29
Ex-sistence 15
Ex-sistence
Jacques-alain Miller
i- Hole, ex-sistence and consistence
1. FroM tHe PatHeMe to tHe MatHeMe
I promised to explain ex-sistence to you, and in two shakes
of a lamb’s tail.1 Although it wasn’t mulled over, or precisely
because it wasn’t mulled over, I don’t renounce this expres-
sion because it proceeds from the ideal of simplicity which,
according to Lacan, animates his teaching.
An ideal, this means that we don’t attain it, but also
that we don’t wallow in the complexity that we set out to
reduce. Provided that we don’t reduce it to an intuition,
that is to say, we don’t reduce it to what we suppose as
common sense.
Common sense, it’s what everyone agrees on. Psycho-
analysis inds itself fundamentally in default with respect to
the agreement that grounds common sense. Psychoanalysis
means nothing if not that common sense is the effect of re-
pression. This situates our place, apart, and isolates psycho-
analysis, to make it the object of a segregation.
a GeoMetric Mode oF tHouGHt
This segregation is structural, and it is all the more convinc-
ing that Lacan dreamt it could be lifted by his teaching. He
dreamt he could lift the segregation that bound psychoanalysis
by linking it—what an idea!—to the dialectic, and even to the
Platonic dialectic. He thought he could in this way believe,
or make believe, that psychoanalysis was not isolated nor
even isolatable from that curious restructuration of the human
sciences that seemed to come about in the middle of the last
century under the header of structuralism.
This moment remains as the one where psychoanalysis
seemed to be in solidarity with a whole movement of thought
and science. This gives it its value, undoubtedly, but also its
illusion. And we see manifest, on this or that occasion, the
nostalgia for that moment.
What is structuralism?—which marks its imprint on
Lacan’s teaching. It is an appeal made to mathematics to solve,
unlikely as it may seem, the problem of the human condi-
tion. It is the illusion that we could substitute mathematics,
and even logic, for the tragic, to substitute the matheme for
the patheme, even up to demonstrating that the patheme—
that which we suffer, that which affects us—is subjected to
the matheme.
It is a noble ambition, the same one expressed in the
preface to the third part of Spinoza’s Ethics devoted to the
affects. There Spinoza proposes to translate nature and the
force of the affects in the same manner of the method he used
16 lacanian ink
in regards to God in the irst part, as with the Mind in the
second, that is to say, in considering human action, appetite,
and the forms of desire, as if it were a question of lines and
surfaces. Spinoza goes that far.
Carried away by the enthusiasm that geometry pro-
duced in him, Spinoza had the idea that the power of the
geometric mode of thought could go much farther than the
objects to which Euclid had applied it. Even if he went much
further than everyone, he was not the only one to think it.
This was the motor of the research that animated what we call
in France the classic century, which took very seriously the
geometric mode of thinking, and dreamt thereby to resolve
the problem of the human condition.
Lacan even went so far as to suppose that this ambition
pertained to the position of the analyst and was sorry to see
that it was not the same in his own time where a community
of this style—referring human action and its motives to the
signiier and its combinatory—did not take shape, as it seemed
to him that we perhaps had the means.
Spinoza thought that the geometric mode could ex-
tend not only to lines and surfaces, but even more to God, to
the Mind, and to the Body, as he explicitly stipulated it. The
geometric mode of thought is a mode of logic that Spinoza
did not limit to thought, to what would later be called pure
reason, but he extends it to the Body as well.
This preigures the form that reason can take since
Freud, namely that it can penetrate into what was apparently
reserved for the obscurity of the passions, of jouissance, and
can penetrate in a mode other than that of mastery, of making
oneself a master, as some dreamt it.
Ex-sistence 17
a ProscriPtion oF PsycHoanalysis
To be effective, this evidently required Lacan to change ge-
ometry, from lines and surfaces, to topology, to the graph, and
inally to the knot. From where we stand, the look back at the
past half-century shows that it was only for a brief moment that
we could have believed that psychoanalysis was in agreement
with the movement of the sciences. We must register the fact
that psychoanalysis has since then returned to a segregative
status that behooves us to assume instead of denying it.
It is a contingency that becomes self-evident, when
stumbling across a French work—that has its merits—which
presents itself as the history of rhetoric from Antiquity
to today, that has the gall to skip over Lacan. Unknown!
Effaced, erased.
If rhetoric, of which Lacan could say, mid-century,
that it was absolutely outdated, had rediscovered its youth,
it is because he gave proper resonance to Jakobson’s article
on the two aspects of aphasia. Lacan extracted from it “The
Instance of the Letter” which marked the moment he realized
he had lost some time and could have started his work earlier,
as he indicated in a cryptic way at the end of that article. From
there we began to consult the works which contained this
rhetoric that still dominated classical studies until the turn
of the century, and vigorously resumed, with an unexpected
vigor, the studies of this library of rhetoric.
And so today, the same ones who were the benei-
ciaries of this turn do not shy away, they don’t even feel like
upstarts, because no power prohibits them from letting any
mention of Lacan fall by the wayside.
