CONVERSATIONS WITH LACAN

Conversations with Lacan: Seven Lectures for Understanding Lacan brings a unique,
non-partisan approach to the work of Jacques Lacan, linking his psychoanalytic
theory and ideas to broader debates in philosophy and the social sciences, in a
book that shows how it is possible to see the value of Lacanian concepts without
necessarily being defined by them.
In accessible, conversational language, the book provides a clear-sighted
overview of the key ideas within Lacan’s work, situating them at the apex of
the linguistic turn. It deconstructs the three Lacanian orders – the symbolic, the
imaginary, and the real – as well as a range of core Lacanian concepts, including
alienation and separation, après-coup, and the Lacanian doctrine of temporality.
Arguing that criticism of psychoanalysis for a lack of scientificity should be
accepted by the discipline, the book suggests that the work of Lacan can be
helpful in re-conceptualizing the role of psychoanalysis in the future.
This accessible introduction to the work of Jacques Lacan will be essential
reading for anyone coming to Lacan for the first time, as well as clinicians
and scholars already familiar with his work. It will appeal to psychoanalysts,
psychotherapists, and scholars of philosophy and cultural studies.

Sergio Benvenuto is a Psychoanalyst in Rome, Editor of the European Journal

of Psychoanalysis, and Researcher in the Institute of Sciences and Technologies of
Cognition at the Italian Council for Scientific Research in Rome.
“Sergio Benvenuto brings a fresh look on Lacan and on psychoanalysis that
couldn’t be more right. Right because it discerns extremely well what distin-
guishes from every ‘lacanianism’ and from every theoretical construction a con-
cern for the real as an impossibility to give reason. It thus distinguishes what
makes Lacan, before anything else, a thinker among thinkers.”
—Jean-Luc Nancy, is a French philosopher,
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Chair and
Professor of Philosophy at The European
Graduate School / EGS

“A conversation with Lacan is the last thing imaginable—he’s just so impenetra-

ble, obstinate, clownish, exceptionally French! In this stunning, concise book,
Sergio Benvenuto imagines the unimaginable, giving us a nondogmatic Lacan
to converse, and even, play with. He turns Lacan’s tense f lesh into feeling, life,
and breath.”
—Jamieson Webster, psychoanalyst in New York,
has written for the Guardian, the New York Times
and is the author of several books
CONVERSATIONS
WITH LACAN
Seven Lectures for Understanding
Lacan

Sergio Benvenuto
First published in English 2020
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CONTENTS

Foreword vii
Acknowledgements xi

1 The dandy dentist: Lacan as a character 1

2 Lacan in the psychoanalysis of today 27

3 Lacan in contemporary thought 49

4 The three registers: the Real 77

5 Après-coup, the future perfect, the hermeneutic

circle, alienation and separation 103

6 “Psychopathology” and the cure according to Lacan:

Depression, psychosis, hysteria, obsessional neurosis,
perversions, transference 125

7 Can we be Lacanians today? 155

Index 181
FOREWORD

Which reading of Lacan can be recommended today? In other words, what is still
interesting in Conversations with Lacan, what is alive of him? By and large, three
types of readings of the great masters of psychoanalysis exist today; three read-
ings that I would say are incommensurable.
One is based on the type of literature that prevails, increasingly unchallenged,
in the sciences. In our age, cognitive validity – truth, in short – is considered
to be the domain of scientific discourse. That is to say, knowledges are only
true (and hence useful) if they are achieved through the protocols accepted by
today’s scientific communities. The protocols derive largely from methodologies
formalized by J.S. Mill, the Vienna Circle, C.G. Hempel, K. Popper, and a few
others. From this point of view, Lacan’s work absolutely fails the test: his theories
may certainly be interesting – they may even have a so-called heuristic value, i.e.
they can suggest possible paths to truth for scientific research – but they are not
scientifically pertinent. Lacanian theories – and in general Freudian ones too –
may even be true, but science can’t state it. The point is that this weakness of
science, namely of not recognizing as truth things that are not provable accord-
ing to its protocols, is championed today as its greatest strength. Lacan inherited
scientific discredit from Freud’s doctrine. Freud is appreciated as a pioneer of
an objective approach to the “mind” as object, as a theorist who did his best to
develop more or less scientific hypotheses on psychic functioning, but it is agreed
that the mind sciences have now gone well beyond his early steps.
In contemporary thought, the so-called cognitive sciences are now consid-
ered to be fully f ledged sciences. In this domain works are published on the
model of the “hard” sciences, which means that researchers only read the latest
articles or books published, at most, in the last five to ten years. In fact, in phys-
ics, astronomy, or biology, the classics (Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein . . .)
are seldom read; knowledge formation is based on up-to-date manuals that deal
viii Foreword

with what a scientist in each field must know at the present time. So, direct read-
ings of classical scientific works are left to specialists in the “history of science,”
a sort of minor celebrative branch of science. The important thing, if one wishes
to take part in scientific research today, is to be up-to-date on what one’s col-
leagues, mainly one’s living contemporaries, are pursuing. The sciences have
little time for the works of those who have long been dead.
Today many psychoanalysts imitate this practice: their papers often quote a
few texts by classic non-living authors (Freud, Melanie Klein, Winnicott, and
a few others) in order to then concentrate on more recent authors, either reaf-
firming or dispelling their theses. They presume that psychoanalysis – like all the
other sciences – is a cumulative knowledge, meaning there is no need to return
to the fundamental discoveries. The important thing is to develop the paradigm
accepted within a particular analytical school on the basis of the most recent pub-
lications. Unfortunately for them however, this imitation of the style of modern
scientific literature has by no means convinced scientists to accept psychoanalysis
as an “ex officio” member of their club, quite the opposite. A lot of psychoanaly-
sis today tends to wear the mask of science without having its true face. I would
call this first “scientific” reading in psychoanalysis: In Awe Simulation of the
Scientific Style. Lacan is famously known for drastically rejecting this simula-
tion from the very start.
Another, totally different, reading is generally practiced in the history
and humanities faculties of universities. Whilst in the scientific literature just
described it is the themes that are important, and hence the contribution one can
give them, the main concern of historical-hermeneutical literature is the texts of
certain authors. For example, in the scientific literature one may write a paper on
the unconscious or on memory, whilst in the historical-hermeneutical literature
the paper will be on “the unconscious according to Freud” or “the unconscious
according to Jung,” and we would read about “memory according to Freud” or
“memory according to Piaget,” and so on. In fact, this approach expresses what
some philosophers called a pietas (piety) for texts and for the authors are behind
them. These studies are usually referred to as the “humanities,” sharply distinct
from “scientific studies.” This humanistic reading is accepted today insofar as it
is part of the preservation of cultural assets. Cultural assets today are everything
that is neither science nor politics, neither technique nor religious faith. I would
say that they are assets that real discourse allows to run free like children in one of
our increasingly efficient playgrounds: they are considered to be works that are
worth preserving or visiting in order to celebrate our cultural origins. This pres-
ervation may concern the Colosseum or Plato’s Dialogues, Renaissance paint-
ings or folk festivals, or . . . the thought of Freud and Lacan. The conception that
prevails today is that, on the one hand, our civilization has fully operating facto-
ries that produce useful knowledge and objects (science, technologies) whilst, on
the other, it has texts and relics of the past that we admire in a sort of recreational
ritual. I would call this second “historical-hermeneutical” reading in psycho-
analysis: Devotional Philological Preservation. Of course, this philological
Foreword ix

reading of Lacan is gaining ground as Lacan becomes further removed from us

in time, but the point is that, in contrast to other authors – Freud himself, for
example – Lacan is still a controversial author, i.e. he is by no means peacefully
accepted as a cultural asset to preserve.
The third reading in psychoanalysis can be called Militant Exegesis of the
Absolute Text. This exegesis may be positive or negative. In Lacan’s case, for
example, one may write a book to praise the truth, topicality, and usefulness of
his ideas, or to prove the fallacy, falseness, and even the fraudulent bad faith of
Lacan and his theories. To limit ourselves to the positive type of exegesis, it is
usually the work of psychoanalysts from a particular Lacanian school who intend
in this way to prove how perspicuously Lacanian, and therefore psychoanalyti-
cally correct, their approaches are. Their exegeses are not mere hagiographies,
but readings that enact a militancy similar to political, ethical, or religious ones.
It is the type of reading that so many leftist intellectuals once habitually made of
Marx, Lenin, or Gramsci in order to prove the strategic validity of their political
line. Or, in the religious field, one would put forward a particular reading of the
Gospels, or of Saint Paul, or of the Fathers of the Church in order to authorize
their vision of Christianity. In this sense, Lacan’s text becomes an authentic cult
text, like the Torah for the Talmudic authors, the sacred text that contains the
core of all truths, which the exegesis of today has the task of clarifying. This is
why I talk here of an absolute text, i.e. a text that is loosened (absolutus) from its
historical contingency. This is the kind of reading of Lacan that prevails today,
which is to say that dealing with Lacan is still a militancy, sometimes against
him.
In actual fact, every text, however profound or brilliant, bears the limits of
historical experience; therefore it is inevitably destined to be attacked, surpassed,
abandoned, sometimes rediscovered or made topical again, and so on. The Devo-
tional Philological Preservation reading is not interested in the meta-historical
validity of the authors and texts it garners, insofar as the value of these authors
and texts only consists in their historical success in past eras. The Militant Exege-
sis of the Absolute Text implies the meta-historical and topical validity of these
texts and authors because they reveal non-contingent truths. They are comments
on a revelation. In some psychoanalytical schools the revelation is in the texts of
M. Klein, in others, it is in those of Lacan, or in those of Bion, and so on. So,
whereas scientific literature prefers the living, and devotional philological litera-
ture prefers the dead (even when it deals with the living, it treats them as if they
were dead), militant exegesis aims at the immortals.
As we can see, the models for the three readings are respectively modern
scientific research, the philological reconstruction, and the religious exegesis of
the sacred text (or the confutation of the text as falsely sacred). We can therefore
say that the In Awe Simulation of the Scientific Style is interested in Lacan only
insofar as some of his ideas are still pertinent to today’s neo-cognitive main-
stream, the Devotional Philological Preservation is interested in Lacan only inso-
far as it is a part of the historical and cultural heritage of 20th-century Europe,
x Foreword

and the Militant Exegesis of the Absolute Text is interested in Lacan as the
source and origin of the eternal truths of psychoanalysis. Whilst what counts for
scientific literature is knowledges, what counts for the historical and philological
literature is the traces or monuments of the past, and what counts for the exegesis
of the religious type is truths to reaffirm.
I shall immediately say that with Lacan I practice none of these readings, even
though today they may seem the only ones possible. I have great admiration for
the scientific research of today, but I don’t believe psychoanalysis is a science (as
I will detail later), so I think it needn’t assume the fashion and ceremonials of
modern science. I have a passion for history and I admire the reconstructions of
monuments of the past, but I am interested in Lacan above all because for me
the things he says are topical and alive. I appreciate the faithful who revere their
sacred texts, because I have my cult books too, with which I am in love and like
rereading from time to time, because they are a part of my personal sanctuary.
All intellectuals have their own precious texts which they turn back to, like one
may turn back to the memory of one’s deceased parents.
But my interest in Lacan does not consist in taking him as an atemporal
truth. Rather my interest is in deconstructing him. Therefore I do not adopt the
scientific literary style, nor the historical garnering, nor the reverential exegesis
of texts supposedly containing an incontrovertible knowledge. As I shall try to
prove in these conversations, an approach to Lacan based on a sort of decon-
structive piety is possible. A reading that can certainly (even though we will not
have the space to prove it in this work) also inf luence the clinical approach of
practicing analysts.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A special thanks goes to Antonio Lucci (Berlin Freie Universität), who made the
first Italian edition of this book possible. Thank you to all the other friends who
by reading and commenting on this work, or by presenting the Italian version
in public, have helped me improve it: Renato Benvenuto, Cristiana Cimino,
Giorgio Cini, Federico Leoni, the late Luciana Sica. Essential contributions for
the English version came from Emily Hughes, Gianmaria Senia, and Claudia
Vaughn. Finally, I thank Svetlana Uvarova, president of Kiev’s International
Institute of Psychology of Depth, for her appreciation of the book and for editing
the Russian language version.
1
THE DANDY DENTIST
Lacan as a character

1 Lacan’s hybris
Between 1967 and 1974 I followed the seminar of Jacques Lacan as a psychology
student at Paris 7 University. In 1975, I translated Lacan’s Seminar XX , “Encore,”
into Italian for the Einaudi publisher. I met Lacan several times in public situ-
ations, but I never considered going into analysis with him, for reasons I shall
explain later. While in Paris, however, I did an analysis with a Lacanian analyst.
I also attended the “case presentations” at the Hôpital Sainte-Anne, which
were conducted in the classic psychiatric tradition. Here psychiatrists would
bring some of their patients along to allow them to “let it all out” before an
audience of clinical practitioners, which included Lacan. Then the patient would
leave and Lacan would give his comments, mainly diagnostic ones, on the “case”
that had been presented; something he continued to do until the end of his life.
In contrast to Freud, who only treated neurotics, Lacan began his career as a pub-
lic health psychiatrist; his doctoral thesis, which had already made him famous in
the 1930s, was on paranoia. Some say that the psychoanalysis of Lacan is Freud
reviewed and adjusted according to psychosis instead of neurosis.
The fact remains that his teaching ends with a seminar on the later works of
Joyce; a writer that he believed had a psychotic structure. Lacan thus began his
career with his doctoral thesis, in which he published the poems of his paranoiac
patient Aimée – poems that struck the surrealists of the time – and ended it dis-
cussing Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. In short, his path began and ended with psychotic
literature. Can we find a key in this loop?
It was a series of writings – the publication of the Ecrits in 1966, when Lacan
was already 65 – that turned him into a star of the French cultural scene. Since
then, crowds began to attend his Wednesday seminars. The huge hall of the Law
Faculty at the Pantheon couldn’t contain everybody and many had to stand for
2 The dandy dentist

hours outside before managing to squeeze in. I was told that there were often
as many as three thousand of us attending. For years, an authentic mass infatu-
ation had turned Lacan into a star, something it would be easy to ironize on.
But in those roaring days of structuralism – which the Americans then called
“post-structuralism,” a term that the French never accepted – the grands maîtres
attracted crowds. At the seminars of Roland Barthes, which I followed exten-
sively in the 1960s and 70s, so many people attended that Barthes would rent a
vast theatre to fit in his audiences.
With Lacan we enjoyed ourselves. He made a formidable seduction machine
function perfectly for decades. Most of us were convinced we were attending
something historical, a teaching that would never be swept away as so many
other trends had been. After all, the cream of the French culture of the time was
there, by no means only psychoanalysts. I felt a very similar sensation following
the courses of Barthes, Michel Foucault, and a few others.
For me, Lacan’s seminars were a key to understanding something of his
notoriously incomprehensible writings. The most important features were the
rhythm of his discourse, the changes in the tone and timbre of his voice, and his
pauses and falsettos. It was a little like the plays of Harold Pinter. When I read
them, I found them boring, but when I saw some acted out on the stage I found
them irresistible. I had finally learnt how to read them. And I thought the living
word of Lacan offered a picklock to “break into” the Ecrits.
The written text of Télévision (Lacan 1973a) is a gruelling task, whilst in the
video of the television interview, with Lacan speaking, everything becomes clear.
Some contemptuously say “many are attracted to the enigmatic obscure word
because they seek a master who says more than they are able to understand.” It’s like
those who say, after the lecture of the “master”: “Fascinating! I didn’t understand a
single word.” But Lacan’s audience also included those who would never easily let
themselves be seduced by a charlatan. After all, Lacan was by no means the pop psy-
choanalyst who reigned on television screens and in the papers like so many we have
today, at least in some parts of the world. Lacan only agreed to one radio interview,
and very few television interviews: on these occasions, he spoke without making
the least concession to the powers of comprehension of the masses. Even then he
spoke as he would during his seminars. In short, he was not a circus act.
Lacan would allow his audience to watch him think. We were like voyeurs of
a statu nascendi of ideas. Lacan always improvised; he would begin a sentence
before even having thought out the end of it . . . he would twist his discourse
around, wrestle with it. In short, he allowed us to watch the labour of the word,
at once loose and troublesome. He always said that in his seminars he spoke not
as an analyst but as an analysand – the usual French term for patient – and that
the audience was his Other. His was a sort of self-analysis that, rather than being
understood, had to be interpreted.
I was particularly attracted to the fact that, like Hegel, he dealt with everything,
citing authors from all fields, breaking through any disciplinary barriers. And,
above all, by the fact that he systematically overturned every cliché in thinking.
The dandy dentist 3

He embodied a hybris. He had many patients, but found the time to read lots
of books and amassed a vast fortune. Over 70, he had attractive young lovers.
The toscano spiral-shaped cigars he smoked were extremely rare. It’s easy to
understand how a young student in Paris like myself, poor but ambitious, could
be bewitched by such a herculean exhibition of enjoyment.

2 A performative theory
It was evident that Lacan wanted to create an effect. And indeed he did. In France
alone, fifty thousand copies of the original edition of his Ecrits were sold, fol-
lowed by 170,000 copies of the paperback version in two volumes. I have no data
for the Spanish and Portuguese editions, but I’m sure the numbers are similar
(Latin America is the culture in which Lacan is most popular). At the time, an
interviewer of his insinuated that many people bought the Ecrits because it was
a status symbol, but that few actually read it. Lacan disagreed: “I think they read
it – he said – even if they don’t understand it, because ça leur fait quelque chose, it
has an effect on them” ( Lacan 2005, p. 85).
This goes for his most sophisticated readers too: an incomprehensible text that
always overf lows in what Lacan says seduces them. Even when a reader thinks
that he knows Lacan’s thinking inside out, there is always something that a logi-
cal linear transcription cannot join together, and this opaque residue affects us.
This is what he expressed in Rome: “I did not write the Ecrits so that they may
be understood, but so that they may be read” ( Lacan 2005, pp. 84–85). What on
earth did he mean?
Perhaps that they should be read in the same way as we “read” a symptom, a
dream, a delirium, as we read some works by Nietzsche, Joyce, Benjamin, Beck-
ett, or Bion. . . . In short, every time we read one of his texts we find ourselves
with a bone that’s hard to chew on.
In fact, he was perfectly capable of talking with great clarity, if he so wished.
See the interview he conceded to the Italian Paolo Caruso (1969): absolutely
comprehensible. Almost like a university textbook. He preferred, however, the
style by which we know him, because he wished to make evident, tangible, the
presence of the signifier.
When one writes in a denotative, transparent language, the signifiers disap-
pear from our mind and we only see what their concatenation presents to us. Then
enunciations are like the glass of a window: through it we see the landscape
beyond it, but we don’t see the glass, or, at least, we don’t pay attention to it.
Unless the glass has some opaque spots, some distortions. Lacan’s intent is to
make us halt when we read or listen to him, with enunciations that cease to be
transparent. The same happens in poetry. We could prove that all poetry, even
classical poetry, functions as a hermetic water’s edge – between the still sand of
sense and the f luid sea of the signifier.
Yet Lacan didn’t intend to give us poetry, which comes from poiesis, pro-
duction. Instead he thought that the unconscious was “poetic,” i.e. productive,
4 The dandy dentist

unwound from the nets of signifiers. He therefore needed a theoretical writ-

ing that would allow us to touch the “poietic quality,” the productivity, of the
unconscious. This is how Lacan brought to the field of psychoanalytic writing
what the form of art Anglophones call modernism has attempted to do for over a
century. A form of art that I would call – stealing a term from Peter Sloterdijk –
nobjectal. From Mallarmé, van Gogh, Cézanne, Debussy, Wedekind, Brancusi,
and so on, up to more recent artists, the nobjectal arts have always sought some-
thing essential: making us notice the signifying matter of which all arts are made.
Painters no longer aim at representing, for example, a mountain, in the most
faithful and compelling way. Rather, they aim at bringing to the foreground the
colours they use, the canvas, or the brush strokes of which their representation
of the mountain consists of, or even their act of applying the brush. The same
occurs in contemporary music; it no longer aims at delighting us with particular
harmonies, but at making us think about the sound, the timbre of the instru-
ments, the rasping or quavering voice of the singers.
And it is precisely insofar as nobjectal art thematizes itself, i.e. ref lects its own
being and doing, that it lays claim to having a direct impact on the Real. Pre-
cisely by relinquishing any “fine representations” of objects, nobjectality wants to
short-circuit representations and affirm the performative function of art.
The British philosopher John Austin pointed out that many linguistic expres-
sions not only “say” things, but also “do” things. For example, when I say to my
daughter “I’ll take you to the movies tomorrow,” this is not a prophecy about
what will happen tomorrow, but by uttering these words I am performing the act of
promising. An action that commits me as a subject. And, indeed, if the next day
I fail to take her to the movies, my daughter could accuse me: “you don’t keep
promises!” Austin says that a sentence like the preceding is performative insofar
as it qualifies me as “someone who has made a promise,” with all the conse-
quences this implies. This practical, active dimension of language is of great
importance in 20th-century art and literature, and in Lacan. I would say that, in
a certain sense, Lacan is a sort of Picasso of psychoanalysis.
In fact, it seems to me that Lacan considers his own theory a performative ana-
lytical act. So, at times, he would count the fact that an analysand had followed
one of his seminars as an analytic session.
This claim of constructing an action-theory, a theory that produces some-
thing for the simple reason that it is uttered, of course perplexes those with a
scientific training. According to the scientific spirit, knowledge and technology
cannot coincide, otherwise it would be magic. The utterance that water boils at
100°C doesn’t actually in itself make water boil.

3 Dazzling mottos
Now, this analytic performativity is reminiscent of dandies, who also exerted an
inf luence through words and impactful acts rather than through classically con-
structed theories. In this sense we can say that Lacan was a dandy.
The dandy dentist 5

A dandy also in the more common sense of the word, for the importance he
gave to his clothing. His attire caused astonishment or laughter. It was reminis-
cent of some excesses by the merveilleuses and the incroyables of the French Revolu-
tion; men and women in exuberant attire who at the time would make a show of
themselves in the streets of Paris. Lacan was a modern incroyable and, after all, he
too bloomed in an era that most considered revolutionary.
Dandies – mostly British or French – were eccentric characters who enjoyed
social success by proclaiming themselves fundamentally above any of the moral
norms of the society they lived in. If they were also geniuses – like Baudelaire,
Hausmann, Raymond Roussel, and so on – their task was to overthrow com-
monplace ideas and affirm their irreducible uniqueness from the masses. This
is the reason why, today, the cult of the dandy has become a mass cult and
those who feel that they are “mavericks” make up a planetary herd. At the Père-
Lachaise in Paris, a cemetery full of celebrity graves, Oscar Wilde’s grave is
the most sought after, more even than Jim Morrison’s, with crowds devoting a
touching compassion to the writer’s sepulchre.
What fascinates us most about so many dandies is their acrobatic self-spun
thinking that opens up profound meanings and cannily subverts commonplaces
and stock phrases. This is how Wilde’s most famous aphorisms work, such as:
“life imitates art”; “if one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found
out”; “it is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances”; “those fur-
thest from their century are those that best ref lect it,” etc. etc. To create what
I would call surplus sense, all that needs to be done is to overturn the plain,
expected meaning by making the signifiers swerve slightly.
Many of Lacan’s aphorisms and theses are constructed in a very similar way to
Wilde’s. Like “I ask you to refuse what I offer because it is not . . . that,” or when
he points out that “love thy neighbour as thyself ” is an ironic commandment
because everyone hates herself or himself. Indeed, in France, some of Lacan’s
expressions have entered common usage. For example, “love is giving something
you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it,” or “there is no sexual relation.”
The success of some Lacanian expressions is the effect of the kind of torsion that
Wilde was a master of.
In Lacan, we constantly find this strategy: playing with the surplus that over-
turning a stereotype produces; something that seduces those who are recep-
tive towards him and deeply irritates those with a rationalist mentality. Nearly
every focal statement of Lacan’s surprises us because it overturns what we would
expect. For example, saying “the Real is the impossible.” Here he is referring to
logical modes: possible, impossible, contingent, necessary. Now, our common
sense, even philosophical, would make us say that the Real is on the side of the
contingent, if not on the side of the necessary. It would cross no one’s mind to
say that the Real is the impossible. . . . But it did cross Lacan’s mind. And we
shall see why.
Does this then mean that Lacan was an impostor? And Wilde too? And Karl
Kraus? And Heraclitus and Plato too? If we read Plato’s Cratylus, we can see how
6 The dandy dentist

already in the Athens of the time the signifier was all the rave. Overturning
commonplaces is not merely a rhetorical technique; it also lays bare something
intrinsic to every “normal” discourse: it shows its hidden sardonic side. With
language, writers like Wilde, Heidegger, Lacan, or Cioran carry out an opera-
tion very similar to the one attempted by Freud, who called it “the unconscious”:
it is by turning the glove of common sense inside out that we discover ipso facto
the striking sense of its reverse side. A sense that seems to radiate from these
paradoxical propositions.
Now, talented Lacanians bend over backwards to explain all these apothegms,
even the most obscure ones, such as “the woman does not exist”; or “Y a d’l’Un
(there is something of the One)”; “there is no sexual relation,” and such like.
They sometimes give us enlightening keys. I’m afraid, however, that wishing to
explain, hence to rationalize, these maxims is an enterprise that would not only
be endless, but even desperate. I read Lacan in the same way that Heraclitus, to
mention another enigmatic thinker, is read today: the fragments that have come
down to us often strike us, but it would be an arduous task to derive a Heracli-
tean system of thinking from them. “We should be Delos’ divers” to understand
Heraclitus, said Socrates. Of Lacan we don’t have mere fragments, true, but
entire seminars; yet with Lacan we have to swim like Delos’ diver.
I read Lacan always bearing in mind that his doctrine is essentially based
on witticisms. Most of his theoretical statements are structured like quips. For
example, “the signifier represents a subject to another signifier” sounds like a
definition, but it only “sounds” like one. This is because in a definition, the
definiendum or that which needs to be defined – in this case the signifier – cannot
appear in the definiens as one of the words it defines. Let’s say that this is a parody
of a definition, in the same way that saying “love is giving something you don’t
have to someone who doesn’t want it” is a caricature of a definition of love.
Significantly, Lacan gave a prominence to Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the
Unconscious – a work that Freudians often consider a minor one – and, together
with dreams, parapraxis, and neurotic/psychotic symptoms, turned Witz into a
fundamental formation of the unconscious. Now, the relation between jokes and
the unconscious actually appears more problematic than in the other “forma-
tions.” Let’s take the quip by Heinrich Heine that Freud quotes and Lacan picks
up: the poor Jew Hirsch Hyacinthe meets the great Rothschild, the richest of
Jews, and says that latter treated him “famillionairely.” Now, if we conceive the
unconscious in the strictest sense, as the place of the repressed, of the forgotten,
of the not known, then we may wonder what the unconscious has to do with the
creation of this droll neologism, “famillionaire.” What kind of repression returns
in this quip? Here Freud sets forth, however obliquely, a vaster conception of the
unconscious. He turns it into a sort of creative source and, with regard to the
Witz, into a sort of special creativity that coincides with a transgression: i.e. with
indulging in amusing oneself with language. It’s as if we all spoke bearing in mind this
sort of tacit clause which binds us to the following discipline: “respect language!
Always remember that it is denotative and referential!” As God prescribes that
The dandy dentist 7

His name shall not be pronounced in vain, language too must not be used in
vain. . . . Do cultures exist in which puns, and therefore jokes, are forbidden?
Linguistically puritan cultures? A Witz-like famillionaire produces a partially sto-
len pleasure (not entirely licit, let’s say), precisely because it says and doesn’t say,
it manipulates the signifier to draw from it a “little sense,” which comes across
to us as a “surplus sense.” In short, for Lacan – and his reading of Freud – the
unconscious is also a restless playing around with signifiers, a sort of shameful
masturbation of language.
It’s quite obvious that most of Lacan’s theoretical propositions are also games
with the signifier, similar to jokes and witticisms, as his constant use of puns
testifies. Even if in his case the ultimate aim is not to provoke laughter (though
his propositions often do make us laugh, but that’s not their main purpose), but
rather to agitate something that as yet has no name, that hasn’t yet found a name
after over a century of psychoanalysis, something I would call a “joke of intel-
ligibility” or “dazzling motto.” An intellectual brainwave, which I would call
graspish in English, can of course be paraphrased in a way that is not dazzling, in
a way that is logical and analytical. But then it loses its quality of being a dazzling
brainwave, i.e. the surplus sense that always makes use of the little-sense.
This is what distinguishes me from many Lacanian friends who take Lacan
too “seriously,” who want to eliminate the dazzling brainwave quality and
finally make him totally intelligible. Freud himself says that instead of “famil-
lionaire” we could say something like “Rothschild treated me in quite a familiar
way, within the limits a millionaire can concede.” But in this way the Witz is
lost. And, ultimately, is this this really the sense of the pun “famillionaire”? By
analyzing the sense “seriously” as we’ve just done, isn’t there a loss of sense? And
what is this sense that we lose? A sense that paradoxically moves as one with the
signifier, that never emancipates itself from the signifier by cutting the umbilical
cord that keeps it attached to it, and which I would call a construction of neo-
sense. What separates me from many Lacanian schools, even those I respect the
most, is that I prefer to make use of this Lacanian neo-sense instead of reducing
it, so-to-speak, to its logical and conceptual sense. If Lacan’s discourse loses its
halo, not of non-intelligibility but of para-intelligibility, we miss his challenge
of lightness: constructing a way of conceptualizing that integrates the formations
of the unconscious; a thinking not on the unconscious, but a way of thinking
un-consciously about the unconscious. After all, I don’t think Lacan is the only
one to practise this type of theorizing: other modern authors, such as Nietzsche,
Kierkegaard, Benjamin, and even in some cases Heidegger, aim at the “dazzling
motto,” on the surplus sense produced by the little sense.
An hysteric analysand once put me on the spot, and I said to her, “you’re
looking for a master to dominate.” This was a quotation from Lacan, but I didn’t
tell her so. It had a dazzling effect on her: it disturbed her and made her think
extensively, and there was a turning point in her way of being. Lacan’s proposi-
tion is evidently a paradox, a Witz, but it talks eloquently to someone who has
that problem.
8 The dandy dentist

The dazzling motto shines bright, of course, but like a thunderbolt, only
brief ly. Explaining its sense is like trying to turn the light of the thunderbolt into
an energy-saving LED lightbulb. The French word for thunderbolt is éclair, as in
éclaircir, to clarify. The dazzling motto clarifies, but the clarification doesn’t last
long, even if it can have a long-lasting effect once the thunderbolt has vanished.
I remember a thriller movie where in the dark of night a sudden thunderbolt
lightens the face of a figure who until then had only been a dark presence in the
shadows.
Many think today that there are only two legitimate registers of discourse,
and that one should choose either one or the other, tertium non datur. One is
rational discourse (philosophical, scientific, and logical/mathematical), the other
is poetic discourse, art. But humour, and a type of thinking that practices intel-
lectual dazzling, tell us that other significant registers of discourse are possible.
Lacan presented us with his very own, brand new register, and I think it’s quite
interesting that his most duteous disciples are those who tend to deny it the most.
I don’t deny that both poetic discourse and logical/philosophical discourse
can produce dazzling effects. Some of the poems of Hölderlin, for example,
produce it, and even in such a rigorously logical work as Wittgenstein’s Tractatus
we find some dazzlements: “[t]he world of the happy is quite different from that
of the unhappy” ( Wittgenstein 1922 , 6.43). A sentence which means too little
but also too much.

4 Signifiers’ anthill
I think that what really counts in Lacan is the fact that he is able to offer us what
Claude Lévi-Strauss – the anthropologist who was a long-time friend of Lacan –
called the “plethora of the signifier.”
In “The Sorcerer and His Magic,” Lévi-Strauss (1963) posed the problem of
how magical practices work in savage societies. He even attempted a comparison
between shamanic treatments and psychoanalysis; and Lacan himself quoted this
essay ( Lacan 1966, p. 351). According to Lévi-Strauss, normal thinking – both
scientific thinking and common sense – tries to explain the world through theo-
ries that give things a specific sense. But very often the world refuses to be
explained, its cloudiness resists any sort of theory. In short, normal thinking
confronts itself with a deficit of meaning: many things have no meaning at all.
Instead, what Lévi-Strauss here calls pathological thinking – psychopathological,
but not just that – has a plethora of signifiers: neurotics and psychotics are full of
interpretations and affective resonances with which they overload a reality that
is lacking in sense. According to the anthropologist, shamanic treatments man-
age an arbitration between this lack of meaning (the non-sense in real life) and
the wealth of f loating signifiers. “Normal thought cannot fathom the problem
of illness,” Lévi-Strauss writes, “and so the group [to which he or she belongs]
calls upon the neurotic to furnish a wealth of emotion heretofore lacking a focus”
( Lévi-Strauss 1963, p. 377).
The dandy dentist 9

Here Lévi-Strauss suggests a model of the signifier-signified relation that

moves away considerably from the schema of Ferdinand de Saussure, the father
of linguistic structuralism by whom Lévi-Strauss says he is inspired. And Lacan’s
model is more Lévi-Straussian than Saussurian. For Saussure, signifier and signi-
fied are closely connected; for example, the signifier “chair” is closely connected
to all the mental images that English speakers have of chairs and that go on to
make up the meaning of chair in English. By contrast, Lévi-Strauss talks here of
two parallel series that are not closely connected: the series of pure signifiers with
no meaning, and the series of everything in the world that lacks meaning. These
two series f loat, but this doesn’t imply that they hold fast to each other. This is
what the Lacanian algorithm of the unconscious consists of: on the one hand
a series of signifiers f lowing above a bar and, on the other, a series of different
signifiers below this bar that can offer meanings to the former.

S1 , S 2 . . . S n
s1, s2 . . . sn

Hysteric symptoms, for example, were found to be so striking at the end of

the 19th century because they were inexplicable, meaningless signs. By making
hysteric women talk off the top of their heads, by inventing the “talking cure” (as
Anna O. called it), Breuer and Freud collected an arsenal of signifiers, which by
themselves had no application, but from which Freud selected elements to refer
to the series of non-signified. We know which signifying elements he picked to
create psychoanalytical theory. But he drew them from hysteric chatter.
To say that psychoanalytical theory is a way of “fastening” a series of signi-
fiers to a series of meanings, Lacan took his terminology from the language of
upholstery. According to Lacan, the mass of both signifiers and meanings find
a fastening point somewhere in the points de capiton (quilting points). Capiton is a
carefully stitched or embroidered part of the work. Lacan thus insinuates that the
set of signifiers and the set of meanings are in fact connected, but precariously,
as in a seam. Just as the two sides of a sofa don’t slide one onto the other but are
fastened with quilting, in the same way he thinks that the two sets find connec-
tion points somewhere, they find absolute signifiers. These are points where signi-
fiers and meanings overlap stably, somehow draining the two f luid masses. And
he adds that psychotic breakdowns occur when this quilting comes undone, and
then signifiers and meanings f luctuate without fastening.
As for the shaman, for Lévi-Strauss he is usually a pathological subject. Like
hysteric women, he too has excessive “unapplied” signifiers. The shamanic cure
therefore consists in “selling” this excess of signifier to a community of “nor-
mal” people who are astonished before a reality lacking any sense. It’s as if a
community bought seams of signifier from “extra” beings, bizarre individuals,
to compensate for lacks of meaning.
But shamanic cures and psychoanalysis differ; whilst in the former it is the
healer who essentially supplies this plethora of signifiers, in the latter it is the
10 The dandy dentist

subject being healed who supplies it, whilst the analyst, the supposed healer,
tends to remain silent. By encouraging the analysand to say everything that
comes to his or her mind, to describe dreams and fantasies – according to the
rules of free association – the analyst acts as a catalyst for an overproduction of
signifiers from which analysand and analyst extract particular capiton signifiers,
which vary according to the psychoanalytical school in question. With regard to
the function of analytic theories, they usually supply the plethora of signifiers
produced by patients with points of application, points where it is possible to find
strong significations, structural and absolute ones – like the anima and animus in
Jung, “the good and bad breast” in Klein, “mental digestion” in Bion, and so on.
Instead, with Lacan, analytic theory – not only practice – actually picks up
on the shamanic strategy: this time it is the analyst – Lacan – who produces the
plethora of signifiers. And here, the “healed” are not his patients, but all those of
us who are interested in psychoanalysis; perplexed and dumbfounded before the
enigma of our existences as they are plunged into the technological Real (as we
will see in more detail further on). Significantly, Lacan said that in his seminars
he was in the position of the analysand: he offered his audience the surplus signi-
fier that the analytic setting causes the analysand to produce.
For this reason, I don’t think we can interpret everything Lacan says, as his more
tenacious pupils try to do. It would be like wanting to interpret every sentence
the patient utters! I select what Lacan says because we have to be analysts of his
plethoric discourse. I mean to say that Lacan’s word is unsaturated and that trying
to saturate it betrays its authentic . . . non-sense. The arbitrational function of the
“illuminated” – once shamans, today writers or philosophers, psychoanalysts or
singers – consists precisely in supplying obscure, but interesting material.
Of course not every “plethora” interests everybody. For example, many find
Bion’s late works incredibly fascinating because he too indulges in this surplus
production of signifiers, but they don’t personally have a great effect on me. Per-
haps because Bion’s fundamental premises are alien to me: Kleinism on the one
hand, and a British version of Kantism on the other. Choices in psychoanalysis,
as in philosophy or politics, are mainly idiosyncratic.
So, interpreting all of Lacan’s aphorisms once and for all, saturating them, is
not the correct path. I take most of his teachings as traces and witness accounts
of a mental “experience” that can “signify,” even to those who have not under-
gone an analysis. In the same way, certain figures I have called “illuminated,”
illuminati, enjoy their prestige not because their admirers thoroughly understand
the experiences they bear witness to, but simply because they provide a surplus
of signifier. This is the way things will always work: people will always need a
dose of the divine – which, in a certain sense, is the power of the pure signifier.
Of course, in the last century psychoanalysis, and not only of the Lacanian kind,
has often competed with religions and with the arts as a supplier of this “surplus.”
Some Lacanians argue that the Ecrits are not as obscure as they may seem at
first sight. They say: “they come across as incomprehensible because they elicit
powerful mental resistances in us. If we overcome these resistances, everything
The dandy dentist 11

will appear clear.” This is a fundamentalist position. The Ecrits are actually strewn
with allusions to situations and people connected to times and places where the
discourse was uttered, and if we know nothing about these situations and these
people, what Lacan wanted to say remains absolutely unfathomable. But, as he
wasn’t a madman, there were strategic reasons behind the fact that he kept these
unfathomable references in his anthology. It’s what he expressed when he said
“you do not understand this writing. So much the better, you will have a reason
to explain it ” ( Lacan 1973b, p. 253). Lacan counts on the fact that his readers or
listeners will remain bewildered and ask themselves: “what the hell is he saying?”
This is because, as we said, Lacan wants his readers/listeners to confront
themselves with the signifier in its opaqueness; in the same way as the signifier
of the shaman, of one possessed, of the schizophrenic prey to a “f light of ideas.”

