Presentation of the Sinthome

J acques -A lain M ller

I - PRESENTATION OF THE SINTHOME

1. T he C h o ic e o f a T it l e

AN ATTITUDE
I thank you for being here! That enables me to recall that
you exist. To tell the truth I had forgotten you a little, so as to
think only of Lacan and to edit Lacan. I realize that it screens
off your presence, to the point that I did not think that I had
to speak to you till last evening. So I am going to do today
what came to me this morning. Now that I have verified that
you are here, and that you expect something from me, I will
now think about it all week long.
It is my beginning that I know the best, and my
beginning is my title: Spare Parts. That opens up and leaves
open what can come, and will come. I have confidence; I
have confidence in you.
It is a title that does not prejudge anything and
relieves me from having to ensure coherence. From having
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taken myself unprepared, I realize that coherence is an arti­

fice. If this title suits me, it is that it gives contingency the
upper hand over coherence. It pleases me all the more as it is
an attitude which can claim to be analytical, it is in any case
what the analytical rule bears out.
I said the word “attitude.” It is a coded word, a word
that has its place in mathematical logic, or at least in its phi­
losophy. One speaks about it, Bertrand Russell spoke of
“propositional attitudes.” I must explain that. What does one
designate by “propositional attitude”? One designates in that
manner the diverse relations that can be established between
what one continues to call, in this philosophy, the mind -
the object unleashed by John Locke - and statements. These
relations are, for exam ple, belief, fear, hope, familiarity,
comprehension, supposition... When I say something, when
I pose a proposition, I can qualify it by specifying: it is what
I believe, it is what 1 know, it is what I hope for, or, even the
contrary: I say the contrary of what I think. In other words,
an attitude in the logical sense is a relation between the state­
ment and the utterance. One could not get past that.
When I say Spare Parts as title, I mean that I imagine
to myself that I cannot take it totally into my account, that
I have to make some trials without too much verification.
Attitude - to think that there is an attitude, in this sense that I
said - recalls at the start that there is something behind what
is said; behind what is said, there is the fact that one says.
It is the reminder to which Lacan proceeded as the point of
departure for his piece ‘L’etourdit.’ This “that one says,” the
propositional attitude, the fact of the utterance, remains will­
ingly “forgotten behind what is said.”1
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ELUCUBRAT
W here is the “what is said” ? This is not an elem entary
given, not a primary datum. The “what is said” is “in what
is heard.”2 “What is said,” which you may deposit on your
sheets of paper, as, formerly, I have myself deposited some
writings; it is what, for you, is said in what you hear of me.
What is said is already what is read and which you write -
which is quite the proof that there is something that is read.
What is heard, here is the fact, that which takes
place, that which gets recorded. Someone not knowing
French has access all the same to what is heard. Here’s what
takes place here, what is heard. True positivism , factual-
ism, is to stick to what is heard. It is this that is appropriate
to remember, to not forget, regarding analytical interpreta­
tion, which is above all what is heard, on condition that the
one who receives it, if he really wants it, has to seek what
was said in what he heard. It is not enough to say: “can you
repeat it?” - which interpretation often provokes. But one
must never repeat it. This gap between what is heard and
what is said is there by structure.
“What is said in what is heard” is already a construc­
tion, a lucubration. That is why it absorbs me to write Lacan,
on the basis of what was heard. There still remains to know
what is said in there. It is at each word, at each line, that
I find there is a construction to be made, to be tested, and
not only one, before delivering a m anuscript of Lacan’s.
Between the fact that one says and the fact that one hears
it, there is that which is not a fact but a construction, what
I could call a “he/she would have lucubrated (elucuhrat).”3
The elucuhrat is what is said, and one is never very sure of
what is said.
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If one uses the pronominal form here, it is because

as a general rule, “what is said” is not what one means to
say. That is the advantage for me of throwing it down on
paper. I did not have to occupy myself with what I meant to
say; I have squeezed this moment there. It is the gap between
what is said and what one means to say that leaves place for
interpretation, which rests upon this divergence there, and
which means that one can always lucubrate some more, in the
order of “He tells me that, but what is it that he means to say?”
Someone tells me something during the session and
I burst out laughing. I laugh, that is to say, I say. To laugh is
one way of saying. What is it that I say exactly? Do I nec­
essarily say that it amuses me, that it is funny? Perhaps it
says exactly the contrary, for example, that it is desperate,
because one can laugh rather than cry.

MARTYR
The analyst does not cry. One has never seen that: an analyst
who cries during the session! It is certainly so much better:
it is the analysands who cry potentially. But when it hap­
pens, that still does not say by itself what it means. Crying
may be a resistance, to cry rather than to speak; but one very
well manages also to cry while speaking. Perhaps it is to sig­
nal that a truth was wrenched off; one cries over this very
wrenching. One could even lucubrate that the tears com ­
memorate castration, and that what is said serves for that.
Who cries there? “Who cries there, if not the sim­
ple wind, at this hour/ Alone, with diamonds extreme?...
But who cries, / So close to myself on the verge of crying?”
Propositional attitude, “I quote.” I have passed to the quota­
tion, to the first verse of La Jeune Parque. In the quotation,
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someone else speaks, who says that it is only the wind that
cries in the solitude of the hour.
Who cries, in the solitude of the analytical session?
As a general rule, it is women. They bear the complaint to
the point of tears, sometimes even simply the truth. Doing
this, they show that the analytical session is often the hour
for tears (I ’heure des pleures), the “wat’hour” {la p l ’heure),
if I may say so. It’s worth what it’s worth. Like saying - I
associate it to this - that “to teach” (enseigner) is “to bleed
from it” {en saigner).
It is to another hour that I am summoned. There is
some bleeding in the business, not only from knowledge.
Thus I could tell you: “This is my blood.” Yes. I was forced
to realize this morning that I have come to the point where
to teach is something like displaying one’s stigmata. I teach
as martyr of psychoanalysis. I feel quite well how ridicu­
lous it is. But undoubtedly the position of martyr is what one
arrives at when one has a passion.
To have a passion is to be subjected, it is to suffer. I
experienced this morning, from having to put myself to turn­
ing the crank once again, how far I am from the university
position that I started out from and that I continued to occu­
py for several years while teaching psychoanalysis. Besides,
I had signaled one day that I felt that this position, which
made of me a teacher, had vacillated; just as I signal today at
which point it is no longer natural for me to address a crowd.
It is the first time that I am experiencing it like this. It is
an effort, which is truly to convert the passion of psycho­
analysis, what it can involve of suffering, into an exhibition
of passion.
The attitude that I could substitute for the “I know”-
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which is what supports a teaching - is that of an “I suffer.”

