When the Semblants

Vacillate

JACQUES-ALAIN MILLER

I am going to make a saying (dit) resonate here, one which

struck me only yesterday, “Have fun!”—Ah! “Have fun” is
a word (parole) which has been said to a person who came
to talk to me.

1. MARKS OF THE WORD

People come, especially, to speak to an analyst about the words

which have been said to them, or which have not been said to
them, when they expected them. The analytic experience is
very concerned with the words which have been said to them
or not said when they ought to have been.
Very well, in that case, someone said something to
someone, “Have fun!” It is something, as one says, which
marked her.

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MARK WHICH ABSORBS

One seeks this mark of the word, in psychoanalysis. One finds
them again when one has forgotten them, or when one has
always remembered them, one finds the occasion to explicate
them, to communicate them, to see their consequences over a
long period of time, the consequences of these words which
have marked them. There is no exception, at least for those
who come to analysis.
If one were to make a survey, I am sure that what I say
evokes something for you, something that makes a frightful
cacophony even in silence. In the analytic experience, one
has the occasion of taking his distance from these marks, that
is to say, in gaining a margin or distance in relation to them.
Lacan put it in the simplest form. In the master’s
discourse, the mark that is distinguished has the faculty of
absorbing the subject. This discourse is the inverse side of
psychoanalysis insofar as, in the analytic discourse, the sub-
ject has the occasion of spitting out again the mark which has
absorbed him.

DM DA
S1 S
S S1

When the subject is absorbed by his mark, he does not dis-

tinguish himself from it. One only sees his mark. One must
succeed in perceiving and even in enlarging the place of this
subject who is nothing beside his mark.

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S1

THE EMPTY SPACE, OPERATIVE CATEGORY

You have the mark, you only see it. But what happens if one
erases it here on the blackboard?
There remains something about which there is a ques-
tion of knowing what it is. From the time that this mark is
no longer there, what I have designed in the form of a circle
has no further place of being, and it is no longer there. When
one reasons by logical classes, there is only material to form
a class if there is something inside. Without that, one says
that there is not anything there, there is nothing. You open
the door, “Oh! There is no one here.” And you close it again.
Or you yourself enter and you are what is inside.
This conception has moved with set theory where
the empty space is classified; it, too, exists. Even if there is
no one here, it remains “here.” Lacan has favored it so that
one can learn to distinguish the mark from this margin that is
intrinsically the subject.
The empty set is operative in set theory since it counts,
not as an element, but as a part of the whole set, in such a
fashion that beside the element-mark you always have the
phantom of the empty part of the set that one can make surge
forth starting from the moment one considers himself a part
of the set.

S1

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It is what helps us to grasp that the type of being that we attri-

bute to the subject can, at least, be approached and situated
starting with this logical device. There, we do not need to have
recourse to metaphysics, to the mystical, to the theological.
It suffices from this logical recourse to give to the lack an
aspect, not only thinkable, but operative. It is indeed what
makes surge forth, appear, name and handle what until then
was unknown, invisible, forgotten. There are not only people,
elements, inscriptions, but there is still the place where it is
inscribed, and it is also necessary to conceptualize, to name
and mark the place, something of the space. In the same way,
we approach the moment when we are going to try to make
a comparable operation with time which also has a difficult
status, often forgotten and occasionally invisible.

TWO DISCOURSES, THE MASTER AND THE UNCONSCIOUS…

This little matter of situating has an accrued interest if one also
wants to remember the equivalence Lacan establishes between
the discourse of the master and that of the unconscious. In the
one, as in the other, S1 is this mark which commands and can
in a moment appear to you in the form of this word “have fun.”
DM DU
It is very profound to make a discourse out of the uncon-
scious because one would have the tendency to think that
the unconscious is the One-all-alone, that it is yours, that it
is your unique property, since that would seem to be what is
the most intimate. Basically, one goes to the analyst for the
analytic operation—which is not a ceremony—completely
alone. We make a strong distinction between family therapy
and psychoanalysis. If you say, “I talk to you so much about

