OF SEMBLANTS

in the Relation Between Sexes

Jacques-Alain Miller

Semblants, again. This time, as implicated in the

relation between sexes.
Where are men in this respect? Perhaps they are
more captive of semblants than women. Perhaps women
are closer to the real in such a way that when one speaks
of ‘women and semblants’, it would be men who are in
the place of the semblant.

The race of women

It appears that Hesiod was the first one to speak, in his
Theogony, a work which is the matrix of an enormous
amount of myths, of the race of women — genos
gynaicon. From then on, after him, in the Greek literature
of Antiquity, one speaks of women in terms of ikelon,
which signifies semblant, copy, of dolos, which signifies
ruse, of pema, which signifies calamity. This means that
to slander women is something which began a very long
time ago.
Semonides, from the appropriately named city of
Amorgos, had already written a poem entitled Iambe, in
which he does not speak of genos gynaicon but of tribes
of women. In this poem, recently reprinted in England, he
enumerates the women. The poem is a catalogue —
10 Jacques-Alain Miller
written, this goes without saying, without knowing
Mozart’s Don Giovanni — which enumerates the types of
women, which he does not call genos but phyla, namely
species. The first word of his poem is koris, which is
translated as on the side, but, after Lacan, one realises
that it must be translated as diversity, not as unity but as
diversity. It is with this word that Semonides begins his
poem.
Amongst other things, I have a risky idea of adding
another type to this catalogue, a type of woman we will
encounter in the course of this hour.
The quotes mentioned earlier are sufficient for us to
think that Lacan’s formulation, ‘the Woman does not
exist’ — there are only women — was something that
has always been well known, at least since the Greeks.
Today, Lacan’s formulation is sufficiently known for us to
take it as a starting point.
‘The Woman does not exist’ does not signify that the
place of the woman does not exist but that this place
remains essentially empty. That this place should remain
empty does not prevent us from encountering something
there. In this place, only masks are encountered, masks
of nothing, which is sufficient to justify the connection
between women and semblants.

The nothing, modesty1 and respect

What do we call a semblant?
We call semblant that which has the function of
veiling the nothing. In this, the veil is the first semblant.

1
T.N.: The Spanish pudor and the French pudeur do not have an
exact English equivalent. They imply the wish not to be an object
of desire but rather to be an object of love. They are also linked to
the term Scham, translated by Strachey as shame, and used by
Freud in Three Essays to mark one of the three ways of
repression.
 Of Semblants in the Relation Between Sexes 11
The history of anthropology testifies to the fact that it is
a constant preoccupation of humanity to veil, to cover
women. In a way it can be said that women are covered
the Woman cannot be uncovered. Thus, there is nothing
left but to invent her.
In this sense, we call women these subjects which
have an essential relation with the nothing. I use this
expression with caution, for any subject, such as it was
defined by Lacan, has a relation with the nothing but, in
a certain way, these subjects that women are have a
more essential, more proximate relation with the
nothing.
Freud thought this bond of women with the nothing
on the basis of a corporeal, anatomic nothing. In his
1932 article, he enumerates some of the psychical traits
of feminine maturation, as he puts it, amongst which he
stresses modesty, which he situates on the basis of that
which would be an initial intention to veil the absence of
the genital organ.
There, we have a paradox in modesty. According to
Freud, it veils absence at the same time as it constitutes
this absence as something, that is to say the act of
veiling creates, gives birth, brings to the surface.
The historical variations on modesty illustrate that it
is an invention which, through its localisation, attracts
the gaze. One could also say that it phallicises the body.
And we are not short of men’s testimonies, whether it be
in literature or in the clinic, for whom modesty appears
as having a phallic value. The veil of modesty can, in
effect, give phallic value, to use Freudian terminology, to
any part of the body, and it is there that the handling of
the veil is shown to be phallicising.
There is a thin line between modesty and respect.
Respect signifies that there is something which should
12 Jacques-Alain Miller
not be seen, which should not be touched. Like modesty,
respect has to do with castration. Perhaps to respect
would always be to respect castration. Thus we have a
demand for respect, a demand that a distance be
respected, for example in relation to the father. What
does one respect in the father if not, what Lacan once
called, his quality of war veteran? When there is respect,
the nothing is always at play, and, correlatively, because
of that, there is outrage. Hence one grasps how outrage
may have an erotic value.
In analytic groups, one sometimes witnesses what
Lacan indicates to be a delusional respect, a very
stringent demand for respect coming from the elderly or
those who put themselves in this position. This obviously
has to do with the fact that the Analyst does not exist. It
is because the Analyst does not exist that respect and its
susceptibilities occupy a place that one may think
excessive in the functioning of analytic groups — even if
it is a School.