I suffer a thousand deaths in order to speak to you. I do not
have the air of that about me, to be sure, and it is to glimpse
the ridiculousness of it that in place of the suffering I sub­
stitute the laughter, at least the smile. Rather smile (sourire)
than suffer (soujfrir).
That is why I say Spare Parts. That is what I have to
tear off from me to bring them back to you. I say that it is an
analytical attitude, because one does not demand anything
else from the analysand than to deliver his thought in spare
parts, without concerning himself with order or with congru­
ence, neither with coherence nor with verisimilitude. It must
be assured that whatever comes to him will not go without
being reported.
It is the trust that is placed in the process invented by
Freud and that Lacan translated with the subject supposed of
knowledge. The subject supposed of knowledge is summa­
rized in what operates from the relation, from the connection
written for sim plicity’s sake as S -S . All this that I say to
you will take on sense, be sure of it, little by little.

BRICOLAGE
The function of the spare part is isolated as such in the
Anxiety Seminar, as a module of objects characteristic of
modern experience. In this Seminar the spare part is valo­
rized as an approach, an outline, of what Lacan lucubrates as
the object small a. The spare part is not a whole. What con­
stitutes the spare part as such is precisely that it is referred
to a whole that it is not; it is taken off from upon {prelevee
sur) this whole, from upon a whole where it has its func­
tion. Whence the question: what is it that the spare part is
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all alone, the spare part outside of the whole? And worse
still, the spare part when the whole where it would have its
function no longer exists? One comes across that all the time
nowadays: “Ah, I regret they don’t make that anym ore!”
And you have in your hands the spare part, which can be
the entire apparatus minus what would make of it the whole.
And behold the apparatus, depreciated, reduced to the status
of the spare part.
This experience is common and justifies the question
that Lacan raises without giving any answer: what is then
the being of this spare part as definitively detached? What is
its subsistence when the whole to which it was referred has
declined and has become obsolete? What sense does it have?
It is thus that the stupidest of the spare parts, once
it is isolated from its function as such, becomes enigm at­
ic. One no longer knows what it means because it no lon­
ger serves for anything. It is a criterion for knowing what
it means as it is for knowing for what it serves. It is the
elementary pragmatism of signification summarized in the
W ittgensteinian aphorism “Meaning is use” : the significa­
tion, the sense, is the usage. As a result, the spare part, when
it no longer serves for anything, is a figure of outside sense
(.hors-sens), outside of sense. And it is even at the moment
when, as such, it no longer serves for anything, that it can
then be controlled and be lent to a thousand and one uses,
and first of all to a use of pure jouissance, if jouissance is
precisely, as Lacan evokes it at the beginning of the Seminar
Encore, what serves for nothing.
The jouissance value of the spare part, it is what a
certain Marcel Duchamp exploited with subtlety, by the ges­
ture of the artist who converted the spare part into aesthetic
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object. A urinal put on a pedestal, with the signature of the

artist - there is no question, of course, of doing one’s busi­
ness - from this fact, can radiate like a Madonna: pure object
of jouissance. There is much to say on the aestheticization
of the spare part in what used to be contemporary art, but
this has durably marked artistic activity. The spare part, once
subtracted from its natural use, lends itself to other potential
uses for which it was not made. It is a process, a so very fun­
damental procedure, this practice of bricolage. It is from this
angle that one can consider in a fertile fashion the history of
thought. Aristotle had not envisaged that a day would come
when St. Thomas would succeed in extraordinarily marry­
ing the unmoved mover and the God of the burning bush.
Theology was made from the re-employment of spare parts
from Greek philosophy in attempting to find something to
say, a spluttering, in relation to the revelation of the burning
bush. An entire section of those who had been traumatized
by this revelation have cobbled together something with
the spare parts of Greek philosophy. That gives us a highly
respectable discipline, theology, even though it is cobbled
together from top to bottom. It is so well made that one does
not even see the seam, one does not even see the welding
that was necessary so that it fit together, though, it must be
said that it was polished over the centuries.
Levi-Strauss highlights bricolage. He puts it at the
start of his work The Savage Mind, indicating very well
thereby that there is an entirely essential link between the
structuralist angle, between structure and the spare part. The
spare part is an object that Levi-Strauss calls concrete, that
is to say, which always includes, when one wants to make
use of it again, something of the predetermined by virtue of
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the original use for which it was conceived. The initiatives,

the projects of the bricoleur are limited by the conforma­
tion of the part that was thought up and produced for the
previous use from which it is detached. He speaks of a “pre­
constrained” elem ent, which has determ inate properties,
with which one cannot do anything and everything .4 You
have a freedom of maneuver, but one restricted by the con­
crete configuration of the object.
T he b r ic o le u r a c c u m u la te s , w ith o u t k n o w ­
ing why, the spare parts that could always be useful, and
then, when he has the project, he finds a way to make do
with the means at hand, with whatever he has, a finite set
of materials from diverse origins, of heteroclite materials.
Structure is not entirely smooth. One has the impression
that it is homogeneous, that it is a whole which makes a
system , with not one head sticking out, but structure is
supported by the heteroclite. The treasury of the brico­
leur is at the mercy of occasions, it is a contingent result
of what he has been able to recover of various residues.
The spare part is alw ays, in that, a sem i-particularized
elem ent, which at the same time has quite precise deter­
m inations but whose em ploym ent rem ains to be found.

2. L anguage and Lalangue

SIGNIFIERIZATION OF THE PHALLUS

From the psychoanalytical point of view, what L acan’s
Sinthome Seminar seems to me to entail is that the body is
comparable to a cluster (amas) of spare parts. One does not
realize this in as much as one remains captive of its form, as
long as the pregnance of the form imposes the idea of its unity.
 Presentation of the Sinthome 107

How many places are there in this room? One by

one. It is a point of view which has its consistency. This
point of view which makes that a body is One even has so
much consistency that it is the living body that is valued as
the model of the individual, the individual as undivided (en
indivision). This word indivision says well what the individ­
ual owes to vision, biology remaining dependent on it.
When Lacan calls upon biological references in his
Anxiety Seminar, he does not fail to recall that structural
difference “is utterly prim itive,” and that it introduces, he
says, “ruptures and cuts, [...] the signifying dialectic .” 5 Let
us understand what that means: the primitive status of the
body is to be in detached pieces, contrarily to the evidence
of the visible. And I recall only for memory’s sake the phe­
nomena that M elanie Klein investigated and that Lacan
gathered up under the expression which he introduced into
the vocabulary of psychoanalysis in France, the expression
“fragmented body,” which designates a subjective status of
the body, primary in relation to the satisfaction of the good
form, of the G estalt .6 It is even what gives its sense to the
mirror stage. If the mirror stage makes an event, it is because
one has to do with a subjective status of the body that is in
pieces. It is thus that Lacan writes in ‘L’etourdit’: “the body
of those speaking is subject to be divided from its organs .” 7
That takes all its value in relation to the reference that he
recurrently makes to the unity of the living body and to the
soul as form of the living body, and in which the concept of
the One does or does not find its source.
In the Sem inar Encore , on several occasions one
sees the return of this interrogation on the unity of the body,
its indivision, mirage from which it is necessary to extricate
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oneself so as to grasp, like one may do in the analytic expe­

