind, attributing to him an even greater perspicacity regarding
sex than Freud’s. Lacan’s Introduction to Spring Awakening takes up this
question of the plural in a way that is worth our while considering.
The Father, he says, has so many names that none suit him. He has no
proper name except the name of the name of the name, or the name as
existence. In this assertion, the Father designates the function, because
in terms of what a father is, the one who carries the function through his
père-version, he has a proper name like every subject.
So, what about the name of the name of the Name-of-the-Father func-
tion? To this triad we can apply the logical game that Deleuze applies
to the name of Lewis Caroll’s song in his Logic of Sense. “Father” is a
name which has an ordinary meaning; “Name-of-the-Father” is a name
of the name which designates the function; and all the particular names
of this name of the name, “woman”, “the masked man”, etc., constitute
the series of Names of the Father in the plural, the series of manifesta-
tions of the function. This means that if existential saying is able to lay
down the law, and even an ironclad law when it is the superego, there
is no law of saying. The paternal saying which names is hence rather
epiphanic, as I have already argued. It reinforces the injustices of nature
92 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

by the contingencies of its emergence, but its contingency also separates

it from the avatars of the conjugal family. And in all cases of saying, the
nominating saying has a Borromean function. It knots the three consist-
encies in hooking the Real into an imaginary-symbolic social bond. It is
thus both knotting [nouant] and nou(s)ant [knotting us], if I may write
it that way.

End identity
Lacan’s successive formulas concerning the subject at the end of analy-
sis are numerous: the end by assumption of “being towards death”, by
subjectivisation of castration, by subjective destitution of the pass, and
finally by identification with the symptom. This variety, that follows the
elaborations of structure, is precious because it forces us to choose and
can thus have anti-dogmatic qualities. But it leaves us with a question:
that of the “saying”, of the unique saying to be inferred from the many
different things that are said.
If we turn to Freud on terminable analysis, it seems that the actual
end is purely pragmatic. This is not the case with Lacan who never gave
up defining the conclusive point of analysis, at first in terms of acquired
knowledge and then finally in terms of the affect produced by the epis-
temic effect.
The constant that runs through the variety of Lacan’s theses is thus
particularly important to me. One claim is never altered: that there is a
definable conclusion, that this is inseparable from the production of the
analyst, and that it has an essential political impact.
What is sought in his various formulas is what I have called a separa-
tion identity (Soler, 2004). The expression is not Lacan’s, but since 1964
with Seminar XI where he produces the notion of alienation to the sig-
nifying chain, he opposes to it what he calls separation by the object.
Separation identity is to be understood in its difference from the iden-
tifications of alienation. These latter are run through in an analysis and
are, as we say, summoned in order to fall. They come from the Other
and borrow from it its signifiers: they go from the ideals, I(A), big I of
big A, up to the phallic signifier. They certainly attempt to “crystallise”
in an identity—the term is Lacan’s—but they are just the screen, if I may
say, of a subject who is only supposed and who is not identifiable in the
Other where he only functions as lack (−1). Analysis, however, reaches
its end in a separation identity. It cannot come from the Other, and it is
 T E R M I N A B L E A N A LY S I S 93

expected from the analytic metamorphosis. This is the invariant saying

of Lacan on this point, conveyed by the various formulae that go from
the “you are that” of the 1949 text on the mirror stage up to this famous
identification with the symptom of the years around 1975.
“You are that.”
In 1949, in his text “The mirror stage as formative of the I function”,
Lacan concludes by saying that analysis accompanies the patient up to
“the ecstatic limit of the ‘You are that’” (Lacan, [1949] 1966, p. 100). If this
is not a formula of identity, what is it? A separation identity, as the term
“ecstatic” indicates.
In the following decade, it is the famous “assumption of being
towards death”, the pathematic resonances of which eclipse the true
structure. As analysis is being defined as the restitution of the chain
of words constitutive of the subject, we might infer that the notion
of intersubjectivity developed in the two great texts “Function and
field of speech and language” and “Variations on the standard treat-
ment”, would only produce an alienated identity. But it is precisely
in relation to this that Lacan describes death as an “external centre of
language”—in other words, real—and more precisely as a paradoxical
real, quilting point. Lacan evokes here the subject who “says no”: no to
the productions of the Eros of the symbol and no to the chain, in favour
of a “desire for death” whose three major forms are not to be confused
with the death drive. He describes these forms that indicate—Lacan
says it explicitly—that being towards death is the “assertion of life”,
the only true one according to him that inscribes one’s own unique
being. Subjectivisation of being towards death is here understood as
the establishment of unique difference. It passes to the act in the suicide
of Empedocles, whom Lacan will later make the paradigm of separa-
tion identity and who provides the model of the act through which the
subject finally becomes identical to himself. We are not far from Valéry’s
famous line: “As into himself at last, eternity changes him [Tel qu’en lui-
même enfin l’éternité le change]”.
“The solution to interminable analysis” (Lacan, [1958] 2006, p. 537).
What would we make, then, of the end by assumption or, as Lacan
sometimes says, subjectivisation of castration, that he will elaborate a
few years later, starting from “The direction of the treatment”? The end
is conceived as the fall of the ultimate identification with the phallic
signifier, the end of the famous “being the phallus” in the desire of the
Other! An effect then of de-identification. Is this not very close to an
94 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

effect of separation since the phallus is the mediating signifier of the

relation to the Other, the relation to its desire? It is true that this effect
does not identify, since it leaves the $ (the barred subject) to be discov-
ered, so to speak, and we could think of this as an end by the indetermi-
nation of a without-identity [un sans-identité]. This idea had a currency
and is still sometimes repeated today, but it is because what came later
was not correctly read, and in particular the lines that followed. They
are certainly very coded but not indecipherable if we work at them,
especially when we have access to the later work.
What do these say? Firstly, that the effect of separation, which is that
of phallic disidentification, is the condition for putting imaginary cas-
tration into play in the erotic relation to the Other: to give and to receive
the phallus. Let us not forget here that the Freudian bedrock, in chapter
VII of “Analysis terminable and interminable”, is the rejection of this
putting into play, and stasis for the man in the despair of protest or for
the woman in her demand. “To make castration subject” [“Faire de la cas-
tration sujet”]—according to the expression Lacan used in his summary
of “The analytic act”—is already a solution to the Freudian bedrock.
Certainly this does not yet make an identity, but it is not all. In the
last paragraph the text concludes on what Lacan calls the “solution to
infinite analysis”, a solution to the Freudian bedrock. This is a solution
provided by Freud himself, according to Lacan, the Freud who in 1937
begins to write for the first time about what he calls Spaltung [Splitting].
To put it simply, according to the two formulae that I have suggested,
that there is no penis, but there is the fetish. In this fetish which for
Freud was the displaced penis, Lacan recognised the first Freudian
introduction of the consideration of an object that he himself had not
yet written as object a, but which he had already seen as the solution.
To conclude on this text, we don’t exactly have an end by separa-
tion identity, but an end that is not without an effect of separation, and
already an indication of the element that will respond to the indetermi-
nation of the subject: namely, the object itself. In this sense, the text is
like an unfinished play, which close to the last sentence leaves us on the
threshold of the additional elaboration that is to come.

Destitution
There remains the famous “destitution of the subject” of the period of
the pass, the true nature of which it is difficult to misconstrue. Lacan
 T E R M I N A B L E A N A LY S I S 95

clarified it himself, notably in “Le discours à l’EFP” in December 1967.

Contrary to what the term “destitution” connotes, it is not a negativisa-
tion but a positivisation. It is only conceivable in relation to the insti-
tution of the subject supposed to know that marks every entry into
analysis. But destitution only institutes the subject as want-to-be, as x
of desire, the enigma of indetermination, and therefore as irreducible
by the signifying chain as Freud’s primal repression. It is to this non-
identifiable x that destitution gives identity, through the equivalence of
the $ with the object, the latter being the only thing to respond to the
“what am I” of the entry into analysis. It is the non-identity of the sub-
ject supposed to the chain that is destituted.
However this objectal identity is paradoxical. Indeed, since the object,
despite its imaginary and real bodily consistency, is not an object of real-
ity that can be grasped within the coordinates of the Kantian aesthetic,
identity by the cause of desire becomes unrepresentable. It has no rep-
resentative. Destitution produces being where there was a want-to-be.
It determines that which was indeterminate, giving being through the
object-cause that determines the subject’s desire: that is what a reso-
lute desire means and what I think Freud also meant with his “inde-
structible” desire. But this object-cause remains unrepresentable. And
at the end of his whole elaboration, Lacan gives his verdict that, it must
be said, has given rise to error: “Vain knowledge of a being that slips
away” [“Savoir vain d’un être qui se dérobe”] (Lacan, 1995, p. 10).
Separation identity, then, but one that slips away. We are not far from
the ecstatic limit of 1949. You are this object that is not signifiable in the
Other—separation—you are that which does not cease to chatter about
all your statements and acts—constantly—but which no statement rep-
resents, no act can staunch, and which thus only manifests itself as an
act. It is not surprising that just after this is the seminar on the Act!

Identification with the symptom

With this notion that surprised Lacan’s students so much at the time, we
can see that the inversion of perspective—introduced by taking lalangue
and the real unconscious into account—does not negate the constant of
the saying about the end of analysis by separation identity. It reinforces
it. The formula is new but the saying is not, and it never varied.
The symptom in the singular, a formation of the real unconscious,
is not on the side of the Other: it comes from the Real, from jouissance
96 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

and from lalangue. Lacan defined this identification in a way that could
not be simpler. It consists, he says, in “recognising oneself in it” (s’y
reconnaître). What does this mean? The expression should be balanced
with another from the same period, which says that you can never
recognise yourself in your unconscious.
Obviously, to recognise oneself in one’s symptom one needs to
have at least localised it, recognised it as a specific modality of jouissance
beyond any therapeutic changes. It is the condition for managing
it—“to know how to use it” [savoir y faire]—says Lacan. For the neu-
rotic, who by definition does not recognise himself in the symptom,
who defends against it and thus complains about it, even if he pretends
to be cynical, it is progress.
To recognise oneself in the symptom is to assume what must be
called an identity of jouissance. This has nothing to do with identifica-
tion to the Other. It is thus the symptom reduced to “what does not
stop writing itself”, the response to the “what am I?” of the entry into
analysis. The precursor to this thesis is found at the end of the seminar
The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, where Lacan, evoking a
special type of identification to object a, was already formulating a sepa-
ration identity by jouissance. Indeed, what the symptom determines is
not the simple subject supposed to the signifier, but on the contrary, as
I have pointed out, what Lacan designated in 1975 as the “real subject”,
the subject well and truly there, the “pathematic” subject: that is, the
individual parlêtre who has a body, both substantial and real.
Lacan’s trajectory thus goes from ineffable identity, asserted from
1949, up to the identification of 1975, the one that the letter of the jouis-
sance of the symptom tears out of the ineffable, the letter being the one
thing in language that is identical to itself. I will come back to this point
for it is more complex than it seems.

Ethics, never individualistic

Identity is the opposite of dispersal; separation, the opposite of
alienation. It is astonishing to see to what extent Lacan produced
misconceptions and was misunderstood by his first pupils. The lat-
ter valorised certain concepts into an ideal: lack, castration, disbeing
[désêtre], destitution, not forgetting, of course, non-knowledge. Hence
their stupefaction when they saw identification with the symptom
appear, which nevertheless only gave the final quilting point to a thesis
 T E R M I N A B L E A N A LY S I S 97

that had been present since the beginning. Lacan himself diagnosed this
misunderstanding when he evoked those analysts “who only authorise
themselves from their dispersal”.
Now, without this fundamental thesis of separation identity, how
can we explain a massive clinical fact—which, indeed, the enemies of
psychoanalysis often bring up—the fact that those said to be analysed,
for whom analysis has changed everything, remain nevertheless at a
certain level the same, if not even more hardened.
The time for understanding that is too long has drawbacks. Clinically,
of course, but also in as far as the conception of the end of analysis has
a decisive political impact.
From the beginning, speaking of psychoanalysis, Lacan proposed
that “ethics is not individualistic” (Lacan, [1955] 2006, p. 346) and that it
involves a contrario effects of current civilisation. Rereading the totality
of these texts, I was struck by the number of virulent remarks about the
times that could be applied perfectly to the beginning of this twenty-
first century. Put briefly: times of social hardship, the barbarity of the
Darwinian century, producing touching victims: this is “Aggressive-
ness in psychoanalysis” (Lacan, [1948] 2006, p. 99); objectification of
discourse which banishes the meaning of the subject: this is “Function
and field of speech and language”; then the ethics of the superego and
terror: this is “The remarks on Daniel Lagache’s presentation”. “The
Proposition of 9 October 1967 on the psychoanalyst of the school”,
furthermore, forecasts a future of segregation into camps, and that’s
not all, right up to “La troisième” in which we are all identified as
proletarians in no longer having anything with which to make the
social bond.
Parallel with each of these diagnoses, the mission of psychoanalysis
is redefined: “we clear anew the path to his meaning in a discrete fra-
ternity […] with this touching victim” (Lacan, [1948] 2006, p. 101); that
“the subject’s satisfaction is achievable in the satisfaction of all” (Lacan,
[1953] 2006, p. 264); freed from the ethics of the superego through the
silence of desire (Lacan, [1960] 2006, p. 573); and then, to make use of
his castration in “Subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire”;
to escape from the “herd”, to leave the capitalist discourse in Television;
and finally to take the real into account—as I understand it, the real of
the proletarian social symptom in “La troisième”.
We see that in each case, and we must follow this progression in more
detail, the prescribed purpose goes in the direction of restoring a social
98 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

bond beyond the resolution of the alienation to the Other that analysis
strives to bring about.
On this point, what is it in identification with the symptom that
concentrates the most intimate aspect of autistic jouissance? Does it not
intensify compulsory individualism and the dereliction of the modern
proletarian? Some have asked, after the year 2000 when today’s subjects
are in the grip of capitalistic values, how we could still want “to meet
at its horizon the subjectivity of one’s time”, as Lacan advocated for
the analyst at the end of “Function and field of speech and language”
(Lacan, [1953] 2006, p. 264). It is that these same people who no doubt
supposed that identification with the symptom was homogeneous with
the regime of what I have called the generalised “narcynisism [nar-
cynism]” of our time. There, I think, is the error. The social symptom of
“all proletarians” which globalises the relation of all with the products
of the market is disruptive of the social bond, establishing only a single
link, hardly social, between each person and some prescribed surplus
enjoyment. This is not the case with the fundamental symptom or, bet-
ter still, with the sinthome that in no way excludes the social bond if it is,
as I will show, a Borromean symptom. This symptom knots desire and
jouissances, the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real for each person in
a singular and never global way.
CHAPTER ELEVEN

Identification with the symptom or …

worse

T
he symptom is what via the unconscious makes up for the
foreclosure of the sexual relation. It is thus structurally out of the
question that the fundamental symptom be absent at the end of
analysis, whether we know it or not. That does not rule out the thera-
peutic effect, which consists of modifying one part of the symptom, that
to which meaning can be given via deciphering. Look at the paradig-
matic case of the Rat Man: at the end of the deciphering process, his
obsession disappears, but the fundamental symptom of his relation to
the sexual partner is neither resolved nor elucidated.
This symptom is not just any old one. At the beginning, and during
the course of an analysis, we are faced with plural symptoms which
are multiple and varied, and that establish themselves in opposition
to the conventionalities governing established discourses. In contrast,
the symptom in the singular is the one that establishes the social bond
where precisely there was none. And where is this if not in the “enclosed
field” of the relation to sex or to different objects that can be substituted
for it: in other words, in the “love affairs” about which Lacan could say
in Television that they are severed “from every established social bond”
(Lacan, 1990b, p. 38). This means that just as the schizophrenic is con-
fronted with his organs, and even more so to his life, without the aid
99
100 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

of an established discourse, so too very parlêtre is confronted sexually

to the Other of sex without the aid of an established discourse. The
symptom is a suppletion. At this level everyone is incomparable. I have
called this symptom fundamental in analogy with the fundamental
phantasy. I could also say the last symptom, since it is this symptom
that in the field of jouissance makes up for the last word lacking in the
field of language.
Analysis necessarily proceeds from the symptom at the start to
the establishment of the symptom at the exit, and thus it is imperative
to know in each case what the position of the subject is in regard to
his fundamental symptom at the end, what he knows about it and how
he bears it. When Lacan says that it would be better to identify with
it, he obviously means that there are other possibilities … worse ones.
I will explore the alternatives. First of all, the excluded alternatives.
With the Borromean symptom we cannot say “either the symptom or
desire”, nor “either the symptom or the social bond”, as we sometimes
hear. It is a symptom that links beings to each other by establishing a
knot between jouissance and desire, between the Real and semblants. It
is inaccurate to imagine, as we sometimes hear, that Lacan’s last elabo-
rations negate his theses on the subject of lack and of desire.
A symptom that creates a specific social bond between bodies
includes desire and the phantasy underlying it. This thesis is clear
when, in his development on what a father is that supports the Father
function, Lacan situates his female partner simultaneously as the cause
of his desire and as the symptom of his jouissance. We can no longer
oppose the Eros of the desire that would be socialising—by sustain-
ing object relations—to the symptom that, withdrawn into its own jou-
issance, would be asocial. There are no doubt autistic symptoms, but
equally there are also quite asocial strangled desires which empty the
relation to the other of its substance, and which illustrate well enough,
without having to look very far, the internment of the obsessional and
the annihilating quest of the hysteric.
From this I will draw a first conclusion: the question is simply of
knowing, in each case, what type of jouissance is linked to what cause of
desire. Lacan replied clearly to this question in the case of the Father as
symptom [symptôme-Père], the father version [version père] of perversion
[perversion]. There are other versions, of course: those bachelor symp-
toms uncoupled from the other sex; those of the spectrum of non-father
 I D E N T I F I CAT I O N W I T H T H E S Y M P TO M O R … W O R S E 101

type heterosexual symptoms that culminate in Don Juanesque positions

that tolerate the woman but not the mother.
A second conclusion: the opposition of “crossing the phantasy” to
identification with the symptom needs to be rethought. It is true that
in the chronology of his teaching, Lacan at first emphasised the cross-
ing of the phantasy as that which would show the subject his being as
object, and that his conception of the moment of the pass is built from
there. But identification with the symptom, which goes together with
the real unconscious, does not exclude this but includes and completes
it. Let us not oppose them under the pretext of doing something new
at all costs.
Alternatives: to identify with one’s symptom is the alternative to
another identification, the identification with the Other, the big Other in
its various manifestations, albeit the famous final identification with the
analyst promoted by the IPA. To an analysis demanded by the subject
because he is flailing beneath inconvenient identifications—subjective
perception of the symptom being relative to the identifications—with
this final identification, he is given the objective of rectifying these
identifications in favour of others supposed to be more compatible and
acceptable, the analyst putting himself forward as the measure of the
norm. This treatment of the identifications of alienation through other
identifications is more than a paradox. Remodelling the analytic dis-
course on that of the discourse of the master reinforces alienation by
restoring in a different way the dominion of the Other.
We can give a weak definition of the final identification with the
symptom and say that it consists simply of accepting what we have
not been able to transform. This dilution of the notion into simple res-
ignation is scarcely of interest. It only has import if taken in the strong-
est sense and it is defined, I think, by two features: it is not a matter
of merely consenting, or even of ceasing to complain, which would
already be progress; much more essentially, and this is the first feature,
it is a matter of no longer suffering from the symptom. But this result,
when it is obtained, is the sign of another change, involving the crossing
of identifications. Let us not forget that the suffering engendered by the
symptom has been produced in large part by the division of the subject
between the ideal and the drive, to use Freud’s terms again, the drive
which prevents compliance with the prescriptions of discourse. To pro-
duce a symptom, which I would dare to call a “happy” one against the
102 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

background of the curse of sex is not impossible, since the fundamental

symptom is the solution given by the unconscious to castration. The
latter is a universal misfortune, however masked it may be by the pre-
treatment imposed on it by discourse. A happy symptom, then, without
forgetting the tone appropriate to say this.
But this is still not its principal feature. The second feature is epis-
temic, not pathematic. To identify oneself with the symptom is, if you
like, to recognise oneself in it. With the Freudian unconscious, it is as
out of the question to recognise oneself in it as it is to know it, because
of what, according to Freud, is primordially repressed: Urverdrängt, as
indestructible as it is impossible to subsume in saying. The perception
of the incommensurable effects of lalangue intensifies this impossibility,
which only the fundamental symptom makes up for. In it alone can the
subject find his principle of consistency, and constitute it as the answer
to the question at his entry into analysis: what am I? I am that jouissance,
or more precisely, that modality of knotting between a desire about
which it is impossible to say all and a jouissance that fixes a letter of the
unconscious, albeit unknown. In this way, the fundamental symptom is
alone in being able to create identity, a truly proper name, which all the
identifications fail to do.
Without this, we could well be with what Freud called the negative
therapeutic reaction. In his definition, we see two traits that I have just
ascribed to identification with the symptom, but inverted. Freud notes
that in this reaction, whatever his progress the subject continues to suf-
fer. Freud even specifies that the more that progress is confirmed, the
more there is renewed suffering. This is not all. The negative thera-
peutic reaction is not just content with not ceding misery, it clings to
ignorance. Freud continues: the subject says “I am ill”, which signifies
that he claims his troubles do not involve his unconscious. This formula
“I am ill” rejects any recognition of the symptom as the subject’s doing:
it carries a refusal. I could say, a rejection of “subjective attribution”,
to take up again a term used for psychosis. And it signifies that what I
suffer from is so strange to me that I am unable to recognise in it any-
thing of “the obscure decision” of my being. The negative therapeutic
reaction as described by Freud, and without confusing it with the
final end point of analysis—besides, he devotes two different chapters
to these—is the direct opposite of identification with the symptom.
There where identification with the symptom fuses a satisfaction and
 I D E N T I F I CAT I O N W I T H T H E S Y M P TO M O R … W O R S E 103

an insight, the negative therapeutic reaction involves a renewal of

misfortune and a refusal of knowledge.
We should add that the therapeutic reaction has various degrees that
distance it from its extreme form, in which sadness and the “I want to
know nothing about it” can be combined in different ways. When the
subject does not give up on what he would like to be, or on what he
imagines others are—when he will not give up on these dreams—when
he continues beyond the first therapeutic effects to reject not only the
real of the impossible to avoid castration but also the necessary solu-
tion his unconscious has already given and which does not stop writ-
ing itself, then we have all the gradations of ends that I would readily
describe as ends by disenchantment. This is the repeated choice of neu-
rosis. I note that these ends are rarely heard about in the procedure of
the pass, doubtless because this procedure selects, as it were automati-
cally, subjects who think they can testify positively, something I already
noted some years ago (Soler, 1994, p. 181).
Another alternative is that of the transference symptom. The expres-
sion is justified insofar as in the analytic discourse the partner cause
of desire, the analyst, is also the condition of the jouissance of the
unconscious.
There are several ways of enjoying the unconscious. The fundamen-
tal symptom is one that involves the RUCS. Free association is another
way of playing with the plural declension of what I could call the rosary
of signifiers. What is enjoyed there is not the fixed letter but the series
of ones that drift in speech. This enjoying of the unconscious via free
association pertains to a temporality in which the series dominates, and
belongs to the modality of infinitude, of the infinite recitation of the
unconscious with the effects of meaning it engenders. It goes together
with belief in the symptom, a point that I have previously developed.
On the contrary, the fundamental symptom is not a fluctuating being
of the chain; its constancy is a fixed point that stops the drifting of the
chain of language. It belongs to the modality of finitude, of the limit,
and identification with this symptom ends the belief that was attached
to it and to the expectation that it will still say something via the race
after truth.
To identify with the symptom at the end of analysis is thus to change
the symptom: to swap the transference symptom for the fundamen-
tal symptom, and to pass from indetermination to consistency, from
104 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

evasiveness to assertion, and also from the want-to-be to the being of

jouissance.
But why privilege the second terms in this series? Why should con-
sistency, assertion, and atheism of the symptom be better? They are not
better but their opposites—the culture of uncertainty, evasiveness, want-
to-be, and belief—are correlated with a specific alienation: alienation
to the real presence of the analyst as condition of enjoying the uncon-
scious. This alienation to the real presence is a different alienation from
alienation to the signifier of the ideal, which also exists in analysis but
which precedes and masks it in the sequence of the treatment. I think
that this real presence is already evoked in different terms by Lacan in
“The direction of the treatment”, when he spoke of satisfactions that are
so difficult to unknot in the final phase of analysis. The question is not
new. Had not Freud already said, with his priceless humour, that after
having gone to enormous trouble to keep patients in analysis he now
had to go to enormous trouble to make them stop? Indeed I note that
the question first raised about the length of time of analyses is posed in
a more general way, for it is not only in the treatment that the presence
of the analyst as symptom can be used. In the institution, outside analy-
sis, it can also be used as a prosthetic symptom (Soler, 1999).
I therefore conclude that the true benefit of identification with the
symptom is to produce the effect of final separation. This resolves
the transferential relationship without going back to identification
with the big Other. Lacan first evoked this separative effect in Seminar
XI, then in “L’étourdit”, in terms of mourning for object a, but it can be
reformulated in terms of the symptom, as I am doing here. It has the
advantage of including in the formulations the true mainspring that
stands in the way of the separation effect: namely, another symptom,
condensing another jouissance, that of the transference.
The two alternatives that I have just examined—the negative ther-
apeutic reaction or the perpetuation of the transference symptom—
already allow me to say: either identification with the symptom, or
worse, the failure of the finished analysis.
Many questions could be developed here, questions that, it seems to
me, open up a vast program of the differential clinic, for it is likely that
some symptoms lend themselves to identifications more than others.
The masculine clinic, which is much less discussed than the femi-
nine clinic, could be refined by these questions about final identifica-
tion. Is it not observed, for example, that for a man to identify with
 I D E N T I F I CAT I O N W I T H T H E S Y M P TO M O R … W O R S E 105

his symptom—when it is a father as symptom—is what allows him

the greatest probability of getting rid of that obsession with the father
that so often possesses the neurotic man. And even of getting rid of
the identification with the traits of his dad? In other words, don’t we
observe that identification with the dad is in indirect proportion to
identification with the father as function? In this case, we must say:
to do without the father on condition of making use of the father as
symptom.
Obviously, questions about the differential clinic are also raised in
relation to the sexes. How would it be otherwise since on the woman’s
side a female version of the exception does not exist? In other words,
there is no exception of one who provides a model of the solution to
castration. I use the word “model” in the sense that Lacan used for the
father, but here as model of the function. The model of the function for a
woman is necessarily on the other side, stretching from the man to God,
with the question, in each case, of knowing whether this fundamental
partner is more in the register of the Father version [version Père], the
one of limited love, with or without the hysteric’s strike of her body
(Soler, 2007a), or, whether it moves away from it and flirts with the side
of the limitless and opaque Other of the mystic. Strangely, the famous
ravage is produced mostly in the first group of cases, that is to say, in
the woman coupled with a father as symptom. I note that the mystics,
in as far as we have their testimony, do not belong to the ravaged nor,
I think, to the masochists. Perhaps it is precisely because in being made
the symptom of a divine Other, or in being annihilated, these mystics
do not encounter the objection of the phallic limit.
Let’s take up finally the question of becoming an analyst, since the
analyst is also reduced to lending his presence and thus also his body as
a symptom. For the analyst, as for the woman, a model of the function
is lacking. It is true that everything indicates that the analyst is tempted,
for lack of any typical version of the analyst as symptom, to cling to
the father version, especially when he is a man. To Freud’s credit he
had already perceived and articulated this problem. However, there is
no more a typical version of the analyst as symptom than there is of a
woman as symptom. And like this latter, the analyst lends himself to
the other, to the analysand, becoming the symptom, but provisionally,
we hope.
This thesis is set out in the seminar on Joyce and raises the question
once more of what may impel someone to it. For the woman, the question
106 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

does not occur, as the benefits of jouissance in being the symptom

appear obvious enough. But for the analyst, who like the saint is not
supposed to enjoy his function, the question should preoccupy him.
I think it preoccupied Lacan. Plenty of ethical and clinical problems
arise here.
We can wonder whether there are not fundamental symptoms that
favour the choice to become an analyst as symptom. Would this not be
for the psychotic the prosthetic social bond where the autism of the real
could dwell? As for the neurotic, what would be the benefit here? Is it
that the analysed neurotic is so struck by what he has discovered that
he would desire to have it discovered by others? Or, on the contrary, is it
because he has not given up on his transference symptom so that, iden-
tified not to his real symptom but to the not-all truth, he is satisfied to
refer the effect of castration to the other, to the analysand? Whether it is
one or the other way, or one more than the other, will obviously greatly
affect the style of analytic practice.
CHAPTER TWELVE

The identity at the end, its aporias

I
said that the question of identity was at the entry into every
psychoanalysis. But we should recognise it under different terms.
When Lacan formulates the step of entry into the transference in
terms of a “Ché vuoï?”, when he adds a “What am I there?” where the
signifiers of the Other are lacking, these are questions of identity.
The references to the cogito of Descartes imply that identity poses
a question, since the “I think, therefore I am” does not say what I am.
It poses—I should say: sub-poses—an existence, not an identity. Hence
the following step by Descartes—“What therefore am I?”—which is
a question about identity, not about a particular subject but about the
universal subject. Translated into psychoanalysis as a practice of speech,
this cogito would become “I speak, therefore I am”, except that I do not
only speak through my mouth but through my symptoms. Identity in
the social sphere is first of all a policing problem, to know who is who
etc. It is also for each subject a problem of social integration. We know
this only too well. The question is intrinsic to psychoanalysis and con-
stitutes the entry into psychoanalysis precisely because of symptoms.
The subject who addresses the analyst knows the indices of his social
identity—profession, sex, income, religion, etc.—but what he presents
are the uncontrollable repetitions, inhibitions, anxieties, both painful
107
108 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

and incomprehensible, which are imposed on him and run counter

to his intentions. All that he does not manage to do—impotence and
everything that he does not manage to prevent—constraint: these are
the manifestations that we can subsume under the term “symptoms”,
which social identity does not accord a place to and which can become
obstructions. Indeed, the person who is in harmony with himself and
his world does not come to analysis.
The cogito of the analysand on entry into analysis could articu-
late itself in this way: “I have symptoms, therefore I am … but what
am I?” Not as a social being, but as affected and thus represented by
these symptoms.
We invite this subject to speak in the specific modality of free
association, to say all the thoughts emerging in the transferential rela-
tionship. We thus enjoin him to represent himself only through his
speech.

