EDITORIAL

Mercedes Iglesias

PAPERS N 4
List of members of
the Action Committee
of the School One
Paola Bolgiani
Gustavo Dessal
Mercedes Iglesias
Ram Mandil
Laure Naveau
(Coordinator)

Silvia Salman
Florencia Fernandez
Coria Shanahan

Responsible for the

edition:
Marta Davidovich

The collection of works that you will

find below manages to transmit a
diversity of perspectives around the
theme that concerns us for this
Congress. We have Patricia Bosquin
Caroz who performs a thorough
analysis of the way in which Lacan
located the couple in the three registers
of imaginary, symbolic and real. The
late teaching of Lacan shows the mode
in which the sinthome replace the
sexual non-relation. This idea has
managed to makes itself visible in
contemporary relationships. The mode
in which a couple can be constituted as
a means of enjoyment is illustrated by
way of two literary examples. In this
way it is emphasized that although the
body of the speaker being is disordered
by the signifier, there is no jouissance of
the body except through the signifier.
This idea is developed by Luiz
Fernndez Carrijo da Cunha, who
quite rightly notes that the term disorder
can be read as a deviation. It is the
incidence of language that produces a
deviation and that gives man his
irrevocable condition of being lacking,
bearer of a body that enjoys in silence.
Lacan aims by means of logic and the
primacy of the symbolic at a real that
would guarantee an order; however in
the end what we have is an ectopic real,
separated from any cipherable value.
However, this stresses something
crucial: even it is a real without law,
Lacan does not desist from the path of
demonstration and transmission, the
vanishing point is not of the order of the
ineffable.

We could not do without the reference

to love under the title of 'A real a love in
the 21st century ' by Celine Menghi
who shows the way in which these two
concepts are articulated nowadays. She
notes the way in which women were
liberated in the 20th century, which
opened the way to the chapter of the
desire for a liberated sexuality, while
today many women are introduced to
the life of sex without passing through
the antechamber of desire but directly to
enjoyment. Through two films and a
case study she shows the mode in which
is opened a series of fundamental
questions about sexual difference,
being, the body and desire. It is by way
of feminine jouissance that it is possible
touch a singular real, with which each
one plays their part and, perhaps in this
way it can be a path for love: a love that
takes into account a real.
Carlos Rossi analyzes the way in which
there was a wish to install a harmony
between the symbolic and the natural at
the epistemic level. It is as if the
symbolic would be able to name the
natural and to get close to it in this
naming. This was how Galileos
postulate that nature is written in
mathematical language was received.
For Freud, things were not so clear.
Rossi makes clear that while Freud,
Nietzsche and Einstein had exploded
the idea of such a harmony,
structuralism gave new hope of an
alliance between the symbolic and the
real. Lacan tries to follow this way a
time but from the beginning his
relationship with structuralism was
complex and it is the formulation of the
concept of jouissance that will produce
the rupture with this dream. The
structuralist antivitalism collides with
the complex relationship between life,
the body and enjoyment.

And
finally
Mercedes
Iglesias
questions the paradox supposed on the
one hand by the intuitive evidence that
'there is a great disorder in the real' in its
confrontation with the idea that the real
has always been a disorder. If the real is
without law then what is it in
contemporary life that produces
consternation in us? She analyzes the
different modes in which Lacan
approached the concept of the real in his
teaching in order to mark that, beyond
the deregulation that the real supposes,
Lacan points to an 'overflowing' of the
real that goes beyond the singularity of
the contingency of the jouissance of
each one because science is inscribing
unprecedented modes for determining
the real.

Translated by Renata Cuchiarelli

The Real of the Couple

Patricia Bosquin-Caroz
Encore, Lacan states that the
symptomatic liaison between a man and
a woman makes up for [supple] the
sexual non-rapport. He relates the love
encounter to an encounter, in the
partner, of symptoms and affects, of
everything that marks in each of us the
trace of of his exile from the sexual
relationship.1 The subjects partner is
thus not the sexual other. In The
Partner
Symptom,
Jacques-Alain
Miller underlines that, with this, Lacan
introduces us to a new doctrine of love
that passes by way of the manner in
which each person enjoys their own
unconscious, the words that have
In

Lacan, J. Seminar XX, Encore, trans. Bruce Fink

(London: Norton, 1998) p. 145

marked them, and their own way of

coming to terms with the sexual nonrapport. The relation to the other is
always mediated and necessarily passes
by way of a symptom. In the clinic, one
thus always has to consider the question
of the partner that the subject is dealing
with. I will explore this with two
literary examples.
From 1998 onwards, Jacques-Alain
Miller has invited us to rethink and to
formalise this fundamental pair, the
amorous couple, in a new way.
Conceived until then, with Lacan, on
the basis of desire or love, the subject of
the want-of-being was complemented
by the loved object, as a substitute for
the lost object. Roland Barthes
Fragments of a Lovers Discourse
perfectly illustrates this conception of
the couple.
The
Partner
Symptom,
an
unprecedented punctuation into Lacans
teaching that takes account of the
question of the jouissance that links a
couple, opens new perspectives and
allows us to get to grips with the
contemporary forms of the couple on
the basis of the advances made in the
last period of Lacans teaching.
On the basis of a theory of couples,
JAM develops a theory of the partner
that bases itself on a constant in Lacans
conceptualisation. A form is repeated:
doubling or division. This two-part
articulation stretches from the Mirror
Stage to the Graph of Desire and the
Position of the Unconscious, which
exposes a double causation of the
subject. On this basis, he distinguishes
three forms of the couple that mark
Lacans teaching: the imaginary couple,
the symbolic couple and the couple of
desire, to which he adds the libidinal
couple.