rience, that at a certain level of conception, the organs are
enlisted in, correspond to and contribute to good health, yet
from another point of view, it is a question of finding a sense,
a value, a function for them. And the form is never what it
should be: one limb shorter than the other, a little too much
fat here and there. The organs are as so many spare parts,
and as one sees in schizophrenia, the subject has to find a
function for them. Indeed, one sees there being deployed the
fact of fragmentation when the operation of imaginary unifi­
cation has not worked.
In ‘L’etourdit,’ Lacan takes the example of circum­
cision which returns to him from his Anxiety Seminar, the
surgery which manages to give some use to a bit of flesh
hitherto neglected in its eminent dignity. This time around, it
is in detaching it that the foreskin finds a function, but this is
only to introduce the major example of the spare part in psy­
choanalysis, which is the phallus - this organ as spare part
that becomes signifier in the analytical discourse.
The signifierization of the phallus falls under the
logic of bricolage. One can immediately recognize in it a
pre-constrained element, in the sense of Levi-Strauss, inso­
far as, qua concrete object, it is already as such in fact isolat­
ed in the body, appearing as something plastered on, being
erectile, and to the point, as Lacan signals, of being able to
appear removable. It is from common experience in what
haunts dream s, even literature. W hat counts here for the
phallic signifier applies to every operation of signifieriza­
tion. Let us say that it takes hold of a spare part so as to raise
it to the dignity of the signifier.
 Presentation of the Sinthome 109

DIVISION STRUCTURE AND SYSTEM STRUCTURE

I gave myself the title Spare Parts above all so as to be able
to not make any plan, to be able to welcome whatever came
to us. You have all the same avoided a title: Zibaldone. This
enormous work of 2000 pages by Leopardi, a kind of journal
made of spare parts that I read in Italian for some years, is
now available in French. I have a special fascination for this
work, even wanting to read all of it. I said to myself, this
here is what needs to be done: in the course of time, one says
what happens.
I preferred Spare Parts because it has the value of an
essential recall concerning structure. Structure always refers
to an initial fragmentation, to a cluster of spare parts. To say
it in the form of a slogan: before being system, structure is
division. That is why structure is never synthesis.
Already when Levi-Strauss introduced this defi­
nition of the unconscious - as such always empty and the
operator which imposes structural laws upon inarticulat-
ed elements, upon a vocabulary of images, such that from
them it makes a discourse - one very well has there these
two registers: of the structure which is an order, but, whose
vocabulary, whose matter is prior to it, under the form of
a material that is there from before. One could say that the
structure always has an Other, which is there the cluster pre­
requisite for its material. Levi-Strauss says that these are the
inarticulated elements that find themselves articulated in the
structure. They are already elements, howsoever inarticu­
lated, i.e., as such detached, they may be. It is necessary, for
example, here, to distinguish between the system structure,
from which Lacan will make the symbolic order, and the
division structure.
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The interrogation which becomes increasingly insis­

tent in Lacan is precisely to know how one passes-this
interrogation is pressing at the end of his Seminar Encore
- from this division structure, from the signifying division
of the elements, to the system structure. It is the manner in
which the elem ent always retains something of the spare
part. Starting from there, Lacan questions the definition of
the unconscious as structured like a language. The uncon­
scious, from the moment that one deciphers it, can only be
structured like a language, but this language is never any­
thing but hypothetical. That aims at the system structure.
And it is starting from there that Lacan introduces the differ­
ence between language and lalangue. Once one makes lal-
angue surge up behind language, language is brought down
to the status of a lucubration of knowledge on lalangue , it
is returned to the status of elucubrat. Language is the sys­
tem, potentially grammatical, the linguistic system, that one
invents starting out from lalangue. W herefrom the debate
between the linguists and the philosophers: how to struc­
ture the tongue {la longue)! Lacan will go to the point of
saying that as things stand language does not exist. It is a
fiction, a construction. It is certainly this that opens up the
path to what Lacan will attempt with his knots and with
the unheard-of definition that he gives of the sinthome. To
cleave language in its difference from lalangue does not
leave unscathed our reference to the unconscious in analyti­
cal practice. The unconscious is not a given. So as to make
a short-circuit, I would say that the prim itive given, it is
the symptom.
 Presentation of the Sinthome 111

3. F rom the S ymptom to the Sintho m e

escabeau
I said Spare Parts to cover the year. O therwise 1 would
have told you: I am going to, at the start, engage myself in
a commentary of the Seminar on The Sinthome. The change
in orthography by which Lacan proceeds is a changing of
sense. The difference between the symptom and the sin­
thome reverberates in the difference between language and
lalangue and indicates a point of view on the symptom
where it is no longer a formation of the unconscious.
Lacan, underscoring the support that Freud took in
his deductions from minute events of psychical life such
as slips and bungled actions, gave a model for thinking the
form ations of the unconscious borrowed from the regis­
ter of life, from the register of plants: “What we thus find
is in no way microscopic, no more than there is any need
of special instruments to recognize that a leaf has the struc­
tural features of the plant from which it has been detached.”8
I was happy to find the adjective “detached” in this place.
The leaf detached from the plant is not at all a spare part, it
is structurally different from a spare part as it is informed
by the plant; it is structurally identical to the plant. It goes
seeking for the plant, a living organism, and, in thinking the
formation of the unconscious, this puts the accent rather on
the fact that all the parts of the plant contribute to the same
finalized totality of the plant.
The sinthome that Lacan invented after his Seminar
Encore is a spare part, a piece that detaches itself so as to
dysfunction, a piece that does not have any other function —
it is apparently thus that it is detached —than to hinder the
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functions of the individual, and, far from being only a hin­

drance, it has, in a more secret organization, an eminent
function. Whence the idea that it is a question, in the analy­
sis, of finding this function, of cobbling together a function
for it (de lui bricoler une fonction).
The Sinthome is supported, is backed up by the very
special literature of James Joyce, and especially by what is,
even if Lacan speaks little about it, the testimony of a spare
part of literature, Finnegans Wake, which we have never
quite known what to make of. No matter what else we do, in
English, we do well to republish the numbering of the pages
without any change, because otherwise we would no longer
find anything again in it. It should remain as it is, it is truly a
residue of literature, it fell out. Lacan’s initial idea is to say:
Finnegans Wake-which is made only from echoes in numer­
ous languages, from word plays of this genre, but which
mixes several languages—can only surge up from the symp­
tom of Joyce, only from a symptom concerning language.
Lacan sees its evidence, its sketch, in the symptom averred
in Joyce’s daughter, schizophrenic - from which he knew
how to make art (dont il a su faire de Tart). From the spare
part of his symptom, he knew how to, like Marcel Duchamp,
put his urinal on the pedestal. He invented a function for it.
This is what supports the developm ent by Lacan:
what would be the example of a writer, of a subject affected
by a symptom, not by mental automatism, but all the same
by echoes in the language, who, far from plunging into it, far
from being enslaved to it, has this leeway, this margin, which
allows him to construct with it what Lacan elsewhere calls
“his escabeau,” the pedestal on which we put the beautiful.
 Presentation of the Sinthome 113