First aporia
The first paradox emerges here. It is that with his statements, which of
course suppose language, the subject cannot accede to his identity.
The signifier, without which we could not speak, is not suited to
fixing identity. Its differential structure, established by linguistics and
notably Jakobson’s phonology, contests this. Because each signifier is
only defined in relation to another signifier, it is never identical to itself.
It certainly represents the subject who utters it, and we can certainly
reply to this subject: you said it, you cannot unsay it, but the signifier
still represents him in relation to another signifier. In the chain of his
statements, the chain of language, the subject is thus never One but
always “some two”, according to Lacan’s expression.
The symptomatic subject, the one we suppose to the decipherable
chain of his symptoms, lacks identity, in as much as he speaks. He is
“a without identity” [un sans identité], a being whose being is always
elsewhere, vanishing, as Lacan says repeatedly, even in the seminar
Encore. He does not know what he is, he does not know what he wants,
and he hopes that analysis will tell him. Is this the case, and if yes, how
so? This is the whole question.
Note first of all that what is of a subject at the beginning of a psy-
choanalysis is also there at the beginning of his life, or rather, at his
entry into language, since he first receives the discourse of the Other
 T H E I D E N T I T Y AT T H E E N D, I T S A P O R I A S 109

which, in saying what he is, in wrapping him in a series of attributes,

raises in a latent way the question of what he is in himself, separated
from all the judgements of the Other. He thus searches for himself,
but at first through identification, in other words, by borrowing the
traits that might define him. He borrows them at first from the other,
the counterpart as supplier of images, or from the Other who speaks
and transmits its signifiers to him. Whether the identifications are
imaginary or symbolic—the first being governed by the second—they
provide what can be called an identity that I’m calling here an aliena-
tion identity, an identity established on loan and which the subject
experiences as such. Especially given that the social other judges, this
alienation identity1 is what actually constitutes the ego, the kernel of
which is identification with the image of one’s own body and which
then gets dressed in successive skins via the ideals of the Other, and
whose alienating function in relation to the subject Lacan emphasised
from the start.
Yet we must not forget that identification does not necessarily pro-
duce conformity, and that the division of identity is indeed reflected
just as well in non-conformity. Many subjects choose a counter-model
and believe that this allows them to separate from the Other although
they are just as captive to its dominion as are the most conformist sub-
jects. We thus sometimes see siblings who are diametrically opposed to
each other, though derived from the same core injunction.
Analysis counts and challenges these pro or contra identifications.
Lacan even says that it “denounces” them in order, I think, to empha-
sise their function as prosthetic identities. It is what we evoke when
we speak of the fall of ideals in analysis, those ideals which are always
linked to the desire of the Other, for “identifications are determined by
desire” (Lacan, [1964b] 2006, p. 724). After the crossing of these identifi-
cations, analysis then brings the subject back to the question of what he
is as desire, “ché vuoï?” and thus to the paradox which I evoked earlier,
namely that language is not suited to respond to this question. Desire
“is incompatible with speech” (Lacan, [1958] 2006, p. 535), despite the
fact that it haunts it, and we could say, taking a more logical path, that
since the subject is supposed to a signifier which represents him but
does not identify him, he always has the value of minus-one in the
chain of language.
If this were the last word, psychoanalysis would not respond to the
question of the entry into analysis due to the incompatibility of the
110 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

linguistic instrument it uses. It would only bring the analysand back to

his essential destitution. Only this is not the last word, just the first.
If language is unsuited for identity, where are we to find a principle
of identity? Nowhere else than in that which, in experience, is not lan-
guage. Indeed, the subject is not the whole of the individual. He is the
effect of speech, but the individual has a body, a body to enjoy that is to
be distinguished from the subject. It is thus on the side of the symptom
that we can look for the solution.

Solution by the symptom

Lacan’s hypothesis at the end of the seminar Encore, but presented
well before this, is that the enjoying substance of the body is affected
by language. This latter may be unsuited for identity, but it is still an
operator that has effects in the Real. It subtracts from jouissance—object
a is a name for this subtraction—but at the same time it governs the
configurations of this remainder and becomes itself an apparatus of jou-
issance. Furthermore, without this hypothesis how are we to conceptu-
alise the hysterical conversions discovered by Freud? Certainly, Freud
only evoked the effect of thoughts and representations, Vorstellungen, to
explain them, but what are they other than language?
The symptom is the main manifestation of the organism affected
by discourse, and Freud, once again, situated it first of all as a way
of enjoying. Lacan at first stressed that it was a way of speaking since
it was decipherable as a message. But that does not stop it from also
being a way of enjoying. If we condense the two di(t)mensions we get
the “I think, it enjoys itself” that I have already mentioned. And this is
more than a way of enjoying: it is the only way, as I have said, there is
no other. The symptom, as a modality of jouissance, makes up for the
relation that is foreclosed for everyone. There is no sexual relation but
there is the symptom, the linguistic modality of jouissance specific to
each of us: a fixed jouissance, determined by one or more elements of the
unconscious as language, the elements that we try to decipher in analy-
sis. Again we must not forget the effect of the two unconsciouses that I
have distinguished, and differentiate the symptoms of the unconscious
as truth from those of the RUCS. The Borromean knot knots these, and
each involves jouissance: for the first, the jouissance of meaning, of the
phantasy; for the second, the jouissance of the incarnated ones planted
in the field of the Real.
 T H E I D E N T I T Y AT T H E E N D, I T S A P O R I A S 111

J-Sense
a
R S

Lacan sought how what I have called separation identity, or even a

will to separation, could be established. How could one not be reduced
to the clothes of the Other that one wears? Lacan recognised the para-
digm of this will in the act of Empedocles, who is supposed to have
committed suicide by throwing himself into the volcano at the edge
of which he had left his sandals. An extreme act. Obviously we expect
from analysis a non-fatal separation of the subject that would give him
his identity, and notably his sexual identity.
In the Other and in social discourse, there are only semblants, signifi-
ers, images, norms, and prohibitions about sex, but nothing which says
how each one of us enjoys. At the hour of truth, when the subject makes
semblants pass to the act, there are many surprises. At the end of his
elaboration, Lacan concludes that it is the real symptom that gives the
subject his own identity, the true proper name that distinguishes him
from everyone else, the only one that does not have a homonym.
We could thus say that analysis answers the opening question:
I am my symptom. This is why Lacan speaks of “identification with the
symptom”.

Second aporia
Is this to move beyond the impasse linked to the linguistic instrument?
I’m not so sure, as I have only recently understood, but it is I think of
major importance.
I’ll propose a formula of this second stopping point: that one identi-
fies with one’s symptom does not imply that one has identified one’s
symptom, contrary to what I at first supposed. If it is true that the
112 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

effects of lalangue exceed all that the subject is able to grasp, it is the real
unconscious, the unconscious as lalangue which blocks us from identi-
fying the symptom other than in a hypothetical way. For the incarnated
One, the one that would be the letter of the symptom, remains unde-
fined, from the phoneme to the word to the sentence, even to the whole
of thought. In other words, the unconscious that we decipher does not
know everything, but only a bit.
We may have taken the measure of our own inertias of jouissance—
for “fixation” means “inertia”—without being able to articulate the one
that fixes them, or only to do this hypothetically. Analysis leads to the
assumption of an identity at the end, but to assume is not to know.
I even think that this is what justifies the expression “identification with
the symptom”.
The identity at the end is clarified by the non-identification at the
start. The Rat Man suffers from his obsession but does not recognise
himself in it; he dissociates himself, he does not want to be the bad
jouissance that appears there. Hence his demand to Freud. This non-
identification is what Freud called defence. It refers, as does the iden-
tification at the end, to the position of the subject at the place of the
jouissance that is at stake for him, according to whether he recognises or
not what he has that is most real.
The real symptom, disconnected from meaning, is not disconnected
from language: it is a mixture of motérialité and jouissance, of the word
enjoyed or of jouissance transferred to the word. Lacan wrote its struc-
ture in the seminar RSI as a function of the letter one. Now the letter, in
its difference from the signifier, is characterised by identity to itself. The
final identification with the letter of the symptom seems to resolve then,
as I have evoked, the ineffable quality of the “you are that”.
A possible program for analysands stems from this: find the letter
of your symptom. We saw and heard that repeatedly on certain panels,
the sympathetic Eureka of analysts fresh from the pass before the split
of 1998, announcing “I have found the letter of my symptom”. We can
only salute the efforts of good will, ultimately pathetic, for being led by
peer pressure. But how can we not see in every case the derisorily “lucu-
brated” dimension, to take up Lacan’s term, of this trophy, of this fetish
even, and the lie organised around the irreducible point of opacity?
These Eurekas forget to coordinate the thesis of the RUCS with
that of identification to the symptom. If we put a little bit of thought
into it, we will no longer be astonished that Lacan refers not to a
 T H E I D E N T I T Y AT T H E E N D, I T S A P O R I A S 113

knowledge of lalangue, but to a “know how [savoir y faire]” with

lalangue. It is precisely the correlate of the non-knowledge of the One
incarnated in the unconscious as lalangue. It is not that there is no cer-
tainty concerning the Real, but that it bears on the presence of the jouis-
sance element, on the “I am my modality of jouissance”, and not on the
one which fixes this and which remains being “indistinct” [indécis] for
whoever is its support. I am the letter of my symptom, certainly, but
I can only approach it hypothetically. Let us say more positively that
I can invent it by successive intersections that approach the effects of
lalangue. What the subject has that is most real is his symptoms, says
Lacan. This is not only because these symptoms are jouissance, but also
because lalangue, which “civilises” this jouissance, is itself, as I said, real,
a-structural, and the Real is not made to be known.
Don’t we recognise how much closer this perspective is to the actual
experience of analysands who are reaching the end of their analyses? Is
there a single person who can believe that he has completely reduced
the opacity of his being? For that he would need to have settled his
score with the unconscious.

Note
1. What Lacan calls alienation in Seminar XI is something else, which
is linked not to the presence of the discourse of the Other but to the
structure of language, which imposes a forced choice which implies,
in every case, a loss.
 PART III
A RENEWED CLINIC
CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The status of jouissances

T
he real unconscious that makes the parlêtre is the most shared
thing in the world, although, as I said, only in an analysis can it
be proven whether or not it can be knotted to the unconscious as
phantasy.
We must consider the consequences here at theoretical, clinical, and
practical levels. They are multiple, and they require that we simultane-
ously complete the theory of the symptom, reorder our diagnostic cat-
egories in relation to the function of the father, and question anew the
impact of the exchange of speech, of love and the very aim and function
of psychoanalysis at the beginning of this century.
However, we cannot situate Lacan’s advances in relation to the
symptom and the status of jouissances without returning to the begin-
ning, the Freudian beginning.

Freud’s saying
We know the first thesis: in deciphering symptoms, Freud discovers
what he calls sexual meaning, but this is coded in terms of the repressed
partial drives: oral, anal, etc. The symptom is thus a sexual substitute:
due to repression, it is a paradoxically unpleasant way of enjoying.
117
118 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

Freud hears, in the adult who speaks to him through his symptoms,
the voice of the little “polymorphous pervert”, enjoying his own body
autoerotically without any partner. This is the first model of what I have
called the autistic symptom, in order to designate a bodily enjoyment
that does not pass through another partner, one that relies only on the
excitation of the erogenous zones.
If the drives do refer to jouissance, they ignore the difference between
the sexes. According to Freud, this is introduced into the unconscious
only via what is called the phallic phase and this is not so much tied to
the discovery of anatomical difference as to the masturbatory jouissance
of the organ. This implies correlatively the maternal lack, and more pre-
cisely that the mother is deprived of the organ that “concentrates in
itself the most intimate autoeroticism”.
I thus return to the notion of generalised perversion that I have
already developed, not in order to say that it is a phenomenon of our
times, nor to generalise the clinical structure of perversion, but in order
to question the mode of jouissance of the speaking being. Generalised
perversion, as the name indicates, concerns each parlêtre and it is con-
sistent with Lacan’s famous assertion: “There is no sexual relation”. Yet
we need to measure its exact scope, its implications for the couple, as
well as for psychoanalysis and its practice. The formula does not mean
that things go wrong between men and women, as is so often said.
The sexual non-relation, if one believes Lacan, is “Freud’s saying”,
never formulated by him in an obvious way, but one that can be inferred
from everything said by the unconscious that he knew how to gather.
The formula is assertive and homophonic: the “il n’y a” [there is no] can
be confused with “nia”, the past tense of the verb “nier” [to deny, repu-
diate]; however, this “n’y a pas” is not a negation, it repudiates nothing.
It affirms in the negative mode: “y a pas” [there is not].
For Freud, what can account for this saying if not what I have just
evoked in relation to sex: the unconscious only has two components, the
partial drives and phallic jouissance. The symptom is a mode of enjoy-
ment that localises that part of the original polymorphous perversion of
the little speaker that is never renounced. In other words, the jouissance
of the symptoms in phobia, hysteria, and obsession, but also in perver-
sion as a clinical structure, is nothing other than the jouissance “deemed
perverse”, the one that Freud discovered in the phantasies that he deci-
phered in each symptom. This says nothing about genital matters. How
can a sexual couple be established without the genital drive? Now, that
 T H E S TAT U S O F J O U I S S A N C E S 119

is precisely what is in question in the expression “sexual non-relation”.

This aims at neither desire nor love, but at the body to body of the act
and the jouissance that is specific to it in the orgasm—the sole emergence
of jouissance, apart from the symptom, to come into the space of the sub-
ject, if we are to believe Lacan.
Freud saw clearly that there was nothing given about the sexual cou-
ple and that with the discovery of the drives, its possibility became a
theoretical problem to solve. The footnotes added over the years to his
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality prove this clearly. His solution is
the appeal to the Oedipus complex, to the figures of the parental cou-
ple inducing behaviours through identification and to the separating
effects of the threat of castration.
Lacan, apparently, did not disagree. The 1964 text, “The position
of the unconscious” bears witness to this (Lacan, 2006 [1964a], p. 720).
The text proposes that sexuality in its relation to the unconscious is split
in two, the side of the living being and the side of the Other. The latter
is that of the Freudian Oedipus, with its ideal signifiers and the iden-
tifications which it governs. This is the space of “order and the norm”;
in other words, of the semblants of man and woman, of the phallic signi-
fier and of the father. The side of the living being is that of the body-to-
body of the act and of the jouissance that it involves.
The real question, however, is of knowing where to place the castra-
tion that Freud made so much of, and how to formulate it. Here, Lacan
separates from Freud, for whom the castration complex is on the side
of the Oedipus: castration caused by the father. For Lacan, beginning at
least with the seminar L’angoisse of 1962–1963 (Lacan, 2004), whatever
the predominance of the imaginary father-castrator might be, castration
is without the father, the function of the father being something else.
Real castration begins on the side of the living being marked by lalangue
and is the castration of jouissance. In the “Position of the unconscious”,
the myth of the lamella articulates this; it is as much a substitute for
the biblical myth as it is for the Oedipal myth. It is a myth that is not
only without the father but, I would say, without the Other of language.
It claims to mythify the enigmas of life in as much as life is reproduced
by means of sex, at the price of a loss of life, as is illustrated by individ-
ual mortality, and which establishes the vector of the libido, the libido
in which Lacan includes even the sexed animal kingdom. Hence his
reference to ethology that he parallels with hysteria. He has moved on
here from the simple dialectic of phallic lack through which, in 1958, he
120 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

gave an account of the couple. It is now a question of the libido in so far

as it seeks a complement for jouissance via the partial drives. And here
is his conclusion as far as the sexual act itself is concerned: “there is no
access to the Other of the opposite sex except via the so-called partial
drives wherein the subject seeks an object to take the place of the loss
of life he has sustained due to the fact that he is sexed” (Lacan, 2006
[1964a], p. 720). It implies the homology of the jouissance of the symp-
tom with the sexual orgasm. Here, we are already beyond Freud.
Concerning so-called genitality, Freud was interested in its symp-
tomatic failures: frigidity, impotence, the disjunction between love
and jouissance in debasement, masculine insensitivity, etc. But of its
“successes”, there is almost nothing in all his work: no theory of the
embodied couple, only some scattered indications that we should of
course take into account in order to nuance what I am arguing. First, we
can take the evocation of the jouissance of the sexual act as the summum
of jouissances. This shows how much Freud distinguished this jouissance
from “the brevity of autoerotic jouissance”, even though both pass
through the same organ. And then, there is all his questioning about
how the partial drives can or cannot be integrated into the preliminary
pleasures of the act. Finally, there are his remarks on the obstacle that the
respect for women constitutes. There is nothing systematic, however, or
even consistent, on what conditions the orgasm or on its function.

The relation as symptom

Lacan’s thesis applies to the sexual act and goes well beyond it. It
does not identify the lack of the sexual relation with the symptomatic
failures of the act itself, but, on the contrary, it holds that it is the suc-
cess of the sexual act that produces the failure of the relation. As he
says in Television, “this failure of which the successful sexual act con-
sists” (Lacan, 1990b, p. 38 [trans. mod.]). The thesis is already explic-
itly present in the seminar of 1962–1963, L’angoisse (Lacan, 2004) where
there are numerous passages devoted to the orgasm and the identity of
its success with the failure of the relation. Our thesis is the following: it
is because Lacan went beyond Freud in questioning the couple of the
sexual act, not only in its failures but also in its successes, that he can
affirm “there is no” (“n’y a pas”) with all that this implies of a general-
ised perversion, and that in attributing it to Freud he overpays his debt,
rendering to Caesar more than is his due.
 T H E S TAT U S O F J O U I S S A N C E S 121

The jouissance of the parlêtre is denaturalised by the blade of

language that limits it, fragments it, and stops it prior to any prohibi-
tion. This “primary castration”, as he calls it in L’angoisse, reduces our
jouissance to being that which is considered perverse, what is certainly
“permitted”, which does not mean that it is authorised—by whom
would it be?—but that it is not impossible, not impossible to write.
Language inscribes only phallic jouissance, one jouissance, and a jouis-
sance of the one, just as surplus jouissance of objects tied to the drives
is integral to it, but as I have said, nothing of an other jouissance. This
means, as I have already formulated it, that “the unconscious knows
nothing about women”. “Sex” as it was called in the classical era, is
not inscribed there, if we mean by that what characterises it as jou-
issance. The signifier “woman” remains, of course, and the semblants
that relate to it according to culture, but nothing of her being of jouis-
sance, except for the index of the suspicion that it exists. Indeed, how
could we ignore that the aforesaid woman is defamed? Lacan did not
fail to emphasise this.
As for the sexual act, it is clinically obvious that its link with anxi-
ety, this exceptional affect, is a sign that allows us to recognise the
place where orgasmic jouissance and castration—not imaginary but real
castration—meet in a single experience. Such is the thesis of L’angoisse:
the orgasm is jouissance for both sexes, but it reiterates the effect of cas-
tration each time through the eclipse of the phallic organ. Some years
later, in Encore (Lacan, 1998), Lacan sticks to his guns in speaking of the
sexed couple in terms of the impossible encounter of the idiot and the
madwoman: in other words, on one side, the castrated jouissance of
the phallic one, and on the other, the other jouissance, unplaceable and
enigmatic.
From here, I will set out a series of conclusions and remarks.
I’ll remind you first of all that for Lacan the drive is different from
what it was for Freud, even though he builds on the latter’s formu-
lations, and its function is double-sided. In its structure, according to
Lacan, it comes from language: more precisely, from the discourse of
demand and its effects on need. But, as an activity, the drive both com-
pensates for and reinstates loss. Speaking of its circuit around drive
objects, he specifies that “the activity in the subject called ‘drive’ (Trieb)
consists in dealing with these objects in such a way as to recover from
them, to restore to himself this earliest loss” (Lacan, [1964a] 2006, p. 720).
The jouissance “deemed perverse” of the drives, is, let’s say, castrated
122 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

jouissance, of which the object a, defined as the object “which lacks”, is

the condition.
Thus the very action of the drive includes an effect of castration, the
same one that I called “primary castration”, and which is also at play
in the orgasm. There is nothing of this in Freud. This does not mean,
however, that for Lacan the adult heterosexual remains the little poly-
morphous pervert that he once was, characterised by the dispersal and
juxtaposition of the partial drives. In some discreet but decisive remarks,
Lacan adds a supplementary condition that, curiously, has been very
little commented on: genitality, if it passes by way of the partial drives,
presupposes the interdependence of their co-presence. The access to the
partner is thus only assured if the partial drives are constituted in a set,
in the logical sense, by the operation of the Other (Lacan, 1973, p. 49).
Whatever there might be of this supplementary condition, the fact
remains that the jouissance of the act is still the jouissance “deemed”
perverse, the same one that Freud detected in the symptom. In other
words, the closed field of the sexual relation is not excluded from the
field of the symptom. As a result, it is logical that the most normative
heterosexual jouissance, that of the father for example, might be called
a father version [père-version], to be written in two words to signify the
father version of perverse jouissance. It is a, surplus jouissance, and
which write this, the Other of Sex remaining unattainable. Our mode of
jouissance “which, henceforth, is only situated from surplus jouissance is,
in fact, no longer expressed in any other way” (Lacan, 1990b, pp. 32–33,
[trans. mod.]).
To summarise, we can say what makes a couple. At the level of desire,
there is indeed a couple: that of the phantasy, $<>a, united with mean-
ing; at the level of love, if one believes Encore, there is a couple, subject
to subject, $<>$; but at the level of jouissance, there is nothing, no couple.
Jouissance does not bind; isolated, it does not establish social bonds.
Why then qualify this jouissance as perverse if it is structural and thus
applies to everyone? In saying jouissance “deemed” perverse, Lacan
indicates a reservation. I see in this qualifier “perverse” what remains
of the original term “perversion”, from the beginning of the last century
in the work of Krafft-Ebbing, where perversion is defined in relation to
a norm that is assumed to be natural, and designates all the behaviours
of the jouissance of the body that are not channelled through the hetero-
sexual act. An anomaly with regard to the zone and the object of the
drive, says Freud, who shared something of this perspective. Perhaps
 T H E S TAT U S O F J O U I S S A N C E S 123

it is necessary to see in the term the index of the dissatisfaction that

it generates and the latent dream of a fusional jouissance. As a conse-
quence, if it is the success of the act that makes the non-relation, the
failure of the act evident in the symptoms studied by Freud—or its con-
certed avoidance by those who abstain from it, those sexless subjects of
whom I spoke in the 1990s—becomes clearer: it is precisely to short-
circuit the inconvenience of the non-relation with its subjective effects.
As Melville’s Bartleby says” “I would prefer not to”.
More important, and this will be my third remark: what is the jouis-
sance at stake in the social bond, let’s say in reality, if not the marriage
of phallic jouissance and surplus jouissance? The jouissance of power in
all its forms (political, epistemological, artistic etc.) is the definition of
phallic jouissance, which goes hand in hand with having the fetishised
objects of consumption. Generalised perversion includes the sexual act,
but it extends over the whole field of discourse and it is today out in the
open, no longer covered by the semblants of tradition. Without doubt
it is this which produces the banalisation of the act, this loss of secrets
and shame that makes some people believe that they are dealing with
mutant subjects. There is thus no exception to generalised perversion,
save perhaps—and I will return to this—the “other jouissance” of the
woman, foreclosed from discourse, which does not pass through the
object a.
Fourthly, let’s return to the sexual relation. How can we explain,
within the framework of this thesis, the well-attested fact that satis-
faction linked to the orgasm in the sexual relation is in general quite
distinct from the one that accompanies masturbation? I use the word
“satisfaction” rather than “jouissance” precisely because the position of
the subject relative to this specific jouissance is involved here, the more
general question being that of knowing how diverse jouissances are
reflected in distinct subjective effects.
With his notion of the psychoneurosis of defence, Freud thought
he could correlate the difficulties of sex with social repression, that is
to say, with the discourse that uses the signifier to limit jouissance. But
there is also an order of inverse determination. If I have used the expres-
sion “the commandments of jouissance” (Soler, 1998), it was precisely in
order to say that jouissance in its various guises has subjective effects. In
allowing the emergence of the jouissance called perverse, the contem-
porary discourse we call “permissive” modifies the notion of the psy-
choneurosis of defence. To remain at the level of phenomena, we could
124 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

almost believe that it renders Freud’s notion obsolete. As Lacan said,

everything that is not forbidden becomes obligatory, and I would add:
by the effect of imaginary induction. As a result, emulation of the prac-
tices of jouissance will follow, particularly in adolescents and in various
groups based on affinity. We should not be deceived by this, however;
the defences immanent to the speaking subject are not so much reduced
as modified in their form. The analytic experience of the unconscious
continues to attest to them for they depend less on the historical contin-
gencies of discourse than on the irreducible effect of language.
It is obvious that generalised perversion goes hand in hand with a
whole series of subjective manifestations specific to our times. These
contrast with the proclamations of those who, following Foucault,
believe that the time has come for self-generation through each per-
son’s free choice of their jouissances: rising depression, suicides, and,
a minima, solitude, morosity, lack of meaning, etc. Perverse jouissance,
in order to be jouissance, is essentially no less than a jouissance that dis-
satisfies the subject. It is the jouissance “that you don’t need”, as Lacan
says in Encore, for Eros to make the One of dreamed of fusion out of
two, that evokes the division of the subject and the lack central to the
non-relation.
In this context, where does the satisfaction specific to the sexual act
come from? I note at first that this satisfaction is not as common as one
might believe—let’s not forget the increase in the number of the “sex-
less” and, more generally, the ethics of the bachelor. However, it seems
to me that the orgasm has a subjective function. I think that it touches
on the problem of sexual identity without resolving it, while at the same
time reproducing in the relation with the partner, mutatis mutandis, the
double import of the partial drives. There is no sexual act, wrote Lacan,
“which has the power to affirm for the subject the certainty of what he
is as a sexed being” (Lacan, 1984a, p. 16). On one side, the success of the
act is the experience for each one of the two, of being for the other, albeit
differently and only for an instant, in the place of the unattainable thing;
while on the other side, the moment of satisfaction itself is the restora-
tion of the separation which does not make one out of two. Depending
on which side one positions oneself on, the question becomes whether
to haunt once again the borders of the thing (the usual way), or to avoid
it (the way that is increasingly being chosen today, it seems to me).
Without doubt we must specify the differences due to sex here. We can
note that the disparity between being a man and being a woman also
 T H E S TAT U S O F J O U I S S A N C E S 125

has repercussions for the subjectivisation of the act. Not to mention the
fact that the other jouissance, the only one not to be included in perverse
jouissance, has its own repercussions, which I have already described
(Soler, 2006). So could we expect spoken communication, especially
words of love, to temper these impasses? That is another question.