To go elastic – Or as One
The Camel’s trait – attained –
How powerful the Stimulus
Of an Hermetic Mind –
( Dickinson 1960)

Lacan never ceases to supply us with signifiers that I would call – as he himself
said in a seminar to which I assisted – fourmidables. From fourmi, ant, and formi-
dable. Because signifiers move around like ants.

5 Freedom
Lacan’s “dandy” game, as I called it, has metaphysical scope in the broad sense.
This is evident in his opposition to, and at the same time complicity with, the
tradition I would call libertus – the liberal, libertarian, libertine, liberalistic, and
liberating tradition (Liberti, freedmen, were in the Roman Empire slaves freed
by their masters).
Indeed, we mustn’t mistake “sulphurous” figures such as Wilde or Baudelaire
with the liberto (freedman) figure that the 20th century incarnated in the sur-
realists, Bertrand Russell, Bataille, Sartre, Marcuse, Reich, Deleuze, or Pasolini;
preachers of freedom for all, who united the theory and practice of liberation
against any form of constriction, whether sexual, political, or religious. The
19th-century rebels against convention, on the other hand, often nourished
conservative opinions and did not believe in freedom, neither for all nor for
themselves; in other words, they were not concerned with giving their license a
universal or ontological ethical/political sense. Because they thought freedom
was an illusion, they laid all their bets on an individual subversion that would
stress a universal subjugation insofar as they exhibited themselves as an exception
to this subjugation.
In a brief interview, a journalist asked Lacan what he had to say about free-
dom. Lacan chuckled sardonically and pitifully before merely saying: “I never
12 The dandy dentist

talk about freedom.” Wilde too, though he served a term of hard labour, never
spoke about freedom. Nor did he ever write an essay in defense of the rights of
homosexuals, though he claimed he was a Fabian Socialist.
This ambiguity pervades Lacan’s doctrine; and I don’t confer any negative
connotation on the term ambiguity. Because on the one hand Lacan does not
believe in the freedom of being able to build one’s destiny according to one’s
wishes: we are all made up of the Other’s desire or jouissance, and what we are as
subjects is structured by our history. Our margins of “individuation” are quite
scant. But, on the other hand, insofar as we acknowledge this determination
what takes place is a sort of Aufhebung, a German term essential in Hegel and that
gives us a key to reading the “Lacanian system.”
Aufhebung means at once erasing, transcending, and preserving. I would trans-
late it as (e)raising: an erasing that raises, something between raising and erasing. For
Lacan, analysis has to make possible an Aufhebung – an eraising – of suffering in
life. In the sense that, through analysis, the neurotic symptom is transcended and
preserved, erased and raised, taken away and taken up.
For example, the capricious and impatient Lacan had a phobia about red
traffic lights (Miller 2011). Sometimes, to avoid waiting for the green light, he
would leave the car he was travelling in and walk. He obviously couldn’t bear
his precipitous advance in history and in life being interrupted by a set of traffic
lights. Lacan wanted an open road, he wanted the way paved for him, with no
idle loitering. Paradoxically, the analyst who gave prominence more than any
other to the function of the law as constitutive of desire had a tendency to break
the most banal of laws, the road rules. Is this a contradiction between theory and
practice? Or does Lacan simply want to remind us of the structuring power of
the law, not to encourage us to submit ourselves to it meekly, but to allow us an
eternal, desperate, ironic escape (Aufhebung) from it?
Lacan constantly, systematically and almost punctiliously subverts everything,
or nearly everything, that we learnt in the healthy faithful textbooks of psycho-
analysis, and everything that common sense would suggest.
When, as a young student I approached Lacan for the first time, I already had
a good knowledge of psychoanalytical literature. I had built for myself an image
of psychoanalysis that is still today largely that of an analyst member of the Inter-
national Psychoanalytic Association, the IPA, which continues to be the most
respected psychoanalytic association. At the time, Lacan’s punctual subversion of
everything about psychoanalysis that I had learnt to take for granted came as a
shock – but a liberating one.
For example, I was impressed by Lacan’s use of a concept from Freud’s so-
called second topic (also known as the “structural model”), the Über-Ich. This
was translated as “Super-Ego,” but the concept could have been conveyed just
as effectively with “Beyond-Myself ” or “Above-Myself.” According to Freud,
the Super-Ego is one of the three psychic instances, the other two being the Id
(originally the Es, the third person neutral in German, like the English “it”)
and the Ego, or the “I.” Now, any plain analyst knows that the Super-Ego is the
The dandy dentist 13

intrapsychic instance that voices the guilt-assigning, censorious, let’s say des-
potic, side of the parents, insofar as they banned us children from doing some-
thing or other, or told us off etc. The psychoanalytically correct definition is
the following: the Super-Ego is that instance “inside of us” that opposes our
impertinent desires to shamelessly enjoy pleasure.
Now, Lacan doesn’t make great use of Freud’s second topic, which he retrans-
lated in his own terms. But when he talks about the Super-Ego, he says that
its fundamental command is “Jouis!,” enjoy! The categorical command of the
Beyond-Myself is the one that forces me, whatever it may cost, to enjoy pleasure.
The contrary of what had been said before. So, what justifies this reversal?
Some are happy with rationalizations such as “Freud lived in a repressive era,
particularly with regard to sexual behaviour, and therefore viewed the Super-
Ego as the repression of carnal impulses. Lacan, on the other hand, lived in a
society where young people were encouraged to go to bed with as many partners
as possible, to take pride in being gay or lesbian, to make money; in short, to
be pleasure-loving and successful. This is, today, still the dominant ‘neo-liberal’
morality in the West. Lacan, therefore, only ‘readjusted some of Freud’s concepts
to a new mentality.’”
This culturalist reading does indeed state an historical truth, but lacks what
to Lacan must have appeared as essential, beyond the historical f luctuations of
morality, namely: that every age is dominated by commandments, by a system
of ethical laws. And that the law – explicit or implicit – to which we are all sub-
ject is not a mere repression of instincts, but imperatively enunciates enjoyment
too. . . . Whose? Of the Other.
Now, language and the law intimately imply each other. I can give orders
without using language – for example by yelling – but the law always implies a
verbalization; and, in turn, words are regulated by grammatical laws.
We will see in more detail what Lacan means by enjoyment of the Other. For
now, it will suffice to say that for Lacan, as for Freud, what opposes pleasure is
in itself a strategy of pleasure. Human conf licts, moral ones too, are conf licts
between pleasures and, above all, between those who must enjoy them.
Let’s take the Ten Commandments, which express the will of God. For Lacan,
this divine will is the (supposed) enjoyment of God. For example, the rational-
ist, like Socrates in Plato’s Euthyphro, will say: “the Gods order us not to steal,
for it is in itself a good thing not to steal.” A truly religious spirit, like the priest
Euthyphro, will instead say: “one must not steal, for this is the will of the Gods.”
In short, commandments make sense to us only when they are divine.
Even if we are atheists or are not prepared to obey to the desires of a god, we
are determined and militarized by what I would call our cause. The latter is an
ambiguous term in many languages, as it means both a cause in the physical sense
and an ideal for which I am prepared to fight; an enlightening duplicity. Let’s
suppose that the commandment I am subject to is to be the richest individual
in my country. To fulfil it, I will be prepared to do anything: ruin my family,
betray my friends, pay a hitman to get rid of any rivals, and so on. Better dead than
14 The dandy dentist

poor. Roberto Saviano’s novel Gomorrah (Saviano 2007) was so successful because
it is an Iliad of the Neapolitan underworld. The camorra men he describes know
they will end up in prison, or dead, or fugitives for life, and yet . . . their com-
mandment is to make money. They come across as the new heroes of the inf lex-
ible law of evil. I wouldn’t be surprised if the book, and the television series based
on it, encouraged quite a few youngsters to embrace the cause of the criminal
organization.
But whose is this inf lexible will that gives a nagging, monomaniacal, single
aim to my existence? One will say: “it is my will. If I fail to become richer and
richer, I cannot find enjoyment.” But who is this me that says “I am enjoying!”?
This pleasure-enjoying ego that forces me to sacrifice even my own life, what
“ego” is it? According to Lacan, this “I must enjoy pleasure” is the Super-Ego.
Kierkegaard had his Don Juan say: “anyone who, when he is twenty years
old, does not understand that there is a categorical imperative – enjoy – is a fool;
and anyone who does not start doing it is a Christiansfelder” ( Kierkegaard 1988,
p. 189).
This reversal of the connotation of the Super-Ego is only one of the many
moves of the Lacanian “game.” We could say something similar about Lacan’s
critique of Ego Psychology. For a naïve Freudian, the Ego is “the good side” of
our psyche, the instance which relates us to reality and which protects us from
both the wild Es and the too severe Super-Ego; in Lacan the positive Ego is
inverted as the main agency of repression and of self-deception.
The point is that this reversal makes us face something that is difficult (for
many) to swallow: that what we call truth is not something entirely disjointed
from the signifier, but is – at least partially – one of its products. This admission
distinguishes every “thought on difference,” in which Lacan is inscribed, from
the dominant rationalism of today.

6 Dentists of the soul

We may ask whether this primacy of the signifier characterizes all of Lacan’s
works. Three phases are usually distinguished in Lacan’s thought. The first is the
1930s and 40s, when Lacan affirmed himself in the French psychiatric and psy-
choanalytical tradition. The second began in 1953, when he started his famous
Seminar, which was to continue almost until his death: this is where the core
of Lacan’s thought is developed, with the primacy of language. Then, after the
publication of the Ecrits in 1966, he has a third phase, in which references to
mathematics and logic prevail along with the themes of jouissance and the Real.
It need be said that his Ecrits very soon became illisibles, unreadable – as French
literary critics say without giving the adjective any derogative sense – whilst
his seminars were, at least up to a certain point, comprehensible. But starting
in the mid-1960s his seminars became increasingly impenetrable. His puns, at
first quite sober, began to overf low more and more. His arguments, originally
linear and scrupulous, crumble into sententious statements that become less and
The dandy dentist 15

less capable of proof. His logical/mathematical and topological formulas become

more and more invasive. We need only compare the titles of the seminars. Those
of the first decade have clear titles: “Psychoses,” “The Ethics of Psychoanalysis,”
“Transference,” and so on. Then the titles become more and more enigmatic,
like “. . . Or Worst”; “Encore”; “Les non-dupes errent ” (which in French sounds
like “The Names of the Father” or “The Unduped Wander/Are Mistaken”), etc.
In the second from last title he surpasses himself: “L’insu que sait de l’une bévue
s’aile à mourre,” literally “the unknown that knows about the one-blunder chances
love,” or “the unknown that knows about the one-blunder hovers as odds and
evens,” which we can perhaps read as “the failure of the Unbewusst is love,” Unbe-
wusst being the German word for “the unconscious.”
Lacan is not the only example of excess at a late age. With time, Joyce and Beck-
ett, for example, slipped more and more towards unreadable “abstract” forms of
writing that broke any link between language and representative content. So Joyce
moved from almost naturalistic short stories like Dubliners to the shattering of the
English language in Finnegans Wake – a text that, significantly, the older Lacan was
particularly fond of. And a similar drift also occurred in Heidegger. The fact that
this bursting the banks of sense is produced at a late age induces some to suspect
that it is due to senile dementia. Some prefer Lacan up to the sixties, when he was
less abstruse, but the most significant Lacanian schools, it must be said, embrace the
late, more obscure Lacan: they initiate their poor students, defenseless psychology
graduates, or MDs, into the thornier version of Lacanian thought.
Now, this rarefaction causes outrage in the “respectable” analyst: “what has
all this got to do with the analytic profession?” But it is also the case that when
Picasso and Braque started exhibiting their “little cubes,” the right-minded
exclaimed “what has all this got to do with painting?”
But can a psychoanalyst be compared to an artist? Can there be a “classic anal-
ysis” and a “psychoanalytical modernism?” Analysis, it is commonly believed, is
not an art, but a cure.
An analyst friend of mine, extremely distant from Lacan, used to say that he
was like a dentist of the soul, stressing the artisanal reparatory character of his
function. Instead, the function Lacan gave to analysis was by no means odonto-
logical. He led psychoanalysis, a technique that many consider psycho-iatric, in
a direction that is decisively Dionysian, in the sense that has been given to this
term after Nietzsche. I shall explain why further down.
Yet there is an odontological dimension in every analysis where “curing”
means “taking care” of someone who is suffering. Some have compared going to
see the same analyst for months or years on the same days each week to the secu-
rity blanket Linus cuddles himself with. Analysis is also what some analysts call
holding, i.e. holding someone in one’s arms like a child. To hold is also to detain
and possess, therefore holding is detaining someone and keeping them in one’s arms.
In fact, Lacan was not “neutral” and, despite his ruggedness, could show affec-
tion towards his patients, though he did not theorize “empathy,” which is so
popular today.
16 The dandy dentist

Compared to the practices of IPA analysts, Lacan’s analyses were far less ritu-
alized. Many psychoanalysts insist on an anachronistic liturgy. For example, in
Italy it is compulsory to use the formal “lei ” (vous in French) between analyst
and patient, even if the two have already known each other long before the
analysis began and used the informal “tu.” A real analysis demands that you have
at least three sessions per week (but nobody explains in what way having two
rather than three sessions a week can change the nature of the analytic work).
The IPA recommends that male analysts should always wear a grey jacket and
female ones a grey loose-fitting suit, to avoid revealing too much of their wom-
anly shape. . . . The consulting room must be aseptic, analysts must not exhibit
objects that reveal their personality (but is it really possible not to exhibit one’s
personality? If one goes to great lengths to avoid doing so, does this not reveal
a personality trait in itself?). There is a sort of petrified analysis which is one of
the causes of the decline of psychoanalysis today. Many of these ceremonials of
icy distancing between patient and analyst make little sense to Lacanians. The
true setting is not a material arrangement of objects or garments, but a type of
relationship the key of which is the unconscious.
Now, we should see the scrapping of this ceremonial in analysis as a sign of
something deeper in Lacan. Something that reveals, I believe, what is really
essential in Lacan.

7 An ethical technique
At the theoretical level, Lacan creates a radical rupture between psychoanalysis
and psychology as a positive science. Lacan sometimes uses the work of psy-
chologists, for example Henri Wallon and Lev Vygotsky, but does so in order to
inscribe them in a framework that is by no means “psychological.” Psychology
arose in the 19th century as a positive science with the human mind as its object;
but for Lacan, the object of psychoanalysis is not the mind, nor is it the uncon-
scious. A “theory of the mind,” like the one conceived by Bion, has nothing to
do with psychoanalysis according to Lacan, who says that psychoanalysis is not a
psychology but an erotology, i.e. a theory and practice of “erotic” relationships in
the broadest sense. He refuses, in short, to consider the subject as the object of an
objective investigation. Rather, he aspires performatively to what he called the
“subversion of the subject” and constructs a theory that coincides with a process
or movement of the subject itself.
In clinical practice, Lacan carries out a contortion that is symmetrical to his
theoretical approach: he breaks any link between analysis and medical practices
and therapies. As in his theory, he separates psychoanalysis from scientific psy-
chology. In the same way, at the clinical level he separates analysis from any
technique that attempts to restore a supposed “healthiness.” Significantly, French
Lacanians tend not to boast about having cured someone, but say instead “ je l’ai
soulagé,” “I have supported and soothed him.” Lacanians don’t step on the pedal
of therapeutic triumphalism.
The dandy dentist 17

For this reason, Lacan talks of the analyst’s ethical position more than their ana-
lytical technique, as we shall see in greater detail further down. Indeed, ethics is
something practical, but not technical; because ethics, in contrast to technique,
directly implies subjectivity.
Now, it’s true that every ethics implies a technical custom – the word ethics
derives from ethos, custom, way of life. Yet, at one point, the choice between
one technique and another becomes necessary. This is the problem that some of
the scientists of the Manhattan project, those who built the first atomic bomb,
were dramatically faced with. The operation demonstrated an outstanding
level of technical expertise, but its ethical value was problematic. I was well-
acquainted with Joseph Rotblat: a young Polish physicist enrolled in the project
directed by Enrico Fermi, who escaped from the United States – pursued by
the CIA – to avoid participating in the creation of the nuclear bomb. For this
and other reasons, he was awarded the 1995 Nobel peace prize. A non-technical
Nobel, I would say.
In any case, it seems to me that this “ethical” question is crucial to under-
standing psychoanalysis in general. Indeed, psychoanalysis, before being a set
of hypotheses on mental functioning, is an ethical project concerned with the
“direction” of subjectivity.
An apparently very simple example: a man came to consult me because he
was prone to being late, and, in particular, he would often miss the train that
was supposed to take him to work every morning. In other words, he came to
me with a symptom, something about himself that he didn’t accept; something
egodystonic.
Now, the non-analytical psychotherapies essentially respond to what Lacan
calls demande, demand. My patient’s demand was for me to remove the symptom.
In this case, a cognitivist psychotherapist, for example, would have looked for
devices, even quite crude ones, aimed at not making him miss this train, and
may have succeeded. Such psychotherapists resort to very precise prescriptions
to extend the subject’s control over him or herself. Expressed in Freudian terms,
the ethical aim of cognitivist techniques is to reinforce the control of the Ego over
himself. This was also the aim of Ego Psychology, the form of psychoanalysis that
was once predominant in the United States.
An analyst operates differently. Whereas in medicine the symptom is the sign
or trace of an underlying disease, the result of a lesion, in psychoanalysis the
symptom is the sign or trace of an “other” – or an unconscious, as Freud called it –
desire or enjoyment. This is why an analyst will never give patients prescriptions
to satisfy their demands, but will instead – as I did – invite the analysand to speak
freely, to engage in free association. And while speaking in this way with my
patient, it emerged that he was only apparently satisfied with his career; he in fact
hated it. Because it was a career that his father had imposed on him, whilst he had
always dreamt of something quite different. In other words, behind the manifest
demand of being able to control himself – “I wish to be able to no longer miss this
train” – desires emerged, hardly confessable ones, even to himself.
18 The dandy dentist

In general, psychoanalysis does not aim at satisfying a demande but at making

a désir emerge. Therefore, non-analytic psychotherapeutic ethics is something
other from psychoanalytical ethics. The latter triggers a process that sooner or
later leads subjects to problematizing what they really want and hence to uncer-
tainty on what they really are. The psychoanalyst aims at the fact that suffering
subjects are theatres of diverging wills, are divided, split, and the analytic “tech-
nique” is based on this ethical choice: a choice not to stitch up this division, but
to bring it into the light of day.
The comparative evaluation of the efficiency of the various psychotherapies –
to which a multitude of researchers have been devoting themselves for decades – is
therefore problematic, and it often risks misinterpreting what each psychother-
apy actually does. After one year, a cognitivist therapist could boast that, thanks
to him, the aforementioned patient no longer missed his train; whilst after going
into analysis, the same patient may stop even trying to catch the train, after real-
izing it was taking him to a job that was destroying him. Which is to be consid-
ered more effective, the cognitive or the psychoanalytical technique? As the two
ethical positions – that of the cognitivist and that of the analyst – are so disparate,
their techniques are also non-comparable. Many will prefer the quick suppres-
sion of the symptom as the apparently simpler way. Many just want the lift they
must take to work properly, even if it’s the lift that’s taking them to the gallows.
It is from this ethical perspective that Lacan’s so-to-speak technical innova-
tions should be seen. The most spectacular of these is the variable duration of ses-
sions. The analyst decides when a session should end; whether after ten minutes
or two hours. This is because, for Lacan, the point at which the analyst “cuts off ”
has an interpretative value that’s even more important than verbal interpretation.
By suddenly dismissing the analysand, the Lacanian analyst acts, thus punctuating
analytical time. In psychoanalytical jargon, acting out is when a subject performs
an act outside the analytical setting that should be interpreted as symbolic in
analysis. I would say that the Lacanian analyst interprets through an acting in, in
the sense of dismissing the patient out of the consulting room.
In practice, however, Lacanians have shortened the average duration of ses-
sions when compared to the 45 minutes of the other analytic schools; a Laca-
nian session allegedly tends to last 20 minutes on average, and a few malignant
tongues say that they’ve shortened sessions so as to earn more money. But what
really earns you more money, more than the duration of sessions, is the cost of
each session.
In other words, the technique Lacan initiated is purely anti-intellectualistic.
Many believe the contrary: as Lacan was a great intellectual, they believe that a
Lacanian analysis is suitable for those who have read Heidegger and Proust, that
it’s basically just full of discourse. The opposite is true. Lacanian analysts do not
interpret much and act a lot. Or rather: they interpret by acting. When I interpret
verbally I give a sense to something that appears senseless, I rationalize the irra-
tional. Instead, analysts inspired by Lacan try to make their analysands interpret
their own dreams, slips, etc. Often Lacanians say that analysands analyze, of
The dandy dentist 19

course, and that the analyst interprets; but in fact they prefer that the analysand
also interprets. The important thing is to fuel the plethora of the signifier and it
will then be up to each analysand to find the points of application, or of stitching
this plethora to their specific lacks. Therefore, more than interpreting a dream in
the traditional way, a Lacanian analyst will emphasize particular points, or may
make a quip or pun on a certain aspect of the dream.

8 Purged psychoanalysis
Freud’s original technique was quite intellectualistic and aimed at communicat-
ing a concept and a sense: he believed that the intellectual awareness of particular
unconscious processes would dispel them. But today no one believes that some-
one will really change because they have been given very acute interpretations
about their dreams, symptoms, and so on.
Most analysts, non-Lacanians too, realized long ago that the original analytic
technique was a naïvely Enlightenment one. They accordingly abandoned inter-
pretations and aimed instead towards passionate, ineffable, empathic exchanges
between analyst and patient. The word is diminished, while all the space is given
to emotional processes between “persons,” not too differently from what takes
place in relations between wife and husband, between two friends, between
father and son, and so on. But by no means does Lacanian anti-intellectualism
consist in this.
Cristiana Cimino, an IPA analyst, pointed out to me that the new trend – that
some call that of “the analyst in underwear” – is only apparently the reversal of
“the analyst in a grey suit” that we mentioned previously. In the past, analysts had
to completely conceal their personality and even their sex; now analysts indulge
in self-disclosure and even start talking to their patients about their private affairs.
This is a democracy! In both cases the belief is that the essential point is how the
analyst appears or does not appear. Two faces of the same medal. But Lacan would
say that one confuses analysts as men or women with their idiosyncrasies, the fact
that they would rather hide behind their role or, on the contrary, exhibit their
ventures, with the analytic function: that is, with the position the analyst assumes
in a relation that is essentially unconscious and symbolic.
Now, Lacanian anti-intellectualism is a third way between classic analy-
sis based on “good interpretations,” on the alleged thaumaturgical power of
sense-giving statements, on the one hand, and “relational” psychotherapies
on the other. For the so-called relational therapies, analysis is an encounter
between two persons on the same level. Instead, Lacan puts his money on
the signifier. On a practice that doesn’t resolve itself in giving a verbal sense
to what the subject says, but one that doesn’t maneuver to try to achieve an
affective bond between “equals” either. Lacan doesn’t speak of “relations” but
of “social bonds”: a relation between two persons is already something social
that transcends individuals. A “third way” that many find difficult to grasp,
precisely because they are trapped in the conceptual opposition “intellectual”
20 The dandy dentist

versus “affective.” If one fails to untie oneself from this opposition, nothing of
Lacan can be understood.
It must be said, however, that in time Lacan’s “analytic scene” became more
and more minimalist. After 1975 the duration of many of his sessions was reduced
to an absence of duration: the analysand would enter, greet the analyst and leave.
The session was reduced to a clocking in and clocking out. Obviously, for those
who hate Lacan, this was proof of his imposture, or at least his senile involution.
But perhaps short sessions are not always monstrous. Some time ago an analysand
of mine, because of various hitches, came to the session extremely late and so
the session lasted around five minutes. Well, this was a memorable meeting, an
authentic turning point in his analysis. . . . Pure chance? This analysand, forced
to mention the essential points of a session in only a few minutes, really ended up
mentioning only the absolutely essential.
I tend to see this “extra-light” practice of Lacan’s as a subtle, ironic, involun-
tary satire of psychoanalysis. I know this is a bold statement, but on the one hand,
Lacan glorified psychoanalysis in ways that many consider excessive, while on
the other it is as if he himself wished to go beyond it, or at least to prove its limits.
Indeed, he even predicted its historical end, often repeating that psychoanalysis
was a transitional “symptom” of Western culture. In later years, he would often
say that in the struggle between psychoanalysis and religion the latter would
ultimately win (and history would seem to have proved him right). And in fact,
we may ask: after purifying psychoanalysis of all its “conservative” gimmicks and
reducing it to an essential f licker consisting of almost nothing, hasn’t one effec-
tively purged it?
Now, the term purge has a sinister aura for us. It reminds us of Stalin’s purges
in particular, or, going further back in history, of the French Revolution and the
Jacobin Reign of Terror. Indeed, this ideal of purification, typical of many mod-
ern radical movements, has had its most horrifying consequences in the Stalinist
purges, and in several ethnic cleansing procedures around the world. I would go
as far as saying that this search for purity has characterized the entire 20th cen-
tury, even in its most creative and heroic aspects.
Alain Badiou, in a book entitled The Century ( Badiou 2007) – i.e. the 20th
century – argues, with celebratory and nostalgic overtones, that this quest for
“purity” was characteristic of 20th-century culture as a whole, and of the artistic
avant-garde in particular, creating a purely pictorial form of painting ( just colours
on a canvas, not depictions of the world), a purely architectural architecture (i.e. a
functional one), a purely literal literature (i.e. letters and not sense), a purely musi-
cal music (sound and silence, not harmonies), and so on. In my day, references
were to “the filmic specific,” “the architectural specific,” where “specific” means
the essence of an art form. This wanting to reach the essence led to an inf lexible
libido vacui, a lust for the void. Indeed, every reduction of praxis to its quid, its
essence, sooner or later crosses the “inconceivable” limit beyond which we find
the void. Thus Malevič painted his “White Square on White Canvas” and John
Cage “composed” 4′33″: a musician comes on stage with his instrument, does
The dandy dentist 21

not play a single note for four minutes and 33 seconds and leaves. And we could
continue with a long series of other examples. Is Lacan the Malevič or Cage of
psychoanalysis?
In fact, he too aimed at the psychoanalytical “specific.” Today the 20th
century is commonly referred to as “the short century,” but I would tend to
call it “the exaggerated century.” And Lacan was undoubtedly exaggerated.
His style was very much inf luenced by the surrealists he frequented – Salvador
Dalí first and foremost. And surrealism was indeed a grand fair of brilliant
exaggerations.
Far be it from me to want to justify the excesses of the later Lacan, which the
Lacanians of today usually do not practice. My hypothesis is that Lacan began to
make his sessions shorter and shorter for the same reason that he loathed red traf-
fic lights: he was always in a hurry. And, as we know, the older you get, the more
you are in a hurry – death is breathing down the necks of us oldies.
It is often said that analysts sit behind the analysand’s couch simply because
Freud didn’t like being looked at for hours. In the same way, I think many
Lacanians practice short sessions simply because I suspect Lacan couldn’t bear to
listen to the same person speaking for too long. He needed a change of scenario
as quickly as possible.
I’m not saying that psychoanalysis just institutionalizes the idiosyncrasies of its
creators. Every important practice is steeped in the singularities of its inventor;
but these singularities have been successful.
In any case, Lacan’s excesses should also be situated as provocations that lay
bare the relationship between psychoanalysis and temporality.
As we know, analyses today continue for extremely long periods of time, to
the point that they evoke permanent therapies such as dialysis for sufferers of
chronic kidney disease more than a therapeutic process defined within a time-
frame. On the one hand we have the chronological time of analysis, the fact that
it may go on for six months or six years; on the other it has its own internal tem-
porality, which can also coincide with meteoric processes from the point of view
of astronomical time. The distinction between “timeframes” is not as abstract as
one may think.
We all distinguish between astronomical time and biological time. As we
grow old, alas, we find that time escapes more and more rapidly, because with
time our bio-psychic processes slow down. A week for an adult goes by in no
time, for a child it is a very long period.
According to Lacan we have a third time, neither astronomical nor biologi-
cal, which he calls the time of the unconscious or “logical time.” Lacan takes up
Heidegger’s distinction between Zeitlichkeit and Temporalität: we could say that
the former is physical temporality and the latter historical and social temporality.
In fact, every culture and society has its Temporalität. For example, in China
today time goes at breakneck speed; and not only because they get things done
quickly, far more than in Europe, but there are also much more rapid changes
with regard to tastes, mentality, and values. Other countries seem instead to be
22 The dandy dentist

slowing down, and let’s say that these tend to be in decline (Italy among them).
In turn, Lacan talks of a specific unconscious temporality.
Gustav Mahler asked Freud for help regarding, apparently ( Jabif 1998), a
problem of impotence with his wife Alma. Freud agreed not to a session, but
to a stroll in the streets, and after this walk Mahler’s problem disappeared. It
would be naïve to think that this speedy recovery proves Freud’s clinical genius,
because that is not the point. The point is that fortunately Mahler found Freud at
the right time and Freud probably said something to him just at the right time.
The Ancients called this kairos; seizing the appropriate moment, being timely.
Therefore, ultimately – and why not? – a session of only a few seconds may have
an effect, whilst hours and hours of sessions may not.
But is analysis then a question of luck? Yes, but having luck on your side is
an art form. In Naples they say, with reference to a card player who seems to be
enjoying an outrageous amount of luck: “the card knows whom to go to!”
It’s a little similar to the way it is with Zen Buddhist techniques, which should
lead to Satori, a state we unlawfully call “enlightenment.” The story goes that a
pupil went to live for years with a Zen hermit but never succeeded in talking to
him and asking the question he believed to be crucial for him, convinced that
the answer would “enlighten” him. For years, the master remained in silence and
didn’t pay much attention to him. One day, the pupil finally managed to articu-
late his question in a concise manner: for the first time the master listened to him
attentively. After which, he hit him so hard that he broke his arm. Then, sud-
denly, because of the pain, the pupil reached Satori. What caused it? The many
years spent with the guru, or the blow that maimed him, or both?
All this is Chinese anecdotic literature – of the ancient kind, not of the super-
sonic China of today – but analytic temporality coincides neither with astro-
nomical time nor with psycho-biological time. Yet it does have its specific
temporality.

9 Psychoprudence
One could then say: well, if kairos is what counts in psychoanalysis, is it not then
a psychic technique closer to magic or to the enlightenment practices of the East
than to scientific practice?
The point is that since the 20th century the prevailing philosophy has been
one that we can trace back to Marx and Nietzsche, and that the Americans have
developed as pragmatism. According to this philosophy only what works is true. We
could then say that, insofar as analysis works, it is true.
In any case, seizing the kairos is not so much a quality of magic, but of several
“serious” activities, such as art and politics. And competitive sports.
I think that the usual question – “does psychoanalysis have scientific
foundations?” – is entirely misleading. Many analysts fall into this trap and feel
it is their duty to prove that ultimately psychoanalysis, too, is scientific; that it is
the technological application of a falsifiable theory, as Karl Popper requires. Jean
The dandy dentist 23

Laplanche, with whom I did a doctorate in psychoanalysis, used to say that psycho-
analysis is a science in the Popperian sense! Which is quite inconsistent, to say the
least. Others say that it is a hermeneutical activity, pure interpretation, and hence
foreign to science. “There are no facts, only interpretations,” the philosopher
Gianni Vattimo says, paraphrasing Nietzsche. Psychoanalysis – the hermeneuts
say – does not deal with psychic facts, it interprets. But, according to Lacan – and
to me – psychoanalysis is neither science nor hermeneutics. So, what is it?
Freud himself sort of answered when he wrote that there are three impossible
professions: governing, educating, psychoanalyzing (Freud 1937, SE 23, p. 248;
GW, p. 94). Impossible but indispensable, I would say. How is it possible not
govern a country, not somehow to educate the young? – and even, I would say,
not to analyze? Even though a certain analytic function was carried out by other
figures in the past (according to Lacan, in Athens it was carried out by Socrates).
Once one would turn to a priest or, in Italy, to one’s philosophy teacher (in Italy
philosophy is taught in high schools). In other words, for Freud psychoanalysis is
in the same register as politics and pedagogy. To these, I would add administer-
ing justice – another impossible profession. Of a magistrate we demand jurispru-
dence, of the analyst we demand psycho-prudence. But I don’t like to mix Latin
and Greek in a single term. Prudentia rendered the Greek phronesis, so I would say
psycho-phronesis. Neither science, nor hermeneutics, but political practice. And
by “politics” I do not mean joining a party or setting up electoral committees, I
mean acting “phronetically” in the polis.
It’s true that politics is very much based on theories – economic, political
and sociological – and a good deal of pedagogy is also based on psychological
research. And psychoanalysis refers to theories, those of Freud and of others. But,
being human activities, “linguistic games” Wittgenstein would say, politics, educa-
tion, jurisprudence, and psychoanalysis are not corollaries of more or less confirmed
theories. For example, can we say that in the 2016 US presidential elections
Trump won because he was more scientific than Hillary Clinton? Today there is
a lot of talk about “politics by technicians,” but it is an attempt to fool us, because
there can be no technocratic governments; the technicians will still have to take
political and ethical decisions. And did the famous pedagogist Maria Montessori
create such a stir because her teaching methods were scientific? And, similarly,
do we say someone is “a fine analyst” because she is good at applying the most
verified psychological theory? The answers to all these questions are negative.
Even if Lacan did not put it in the terms I use here, it is still evident that for
him psychoanalysis is not a technique that applies a theory, but rather a praxis
that is derived from an ethical choice. He explains it very effectively in the semi-
nar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis ( Lacan 1986).
This said, we actually find ourselves before a paradox. Lacan idealizes psycho-
analysis enormously, turning it into a way of acting and thinking that is abso-
lutely irreducible to psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy, cognitive sciences,
philosophy, and so on. His purifying hybris is part of his project for an Aufhebung
of psychoanalysis as a whole. In any case, as we’ve seen, Aufhebung means both to
24 The dandy dentist

lift up and to cancel. So, Lacan wished to raise psychoanalysis to the highest levels
(which is one reason why those who love psychoanalysis, too much, tend towards
Lacanianism), but for this reason, I would say, it’s as if he also wanted to erase it.
Hence the very brief sessions.
For Lacan, therefore, the analyst needn’t take the trouble to cure patients.
What counted was analysis for the sake of analysis, in the same sense that we
say “art for art’s sake,” even if this analyzing out of sheer love for analyzing also
leads – fortunately – to relieving suffering.
The analyst shouldn’t aim at healing a subject’s symptom, because for Lacan
the focal symptom is not an impediment to the free expression of the self but
is, on the contrary, the essence of subjectivity itself; hence his motto “love your
symptom as yourself.” Of course, the analysand hopes that the unbearable para-
lyzing part of the symptom will disappear – that the symptom will “be raised”
and erase itself into a sinthome, no longer a symptôme – but this is only possible if
the analyst does not attempt to eliminate the symptom.
We said that Lacan did not believe that analysis pursues the ideal of free-
dom and that, on the contrary, he kept reminding us that we will always be
over-determined by our symbolic bond to others, by the discourse of the Other.
What’s more, many of Lacan’s best-known maxims inscribe him in the pessimis-
tic tradition, from Schopenhauer to Freud. Not to mention his Leitmotiv of later
years: “there is no sexual relation.” Sexual acts do take place, thank heavens, but
precisely because there is no relation between the sexes: another obscure proposi-
tion, even if it makes several things echo in us. To say, as Lacanians usually do,
that there is no sexual relation because in the unconscious there are no symbols
corresponding to the masculine and feminine still amounts to saying nothing:
because the point is to understand in what sense the symbols “masculine” and
“feminine” do not exist in the unconscious and what this lack of relation means
in practice when sexual acts do take place. It is a statement that remains entirely
enigmatic.
Of course, many “positive” down-to-earth thinkers can’t fathom why such a
brain-racking and depressing thinking, one that doesn’t even promise any form of
healing, and certainly not happiness, can attract so many. The positive success of
every form of “negative thinking,” so-to-speak – of every way of thinking remi-
niscent of a constitutional and structural lack in our being – appears mysterious
to those who see the world as a whole with no voids; firm and solid like a rock.