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my wife that I will bring her to you.” No, no. If you bring her,
she will come all alone, on her own.
When there are subjects for whom it is dangerous
to let them cross the street, like little children, they must be
accompanied, and that already creates a difficulty. What will
one do about accompanying them? Does one let them enter in
order to be polite? Does one leave them in the waiting room?
Does one say, “Go take a walk and then come back?” There
is truly an exigency of formal solitude there.
The solitude of the analysand who makes a couple,
a partner with the analyst, could make one think that the
unconscious is on the side of the One-all-alone. Un con…
scious. A twit (con) who, moreover, knows some things. The
Unbewusstsein of Freud could be translated thus. The point
of view according to which the unconscious is a discourse
obliges us to revise this spontaneous conception. That says,
first, that the unconscious is a combinatory, because a dis-
course is a combinatory of terms and places, and insofar
as it is a discourse, like any discourse, the unconscious is
governed by a semblant. It is governed by a master-signifier
or by a set of master-signifiers, since S1 can just as well
be found with the name, the letter, qualifying or referring
itself to a set of signifiers, a swarm of signifiers, which
are semblants.

…A SAME IDENTIFICATION
It is there that one must give the equivalence of these two
discourses all its value. The equivalence is two names for
the same structure of discourse, for the same discourse.
This highlights that the identification—a Freudian con-
cept which is in some fashion mathematized by Lacan

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under this form—in the discourse of the master as in

the discourse of the unconscious, one finds the same.
In the master’s discourse, the subject is always identi-
fied. He is always identified in the Other. This can extend to
the universal discourse. It is there where he fishes, or where
he is caught, hooked by a master-signifier. What hooks, it
is what is said, what is said in the family, this little piece of
the particular. But as soon as one says “the family,” there is
society, eventually the state, there is an order, or a disorder,
where this family has its place. It is this way that the S1 plays
this eminent function in the unconscious under the form of
these words which mark you.
This S1 is at the same time conveyed and carried into
the universal discourse. It is an amboceptor which, on one
side, is linked up to your intimacy and which disturbs it—one
wonders what it makes there, it is precisely, rather, extimate—,
and on the other side, it is connected to everything which is
recounted and which makes a rumor. It is the whole kit and
caboodle where the Venus of Urbin is placed side by side with
set theory and lends a hand to philosophy, mathematics, and
the sect. It is the reserve where everything enters, like that of
the bricoleur.
When you are there, in your obligated solitude, all
this commotion comes with you into the analyst’s office.
It is the linguistic (langagière) identification and ipso facto
“social,” between quotation marks, because it is precisely in
the analytic experience that one can have a little glimpse of
the social, and precisely of the fact that, in order for there to
be groups, even a nation, and social classes, one must find a
certain number of subjects operating with an identification to
the same master-signifier.

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There are other master-signifiers which are different,

of course, but it is necessary, in order for there to be a social,
that there be identifications to at-least-one master-signifier
valid for all of those of the set. This language (langagière)
of identification is the condition of work, the condition in
order that this set of signifiers marked as S2 work and that
it produces something which, since Lacan, we indicate
as objet a.

2. AN UNCONSCIOUS TO JOUIR

THE UNCONSCIOUS-MASTER
Let us comment on this schema of the discourse of the mas-
ter, which is well known, on the slope of the discourse of the
unconscious. Where is the unconscious in the discourse of the
unconscious? It is everywhere. Here, it is the unconscious-
subject, the one that one knows under the species of the truth
that betrays your intention. Let us inscribe the lapsus there,
the truth which bursts forth, despite what you have of it and
which especially affects those for whom the social identifica-
tion is especially pregnant. The lapsus has all its brilliance
in a social function in the measure by which someone is the
seat of it.
S1 S2
S (a)
Freud takes the example of the president who, when he is func-
tioning, reveals the truth from underneath. With others, if it is
not the president, but the buffoon, one calls that a witticism.
But in S 1 there is an unconscious-master, the