What you could not choose

Classical theory saw very clearly that the phantasy was at stake in the
creation of erotic links with the counterpart, the object of the phantasy
underlying “object relations”. However, it is well-known that this link
of desire guarantees nothing about the response of jouissance. The symp-
tom as emergence of the real unconscious, is “an event of the body”.
The term “event” suggests the manifestation of a non-programmed jou-
issance that is imposed on the subject who submits to it. The orgasm
illustrates this at the level of the couple, and to say that the partner
is symptom is to say that they are the cause of the event of jouissance:
“A woman is a body that is the jouissance of another body” (Lacan, 1979,
p. 35).
Up to what point does the symptom of the real unconscious deter-
mine the subject? Between the iron law of the effects of language on the
living being and the contingency of the encounter that makes the body
event, what margin is there for any liberty? Between what does not stop
writing itself of the effect of castration and the chance of the event, does
a place for choice remain? Or is the subject only there as the puppet of
the unconscious?
This is not today’s debate, but it is still more topical than ever. Freud,
speaking about the psychoneurosis of defence, could evoke what he
called a “choice of neurosis”, for the very notion of defence implies
a position of the subject in relation to what constrains him: accord-
ing to Freud, his drives. In 1946, when Lacan was fighting against
the organo-dynamism of Ey, he wrote “Presentation on psychical
causality” (Lacan, 2006 [1946]) denouncing a conception of mental ill-
ness that excluded the dimension of freedom and which reduced the
subject to being nothing more than the product of malfunctioning
organs. I will pass over the diverse forms in which this perspective has
appeared both in the past and today, with the increase in the ideas of
cognitive behaviourism. The question remains of what psychoanalysis
is able to oppose to it. We know that from the start Lacan evoked even
126 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

in madness what he called “the obscure decision of being”, and some

decades later he did not recoil from saying that subjects “have a choice”
regarding their sexual identity. More generally, putting forward the
notion of an ethics of psychoanalysis and even of a sexed ethics when
he spoke of the “ethics of the bachelor” excludes determinist thought.
But on what grounds?
For Freud, man or woman depends strictly on anatomy. There is a
place for subjective alternatives but they are at another level, essentially
that of each person’s response to the experience of the castration com-
plex (we know that for women, Freud distinguished three possibilities)
and also at the level of object choice, homo or hetero. But for him, in all
these cases it is anatomy that functions as the real basis for all the par-
ticular configurations. This thesis seems closer to common sense.
Lacan’s conception is completely different. The very term “sexua-
tion” that we now use frequently, and which suggests a process, already
implies that. We could remember some striking formulas from his late
work: subjects have a choice between the side of man and the side of
woman, he said; and later, even more strongly: sexed beings authorise
themselves.
There is thus a major disconnection between sex and anatomy.
Anatomy implies much more than the form of the image, for it is linked
with the living organism as sexed. The anti-naturalism of these formu-
las is clear and could obviously give rise to the suspicion of anti-realism,
even of anti-biologism, as if the denaturation through language in the
speaking being were such that his position as sexed owed nothing to the
living body. This is strange, if one remembers that in the 1960s, between
the seminar L’angoisse (Lacan, 2004) and the text “Position of the Uncon-
scious” (Lacan, [1964a] 2006), Lacan had made much of the real of the
sexed reproduction of life, of its link to death, and of what castration
owed to the characteristics of the functioning of the male organ.
Here, there is something to consider and evaluate in Lacan’s
conception.
It is new, as much in relation to common sense as in relation to Freud.
In addition, the term “choice” must not lead us to think that the thesis is
Foucauldian. We know that Foucault did his best to emphasise the idea
of the free choice of pleasures as the principle of the auto-fabrication of
sex. This was an attempt to disconnect the question of identity, a ques-
tion so central to our civilisation, from that of sex. So it was a way of
denying that there was something like a sexuated identity, and denying
 T H E S TAT U S O F J O U I S S A N C E S 127

that there were any real constraints in the field of sexuality. This attempt
should be distinguished from those theories of gender that make sex a
social product.
With his formulas of sexuation, Lacan puts forward the idea that the
identity man/woman neither follows anatomy nor even semblants—
the images and ideas of woman and of man that are not lacking in any
discourse to which the theories of gender refer. One is a man or a woman
according to the mode of jouissance, that is, depending on whether for a
given subject its jouissance is all or not all phallic. I developed this point
in 1992 in London, in a talk called “Otherness today”. We could say that
man is any parlêtre who is all in phallic jouissance, whatever his anatomy
might be; and woman is any parlêtre who is not all in phallic jouissance,
regardless of anatomy.
This thesis is difficult to handle and it is very obvious that we handle
it badly, for while repeating the formulas that I have just quoted, we
continue to speak of women according to common sense. Far from call-
ing women those who are “not all”, we attribute, on the contrary, the
“not all” with its other jouissance, to those who are women according
to their anatomy or civil status, assuming that it is the same thing. This
produces some comic effects that I have already had the opportunity to
emphasise, since it allows those who are visibly the most wholly phallic
to adorn themselves with a pseudo not all, as if it is their right.
The evaluation of the anti-naturalism that I evoked will thus depend
on the conception of jouissance. We can already say that this anti-
naturalism is not an anti-biologism; it does not neglect the Real, the Real
outside the Symbolic, the one that Lacan inscribed in his Borromean
knot, which includes precisely all that is called life, without being able
to represent it. Jouissance is linked to this real of life and not to the ana-
tomical form of the body, that is, the Imaginary. When it is all phallic,
this Real bears the mark of the letters of the unconscious. When it is
not all phallic, when it is Other, it remains unmarked, inhabiting the
body-substance, for in order to enjoy, it is necessary to have a living
body. In all cases, jouissance is anomalous, foreign to the homeostasis of
the organism and to the organisation of semblants. It is disturbing, for
it perturbs the pleasures that are called natural and the good order of
things, which is that of discourse.
So I can be more precise: the thesis of the choice of sex is neither
an anti-biologism nor an anti-realism. Its presupposition, the postulate
that grounds it, is that the Real is heterogeneous, that it is naturally
128 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

untied from the intertwining, if I can use this term, of the Symbolic
and the Imaginary which discourse organises, and which regulates the
right dosage of pleasure and the balancing of satisfactions.
This still does not tell us in what way sexuated speaking beings
authorise themselves. The thesis seems very paradoxical. It is true that
with regard to their sexuated identity, many subjects do not trust their
anatomy. On the contrary, they develop all the doubts we know about
being a man or a woman, sometimes to the point that they challenge the
civil status that recognises only their anatomy. The feminine masquer-
ade and the masculine display seem to affirm sex in using the images
and symbols of man and woman, but these are, rather, fine covers for
the question that often torments them: Am I a true woman? Am I really
a man? Most subjects are far from having a sense of choice. Indeed, the
whole of clinical practice immediately confirms the fact that they suffer
from what makes their sexual reality, and often unwillingly. Confronted
with impotence, frigidity, the intrusion of uncomfortable jouissances,
sardonic repetitions of their choice of object, insurmountable disgust,
uncontrollable appetite, automatic escape, even indifference or insensi-
tivity, and equally—Oh surprise!—unexpected happy encounters, in all
these cases there is nothing they can do about it. They are far from see-
ing themselves as the secret agents of their symptoms. The symptoms
of jouissance are certainly sexed, but not sexuating.
I would conclude that if they authorise themselves, this “themselves”
is not a subject: or at least, not the subject supposed by the enunciations
of the complaint and the suffering to which it attests.
Lacan’s thesis is unintelligible without the conception of the division
of the speaking being and who, despite being divided, is still just one
individual, since he has a body and only one of them. He is divided
between what he is as represented by the signifier, and what he is as
affected in his jouissance by language. The gap between the two is irre-
ducible. A subject does not have much to do with jouissance, Lacan says
in Encore, but the corporeal individual who underlies it does, for he is
himself the subject of the furrowing effects of the Other. Contrary to
what he said before, Lacan notes in 1977 that the unconscious does not
make a chain: between the word which represents the subject, the one
who speaks to us on the couch, and the signifiers of knowledge from
lalangue that mark the jouissance of the living body, there is a gap. In
other words: jouissance is subject to language and more exactly, to the
lalangue that colonises it, but the subject remains separated from his
jouissance. We call it “his” because it is his body that is affected. With
 T H E S TAT U S O F J O U I S S A N C E S 129

all due respect to the Freudian Oedipus and to the identifications it

governs, Freud would have wished that they ordered everything, but
the jouissance of sexuated beings doesn’t authorise itself from the Other,
no more from the Other than from their anatomy.
The formulas of 1964 that I evoked do not give any translation of
the real difference of the sexes in the field of the parlêtre. If Lacan had
remained at that point, then yes, we would have had a sexuated identity
purely “Otherfied”, if I can say it in that way: between the semblants
on one side and the partial drives, in themselves asexual, on the other,
there is no place for real sex. It is this that Lacan corrects, starting with
the formulas of sexuation. The difference between the sexes has noth-
ing to do with semblants; it is well and truly inscribed in the Real by
the two modes of enjoying that I have discussed already. Obviously the
confusion—or at least, the complication—emphasised in Encore, is that
these two modes, as real as they are, are in no way natural and belong
only to the being of language.
The choice of sex is the choice of jouissance, but in the subjective
sense, to the point that one could almost say that it is jouissance that
chooses, where it responds and in the forms in which it will respond: all
or not all. It rules … the sexual. Would I say epiphanies (in the plural) of
the Real in the space of the subject? Lacan’s thesis was only apparently
paradoxical, but it is definitely sardonic.
Indeed, if these subjects authorise themselves, it is a “themselves”
which is certainly very close to them, as close as what they are as body,
but a “themselves” which is neither ego nor subject, strictly speaking.
Without any free will, no liberty of indifference, no question of choos-
ing this so extimate an intimacy. It has already chosen you, and far from
it speaking, it makes you speak. The Real governs the saying of truth
(Lacan, 1973, p. 9). It is thus in what you say, more precisely it is in
your saying—in the way Lacan defines it—that we will recognise it.
This means—by the way—that it is useless to expect anything from
testimonies, which are so much in fashion today. Such is the generic
curse evoked by the formula of the sexuated who authorise themselves.
When I say “generic” I mean that it is for all parlêtres. You see that we
are far, far away from the Foucauldian illusion. What margin of choice
remains for the one who says “I”? It is that of the position he takes with
regard to what chooses him: rejection, consent, patience, enthusiasm,
there are many of them. That would be another chapter, and the notion
of identification with the symptom starts there.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Symptom of the real unconscious

T
he status of the jouissance that does not write the sexual
relation changes the function of what we call the symptom. If
all jouissance could be said to be perverse—and this applies to
everyone—we must not say “all perverts” for that would add nothing
except complacency. But if, on the other hand, this jouissance is displaced
everywhere in the series of signs which carry it and where we decipher
it, constituting reality and even social bonds, it is a matter of extricat-
ing both the specificity of the symptom in so far as it is a formation of
jouissance and that which of the two unconsciouses determines it.
The symptom, indeed, is not just any decipherable formation of the
unconscious. The dream, the lapsus, and the bungled action, although
sometimes repeated, are punctual but the symptom, by its constancy
and fixity, both enjoyable and uncomfortable, is different from these
ephemeral manifestations. It is different from the coding of the uncon-
scious and from the metonymic drift of speech that never stops displac-
ing castrated jouissance and surplus jouissance. On the contrary, where
language displaces in the series of signs, the symptom anchors, fixes,
makes “fixion”.
Remember that in RSI Lacan wrote the structure of this symptomatic
exception as a function of the letter: f(x), f being the jouissance function,
131
132 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

x any element of the unconscious that has become the enjoyed letter,
which, in contrast to the signifier, is characterised by self-identity. This
is what led Lacan to say that the symptom is “the way in which each
enjoys his unconscious” (Lacan, 1974–1975, lesson of February 18th
1975). But there are several of these ways, and they can be ordered. The
generalised perversion of jouissance calls for a clinic of variety—“varité”,
said Lacan playing with the equivocation between “variété” and “verité”
[variety and truth]—the “varité” of these arrangements: in other words,
there are diverse versions of the symptom according to whether its jou-
issance will be knotted or not to the two other dimensions. This will
determine whether it will include the truth of the phantasy or not.

Autistic or socialising
Lacan’s distinction between symptom and sinthome—he writes
the latter in a different place in the Borromean knot—echoes, but in
a different way, the Freudian distinction between auto and hetero-
erotism, the latter beginning, according to Freud, before the distinction
between the sexes, at the level of the aggressive drive. The jouissance
of the linguistic element, of the moterialité of the unconscious, does
not need a partner. Configurations of jouissance that may be so diverse
phenomenologically—the lonely jubilation of Joyce squeezing out
lalangue when he writes Finnegan’s Wake, the satisfaction of Freud the
smoker, or some corporeal compulsion of the schizophrenic—have this
in common: they ask nothing of another body. This is what I have called
autistic symptoms, to be written between the Real and the Symbolic,
as a direct effect of lalangue on jouissance. In themselves they exclude
the social bond, withdrawing to a jouissance that I would readily call
autoerotic if Lacan did not contest this term on the grounds that for the
parlêtre, there is no jouissance—at any rate not that of the phallic organ—
that does not suppose the heterity (hétérité) of language.
These autistic symptoms are to be distinguished from those that I
call socialising, in which jouissance, although not very social, is lodged
in a bond by virtue of the fact of being knotted to the Imaginary and the
Symbolic of the partner. These deserve to be called Borromean symp-
toms. Lacan went from the generalisation of jouissance “deemed per-
verse”, equivalent to the sexual non-relation, to the affirmation of the
partner-symptom which makes up for the foreclosure of the relation.
There is no sexual relation but for everyone there is the fundamental
 S Y M P TO M O F T H E R E A L U N C O N S C I O U S 133

symptom that comes in its place, as I said earlier. The thesis is explicit
for the hetero couple in the famous lesson of January 1975: “For a man,
what is a woman? She is a symptom. In other words, a body to enjoy.”
(Lacan, 1974–1975, lesson of January 21st 1975). And to say “body to
enjoy” is to say more than object cause of desire.
A body to enjoy, but not just any body. It is not just any woman that
is symptom for a man, in spite of the feminine dream of Don Juan. So,
it is a body that is chosen via the unconscious. In other words, for a
man, a woman is a formation of his unconscious. Isn’t it the case for
every partner? Isn’t it demonstrated by the example of the Rat Man’s
obsession? Although it holds the secret of his loneliness and haunts his
most intimate depths, it is not autistic: that rat is certainly metonymised
in the forms that Freud details, but the obsession only invokes it as
knotted to the signifiers of the father and the lady, and to the represen-
tations of the body in the torture scene.
From one perspective, we can say about this obsession what Lacan
says of all symptoms, that it “savagely” ensures the jouissance of a letter
of the RUCS, a letter it makes manifest in this case; from another, that
which includes phantasy and truth, it knots this jouissance of the letter
to meaning or rather, to joui-sens.
Obviously, in the course of this elaboration, the meaning of the
symptom has changed. Classically, it is the sign of something that is a
problem, whether it is called an illness or not; for psychoanalysis it is a
sign as well, but of a generic illness of sex, of the disturbing side of sexu-
ality that Freud observed right to the end, and for which Lacan gives
the formula. As a result, as well as being a sign, as I have emphasised, it
is also an answer and a solution, always singular, to a failure, which is,
on the contrary, general. And as a consequence, just as the unconscious
is not reduced by analysis, the symptom is found again at the end of an
analysis, transformed without doubt (the therapeutic effect) but as that
which does not stop writing itself for each person, as guarantor of the
jouissance that his castration has left him.

A psychotic unconscious?
In all cases, the lettrified (lettrifié) One of the symptom, which may be
holophrastic, applies only to a given subject, depending on the jouis-
sance value that words have for that subject. It is jouissance of the real
unconscious, outside meaning. In other words, it is neologistic, if the
134 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

neologism is indeed a word or an expression that can carry the weight

of an ineffable and personal jouissance. Hence the term “autism” that I
have applied to it. It is the psychotic kernel of those who are not psy-
chotic, and which makes of each subject “scattered, odd” (Lacan, 1981a,
p. ix, [[Link].]) according to Lacan’s beautiful expression in the
“Preface to the English-language edition”. The letter outside meaning
is homologous to the basic schizophrenic phenomenon where words
are treated like things, according to Freud; for the schizophrenic “all the
symbolic is real”, outside the chain and outside meaning.
Lacan engaged in much polemic against those who held to the idea of
a psychotic kernel, introduced by Melanie Klein, but this is because she
makes it homologous with the phantasy of the maternal body, which
supposes a relation to the Other. We must bring the thesis up to date
with the real unconscious: it comes from lalangue outside meaning and
is not necessarily linked to the phantasy.
With the Borromean knot, Lacan retranslated the “outside discourse”
of psychosis, which implied being outside the social bond, in terms of
not knotting. The RUCS—the core of the symptom—combines an ele-
ment of language with jouissance, thus it is between Symbolic and Real,
but it is not necessarily knotted with the Imaginary in a Borromean way
to make a social bond.
From now on, the clinical field is divided between subjects whose
symptoms are all in the real unconscious—let’s say those of pure schiz-
ophrenia if it exists, outside the bond, outside meaning and where the
Imaginary is unknotted—and those who are not all in it, since they have
what Lacan called a sinthome, a knotting of this Real to the unconscious
as phantasy, between the Imaginary and Symbolic.
But then there is the case of Joyce.

Joyce, a father of deo-logue

I said all or not all in the real unconscious, but Joyce is both all and not
all in it, as I tried to show in the year when I dealt with the “The quarrel
of diagnoses”.

His symptomatology
He is all in it in so far as he gathers, at the start, the real scraps of
the heard that are his epiphanies, and at the end, in as much as he
enjoys the pulverised ciphers of lalangue in writing Finnegan’s Wake.
 S Y M P TO M O F T H E R E A L U N C O N S C I O U S 135

This literary manipulation of the letter “not to be read” is produced

without passing through the body, the phantasies of the body, which
goes well with the absence of imaginary passions in Joyce in rela-
tion to the counterpart (Soler, 2001) that Lacan made such a big deal
of. Nevertheless, he is finally not all in it to the extent that, through
publication, which has a different function, he established himself
ultimately as “The artist” he wanted to be. He thus restored a social
bond with his audience that corrected the autistic symptom of his real
unconscious by inserting it into this specific bond with the public,
even making use of it there. We know, and I have emphasised this,
that he sought this bond in a frenzied and precocious way. Certainly,
for Joyce, this social bond is atypical, without a link to sex, but it is
very effective, since it allows him to rename himself. Sinthome, says
Lacan in order to designate what must be added to the three consist-
encies of the Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real so that they are knotted.
Generally, this knotting most often relies on the nominating saying of
the father, but for Joyce, it was a self-nominating saying that he suc-
ceeded in establishing.
It is a very singular saying that links the real unconscious to the imag-
inary of the relation to his counterparts, without passing by way of the
body. Joyce, in contrast, let’s say, with the man in the street, was more
idolatrous of his text—the “Book of himself”—than of his own body,
and if one is to believe Lacan, as I do, it is through this special Ego that
he was maintained as The Artist, with the definite article and the capi-
tal. The knot that it produces, effective enough to rename him, does not
pass by way of the father. This “non-dupe” of the father only wanted
to know about masterly saying. Ignoring the “hystoriole”—both that of
Christ and of Oedipus—and a stranger to every Oedipal solution, Joyce
did not even take himself for the redeemer, for if he saves himself, he
has done so alone. And yet he will have compensated for the paternal
deficit, and will have done this without the father by using his letter
symptoms for his self-institution.
That is why Lacan can affirm that Joyce has made “a tour of the
reserve” of the unconscious. Indeed, he illustrates alternately and
sometimes conjointly the symptom of the word in the real of jouissance
outside meaning and outside any social bond—despite the link to
his jouissance (Σ)—and the subject that I call Borromean whose RUCS
is caught in the social bond, his artist’s Ego having made up for the
paternal deficit. That is why Lacan made of him a father of deo-logue
(dio-logy).
136 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

R l

Ego

It is clear that this fundamental symptom, constituting a social bond, in

contrast to what is usually the case, does not involve for him the differ-
ence between the sexes, or his link to the woman. In other words, it does
not supplement the sexual non-relation, but only the outside-discourse
of his relation to lalangue, produced by the paternal deficit from which
he suffered. Joyce teaches us something here about the function of the
father. I will come back to this. It no longer surprises me that since 1967,
in “The mistake of the subject supposed to know”, Lacan situated him
among the Fathers of deo-logue, with Moses and Meister Eckhart—in
other words, with those who knew how to mark the place of God-the-
Father—and that in 1975 he called him “necessary son”. But we are also
left with the question of Joyce’s relation to the Other sex.

His “odd relation”

We can thus ask what Nora the woman was for Joyce the man, in his
singularity. Lacan could say of Joyce that he was “unsubscribed from
the unconscious”. But how can he also say that with his writing of
Finnegan’s Wake he goes directly to the best one can expect from an
analysis? Certainly he is unsubscribed from the unconscious as truth
organised by the phantasy but not from the real unconscious discon-
nected from the Imaginary where the letter and jouissance are joined
without mediation. Except that for Joyce, this copulation of lalangue
with jouissance does not involve the enjoying substance of the body: he
enjoys lalangue as a thing.
 S Y M P TO M O F T H E R E A L U N C O N S C I O U S 137

Freud tried to define various types of object choice: narcissistic or

anaclitic. As for Lacan, in his seminar RSI, he defined the typical part-
ner of the man as pertaining to the father version of the symptom. But
Nora is other as Joyce himself is other.
It is clear that Nora his wife, Giorgio his son, and Lucia his daughter,
are not placed in the constitutive social bond of which I have just spo-
ken. Nora was not even his muse, the common name for designating the
fetish of the artist’s desire. However, Joyce cared for them in an almost
fanatical way. This is an opportunity for us to verify once more that
there are several ways to cherish one or more beings, and in addition,
that the question cannot be resolved at the level of observable social
reality. A wife and children: what could be more conventional? But it
tells us nothing about heterosexuality or about the paternal position of
Joyce. How then can we situate the indubitable strength of his relation
to Nora and his children? I am approaching things at the surface level,
the most visible level.

Exiled, but not without luggage

I say all alone, but not without his luggage. In a first approximation,
I think that Nora and his children almost had the status of “luggage”.
This is an image, obviously, and I have developed it elsewhere. We
know very well that a partner to whom one is attached can be valued
on very diverse grounds. Analytic theory has listed a number of them.
For example, the partner can have the value of a cash register when it is
the rich woman or the wealthy man; a pantry (we see couples like this),
a domestic animal that is almost a transitional object and—why not?—
a piece of furniture. Lacan evokes such a case in one of his seminars.
Luggage is another thing, a little variation. Luggage accompanies
you on your travels, and God knows that Joyce, exiled and homeless,
knew a lot about travelling, some more or less necessary, some more or
less capricious. Luggage accompanies you, you put it down occasion-
ally, sometimes it encumbers you, often it is too heavy, but you don’t
abandon it, and you know that if you do not want it stolen, you must
guard it possessively.
In Richard Ellman’s biography of Joyce there is an anecdote that
struck me at the time I read it because it pointed to a certain subjective
singularity in Nora. But that is not what interests me today. Richard
Ellman notes that at the time of their first departure, on their arrival
138 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

in London and then in Paris, the same thing happened: each time
he deposited Nora and the luggage in a park and set off in search of
acquaintances in order to find money and a place to stay. And Nora
waits with the luggage for the time that it takes him to find them. We
have testimony to this in one of her letters. The first time she thought
he would not come back but, despite this she did not move: she contin-
ued to wait for the man who did not come back and who, as night fell,
finally found her there waiting. Obviously, the subjective impact of this
episode must be relativised in terms of its context. This was Ireland at
the beginning of the century; according to the figures that I have been
able to find, 17,500 Irish people left in the same year, but even so. Then,
when it is she who wishes to leave him, it is he who goes to find her
and bring her back. Finally, through an obscure agreement, I would say
from unconscious to unconscious, she never became a lost object. This
place of the absolute condition cannot but evoke for the psychoanalyst
the transitional object; the “it does not matter what” that in itself has no
value, but that is required unconditionally.
I say “luggage” in order to characterise a bond that I would qualify as
the bond of “adjoiningness”, a sort of extension of the subject himself.
There is no doubt however, that for Joyce, Nora was a chosen woman,
unique in spite of two or three transitory flings. Lacan says: “She was
the only one for him”. Indeed, and this is rather rare. So for him she was
acquired, absolutely—everything points to that—but as what?
Since Freud, we know about the narcissistic relation to the partner;
however, there is nothing like that with Nora. Those close to Joyce were
very surprised by this disparate choice of a woman who was clearly
uncultivated—it was exactly as those close to Jean-Jacques Rousseau
responded to his choice of Thérèse. She was not acquired on the grounds
of intellectual affinity. Nor was she a mother according to the Freudian
schema. She never took care of her body, of her corporeal comfort, of
their meals (completely broke, they still ate everyday at a restaurant),
etc. This is neither a narcissistic nor an anaclitic choice. Can we assume
then that erotic benefits were central here? It seems not. This is even the
hypothesis emphasised by Lacan: “He wore her as a glove but only with
repugnance”. Repugnance is a strong word. There are certainly erotic
letters from Joyce to Nora. But erotic letters precisely do not involve
body to body; on the contrary, they involve the separation of bod-
ies, and it is exactly this that clears the field for the letter. Scatological
and masturbatory erotism is evident here, but Nora’s place is not par-
ticularly readable. It seems, moreover, that according to what people
 S Y M P TO M O F T H E R E A L U N C O N S C I O U S 139

have said, that after these passionate letters, when Joyce returned
home everything changed. Nor was she acquired in order to make chil-
dren for him—as in the “father version” of the man—for each time a
child was born there was a great drama. We know that Giorgio was only
registered one year after his birth, Joyce having been charged to do it.
He was given the name, moreover, of a dead brother …
Contrary to the case of the father as symptom, “the children were
not part of the plan”. That is, not planned in the scripted programme of
the symptom that was not tied in any way to Nora; nor was it foreseen
in the specific bond that tied him to her. Perhaps it is not without an
obscure relation to their future destiny: the schizophrenia of Lucia and
the serious alcoholism of Giorgio. Everything indicates that their births
were a problem and that Joyce could not bear the change produced in
Nora by becoming a mother. The theme is classic, but there is a letter
Joyce wrote to his aunt after the birth of Giorgio, the eldest son, where
he complains of the change in their relations and the abandonment
he suffers and where he says: “After all I am not a domestic animal,
I am supposed to be an artist”. He complains bitterly about the birth of
his children but he did not abandon them. He tried to encourage and
protect them, moving heaven and earth so that Giorgio could become a
tenor, since there was a tradition of singing in his family. As for Lucia,
he did all he could to protect her against the psychiatrists right up to
the end.

“She doesn’t serve any purpose”

To the question “What was this woman then for this man?” Lacan
replies: “She doesn’t serve any purpose. It is only through the greatest
of depreciations that he made of Nora the chosen woman” (Lacan, 2005,
p. 84).
The term “depreciation” deserves an explanation. It would appear to
contradict all the evidence we have of the esteem in which Joyce held
Nora, and also with the patent fact that he used her all his life. But
according to Lacan, “depreciation”, when it concerns a woman, does
not designate a narcissistic minimising of the characteristic qualities of
the person. The term refers to her function as a woman, at a time when
Lacan produced the thesis of a woman as symptom for a man, that is,
a body involved in the jouissance of another body, a point he elabo-
rates with great precision in the second lecture on Joyce. And isn’t it
precisely the symptom that serves jouissance which everyone is the most
140 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

interested in, even if this is to their cost, the cost of their ego? We could
put it in a different way—Nora didn’t serve as Joyce’s phallic armour: it
was provided not by her but by his writing.
What is implicit in Lacan’s affirmation, his postulate, is that the
appreciation of a woman consists in raising her to the rank of symptom:
in other words, to make use of her for the purpose of jouissance. This
thesis may appear out of line in a time where the narcissistic claim for
recognition and equality is at its peak. Here is the question: men and
women can be equal in many ways, even in all ways pertaining to social
reality, but does equality mean anything at the erotic level? Today, some
people would like to believe it does and campaign for it, as we know,
but it is always at the price of the denial of the unconscious. Curiously,
on this point Lacan, who was always so syntonic with his times, does
not pander to the epoch at all, and maintains the incommensurability of
the sexes in the matter of jouissance, not their equality.
Joyce, who was beyond all the prejudices of his time, knew how to
value Nora, her simplicity, her good qualities, her honesty, her imagi-
nativeness, her flexibility in life, but he did not make use of her as the
symptom of jouissance, which would have been to appreciate her as a
woman. His own symptom is his writing, and in order to enjoy the
letter and make a name out of it he does not pass through the body of
Nora. It was enough that Nora accompanied him, that’s all.
The exile from the sexual relation takes a particular form in Joyce,
one that Lacan diagnosed in the seminar of January 13th, 1976. Com-
menting on the text Exiles written, he says “during the reign of Nora”,
he asserts that “the way to approach Joyce’s central symptom […] is
that there is no reason for him to take one woman, among others, for his
woman”. And in fact, right from the beginning Joyce said to Nora that
she would never be his woman, in the sense that he would never marry
her. In other words, he would never utter an implicit “you are my wife”.
And if he did not consider himself a man like other men, how could he
consider this unique, chosen woman to be his, for that would be the
standard solution of the Oedipal man: that is to say, the père-version.

