PAPERS N 8

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

Editorial
Florencia F.C.
Shanahan

The attentive reader will not fail to

notice how each of the contributions of
the eighth issue of PAPERS achieves -in
its own way and style- a tautening of the
arguments relative to where, according
to Jacques-Alain Millers presentation
of the theme of the WAP Congress, the
search for the real stripped of meaning
leads us.1
In her beautiful writing The Rat or the
Spider, Vilma Coccoz unfolds with
exquisite precision and gripping
references, the ethical choice to which
one is confronted in the 21st century in
the search for a solution to subjective
suffering. In the antipodes of the
Watsonian domestication underlying
learning theories, the Lacanian subject
-including the mystery of the speaking
body-, does not ignore the question
about the the place from where each
one may be able to take the floor2. The
author shows us how, in an analysis, a
chance may be offered to circumscribe
the place from where is secreted the
satisfaction by means of which the
fabric of the symbolic is woven.
In The Passage of the Real. There is
(difference between the sexes) / There is
no (sexual relation), Daniel Roy
develops the mainspring of the logical
operator of sexual difference in
Seminars XVIII to XX. Taking over
from the impasses encountered by
Freud, and isolating the terms
repartition,
distinction
and
sexuation in Lacans teaching, the text
gives a rigorous account of difference as
being verified as Real by the speaking
1

being, and the subjects choice of

jouissance with regards to the
impossible of sexual discourse.
How the real presents itself nowadays in
the form of a frantic race against time,
which is in fact an alibi for generalised
sleep, is the departing point of Claudia
Iddans The Real, a Contre-temps3. In
the limit point of repetition, the
unexpected real that marked the
speaking body instilling the mystery of
the unconscious, may find in the
analytic act its true contretemps: the
orientation towards a real, that of a
singular desire lodged in a time without
Other, a time for the new. This paper
demonstrates well how an erotics of
time that livens desire cannot be
separated from an ethics of the wellsaying.
The fourth paper, Out of reach of
symbolisation, written by Maria do
Rosrio Collier do Rgo Barros,
sharply interrogates the experience of
the human subject beyond the confines
of what can be said. Psychoanalysis, the
author argues would be not so much an
experience of the symbolic but of its
limit. In times where the expression
talking therapies becomes the grab bag
of
all
kinds
of
authoritarian
manipulations, the specificity of
Lacanian psychoanalysis is localised in
its operation of real-ization and its
offer to transform of the horror of
truth into a horror of knowledge. This,
in turn, may open up an opportunity for
invention there where no science can
program how to do with what
constitutes the hole of trauma for each.
It is also horror that is evoked by
Analle Lebovits-Quenehens text,
entitled Dieudonn, From Silence to
Interdiction, or On a Ferocious Defence
Against the Real in the 21st Century,
and which plunges us into one of
Francess current burning debates.

Against the everything goes, the

knavery sustained in the name of a
supposed freedom of speech, the
resounding silence of cowardice makes
the author explore what could give a
limit to the real of what E. Laurent
called the collision of jouissances4,
while offering an interesting reflection
on hatred.
This issue of PAPERS undoubtedly
deals
with
the
function
of
psychoanalysis
in
civilization,
contributing to delineate the lines of
force orienting the analytic act in the
21st century.
In the limits of the interpretation of the
real by the unconscious, what is rooted
in the body emerges, and it falls to the
analyst the task of pointing at the logic
that founds every social bond5 and the
impossible within. The elaborations you
will find here bear witness to that effort
of each, still
26 January 2014
1

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

Hurly-Burly, Issue 9, May 2013, p. 202.
2
In Spanish tomar la palabra: literally to take
up the word.
3
Contretemps: An unforeseen event that disrupts
the normal course of things; an inopportune
occurrence. [French : contre-, against (from
Latin contr) + temps, time (from Latin
tempus).]
4
Laurent, E., Le racisme 2.0, in Lacan
Quotidien 371. Available on-line.
5
Ibid.

The Rat or the Spider

Vilma Coccoz
2

Psychoanalysis will become something

more and more useful to be preserved,
in the increasingly faster movement that
our world is entering

supplemented by a fascination with

genetics, brandishing promises of
locating disorders in an ever elusive
cerebral determinism.

What did Lacan mean when he spoke of

our world? He, who had chosen silence
during those atrocious years when the
destruction of humanity took the form
of an industrial machine during the
Shoah. He could anticipate that the
deleterious waves would spread with
the expansion of capitalism. He warned
about the mortifying face of technoscience, anointed with the new forms of
the
superego,
which
threatened
subjectivity and whose currency is
evident: Given the point we have
reached in the light of our science, a
renewal or updating ot the Kantian
imperative might be expressed in the
following way, with the help of the
language of electronics and automation:
never act except in such a way that
your action may be programmed.1

This psychology has its origins in

Watson and his experimentation with a
baby named Albert, who was subjected
to a cruel experiment which already
included the sinister rats. Around those
same years, the shock doctrine
-developed by psychiatrists- was
beginning to be applied to economy, as
Naomi Klein demonstrated in her
accurate
analysis
on
"disaster
capitalism. That fear may be at the
origin of many behaviours is no news,
but what is new is that this may become
the basis for a psychology and a
pedagogy,
whose
dangerous
consequences are the transformation of
education in pure domestication, as
highlighted by Judith Miller.