The imaginary couple a-a refers to

the mirror stage. It is an articulation that
finds its basis in the image of the other
through which the ego is formed. It
introduces the alterity that founds
identity with oneself. Freud discovered
the narcissistic part that all love consists
of. But the imaginary constitutes a
perceptible impasse in loves clinic of
ravage when the couple withdraw into
their narcissistic unity. The film, Le
Chat by Pierre Granier-Deferre
beautifully illustrates this. The film
chronicles the hateful, dead-end
relationship of a retired couple,
admirably played by Jean Gabin and
Simone Signoret, whose equilibrium is
thrown out by the introduction of a third
element, the cat.
For the early Lacan, only the reference
to the symbolic Other that the subject is
linked to makes it possible to exit the
imaginary impasse. As JAM explains,
for the imaginary couple, the central
concept is identification; for the
symbolic couple, it is the central
concept
is
recognition,
which
culminates in the speech of love. The
you are my wife that recognises the
other is foundational in the Seminar on
The Psychoses.2 In these two couples as
in the next, the ego and the subject go to
look on the side of the image of the
other or the speech of the Other for
something that completes them. The ego
and the subject being both affected by
lack.
The couple of desire on which the
imaginary and symbolic couples
converge, gives the formula of the
fantasy, $<>a. This formula allows the
subject to fill in the fault by linking an
element of the symbolic couple, the

Lacan, J. The Psychoses, trans. Russell Grigg,

(London: Routledge, 1993), p. 37. Translation
modified.

barred subject, with an element of the

imaginary couple, the little a.

These three modalities of the couple

will lead Lacan to construct the couple
of jouissance, the libidinal couple. The
imaginary little a of the fantasy will
shift over to the side of the real. It is no
longer the signifier of lack nor the
phantasmatic object of desire that the
subject goes in search of in the Other,
but something of his jouissance, the lost
part of the living being.

Two heteroclite registers marry here:

the workings of the signifier and
jouissance, or the libidinal body, which
Lacan tries to bring together in The
Position of the Unconscious. JAM
points out the sleight of hand Lacan
makes in order to account for jouissance
solely on the basis of the workings of
the signifier: he transforms the empty
subject of the signifier into a sexed
being that submits to a loss of life by
being mortal. The subject will then go
looking for more life, a surplus
enjoyment [plus de jouir] on the side of
the objects that make up for the loss of
life suffered by his being in language.
The libidinal couple takes up the writing
of the fantasy once more, but this time
the object is given a real value. The
subject in analysis will have to discover
the privileged drive object that he has to
deal with beyond the love partner. The
clinic of the pass is particularly
enlightening in this respect.
Miller goes on to indicate that, despite
this libidinal couple, $<>a (plus de
jouir), it is not possible to construct the
partner-symptom if the register of the
Other is separated from the register of
jouissance. Only the advances of the
Seminar, Encore, and its new
conceptualisation of the signifier make
4

this possible. In this unprecedented

elaboration, there is no longer any
opposition between the signifierness
[signifiance] and the jouissance of the
body, but a connection between
signifierness and jouissance, the body of
the speaking-being is fundamentally
disturbed by the signifier. Jouissance
can be approached in terms of the
jouissance of the body, or in terms of
the jouissance of language, but we must
not forget that these are only two sides
of jouissance as such. There would be
no jouissance of the body without the
signifier and there would be no
jouissance of the signifier without the
being of signifierness being rooted in
the jouissance of the body. The
jouissance of the body and the
jouissance of the signifier are
connected; they are two aspects of the
same thing. There is no speaking being
of jouissance before the signifier.3

This conception of the signifier

connected to the jouissance of the body
(distinct from the first Lacanian
conception of the signifier that mortifies
jouissance) leads Lacan to substitute the
speaking being for the subject. The
being who speaks and is spoken will be
substituted for the lack in being that is
the condition of the divided subject. It
implies a body marked by the signifier
that has struck it, as JAM argues in his
latest course. If the status of the
signifier changes, the status of the Other
changes too. The pair formed by the
speaking being and the partner
symptom will come to substitute itself
for the pair formed by the subject and
the Other. If the speaking being is
attached to a sexuated body, the person
he is linked with must have one too. As

Miller Jacques-Alain, Orientation lacanienne,

Le partenaire-symptme, final lesson.

JAM put it, one doesnt sleep with the

big Other as locus of the symbolic.
The notion of the partner-symptom
implies a coupling, not between the
speaking being and another speaking
being, but between the speaking being
and its mode of enjoyment.
While the subject and the Other form a
couple in a linguistic, signifying
relation, two speaking bodies cannot
form a couple without a symptom as a
means of linking them. The effect of the
sexual non-rapport makes the symptom
necessary. The symptom creates the
couple, says JAM. Between a man and
a woman, there is a symptom. The
relation of the couple at a sexual level
supposes that the Other becomes the
speaking-beings symptom, the means
of his jouissance. In Les tout-seuls,
JAM radicalises this theses by
extracting the symptom from the Other
of sense and truth in order to make an
event of the body, bringing the
symptom back to the autistic root of a
body that does not stop enjoying the
signifier-all-alone which struck him.
From this perspective, the other is only
the means, the instrument of my always
auto-erotic jouissance. For each sex, the
partner-symptom is a means of
jouissance.
In Encore, Lacan distinguishes between
the male side and female side. On the
mans side, the partner-symptom is
localised in the little a and on the
womans side, it concerns the Other, in
so far as he speaks. The womans
partner has an unlimited character that
takes the form of an absolute, infinite,
unbounded demand for love. On the
basis of Les tout-seuls, one could
propose that the formula of the fantasy
forms the masculine matrix of the
couple, which is no longer the privilege
of the masculine sex, while the striking
of the body by the signifier-all-alone
5