A COUNTER-INTUITIVE GEOMETRY
Is this the purpose of analysis? To take it in this way is
already to be very far from the idea that the sym ptom —in
the first sense—is cured. The sinthome is not cured, and it
is a matter of knowing what function it finds. Lacan intro­
duces the notion that it is not literature but logic that must be
applied to the sinthome, that is to say, to recognize its nature,
in particular that it is not a formation of the unconscious,
and to use it logically to the point of reaching its real, in
supposing that at the end of that, it no longer has any thirst.
He notes that this is what Joyce did, but at a first glance,
approximately.
The logical usage of the sinthome to which Lacan
invites us is opposed to its usage of deciphering. Whereas
the usage of deciphering refers to the notion of the truth of
the symptom, logical usage leads to the real of the sinthome.
It certainly bears, both in the outlines of theory that Lacan
proposes and in his practice, with a depreciation of truth,
and indeed with the idea that to aim at the truth of the symp­
tom is to feed it.
He no longer borrow s the representation of the
symptom from the plant kingdom —the leaf of the grow­
ing plant—but from the animal register, the symptom as a
voracious entity that drinks the wine of truth, of significa­
tion. Interpretation, then, if it aims to state a truth, feeds the
symptom. Lacan said in a lecture delivered in the same year:
“Interpretation must not be theoretical, suggestive, namely,
imperative.” It is not “made to be understood, it is made to
make w aves .” 9 It should not be food, it should not feed the
symptom; it should not be food for the lying truth, for the
true lie of the symptom.
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From where the approach to the question by way of

the knots. It is still geometry, but a counter-intuitive geom­
etry, which in itself is a critique of the geometry of surfaces.
This is a geometry that can no longer take support on form in
as much as it captivates the subject, to the point that Lacan
dreams, in this seminar, that we should envy the blind, that
is to say, to undo the hold of the imaginary and of forms so
as to process only the symbolic, and even before noticing
that we are obliged to open the eyes, to handle knots. And
yet this is a geometry that he defines as forbidden to the
imaginary. It is the difficulty of imagining in the order of
the knot that makes for the truest substance of the knot. We
touch there the limits of all naturalist or vitalist metaphors.
Lacan finds himself there confronted by the person
of Chomsky, among others, whom he meets in the United
States, and who astonishes him by defending the th e­
sis according to which “language is an organ,” which thus
inscribes language as a supplementary organ of the body and
ensuring its survival in the environment: an organ of prehen­
sion by the word, by the concept. The idea of organ language
inspired logical positivism, Wittgenstein, the idea that there
are some diseases of language, some symptoms of language,
and that good philosophy is a language therapy, that logic
should help us learn to say what is, and thus deliver us from
false problems. This is the sense of W ittgenstein’s expres­
sion “games of language.” This does not mean that we are
playing, but that to speak is always part of an activity, a form
of life. This is coherent with the notion, which is quite pres­
ent in the Tractatus, that language is an organ: “Colloquial
language is a part of the human organism .” 10 Chomsky does
nothing here but inscribe him self on the same path, a path
 Presentation of the Sinthome 115

that leads to setting philosophy up as an activity that con­

sists essentially in an elucidation, which consists in clarify­
ing the propositions so that language fits itself to reality.
On the horizon, which constrains the Tractatus as
well as W ittgenstein’s investigations, there is the belief that
the problems will dissipate. This is what Wittgenstein says:
“The solution to the problem of life is seen in the vanishing
of this problem .” 11 This idea, that “the goal of philosophy or
of wisdom is to learn to no longer pose the problem of life,”
this is what Wittgenstein believed, as did Paul Valery, and
even Andre Gide. It is not necessary that problems be posed.
Culture, philosophy, these are the scratching out of insoluble
problems that are not necessary to be posed. Philosophy is to
learn not to pose problems to oneself.

REVELATION OR THE SINTHOME

Besides, we had, in phenomenology and in what followed
from it, on the contrary, the cult of the infinite question that
must never be closed. Where does Lacan inscribe himself in
all that? Very precisely on this point that there is a problem
of life that has no solution, but which we cannot not pose,
namely, that there is no sexual rapport for the human spe­
cies. All the wisdom about false problems does not prevent
this very question’s being raised there, even if the proposi­
tional form in which this thesis is stated—“there is no such
thing as” —is not satisfactory. It is not satisfactory in the
eyes of Lacan him self since it proceeds by negation, and
negation is a relation, it is already a construction.
W hat it is a matter of circumscribing here is the bit
of the real (le bout de reel) that we aim for in saying “there is
no such thing as sexual rapport,” which is the negative face
116 lacanian ink

of the positive fact “there is something of s in th o m e Lacan

calls sinthome the positive fact of which the statement “there
is no such thing as sexual rapport” is only the negative face.
That is how we may say—why not—that psychoanalysis,
let us say the subject, is inherently zetetic—from the Greek
zetei, to search, he who inherently searches, a qualifier that
was attributed to the skeptics.
Here psychoanalysis is found attuned to what was
our modernity. I say “what was our modernity” because it is
in the course of changing before our eyes. Ironic modernity,
the modernity that knows that everything is only semblant,
provokes, under our very eyes, a backlash, and the return to
the singular weight that tradition takes on among us today,
along with revelation as the principle of an objective moral­
ity. Today, we can state clearly that the famous ethics com­
mittees that we once spoke of with Eric Laurent—that we
expected—that does not measure up . 12 The ethics commit­
tees where we were to form groups, discuss, come to terms
for negotiating the norm, these do not measure up concern­
ing the existence of the Other. Instead we have today the
affirmation of all the signs of a return to an Other that would
be one, that is to say, a return to taking the fact of revelation
seriously—where morality, what is good and what is bad, is
not a question to discuss with the neighbor, and then to put
to the vote and reach an agreement - but, rather, where good
and bad proceed from a discourse that was held by the Other
at a moment in time and which constitutes the command­
ments. That has always been there, but it was more discreet.
In some respects, it even hugged the walls under the weight
of a triumphant modernity. But we are witnessing the entry,
the sensational comeback on the world stage, on all sides -
 Presentation of the Sinthome 117

because of revelation, of which there is not only one - of

subjects who are seized by the truth of revelation. They are
realizing under our eyes the aspiration to what Lacan called
“a discourse that would not be of the semblant'.'
Wittgenstein and Valery could dream of a philosophy
which would cancel itself out because there would no longer
be any question that would be valuable, but if they could
proceed to the cancellation of philosophy, it is because phi­
losophy had always been sustained by its rapport with divin­
ity, and following that, by its rapport with revelation. This is
what sustained the effort of thought throughout the Middle
Ages, and then, with Descartes and Malebranche, this was
the rapport between science and revelation, and right up
to Hegel it holds up like that. Once we had left philosophy
there, in fact, it had nothing more to do but to adjust to the
absence of problems. Surprise! The spare part that no longer
serves for much is now mounted on a tank. It imposes itself
on the public stage, in what we may call world politics. It’s
there. All this does not make spare part enough; rather, it is
ordered too well. It is ordered in that we have this choice:
either revelation or the sinthome.