At the same time, a new psychology

would be gathering strength from the
question of how can you learn
something. Putting their hopes on
finding the answers in animals, doing
without the clinical field and
authorizing themselves in laboratory
researches. In their budgets, the aim of
life is to survive. Being is thus
identified with the body. Life is
identified with animal life. What applies
to the unit, is also applied to
everyone". The Kantian question,
actualised by the Freudian discourse:
what may I know? Has been turned
into: how does one learn? Their
responses have formed an ideology of
domination and control that denies
psychical causality, and which has been

In his early writings, Lacan had

compared
ethology
and
human
behaviour. But, what an extraordinary
difference between one perspective and
the other, between the rat in the maze
and the Lacanian bestiary!2 Although
the imaginary may reveal similarities
between animal and man, human
language disconnects the speakingbeing
from
vital
immanence,
summoning him to the transcendence of
the discourse that beats in the social
bond. A pact is established between the
human being and the signifier chain,
which transcends the order of the vital
-understood just as dark power. The
symbol of this consent to the signifying
mortification inscribes itself as relation
to the Phallus, which in psychoanalysis
operates as the signifier of life3. The
subject does not learn language, but he
2

Lacan, J. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book

VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960,
edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, transl. by
Dennis Porter, W.W. Norton & Co., New York,
1992.

Erminia Macola and Adone Brandalise,

Bestiario lacaniano. Miguel Gmez Editions.
Mlaga, 2006.
3
Marco Focchi, Commentary of Seminar V The
Formations of the unconscious, Madrid, 22nd
June 2013.

receives it, it is instilled into him by his

close ones4, by his environment. If the
Real is the mystery of the speakingbody, this is because the mystery
reproduces itself with every being that
comes to life. Its realization depends on
the place from where each one may be
able to take the floor [tomar la
palabra].
In his Seminar XX, Lacan was inspired
by the image of the spider as an allegory
of the speaking-beings mystery, the
mystery of the unconscious, indicating
that thanks to the analytic process we
are able to approach the logical
dimension through which bodies are
invisibly held. The subtle threads that
bind the mystery of one body onto
another, without it being possible to
deduce the writing of a relation from it.
The clothing of the self-image, which
we call semblant, covers with its fine
signifying fabric the object cause of
desire, which is Real and it is thus that
the so-called object- relation is
sustained5.
Such image of nature is chosen because
it seems to most closely approximate
the reduction to the dimensions of the
surface [that] writing [lcrit requires, at
which Spinoza himself marvelledthe
textual work that comes out of the
spiders belly, its web. It is a truly
miraculous function to see, on the very
surface emerging from an opaque point
of this strange being, the trace of these
writings taking form, in which one can
grasp the limits, impasses, and dead
ends that show the real acceding to the
symbolic6
The spider provides an image of the
mystery that everyone is for oneself.

Unlike the rat, this stranger being has

a prominent place in Western culture. It
can be found already in early Sumerian
inscriptions. Ovid begins Book VI of his
Metamorphoses with the myth of the
mortal Arachne, whose weaving art had
aroused such admiration that it was said
she could have been Pallas disciple.
But the vain weaver denies such
learning and challenges the goddess to a
duel. Disguised as an old woman, the
goddess implores the mortal to humble
herself, to ask for forgiveness and
Arachne refuses. In response, throwing
aside her disguise, the goddess presents
herself to the young weaver, and
offended, accepts her challenge. She
weaves a tapestry with the twelve
heavenly gods adorning its centre and in
the four corners, scenes of mortal
failures to challenge the rule of the
gods. Arachnes tapestry, in turn, depicts
scenes of celestial dishonesty: gods
masquerading as mortals and animals,
changing their forms, impregnating
women, giving false gifts. Pallas
acknowledged
her
opponents
superiority in weaving, but unable to
accept the accusations against the
Olympus, she stroke her fury against
her Arachne, who tried to hang herself
with one of the threads. The goddess
prevented this outcome but condemned
her
to
weave
eternally,
after
transforming her body into a small
silhouette with big legs, a small head
and a big belly: still from this she ever
spins a thread; and now, as a spider, she
exercises her old-time weaver-art.7
The moment of transformation of the
feminine body into a spider was
masterfully reflected by Dor, in his
illustration of the Divine Comedys
Canto XI of Purgatory8. Veronese, in his
7

Lacan, J., Geneva Lecture on the Symptom.