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unconscious grasped as what commands you. It is what oper-

ates when one spots what could be compulsive in a behavior.
The unconscious-master is what especially highlights the
superego. It was necessary that Freud create a concept for
that. When he wanted to demonstrate that the unconscious
is what is solid, that it was not his dream, when he wanted
to give the unconscious a character of the bearable real in
regards to the discourse of science, he does not bring forth
the lapsus. No, the lapsus is an interference, a short-circuit. It
has barely appeared when it disappears. It is a shooting star, a
spark. It does not count. It is the same thing as when one fails
a chemistry experiment—the litmus paper was not at the right
temperature, the retort was cracked. These are little accidents
on which one does not establish the real.
When, in public, Freud wants to give credence to the
notion that the unconscious is real, he makes recourse to the
unconscious-master. He gives evidence of compulsive actions,
repetitive ones, where the subject appears as evidently com-
manded by something stronger.

THE UNCONSCIOUS-WORK
Then, of course, there is the unconscious in S2, the unconscious
in the place of the slave. That is the unconscious which works,
and of which at a certain moment Lacan makes the essential
character of the unconscious, der Arbeiter —taking up again,
not without derision, the title of a work strongly recommend-
able by Ernst Jünger.
One knows, basically, at what point Freud put the
accent on the work of the dream. It is the unconscious that
we love, that one. The unconscious which commands, in gen-
eral, is harsh. The unconscious which works, which knits, the

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unconscious which interprets, which misunderstands, which,

with a word, succeeds in producing loads of meanings, one
says of it, “Oh! What an artist.” I recently listened to a sub-
ject who does his analysis in English. He had the notion of
a little fly in a transparent glass container and he had it very
close to his ear. With these three letters, fly, what does one
not find? To fly. The airplane which one has some difficulties
taking, and, by metonymy, the little bee that one has in his
head—we say a spider in the ceiling. He also has the thought
that it was on the exterior, rather than in his head. He could,
thus, begin to take a little distance, a small margin from it
with his master-signifier. Fly, also being a slang word for the
codpiece, the famous master-signifier of the phallus, has also
succeeded in gliding in there. And still, the verb to fly has
some erotic values, from Erica Jong to Joyce. One must stop.
Three quarters of an hour were not sufficient. If one were not
an analyst, one would go down on his knees before the marvel
of this construction. What a work of art! As one says before
little doilies. It is artisanal, doubtlessly, rather than great art,
and that, unfortunately, does not leave the analyst’s office,
except in the form of a little recitation that the analysand or
analyst will make of the day.
The unconscious-truth, the unconscious-master, the
unconscious-work, are a putting into form by Lacan of what
Freud found across time, and for which he had to invent the
concepts that he proposed to us with the means of the rim.
The fourth one of the affair is the finality of the system.
It is what Freud brought immediately and what Lacan only
recuperated a little later, after the beginning of his teach-
ing, namely, the articulation of the unconscious-truth, of the
unconscious-master, and the unconscious-knowledge, made

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jouir, it is made to obtain a Lustgewinn, a gain-displeasure.

The Freudian unconscious thinks of nothing else, not
working so much to deliver this gain-displeasure, and tries to
do it with the least cost. That is its economy.

A FALSE REAL
All this paraphernalia of signifiers, the whole mechanism—
think of the machine of Vaucanson, the steam engines, the
pistons—to set off something that is not of the order of
the signifier.
At least this is what petit a says. It is not of the order of
the S1—S2, not even of S barred which is at the base the lack
of a signifier where one could inscribe one. It is something
else, something else which is, incidentally, made to be taken
for the real.
One has said to oneself: all this signifying parapher-
nalia for that? That is the real of the affair. Petit a. It suffices
to look at it, this petit a, pretty as anything, well lodged in its
parenthesis, it is a little jouissance, a nibble of jouissance, as
Lacan once said, which remains very well in its place. Look,
these signifiers are in their place. Well forced, but petit a
is jouissance properly in its place which arrives at just the
right moment. It is necessary to see that also in the master’s
discourse, well, it is a production. It is also properly speaking
the merchant’s product, this small a that one piles up, that
one numbers, and that one eventually produces in a tight flux.
Tomorrow, thanks to electronic equipment, one will order
it, and it will be immediately produced and brought to you.
Small bits of jouissance that are scattered. Nothing to
do with infinite jouissance. Petit a, it is of the small numer-
able jouissance, which evidently has something in common