I register it as a proscription pronounced by the uni-
versity discourse in the place of psychoanalysis and the one
18 lacanian ink
who made advances in this domain by showing what Freud,
knowingly or not, revived of this ancient rhetoric. I take it as
the sign of a desire, in a certain area of thought and research,
namely to act as if Lacan’s teaching had never existed.
It is in the same measure that the personage he was
survives. In so much as we efface what we owe him, we value
the peculiarity of his personage. A peculiarity that is undeni-
able, but such peculiarity does not annul his lesson. What he
teaches is evidently beyond his singularity, if not, what we
are doing in psychoanalysis would have no meaning.
2. tHe outside oF ex-sistence
Not long ago I conveyed to you what, in my eyes, grounds
the without-law of the real,2 and it is in the same spirit that
I tackle what is in question with ex-sistence. Ex-sistence,
which became a category of the last teaching of Lacan, is
what, strictly speaking, qualiies the real. To make a link, from
the without of the without-law to the outside of ex-sistence.
a Knot-tyPe trutH
The last teaching of Lacan, that I only now address themati-
cally, and with caution, does not invite you to set ire to that
which you adored. I reassure you, but that would be a denial,
because the last teaching in effect puts into question what
might appear to be acquired once and for all. And it is that
which disquiets.
It is nonetheless not a question of setting ire. It is a
question of not adoring anything, that is to say of not confus-
ing the real with the constructions that are the artiices with
which we scaffold it.
Ex-sistence 19
Lacan said somewhere that truths are solids, that is
to say that they are not surfaces spread out on a plane which
reveal themselves at irst glance, only a glance, and always
in the same way. It is a way of saying that truths authorize
perspectives, that we can turn around them and not always
say the same thing.
This already allowed us to reduce Lacan’s last teach-
ing to a point of view, a point of view from which we can
consider what takes place and comes to pass in an analysis,
and this would suppose that the truth remains the same, very
solid, while we turn around it. But sameness is not grounded
in being, it depends on the parameters that deine it. And it is
in this way that we can turn to geometry, that we can admit
topological deformations that affect lines and surfaces while
remaining constrained and limited by the invariants that to-
pology itself prescribes.
Undoubtedly a truth that is not of the solid type, nor
of the surface type, comes out of the last teaching of Lacan,
it would be of the knot-type, a type with which we are not
familiar. It is because this truth came out that the knot began
to ex-sist.
It began to ex-sist by a coup de force of Lacan, that he
legitimized by saying that the knot came out of the analytic
practice itself. I have said how, in the simplest way, one can
justify this coup de force from that one speaks, that one needs
a body, and on top, this is something that is non-sense at the
whim of the symbolic as well as the imaginary.3
To grasp what ex-sistence is about, one must again
ask oneself what it means to exit, the exit.4 We can remain
at the level of the expression and make a phenomenological
analysis of it, why not. This sufices to realize that to exit
20 lacanian ink
means that we are no longer there, that one crosses a limit,
a threshold, and that, consequently, one passes into another
space, n’espace, possibly into another dimension. But to exit
also means, in the “bye-bye” that it is involved, that one must
go through it in order to inally exit from it.
This already sufices to say that ex-sistence is always
correlative to an exit out of.
tHe siGniFier oF ex-sistence
When I had, in the program I set myself, to explain to you the
real without law, I referred myself to a pons asinorum that
constitutes the construction of the alpha, beta, gamma which
commences the volume of Lacan’s Écrits. I could do the
same to explain ex-sistence or show you that it was already
there. This concept is in a way sketched in a matheme well
before its promotion in the teaching of Lacan. Ex-sistence
is already there, in nusce, in the matheme to which we refer
ourselves, S of A barred.
How to decipher the code of this matheme? How to
decipher it if we want to introduce here the temporal pulsa-
tion by which it is animated? In the irst moment, there is
the Other.
In the second moment, we notice or we feel that this
Other cannot support itself. It is not a substance, it does not
stand all alone, it is inconsistent, it collapses, it fades, and that
is what writes A barred.
In the third moment, this matheme writes what remains
of the disaster of the Other, a signiier that cannot ind a locus
to inscribe itself within the previously designated locus.
This is what justiies the rewriting that I propose of
this matheme, one that has me introduce the signiier of ex-
Ex-sistence 21
sistence beginning from the collapse of this Other, and which
permits one to posit what survives of this obscure disaster.
I inscribe with this signiier the thesis, the position, the
afirmation of what is posited outside of what just collapsed,
what is posited as the result of what is annulled and of what
effaces itself.
I chose this signiier because, in its imaginary form, in its own
way, it is evocative. From its vertical bar it acknowledges that
it is annulled and from its horizontal pseudopod it indicates
the remainder that emerges from it.
I have chosen it also because its classical usage in logic
makes it the signiier of what is afirmed in the statement as
true. And I say: I propose it as the signiier of ex-sistence.
In the Other conceived as the locus, where the signi-
iers gather, the signiiers are relative to each other. This is
what a signiier for another signiier means. Whereas the big
S that igures in the formula of the early Lacan, and in my
transformation on the far right, designates on the contrary a
signiier outside of the Other. It is, if you wish, an absolute
signiier, that is to say it is not relative.