5
Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan.
Book XX, Encore, W.W. Norton & Co., 1999, p
93.
6
Ibid., p. 93

Ovid, The Loeb Classics Library: Ovid III:

Metamorphoses I. Frank Justus Miller (Trans.).
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
8
O fond Arachne! Thee I also saw / Half
spider now,/In anguish,/crawling up/The
unfinishd web thou weavedst to thy bane.

painting
Arachne
or Dialectics,
identifies it to the thin and subtle fabric
woven by words. Velsquez, the painter
of enigmas, gave his version in the
wonderful painting The Spinners. Built
on three planes, its particular topology
captivates our gaze, which endeavours
to decipher its mystery, namely, that of
the artists own weave. In the
background plane of the picture, there is
the abduction of Europa, the theme
chosen by Arachne.
With such noble precedents it is not
strange that the allegory of the spider
proves useful to illustrate the structural
logic developed by Lacan developed in
his later Seminars. Lacan argues that the
weave, the fabric comes from an opaque
point in its belly. The spider secretes,
that is to say, it loses something, a
substance that will give consistency to
the first thread. From this thread, it
throws Y-shaped the woven scaffolds,
with which she will weave the rest of
the web. This first thread, the spider eats
it: as if it were an S1, figuring the
Freudian introjection, the subjects
disappearing under the traumatic
signifier. The web may well be
conceived of as a surface, and the
weaving as a writing in which
irregularities, imperfections can be
observed. These can be assimilated to
the points of impasse, of limit, the dead
ends of the Real by acceding to the
Symbolic. We can even locate the
threads joining points in the weave,
tiny knots encircling the real of the
void, offering a support for and
favouring the displacement of the body.
That subtle weave would illustrate the
logic of sexuation by which the body of
the speaking-being may be invisibly
linked with another body.
This signifier One carries the mark of
uniqueness that gives the weave its
colour. The weave constitutes the S2,
articulated knowledge, ordered in an

analytic discourse, in whose structure

places
and
functions
can
be
distinguished: one emerges from an
opaque point; the other one is woven
from a void, in a void. What causes it?
The object a, located somewhere in
the belly of the speaking body. In
analysis, these elements are reduced up
to the point where it can be captured
where did they derived their drive force
from, their colour of void, which
makes of jouissance something singular,
a singular enjoyment trapped in the
den of language. The analytic work is
destined to make it exist as cause of
speech in the habitat of discourse.
The discourse of psychoanalysis is the
other side of the Masters discourse,
which in calling for opposition,
condemns us to rebellion, impotence
and martyrdom. Once its logic is
ordered, it will be possible to do
something with it9: to circumscribe the
place from where is secreted the
satisfaction by means of which the
fabric of the symbolic is woven; once
we manage to read our unconscious,
once we have proved the real of the
structure.
Thanks to Autres crits, we have now
more spindles, threads and knots which
help us to preserve the place of mystery,
the real of the unconscious in the
speaking-being. This is the opportunity
we offer to each analysand: that s/he
weaves his or her own fabric to inhabit
discourse. Lacan defined the ethics of
psychoanalysis as being that of the
well-saying: that which governs the
action concerned with enriching the
looms so that new patterns and fabrics
which shape our ever enigmatic
existences can be woven, one by one,
with the threads of desire.

This alludes to Lacans expression savoir y

faire, translated as knowing how to make do
with. The adverb of place[y] indicates the
unconscious.

In the search for a solution to subjective

suffering, the 21st Century is presented
as the time of a choice between genome
and poem, between the norm and the
singular, between the rat and the spider.
Translated by Betina Ganim

The Passage of the Real

There is (the difference
between sexes)/ There is not
(the sexual relation)

Daniel Roy
The speaking-being bumps into the fact
that a difference exists between the
sexes. And the real is what the speaking
being bumps into, that with which he
collides: does this mean that the real
resides in the difference there is
between the sexes? But the real has no
abode. Should we therefore state that
the real is the difference that there is
between the sexes? But this difference
between the sexes has many names and
none is the real. So, it is better to say
that between the sexes there is a
difference which can be verified to be
real. We collide with it without the aid
of already established discourses,
without possible recourse to a name.
But in analysis, nothing comes up but
through established discourses private
fictions, individual myths, various
references, anecdotes, dreams, fantasies
-, or through names, alone signifiers
which get deposited like the dregs of
discourse or gush like incandescent
lava. Freud and Lacan have butted
against this aporia but have not refused
the obstacle.

Firstly Freud will demonstrate that a

mythical
discourse
is
getting
constructed for each subject every time
s/he collides with the difference: this is
the Oedipus as psychical consequence
of the anatomic difference between the
sexes. But in following this path which
is his own, Freud butts against another
difference than the anatomic one
because things are going differently for
the girl in regards to the Oedipus.
Secondly, in his article of 1925, starting
with the boys Oedipus and another
Oedipus for the girl, he fails to establish
a single, universal narrative, but will
produce a new nomination which Lacan
will emphasise: the castration about
which we could then think that it
applies for both sexes. Well then, in
front of castration the difference would
be abolished and that would be the final
word about it? Yes and no. Yes, because
castration is the railroad switch from
which boys and girls will orientate
themselves. No, because girls and boys
orientate themselves at different
moments of the logic induced by the
anatomic difference between the sexes,
making their stands, not on this
difference, but on possible choices of
enjoyment following the way the
subject position him / herself according
to a having or a having not.
Lacan circumscribes the real by
following the logic of this Freudian
saying: there is the difference between
the sexes until its point of reversion
where he formulates his saying: there
is not the sexual relation. This
trajectory is especially accomplished in
the three Seminars of the years 1971, 72
and 73, Dun discours qui ne serait
pas du semblant, Ou pire, and
Encore. In the first one, the difference
that there is between men and women is
articulated
around
the
term
distribution [rpartition] , in the
second around the term distinction,
and in the third Lacan produces a new
6