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with the signifier, otherwise we could not inscribe it on this

schema. What there is in common with the signifier is that it
can be counted, that it accumulates, and that, while not being
signifier, it is encircled by the trait of the semblant. This means
that in the discourse—but in the others also—what is inscribed
there is a false real. Clearly substantial. Everything is there.
If one takes the terms which are underneath the two
bars, one has in relation to this insubstantial term, doubtlessly,
an insubstantial term here, the empty term of the subject. The
word itself of subject carries the indication that it is below,
it is the upokeimenon, as Lacan refers to it—“upo” means
below. In relation to this insubstantial and empty term, without
a doubt this one is substantial, not upokeimenon, but ousia,
what one has caught in Latin by substantia, and which has
come to us as our “substance.”

3. SOCRATIC EFFECT

WHAT AM I?
Based on this schema, what determines that there are, in
effect, three responses that one gives to the question “I am?”
The first response to “what am I?”, it is the response by the
identification to the S1, by the identificatory signifier.
That can go from “I am the son of” up to “I am a profes-
sor,” “I am an adjunct,” “I am employed by the Post Office,”
etc., some identifications where I am the one who received
the word “Have fun”—but the response by the identificatory
signifier. Then there is the response by S barred which is the
response, “I am none of that.”
Immediately, one accedes to it by the analytic experi-
ence, “I am the one who has the possibility of denying what

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he has just said.” When it is enclosed in certain ceremonies,

you cannot say the contrary. Once you have said, “Do you
want to take this man for a husband…?—Yes. —Then, I
declare you united by the bonds of marriage. —Hey, just a
minute, I have changed my mind.” There one must enter into
a very long story. There, you do not have the possibility of
changing your mind. “—But I have just perceived…Ah! No
sir, no madam.” While in the analytic experience, you say
something terrible. “—No, all things considered.” You are
already the subject who can say the contrary in the second.
You do not wake up your analyst for this much. That gives an
extraordinary liberty in relation to identifications. Nothing but
that. You are, then, the one who can always say more about it.
It is sufficient to return the next session. You are, thus, a sort
of plus-one. It is permitted that you be silent, be a sort of
minus-one.
That is the definition of your “I am” as barred subject.
And then, there is the definition by the petit a,
something that one could formulate as “I am what I jouis.”
Incidentally, one could, why not?—add the fourth response,
the response by S2, “I am what I know,” “I am what one knows
of me.” All these responses do not give us, as far as I know,
the real of the discourse.

SNATCHED BY THE MASTER-SIGNIFIER

How did Freud begin? He began rather by perceiving the
unconscious-truth and the unconscious-work, and then, in the
second topography, he gave value to the unconscious-master.
He produced the concept of the superego, principle of your
unconscious, spring of your symptoms, agent of the discourse
of the unconscious.

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Freud has, moreover, given it value as the emblem

of the discourse of the unconscious, as his insignia. It is the
lesson which is common to the discourse of the master and
to the discourse of the unconscious. One governs man by
identification.
The question is posed, evidently, of what happens
if one truly arrives at the end of the analytic discourse, by
producing S1, if one manages to get the subject out of his
absorption in the S1 to separate from it.
That has, basically, given the idea to analysts that at
the end of an analysis one finds oneself as a non-identified
subject. When one proposed this reading to him, Lacan
refuted it immediately by saying: one does not deal with non-
identified subjects in analysis. That was said very precisely:
a non-identified subject has no unconscious that is not in the
discourse of the unconscious.
To be in the discourse of the unconscious, one has
to have been snatched by the universal discourse, and that,
this universal discourse, came upon you, baptized you, tran-
substantiated you, as a master-signifier. If it is not the case,
if something has failed in this initial capture, if the master-
signifier has been badly attached, badly pinned together,
askew, not at all, desolate, you are not in the discourse of the
unconscious, you cannot enter into the analytic discourse.
The condition for being in the analytic discourse, is to have
entered into the discourse of the unconscious.