She fits him like a glove …

This is indeed why Lacan could add correlatively that she fits him like a
glove. For him, the symptom, whatever its benefits of jouissance, never
fits like a glove: it puts us at odds, always including the uncomfortable
 S Y M P TO M O F T H E R E A L U N C O N S C I O U S 141

and irrepressible dimension of the unconscious. And furthermore, it is

not a mystery to anyone that the valorisation of a woman as symptom
is not at all propitious for the peace of the household.
With this expression, Lacan stressed the function of the Imaginary,
while his definition of the symptom accentuates rather the knotting
of the Real and the Symbolic. Lacan often referred to the glove that
you need to turn inside out in order for the right hand glove to be the
same as that of the left. It is a reference he borrows from Immanuel
Kant. This reversal has the advantage of both annulling and revealing
the asymmetry included in the specular relation itself, which is mani-
fested through the inversion of right and left in the mirror. This has the
consequence that, in spite of appearances, the reflected image is not
identical to its model. The turning inside out of the glove annuls this
difference (the right-hand glove then looks the same as the left) unless,
Lacan notes, the glove has a button, something that Kant disregarded,
for then the button which was on the exterior would be found on the
interior of the glove that is turned inside out. There is thus a return to
the difference between the subject and his specular object! We should
not be surprised that Lacan makes a parallel between this button and
the clitoris, and hence the phallic disparity.
On the 10th of February 1976, Lacan notes that all that “remains of
the sexual relation is this geometry to which we have alluded with the
glove. That is all that remains for the human species to support the
relation”. So this is not only for Joyce but for all of us. This development
is important for it completes the thesis of the symptom as a function of
the letter, f(x). The jouissance of the letter of the unconscious, between
the Symbolic and the Real, allows Lacan to assert: “We make love with
our unconscious”. The geometry of the glove reintroduces the consid-
eration of the imaginary of bodies. But there tends to be a button.
As a result, we grasp the meaning of “she fits him like a glove”
which, assuming that there is no button, means the annulment of the
heterogeneity between the subject and the object—the image being
the first object—a heterogeneity that the mirror itself preserved. The
expression designates a relation in which not only the hetero—what we
now call the “not all”—is absent, but in which imaginary disparity itself
is overcome: no button on the glove. This is why I spoke of “adjoining-
ness”. I will evoke a sort of object transitivism—not reciprocal perhaps,
as we do not know what Joyce was for Nora—which obviously created
for her some hefty obligations, once she consented to them. Not only
142 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

was there the obligation to put up with his riotous life, the obligation
to bear him, to bend to his caprices, to his decisions to move house, for
example, but the additional obligation of looking to him exclusively,
and to look at him with the eye with which he looked at himself, annul-
ling the split between the eye and the gaze. It is this that we notice in the
letter that I evoked where, at the birth of Giorgio, he complains about
the eye that does not see him as an artist.
Exiled from the standard symptomatic relation to a woman, did Joyce
make of Nora the god of his life? Not in the least. It is very clear that
Nora was not for Joyce what God was for Schreber. If there is something
obvious in their bond, it is that she does not have speech. Not that she
is gagged but that she says nothing of importance. There is nothing in
Joyce that looks like “my wife says that …” Why? Here is my hypoth-
esis: if there is no phallic objection that would classically block the sex-
ual relation, there is what I will call the egotistic [égotique] objection, to
equivocate between ego symptom [ego-symptôme] and the meaning of
the word égotique [egotistic] in French. This is what prevented him from
taking himself for the redeemer, as I said earlier, and that prevented
him from instituting Nora in a position that I could call deified: Nora is
not the god of Joyce.
Let‘s say what Joyce’s particularity consists of: the non-relation,
which is structural, is revealed to him, while it is generally veiled for
each of us by the symptomatic relation, so veiled moreover that it
requires the whole of psychoanalytic elaboration in order to produce
the thesis, for it is not learned from books. You have to be the Egotistic
Joyce in order for the reign of the adored one to unveil the non-relation
instead of covering it, as is generally the case, at least for a time.
What then remains of the relation if this woman is neither the one
of the symptom nor the god of his life? The answer, and I will con-
clude here, is a glove that annuls disparity. Indeed it makes an odd
relation, barely sexual, reduced to the geometry of the imaginary enve-
lope, a geometry that is normally knotted to the symptom of jouissance.
An envelope in the form of a glove, Nora will have been the imaginary
supplement to the a-corporeal ego of Joyce.
It is in this way that Joyce illustrates, inversely, the true function of the
father as condition and “model” of the fundamental sexual symptom.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The father and the Real

L
acan introduced the Name-of-the-Father as a metaphoric
function. Hence a question: for a clinic that includes the real
outside meaning, what becomes of the function of the Father? It
remains. The beyond of the Oedipus is not the beyond of its function.
I have been able to show (Soler, 2003–2004) I believe, that it was neces-
sary for Lacan to give the two seminars, “RSI” and “Joyce the symptom”
in order to conclude, after tentative steps and hesitations, that the tri-
adic knotting of the three consistencies represented by the three circles
of string that make the knot, supposed a fourth element, represented
by a fourth circle that he calls sinthome, inscribing the function that is
the condition of knotting. The Father, not his signifier but his saying—
more precisely, his nominating saying that makes the sinthome—is the
existential condition of Borromean knotting. And it is from here that
Lacan drew his conclusion about the “symptomatology” of Joyce and
the particularity of his sinthome of suppletion.
If it is the condition of knotting, we can conclude that the Father as
sinthome is necessary in order for the dit-mension of meaning to be lim-
ited by the Real, and for the Real not to be disconnected. It is an effect
of this knotting to suppose that the Real does have a meaning, but a

143
144 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

limited one. As a result, we can attribute to foreclosure, on the one hand

the real signifier, the too real of the schizophrenic, and on the other, the
untethered meaning that occurs when mentality goes as far as psycho-
sis. The one who speaks “thinks feeble-mindedly”, he has a mentality,
dreams while wide awake, does not come out of his linguistic envelope
and the representations over which it presides. The glue of meaning
does not let him go, but in so far as meaning is without the ballast of
the Real it is the “illness of mentality” as I have illustrated in the case
of Pessoa.
However, this raises the question of what this new framework of the
Borromean knot—with all the revisions that follow from it—changes or
complements regarding the first ideas on the paternal function.
What precedes it implies that the avatars of the Father function are
not without effects on the type of symptom for each subject—whether it
is autistic or socialising—that is, what we call in classical terms, clinical
structures. Moreover, Lacan finishes by situating the Father function as
a function of the symptom.

Castration without the father

I will review the steps taken in this elaboration. I recalled Freud’s dis-
coveries on the partial drive and castration that led Lacan to the for-
mula “there is no sexual relation”, which entails that jouissance does not
make a social bond. From then on, the sexuated bonds of the couple
are symptoms that make up for the foreclosure of the relation by knot-
ting the jouissance of the real unconscious to the bonds of the phantasy.
However, the fundamental symptom of the couple is not for every sub-
ject, as I have just shown in relation to Joyce, and nor is it necessarily
the heterosexual symptom, which poses the question of what makes it
possible. It is at this point that Lacan invokes the father.
Castration and the specific anxiety attached to it are at the root of
all the symptomatic constructions thinkable in the analytic sense. This
thesis is Freudian, and we can date it precisely and explicitly to the 1926
text Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (Freud, 1926d). In a categorical
fashion, and reversing all that he had said up until then, Freud now
claims that the genealogy of the symptom—if I can use this term—goes
from primary anxiety to the symptom. In other words, it goes from cas-
tration to the symptom.
 T H E FAT H E R A N D T H E R E A L 145

The fact is that perverse jouissance, which is the lot of the parlêtre,
makes do with very diverse symptom-partners. This mode of
jouissance, as I said earlier, is that of the individual fallen under the blow
of the effect of language, the effect of mortification: primary castration.
This says nothing about what has been called in the history of psycho-
analysis since Freud, object choice, or about sexual identity. I will not
give an account of the detail of the Freudian constructions here but the
fact is that they always invoke the castration complex in its link to the
Oedipal father. Lacan takes a sideways step here that is fundamental.
This begins with the seminar L’angoisse and, despite appearances, goes
right up to the so-called formulas of sexuation.
It is striking to note that, beginning in the 1960s, Lacan constructs
his theory of the object a and of castration without recourse to the
father. This step is particularly clear in the seminar L’angoisse, where
he elaborates a deduction of the object a from the Other, from the effect
of language, and takes an approach which is almost naturalistic, with
the phallus as the “default organ” which short-circuits all reference to
the father in conceptualising castration as real. We find the same fea-
ture in “Position of the unconscious”. The father is not evoked there,
and to the myths of the forbidden fruit and the Oedipus, Lacan adds
one of his own, that of the lamella which mythifies the part of life that
is lost, without the father or even the Other, since here, the enigmas
of life and of the link between sexed reproduction and individual
death are evoked, even before there is any intervention of the Other.
All Lacan’s effort will have been to detach the cause from castration,
which is not a myth of the father, from both Totem and Taboo and the
Oedipus complex.
Lacan stressed his disagreement with Freud on this point, and
throughout his seminar we can follow the recurrence of his viru-
lent critiques of the Oedipal father, supposed instigator of castration
anxiety. We will read successively that the prohibition, the threat and
the murder are lures, a secondary comedy (Oedipus has no use in anal-
ysis), and worse, the worst that we can say of an analytic theory, that it
is contrary to experience. However, each time, Lacan tries to recuper-
ate what justified Freud in sustaining the unsustainable and attempts
to put it in other words, to the point of making that year culminate in
considerations about the father and the necessary passage towards The
Names of the Father that he announces for the following year.
146 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

The first subtraction that cuts out object a is an effect of language

which owes nothing to the father and everything to the entry of the
natural subject into language and to the functioning of its unary traits.
Limited jouissance, that we could already call the castration of the one
who speaks, is not the effect of any prohibition. At the phallic level,
castration itself is not the threat to the organ that Freud believed.
It bears on the disjunction of desire and jouissance and on the proper-
ties of the organ of copulation that make of the phallus “the default
organ”, which can be put in a series with the objects a. We will read in
L’angoisse the lengthy elaborations devoted to the sexual act and to the
impossibility of desire acceding to the Other of jouissance. Castration,
thus, is not a myth but a bone, said Lacan; that is, a real that owes
nothing to the father as Bogeyman. The father is not the agent of
castration.
In Lacan’s work we can find many texts that would appear to contest
this, in particular, his analyses of the father of little Hans who, he says
in the seminar Object Relations, is insufficiently castrating, although
the “Question prior” does not take this up; and also the formula in
L’angoisse, “the desire of the father is the law”, if one does not read it
correctly by omitting the commentary that he made on it; and above all,
“the saying that no of the father” [le dire que non du père] in “L’étourdit”.
Some believed they recognised the Freudian father of Totem and Taboo
there, uncastrated, enjoying all the women. This is an error, I believe. It
would be strange and above all illogical that, in order to translate the
father of the Oedipus anew, Lacan would make an appeal to the primal
father, a notion which he never stopped denouncing, one that he attrib-
uted to Freud’s neurosis, and which he mocked again in “L’étourdit”,
joking about the “père orant”, the “pérorant outang” imagined by Freud.
Moreover, how would this reading fit with what Lacan said so clearly:
that the “saying that no” of the father—taking care to distinguish it
from the saying no—offers no hope of access to the sexual relation. In
other words, it does not offer the possibility of an exit from the castra-
tion of jouissance. Can we ignore the fact that all the texts that follow
on the father, notably RSI and “Joyce the symptom”, situate the father,
a father, as a solution symptom to castration?
Hence the question that Lacan never stopped working on: what use
is the father? The question is all the more justified in that he ended up
asserting that as far as the father is concerned, we can go beyond him
on the condition that “we make use of him”.
 T H E FAT H E R A N D T H E R E A L 147

As for the father solution, the thesis is constructed in two stages: at

the end of L’angoisse, a father is thought of as a model of a “completed”
desire, and in 1975, as the “model” of the symptom.

From the object cause to the father

Neither the construction of the object a as cause of desire, nor the
inscription of subjects in phallic jouissance, resolves the question of
object choice, of the mystery of “elective affinities”, and of the strange
and rare conjunction of the object of desire and the object of jouissance.
It is a fact that the partner of sexed love is not just anyone, he is cho-
sen: it is the ABC of love life. And everyone asks him or herself about
the one he or she finds: is it this one or that one? We know the response
of Montaigne: “Because it was him, because it was me”. Lacan at first
objected to this through a reference to a masked ball, well known within
the genre of light comedy, and he liked to repeat that at the end of the
masked ball, it was neither him nor her. This is of course because it is
the object a that causes desire, the object that is no partner in particular,
only the counterpart of the subject in the phantasy.
The object a lies to the partner. Hence the comments at the end of
the seminar Le transfert (Lacan, 2001e), asserting that there is no object
that is worth more than any other. This is true if all objects take on their
value from the anonymity of the object a, to which they are ultimately
reduced. As a result, the “I do not love him” that Freud reserved for psy-
chosis is for everyone, neurosis and perversion included (Lacan, 1990b,
p. 10). The comedy of love makes me believe that my life is entirely with
one unique, irreplaceable object only, the man or woman of my life, as
we say. And the humourist that Lacan cites in L’angoisse says, in refer-
ence to the film Hiroshima mon amour, that Resnais shows that “no mat-
ter how irreplaceable the German, he can immediately find a perfectly
worthy substitute in the first Japanese person he meets at the corner of
the street” (Lacan, 2004, p. 387). Lacan does not leave it there though,
and we understand why.
Certainly, it is the object a, as the object that has fallen, that has been
subtracted through the primary operation of language, the object “that
one no longer has,” which is the principle of all eruptions of appetite, all
extensions of libido. But this original “separtition” (sépartition) makes of
it an “unsubjectifiable” secret as Lacan says in L’angoisse from which a
subject remains divided enough never to know whence he desires if it
148 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

were not for the index of anxiety which alone signals the a-phenomenal
object in experience. The object a, which has no more a name than an
image, is certainly a cause of desire, but a cause that is indeterminate
and anonymous. There is a gap between the cause and the chosen object
that would fix desire and give it its finite forms, liveable within a social
bond. We can represent this structure of the gap of indeterminate desire
without a specific end:

a → d → (… ? …).

In other words, the cause creates desire, a vector, but leaves the target
blank. It does not say what the desirable is. Certainly there are types of
desire linked to corporeal cuts, and one can speak of desire as oral, anal,
scopic, or invocatory in order to specify the surplus jouissance aimed for,
but that says nothing about a chosen partner from which the surplus
jouissance can be taken, and which, through the relation to the object
cause, always appears as a “lure”. Lacan enumerated some of the forms
of indeterminate desire which dominate the desire for something else:
boredom, prayer, watching, waiting. There are others, depression some-
times when it is like an anorexia of all objects, and why not vagrancy
which re-establishes indetermination in the place of the chosen object.
This structure of the gap of the cause allows us to grasp that the fixa-
tion of desire on specific objects, notably sexual ones, requires a com-
plementary condition. Which one? We can easily see that discourses
use the structure of the gap of the cause in order to commercialise
desire, and to make desiring the objects that they offer “a command-
ment”. Today, these imperatives of discourse take the specific form of
the market of capitalist consumption, using images and publicity slo-
gans to direct aspirations towards industrialised surplus jouissances, but
this operation is not new. There have always been suggestions, arising
from discourse, that are offered in order to fill the empty brackets of
our diagram and to designate the desirable. Obviously, there need to
be a lot of images in order to captivate interest by imaginary induc-
tion and a lot of words to suggest value. It is in this way that forms of
desire are subject to historical variation—Freud would have said, “to
civilisation”—even though the cause, an effect of structure, sticks to the
subject a-historically.
It is thus necessary to distinguish the object a as pure cause of desire
from the object a that has “passed into the space of the Other”—according
 T H E FAT H E R A N D T H E R E A L 149

to the eloquent formula in L’angoisse—when its quantum of investment

is transferred to historicised objects, dressed up in the images and sig-
nifiers of discourse. The phantasy is nothing other than the product of
this transfusion of a into the field of the Other. It is, moreover, from
there that Lacan defines his conception of mourning as the time of sus-
tained attachment to the details of the specular and historical indices of
the object, which only ends by its reduction to the object a as pure cause,
at the moment when the first Japanese person comes …
It is the same passage to the Other which makes transference pos-
sible, if we agree that the subject supposed to know, where the object
is “latent”, is another name for what Lacan called in 1963 the space of
the Other. I could call this object that has become the target of desire
the symptom object, in implicit reference to the subsequent texts, and
write it: aΣ.

a → d → (a∑).

This is the level at which we meet the model of the father: he presents
the example of a solution to the indetermination of desire, which, at
the same time, makes it the condition of going beyond anxiety, for let’s
not forget that Lacan’s aim was to go beyond the Freudian endpoint of
castration anxiety. It is this that the last lesson of the seminar asserts.
He says it in a precise way: “the desire of the father, desire hooked
to a determined object” is a finite desire which “has reintegrated its
cause”, and which moves forward in what he calls the “realisation”
of his desire. In other words, it is what moves towards a sexual object
invoked as a response to castration. What is exceptional about this is
that in spite of the (-ϕ) there is an a that is guaranteed for him, that is
fixed. Thus a father is not a problematic figure but a solution, a symp-
tomatic solution.
Lacan still saw a problem here: if it is like this, why does the func-
tion of the father remain so indissolubly linked to the prohibition of
incest? I will pause at the formulas of L’angoisse. “The desire of the
father and the Law are one and the same thing”. This sentence does
not mean—he is specific—that we must submit to the desire of the
father, but rather, that he shows the path of desire: desire, he says, is
the Law: “Desire, as desire for the mother is identical to the function
of the law. […] In short, we desire the commandment. The Oedipus
myth means that the desire of the father made the law” (Lacan, 2004,
150 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

p. 126). What is there to say if not that it prescribes the feminine object
in subtracting the first object? Thus, it seems to do for the sexual relation
what language does, without prohibition, for the drive: to ensure a
subtraction of jouissance that generates appetite.1 Nevertheless, this
father as subtractor is only ever the rationalisation of the impossible.
It is not the Father who prevents us from enjoying the Other, it is rather
that the jouissance of the Other is impossible: castration of the relation,
if I can put it like that. The father, through his object, or as Lacan will go
on to say, through his symptom, indicates a path of suppletion.

The father as symptom

Some fifteen years later, RSI, including the Real, goes further. Lacan
refers less to the desire of the father than to his symptom, namely a
woman/mother who gives him his children. This is a symptom that
makes the social bond in two ways: between the sexes and between the
generations, as I have already developed—thus making up for the fore-
closure of the sexual relation in language. It does not operate openly but
rather has its effects only through a “true half-saying”. Still at the stage
of trial and error, Lacan could say in L’angoisse (Lacan, 2004, p. 389) that
the father knows to what object his desire is bound. In fact, no subject can
know from where he desires but he can half-say, that is, leave his truth
to be heard by the interpretive ears of his descendants. This shows that
a father is invoked here as a subject, falling as all subjects do under the
sway of the not whole truth, and that he operates through his saying.
It is a major turning point, for saying is not a signifying function but
a function of existence. If the function Name-of-the-Father is conveyed
through a singular existence, and Lacan never went back on this thesis,
there are “so very many” existences that the plural is justified in order
to designate the supports of the function. With this plural, announced
at the end of L’angoisse, contingency appears, as I have shown, although
the function is very necessary in order for the subject to be able to exist
“appended from finite desires” (Lacan, 2004, p. 389), without which it
does not have an authentic realisation.
We see that a father presents a version of the fundamental symptom:
if it is not nature that speaks—there is no doubt on that point—and if
the object a does not determine the singularity of choice, castration does
not decide on the chosen partner. All that’s left is the sexual symptom
to make up for the foreclosure of the sexual relation. It fills the gap of
 T H E FAT H E R A N D T H E R E A L 151

the “there is not” by a “there is”, establishing a substitute, a suppletion.

And one can then say that the subject, besides being subject to the great
law of lack, is married to a constant of specific jouissance via the words
of the RUCS. A father only transmits his function because he has the
symptom of the father, a version of generalised perversion. This is the
case for masculine libido, a case amongst others, for there are also the
hetero non-fathers and those that Lacan called the bachelors, to des-
ignate those who are not linked to the Other sex. A father is specified
firstly by a heterosexual desire that “makes a woman the cause of his
desire” and then by a desire that links the woman partner to the mother
partner to the child partner, thus a triple partner in some ways. His
symptom is Borromean: it knots the RUCS to the truth of the phan-
tasy. He can have other symptoms, but it is through this one that he
transmits his function. Hence the question of its link with the conjugal
family. I will come back to this point.

Note
1. Already in the text “Kant with Sade”, written just prior to this, he
posited an identity of the desire of the father and the law, concluding
with a “verdict” on Sade: Sade remained stuck to prohibition, subject to
the Law, “raped and sewn shut, the mother stays forbidden”. This is the
negative side of desire, but as for a real treatise on desire, in its positive
aspect, Sade gives us nothing.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Towards the father of the name

I
f a father is only a Father, if he incarnates his function only by the
half-saying of his symptom, the question is raised of knowing how
this saying operates in order to ensure what Lacan calls the sinthome
function of knotting the three dimensions together. Lacan ends up by
asserting that this knotting takes place via the nominating saying, thus
sliding from the Name-of-the-Father to the Father of the name.
Before this thesis crystallizes, Lacan had marked the link of the func-
tion of the father with nomination several times. Notably, this occurs at
the end of the seminar L’angoisse, where the father is invoked in the link
with his object as the principle of overcoming anxiety. These are brief
but very precious indications after some remarks about the transfer-
ence transposing the object into the field of the Other: “Anxiety is only
surmounted when the Other is named. Of love, there is nothing more
than the name, as each of us knows from experience. The moment when
the name of the one to whom our love is addressed is uttered, we know
very well that it is a threshold of the greatest importance” (Lacan, 2004,
p. 390).
The name is that which founds “a desire which is not anonymous”
according to the expression in Notes à Jenny Aubry [Notes on the child]
(1990c, pp. 7–8). This refers to a chosen, particularised desire for an
153
154 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

object distinguished from all others, in which one can recognise oneself,
in contrast to the unknown object of anxiety. Love is a great inventor of
names, at all levels, even in the relation to the child—from pet names to
great names—and the names that we give to our beloved. Claudel, with
his Ysé, knew that already.
The object, the true object, the one written a, does not have a name. It
is the cause of anxiety precisely because it is anonymous and unknown.
It is worthwhile here to juxtapose the endings of the seminars Le trans-
fert (Lacan, 2001e) and L’angoisse. In the first, we read: “There is no object
that is worth more than another”, “here is the mourning around which
is centred the desire of the analyst”. That allowed some people to think
that to become an analyst necessitated a transformation of the subject so
that at the end of analysis he would enter into cynical indifference. But
it actually referred to the extraction of object a, destituting the partner
that it annuls, that it “a-nuls” [“a-nise”], Lacan goes so far as to say. And
the whole movement of the seminar goes from love, from its brilliance,
from its “miracle”—in brief, from its metaphor—towards another meta-
phor that is completely opposed to it, that of desire, that substitutes the
object for the agalma of the idealised Other that falls. Lacan evoked “the
perfect destructiviness of desire” caused by this object summoned to be
the complement of life, which has no name and which we find also in
anxiety.
The seminar L’angoisse starts with the object that marks the endpoint
of Le transfert. It goes from the anxiety of a subject confronted with the
enigmatic desire of the Other and the imminence of his reduction to the
object that is not chosen, to the last lesson which turns to the father as
the principle of overcoming anxiety, through his object, not only finite,
but also named. In the terms of the times, we see the function given to
nomination: it is a shield against anxiety in that it makes the anony-
mous a pass into narrative and history: in other words, it transfers the
unknown cause of desire towards the nameable object.

Kno(t)mination
The Father of the name is a major conceptual leap. We could imagine
that with this naming father, Lacan saves the father, and simply perpet-
uates both the old biblical refrain and the Freudian Oedipus. However,
this would be very surprising at a time when we see the expressions
of debasement of the father multiply: it’s a name to get rid of, to do
 TO WA R D S T H E FAT H E R O F T H E N A M E 155

without, have no recourse to etc. In fact, it is the opposite of a salvaging:

Lacan’s definition maintains the function of the Name-of-the-Father
but disconnects it, in effect, from the fathers of the traditional family,
the fathers of the Oedipal triad. This is what I would like to show. It is a
crucial thesis for us at a time where the failure of the father of the family
manifests in an efflorescence of clinical phenomena.
Clearly, I am not ignoring what all assiduous readers of RSI have
in their heads, and that I evoked above: the famous passage from the
lesson of January 21st 1975 on what is a father worthy of this name—
and when I say “famous”, it means that it has already become a
Lacanian slogan. This passage specifies under what conditions a par-
ticular father—a father as subject—can convey the father function, can
be what I am going to call a father-Name-of-the-Father. However, that
a father can do it does not imply that he is the only one who can.
To say that the father names is already to say that his function is not
the function of metaphor. Nor is it a function of the letter connecting an
element of the Symbolic to real jouissance. Strictly speaking, nomination
is not a signifying function although it is the privilege of the parlêtre. It is
the function of saying, and saying, as Lacan says, “is event”. It is neither
true nor false, it just is or is not. Exactly like the act, I would add. Event
implies contingency. A “that which does not stop saying itself”. Unlike
signifiers that are in the Other, “to be taken up”, the “naming” of the
father is a fact of ex-sistence.
This leaves the question of the relation of the Father to semblants,
these semblants that the English translate so precisely as “make
believe”. Concerning the signifier of the Father, we could say that it
was itself a semblant, but what about “saying”? Its event ex-sists in
relation to semblants and, because of this, it can put them in their place,
allowing the subject to avail himself of discourse, to be its dupe, to con-
sent to the semblant that grounds this discourse, which is always a dis-
course of “the semblant”. However, as I have had the opportunity to
demonstrate, the discourses themselves are always appended to a say-
ing, incarnated for each one by a historical figure. Lacan named them:
Lycurgus for the discourse of the master, Charlemagne for that of the
university, Socrates for that of the hysteric and, of course, Freud for
the analyst. Without the saying that puts the semblant in its place, we
would not understand the assertions of the seminar Encore, those that
posit that with each change of discourse a new love arises, and even
an emergence of analytic discourse. A new saying makes a promise,
156 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

a promise of another solution, and a new knowledge—which will lead

to another barrier.
Another way of formulating this is in terms of the Borromean knot:
the efficacy of the Father is to knot the three consistencies, to hook the
unthinkable Real of the symptom to semblants, between the Imaginary
and the Symbolic. The sinthome as saying presides over the consist-
ency of the semblants, which does not go without the Real, without the
symptoms of the RUCS.
But in what way, and how, does a nominating saying make a knot?
Nomination fans out (s’éventaille), if I can put it this way, from
the attribution of the common noun to that of the Name that we call
“proper” because it belongs to one and no other. The Bible attributes
the naming of things to God. But God only gave things their common
name. The proper Name has a greater claim and more import.
The function of the proper name responds to what is unthinkable
in being, to what cannot be qualified. The unqualifiable is a problem
with which each psychoanalysis confronts us every day, for although
he is represented by his speech or his signifiers, the subject who speaks
is none the less unqualifiable. Put in more familiar terms, in speech
[la parole]—chatter [“la parlotte”], as Lacan says—only primary repres-
sion responds to the subject’s question, to his “Che vuoi?”. To say this
in another way: the “Symbolic makes a hole”, an irreducible hole. This
hole has a name outside psychoanalysis: it is God, the God of “I am that
I am”, an assertion about the unqualifiable. In psychoanalysis, the name
of the hole is the thing itself.
What recourse is there against this hole? Outside analysis, it is
identification that covers the hole in the subject, but without reducing
it; and it is a psychoanalysis that allows an uncovering of this hole. The
proper name is precisely what tries to make up for the impotence of
identification. How it gets there is another question.
Names come from the hole of the unconscious. The hole, says Lacan,
spits out the Names of the Father. Actually, it spits out some names
and, indeed, each subject or rather each unconscious, produces some
names, and when it is in an analysis, it does so via interpreted chatter.
But what is named? Everything that does not pass into the signifier:
the object, and most of all, the Real. This is clearly visible with the say-
ing of a father-Name-of-the-Father. I have noted that his saying names
his objects, his woman as symptom and his children, and in so doing,
knots the jouissance which constitutes him to the Symbolic and to the
 TO WA R D S T H E FAT H E R O F T H E N A M E 157

Imaginary: let’s say, the Real to the semblants. It is in this way that the
saying of the name is knotting. “By naming, chatter is knotted to some-
thing of the Real”. The Real is holed by the signifier but knotted by the
name. To the point, as I said earlier, that we should write with a calcu-
lated neologism: kno(t)mination. Nomination knots the chatter that rep-
resents the subject with the real of enjoying: let’s say, with its symptom
name. It is this that justifies Lacan’s saying that the names that respond
to the unqualifiable are the Names of the Father. They might not have
anything to do with any actual father: what matters is that they have a
function of Borromean knotting.
There is more: the knotting of chatter with the Real cannot be
dissociated from the social bond. It is neither self-production nor
self-attribution of the name. The name, whether it is a common name
or, more radically, a proper name, must be ratified in order to exist.
Of course we might wish for a name, some people are renowned/
renamed [se renomment] through their works, good or bad, but no one
assigns himself his own name. Joyce proves this: he “delusioned” [il a
déliré] his name, if I can put it like that, before having it, but there would
be no Joyce without Joyceans, without the magisterial saying of the
Joyceans. A more general example: the patronymic name Mr Poubelle
has become a common noun for an everyday object [“une poubelle” is a
rubbish bin], but not without the public who recognised its usefulness.
The hetero-attribution of the name is important even for the name as
“symptom”. See for example—I’ve mentioned them already—Jack the
Ripper, M. the Accursed, Zorro the Avenger, and even the Rat Man. The
name that indexes identity is sanctioned within the social bond.
QED: nomination knots the three consistencies, it makes the sinthome
(to be distinguished from the symptom as a function of the letter), and
that is why Lacan suggests adding the letter “h”, the “h” of homme [man],
between the n and the o” “n’hommer”. Nomination makes the One of the
man, thus correcting the always equivocal “from them/two” [“d’eux”]
of the subject. Naming is Father. From now on I will write: Nomination-
Name-of-the-Father. Fathers are now reduced to being only particular
and contingent instances of a more general function.
This point was already implied in the pluralisation of the Names of
the Father. We did not understand it, perhaps because it was not deci-
pherable then. It led Lacan to say that the father has so many names
that he does not have a proper Name. A father, who has the father ver-
sion of the symptom, has a proper name, but not the function. Lacan
158 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

gave some examples of these multiple names of the function, as I have

mentioned.