refers to the feminine logic in so far as

it escapes the normative universal of
phallic logic.
In this respect, we can pick out in two
novels two ways of forming a couple
that their authors attribute to the
feminine position of their characters.
In Belle du Seigneur by Albert Cohen,4
Ariane wears herself out trying to keep
intact the image of a self-sufficient
couple
founded
exclusively
on
narcissistic love and more precisely on
maintaining the phallic image at all
costs, as much for the man as for the
woman. With this in view, the demand
for reciprocal and total love suffers no
alteration in time. The image of the
couple must remain intact, the flawless
Beauty and the absolute Seigneur
[Lord]. Time stands still and the image
does not fade. Each one being satisfied
by the perfect image of the other that
reflects their own, while devoting
themselves to ensuring the continuing
existence of the idea of the couple
sketched out in Aristophanes myth. In
this way, Ariane and Solal fail to make
a symptom exist that could create a link
between them and make up for the
sexual non-rapport. Beauty is paired
with the immortal image of the
Seigneur, but dreams of being loved for
more than just her beauty and her
ephemeral charms. With reference to
Seminar VI, we could say that Solal
does not take the risk of castration. He
does not give way on the magnificence
of his phallic image that is reflected
back at him in the mirror of Ariane. As
for Ariane, she devotes herself to the
task of continuing to be the Beauty,
attempting to avert and avoid the sexual
non-rapport by staging, daily, the
ineffable instant of seeing that occurred
on the day of their first amorous
4

[T.N. An English film adaptation of this book

was released in June 2013]

encounter. And so, this couple is

inevitably destined to fail, as the novel
shows. In August 2013 edition of Elle
magazine, one can find all sorts of
advice about how to sustain a masculine
desire founded on the fetishisation of
the object. For example: Dont share a
bath with your partner. In Belle du
Seigneur, the protagonists are divided in
this respect: to each their own. In a
certain way, they anticipate this new
form of conjugal hygiene that blossoms
in womens magazines. Arianes baths
are a private affair and the lengths she
goes to to prepare herself for love make
the aesthetic measures taken by women
today pale by comparison. And we
know how the story ends.
Another portrait of a woman and the
couple is provided by David
Grossmans book, To the End of the
Land [Une femme fuyant lannoce].
Unlike Belle de Seigneur, which strives
to satisfy the masculine fantasy until it
is lost, Ora, while speaking, will make
the symptom exist that will link the
lovers forever: love of a child with as its
backdrop the news of a death. Death,
Israel and the war are so many names
for the impossibility around which the
novel turns. The authors style gives a
form to what is impossible to say.
Words search out, push against, press
and trace a furrow around a hole as if to
discern it better. Around this hole, Ora,
the novels essentially feminine figure,
will thus make love, life, maternity,
femininity and paternity exist. By
fleeing the news she dreads, her
unbearable wait, and by speaking to a
man, an ex-lover and friend, she tries to
ward off the presentiment of death.
With her act, she objects to the order of
the world she belongs to. And thanks to
the singular way with her language
[langue], she tries to keep alive her son
who has gone off to war. In speaking to
her lover, the childs father, she pulls
6

him from the malady of the death that

has inhabited him for so long. Her time
has done its work. The image of the
body is damaged. War injuries have
marked each of them forever. War has
ravaged their souls. It wreaks havoc
upon families and shatters the conjugal
ideal. However, in this novel, it is a
woman, Ora, that David Grossman
makes speak and, through her
intervention, makes life rise up out of
the death drive. He once told le Monde
that only a woman could act in such a
way. Women are more sceptical than
men in relation to power and beliefs.
Just think of Genesis in which God
approaches Abraham and says to him:
Take your only son, Isaac, lead him to
Mount Moriah and then sacrifice him!
God was wise to go to see Abraham and
not Sarah. Sarah would have sent him
packing. But Abraham took his eldest
son and would have executed him
without hesitation.
Through the intervention of his
characters, David Grossmanns writing
touches that Other dimension that Lacan
writes S of barred A. Ora and Avram
find in the sexual non-rapport the means
with which to found a link around the
impossible to say of femininity and
paternity. Throughout the novel, the
words that are spoken go to make the
language [langue] of the symptom exist
which links the couple together. Each is
affected by the language [langue] of the
Other.
Oras
strikes
Avrams
unconscious who, in return, will make
her exist as woman beyond the mother
that she is and the beauty that she was.
On her side, Ora makes Avram into the
father of a child who he has never seen
or recognised and makes him pass
through his mortifying impotence. The
link by means of the symptom has taken
place. The conversation is without end.
She speaks of the child, first very softly.
He lets her do so and he will never

silence her again. Each throws off their

phallic yoke. The symptom, Ofer, is
constituted and will link the couple
forever beyond the real of death. From
then on, they only have to try to turn
around the impossible to say, which will
cement their couple. Love here touches
the register of the real. The bodies can
encounter each other again and join
together.
At the end of an analysis, something of
this order can be attained in a singular
way for each person. But whether this
person is a man or a woman, each one
will have to go beyond the Oedipus,
beyond the phallus and its inability to
say, in order to attempt to make
something of the exile of the sexual
non-rapport.