DISIDENTIFIED SUBJECT
In the analytic discourse, it is more severe. At the end of the
analysis, you do not have a non-identified subject at all. Let us
make a difference here with the disidentified. The disidentified

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means that the subject has passed by identification and then he

has separated himself from it, in a close-up mode of seeing.
He has separated himself from it because in analysis, he has
had the experience of himself as S. He has had the experience
of his lack-in-being, that is to say of putting all identifications
into question, and that he has finally brought himself there,
necessarily.
It is the ironic effect of free association, it is analytic,
spontaneous Socratism. When you have someone to screw in
your identifications, to recognize you as an employee of the
Post Office, the son of Untel, etc., when this someone you are
there is subtracted, he operates otherwise in saying to you,
“Of course Mr. Untel, of course Mrs…,” and he moves a little
bit, then he is not in the place where he ought to be, namely
to acquiesce to your identification, very well, in return, your
identification trembles, your identificatory semblant vacillates,
and nothing remains to take its place.
The analytic experience is Socratic. Socrates walked
around saying, “Ah! You say that? And you truly believe
it? Oh! Oh! How interesting it is…” He ruined everybody’s
life. That is the analytic process itself which, at one point or
another, attacks this confusion where you are one with your
identification.
Suddenly—follow me closely—in the analytic dis-
course it is the S1 that one produces which makes a figure
of the real. It is why when Freud wants to give credit to the
unconscious in relation to the discourse of science, he brings in
some facts about the superego, he brings compulsive actions,
where the subject does not absolutely understand by what
force he is operated.
What makes the figure of the real in the analytic

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discourse is the master-signifier, the master-signifiers. Let us

remember well that it is all the same a false real.

4. “HAVE FUN”

“MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN”

The theme of the Study Days of the School of the Freudian
Cause will unfold on this particular matter, under the title of
“When the semblants vacillate…incidences of the real in the
psychoanalytic clinic.”
I can already say how this will be illustrated, since
they have confided it to me. Catherine Bonningue is going
to adorn these Days with a painting by Rembrandt who puts
precisely into a scene the famous moment when, on the wall
the fateful “Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin” is inscribed, that
to which Lacan makes reference.
Starting with the moment when these Aramean
words appear on the wall, the king knows that his days are
numbered, that he does not have much longer, that his his-
tory is terminated, and that everything must go—as one says
in the big stores. As Lacan evokes it, “if this appears on
the wall so that everyone can read it, it damns an empire to
the earth.”
One could say to oneself that it is a fact of the signi-
fier there, but that illustrates precisely the return of the S1 that
makes the real function and that prevails over all the semblants
of power. One has represented it there on the canvas of the
semblants of power, which fail at the moment when the fate-
ful word appears, written, and which is valuable as real in
relation to these semblants.

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WORD OF THE SUPEREGO

“Have fun!” There is someone who has seen, in some fashion,
that appear on the wall, and in a circumstance well made for
engraving it, since it was a word the mother said on her death
bed, and even the last word of the mother.
On occasion, it is the word that one says to children,
to take them away from duty, to say to them it is time for
recreation. One authorizes the child to have fun. It is the oppo-
sition of “no more laughing.” “Have fun” means “permitted
to jouir.”
When that is said to you in this circumstance, this
loveable and permissive word takes a grimmer turn. It is a
little “have fun with what I leave to you.” Result, the subject
does not laugh. “Have fun before you die.”
It is a word which reveals its face of terror, of horror,
on occasion, which is the word even of the superego, since it
is not anything else than “jouis” which resonates there.
This will to jouissance that is proposed there is
precisely akin to the death drive. To be told “have fun” by
someone who is the mother on her deathbed, and from whom
this will be the last word, I can say that I do not wish that on
anyone. It is perhaps only at the end of an analysis that one
can bear the word “have fun”—which can be a good word.
Perhaps if this saying has struck me, thus, it is that, this year,
I have decided to have fun, including here, especially here,
where, for some time, I did not have very much fun, and
especially last year, when I had the feeling, at least during the
first half of the year, that to lift the experience of the real is an
enormous weight.
The considerations that I bring cause one to grasp the
essence of the master-signifier, the master-signifier which