Without the family

The first consequence is considerable: the function Name-of-the-
Father is not necessarily dependent on the family. In 1969, Lacan spoke
of the conjugal family as the final remainder of the fragmenting of
social bonds. We know today that it’s not the final remainder: he saw
himself that the final remainder was the individual. Today, it is from
the outside, from current mores and from the family, that psychoana-
lysts receive a merciless questioning in the media that they could have
taken up forty years earlier, since it was already there in Lacan’s work.
Rethinking Kinship and Marriage is not new. In 1977, it was already the
title of a book by Rodney Needham (1971), which Lacan quotes in his
lesson of April 18th of that year. After all this time, it is urgent, I think,
to extract the responses that Lacan gave to questions that aimed at
analysts and to evaluate their possible use for our clinic.
The hard core of these responses is the questioning of the Freud-
ian Oedipus, a “show that cannot run indefinitely” (Lacan, [1960b]
2006, p. 688) and, over the decades, a constant redefining of the pater-
nal function that led to the function of nomination. Now the family is
not the condition of nomination. It refers to an existential saying that
has nothing to do with the establishment of any conformist conjugal
household.
It is through the name that he gives to his symptom-objects—woman,
mother, and children—that a father makes the kno(t)mination [nou(e)
mination], and even an ‘us’ “nous” [us]. This has nothing to do with the
family, for we know from experience that even in its most conformist
configurations it is far from warding off foreclosure.
There is a topical question here. We no longer live in a time when it is
possible to raise the cry: “Families, I hate you”. Today, there is only one
great inverse cry: “Families, we miss you”. Is it that the function of the
existential saying of the Father does not imply his presence in the fam-
ily, nor even the stability of the couple, nor heterosexuality as such? The
same question was raised when Lacan spoke of a father of desire.
Indeed, when we speak of the desire of the father—or of the saying
of the father—it is not only a matter of a signifier as Lacan had at first
claimed, but apparently of a libidinal presence. In his “On a question
 TO WA R D S T H E FAT H E R O F T H E N A M E 159

prior to any possible treatment of psychosis”, Lacan specified that the

signifier Name-of-the-Father could very well be compatible with the
absence of the actual father (Lacan, [1957–1958] 2006, p. 557), which
not only disconnected the paternal function from the progenitor, but
also from the avatars of the conjugal family, to the point where we can
identify this signifier with an abstraction.
What about the Father of the saying? Can he only be conveyed by
discourse, without requiring his presence, or is the “father one meets
at breakfast” necessary, as Winnicott said? The English breakfast is quite
different from the French breakfast: “petit dejeune”. It is a metonymy,
this father at breakfast, which goes back to what preceded breakfast,
the father in the marital bed from which the child is excluded. With this
metonymy, we run the same risk as with Lacan’s first metaphor. This
did not imply the father at breakfast, as I just said, but it does seem to
suggest, in a hasty reading, a mother accountable for the presence of
the signifier. And the risk, largely already realised, is to interpret it in
a conformist family-oriented way, and consequently, with the success
of Lacan’s thesis, to move directly, particularly in services dealing with
children, to appeals to the father that destitute him more than they sus-
tain him, since they signify, whether we want this or not, that he is not
doing his job. This is also to confuse the desire of the father and the edu-
cational advice of the father: let’s say, the magister father, which Lacan
always fought against.
We are on an ideological frontier here that Lacan evoked at the end
of “Proposition of 9 October 1967 on the psychoanalyst of the school”,
especially in its first version. There he denounces “the Oedipal ideol-
ogy” as “the attachment specified for analysis to the coordinates of the
family, […] bound to a mode of questioning of sexuality that carries the
high risk of missing a sexual conversion that is taking place beneath our
very eyes” (Lacan, 2001c, Annexes, p. 587). He had thus perceived how
analysts were out of touch with their times, and if there is conversion,
it can only be tied to the “ascent to the social zenith” of the a-sexed
object a.
However, the same question returns in the texts of January 1975,
from RSI. Lacan again approaches the question of the relation between
the logical function of the exception and the individuals who incarnate
this exception. It is not the mother who is in the hot seat here, but the
father. According to Lacan, the paternal exception should be able to be
found in anyone, but this anyone cannot be just anyone for he must
160 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

fulfil two conditions. The first is that he has desire for a woman, the
father’s wife; the second, which Lacan now adds, and it is crucial, is
that he takes care, paternal care of the children that she has given him.
We are far from the metaphor which would substitute the desired
woman for the primordial mother. Here it is the opposite: the perspec-
tive given by the desire of the Father, that is, the desire of a man who is
not just anyone, the desire of a heterosexual man not just anyone, who
makes his woman become a mother, the mother of his children. In other
words, hetero desire is not enough.
But what is paternal care? It is certainly not maternal care. With these
notions of maternal and paternal care, we advance into an ideologically
thorny terrain. Indeed, today, the ideals of equality between the sexes
lead to the increasing separation of social and familial roles—along with
the respective responsibilities—from their sexed anchoring. And we see
women claim the right for aid with care of the body, with survival and
with the family economy in which they were so long confined. I see
only one way of understanding this specific paternal care at the moment
Lacan evoked it: it is the care of nomination, the care, that distinguish-
ing its objects—here the children as products of the couple—takes them
out of the generic anonymity of being simply what bodies reproduce.
For the child it promises, it makes possible, what Lacan called at one
time the humanisation of desire. Indeed, what purpose does nomina-
tion serve, for it does serve a purpose? It guards against the proletarian
status of the corporeal individual, who has nothing to make a social
bond. It is the association of signifiers which allows the creation of
bonds, and it is this that gives us the naming father, or the naming that
is Father: the signifiers of the original bond which produced the child.
The whole clinic shows how crucial this is.
The only presence required of the father—the only one which protects
against psychosis, for the question is not whether the amenities of daily
life depend on whether the father is there or not—the only required
presence is that of the saying which names. In evoking a specific pater-
nal care, Lacan does not situate himself on the wave of equality, that’s
for sure, nor does he, I believe, situate himself on the wave of patriar-
chal chauvinism either which, indeed, has not lasted around here.
The question remains: does not the Father as saying require that the
father of the family is there at breakfast? Certainly not. The founding
event of saying implies contingency, and can therefore be disconnected
 TO WA R D S T H E FAT H E R O F T H E N A M E 161

from the circumstances of generation, of the care of the body and of the
arrangements of everyday life.
I have already emphasised that when Lacan introduces this function
of nomination, the Father of the name, it is to be read in two ways: the
Father, a father-Father names, but also that which names is Father, or
sinthome. Without this contingency, we cannot grasp the complexity of
our current times.
This means that it is not the family that makes the father-Name-
of-the-Father. It is, on the contrary, the saying that names, when it is
there, that holds bodies together, without necessarily going through the
Registry Office, the ring on the finger, and the cohabitation of various
objects that the family was supposed to gather under the same roof.
The nomination-Name-of-the-Father can do without fathers and can
make do with the names of any other sinthomes. The extreme proof is
in Joyce.
Thus psychoanalysts should themselves be able to do without their
attachment to the coordinates of the traditional family that Lacan
stigmatised since 1967. That would allow them to face up to the current
situation rather than deploring it.
The question of its link to sex remains. Can the nomination-Name-
of-the-Father, always with the hyphens, also be disconnected from sex?
Saying that a father makes a woman the cause of his desire, doesn’t it
signify a necessary adhesion of the function to a hetero man? However,
on closer inspection—I mean, taking into account the set of texts—I note
that in the writings of Lacan, the names of Name-of-the-Father are not
sexed. This is quite another moment, one that catches in an impressive
way the evolutions of the time. Evoking sexual subversion in 1967 was
visionary: now, we see it every day. The subversion in question is linked
to what we now know, thanks to capitalism and without doubt also to
psychoanalysis, that our jouissance is only situated in surplus jouissance:
in other words, it does not make a relation. But this regime of jouissance
changes the place of heterosexuality in discourse, and correlatively rela-
tivises the figure of the hetero father.
That the father is not the biological parent, although the biological
parent can also be a father, is Lacan’s original thesis and one that
contemporary science realises. The nomination-Name-of-the-Father
generalises this disjunction by adding to it the disjunction with the
copulation of bodies. The consequences of naming, says Lacan, reach as
162 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

far as enjoyment, but if all the names of the Name-of-the-Father refer

to jouissance, not all refer to sex, as we see very clearly in the example
of the “the masked man” of “Spring Awakening” whose sex is unclear
and whom Lacan makes one of the Names of the Father, and even more
so with “The Artist”, the asexual sinthome that gives Joyce his name,
the one without a body.
Indeed, today we can see that the configurations of what is
transmitted in the form of “you are my symptom”, or “you are my son,
or my daughter”, you are the name of one of my jouissances, are much
more varied in social reality than they used to be. The thesis of the
nomination-Name-of-the-Father as disconnected from the family and
from sex—that it can, however, include—allows us to reflect on these
evolutions, at the very moment when science is putting into question
the transmission of life by means of sex at the level of the reproduction
of bodies.
I conclude with a very concrete and current consequence: the contin-
gency of naming in the social bond, a contingency, I insist, which opens
onto the encounter—a priori objection to prediction—and with it, all the
projects of prevention with regard to children. I am obviously distin-
guishing the protection of children that is a response to actual facts from
prevention which claims to anticipate effects and which, postulating a
false causality, seeks to guard against supposed damage, with results
that are generally closer to discrimination than to real care.
That the nominating saying is, as I have qualified it, epiphanic, an
event, belies the prediction so dear to the politics of health and edu-
cation. The theme is current since, if we believe a recent report from
INSERM, children with problematic futures can be detected from the
age of 36 months! The whole question for analysts would be to finally
drop the reference to the Oedipal and familial norm in order to look for
and recognise the clinical variety of nominating sayings, where they
present themselves.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Love and the Real

T
he question of knowing if psychoanalysis can promise a new
love, beyond the symptoms of love life that are addressed to it,
has been there from the start. Today, given the preceding elabora-
tions, it is more precisely a matter of knowing what new light is brought
to this question by taking the real unconscious into account.
From the beginning, Freud postulated that the bonds of the passions
of love, incomprehensible as they are, escape neither rationality nor
logic. He succeeded in showing the workings of repetition. One love
repeats another. In other words, the object carries the traits, the marks of
the primary object. As Freud said, the first is thus always the second. In
Lacan’s terms, the object bears the marks of the first Other encountered
in the first demand for love, what Freud called the Oedipal objects. We
are at the level of family stories here. Now, according to Freud, these are
always stories of despair. There is no happy childhood, despite people’s
amnesia. One should read Beyond the Pleasure Principle on this theme,
where there is an astonishing page, penned with an unusual animation,
on the unhappiness of childhood (Freud, 1920g, p. 20).
At the erotic level, however, the object inherits something else,
not the marks of the Other, but the traits where the first encounters
with jouissance were inscribed, something seen, heard or felt: always
163
164 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

traumatic, says Freud. Here we are at the level of a story of the body,
more precisely, of what Lacan called the “events of the body”. For
Freud, both despair and trauma are condensed in the term “castration”
and are the two sources of repetition. From this we can understand that
love, even when called reparation, fails to avoid the repetitions that
ruin love life.
In addition, for Freud, the transference is also repetition and will
thus reiterate the worst of the past without the possibility of pleasure.
This risks making it basically a reiterated experience of castration:
lack of love, of knowledge, and of sexual satisfaction. And hence an
impasse.

Love on trial
Lacan followed the same axis that bound love to castration, in itself the
effect of language, as I have already pointed out. The famous formula,
“Love is to give what you haven’t got”, is situated at this level. And
the seminar Le transfert often evoked the effect of being that is obtained
when the beloved loves in his turn, an illusory effect, however, when it
comes to desire.
It is not excessive to say that there is in the teaching of Lacan some-
thing like a trial of love where the prosecutor concludes: first of all, on
the baseness of love (Lacan, [1964b] 2006, p. 723). “To love is to want
to be loved” (Lacan, [1964b] 2006, p. 723) and it is true that the ques-
tion of a possibly disinterested love has travelled the centuries before
psychoanalysis. In Christian theology, it gave rise—notably in one of
its last articulations with Madame Guyon—to the debate on pure love
that would not call for any reward, not even that of salvation. He then
concludes on the cowardice of love that does not want to know the
irreducible real of castration that founds desire and marks jouissance.
But there is also love’s deception, for love lies about the true partner;
Lacan indeed generalises the “I do not love him” that Freud applied
to psychosis to all the clinical structures. At the end of the ball, it was
not her, and it was not him, as I reminded you. There is more besides:
the speech of love itself is rival to the beloved, for to speak of love is
itself a jouissance that demands nothing from anyone. On this point,
Lacan is justified in evoking Saint Thomas, who, after a life of dis-
course consecrated to the love of God and for God, concludes at the
 L OV E A N D T H E R E A L 165

end with a “sicut palea”, which connotes both the lie and the jouissance
of the drive. Finally, Lacan refers to the comic illusion that an object
is one’s life. All these developments affirm the antinomy between the
stage where love produces its colourful effects and the real where it
runs aground.
It is not simply a matter of a making a survey here: we are dealing
with ethical judgements. There are many such judgements in Freud’s
writing and the notion of defence itself involves them. When Lacan says
that the neurotic is a coward, that his sadness is a fault, not against God
as in Christianity, but against the analytic imperative, it is a judgment
relative to the ethics of psychoanalysis. For there are several types of
courage—that of the master is not that of the analyst—and the neurotic
can also be a hero in other situations, for example in wartime, while he
recoils in front of the real of the unconscious. There are judgements that
recognise in love and in the taste that we have for it, a figure of defence
against the Real, friend of the passion for ignorance that wants to know
nothing about it. Obviously it is not a question of any real here, but of
that which is at stake in analysis.
Is this the last word, however? Transference love already required
a reservation. For Freud, this unexpected love was a surprising dis-
covery, unforeseen in his procedure, and its demands embarrassed
him. But he perceived quickly enough that it was the condition of
analysis.
As long as the partner operates in the analyst, that love which,
contrary to any other, arises almost automatically in the Freudian pro-
cedure is already according to Lacan a “new” love, although no less
illusory. Love is blind, says the proverb, but perhaps not that of the
transference. Contrary to any other, because “it is addressed to knowl-
edge” (Lacan, 1975c, p. 16), to unconscious knowledge. It therefore
seems to be excepted from the three passions of being, already distin-
guished in Buddhism—love, hate, and ignorance—from the moment
that it awaits not so much an effect of being as an interpretation. It is
a love that would have an epistemic import except that, as we know
from Freud, it also resists analytic revelation. Lacan did not disagree. As
necessary as the transference is with its love of knowledge, its postula-
tion of a subject supposed to know, indeed to a supposed knowledge
which would give meaning to the symptom, the transference is in fact a
denial of the real unconscious. There is a divergence of the supposition
166 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

from the transference to the unconscious, as already indicated in “The

mistake of the supposed subject of knowledge” (Lacan, 2001d, p. 329).

A love that knows

Lacan took one further step when he brought to light the real uncon-
scious. The generalised foreclosure of the sexual relation, which cre-
ates the “curse on sex” specific to humans, is connected with the thesis
of the symptom as partner, whether this takes the form of a jouissance
partner civilised by lalangue or of the human partner who sometimes
houses it and who is chosen by the signifiers and the representations of
the phantasy. Jouissance “is not the sign of love” (Lacan, 1998, p. 4) but
it can happen that they are knotted together. To make love is poetry,
said Lacan, for the sexual act is nothing other than “the polymorphous
perversion of the male”. Thus, no sexual relation, but a possible relation
of love that, this time, recognises the other.
At the end of seminar Encore, Lacan introduces this as an affect, an
effect of the real unconscious. I have already indicated that beginning
with the RUCS, Lacan had given a new function to affects, or rather to
the enigmatic character of affects. He did the same with love, recognis-
ing it as a sign there: the sign of a perception of the unconscious and
its effects. Love is an obscure recognition, in “always enigmatic signs”
(Lacan, 1998, p. 144) of the way in which the other is affected by the
destiny that the unconscious has made for him. The mystery of love
is not reduced, but linked to its unconscious foundation. It is a step
beyond the Freudian attempts that looked instead for the determining
factors, something like the laws of production, which would remove
its mystery. The term “recognition” suggests that this love has the new
function of revealing the presence and the effects of the unconscious.
The text seems to hesitate on the nature of this recognition. It con-
siders the idea that this is a recognition of the “courage” of a being in
bearing its fate as parlêtre, its relation to the real of the non-relation and
the symptom that makes up for it. Love would then be like an ethi-
cal detector of a subject affected by solitude and by a jouissance which
he cannot master. But perhaps this is too much to claim and perhaps
it is necessary—and more probable—to say that it involves a recogni-
tion between two unconscious knowledges, two lalangues, which do
not necessarily engage the ethics of the subject who is affected. In both
cases, the enigma of love, as has always been recognised, appears like
 L OV E A N D T H E R E A L 167

the revelatory sign of the perception of a knowledge which is there,

unknown, but obscurely apprehended: an index not of intersubjec-
tivity, but of an inter-recognition between two parlêtres, made of two
lalangues.
It follows that to make of love—this very mischievous god—a rev-
elation, is to imply that the signifier is no longer the only indicator of
knowledge. This is a considerable change of perspective, and we see the
difference with the famous formula “you are my wife”. This full speech
was an act instituting the other, the partner. Love that is obscure recog-
nition is not primarily an act, it is a sensitivity which registers some-
thing like an affinity—this does not mean an identity—between two
unknown and thus incommensurable unconsciouses.
Obviously there is a snag here, at least on the epistemic level: what is
recognised cannot be transmitted, and only recognition itself is shown
or staged in some way.
This thesis of love as recognition of the unconscious has some
major consequences, which do not seem to me to have been entirely
noticed. Yet it allows us to throw a new light on a variety of well-known
phenomena.
For example, the fact that love is so talkative. That it speaks and even
sings is well known. The unspeakable object is made word, and it is
very difficult to believe in a silent love. History shows that even if the
god of love is silent, he has his interpreters and they are always very
prolix. We denounce this blah-blah as deceptive, the lie of seduction,
sweet talk, and indeed, as self-reflexive due to its enjoyment, as love
letters are. This is not false, but one can also observe that if love loosens
one’s tongue, it is perhaps because it is precisely based on the meeting
between two lalangues. And if lalangue is an obscenity where jouissance
has been deposited, we must say then that the epithalamium, the duet
between lovers, is a specific relation between two obscenities, between
two enjoyed lalangues which, while not necessarily having anything to
do with the sexual act, guarantees the verbal copulation of two parlê-
tres. Thus we understand why the private dialogue of lovers reverts so
irresistibly to baby talk, as if talking nonsense is aimed at a return to the
lallation of the start of life.
Likewise, we could rethink object choice here. The choice marked by
repetition that Freud perceived is in fact sustained from two sides: on
one side, the programme of jouissance, and on the other that of narcis-
sism. On the narcissistic side is the ego ideal, which, according to Lacan,
168 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

is in fact an ideal of the Other, I(A). It is at stake in what Freud saw as

the idealisation of the object. For him, our particular loves are bound to
the values of a particular time, to what is esteemed at each moment of
civilisation according to its semblants. Thus, love as repetitive works in
the direction of conformity.
We cannot ignore love’s surprises, however, those choices that are
discordant with the subject’s world, which surprisingly bring together
individuals who are perfectly mismatched relative to the semblants that
govern them. It is difficult to explain this discordance with the phantasy
as one’s only reference, that is to say, with the object a. The involvement
of the object—it too—determines typical choices, not from the point of
view of semblants but from that of the drive: oral partner, scopic part-
ner, etc., and, far from implying the exclusivity of the partner as object,
it suggests instead the secret equivalence of all one’s chosen objects.
The meeting of the two obscenities allows us, on the contrary, to bet-
ter understand these discordant choices, for lalangue obeys neither the
ideal nor the phantasy. It is the last mainspring of singularity—alas, of
a singularity resistant to being grasped conceptually.
We can add some developments here on the question of speech
under transference. What part is taken by the enjoyment of lalangue
when the analysand speaks without saying anything? What Freud
situated as a moment of the closing of the unconscious—and Lacan
as empty speech—was at first formalised in the structure of language
beginning with the object coming into the position of the shutter. But
we can rethink this starting with this other unconscious that is the uncon-
scious as lalangue, which is given a much freer rein once the constraints
of everyday speech are suspended in free association. Empty speech,
chewing over wearisome repetitions, turns out to be not so empty, as
it is saturated with the enjoyed signs of lalangue, and it imposes on the
analyst the specific task not of revealing meaning but of approaching
the specific value that the subject gives to words, this opaque jouissance
raising the question of knowing if the handling of these moments is
not more important in an analysis than those in which the pearls of a
subject’s truth are gathered.

The analytic promise

Finally, a crucial question: is the analytic promise modified? Everything
that has been elaborated up until now explains the obstacles, the curse
on sex. Dante obtained from Beatrice only the fluttering of an eyelash,
 L OV E A N D T H E R E A L 169

a look, the object of his phantasy. The Other remains the partner for
between man and woman there is a wall. In other words, the partner
of the couple is never other than the place holder of the true partner, of
the object a, aimed at by desire, and of the jouissance of the unconscious,
when it is the symptom of another body. However, neither the object a
nor the jouissance of the unconscious dissipates the mystery of elective
choice.
They tell us what value a Beatrice might have, but they do not tell
us why it is Beatrice and not someone else. Why not a Juliet? From
now on, one could ascribe the elective and even exclusive encoun-
ters of love—which certainly exist—to contingency, good fortune
(l’heur bon) and say, as Lacan does in Television, “the subject is happy
(heureux)”. Happy because he can only repeat himself in his relation
to the partner, but more essentially because he is subjected to fortune
in terms of the encounter. I translate thus: like the rose, the elective
object of love is without reason. The contingency of the encounter is
the mystery of love reintroduced into Freudianism. Would this be a
way of giving in? It is rather an indispensible way of situating the
analytic promise, by placing the mystery of love within the logic of
the treatment.
The analytic promise, if it does not lie, depends on what of the
speech of the analysand can be inscribed. Now the elaboration of
the unconscious only inscribes the One, not the two of love: One of
jouissance, letter or sign, and One saying of the speaker that only relates
to solitude. We know the historical avatars of the analytic promise,
especially at the time when a certain current did not hesitate to prom-
ise, even to demand from an end of analysis, what is called genital love,
precisely the love that would constitute an encounter. Lacan fought
against this fallacious offer, yet strangely it has known some pseudo-
Lacanian variants, with the quasi-imperative “desire the woman you
love”, and vice-versa. It is not that this doesn’t happen, but that the
tuché cannot be programmed. Analysis can certainly promise change,
even substantial change, starting from what is inscribed of the speech
of the analysand, but the happy encounter is contingent and cannot be
promised; only the conditions of its possibility can be created.
To say that love is a recognition from unconscious to unconscious
does not change anything. We can no longer really say about it that it is
a rose, without a why. The unconscious affects have a why: Lacan takes
a further step here, but one that cannot be absorbed into knowledge and
does not reduce the contingency of the encounter.
170 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

Is this at least the promise to remedy “the no dialogue” which Lacan

emphasised? This “no dialogue” is not a novelty, everyone is aware
of it, but psychoanalysis explains it. The non-relation of jouissance has
repercussions at the level of exchange, producing a non-relation of
speech. Metonymised perverse jouissance drifts in the chain of speech,
especially in the speech of seduction, and even, scandalously, in the
words of love. The anti-cognitivist postulate of Lacanian psychoanaly-
sis, which recognises in language the unique apparatus of access to real-
ity and to jouissance, implies that “to each his truth” is founded on “to
each his jouissance”. There is no dialogue, a drawback even within each
sex, and ultimately, to speak of love is in itself a jouissance. The partner
of speech is perverse jouissance. The word makes a sign, certainly, but
not to anyone. Jouissance of the blah blah, says Lacan. It has no more
access to the Other partner than does orgasm itself. Today, moreover,
the non-relation of speech is out in the open, denied sometimes, but
there all the same, and it feeds the two main themes of contemporary
complaint: the precariousness of couples and loneliness.
Women demand that they be spoken to. This is a hopeless request
that the unconscious as lalangue intensifies with words outside its mean-
ing, unsuited to exchange. It is true that the lovers’ epithalamium that
I evoked might seem to contradict this: with its verbal duets, it would
seem to be an exception, but do two voices in unison playing opposite
each other really make a dialogue? This is not so sure. The great duets
of opera must give us a hint at least.

“Love more worthy”

We cannot imagine, however, that analysis has no effect on love
and experience, indeed, proves that this is not the case.
In his “Italian note” of 1975, Lacan referred to a “more worthy” love
(Lacan, 2001b, p. 307) to qualify this change: that is, more worthy than
the proliferation of chatter that it generally consists of. Thus a love which
has perceived its real kernel, outside meaning, that has thus become the
symptom in which we no longer believe. We believe in the symptom,
Lacan said, and that signifies that we believe it can say something. This
is the very definition of the symptom of transference: we expect that
it can say something, since we suppose unconscious knowledge to it.
When the symptom is a woman, the distinction between believing her
and believing in her is imposed as soon as she speaks. To believe in
 L OV E A N D T H E R E A L 171

her, is to believe that she can say something about you. I have had the
opportunity to emphasise how certain subjects receive their message in
an inverted form, in the style of “my wife says that”. Believing her is
another thing: that makes her equivalent to the voice of “mental autom-
atism”, speaking of you in the Real. Certain subjects sustain themselves
for a whole lifetime provided that she consents to take this role.
Love more worthy is a love that neither believes in the partner, nor
believes her—and so it is not mad. Having recognised the real uncon-
scious and the contingency of the encounter that goes with it, love does
not question it on its meaning, for it has grasped at least a little bit the
jouissance outside meaning which is localised there. I have called this
atheistic and not transferential love, no less solid than other forms of
love, but certainly less verbose.
Psychoanalysis, however, does not prescribe this love, and rightly
so, for it is only one of the diverse forms of socialising symptoms, the
essential dividing line being between autistic symptoms that are out-
side social bonds and the socialising symptoms that create these bonds.
Between these there is no hierarchy, as there is no Other who could say
what their value is. At most, there are some more or less convenient
consequences for subjects. But who can decide about this if not them-
selves? Common discourse prescribes modalities of acceptable satisfac-
tion, not Lacanian psychoanalysis. Its only imperative, if there is one, is
to recognise the Real, or that which functions as Real. Hence the suspi-
cion that I evoked re the truth which can only lie about the Real outside
meaning.
Neither science, nor the capitalism that it conditions, work for Eros,
the god of the bond. Thus it is up to psychoanalysis to make an ally of
Eros, but to the extent that is possible for each subject in terms of the
symptomatic real which defines him, and without passing through the
norm, whether hetero or not. It thus returns to the evolutions that, in
the reorganisation of social groups, troubles—for better or worse—the
traditional norms of sex and the family.
This is a different program for psychoanalysis, it must be said, than
that of its beginnings, which sought to base the unconscious on reason,
in order to give to psychoanalytic knowledge a dignity equal to that
of science. With the change of paradigm introduced by the RUCS, it
is a rather a question of configurations of jouissance, the satisfactions/
dissatisfactions of subjects and the consequences of these for social
bonds.
 PART IV
POLITICAL PERSPECTIVES
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Dissidence of the symptom?

A
ll of Lacan’s rethinking of the regulations of jouissance, sex,
the Father, clinical structures, love, and the correlative ends of
analysis, has political implications and consequences. As well
as revising them in the light of these developments, they should also to
be adjusted to the changes of our times and to the social reorganisation
produced by the triumph of globalised capitalism.
That the symptom has a political import is a Freudian thesis; a sim-
ple title like Civilization and its Discontents indicates this.
Announcing, as Lacan did, a final identification with the
symptom—construed as the product of a double “event” of the body
and of saying—no doubt adds something to this.
The implication of jouissance is clear in the conversion symptoms of
hysteria and in the perversions, which both involve scenarios with the
body. It is also visible enough in schizophrenia, with its anomalous phe-
nomena of the body. But what of obsession and paranoia? Obsession is
certainly a mental phenomenon that interferes with thought, yet obses-
sions are always thoughts of jouissance. The same goes for paranoia. The

175
176 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

paranoiac is also a thinker, but what does he think of if not the jouissance
of the other, of the persecutor?

The civilised body

These symptom events of the body are to be situated in relation to the
body we deal with: the civilised body—that is, socialised. We must
gauge the extent to which there is a body factory for our socialised
bodies. The body is not a product of nature, it is rather a product of art.
And it is certain that what we call education is first an attempt—which
succeeds what’s more—to tame the body, to make it enter into the col-
lectivising practices of the body. We teach the child how to eat, how
to regulate its excretions, at what time, in what form, how to present
himself, etc. We transmit social conventions to the child. And in order
for the child to observe good manners, we bend him to habitus, to use an
often-appropriated term of Pierre Bourdieu’s. If we ask how we man-
age this, it is first by the operation of master signifiers functioning as
imperatives, by the breviaries of good conduct, but also by imaginary
contagion, by the induction of models, for the fact is that little children
are transitivists, they have a tendency to “do as”. In this sense, the
socialised body is not only for “good society”. Children of the street,
of shantytowns, from under-developed countries fall in the same way
under the induction of corporeal models.
We verify here how the human body assimilates symbolic and imagi-
nary relations. Lacan formulated this right at the beginning of his teach-
ing in saying that “Habit and forgetting are the sign of the integration
of symbolic relations into the organism”, and that are translated later
as the folds of the body and which become identical to the feeling that
everyone has of himself. Indeed, a body that I am calling civilised is
always connected with the state of mentalities, with all they imply of
the Symbolic and Imaginary.
If we wish to gauge the degree of this profound socialisation
of the body, we can turn to the differences between civilisations
where body practices are not the same. In eighteenth century France
there was a great discovery: Man was believed to be universal. Well,
there were others as well, those whom Montesquieu called the “Per-
sians”. It was a shock at that time to discover the heterogeneous man-
ners of other civilisations. It must be said that between the different
practices of the body of different civilisations, there is not always
 D I S S I D E N C E O F T H E S Y M P TO M ? 177

much understanding because, fundamentally, other practices of the

body are always perceived to be barbarian and indeed, this question
is very delicate. Today, globalisation of the capitalist market is homog-
enising to the point of including practices of the body, but we see that
the signs of antipathy between discourses become even more contro-
versial. When we hear talk of female genital mutilation, we, in our
part of the world, shudder; when we think about the atrophied feet of
Chinese women over the centuries (that is no longer practised) or of
the neck or the lips of certain African women, all these practices of the
body which had, and which still have sometimes, the aim of distin-
guishing the body according to sex—man/woman—then in the name
of the hegemonic discourse of the universal rights of man and of the
individual, we raise our eyebrows. But this ultimately shows that
there is a sort of competition between regulations of the body accord-
ing to places and times, rather than an antipathy. This is what Lacan
said in a very striking formula: he spoke of the “racism of discourses
in action”.
A small parenthesis here. We see clearly the offer made by the dis-
course that we call capitalist. It consists in trying to make all jouissances
enter into the mad machine of production-consumption. We always
say, and with good reason, that for psychoanalysis there is no collective
unconscious, it is true, but there are collectivised modes of jouissance.
And it is these collectivised modes that are transposed onto all cultural
productions. It starts with the songs that are sung in one culture and
extends to the most elevated productions of art—what we call sublima-
tions, which are sublimations of jouissance. These are the collectivised
modes of jouissance that ground the feeling of belonging to a nation, to a
place, to a people: there are many names to designate that to which we
belong. This is a critical question in Europe today. It grounds the feeling
of belonging as well as the feeling of exile.
Thus discourse gives us our bodies. The body that we must say we
“have”. The subject, the one who speaks, in contrast to the animal, is
not his body. We see this in the fact that he precedes it in the discourse
of the Other, and survives it for a time in memory, whereas his body is
returned, as we say in a certain tradition, to dust. Hence the insistence
that we must say, “the subject has a body”, because to have a body is
to say what? All subjects indeed have an organism, but perhaps all do
not have a body, if to have a body is decided, according to Lacan, at the
level of the use we can make of it.
178 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

We use and we abuse our bodies. First, we treat it like an object,

beginning with the image that we have of it, the image that is our first
object. We love or hate this image, or both, but above all we apply
ourselves to transforming it, to improving it, to distinguishing it. In
addition to fashion, we should mention here all the surgical uses, which
go from sex change in the operations on transsexuals to all the practices
of piercing and of tattooing which multiply today: a whole industry to
accommodate the body to the tastes of the subjects of our times.
Use is not only at the level of the image. There are also uses for per-
formance, for example in sport, which is a good example to illustrate
the body instrument, the body that we make use of. And then, certainly,
the erotic use of the body that can be sold, loaned, refused etc.
Subjects who do not have a body, as Lacan says of Joyce, for exam-
ple, but also of a young woman in a clinical presentation, these subjects
obviously have an organism and an image, but they cannot make use of
them, or in any case, not the standard use. The use of the body applies
to the socialised body, and this use has a limit, for we effectively make
use of something over which we have a certain mastery.
The limit of “to do something with” is at the sexual level, or more pre-
cisely at the level of the response of the jouissance of the body, of which
the subject is not master. That is, the use of the body, which supposes a
certain degree of instrumentalisation of the body, stops as soon as we
approach the jouissance called sexual. I could add “with due respect to
Michel Foucault”, because Michel Foucault, who has much merit oth-
erwise, insisted on what he calls the choice of pleasures, the choice of
practices which govern the type of sexual pleasure that we choose. It is
certain that we can in a voluntary way choose body-to-body scenarios.
What is also certain is that we can never choose the response of jouis-
sance. This is very true at the level of the sexual orgasm as all the failures
of this register show us, but not only there. In the sado-masochistic prac-
tices which are so fashionable today, you can completely programme
the scenarios, but the effect of jouissance cannot be programmed; you
encounter it or you don’t.
So it is the symptom of sexual jouissance that marks the limit point of
this use of the socialised body. The schizophrenic, outside discourse—
but not outside langue—copes with his organs without the help of an
established discourse. By homology, we could say: each of us copes
with the sexual body-to-body without the help of an established dis-
course. Discourse says a great deal about sex, it constructs semblants of
 D I S S I D E N C E O F T H E S Y M P TO M ? 179

it and even organises the scenarios of erotic practices that we know are
subject to the influences of culture. In this sense it touches even what
happens in bed, but it has no hold over what I have called the response
of jouissance.