signifier, that of sexuation which

would be, from then on, the signifier
functioning as logical operator of the
difference. We will now examine the
movement that is inaugurated by the
first two terms.
1- DISTRIBUTION
Lacans thesis starts with: it is the
destiny of speaking beings to assort
themselves in adulthood between men
and women1. Therefore, the definition
of man is his relationship to the woman,
and reversely. That is what constitutes
their nature of semblance.
Thus, the sexual identification does not
consists in believing to be a man or a
woman, but in taking into account that
there are women, for the boy that
there are men, for the girl2.
Consequentially, the so-called sexual
enjoyment (jouissance) finds itself
dependent on a semblant.
The signifiers man and woman are
not valued here for their signification
but for their relation in a real
situation, says Lacan. In a real
situation these living signifiers, as we
could define the semblants, have an
effectiveness: for a man, the girl is the
phallus and this is what castrates him;
for women, the boy is the same thing,
the phallus, and that is what castrates
them as well because they only get a
penis, and that it failed. He continues:
Here is the real, the real of sexual
enjoyment inasmuch as it is detached as
such, it is the phallus3.
There is a strong thesis: in the encounter
of the sexed bodies what we call
making love, the enjoyment detaches
itself from the bodies: this so-called
sexual enjoyment is not an enjoyment
the locus of which is the body. Thus
Lacan introduces something new in this
Seminar: the effect of surprise of the

analytic discourse is that the sexual

bipolarity is unsustainable because of
the obstacle to the relation between the
sexes4. This obstacle, designated by
Lacan as the intrusion of the phallus,
indicates that the phallus is not the
name of the sexual enjoyment that there
would be between a sex and the other,
but the name of the sexual enjoyment
which comes between a sex and the
other the result of which is that there is
not the sexual relation5.
Men and women, beings of language,
have no other means but passing
through the phallic operator in order to
verify it each time they come forward
towards enjoyment with their being of
semblance: this is a renewed way of
formulating the rock of castration,
which applies for both sexes. The
phallic obstacle underlines the gap
between semblance and enjoyment,
where another difference is effectuated:
a woman, for a man, and therefore for
herself, in the sexual encounter,
produces herself as Other. This does not
only mean Other than man, this means
that she extracts herself, or is extracted,
from the common logic of assortment
between man and woman. Here is the
limit of the treatment of the difference
by the distribution.
2- DISTINCTION
From now on another logic is working,
that of the one and the Other sexes6.
This is the path that Lacan will follow
until his formula of sexuation which
write down what it is to count oneself
of one sex, and to count oneself of
the Other sex: thus a speaking being
defines him/herself of one sex and for
some they can also count themselves
of the Other sex but, in this case, this
does not define them anymore, it does
not delimit a finite set.
7

When Lacan says There is not the

sexual relation, he proposes this as a
truth which would be the following:
sex defines no sexual relation among
speaking beings, not even a relation of
difference7. Nothing from sex comes
to give a compass for the speaking
being, nothing can be stated about the
way to relate to ones body or to the
body of one or several others. As it says
nothing, Lacan says: I leave this place
empty and I put (), typography to
mark or make an empty place. This is
the place about which Lacan says that it
is the place where the real passes
through you8.
To extract this place, Lacan will make
an operation of emptying, by
formulating the negation of an
enunciated negation: It is not that I
deny the difference there is, since early
childhood, between what we call a little
girl and a little boy9, difference which
imposes itself as native10, but which is
in fact already something else than an
anatomic difference as it is a difference
which corresponds to the fact that the
sexes seem to be distributed in two
more or less equal numbers of
individuals.
Lacan introduces an inflexion: quite
early, earlier than what one might have
expected,
these
individuals
are
distinguished. And he says: the
speaking beings reject this distinction
founded on the anatomic, biological
difference, and they reject it by all sorts
of identifications. Thus, it is no longer:
for all speaking being, one must go
through the difference (distribution
logic), it is: I can recognize myself as a
speaking being by rejecting the
distinction founded on the difference, in
order to leave an empty place. The
empty place for a new logic, that of the
operation of distinction which operates
not from a scientific observation but
from the Other of the signifier. Because
they are distinct indeed but they are