there has been an event, a body-event,

after which natural jouissance, which
can be imagined as the natural
jouissance of the living body, is
troubled and deviated. This jouissance
is not primary, but it is primary with
regard to the meaning the subject gives
it, and gives it through his symptom in
as much as it can be interpreted5. The
same idea reappeared in the following
year, however, more concisely and
directly linked to the notion of the real
without law at the closing of the VIIIth
WAP Congress in Buenos Aires, when
Miller announced the theme of the next
Congress: ...this encounter of lalangue
and the body does not respond to any
prior law, it is contingent and always
appears perverse this encounter and
its consequences because this
encounter is translated by a deviation of
jouissance with respect to that which
jouissance ought to be, which remains
in force as a dream.6

Translated by Philip Dravers

The real in the flight of

sense... Contingency as
fissure

Luiz Fernando Carrijo da

Cunha

I would highlight from these two

references the term deviation to put it
in a series with the term disorder that
also appears in the text The real in the
21st century7. Although between
inverted commas, a prior, natural
jouissance is supposed proper to the
living-being, ingrained in the body as
for any other form of life. The incidence
of lalangue, promoting a deviation
and a disorder, is what gives man his
5

J.-A. Miller reminds us that the

encounter of the body with language
denaturalises it. It is appropriate to
return to this passage as one of the
guiding bastions of our reflection about
the real in the XXIst Century. It is
precisely this impact of the signifier that
makes the symptom an event, and not
simply a phenomenon. The jouissance of
the symptom vouches for the fact that
7

Miller, J.-A., Reading a Symptom posted by

AMP Blog in August 1, 2011. Translated
(Portuguese) by Maria Cristina Maia Fernandes
with the following note that we consider
important to preserve: Jacques Alain Miller
presented, at the end of the NLS Congress held
in London 2-3 April 2011, the theme of the next
Congress to be held in Tel-Aviv in June 2012.
Text established by Dominique Holvoet, not
revised by the author.
T.N English translation published online in
www.lacan.com
6
Miller, J.-A., The Real in the 21st Century, in
Hurly-Burly 9, May 2013, p 202.
7
Ibid.

irrevocable condition as a speaking

being and as bearer of a body that
enjoys in silence. The signifying order
comes later as an attempt to regulate
what remains of this jouissance,
producing what is interpretable in the
symptom.
The interpretation of the symptom, its
effect of truth upon the subject, took
Freud as far as it could. Freud at the end
is faced with a residue that is resistant to
the powers of speech, the symptomatic
residues. Similarly, Lacan followed
Freud in the same path, searching for a
term that could contain these
symptomatic residues. Miller points out
that, for Lacan, the various conceptions
of the real throughout his teaching were
an attempt to establish it, initially, from
the primacy of the symbolic and
through logic, and finally placing it in
the category of the real without law.
At the end of his teaching the real is no
longer a guarantor of the symbolic
order, fixed and calculable that always
returns to the same place.
On the contrary, it is an ectopic real,
radically detached from any value
cipherable by language, including
mathematical language. We would say
that the category of the impossible was
taken to its extreme, separated from
everything that might be inscribed as
translation. Lacan goes to the limit of
the thinkable, dispensing even the
object a as latent referent, reducing
it to a semblant like others. This real
without law is at the root of everything
that can be ordered in the existence of
the subject, without however, being
correspondent to this ordering, making
of the real an ex-sistence
In a fairly curious way Miller goes back
to the Seminar on the Purloined

Letter8 to demonstrate, in an inverse

way, the presence of the real without
law linked to pure contingency. Miller
states that ...with the reservation that
this is an illustration within the
symbolic, we see in which aspect the
real, at the first level, is lawless.
Between the first and second toss (Miller refers here to the launch of the
coins), there is no connection, there is
no weave. You have no regularity to
underline between both (- meaning
between one throw and another). So,
here, you already have the implication
of the real as lawless, and what is fixed
and articulated as determinations and
as law will depend on the constructions
that you put on the real without law...
what maybe, after, becomes revered to
the title of law, is no more than what
you yourselves had obtained through
your elucubrations...9*. So if there is
no connection or link between the
tosses, the result will depend on pure
contingency. All construction and/or
calculation will a posteriori be taken
in the imaginary and symbolic registers;
they will not be able to apprehend what
it is in the first level. This thesis goes
against that which Lacan highlighted in
his Introduction to the German edition
of the first volume of crits where at
the end, he poses the question: -...how
can we not consider that contingency,
or that which ceases to not write itself,
is that by which impossibility, or that
which does not cease to not write itself,
is demonstrated. And a real is thereby
attested to, which, for not being better
founded, is transmissible by the flight to