References
Badiou, A 2007, The Century, Polity Press, Cambridge.
Caruso, P 1969, Conversazioni con Claude Lévi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Mur-
sia, Milano.
Dickinson, E 1960, ‘Strong Draughts of Their Refreshing Minds’, in Johnson, TH,
ed., The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, Little Brown and Company, Boston and
Toronto, Poem 711, pp. 349–350.
The dandy dentist 25

Freud, S 1937, ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable (1937)’, in Strachey, J, ed., Moses
and Monotheism and Other Works, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
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of Psychoanalysis, London, 1964, pp. 216–253.
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Freud, Jornadas de la Escuela Freudiana de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires.
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2
LACAN IN THE PSYCHOANALYSIS
OF TODAY

1 A placebo cure?
Nearly 40 years after the death of Jacques Lacan, we can ask ourselves: what is
alive and what is dead in his teaching? What is still relevant today and what has
proved to be evanescent, in particular with regard to psychoanalytic practice?
But before taking a close look at the Lacanian trees, perhaps we should look at
the psychoanalytic forest first.
Lacan died in 1981, followed 29 days later by Heinz Kohut, the forefather of
Self psychology. Two years earlier Wilfred Bion, who dominated psychoanalysis
in several countries – particularly Italy and Latin America – for the last 20 years,
had also died. In other words, the death of Lacan marks the end of an era; the age
of the great masters of the second and third generation of psychoanalysts.
I envy these analysts of the second and third generations. They died when
psychoanalysis was in full sail, when its popularity was constantly growing. By
contrast, the analysts of today live in the era of its regression – in a grim old age
for psychoanalysis, at least in Western countries. Many consider that the decline
of psychoanalysis began in the 1980s. This decline has been due not only to the
fact that, in the last 30 years, no masters with the stature of those just mentioned
have emerged, but also because in the leading Western country of the 20th cen-
tury, the United States, a cultural war has been triggered that has deprived psy-
choanalysis of credibility and respectability. “Today neuroses are no longer cured
with psychoanalysis but with drugs,” is the stock phrase I’ve heard pronounced
thousands of time in the US, and not only there. A ridiculous statement, as 80%
of the clients of analysts complain of problems for which there are no drugs.
For example, what drug should be given to a mother who complains that, in
her opinion, her adolescent children no longer love her? Or to a homosexual
who complains of being unable to stay in a stable relationship? Or to an hysteric
28 Lacan in the psychoanalysis of today

girl who only falls in love with men who reject her sexually? And the list could
continue. If these problems make them depressed, of course we can give them
an antidepressant, but the drug won’t solve the problem for which they came to
see an analyst.
In Europe, too, a campaign to discredit psychoanalysis has been underway.
In France – a country where psychoanalysis enjoyed high prestige until not so
long ago – popular lampoons such as The Black Book of Psychoanalysis from 2005
and The Twilight of an Idol from 2010 (a trash bestseller by Michel Onfray against
Freud) have appeared. A double process has taken place in Europe too: on the one
hand the progressive exclusion of psychoanalysis from psychology and psychiatry
faculties, and on the other, historiographical, epistemological, and philosophical
attempts to undermine the plausibility of psychoanalysis, of which the contribu-
tions by Grünbaum, Crews, Bouveresse, Borch-Jacobsen, and Sonu Shamdasani
are the best-known examples. The Freud bashers have multiplied.
The core of these criticisms is ultimately always the same: psychoanalytic
theories have never been verified or confirmed through protocols that are uni-
versally accepted today by anyone whose approach is “serious.” And the thera-
peutic results of psychoanalysis, if there are any, have not been documented
in any quantified way and are therefore untestable. Psychoanalysis is a form of
superstition.
Today, when the Food and Drug Administration or similar agencies have
to decide whether to authorize a drug, they apply the “double blind” protocol.
A sample of patients suffering from the illness that the drug is claimed to cure
are given the real drug, whilst another sample of patients are given an inactive
substance referred to as a placebo – which in Latin means “I shall be pleasing” –
despite the fact that the poor wretches believe they are taking an effective drug.
Not even the doctors taking part in the experiment know whether they’re giving
a patient the tested drug or the placebo. In the end, if plain water cures 40% of
cases and the drug 50%, then the latter has a very good chance of being autho-
rized as effective. It’s all decided by the percentage difference between drug and
placebo – often not a remarkable one. The aim is, as many say, to safeguard the
consumer. The consumer of psychotherapeutic techniques too.
The problem is that this test is very difficult to apply to psychoanalysis and to
psychotherapies in general. What would an analytic “placebo” be? And as verifi-
ability is extremely difficult to establish, the conclusion is that psychoanalysis is
something unserious. Effective, perhaps, but in the same way as a placebo.
In our age, the non-verifiability of something tends to coincide with its non-
existence; a result of the dominant pragmatist philosophy. For example, if a sci-
entific journal does not follow the criteria required today to assess its scientific
quality – a system of peer-reviews, incidentally, also called double blind – it’s
as if it didn’t exist, even if it publishes brilliant articles. The age of verifiability
extends to all fields with the widespread philosophical criterion according to
which “it is impossible to prove the existence of God, therefore God does not
exist.” Non-demonstrability and non-existence coincide.
Lacan in the psychoanalysis of today 29

It must be said that Lacan – who never fails to surprise us – agreed with these
slanderers of psychoanalysis. In one seminar he more or less said: “thank you for
coming in such great numbers to listen to a talk on something, psychoanalysis,
which is not even a science. In fact, one Popper says that it is irrefutable” ( Lacan
1977, Seminar 15 November 1977). Lacan was not kidding. According to Pop-
per, psychoanalysis is not scientific because its propositions are not falsifiable,
they are not refutable. Psychoanalytic propositions may even be absolutely true,
but we cannot state the fact scientifically and, therefore, we cannot recommend
it to consumers. As a consequence, analytic sessions – in contrast to what hap-
pens, for example, in Germany and Switzerland – cannot be paid for by the
National Health Service. Lacan agreed with Popper: psychoanalysis is not a science.
But for him being a science was not the only possible value for a theory or prac-
tice. Lacan also said that even though psychoanalysis is not a science, science still
supplies it with its materials ( Lacan 2011, p. 141). Psychoanalysis does not follow
the scientific method, but it assimilates many contents of science.
This makes things more complicated, because it means that Lacan did not
consider psychoanalysis – as many analysts consider it today – to be a “human-
istic” practice, an “empathic relation,” a “hermeneutics of intersubjectivity,” an
“encounter between persons,” a “being with,” and so on. For him psychoanalysis
is not a science, but it is still a creation of the scientific era. It is a by-product of
the Cartesian revolution, which forced science to follow a method. Psychoanaly-
sis is a non-science produced by the scientific subject; it is unthinkable without
science.

2 Psychoanalysis in the epoch of the DSM

For many analysts, publicly recognizing the crisis of psychoanalysis outside their
circle is undeniably a taboo. I reject this dismal conspiracy of silence. Amicus
Freudus, sed magis amica veritas (Freud is my friend, but truth is a better friend). Put
more plainly, being a psychoanalyst does not authorize me to look at the problem
through rose-coloured glasses.
Perhaps it could be proven that in many countries psychanalysis is practiced
more today than it was in 1981. But the social sense of the practice has changed
to the extent that many American analysts say, for example, that “we feel like
dinosaurs,” an extinct species.
The new generations of psychiatrists, nearly everywhere in the world, study
and train with DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, now in its fifth edi-
tion, or with the World Health Organization’s ICD, International Classification of
Diseases, which is a sort of DSM’s twin publication. These guidelines have built
a diagnostic Esperanto that progressively expels the nosographic categories we
analysts use – at least the older ones like myself. Starting with hysteria, which is
no longer listed as a mental disorder. Note that the DSM does not refer to “men-
tal diseases” but to “mental disorders.” The language has been de-medicalized.
As the Lacanian analyst Fulvio Marone pointed out (Marone 2013), the term
30 Lacan in the psychoanalysis of today

“psychiatry” is mentioned less and less in favour of the term “mental health.” A
sign of our (not only politically) “correct” times. The DSM has given psychiatry
a formidable tool for homologation in medicine by doing away with medical
language!
The sense of being a psychoanalyst today is therefore very different compared
to 30 years ago. At the time, psychoanalysis was considered a respectable, though
controversial, branch of medicine. In any case, it was an authentic “human sci-
ence,” like political economics, linguistics or cultural anthropology, and the pro-
fane [non-shrinks] believed that a university degree in psychoanalysis existed. By
contrast, today psychoanalysis tends to be perceived as a practice on the fringes
of the official therapies, a little like “ethnic” medicines such as acupuncture,
Ayurveda, and so on. Psychoanalysis may even be fashionable in some areas, but
in the same way as many “alternative” forms of medicine. (As for me, I believe –
in accordance with the WHO – that some therapies outside of standard medicine
should be taken seriously, for example acupuncture.)
In 1981 – the year Lacan died – psychoanalysis still believed it could con-
quer the great institutions, such as public hospitals, mental health services, and
psychology and medicine faculties. Yet, today it is a fringe practice that has to
defend its own existence. Psychoanalysis has increasingly moved away from the
domain of psychiatrists and toward that of philosophers, biopolitical thinkers,
art and film critics, feminists, theorists of cultural studies and complementary
literatures, political analysts of the New Left, and so on. It has shifted to the post-
modern galaxy. In short, practising psychoanalysis today appears to be a specific
choice, but not one of those disciplines being “recommended to consumers.”
This is something that delights many psychoanalytical schools, because for them
psychoanalysis is a form of résistance, as the French, who adore the term and the
concept, say. Resistance against the hegemony of the technical and scientific
approach, against the hegemony of the impact factor.
It is difficult to say whether this marginalization of psychoanalysis is an irre-
versible process. In fact, in recent years a series of signals – especially from the
media – seem to indicate a moderate general revaluation of psychoanalysis. Some
of the leading newspapers that dictate intellectual opinion in the world, such as
the New York Times and The Guardian, seem to have shifted from a hostile posi-
tion towards psychoanalysis to a far more benevolent one. But it’s difficult to say
whether this is an authentic, radical change of direction.
Many political ideologies and philosophies that seemed to be on the decline
have had unexpected resurrections. I remember that in Italy in the 1960s and
70s we spoke of the free-market economy in general (liberalismo) as an historical
residue composed of nostalgic old men; at the time we believed that Keynesian-
ism and Marxism had completely supplanted liberalism. Then, in the 1980s,
with Thatcher and the “conservative revolution,” liberalism made its comeback
and we witnessed hasty mass conversions by formerly Marxist intellectuals to
free market theory. Today, after the 2008 economic crisis and with the achieve-
ments of Brexit and Trump, the wind is apparently changing again away from
Lacan in the psychoanalysis of today 31

neo-liberalism. No one can know, therefore, whether psychoanalysis will enjoy

a new spring. It will be impossible, however, for a nouvelle vague psychoanalysis
to be the same as the psychoanalysis that is currently in decline (the spread of
the skype analytic sessions is an example of the fact that the old analytic setting
cannot always be used).
The question is: does Lacan belong to the declining psychoanalysis or can he
announce its rebirth?
Up until a few years ago, historians and philosophers of medicine had been
engaging in attacks against Lacaniansm, branding Lacan as an impostor. It has
become a classic accusation against Lacan. Even Noam Chomsky (see Connolly
2016), after meeting Lacan in New York, said that the Frenchman was a charla-
tan, as were, in his opinion, the vast majority of the Parisian thinkers of the time.
In 1971, Chomsky condescended to converse with one such “Parisian charla-
tan” on Dutch television: with Michel Foucault (Chomsky and Foucault 2006).
This debate is one of the most famous “intellectual summits” of the last century.
If we read or listen to this debate today, what stands out is the philosophical and
political dullness and naivety of Chomsky.
It must be said that in Italy and in France at least, any plausibility is denied to
psychoanalysis by aiming at its weakest point: its approach to autism. I cannot
deal with the issue of autism here, or with psychoanalytic theories on the sub-
ject, but the brightest analysts themselves have to admit that analytic theories on
autism are still today poor and quite unconvincing (Benvenuto 2019). Obviously
a rival discipline is attacked in its weakest aspects.
The fact that Lacan is attacked in Italy today with much more emphasis than
the equally inf luential leaders of other schools (such as Melanie Klein, Winn-
icott, Bion, Renik, . . .) has a very simple explanation: Lacanianism, more than
any other school or current, risks promoting, against the f low, a relaunch of
psychoanalysis in Italy. No one would waste time in vehement attacks against a
current that is irrelevant or in its twilight.
I think this (partial) revival of Lacanianism, at least in Italy, is a paradoxical
effect of the rise of cognitivism. Today, in Italy and elsewhere, most psycho-
therapists recognized by the state practice cognitivist techniques, or systemic
family therapies based on the theories of Gregory Bateson and Paul Watzlawick.
In continental Europe, Bateson’s thinking has been remarkably successful (even
Lacan paid some attention to Bateson’s work in the 1970s).
The psychoanalytic movement in the world has always been lacerated by two
opposing needs. One tends to describe psychoanalysis as a corroborated psycho-
logical science that should ultimately be integrated into medical psychiatry. The
other – first incarnated by Rank and Ferenczi, and then by Horney, Fromm,
and Sullivan, the so-called Culturalists – tends instead to drag it towards the
sphere of the humanities; towards values, methods, and styles typical of the latter,
such as history, literary criticism, phenomenological philosophy, and so on. To
me this seems a repeat of the old division between believers and non-believers,
except that today we are supposed to take sides with either the scientific or the
32 Lacan in the psychoanalysis of today

humanities faculties. This alternative has always seemed to me a trap to avoid. I

have personally always had an idiosyncrasy against rigid, not properly thought
out dichotomies; the intellectual equivalent of rooting for the New York Yan-
kees or the San Francisco Giants.
But in the last couple of decades, the tendency to bring psychoanalysis towards
medical science has been kept in check by the success of the cognitive sciences,
which have been seen to surpass psychoanalysis in the very field it was believed
to excel in; that of a science of the psyche. Many young people bypass psychoanalysis
and devote themselves directly to the cognitive sciences, including neuroscience.
To these new generations, psychoanalysis appears a little like the 19th-century
phrenology of Franz Joseph Gall, who was convinced that the shape of some-
one’s cranium also revealed something about their mind. Neuroscience today
can boast advanced techniques that make phrenology seem like a very early and
rough attempt to thematize the relation between mind and brain.
The topic of the neurosciences needs to be clarified: I too have a humanistic
background, but I am careful not to measure everything by the same yardstick.
Further, I avoid saying that all neurosciences are only positivist reductionisms in
the manner of Gall or Lombroso (another famous 19th-century neurologist who
thought he could understand someone’s criminal tendencies on the basis of the
shape of their cranium). Lacan always had a certain respect for neurology, today
known as neuroscience. In a 1957 seminar, for example, he complained that the
neurologists of the time proved they had a good knowledge of linguistics, which
analysts didn’t have: as if he were saying “neurologists are ahead of you.” The
defensive ref lex of many analysts, even Lacanian ones, against the neurosciences
seems to me like the sign of a sort of obscurantism and historical weakness. Some
neuroscientists today – for example Gerald Edelman – explicitly pose extremely
subtle philosophical questions that many “humanist” philosophers ignore, not
because they don’t agree with them, but simply because they know nothing
about science and even less about cognitive science. Or rather, they don’t want to
know anything about it. For Lacan, the subject of science (not the individual sci-
entist) implies a foreclosure of the subject psychoanalysis deals with: the subject
of desire. I think that both the medical sciences and the humanities perform a
foreclosure. Many want to know nothing about the scientific theories that today
hold centre stage; they nurture a phobia of rationality.
For many cognitive scientists today, psychoanalysis is a childish phase of the
mind sciences. If we take this point of view, then currents such as Ego Psychol-
ogy and others, which aimed at turning psychoanalysis into a “scientific psy-
chology,” lose points. Further, in America today Ego Psychology seems to have
been replaced by Relationism, which embraces spiritualistic instances linked to
ethical and political demands, such as civil rights, feminism, Queer Studies, and
so on. And Lacanianism, too, a decisively anti-cognitivist psychoanalysis, ends
up coming across today as an “authentic psychoanalysis.”
On the other hand, parallel to psychoanalysis, a “humanistic” psychotherapy
movement has developed that essentially derives from Carl Rogers. Those who
Lacan in the psychoanalysis of today 33

were once attracted to psychoanalysis because they were moved by a need for
“empathy” with the other, by the desire for a “soul-to-soul contact,” today turn
to these humanistic or intersubjective psychotherapies. The most sophisticated of
these are based on the phenomenological psychiatry of Minkowski, Binswanger,
and Laing. (Note that as a young psychiatrist Lacan too was deeply inf luenced
by the phenomenological current.) These psychotherapies reject any pretence
of objectivity and present themselves as practices of help, of mutual empathy, of
“relations between persons,” and so on. I would call it a sugar-coated psychiatry.
In short, psychoanalysis finds itself overridden, by two opposite sides, by schools
that seem to better respond to the ideals of those who would once have chosen
psychoanalysis.
Lacan always felt deeply alien to both of these poles. And this is why I still read
him. At a time when currents alien to psychoanalysis are prevailing among the
masses of psychology graduates, Lacan emerges as a credible stronghold of psy-
choanalytic psychoanalysis, so-to-speak, which clearly marks its difference from
both cognitive techniques and theories and “empathic” relational practices. Lacan
is still one of the few to envision a psychoanalysis that refuses to “f lirt” with its
rivals. He rejects any pretence to turn psychoanalysis into a “scientific psychol-
ogy,” while at the same time aiming at a Cartesian ideal of stubborn, formal
rigour. He attracts so many because he manages to square this circle: he doesn’t
abandon the ideal of rationality (with his passion for linguistics, logic, mathemat-
ics), without adopting, however, the quantitative and simulative protocols of the
sciences of today. He still offers the thrill of a psychoanalysis that doesn’t resolve
itself in cognitivism on the one hand, or humanistic syrup on the other.

3 The “empathic” analyst

Today the key signifier of this syrup is “empathy.” Even in everyday life, we no
longer say of someone that they’re “rotten,” but that they “lack empathy.” I think
that deep in the background, the success of “empathy” is the proof of a powerful
return of a certain type of philosophical phenomenology, also relaunched by a
particular variety of neuroscientific research (Francisco Varela, mirror neurons,
and so on). This is often a vulgarized phenomenology, summarized, for the ben-
efit of psychotherapists, as follows: the analyst, like anyone who offers herself
as helper, must be empathic towards patients, in the sense of trying to “step
into their shoes.” The analyst must “understand” the other in the plain sense
of the term, like when we say “I understand why you want a divorce,” meaning
by this: “if I were in your shoes, I’d want to send that whoremonger of a hus-
band of yours to hell too!” If we focus entirely on “stepping into the patient’s
shoes,” practically nothing distinguishes analysis from a good friendship, and it
just becomes something like an occasional get-together between two friends at
the pub to chat about their woes. In fact, we tend to prefer talking to “empathic”
people, who somehow respond to our joys and pains. Today the most successful
psychoanalysis is a “pub get-together” psychoanalysis.
34 Lacan in the psychoanalysis of today

I think that this kind of psychoanalysis, even when theorized with great sub-
tlety, is the symptom of a sort of disintegration of mainstream psychoanalysis.
With the term mainstream I refer to the most important psychoanalytic institu-
tions, excluding the Lacanian.
For decades, scholars who don’t believe in psychotherapies have said: “When
a psychotherapy does have curative effects, this is not due to the psychothera-
peutic theories themselves, but to the fact that a subject has found someone who
is haloed with the prestige of the specialist who is actually listening to them and
giving them empathy, attention, and suchlike.”
In other words, all psychotherapies are a placebo, as there is no “active sub-
stance” apart from this conviviality “that pleases.” And, indeed, it could be help-
ful to systematically increase placebo effects in medicine. For example, with a
little more empathy we could increase the number of people recovering from
illnesses thanks to plain water from 40% to 50%. Why not?
Now, it seems to me that these relational and interpersonal currents have fully
accepted these criticisms. It’s as if they were saying: “we admit it, there’s nothing
‘real’ at the basis of psychoanalysis; it is merely an empathic relationship between
two human beings, in which one may help the other.” We are witnessing a place-
bation, if you will forgive me the horrendous neologism, of analysis. This is why
I believe that relationism – so popular today – is a sign of the crisis of traditional
psychoanalysis, under fire by the scepticism towards any talking cure.
I believe that this insistence on relation and empathy is a sort of return to
where psychoanalysis began: hypnosis. Before psychoanalysis, Freud practiced the
“cathartic method,” with the use of suggestion. “Hypnosis” and “empathy” are
apparently opposites: Hypnosis is based on the fact that the curing subject imposes
his will on the hypnotized subject, whilst empathy is based on the fact that all of
the patient’s feelings and life experiences are imposed on the healer. The analyst
embraces all of the former’s desiderata. It’s as if psychoanalysis has come full circle,
capsizing on itself. But hypnosis and empathic effects have one thing in common,
namely: that one of the two subjects adapts to the will or feelings of the other.
Now, Lacan would have shown contempt for the “relational” approach,
though he was sometimes empathic himself; at the beginning of an analysis a dose
of empathy is a fine stimulus. But real analysis begins when this specific under-
standing between analyst and patient makes room for something else. Allow me
to give an example.
Some time ago I followed a young man who had embarked on a university
career in Italy. He would continuously condemn the pettiness, dullness, and
frauds of the Italian university world, which he considered responsible for his
failure to obtain tenure. Now, being quite well-acquainted with Italian academic
environments, I felt in total empathy with what he was saying. I too had gone
through the ordeal he was describing. Like most when they start a psychothera-
peutic relationship (before becoming analysands), in me he was looking for a
conniving “specialist” who would say to him: “you’re quite right! You’re dealing
with some abominable characters!” Most people “go into therapy” wanting to
Lacan in the psychoanalysis of today 35

buy your empathy; this is their demand. The wholesalers who copiously supply
the goods the patients are asking for – approval, solidarity, often even fondness –
remain at the level of connivance. Whilst for Lacan, analysis begins when one
moves from the reiteration of the demande to a sometimes unpleasant level, that of
désir. Unpleasant, because according to Freud, we are truly horrified by our desire.
Lacan conceptualizes this passage in Hegelian terms, as a dialectical overcom-
ing of the “beautiful soul,” die schöne Seele. I shan’t delve into the full dialectics of
the beautiful soul, but limit myself to what is of interest to us here, i.e. at a certain
point the analyst must confront the patient – the client, in today’s terminology,
who has come to purchase empathy from you – with the following observation:
“what was your own contribution to the decay you are decrying?” But this
means the suspension of empathy at the risk of being disliked by the patient.
Now, it was precisely by abandoning my empathy towards the aspiring tenured
professor that I gradually began to help him realize that the academic defeats he
kept falling victim to were somehow of his own making. That he was basically
doing everything he could to make the powerful reject him. Why? The analysis
had now begun to focus on this question. But for it to emerge, I had to set my
empathy aside – my knowledge that all the Italian academic decay he complained
about was perfectly true.
In addition to empathy, another somewhat opposite prescription is popular
today, particularly in Italy: Bion’s “suspension of memory and desire” by the
analyst. A slogan that seems to me to be just as dubious as the appeal to empa-
thy. Because if analysts completely suspended memory and desire, they would
become like a camera – according to Freud, we are human because we desire
and remember. It’s true that analysts should suspend certain desires and certain
memories, but not all. It’s crucial that analysts burn with a specific desire: the
desire to analyze. It is thanks to the fact that patients are infected by this desire
that they connect in transference and become analysands. And analysts should
have memories of certain aspects, for example, of everything that keeps repeat-
ing itself in the lives of their analysands.
Psychoanalysis works when it steers clear of both the Scylla of reducing analysis
to an empathic relationship and the Charybdis of stripping its own f lesh, which
relegates the analyst to being outside the world of desirers and rememberers.
There should also be “empathic” phases of course, because analysis is never
pure, it is always seasoned with a dose of psychotherapy, i.e. with relations of
favouritism. But analysts, if they can really call themselves that, hope something
else will emerge beyond the “relation,” i.e. the structure of the symptom, which
for Lacan is everyone’s specific way of enjoying.

4 Political gospels
There is an aspect of Lacanianism, however, that should be seriously questioned:
the tendency it has had – today a little less so – to split into a myriad of schools.
Many of these are proudly opposed to each other, as in a sort of civil conf lict. In
36 Lacan in the psychoanalysis of today

my opinion, the proliferation of rival schools that were set up in Lacan’s name
after his death is more often due – as happens in other fields – to personal incom-
patibilities or political rivalries than to well-defined theoretical differences. It
seems to me that most theoretical “heresies” have been subsequent to political rifts
and did not precede them.
I use the term heresy because, from its beginnings – consider the unresolvable
conf licts between Freud and Jung, Freud and Adler, and so on – psychoanalysis
has had a history similar to that of the monotheistic religions, with their heresies
and schisms. Today there are several currents within the International Psychoan-
alytic Association (IPA), but they all share a common institutional umbrella. This
is not the case among Lacanians, who are reminiscent not only of the protestant
cults, but also of the quarrelsomeness of Marxist political parties.
In fact, such heterogeneous spiritual movements like Christianity, Marxism,
and psychoanalysis have something fundamental in common: as Lacan said about
Marxism, all three are bringers of good news, they promise a salvation.
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam announce eternal life for everyone, or at least
for the worthy. In this way, in the monotheistic religions human life appears
enshrouded in meaning: what we do in this life will have eternal consequences
and inscriptions. As for the “Gospel According to Marx” ( Lacan 1973, p. 253),
it envisions salvation at the end of the path of history: Socialism. And then
Communism – a paradisiacal society in which all people will receive according
to their needs, independently of what they do.
In comparison to the two great palingeneses – eternal life for the monothe-
isms and a just, happy society for Marxism – psychoanalysis definitely seems to
promise very little; not even individual happiness, considering that, as Freud
wrote at the end of his Studies on Hysteria, “much will be gained if we succeed in
transforming our hysterical misery into common unhappiness” (Freud 1895, SE
2 p. 305; GW p. 312).
Yet in recent decades the fortunes of Marxism and psychoanalysis seem to have
been interconnected. Today the most popular philosophers who base themselves
solidly on Lacan’s thinking are authors like Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, and the
late Ernesto Laclau, who either call themselves Marxists or have a Marxist back-
ground. It’s true that they pursue a line that has run parallel to psychoanalysis for
at least a century, Freudo-Marxism. The temptation to connect Freud to Marx
(and even Lacan to Lenin . . .) has been extremely strong and many brilliant
minds have given in to it – one after the other, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse,
Louis Althusser, Jean-François Lyotard, and Elvio Fachinelli in his earlier works.
The fact that in France The Black Book of Psychoanalysis followed The Black Book of
Communism means that the Marx/Freud implication is also valid for the enemies
of both: the two black books should be taken as two episodes of the attack against
the Freudo-Marxist 20th century.
But what does the Freudian promise that seduced the 20th century consist of?
Not in the fact that analysis cures neurosis and psychosis, because this is some-
thing other techniques are equally capable of doing (or, as the malevolent would
Lacan in the psychoanalysis of today 37

say: something the other techniques are equally incapable of doing). Lacan is
right, the essence of psychoanalysis is not the therapy. If you only want to remove
an unpleasant symptom, you don’t enter analysis.
What historically makes certain religions, certain political promises, certain
wisdoms such as Buddhism, or psychoanalysis so seductive is the fact that they
all have a message, even if only implicit, of hope. One of the three theological
virtues: fides, spes, caritas – faith, hope, and love. Even before being an experience
founded on a faith in the existence of the unconscious, and beyond exploiting
a certain transferential love (caritas meant love, not charity), psychoanalysis is
attractive because it offers a charge of hope.
The Freudian hope consists in telling us that our spiritual sufferings ulti-
mately express our inauthenticity and that thanks to analysis we can live accord-
ing to the truth, i.e. in accordance with our true desire. Or accepting our specific
way of enjoying. Authentic is equivalent to being one’s own: being authentic is
being one’s own self. Neurosis and psychosis are then forms of inauthenticity, of
being-other-than-oneself, the result of a subject’s resistances to its own truth,
of mistaking itself for its own mask. Thus psychoanalysis would seem to give a
practical outlet to the modern prescription inspired by Nietzsche, who quoted
Pindar, “become what you are.” Being ourselves is not something given, but some-
thing we need to become, perhaps by going through analysis.
But Marxism doesn’t simply promise a more egalitarian and fairer society
either: it aims at a “true” society. It dreams of a society in which subjects are no
longer “alienated,” i.e. in which they can be themselves, freed not only from need
but, above all, from that fetishist religion, which according to Marx is capitalism.
Yet Lacan always distanced himself from Marxism and the ideal of a com-
munist revolution. In one of his Écrits, “The Subversion of the Subject and the
Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” Lacan criticizes the concept of
revolution, comparing revolutions to those of celestial bodies, which after long
rotations return to their starting point. And he was not only referring to intel-
lectual and scientific revolutions, but to political ones too.
Lacan thought that psychoanalysis, not politics, was achieving an authentic
revolution. Was he then expecting too much from psychoanalysis? Yes and no.
In the 1970s Lacan went to Milan, invited for a discussion with young train-
ees. Lacan had found out that his pupil inviting him was an intellectual organic
to an almost fundamentalist Catholic movement, Communion and Liberation.
Now, Lacan had no scruples in attacking this pupil in front of the pupil’s own
followers: “how can something called Communion and Liberation have anything to
do with my teachings?” Lacan didn’t quite know what this movement was, but
its very name was enough to make him furious. It was his f lair for the signifier.
He said:

It cannot be said that my discourse promises any kind of liberation! Because

for the analyst it is a question, on the contrary, of gluing himself to the suf-
fering of the people who come to see him. [. . .] The psychoanalyst is most
38 Lacan in the psychoanalysis of today

definitely the least free of all men. [. . .] As for Communion, of hearts I

suppose, it doesn’t have the same sort of resonance as the term “Commu-
nism,” which is a communion of goods. Indeed, 65 years after the October
Revolution, not the least progress has manifested itself [in Communist
countries] in the sense of some sort of liberation!
( Lacan 1978, p. 122, 124, 127)

This was a spontaneous attack against those he considered the “natural” adver-
saries of psychoanalysis: communism, Catholic communion, and liberal libera-
tion. Essentially, he felt alien to the three main political ideologies of his time
(today there is a fourth, communitarianism which has been rebaptized as popu-
lism). Deep down, he thought that psychoanalysis had to set right the damage
caused by Communion – whether communist, communitarian, or Catholic –
and Liberation.
The writer Jacqueline Risset recalls an episode on Easter of 1975 when Lacan,
admiring from their car the splendid cupolas of Rome’s baroque churches,
exclaimed: “Elles vont gagner ” (“they shall win”). And added: “they have gratifi-
cations to offer; we offer none” ( Risset 2012 , p. 345). The “we” was referred to
psychoanalysts, the “they” to churches. For him the struggle between religion
and psychoanalysis was an historic one, and he knew who would win. After over
40 years can we say he was prophetical?
We must stress that neither Freud nor Lacan were Marxists. Freud never
believed in Bolshevism and talked about it as a form of secularization of the
monotheisms (Freud 1933, SE 22, pp. 179–181; GW 15, pp. 195–197). Therefore,
he considered it, in the same way as religions, an illusion and a kind of neurosis
(for Freud neuroses are illusions). In the case of Lacan, he always admired Marx
but had never been a Marxist. Most refer to him as an “enlightened conserva-
tive,” but he was more of a moderate leftist. He was a friend of Gaston Defferre,
the powerful socialist mayor of Marseilles. Lacan was a radical in psychoanalysis
and a moderate in politics. He never idealized the May 1968 events, for example,
which he saw as an unconscious search by the youth of the time for a master.
In fact, in France and elsewhere at the time, a masochistic liturgy drove several
intellectuals with great expectations to jubilantly display master Mao’s “Little
Red Book,” with the aim of appearing as dumb, in their opinion, as the “people”
they claimed they were serving.
I know what I am about to say will cost me the approval of some readers:
on the subject of the political passions of the 20th century, I feel much closer
to Freud and Lacan than to many of their followers. I too was a young Marx-
ist at the time (who claimed they weren’t?), but today I consider the cult of the
Revolution one of the grandes illusions of Greek/Christian metaphysics. Freud’s
and Lacan’s scepticism towards political Millenarianism is in my view entirely
embraceable.
I admit it: separating psychoanalysis from its indisposed fiancées – religion
and Marxism, to which I add phenomenological philosophy – is risky. But it is
Lacan in the psychoanalysis of today 39

important for psychoanalysis to fight alone, without the aforementioned lovers,

and, if it feels up to it, even after some good Lacanian continence.
What sometimes makes my relations with certain Lacanians difficult is the
fact that many of them are radical leftists or Catholics, whilst I feel alien to both
the Catholic and the Marxist faiths. In the wake of Freud and Lacan, I accept
the tragic harshness of the human condition. I have very little Spes. The analytic
hope in helping some people implies a sort of background despair. This is the
tragic background of psychoanalysis, which Lacan had the courage to stress.

5 Nathan’s rings
When one says “Lacan,” one talks about a project of a “return to Freud,” not
only in theory but in clinical practice too. Quite frankly, I have never taken this
return literally. After all, it wasn’t about a return to Freud’s letter, but to his sense.
In my opinion those who claim the contrary distort Lacan.
It is a fact that most “orthodox” IPA Freudians are more literally Freudian,
in the sense that they use a language and concepts that are much more similar
to those of the Viennese. At the same time, it is evident that Lacan’s language
and concepts are radically different from Freud’s. Another of Lacan’s paradoxes:
promoting an historical return to Freud while creating a diet of thought and
words far removed from Freud’s. Being an Hegelian, Lacan knew full well that
returns are always illusory; a river never returns to its source. Another Hegelian,
Karl Marx, said that history only repeats itself as a farce (Marx 2006, pp. 7–8).
Believing that Lacan is merely a modernized reprise of the tragic Freud adds up
to considering Lacanian thinking a farce. Luther also wanted to return to the
fathers of the church, to Saint Augustine, and he ended up transforming Chris-
tianity and making it the religion of the countries that dominated the world.
When we commit ourselves to returning to something, we often thoroughly
innovate. This is what I would call the necessary unfaithful fidelity to the master.
Lacan certainly put forth an acute reading of Freud, even though my personal
reading of Freud is different from his – we all have our intellectual obsessions
and mine are not the same as Lacan’s. The latter has eradicated from Freudianism
any “psychologistic” concessions and the “Jungian” slope, in particular the idea
that there are universal symbols, un-historical signifieds to reveal, “archetypes.”
Lacan’s reading of Freud still poses the fundamental problem of every hermeneu-
tics, i.e. of any reading of texts by dead authors.
It’s an unsolvable paradox. Today, with a rigorously philological commitment,
we aim to reconstruct what seems to us the true and authentic sense of, for example,
Aristotle or Shakespeare, disposing of the exegetical encrustation from the previ-
ous centuries. In this way, many teachers of literary subjects today base themselves
on the methods used by anthropologists who study primitive populations, i.e. they
situate the text in the tissue of the culture and society in which it was produced.
On the other hand, the hermeneutic historicism we’re steeped in today
reminds us that any reading of these authors that’s possible today, however relative
40 Lacan in the psychoanalysis of today

it may seem to us, is still always an “actualizing” reading. In the words of the
philosopher Benedetto Croce, another Hegelian, historiography is always con-
temporary historiography. In other words, historiography is always ego -centric,
nunc-centric, and ethno -centric (nunc means “now”). We think we are finally
reading Aristotle and Shakespeare unfiltered, yet we also know that never again
will we be able to read Aristotle as the Athenians of the 4th century BC under-
stood him; never again will we be moved by the plays of Shakespeare for the same
reasons that a Londoner at the Globe Theatre was moved by them. In short, our
pietas – piety – for texts written by dead authors is deeply split. On the one hand
we want to forget our passions of today and try to plunge entirely into the Juras-
sic Park, I would call it, of experiencing a text or a theory as they would have
been at the time of their creation. On the other, we no longer believe in neutral
historical objectivity; we know that “the true sense of Aristotle” is the sense that
can be read into his works by us, who have been acquainted with Aquinas, Kant,
Heidegger, and so on. Who can read Hamlet today whilst ignoring Freud? This
is the paradox Heidegger tried to make us digest calling it “hermeneutic circle,”
a non-vicious circle. This virtuous but actually lethal circle also applies to any
reading of Freud and Lacan.
The majority of Lacanians are convinced that the true, faithful, and lucid
reading of Freud is Lacan’s, whilst the readings by Ego psychologists, by Anna
Freud, Marcuse, Derrida and others are misleading. Personally, I respect all the
important readings of Freud. I think that whilst the Ego psychologists – one
of which, Rudolph Löwenstein, was Lacan’s analyst – were Central-European
Jews brought up in a context of contempt for America, they nevertheless did an
excellent job in finding a way to allow WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant)
Americans, with a totally different background and tradition from theirs, to
digest Freud. Just as excellent a job was done by the Central-European Melanie
Klein in making psychoanalysis relevant to a certain “Elizabethan” sound and fury
that beats in the heart of every Brit. Through psychoanalysis it was German-
language Jewish culture that extensively colonized the English-speaking world
in the first half of the last century, not the other way round, as many wrongly
state. In America the stereotype of the analyst was a Jewish gentleman in a dark
suit who spoke English with a strong German accent. In the same way, Lacan did
an excellent job in making Freud attractive to the passions of Parisian culture.
Which is the real Freud? I would answer with the three-ring parable, already
known in the Middle Ages and featured in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s play
Nathan the Wise, and banned by the Catholic Church at the time.
The Arabic sultan Saladin asks Nathan (a Jewish merchant) which he con-
siders to be the true religion, the Jewish, the Muslim or the Christian. Nathan
refers to the famous parable. At every generation a father gives a magic ring to
his favourite son. But one day the ring comes into the hands of a father who loves
his three children in the same way. This father has two new rings made, both
identical to the original, and secretly gives one to each of his sons, making him
believe he is the receiver of the magic ring. After the death of their father, each
Lacan in the psychoanalysis of today 41

son obviously claims that theirs is the authentic ring. But who really possesses it?
Lessing doesn’t tell us. The three monotheistic religions are like three children
who have been led by God the Father to believe that they hold the truth. But
who can say which of the three actually possesses it?
Today, deep down, we think that the ring that has gone from father to son
for generations is not actually a magic ring, but in itself a facsimile. This is
what Derrida actually tried to say: that we should consider our cultural history
a succession of copies with no original. None of the three rings is the “real”
one. Voilà.
Mutatis mutandis: which of the three schools – Ego Psychology known today as
Relationism, Kleinism known today as Object Relations, or Lacanianism – have
captured the real psychoanalysis?
I doubt that Lacan would have been very fond of this parable, as he was
convinced he possessed the true ring. Nathan the Wise was the manifesto of
Enlightenment tolerance, i.e. of what today is known as relativism, something
the various churches, the positivists, and the Freudo-Marxists despise. The latter
despise what they call the hypocritical ideology of tolerance because, for them,
tolerance means saying “as long as you don’t annoy me, anything goes.” The 20th
century was the century of relativism, but today the monotheisms, the sciences,
and neo-Marxism are allies in fighting it. I think Lacan tended more towards the
churches and sciences than towards Enlightenment relativism.
Unless we think that Nathan’s three rings were a premonition of the three
Borromean rings, which obsessed Lacan in the last decade of his life.
The Borromean rings, or rather the Borromean chain, are pictured in Figure 2.1.