distinguished, it is not them who

distinguish themselves.
The sexual difference is marked here as
a distinction: there are the distinguished
girls and the distinguished boys. And
the premature vocation that each of us
feel for ones sex is socially in
accordance with the types of man and
woman such as they will be constituted
by something altogether different,
namely the consequence, the price to
pay that the small difference would
have. That is what Lacan calls the
common mistake. A logic no longer
founded on the on the all but on a
mistake, this is what is new. The
mistake is the following: boys and girls
are distinguished from a choice of
enjoyment, choice that determines the
man or woman positions, which
passes for a signifying assortment. The
common mistake, which does not see
that the signifier is jouissance, and that
the phallus is only its signified. Thus,
the small difference comes between a
sex and the other, at the very moment
when this difference deceivingly passes
to the real via the organ, precisely by
not being taken as such any longer and
passes to the signifier, because it is only
as signifier that it can be used as an
instrument for the sexual encounter.
This is the moment when, Lacan says,
in order to access to the other sex, one
has to really pay the price of the small
difference, that of the distinction that
you have received from the Other of
language, distinction with which you
are or not satisfied. It is on this point
that the distinguished girl and the
distinguished
boy
are
really
distinguished, by coming to place
themselves as argument of the function
Phi of x, which is valid for all.
In this way are the new distribution
principles inaugurated by Lacan;
principles which will be applied to those
who will take a sexual value under the
signifiers man or woman; principles
8

which take on board the obstacle of the

sexual enjoyment which comes between
the sexes.
It is on this basis that Lacan will from
then on construct his formula of
sexuation, last transformation, in his
teaching, to circumscribe, by his saying,
the sexual discourse which, as
impossible, is the passage of the real11.
Translated by Vincent Dachy
Notes

Lacan J., Le Sminaire, Livre XVIII, Dun

discours qui ne serait pas du semblant, Paris,
Seuil, 2007, p. 31.
2

Ibid. p. 34.

Id.

Ibid. p. 67.

Ibid. p. 166.

This is the title given by J.-A. Miller to the

first chapters of Seminar Ou pire.
7

Lacan J., Le Sminaire, Livre XIX, Ou pire,

Paris, Seuil, 2011, p. 13.
8

Ibid. p. 14.

Ibid. p. 13.

10

Ibid. p. 15.

Above quotes are from pages 15 to 17

of Seminar Ou pire, op.cit.

The Real, a contretemps

Claudia Iddan

In everyday life the real swings into

action furiously-1 in most cases. The
ferocious race against time [contre le
temps] illustrates this ascendancy of the
real, constitutes a clear sign, a sign of

refusal of an impossible which, perhaps,

creates the illusion of a constant
awakening, of a search for total
satisfaction in life. What are the links
existing, therefore, between time and
the real? In the analytic experience, the
real, also called the impossible, does
not cease not to write itself. This
formulation by Lacan links two
elements, that of not ceasing which
implicates the idea of time as repetition,
and that of writing, of course. This
conception of time, as repetition, what
does it consist of precisely, and what is
its relation to a Real which is always
lawless2, always disorderly?
We already know about the relation of
the concept of time to unconscious
desire, such as Freud brought it out, in
which the strings of desire catch hold of
a present occasion in order to resurrect
something of the past and put it to work
in the future. Indeed, analysis brings out
that moment of temporality of desire by
constructing the history of the subject
from his experience, that is, that within
which the subject recognizes himself,
correlatively in the past and in the
future3; a history which will become
hystorisation with the conceptualisation
of the pass. In other words, this would
amount to saying that there is creation
of a narrative in order to delimit a
position of jouissance linked to the
master signifiers, reduced then to
letters, to writing. Time, whether it is
the time of analysis in general, or the
time of the session, the timelessness of
the unconscious or the retrospective
effects of meaning, constitutes an
element which instils a certain order or
direction. Thus, we can establish, we
find a sort of parallel between the
direction of movement of the time of
desire with the time involved in fantasy,
the future anterior, a tense which
presents a future action but described as
already occurred. It is also the
movement of the symptom, of the return
9

of the repressed which is the effaced

signal of something which only takes on
its value in the future, through its
symbolic realisation, its integration into
the history of the subject. Literally, it
will only ever be a thing which at the
given moment of its occurrence will
have been.4 It is the very movement of
repetition which tries to have access to
what is new, to the future, but returns,
however, to the same place, to the
already past to that which has
occurred, to that which has been already
necessarily written. Repetition encloses,
however, a nucleus of the real which
does not cease not to be inscribed in the
speaking-being, creating, I would say,
the set of inexistence: the absolute
zero5, according to Lacan, a zero which
does not create the chain, which is
disconnected from any sense and any
order.
The time of repetition, the time of the
symptom, is at the basis of the
troumatism*6 in the speaking-being; it
is the product of the initial encounter
with sexuality, with jouissance, with an
always unexpected real, which marks
the speaking body and instils the
mystery of the unconscious in it.
Around that core, that fragment of the
real, thought embroiders stories which
develop the formula of fantasy, but its
stigmata, its mark forged by fire, such
as the slave possesses one on his body
without knowing it, is to be linked to
nothing.
In the Erotics of Time, J.A. Miller
accentuated the fact that time is
measured by space, that is to say, by the
location of the different places in
discourse as well as of their
displacements from one place to
another. Historisation, produced by
means of analysis, introduces changes
in discourse and displacements, of
course, in particular those of the master
signifiers. Thus, the master signifier