Lacan, J., The Seminar on the Purloined

Letter, in Ecrits, pp 13-67
9
Miller, J.-A.,El lugar y el lazo Los cursos
psicoanaliticos de Jacques-Alain Miller Cap.
VIII, La ultima enseanza de Lacan, Ed.
Paids. Buenos Aires, 2013, p 148.
*Translated into Portuguese for use in this
article.[AN]

which all discourse responds.10 We

notice that even though the real is
without law, Lacan does not give up the
route of demonstration. Therefore, for
Lacan, this elusive, fleeting, point is not
of the order of the ineffable, on the
contrary, it is liable to demonstration
and transmission.11
In this sense, we can ask: How to reach
the real if the laws of language impose
themselves on the subject only at the
price of a construction?
To address this question, I return to
PAPERS N1, to Ram Mandils text Of
a desire to touch the real12. In this
paper he highlights four paths, being the
Sinthome that which enables a
difference to emerge in relation to the
real without law. The other modalities
there underlined, nature, divine body
and science, are each in their own
way, related to the assumption of an
existence of knowledge in the real. So,
if Lacan operated a sliding in the
conceptualization of the real to the
extreme of disconnecting the real from
law and cause, then aiming at the
sinthome becomes the index of the
analytic discourse. This enables
psychoanalysis to go on, thereby
avoiding becoming a symptom destined
to be forgotten, as Lacan points out in

10

Lacan, J., Introduo edio alem de um

primeiro volume dos Escritos, in Outros
Escritos, Jorge zahar ed. Rio de Janeiro, 2003,
p 556.
11
On this need for demonstration and
transmission of the real without law by Lacan, I
refer the reader to Jacques-Alain Millers text
Um real para a psicanlise [A real for
psychoanalysis, published in Opo Lacaniana
n 32, p 15. This text refers to Millers
intervention as though an improvised comment
on the occasion of Seminrio das sete sesses
[The Seven Sessions Seminar]. [AN]
12
Mandil, R., Of a desire to touch the Real, in
PAPERS of the School One, Issue n1.

The Third13. The path of the

Sinthome implies that all meaning is
entwined to the symbolic and the
imaginary, all meaning escapes the
connection with the real as the
Danaides barrel, where the hole
localizes exactly the impact of language
over the body. It is constituted by the
contingency of the encounter and the
deviation of jouissance. Therefore, the
flight of meaning itself produces the
hole. Thus, the operability of
interpretation
remains
necessarily
connected to the contingency of the
encounter able to reduce the symbolic to
the hole, and not to return to the
proliferation of meaning.
Contingency inaugurates the human as
such, the result of a deviation, marked
by the structural not-all of language.
Thus, in a path inverse to the production
of sense by the articulation of the
signifying chain wherein meaning
escapes, the analyst, himself is the
product of the contingency of the
encounter, and can position himself in
the structure from this reference. In
other words, that to which the subject is
brought to testify in his own analysis is
verified as the inscription of a
disorder related to the body and can be
read as the most radical singularity,
founded from the circling of a hole.
This hole being structural, while
introducing an inexorable trauma, offers
the subject the possibility of having a
body. It is with this body that the
subject can make something of
him[self] pass into the world, beyond
the fictions of being.

Translated by Micheli Romo

13

Lacan, J., A Terceira, in Opo Lacaniana,

Revista Brasileira Internacional de Psicanlise,
n 62, December 2011. (Lacan, J., La troisime.
Lettres de lEFP, Paris, n. 16, p. 178-203, November
1975). Unpublished.

One real, one love, in the

21st Century

Celine Menghi
In his The Real in the 21st Century,
Jacques-Alain Miller puts forward the
hypothesis that the transformation in the
Symbolic order (the discourse of
capitalism and that of science having
overturned and re-structured the world)
creates a disorder in the Real which has
consequences for the subject1. The Real
is lawless, Lacan tells us in his latest
teachings, and there is a hole in
knowledge, in the Real, which concerns
sexuality.
If the women of the sexual revolution of
the 20th Century, freed from the legacies
of the puritanism of the previous
century (strongly marked by the Father)
unfolded the page of desire towards a
freed sexuality within the novel of
femininity, today, after the wall of sex
has fallen, many young women enter
their sexual lives directly by the door of
jouissance, thus bypassing the anteroom
of desire.
The same way the fall of the Berlin Wall
had not only political but also economic
effects on society, serving even more
the capitalistic rush, so the fall of the
J.-A. Miller, The real in the 21st Century,
Presentation of the Theme of the IX
Congress of the World Association of
psychoanalysis, Buenos Aires 27th of April
2012, in Hurly-Burly, Issue 9, May 2013, p
202.
2
J. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The
Other Side of Psychoanalysis , Book XVII ,
W. W. Norton & Company, London, 2007, p
207.
3
J. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The
Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique
of Psychoanalysis, Book II, W. W. Norton &
Company, London, 1991, p 222.

Sex Wall has produced effects on the

(psychic) economy of the speaking
being. A downfall resulted from it: from
freedom, always carved in the gap of
desire situated by the Symbolic, to a
pseudo-freedom situated by the
Imaginary as a jouissance-filled
segregation within the disorder of the
Symbolic.
Lacan glimpsed signs of the above
scenario when, in his Seminar The
Other Side of Psychoanalysis, warned
his students, who were insulting him
while listening to his lectures, by saying
What you aspire to as revolutionaries
is a Master. You will get one.2
Today the Master is a dictator; it is a
Real without law that is less and less
touched by desire and even less by love.
On the one hand, there is nothing more
to be transgressed Does not Italy boast
a Master of the 'everything is permitted',
after all? (sex, politics and economy all
in a single blend), a Master to whom
Law and Constitution have no value to
the point of blackmailing an entire
Country; on the other hand, love turns
to asphyxiation, it cannot compensate
for anything anymore everything
stands by itself.
Everything is there, in a world of
things where the lack-of-being no
longer plays for the world of desire as
such3 inaugurated by Freud.