FIGURE 2.1 Borromean Chain

42 Lacan in the psychoanalysis of today

The peculiarity of this chain is that if we cut any of the three rings the other
two are free. And the same goes for an undefined number of rings: if a thousand
rings are linked in the Borromean way, you can cut one and the other 999 are
free. Lacan was so enthusiastic about these rings that he went to Germany to
praise them to Heidegger. The latter, already very ill, remained absolutely silent
(Millot 2018, p. 101).
I shan’t delve here into the use Lacan makes of the three rings, in part because
they are too enticing and there is a risk of losing oneself in them, like with an
addiction. I’ve met several people with the Borromean monkey on their backs.
However, for Lacan the way these rings intertwine describes the functioning of
the human subject.
Let us take as a metaphor something that in Lessing is literal: the human sub-
ject does not need a psychiatrist – the human subject is not mad – only if he is at
once “Jewish,” “Christian,” and “Muslim”; given such a rings’ bind, however, if
he stops being one of the three he will enter what Hölderlin called “the furious
folly of atheism.” An “atheism” leading to involuntary psychiatric commitment.
Some have admitted to me: “if I were convinced that there was no God, I
would kill myself.” I can understand them. Lacan would say that in such subjects
the three rings have not linked in the Borromean way and hence they need a
fourth ring, God, to keep the other three together. His seminar on Joyce focuses
on this very point: Joyce had a psychotic structure because his three rings were
not interlinked in the Borromean mode. To avoid becoming insane, he needed a
fourth ring, which was his very special form of writing.
Having said all this, I evoked Nathan to say that in my opinion Lacan, more
than revealing what is essential about Freud, has somehow transfigured Freud, as
in the evangelical transfiguration. Of course he tried to make his pupils believe
he possessed “Freud’s authentic ring,” but I’m convinced he was too intelligent
not to know that his was facsimile too. And it’s because of this truth, which he
knew about without mentioning it, that Lacan still interests me.

6 The four discourses

In any case, Lacan undoubtedly attempted to reform the mode of the analytic
relation compared to Freud’s. Here too, as usual, Lacan overturns common feel-
ings, in particular the feelings of common analysts.
The image analysts usually have of themselves is that they are authoritative
personalities. And it’s true that analysands often have an awed deferential attitude
towards their analysts, as if they were Indian Mahatmas. Now, Lacan – being a
dialectical surrealist – completely overturns this “belief in themselves” that ana-
lysts have. For him, the analyst is not a Mahatma like Gandhi, but simply a piece
of shit. Literally.
For Lacan, analysts – I stress: analysts, not the men or women who occupy
that position – are Saint Francis-like figures, masochists wearing cilices, who
bask in abjection and humiliation, not to save their souls, but to save analysis.
Lacan in the psychoanalysis of today 43

Where does this perception that Lacan has, so discordant from the function of
the analyst, come from? He tries to explain it in his seminar on transference,
largely dedicated to a rereading of Plato’s Symposium.
Lacan focuses in particular on the speech in praise of Socrates – which is also
an invective against Socrates – by his rejected lover, the splendid Alcibiades.
In this speech, Alcibiades stresses that Socrates is profoundly ugly, but that his
beastly appearance is a trap, because he is like an àgalma, a statuette reminiscent
of a Russian doll. It represented a Silenus, certainly with an erection, because the
Sileni were permanently aroused brutes. But when you opened it, the statuette
revealed the radiant image of a god. In cruder terms, we could say that Alcibi-
ades enunciates, or rather denounces, Socrates as someone with the appearance
of a rogue but who conceals a dazzling pearl. Thanks to this pearl, which does
not appear at first sight, Socrates can seduce the most handsome and noble boys
of Athens, but without “giving them any.” This is not my own lewd indulgence,
but an historical truth: the mature Greek man in love, erastes, would sodomize
the well-bred stripling who was the object of his love. The erastes felt autho-
rized to penetrate the boy, promoting himself as his master and life teacher; in
other words, the pederastic relationship was half way between paedophilia and
pedagogy.
Socrates, in contrast, does not use his Silenic phallic knowledge to penetrate
his kaloì, his “beauties,” as young lovers were referred to at the time. He even
denies he has a phallic knowledge – “I know that I know nothing.” Socrates
limits himself to the role of midwife. Like a woman, he limits himself to giving
birth to the fine ideas in the mental “uteruses” of those “beauties” undergoing
philosophical labour. He is not the father of the ideas to which the feminized
paramours give birth, but only their obstetrician, and the ideas to which he helps
give birth to do not belong to him. Lacan would say: Socrates uses others to
make the Other emerge.
For Lacan, the analyst is like the Socrates that Alcibiades described with
admiring resentment. Socrates is the first analyst; not only because, like Socrates,
analysts relinquish any carnal contact with those who turn to them. I notice
that if a medical doctor, a gynaecologist for example, goes to bed with an adult
patient we couldn’t care less, but if an analyst takes a consenting analysand to
bed, it becomes a scandal. A sign of the fact that the analytic relationship has
little to do with the doctor-patient relationship. Behind the curtain of reverential
respect for the analyst, Lacan reads – a stroke of genius – the true functioning of
the analyst for the patient: the analyst is an écart (gap/scrap), an excrement, and a
Silenus that is at once a mysterious diamond, capturing the analysand and tying
him to analytic fidelity. But this contempt for the analyst, often disguised as
admiration, sooner or later emerges in analysis.
By permutation, Lacan would later describe in an enigmatically rigorous fash-
ion what he calls the “analyst’s discourse.” The three other discourses that he
considered crucial are that of the “Maître” (master and boss), the “universiterian,”
and the “hysteric.” By these four “discourses” Lacan means four types of “social
44 Lacan in the psychoanalysis of today

bonds,” as he calls them. The analytic is thus one of the four possible bonds,
though we may disagree with the fact that these are the only four essential ones.
To understand the specificity of the analytic discourse or bond, we will need to
say something about the other three.
Often the analyst is taken to be a Maître, which means at once boss, master,
and teacher. Yet, when an analysand makes a slip of the tongue with the analyst
and says “when’s the next lesson?” instead of “when’s the next session?,” then we
can bet on the fact that the analytical bond has not taken place. Someone who
teaches always risks being pedantic – from paidos, child – insofar as they impose
a knowledge the pupil must submit to. When a pedant is skilful, pupils will elect
him as their master, as in the case of Lacan. But as the French word maître shows,
even the most easy-going of masters has a despotic face and is a boss of souls.
If instead the pedant is someone mediocre, we call him a windbag, a pomp-
ous braggart. In Italian we can call him a “trombone”; an appropriate meta-
phor, because the sound of this instrument has a f latulent connotation and in an
orchestra it dominates over the other subtler instruments, but behind its pretence
to do so we capture a sort of “anal” arrogance. Lacan assigns a precise name to
the discourse of the “trombone”: he calls it “university discourse.”
Did he allude to the various disciplines taught in universities? Or was this his
way of designating any knowledge that is conveyed as universal? I would say that
the academic is someone who has failed to be recognized as a master and is happy
to talk like a “trombone.” University knowledge is not conveyed thanks to the
charisma of the master, nor thanks to the analyst, but thanks to the bureaucratic
and pedantic academic system.
I think that the cognitive psychotherapies are a clinical application of uni-
versity discourse. Cognitivists presume that their patients’ problems depend on
“cognitive errors,” a bit like students who make a mistake and reiterate that
mistake. Cognitivists correct the “mistakes” in red ink and try to divert their
patients/pupils from their initial blunder to help them pass their cognitive exam.
With regard to the hysterical discourse or bond, why hysteria and not another
neurosis? Most say that by the discourse of the hysteric, Lacan means the neurotic
order in general. The ambiguity consists in the fact that, though according to the
luminary Charcot and his Viennese pupil hysteric men existed too, Freud only
presents us with female hysterics. The etymology of hysteria – from hysteron,
uterus – was denied by psychoanalysis on the surface, but confirmed on the side.
Note, however, that Lacan ultimately shares the opinion of today’s “relational
analysts” in thinking that neurosis is a relation, a specific social link, and not an
exclusively private matter.
In fact, psychoanalysis privileges hysteria with respect to obsessional neurosis.
Freud said that the latter is a dialect of hysteria, which is the standard language.
Today, however, this is something Freud would not say, because according to
modern linguistics there are no dialects. If we consider Tuscan to be the Italian
language and Neapolitan or Venetian dialects, this is simply because historically,
the Tuscan dialect affirmed itself as the official language, reducing the others to
Lacan in the psychoanalysis of today 45

the status of “dialects.” A language is a dialect that imposes itself over the others.
Now, for psychoanalysis the hysteric dialect prevails over the obsessive dialect.
And this precisely because of its feminine specificity. For Freud, every neuro-
sis is hysteric insofar as it is a rejection of our femininity, whether we possess a
penis or a vagina. Freud had spelt this out clearly in an almost testamentary work
published two years before his death, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable”
(1937) (in fact, rather: Finite and Infinite Analysis): neurosis is the refusal to be
feminine. The neurotic is then a sort of “Prima donna always on the Verge of
a Nervous Breakdown,” if you will allow me a f leeting tribute to Almodóvar.
We can then give more savoury names to the discourses according to Lacan:

Discourse of the Maître: Verdicts of the despotic master

Discourse of the universiterian: Lessons of the windbag professor
Discourse of the hysteric: Scene of the prima donna on the verge of
a nervous breakdown

What about the discourse of the analyst? One that assumedly began in the 20th
century but that, according to Lacan as we’ve seen, was already being held at the
highest levels in the restless Athens of the 5th century BC.
Considering everything we’ve said on Socrates as an obscene figure possess-
ing a f licker of spiritual seduction, I would say that for Lacan, the discourse of the
analyst is “an attraction for the pearly excrement,” a shit in which the pearl tying
the analysand, sometimes for years, to the grievous and joyful work of analysis
shines bright. Fachinelli (2004) pointed out that patients very often equate their
analysts to whores; analysts too supply erotic experiences, in the broad sense, for
a fee. For Lacan the analyst is a piece of shit, for Fachinelli a prostitute paid by
the hour.
For Lacan the analysand holds the analyst in deep contempt but, insofar as the
latter insists pigheadedly in not tearing himself away from that position, he keeps
magnetizing the subject.
According to Lacan, this is because the analyst is in the position of object
a, which is the cause of desire. If I suddenly meet a woman and desire her,
that woman – Lacan says – is a desirable object, but not precisely an object a.
Lacan argues that even in sexual attraction we always mistake objects. Because if
there is something that really secretly makes a woman desirable – or a man for a
woman, or a man for a man, or a woman for a woman – it is the fact that behind
her attractive forms, a woman is a scrap, a déchet. And, indeed, for a woman not
to be only a Madonna, but also a woman – Madonna in Italian includes the word
donna, woman – it is important for her to engage in an act that in all cultures
is considered obscene, though pleasurable: coitus. In this way we can see how
object a – which we shall discuss further on – is at once the most attractive and
the most repulsive object.
Here, too, Lacan shockingly breaks away from both common sense and the
established psycho-biological theories. According to the latter, erotic attraction
46 Lacan in the psychoanalysis of today

is adaptive, because in the other sex we look for someone who will guarantee
us offspring: the beauty of a woman is connected to the sign of her fertility,
the physique of a man tells us whether he will be able to adequately defend her
and their common progeny. All this is (partially) true. But what really attracts
us in an individual man or woman, according to Lacan, is the fact that, behind
the beneficial male or feminine figures, we glimpse the object a; that which
authentically – beyond the “fine figures” – triggers our desire.
We can then say that Lacan’s four discourses are his theory on social life.
Freud had set out his doctrine on social sets – on the Massen, on the crowds – in
texts like Totem and Taboo and Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (Freud
1912 –13, 1921). If we read the latter carefully, what becomes apparent is that
Freud thought that every form of social life is essentially fascist.
Freud didn’t say so explicitly, because fascism and Nazism hadn’t yet affirmed
themselves when he wrote the essay in 1921. However, for Freud a Masse, a col-
lective, is never “horizontal” but is always constructed “vertically.” So there are
no anarchic collectives. A Masse is set up when an external figure – a Führer, a
leader – occupies the place of various people’s Ego Ideals. It seems evident to me
that this is the very definition of fascism as we’ve witnessed it in history.
I’ve met several fascists first-hand, people who were infatuated with Mus-
solini when he was still alive and powerful. Some of these people would never
have hurt a f ly. Their Ego Ideals were also very different: in one it was the ideal
of the warrior, in another the ideal of Aphrodite sleeping with the warrior Ares,
in another the ideal of the Italian people emancipated at last, in another still the
sense of discipline to fight decadentism, and so on. Each gave particular contents
to their ideal, but Mussolini occupied the place of this ideal – he took possession
of it – becoming the ideal Object of so many. But for Freud, this is the rule for
the construction of any collective. Let’s say that historically, Nazism and fascism
lay bare the fascist nature of any established “being a group.”
I realize that what I’m saying is extremely serious: most of us belong to some
sort of Masse, of which we are often proud members, and wouldn’t dream of
considering ourselves “fascists.” For example, how to tolerate the idea that my
psychoanalytical association, guided by such an admirable, good-natured, and
combative leader, is a fascist one? But we need to read Freud’s essay without
blinders: it states exactly what I’m saying here.
Freud also described the opposite process to “collective doing,” to the “f lock”
as Nietzsche called it. This is when my Ego Ideal totally invests an external
object, almost taking its place. He called it Verliebtheit, falling in love, and thought
it blinded us no less than the group we belong to. It’s what the French call amour
passion, distinct from calm marital love. For Freud, passionate love undermines
social aggregation, it tends to break up the Masse. Passionate love is lethal to col-
lectives and collectives are lethal to passionate love, as Shakespeare showed in
Romeo and Juliet.
Some, even without having read Freud, feel that associative life is structur-
ally fascistic and try to keep away from it; behaving like Stirnerian “Uniques”
Lacan in the psychoanalysis of today 47

they steer away from any crowd and rebel against the masses like José Ortega
y Gasset (The Revolt of the Masses). They belong to the snobbish anti-Mass.
Freud, however, who in turn created his own Masse – behaving as a proper
despotic leader within it, expelling anyone he disliked – knew that exiting the
group is not a solution. That in any case the mass is aggregation, Eros. Retir-
ing to a castle, far from the madding crowd, is Thanatos. Hence the dilemma
from which no one can escape: either we enter the fascist, but erotic, logic of
being-in-the-group or we leave it in a motion of mortal disintegration. We
must choose between killing on behalf of a Führer and causing our own civic
death by singing from a different song sheet, by which we risk hitting the bad
note of narcissism. We all swing between the “fascism” of the group we belong
to and “infatuation” for the person we adore, which may even be ourselves.
Ethic decency in our lives is entirely decided by the way we juggle between
infatuation and fascism.
As for Lacan, he seems to have limited the fascism of groups to what he calls
the discourse of the Maître. But he believes there are three more social bonds.
He prefers the discourse of the analyst, which is certainly not fascist, but which
requires a saintly sacrifice, an immolation of someone who calls herself or him-
self an analyst. Someone prepared to end up like Socrates, the prototype of all
analysts according to Lacan.

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com/watch?v=NSab2hNsZhk (Accessed: 1st December 2018).
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Institute of Psychoanalysis, London, 1955.
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Riuniti, Roma.
3
LACAN IN CONTEMPORARY
THOUGHT

1 Linguistic primacy
Where should we locate Lacan within the Western intellectual landscape? His
work, at least until the end of the 1960s, can be seen as belonging to what Rich-
ard Rorty called the linguistic turn: 40 years of Western culture mesmerized by
reference to language. In the 1960s semiotics, the science of all signs, f lourished.
Phenomenology drifted towards hermeneutics, i.e. a philosophy of reading and
interpretation. Deconstructionist philosophy, which originated in the work of
Derrida, focused on the notion of “text.” My generation of intellectual baby-
boomers developed a passion for structural linguistics. The most representative
English-speaking intellectual of the 1960s and 70s – no less because of his politi-
cal battles – was Noam Chomsky, a linguist. Even the physical sciences felt the
inf luence of information and communication theories, with cybernetics. And
in many European countries, the psychotherapies saw the rise of “communi-
cational” models like systemic-relational family therapy, inspired by Gregory
Bateson, Paul Watzlawick, and Mara Palazzoli Selvini.
There was a linguistic turn in the arts too. Pop art of the 1960s and 70s was
dominated by an “irrealism” that “ref lected” (on) advertising and mass media
messages. Take the famous portraits of celebrities by Andy Warhol: he would
produce them starting from passport size photos of the stars rather than from
their real faces. Reproductions of reproductions, signs of signs.
The assumption that formed my generation was: “don’t deal with things,
deal with the languages that give shape to things.” The primacy of “language”
illustrates what Lacan means by signifier: something literal, not defined by its
sense, given that every signifier can have completely different “effects of sense.”
Yet there seems to be nothing in common between “the language” that Witt-
genstein, Austin, Benveniste, Barthes, Bateson, Quine, Luhmann, and so on,
50 Lacan in contemporary thought

spoke about; each gave different meanings to “language.” But language was the
signifier that connected them. Now, the signifier “language” polarized the sec-
ond half of the 20th century because it modified the old dichotomy between
two other opposing signifiers: “thought” versus “things.” “Language” worked
for many as an exit, with an elegant shortcut, from the century-old Cartesian
separation between mind and physical world.
In this climate, an intellectual like Lacan who was extremely sensitive to the
spirit of the times, rewrote psychoanalysis so as to be in tune with the primacy
of language. Hence the mottos “the unconscious is structured like a language,”
“the unconscious is the discourse of the Other,” and so on, which are entirely in
line with the cultural mood of the time.
One by one, Lacan adopted the most prominent themes of Parisian culture,
like an Igor Stravinsky of psychoanalysis. In the 1930s Lacan anticipated Sartre’s
phenomenological analysis of the imaginary. His work on the mirror stage dates
back to 1936, when Sartre published L’imagination, a theme he would return to
in 1940 with L’imaginaire. In the 1950s and 60s Lacan captured linguistic pre-
eminence developing a theory of the primacy of the signifier. After assuming the
centrality of language, Lacan picked up on the most prestigious form of linguis-
tics of the time: structural linguistics. By the 1970s he probably understood that
the wind was changing, hence his insistence on topology, logics and the Real.
In saying this I am not implying that Lacan was an opportunist; deep down,
as an Hegelian, he embraces Rimbaud’s contention that “One must be absolutely
modern” ( Rimbaud 1873). For an Hegelian, the only way to be at the pinnacle
of the Spirit is to live one’s present time dramatically, through a connection to
the present that is at the same time profoundly discordant with the present. The
present is always more in the right (il a raison) and always has more reason ( plus
de Raison) than the past.
In any case, after Lacan’s death the linguistic turn came to an end. I also
consider myself beyond the linguistic turn. But what separates me from several
friends who seem to have taken paths similar to mine is that I experienced the
linguistic turn, whilst they were intellectually born in a post-linguistic-turn era.
The linguistic turn, in the various fields to which it has been applied, can be
summed up as follows: we must never forget the very simple fact that our philosophical
and scientific thought consists of words. And not just any words, but propositions; i.e.
whatever we think or discover will always be within the cage of propositional
language. This is not a limit that philosophy set itself at one point in time; it is
the limit from within which philosophy was founded. The important thing is
that philosophers realize this. Therefore, the problem of linguistic philosophy is:
how can the (propositional) language of philosophy take on something that is not
linguistic, not propositional?
Of psychoanalysis, too, we must never forget that it is practiced through
words. It does of course put us into contact with something that is by no means
linguistic – the Real, as Lacan calls it – but always within the limits, the hori-
zons, the modulations, of the language we use. Forgetting this would be like a
Lacan in contemporary thought 51

painter forgetting that he uses colours and then expecting the fine young lady he
has reproduced to come to life, like Pygmalion. Or a physicist forgetting that he
uses mathematical words and formulas and then wanting to explain the essence
of light through a musical symphony. Every practice is tied down by the limits of
one’s language. This is something I never forget.

2 Freud’s basic project

Some believe that rather than the linguistic turn having been exhausted, what
has occurred instead is the positivist application of the linguistic turn to the exact
sciences.
The sciences known today as cognitive, which deal with the mind, do cer-
tainly deal with language. But in these mind sciences the hegemonic signifier, or
constituent “metaphor” as it is referred to today, has changed. The fact that the
term “cognitive” has prevailed speaks for itself: the mental is ultimately identi-
fied with this type of function. “Language” has been reabsorbed by “cognition.”
Cognitivism in the strictest sense is the idea that the human mind is a set of
software programs, and the brain its hardware. The mind is conceived in com-
putational terms. And if the human mind and brain are like a computer, then
computers themselves will in turn become human minds. This is not mere sci-
ence fiction, many serious scientists believe that this is exactly what is going to
happen. Like in the film Matrix, intelligent machines will challenge our control
and even gain power over us.
But logo-centric cognitivism has been supplanted by the neurosciences, which
try to understand human thought and language according to how the brain, a
hard organ, works. Hence the development of research on neural networks.
In fact, Freud was the first to describe a neural network, though a purely
hypothetical one. I’ve seen a portrait of Freud on the walls of the labs of some
important neuroscientists.
Freud described a neural network in an 1895 text, published posthumously,
entitled “Project for a Scientific Psychology” (Freud 1895). In this Entwurf, or
sketch, he perfectly describes the function of something crucial that was only
to be discovered much later: brain synapses. Many reject this project because in
it Freud uses a neurophysiological language that he would soon abandon for a
psychological one; the latter being “correct,” according to many, because it is the
language “of the soul” and not “of the brain.” In actual fact we can prove – as
Derrida (1967 ) attempted to do – that Freud always remained deeply faithful to
this Project, even if he later used a psychic terminology. And he was to return to
the themes of this same project in his fundamental theoretical work, Beyond the
Pleasure Principle.
We shouldn’t naïvely mistake the terminology an author uses for the structure
of the sense of what he is saying. Naming something is not yet equivalent to
thinking it. It was easy for Freud to jump from a neurophysiological language to a
“psycho-” language because the structure described in his Entwurf never changed.
52 Lacan in contemporary thought

I shall try to summarize this Freudian essential structure in a few words.

Freud begins with an axiom that apparently finds no validation in observation.
With this I am not implying that Freud’s system is invalid because it is not based
on empirical evidence. The history of science shows that the great revolutions in
physics are produced when scientists decide to begin from anti-intuitive, non-
empirical premises. For example, Galilean physics is based on the principle of
inertia, which says that a body will remain at rest or continue to move with
uniform speed in a straight line unless an external force “disturbs” it. In earthly
experience, however, no one has ever seen a body moving at a constant speed
for eternity unless it was disturbed! Aristotelian physics, by contrast, seems to
conform much better to daily experience. Every turning point in science occurs
when certain forms of evidence are abandoned. For example, quantum mechan-
ics came about after the abandonment of the seemingly obvious premise that
space is continuous: that if I shoot an arrow it doesn’t “jump” from one point to
the other of the space it travels through – something that has caused a wealth of
headaches for philosophers since Ancient Greek times.
Freud’s anti-intuitive axiom is that desire tends to hallucinate its own satis-
faction, and that human beings tend towards not only wishful thinking but also
towards a wishful perception, a perception they desire, towards hallucination.
Now, this postulate, which appears quite bizarre, is confirmed by the Charles
Bonnet syndrome described in 1760: non-psychotic hallucinations that we could
all have in certain conditions. For example, in situations of sensorial deprivation
in deaf or blind subjects, or of isolation (Sacks 2013). Cases in which many tend
to hallucinate. In Freudian terms: when our drives do not find objects that can
satisfy them in reality, they create “a mental movie,” they make subjects see, feel,
and hear the inexistent to satisfy something that’s pressing inside them and from
within them.
In short, Freud builds his theory starting from his own “principle of inertia”:
i.e. that the human psyche is not inclined towards the real but towards desir-
ing illusion. For Freud human beings are not essentially cognitive organisms
but organisms that aim at enjoyment. Everything else – psychoanalysis – is a
corollary.
In my opinion, if psychoanalysis, Lacanian or not, fails to deal with the great
problems of science, and in particular with the theme of Life in the Age of Its
Technical Reproducibility, it will end up being reduced to a cult, a semi-religious
sect. It may even have millions of followers, like gurus such as Sai Baba, but will
have lost any prestige among the cultivated élites. A few analysts do try to have
a dialogue with the sciences, but one swallow does not a summer make. What’s
important is to make sure that the confrontation between psychoanalysis and
science is never superficial, that it captures what I would call the metaphysi-
cal core of many scientific theories. I think that sooner or later psychoanalysis
should confront itself with the metaphor of reticularity, of networks, that was
first thought out by Freud. Indeed, the shift towards the neural paradigm, which
develops a concrete model of the brain, marks in my opinion a passage from the
Lacan in contemporary thought 53

primacy of a linguistic “signifier” (computer programs) to a reticular “signifier,”

the model that prevails in so many sciences today.
We have witnessed in scientific culture the increasing predominance of
Darwinian neo-naturalism (its best-know representatives being Daniel Den-
nett, Steven Pinker, and Richard Dawkins), but, within “continental” philoso-
phy too, a parallel slide has occurred. Namely, the linguistic metaphor is being
increasingly replaced by the metaphor of life, no longer understood in terms of
Erlebnis, experience – something phenomenology was very fond of – but as abso-
lute zoé, animal life. This is demonstrated by the fact that, between the late 1990s
and early 2000s one of the most acclaimed philosophers was Giorgio Agamben,
whose signifier, “bare life,” was extremely successful. Whilst today, many are
compelled by Foucault’s concept of biopolitics.
We can talk in similar terms about the signifier zoé – not bios, which also
includes social life – as we can of the signifier language: every current and culture
gives a different sense to the signifiant Maître, the master signifier, “life.” The philos-
opher Ernesto Laclau would have said – using a term borrowed from Gramsci –
that first language and then life became hegemonic signifiers in different periods.
Neo-Darwinism and biopolitics, even if they mutually ignore each other (even
despise each other), are the two poles of this new zoo-centric hegemony.
Neo-Darwinism can be summed up as follows: “all living things – including
Homo sapiens – have an adaptive ratio.” A biologistic version of Hegel’s “all that
is real is rational.” Yet being “adaptive” does not mean being the strongest, being
the one who can defeat the most enemies and hunt down the most prey. Because
if I am a male who obtains all the females and defeats all his enemies but am also
sterile, in evolutional terms I am a dead end. Accordingly, by adaptive Darwin-
ism essentially means that phenotypes (individuals) have certain qualities which
maximize the reproducibility of their genes. Being handsome and having a great
sexual drive is no less important than being strong.
Instead, biopolitics considers society and history in terms of policies that dis-
cipline and manipulate biological life. According to Darwinism, history, culture,
and politics are products of our genome, of that which makes us adaptable to
our environment. Yet, according to biopolitics, will and political projects adapt
human life, our bodies, to these projects. Two opposite points of view? Or two
faces of the same zoé coin?

3 Freud’s single thought

Some Lacanians have entirely failed to react to this new cultural climate. Others
understand the change of paradigm and aim at a Copernican revolution within
Lacanianism: from Lacan-Ptolemy to Lacan-Copernicus. The “Copernicans,”
apparently without renouncing logocentrism, try to bend Lacan’s theory so as
to remove – bit by bit, somewhat surreptitiously – the hegemony of the Sym-
bolic. Between the three Lacans – the younger Lacan focused on the imaginary,
the mature Lacan focused on the Symbolic and the old Lacan focused on the
54 Lacan in contemporary thought

Real – they choose the latter. The Real is not exactly the zoé of today’s philoso-
phers, but it somehow includes it. In this way, by focusing on the register of the
Real, Lacan promoted the notion of jouissance, enjoyment. And in fact all the
young enterprising Lacanians of today have done away with the classic Lacanian
themes of desire and lack (manque). Instead, they place all their bets on jouissance;
a term, incidentally, that is somewhat difficult to render in English, with “enjoy-
ment” being a rather weak commonly adopted translation.
In fact, Lacan’s thought of the 1950s and early 60s focuses on desire, which
translates the Freudian drive (das Trieb) into Hegelian terms. Hence famous slo-
gans such as “man’s desire is the desire of the Other.” Then Lacan comes to focus
more on enjoyment and the Real. Why?
It is my opinion that with these two terms – désir and jouissance – Lacan rein-
terprets that which is essential in Freud. I have developed my own precise idea of
what is essential in Freud ( Benvenuto 1999), concerns that have since become
non-essential in most of psychoanalysis.
Heidegger said that every great thinker entertains only a single thought ( Hei-
degger 1961, p. 475). I think he was right. As I think Freud was a great thinker –
as well as the inventor of a new social bond, the psychoanalytical – I believe he
too entertained a single thought: that the essence and ultimate truth of human beings,
and perhaps of living beings in general, is die Lust.
This has not always been clear to many because the German term Lust is
ambiguous. It means pleasure, and therefore something similar to jouissance, but
also yearning or desire. The Freudian Lust is usually translated with “pleasure,”
therefore Jenseits des Lustprinzips was translated as Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
But, as we’ve seen, this translation does not do justice to the ambiguity of the
term. Freud wrote that in referring to desire, he preferred the Latin term libido to
the more common Lust, precisely because of the ambiguity of the latter ( Freud
1905, SE 7, p. 135; GW 5, p. 33). But Freud always plays around – often without
realizing – with this ambiguity.
In translating libido as desire in Hegelian terms, Lacan mitigates – though
only partially – its sexual connotations. But desire is only one side of Lust. The
other, opposite sides of Lust are pleasure and enjoyment; which are the extinc-
tion of desire. Indeed, for Freud pleasure is essentially a release of tension, i.e. the
annihilation of desire. The other pole of desire is the joyful end of desire. And
the end of every desire, according to Freud, amounts to death. Enjoyment and
death are closely related in Freud.
I’m putting pleasure and enjoyment on the same level, though any Lacanian
would slap me on the wrist for it, considering that Lacan opposes pleasure to jou-
issance. For him enjoyment is beyond the pleasure principle. In fact, Lacan inter-
prets pleasure – a one-sided translation of Lust as we have seen – in the sense of
utilitarianistic philosophy. Utilitarianism was developed by British philosophers
such as Hume and Bentham in particular. It is based on the premise that the ori-
gin and principle of every human activity is the quest for pleasure; aka, a quest for
happiness. Pleasure is another name for happiness. The Constitution of the United
Lacan in contemporary thought 55

States, which was inspired by utilitarianism, says that we all have a right to pur-
sue happiness. But this is something blatantly obvious, because for utilitarianism,
human beings can do nothing but pursue their personal happiness, period.
On the other hand, according to Lacan, enjoyment belongs to a dimension
I would call Dionysian. He thinks there is an opposition between the good and
balanced order, plaisir, and the dimension of evil and excess, jouissance. And it was
Lacan who introduced this opposition into psychoanalysis. Yet, in Freud die Lust
has a more ambiguous and tragic sense that goes far beyond a wise economy of
pleasures. In fact, Freud says that the final destination of Lust is at the service of
the death drive, insofar as a full pleasure is the cancelling out of desire. A nap
after orgasm . . . a rehearsal of death, as Hamlet called it. Lacan introduced the
search for excess pleasure and would later call it plus-enjoyment. In his vision,
unconscious enjoyment undermines peaceful hedonistic management. In other
words, plaisir is a conscious egotistic enjoyment, whilst jouissance is an uncon-
scious surplus pleasure.
Apart from these differences from Freud, it seems to me that Lacan grasps
Freud’s gamble to describe human beings as signifying flesh. As “thinking flesh,”
one would be tempted to say. But for Freud, most thinking is unconscious, and
one signifies through symptoms, dreams, delusions, and so on. The unconscious
is the f lesh that thinks without thinking, and hence signifies.
Heidegger affirms that for Nietzsche human beings are essentially “thinking
animals of prey” (Heidegger 1961). I would say that for Freud they are “signify-
ing erotic animals,” caro significans. Caro is flesh that suffers and enjoys. For Freud,
anthropos is signifying f lesh. Those who do not see humans as signifying f lesh
may practice as analysts, but they are not Freudians.
Lacan makes Freud’s theory skid slightly towards the human as caro loquens,
speaking f lesh. Or, as he would later call it, parlêtre, a neologism translatable as
talkbeing. Can we interpret this shift from a Lacan who focuses on desire to one
who focuses on enjoyment as a shift from a Freudian Lacan to a less Freudian
one . . . to a more Lacanian Lacan?
I don’t believe so. I am tempted to state the contrary. Lacan devoted himself
to the enterprise of engrafting Hegel, Heidegger and structural linguistics with
the Freudian corpus. A titanic operation.
As I said, die Lust – the quid of human beings according to Freud – has a face of
desire and one of enjoyment, two faces that divide human beings. To desire Freud
preferred terms such as libido and drives; to enjoyment he preferred satisfaction
and pleasure and read them as being on the side of death. Now, in an early phase
Lacan focuses on desire, the “subjectivizing” face. No longer cogito ergo sum,
but desidero ergo sum. In a second, less subjectivist and more “realist” phase he
focuses on the enjoyment face, in which subjectivity crumbles in the enjoyment
of something. Not in the sense of gaudeo, ergo sum (“I enjoy, therefore I am”),
but rather in the sense of ego sum, ergo Alienum gaudet (“I am, therefore the Other
enjoys”). Regardless of whether it is a case of desire or enjoyment, we remain in
the domain of Lust.
56 Lacan in contemporary thought

Lacan certainly puts the dimension of logos in the foreground and, as a conse-
quence, tones down Freud’s dense, often brutal, references to elementary drives
in favour of an impressionist, Proustian, salon -style flou. As I attempt to explain
this further, please forgive me should I now sound a little pedantic.