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comes all alone, which is imposed on a set. Even if it forms

a swarm, it is an S1 on its own, from where the conflicts of
duty come, those by which the human soul is agitated. If
all that held together, there would not be any conflicts. It is
what Kant tried to resolve with his universal criterion. The
essence of the master-signifier is all the same what one can
call its arbitrariness: why that one rather than another one?
One says arbitrary first to give value to the fact that one does
not perceive its necessity, even if it follows on from it, then,
a necessary chain that underlines the compulsive action as
the symptom.

THE CAPRICE
It is indeed what makes it so that this essence of the master-
signifier is excellently highlighted by the caprice.
Regarding the caprice, I have been fulfilled this
week. Marie-Hélène Brousse gave me the gift of a book for
children, while recommending to me to read it to anyone
from whom I have borrowed the “out of the question.” She
pointed out in this book the page where there appears the
figure in Latin of the “Sic volo, sic jubeo” of Juvénal, attrib-
uted to a shrew who is represented in a lively manner, as one
does for children. This book is not just any book. It is by the
Scandinavian illustrator Tomi Ungerer, from whom I had
bought the first volume that appeared for children. I had lost
sight of its production. Without further reference, this reader,
more a Juvénal than a Kant, slips this Latin word into this
book for children. Francesca Biagi-Chai brought me an Italian
nursery rhyme which clarifies many things, “Sotto ogni ric-
cio ci stà un capriccio, la donna a riccio non la voglio, no.”

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That means curly hair. “Under any curl, there is a caprice,

I do not want the curly-haired woman, no.” It is not the
head standing up with frizzies, that the historical dictionary
Robert mentions, but the curly hair which is linked to caprice.
It is full of wit.
One sees well why this concentrates on the head,
this business of the master-signifier. Immediately, one goes
towards the head, and when one wants to make you understand
that you are not on the axis of the master-signifier, what one
cuts from you, is especially the head, in any case in the French
tradition. And, on the head, one is going to look precisely for
the capricious curl, representing the caprice, the capricious
hair, the hair which only makes her head particular to her, all
that being incarnated in Madame-Curl who has under each
one of her curls a caprice.
I pass on what might evoke Lacan’s reference in the
opening of his Écrits, The Rape of the Lock, by Pope. The
lock, it is riccio, the curl. It is there in the beauty.
Belinda who is impudent has just cut a lock. One fights,
then, for the lock stolen from Belinda, and Pope mobilizes all
the gods of Olympia who take part for or against Belinda and
her thief. As Lacan says it, Pope gives value to the stake of
derision in any epic, namely, that one fights for nothing. It is
not truly serious except when one fights for some nothings.
What the wars of religion show, which—when they
existed—had the merit of making God exist.
There are also psychoanalytic wars which have,
perhaps, had the merit of making psychoanalysis exist for a
certain number among us.

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5. THE DISCOURSES AND THE REAL

AN APPARATUS OF SEMBLANTS
Where is the real in all that? The real is not there, nô c’è. It is
not that there, no hay. It is not there, there’s nothing. Nothing.
Nothing at all.
All that, if one looks closely, and even if this place is
par excellence that of the semblant—and it seems to be the
place of the real—all of those are semblants, and a discourse
is an apparatus of semblants.
If one wants to lodge the real somewhere, one must
follow, as Lacan indicates, the path of it: it is not there, it is
not there, it is not there, it is not there… One must consider
that all this apparatus and the circuit that one can make of
it—one can make some others—is made to set and to avoid
a real which does not find itself gently lodged in any one of
these places.
What would be a real that would agree to make the
rounds? It must be a semblant as some signifiers or as the
objet petit a has to agree to make the rounds.
They make the rounds around the Thing which, itself,
does not make the rounds. Let us represent this as something
a little dribbly—the dribbling having very much served to
represent the real. But it is still an image.
In this regard, the petit a that one would like to pro-
mote as being the real, it does not want to, it does not want
to. Besides, the petit a is a defense against the infinity of
jouissance because the will to jouir, if one gives it full rein,
reveals that it is only the death drive.
I find it rather mean, the blow of the dying mother
to her daughter, to have said to her “have fun” before dying,
understood “before dying like me.” She has truly played a