10

'Clayey, shapeless, bare, transparent,

vulnerable, useless, humiliated, used' is
a woman from a European Country. To
be a woman, she speaks very little of
love, but she speaks copiously and in
much detail about sex 'to have sex'.
Pleased by her performances with
partners who approach the limit, she
oscillates between satisfaction ('I like it',
even in absence of an orgasm, or 'I want
to do it and there is nothing wrong with
it'), and the nothing into which she

precipitates at times. It is precisely

within
this
oscillation
that,
paradoxically, she feels 'alive' 'I feel
like myself, I feel like I exist' and, at
the same time, 'sad'.
What strikes about her is the absence of
anxiety. She feels lonely in the
loneliness of a jouissance that is nearly
masturbatory specialised, 'mono' and
the contradictions in her speech are
unintelligible to her, while at times, with
a challenging and angry tone she
exclaims: 'Thats the way I am'.
...imaginer des choses et puis y aller...
pas savoir sur qui jallais tomber, tout
tait comme un jeu... je ne sentait
presque rien... says Isabelle from
Ozon's movie Belle et Jolie, which
reminds us of Buuel's Belle de jour,
but far beyond freedom. Mutatis
mutandis, the masculine side of the
matter is well represented by Steve
McQueen's movie Shame, where
Brandon threads pearls of promiscuous
sex like objects of 'surplus jouissance',
accumulated between luxuries and
slums in the capital of consumption:
New York.
Thanks to Jacques Lacan, we are able to
retrieve in Shame - and this title sounds
like a provocation to those who read
Lacan-, as well as in Belle et Jolie,
expressions of the Real that interrogates
psychoanalysis today, where what is at
stake is ontology as opposed to ontic,
the being (as opposed to 'that which is'),
which was at the core of Lacan's
theorization. What has happened, today,
to man and woman, to body and sex, to
being and love? What is the being in
relation to the unconscious? What has
all this become in an era where
enjoyment is imperative, where we are
demanded to be 'ourselves', to wellbeing (to be well) at all costs.
Jacques-Alain Miller, in his Being and
the One4, picks up on a difficult point
11

Lacan was trying to address since the

60's, when he was limiting the function
of the being to get a better handle on the
Real, steeped in the jouissance which
objects to Being.
It is at that moment, in the Preface to
the English Edition of Seminar 11, that
Lacan introduces a new status of the
unconscious which he will call the real
[unconscious], as I say - only if I am
believed5.
We can appreciate a development of this
new status in the Seminar The
Sinthome: the unconscious here
repudiates this imaginary conception
[] that sees the unconscious as
symbolic16,
in
favour
of
a
conceptualisation of the unconscious as
caught up in the body, in the drive, the
unconscious as traces of language on
the body the unconscious is the body,
claims Miller, because it takes into
account the jouissance which brings us
into play7
Lacan, once again, had foreseen signs of
the slope men and women were
precipitating in when, in Television, he
refers
to
the
boredom
and
moroseness [] in those young people
dedicated
to
relations
without
4

J.-A. Miller, The real in the 21st Century,

Presentation of the Theme of the IX
Congress of the World Association of
psychoanalysis, Buenos Aires 27th of April
2012, in Hurly-Burly, Issue 9, May 2013, p
202.
5
J. Lacan, Autres Ecrits, Ed. Seuil, 2001.
Unpublished.
6
J.-A. Miller, L'orientamento lacaniano, in La
Psicoanalisi, N 43-44, p 205.
7
J.Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: On
Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and
Knowledge (Encore). Book XX, W. W.
Norton and Co., London, 1999, p 60 [the
jouissance with which we began]
8
J. J. Lacan, Television. A challenge to the
Psychoanalytic Establishment, W. W. Norton
& Co., London, 1990, p 30.
9
J. Lacan, Ecrits. The First Complete English
Edition, W. W. Norton and Co., London,
2006, p 851.

repression, his critique not sparing

analysts, of whom he says they are blind
to the sexual impasse [that] exudes the
fictions that rationalize the impossible
within which it originates.8
In the case of the young woman whom I
saw, having sex [fare sesso] is
something that touches the soul, lending
consistency to the Being, it stitches up
the fault of the subjective division in a
repetition of jouissance, of which all
parts of the body are the support.
The sexual colour of libido (in Freud),
claims Lacan, is the color of
emptiness: suspended in the light of a
gap.9 It is from that gap that desire is
confronted with an impossibility, a
limit. For my young client there is no
gap and the colour with Lacan we can
call it the colour of jouissance is
instead opaque and it protects her from
her not knowing about sex.
Our clinic shows us every day how
difficult it is to carve out an oasis for
desire, civilised and civilising desire,
and how today's everything is possible
injunction is not the same that was
wished for by Lacan in the 50's, thanks
to the supremacy of the Symbolic, but it
is rather linked to the supremacy of the
inert10.
If we were once used to the particularity
of love, which for a woman consists in
making herself be loved and desired
(for what she is not11, Lacan claims),
particularity which, as noted by Freud,
has its roots in the fear of losing love as the equivalent of castration anxiety in
men-, and where feminine jouissance is
at play as making the difference, today
the imperative to enjoy obliterates such
difference and love too often becomes a
deserted beach Isabelle, Brandon, the
young lady...
Let's take that little body trait object a
12