Towards a ‘feminine clinic’

Freud, unlike Lacan, seems to have stopped at the
anatomical difference of the woman, considering that, de
facto, she was marked with a minus, that her castration
was effective. But if one is to accept the construction
which leads to define the fact of this minus, the question
remains as to its subjectification, that is to say what
sense her not-having acquires for the subject. Freud
proposed what he calls Penisneid as the fundamental
signification of this not-having. It is the Freudian name of
not-having.
Thus the gates to what one could call ‘feminine
clinic’ stand open. Without making any claim to
completeness, one can already speak of feminine clinic
 Of Semblants in the Relation Between Sexes 13
directly on the basis of the conceptualisation of the
minus. For example in the feminine clinic we could speak
of the space taken by the feeling of injustice, a theme
that could fill many analytic sessions. We could almost
speak of a fundamental fantasy of injustice. We could
maybe say — it certainly would be entertaining — that
the very origin of the concept of justice must be looked
for in the ‘feminine’ complaint. We could also speak of
the extent, frequency, and currency of a feeling of
depreciation. Such a feeling is also linked to that which
could, in a somewhat crude way, be put in the
parenthesis of a feeling of inferiority. For example, the
clinic of inhibition takes on different aspects in masculine
and feminine clinics. It does not only concern an
inhibition to knowledge or to study but, frequently, there
is in its core a not-having-the-right to knowledge. The
not-having is sublimated into a not-having-the-right, that
is to say into an illegitimacy which is not encountered so
heavily in the clinic of men.
Freud laid stress on the supplements encountered or
invented by the subject to deal with her minus, the
fundamental minus with which, according to Freud, the
subject has a relation. To this end, the analytic
investigation will be directed towards the goods which
may successfully cover over the hole of the minus. He
emphasises obtention and giving. And indeed, Lacan
himself took a great delight in pointing out this
denomination of la bourgeoisie which, in colloquial idiom,
can be the name for the wife — Ma bourgeoisie. This
signifies that she is the one who accumulates money,
that it is up to her to manage the household money.
The child, too, was placed by Freud in this series,
and, in a certain sense, maternity itself can be
considered to be part of the feminine pathology. To
14 Jacques-Alain Miller
become a mother, an Other of demand, is to become the
one who has par excellence.
The question remains open. Is becoming a mother
the solution to the feminine position? It is a solution on
the side of having, and it is not certain whether Freud
worked out a solution for women other than this one, on
the side of having.
Still, there is another solution, or another order of
solution, namely the solution on the side of being. This
solution on the side of being consists in not covering
over the hole but in metabolising and dialecticising it,
and in being the hole, that is to say building up one’s
being with the nothing. From this perspective, a whole
feminine clinic, the clinic of lack of identity opens up. Its
intensity in women is incommensurable with what is
encountered in men. We have thus little choice but to
speak of a being of nothing and of a suffering specific to
this being of nothing. A lack of consistency comes on top
of this lack of identity, which can be noticed in the
testimonies telling of a feeling of bodily fragmentation.
This may go far enough to make us think of psychosis,
and to raise the question of differential diagnosis. We
can situate the lack of control, the affect through which
one comes to realise that the mastery over one’s own
body is slipping away. In the feminine clinic, there are
testimonies of a psychical suffering linked to an affect of
non-being, of being-nothing, such as moments of
absence from oneself. There are also testimonies of a
strange relation to infinity, which can also be manifested
at the level of that which is not finished, that is to say at
the level of a feeling of radical incompleteness.
In this case, we know the solution that may be
encountered, and which consists in being the hole, but in
relation to the Other, as if, in order to escape this lack of
 Of Semblants in the Relation Between Sexes 15
identity, one of the solutions were to displace this lack
towards the Other by attacking its completeness. Thus
this solution consists in thinking that the Other, the virile
Other, lacks a hole, and in incarnating it. What Lacan
brought to the clinic under the expression ‘being the
phallus’ corresponds to this variant of being the lack in
the Other by giving this lack a positive value.
We must realise that the expression ‘being the
phallus’ already implies a certain depreciation with
regard to the position of having of the virile Other,
namely a reduction of the position of having of the Other
to the status of semblant.