Body outside discourse

We could illustrate the socialised body a contrario by comparing it to
autism, which seems to me very demonstrative. I am speaking here
about the little autistic subjects, not in the expanded sense of the term
that is often used today. What is it that characterises these autistic sub-
jects? They are not delusional; they have trouble with language, with
the relation to the counterpart and then above all, trouble at the level of
the drive. Now, for anyone who refers to the teaching of Lacan, trouble
with the drive is a translation of trouble with the relation to the Other
of language. It is the Other’s saying that determines the order of the
drives, the passage of the oral drive to the anal drive by an inflection of
demand, and the setting in motion of the scopic and invocatory drives
through the emergence of its desire.
What is striking, for example, for anyone reading the works of
Margaret Mahler or Melzer on autism, is to note the degree to which
it is a major theoretical problem for them. How can one understand
that a six-year-old child manifests the same oral eroticism as a baby
of six months? They do not have any other framework than to assume
an organic disorder. And Meltzer imagines that perhaps the child was
born with a dominant sense amongst the five senses that we recognise.
We can refer to two famous cases in order to get an idea of a way
of tackling the problem: Bruno Bettelheim’s case of Joey and Margaret
Mahler’s case of Stanley.
For Little Joey, none of his bodily functions work by themselves. He
can neither eat, nor defecate, nor sleep, without being connected to his
machine—he had a machine. And, fundamentally, that is understand-
able enough for us: it is because the machine of discourse has not been
incorporated—the condition through which the body is socialised—
and hence functions outside, or rather, finds a suppletion in the Real.
The case of little Stanley is even more demonstrative. Margaret
Mahler is very insistent on saying that this child has two states: in one,
he presents himself like a rag, an inanimate package; in other words, as
totally de-libidinised and even de-functionalised, and she describes very
180 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

precisely how he comes to life, and that she could not have invented,
she has observed it. He has two modes: either to touch the body of an
adult, the therapist here, or else to utter certain words. That is to say,
it is a case where we can see that another body, homologous to Joey’s
machine, as well as some words from langue, have the same effect. They
work as separated in the Real because of the failure of incorporation
that would produce a dynamic subtraction.
So, it is not only that not all bodies are socialised, but that in order
that they might be there has to be a knotting of the three dimensions,
of semblants and the Real. But when they are not outside discourse—
that is, when they are civilised—there is still a jouissance that does not
walk in step with the discourse of the norm. Not all of jouissance can be
absorbed in the offerings of discourse, and this is very noticeable at the
level of sexual symptoms. Moreover, how many times does the subject
who comes to ask for an analysis not ask himself why he is not “like
others” in making a couple like all his mates, having a child at the same
age as his friends, finding a woman ad hoc like most of them, etc.? The
sexual symptom is the point of exception from the established social
bond.
That is perhaps one of the reasons why in the Anglo-Saxon world
the word “symptom” has disappeared in favour of “disorder”. They
do not say “obsession”, but “obsessional disorder”. And effectively, the
term “disorder” indicates that the order of established discourse that
regulates the body is thwarted. That leads me to what I would call the
dissidence of the symptom, to mark its political import.

The symptom as objector

I’ll take two main examples. The first occurs very early in psychoanaly-
sis. At the time of the 1914–1918 war, Freud was confronted with the
appearance of what were then called “war neuroses”. The war neuro-
ses presented descriptively as very close to hysterical symptomology:
subjects terrified by the murderous body-to-body combat—it was still
a war of body-to-body combat, with bayonets—terrified subjects who
were seized with fainting, vomiting, trembling, and the impossibility
of going to the front. You know, no doubt, that the military authori-
ties consulted Freud—the times have certainly changed—in order to
know if they were simulating illness or were ill. They were right to
pose this question because at the same time there were subjects who
 D I S S I D E N C E O F T H E S Y M P TO M ? 181

refused to go to the front, not because of war neurosis but because

of antimilitarism. The only two alternatives for the military authori-
ties were to shoot them—as they had shot a number of conscientious
objectors in order to set an example—or to care for them, the care
envisaged being electric shock treatment [sic]. There is a marvellous
letter from Freud to the military authorities, where we are struck by
the courage of Freud the man: obviously he was against electric shock
treatment. However, at a theoretical level, independent of his response
to the authorities, what does he say? The war neurotic is an objector
who does not know himself, an objector in the unconscious, and thus a
subject divided between the unconscious that objects and his conscious
that wants to go to war. In other words, war neurosis has a political
significance: it objects to the discourse of the military master.
The other example is hysteria—more exactly, the conversion symp-
tom of the hysteric. The functional disturbance without organic foun-
dation can affect walking (paralysis), sight (blindness), the stomach
(digestion), sleep. They are disturbances of a functional order without
being an illness of the organism: according to Freud, they are an out of
place erogenisation. The civilised, socialised body has its designated
sites for erogenisation that Freud called the erogenous zones, mapped
on the surface of the body by speech, by the saying of the Other. In this
sense, the conversion symptom manifests the “refusal of the body” spe-
cific to hysteria: it objects to the erotic norm in eroticising the zones that
are silent with respect to eroticism.
Here we see the ambiguity of hysteria. The hysterical subject—I am
not speaking of the hysterical symptom—the hysterical subject is not an
objector at all. Besides, Lacan always calls them, both men and women,
the lovers [les amoureuses], or the lover [l’amoureux] (Soler, 2007). We
know that as subject, the hysterical subject is rather a supporter of
the master, a fan, but there is the “but” of his symptom that does not
march in step but objects. Charcot, with his prescription of the male
norm “repeated application of the penis” as a treatment for hysteria,
was completely mistaken. Each hysteria, whether of man or woman, is
divided between these two poles, and at the level of the body symptom
we can understand the expression that Lacan used: “She goes on strike
with her body”. What could be more political! Strike against the corpo-
real norm in the conversion symptom, strike also and above all against
the genital relation where, whatever might be the behavioural liberties
that are so conducive to confusing the issue today, she refuses to be
182 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

the symptom of another body. The expression “strike with her body” is
designed to convey its political import.
The political value of the dissident symptom in relation to the social-
ised body was noticed very early, as I mentioned above, but we have
seen it change over time. When the master signifier is still powerful, the
symptom appears clearly as a political dissident. Think of the Marxist
slogan “Psychoanalysis is bourgeois science”, indicating that treatment
was intended to make people stay in line, that therapy is a collabora-
tion with the dominant discourse. Lacan said that, indeed, about the
psychotherapies. Think also of Russian psychiatry, of the Stalinist “belle
époque” which forged the notion of “white psychosis” thereby justifying
the incarceration of a number of opponents of the regime on the basis of
their supposed mental illness.
At this level something has changed. It is linked no doubt with what
Foucault has called bio-power, in order to designate the fact that now
the State takes charge of life, it aims to sustain life, as is indeed dem-
onstrated in all the politics of birth, of health, and now in the protec-
tion of the planet, compensation, etc. In relation to this bio-power, what
we should call bio-symptoms, the symptoms of the body, are evaluated
differently. But our bio-power is not just any power—it belongs to the
time of capitalism where the imperative of discourse is competition in
production and consumption, and the symptoms that concern us are
not those of sexual malaise, but on the contrary those that challenge life
and put competitiveness into question. Anorexia, which can be fatal,
depression, that prevents working and costs dearly, everything that can
lead to suicide—drugs, obviously, and also, certainly, destructive vio-
lence. Now capitalist bio-power is allied with the ideology of science
and with the performance values it supports, so basically, it no longer
considers bio-symptoms as political dissidents, even if they have politi-
cal consequences. Capitalist bio-power thinks of them as dysfunction-
alities or as breakdowns of a human machine—neurological, hormonal,
social, etc.—which goes haywire just as any machine could go haywire.
This is a huge change that forecloses the value of the truth of the symp-
tom that Freud revealed.
As a result, what do these bio-powers say today about sexual symp-
toms? Very little. They are indifferent enough to sex as is clear in the fact
that sado-masochistic lobbies are well established; this is the permis-
siveness of our time, and in the name of what could we object? There is
then only one barrier to the discourse of capitalist individualism united
 D I S S I D E N C E O F T H E S Y M P TO M ? 183

with the rights of man: everything is permitted sexually within the

limits of mutual consent. I have had the opportunity to develop this
point elsewhere. As a result, besides murder, there remains essentially
only one big sexual taboo: paedophilia, where reciprocal consent does
not apply.

An emergency discourse
All of this changes the place of psychoanalysis: it is in direct conflict
with the operation of capitalist bio-power. The latter has two sides: on
one, keeping alive the instruments of the market—that is, individuals—
maintaining what is now called human material, by constructing the
standard symptoms of the normalised producer-consumer by means
of images and slogans. On the other, reducing the atypical symptoms
that don’t fit and make things stall by reducing them to dysfunctions
that have led to the breakdown of the cognitive behavioural machine.
It is a whole programme: make the anorexic eat, make the mute person
speak, make the depressive smile, tranquillise the stressed person, calm
the agitated and all will be well. It is clear that we live in the age of psy-
chotropic drugs. And in the age of “psy”, certainly less bad, but which
“leads back to the worst”. The symptoms that we sometimes call new,
which affect orality, action and mood, are almost all symptoms outside
the social bond, bearers of autistic jouissance.
What can psychoanalysis do in this situation, a psychoanalysis that
does not reject the therapeutic aim? More precisely, does the real uncon-
scious, the notion forged and founded by Lacan, change the way things
are here? The notion implies, as I said earlier, a division of the uncon-
scious between a decipherable unconscious as language to which the
phantasy gives its meaning, or its truth value, even its joui-sens, and
the real unconscious which fixes jouissance to a linguistic element out-
side meaning, in itself disconnected from the Imaginary. Neologic or
holophrastic, coming from the effects of lalangue, it is not a product of
discourse—and it does not walk in step with collective injunctions. Nor
does it lend itself to any form of exchange: it is autistic, even if not
always resistant to the perception of obscure affinities. It constitutes,
whether it is knotted or not to the Imaginary, the most real kernel of the
singularity of each parlêtre.
From where does it come if not from our first encounters? In spite of
the distance between the formulas, it is also Freud’s thesis—the Freud of
184 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety—which asserts that for all subjects, the
symptom comes from the anxiety produced by the encounter, deemed
traumatic, the surprise encounter with the emergence of an unexpected
jouissance, seen or heard, or felt. Events of the body. It is why, I believe,
Freud never incriminated the Other in explaining symptomatic jouis-
sances, despite all of his Oedipal construction. Lacan defines the RUCS
in establishing the link between these first events of the body and the
encounter with the first lalangue, also contingent in its modalities. Thus,
to the contingency of Freud’s traumatic encounters, he adds the contin-
gency of the first saying; it is also traumatic. That does not incriminate
the Other either. History certainly starts at the very beginning of infancy
where the two heterities—the first jouissances and the first saying—are
linked, but this does not make a destiny.
I note that the symptomatic manifestations of the real uncon-
scious that Lacan brought to light—whether they are isolated or
whether they can be included in a Borromean link with the phantas-
matic partner—share at least one trait with the so-called “new symp-
toms”: that of an autistic jouissance outside the social bond and outside
exchange. Except—and this is the crucial difference—they are not, like
these symptoms, the reverse side of the pressures of a triumphant capi-
talism. Who would hesitate to choose between a symptom of real singu-
larity which gives an anchoring to identity and separation, and others,
just as autistic, but which have repercussions in that they invert the
alienation to the injunctions of discourse and do not subtract the subject
from the common clamour?
Psychoanalysis treats, certainly, it even wants to treat but without
lying about either the relation that lacks, or about the Real and the
symptoms that both make up for and make each subject’s destiny as a
parlêtre. Contrary to what some imagine, it could be that the multiplica-
tion of victims of global capitalism—always producing more subjects
outside the social bond—is enlarging the psychoanalyst’s field of action
rather than reducing it. That is, in fact, what the notion of the Lacanian
field that Lacan introduced in 1970 is about.
Yet it must be understood that psychoanalysis does not reduce the
sexual deficit. It just brings to light its foundation in the linguistic
“curse”, the untreatable fact that language does not direct us to any
other partner than those objects detached from the body by language—
the oral object, the anal object, etc.—and that the social bond is only
installed by discursive artifices. In this sense, the bonds organised by
 D I S S I D E N C E O F T H E S Y M P TO M ? 185

each discourse, and specifically the models of the couple that they
construct via their semblants, make up for the lacking relation in con-
structing the implicit norms of love.
However, not everyone has yet understood this. Those who would
doubt it can read Otto Kernberg’s 1995 book—it is not so old—Love
Relations (Kernberg, 1995). He explains the characteristics of mature
sexual love, the result of a successful analysis. It is the return—how
anachronistic—to the genital oblativity of the 1950s, which was, more-
over, nothing other than the pseudo-psychoanalytic version of the
edifying ideology that is Christian love that has already had a history
of some centuries in the master’s discourse. Psychoanalysis in the serv-
ice of the old norms here. The psychoanalysis, on the contrary, that aims
at the Real has another aim: not of re-establishing the status quo but of
revealing the fundamental symptom of the subject’s unconscious, that
which creates his singularity.
Thus the first question for each subject is to know what his
suppleting symptom is, and what level of humanisation it allows in
a liveable social bond. If it is socialising, the aim will go from the
phantasmatic novel of a life towards the misrecognised real of the
autistic unary letter, in bringing to light the original contingencies
that repetition elevated to the level of the necessary and which, from
then on, never stop writing themselves as a programme of jouissance.
In the contrary case, it would aim to go from a Real that is too free,
outside the social bond, towards a linguistic mooring. In both cases,
it aims at what Lacan called at one time “absolute difference” (Lacan,
1981b, p. 276); this is very far from making the subject bear the weight
of not being completely within the norm, or of inducing him to make
himself its clone.
This means that the malaise in capitalism is more than ever the con-
cern of the psychoanalyst, since its programme of jouissance does not
undermine sexuality as such but the socialising libido, in aid of the
great aggregates of the proletarian body, which no longer have any-
thing “from which to make the social bond.” I have said that these
social bonds are the discourses that make up for the bond of the relation
that lacks, all of them, except the capitalist discourse that forecloses the
“business of love” and does not construct any standard couple. From
this point on, there remains only the precariousness of love-symptoms,
arising according to particular unconsciouses and the contingencies of
the encounter.
186 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

Yet it is not capitalism alone that is to blame here, but what has
made it possible through the technological developments due to
science. The wonders of science, with all their apparent progress,
cannot make us forget that science works for what Freud called the
death drive. With the leap forward in biology at the beginning of the
twenty-first century, and the devitalisation that it makes possible, this
is indeed no longer a secret. In the previous century, some scholars in
physics were alerted to the lethal consequences of their discoveries.
That stopped nothing. Today, from ethics committee to ethics commit-
tee, we are alert to the fact that biology, the only science that Lacan
inscribed at the level of the Real, traffics in life: its reproduction, its
selection, its longevity, etc. Probably, that will not stop anything either,
but it raises psychoanalysis to the status of the emergency discourse in
civilisation.
A discourse of resistance, which privileges a Real different from that
of science, that of the parlêtre, a Real that works to knot it to the Eros of
a possible, liveable bond. It must be said that this offer corresponds to a
perceptible change in social demand. Now, life is thought of as an object
to manage. “What should one make of one’s life?” has not always been
a question, but is more and more a question today, linked obviously to
the multiplication of possibilities that leave choice to the responsibility
of each subject. In these circumstances, symptoms of sex are far from
being the most invoked, while a number of people deplore their dif-
ficulty in “constructing” personal relationships, as they put it, whether
this be at work, in love, with the family or with friendship. The aspira-
tion to be integrated is everywhere. There’s nothing to add here: it is the
disruptive effect of capitalism that motivates this.
With Lacan, the analysis of the malaise in sexuality has revealed that
the non-relation of the sexed jouissances, connected in our reality to the
generalised cynicism of perverse jouissance, is at the root of the difficul-
ties in the social bond: no dialogue between the sexes, but no longer
dialogue between real symptoms either. Psychoanalysis cannot there-
fore promise fusion, but as long as it leads the subject to recognise him-
self in his fundamental symptom and not in membership of the groups
that are prescribed for him, it allows, one by one, this “exit” from the
capitalist discourse that Lacan evoked in Television.
I said psychoanalysis, to be understood as defined by the act consti-
tuting its discourse, not psychoanalysts. As for them, they are notorious
for their insensitivity to their times. How many of them are nostalgic
 D I S S I D E N C E O F T H E S Y M P TO M ? 187

for a tradition that they confuse, incorrectly, with the efficacy of the
father, who moan about our times, and who denounce subjects prey to
the deleterious values of capitalism when they should receive them in
their discourse. How many who, not having grasped the subversion
that is properly Lacanian, lack the power to use the resources that it has
produced with this real unconscious and which would still allow them
to meet “the subjectivity of their times” (Lacan, [1953] 2006, p. 264), that
of the beginning of this century which is Freud’s no longer.
CHAPTER NINETEEN

Psychoanalysis and capitalism

P
sychoanalysts today have got into the habit of incriminating
capitalism. Their grievances deserve to be scrutinised.
Both Freud and Lacan exalted analytic action as one of the
highest and most subversive forms of action. They speak in these terms:
plague, atopia, ex-sistence, other desire, subversion. We are no longer
exactly at that moment; the tone has changed. Yet there is no way to
erase the opposition of aims here: the one who analyses is in a battle.
And yet the distance of a century allows us better to perceive that psy-
choanalysis is also connected to what it fights against, and that psy-
choanalysis and capitalism cannot be contrasted in such a binary way. If
psychoanalysis is indeed the other side of the discourse of the master, as
Lacan has shown, it is not the other side of the capitalist discourse.

Eye opening
We should recognise that a part of what psychoanalysis produces in
the individual, capitalism seems to obtain on a grand scale in the Real.
Does not each psychoanalysis aim, at both the disidentification of the
subject (the fall of the semblants introjected from the Other)—which is
also disalienation—and the bringing to light of the object of jouissance
189
190 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

that governs him? “Cynical remainder” of analysis, said Lacan. Now,

doesn’t capitalism also produce, by other means, the fall of the great
semblants—God, the father, the woman, etc.—in favour of the impera-
tives of merchandise, of the push-to-consumption that homogenises
without passing through the universal of the ideals of tradition and
which breaks up even the Freudian crowd suspended from the paternal
exception?
What psychoanalysis has revealed at great cost about sex is now in
the open: that the demand of the drive is one of the major mainsprings of
the libido, as if a century later the secret was uncovered. I have pointed
out that Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality are nothing com-
pared with what appears on our screens. Human rights now extend
to the right to jouissance, that we can thereby display and claim, and it
is even possible to make a private cause of it. In fact, we can see that
interpreting with the drive occurs everywhere outside psychoanalysis,
in politics as well as in love. How could the formulations of demand,
along with the conditions of analytic interpretation, not be changed? It
is difficult to imagine that psychoanalysis could be exempted from any
responsibility for this development.
Indeed, the misfortunes of sex can no longer be blamed on capital-
ism. It has often been thought that if we don’t enjoy well, it is due to the
effects of a defective social organisation. Hence the dreams of a better
world and a new man which preoccupied the preceding century, with
the results that we know. They didn’t last, it’s true, and today all that
remains is the lamentation of the victims seeking those responsible to
incriminate them.
Concerning the problems of survival and of the meeting of needs, we
could legitimately incriminate the flawed social order: monopolisation,
dispossession, exploitation, and I could go on, are certainly not empty
words. But as for Eros, the mischievous god from whom we expect the
union of souls and bodies, it is not the fault of society if it goes wrong.
The “no sexual relation” to which Lacanian psychoanalysis attests, is
not the doing of capitalism. It is rather that the arrangements that the
discourses propose are, in every case, incapable of preventing a “curse
on sex” which comes from somewhere else.
Is this to say that all social orders have the same value? Surely not,
and how could the psychoanalyst not be actively involved here? The
first symptomatic sufferings that are presented to him always testify
to the inadequacies of the standard solution, and today he receives a
 P S Y C H OA N A LY S I S A N D CA P I TA L I S M 191

clamour as globalised, as I said earlier, as the capitalist discourse itself.

Depression, morosity, impotent rebellions, the sudden collapse of sol-
diers, abulias, distractions, violence, different excesses, repeated trau-
mas, and I could go on, speak of the non-sense of striving for some
sham surplus jouissance, without any transcendence, and the ineptitude
of scraping a living within the balance of producer-consumer, more-
less. This clamour protests against the pre-treatment of subjects by the
norms of desire and jouissance of a discourse which no longer masks
the curse on sex which destroys all the semblants that cover it in the
other discourses. Another affinity with psychoanalysis. The malaise is
going to increase, like the dark shadow of the well-being that capitalism
claims to bring.
Each discourse—what Freud called civilisation—constructs a type of
social bond, a sort of standard couple: master and slave, teacher and
student, hysteric and master, and then psychoanalyst and psychoana-
lysand. They do not have the same value, of course, and they can be
denounced, but all make a bond, and can be used as recourse against
the programmed misfortunes of the sexual couple. But there is no such
possibility in the scientificised capitalist discourse. It is not a variant
of the discourse of the master, and can only constitute a single, barely
social bond between the individual and products. Indifferent as it is
to “the business of love”, it moves towards an increasing fragmenta-
tion and instability of social bonds, and leaves individuals always more
exposed to insecurity and loneliness (Soler, 2000).
The result has something paradoxical about it: in a market of
generalised lack of enjoyment, the satisfactions obtained are, at the
same time, dissatisfactions. Indeed, all the offers which this discourse
makes in terms of consumption and “narcynical” success, as I have
put it—with all that implies of fanatical individualism, of competition
and of the generalised instability of the bonds of work, the state of the
world, etc.—even this offer is the object itself of dissatisfactions and
complaints.
But this discourse needs the satisfaction of contemporary subjects in
order for the machine to keep working. This was not always the case;
there were times, for example, when religion allowed the treatment,
even the idealisation, of the concrete dissatisfaction of the masses. This
time is no more, for bio-politics is supposed to take charge of the well-
being of subjects, at the very moment when the victims are ever more
numerous.
192 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

Regarding the equivalence between satisfaction and dissatisfaction,

the most significant aspect, to my eyes, is not the dissatisfaction of the
losers, as they say, it is that of the winners. Witness all these phenomena
of sudden collapse, of which, some ten years ago, there was an epi-
demic in the United States of America among top executives, and today,
all those in the top echelons of business, the arts, show-biz who, feel-
ing overwhelmed, run to religions, sects, “psys” of various sorts, and
many other things as well. And the cherry on the cake is that, given that
the values of combativeness and optimism that our whole culture tries
to instil do not succeed in masking the other side of the coin, there is
someone to promote the value of resilience for everyone by making it
each person’s duty to bear the real and subjective failings of our times
without letting himself be defeated!
But the multiplication of victims, with the correlative increase
in the ideology of victimisation, does not prevail only because the
capitalist universe is hard, making satisfaction and dissatisfaction twin
sisters. There were times that were much harder in Western history.
I have had the opportunity to develop this point (Soler, 2005). There
is no horror that a consistent discourse cannot surmount—just look at
fundamentalisms today.
Capitalism is not only hard, but it fails at another point. It destroys
what Pierre Bourdieu called symbolic capital. Symbolic capital cannot
be reduced to the stock of transmitted knowledges, those knowledges
that are the weapons, the instruments of success. It includes the ways
of the world and with them, what we call values, whether they are aes-
thetic, moral or religious. They allow meaning to be given to the tribula-
tions of subjects or act as compensations for them; thus, they offer them
support in organising their innermost defences.
Bourdieu denounced the unequal distribution of symbolic capital
along class lines. He was right, but I believe that the phenomenon goes
beyond the differentiation of classes. In rereading whatever great liter-
ary work of the nineteenth century or of the beginning of the twentieth
century, or even watching the films of the 1950s again, we can see what
has been lost of symbolic capital. Stefan Zweig, the contemporary and
friend of Freud, was one of those who was perhaps most aware of it and
this makes him sometimes seem very dated. It is not that there are no
longer values, but in contrast to the market, they are not globalised; on
the contrary, they are fragmented, local, the least shared things in the
 P S Y C H OA N A LY S I S A N D CA P I TA L I S M 193

world. And human rights try in vain to maintain a final barrier against
the generalised commodification of individuals.