4 Essence and existence

Let’s remember the difference between essence and existence. Metaphysics dis-
tinguishes between the quiddity of beings and the quoddity of beings. Quid esse
refers to what something is, and quod esse is “the fact that something is.” There-
fore, metaphysics tries to state the quid (“the what is”), whilst also acknowledging
the quod (“the fact that”). Science does the same. On the one hand it says that the
quid of water is being a particular combination of hydrogen and oxygen and on
the other it acknowledges that the quod of water is the fact that it exists on our
planet, and perhaps on ours alone.
Heidegger interprets the difference between two fundamental Nietzschean
concepts, the Will to Power and the Eternal Return of the Same, in these terms.
What relation is there between these two truths that Nietzsche considers to be
fundamental? The Will to Power is the quid or essence of things, whereas the
quod is the Eternal Return. Events take place in order to return.
Something analogous occurs in Freud’s meta-anthropology. Die Lust as Eros
is the quid of human beings, their essentia. Lust as Thanatos is the quod. Because
for Freud, every organism lives in order to die in its own way, death is the quod
of human beings, their existentia. The factness of life is its being moribund. Like
in Heidegger, when he writes that authentic existence is “being-toward-death.”
I realize how irksome these statements may sound to those not used to philo-
sophical cogitation, yet this point is absolutely crucial to understanding both
Freud and Lacan. What complicates things is that for Freud, the death drive
“opposes” Eros as if the existence of things is opposed to their essence. We
can say that for Freud, human beings are essentially desire and exist de facto in
enjoyment and suffering. His theory states that neurosis and psychosis pres-
ent themselves as often unbearable sufferings, but only because they express an
unconscious enjoyment, it enjoys.
If the quid of mammals is that of being viviparous vertebrates, how can we say
that the fact – the quod – that mammals exist on the earth’s crust is in conf lict
with the quid of being a mammal? Could it be that Freud misinterprets this dif-
ference as an opposition, when it is actually a logical distinction between the two
categories of essence and existence?
In actual fact, this strange struggle between the essence and existence of
something is typical of every theory that I would call “militant.” That is, of every
theory that does not limit itself to stating something essential on the human, but
that instead wants to lead the human to this essential, perhaps through a revo-
lution, or through a “Spring,” to use a term that is more popular today. The
political ideal aims at superimposing the essence and the existing of peoples. The
Lacan in contemporary thought 57

analytic cure is generally something similar: analysis is a militancy that states “in
your very existence, discover your essence.” In other words: “comply with Eros
in this life of yours that is running towards death.”
Now, it seems to me that for Lacan, too, the quid is f lesh. However, he bets
on a quod that is different from Freud’s (the impulse to die): he bets on the fact
that human beings are speaking beings. For him, language is a pure event, with no
origins; i.e. it does not need to be explained. It is the human quoddity. Once it
imposes itself on us humans, it allows us to exist as humanitas. In other words, it is
not something that comes from humans. Lacan is here referring back to medieval
philosophy, namely to Richard of Saint Victor. The latter identified God with
the eternal being that is eternal from Himself. For Lacan, the signifier, language, is the
non-eternal being that is non-eternal from itself. This means that the signifier is not
eternal, but contingent, yet it reproduces itself from itself. It is not produced by
others, Language is an ephemeral divinity, but it is still a divinity ( Lacan 1975,
pp. 40–41).
So, Lacan linked the symbolic order to the death drive. If we always repeat
the same mistakes, never learn from experience, and are forced to suffer the same
comedown again and again, then we are bound to a repetition compulsion that
for Freud is a death impulse. But for Lacan, this same impulse is like a computer
program that continues to run by itself, that doesn’t give a damn about the desires
and wishes of people who only want a quiet life – and this computer is logos, i.e.
death. It was very bold of him to identify the Freudian death drive with the grim
efficiency of language.
The idea that the unconscious depends on using language is the consequence
of a very precise philosophical vision: the idea that language tears us away from
a sort of natural bliss. Language alienates us from nature, from our very own
nature as biological beings, and exiles us from an animal world that Lacan con-
siders “imaginary,” in the sense that in animality every image is accompanied
by a complementary one. Language demolishes our biological automatisms, not
to make us freer, but to subject us further still to the order he calls the symbolic.
Now, you are a Lacanian when you profoundly believe in this vision of language
as a demolition of animal life. If you do not share this vision, though you may
sympathize with many aspects of Lacan’s thought, you can never be a Lacanian.
It must be stressed the extent to which making language the matrix of the
unconscious overturns what we moderns usually think: that language, the fact
that Homo sapiens speaks, is the condition of human consciousness. We all
think – starting from Heidegger – that animals are conscious of things but not of
themselves. An animal can recognize a staircase, as it climbs it. But only human
beings are conscious of the staircase in itself, and hence conscious of the fact that
they are conscious of this staircase. We are convinced that language is at the root
of our cogito, that it is an auto-ref lexive act, the quintessential conscious act. If we
feel ashamed or guilty, if we have conscience and consciousness (in many languages
there is only one word for both), then this is an effect of language. Well, Lacan,
disappointing our expectations – as usual – turns language into the condition for
58 Lacan in contemporary thought

the unconscious. This is because for him consciousness, as he said, is simply a

mirror, it can exist even without language – a mirror can’t speak.
On the other hand, it is not correct to say that Lacan extolls language because
it is constitutive of humankind. He never extolled it because, after all, his entire
thought amounts to a condemnation of language. In fact, Lacan’s is one of the most
dramatic condemnations of language in the 20th century, equal only to Witt-
genstein’s no less ardent denunciation. Language kills the thing, it takes away
from us any opportunity of being truly satisfied, because joy and satisfaction are
the being there with no words. Lacan’s controversial logocentrism – which Der-
rida challenged – is actually a logophobia. Strange that so many have failed to
see this logophobic spirit in Lacan, which is so well displayed. Perhaps they have
failed to see it because, like Poe’s purloined letter, it is too blatant.

5 Desiring the thing

How to explain the fact, therefore, that so many contemporary Lacanians reject
the part of Lacanian thought that revolves around the theme of desire and the
lack that constitutes it? I think it’s due to a reaction against much of the Western
tradition since Plato, which has often equated philosophical passion to Eros, to a
desire that must always remain unsatisfied. As the term itself suggests, philosophia
is always a lack of knowledge and a desire to know. There is a growing intoler-
ance for a way of thinking that extols non-consummation, dissatisfaction as a para-
doxical wealth of humankind.
The philosophy of desire began with Spinoza, for whom the quid of being
human was cupiditas, desiring. The identification of the subject with cupidity is
taken up again by Hegel. Then, in Being and Time Heidegger affirms that the
being human of humans is Dasein, being there (often poorly translated into English
as “existence”), and that the specificity of “being there” is being a “thrown proj-
ect.” For Heidegger, being a human subject does not mean simply being pres-
ent, it is not being something. Rather, I am always something that I am not yet. In
Heidegger the project replaces the cupiditas. It seems to me that Lacan reinterprets
cupiditas, désir, as a project thrown into the universe of imaginary identifications
and alienations, which are in turn symbolically commanded.
Yet, as we said, the primacy of desire was born with philosophy itself. In my
opinion, Lacan first thematizes desire – a Freudianization of Dasein – because he
was still working in the wake of the Western philosophical tradition. Philoso-
phers have always considered themselves as hurricanes of desire. Significantly,
Socrates confessed he was always in love. Always.
So, in the Symposium Socrates states that philosophy is Eros, a variation of
erotic attraction. The only difference is that it is not fine bodies that excite the
philosopher, but ideai, looks (today we would say abstract forms or structures). In
the same way as Socrates desires Alcibiades sexually but rejects the intercourse
the handsome boy offers, philosophers desire the thing in itself but make sure
they cannot reach it; they refuse to constrain it within an embrace of mucous.
Lacan in contemporary thought 59

The term philosophy should thus be interpreted as erotosophia, but as a chaste eroti-
cism. From Plato down to today, philosophy has wanted to be a great panegyric
of desire against a transition to the act of enjoying, against transitive power over
another thing.
In Lacan, enjoyment is often something transitive, it’s an enjoyment of some-
thing. Even the Other, when it enjoys me, enjoys something: me. Yet in many
other points, Lacan seems to intend enjoyment in the intransitive sense, as plea-
sure for its own sake. As usual, Lacan swings between concepts, he never allows
them to slot into precise signifieds.
And what to say of the ascesis of mystics or of certain philosophers? Does it
not represent the enjoyment of a privation? Lacan would say that ascesis is an
apparent relinquishment: we relinquish certain pleasant objects in order to reach
an other object – which in the seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis he called the
Thing. This Thing is where the subject situates a primary enjoyment, an inef-
fable, unrepeatable one. The ascetic mystic tries to derive enjoyment from the
Thing, which in the monotheistic religions is called God, i.e. it has no name.
Lacan has applied something similar to phenomenology. Husserl impressed
his century by pointing out something obvious: that “consciousness is always
consciousness of something.” This is the transcendentality of consciousness as
something intentional. Anyway, because the term “transcendentality” lends itself
to misunderstandings, I shall say that this philosophical tradition is archaeological.
From the Greek arche, which means origin, beginning, and command. So-called
continental thought – to which Lacan belongs – is an arche thinking: we must
start from an initial act that commands. Whilst non-continental rationalist posi-
tivist thought is far more reductionist: “at the foundation there is nothing but. . . .”
For example, “at the foundation of everything there is nothing but matter and
energy,” “at the foundation of human beings there is nothing but selfish genes,”
and so on. Whilst so-called continental thought is one of initiality or of the pri-
mal, Anglo-American thought is one of ultimateness or basicness.
We said that for Lacan – though not always – enjoyment is the enjoyment
of some thing. And when we seem to be enjoying nothing, we are still enjoy-
ing some thing: “nothing.” But desire too is transcendental in the Husserlian
sense; it is always a desire of some thing. Why then this shift in Lacan from desire
to enjoyment?
We mentioned how the metaphysical tradition has always promoted the eter-
nalization of desire, which has to stop its march towards enjoyment. Philosophy
is a consolatio, insofar as, by never extinguishing desire with the enjoyment of
knowledge, it elevates us as desiring life – sceptical life, as the Greeks called it;
from skepsis, search.
For decades now, so many have enjoyed repeating the same rants against
vulgar “consumerism,” which they see as characteristic of modern capitalism.
Desiring is sublime, enjoying is shameful! Except when enjoyment derives from
mystical ecstasy, when it is an enjoyment that involves no material objects, which
I would call a “poor” enjoyment. Philosophy – the condition for authentic life
60 Lacan in contemporary thought

in general – presumably consists of turning ever-unsatisfied desire into the only

authentic pleasure. This is the vision of human beings that Sloterdijk calls mise-
rabilistic (Sloterdijk 2004). But, as we mentioned, many are now bored with this
imposed anathema against consumerism, an execration that represents the con-
tinuation of our metaphysical (ascetic) tradition.
So, Lacan too seems to follow in the wake of the ancient and modern philoso-
phies that see humans as being polarized on lack, on subtraction, on an inevitable
dissatisfaction. But only to a certain extent. In fact, the late Lacan seems to take a
different direction when he talks – emulating Marx’s surplus value – about plus-
de-jouir, surplus enjoyment. Here Lacan seems to go towards a different formula-
tion according to which all the pathetic problems of humans derive from an awe
of an excess, from the terror man has of an abundance – of an “excessive joy,” as
the psychoanalyst Elvio Fachinelli called it – that tends to overpower him.
It must also be said that according to Lacanians, some forms of life are polar-
ized not by a lack but by an excess of libido: psychotic ones. Paranoiacs, schizo-
phrenics, and melancholiacs suffer from a “surplus,” not from a lack.

6 The master and servant acting out

Another aspect that Lacanians today are not fond of is all his content – taken
from Hegel – on recognition, i.e. the essential desire of every subject to be
recognized as such. Lacan almost identified Freudian libido with the Hegelian
drama of desire for recognition, and his thought undoubtedly arose from this
hybridization.
Other psychoanalytical schools that concentrate on the primordial mother-
child relationship – most importantly Winnicott’s – have also focused on the
question of recognition, i.e. that it is essential for children to be recognized by
their nurturers as being of value to them. But only Lacan connected Freudian
erotic desire and the Hegelian dialectics of master and servant in a struggle for
recognition.
In Hegel, the desire for recognition initiates the history of humankind. The
matrix is the consciousness of each individual requesting the other to recognize
their freedom. But this affirmation of freedom only makes itself recognized in a
life or death struggle with the other – a struggle for pure prestige. “Me or you.”
For Hegel, the original struggle is triggered because each subject affirms his
freedom challenging the other as other consciousness. It is a radical struggle, an
absolute one, and one that won’t listen to the case for mutual interest. But it can
happen that one of the subjects gives up the fight to the death and, to preserve
his life, submits to the other as his servant.
According to Hegel, however, historical evolution turns the servant into the
real master. To better serve his master, the servant has to work hard and trans-
form the objective world. With time, the subjugated – now an intellectual or
scientist – has become, with the great revolutions, the master. Modern democ-
racy is the supremacy of the servants.
Lacan in contemporary thought 61

In the wake of this, Lacan develops the concept of the Other with a capital O
without which I would be unable to recognize myself as a subject. The differ-
ence is that in Hegel, I confront myself with an other who wants to be recognized
like me, whilst in Lacan the confrontation occurs with the Other, which does not
exist. It’s a fight to the death with someone dead. We will see later what Lacan
means by the Other.
In this way Lacan introduces into psychoanalysis the Nietzschean dimension
of the “will to power,” which was always secondary in Freud. Hysteria, obses-
sive neurosis, and phobias are thus interpreted from the point of view of power
relations with the Other. For a hysteric woman, the Other – usually incarnated
by her father – is impotent, and not only in the genital sense of the term. For
the obsessive, the Other is a coercive punitive father, and he spends his life
waiting for his death. The phobic is searching for a father with the power to
terrorize him, and so on. Every “psychopathology” features a form of struggle
with the Other.
For Hegel, the stakes of the fight to the death are the recognition of one’s
freedom, whilst for Lacan, that which wants to be recognized is désir. For
Freud, a dream or a neurotic syndrome are ways for certain desires to repre-
sent themselves without the subject recognizing them. In Hegel or Winnicott,
there is the desire to be recognized as subjects. At the basis of Lacan, however,
is there not, rather than the desire to be recognized as subjects – like in Hegel
or Winnicott – the recognition of a desire so that subjectivity may, so to speak,
fulfil itself ?
One wonders whether recognizing a desire implies a form of action, and
therefore what the relationship between psychoanalysis and taking action – for
example, political, aesthetical, or entrepreneurial – consists of.
Psychoanalysis is intrinsically sceptical about acting out. The analyst fears
that, instead of desiring motionlessly on the couch, subjects will move on to doing
something that will give them enjoyment or suffering. For example, grabbing
the analyst by the neck – to kiss or strangle her. Strangling, kissing, eating a dish
of fresh brains; any act should be interpreted symbolically as if it were a dream
or neurotic symptom.
In the past analysts would prescribe patients not to marry or change jobs
during analysis and devote themselves entirely to analytic elaboration. Such pre-
scriptions are no longer made. Obviously not all actions carried out outside ana-
lytic sessions are an “acting out,” but the analyst always suspects that deep down
all of the patient’s actions are a form of acting out.
This doesn’t exclude the fact that many psychoanalytically oriented thinkers
believe in action – political action in particular. Slavoj Žižek is one of them. But
there is a tendential mistrust of action. And when analysts are politically involved,
they often face problems with their psychoanalytical institutions.
The Austrian Marie Langer became famous in Argentina as a Marxist and
feminist psychoanalyst. The Viennese Psychoanalytical Association never
accepted Langer in the 1930s, because of her anti-fascist activities. All the young
62 Lacan in contemporary thought

activists against the authoritarian regime of Dolfuss – a precursor of Nazism –

were expelled from the analytic association. Not because the senior analysts, who
were mainly Jewish, were pro-fascist, but because they saw political militancy
as a form of acting out. At one point, the Viennese analysts even began to invite
officers of the regime’s police forces to their meetings to allow them to ascertain
that “we are not involved in politics!” ( Roudinesco and Plon 1997, pp. 612–615).
But what lies at the bottom of many analysts’ political indifference is a basic ethi-
cal rejection of “action.”

7 Desire and the skinny virgin

Let us return to the question of desire. The early Lacan develops a form of exis-
tentialist Hegelianism, so-to-speak. He makes the manque à être, the lack of being
or being deficit, the centre of subjectivity. According to Heidegger, Dasein lacks
“presence,” insofar as it is a project and an anticipation, but it does not lack being.
What counts in Lacan, by contrast, is the lack-of-being, the hole around which
subjectivity as a whole rotates. The desiring being desires “to be,” but will never be.
Hence Lacan develops a vision of human desire that I would call anorexic.
Significantly, he uses the term aphanisis, by which he means the extinction or
disappearance of desire. In this phase of his thinking, castration is not so much
the incapacity to no longer enjoy sex, but the incapacity to desire. This is partic-
ularly evident today with tools such as Viagra. Many males – not only the old –
complain not of impotence, but of being unable to desire women, or men in the
case of homosexuals, and this makes them feel half dead. And in fact, because
Lacan essentially understands the subject as desiderans, then the subject itself risks
disappearing in the twilight of desire.
In the 1950s and 60s Lacan centres on desire, which gives “life” to the subject
by never finding satisfaction in a determined object. This is what the Lacanian
theory of anorexia is based on. It is an ascetic enjoyment in which mainly young
females engage, that prospers almost exclusively in well-off countries where obe-
sity rather than hunger is the main problem. Anorexia is also an anerosia, a lack of
Eros: authentic anorexics also reject carnal relations with men or women. If they
love someone, they do so only through Facebook or WhatsApp. The “skinny
virgin” refuses to satisfy herself with food or orgasm because, in so doing, she
preserves herself as a desiring being and hence as a subject. She fears food or
the penis like the plague, because they could close the openings of her being a
subject. Her want of fat is her greatest wealth, and the “true” anorexic is often
in high spirits, frenzied and triumphant. So, at the time, Lacan developed an
anorexic-like theory of human beings.
We saw how for the ancients, relinquishing satisfaction – relinquishing direct
seizure of the glabrous boy or of the structure (the idea) – was limited to a philo-
sophical élite. Instead for Lacan, we’re all “philosophers.” Saint Augustine said
that we must love. We desire to desire, and desire, far from extinguishing itself
in pleasure, relaunches itself in a spiral.
Lacan in contemporary thought 63

8 Purloining philosophy and the music of ideas

An Italian philosopher wrote about a doleful quip common among Italian phi-
losophy students: “to do philosophy we have to hang around with the Lacani-
ans!” Today’s philosophy faculties, especially in Italy, are dominated either by
Anglo-American analytic philosophy or by a purely philological approach that
understands philosophy as a cultural heritage from the past, to be preserved like
the excavations of Pompeii. So, “continental” philosophy is apparently only kept
alive, outside the museums of philosophy, by the Lacanian circles.
Yet Lacan always said he was not and did not wish to be a philosopher, despite
his plundering of philosophical themes. His audience were psychoanalysts, not
philosophers. He also ransacked other disciplines, from linguistics to mathemat-
ics. This is why Badiou (2018) situated him among the anti-philosophers (with
Pascal, Rousseau, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein). Nevertheless, it is a
fact that many philosophers are attracted by his thinking.
But the opposite of what Ronchi quotes is also true. I’ve noticed that when
philosophy lectures are given at many Lacanian schools of psychotherapy, stu-
dents often say “I finally understand something about Lacan!”
In short, “to understand Lacan we analysts have to hang around with the
philosophers.” It is absolutely significant that Jacques-Alain Miller, one of the
leaders of the Lacanian school and editor of Lacan’s Complete Works, studied
philosophy. This is where the crucial problem of the transmissibility of a thought
or of a praxis emerges.
What do these philosophers, who can explain Lacan more effectively than
so many analysts, actually help us understand? They help us understand a clari-
fied Lacan, one whose concepts can be conveyed clearly and distinctly. A little
like what I’m trying to do here; I’m someone who considers clarity a moral
duty. Despite everything, philosophy is on the side of science and mathemat-
ics, not on the side of art, politics or psychoanalysis; in other words, it aims
at clarifying our ideas. Even though many modern philosophers are actually
un-conveyable.
But a doubt remains: is what is clarifiable and comprehensible in Lacan really
“the thing Lacan”? Is it not a little like turning poems into prose, as they made
us do at school to check whether we’d “understood” them? What do we lose in
the conversion to prose? As I said, we lose the Witz, the joke, the pun, the echo
of the “plethora of the signifier” of which I spoke.
When Lacan kept repeating that he absolutely did not want to do philosophy,
he did not do so out of vanity. He wanted to challenge philosophy on its own
turf, to lure it into making itself say something other than what it wants to make
us understand. He blocked clarification with something conceptually opaque
that would provoke explicative erections without penetrating sense. If we cannot
digest this non-clarifiable quality in Lacan, we end up mixing psychoanalytic
apples with philosophical oranges. Even if it is commonly thought that Lacan’s
essential reference was philosophy.
64 Lacan in contemporary thought

We can say that Freud’s reference discipline was archaeology, Jung’s was cul-
tural anthropology and the history of religions, M. Klein’s the observation of the
precocious mother-child relationship, Winnicott’s paediatrics, and Bion’s Bud-
dhism. Whilst one of the disciplines Lacan referred to the most was philosophy.
But Lacan’s use of philosophical texts – from Plato’s Symposium to Aristotle,
from Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, to Hegel, and Heidegger . . . – is not
heavily criticized by those philosophers who would like to “clarify” according to
analytic philosophy. Rather, the most significant criticisms of Lacan – I’m think-
ing of Derrida’s, Lacoue-Labarthe’s, and Nancy’s – are not from traditionalist
academic philosophers, but from philosophers who blame him for not having
gone far enough, for having remained attached to a logocentric (and phallocen-
tric) vision, and ultimately to a humanistic conception of the unconscious.
However, Lacan attracts philosophers and non-philosophers insofar as, instead
of clarifying, he creates thought-events. Consider some Lacanian semi-slogans such as
“there is no sexual relationship” or “woman is not-whole [ pas-toute: not-every].” They
strike us as other thought-events that ended up giving the world a particular direction.
Consider statements such as “man is the measure of all things” by Protagoras. Or
the “epiméleia heautou” – “care for self” – of the ancient Greeks; or “all human beings
are born free and equal,” or Nietzsche’s “God is dead.” These are mostly gratuitous
statements, given to us without the philosopher paying the levy of demonstration.
Yet empires, wars, genocides, enthusiasms and desperations, poverty and prosperity,
have been generated by such philosophemes, by charming bursts of thought-events.
Sometimes when we listen to a particular piece of music we say “this music
is making me think!” About what? About no specific concept, yet it’s a piece of
music that makes us thoughtful, one that reminds us that the world and life are
things to think about, that do not lend themselves to absent-minded simplicity. I
think that certain authors are like this “music that makes us think.”
After all, what counts is the music of ideas. Some authors say the right things, but
their thinking has no musicality and so what they say sounds irrelevant. Those
with a taste for Lacan understand his music. For example, I don’t understand cer-
tain types of actual music nor certain ways of doing philosophy, therefore they
give me no enjoyment. What makes a thinker great is not the fact that he or she
has discovered definitive truths, but the fact that his or her ideas have the right
rhythm, the rhythm that leads (many of us) “to think.” If this conversation of
mine is to be of any value, then it will be because I have produced a conceptual
music for certain readers, rather than stated certain truths. The perception of
stated truths is a trompe-l’intelligence of this music of concepts.
It is by distorting certain philosophical texts that Lacan has enriched them,
resituating them in a new regime of sense. The same thing surrealism did with
the figurative arts. I think that Lacan is to current psychoanalysis what surrealism
was to the more traditionalistic arts of the 20th century.
Let’s take the painting “L’ange du foyer ” by Max Ernst, for example. What does
this painting really represent? It could be read, of course, as a representation
based on the fantastic beings. We see a figure, part human, part monster, which
Lacan in contemporary thought 65

seems to be hyperbolically pouncing upon a piece of land. Is this “angel of the

hearth” supposed to represent the monstrous side of the good housewife? We
then realize that a purely figurative reading of this painting allows us to capture
its abstract, non-representational tone. In other words, it is not a representation
of monstrous creatures, but an uncertainty in giving them form and sense. On
the one hand the painter encourages us to take an interpretative path, but soon
condemns it, in the way we say a door is “condemned.” We can still see its shape,
but it is walled up, still inviting us to see something figural in the work. It is a
painting suspended between figuration, expressionism, and abstraction; images
that never coagulate once and for all into describable representations.
My feeling is that Lacan does something similar. Some say “Lacan is a
philosopher,” but in him we can find plenty of traits that are absolutely non-
philosophical. It is even uncertain whether his is a theory in the strictest sense.
Under many aspects it does present itself as a monumental theoretical system. But
under others, it presents itself as a series of literary pages written in a baroque style.
The writing and speech of Lacan are reminiscent of the writings by psychotics
he published in his younger days. Lacan’s writing is also psychotic, because some
psychotic discourses are like Ernst’s painting: something that apparently tends to
a sense, but fades into other discourses, like a discordant polyphony.
Lacan notoriously infuriated not only philosophers, but specialists more gen-
erally from all the disciplines he plundered, who often condemned the use he
made of linguistic, philosophical or mathematical concepts as malpractice. Lin-
guists, for example, reproached Lacan for his off hand use of some of de Saussure’s
and Jakobson’s concepts.
Something Lacan couldn’t deny. So he declared “moi, de la linguistique, je m’en
fous,” “I don’t give a shit about linguistics.” Then he made fun of himself, saying his
wasn’t linguistics but “linguistérie,” “linguisterics.” A neologism we can understand
as “hysterical language.” Or as “language shop” (in French, terms that define com-
mercial activities often end in -erie, like pâtisserie, brasserie, boucherie). And he could
have said the same of all the disciplines he based himself on. His was “philosophérie”
and “mathemathérie.” He purloins the various disciplines he uses, like Poe’s letter.
It would be naïve to think that Lacan’s disarraying of non-psychoanalytic
authors is the result of an artlessness or amateurism on his behalf. The distortion
of certain theories seems to be calculated, something that he even admitted to on
occasion. These diversions respond to his intent to “psychoanalyze” the theories he
bases himself on, in the sense of making them say what they do not manifestly say,
but that is nevertheless nestled in a conceptual latency in the theories themselves.

9 Dionysian thinking
Though not explicitly, Lacan makes reference to Georges Bataille’s thinking,
and he had close, even personal relations with Bataille. Indeed, Lacan became
the companion and then husband of Bataille’s former wife Sylvia, adopting their
daughter Laurence, an analyst herself, who died in 1986.
66 Lacan in contemporary thought

Lacan doesn’t mention Bataille even once in the Ecrits and only quotes him a
few times in the seminars, and there not exactly in f lattering terms. In any case,
if it’s difficult for me to say the extent to which Bataille may have inf luenced
the psychoanalyst, it seems evident that they both belong to the same cultural
“family.” And I think the name we could give this family is Dionysianism. Lacan
was a Dionysian dandy.
The Dionysian tradition is particularly profuse in French culture. We can
count among its members authors such as Deleuze, Guattari, Debord, Baudril-
lard, Sollers, Maffesoli, and many more.
Bataille found a term for Dionysianism: sovereignty. This is dépense, waste,
squandering in laughter, in inebriation, poetry, sacrifice, ecstasy, and eroticism.
Now, what all these things have in common is the fact that they are all over the top
experiences, i.e. they clash with the wise administration of pleasures and goods.
According to Bataille there is a restricted economy, or a “towing the line econ-
omy,” as I would call it, which corresponds to what we call “the economy” in
the strictest sense of the word; goods exchange value and so on. But there is also
a general economy, which starts from surpluses and excesses of energy and, by defi-
nition, are not useful. Dionysianism is the opposite of Utilitarianism, which –
according to Lacan, but also in my opinion – is Freud’s starting point.
How is this romantic maudite celebration of excess related to Lacan’s thought,
which instead seems to be inscribed, like Freud’s, in a rather tragic vision? Yet,
we shouldn’t let appearances deceive us. I think that Lacan’s return to Freud is
also a reinterpretation of Freud in a Dionysian key.
It would be enough to consider how Lacan conceptualizes the end of analysis.
The end is also the aim: does analysis end when it has achieved that aim? We said
that its end is not curing the symptom, even though – dodging the theory – this
is precisely what the analysand hopes for. Freud wrote that the end of analysis is:

Wo es war, soll ich werden.

(Freud 1933, SE 22, p. 79; GW, 15, p. 86)

A testamentary statement.
There’s a diatribe on how to translate this sentence. The Standard Edition trans-
lates it with “where id was, there ego shall be.” But Freud doesn’t say “das Es” or
“das Ich,” only es and ich. Lacan gives this lack of determiners a great relevance.
I would render Es with It, not with the Latin Id. Freud did not use Latin
(with the exception of the term libido), but common German. Werden can mean
become, get, take over, happen, grow into. Therefore, a possible translation is:

(1a) “Where it (es) was, there I have to take over.”

Another is:

(2a) “Where it was, there I have to become.”

Lacan in contemporary thought 67

There’s an obvious difference between the two translations. In fact, two polar
psychoanalytical ideals are possible according to whether I interpret my duty as
taking over the unconscious, substituting myself to the unconscious, or as entering
the space of the unconscious. So, this statement of Freud’s can be interpreted in the
sense that

(1) the Ego must dislodge the unconscious, impoverish it, dry it up,
or in the sense that
(2) I must achieve an unconscious status, I must slide into the unconsciousness
while remaining I (myself ).

The first sense was adopted by the sort of psychoanalyst who wishes to inte-
grate with psychology, which today we understand as “cognitive.” This was
perhaps the sense Freud intended, considering that he compared analytic action
to the drainage of the sea which, at the time, the Dutch were undertaking in
the Zuiderzee. The end of analysis is then similar to the way in which humans
seize land from the uninhabitable sea. The second sense was adopted by Lacan:
I should be not like a land that invades and dries up the sea, but like the boat
of a single-handed sailor who scampers around the seas, inhabiting it without
sinking.
According the adaptationist reading, the end of analysis is reinforcing the Ego
to help it tackle three saboteurs: inopportune drives, strict moral prescriptions,
and the strenuous requests of the social world around me. For example, if I’m
assailed by paedophile drives, both my Super-Ego and the law forbid me to have
sex with children. And analysis will have to strengthen my Ego, in the sense that
I will have to gradually abandon my paedophilic impulses both to escape the
reproaches of the Super-Ego and avoid being arrested.
But according to the Dionysian reading, in order not to feel guilty we should
not, Lacan says, “give up on our desire” ( Lacan 1986, p. 368). Hence his iron-
ically catechistical question: “have you acted in conformity with the desire
which inhabits you?” ( Lacan 1986, p. 362). Here we have another Wilde-like
prescription, opposite to common sense. People usually think that we feel guilty
when we give free rein to our raffish desires and hurt others. But the dandy
overturns this formulaic ethics: the true guilty action is to relinquish our deep-
est desires.
Some psychoanalyst-philosophers – not to mention any names, Cornelius
Castoriadis – expressed their indignation for such a statement, and said: “[Lacan]
wished to propose an ideology of desire. Now, that Lacanian ideology of desire
is monstrous, because desire is murder, incest and rape” (Castoriadis 1998). But
Lacan’s Dionysian ethics is not an incitement to crime. And, indeed, Lacan later
specified that not giving up on one’s desire is equivalent to “doing one’s duty”
( Lacan 1986). Lacan’s ethics is Kantian. When he said “don’t give up on your
desire,” he meant what we would simply express as “we must never give up on
living for our cause.”
68 Lacan in contemporary thought

10 Salesman’s narcissism
The ancients believed that we each aspire to our own good, and that this good
can be achieved through correspondence with the Good. It is only by ignoring
true Good that we can do evil. For the ancients, knowing what is good and
doing good coincide. It is implicit for Lacan, too, that aiming for the Thing
can never resolve itself in authentically evil actions. This is despite the fact that,
in the same seminar, Lacan not only lingers on the martyr Antigone, but also
on someone who wasn’t exactly a saint, the Marquis de Sade. Yet whilst we can
even destroy the objects we lust after, the Thing beyond them doesn’t lead us to
destroying them.
I think that Freud himself oscillates between the two meanings of the end (as
limit and aim) of analysis that we illustrated previously. And it is in this oscilla-
tion that psychoanalysis expresses one of its existential dramas, one that is still
unsolved today. La chose est la cause, the Thing is the cause for which we can offer
our lives. Ultimately for psychoanalysis, like for the ancients, evil – doing ill to
others – is an illusion: it is, in short, a form of ignorance.
For Lacan, the end of analysis is therefore allowing subjects to access the
place of the unconscious, not by becoming the unconscious themselves, but
by taking on its original and peculiar vocation. In other words, the end of
analysis does not consist in controlling the obscenity of one’s desire, but in
recognizing the Thing that directs that desire. Psychoanalysis should have the
direction of a Dionysian access, which is also an excess. In this sense Lacan is
Bataillean. But then what does it mean to concretely end analysis? Sometimes
Lacan says that at the end of analysis subjects arrive to consciously wanting
what they once desired unconsciously. In the end, subjects fulfil themselves
in their unconscious desire, wearing it like a glove. But what if, for example,
a subject wanted to kill his father? The point is that, for Lacan, unconscious
desire is never wanting something specific of the type “I want to kill my
father” or “I want to seduce all the women in the world,” or anything along
those lines. He thought that our true desire is unspeakable; it is, instead, a
structure. But if the conciliation between desire and subject doesn’t coincide
with wanting this or that, what guarantees that the process of analysis won’t
lead to the awakening of a rogue?
Lacan evokes the cases of an analyst who was tempted to jump on an attrac-
tive and seductive patient in order to make love to her, and of another who
was tempted to hurl an obsessive analysand, one who kept pestering him with
quibbles, out of the window. What prevented them from doing so? The fact that
there are deontological rules that say that it cannot be done? In actual fact, Lacan
says in a Platonizing tone that analysts do not do such things “because they have
different desires from making love to analysands or ridding themselves of obses-
sionals.” And that different desire is the desire of analysing. Analysts don’t err
from their role because their Thing is analysing, not reacting towards the other
like in any other human relation. This is what separated Lacan from so-called
Lacan in contemporary thought 69

relationism. The relation between analyst and analysand is never between two,
but between three: the third element, so-to-speak, is the analysis itself.
In any case, this Lacanian Dionysianism overturns another assumption of
mainstream psychoanalysis according to which analysis is a technique that aims
at a higher wisdom, a fine calibration between expressing deep-down desires
and accepting limitations; a sort of art of savoir-vivre. Many analysts promote
the morals of the stoics.
Now, Lacan rejects this ideal of a wise administration of desires and modi
vivendi as the aim of analysis. Lacan himself, though a socially successful figure,
had undoubtedly very little of the man of wisdom. He never posed as the love-
able and sensible grandpa who imparts fatherly advice to the masses of grieving
television and magazine consumers. On the contrary, he presented himself in the
knotty forms of the Sybil, who can only be half understood, who only follows
his own personal thread.
Most post-Freudian schools, as we said, have given a highly positive value
to the Ego, as English-speakers Latinizingly call it. Instead, for Lacan, the Ego
is an eminently narcissistic instance. And, insofar as it acts in support of our
“personality,” the Ego is even a function of our paranoid relationship with the
world. In other words, though we are not paranoid in the clinical sense, the Ego-
personality is the paranoiac feature within us.
Of course, Lacan doesn’t deny that in each of us, and in some more than oth-
ers, there is a “functioning” part that allows us to manage everyday life. Cog-
nitive psychology, for example, concentrates on this functioning part, the Ego
identified with a knowing calculating mind; in other words, the cynical mind.
But this cognitive-calculative function is of little interest to Lacanian analysts,
who read into the rationality of the Ego a deep resistance to recognizing desiring
subjectivity.
Yet we need only look at our daily interpersonal relationships to realize to
what extent narcissism is an indispensable blunder to help us get by in reality, i.e.
to live – well or badly – with others.
As a child I had an immense respect for adults. I was convinced they knew
far more than me and that their knowledge was always more valid than any
childish opinion. At the same time I noticed that adults often bitterly disagreed
on many things – for example, political opinions, the talent of singers, and so
on. But something else soon troubled me: I began to think that all adults were a
little mad. I realized that, strangely, everyone “thinks they’re someone.” Who do
they think they are? So, still a child, I began to think: everyone thinks they’re
right. Everyone thinks “I’m the coolest!” And when they openly argue about
something, it’s extremely rare for one of the two to say “I take it back; you were
right.” So, as a kid, I was particularly struck by a television drama the name of
which unfortunately I no longer remember.
In his play Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller put Willy Loman (the Low man)
on the stage. Like Loman, the character in this particular television comedy-
drama “thinks he’s something.” He thinks he’s successful and jolly; he woos and
70 Lacan in contemporary thought

seduces women. This “pleaser” was actually put across to the audience as a frivo-
lous charmer, like so many we may stumble upon. One day, Lowman, as I will
call him, f lirts with a young woman and stains his face with lipstick. Amused,
the girl lends him her mirror: Lowman is stunned! “Who are you?” he exclaims
before his image in her mirror. When he looks into his own mirror, he sees a man
just like the one he thinks he is, but now. . . . And the same happens every time
he looks into someone else’s mirror; he is left devastated. Who does he see in the
mirror of the other? The director doesn’t show us, but we infer that it is the person
the others see; a low man.
This is the Ego according to Lacan: the image we see only in our own mirror.
Can we say that analysis leads us to seeing Lowman – the analysand – through
the mirror of the others? Those who think, like Kleinians, that analysis should
lead us to a depressive position, will say yes. I don’t think so. A successful analy-
sis will lead a subject to coming into contact with a “himself ” beyond mirror
images, both for himself and others.
In the wake of Freud, Lacan thinks that narcissism is not a pathology in
itself but, on the contrary, the condition that allows all of us to function in an
acceptable way, like a Lowman. Even if in my life I’ve never achieved anything
worthy of note, I have to “believe in myself,” and nurture the fundamental
self-infatuation that makes me think “I’m cool!” After all, democratic ideol-
ogy strengthens our narcissism: in democracy everyone’s and anyone’s opinions
count and therefore “my opinion” too, even if I know nothing about politics, is
somehow sacralized. Most people, when they see that someone is hostile towards
them, will immediately say “he’s jealous!” A sign of the fact that most of us think
we’re enviable. This is what Lacan notes as the megalomania of every Ego –
unless we look into the mirror of the Other.
For this reason, the man in the hand-in-jacket pose who thinks he’s Napoleon
has become the paradigm of the paranoiac. Why Napoleon? Not because he was
a great general, there have been many others, but, Lacan jokes, because “Napo-
leon was someone who thought he was Napoleon” ( Lacan 1966, p. 170). He was
a low man – also because he was rather short – who became emperor and ended
up dying on a remote island in the Atlantic. “In thinking he is Napoleon,” the
paranoiac at once fulfils his megalomania and ironically and obliquely exposes
every megalomania; the paranoid infatuation of the Ego.
Cognitive psychology considers this aspect under the entry self-esteem. These
psychologists assess the levels of self-esteem, or self-disesteem, of various subjects,
in order to ascertain the extent to which these levels inf luence their activities,
and so on. Lacan, instead, would ask: who does one esteem in self-esteem? Now,
by narcissism both mainstream psychoanalysis and cognitivism mean love of the
self and thinking above all about oneself. They assume there is a Self, which is
more or less the object of narcissistic love. For Lacan, by contrast, narcissism is an
experience of imaginary alienation: it is a love not of one-Self, but of one’s mirror
image. Narcissism is love for the other that represents me. For Lacan we don’t have the
“false Self ” on one side and the “the true Self ” on the other (like in Winnicott),
because there’s no room for the concept of Self in his topology. For Lacan, there
Lacan in contemporary thought 71

is on the one hand the imaginary Ego – i.e. our mirror image, which in our ordi-
nary paranoia we mistake for our self – and on the other, the subject as / S], i.e. an
empty place in a series of symbols, a non-representation. In fact, the bar on the
/S] should also be read as a crossing out, not only as a split.
After Trump’s election to President of the United States, an Italian magazine
asked me: “as a psychoanalyst, do you think Trump is a narcissist?” Saying that
Trump is a narcissist simply amounts to saying that Trump believes in Trump,
in the same way as we all believe in ourselves. For example, whenever there’s
a political discussion, anywhere, I’m always struck by the way everyone thinly
conceals a certain contempt for those who hold a different opinion. Their own
opinion appears self-evident to them, and if someone doesn’t agree, it’s because
they’re a slob. This is obviously not stated, and some don’t even think it con-
sciously, but it’s true. We can say, however, that Trump is the narcissism of
those who voted for him, most of whom probably suffer from serious narcissistic
injuries. Trump, the man of success, tells them “I think what you think! You,
who the New York and California intellectuals scorn as rednecks, as hicks full of
prejudices, as losers. . . . I shall be your narcissism.”
So, a high or lower self-esteem from Lacan’s point of view doesn’t depend on
an assessment of one’s qualities, but on the solidity of the self-infatuation an Ego
is capable of. We’re efficient insofar as we identify with the mirror image – the
ideal image – of ourselves, with our Ego. Luigi Pirandello would say that we
identify with our mask. The point is not taking away the masks from subjects
to show them their true faces, but to expose the fact that they are only masks
(Pirandello called his characters “naked masks”). And in this recognition of being
a mask, the subject advient, “succeeds.”
The point is that showing how each Ego “believes in itself ” has self-referential
setbacks. Insofar as Lacan too was most certainly an Ego – and an extremely
powerful one too – he was obviously himself affected by paranoiac miscompre-
hension. This reinforces many of his pupils, who believe they’re taking part in
the strength of Lacan’s Napoleonic Ego, but who also often risk being led to a
Waterloo in their relationship with “the people.”
Many reject Lacanianism because they believe all they can possibly offer
patients is a perspective consisting of a wise acceptation of one’s limits. The limits
that will lead them to working in some IT company, B&B, or government office
like most of us. Lacanianism seems instead to have an underlying ethically heroic
and supermanly perspective, something not usually applicable to the clients of
analysts, who are mostly quite common people. And many are surprised by the
fact that in several countries – particularly in Latin America – Lacanianism has
become a psychoanalysis for the masses.
I have met several people who underwent long Lacanian analyses. In
most cases I cannot say that their way of weaving into the social fabric is
any different from that of people who came out of other forms of analysis.
The Lacanian analysand will probably talk of “signif iers” and “traversing
the fantasme ,” while the Bionian patient, for example, will talk of “making
things thinkable,” of “transformation,” and so on. But, jargon aside, if their
72 Lacan in contemporary thought

analysis has been successful, their modes of coping in life don’t seem very
different to me.
A Lacanian analyst friend of mine from a Northern European country wrote
heated articles against the adaptive ideal. He told me a little about his life, how as a
young man he’d gotten up to all sorts of mischief: he’d experimented with drugs,
had taken Eastern paths, had had f lings with models, and experiences with swing-
ers. . . . I frankly found his youth quite entertaining. “Then, I went into analysis
with J. [a notable Lacanian analyst] for 20 years and came out once and for all
from that dissolution.” And indeed today he is one of the most prominent analysts
in his city, he has a handsome wife, charming unproblematic children, and his
life is generally prosperous. He is someone who has perfectly adapted to the social
context in which he lives; even though he probably has less fun than he used to.
Until now I still haven’t come across former analysands of Lacanians who
ended up becoming solitary seafarers or down-and-out artists living in small
garrets. They are all quite moderate people, more or less “integrated” in society.
So, what about all the campaigns against Adaptationism, the Dionysian tones
of so many Lacanian teachings? Are they only a pose to seduce restless Parisians
or South American intellectuals who want to distinguish themselves from the
American way of life? Is there a discrepancy between what Lacanians preach and
what they practice? In other words, aren’t the adaptive analysts de facto right?
The point is that for a Lacanian, external behaviour is of little import; Laca-
nians do not practice a social science, they do not deal with the directly observ-
able and computable. Their interest is in the subjective structure. Not the way
someone behaves, but the sense this behaviour has for them. What really counts
is “the way they have rectified their relation to the Real.” There are two dear
friends: one has completed an analysis and has therefore “rectified,” the other has
not, but from the outside the difference is unnoticeable.
In the short story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” ( Borges 2000),
Jorge Luis Borges imagines a minor, early 20th-century French poet who suc-
ceeds in a gargantuan enterprise: rewriting – which does not mean copying –
Cervantes’s masterpiece. His Don Quixote can be perfectly overlapped with the
original text. But are they the same novel ?
Borges shows us with the subtlety of which he is a master, that though they
are literally identical, the two texts actually carry very different meanings. In
fact, the same sentence has one sense for the Spanish reader of the 16th century
and a very different one for the reader of the 20th century. They are two totally
different novels. Lacan would say: the statements (énoncés) are the same, but the
enunciations (énonciations) are different.
Pure literary fantasy? Yet how many times do we find ourselves before sub-
jects that are only “literally” similar, but actually profoundly different.