The act of a ‘true’ woman

Lacan says that not only does the Woman not exist but
also that there are true women — an expression which
poses a problem for us.
It is not that one cannot understand that women and
truth may have something to do with each other, since
truth is distinct from knowledge, since truth has the
structure of fiction, and is thus dependant upon
semblant. We can also understand that women may be
placed as the truth of a man in so far as they reduce
masculine sublimations to lies, and incarnate, in so far as
the Woman does not exist, the failure of his concept.
What would a true woman be, then?
There is a very simple answer to this question. The
true in a woman, in Lacan’s sense, is to be measured by
her subjective distance from the position of the mother.
To be a mother, the mother of one’s children, is for a
woman to choose to exist as the Woman. To make
oneself exist as the mother is to make oneself exist as
the Woman in so far as she has.
16 Jacques-Alain Miller
When does this cry — It’s a true woman! — come
out of Lacan’s mouth?
On the one hand, this expression should always
come out in this way, for we should not construct the
concept of the true Woman. The true woman can only be
declared one by one, and on a single occasion, for it is
not certain that a woman can sustain herself in the
position of a true woman. It can only be said as tuché. ‘It
is a true woman’ can only be said in a cry of surprise,
whether it arises out of wonder or horror, and maybe
only when one can perceive that it becomes palpable,
visible, that the mother has not filled in the hole in her. It
is something which is articulated with the sacrifice of
goods. It may be that a woman deserves this
exclamation precisely when she consents to her own
modality of castration. I thus regret not being able to
offer the model of a sufficiently good mother, as
Winnicott did, or the model of supportive spouse.
From another perspective, I would like to say
something of a character who can figure for us, give us a
model — albeit an extreme one, not one to identify with
— of the ‘it is a true woman’, following an indication of
Lacan. He indicates it much more discreetly than I do
but, as a lot of time has gone by, it seems to me that one
can introduce Medea today.
Medea had done everything for her man, Jason. She
had betrayed her father and her homeland, had
convinced the daughters of Pelias to kill him. This is why
she was living in exile in Corinth with her husband and
children. It is brought out at the beginning of Euripides’
play, in which it is explicitly mentioned that Medea was
doing her best to consent to everything Jason desired.
There was no disagreement, she was the perfect wife
and mother. She was a bit of a criminal, a bit of a witch
 Of Semblants in the Relation Between Sexes 17
but perfect as wife and mother. It is then that Jason tells
us that he wants to get married to someone else, Creon’s
daughter. In Medea’s own terms, it is an outrage. And
she goes through what we would call today a moment of
depression. In her own words, she lost her joy of life, and
is driven to tears. Then we have this beautiful song: Of
all that breathes and has conscience, there is nothing
more sorrowful than us, women.
Jason tries to appease her with soothing words, give
her explanations, reassure her of his honourable
intentions — he will take care of the children, pay the
costs…. She refuses the gifts. As she explicitly puts it,
she is already in a zone where having no longer has any
value for her without this man.
How does she construct her revenge? She will not
kill the faithless one. It would be too simple. Her revenge
will consist in killing what is most precious to him, that is
to say, his new wife and his own children. In Euripides’
play, the value of this extreme act is admirable in so far
as Medea is presented as a mother who deeply loves her
children. She delights in speaking of them, of her hopes
for them, of how they were with her until their death, and
of how she led them to what was to become their grave.
And yet, at this moment, she is prepared to kill them and
— this is the most horror-ridden act in theatre — so she
does. She kills her own children, who are also those of
Jason, and there it is the woman who, in her, wins over
the mother. Of course we are not talking about imitating
her. Yet she provides us with the radical example of what
it is to be a woman beyond being a mother. Through this
act, she emerges from her depression. The whole of her
being is in this act. From then on, words are useless, and
she definitely leaves the register and the reign of the
signifier.
18 Jacques-Alain Miller
Even if I don’t want to expand on this, we must now
add something that is very present in the whole play,
namely Medea’s knowledge. The word episteme suits her
well.
Lacan refers once to Medea, regarding some lines in
which Medea appears in the position of the sage, of the
one who knows, which is not without resonance for the
analyst’s position. Indeed, the lines quoted by Lacan are
not those telling of Medea’s crime but those she speaks
to Creon — “Those who are fools will call you
ignorant/and useless, when you offer them unfamiliar
knowledge./As for those thought intelligent, if people
rank/you above them, that is a thing they will not
stand”.2
Lacan alludes that the act of a true woman —
although I would not say that it is the act of Medea, even
though it has the same structure — is the sacrifice of
that which is most precious to her in order to drill, in a
man, a hole which will never be sealed. No doubt it is
something which goes beyond all law and human
affection, although not because these values are
disregarded, contrary to what Goethe thought. A true
woman explores an unknown zone, transgresses limits. If
Medea gives us an example of the disorientation of a
true woman, it is because she explores a region without
marks, beyond borders.
We must also stress that she acts using the minus
and not the plus. In the very midst of a situation in which
she appears to be defenceless, she encounters a deadly
sword. She manages to turn her minus into her very own
weapon, which is more powerful and effective than any
war weapon. Let us also add that she does it for a man,
in her exclusive relation with a man.