This is what enables me to give you S of A barred as
the matrix of the position of ex-sistence. I do it to the extent
where ex-sistence always designates, when we invoke it,
when we put it to use, the position of the real in so much as
the position of the real is correlative to the inexistence of
the Other.
If the last teaching of Lacan emphasizes ex-sistence,
22 lacanian ink
and assures its promotion, it is to the extent that it inscribes
itself from the Other that does not exist. It follows from the
thesis—it is one—of the inexistence of the Other, the neces-
sity to posit ex-sistence and namely, how to grasp it.
The Other obeys a law which is a law of relativity, the
one which expresses the formula according to which a signi-
ier is only in relation to another signiier. This is well and
good, because this makes a system, and the signiier system
entails that there is nothing that would be exterior to it. If we
let ourselves go, at least outside of the analytic experience,
this system leads to the negation of the real, to consider that
there is only artiice, only construction. This leads straight to
the negation of the reference.
3. Jouissante substance
tHe coMMercial WinG oF PsycHoanalysis
The enthusiasm produced by this concept of the system, once
one grasps that language is in the net of the system, and the
enthusiasm that followed, precisely during the heyday of
structuralism, led straight to all the aberrations of literary
theory, namely that literature was self-referential, and that the
intransitive use of language, unknotted from any reference,
was called literature. Thus the exaltation of playful freedom.
We can construct the system in one way or another because
there is no one to call you back to order. Incidentally, on oc-
casion this makes for amusing, even moving results.
What Lacan calls ex-sistence re-establishes the real.
Undoubtedly, this playful vision of the usage of
language, in the spirit of the times, continued to exercise its
ravages. Those who can present themselves today, here and
Ex-sistence 23
there, as the commercial wing of psychoanalysis underline to
what extent that which the analysand articulates is precisely
to its exact credit. This is the way the analysand grasps things,
it is a little story that he tells this way or that, and which can
only be judged aesthetically, and through the satisfaction that
he is getting from it, without further sanction.
It is certain that, without exiting from what psycho-
analysis is, one can take it a good many ways. Its parameters
are not so demanding if one reduces this to coming to speak
to someone about what does not work, more or less regularly,
and that this someone dialogues with you, with no other aim
than of holding that position.
This is what I read yesterday from an English work
which found no better way to deine psychoanalysis than to
say that it consists of a certain number of paid conversations—
verbatim—and that something could eventually come of it,
if only the psychoanalyst was not putting himself irst, and
refrained from prescribing a way of life to the patient. One
can see well how the systematic point of view can degrade
itself up to this point.
It is exactly this that ex-sistence, which re-establishes
the real, can stand in the way of, that is to say that the Other
that does not exist is exactly what sketches, as a consequence,
the position of the jouissante substance. Here, the word sub-
stance, that Lacan stopped using nevertheless has the merit
of indicating that there, at least, something stands all alone,
outside of.
no otHer oF tHe otHer
It is necessary to put in its place the saying of Lacan according
to which there is no Other of the Other.
24 lacanian ink
It was imagined that the inexistence of the Other of
the Other left untouched the existence of the Other. It was
agreed—convinced, one wonders why, by Lacan’s argu-
ment—that if the Other of the Other did not exist, it was to
the extent that we stubbornly believed that the Other existed.
But it is not so, because, precisely, the existence of the
Other of the Other is what could enable the Other to ex-sist.
There is no Other of the Other means that the Other does not
exist. This puts into question that the Other could ground an
existence, and even and more so, to produce it.
There is no Other of the Other implies that the Other
can only ground an existence through its own collapse. This
is what the reduction of the Other to the subject supposed to
know means. It is the reduction of the Other to a supposition.
It is here that one must seriously distinguish supposition and
ex-sistence; supposition // ex-sistence.
Supposition, of which the function has been noticed
long ago, already with the Scholastics, is an effect of signii-
cation of the signifying chain. What one mumbles and what
one communicates is of that order. What is supposed does not
exist all alone but depends on that which supposes it.
It is in this way that the subject is supposed. And it is
as such that Lacan recommends, at the beginning of his teach-
ing, that in psychoanalysis we aim at the subject. We don’t
concern ourselves, as Lacan and Freud sometimes did, with
the veriication of the objectivity of the coordinates that the
subject articulates, we assume the negation of the reference.
Not in literature, in psychoanalysis.
FroM suPPosition to ex-sistence
One must say that the literary theory of the heyday of the
Ex-sistence 25
mid-century is purely and simply a consequence of the psy-
choanalytic perspective. That is why it is unbelievable to
write a history of rhetoric that eliminates the most important
consequence that psychoanalysis had on the discipline, if only
to deny it, or to divert it.
Lacan recommends from the beginning of his teach-
ing that it is the role of analysis itself to focus on the subject
as supposed from that which is said. But this supposition is
not an ex-sistence. This is what the symbol S barred says as
clearly as is possible.
The psychoanalytic hypothesis such as Lacan articu-
lated it, constructed it, it is from the supposition that we ac-
cede to an ex-sistence. This hypothesis took the form of what
he called the logic of the fantasm, and that entails that the
fantasm once submitted to the analytic apparatus is animated
by a logic that allows to pass from supposition to ex-sistence.