The derision of speech

But even so, can’t we credit our times with the fact of accepting the
articulation of complaint, recognising it enough to allow a good lis-
tener, someone who is not simply an instrument of the social order
there to redress a symptomatic deviance? There is no doubt that this
condition is not always a given in history and we can easily see that
it is one that totalitarianisms as well as fundamentalisms exclude. We
understand why and how: in the framework of an absolute political or
religious order, individual voices are only acceptable if that they are in
unison with the one and only message. From that point on, all truth-
value is automatically refused to the symptom’s deviance. Such a dis-
course eventually makes way for the psychiatrist or to various judges,
but never to the psychoanalyst-interpreter.
It would appear that we are not at that point yet. Completely to the
contrary, the capitalist discourse, united with the political forms of
democracy, seems to give the freedom of the city to the most diverse
individual voices. Even more so, it encourages speaking, recognises
the benefits of speech and produces endless “psys” for all varieties of
trauma. The one by one has become the rule and we participate in phe-
nomena of speech without precedent. Take the practice of testimony,
for example. Today it is pushed to the point of mania, independent of
all content. You have nothing to say? All the more reason for you to
express yourself. A woman was interviewed on the radio: “I am noth-
ing, I have no particular information, but that is no reason for me to be
silent”. What a great comment.
The processes of monopolisation of speech have certainly not dis-
appeared, but the ideology of the right to expression has triumphed
so much today that, aside from anecdote, there is perhaps no longer
anything to hear but the universal clamour of human misfortune, that
is proclaimed or denied. This is the other side of the phenomenon.
Say what you like, it will be completely without consequence. “You
chatter, you chatter …”. A supreme derision of speech reduced to its
role as cathartic outlet, expected only to stifle the sufferings of the
consumer-voter. And what was in the seventeenth century the fine art
194 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

of conversation is no more, for chatter and silence are now one. The gag
has not been lifted: it has only changed its terms. I also see here one of
the reasons for the unprecedented development of techniques of listen-
ing targeting solitary voices in distress rather than really finding help
for them. They have a compensatory social function. Besides, and with-
out it being recognised, this new regime of speech probably sustains
itself due to the fact that to speak, and even to speak in vain, is in itself
a jouissance, and one which comes at no extra cost!
What could we expect from this for psychoanalysis? Contrary to
what we might imagine, this culture of speech without consequence is
hardly favourable, and we can see that it is more than compatible with
the reduction of the symptom to an organic disorder that I was criticis-
ing earlier. For psychoanalysis, it is a considerable obstacle to the insti-
tution of the subject supposed to know without which the mainspring
of the symptom cannot be put in question. We meet this difficulty in the
majority of first consultations where the wish to confide, to say what
is known and to be understood, is in conflict with free association and
with the expectation of an interpretation of what one did not know.
At a more collective level, we might fear some boomerang effect.
If there are only media ratings intended to supplement the big Other—
and that number represents no one—is not the path open for a “return
in the Real” of the voices of exception? The multiplication of sects
points in this direction. All of them attach themselves to the prophetic
voice of a One who is out of the ordinary, and they bank on the promise
of some transcendence, which goes beyond and sweeps up subjects. To
boast of generalised cynicism is fashionable everywhere today, and for
some Lacanians too. We go on repeating that the time of great collec-
tive causes, the prerogative of the twentieth century, is behind us, that
ideas and values are going downhill, etc. It’s true. Nevertheless, it is
also obvious that other causes are sought which seem indeed to come
from the side of religion, as Lacan had indeed predicted.
Yet Freud, who didn’t have any illusions about the speaking “thing”,
had already perceived how the being who knows himself to be mortal
aspires to something that goes beyond him. He stressed, in the 1920s,
that men are not only more “immoral” than they believe themselves to
be, they are also more “moral” and aim, in spite of their wishes to the
contrary, at what I would call at least a little “dose” of ideal. Clearly,
this vocabulary is no longer ours, but Lacan engaged with this the-
sis, although in different terms: left to themselves, subjects sublimate
 P S Y C H OA N A LY S I S A N D CA P I TA L I S M 195

with a vengeance, he said in Encore. Governed by their drives, yes,

doubtless, but what the effect of language leaves them with regard
to satisfaction—which is nothing if not limited, fragmented, and cer-
tainly unable to create the fusion of which Eros dreams—makes them
dream of something else. Yet this Other thing itself, depending on the
circumstances, could well prove lethal. The famous death drive, if one
wishes to use the term for anything which threatens the homeostasis of
discourse, is not only on the side of cynical jouissance, but it also takes
sustenance from expectations of despair. To be continued, then, in the
new century.
What is already sure is that they also reinforce segregations. I am
not speaking only of segregations imposed by various ostracisms, but
segregations that inspire affinities, those we choose spontaneously to
find a place once more amongst those who are like us, our brothers and
sisters in the symptom. Most notably: alcoholics anonymous, the obese,
gays, but also the “Sloane Rangers” of the posh districts. All of these are
groupings upon which subjects now base identifications, and they are
given even more weight by their number.
I come back to the psychoanalyst. He receives the malaise, but he
cannot dream of eliminating it. It is another score that interests him,
the one which produces the always individual unconscious, and which
inscribes a barrier between the satisfactions/dissatisfactions, the stand-
ard ups and downs of life on one side and the truth of jouissance on the
other—this truth that responds in each of us through fictions, or “fix-
ions”, that are always particular, which separate us from the herd, and
which are only revealed in an analysis.
The bond between the analyst and the analysand, a very singular
social bond, is organised entirely by the “question of jouissance”. When
I say question, I am not simply saying treatment, adjustment or therapy
of jouissance. A question is not in the register of care, it refers to knowl-
edge, this knowledge that the analysand lacks from the start, since he
knows so little about where his symptomatic suffering comes from that
he expects interpretation to reveal it to him. This polarisation of analytic
action towards the most real does not short-circuit Freudian truth—free
association is still obligatory—but it is not happy with its half-saying
either, and it takes issue with the aims of common discourse. Let’s not
be lured by a possible dialogue between the various discursive orders
of jouissance: between the first discourse and that of psychoanalysis,
there is an opposition of aims.
196 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

This is so true that there is a question of knowing what made the

emergence and success of Freud possible. Freud’s success is that a cen-
tury later there are still psychoanalysts and psychoanalysands, subjects
who continue to make the offer of an analysis and others who take up
this offer in order to do an analysis with them.

Freud masked
How could the capitalism of the end of the nineteenth century have
received the new practice? Not without resisting, it is true. I see only
one answer: it did not know. Like Descartes, Freud advanced masked.1
We know, indeed, his remark: they do not know that we are bringing
them the plague. The affinities between Freud’s works and the human-
ist tradition, which has since fizzled out, are frequently evoked. Freud
was, indeed, a scholar in this tradition, and the scope of his invention
goes far beyond therapeutic problems. The notion of the unconscious
introduced something new to the subject of this tradition, a true subver-
sion, which had its enthusiasts. But can it seriously be argued that this
is what granted him the indulgence of the capitalist master of the time?
The discovery was philosophically and ethically subversive, but Freud
did not proceed as a subversive.
At a time that was, at least in Europe, a fertile period for psychia-
try, psychoanalysis was born as a derivation of mental health practices
confronted with the symptom of a growing nervousness. The impetus
came to Freud from the enigmas of neurosis, for neither psychosis nor
perversion were the muses of the inventor of psychoanalysis. Between
the damage caused by neurosis and registered by the social body on
one side, and the impotence of the offers of the medical body to respond
to them on the other, the new technique advanced by asserting its ther-
apeutic efficacy and the scientificity of its method. Novelty, efficacy,
scientificity: there’s nothing there to challenge the ideals of capitalism,
far from it. Freud could believe in his plague, he who had taken the
measure of the unconscious, and imagined that it sounded the death
knell for the classical master. But what he had not foreseen was that
capitalism had no interest in the subject and the truth of his jouissance.
Appropriating the foreclosure of the subject that characterises science,
it knows only the management of individuals—I mean, of proletarian
bodies—to which it gives an industrial dimension today. This is what
we are now dealing with, for to manage jouissance and to question it are
 P S Y C H OA N A LY S I S A N D CA P I TA L I S M 197

two very different operations. Hence the question: what weapons does
psychoanalysis have at its disposal?

Note
1. I’m alluding here to Descrates’ remark “At the moment of stepping
onto the world’s stage, I advance masked”.
CHAPTER TWENTY

Malaise in psychoanalysis

T
here is a palpable anxiety here. This was no doubt always the
case, for the concern for the survival of psychoanalysis was there
since the time of Freud. The difference, however, is that it was
then translated into a fighting stance—the texts and correspondence
generally attest to this and it was also the case with Lacan. Today, some-
thing has changed in civilisation, and no less with psychoanalysts.
Yet everywhere psychoanalysts are consumed. That is a sign, there
is no doubt about it. On the radio one morning a psychoanalyst, with a
pleasant voice and a delivery suited to a very large audience, dispenses
plain common sense, never going beyond conventional banalities on
the trivial social phenomena submitted to her for comment. Why make
them come from the mouth of a psychoanalyst? Must we suppose that
a statement by a psychoanalyst has a special aura, whether anyone
knows it or not? Here is something that would indicate the presence of
a collective transference. Or could it be exactly the opposite? Because
once the psychoanalyst is put in a series with all the other experts on
sport, medicine, current catastrophes, aggressors and victims, festivals,
national fairs, men of the moment etc, what’s left of him?

199
200 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

On the other hand, how many forecasts have there been about
the future of psychoanalysis over the last thirty years saying that it
does not have one! The novelty in recent years is that there are still
psychoanalysts who perpetuate this, and they themselves sign the
anticipated funeral oration. There is every reason to suppose that psy-
choanalysis, the product of civilisation, remains at the mercy of its evo-
lutions, but there is still a malaise in psychoanalysis. It takes the form, as
I said earlier, of a nostalgia for the humanism of the past, accompanied
by a denunciation of contemporary culture and of the modern subjects
that it produces with their new symptoms. This phenomenon is recent.
It has nothing to do with what Freud and then Lacan articulated. The
first diagnosed the malaise, as we know; the second repeatedly put into
question “the growing impasses of our civilisation”, and even envis-
aged that it could “lay down its arms”, in order to give psychoanalysis
its objectives corresponding to that moment in its history.
And indeed, have there ever been subjects pre-adapted to the
Freudian subversion? We should consider anew the degree of will
required by the inventors—I am thinking of Freud, of Melanie Klein,
of Lacan—to go as far as they did, to invent or renew the practice in
circumstances that were always adverse. We can reread Freud’s texts to
see how he described how the technique of free association started, like
a forced association, imposed by Freud, aided by placing his hands on
the forehead of the patient (!) in order that the secret thoughts linked
to the symptom could be formulated. And Melanie Klein: how was
she able to recognise the transference in the child that no one else saw?
Her own phantasy must have played a part, but isn’t it because, above
all, she dared to carry interpretation to the point where it had not yet
gone, to the language of play and the behaviour of the child—the point
where Anna Freud and all the others saw nothing other than a subject
to educate. In her act, she refuted the existence of the first unanalys-
able element supposed by psychoanalysis: the child. Fortunately, the
certainty of Melanie Klein nevertheless spread like wildfire and later
on, Anna Freud herself would inflect her positions. As for Lacan! I like
to imagine where psychoanalysis would be today if he had waited for
the subjects of capitalism to ask him to adjust the time of the treatment
and of the session to the time of the parlêtre.
So, a suspicion: if psychoanalysis is losing its fighting stance today,
would it not be due to the fact that psychoanalysts themselves are
also among the subjects we are speaking about, subjects modified by
 M A L A I S E I N P S Y C H OA N A LY S I S 201

capitalism? The potential candidates for an analysis are perhaps not the
only ones whose desire is imbued with the values of capitalism.

Precariousness of institutions
It is a fact that the social position of psychoanalysts has changed over
the last few decades. What has happened for the “at least me” of each
one, as Lacan said, to take such a media-friendly form today?
With the passing of time, I sometimes say to myself that the great
mutes of psychoanalysis had their merit. I am not speaking of the fact
that with psychoanalysts, as with others, there are diverse tastes and
aptitudes: some are tenors and some do not say a word. I am speaking
of the collective position of the analytic group.
There was a time when these hyper-discreet analysts existed. It is
true that this was before the time of the generalised “loft”, where every-
one has to sing his little song. The IPA had even made a doctrine of it via
the necessity of neutrality, of a colourless analyst who kept any possible
comments for the inner circle of his colleagues. Lacan gave them ironic
homage in a pamphlet “The situation of psychoanalysis in 1956” (Lacan,
[1956b] 2006, p. 384) stigmatising their air of self-importance and their
parodic church. And yet his School, the Freudian School of Paris, did
not hinder their spontaneous generation. So he mocked both equally,
in the name of the ideal of Enlightenment reason, and knowing full
well, as he says, that “noise does not suit the name psychoanalyst”—as
doubtless he knew from experience.
I am by no means pleading for a return to the complacency of silence.
I think, on the contrary, that it is all the more necessary that psychoana-
lysts address today’s subjects, but on condition that they speak to them
about what psychoanalysis is, that they explain, that they confront the
specific difficulties of transmission in their field. This is something dif-
ferent from devoting themselves to media chatter.
And yet, if there is a domain in which the rigours of the
Bourbakian ambition for complete transmission has always met
obstacles, it is certainly psychoanalysis. Lacan himself ended up by
admitting this, saying, “The analytic thing will not be mathematical”.
Not because of any ill will, but just because the unconscious, which
is rational, and the jouissance it programs, do not allow the elision of
singularity that science does. This is so crucial in practice that it runs
counter to the analyst being reduced to his common name of analyst.
202 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

Has an analyst ever once received a single subject who, in

demanding an analysis, does not arrive equipped with a word, with
a sentence he has heard, with a reading that indexes the one he is
addressing? That it will usually be with the greatest misunderstanding
and without any relation to the true criteria of competence, it is certain.
But this imaginary hook indicates the impossibility of the anonymous
analyst. Lacan could speak of the “any signifier whatever” of the ana-
lytic address, but he also added that the analyst must be someone, even
if his signifier can be any one whatever. To be pinned down to the name
of the function psychoanalyst is never enough: a little extra sign is
needed—however illusory it may be—which says to the candidate that
it concerns some One who is worth something.
This clinical fact indicates two things. First, with his initial step, the
candidate for an analysis never authorises from himself. Then, and
above all, that the transference love that accompanies the institution
of the subject supposed to know is addressed, at its horizon, as with all
love, to a proper name, at least potentially.
This is the cross that psychoanalytic associations have to bear! They
would like the one who does not authorise from himself, in addressing
his demand for analysis, to put his trust in their authority rather than
in what circulates by word of mouth and from one person to another
according to whom he meets. In other words, they would like a pre-
liminary transference to the institution to orient individual transfer-
ences. This wish is not unfounded—we can never say it enough, for the
guarantee for an analyst can only come from those who know him and
who recognise him. When that happens, when the analytic institution
is raised to the status of subject supposed to know, this transference
reflects on each one of its members, and then each one can be very dis-
creet also, for his membership is a guarantee for him.
This was the case for decades, as long as the International Associa-
tion created in Freud’s time was supposed to be the only repository of
analytic knowledge. But now the good old days of the single institution
have ended. A strange history, in fact: the contingencies of its adven-
tures concur so well with the spirit of these times of free enterprise that
we could suspect them to have been contrived.
Take an association stemming directly from Freud, wanted by him,
with many members, international, that watches over the forma-
tion and the guarantee of analysts, and that even succeeded in mak-
ing diverse currents converge, for example, keeping Melanie Klein
 M A L A I S E I N P S Y C H OA N A LY S I S 203

and Anna Freud together. What a performance! So, seen from the
outside—that is the indicator of respectability—all seems in order
until the teaching of Lacan emerges. I’ll skip over the accidents in this
history in order to go straight to the result: a discreet expurgation. Exit
the troublemaker.
No good riddance though: it is from this point that everything
starts, that the subject supposed to know is divided irremediably with
the renewal of analytic theory, and the splitting of the field is fixed.
This will go to the point of a centrifugal dispersion after the dissolu-
tion of the School of Lacan. How could this attack, against a unique
subject supposed to know in psychoanalysis, not have reverberations
in the form of a very perceptible anxiety? From now on, unfettered
competition has spread in the psychoanalytic associations, the trans-
ferential rivalries which were at first internal being transposed to the
inter-associative level; it is the struggle for public recognition that is
culminating now, with an ultimate appeal to the State. That quackery
finds comfort here is something that each of us can see. I note more-
over that it is not surprising, logic never losing its rights, that some
people start dreaming of a reunification and—why not say it?—of a
“merger” in order to stay in tune with the logic of the large corporations
of capitalism.
I said malaise, but this is a euphemism when it is the whole of insti-
tutional logic that runs counter to analytic subversion. It does not spare
anyone, dominates everyone, for the solitary way is not a more promis-
ing alternative due to the fact that the analyst connot establish himself
on his own. He certainly authorises from himself in his act, and not
from his institution—Lacan will have at least passed on this truth—but
this act requires an elaboration of discourse which cannot be under-
taken alone, and which places each person under the supervision of his
peers. It is from this fact that Lacan argued for the necessity of a School
of psychoanalysis.

The institution reinvented

The question is controversial, but it is certain that the concept of the
School, far from being an addition that could be subtracted, is central to
the Lacanian path. We know that the practitioners of analysis find both
a social inscription and a guarantee in the comfort and the discomfort of
associative groups, and perhaps today, a shelter against the inquisitions
204 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

of the State as well. But the logic of these groupings is not that of the
analytic discourse.
The term “School” is designed to bring us back to it. It seems to indi-
cate that essentially it is a question of knowledge. This is not false, but
it is only partially true. It is indeed a question of what psychoanaly-
sis teaches, of what each has learned from his analysis that may pos-
sibly be valuable for all; about what it changed in each case and can
be reproduced for others; of what the analyst himself knows about it
and how he acts in relation to it. From the beginning, the old notion of
didactic analysis implied that an analysand was schooled by his own
psychoanalysis. Yet it is necessary that what he believes he has learned
be put to the test of transmission, since it concerns an experience that
is always singular and never repeatable, contrary to what happens in
science. Ideally at least, the question of the project of the School is not
to find a shelter, but rather a place to question both the experience of
the unconscious and what analysts make of it. This cannot be solitary
work, for it is necessary that there are multiple presences in order to
think psychoanalysis, even for innovators like Freud and Lacan. So the
School does indeed have an aim of epistemic transmission, but I believe
that this is in fact secondary.
Here, as elsewhere, we work on knowledge through rectifying ethics.
Moreover, can twenty years of seminars be without effects of a School,
without effects on the desire of the analyst? Beyond the elaboration of
doctrine, a saying is affirmed and a desire is transmitted.
In contrast with science, in psychoanalysis we are dealing with the
horror of the knowledge at play, which, for everyone, is nothing other
than knowledge—acquired with great difficulty—about his own uncon-
scious, as real, and its consequences. Since Freud, the main consequence
has a name: castration. This name is as suggestive as it is deceptive with
its connotations of mutilation, which says—though not very well and
invoking too much imaginary—that for the analysand this knowledge
can only be approached at the price of passing through anxiety.
That the latter can lead to a retreat is only too obvious and it touches
psychoanalysts to the extent that they shy away from it more than they
should. Psychoanalysis is thus at the mercy of the psychoanalyst, who,
Lacan did not hesitate to say, is “responsible” for the unconscious.
Responsible for its articulation in so far as the analysand can only ques-
tion it to the point of producing a response if it is caused by the desire
 M A L A I S E I N P S Y C H OA N A LY S I S 205

in act of the analyst. A School is made to sustain this desire. Indeed,

there is a homology between the analysis of the analyst and the School:
that there be a psychoanalyst is the stake in both cases. Of the first we
expect the development of a desire which allows the analysand to bear
the analytic act—it can never be sufficiently remembered that this is not
simply a therapeutic act—while with regard to a School of psychoa-
nalysis with its pass, we expect that the analysts, without whom the
unconscious could not be questioned, put themselves in question, not
so much in terms of what they know but in terms of the rectification of
their ethics.
A rectification without a rectifier, obviously, and never acquired once
and for all, not only because psychoanalysts have a horror of what has
been revealed to them, but also because the conditions of the invoca-
tion of the unconscious via the transference change according to the
evolutions of civilisation. If the unconscious is indeed what Freud and
then Lacan and a few others have said it is, psychoanalysts have this
curious destiny of only being able to become integrated—God knows
that the theme is current—as “extimate”. Assimilated, they join the
mass of psychotherapists; excluded, it is no better, they disappear. If
the only politics possible is to make their discourse ex-sist, to maintain
its status as the exception, they have both to get rid of the models that
were adjusted to previous decades, and never depart from the ethics of
well-saying. How could they not have to permanently reinvent their
strategy when dealing with subjects who address them from the other
discourse? Imitation and repetition are fatal to them, but no less fatal is
forgetting the Freudian subversion that stirred things up at the begin-
ning of the twentieth century.
The procedure of the pass is thus consubstantial with the School. In
1976, ten years after having conceived the pass, Lacan returned to it as
a leitmotif in the preface that I commented upon, but one that had been
rethought. He puts the analyst in the hot seat so that he testify to his
relation to the subject supposed to know, to the truth and to the Real. It
is a test, there is no doubt about that, and this is indeed what its detrac-
tors held against this pass. We have already heard everything on this
theme: a time bomb for the institution, even an indication of Lacan’s
malice; an anthropophagous procedure which devours the passant if it
does not vomit him up; a useless one which produced nothing new; for
already, the idea of finished analyses had been questioned, or there’s no
206 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

need to question anyway, etc. Arguments that come from the pressure
cooker are always a sign of confusion, but it is true that there is a test
and not only for the passant.
But is it so serious? And isn’t it also the case in the treatment itself?
In both there is the same stake: that of well-saying, because of the incon-
sistency of the Other. It’s amazing that analysts already established in
the profession could collectively refuse the test.
Beyond its aims of guarantee and selection, isn’t the procedure of
the pass also the most propitious way for everyone—the passant in
particular—to measure what his relation to the subject supposed to
know has become, to see just where he has really gone in his explo-
ration of the Other, and this insight is sometimes the occasion for
taking up analysis again, and it is a rather good sign—and, above all,
to see what use he makes of what he has learned? For there are several
possibilities here, the most obvious being forgetting, flight, cynical
exploitation, etc.
There could very well be some “returns in the Real” of what analytic
practice imposes on the person of the analyst. The fact is not new, but
perhaps our times offer new ways. For more than half a century, it was
the analytic institution that absorbed these phenomena of compensa-
tory returns. Now they have passed into collective space and interfere
in the public discourse of analysts. There is more, however. The analytic
function, as we know, presupposes a long and difficult formation, the
outcome of which is never guaranteed. I offer the preliminary hypoth-
esis that this function has become even more gruelling in the current
climate of capitalism.
Very early on, and without doubt because of the limits of his own
analysis, Sándor Ferenczi was the first to really see the price that
had to be paid by the one who offers himself as support for the ana-
lysand’s transference. Several terms have been produced to say what
this is: “abstinence” and “neutrality” said Freud in order to designate a
suspension of the person’s prejudices, tastes and essential choices—in
brief, all of his own options—with the aim of maintaining an even inter-
est in all the statements of the subject and aiming only at their interpre-
tation. All analytic currents agree on this point: the analytic function
supposes that the analyst will put into suspense what there is of him-
self. On this condition, the analyst can embody for each analysand the
object that causes him. Indeed, the term “counter-transference”, of
which so much is made in both theory and practice in Ego psychology,
 M A L A I S E I N P S Y C H OA N A LY S I S 207

is indicative of the difficulty of this abnegation and the ever-present

temptation to give voice to the person of the analyst in the treatment
itself.
No doubt the analyst suffers from having to efface his person—in
other words, to put his phantasy and his symptom in parentheses—in
order to make himself, for the length of the treatment, the cause of the
analysand’s work. This is the price of the analytic act. It is true that this
methodical subtraction of the personal factor costs more or less accord-
ing to the exigencies of the analyst’s own narcissism, and it is necessary
to establish a specific desire here, called the “desire of the analyst”. This
is never completely accomplished, and there is always a remainder,
but, in all cases, this elision which defines the psychic economy of the
analyst at work produces return phenomena which would need to be
studied, since what is renounced on one side always risks making itself
felt on the other.
There is more. Lacan recognised that with analysts there was what
he designated as a “horror of their act”. The term is strong and goes
much further than merely signifying the transferential responsibility
perceived by Ferenczi. It involves the end of analysis, what it aims for.
The unconscious is certainly a very complex thing: indestructible
unconscious desire, said Freud, or essential primary repression. Lacan
reformulates this as the subject of the unconscious supposed to the
unconscious as language, primordially and irreducibly repressed. Then,
as I said earlier, he reinvented the RUCS, the embodied unconscious,
which becomes corporeal in order to fix the jouissance of the symp-
tom. The concept was not elaborated all at once, and remains open to
re-workings, but in all cases the unconscious is seen as indestructible,
impossible to reduce, for it is inherent to the speaking being. In contrast,
what is not indestructible and what has emerged historically is the pro-
cedure that allows us to explore it. Freud invented the procedure spe-
cific to the revelation of the unconscious, with the real that it involves,
and this procedure includes the analyst. Thus psychoanalysis remains
partly at the mercy of psychoanalysts.
Now, to reveal the unconscious is to make an effect of irreducible
division appear. For example, to follow the path of deciphering the for-
mations of the unconscious—dreams but above all the lapsus—would
already reveal to the subject that language works in him, without him
and indeed at his expense. Freud made this the first objective of the
analysis of the analyst: that he experience this effect enough, he said,
208 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

for him to “believe” in the unconscious. That doesn’t seem much, but
it is a lot and it is perhaps the maximum, if it shows him the effect of
division that annuls introspection and renders all self-analysis impos-
sible. A true “subversion of the subject” said Lacan in designating this
challenge to unity and the supposed autonomy of the classical subject
with his aims for mastery. Lapsus of intentions, counter-will of uncon-
scious desire, sardonic injunctions of repetition all signal the distance
between the prescriptions of collective discourse and the scheming of
an unconscious that works jouissance and that moves “beyond the pleas-
ure principle”, rather than towards the equilibriums of what is called
happiness. Who would wish for, or wish to know, this unconscious that
is so unlovable? Someone like a new age saint?
All the more so since at the end, the analyst is the refuse of his experi-
ence. What does this mean? We must not let ourselves be deceived by
the pathetic resonances of the term. It does not simply mean that the
analyst is an object destined to be left, a very common fate, but that he
can be such only on the condition of being deposed from his position
as object of the transference, and hence the term “disbeing” (“désêtre”):
I will add though, and this is the essential point, deposed without the
benefits of the operation returning to him.

An act without reward

The analytic act, when it operates, produces transformation in the
analysis, but it is forgotten in proportion to its efficacy, as all the ben-
efit accrues to the analysand, and rightly so. It is in this sense that the
analyst is the waste product or refuse of the operation. He undertakes
an eminent and difficult task, the effects of which do not return to his
name. This is a unique fate: the analytic act operates, but it does not
have a signature. That does not stop analysts from being very different:
the personal factor cannot be reduced to zero, but the analysand does
not bear its mark—and when he does, it is, rather, the indication of the
limits of a practice. The obscure hero of an act that dispossesses him,
the analyst must bear being responsible for the failures of the analyses
that he directs, while any successes must be given to the credit of the
analysand. He is responsible, but not the beneficiary: we understand
why he must be paid! To put it in other words: the act and the genea-
logical tree are incompatible. The analyst does not have descendants:
 M A L A I S E I N P S Y C H OA N A LY S I S 209

the transformed analysand is neither the descendent nor the heir and
even less the work of the analyst. Which means that it is impossible to
identify with the analyst defined by his act. We might as well say that
psychoanalysis is perpetuated but not transmitted.
This is why, I believe, Lacan could evoke the enigma of the choice of
this position. How can one sustain an act that is so anti-capitalist when
the big question resounds: what is the return and where is the advan-
tage? In a world that works only in terms of accountable remuneration,
how can one bear this act without the Other, both solitary in its essence
and non-capitalisable in one’s proper name? Earning one’s livelihood
doesn’t require that much!
To put it another way, can one be a saint in a capitalist regime? I’m
formulating it like this in order to echo the celebrated page in Televi-
sion where Lacan compared the analyst with what was, in former times,
the saint: someone who had a singular and contagious desire and was
driven to the margins of every canonical path, outside the sign-posted
routes of the discourse of his time. This is why, indeed, he was rather
suspect while living and could only be canonised after his death. The
analogy has its coherence: no canonical path for the act that aims at an
exit from capitalist discourse (Lacan, 1990b, pp. 15–16).
Yet there is a difference from the classical saint. The saint was not
alone. He lived in a time that made the Other exist, which assured him
of the divine presence and promised him infinite beatitude. Thus his
tribulations and his sacrifices never left him alone, even if he were an
anchorite in the desert. No doubt authorising from himself rather than
from the precepts of his Church, but not without the Other, even an
Other of reward. The condemnation of Madame Guyon is exemplary
here: to question the God of reward with his “pure love” was to threaten
the whole edifice (see Le Brun, 2002).
Obviously no such thing applies to the analyst. The refuse of his
discourse, he can expect nothing from the capitalist discourse, except
objection. That discourse can promise him nothing: its path turns in a
closed circuit. Lacan described this in 1970 in terms of an infernal cycle
in which surplus jouissance governs the subject; that subject governs the
chain of language which governs the production of surplus jouissance
which governs the subject, etc. When the Other is consistent, the most
marginal pathways can be made desirable, even sanctified according
to the moment. But when the Other is no longer there and social bonds
210 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

come undone, it is, on the contrary, the desire for integration that rages
in proportion to the sense of dereliction. We see this everywhere today,
and analysts escape even less from this logic that now dominates their
institutional life since they cannot count on any return for their act.
Not even that of the proper name. The artist, the politician, the
sportsman even, and all those who become established through some
exploit whatever it might be, make a name through their action. This
is not the case for the analyst who never makes a name for himself
through the daily round of his practice. This is verified by the simple
fact that all that remains in the history of psychoanalysis are the names
of those who have done more than practise, those who have tried to
think psychoanalysis and produce knowledge, Freud being the very
first. To make himself the creator of discursivity is still an act, no doubt,
but not exactly the same one. It indicates at any rate that the connec-
tion between the desire of the analyst and desire for knowledge cannot
be erased. Take away what is elaborated of a possible transmission of
knowledge and the analyst is reduced to the “practitioner”. And how
would one practitioner be distinguished from any other without all the
doctrine that has been laid down, starting with Freud’s desire to know,
starting with the concept of the unconscious.
Indeed, this is why Lacan wanted a School, a place that sustains the
desire that is necessary to resist the adverse seductions of contempo-
rary discourse and to maintain the specific aims of psychoanalysis in
the new epoch.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

What does the psychoanalyst want?

T
he fact remains that putting psychoanalysis in the singular is
becoming more and more of a problem, in the singular, with the
fragmentation of associations and doctrines. Could we really
say that it has only one politics, inherent to the relational procedure
invented by Freud? Indeed, we can consider, as did Lacan, that this pro-
cedure is even more important than the discovery of the unconscious
and, and that the constraints it establishes and the rules that it promotes
prevail over the diversity of players involved.
Thus, from the free association required of the analysand and the
duty of interpretation demanded of the analyst, we could conclude that
there is one central politics: that of the revelation of the unconscious.
Similarly, on the basis of the rules of evenly suspended attention and
benevolent neutrality laid down by Freud, we can conclude that to
analyse is not to direct the patient and that the desire of the analyst
excludes the desire to be the master, etc.
The majority of analysts would no doubt agree with these very gen-
eral formulas, but it would be an agreement without consequence if
they do not ask of the unconscious: “What is it?” and from there, “what
can happen to it in a psychoanalysis?”