2
Eurupides, Medea, trans. P. Vellacott, Penguin, London, 1966.
 Of Semblants in the Relation Between Sexes 19
Lacan recognised Medea’s act in the act of Gide’s
wife. One could ridicule the latter, who could be
described as a virgin, Protestant, mean-spirited
bourgeois wife, falling prey to the opinion of her social
circle, and who stayed by Gide’s side in the position of a
sacrificed and immutable angel. But what attracts
Lacan’s attention is precisely her act, when she burns
the letters of André Gide, which she had herself called
her most precious possession. They were Gide’s love
letters to her, a correspondence kept year after year,
from the first encounter. He too tells us that these letters
were his most precious possession, that there never was
a more beautiful correspondence, which he calls the
child he never had. It is in this context that we find
Lacan’s phrase referring to Gide — ‘poor Jason, he does
not recognise Medea’. Indeed, he does not recognise the
Medea in his angelic wife. Poor men, who don’t know
how to recognise the Medeas in their wives! This is
where there is no proper measure, as a character in
Euripides’ work had expressed the wish. There is no way
to negotiate. This verges on an emergence of the
absolute.
In those cases, whether it be that of Medea or of
Madeleine Gide, we are talking about reactions to the
betrayal of men, and thus of a punishment.

Not-having and having

There are other modalities, also known to Lacan, for
example when he indicates that there are no limits to the
concessions a woman will make for a man, whether it be
with her body, her soul, her possessions. Here,
concessions signify to cede. It means that every woman
is able to go towards not-having, and to realise herself as
woman through this not-having.
20 Jacques-Alain Miller
The ‘Lacanian’ man, as he is depicted throughout
the seminars and the Ecrits, is, on the contrary, a heavily
clogged being, burdened and embarrassed by having.
Having is for him a burden, and, since he has something
to lose, he is condemned to prudence. The Lacanian man
is fundamentally fearful. And, if he goes to war, it is to
escape from women, to escape from the hole. Thus, men
are not without semblants but they are there in order to
protect their little having. This is not the case with the
semblant properly speaking, the feminine semblant,
which is, stricto sensu, the mask of the lack.
We could speak of the subjectification of the genital
organ in man, and do so under the title of The having —
the having as a feeling which gives him the superiority of
ownership, something good but which also comes with
the fear that he be robbed. A masculine cowardice is
here contrasted with the feminine limitless.
Having is clearly linked to masturbation. Phallic
jouissance is, par excellence, a jouissance of ownership.
This means that the subject does not give the key to the
till to anyone, and this may go as far as a subject
protecting himself by means of impotence, and he even
derives satisfaction from it. And when, finally, it happens
that he gives, it is as if he was the victim of a theft to
such an extent that he retains his masturbation as a
bonus, as a shelter for a jouissance all for himself — One
for her, one for me. But let’s put the masculine having
aside.
It seems to me that Lacan is not merely thinking
differently from but also contrary to Freud. Indeed, Lacan
thought that there was no solution for a woman on the
side of having, and that such a perspective would only
lead to falsities and inauthenticities.
 Of Semblants in the Relation Between Sexes 21
What does it mean to live subjected to the
signification of having? In order to pave the way for an
answer, I will carefully introduce this character, the
woman with postiche.

The woman with postiche

The woman with postiche is the one who artificially
covers what she lacks, on condition that, in every case,
and secretly, she obtains it from a man. For the woman
with postiche, ‘seeming’ is essential in so far as it must
appear to come from her, be her property.