It was from the outset that the question was situated,
agitated, in the teaching of Lacan. This logic prescribed
since “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in
Psychoanalysis,” whose third part tries to sketch what could
be a realization of the subject. What is at stake with such a
realization of the subject is that its supposition is what permits
access to an ex-sistence, or to put it in the terms of the last
teaching of Lacan, that meaning permits access to the real.
Ex-sistence as Lacan inally extracts it from what he was lead
to agitate himself, this ex-sistence is what ultimately led him
to say that the real is what is excluded from meaning.
It sufices to write here meaning and real in order for
us to ind our bearings. The failure of a meaning produced
as an effect of the signiier eventually leaves ex-sisting a real
that supports itself.
26 lacanian ink
a Hole
From here there is no need for grand developments so I might
as well mark that the position of an ex-sistence is always cor-
relative to a hole.
It is what the last teaching of Lacan highlights through the
knot, and even—this is what is amazing—through the simple
consideration of the ring of string. The ring of string is above
all a hole from which something ex-sists. Which obliges us to
problematize this something under the species of consistence.
Ex-sistence 27
Here are the three terms that frame the thinking of Lacan in his
last teaching: hole, ex-sistence and consistence, either affected
in a differential way in each of these three rings of string of
the borromean knot or as found present in each ring once the
knot has been broken down. In the borromean knot as such,
the hole is what characterizes the symbolic, ex-sistence is the
mark of the real, and it is in consistence that we recognize
the imaginary. Each of them is attributed to one of the three
rings, but this tripartition can also be found in each element
which then can be broken down thus: hole, ex-sistence,
and consistence.
essence, MeaninG, and ex-sistence
What is wonderful is that this notion of ex-sistence its per-
fectly within the classical usage of the term. It sufices to
refer to the text of Heidegger’s “Metaphysics as History of
Being” which is the last chapter of his Nietzsche, where he
deals with, in his overbearing manner, this bipartition of ex-
istence and essence in the history of metaphysics. He makes
clear that essence has always partook of meaning. Even since
Plato gave to it the status of Idea, it is in the essence that is
gathered what an ex-sistence is or, as the Scholastics will have
it later, in its quiddity.
Quid, what, quiddity. It is not very graceful, this is the
translation of quidditas. Quiddity means that we can deal with
what is, through what it signiies, through the predicates that
we can give to it, and that can be distinguished, from there,
the fact that it is, without us knowing exactly what it means.
The fact that it is, this is quoddity.
This sufices for one to perceive that essence is en-
dowed with a form that has signiication, while ex-sistence
28 lacanian ink
as such, it is what is formless—which has found its repre-
sentation in objet petit a. It is a division of being, a division
between meaning and ex-sistence. And all this leads to the
deinition of being starting from causality and of existence as
what really exists, of which we search for the proofs.
What does this mean to search for the proofs of the
existence of God? This means that we search if, starting from
the way in which we can scaffold the meaning that is in ques-
tion, we can obtain an existence. And in relation to causality,
existence as such is constituted extra causas, outside causes.
The position of existence comes about once we traverse the
order of causes, that is to say an order that makes sense.
What is a psychoanalysis in the history of metaphys-
ics? A psychoanalysis puts the parlêtre to the test of meaning.
It puts what makes sense, for him, to the test of the statement.
It puts to the test a being that holds its being from meaning.
It puts to the test of meaning that which unfolds from the
signifying chain. And the question is to know if, from that
test, he accedes to the real, that is to say if he accedes to a
position which ex-sists outside meaning.
It is existentialism, and I don’t repudiate Jean-Paul
Sartre’s formula with which he decorated it, “existence pre-
cedes essence.” I could very well give my Lacanian formula-
tion of it, by saying that the real precedes meaning, except
that an analysis implies that one must pass through meaning
in order to accede to the real, inasmuch as it could precede
meaning.
I see in any case here founded the real as excluded
from meaning, that is to say that it ex-sists outside meaning.
It is what the knot is employed to show.
Ex-sistence 29
II– aPrès-couP oF tHe eMerGence oF ex-sistence
1. Modus Ponens
tHe syMbol oF JudGeMent
I have introduced a Lacanian symbol, which I have not often
done. Maybe I never did it. I am usually content to handle
those which Lacan himself forged for our usage. If I have
done it this time, it is to give more consistence to the con-
cept of ex-sistence by formalizing it in the guise of a relation
between two terms.
To do it, I have twisted the symbol that Frege ¾ who is
at the origin of what has developed in the twentieth century as
essentially mathematical, symbolic logic ¾ introduced in his
Begriffsschrift, his Conceptual Notation, which was published
in 1879 and which presented itself as a formalized language
of pure thought conceived on the model of arithmetic, which
he called, “the language of arithmetic.”
The symbol is the following:
For Frege, it is made from the combination of a vertical trait
and of a horizontal trait. In paragraph 2 of his treatise it is the
irst symbol that he introduces as the sign which expresses
the judgement.
What does he call a judgement? It is an act of thought
which focuses on a content. This content of judgement itself
is expressed by a sign or set of signs, say, in our language,
30 lacanian ink
a signifying chain. For him, this chain inscribes itself to the
right of the symbol.