November 17, 2004

 Presentation of the Sinthome 119

K en O kiishi, photographs, from the 2017 show at Reena Spauli

120 lacanian ink

II-R ESO N A N C ES
1. T h e H a n d o f J o y c e

INTERCESSOR
I said Spare Parts because I am led to do something else here
than what I have always done. I mean to rely on the absence
of order and leave for you the trouble of finding some sense.
W hat I have always done is to put order into what Lacan
said. I have always entrusted my lucubration upon Lacan.
This once, for a change, I will not reason, in the sense
of rationality. I will content myself with resonating, in the
sense of resonance. Perhaps it is after all what I have always
done, without knowing it: to resonate with what Lacan said.
It is thus that 1 write Lacan, that I edit him. I do
not seek to put my order there. I try to abstain from it. To
resonate with Lacan is perhaps, moreover, what is suitable
when one writes and when one reads the Seminar on The
Sinthome. This is a singular path in the elaboration of Lacan,
a path made from shards, and where the least that we can say
about coherence is that it is not in the foreground. There, the
insightful glimpse is preferred to order.
There is nevertheless a thread. All along this twenty-
third Seminar, Lacan takes James Joyce by the hand. This
is a Dantesque im age—I mean it comes from Dante. It is
Virgil’s hand that Dante holds in his journey through hell,
purgatory and paradise. Perhaps, whether explicit or hidden,
a guide, an intermediary, or more precisely an intercessor is
always necessary.
What is an intercessor? He is someone who has some
influence and who uses it in your favor, who intermediates.
If we reflect on this function of the intercessor, we cannot
fail to recognize that Lreud was this intercessor for Lacan.
 Presentation of the Sinthome 121

It is the hand of Freud that Lacan held all along his Seminar.
He did not believe he could make headway into psychoanal­
ysis, lucubrate what it is, without grasping hold, as he said,
of Freud, but this was the intercessor under whose influence
he himself fell. We are all there in it, of course. Except that
Lacan struggled against this influence of Freud the interces­
sor. He gets entangled and he despairs of this influence. He
recognizes it for what it is -a n ascendancy held over him,
an authority, a domination that was imposed, an empire that
was extended, a grip that was tightened, and also a fascina­
tion that captivated him, and which had taken on power over
him, which exercised its pow er—and which he suffered
from. That is it, a passion, what one suffers from.

SUBSTITUTIONS
I enumerated in passing the diverse terms that share out the
signification of influence in the Dictionnaire Robert. This is
one of the hands that I hold.
Lacan’s teaching is his way of making do with the
intercession of Freud, his way of shaking it off and try­
ing to get rid of it, because it is a fact that this intercession
obstructs him from grasping what takes place in what he
practices of a psychoanalysis. That is why, against Freud,
he calls Joyce. He brings another intercessor, an artist rather
than an analyst, in the place of Freud.
J oyce
F reud

Likewise, I say, the sinthome in the place of the symptom.

They make a pair.
S inthome
S ymptom
122 lacanian ink

Why this new word? Because the symptom, such as had

been isolated, renew ed, articulated, invented by Freud:
that symptom is truth; to the point that Lacan, when he was
on the edge of choosing another intercessor, defined the
Freudian operation as “the symptom’s proper operation.” 14
What does what he says there mean? It means that
the Freudian symptom is properly speaking that which is
interpreted, and, interpreted in the order of the signifier.
The order of the signifier, when we repeat that, that makes
us pass the notion that the signifier is solidary to an order,
and, among others, also the notion that the symbolic order,
as Lacan says, not only has primacy but that it is primary.
This is what is in question: is the order prim ary?
This order in question is already expressed in this dumbest
of relations, S1-S2. It is the dumbest because it conforms
to the sequence of numbers. It could not be any simpler.
This order is the condition of sense. The signifier has any
sense, to speak like Lacan, only from its relation to an other
signifier. All of the Freudian operation is in the relation. The
relation, not to qualify it, we call it “articulation.” And it is
this sense from the signifier that we call truth, when it dis­
turbs us. Through the intercession of Freud we give to this
truth another name: we call it the symptom. The symptom is
the clinical name of truth. It is there, I imagine, that Lacan in
this comes to change the name for designating the symptom,
precisely when he disjoins symptom and truth, and that, in
this disjunction, he makes place for jouissance.
I will continue my little series, and say that I do not
wish to put the things in order.
J ouissance
T ruth
 Presentation of the Sinthome 123

I can even extend this series of substitutions, saying that

the substitution of jouissance for truth reverberates the sub­
stitution of lalangue for language that is indicated, that is
imposed, right at the end of the Seminar Encore.
L alangue
L anguage

Behind language, behind the linguistic and philosophi­

cal ordering that constitutes a structure of language, there
is lalangue, there is something else that does not function,
in any case that does not function like language. Language,
Lacan says, is a lucubration of knowledge on lalangue. This
statement has enormous repercussions. It is on this that
Lacan’s teaching tips over, and precisely there that he will
seek another hand. Language consists in imagining that to
speak serves to communicate. Of it, there are, indeed, all the
appearances. Teaching is built on it.
This allows us to glimpse that lalangue serves for
an entirely other purpose than communication, something
entirely other than what can take there the form of dialogue.
Lalangue is the concept which means that the signifier
serves for jouissance.
Language is only a lucubration on this primary
usage, which makes believe that its primary use is to serve
for communication. It is on this lucubration, well anchored,
that psychoanalysis rests. Lacan comes from there, from
having structured it on the model of the communication said
to be intersubjective. Intersubjective is not essential there,
that continues to prescribe the rapports of the subject and
of the Other. The Freudian unconscious has sense only at
this level, at the level of communication. It simply means
124 lacanian ink

that communication can be ciphered and, therefore, that it

demands to be deciphered.