Let us shed some light on the ambiguity of the
concept ‘phallic woman’. We must distinguish the phallic
woman, which is constituted as the woman who has, on
the side of having, what I call the woman with postiche,
from the woman who is constituted on the side of being
the phallus. They have nothing to do with each other,
even if they can be encountered as dividing the same
woman.
A woman who is constituted on the side of being the
phallus takes upon herself her lack-of-having. It is on the
basis of her lack-of-having, recognised as such, that she
succeeds in being the phallus, the one which men lack.
On the contrary, the former woman, the one with
postiche conceals her lack-of-having and prances about
making a show of the fact that she is the owner who
lacks nothing or no one. However, she remains a woman
— and this can be observed through the wild passion
with which she protects her possessions — with a trait of
hubris, of excess. The latter, who is on the side of being,
on the contrary, shows her lack ostentatiously. With
regard to the man, a ‘true woman’, in Lacan’s sense,
allows a man to appear as desiring in so far as she
assumes the minus and the semblants that are put into
22 Jacques-Alain Miller
play. In opposition to this, the woman with postiche
exposes man as castrated, and it is not uncommon for
her to complete herself by means of a man in whose
shadow she remains.
When, at the end of Euripides’ play, Medea leaves
on the winged chariot of the sun, she is the woman with
postiche, the most conservative subject possible, the one
who requires not to be looked at too closely, and
demands a great deal of respect; what she demands is
the distance necessary to make believe that the postiche
is true. She demands respect as something absolutely
owed to her. A true woman, on the contrary, shows to
the man that having is ridiculous. In a certain way, it is
the ruination of the man. It is much less hassle to pair up
with a woman with postiche, as the man can then deposit
his own possessions in a safe. This woman with postiche
does not appear to be castrated, does not pose a threat
to a man, for she does not demand from him that he
desires. In return, she receives respect and her
castration is left to rest.
We encounter the word postiche in a fragment on
page 825 of Ecrits in Lacan’s Subversion of the Subject
and the Dialectic of Desire [p.322], when he speaks of
the absence of the penis which makes of the woman the
phallus; he goes so far as to suggest that one could
evoke the said absence by making the woman wear a
postiche under a ball gown. This is not a woman’s
initiative, as is demonstrated in this simple compliance
with man’s desire when she yields to his demand by
lending herself to his fantasy. And this man is the one
who is not afraid of the feminine castration and of not-
having, for this Lacanian postiche is not designed to
make believe that she has it. On the contrary, this
postiche is the signal that she does not have it, a signal
 Of Semblants in the Relation Between Sexes 23
to indicate her lack and to bring it to light. This Lacanian
postiche, in so far as it is handled by a man, reveals itself
as postiche. It is a postiche which says — I am a
postiche. In the same way that Magritte’s painting
declares — ‘This is not a pipe’. The Lacanian postiche is a
semblant which is open to being a semblant, while, on
the contrary, the postiche of the woman with postiche is
a postiche which lies. It is a semblant which says — ‘this
is not a semblant’. She wants the others to believe in it.
Hence the importance she attaches to respect,
considering any lack of respect to be an outrage to
remind ourselves of Freud’s phrase of ‘those who love
their delusion as they love themselves’. We could say
that the woman with postiche loves respect as she loves
herself. Correlatively, she respects masculine semblants
and adopts them. And yet the truth of a woman,
sometimes concealed, is that she does not respect
anything or anyone, and she exposes the phallus itself as
a semblant with regard to jouissance.