This symbol is for Frege a preix that signiies what he calls
the author which afirms the truth of the content, afirms that
it is so. It afirms a truth within a conceptual framework that
remains caught up in the notion that such truth is in accor-
dance with reality.
If the symbol is omitted, if there is only the term on
the right, then for Frege, there is no longer judgement. The
author introduces only one or several ideas without pronounc-
ing himself on their truth. The author gives some ideas, but he
does not take them into account, he does not guarantee that
this is so.
With Frege, this can be broken down. If we content
ourselves with the preix written by a horizontal trait, we
introduce a proposition that becomes an assertion only if we
add the vertical trait. One needs a proposition on the right in
order for this to have a meaning. Frege refuses that there only
igures a simple substantive or the notation of a substantive.
He would not accept it for example were we to write
the word house by utilizing a symbol to say, “there is a house.”
It takes a complete proposition for the symbol of judgement
to be employed astutely.
Ex-sistence 31
a MaJor indeMonstrable
If I retain this symbol, if I twist it to our ends in order to make
it the symbol of ex-sistence in the sense of Lacan, it is for the
usage to which this symbol is put in the statement of the rules
of inference. It is not necessary here to develop the general
notion of it. I am content with the statement of the rules of
major inference, where one makes use of Frege’s symbol.
Here are the givens of the problem. To afirm that “if
B, then A,” is to afirm at the same time, by linking them, the
proposition B, and so one can suppress B in the conditional
proposition, the irst one, to obtain the position of A.
It is an absolutely primary logical mechanism that
igured in an almost formalized way in the logic of the Stoics
as the irst of the indemonstrables, a list they made.5 They did
not differentiate between the axiom and the rule as carefully as
we have learned it, and they made of this mechanism a major
indemonstrable conditioning logical thought. The result is that
at the end of the process we have a proposition A uncondi-
tioned, whereas initially we have an A which is conditioned
by the position of B.
32 lacanian ink
All this scaffolding is what the Scholastics, who also got
involved with it, call modus ponendo ponens. It is one of the
forms of modus ponens, that is to say a way, a mode, a logical
modality of posing a term by posing, ponendo, another term,
as it happens here, B.
You still have another modus ponens, which is tollendo
ponens, which functions in the following way: we pose A or
B, while giving the “or” an exclusive meaning, and if we pose
it “not B,” then we can pose A. This time we pose the modus
ponens of A by having removed the term B, the horizontal
bar signiies the negation. It is a little further on in the list of
the Stoics’ indemonstrables.
It is this modus ponens, well known—it is truly the ABC’s
of the logical mechanism—that I twist to my own ends and
which I make function in another way.
I undertook to make it function not in one place but in
two places. The concept of ex-sistence necessitates that we use
Ex-sistence 33
two places. I place to the left of the symbol of ex-sistence the
set of that signifying articulation that conditions the position
of the term on the right. I place it before the condition and I
attribute ex-sistence to the term on the right.
I mean by the ex-sistence of the term on the right that, in accor-
dance with the logic of modus ponens, that which conditions it
is annulled once the prescribed route has been accomplished.
Once one has reached this, in logic, one can introduce the
position of A in the new calculus without having to trail after
that which had permitted us to pose A. One can say that the
condition is annulled precisely in the measure where we state
that the term on the right ex-sists, but, while being annulled,
it is maintained in so much that it must pass through it irst.
betWeen antecedent and consequent
This is precisely what signals the written form of ex-sistence
by Lacan as we reproduce it, which is here to recall the ties
that remain between the term on the right to the one on the
left. Ex-sistence retains the link of the term on the right with
the term on the left. Thus, in utilizing this elementary form of
writing we say that the term on the right ex-sists to the one on
the left. It is a way of posing this term as such, of afirming
34 lacanian ink
the truth of its position, but following a logical course.
To say it in this way, we see what is paradoxical about
the notion of ex-sistence. On one hand, the ex-sisting term is
all alone; cut from its condition it is no longer contained by the
condition—as we see it here iguring in the judgement “if B,
then A”—but from a different perspective, it is also true that
we accede to it precisely by the means of what is disregarded.
It is on the head of a pin, but, by paying attention to
this, we notice that the notion of ex-sistence—a Lacanian
notion that we need to construct a little, since we ind it with
Lacan rather utilized than thematized—modiies the notion
of consequence.
A logical consequence is only, “that which follows.”
When we speak of consequence we put the accent on this;
that the consequence remains purely and simply attached to
the antecedent and that it remains of the same order.
It is precisely here that ex-sistence distinguishes it-
self from the consequence, because ex-sistence introduces a
discontinuity between the antecedent and the consequence.
It rejects the consequence in another order, that is to say in
another locus. It is that which makes the paradox and eventu-
ally the oscillation that we note in the usage of the term.
On one side ex-sistence conserves the trace of the
link that articulates the two terms, and at the same time it
disarticulates them, since it is the second that subsists so
that we unburden the irst. But evidently, ex-sistence is not
a substance, in the sense that the substance does not require
anything, and particularly, from what brought it to light. The
ex-sisting term is thus at once independent, unconditioned,
but only in so much as it is untied from a condition.