2. L ogical U sage

A cademic
For Lacan to take the hand of Joyce means that there is a
beyond of deciphering. This is the precise value that must be
given to the humorous reminder of Lacan, that Joyce vowed
to occupy the academics, it was his prophecy: “What I write
will not cease to provide work for academics.” A prophecy
verified. Joycean studies is gathering a growing phalanx in
the Anglophone academia, a community that has its own
rites, with some offshoots in France. Lacan had moreover
co-opted, in his Seminar, the most brilliant French offspring
of this community, in the person of Jacques Aubert, to whom
we are indebted, since the Pleiade edition of Joyce, for a
superb critical apparatus, and, very recently he has been edi­
tor in chief of a collaborative retranslation of Ulysses by sev­
eral hands. He is there as the witness bearer to whom Joyce
could destine his work. I have co-opted Jacques Aubert in
my turn in making him read my redaction of The Sinthome.
I requested him for some reading notes, w hereupon, he
delighted me by sending me a critical apparatus, worthy of
the Pleiade, focused on Lacan’s references to Joyce.
What does this presence of the academic mean? To
my mind, something very specific implied by Lacan. To
decipher Joyce is the prerogative of the university, that is
to say, this is not the privilege of the psychoanalyst. What
contrasts with this academic industry that takes Joyce as raw
material on the whole, is the position of abstention, of with-
 Presentation of the Sinthome 125

drawal, of reserve where Lacan holds himself in relation to

the interpretation of Joyce.
From the point of view of the Sem inar on The
Sinthome, the only thing we can catch from the text of Joyce,
from Finnegans Wake at least, is the jouissance by which it
is necessary to suppose Joyce had been animated to write,
and to which his writing testifies. There are, of course, ele­
ments of interpretation about Joyce in this seminar, but all
these elements are based on what is below this final work.
This remains untouched by the interpretation. And to say
“the only thing that we can catch, it’s the jouissance,” that
is to say: it is jouissance, not communication, not any deci­
phered truth. Joyce is the intercessor who leads to this: that
the signifier is first of all the cause of jouissance. It follows
that the symptom as such, that is to say stripped, reduced
rather than interpreted, is not truth but jouissance. Reduction
rather than interpretation.
R eduction
I nterpretation

If there is any interpretation, it is for use in the reduction

of the symptom. Therefore, what is seen between the lines
of this Seminar, which is amongst the last, is that what is at
stake in the analysis is less to decipher the symptom than to
make use of it. Usage is the one key term, if we know how to
oppose it to that of deciphering.

M odified language
These are some considerations that led me to give to the
first chapter the title —it is not easy to put this order there,
each of these lessons opening so many paths, and there is
126 lacanian ink

evidently always an abuse to say that this here is the key—

“On the Logical Use of the Sinthome,” there where I see the
orientation of the whole of this singular clearing that Lacan
had marked out that year, and I added “Freud with Joyce.”
In this I transferred from Lacan’s “Kant with Sade,” to mark
that Freud here is modified by Joyce. He is modified, Lacan
indicates straightaway, just as the English language was
modified by Joyce. It was modified in Finnegans Wake to
the point of being pulverized, annihilated, to the point that,
in fact, it does not exist, as Philippe Sobers, in prefacing this
seminar, has noted. As if, in fact, Joyce were revealing in
this work of Finnegans Wake in what sense language does
not exist as structure, and that he were showing in fact how
language is undone by the thrust of lalangue.
In terms of psychiatry—Lacan evokes it—we can
speak of mania, like we speak of it whenever language is
wrought, heading towards decomposition, towards disso­
lution. Here, it simply means, without psychiatry, that the
order of language shows itself decomposed, undone, stuffed
full of echoes that it takes up, homophonically, in other
languages. Here, the author gets ahead as the master of the
signifier, he does not flow into its forms.
There is, from this perspective, a privileging of
Joyce over Freud, in that Joyce attacks what we could call
the routine. Lacan uses this word in Encore, the routine that
associates the signifier to the signified, “this good routine
which makes the signifier always keep the same sense,” and
which assures for us the veracity of the feeling “that every­
one has some part in his world,” of what remains to us as
world . 15 This does not go far. The world of our habits, the
world of friends, of the family, an ultra-reduced world in the
 Presentation of the Sinthome 127

measure that intentions which proceed from the discourse of

science make this world vacillate.

R ing of string
Globalization. Globalization is an un-worlding. This ravages
what we could imagine as our basis of equilibrium. This dis­
locates us, of course. And moreover, as regards what remains
to us as the world, reduced, we begin to perceive that this is
again only for a time. Family, procreation, the body, it will
all be overcome shortly by the scientific decomposition.
This is where Finnegans Wake is prophetic in the
Joycean operation that is effected there and consists in mak­
ing what remains to us of a world-order dysfunction, and
which shows, starting from Lacan at least, that if we do
not clothe the sinthome with the symptom and its truth, it
objects to the social bond and to the form under which we
have approached it, that of communication.
This is what gives all its value to the recourse to
logic. Logic, without doubt, is an order, an articulation, but
which makes no allegiance to the social bond. The logical
usage of the sinthome, on which Lacan intends to re-center
the psychoanalytic operation, is as such disjoint from its
social usage, which is always com m unicative. The logi­
cal usage tends to be solipsistic —to put it in philosophi­
cal terms — , or again, autistic —in clinical terms. The logi­
cal use of the sinthome is the point of departure for the
Seminar The Sinthome and it is opposed to the deciphering
of the symptom in terms of truth. It introduces us, without
doubt, to a developm ent—it is not a stagnation—but one
that is not a revelation, but rather a reduction. Reduction
to what? Reduction to a bone. Reduction to an element, or
128 lacanian ink

even reduction to a signifier, but everything changes if the

signifier is represented, and thereby conceived of, as a ring
of string. In this seminar, the ring of string with which one
makes the knot, a multi-purpose ring, comes to the place of
usage in which Lacan used to put the signifier.
R ing of string
S ignifier

The ring of string is not a trait; it contains, isolates, supposes

a hole.
H ole
T rait
hole
Lacan borrowed the definition of the signifier as differen­
tial trait from linguistics. From the sole fact that it is differ­
ential, that it is posed in relation with an other signifier, it
makes a system with this other signifier. The definition of
the signifier, whatever it be, is linked to the concept of the
system as making a whole. Difference, which is the only
substance of the signifier, in the Saussurian conception, sup­
poses the relation of a signifier with another signifier. The
signifier links up with the Other. It is this that the elementary
matheme S,-S2 manifests, so usable that it becomes fascinat­
ing. To this is opposed what Lacan evokes in a sentence that
seems approximative, “that language is linked to something
which, in the real, makes a hole”- an essential proposition
for withdrawing from the captation of the linguistic concep­
tion . 16 That is what I chose to entitle the second chapter of
this Seminar: “On What Makes a Hole in the Real.” Lacan’s
knots are all constructed on this function of the hole, which
shows well the scope, howsoever elementary, of this dis-
 Presentation of the Sinthome 129