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dirty trick, because after one cannot take her back to reproach
her. It is the last ravage. Then, one must pick up the pieces.
The mother has played like the Stone Guest. The good
God is more honest. At least, he says “Your time is counted,
you are finished, my good fellow.” If the good God were not
honest, he would also have said “Have fun.”
One must conceive of the discourses as trying to sur-
round the formless Thing which could represent the real to
us. It is indeed for this reason that Lacan signals—it is his
imagery as well—that it does not loop itself, that there is a
discontinuity here which makes it so that one cannot make
the round.
The real of each discourse is rather in this interval, if
one must give an image of the master—of the master and his
caprice—, which is also the essence of the master-signifier
which is there. One does not know why.

MASTER HUMPTY-DUMPTY
Why is it this word which has grabbed you like that? I shall
represent the master who knows the secret, rather, under a
smiling figure—smiling for us, he is not smiling at all—this
Humpty-Dumpty in The Other Side of the Looking Glass.

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Humpty-Dumpty is the master. Besides, one cannot

make a mistake about it, he is seated on the top of a wall when
Alice meets him, in an equilibrium that one could believe
unstable, but he holds himself there. It is the caprice incarnate.
That makes one see moreover that Alice is not
capricious, not in the least. It is precisely because she is so
uncapricious that she enables one to see the caprice of others.
It is on the basis of Alice that one sees the madness of the
Hatter, the bad conduct of the Dormouse, the unmotivated
haste, the pathological haste of the Rabbit.
It is because she is truly a kind of barred subject that
she enables one to see the caprices of the others and how they
are fixed on their own jouissance. She is even the barred sub-
ject, par excellence, since she incarnates, as Lacan notes, the
minus phi—Lewis Carroll’s object, the little girl. It is on this
basis that one has this gaily colored, baroque world, where
one sees each one following his own voluptuousness.
Humpty-Dumpty introduces a powerful effect of deri-
sion, in immoral fashion. He truly gives value to the kingly
power of the signifier about which Lacan speaks in the Écrits,
the possibility of the instantaneous abolishment of any sym-
bolic order if one knows how to manage Humor.

—What—says Alice?

—When I use a word, replied Humpty-Dumpty, in a somewhat

disdainful tone of voice, it signifies exactly what it pleases
me that it signify… no more, no less—

Exquisite precision concerning the caprice.

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—The question, says Alice, is to know if you have the power

to make words signify something other than what they mean.

—The question, retaliated Humpty-Dumpty, is to know who

will be the master… that point is everything.—

There is a prodigious dialogue, which demonstrates, basically,

to what point the signifying order is dominated by the master-
signifier, by the essence of the master, his caprice.

THE UNIVERSITY DISCOURSE AND THE WITTICISM

The university discourse has this property, that it puts the
whole order of knowledge in the position of the semblant.
Lacan says about such words that the best that can be made of
this university discourse is the witticism, which is horrifying to
them, to academics. That means that the truth of S1 is to make
knowledge pass completely into the position of the mistress
of the semblant, that is to say, precisely into the arbitrary, the
caprice. What the university discourse ought to familiarize
itself with is to let some of its truth appear, that is to say,
under the knowledge that is Witz. And in the same fashion,
under the categorical imperative of Kant, which is truly the
incarnation of excellence of this S2, that is to say, its truth in
Juvénal, since, after all, Kant was not ignorant of it. Under
the logical, universal imperative, one sees a particular caprice,
and then, under S1, one can see the S2 in the position of truth.