The supposed knowledge of women

It is from feminine sexuality and from nowhere else that
we can situate jouissance, properly speaking, in so far as
it exceeds the phallus and the all-signifier.
Before psychoanalysis, the Church had recognised
true women. The Church identified a threat in them and
devised a solution for them — to marry them with God.
And this is why, today still, some women utter these
perpetual vows of obedience, chastity and poverty.
These vows frame the jouissance beyond the phallus.
They signify that no man can be introduced at this level
of jouissance and that only God is equal to the task. And
the feminine not-having is assumed through the vow of
poverty, as proposed by the Church.
24 Jacques-Alain Miller
It is not by chance that it befell a catholic author,
Léon Bloy, to write the novel La femme pauvre to define
the fundamental feminine position. On the basis of this,
one could just as well situate the origin of the infinite as
the function of the secret.
This structural secret of speech, in so far as there is
something which cannot be said, is a secret on the side
of women. For them, the secret can be a condition of
jouissance and they can come to enjoy secrecy as such,
to constitute the lie itself as object a. Hence the famous
question of women’s ignorance, that raises with it the
question of knowing how to teach them, educate them,
and which is present throughout the ages to the extent
that women themselves end up believing that they are
ignorant. In truth, it happens that a woman, due to the
very nature of speech, incarnates that which cannot be
said, a veiled, secret knowledge, and this is why the
subject-supposed-to-know is situated in her. All this fuss
around the question of what they must be taught is not
sufficient to mask the male fear of women’s supposed
knowledge.
There is no doubt that sometimes women need an
analysis in order to become aware of the knowledge of
which they are supposed. This is where we approach one
of the many reasons for which we can say that
psychoanalysis suits women. Psychoanalysis suits
women, because, as Freud says, they incarnate in
culture the subjects who are preoccupied by the question
of sexuality, love, desire and jouissance. These
psychoanalytical themes are women’s themes. As a
mass phenomenon at least, it is quite a recent thing for
men to take such themes upon themselves. The position
of object a suits them too in so far as it requires some
flexibility in relation to the fantasy of the Other
 Of Semblants in the Relation Between Sexes 25
In relation to this, we can perhaps say something of
women in analysis, for analysis offers them, at its
beginning, a certain liberation, a letting-go of the
semblant, a liberation from the capture which, as object
a, is exercised upon them in men’s fantasy. To sustain
oneself in such a position is tiring. Thus, analysis offers
women the repose that comes from the fact of
delegating this position to the analyst. It also suits
women to occupy the place of the barred subject — the
subject which experiences its lack of identity. There are
cases which demonstrate that some women can remain
so glued to the function of object a that they cannot
manage to cede it to the analyst, or where they are so
much in the habit of occupying the position of the
subject-supposed-to-know that they are unable to accept
it in another, even less if it is a man who is necessarily a
bit silly.