placement: that from now on Lacan makes the hole the

essential characteristic of the symbolic. That means that this
essential characteristic is not difference, is not the system, is
not the relation, is not the order, is not the trait, but the hole.
Consequently, it is on to the imaginary that consis­
tence is carried back. The word consistence is the displaced
translation of what was the old idea of the system, of what
holds together. It was imagined that what holds together was
the property of the symbolic as order. To refer consistence
to the imaginary, one must push it to the end: what holds
together, indeed the knot itself, all this that makes a system
is suspect from being only imaginary. This is why Lacan, at
a moment, as if by surprise, can pose the question of know­
ing if the unconscious is symbolic or imaginary . 17 Insofar as
we construct the unconscious as a system, is it not simply
a lucubrated imaginary consistence which must be referred
essentially to its hole, rather than to fascinate oneself on
what corresponds from one signifier to the other? Of course
the signifiers correspond, of course they are in unison. As
for the real, it is ex-sistence, which means that it comes in
addition (en plus), it is the third as such, the one that holds
together the imaginary and the symbolic. That is the con­
crete knot, the initial knot as the rapport of three rings: a set,
no doubt, but one that does not make a system, the set of
hole, of consistence and of ex-sistence. In the seminar The
Sinthome, you find, including the image, the representation
of the knot, all that is necessary to show that that is sufficient
as such, that three are sufficient, arranged in a Borromean
fashion, so that this holds together, and that suffices to make
the support for the subject.
From where the strange one that comes in addition:
130 lacanian ink

the symptom, when the basic knot does not hold all alone
by itself, and it is this fourth which Lacan discovers on the
track of Joyce.

3. C onsistence of the B ody

In this perspective, which is that of consistence and not of
the system, it is not the symbolic order that is fundam en­
tal—Lacan sets himself to reverse his construction—but the
consistence of the body. Hence the new value that this refer­
ence to the body takes on. It is not only a conversion to the
concrete but to give this very value.
The body is what the law confers to the subject as
his property. Habeas corpus - “your body is yours .” 18 The
property confers the body to the subject of law who, con­
sequently, takes him self for a soul. He takes him self for a
soul when he excepts himself from the world and he feels
that he endures it, that is to say that he suffers from it. As
a result, we can see in short-circuit, following in Lacan’s
footsteps, that what the beginning of an analysis reveals is
the adoration that the one who speaks has for his body, in
the measure that he finds there his consistence, imaginary
consistence. In terms of its material, this body decomposes.
It is even a miracle that it should hold together for a while.
This consistence, for all that, is insufficient, in the measure
that there is something of love, or that the question of love
is raised, that is to say, to make the choice of another body.
It is aleatory, it depends on an encounter, and it is notewor­
thy that Joyce him self did not escape from it. Destined as
he is to the literary usage of his symptom, he nevertheless
takes a woman for his wife. Again, it comes to property. The
craziness involved becomes even clearer in this case than in
 Presentation of the Sinthome 131

that of the rapport to one’s own body. A woman, Lacan says,

might as well have dealings with just about any man. To say
of a woman that she is yours is a lucubration. To the extent
that she believes it, it will yet do (5a va encore). This is the
humorist translation of sexual non-rapport.

PARASITE
Why love? Why is the species haunted by the question of
love? Love yes, love no, capacity to love, love withheld,
unhappy love, satisfied love. We can refer it first of all to
what was insufficient in the consistence o f o n e ’s own
body, but love is also a way, in the perspective of the sin­
thome, to make sense of a jouissance that is always para­
sitic. Parasite: this is a term whose use does not cease to
grow in Lacan’s teaching. Lucubrations are parasites. Truth
is parasite. Speech itself is parasite. It is a wise position, a
wisdom that goes against common wisdom, which swoops
down on language in order to sift all that. Wisdom consists
in making you learn that you can live in good agreement, in
good understanding, in harmony with jouissance. This, on
the contrary, is an anti-wisdom, a subversive wisdom that
explains to you that there is a parasite that does not let itself
be eliminated and which we can only modify and transform;
that the one who is man, and speaks, is swarming with para­
sites - swarming (grouiller) is a verb that we find in Lacan.
What is this parasite of jouissancel Jouissance is not
in the body as consistence, when consistence is articulated
to its form, it is not in the symbolic as hole—this parasite
comes in addition (en plus) between the body and the sym­
bolic—and, if we want, it knots them. This is why Lacan can
speak of the parasite of jouissance as something real.
132 lacanian ink

W hat is the signal value of Joyce’s case? In the

Seminar, his case is presented as the example of a suppletion
to an unraveling (denouement) of the knot. The jouissance
of the body of the Other is not enough to make the knot; it is
necessary that the jouissance of the symptom be added to it.
And in the case of Joyce, what is this jouissance of the symp­
tom? It is, at the start, what is the secret recourse of each
one, and what we may qualify, in psychiatry, as megaloma­
nia. In Joyce, this takes the methodical form of an ambition,
namely the promotion of his own nam e—his proper name,
Lacan established, to the place of the homage he has not ren­
dered to the Name-of-the-Father; from where these elements
of the clinical analysis of Joyce’s case. Firstly, that his father
has not been a father to him. Secondly, what does that mean?
The only thing we find in the Seminar is that this father has
not been a father to him because he taught him nothing. He
has not passed on to him any knowing how to do with the
world, to the point that he had to fall back upon the Jesuit
fathers to learn how to do, how to negotiate the affair of his
life. Thirdly, Lacan supposes that Joyce suffered from a res­
ignation of the father. This shows that the function of the
father has a mission —what Lacan once called “to humanize
desire .” 19 One could simply say: to teach communication.
The mission of the father is to teach communication, that is
to say, to lucubrate a language, to introduce a routine that
makes the signifier and the signified coincide.

EMBROIDERIES
If this is it, we can say that, for each, the sinthom e is
inscribed always in the resignation of the father and that
it is in this step that is opened up by the resignation of the
 Presentation of the Sinthome 133

father that the signifier is cause of jouissance. Hence this

function attributed to the sinthome of being reparative. It is
huge, and it is perfectly Freudian. The symptom is a cure, a
therapeutic factor. This is what is assessed in the Seminar on
The Sinthome, where we see the sinthome coming to repair
the Borromean chain when its elements do not quite hold
together. The sinthome appears as an operator of consis­
tence, which allows the symbolic, the imaginary and the real
to continue to hold together.
In the case of Joyce, the symptom is exactly com ­
pensation for a paternal deficiency, a deficiency, which ends
in the next generation through his daughter’s schizophrenia,
as if Joyce were the intercessor between the deficiency of
his father and the schizophrenia of his daughter. It is in this
interval where Joyce lodges him self that we can make the
hypothesis he was a serf of the polyphony of speech. For
him, language was not found to be ordered in the regime of
the father and it began to bristle with echoes. The hypothesis
is that it was there his very sinthome and that it is this from
which he made a product of art, of his art. He welcomed
his symptom to make use of it. It is under this heading that
Lacan gives him in example, example of this that the symp­
tom is not to be interpreted but to be reduced, that it is not
to be cured, but is there so that we make use of it. There is
no resonance there of any resignation, but on the contrary
the idea that we have to do with the remainder, and that the
remainder is fertile, that it is the coil-spring.
It is in comparison with the reduction of the symptom
that the Name-of-the-Father appears in Lacan as something
light. It is light in regard to what Lacan calls the real which
is not something light, which is a bit (un bout), a core ( un
134 lacanian ink