SCIENCE AND THE SEMBLANT

It is striking that the semblant also dominates in the discourse
of science from which one would believe that it gives us access
to the real in question.

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One perceives, since in order for the discourse of

science to work, it is necessary that God—God or whatever
takes his place—be a serious fellow—he must keep his word.
It is necessary that God not be Humpty-Dumpty who gives
the game away. With a Humpty Dumpty who says “It is like
that because that pleases me,” one has difficulty producing the
discourse of science. For the God of Descartes too, the eternal
truths are as they are because that pleased him. And Descartes
leaves it, “Come on, my good fellow.” Once he has chosen the
eternal truths, he no longer has the right to change his mind.
That is what Descartes comes to explain. He passes
the handcuffs to the good God. He has found a way of doing
it, and then, he cannot change it any longer. God would have
been able to make it so that 2 + 2 = 5. Perfectly possible.
But once he has chosen that 2 + 2 = 4, it is forbidden that he
change his mind. It is necessary, then, that God be a serious
fellow. One knows how Lacan has highlighted the fact that, for
Einstein, it was necessary at all costs that God be trustworthy,
of good faith, that is to say that things not happen by chance
or by caprice.
With his relativity, he has thrown to the ground a whole
world of semblants. This has been extraordinary.
It is absolutely interesting to be here today, at the
beginning of the 21st century, but, at the beginning of the 20th
century, one had to hold on tight. With Freud who released
psychoanalysis into the world and then relativity which has
tossed around evidence accepted for thousands of years!
It is this man, this subversive one, who thought that
in order for things to cohere, it was necessary that the real
obey the law, a law, which maintained that it was necessary
that the real be “law-like,” as one says it in English.

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THE SCISSION BETWEEN THE REAL AND THE LAW

From this point of view, quantum mechanics – before which
Einstein held complete reticence, before this genre, “I will not
eat of this bread”—threatened even more the notion of the
real, from then on it introduced a function of the incalculable,
of the random, and basically quantum mechanics began to
dwell in the notion of a real without law.
One cannot even read the formula on the wall, which
made visible, at least, that it could be possible that the law
the real would obey would only be a semblant.
What is crucial is the scission between the real and
law—which animates Lacan’s last teaching—that the real,
precisely, does not obey it. While in discourse, everybody
obeys everybody.
Here the subject identifies with the master-signifier,
the one which works like a crazy person to produce petit a.
The only problem is that it is here where that breaks. Here
the truth is that which obeys no one, and is the false real.
It is a malfunction, if one wishes, but it is in this inter-
val that one can have a little glimpse of this real.

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TEACHING AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

I will end by what I have perceived concerning teaching,
especially the teaching of psychoanalysis.
Teaching consists in covering S1 by S2. This covers
the arbitrary by coherence, by consistency. This shows that
it holds together. As Alphonse Allais said, “Where does this
hold together?” This holds together. This does not, moreover,
hold together from only one thing. This holds onto a desire,
to a whim (fantasie,) to surplus-jouissance.
The teaching of psychoanalysis, of course, does not
escape from promoting S2 in the position of a semblant, but
to legitimately teach what touches on psychoanalysis, one
must teach it on the edge, between S2 and S1, on the edge
where one makes the master-signifier communicate with the
truth of discourse. And furthermore, in each discourse there
is psychoanalysis when one connects the master-signifier and
the truth of the discourse.

—Translated by Ellie Ragland

L’orientation lacanienne III, Les us du laps (1999-2000), lesson of

February 2, 2000—text and notes established by Catherine Bonningue.
Originally published with the authorization of Jacques-Alain Miller in la
Cause freudienne n˚47 (March, 2001).

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NOTES

J.-A. Miller alludes to the exposé by Claude Arasse made the samevening
on the Venus of Urbin by Titien, in the frame of the seminar litique
lacanienne.
Cf. The part of J.-A. Miller’s Cours (1998-1999), “The experience of the
real in the psychoanalytic clinic.”
Cf. Miller J.-A., “Theory of the caprice.” Quarto, no. 71.

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