11 Dilly-dallying sciences
This explains Lacan’s troubled relationship with the “human sciences.” The con-
cept of sciences humaines is very French. The English-speaking world has no real
Lacan in contemporary thought 73

equivalent. It has the humanities, the social sciences and psychology. More recently
Anglo-American culture invented the term cultural studies, a sort of anthropologi-
cal hermeneutics combining Gramsci, Foucault, Barthes, Judith Butler, and Lacan.
Today the term “cognitive sciences” includes all the sciences of human beings that
treat the subject scientifically, thus excluding the humanities and cultural studies.
Forgive me for evoking my own history: the son of a philosophy teacher in
Naples, I grew up in the spirit of the idealism of Benedetto Croce, Giovanni
Gentile, and of Gramsci, the Marxist version of Gentile’s idealism. Italian neo-
Hegelianism rejected the “Human Sciences,” which it considered a creation of
positivism, and radically rejected the presumption that the human being, i.e.
the spirit, could be the object of any kind of scientific knowledge. Given the
fundamental presumption of freedom of the spirit, there can only be a science of
the human body, not of the human spirit, because science itself is a product of the
spirit, of subjectivity.
As a young man, moved by an Oedipal urgency to go beyond my paternal
Hegelianism, I plunged into the study of the human sciences, including psycho-
analysis, which I considered a science among all the others. French structuralism
attracted me precisely because, in contrast to the existentialism of the previous
generation, it centred on these vilified human sciences and denied the funda-
mental freedom of man. Was Freud not a determinist? Did Foucault not write
that the very concept of “man” is a relatively recent historical product? I had read
structuralism as an anti-spiritualism, but today I know that I was completely
deceiving myself.
It took me some time to understand that my passion for Lacan as a student in
Paris, was actually leading me to the same Hegelianism, hostile to the human
sciences that, as an avant-gardist of the sixties, I had gone out of my way to chal-
lenge. The Neapolitan Croceans laughed when psychoanalysis was mentioned –
in exactly the same way as Steven Pinker-style positivists laugh at it today.
However, I was seduced by psychoanalysts who were no less Hegelian. Without
realizing it, I had come full circle: I had abandoned my father in Naples only to
find him again – without recognizing him – in the Quartier Latin.
Today these dynamics of intellectual offspring trying to transcend their fathers
aren’t very different and the children of psychoanalysts or of psychoanalysis buffs
often go on to study neurosciences or cognitive sciences, evidently doing what
my generation did at the time: overtaking their parents on their same route
and making them appear to themselves as old bangers. I wouldn’t be surprised,
therefore, if these youngsters who want to mark their parents as old fogeys will
one day end up rediscovering Freud through the neurosciences. After all, as we
mentioned, he was one of the founders of the neurosciences. This is the totemic
banquet that follows every Oedipal killing of the father.
So, as a young man, I saw in the feelings of disgust of a Baudrillard towards
sociology, though he was himself a qualified sociologist, the same contempt the
Neapolitan high school teachers had for “those blasted sociologists and psycholo-
gists.” In Paris, however, only some sciences were rejected, whilst others were seen
as models: structural linguistics, cultural anthropology – especially of the French
74 Lacan in contemporary thought

variety – Marxist sociology in the style of Bourdieu, and psychoanalysis. Because

these were romantic human sciences (even though the term “romanticism” was
also rejected), receptive to the inf lux of phenomenology and of Heidegger. The
other human sciences – the “positivist” ones, the “bourgeois adaptative Ameri-
can” ones – were considered dismal sciences, like economics for Thomas Carlyle.
And the rejection was always based on the same principle: that human subjectivity
cannot authentically be the object of objective study, and the pretence to take it as
such removes what is really essential, the Dasein, the Being-there.
Not even Lacan had a high opinion of the “human sciences” – apart from, of
course, linguistics, anthropology, and, strangely, game theory. He couldn’t have
imagined that the latter would become one of the pillars of cognitivism. In fact,
he was interested in “human sciences” only when they were structuralist, that is,
when they put the language at the core of their approach.
A revealing anecdote: during Easter 1953 Lacan wrote to his brother Marc-
François, a Benedictine monk, illustrating his work and asking to meet the Pope
so he could talk to him about the future of psychoanalysis in the church. He was
obviously going through a manic phase, as he had just made a similar request to
the secretary of the French Communist Party, which at the time was the political
and ideological force most opposed to the Catholic Church. Though he declared
he was an atheist and belonged to libertine cultural circles, he claimed in this letter
to his brother that his theses belonged to Christian tradition. He wrote that he was
practically the only thinker who taught a doctrine that roots psychoanalysis as a
whole within a great tradition: the one that states that man cannot be reduced to an object
(Roudinesco 1993, p. 274). It seems to me that Lacan is here confiding in his brother
the deepest sense of his thinking: the rejection of any objective, scientific, approach to
human subjectivity, the refusal to turn it into the object of knowledge, predictions,
or calculations. But this is a rejection that characterizes every form of idealism.
It’s true that Lacan valued a combinative vision of subjectivity, hence his
evocation of the “conjectural sciences” – his name for the sciences humaines –
of logical/mathematical models, of topology, and so on. Is this a contradictory
oscillation in Lacan? Or is it part of his dream of a good science, so-to-speak, a
structural and qualitative one, as opposed to a mean science, metrical, quantitative,
calculational, and statistical?
Lacan would later say in the Seminar, that the only function of the human
sciences

is to form a branch, of the service of goods, which is no doubt advantageous

though of limited value. Those fields are in other words a branch of the
service of those powers that are more than a little precarious [in the origi-
nal French, branlants dans le manche, shaky at the handle, dilly-dallying].
( Lacan 1986, p. 373)

At the “service of goods” are the objects of “bourgeois dreams,” i.e. all private
goods, all family and domestic goods, professional goods, and so on; in other
Lacan in contemporary thought 75

words all those things that most people believe to be a condition for being happy,
or at least as unmiserable as possible. The political and economic powers “serve
these goods,” which others call acquisitive, and so – Lacan strangely adds – they
dilly-dally. Branler dans le manche refers to the degree of play between a pot and its
handle, which makes the grip on the metal unsteady, shaky; it means not being
ready to do what one has decided, being irresolute; and also seeing ones position
or fortune as being under threat. In short, Lacan didn’t believe that the human
sciences on the one hand and the political and economic powers on the other
were really effective; he considered both to be awkward and unstable.
But then did Max Weber, Georg Simmel, Jean Piaget, John M. Keynes,
Niklas Luhmann, to name only a few, dilly-dally too? Hard to believe. Ulti-
mately, Lacan’s was an attitude common to many currents of the 20th century –
to neo-Hegelianism as well as to the Frankfurt School, phenomenology and
hermeneutics. These “continental” currents scorn the human sciences for their
wanting to remove the dimension of subjectivity that I called “archaeological” –
the Dasein or intentionality. According to them, the human sciences objectiv-
ize the human being considering it entirely “at the service of goods,” i.e. they
thematize a Homo entirely devoted to obtaining the goods that are supposed
to offer pleasure, satisfaction, and happiness. Note that utilitarianism consid-
ers all these terms ultimately equivalent; with not much subtlety, all it needs
is the emoticons ☺ or ☹. In this vision, the human sciences – the long arm of
utilitarianism – are the cognitive superstructures of the values of what Lacan
calls “capitalist discourse.”
Yet, Lacan himself said that Freud’s theory took Bentham’s utilitarianism as
a starting point. Hence the centrality of Lustprinzip, which Lacan interprets –
in my opinion in a distorted way – as “pleasure principle,” and not as desire-
enjoyment principle. The mastery of the pleasure principle is indeed at the basis of
every utilitarian vision, and in particular of modern economic policy as a whole.
Freud thought – but he was mistaken – that he was entering the positivist, and
therefore utilitarian, line of his time. Instead, as Lacan and all anti-utilitarian
Freudians think, at one point Freud starts talking about a beyond the pleasure
principle, a beyond utilitarianism. Freud doesn’t dilly-dally. And indeed, by
admitting there is a beyond the desire/pleasure principle, he effectively expels
psychoanalysis from the “human sciences,” which today are cognitive.
The admonition against the cognitive sciences – as knowledge on calculable
pleasures – is hence a consequence of Lacan’s fundamental Dionysianism. But
what can a theory of the subject that doesn’t take the subject as its object consist
of? It can only be a theory that describes nothing about the subject, that doesn’t
wish to say anything about it, but only wants to specify its place. This is why
Lacan distinguishes rigorously between the Ego (le moi ) and the subject ( Je). The
Ego is an object of science because it is an actual alienation, it is the subject’s
illusion in believing, as we’ve seen, that he is “someone.” Whilst the subject “is
what it is not and not what it is,” as Sartre defined the “for-itself,” the subject
(Sartre 1956). The Dasein is not an entity that is simply present or objectifiable.
76 Lacan in contemporary thought

The subject is desiring, but desire doesn’t coagulate into an “Ego”; it is always a
tension towards something, towards some Thing.
This is why Lacan would write the subject as / S], the barred signifier. He
writes it in negative terms: as something that cannot be the object of any knowl-
edge, but which we must always imply in everything that a subjectivity expresses.
This subject that can never be the object of any knowledge is a desiring project
thrown into enjoyment.

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4
THE THREE REGISTERS
The Real

1 Imaginary as a mirror
As we know, Lacan distinguishes between three registers: the Imaginary, the
Symbolic, and the Real. The distinction was set forth at a time when Lacan
thought that the symbolic order prevailed. In fact, the very choice of the word
registres makes the three something symbolic. A register is a book where official
records are written down and the word comes from the Latin regesta, transcribed
acts, a “repetition of gesta, of acts.” The reference to transcription therefore gives
all three Lacanian registers a symbolic fabric.
At first, the distinction between the three registers seems a simple idea. Upon
a more careful examination, however, they come across as being quite different
from how analysts of other schools would describe the symbolic, the imaginary,
and the real. Abandon all hope, ye who enter Lacan’s system hoping to find con-
firmation of your conceptual habits!
And indeed, the Lacanian Symbolic symbolizes nothing in particular, whereas
the Imaginary is founded on an initial visual experience and becomes confused
with our perception of the environment. As for the Real, it is by no means the
reality surrounding us.
But let us begin with the Symbolic. Lacan separates it from the close relation
between the signifier and the signified, which turns a symbol into a sign. We
said that in Saussure, signifier and signified are closely connected in the sign, like
two sides of a sheet of paper.
But, in the wake of Lévi-Strauss, Lacan bends Saussure to his needs. Because
for Lacan what really counts is the signifier, not the effects or consequences it
may have in terms of signifieds. We are therefore at the opposite end of “sym-
bols” in the Jungian sense, which are usually archetypical, i.e. having universal
significations for all, regardless of specific languages or what a symbol may mean
78 The three registers: the Real

in relation to the unrepeatable history of each individual. In other words, Lacan’s

Symbolic does not symbolize.
As for the Imaginary, we usually associate it with fantasies, or fantasmes in
French. But what really matters in Lacan is that he uses an experience that is by
no means imaginary as the prototype of the imaginary register: us looking at
ourselves in the mirror. In the mirror, we of course see our image, which is by no
means something inside us, but something entirely outside us. For Lacan, therefore,
the imaginary begins not as an internal or private experience, but as an external
encounter in relation to an image we perceive before us. And he sees this encoun-
ter as the key to paranoia, as we shall later see. The fantasme is something that
grasps us from the outside and at the same time something that “belongs to us.”
The point is that psychoanalysis after Freud accepted the – let’s call it
“common” – topology of the subject: an inside versus an outside. The psyche is
conceptualized on the model of the animal body, which is basically a closed bag
with several openings or holes – mouth, anus, eyeballs, vagina. . . . Lacan said that
for us the soul is a duplex of the body; we imagine it as having the same structure.
The problem for analysts would then be to try to understand what comes out
of the bag, what goes inside it and what stays there. Hence they will talk about
internal or external objects, about containers and contents, and so on. The Laca-
nian model of subjectivity is instead more like two sides of a border, but a mobile
one, like borders are in reality: we have “the side of the subject” versus “the side
of the other.” Lacan replaces the opposition inside/outside – or, if we prefer, in-
the-bag/out-of-the-bag – with the fundamental opposition subject/other.
This is the so-called L schema, on which I shan’t comment here. It will suffice
to say that S stands for “subject”; a¢ as “other” is the object a; a as “ego” means
the mirroring of the object on the subjective side; and Other (A) is a symbolic
dimension which coincides with the unconscious (Figure 4.1). As we can see,
the two instances on the left are somehow subjective, we have S (the subject)
and the ego; the two instances on the right are the other and the Other. In this
schema we need to imagine a longitudinal line cutting it in half, which crosses
the point where the imaginary relation and the unconscious intersect: this is the
line that separates the subjective side from the side of the other (or, if we prefer, of

(Es) S a ′ other

n
io
l at
re
a ry un
n co
a gi ns
im cio
us
(ego) a A Other

FIGURE 4.1 Scheme L

The three registers: the Real 79

the object). As we can see, the fundamental opposition ceases to be inside/outside

and becomes more like being-on-the-side-of-the-subject/being-on-the-side-
of-the-other. And this division never has a clear border, but bounces back and
forth between the two sides of the division.
One of Lacan’s earliest contributions, in 1936, dealt with “the mirror stage.”
There is a phase in infancy during which children play with their image in the
mirror, knowing full well that they’re seeing a semblance. Instead, when Narcis-
sus saw his ref lection in the water he believed he saw an other very handsome boy.
According to Lacan, this mirror image gives coherence to a body that still doesn’t
perceive itself as an organic whole and, for this reason, the mirror image becomes
the prototype of every narcissistic idealization.
Freud sometimes talks of the Ideal Ego and at other times of the Ego Ideal.
Whilst commentators often think he is referring to the same thing, Lacan in
fact makes a distinction between the two concepts. The Ego Ideal is symbolic
and the Ideal Ego is imaginary. An example: I can say that a Ferrari is an ideal
car, i.e. I see it as the ideal image of a car. But if I’m a Ferrari engineer, I aim at
an automobile-ideal that the current motor vehicle with the Ferrari logo only
partially fulfils: I have in mind a symbolic criterion for the car. Therefore, the
Ideal Ego is the mirror image as the figure of what we believe we are or would
like to be. Everything that will later develop as imaginary life – including the
intricate unconscious fantasies that psychoanalysis brings to the surface – has this
mirror-like matrix and tends to an idealization of one’s self, or of an other as the
ideal image of one’s self.
Lacan says that our perceptive relationship to the world, to the environment
in which we dwell, is structured in an imaginary way; something that sounds
unsustainable. How can I say the computer I’m fiddling on now is structured
in an imaginary way? What could be more realistic than the world around me?
And there’s more. Lacan also uses the concept of the imaginary to denote
what structures animal life, both ours and that of animals in the stricter sense.
For him, the animal is trapped in the imaginary, i.e. in a game of mirrors, and
when we let these mirrors entangle us, then we become “animals,” we forget
our human essence as creatures of the symbolic. Lacan identifies the imaginary
dimension with what ethology studies: with our behaviour. Every time Lacan
talks of the Imaginary dissolved by the Symbolic, we can be sure he is referring
to the ethology of Homo sapiens. Here Lacan is evidently overturning another
obvious concept according to which animals are instead dominated by absolutely
real biological mechanisms. The biologic reality of animals is to be responsive to
imaginary captures.
I think that what Lacan says about the – animal – imaginary structure of our
relationship to the world has been confirmed to some extent by the discovery of
mirror neurons.
It’s a real pity that so many Lacanians today scorn the neurosciences as
“reductionist and mechanistic.” Lacan, however, did not indulge in this kind of
obscurantism. On the contrary, he always tried to keep up with the important
80 The three registers: the Real

scientific discoveries of his age and concerned himself with cybernetics and the
linguistics of Chomsky; with cognitivism, basically. In particular, Lacan never
attacked or disdained the neurology of his time. But most Lacanians do not fol-
low his example.
Mirror neurons were discovered in the brains of monkeys – and later in those
of humans – by a team in Parma, Italy, headed by Giacomo Rizzolatti. Mirror
neurons are in the motor area of the brain, and so should be associated with
movement, but this is not so. If I see someone picking up a glass to drink, certain
motor neurons are activated in my brain too, and they “shoot” as if I were pick-
ing up the glass myself. At the same time, neurons connected to drinking shoot
too, so that I anticipate the act of the other in an imaginary way – I see his aim
and imitate it. Therefore, as I’m actually absolutely still, I can say that my mind
acts as a mirror to the finalized movements of others. But a mirror is something
purely visual, whilst here we are dealing with motor “mirrors,” simulational
ones. I “am doing” what another is doing without moving.
Now, if we must choose a quintessential Lacanian image, it must be the mir-
ror, and I find it strange that Lacanians today disregard this discovery. To this
let’s also add that in humans, these neurons are situated, oddly enough, in Broca’s
area, the part of the human brain that ensures the use of language. Therefore
there’s a connection between mirror neurons and language – in Lacanian terms
between the Imaginary and the Symbolic. Today mirror neurons are interpreted
in a Husserlian phenomenological key by some of their discoverers, and so today
everyone says that mirror neurones are the neurons of empathy that allow us to
live through the experience (Erlebnis) of another subject. I think Lacanians could
say something different on this, something alternative to the phenomenological
appropriation.
In actual fact, mirror neurons not only come into operation when we find
ourselves before other human beings, but also with human-like beings. If a
mechanical arm grabs potatoes, the mirror neuron of grabbing “shoots.” And we
even react to cartoon characters as if they were humans. In other words, mirror
neurons couldn’t care less about the distinction Homo sapiens/living animal/
automaton. Do we feel empathy for machines and cartoon characters that mimic
our gestures? Of course. This discovery actually shows that we perceive ourselves
everywhere in the world, and that we “become” the world that we interpret
as our mirror. Our brain identifies ourselves in the world, in the sense that we
interpret the world – even paintings and cartoons – in our own image and like-
ness. This means that the confusion over who or what the real subject is always
possible. In short, we identify in an imaginary way with whatever moves, by
attaching an aim to it. When this identification is lacking, alas, we find ourselves
confronting the Real. Ultimately, the real is what doesn’t cause mirror neurons
to “shoot”; it is everything beyond our imaginary identification with the world.
Lacan gave great importance to so-called infantile transitivism, to the fact
that a child will often call another child he is addressing “I,” and to the fact that
a child cries when other children hurt themselves. Lacan didn’t mention empathy
The three registers: the Real 81

but talked of imaginary identification towards our kind. Mirror neurons tell us
that ultimately we always remain children, because we always remain transi-
tivistic. The only individuals who are no longer children are the few that are
in contact with the Real. Probably autistics. Vittorio Gallese (2006), one of the
discoverers of mirror neurons, put forward this hypothesis to explain autistics:
they are beings with a shortage of mirror neurons. These beings are not-like-
the-world. Now, according to Lacan we cease to be children – we come out
of specularity – when we do mathematics, and autistics are often very good at
mathematics (Tammet 2012). Lacan believed – like Plato – that only with mathe-
matics and formal logic do we free ourselves from the imaginary neuro-specular
dimension of our relationship to the world, and hence obtain access to the Real.
Perception, as Rizzolatti says, is also a motionless monkeying of the other.

2 The signifier and the law

Today we ask ourselves whether Lacan gives any priority to one of the three
registers. As I said, Lacan – at least up to a certain stage – gives priority to the
Symbolic. The Symbolic is the very condition of the unconscious – therefore
only human beings have an unconscious. This is the primacy of the signifier.
This primacy of the signifier seems bizarre to analysts of other schools, who
consider the unconscious more as the realm of affections, emotions, of ineffable
experiences, of beta-elements, as Bion calls them.
Yet the structuring power of the signifier is more or less obvious in politi-
cal and social life, even though the social sciences refer not to signifiers but to
“categorizations.”
In the 1950s, Muzafer Sherif, a researcher of Turkish origins, set up the so-
called Muzafer Sherif Robbers Cave Experiment in a summer camp for boys. He
arbitrarily divided the youngsters into two separate huts – one group decided
to call itself The Eagles and the other The Rattlers – and gave each of the two
groups a f lag. This was enough to quickly create a growing hostility between
the two “identities” – “us versus them.” The researchers launched competitive
activities between the two groups, such as athletic contests, which soon aroused
mutual scorn and antagonism. During the competitions, the members of the two
teams accused each other of cheating, calling each other “swines” and “swin-
dlers,” and so on. Attacks against the “enemy” hut ensued, with the aim of
stealing and burning the f lags, whilst the fights at the shared cafeteria became
more violent every day. The researchers soon realized they’d given life to a mon-
strous xenophobic embryo with two randomly formed groups. In Lacan’s terms,
it was sufficient to represent the two groups as an opposition between signi-
fiers to obtain a political conf lict. The important point was not, as some more
naïve analysts might think, the signifiers we commonly connect to “eagles” and
“rattlesnakes,” two animals that are opposites in many ways. The groups could
just as easily have called themselves X and Y, as the important thing was to con-
struct a purely signifying opposition. How can anyone fail to see that most of the
82 The three registers: the Real

political, ethnic, and religious conf licts that bring bloodshed to the world are the
effect of opposing signifiers?
Let’s move on to a different field. One of the few examples Lacan gives us of
his clinical practice concerns an analysand originating from a Muslim country
( Lacan 1975), who had difficulties using one of his hands. A previous analysis,
aimed at tracing this inhibition back to the prohibition of masturbation, had
produced no results.
At one point, however, the subject evoked an old suspicion of his regarding the
integrity of his father, who had lost his job as a company executive. Did he lose it
because he was stealing? Now, according to the law of the Koran, thieves will have
one of their hands cut off. The re-emergence of this symbolic relation between
theft and amputation of the hand dissolved the symptom. The father had never lost
one of his hands, but “the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children,” and the
man’s son had amputated his own. The symptom expressed a signifier of the law.
The patient had ceased to be a Muslim long before and actually harboured
a deep aversion to the Quranic law. And indeed the law, the symbolic, comes
not from the subject, but from the Other, as Lacan calls the symbolic apparatus.
Broadly speaking, the more we abhor “our” law, the more we are somehow sub-
ject to it, without knowing it. Through the law, which is symbolic in essence,
we are in any case subject to God, or Allah, or JHWH, even if we claim to be
atheists. For Lacan, no one is atheist in the unconscious. Even if today one out of
six human beings declare they’re atheists. But most human beings dedicate a cult
to a God because they have an unconscious. The reason why we don’t know of
any culture without a divinity: the very idea of God and of a law that transcends
us, is implied by the signifier.
But then how can we explain Lacan’s patient’s recovery? In any kind of psy-
choanalysis, I think the most difficult things to explain are therapeutic successes,
whereas a good explanation can always be found for the failures.
A “hermeneutic” analyst will say that Lacan in any case conferred sense to
the symptom; that he built a narration based on the subject’s identification with
a father who had supposedly been a thief. Psychoanalysis certainly bets on sense,
insofar as it is the cause of effects on the patient, though Lacan – going against the
tide – insists on the power of the signifier. Except that, in Lacan, sense functions
as the cause of neurotic symptoms insofar as it emanates from the senseless cruel
letter of the law to which we are subjugated.
The symptom of this apostate Muslim, however, was dissolved; so what hap-
pened exactly? The following problem poses itself: if the symbolic is automatón – as
Lacan says, taking the Greek term that means “at random” (see Lacan 1973) – the
blind law, how can subjects free themselves from it? The Symbolic – Quranic
law in this patient’s case – produces the subject’s disability. And, as an initial
approximation we could say that, by recognizing the symbolic automatism that
has grabbed him, he ceases to struggle against it, adjusting himself to it with-
out suffering it. Is subjectivization then a form of resourcefulness that merely
attempts to deal with our being slaves to the Other?
The three registers: the Real 83

Probably. According to Lacan, reconstruction through words did not produce

the subject’s definitive deliverance from Quranic law, which was unconsciously
being applied inside of him. For Lacan, analysis is not essentially emancipation
nor psychic maturation – even though usually, seen from outside, this is exactly
what it seems to be. Instead, we could suppose that the subject freed himself from
the symptom precisely by accepting the fact that Islam had a firm hand on him,
quite literally. He admitted that Quranic law was still his own unconscious. Now,
only by recognizing himself as being still a Muslim could he free himself from the
effects of Quranic law. This paradoxical outcome can be understood thanks to a
dialectics I call topo-logical.
It is only insofar as we subjugate ourselves to the law that we become subjects;
i.e. we remove – in the sense of Aufhebung – the alienating effects of the law. By
becoming what we are, we cease to be what we “are.” But ultimately what we
“are” is the truth of what we are. . . . Analytical practice consists of navigating
through this vertigo.
Someone who was not fond of psychoanalysis, Jean-Paul Sartre (1995), wrote
a paper in 1944 called Reflections on the Jewish Question. His thesis seems extreme:
as biologically there is no Jewish race, Jewishness is a product of anti-Semitism.
If there were no anti-Semites there would be no Jews. But in this case, is the
solution for authentic free Jews – in other words Sartrian ones – to repudiate
their belonging to Jewishness? No, Sartre would reply, precisely because I am
not a Jew out of my own choice, I must accept to be one for others – or for the
Other, as Lacan would say. Repudiating my belonging to Jewishness is some-
thing inauthentic.
I imagine that with regard to his patient, Lacan’s position was both analogous
and opposite to Sartre’s. Lacan believed we will never be able to free ourselves
from the primacy of the signifier; for example, of my being the product of the
Muslim or Jewish signifier. An infinitely free subject like Sartre’s is unthinkable
according to Lacan. Basically – in non-Lacanian terms – every subject is a prod-
uct of history. However, we can change our subjective position with regard to
what we are. This is what Lacan tries to say with / S], the barred subject; it means
that every subject is a signifier – we are marked by our name, surname, national-
ity, official gender, marital status, etc. Yet a subject is not-entirely-a-signifier.
We can adopt an ironic position with regard to the signifier we actually “are.”
As we can see, Lacan’s position, though it overturns Sartre’s from many points of
view, is akin to the Sartrean predication on the limitless freedom of the for-itself.

3 The empty signifier

Both examples – the opposition between Eagles and Rattlers and the ampu-
tated hand symptom – illustrate what Lacan indicated as the primacy of the
signifier. In the two examples, the signifiers constitute the subjects. In other
words: there are no pre-established social or cultural (let alone sexual) identi-
ties, but rather effects of signifiers, which are differential in their own right. The
84 The three registers: the Real

Quranic law is differential too, insofar as it establishes a difference between

“ hand +” versus “ hand –,” and this difference represents the semantic opposi-
tion of honest versus thief.
Lacan always repeated that “the signifier represents the subject for . . .” – one
would expect “. . . for another subject.” No. “The signifier represents the subject for
another signifier” ( Lacan 1966, p. 822). This is not a definition of the signifier, as the
definiendum (what must be defined) appears in the definiens (that which defines). It’s
more like defining woman as “the being that appears as a woman to the eyes of a
man.” Let’s take the name Eagles in Sherif ’s experiment: it represents a subject –
the group that recognizes itself in that name – because of another signifier, that of
the Rattlers, which in turn defines the other group because of the signifier Eagles.
Lacan is trying to say that the signifiers that are paraded represent subjects that
never come into play as authors; Eagles and Rattlers represent the minds of the
boys only insofar as they allow themselves to be identified in that game.
Not identities but differences are the driving force of the historical and social
world, and of subjective history. This is something that Carl Schmitt had seen
clearly in the political field: it is always based on the difference “friend versus
enemy.” In politics, if you want to win, you must have an enemy; and if there
really isn’t one, then you have to make one up. Something that current politics
clearly proves.
Ernesto Laclau (2005), a political philosopher inspired by Lacan, described
the constitution of any people, whether “the British” people, the “Italian,” the
“Iraqi,” and so on, in relation to something he calls empty signifier. But all signi-
fiers are empty, just like “Eagles versus Rattlers” or “Muslims versus Christians”
and even “Communists versus Capitalists.”
Even Italy, for example, is the effect of a signifier that is ultimately empty. In
the 19th century a few intellectuals decided it was necessary to turn this “geo-
graphical expression” – as the Austrian minister Metternich called Italy – into
a state made up of all the regions where languages similar to Tuscan (today’s
standard Italian is fundamentally the dialect spoken in Tuscany) were spoken.
Achieving this meant wars, bloodshed, martyrs . . . and the signifier “Italy” took
on a political concreteness.
It is immediately clear how such an approach – despite all the efforts in the
opposite direction – is incompatible with Marxism. In the heyday of post-
structuralism, the most prestigious Marxist thinker was Althusser, who also
called himself Freudian and was inspired by Lacan. Now, I think the essential
point about Marxism is the following: historical epiphenomena express – at once
manifesting and disguising – the essence of social relations, which is the struggle
between economic classes. This is so because, for Marxism, the human being is
essentially a producer of goods; “a thinking producing animal.”
Now, I often discuss political matters with people who describe themselves
as Freudian/Marxist/Lacanian, and one thing always strikes me: that when they
talk about politics, they always forget about the primacy of the signifier. When
they speak Marxian, they suppress Lacanian.
The three registers: the Real 85

But very often, economic inequalities are not the primary cause of social conflicts,
but are rather the effect of what I would call the Leviathan Signifier. The Leviathan
was the hideous Biblical whale that inspired Hobbes for the title of his most famous
work. This Leviathan produces wars, racial and ethnic hatred, and slaughter.
Let’s take a conf lict that risks going for centuries: the Israeli-Palestinian. We
can’t say that it’s a conf lict between two religions, because many Israelis and
many Palestinians are non-believers. Between Jews and Arabs? But races don’t
exist. This struggle is unexplainable in Marxist terms, because it would be in the
highest economic interest for both Jews and Palestinians to live in peace. This
nominalist conf lict proves the lethal power of the Leviathan Signifier.
I owe it to Lacan if I can understand that, despite my youthful communist
enthusiasms, I am not ultimately a Marxist. I say “I am not a Marxist,” but Marx
should be read, and not only because he was a genius. He understood so many
things, especially in economics; he realized that the economy is a system! I have
always made a rigorous distinction between Marx and Marxists.