211
212 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

If you say, for example, as was the case in a certain current, that
there is certainly a diabolical unconscious, fomenter of trouble and
anomalies—that is, symptoms—but this Freudian plague isn’t the
only thing, there is also a healthy, rational part of the ego with which
we can reason, and which makes use of mechanisms of consciousness
independent of the drives and can contribute to the reinforcement of its
autonomy, well, then what!1 Theoretically, before the term was used as
it is today, you have brought cognitivism into psychoanalysis. And it is
to the filial piety of Anna Freud that we owe this Trojan horse, tailored
to ensure the defeat of the Freudian unconscious!
Politically, could it be said that you’re acting as master? This would
be too simple. You would only be introducing the master into the psy-
chic apparatus; it is an epistemic question that involves the conception
of the subject. From there you can argue that far from acting as master,
you have only made yourself the ally of what was already in place in
the form of the ego, as an apparatus of reality, the agent of mastery
and of consciousness. Thus you become the re-educator of a shackled
ego. But why, if the unconscious were indestructible as the inventor
of psychoanalysis believed, why would this CBP [cognitive behaviour-
alist psychoanalysis] be more successful than the pressures of early
education, combined with those of the social superego that weighs on
the shoulders of poor subjects. It is not surprising, in fact, that there
where this Ego-psychology passed, it succeeded in bringing to an end
not people’s symptoms—which still flourished, even more so—but
Freudianism itself.
Similarly, if you claim that the sexual impasse is resolved at the end
of an analysis, and that the libido that had first gone astray in the symp-
tom can be made to return to the norm of genital love, you apparently
do not take a position on the psychical apparatus, but nonetheless pos-
tulate that the operativity of the unconscious—which forges these “for-
mations of jouissance”2 that are symptoms—can be put out of action.
In doing this, how could you avoid pushing subjects towards the het-
erosexual norm, out of step with our times, and above all, completely
contrary to the analytic discourse which is there precisely to offer the
other side of the discourse of the norm.
Can it be said, then, that the way in which we think psychoanalysis
will determine not just the modalities of its action but its actual ends?
A text like Lacan’s “The direction of the treatment and the princi-
ples of its power” (Lacan, [1958] 2006) might make us think that this
 W H AT D O E S T H E P S Y C H OA N A LY S T WA N T ? 213

is the case. Indeed, he subordinates what he calls precisely the politics

of the analyst, its ends, to the instrument used—speech in the field of
language—and its potentialities. He thus suggests an order that goes
from understanding to analytic action and from knowledge to politi-
cal orientation. Take for example an imperative such as “Desire must
be taken literally” (“Il faut prendre le désir à la letter”), the title of the
fifth section of the text. Does it not suggest a political purpose subordi-
nated to knowledge of structure—that of speech—where the desire that
Freud called unconscious comes into the place of the signified? And
how indeed could a signified be approached if not literally, that is, by
the chain that signifies it? Epistemo-politics, perhaps? Not quite. In fact,
this imperative only concerns the how—so, epistemo-strategy—not the
purpose itself that remains implicit and which stems from a choice that
knowledge does not determine: to target the desire that Freud called
unconscious rather than that which could contain it. And referring to
my two preceding examples, surely it is something other than aiming to
reinforce the defences that the ego is able to oppose to desire, or trying
to make conform to the sexual norm. Thinking and doing psychoanaly-
sis well are interdependent for the psychoanalyst, although we can’t
say that one governs the other, for if doctrine and practice are knotted,
both derive from the same third path.
The aims attached to a discourse, whatever it may be, always remain
suspended from contingency, always borne by historical figures and
susceptible to inflection by a new saying. They are at the mercy of the
act, the act of those who come into the position of agent: the master,
the teacher, the divided subject or the psychoanalyst. If we can do no
less than say “Freudian psychoanalysis” or “Lacan psychoanalysis”, it
is not only to designate the differences between doctrines, but it is pre-
cisely because the procedure installs the place of saying from where the
order of discourse can be renewed or, on the contrary, repudiated. This
is not the level of the automaton of the rule, but existential, that of the
choice—contingent, indestructible and, occasionally, founding.
In 1962, at the beginning of his “Kant with Sade”, Lacan wrote:
“[…] one paves the way for science by rectifying the position of ethics”
(Lacan, [1963] 2006, p. 745) and elsewhere, “Thinking only proceeds by
the ethical path” (Lacan, 1975d, p. 9). This was to say that ethical choice
prevails over the epistemic register—which, as I have just mentioned,
is itself knotted to the political. The thesis holds for all cases, since the
comment applies as much to the circumstances that have made the
214 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

emergence of modern science possible as to those that opened Freud’s

path, and it seems to me to be even more certain today than yesterday.

The other side of cognitivism

The catch here is that once this effect of division is recognised, we must
also recognise that it spares nothing, not even thought, which we would
like to think [sic] could be spared. But no, the desire on which thought
lives is no less subject to the effect of division than any other desire.
In this sense, we cannot really think the division of the subject; at best
we can think “in division”.3 The discourse on the unconscious is a con-
demned discourse, for there is no coherence of discourse which the
unconscious does not undermine. Given that, how can one have a con-
versation with those who do not have the experience of psychoanalysis
or elaborate its epistemology?
In the end we can conclude, as Lacan did in Encore, that “reality is
approached with the apparatuses of jouissance” (Lacan, 1998, p. 55).
A sole apparatus, language, organises access to perception, thought
and jouissance, at the same time. This means that thought itself only
proceeds on an ethical path, that “judgement, similarly, up to the ‘last’,
is only phantasy […]” (Lacan, 1973, p. 44) and that there is no “univer-
sal that cannot be reduced to the possible” (Lacan, 1973, p. 7). Such is
the radically anti-cognitivist postulate of psychoanalysis in the version
that I would gladly call Freudo-Lacanian, rather than Lacanian only,
although the formulas are Lacan’s.
Indeed I do not share the thesis of Freud the scientist. Certainly, in
Freud’s work there are formulations that have a touch of the scientist
about them, but no scientific inspiration could ever have given birth to
psychoanalysis. As for the postulate that I have called anti-cognitivist,
it has nothing to do with a return to any kind of pre-rationalism which
would be to completely ignore the demonstration specific to the scien-
tific spirit itself which Freud, like Lacan, always considered to be cru-
cial. It is the opposite: we should rather see that cognitivism itself, far
from being able to give an account of science—so unequal is it to the
epistemology that science requires—is rather a debasement of it. But
that is not my intention here.
Three theses are knotted: there is no politics of psychoanalysis
without a conception of psychoanalysis and of the subject that it treats.
This is why Lacan could evoke his own “efforts to undo the arrest
 W H AT D O E S T H E P S Y C H OA N A LY S T WA N T ? 215

of psychoanalytic thought” (Lacan, 1968b, p. 50) and to restore its

scientific aim. But, on the other hand, there is no thought at all that
escapes the effects of division: the “I think” is divided, and for each
assertion there is a world between the reasons that justify it and the
cause that produces it. Thought, far from being able to think its own
cause, is divided from it; as a result, it is ethical choice that dominates
knowledge and politics. Moreover, we should consider here the indif-
ference to doctrinal material—current discourse tends to make a virtue
of being open [sic]—to the point of reproaching all creators of discursiv-
ity for their sectarianism, without seeing that in giving up thought they
are giving up the ethics of their discourse. Today the term “ethics” is,
alas, well and truly overused by analysts, who sometimes don’t hesitate
to cloak themselves in it, but nevertheless, it retains its value. The ethics
of psychoanalysis are situated, like all others, in relation to the Real, but
they are distinguished from all others by aiming at this Real through
“well-saying”. What, then, can a politics oriented by the sole duty of
well-saying be at the level of each treatment and the level of analytic
institutions?

A non-prescriptive therapeutics
It is not surprising that psychoanalysis is questioned about its objec-
tives, since well-saying [le bien-dire] is not well-caring [le bien-soigner]. It
does not set therapeutic results at the level of ends. It does not neglect
for all that but it makes something like a secondary benefit, coming “in
addition”, as Freud said. Some people can then imagine that this well-
saying is a luxury in relation to the well-curing (le bien-guérir). As for
the psychoanalysts of today, caught up in the politics of control and of
standardised care, they have a tendency to become confused, even to
fall out with each other: we saw this with regard to the law on mental
health, finally voted on in 2004. Some even claimed not to be therapists,
contrary to what opinion attributed to them, and attributed to them so
well that, in order to denigrate them, they were reproached for not cur-
ing as fast and as efficaciously as other therapies! But let’s leave that, for
the essential problem is elsewhere.
What is it to care for, since we are not in the field of physical medi-
cine, but in that of the divided subject? We can already note that well-
saying is not opposed to well-doing. It is niether the beautiful-saying,
nor the saying of one person, but the saying that is inferred from all the
216 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

statements that the analytic work registers, it is a saying that satisfies.

It satisfies in the sense of satisfaction, but also in the sense of operation:
it satis-fies [satis-fait], enough for the one who enters the procedure. The
alternative between analysing and curing is too simplistic to be perti-
nent and would benefit from being reformulated.
What’s more, we can see that a century of psychoanalysis, right up
to Lacan’s last elaborations, have led to a rethinking of the definition of
the symptom itself. In the common approximation today, we are happy
with vague ideas and there is a tendency to treat any of the various
ills of contemporary subjects as symptoms to be cured. Now, there is
certainly a market for suffering. But not all pain is a symptom, and to
administer to the misery of the world and its clamour, assuming that
the intention is laudable, is not to treat the parlêtre.
As I said earlier, as soon as the symptom that the unconscious creates
makes up for the deficit of generic sex for the parlêtre, as soon as it gov-
erns each person’s choice of partner or partners of jouissance, and some-
times even this relation of subject to subject that is called love, then
there is only a symptomatic partner determined by the unconscious,
and the heterosexual norm itself, realised solely by the paths of the pri-
vate discourse of the unconscious, becomes a symptom.
Obviously, these theses have repercussions for therapeutic aims. We
can no longer think of reducing the symptom to zero and if there is
no subject without a symptom, then what does the therapeutic effect
of analysis become? It certainly exists, experience proves it, but it is
only a change in the symptom. To put it without irony, an obsession can
decrease because a man or a woman, or any other partner, can come
and replace it! An assumed homosexuality can be substituted for a
heterosexuality that was only a facade, and the other way around etc.
That a symptom that is more liveable for a subject is substituted for
one that was intolerable for him is a great success! And yet, it is a suc-
cess that only the subject himself can evaluate for only he experiences
the benefit of satisfaction. That’s the catch, because nothing says that
a symptom that is more liveable for him conforms more readily to the
expectations of his entourage and, more generally, to social prejudices.
Thus we must expect the continuation of the familiar protests from
those who do not find the analysed to their taste.
Today, who would dare to say, and in what name, what the symp-
tom of exiting an analysis must be? Would it necessarily, for example,
 W H AT D O E S T H E P S Y C H OA N A LY S T WA N T ? 217

be hetero rather than homo, peaceful to keep the neighbours happy,

maternal when one is a woman, etc.? I say today, for something has
already changed in discourse. It can be seen in the fact that a century
ago, homosexuality was treated as an offence and a perversion of nature
while today it is generally accepted. Psychoanalysis has without doubt
played a role in this evolution, and a part of what it teaches us has, in
fact, passed into common discourse.
How would the psychoanalyst find fault with this evolution in
taste? At the most he could observe that once puritanical repression
is undone and the jouissances “deemed perverse” (Lacan, 1984b, p. 22)
are permitted, subjects are hardly more cheerful, that is a fact. He will
not be surprised, for he is paid to know that the jouissances of the parlê-
tre meet obstacles that are not accidental. He could even anticipate the
superegoic process of the escalation towards excess that a permissive
regime does not fail to induce. He will not conclude from this that there
is increasing perversion, but rather an enforced capture of subjects in
the effect of discourse.
On the other hand, the psychoanalyst cannot preach about the dis-
course of his time without leaving his own: the analyst’s discourse does
not aim to rectify morals, but to analyse the symptoms of each person
who asks him and to reduce them to the point of his fundamental symp-
tom. The ethics of well-saying are relative to the analytic discourse.
Hence the problem arises for analysts of knowing how to situate them-
selves in the politics of their time, without going back on, and without
exceeding, the knowledge that their experience produces. How could
this dilemma be resolved? The pitfalls are legion: demagoguery and
coquetry on one side, and an anachronistic purism on the other. They
constitute two opposed poles, generators of this professional stupidity
that is growing at the same rate as psychoanalysts’ wish to authorise
themselves on the basis of public opinion. We can see this case by case:
it is unforgivable. And yet, we can’t doubt that the politics of psychoa-
nalysis forces it to continue to “be at a premium on the market” (2001b,
p. 310), as Lacan formulated it in 1974, since its practice is dependent on
the transference of subjects. It is impossible for psychoanalysis to disas-
sociate itself from the politics of the discourse of its time. Once again,
psychoanalysis must make itself heard.
Fortunately, most of the time, psychoanalysts today are so con-
formist that the more we hear them, the more we suspect that analytic
218 L A CA N — T H E U N C O N S C I O U S R E I N V E N T E D

subversion must be taking place somewhere else! Perhaps with those

who still dare to attempt the adventure of an analysis, even if they can-
not know in advance where it will lead them.

Notes
1. See the three “lines of development” that Anna Freud distinguished,
that of the ego, that of object relations, and that of the drives.
2. I use this expression in reference to the “formations of the unconscious”
introduced by Lacan, to indicate that the symptom is also jouissance.
3. Hence Lacan’s appeal to topology and set theory.
REFERENCES

Claudel, P. (1967). Partage de midi. Paris: Gallimard, Èditions de La Pléiade.

Freud, S. (1920g). Beyond the Pleasure Principle. S. E., 18 (pp. 3–64). London:
Hogarth.
Freud, S. (1926d). Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety. S. E., 20 (pp. 77–175).
London: Hogarth.
Kernberg, O. (1995). Love Relations: Normality and Pathology. New Haven:
Yale University Press.
Lacan, J. (1968b). La psychanalyse. Raison d’un échec. Scilicet, 1. Paris:
Éditions du Seuil.
Lacan, J. (1970a). Discours à l’École freudienne de Paris. Scilicet, 2/3, Paris:
Éditions du Seuil. (Also in: Autres Écrits. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2001.)
Lacan, J. (1970b). Radiophonie. Scilicet, 2/3, Paris: Éditions du Seuil. (Also
in: Autres Écrits. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2001.)
Lacan, J. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, The Knowledge of the Psychoana-
lyst 1971–1972. (Trans. C. Gallagher from unedited French manuscripts,
unpublished manuscript).
Lacan, J. (1973). L’étourdit. Scilicet, 4, Paris: Éditions du Seuil. (Also in:
Autres écrits. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2001.)
Lacan, J. (1974–1975). RSI (Unpublished manuscript).
Lacan, J. (1975a). La troisième: Intervention au congress de Rome, Lettres de
l’École freudienne, 16: 177–203.

219
220 REFERENCES

Lacan, J. (1975b). Joyce le symptôme 1. In: J. Aubert (Ed.), Joyce avec Lacan.
Paris: Navarin, 1987.
Lacan, J. (1975c). Introduction à l’édition allemande d’un premier volume
des Écrits. Scilicet, 5, Paris: Éditions du Seuil. (Also in: Autres Écrits. Paris:
Éditions du Seuil, 2001.)
Lacan, J. (1975d). … ou Pire. Compte rendu du Séminaire 1971–1972.
Scilicet, 5, Paris: Éditions du Seuil. (Also in: Autres Écrits. Paris : Éditions
du Seuil.)
Lacan, J. (1979). Joyce le symptôme 11. In: Joyce avec Lacan. Paris: Navarin,
1987.
Lacan, J. (1981a [1977]). Preface to the English-language edition. In: The
Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan,
Book XI. New York: W. W. Norton.
Lacan, J. (1981b). The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Trans.
A. Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton.
Lacan, J. (1984a). Compte rendu du Séminaire 1966–1967: La logique du
fantasme. Ornicar? 29. Paris: Navarin. (Also in: Autres Écrits. Paris,
Éditions du Seuil, 2001.)
Lacan, J. (1984b). Compte rendu du Séminaire 1967–1968: L’acte analytique.
Ornicar? 29. Paris: Navarin. (Also in: Autres Écrits. Paris, Éditions du
Seuil, 2001.)
Lacan, J. (1987). Joyce avec Lacan. Paris: Navarin.
Lacan, J. (1989). Geneva lecture on the symptom. Analysis, 1: 7–26.
Lacan, J. (1990a [1964]). Founding act. In: Television: A Challenge to the
Psychoanalytic Establishment. Trans. D. Hollier, R. Krauss, A. Michelson.
New York: W. W. Norton.
Lacan, J. (1990b). Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment
[1973]. Trans. D. Hollier, R. Krauss, A. Michelson. New York: W. W.
Norton.
Lacan, J. (1990c [1969]). Notes on the child. Analysis, 2: 7–8.
Lacan, J. (1992). The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960, The Seminar of Jacques
Lacan, Book VII. Trans. D. Porter. London: Tavistock/Routledge.
Lacan, J. (1995). Proposition of 9 October 1967 on the psychoanalyst of the
school. Trans. R. Grigg. Analysis, 6: 1–13.
Lacan, J. (1998). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, The
Limits of Love and Knowledge, Book XX Encore 1972–1973. Trans. B. Fink.
New York: W. W. Norton.
Lacan, J. (2001a [1975]). Peut-être à Vincennes. In: Autres Écrits. Paris:
Éditions du Seuil.
Lacan, J. (2001b [1973]). Note italienne. In: Autres Écrits. Paris: Éditions du
Seuil.
 REFERENCES 221

Lacan, J. (2001c). Annexes. Autres Écrits. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.

Lacan, J. (2001d [1968]). La méprise du sujet supposé savoir. In: Autres
Écrits. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
Lacan, J. (2001e). Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre VIII, Le Transfert
1960–1961. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
Lacan, J. (2004 [1962–1963]). L’angoisse. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
Lacan, J. (2005). Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre XXIII, Le Sinthome
1975–1976. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
Lacan, J. (2006 [1946]). Presentation on psychical causality. In: Écrits: The First
Complete Edition in English. Trans. B. Fink. New York: W. W. Norton.
Lacan, J. (2006 [1948]). Aggressiveness in psychoanalysis. In: Écrits: The First
Complete Edition in English. Trans. B. Fink. New York: W. W. Norton.
Lacan, J. (2006 [1949]). The mirror stage as formative of the I function, as
revealed in the psychoanalytic experience. In: Écrits: The First Complete
Edition in English. Trans. B. Fink. New York: W. W. Norton.
Lacan, J. (2006 [1953]). The function and field of speech and language in
psychoanalysis. In: Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Trans.
B. Fink. New York: W. W. Norton.
Lacan, J. (2006 [1955]). The Freudian Thing, or the meaning of the return to
Freud in psychoanalysis. In: Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English.
Trans. B. Fink. New York: W. W. Norton.
Lacan, J. (2006 [1956a]). Seminar on “The Purloined Letter”. In: Écrits:
The First Complete Edition in English. Trans. B. Fink. New York: W. W.
Norton.
Lacan, J. (2006 [1956b]). The situation of psychoanalysis and the training of
psychoanalysts in 1956. In: Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English.
Trans. B. Fink. New York: W. W. Norton.
Lacan, J. (2006 [1957–1958]). On a question prior to any possible treatment
of psychosis. In: Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Trans. B. Fink.
New York: W. W. Norton.
Lacan, J. (2006 [1958]). The direction of the treatment and the principles of
its power. In: Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Trans. B. Fink.
New York: W. W. Norton.
Lacan, J. (2006 [1960a]). Remarks on Daniel Lagache’s presentation:
“Psychoanalysis and personality structure”. In: Écrits: The First Complete
Edition in English. Trans. B. Fink. New York: W. W. Norton.
Lacan, J. (2006 [1960b]). Subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire
in the Freudian unconscious. In: Écrits: The First Complete Edition in
English. Trans. B. Fink. New York: W. W. Norton.
Lacan, J. (2006 [1963]). Kant with Sade. In: Écrits: The First Complete Edition
in English. Trans. B. Fink. New York: W. W. Norton.
222 REFERENCES

Lacan, J. (2006 [1964a]). Position of the unconscious. In: Écrits: The First
Complete Edition in English. Trans. B. Fink. New York: W. W. Norton.
Lacan, J. (2006 [1964b]). On Freud’s “Trieb” and the psychoanalyst’s desire.
In: Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Trans. B. Fink. New York:
W. W. Norton.
Lacan, J. (2006 [1966]). Science and Truth. In: Écrits: The First Complete Edi-
tion in English. Trans. B. Fink. New York: W. W. Norton.
Lacan, J. (2006). Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre XVI, D’un Autre à l’autre
1968–1969. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
Le Brun, J. (2002). Le pur amour de Platon à Lacan. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
Lombardi, G. (2005). L’aventure mathématique. Liberté et rigueur psychotique
(Cantor, Gödel, Turing). Paris: Le Champ lacanien.
Milner, J. -C. (2006). Le juif de savoir. Paris: Grasset.
Needham, R. (Ed.) (1971). Rethinking Kinship and Marriage. London:
Tavistock Publications.
Soler, C. (1992). Otherness today. Colloquium of the EEP, Limits of Gender.
London, 22 March 1992.
Soler, C. (1994). Leçon clinique de la passe I. Comment finissent les analyses?
Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
Soler, C. (1998). The commandments of jouissance. Analysis, 8: 15–25.
Soler, C. (1999). Les deux amours. Journées des Forums du Champ lacanien
(FCL).
Soler, C. (2000 [1989]). Une par une. Retour à la passe, Publication des FCL,
2000.
Soler, C. (2000). Le discours capitaliste. Opening address of conference, la
découverte freudienne. Université de Mirail, Toulouse.
Soler, C. (2001). L’aventure littérraire, ou la psychose inspirée. Rousseau, Joyce,
Pessoa. Paris: Le Champ lacanien.
Soler, C. (2003–2004). La querelle des diagnostics. Documents du Champ
lacanien.
Soler, C. (2004). Les invariants de l’analyse finie. Hetérité, Revue de psychana-
lyse: La psychanalyse et ses interprétations II, IF-EPCL, 5: 113–121.
Soler, C. (2005). L’époque des traumatismes/The Era of Traumatism. Rome:
Biblink.
Soler, C. (2006). What Lacan Said about Women: A Psychoanalytic Study. Trans.
J. Holland. New York: Other Press.
Soler, C. (2007). Conférence à Rennes.
Soler, C. (2007a). L’hystérie, les hystériques. L’Évolution psychiatrique, 72.1:
43–53.
Soler, C. (2007b). Une pratique sans bavardage (Nov. 2003). Colloque
de la Fondation européenne de psychanalyse. In: A. Didier-Weill &
M. Safouan (Eds.), Travailler avec Lacan. Paris: Aubier.
 REFERENCES 223

Soler, C. (2008a). Lacan réévalué par Lacan. In: L’anthropologie structurale de

Lévi-Strauss et la psychanalyse. Paris: La Découverte.
Soler, C. (2008b). Le transfert, après. Mensuel, École de Psychanalyse des
Forums du Champ lacanien, France, 38: 46–54.
Soler, C. (2008c). Lalangue, traumatique. Revue des Collèges Cliniques du
Champ lacanien, 7: 195–205.
INDEX

“agency of the letter, The” 58 Borromean function 92

analysand, creation of term 5 Borromean knot, the 9, 57
analysand libido 71 Borromean symptom 98
analytic promise, the 168–170 “business of love, the” 191
anti-cognitivist 214
aporias 107–113 capitalism 192
first 108–110 capitalist discourse 209
identification with the symptom castration 20, 77, 82, 92–94, 96–97,
111 102–103, 105–106, 119,
second 111–113 121–122, 126, 133, 149–150,
solution by the symptom 110–111 164, 204
unconsciouses knotting 111 primary 121–122
assertion of life 93 without the father 144–147
atopia 189 Civilization and its Discontents 175
Claudel, P. 90, 154
Beyond the Pleasure Principle 163 cognitivism, other side of 214–215
“Boaz Asleep” 8 coitus interruptus 80
“Book of himself” 135 commandment, a 148
Borromean aleph, the 55–59 “commandments of jouissance, The”
is already made 58 14
lapsus of the knot 58 consequences of the RUCS 69

225
226 INDEX

Critique of Pure Reason 50 good society 176, 192

crossing the phantasy 101
curse on sex 166, 190 habitus 176
cynical remainder of analysis 190 hystoriole 135
hystorisation 70–71, 79–80
“death of the sign, the” 28 of the subject 44, 80–81
deemed perverse 217 transferential 46
delusion 22
depreciation 139 identification with the symptom 72
desert of analysis 42 immoral 194
destitution 95 impregnated 28
“direction of the treatment, The” inertia 112
62, 80, 93, 104, 212 Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety 144
Interpretation of Dreams, The 31
Ellman, Richard 137 Introduction to Spring Awakening 91
enclosed field 99 Introductory Lectures on Psycho-
Encore 46 Analysis 31
end pass, the 69–74
enjoyment of lalangue 168 Jakobson’s phonology 108
Ethics of Psychoanalysis, The 13, 65 Jelinek, Elfriede 34
events of the body 164 Jokes and their Relation to the
exiled, but not without luggage 137 Unconscious 31
jouissance 37, 98, 196
father and the real 143–151 apparatuses of 214
castration without the father 144 effect of 178
father as symptom, the 150–151 formations of 212
Kno(t)mination 154 implication of 175
without the family 158 non-relation of 170
Foucauldian illusion 129 question of 195
Foucault, Michel 4, 178 regulations of 175
Four Fundamental Concepts of sublimations of 177
Psychoanalysis, The 14, 40, thoughts of 175
96 use of 28
Freud, Anna 200, 212 jouissances, status of, the 117–129
Freud, S. 6–9, 12–13, 18, 21, 30–31, 36, choice of 129
38, 40, 94–95, 101–102, 105, complement for 120
110, 118–120, 138, 144–149, conception of jouissance 127
163–165, 191, 195–196 Freud’s statement 117–120
Freud masked 196–197 phallic jouissance 127
Freudian psychoanalysis 213 relation as symptom, the
friendship 46–47, 72, 186 120–125
function as real 56 Joyce’s sinthome 136
 INDEX 227

Joyce the symptom 143, 146 an act without reward 208–210

Juanesque, Don 101 forecasts for future
psychoanalysis 200
Kernberg, O. 185 institution reinvented, the
Klein, Melanie 200 203–208
lay down its arms 200
Lacan, J. xv, 4–6, 8–9, 12–13, 18, precariousness of institutions
74–90, 92 201–203
Lacan psychoanalysis 213 masculine clinic 104
Lacanian hypothesis 21 mentality 57
Lacanian short session 75 Milner, J. -C. 12–13
Lacan’s formulas 33 monopolisation of speech, processes
Lacan’s trajectory 49 of 193
lalangue, traumatic 25–38 moral 194
analphabetic symptom, the 35–38 motérialité 32–33, 42, 50–53, 57, 63,
A-structural 26 112, 132
cemetery 27 mythand 5
effects of, The 28–29
holophrastic unconscious, the narcynical success 191
32–34 narcynisism 98
proof by affect 29–30 Needham, R. 158
proof by treatment of the no dialogue 170
symptom 29–31 non-epistemic variable, the 76
wild subjective 30 non-prescriptive therapeutics
lallation 25, 32, 167 215–218
lapsus 29, 35–37, 40, 43–45, 49,
51–54, 58, 69–70, 76, 82, 131, object relations 100, 125, 218
207–208 Object Relations (seminar) 146
Le Brun, J. 209 obsession 175
Le Monde des livres 34 obsessional disorder 180
Le transfert 147 Other Side of Psychoanalysis, The 22, 66
liquidation 39
Logic of Sense 91 parlêtre 61
Lombardi, G. 14 dysorthography, calculated 63–65
love more worthy 170–171 inventoried speech 62
love on trial 164 mystery of the speaking body,
lucubration 22, 54, 79 the 65
of knowledge 20, 64 pathematic subject 96
luggage 138 phallic limit 105
plague 189
Mahler, Margaret 179 psychoanalysis and capitalism
malaise in psychoanalysis 199–210 89–197, 171
228 INDEX

derision of speech, the 193–196 sinthome 9, 37, 59, 88, 98, 132,
eye opening 189–193 134–136, 143, 153, 156–157,
Freud masked 196–197 161–162
no sexual relation 190 Soler, C. 3, 14, 71, 77, 79, 86, 92,
processes of monopolisation of 105, 123, 125, 135, 143, 181,
speech 193 191–192
psychoanalytic associations 200 space 51
Psychopathology of Everyday Life 31 of the subject 119, 129
Psychoses, The 7 spoken knowledge 55
pure love 209 subjective conversion, a 6
“Purloined Letter, The” 6 subject of the unconscious 12
surplus knowledge 13
“Radiophonie” 18, 43, 50, 77 symptom, dissidence of the 175–187
rambling speech 75 body outside discourse 179–180
Rat Man 90, 99, 112, 133, 157 civilised body, the 176–179
realisation of the desire 149 emergency discourse 183–187
real subject 11, 14–15, 63, 96 symptom as objector, the 180–183
real unconscious, symptom of the the subject has a body 177
autistic or socializing 132 symptom of sexual jouissance 178
Finnegan’s wake 136
odd relation 136 terminable analysis 85–98
psychotic unconscious 133–134 assertion of life 93
recognition 166 destitution 94–95
reduced model of the pass to the end identity 92–94
RUCS 43 ethics, never individualistic 96–98
“Report on ‘The Analytic Act’” 21 identification with the symptom
return in the real 194 95–96
return of the repressed 7 names of identity 85–92
royal road to RUCS, the 49–54 separation identity 85
failures that do not have equal Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
value 52–54 119, 190
motérialité of the unconscious time that isn’t logical, the 75–78
50–53 didactic affects 78
RSI 143 satisfaction at the end, The 81–83
session adjusted to the real
satisfaction 71 unconscious 79–81
Seminar XI 71, 104 the horror of knowing 76, 78
sexual substitute 9 the non-epistemic variable 76–78
sexuation 126 towards the real 17–23
shared delusion 76 functions as real 18–21
Sicut palea 80 navel, the 21–22
 INDEX 229

two unconsciouses, the 22–23 war neuroses 180

trajectory 3–15 water of language 31
mark of 5 Witz 53
real subjects 11–14 graph of 51
re-evaluations 9–11 Idem for the 54
structuralist 5–6
structuralist moment, the 6–8 Zweig, Stefan 192
transferential hystorisation 46
trauma 34–35