quits the place of the agent of discourse

and comes to occupy the place of the
outcome. We could define this as a
trajectory from the patheme to the
matheme, which has the real of
discourse7 as effect. According to J.-A.
Miller this is a real produced by
discourse, but which necessarily must
be placed before discourse as an
element preliminary to it. This
trajectory develops from the burning
fire of the symptom to the cold fire of
the absolute zero of the real. At that
moment, when a limitation is produced,
the symbolic and the imaginary resist
the real by way of historisation, thus
this real finds a barrier which furnishes
it with ex-istence. Insofar as jouissance
is concerned, this previously cited
trajectory takes it to a jouis-centre ,
which has the phallic signification and
the phantasy as epi-centre, while still
allowing it to accede to a relation of desence**,8 which although absent from
phallic signification is not a loss for all
that, and marks an impossible to think
the unconscious. Thus, the time of
repetition opens up to the possibility of
a future which instead of returning to
what has already occurred, to the past, it
would expect the novelty, that is to say
it would direct itself towards the vector
of having to be or having already been
implicated in the line of action, that is to
say towards the vector of desire as duty.
The orientation of the real is therefore
an orientation towards the feminine side
of the speaking-being, towards the time
of novelty.
Returning to the theme of the race
against time in contemporary everyday
life, this is paradoxically in favour of a
generalized eternal dream, to sleep in
the arms of an absolute Other.
Psychoanalysis or more precisely the
analysts mission it to go against the
real, to push the analysand towards
awakening, towards the unexpected
10

instant, towards the time of action,

towards the contre-temps.
Translated by Hara Pepeli
Notes
1

J. Lacan, La troisime, La Cause freudienne n o 79,

page 19.
2
J. Lacan, Le Sminaire, Livre XXIII, Le Sinthome,
Seuil, Paris, 2005, page 137.
3
J. Lacan, The Seminar, Book I, Freuds Papers on
Technique, Cambridge University Press, 1988,
Translated by John Forrester, page 157.
4
Ibid, page 159.
5
J. Lacan, Le Sinthome, page 121.
6
J. Lacan, Les non dupes errent, cours du 19-2-1974,
unpublished.
7
J.A. Miller, Un rve de Lacan dans Le Rel en
mathmatiques, Agalma diteurs, Paris, 2004, page
124
8
J. Lacan, Le Sminaire, Livre 19, Ou pire ,
Paris, Seuil, page 206.
TN :
*Troumatisme is a new word made up by Lacan from
the signifiers trauma and hole (in French, trou), both
caused by the real.
** De-sence a Lacanian play on the words decency
(in French dcence) and sense (in French, sens). The
new word would thus mean without sense.

Beyond the reach of

symbolization

Maria do Rosrio Collier do

Rgo Barros
Does the symbolic have a limit? This
question is relevant today, when the
manipulation of the real by the symbolic
seems to have no limit. With
mathematical formulae and their
application in technology, one could
think that the symbolic is without limit,
since even when its order does not
function, its disorder produces effects
and promulgates disorientation.
Psychoanalysis is an experience not so
much of the resources of the symbolic,
but of their limit, when the analysand
has to deal with an occurrence beyond

the reach of symbolization, which

remains as a residue unreachable by the
signifying process. The analysand
experiences the limit of the symbolic in
order to deal with fragments of the real,
which cannot be erased, but rather have
to be inscribed in an empty space in
discourse. It happens when the
effacement by repression, in which the
insistence of repetition is inscribed as
the faulty encounter with the object, no
longer offers to the subject a resource
for dealing with a real that is unsayable
and without law and which insists.
Then it is necessary to transform the
analysands not want(ing) to know, so
that he does not get attached to the
fascination with truth -which prevents
knowing-, thus opening a path for
invention. Faced with the unsayable, the
work of mourning cannot be spared;
however it needs another expedient in
order to be achieved, an act. Something
beyond the symbolic but which
nevertheless obeys to a symbolic
necessity. When pretending to make a
short-cut in the work of mourning, to
cope with the inevitable loss, one falls
into perpetuation of the worst in the
deadly jouissance of the symptom.
Lacan in Seminar XX refers to a
generalised not want(ing) to know;
given that all of us are marked by events
that escape us and scars of jouissance
experienced without the recourse to
decipher them, both provoke perplexity
and horror in knowing. But Lacan
points out, in Book XX Encore, that
there is a difference between his not
want(ing) to know and that of those
whom he was addressing; this leads us
to think of a possible transformation of
the not want(ing) to know. It is this
transformation that I would like to
approach, and to verify possible
modalities of dealing with a real without
law, mainly when the resort to the father
is not sufficient -not even via an
elucubration
of
unconscious
11

knowledge-, which leads the subject to

an analysis at the point of encountering
his not want(ing) to know and his
horror of knowing.
The not want(ing) to know nourished
by repression reaches its point of
exhaustion, and the identifications that
rely on it are put in question.
This horror, when it comes to the fore in
analysis, calls for a type of operation for
which repression is no longer sufficient.
Jacques-Alain Miller in his course The
experience of the real in the analytic
treatment indicates that in the
relationship of the body with the
signifier, significantisation is not the
only operation at play. He points at the
operation
of
corporification
[embodiment] as being the reverse of
significantisation since, in it, the
signifier enters the body. The entering
of the signifier into the body produces
an event, an affect which will be the
material for the construction of the
symptom. But this construction requires
an effort to inscribe in the real,
something like a minus, which in the
symbolic is responsible for the empty
space that allows for the articulation
between signifiers and the production of
resources to decipher them. In order to
deal with a real that is not captured by
symbolisation, by deciphering and by
annulment, it is necessary to introduce
in it a hole, something equivalent to a
minus, a cut. Jacques-Alain Miller
proposes this operation as matrix for the
treatment of the case of Robert,
presented at Lacans Seminar by Rosine
Lefort, in his attempt to embody, in the
real, this minus which seems to obey in
him to an absolutely infallibly
necessity10.
Jacques-Alain
Miller
named it reallisation (rellization).