4 The registers of a lecture

The three registers are three ways of relating to otherness. They can ultimately
be seen as three modes of “alienation.” Imagine that you are my audience in a
seminar, and I am the teacher – we fall under two complementary and opposed
signifiers. With regards to me you are the Other, because the audience cannot be
reduced to the fact that it is you, precisely you, who are listening to me. My audi-
ence could have been made up of entirely different people. It would be a problem
if I spoke to no audience, to rows of empty chairs – in that case we could suspect
some psychotic misunderstanding on behalf of the Other. The mad sometimes
talk to themselves in the street, i.e. they talk to the Other as if it existed as Other.
And, as the teacher, I occupy the place of your Other, given that another
fellow could occupy this same position, and probably even make a better job of
it. It then becomes clear why Lacan says that the Other doesn’t exist: of course,
you exist as single listeners, but the audience as such does not exist; it is only an
implicit function for an institution called “holding a seminar.”
Sometimes art and the cinema enjoy making certain signifiers “exist.” The
Nanni Moretti film Sweet Dreams features the director playing himself as the
main character. Every time the Moretti character has a debate with the audience
about one of his films, a boring intellectual stands up to say things like “but why
should a housewife from Treviso or a field hand from Lucania give a damn about
your film?” (Treviso is a dull city in the Venice region and Lucania was until a
few decades ago a poor agricultural area in southern Italy). The intellectual is
obviously quoting clichés. Suddenly, however, just as the usual lame intellectual
is finishing his sentence, we see the appearance of a real housewife from Treviso
and a real field hand from Lucania who have, independently one from the other,
decided to take the train to participate in the debate, as if dragged there by a
transcendental inspiration.
86 The three registers: the Real

This is not a case of psychosis, but of satire. In any case, the Other doesn’t
exist even as a housewife from Treviso. Only housewives from Treviso exist, not
The housewife from Treviso. This example allows us to understand to an extent
why Lacan said that The woman does not exist, that only women exist. / La Femme,
the signifier Woman, Lacan wrote, is lacking in the unconscious (an enigmatic
statement to unravel). For him this deficit explains hysteria: the hysteric is some-
one who is convinced that The Woman exists and tries to understand what She
could be.
In any case, what counts for a subject is to be recognized by the Other. Here
Lacan introduces the Hegelian dimension of recognition, giving the burden of
this to the Other. If I wish to be recognized as a “teaching subject,” it is necessary
for the audience to recognize me as such. Conversely, I will recognize an audi-
ence as an audience if I speak with my face facing them, not if I blabber to myself.
The imaginary register comes into play when instead I look at you the audi-
ence and read some show of interest, pleasure, assent, or wonder in some of you.
In this case are you no longer just filling in as the signifier audience, but . . . are
you concrete people? No, because in this picture you exist for me only insofar
as I read in you what I wish to arouse: I look at myself in you like in a mirror to
capture what I’m thinking and saying. I read in you the complementary or sym-
metrical reaction to what I am saying because it tells me how I appear to you.
You are narcissistically confirming me as teacher. The Imaginary has a narcis-
sistic matrix; it is based on the experience of looking at oneself in the mirror and
finding oneself amazing.
Of course, you, the audience, may also decide to hiss and boo me in disap-
proval, and then I would become the victim of a “narcissistic wound.” You are
wounded when the mirror fails to glorify you, when the “mirror on the wall”
replies to the queen that no, she is not the fairest of them all; Snow White is.
Whether the audience applauds or boos, it still remains an imaginary relationship
between speaker and audience.
What about the Real?
Imagine that while I am speaking now, and you’re all following me carefully,
one of you suddenly stands up and leaves without saying a word, voluntarily
excluding himself from the audience-Other, refusing to convey back to me an
image of my discourse, not even one of disapproval. In so doing, he drops out
from both the Imaginary and the Symbolic.
In the Ernest Lubitsch movie To Be or Not to Be, we meet a stage actor whose
tour de force is Hamlet’s soliloquy. He has started to notice, however, that every
time he begins his “to be or not to be” speech, a male member of the audience
stands up and leaves. This terribly irritates the actor, who follows with his eyes
the only one who disengages himself from the audience. In fact, many actors
can’t tolerate spectators who don’t pay enough attention and, as if attracted to a
black hole, “speak” only to them. Whatever disengages itself from the symbolic-
imaginary bond, whatever resigns from the Other and slips away from the imagi-
nary confrontation with me, Lacan calls object a.
The three registers: the Real 87

Why a? Because it’s the first letter of the word “autre,” the French for other with
a small a, and a different other from the imaginary other who either applauds me
or blows raspberries at me. Whoever leaves, thus breaking the rule of reciprocity,
is a déchet, Lacan says, something that falls away like garbage. Yet the ham actor
addresses the Shakespearian soliloquy to the only person in the audience who
disengages himself. (In the film he later finds out that his wife had an agreement
with her lovers for them to leave at the start of his soliloquy, because that’s when
she would be free to meet them.) Insofar as the other withdraws from the game,
he or she becomes the object of maximum attraction. We could say that actors or
public speakers always address an audience that is about to leave.
Object a, being real, is something lost, a fiasco. But for this very reason, this
object that challenges us is of more interest to us. This is why Lacan can say that
object a, being real, is the cause of desire.

5 Love and war

At first Lacan spoke of object a as the object of the fantasme, of fantasy, which
is, according to Freud, also the object of the drives; i.e. faeces, phallus, gaze –
to which Lacan adds the vocalized word. Donald Trump speaks, and many are
charmed by him (certainly not me): for these people, Trump’s word is object a.
The list of objects is somewhat quaint, including much valued ones, such as
the breasts and the phallus, and obnoxious ones, such as the faeces and urine. Yet,
in almost every language, when we want to express our contempt for something
or someone, we use Grundsprache, the basic language of the drives: we exclaim
“you c**t,” “you d**k,” “f***k you,” “that novel’s crap,” “I’ll spit in your face,”
and so on. Highly valued organs like the vagina and penis, or acts, like coitus,
are interchangeable with highly disrepute “anal” objects. When we’re somewhat
“beside ourselves,” the Freudian drive-objects spurt out of our mouths. Lacan’s
object a – in its two faces, imaginary and real – also has a double value: it is at
once the vilest of things and the most desirable. The offensive word nearly always
has this extraordinary ambiguity. Besides, the maximum vulgarity consists in
putting divine persons together with anal or sexual bodies, as we know.
In my imaginary seminar we saw that we’re dealing with three epiphanies of
otherness. We have the Other, with the capital O of the Symbolic. We have the
other of imaginary relationships, which always leads back to a relationship of love
or unlove, of admiration or contempt, between the other and me. And, finally,
we have an other that is reduced to a letter, a or o. These are the three registers
of otherness.
In fact, it is often found lamentable that Lacan has overloaded the other, espe-
cially the Other with a capital O. Of the Other he says that it is the treasure of
the signifier, the guarantor of truth; that it is that which recognizes us as subjects,
the other sex, the mother in earliest childhood, the analytic position, and so on.
All these facets of the Other make its meaning impenetrable for those who have
not yet entered the Lacanian Wonderland. We don’t have enough room here to
88 The three registers: the Real

show the congruousness of all these “attributes” of the Other. I shall limit myself
to discussing the sense in which Lacan speaks of the Other sex.
For Lacan, attraction between the sexes is not simply the effect of particular
chromosomes dictating, as from puberty, the desire for the other sex. Proof of
this is the existence of homosexuals, who are men or women in every sense but
receive no “dictate” to desire the other sex. (I would add: non-effeminate male
homosexuals often appear super-masculine, the very paradigm of being male;
whilst the non-masculine lesbian also appears to me as the cultural paradigm
of femininity. Homosexuals appear as pure males and females, unadulterated by
commerce with the other sex.) There is of course an animal complementarity in
sexuality according to Lacan, a “biological” that he attaches to the Imaginary.
In addition, however, the sex that attracts “speaking beings” is Other, in the
sense that, for me the teacher, the audience is not simply a group of listeners but
a symbolic function that recognizes me as speaker.
When during adolescence we fall in love with a boy or girl, a unique emotion
reveals a surplus: it is not only the erotic qualities of the person we desire that
attract us, but the fact that they are a sort of alien who is recognizing us as a legiti-
mate desirer. The Other sex carries a delightful alienness, which is indispensable
to desire imposing itself on us in all its chilling gravity. And this goes for homo-
sexual love too, because the loved one of the same sex is symbolically the Other.
We know that this extraterrestrialness of the loved Other – like in the “angel-
woman” of medieval poetry – can, alas, disappear. After months or years of “cor-
respondence of amorous senses,” at one point I may cease to desire my partner,
even if their charms have remained the same. A topological catastrophe has taken
place: my loved one has shifted from the place of the Other to that of “sameness,”
s/he has plunged into the banality of my reality. If this collapse of desire is suffered
by heterosexuals, they will feel that making love to their dismissed lovers would
be like having an embarrassing incestuous or homosexual form of intercourse.
Lacan wants to prove that, even if in its sexual career the parlêtre (the speaking
being) would seem to behave like all other animals, the logos actually transub-
stantiates all the “animal” things it feels and does. The human being is an animal
incurably corrupted by language.
The other is determinant in war too. Ares and Aphrodite are paired, as in the
famous painting by Botticelli. For males, war is not simply a means of defending
their women or their territory, it is also a symbolic act. The emotion of baptism
by fire is that of an initiation to the enemy as an Other, beyond fear and hatred.
The wars described in the great epics – from The Iliad to Coppola’s Apocalypse
Now – are always odes to the enemy as the Other, without which the warrior
wouldn’t be a hero, but only a poor wretch who fearfully attacks or escapes.

6 “Real” others
Some may be wondering: “what about the real others? What’s the place of people
in f lesh and bones standing in front of me in this system?”
The three registers: the Real 89

The others that we take for granted – all the others who are not myself –
actually have no place in this system. There are various “others” in Lacan, but
never the others, who are absorbed into the “other” or the “Other.” The other I
suppose to be a subject more or less like myself seems in Lacan to be split into the
three dimensions: the symbolic, the imaginary and the real other. The supposed
unity of the other-like-me becomes fragmented like in a kaleidoscope.
This is something that frustrates phenomenologists in particular, as they’ve bet
everything on the fact the I immediately recognize the other subject; he or she is
my primal datum, there’s a primal I/You understanding. According to phenom-
enology, we don’t perceive a set of coloured mobile dots that after a rapid process
of inference we recognize as “Mr Kennedy” or “Ms May.” The intentionality of
our perceptive consciousness immediately puts us into relation with the subject
Kennedy or May, not with a robot that we recognize as our counterpart. Only
post factum phenomenology – a rigorously anti-scientific philosophy – describes
our relationship to the world inversely to how science explains it. Science explains,
phenomenology describes. Science starts from global processes and then disman-
tles them to isolate underlying springs and cogs that make an apparent immediate
intuition possible. Phenomenology does the opposite, it sends us back to the life
experience (Erlebnis) through which we have to do with the things of the world,
not with private sensations. “Go back to the things themselves” was Husserl’s
programme. And so, Mr Kennedy or Ms May are people I see (in this sense all phe-
nomenology is a philosophy of perception – see Derrida 1967, p. 117).
By distinguishing between the three “others,” Lacan seems instead to fall
under the analytic programme of science. Analytic, as we said, means that you
conceptually distinguish and separate the various parts of a whole. Psychoanalysis
is called what it is because Freud wanted it to be analytic, like science. And in
fact, many phenomenologists reject Freud and Lacan as “scientists.” Heidegger
too saw Freud’s theory as an objectivist approach to the subject, and therefore as
a monstrosity (Heidegger 1987).
Now, Lacan is not interested in speculatively legitimizing the obvious concept
that on the one hand there is me, and on the other all the others, who are in
turn all Egos. He is interested in reconstructing the history and structure of each
subjectivity. Of course, as adults we all know that the others are egos like us; but
what about children? I’ve met young children who expressed solipsistic theories:
they thought that “only I am I, because only I feel ‘me.’”
This point is crucial, because Freud’s project was to reconstruct the history
of each subject by putting between parentheses – here’s a phenomenological term –
everything that an external observer can see and understand about this subject.
For example, if we observe a newborn, we will see how it behaves in a certain
way, how it sucks its mother’s breast, how it cries, and so on. But what interests
Freud and Lacan is understanding how the baby constitutes itself as a subject.
Obviously the newborn doesn’t know that the warm body it is attached to is
that of its mother, it doesn’t know exactly what a breast is and, besides, it is still
blind. . . . It has nameless experiences with a very different sense from that which
90 The three registers: the Real

is given to them by an adult observer. Freud says that in that phase, the subject
is entirely Lust-Ich, Desire-Pleasure-Ego; there is still no Real-Ich, Real-Ego (see
Freud 1925). This is the reason why some theories that focus on primitive rela-
tions between mother and child – “attachment theory” in particular – eventually
separated from psychoanalysis. Such theories also wish to reconstruct the internal
processes of young infants, but they start from child observation. Observing does
teach some very interesting things, but it risks distracting us from the question
that’s essential for psychoanalysis: the constitution of subjectivity.
As newborns we have no child-mother relationship, but rather, as Lacan says,
a relationship with the Thing. Before everything else, therefore, the child has to
do with the Thing and the Other. And the concrete mother occupies the place
of the Other in the same way that the ladies and gentlemen attending a seminar
occupy the place of the audience.

7 Topology of the Real

In the previous chapter we said that a primacy of the Real began to emerge in the
later Lacan. What do we mean by this? The Real is among Lacan’s most prob-
lematic concepts. I shan’t try to define the Lacanian Real here, because it would
mean betraying its sense. A definition – except in mathematics – says nothing
about the actual use that is made of a concept. And the Real acquires a sense if
we make it function in relation to the other two registers.
As we said, the Real is not the objective reality we refer to in practical life
and in the sciences; but it’s not even the Kantian thing-in-itself, the unknowable
that every knowledge presumes. It is a sort of repercussion of subjectivity itself,
hence of the symbolic: it is the non-subjective part that every subjectivity leaves
behind as an écart, a gap or discard, within its constitution. The Real is whatever
is discarded from subjective signification, what every subject considers impossible.
So, the Lacanian Real has a subjective stance.
When something unthinkable is reported to us, for example “today, the 11th
of September, two planes have destroyed the Twin Towers,” our first reaction is
to exclaim “that’s impossible!” This is when we confront the Real.
If the Real is the rejected and excluded part of subjectivity, then the Real is a
relative concept, i.e. it makes sense only in relation to something that is not real:
subjectivity. For Lacan the subject is not a psychic reality: it is /S, it is se barrer,
which in French means “to bar oneself,” but also “to sneak away.” I am a subject
insofar as I sneak away from what I am. But in a relation between two sides, we
can make one side prevail over the other, we can make it not entirely comple-
mentary. I can interpret the Real as that part of the Ego that the Ego rejects, and
that returns alienated to the Ego as that which is extraneous to one’s self. But
I can also interpret it as that which the subject does not symbolize, that which
comes before any symbolization and is independent from symbolization, some-
thing that remains non-subjective. In this second sense, the Real is no longer
The three registers: the Real 91

FIGURE 4.2 The Torus

the rejected, but is the non-accepted ab initio, with an absolute antecedence to

subjectivity and that remains eccentric to it. The effect of what Freud called
primary repression.
We can illustrate the way Lacan conceives the Real in terms of the yielding of
the Symbolic. The Symbolic yields to the Real in the sense that it cannot symbol-
ize it, it cannot fit it in a chain that follows a certain “law.” But yield can also refer
to the unsold copies of a book, the remaindered books that the retailer can return:
here the Real is the part of the Symbolic that can be returned to the subject as
a remainder that has not reached a symbolic destination. Lacan tried to express
this double face of the Real with the topological figure of the torus: a doughnut
shape (Figure 4.2).
The surface of the figure is the torus itself, while the volume it delimits is
called a toroid. A torus is a surface closed around the central void it circum-
scribes. At the centre of the torus we do not find something “intimate,” like at
the centre of a sphere. The torus instead draws what Lacan calls extimité, exti-
macy, the reverse of intimacy: the centre of the figure is outside it. In the same
way, we can say that the centre of every subjectivity (and therefore of the sym-
bolic components of which it is constituted) is outside of it, in the Real. The void
at the centre that “constitutes” the torus is the figure of the Real.
But does it make sense to ask the question: “did this void exist before the
torus?” The void is a space that contains nothing. The shape that a part of void
seems to take on with the torus is given by the shape of the latter. The void (the
Real) is what lies outside the figure (which is symbolic and imaginary) and it is
also what the figure owes its shape to.
The relationship to the Real relativizes the foremost logocentric instrument:
psychoanalytical interpretation. It is always thought that the analyst is someone
who will offer the patient the standard, more or less sexual, interpretation.
92 The three registers: the Real

During a seminar, Bruno Bettelheim was disturbed by a female student who

was knitting while listening to him. Bettelheim told her that what she was doing
was a metaphorical surrogate for masturbation. And she replied: “no sir, when I
knit, I knit and when I masturbate, I masturbate” (see Leader 2016). It is inter-
pretations such as Bettelheim’s that have ended up turning the analyst into a
farcical “stock character.”
For Lacan, interpretation – being a form of linguistic elaboration, of symbol-
ization, of “making things thinkable,” and so on – is not decisive: it refers back
to something that will always remain outside anything that is symbolizable. For
Lacan, analytical constructions work if they re-construct our relationship to the
Real, i.e. a relationship to something that remains external to the analytic rela-
tion, that structures it, and goes beyond it. In short, the point is not offering a
“good interpretation” – of the dream, of the symptom, and so on – but, as Lacan
says, “rectifying the subject’s relationship to the Real.” “Rectifying” implies a
mistake, a deviation that needs to be corrected. What counts for Lacan is the
relationship to the Real, not to other humans, symbols or representations. For
Lacan, the end of analysis is not introverted but extroverted.
Psychoanalysis is often accused of being therapeutically ineffective because it
demands too much. It expects to cure people by changing their mental structure
through and through; something that is extremely difficult and the reason why
analyses last so long. Behaviourist, cognitive, or pharmacological therapies, on
the other hand, try to cure just our symptom, and then we can carry on being
the more or less “non-rectified” individuals we’ve always been.
If someone suffers from periodical bouts of depression, it will suffice to
administer antidepressants that will make them come out of those states, even if
their being-in-the-world at the root (perhaps) of their depression remains unal-
tered. It’s true that after a few months, the antidepressants stop working, that
they cause weight gain, addiction, and so on . . . but in the meantime the critical
phase has been overcome. Wanting to change the Self is like trying to squeeze
blood from a turnip. Sometimes these metanoias – as Saint Paul called them –
happen, but they’re relatively rare.
Now, strangely enough, Lacan seems to agree with these criticisms of psy-
choanalysis. In contrast to other analysts, he doesn’t think it’s possible to really
change a person’s subjective structure. Being obsessive, hysteric, perverse, para-
noid, or manic-depressive are not sets of symptoms, but structures. Lacan is
rather sceptical about the possibility that an obsessive will stop being one, or
that a psychotic will stop being one, and so on. It’s not on a complete restructur-
ing of the psyche that he counts on, but rather on tiny structural shifts; slightly
changing the position that every subject holds with respect to what and who
they are.
The idea that analysis “allows to rectify the subject’s relationship to the Real”
is actually no less enigmatic than most of Lacan’s statements. I shall try to make
it more comprehensible by referring to the text, unpublished outside Italy, of a
conference Lacan held in Milan in 1974.
The three registers: the Real 93

Here he asks himself what pushes people to enter analysis and replies: “some-
thing has become impossible because of a sort of invasion of the Real, which
perhaps escapes us, but that has become extremely troublesome” ( Lacan 1978,
p. 106). In fact,

the minimum we can conceive of what happens with this Real is the fact
that it will squash us. Or, rather: it will not let us breathe, it is strangling us.
( Lacan 1978, p. 108)

Therefore, “analysis is the only thing that can allow us to survive the Real.”
What can this Real that suffocates us be? Here Lacan seems to mean the Real
as the senselessness of the world, and that analysis can give a little whiff of sense
to this murky density of things. But someone like Lacan cannot be so simplistic.
Indeed, he doesn’t give us trees, the sea, or the stars as examples of the Real,
but the objects that scientific knowledge allows us to construct:

The Real has taken on a presence it did not have before because of the fact
that we have started building a host of devices that dominate us in a way that
would have been unimaginable in the past . . . every sort of gadget ultimately
squashes [man] . . . it squashes him because what relates to his life [. . .] is
something completely other.
( Lacan 1978, pp. 106–107)

I would say that today the ne plus ultra of the Real is the computer, a device that
functions like the Symbolic, i.e. software.
The real that squashes life is therefore represented by the machines engineered
by scientific thought, which at first, Lacan reminds us, had concentrated on the
sky, on the part of reality furthest from our life. The ancients were excellent
astronomers, not great physicists. Then scientific thought applied its look on the
stars to the things of the earthly world. This is why technology squashes our life
today; because we are the victims of an “invasion of fabricated things, and fab-
ricated according to the celestial model” ( Lacan 1978, p. 109). Lacan evidently
thinks of technoscience as a heritage of the Galilean revolution, which applied
to terrestrial nature the geometrical order that the ancients only saw in the starry
skies. Human knowledge, science, has machines as a backlash, “namely [à savoir]
that their knowledge [savoir] is thrown back into its face and squashes [human
beings]” ( Lacan 1978, p. 111).
Technology, which Lacan identifies here with the Real, is mostly conceived
nowadays as something at the service of human beings, whilst the trees, the sea,
and so on, weren’t made for us. In other words, “celestial” science ended up invad-
ing the natural reality with a technological real that aims at transforming nature
itself into utensils for our use. The Real that devours us is not then the non-sense
but, on the contrary, the too much-sense that science and technology impose on
us. So, the menacing Real that causes us to go into analysis consists of the artifices,
94 The three registers: the Real

the machines, as objects overcharged with utilitarian sense. This Real that threat-
ens us is actually Sense itself as a functionality. What Lacan calls the Real here is
basically a Hegelian reversal, a sort of reification of Sense in machines: what pres-
ents itself as a triumph of the functional sense comes back into life as a murky Real.
Heidegger (1957) quotes a verse by Angelus Silesius: “the rose is without
why.” Es gibt, “there is,” in the sense that the rose offers itself without a reason.
It is of no use. Its beautiful vain existence challenges the “principle of sufficient
reason” that stipulates that “everything must have a reason.” Is the rose an elo-
quent figure of the Real escaping any rational sense? But why should this rosy
Real then suffocate us?
Frankly, what’s suspicious about this verse by Silesius is the choice of the rose
itself. The rose, though a natural offering, has entered a very human network
of senses: the rose as gift, as symbol of the female sex, of the caducity of beauty,
of love, and so on. It would be a different story if Silesius’s verse had been “the
cockroach is without why.” As a pestiferous being, the cockroach would have
served to challenge the principle of sufficient reason far more perspicuously.
Gregor Samsa, the salesman of Kaf ka’s Metamorphosis, doesn’t become a rose, but
a bug. He really is a ohne warum, a “without why.”
In any case, Lacan doesn’t consider the Real – the beyond sufficient reason –
in terms of roses or cockroaches. He considers it in human, too human, terms, in
terms of computers: a prevarication of sense over life. But is this not in contrast
with what Lacan says elsewhere? That the Real is life itself, escaping as it does the
deadly tangles of the Symbolic? As always, Lacan’s “plethora” will not allow us to
rest in a closed conceptual order: he twists his own concepts, moving them away
from equilibrium, he also makes them say what they reverberate.
For example, prima facie, Lacan’s doctrine presents itself as an attack against the
phenomenological and hermeneutic primacy of sense. Against a totalizing vision
that aims at the recognition of sense in that which appears to have none, Lacan
puts forward signifiers’ chains – like computer programs – which have no sense
as such. But on the other hand, Lacanian thought aims, no less than phenomeno-
logical thought, at the order of sense. The primacy given to language expresses
the principle that psychoanalysis does not deal with causal links or ineffable life
experiences (empathy, emotions, “inner experiences,” and so on) but with sense
relations. That is the case, Lacan constantly jeers at naïve theories on sense, but
only because he himself tacitly poses the primacy of sense.
Something similar could be said about his campaign against conceiving indi-
viduals according to the way in which they aim to maximize usefulness. That is,
as free enterprise and “human capital.” We’ve said that, snubbing any ideals of
freedom, Lacan insists instead on the determinative power that our history, and
our social and family structures have over us; in other words, our symbolic struc-
tures or culture, which determine and condition us often more than nature. I’ve
always found it laughable to identify nature with the tight constraints of need,
and culture as the opening of human beings towards new horizons of change and
freedom. In actual fact, every culture has its Unbehagen, its discontent, precisely
The three registers: the Real 95

because culture adds no less stringent chains to us than nature does. This is the
reason why I have never believed in an opposition between nature and nurture.
Yet the entire Lacanian critique of the free market chant can only be understood
against the backdrop of a Hegelian and Heideggerian thinking, which presup-
poses precisely the freedom of Geist or of Dasein, of the mind or of “being-there.”
And this is because for Lacan, freedom is something to practice, and those who
practice something hardly ever theorize it. It’s a little like what Blanchot said
of friends: that one can never really speak about them, but only speak to them
( Blanchot 1997, pp. 326–330). Lacan himself was somewhat of a libertine, but
did not appreciate the libertine theoretical propaganda of, for example, Georges
Bataille, and not because Bataille had been the first husband of his second wife.
It’s as if in every attack against particular conceptions, Lacan went through a
sort of divorce from his own specular image: attacking the ideologies of Sense in
the light of sense, mocking the ideologies of Freedom while practicing freedom,
condemning the abuses of the technological Real in the name of reality, and so
on. Every single one of Lacan’s controversial campaigns targets an opponent in
which he represents himself with self-irony: by condemning the acclaimed X he
makes x transpire, without acclaiming it.
This oscillating, almost derisive character of Lacanian concepts is invoked
by many as proof of the inconsistency of this thought. Whilst those who are
attracted to Lacan are pushed by the need to take part in an experience of think-
ing that offers the enjoyment of developing and twisting particular concepts,
of putting them to work in various directions. Those who need a linear non-
equivocal way of thinking will prefer to embrace a Hegelian vision, phenom-
enological psychiatry, traditional psychoanalysis, structuralism, or the linguistic
approach – all branches of thought that deeply inf luenced Lacan. The difference
is in the fact that Lacan dialecticizes all these branches to which he owes so
much: he doesn’t freeze them in a saturated vision, but drags them to new shores
of sense that effectually overturn their sense. In short, he overwhelms these vir-
tually accomplished systems with the instability of a wave.

8 The real Real

This ambiguity of Lacanian thought also reveals itself in his vision of the symp-
tom. In Seminar XXIII, “The Sinthome,” Lacan introduces a new notion in the
title of the text.
In French, symptom is spelt symptôme, whilst here Lacan writes sinthome, and
one wonders why. Now, the seminar in question is largely devoted to Joyce. This
is immediately detectable in the title, where Lacan uses a Joycean licence. Like
the Joyce of Finnegans Wake, Lacan is progressively attracted to the enjoyment
of deviant words. But it would be naïve to want to find a precise sense to all the
puns in both Joyce and Lacan, plays on words invented specifically to fire beams
centrifugal from sense. Lacan said that the stigmata of psychosis are neologisms,
and more and more did he begin to indulge in them.
96 The three registers: the Real

With the sinthome, he seems to be indicating an alternative to the psychotic or

neurotic symptom; it is reminiscent of what Winnicott would have called “cre-
ativity.” Joyce’s writing is his sinthome insofar as it acts as a prosthesis which
achieves a subjective consistency that James lacked. In any case, I think that in
talking about Joyce, Lacan was ultimately talking about himself. I would like to
insinuate that all of Lacan’s works can be read as his sinthome, as what he pro-
duced as a remedy against . . .?
Further, the “sinthome” is closely linked to the Real. Lacan said that the Real
is ce qui ne marche pas, that which does not work. It is the difference between what
works and what does not work. What works is the world. The Real is what does
not work ( Lacan 2005, p. 76).
But the French for “(to) work,” “(to) function,” is marcher, which also means
to walk. The Real doesn’t walk. Now, while science deals with the world that
works and walks, or rather that goes round (in the way the planets go round in
the solar system, or the electrons go round an atomic nucleus, and so on), ana-
lysts confront themselves with the Real, which doesn’t walk or go round. And
they confront it through the symptom, through the impotence and suffering that
humans carry deep down in the f lesh.
Analysts therefore deal with the Real, but they’re not acquainted with it,
there is nothing they can say about it. In a seminar, I can’t remember which,
Lacan said that the analyst is “un amateur du réel,” an amateur of the Real. Not a
professional of the Real (who is?), but only a dilettante.
Yet, to our surprise, Lacan sometimes says that it is from science itself that we
can finally expect something about the Real!

But the real real, if I can speak thusly, the true real, is that which we are
able to access via an absolutely precise path, which is the scientific path.
It is the path of little equations. This real is the exact one which eludes us
completely. We are completely separated from it.
( Lacan 2005, p. 93)

Hence: “after all, why not also think that one day we may find out a tiny bit
more about the real? – thanks to calculations, always” ( Lacan 2005, p. 98).
These statements surprise us, because Lacan had just said that science deals with
the world, not the Real. In fact, for Lacan the world is that to which knowledge has
given shape and sense. For example, our current image of the world – via science –
is that it is an explosion in progress. We’re still in the Big Bang. Yet, beyond this
image of the world, Lacan seems to consider mathematics the only path that can tell us
something about the Real. Through equations, i.e. by formulating scientific laws.
But equations are symbolic devices. In any case, we can conclude that for Lacan the
Real is not formless, and that mathematical expressions can convey its shape. Lacan
expects that science will give us the cypher of the real Real.
Does this hope in science not mark Lacan’s conversion to positivism? But what
can we expect from a science that he thinks excludes and precludes subjectivity,
The three registers: the Real 97

first of all the subjectivity that produces science? Is he not here denying the
“archéological” approach of all his work?

9 Giving up what we don’t have

One point seems crucial to me: what makes Lacan incomprehensible to many is
the fact that his way of theorizing is all topo-logical, that is, neither logical nor
scientific, even if he often adopts the tools of logic – to twist it, of course.
Let’s take one of Lacan’s famous aphorisms: “love is giving something you
don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it.” “What’s the sense of such a ‘defini-
tion’?” ask the philosophers and scientists I would collectively call – if you will
allow me a nudge and a wink – accountant Sokal’s men (Sokal and Bricmont
2003). Does Lacan talk about logic illogically?
Yet, in mathematics set theory contemplates empty sets, i.e. sets that don’t con-
tain a single element. A perfectly respectable set, like all the others. The empty set
of what one has, can actually be given. Let’s consider one of the most common fears
in the world: the fear of death. Ancient philosophers went to great lengths to prove
that the fear of death is a fear of nothing, for we can only fear something that is in
our life. Yet we know that Epicurean arguments have never had any real impact on
our fear of dying, nor have all the religious promises of an afterlife. Because our fear
of death is not a fear of nothing, but a fear of nothingness. Giving someone death is
not giving him nothing, but ferociously inflicting nothingness on him.
I think some clarifications need to be made. Lacan’s argumentative regime
belongs to a dimension of discourse I would call topo-logical. Lacan suggests the
term “logic of the signifier.” Some call it dialectics, but it is not a Hegelian
triadic dialectics – thesis-antithesis-synthesis. Rather, it is, I would say, a tragic
dialectics, one without synthesis. We remain in contradiction. This topo-logic is
not unrelated to topology, i.e. to the branch of mathematics that fascinated Lacan
most, as the discourse of both topo-logic and topology is centred on topoi, places.
Topology is a non-metrical (non-quantitative) geometry that deals with the rela-
tions between “places” in space. What I call topo-logic is a “logic” that deals
with the structural relations between logical “places.”
Let’s take the example of a glove. Every glove has a reverse side, so we can turn
it inside out. This means that the velvet that was meant for the inside is now on
the outside, whilst the itchy surface that was supposed to be on the outside is now
internal. Something I wouldn’t wish anyone to have to wear. Yet a glove will
always have two sides. Now, as we’ve said, for Freud the unconscious is not what
lies inside a sort of sack with holes, which is supposed to be the psyche of each
of us, but is the reverse side of this glove, which, in a certain sense, all subjects
are. The unconscious is the stinging reverse side of every velvety consciousness.
I’m suggesting the name topo-logic to distinguish it from two other kinds
of “logics” of which the aforementioned accountant is an expert: formal logic,
which I would call mathema-logic, and what I would call epistemo-logic, i.e. the
discourse that constructs the knowledge of the world, science.
98 The three registers: the Real

Mathema-logic corresponds to classic syllogisms such as:

“Socrates is a man; all men are mortal; therefore Socrates is mortal.”

An example of deductive inference of the type:

“If a is x and x is always y, then a is always y.”

In the Tractatus, upon which Lacan has commented, Wittgenstein said that logic
and mathematics are tauto-logical. Purely typographic operations. It’s like saying
“it will either rain or it won’t rain”: this enunciation will always be true, because
in any possible world it will either rain or not rain. Mathema-logic is the science
of truisms: empty signifiers that say nothing about the exploding world in which
we live.
An eminent example of epistemo-logic – eminent because used by the great
logician Gottlob Frege – is the statement “the Morning Star is identical to the
Evening Star.” An astronomical statement that dates back to the Hellenic age.
Thousands of years ago, it was noticed that those apparently distinct stars were
actually one and the same: Venus. Frege pointed out that the two signifiers (as
Lacan would call them) – “Morning Star,” “Evening Star,” “Venus” – have dif-
ferent meanings (Sinne) but the same denotation (Bedeutung): the specific star we
today call Venus, an existing object ( Frege 1892). The planet Venus is by no
means a construction by astronomers – as a braggartly idealism claims – even
though the latter have bestowed various Sinne on this object.
Lacan cites Frege to say that the significations the analyst interprets or con-
strues are all Sinne and all have a single Bedeutung, a single denotation. But for
Lacan, the Bedeutung of all significations is in turn a signifier, the phallus!
The accountant Sokal thinks that Lacan misunderstands both mathema-logic
and epistemo-logic, but we could prove that Lacan was aware of both. Yet, along
with several other non-transmissible authors, Lacan practices a topo-logic, which
he thinks is the most appropriate for those who practice analysis (even though,
frankly, I doubt the vast majority of Lacanians knows of what use it would be to
them). Still, this topo-logic – the discourse and reason of places – wasn’t born
thanks to Lacan. The ancient Greeks had already outlined it perfectly.
The Greeks cited the Cretan Epimenides, who said “all Cretans are liars.”
The paradox is salient. Because if his statement is true, then at least one Cretan,
Epimenides himself, is not a liar, and one exception is enough to falsify any
universal statement. Therefore, if the statement is true, then it is false. But if we
think that the statement is false, then we have to conclude that it is true, because
even Epimenides lies.
Paradoxes are the nightmare of every logical mathematical construct. Ber-
trand Russell proved to Frege that his attempt to reduce all arithmetic to pure
logic led to a paradox. His demonstration, that destroyed 20 years of poor Frege’s
work, is famously known as Russell’s paradox. It is a slightly more complex version
The three registers: the Real 99

of the Epimenides paradox. These paradoxes are the pillars of Hercules of logic
and mathematics; if we go beyond them, we end up, like Alice, in a Wonderland,
in a world where the strangest things can happen, even the smile of a cat appear-
ing before the appearance of the smiling cat itself . . . Crazy stuff! The stuff of
Lacan!
So, is this topo-logic a Mad Hatter logic? Paradox is a negative term, but
topo-logic has a positive side, as we saw in what Lacan says about love as giving
something you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it.
In a moment of bonhomie, Sokal may even say: “sure, this is poetic expres-
sion, and as such some may like it, but it has nothing of the mathema-logical or
of the epistemological.” Lacan should be read as we read a hermetic poet. In Italy,
modernist poetry is still today known as “hermetic.”
Lacan is hermetic, but he is not a poet. And in fact, his statement on love has
the pretentious form of a definition, even if it is evidently not a logical definition
nor an epistemic explanation. It is neither poetry nor knowledge, it is topo-logy.
I shall try to explain.
Since Plato, philosophy has always tried to confute what today is known as
relativism, i.e. statements of the type “human beings always delude themselves.”
Whether it is the former Pope Ratzinger or Daniel Dennett, anti-relativists point
out that with such a statement, a relativist claims to be saying something non-
delusional, therefore it is false to say that “human beings always delude them-
selves.” This anti-relativist argument has been used for thousands of years to try
to prove that sometimes human beings do not delude themselves; for example,
when they rationalize rigorously, or when they affirm truths written in the Bible
or the Koran, or when they understand Gödel’s theorem, and so on.
A Lacanian position towards a subject who states that “human beings always
delude themselves” could be expressed as follows: this person is certainly speak-
ing the truth, but not-all the truth. Their very enunciation is an exception to
the stated truth, but it does not for this reason confute it. In other words, every
universalization implies exceptions and eccentricities, and these are the subject
matter of psychoanalysis. For Lacan, psychoanalysis has been successful, despite
everything, because it deals with exceptions to universalness, with the so-called
patients who suffer their state of being outside universalness.
When Lacan speaks about truth, deep down he is talking about woman. He
returns to an ancient tradition that considers woman an allegory of truth. He says
“like the stated truth, Woman is not-all.” Women, individual women, are the Epi-
menides of femininity because they evade universalness, they evade womanness.
In other words: it is true that some women exist, but they are not definable using
universal qualities, even those of possessing a uterus and ovaries. That is to say:
stating a universal truth always implies a not-all that at once establishes it and limits
it. The paradox is that Epimenides is right, but his saying does not fall within his
said. In short, Epimenides bars the state of being a Cretan, i.e Cretan ].
As we can see, Lacan’s “logic” is a challenge against logic in the strictest
sense of the term. All this seems delirious to the accountant. In fact, we can
100 The three registers: the Real

see Epimenides’s not as a mere paradox, but as the core of a political problem.
What relationships are there between Epimenides, the Cretans, truth, and lying?
Where does Epimenides place himself as a subject? He is a Cretan, yet he presents
himself as an exception among Cretans, being the only individual who states the
truth about Cretans. We owe it to Epimenides if Cretans are not-all. . . . Is his
position then that of a dissident, does he risk exile? Or, on the contrary, by say-
ing that stating the truth is lying, is he running as prime minister of the island
of Minos? And what if immigrants from Africa ready to speak the truth landed
in Crete? Would they be “repelled” on the rust-buckets of truth as an Italian
minister was doing very recently? Has this tangle of topo-implications not always
represented the core of political dialectics?
And this is something we also saw in the case of Lacan’s analysand of Islamic
origins: thanks to analysis he discovered he was a Muslim and didn’t know it. In
what religious locus can this man be situated?
Therefore, the Lacanian statement “love is giving something you don’t have”
has a topological sense insofar as “what you do not have” is still something that
can be inscribed as such; in the same way as set theory contemplates the empty
set. And a little like a gift that costs nothing that we bring to a birthday party; the
birthday girl or boy will say to us “what a lovely thought!” “It’s the thought that
counts,” we say, and therefore the object given as a gift is nothing. Or rather,
not-nothing, because a thought is not nothing.
For example, Lacan says that the anorexic is not a girl who doesn’t eat any-
thing, but a girl who eats rien, “nothing.” She stuffs herself with something that
is indeed “nothing,” she finds enjoyment in the empty set. In the same way as I
can eat “nothing,” I can give “what I do not have” which, in the case of love, is
giving that “thing” – beyond sex and fondness – that I do not have.
The significance of the symbolic is clinically proven by the evidence that it is
very difficult for many subjects to do without what they do not have. Let’s take
the real case of a folie à deux involving a mother and a single daughter, which
consists of a series of paralyzing obsessive rituals revolving around washing and
keeping the house clean. The mother began the psychotic cycle when she was
already over 40, after divorcing from her daughter’s father. It was actually a mar-
riage only on paper, because she and her husband had never lived together and
he had disappeared for several years. For years he had been living with another
woman, but she absolutely refused to grant him a divorce, until she was forced to
do so because of his legal initiatives. Her breakdown, into which she dragged her
daughter, occurred immediately afterwards. It’s as if her subjective consistency
had been completely clinched to being married, to bearing her husband’s name,
even in his absence, i.e. clinched to what I would call The Name of the Man (after
all, she had always complained of her father’s total absence; physically present,
but absent as a paternal instance). Having lost this name, she and her daugh-
ter began acting compulsively, identifying the lost name with dirt; in Lacanian
terms, they spend their days keeping the Other away. The mother can’t leave the
house because going out would force her to touch or brush against non-domestic
The three registers: the Real 101

objects, and, as such, sources of contamination of otherness. And it is significant

that the mother sticks a tag on every piece of furniture or household appli-
ance indicating its function, “washing machine,” “tap,” “storage closet,” as if the
name made these otherwise alien objects recognizable. This need to tag reveals
how the symbolic is detached from reality: the compulsion to avoid any contact
with the other betrays the fact that the subject (and the daughter as its derivation)
has remained attached to the Other as Name of the Man, as if this Name could
guarantee an otherwise impossible self-ownership. Because in French, the propre,
meaning clean, is identified with the propre as one’s own. Constantly staging non-
contact with the other, the subject always fails the detachment, she doesn’t accept
giving up what she doesn’t have. Because it is only insofar as our being does not
depend on the symbolic Name of the Other that we can have a sort of ironic
dependency on the symbolic. As the Stoics said, meaning is incorporeal. . . .