If one may say so, ex-sistence is a result, but a result
Ex-sistence 35
that remains, even as we efface the operation of which it is
a result. And to make room for the notion of ex-sistence, we
must still push the notion of supposition to one side. I have
indicated it already, there is an absolutely essential difference
to make between supposition and ex-sistence, in the measure
that the supposed remains in the direct dependence of what
poses it and that, there, the condition would not be annulled.
In this sense, in the usage of the terms such as we practice it,
what is supposed does not exist.
2. an ex-sistinG reMainder
an eFFect oF tHe siGniFyinG cHain
To give an example, which in fact guides us as well; when
Lacan reduces the unconscious to the subject supposed to
know, insofar as he does not make of it an effect of the sig-
nifying chain such as it is structured in the analytic experi-
ence, he takes good care to specify, for those who would not
give the term of supposition its proper value, that this has
nothing to do with the real. The analytic experience unfolds
under the header of a supposition. That something comes to
ex-sist from this operation, in this regard, just a hypothesis,
that is to say that the supposition leaves space, makes space,
introduces, permits the access to an ex-sistence, and, to say
it another way, that from the subject that is only supposed,
could come to ex-sist in that same place what Lacan baptized
with the term of objet a.
36 lacanian ink
This is what more simply supports that to which Lacan gave
the coordinates under the name of the pass. The pass would
be the moment of the eclipse of the supposition in so much
as it would leave an ex-sisting remainder, that is to say that
this would designate the turn of the supposition towards ex-
sistence. A turn affecting the subject that, who being deposed,
inds himself thereby all the more ex-sisting. Lacan signals
it in a very precise way, precisely located on the schema, as
elementary as it is.
We don’t see why one could speak of the post-analyt-
ic—I say it for me, since I myself happened to speak of it—to
qualify what leaves itself denominated by a better situated and
more striking way, the domain of ex-sistence. Let’s consider,
in these elementary terms, the après-coup of the emergence
of an ex-sistence. Once an ex-sistence has emerged, in accor-
dance with a classic usage of modus ponens, the antecedent is
reducible to a semblant. The antecedent—what incidentally
includes the usage of the symbol that I propose—does not ex-
sist, while the one ex-sisting seems real, or at least is posed
as real. We can thus give a general formula that qualiies the
irst term as semblant and the one on the right as real.
Ex-sistence 37
Is ex-sistence “truly” in a position to “ground” the real? I put
“truly” and “ground” between quotes, because we ask our-
selves if we have truly attained the appropriate notion of the
real when we are still concerned with grounding it. But let’s
consider these terms, because if we pose this question, it is
because we have to ask ourselves if the real does not remain
in the dependence of the semblant.
This is precisely the question that torments Lacan, who
deined the real as the impossible. He deined the real as the
impasse where we can ind ourselves in a logical articulation
and which allows us to isolate what ex-sists from it.
a loGical iMPasse
This notion that we attain ex-sistence beginning from a logical
impasse is what explains the choice that Lacan made of the
term of the pass for the turn from supposition to ex-sistence.
The term refers to the notion that it is from a logical impasse
that we could, strictly speaking, operate the true modus po-
nens, that is to say that it is here absolutely disjoined from
the consequence.
This is why what I have told you about modus ponens
is a scaffolding, because it is evidently here in a direct line that
it follows. It is simply a consequence that we can amputate
from its antecedent, from its premise.
38 lacanian ink
Lacan’s idea is that, from a logical impasse, something
emerges that is of another order than what gets stuck there.
To deine the real as the impossible is nothing other
than to deine the real by a logical mode, that is to say by
logic, and it is to give logic the primacy over the real. In this
case, the ex-sisting only has the value of the real in relation
to the logic that conditions it.
Regularly, we see the last Lacan appealing to the
impasse, wishing for the well-structured impasses, impasses
that can be demonstrated, as he says in Television, “impasses
that afirm themselves through demonstration.”6 To afirm
themselves through demonstration, it is what is here encap-
sulated by the symbol of assertion. It is because he hopes for
well-structured impasses that this allows one to touch, as he
says, the real pure and simple.
Lacan speciies this real as being pure and simple only
because it is not certain that it is pure and simple. It is rather
impure and complex in being dependent on the demonstration
of the impasse.
tHe unconscious ex-sists tHrouGH discourse
This is why we also ind with Lacan a depreciative usage of
ex-sistence. For example, look at the third part of Television,
where he introduces his idea of discourse, “I do not ground the
idea of discourse on the ex-sistence of the unconscious, it is
Ex-sistence 39
the unconscious that I locate ex-sists only through discourse.”
I underline “only” so as to use our little symbol. What is here
on the left, it is the discourse, and the unconscious ex-sists
through discourse. I only transcribe Lacan’s sentence here.
The unconscious ex-sists through and only ex-sists through
discourse.
What does this depreciative usage mean? It is a limiting usage.
This limits the ex-sistence of the unconscious to ex-sisting
through discourse. It is a usage of the notion of ex-sistence
that puts the accent on what keeps attaching the ex-sisting
term in relation to what it ex-sists from.
Lacan considers here, in effect, those discourses of
which he gave the formulas as signifying articulations which
are only a construction, an artiice, an articulated set of sem-
blants, and that the ex-sistence of the unconscious is strictly
dependent on the articulation of the discourse.