cause of desire- taken from the woman's

body as having an agalmatic value
within the masculine phantasy -to which
she replies as not-all for herself nor for
the man who is deluded to possess her;
today, that little trait has to compete
with the bodies devastated by
jouissance, launched on the market, as
lathouses that clog up desire and do
not ask for the suppletion [suppleance]
of love.
Starting from the logic of feminine
jouissance, which points at difference
and against which the analyst leans,
psychoanalysis shows a glimpse of a
possible way to destabilise the lawless
Real, to break up its density and get to
pinch, to touch upon a Real, each one's
Real, the one allowing each subject to
play its unique and particular game.
Sadness is a moral failing whereby one
subtracts oneself to the well-saying, to
finding ones way in dealing with the
unconscious,
with
structure.
In
opposition to it we have the Gay
Science (savoir), which is not about
making sense or suturing the division,
but rather -as claimed by Lacan- about
the return to the sin original as
everyone knows12.
It is a return to sin that psychoanalysis
opens the way to, to the exploration of
each one's speech [langue], for him to
get to know how to do with the effects
of the original sin.
It is perhaps for those who have crossed
the path of shame and the feeling of
guilt that it is possible to obtain, love
for the unconscious.
It is perhaps because of this path that
love can make itself a little bit more
worthy [digne] than the proliferation of
chit-chat in which it consists today
sicut palea, said Saint Thomas.13
Not Love, not True Love, which would
be in opposition to the absence of love,
but love freed from the Ideal; a love

which takes into account a real with

difference, the difference made by
believing in feminine jouissance. This is
a love for the traces of real in the
unconscious, a love that doesn't fear the
hole in knowledge about the sexual
relation, but rather draws gaiety from it;
a love that finds its humus in a real, a
real singular to each one, from which
each one can excavate the uncovered
thread of love and around which each
one can, contingently, make a love spin.

Translated by Anna Milleri

10

J.-A. Miller, The real in the 21st Century,

Presentation of the Theme of the IX
Congress of the World Association of
psychoanalysis, Buenos Aires 27th of April
2012, in Hurly-Burly, Issue 9, May 2013.
11
J. Lacan, The Signification of the Phallus,
in Ecrits. The First Complete English
Edition, W. W. Norton and Co., London,
2006, p 575.
12
J. Lacan, Television. A challenge to the
Psychoanalytic Establishment, W. W. Norton
& Co., London, 1990, p 22.
13
J. Lacan,. Note italienne, in Autres Ecrits,
Ed. Seuil, 2001, pp. 307. Unpublished.

On the harmony between

the symbolic and the
natural. This trick that
lasts.

Carlos Rossi
The supposition of a knowledge in the
real
is the last veil to be lifted
Jacques-Alain Miller*

It is said that there was a time when the

relations between man and nature were
harmonious. Each one was busy with
their task. Man named and nature
repeated. It repeated on greater scale by
each day giving evidence of its eternal
return in the form of the light of the sun
and on smaller scale in the interior of
each snail where the Fibonacci series
was knowingly inscribed. This order
endorsed Galileos postulate of 1623:
"Nature is a book written in the
language of mathematics". And nature
let itself be named without opposing the
fact that, as it must be, each thing
should have its name.
But in nature, as in literature, the only
paradise is the one that is lost. A
background noise led Freud to begin to
pay attention to the particular
relationship between words and things. I
say particular because for Freud it was
never clear that there was such a thing
as a natural articulation. At least not in
the way that Galileo thought.
Even though Freud investigated all the
forms of articulation of the word with
the thing, even with his Galilean
optimism, with his idea that the
unconscious could be made conscious,
for example, he could not but conclude
that this operation had a remainder, to

13

which he gave various names: the navel

of the dream, primary masochism,
negative therapeutic reaction. Names
that do not, of course, fit the concept
naturally.
Everything happens in a temporal
succession so complex and convoluted
that it becomes difficult to order and
explain it. I understand that it is not a
problem of understanding. It is due to
the complexity of the problem in itself.
We assumed retroactively that the
publication of Nietzsches ber Man,
Einsteins theory of relativity and the
Interpretation of Dreams at the turn of
the century would have definitively put
an end to the idea of the harmony
between man and nature.
It is in this sense that, fifteen years later,
Freud dedicates himself to clarifying the
non-relation between man and nature in
his article A difficulty in the path of
psychoanalysis of 1917. In the early
stages of his researches, man believed
at first that his dwelling-place, the
earth, was the stationary centre of the
universe, with the sun, moon and
planets circling round it.14 Freud
assigns this first affront to universal
narcissism,
which
he
calls
Cosmological, to Copernicus. The
second affront, that man is not master of
the animals, he assigns to Darwin,
calling it Biological. And in the third
place he adds himself in as much as "the
ego is not master in its own house.15
These three blows, the Cosmological,
the Biological and the Psychoanalytical

Miller, J.-A., The Real in the 21st Century, in

Hurly-Burly, Issue 9, May 2013, p. 202.
1 Freud, S., (1917) A difficulty in the path of
psychoanalysis, Standard Edition, Volume
XVII, p. 139.