This necessity (which is of a symbolic

order) of introducing a loss, an
annulment, a negation, that the autistic
and psychotic subject show to us as
being indispensable for their survival as
subjects, is effectuated in the real. There
where trauma produces an excess,
correlated to a borderless hole
[troumatisme / tropmatisme], the
speaking being needs to do something
to produce a puncture, so he will not be
left at the mercy of the disorienting and
destructive power of a mark without
meaning. The puncture thus realized
falls upon the very subject, allowing
him to build himself, or to take
ownership of his body in a new way.
This operations of reallisation can
open a path of work and research in
which we might think about how each
subject invents his own modality of
introducing,
in
the
scientific
manipulation of the body, the gap that
can counteract the devastating and
unpredictable
effects
of
this
manipulation that seems without limit
(and which is the consequence of the
coalition between capitalism and
technology). We can bet here on the
unsayable11 as a counterpoint to the
principle of predictability, which
believes itself absolute in its attempt to
eliminate risk. To be able to
accommodate the unpredictable in order
to localise in it the unsayable, requires
an answer that cannot programmed but
rather has to be invented.
The advances of science, which concern
the enigma of life and death, cannot let
us forget what is at stake in the work of
mourning, which is of the order of
invention and binds the unconscious
and the symptom in a new way, via the
gap produced in the traumatic real.

10

Miller, Jacques-Alain. The Matrix of the Wolf

Childs Treatment. In: Revue La Cause
Freudienne, Issue 66, Navarin diteur, Paris
2007

11

Lacan, Jacques: Radiofonia. In: Outros

Escritos, Jorge Zahar Editor Ltda, Rio de
Janeiro 2003, pg. 427.

12

What makes the gap? It can be a word, a

phrase, an object, an act, something that
prevents
that
jouissance
gives
consistency to a superegoic Other that
has the power to paralyse the subject.
This gap has consequences on the not
want(ing) to know which feeds itself
from the passion for truth, as it makes
appear at the truths core, the gap which
it tries to eliminate: the impossible to
know. Instead of nourishing the ailment
by clinging to the truth that in its turn,
nourishes the tragedy, the not
want(ing) to know can make use of the
gap in the real to reach an
unprecedented
vital
dimension,
something
unforeseen
by
the
programmes
of
survival
and
predictability.
The horror of knowing is inscribed in
a logical register that allows for a
transformation of the horror of truth.
The latter remains at the level of the
pathetic and thus in relation to it there
can only be an insurrection of your
entire body and your whole being to
refuse it12. It is an effort at refusal that
leads to pure loss, to the worst, to a nonexit. Unlike the horror of truth, the
horror of knowing allows for a
transformation, a reversal in relation to
the traumatic signifier, to the opaque
jouissance that excludes sense; it calls
forth a creative act.
This is the contribution to knowledge
that we expect from analysands and
analysts so that psychoanalysis will
survive bearing witness to a Real for the
21st century, which will bring us always
to the limit of the symbolic.

12

Miller, Jacques-Alain: O paradoxo de um

saber sobre a verdade in Opo Lacaniana
numero 61, novembro de 2011, So Paulo,
Edies Eolia, pg. 36.

Translated by Micheli Romo

The Dieudonn Affair: from

Silence to Banning Or a
Ferocious Defence Against
the Real in the 21 st Century
Annalle Lebovits-Quenehen
The real of jouissance provokes a
defence that can take different forms,
and which, though it always constitutes
the object of a singular and intimate
choice, can, for all that, become
collective, and constitute a rallying
point with which to make a link
between some-Ones. In fact, types of
defence against the real exist which
mark an era when a great many people
adopt them in a given context [lieu
donne] and time. There are those that
exist which mark the era in which they
occur through their beauty or by their
ingeniousness and others, which mark it
by their ferocity or by their baseness. In
France one of these defences, which we
judge reprehensible, has particularly
held our attention recently.
For the last ten years, Dieudonns antiSemitism has, for certain French people,
imbued him with an aura that has
become more and more intense and
which unfortunately looks as if it will
go on to become even more
pronounced.
It will also soon be ten years since the
founding act of the group Dix-it, which
was to write an article on what was then
only the beginning of the Dieudonn
affair, as we know it today. 13 Its
signatories denounced the fact not only
that Dieudonn was already beginning
13

The group Dix it, was the object of an

Aufhebung in the review, Le Diable
probablament, whose next issue will appear in
autumn 2014.