Fantasy according to sexes

While I will not develop these themes, I could perhaps
simply mention that it would be useful to think about the
distinct function fantasy has for men and women.
In masculine desire, the nature of which, according
to Lacan, only accentuates perverse desire — since there
is for him a certain homology with perverse desire —
objects are caught in the parenthesis of what is written
as Φ, to indicate that there is in this desire a manifest will
to jouissance which necessitates fantasy. Lacan wrote it
Φ (a). This is his first way of writing masculine desire,
where object a figures as part-object, drive-object.

We can displace this writing to the writing of

fantasy, this time as masculine fantasy, as $ ◊ Φ (a), in so
far as masculine desire is sustained by phallicised
26 Jacques-Alain Miller
semblants. The experience of analysis shows that the
crossing of the different levels of fantasy makes this
formula a concentrated one emphasising the function Φ.
In other words, to cross the different levels of fantasy,
and to strip it to its bone only results in the phallic
function becoming all the more insistent. And conversely,
if we are to refer to Lacan’s writing of feminine desire, A
(ϕ), even if Lacan said a lot of other things afterwards,
one can already read in this formula the relation of this
desire to A, on the one hand, and to the phallus, on the
other. On the one hand then, as Lacan says in Encore,
the drive-object does not figure in the pathways of this
desire but passes through A, and, on the other hand, we
have the relation to the supposed genital object. These
two formulae indicate that, when a man encounters the
pathways of his desire, the phallic function becomes
more insistent for him, while, when the pathways of
desire open up for a woman, it may give her access to A,
that is to say to the knowledge that the Other does not
exist.
From time to time, feminine cynicism already
provides us with an anticipation of this, when it reminds
men that their sublimations are nothing in comparison
with jouissance, and that they are deceived by
semblants. It is women who remind men that they are
deceived by semblants, and that these semblants are
worthless in comparison with the real of jouissance.
In this, women are better friends with the real than
men, and it is on their side that the access to the truth
that the phallus is not whole and is a semblant, is easier
for them than for the men. Of course, as subjects they
may end up on the side of Φ, which is the way of
inscribing the postiche; they can be inscribed as subjects
on the side of small phi, that is to say ϕ (x), by playing
 Of Semblants in the Relation Between Sexes 27
whole in using the postiche, and in this way concealing
the A while incarnating it in a castrated man.
An analysis of feminine desire pursued in this
extreme direction can lead to a cancellation of A, which
gives rise to something of a monster who says — I know
everything. This is the point at which oracular figures
come to life, and the brilliant Melanie Klein, who never
had any doubts, was such a figure in her time. But if one
is to depart from this pathway, it can be said that a
woman’s desire will lead her naturally towards A, while,
in man, the phallic function will stand in the way of the
reduction of the phallus to the semblant.