14

exploded forever the idea of a supposed

harmony.
The end of the First World War would
confirm this trend predicted by Freud
whose consequences are explored by
Walter Benjamin in his text The
Storyteller16. The traditional structure of
human experience begins to undergo a
fundamental transformation between
1914 and 1918. He asks: Was it not
noticeable at the end of the war that
men returned from the battlefield grown
silent? He refers to the fact that for
more than ten years there had been no
stories about the experiences of a
generation that had gone to school on a
horse-drawn streetcar and finds itself
astonished by the devastating machinery
and technology of war. How to read this
phenomenon? As the inability of the
symbolic to give an account of a
traumatic phenomenon. I would say
more, as the inability to fictionalize the
trauma by way of the construction of a
story, which we call fantasy. All that is
solid has vanished into the air. Without
the possibility of elaborating any
knowledge about that real. Any
possibility of defense had been
disturbed.
Against this background the Second
World War did no more than test
Benjamins hypothesis to the umpteenth
power. In the face of perplexity it is
logical and understandable that the post
war era would bring a new approach to
2 Ibid p. 143
3 Benjamin, W., The Storyteller, transl. Zorn,
H., in Illuminations, Pimlico Press, London,
1999.
4
Levi-Strauss, C., Myth and Meaning: Cracking
the Code of Culture, Schocken, 1995.
5
Lacan, J., (1953) The Function and Field of
Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis, in
Ecrits, the First Complete Edition in English,
transl. by B. Fink, Norton, New York/London,
2006, p. 223.

the human sciences. It is here that we

find what Miller does not hesitate to call
the dream of Structuralism. The
scientific dream leads Lvi-Strauss to
sustain
that
what
we
call
structuralism... is no more than a pale
imitation of what the natural sciences
have been doing forever4. Its field of
application is to the myth. For LeviStrauss, we have to read the myth like
we read a musical score. Music and
myth are structured like a language with
diachronic and synchronic elements that
form a greater constitutive unit, a
bundle of relations that structural
analysis simply brings to light.

In his presentation of the theme for the

IXth Congress of the WAP, JacquesAlain Miller says of Lacan that in that
epoch he was looking for laws, the laws
of speech, the laws of the signifier
starting from the structure of
recognition in Hegel6. And is in Hegel
himself that we find the formulation that
establishes a relationship between the
real and the rational. For Hegel, the real
is rational and the rational is real.

Which is to say that, in 1949 (with the

appearance
of
The
Elementary
Structures of Kinship), at the moment
when we would expect to hear the
resonance of this beginning of the antirationalist century, the hope of an
alliance between the symbolic and the
real re-emerges. One part history and
another part contingency.

I would like to sketch some of its tenets.

There are obvious resonances with what

we call the first Lacan, for whom there
was a time in which symptoms can be
entirely resolved in an analysis of
language because a symptom is itself
structured like a language: a symptom
in language from which speech must be
delivered.5
We can thus say that there is a musical
order, a mythological order and a
linguistic order sustained by that higher
order bundle of relationships that we
call symbolic order.
This is the dream of an ordered universe
with its own rules and laws:
substitution,
combination,
and
permutation. That should be understood
as an incursion of the symbolic into the
real that can be studied, known and
written. A real with law.
15

In order to understand this torsion in

time it is illuminating to read the text by
Jacques-Alain Miller called S truc
dure7.

1. Even though it can be said that Lacan

in 1953 is supported by the
epistemological tripod of Saussure,
Jakobson and Lvi Strauss, Miller does
not define Lacan as a structuralist but
rather as a rationalist theoretician who
tries to reconcile at least two models of
structure: that of language and that of
speech.
2. The structuralist, anti-substantialist
hypothesis was formulated in order to
evacuate subjectivity from the field of
the sciences of man and bring them
closer to the natural sciences. Lacans
effort will be to include the subject in
structuralism. He will achieve this
introduction, on the basis of structural
anti-vitalism, by defining the subject as
dead.
3. Anti-substantialism entails giving
preference to relations rather than to
magnitudes and not conversely.
4. The structural perspective does not
allow for the existence, in a language,
of the lack of the word to designate
something. There is no lack in language.
5. For Lacan, structure is not a
construction. The structure of language
precedes each one.

If we follow these lines we see how

Lacan will oppose to each one of these
concepts the incalculable effects of the
encounter with inertia in the clinic. It is
the formulation of the notion of
jouissance that will produce the rupture
with this sort of enchantment that never
existed. The primacy of the practice
teaches us that structuralism was
nothing else but the sacralization, with
the appearance of science, of a certain
number of relationships in question...
wasnt there a non-relation?8
Structuralist antivitalism thus collides
with the complex relationship between
life-body and jouissance that the
symptom as body event comes to
represent. The later teaching seeks to
capture by what paths the effect of
jouissance arrives in the body. Hence
the need to articulate a Lacanian
biology beyond the correlation of the
symbolic and death founded on the
structuralist dream of the first Lacan.
Science supposes a knowledge in the
real, while the real that is of interest to
psychoanalysis is that of the symptom.
Here there is an insurmountable
obstacle between the two approaches,
because the real that is of interest to
psychoanalysis in the symptom always
implies a singular and contingent
arrangement with jouissance. 9

Translated by Renata Cuchiarelli

Translations of PAPERS 4 reviewed by

Roger Litten

Miller, J.-A., The Real in the 21st Century, in

Hurly-Burly, Issue 9, May 2013, p. 202.
7
Miller, J.-A., S Truc Dure, in Matemas II,
Manantial, Bs.As., pp 89-104

16

Miller, J.-A., La experiencia de lo real en la

cura psicoanaltica, Paidos, Bs.As., p 262.
9
Stiglitz,
G.,
http://www.enapol.com/es/template.php?file=Te
xtos/Saber-Real-Cuerpos_Gustavo-Stiglitz.html