trognon), that is to say, a spare part, but that precisely is not

in the relation, and around which what we call “thought”
turns in circles. When we have reduced what it is a question
of in the analysis, the truth that is realized and that points
towards the real is that thought turns round and round in
circles. Lacan expresses it in saying that thought embroiders
around the real. There is an embroidery, but not formations
of the unconscious, while there are indeed formations of the
unconscious in as much as we hold Freud’s hand.
When we take Joyce’s hand, we hold this perspec­
tive on the form ations of the unconscious: that they are
embroideries around the core of the real, and that analysis is
to isolate the core, and that, for this, it is necessary to know
how to let the embroidery fall. This is something other than
to decipher it, because to decipher is always to link; while
the real, such as Lacan conceives it in the Seminar on The
Sinthome, it is an invention of something that is not light,
but an invention in itself fragile. The real as Lacan conceives
it does not link to anything. It is even there that he can bring
the “There is no such thing as sexual rapport” into doubt,
and say that even this statement is something of em broi­
dery. because it participates in yes or no, that is to say that
it participates in the relation, it is a statement which remains
caught in the logic of difference. Thus, he attempts to say it
otherwise, so that it make real.

A BIT OF REAL
This is an opportunity to take some distance from what in
our practice we call the case; we deploy a case, as we say,
and we approach it in the end always through the subject’s
history. But history, in the perspective of the Seminar on The
 Presentation of the Sinthome 135

Sinthome, is the greatest of fantasies, says Lacan. History is

never anything but a myth. History, it is nothing but a way,
that seems factual, of giving some sense to the real. It is why
Lacan approves Joyce for having had the greatest contempt
(,mepris) for history. For Joyce history was a nightmare. It is
not badly put. Lacan himself says that history is futile. It is
futile with regard to a symptom when in it we come to this
point of reduction where there is nothing more to be done to
analyze it.
Lacan says of Joyce that he had unsubscribed from
the unconscious. But is it the characteristic property of
Joyce? To be unsubscribed from the unconscious is the real
of every symptom. It is in this sense that Lacan makes from
the real his response, a response to the Freudian discovery as
lucubration. The Freudian lucubration is that the symptom
is truth, and in the dialogue that Lacan invents with Freud,
Lacan responds to him with the sinthome as real.
What is the value of this response? It is not a deduc­
tion. Lacan underlines that Freud’s unconscious does not in
any way necessarily suppose the real of which Lacan makes
use. Freud certainly had an idea of the real, he was searching
in the direction of energetics. The real was for Freud some­
thing like the libido, a constant energy, that is to say, such
that one found it always the same, as what would define a
constant, in that the number be always re-found. The pro-
foundest idea Freud had about it—what is shown by his
idea of the constancy of libidinal energy —is that there is a
knowledge in the real. It is even this that would direct his
handling of the symptom. To say that there is a knowledge
in the real is to say that the real is equivalent to the subject
supposed of knowledge. And it is in this sense that we may
136 lacanian ink

say that, well beyond the Oedipus complex, Freud believes

in the Name-of-the-Father; that the hypothesis of the uncon­
scious can hold only on condition of supposing the Name-
of-the-Father, that is to say, of supposing that there is a real
that is knowledge, a real that is articulated, a real that is
structured like a language.
Psychoanalysis, at least the one that Lacan would
practice, proves that we can do without it, in the measure
that psychoanalysis opens onto a reduction to what does
not have any sense, to that which is not linked to anything.
Nevertheless, we make use of the N am e-of-the-Father in
psychoanalysis, that is to say that in it we do pass through
deciphering, through the effects of truth, but they are
ordained to a real that has no order.
Lacan’s hope in theory was to arrive at the articula­
tion of a bit of real, and by my spare parts, perhaps I wish to
sketch, allude to what could be a bit of real.

November 24,2004

—Translated by Samya Seth

Presentation du sinthome’ (November 17,2004) and "Resonances’

(November 24, 2004) are the first two lessons of the course
L ’orientation lacanienne III, 7, Pieces Detachees, 2004-05, deliv­
ered at the Department of Psychoanalysis, University Paris VIII.
This course was officially transcribed and edited by Catherine
Bonningue, and its first seven lessons were published in four con­
secutive installments in La causefreudienne (LCF), issues 60 to 63
 Presentation of the Sinthome 137

ENDNOTES

1 Lacan, J., ‘L’etourdit,’ in Autres ecrits, Paris: Champ

Freudien/Seuil, 2001, pp. 449.
2 Loc. cit.
3 [TN: elucubrat is the 3rd person, singular, imperfect, sub­
junctive conjugation of the verb elucubrer (to lucubrate, to
elaborate).]
4 Levi-Strauss, C., The Savage Mind, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1966, Ch. 1: ‘The Science of the Concrete,’
especially, p. 19.
5 Lacan, J., Anxiety, transl. by A. Price, Cambridge/Malden:
Polity, 2014, p. 66.
6 Lacan, J., Ecrits, The First Complete Edition in English,
transl. by B. Fink, New York/ London: W.W. Norton &
Company, 2006, pp. 55,78,85.
‘L’etourditj’ op. cit., p. 456.
oo o\

Lacan, J., Ecrits, op. cit., p. 519.

Lacan J., ‘Yale University. Conferences et entretiens dans
des universites nord-americaines’ (1975), Scilicet, issue no.
6/7,1976,p .35.
10 Wittgenstein, L., Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, prop.
4.002.
11 Ibid., prop. 6.521.
12 Miller, J.-A., and Laurent, E., L ’Autre n ’existe pas et ses
comites d ’ethique (1996- 97), teaching delivered at the
Department of Psychoanalysis, University Paris VIII.
13 Lacan, J., D ’un discours qui lie serait pas du semblant,
Paris: Champ Freudien/Seuil, 2007.
14 Lacan, J., Ecrits, op. cit., p. 194.
15 Lacan, J., Encore, transl. by B. Fink, New York/London:
W.W. Norton & Company, 1998, p. 42.
16 Lacan, J. The Sinthome, transl. by A. Price, Cambridge/
Malden: Polity, 2016, p. 21
17 [TN: Ibid., p. 84, where the passage reads: “How are we
to know whether the unconscious is real or imaginary? That
is the question. It partakes of an equivocation between the
two.” Arguably, here Miller remembers the passage slightly
differently.]
18 Lacan, J., ‘Joyce leSymptome,’in Autres ecrits, op. cit., p.568.
19 Lacan, I., Ecrits, op. cit., p. 634.
.>an F rank, Stud.es, 8.5 x 14”, xerox, industrial vh.te out, ink, collage, 1994.
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