The goddess Psychoanalysis and the goddess

School
This may sometimes come to light in the procedure of
the pass.
The passant can or cannot have reached the end of
his analysis in the opinion of the jury. Notwithstanding
this, at least in the French experience, if he presents
himself for the pass it is because, in his opinion, he
thinks he has cleared his account, he is done with it. He
thinks he has drawn from psychoanalysis all that it could
offer him, and there is something, at least according to
our experience in France, which can be called the feeling
of the end of analysis. The analysand presents himself to
the pass at the moment at which he thinks that the
goddess Psychoanalysis realised its vows, and he will
present the gem derived from psychoanalysis to the
supposed experts, so that they may evaluate whether it
is genuine or not.
It is true that one can observe through the pass that
analysands change in the course of the analytical
experience — the bachelors marry, the spouses divorce,
28 Jacques-Alain Miller
the mad-about-the-body find their place, the obsessed
can think of other things, and the anguished can enjoy in
peace. Sometimes, one does not know whether it has to
do with analysis or with age, because, at times, the only
thing that is clear is that analysands grow old.
The passant does not always come to say that the
goddess realised her vows. Sometimes he comes to say
the contrary: that the goddess has done nothing for his
wish, that she rejected his demands, and that what he
demanded from an analysis remains yet to be fulfilled.
But if he goes through the pass, it is because it is
possible for him to recognise to have learnt that his very
vow was a vow of nothing, or that the goddess who could
have realised it does not exist. The passant is the one
who is really convinced that that there is nothing more to
be obtained from the goddess, and that there is from
then on nothing more to be hoped for from her. And he
asks another goddess, the goddess of the School, that
she fulfil his wish to belong to the register of the analysts
of this School. In this perspective, it is the incurable
which constitutes a merit for the nomination: namely, the
access of the subject, and his consent, to the incurable.
Other analysands offer another kind of testimony. They
have realised their vows and the goddess gave them a
present, offered them a gift. Both the former and the
latter testify, in their own way, that psychoanalysis
healed them from their lack-of-being, although not
always in the manner they had hoped for.
For some, it happens through an identification with
the symptom. They no longer hope to get rid of the
symptom, and cease to wish for more. They themselves
are transformed into symptoms. They are their
symptoms, and, in this case, the feeling of the end of
analysis translates the stripping bare of the symptom’s
 Of Semblants in the Relation Between Sexes 29
jouissance. It is the revelation of the symptom’s
jouissance which puts an end to the lack-of-being.
For others, it is the crossing of fantasy. If, for the
former, a feeling of necessity comes to denote the
access to the impossible, for the latter there is
something akin to an affect of liberty, that is to say of
the possibility which gives access to contingency. When
one ends on the side of an identification with one’s
symptom, there is something akin to a feeling of
necessity, a feeling that one is accessing the impossible.
On the side of the crossing of fantasy, there is an affect
of liberty, of accessing contingency. Here, what can be
translated of the crossing of fantasy in Freudian terms is
a certain modification, understood as a flexibilisation of
the condition of love which governs object-choices.
From the jury’s side, the pass teaches us — at least
this is my conclusion, albeit a very transitory one — that
there is an influence of sexual difference in what refers
to fantasy. In male sexuation, there is a very special
pregnancy of fantasy. Indeed, sometimes, the fantasy is
far from allowing a crossing to masculine desire and, on
the contrary, one observes something like a compression
of fantasy.
I don’t know whether you are familiar with the work
of the French sculptor César, who sometimes takes a
whole heap of cars and reduces it by means of
compression into a cube-like sculpture. It amounts to
making a cube out of compressed cars. Well, likewise, a
possible result of analysis concerning masculine desire is
when a terrible César-like compression of fantasy can be
observed. It is as if one obtained, through the crossing,
the bare signifier of jouissance, and the subject remains
glued to this last signifier.
This presents itself like a question.
30 Jacques-Alain Miller
Once all the semblants have been reduced, the last
one remains, covering A with a screen. So much so that
one could have thought that after the Proposition of
1967 on the pass, defined as the crossing of fantasy,
Lacan would add, as a fruit of his experience, the end of
analysis as an identification with the symptom.
This could be another end for an analysis. The
question is whether one would recognise this type of an
end of analysis as a valid end since, after all, the phallic
function remains. One can very well see, in Lacan’s two
formulae of the sexuation of masculine and feminine
desire, that the question can, in the end, be reduced to
the first term. And the question can then be: how to
practice analysis with the phallic function, as it is
practised, sometimes with rigidity, but not without
honesty, sometimes with brutality, or with the silence of
a stone, and is not without having positive effects. Must
we recognise the identification with the symptom as
another modality of the end of analysis?
Freud had perceived that, by the same stroke, an
obsessional neurosis may be prolonged up to the point
where the illness can no longer be distinguished from the
treatment. Freud said that symptoms end up
representing satisfactions, and that this signification
becomes progressively more important. The subject
seeks his satisfactions in his symptoms.
The most typical in the pass, its ideal, is certainly to
be sought on the side of A, but it has to be said that it is
the feminine side. Lacan privileged the end of analysis
on the feminine side, as he defined the very position of
the analyst as having affinities with the feminine
position.
The last word could be — Men, one more effort…!
 Of Semblants in the Relation Between Sexes 31
Translated by Véronique Voruz and Bogdan Wolf

This text was originally presented in Buenos Aires in 1992,

and appeared in French in La Cause freudienne No.36, 1997.