He does not say it all—at least not here—that it is ex-
clusively that the unconscious can ex-sist through the analytic
discourse. He means that the unconscious ex-sists through
discourse as such and that it is even in relation to the hysteric’s
discourse that the unconscious ex-sists all the better, at least
more clearly. It is in any case a usage of the ex-sisting that
puts emphasis on its dependence in relation to the discourse.
Lacan had on occasion, previously, willingly articu-
lated the dependence of the unconscious in relation to the
40 lacanian ink
analytic discourse, when he explained that the unconscious
is veriied all the better when it is interpreted. This is what he
was able to say in “Radiophonie” some years before, that the
unconscious starts to ex-sist all the more that we interpret it. It
was also to put the emphasis on the relation of ex-sistence that
undoubtedly makes a term emerge, but does not completely
efface its relation to what conditions it.
Ex-sistence eclipses, in this regard. So it is not self-
evident that ex-sistence deines the real.
3. syMbolization and ex-sistence
double status oF tHe unconscious
If you again take, in Television, the example that Lacan gives
there of God, he says very clearly, “God ex-sisted.” And since,
as the other said it, God ceased to ex-sist as strong as before,
and Lacan evokes the possibility that God could regain some
strength up to the point of ex-sisting anew.
We ind the same oscillation concerning the status of
the unconscious. It is clear that the unconscious, in the last
teaching of Lacan, receives at least a double status, sometimes
referred to the supposition of the analytic discourse, and
sometimes partaking of ex-sistence to the point that Lacan
could say it was real.
His last teaching navigates in this problematic. Is the
unconscious a supposition? Is the unconscious ex-sisting?
And does this ex-sistence deliver, or not, a real?
Incidentally, one of the problems of the domain of
ex-sistence, otherwise said post-analytic, is to know if after
an analysis one still believes in the unconscious anymore?
Lacan did not restrain himself from showing some big doubts
Ex-sistence 41
that he nourished about the density of the belief in the uncon-
scious of the analysts practicing analysis. Once the supposed
knowledge that follows from the position of the analysand in
the analytic discourse is eclipsed, what remains of the position
of the unconscious in a practitioner? This seemed to him at
least something that was to be interrogated.
We have, in effect, with Lacan a symbolic uncon-
scious, the famous “structured like a language,” but we also
have an unconscious that I don’t hesitate to call imaginary—it
is the one of supposed knowledge—and then the idea of an
unconscious that would be real, and that he puts to the test
and that he writes.
One must here understand how this problematic of
ex-sistence at the same time differentiates itself from and also
continues the very well-known and well explored problematic
of symbolization, of the style of the “words to say it” to refer
to the title of a work by Marie Cardinale—recently passed
away—that had been her fame.
Everyone thought that they could understand what it
was about in the thematic of symbolization. I propose that
we grasp what differentiates and articulates the problematic
of ex-sistence and the one of symbolization.
a beyond oF disidentiFication
Let us irst take the precaution of marking that, with Lacan, the
problematic of ex-sistence does not only concern the relation
between the symbolic and the real, as I underlined with the
terms of the logical impasse and of the pass, but that it also
includes the relations of the imaginary and the real.
42 lacanian ink
Lacan isolates in his last teaching, for example, terms which
ex-sist from the imaginary. I will only take the well-known
one as a reference, which appears one time in the Seminar
Encore, when Lacan evokes the instance of phallic jouissance
as outside of the body. This lets it be placed on the schema as
a term ex-sisting from the imaginary.
The body event is the analogue of the logical impasse.7 It is
what inscribes itself in what ex-sists through the body, in the
same way as what makes the pass ex-sist in relation to what
in the symbolic is logical.
The irst ten years of Lacan’s teaching truly gives the
sense of the exploring between the symbolic and the imagi-
Ex-sistence 43
nary what is the covering of the imaginary by the symbolic,
and precisely the intersection of these two, in order to assure
the dominance of the symbolic. What situates itself at the
intersection—what had irst been retained—it is a term like
the one of the phallus in so much as it igures in the paternal
metaphor, that is to say an imaginary term taking symbolic
value.
Lacan situated the principal concepts of psychoanaly-
sis in this intersection. The whole of the irst movement of his
teaching tends to show the symbolic character of the concepts
that were treated as imaginary.
This hit the bull’s eye with the phallic reference con-
sidered as the major identiication of the subject but having
a beyond due to the fact of the analytic operation, a beyond
of disidentiication. It is the irst approach that Lacan made
of the end of analysis.
In Seminar XI even, we ind again the formula of
the crossing of the plan of identiication. What is there, little
developed but present, to situate this beyond of what igures
at the intersection? We see, regularly, demonstrable in this
perspective, that which is beyond tends always to be deined
as real.
44 lacanian ink
a call to tHe diMension oF tHe real
In Seminar XI, the crossing of the plan of identiication inter-
rogates the drive conceived as the real. The whole problematic
of symbolization is appropriate in order to situate the course
of the analysis, but, when it comes to the end, there is deini-
tively, in the irst movement of Lacan’s teaching, a call, more
or less precise, to the dimension of the real.