13

to get out of control, but that his already

worrying outbursts were being met by a
resounding silence by the French press
(which perfectly reflects the opinions of
those who read it). No journalist, very
few at least, thought it opportune to
reveal his uncontrolled rants to the
public at large. People first heard of
Dieudonn by accident, when he gave a
performance in Algeria: the French
press was happy to make itself the echo
of the guilty laughter of foreigners on
their own foreign soil, yet not a word
was spoken about the hilarity of certain
of its own citizens who laughed at the
same jokes at home. If my memory
serves me well, Dieudonn had already
filled the Paris Zenith and by playing
on the same themes that have led to the
scandal today.
Dieudonn the anti-Semite, Dieudonn
wallowing in baseness, Dieudonn
inciting to hatred all those disposed to
it, attracted little comment at the start.
No doubt with the idea that if wasnt
being spoken about, it did not exist. A
form of cowardice oriented this silence.
But more than simply sidestepping the
issue, this silence, we suggest, was the
sign that it was being indulged.
Jacques-Alain Miller who at that time
was running the journal LNA: Le
Nouvel ne (which he had just created
in the context of a threat to the existence
of psychoanalysis) welcomed the
collectively written article whose tone
was given by its title: A Silence
Impossible to Bear. I see this as a sign
that a moment in history in which one
could seriously consider banning the
practice of psychoanalysis is a moment
in which one should not be at all
surprised to see the (re)nascent antiSemitism that marks it being indulged.
Times have changed: Dieudonn and his
scandalous pranks are being talked
about everywhere, and oh, this very
evening, at the very hour at which I am

writing these lines, his show has just

been banned for the second time.
Finally! For what is such cause for
concern these days is not only the
increasing number of his aficionados, or
the 5000 people from Nantes who have
bought their tickets in the hope of
ending up with a good slice of laughter
(to say nothing of the millions of views
that his videos have notched up on
Youtube). What is such cause for
concern recently is not only the number
of fines for the incitement of hatred that
the comedian is avoiding, nor even that
he is not condemned more severely. No,
what is most cause for concern is the
possibility that such meetings are able
to take place in our country without
breaking the law.
Manuel Valls [T.N. then Home
Secretary and now Prime Minister of
France] has put in place the necessary
means for the banning of one of his
shows last night and again tonight. And
he nearly didnt manage it. It is clear
that the issue divides public opinion.
And even among those who oppose the
hateful words of Monsieur MBala
MBala, there are those who do not
think it would be legal to ban his shows.
Until last night, the Law did not allow
such a ban. We ought to say the existing
law and at the same time reinforce the
measures against racism. Let us admit
it. Doesnt a new era require a new legal
framework? What kind of credibility
can an antiracist prevention strategy
have, if it allows such events to take
place?
The Council of States decision is not
nothing. It changes the law and,
momentarily at least, puts a healthy stop
to the flood of hatred the object of
which are Jews in Dieudonns shows. It
was necessary. But this decision is not
everything. There is a resurgent antiSeminitism and, once again, what
remains worrying, tonight, despite the
ban, is that with the increasing number
14

of fans there is also an increasing

number of lawyers, jurors, politicians,
sociologists and intellectuals (among
whom can be found the best) who are
doubtless not fans of the pest, but
who
publically
question
the
appropriateness of such a ban, arguing
that he should be able to continue to
perform on stage and say what he says.
These supporters of the current law,
some of who had previously denounced
the excessive noise surrounding the
affair and claimed that it would be
better not to speak about it, these
supporters of the current law, are they
any better than those who previously
remained silent?

at the heart of being.14 And if it prospers

in times of economic crisis, it is because
the economic crisis jeopardises the
semblants that sustain being and allow it
to treat existence. Localising it in the
Other and, on top of everything else,
hating it, this Other, for not being able
to get rid of it entirely, is something as
old as the world, but also entirely new
as a means of copying with ones
condition as speaking-being.
The rumour of the age passes like a
breath on the wind.15 Times are
certainly changing. We must keep an
eye on them to counter their excesses.

It is true that time has passed since the

Shoah. Survivors of the camps are
getting fewer and fewer, but also with
them the resistance fighters and
collaborators marked by this dark time.
And it is as if, with the passing of the
generation who were marked in their
flesh by this trauma, the veil of modesty
that surrounds this episode of history is
raising little by little, to bring to light
what has been brewing beneath this
veil, for all eternity.

Translated by Philip Dravers

Anti-Semitism is not racism. While

racism emphasises the lack of adequate
jouissance that the foreigners are held
responsible
for,
anti-Semitism
emphasises the all too adequate
jouissance of the Jews. Anti-Semitism is
thus the ferocious variant of a ferocious
relation to the Other, and its two forms
of relation to the Other, and these two
forms of relation to the Other, the one
no better than the other, are going strong
today.
But what is this hatred of the Other who
supposedly enjoys either too badly or
two well? It is hatred not of oneself, but
hatred of the most foreign to oneself in
oneself, namely the hatred of existence

14

On this distinction see JAMs course Ltre

et lUn.
15

To recall Charles Soucys expression.

15

16