See for example when this zone of intersection is
speciied by Lacan. Not only the phallus but the fantasm, at
the same place, the same place of intersection brought all the
more to the fore, in order to give the formula of the fantasm,
Lacan joins a symbolic term and an imaginary term.
And Lacan supposes that analysis makes the fantasm obey
a logic that concludes itself with a crossing. The crossing
of the fantasm, it is the recovery of the term crossing that
igures already in Seminar XI. This crossing means, inally,
the institution of the non-relation between S barred and petit
Ex-sistence 45
a and the emergence of a real.
It is still the same if we refer ourselves to the begin-
ning of Lacan’s teaching, to the doctrine of the end of the cure
that he proposes in his article “Variations on the Standard
Treatment.” All that he articulates about the analytic cure is
in the terms of symbolization, but what he articulates about
the end of analysis distinguishes itself from symbolization.
Lacan deined the course of analysis as symbolization, which I
reduced to the simplest by saying “some words to say it,” but
he never deines the end of analysis by symbolization except
perhaps at the very beginning, at the end of “The Function and
Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” where we
see, in a way, a horizon of absolute knowledge present itself,
it’s scintillating.
In fact, he really gives his irst doctrine of the end of
analysis in “Variations on the Standard Treatment,” in making
it equivalent to the end of the ego in the analyst. Undoubt-
edly he made it equivalent to a resorption of the imaginary in
order to be able to operate from the locus of the Other. What
he calls, with the terms he had at his disposal, the assumption
of death.
What is Lacan naming here, with these Heideggerian
accents, this death one is to assume? It is a term of which
the reality is such that one cannot know anything about, and
that we can only imagine. From his irst doctrine of the end
of analysis, this points towards a term that escapes from the
symbolic as well as the imaginary, which Lacan calls death.
Straightaway, the coordinates are there in order to situ-
46 lacanian ink
ate, at the end of analysis, something that remains exterior to
the chitchat and that is extracted from the semblant. We could
even say, if we take “The Function and Field of Speech and
Language in Psychoanalysis,” that is to say the early Lacan,
that he speaks of the realization of the subject.
In effect, it is a question of the subject that is not real-
ized at the start and the analytic operation brings into being.
We can see here the limit. One would still need to differentiate
being from the real
Lacan will bring about this displacement in his last
teaching when he will speak of the parlêtre, this is to say that
he will situate being on the side of the symbolic. The parlêtre
is another way of saying the subject. Being is always on the
side of the symbolic. One attributes being to oneself. There is
also being on the side of the imaginary, it is when we locate it
in the unity of the body, and here we talk of the speaking body
and its mystery. But being is eclipsed in the face of the real.
It is that which is the question in the last teaching of Lacan,
who decided to operate straightaway with the three dimen-
sions and not to reserve the one of the real for the beyond of
the crossing. Lacan re-includes it, situates it and articulates
it straightaway in its nodal architecture.
—Translated by John Burton Wallace V
and Frédéric-Charles Baitinger
Ex-sistence 47
L’orientation lacanienne III, Le lieu et le lien (2000-2001), lessons of
5/3/01, 5/9/01, 5/16/01- text and notes established by Catherine Bonningue.
Originally published with the authorization of Jacques-Alain Miller in la
Cause freudienne n˚50 (February, 2002)
endnotes
1. Miller uses the French idiom “en deux coups de cuillère
à pot” which word for word translates as “in two hits of
a ladle.” Cuillère also refers to the two-fold function of a
buccaneer’s cutlass which acts as a weapon and a tool to
cut ropes. The translators here substitute the idiom for an
Anglo correspondent. [tr.]
2. Miller J-A., “The Real is Without Law,” Lacanian Ink 47,
2016, pp. 48-73.
3. Cf. Miller J-A., L’orientation lacanienne III, Le lieu et le
lien (2000-2001), lesson of 05/02/01 (unpublished). Herein
summarizes the passage to which Miller makes reference:
“Lacan afirmed that the knot was in relation with the
analytic practice. First, there is the symbolic. You receive
someone, you ask him to speak. You put into action the func-
tion of speech, that which mobilizes the ield of language.
Second, there is the imaginary. Analysis only functions if the
body is also there in the experience. And third, there is again
the real, that is to say the instance of what has no meaning.”
4. In French, “sortir, la sortie.” [tr.]
5. These ive indemonstrables are the familiar forms: (1) if p
then q; p; therefore q (modus ponens) (2) if p then q; not
q; therefore not-p (modus tollens) (3) it is not the case that
both p and q; p; therefore not-q (4) either p or q; p; therefore
not-q (5) either p or q; not p; therefore q [tr.]
6. Here, and in subsequent references to Television, the trans-
lators have chosen to translate Jacques-Alain Miller’s cita-
tions strictly as they were published in la Cause freudienne
n˚50. [tr.]
7. Cf. Miller J-A., “Lacanian Biology and The Event of the Body,”
Lacanian Ink 18, 2001, pp. 6-29.; Miller J-A., “The Symp-
tom and the Body Event,” Lacanian Ink 19, 2001, pp. 4-47.
48 lacanian ink Ex-sistence 49