References
Blanchot, M 1997, Friendship, Stanford University Press, Palo Alto.
Derrida, J 1967, La voix et le phénomène, PUF, Paris.
Frege, G 1892, ‘Über Sinn und Bedeutung’, Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische
Kritik C, pp. 25–50.
Freud, S 1925, ‘Negation (1937)’, in Strachey, J, ed., The Ego and the Id and Other Works,
The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol.
19 (1923–1925), The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, London, 1961,
pp. 235–239.
Gallese, V 2006, ‘La molteplicità condivisa. Dai neuroni mirror all’intersoggettività’, in a
cura di S. Mistura, Autismo. L’umanità nascosta, Einaudi, Torino, pp. 207–270.
Heidegger, M 1957, Der Satz vom Grund, 5. Lektion, Günther Neske, Pfullingen.
Heidegger, M 1987, Zollikoner Seminare. Protokolle-Gespräche-Briefe, Vittorio Klostermann,
Frankfurt am Main.
Lacan, J 1966, Ecrits, II, Seuil, Paris. Eng trans. Ecrits: A Selection, W.W. Norton & Co.,
New York, 2004.
Lacan, J 1973, Le Séminaire, Livre XI. Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse,
Seuil, Paris. Eng. trans. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, W.W. Norton &
Co., New York, 1978.
Lacan, J 1975, Le Séminare, livre I. Les écrits techniques de Freud, Seuil, Paris.
Lacan, J 1978, Lacan in Italia/Lacan en Italie, 1953–1978, Contri, G, ed., La Salamandra,
Milano.
Lacan, J 2005, Le triomphe de la religion, Seuil, Paris. Eng. trans. The Triumph of Religion,
Preceded by: Discourse to Catholics, Polity, Cambridge, 2015.
Laclau, E 2005, On Populist Reason, Verso, London.
Leader, D 2016, Hands: What We Do with Them – and Why, Hamish Hanilton, London.
Sartre, J-P 1995, Anti-semite and Jew, Schocken, New York.
Sokal, A and Bricmont J 2003, Intellectual Impostures, Gardners Books, Eastbourne.
Tammet, D 2012, Thinking in Numbers, Hodder & Stoughton, London.
5
APRÈS-COUP, THE FUTURE PERFECT,
THE HERMENEUTIC CIRCLE,
ALIENATION AND SEPARATION

1 The weave of destiny

A passage from Lacan’s Seminar XXIII:

In fact, chances push us left and right, and we make of them – because it
is we who braid it – our destiny. We make of these chances our destiny,
because we speak. We believe that we say what we want, but really, it is
what the others wanted, more particularly our family, that speaks to us –
take this us as a direct object. We are spoken, and because of that, we make,
of the chances that push us around, a sort of weave. And indeed, there is a
weft – we call that our destiny.
( Lacan 2005, p. 162)

I chose this passage because in it Lacan not only expresses the core of his think-
ing as a whole, but also the essential problem that beleaguers and threatens him.
In it Lacan seems to be saying that our life is fortuitous, that it doesn’t have
a precise sense as such. Something obvious: what thinker today would say that
our life has a sense as such? The chances of life push us left and right, but – he
adds – we make of them a destiny. Destiny is something that will occur anyway, but
here Lacan says “we make of these chances our destiny.” This is an ambiguous
expression: does it mean that in these chance happenings we simply interpret a
destiny? Do we think we can see something pre-written in our wanderings? Or
that a secret necessity guides the chances of our life?
But Lacan tells us that “we make of [our destiny] a sort of weave.” So, should
we read this “we make of it” in the sense that we actively weave together chance hap-
penings to derive a sense from them? Or the sensation of a destiny, of an ineluc-
table need? Are we mere readers and interpreters of the wanderings of our life, or
104 Après-coup and the future perfect

are we the authors – albeit unawares – of the plot of these wanderings? Of course,
the two things can be correlated, but then we must ask: how does the interpre-
tation of our life that we give after the events (après-coup, afterwardness) weave
into the way we produce these lives of ours? This is the central problem of every
logo-therapeutic practice, i.e. of every psychotherapy.
Here Lacan seems merely to be saying that what appears as our destiny – a
necessity – has actually been weaved by us; that we are the authors of our future
without recognizing ourselves as such. But I find this idea quite banal, and any
analyst would subscribe to it. It evokes “self-fulfilling prophecies,” traps that
any psychologist is well-acquainted with. Like when someone says “I feel I’ll do
badly at the exams tomorrow,” and indeed they do go badly. However, the ques-
tion remains open to find out whether what we take as our destiny is entirely an
effect of our acting in a certain way, or whether it is our acting that is actually
only the product of contingent circumstances, even if we interpret these circum-
stances as “necessary.” The statements that follow do not solve this uncertainty
and in fact expound upon it.
What follows reaffirms Lacan’s logocentrism: we “make of ” the chances of
life our destiny because we are speaking beings. But this word that “destinizes”
is not our word, it is that of the Other – firstly of the parent, the first to occupy
the place of the Other. Even a non-Lacanian psychoanalyst would agree: “we are
spoken,” in the sense that the will of our adults has already defined and designed
us. In his book about Flaubert – L’idiot de la famille – Sartre writes: “when fathers
have projects, children have destinies” (Sartre 1981, p. 109). In other words,
when the Other has a wish for us, we subjects should make it our destiny to
satisfy it. Sartre, too, could therefore subscribe to Lacan’s statement. The only
difference between Lacan and the analysts of other schools apparently consists
in the fact that, for the former, the will of our parents or tutors is conveyed to
us essentially through words – and not mainly through motherly emotions or
experiences. But this difference doesn’t seem crucial to me.
Yet, immediately afterwards, Lacan reinstates the problematic nature of his
argument – fortunately. He says that “we make, of the chances [of life] . . . a sort
of weave,” insisting on the ambiguity of the “we make.” In fact la trame, weave,
is something that is at once objective and subjective (in French trames means plot,
weave and weft). The trame of a novel is the way the narrated events are arranged;
but their arrangement is also our reading of the events according to a certain
logic, according to “a plot.” Is it we who see a narrative form in a series of events,
or do the events themselves sketch out a form that imposes itself on us as a plot?
Allow me to call these events traumas – when an event breaks a routine, a regular
way of life. To what extent is the Gestalt, la trame, of “traumas” (of events) in the
dynamics of traumas themselves? Or is it we who see this Gestalt, this figure, as
a phantom with which we dress trauma/events?
In the 20th century we even had novels with no plot; those of Faulkner, for
example. Or unconnected events with a meta-plot in the sense that, in the end,
the author gives their succession a form, like in Schnitzler’s La Ronde. Conversely,
Après-coup and the future perfect 105

in many television series the events unravel in several plots, but without us being
able to say “this is ultimately the general plot.” The several plots never complete
the puzzle.
In other words, “making a weave” lends itself to an objectivist reading (“there is
a weave in the events”) or to a subjectivist one (“we interpret the events as a weft”).
This ambiguity is not, however, Lacan’s unique contribution, it was already in
Freud.
A late essay by Freud, Constructions in Analysis (Freud 1937), is often inter-
preted as a partial denial of analytic interpretation as a symbolic decoding: ana-
lytic work should instead operate as a Konstruktion of the subject’s life plot. Now,
in German Konstruktion can mean both “construction” and “reconstruction.”
The problem is that these two senses are quite different: we call reconstruction –
for example, of a crime – the attempt to narrate the “web” of facts; whilst we call
construction a made up story. An historical event is reconstructed, and a novel is
constructed. Whilst a plot is something that can be both reconstructed and con-
structed. The “plots” in the sense of conspiracy are something one constructs.
Freud seems to be saying that he means Konstruktion in the sense of recon-
struction. Yet, symptomatically, he chooses this term – here too the choice of
words reveals more than the author thinks he is telling us; words know a thing
or two more than the thoughts they express. There’s a psychoanalytical current
today that calls itself “narratological” and has decisively opted for a “construc-
tive” vision, in the sense that the analyst shouldn’t deal with historical truth.
According to this conception, the analyst and the patient do no more than build
together a narrative plot or web of life; not the truest but the happiest.
In fact, an ancient Western tradition thinks that aesthetic construction is more
profound and “higher” than historical reconstruction. Aristotle himself said that a
work of fiction “is more philosophical and more serious (spoudaióteron) than his-
tory. Poetry tends to express universals, and history particulars” (Aristotle 1996,
5.5 “Universality,” 51b, 9). Many today still think that a great deal of made up
stories are more “serious” than objective history, that they are truer.
According to these narratologists, psychoanalysis constructs, in the sense that it
helps subjects to give themselves a profoundly “happier” image of their lives. Analysis
changes the plot of their lives après-coup, afterwards. Psychoanalysis for them is then
a sort of therapeutic literature, a passage from a woeful to a joyful myth. After all,
myths produce history no less than economics or demography; myths can change
the course of the world. Urban legends, for example, have fed anti-Semitism for
centuries, and the myth of superior races has led to millions of victims.
At the opposite end, there is a current that aims at reconstructing historical
events as the cause of subjective problems. Many psychiatrists – particularly
American ones – always correlate mental suffering to traumatic experiences of
violence or incest. They argue that reconstruction does not blend with construc-
tion; hence the dullness of these (re)constructions.
Whilst for Freud the founding traumas were essentially of the sexual order,
the common question is whether, for Lacan, the essential trauma is access to
106 Après-coup and the future perfect

language. In other words, does the Symbolic or the Real comes first? But perhaps
for Lacan it is the concept of “coming before” that makes no sense, because Lacan
always thinks in circular terms: what comes first when we go in one direction
comes after if we go in the opposite one. If a current is going round in a net, we
will never be able to say whether the state of this current at point A is the cause
or the effect of the state of the current at point B. In a distribution within a net,
every cause is the effect of itself, and every effect is the cause of itself.
Some psychiatrists (Masson 1984) have actually accused Freud of not giving
sexual traumas the prominence they deserve. They think that Freud really does
consider certain forbidden fantasies traumatic; for example, for a young girl to
want to have sex with her father. Whilst, in actual fact, the father really did try to
have sex with her. But we could prove, if we had the time, that Freud’s position
is quite different. For example, for Freud the Urszene, the primal scene, is trau-
matic; the fact that as a child the Wolf Man had watched his parents’ coitus. But
then Freud says that perhaps he had watched the coitus of another pair of adults,
or perhaps only of animals. . . . The move from there to saying that this coitus
was perhaps fantasized is a short step, but one Freud dares not take. In any case,
this is a case of traumatic images: the trauma consists of having the image (imag-
ined? perceived?) of a trauma – “seeing” one’s parents having sexual intercourse.

2 The trauma and the après-coup

In reality, Freud has always thought that the origin of both individual history and
collective history is a tragic event. Freud was convinced – even though he never
gives us convincing proof – that this original event was the killing of the father. Or,
if we prefer, the killing of God, which is its hyperbolization. The Oedipus myth is
not important because of the incest involved, but because of the fact that Oedipus
kills his father. It was his killing his father, and not his having sex with his mother,
that generated the plague in Thebes. And his mythology of the primal horde, in
which the Urvater, the original father, is killed and eaten by his male children who
have joined forces against him, is itself a fantasy history hyperbolization of the
Oedipus. In Moses and Monotheism Freud takes up a totally fantastic theory – let’s
call it aberrational too – according to which Moses was supposedly killed by the
Jews themselves. In other words, at the basis of subjective and collective history
there is a murder. According to Freud, human history is one big thriller. Freud
oscillates; sometimes these events have a precise historical dating, at other times
they’re mental events, fantasies. But let’s say that there’s always an original event.
One thing I find misleading is the classic opposition that so many analysts
indulge between an “internalist” Freud, for whom it is alleged that only fantas-
tical, internal life counts, and an “externalist” one, upheld by rival schools, for
whom only “objects” count (starting from the mother), along with traumas and
intersubjective relations. If Lacan had one merit, it would be that he proved this
as a false opposition. We must not think in terms of inside vs. outside or internal
vs. external.
Après-coup and the future perfect 107

Jean Laplanche, Lacan’s pupil and later his adversary, tried to find a compro-
mise. Laplanche also sees a trauma as the source of the unconscious, but he thinks
that this trauma consists specifically in the sexual desire of the adult, of the other.
The adult wants something from me that I don’t understand, because as a child I
don’t understand sexuality – and I have to try to interpret or “translate” what the
adult does and says to me. For Laplanche, the origin is linear, at the beginning there
is what the adult wants, what the other wants – there is a primacy of the other in
psychoanalysis. Whilst in Lacan, there is no well-defined origin; the Other and
the subject kick back and forth to each other, so-to-speak, the ball of the origin
of the unconscious.
In Greek, trauma means wound; here we are then talking about psychic
wounds. But the point is: what wounds us in an event and why does this some-
thing produce a great wound in me but not in you? Consider how people react
to a cancer diagnosis: each person “realizes” their being sick in a different way.
Some people after being diagnosed with an incurable cancer say that they have
never been so happy. . . . I’m not joking, I have personally had various experi-
ences of this. Because they felt loved more by others.
Trauma and subjective structure – which for Lacan is our fundamental
fantasme – are inextricably connected, they mutually imply each other. Already
in Freud the true problem was not discovering what wounded us but why a par-
ticular thing wounded us. In other words, what gives traumatic value to a certain
event?
For Lacan, there is a traumatic event because there is a plot of language. But
language – the killing of the thing – is not only a metaphysical trauma. Deep
down, Lacan conceives our being speaking-beings as a plot or weave of traumas.
There is always a loop between Symbolic and Real, between language and event.
Incidentally, today many take for granted that a real trauma is the origin of a
mental pain. At least until a few years ago, if an American novel or film featured a
character with “existential” problems, someone whose distress we couldn’t under-
stand, we could be sure that sooner or later we would find out that in infancy they
had been the victim of some incestuous or paedophilic violence. In the US and
elsewhere this has led to an authentic mass psychosis, which I’ve had the opportu-
nity to observe closely. Most of the individuals – women in particular – at one point
“remembered” that they suffered abuse, sexual abuse in particular, at the hands
of fathers, mothers, grandmothers, siblings, or family friends and acquaintances.
A witch-hunt. The reasons are the same as those that lead to the persecution of
a scapegoat; like the Jews. “If we’re unhappy, the Jews are to blame!” Today, in
many rich countries, people say: “we’ve got wealth, but we’re unhappy. Dirty
relatives must be to blame.” Identifying a trauma – always the same one – as cru-
cial is the first step towards some form of political persecution.
Psychoanalysis tends to become polarized either as a pure interpretation-based
“construction” or as a specific historical “reconstruction.” But Lacan doesn’t decide
between reconstruction or construction. So, significantly, he talks about “plot”
and “trauma.”
108 Après-coup and the future perfect

Still today the debate goes on in the social sciences whether we should recon-
struct historical and social facts in relation to causes (like in physics) or in relation
to sense. If a war causes destruction, is the war the cause of it or is war, as a social
institution, a matter of sense?
Lacan wants to overcome the alternative between primacy of cause and pri-
macy of sense, between scientific explanation and hermeneutic interpretation.
An impossible task? If so, Lacan attempted it anyway.
Even if his approach remains entirely within the dimension of sense, within
a theory of subjectivity – his Dionysian dandyism – he has nevertheless always
insisted on something external to the subjectivity that structures it. He insisted
on, bombarded us, with a cause of subjectivity and sense, which he identifies
with object a, the object that causes our desire. He calls extimity that central void
implied by subjective interiority. As we saw, every subjectivity, every supposed
intimacy, is a going around in a torus, in a lack or void. He would give several
names to this extimity: lack of being, Thing, object a, agalma, central void. . . .
But this externality to subjectivity in Lacan will always be double-faced: on
the one hand, the external is what imposes itself as the Real, and on the other, it
is what is real for a specific subject.
At the same time, extimity will be what for me, as the observer of another sub-
ject, is their Real, something that at once exceeds and produces them. The ideal
would be to override this alternative, but I wonder to what extent this overriding
could only and for always remain an ideal.
Hence Lacan tries to play in a sort of third space between cause and sense;
a space outlined by the concept of après-coup. Après-coup translates Freud’s
Nachträglichkeit. Jean Laplanche (2017) proposes the term afterwardness for English,
whilst the Standard Edition uses various disconnected terms such as “deferred
action,” “after-effect,” and “subsequent.” By Nachträglichkeit Freud apparently
means something very simple: in our life we remember certain events as par-
ticularly significant and traumatic, whereas at the time they actually happened
we did not experience them as such. Certain events only take on their meaning
afterwards, après-coup.
The best-known example is the Wolf Man. According to Freud, the neurosis
of this adult man was the reprise of a neurosis he had suffered since the age of
four and a half, when he had the dream about the wolves: five wolves perching
in a tree watching him as he lay in bed. This dream, connected to a neurosis, was
an après-coup of an earlier experience, which had been by no means traumatic at
the time it happened: having observed a coitus a tergo performed by his parents.
This original scene, Urszene, however, is never remembered by the Wolf Man;
it is a pure analytic construction (or reconstruction?). A scene does not become
traumatic immediately but only afterwards.
This would seem quite a trivial statement. Those who took part in the storm-
ing of the Bastille in Paris on July 14th 1789 never thought that this limited
scuff le was to signal a new era in history. The actors of that event will have real-
ized (future perfect) the historical sense of their experience only après-coup. Lacan
Après-coup and the future perfect 109

isolates this concept of Nachträglichkeit in order to distance psychoanalysis as a

whole, theory and practice, from positivism; to unleash it from the positive sci-
ences and turn it into a practice of signification.
My impression – which I have expounded upon in other writings ( Benvenuto
2018) – is that après-coup appears so important because it somehow puts together
cause and sense. First I experience an event 1 that produces no effects; then, at
another time, I experience an event 2 that gives a different sense to event 1. This
sense becomes, for example, the cause of my neurotic symptoms 3. In both cases
we are dealing with events, but the sense that event 2 affords event 1 becomes
the cause of a situation 3.

3 The horror of immortality

I said earlier that modernity has embraced the precept “become what you are.”
In the ancient world things were different. The Greeks, for example, believed
that the sense – the plot – of a lifetime would only be revealed at the very end, in
the way someone died. So, for the ancients a life will have been beautiful if it ended
with a “beautiful death.” And for a man, the most beautiful of deaths was to be
killed in battle. We could say that their ethics was “you are the way you will have
died.” The analyst too looks at the life of subjects in the future perfect: the history
of a life gives the essence of the subject who is living that life only . . . afterwards.
“If that woman falls in love with me, then everything I said to her will have
been seductive.” While I’m seeing this woman I don’t know whether my behav-
iour is really seductive: only the future will be able to reveal this to me. The life
I live is in the present, whilst its sense will be given in the future: the sense of
my current existence is therefore always in the future perfect. If we look at our
life as positivists it will seem like a succession – which at a certain moment is
interrupted – of present points in time, of heres and nows. If, instead, I look at
it “archéologically,” it will seem like a process, the sense of which is suspended
in what is to come.
The cognitive sciences are also acquainted, empirically, with après-coup. For
example, Daniel Kahneman, Nobel prize winner for his research on happiness,
once studied the way people experience music ( Kahneman, Krueger, Schkade,
Schwarz, and Stone 2004). He made a sample of individuals listen to a piece of
music they particularly liked. Half the sample – group A – were made to listen
to a CD where the first part had terrible sound quality, with irritating noises
and other defects, and the second part had a perfect sound. The other half of
the sample – group B – were made to listen to the same CD, but in the opposite
order: the first part had perfect sound quality and the second a very poor one.
Well, the result was that, having to express an opinion on their global listening
experience, those in group A judged their overall experience far more positively
than those in group B. Hence a certain positivistic surprise on behalf of Kahne-
man, who talked of the listeners making a mistake in assessing their emotional
experiences! But this “mistake” is merely the effect of après-coup, the fact that
110 Après-coup and the future perfect

experience is never a passive reception of a sum of stimuli, but an organization

of sense on the basis of the desire-enjoyment principle. The difference was that
group A had lived through an experience of improvement and group B one of
deterioration.
If we invert the temporal sense of certain events, the sense of the experience
changes. Significantly, many languages use the same word – such as the French
sens – for both “meaning” and “direction.” Hence the need for a limit – especially
that of death – for us to be able to make sense of any experience. For this reason,
we cannot agree with Freud’s thesis stating that the unconscious does not really
know death, i.e. that we unconsciously believe we are immortal. In fact, if we
did not presume death, there could be no après-coup, no structure of sense for us.
The Immortal is a short story by Borges (2004). The narrator meets strange
human beings who vegetate in a sort of stupefacient catatonic decadence. We
then discover that they are immortal beings and that, consequently, their lives
are totally meaningless. Only one sense still gives them a motivation: to find the
river – the only one on the entire Earth – whose waters make you mortal again.
In other words, the most dreadful thing for a human being would appear to be
immortality – and Lacan said something very similar. Immortality would dis-
solve any possibility of the sense – in the double sense of the word as meaning and
as direction – of life.
Some will argue that according to Christians, we’re all immortal. Does this
mean that Christian life is entirely void of sense? No, because death operates a
crucial function of separation: if at the end of your life you repent, whatever sin
you may have committed, even if you were Hitler, you would be saved. In other
words, immortality (if we take hell to be an eternal dying) is uncertain, never
guaranteed. There’s some suspense.
Why do we say that the sense of an event is traumatic, rather than saying that
the event itself was the cause of particular psychic wefts? The relations between
cause and sense are problematic. “And indeed there is a weft – we call that our
destiny,” Lacan says in the quoted passage.
What sense should we give to this “there is”? The same as when we say that
the chair on which I am sitting is there? Or in the sense in which a publisher
might say that “the novel is there,” meaning that the manuscript already has a
satisfactory form for a novel? Being that this weft is a plot, something in the order
of a form, the second case would seem more appropriate. The sense of “there is
a plot” is in fact “there is a sense.” And to interpret this sense as destiny amounts
to interpreting it as a necessity.

4 Psychic causality
We should also ask whether there is any room for freedom in this human destiny
that appears necessary. We already mentioned Lacan’s profound aversion – in
the wake of Freud – toward any discourse that presumes or glorifies human
freedom. Yet, insofar as Lacan is opposed to a naturalistic vision of subjectivity,
Après-coup and the future perfect 111

he does presume freedom somewhere. It is not a question of saying to the subject

“you weaved the plot, which you take as a necessity that has coerced you!”, but
of saying to the subject “you have somehow consented to entering the plot the
Other has hatched for you.” The point, however, is that the Other, according to
Lacan, doesn’t exist.
It is not a question of revealing, behind a necessary plot, a sort of free submis-
sion to the Other, which should be repudiated, as Sartre preached. The question
is evading a necessity insofar as one recognizes it as such. “The plot is there.” But
is this supposed necessity, this constrictive plot, the cause of our problems or only
their sense? Lacan leaves this question, to which we could only have an answer
après-coup, suspended.
So we return to the après-coup. We must return to it because it appears to me as
the great distinction between science and psychoanalysis. This is a central point.
The sciences count on the causal reconstruction of processes generated in a suppos-
edly linear temporality. For example,

(1) we have some water, hence

(2) we heat it to over 100°C, hence
(3) the water boils.

Analogously

(1) we have a small child, hence

(2 ) his mother, who isn’t sufficiently good, interacts with him without reverie,
hence
(3) as an adult the child will be a manic depressive.

Things become more complicated when science deals with networks, such as
neural networks: here causality ceases to be linear and becomes far more com-
plex. But it still remains a search for causes. In any case, the definition of circular
causes remains within the sphere of an explicative search for causes.
Mainstream psychology tries to reconstruct these kind of linear or reticular
causal processes among behavioural or mental events. For Lacan, psychoanalysis
has nothing to do with linear causality but with the temporality – Temporalität –
of sense. It does not describe an evolutional history of subjects, but their genealogy,
which is a transcendental history. Only if we grasp the difference between “evo-
lutional history” and “genealogy” will Lacan seem (a little more) comprehensible.
So, we can ask what is the place of reality, as we refer to it in both common
and scientific language, in the psychoanalysis of Lacan? To what extent are the
events that make up the plots of our lives causal? What is the connection, within
this plot, between word, desire of the Other and finding or recovering aims and
forms?
In Lacan all these questions remain unanswered. Perhaps because they have
no theoretical answer.
112 Après-coup and the future perfect

All of Lacan’s thought is a process that aims at accounting for a psychoanalytic

experience, his own. This practical experience is also undecided, it remains as if
suspended between the necessary and the contingent, between the signifier and
the Real.

5 Interpretation and explanation

An Italian-born friend of mine began an analysis in France with a Lacanian ana-
lyst. A childhood theme emerged: an intense knee pain his mother suffered from,
which in his imagination had been caused by him. The analyst interpreted this
pain in the genou, the knee, as a word game with je – nous, “I – us,” something
that actually had a certain correspondence with his problems at the time. But of
course he soon realized that when he was a child in Italy he had no knowledge of
French, and that such a pun could not have worked for him. But the analyst did
not f linch: “the interpretation – he said – is valid après-coup.”
This analyst confirms two negative clichés about Lacanianism: indulging in
word puzzle interpretations and appealing to an easy version of après-coup, to
afterward-signification.
I wonder, however, whether this risk of sloppiness isn’t present in virtu-
ally all analysts of all schools simply because they interpret. Every interpretative
system authorizes these hermeneutic excesses that prompt the censure of our
“serious” Super-Ego. Among analysts we say that a colleague is “a savage”
when he or she doesn’t show the sophistication of those who trained in “seri-
ous” analytical schools – well, I would say that every interpretation is savage.
On the contrary, every objective explanation of phenomena is “civilized,”
because it can be summed up as a search for a regularity in these phenomena.
Instead, every interpretation is by nature an erratic explanation, an unfolding
or displaying; it is something that is unfurled without explaining, and without
a crease.
It’s true that Lacanians always tend to dissociate themselves from hermeneutic
thinking, but I wonder if many of them don’t actually fall into very poor forms
of hermeneutics. In this sense, the appeal to après-coup risks becoming a vehicle
towards a “savage” relativism and a hermeneutic degeneration of psychoanalysis.
In fact, for Lacan hermeneutics is a degeneration or, as he called it, an obscenity
of the universities. He included it in University Discourse.
In fact, the abuse is not the interpretative freedom, but the pretence that an
interpretation can also describe a causal process. In other words, that a particular
sense I read in certain subjective processes can also be their cause. Conversely, every
time a causal reconstruction wants to stray into the domain of sense, it will be illicit.
Consider what has happened in the last two centuries or so with Darwinian
theory; it describes quite convincingly the transformation mechanisms of liv-
ing forms. But soon after it was given the sense of an ethical and political pre-
scription; so we had the philosophy of Herbert Spencer, a “social Darwinism,”
and a certain free-market theory claimed to be inspired by Darwin. But these
Après-coup and the future perfect 113

“Darwinisms of sense” have nothing to do with the Darwinism of biology. So,

again and again, some explanations become interpretations and some interpreta-
tions are mistaken for explanations.
But an interpretation that pretends to be a determination of causes of facts is
an attempt to cover the senseless contingency of our existence with the syrup of
sense. We then understand why Lacan grafts a reference to causality and the Real
onto a doctrine of the après-coup. And why, to our great surprise (as we saw in the
previous conversation), he says he expects a solution to the mystery of the Real
from scientific calculation.
When Lacan says that object a – an object outside the plot of language and
sense – is the object that causes desire, he wants to bridle hermeneutic compla-
cency. This is the most important difference between Freud and Lacan: whilst
for the former drives express organic tensions and seek and find an object that
can therefore be replaced by another, the latter considers that the drive has a
cause that is external to it, object a. Beyond any sense, there is a causal force, an
imprinting of an object that triggers the drive, that steers every interpretation
towards an original non-sense. Lacan’s reference to “chance” in the opening
quote went in that very direction: the plot or weft of life orbits around an opaque
event, around an encounter that will never be reducible to an après-coup sense.
We could then say that Lacan completes the Nietzschean prescription with:
“become who you are in relation to the Real.”

6 There is no metalanguage
It should be clear at this point why Lacan belongs to the tradition of transcen-
dentalist thought (which doesn’t mean he believes in the transcendent, in God,
in the angels, and so on). For Lacan, language is a transcendental condition – in
the Kantian sense – of human subjectivity. Meaning that it is impossible to stand
outside language, and to observe it and describe it objectively from there, for the
very simple reason that every observation or description of language will always
be made linguistically. In fact, what separates Lacan from the positivist approach
is expressed by his statement: “there is no metalanguage.” Or, as he also says,
“there is no Other of the Other.”
Yet in linguistics and in philosophy, metalanguage seems the most obvious
thing in the world. If I say:

(1) “‘there is no metalanguage’ is a sentence of the English language,”

statement (1) is metalinguistic because its object is in turn something linguistic,

the sentence “there is no metalanguage.” Metalanguage is there when language
takes itself as object, self-referentially. Note that it is not a question of tongues,
but of language. Indeed, if I say:

(2) “‘there is no metalanguage’ est une phrase de la langue anglaise,”

114 Après-coup and the future perfect

this is a metalinguistic statement expressed in French with an English sentence

as the object.
By saying there is no metalanguage, Lacan means that everything we can say
about language, whether scientific or not, will always belong to the language
we’re dealing with; we cannot talk about language as if we were outside lan-
guage. For Lacan, not even linguistics is a meta-language, because it is always
a discourse on languages made with language. In general, Lacan rejects the idea
that we can stand outside the reality that we ourselves are and from which we
speak, that we can look at ourselves in the same way that a Martian who lands
on Earth may look at us: we are always on the “Earth” we happen to ref lect on.
Even if we go to Mars, our view on the Earth will never be a “Martian” one, but
always an earthly one.
The model for this exclusion of metalanguage is the “Transcendental Aes-
thetic” in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. For Kant, every knowable phenomenon –
including our thinking – is always spatial and temporal. Importantly, space and
time as such are not part of experience itself, but are rather its “transcendental”
condition. This means that whilst all our representations are in space and in time,
it is nevertheless impossible to represent space and time as such. I could of course
paint allegories of space and time, like artists once painted allegories of virtue,
modesty, truth, and so on, but these representations would always be spatial and
temporal. This does not mean that we cannot talk about space and time, but that
we can never talk about them in a meta-spatial or meta-temporal way. Analo-
gously, Lacan does of course talk about signifiers, language, and so on. But he
knows that we can never pretend to be talking about them extra-linguistically
or starting from a super-language. For Lacan, language gives linguistic shape to
everything human beings think, do, and long for.
Hence Lacan doesn’t suggest a scientific theory to prove the significance of
language in Homo sapiens; he makes the latter a “parlêtre,” a “talkbeing” (a
speaking subject). It is an axiom from which he starts. But we cannot start from
before or from outside an axiom to prove it, guarantee it, “found it,” and so on.
Otherwise it would no longer be an axiom.
When we practice natural sciences, our knowledge doesn’t seem to be a part
of their object. If we say “water is H 2O,” this sentence is not in itself made of
hydrogen and oxygen. But, as we’ve seen, when we try to find out something
about parlêtres, we ourselves remain “speaking beings.” This applies to all the
so-called human sciences. For example, Pierre Bourdieu, a prominent Marxist
university professor, wrote a book about university professors, Homo Academicus
( Bourdieu 1988), which adopted a critical and sarcastic stance toward academics.
But it is evident that even this book was in itself an academic act, and in fact it
was very successful in the university world. We may even criticize an institu-
tional world, the important thing is that we impeccably remain inside that very
world.
According to Lacan, the Other is above all language that would incarnate it
in more or less concrete figures: mother, father, analyst, and so on. As such, it
Après-coup and the future perfect 115

appears evident that “there is nothing Other of the Other.” That is, there are no
symbolic relations that found – in the sense of accounting for – the fundamental
symbolic relations, such as those between father/children, nurturer/nurtured,
woman/man, I/you, analyst/analysand, and so on.
Let’s take my example of the symbolic relation between speaker and audience.
A scientific study on lecturers and listeners as individuals is certainly possible;
we can point out, for example, that Lacan’s seminars are more popular among
those of a certain social level, of a certain linguistic area. . . . But none of these
objective studies can in turn “found” the symbolic relation between speaker and
audience. There is no symbolic code stronger than that between speaker and audi-
ence: it is a relation that structures certain human relationships without being
in turn produced by a symbolic relation of a higher level. Substantially, all of
Lacan’s thought is inside what is known as the “hermeneutic circle,” even though
he never personally evokes it.

7 “Your money or your life!”

Among the many concepts that Lacan illustrated ( Lacan 1973, pp. 195–205
[French edition]) but rarely returned to, one became particularly popular among
Lacanians: the passage from Alienation to Separation. Here he uses the logical
and mathematical instruments of set theory; a theory that at the time, 1964, was
also extremely popular in the intellectual world. In particular, Lacan uses the
union and intersection between sets.
A logical union is when we intersect two sets and, rather than simply adding
up the elements of one and the other, we unite them. In Figure 5.1 we have one
set of European countries and one of Asian countries. But two countries, Turkey
and Russia, are both European and Asian; hence the union of the two sets adds
up to eight (not ten).

France China
Turkey
Italy Japan
Russia
Germany India

FIGURE 5.1 Logical union

116 Après-coup and the future perfect

The intersection between sets means instead that we take only two elements,
Turkey and Russia, as the only ones that combine Europeanness and Asianness.
Starting from this simple difference in set theory, Lacan establishes the very
complex difference between alienation (logical union) and separation (logical
intersection), but radically altering their sense in his mathemathérie.
In the place of “European states,” Lacan puts “being (the subject),” whilst
instead of “Asian states,” he puts “sense (the Other)” ( Figure 5.2). But in this
case, we do not have a union but a choice, vel: “either Being or Sense.” In other
words, if we choose Being we lose sense: we have the pure senseless existence
of a subject. If we choose Sense, we lose Being: we have the Other, as sense,
which doesn’t exist. It’s surprising that he defines the interaction of the two sets
as “non-sense,” whereas, following set theory logic, we should instead call it
“being and sense” together. But indeed, immediately after relating this schema of
his to logical operations, Lacan betrays them. It’s as if in our example the Euro-
pean states excluded the two states that are also Asian (Russia and Turkey). In
Lacan’s terms, it’s as if Europe alienated those two countries (which, incidentally,
is precisely the situation today between Europe, Russia and Turkey). Alienation
is therefore precisely the thwarting of logical union: if I choose Being, I find that
a part of me is without Sense (dreams, symptoms, parapraxis . . .). But if I choose
Sense, I also lose my Being, and hence, because of this, I lose Sense itself. We
enter a dizzying dialectics that is quite alien to the logic of mathematics.
And, indeed, Lacan illustrates the alienating vel with an even more astonish-
ing example: the alternative “your money or your life” that a robber presents to
his victim (Figure 5.3).
There is clearly no choice in this situation: if I choose my life, I will carry
on living without my money, whereas if I choose my money, I lose both my
money and my life. There is a lethal factor, Lacan says, that makes the choice a

Being non- Meaning

(the Subject) meaning (the Other) Alienation

FIGURE 5.2 The Spaltung Diagram in Seminar XI

Après-coup and the future perfect 117

The money
The money The life
in the life

FIGURE 5.3 “Your money or your life”

non-choice. Indeed, if we substitute “your money” with “sense” and “your life”
with “being,” we realize the isomorphism: if I lose sense in order to choose
being, I shall be, I shall live, with a senseless slice of life. But if I choose sense, I
will be depriving myself of being, and hence of sense too.
In short, Lacan uses these formal logical instruments in order to purposely
distort them from their original sense. Lacan actually uses these logical opera-
tions to refer to something very different from pure logos: to something I would
call a power relation. The logical mathematical operations to which the figures
refer are “animated” – in the same way as cartoons are animated – by the tragic
dimension of the power of life or death at the heart of human destiny.
The Lacanian game consists in diverting these instruments of logic and math-
ematics, in order to help the emergence of something I would call a fundamental
violence – a sort of blackmail – at the origin of human subjectivity. “Your money
or your life!,” “your freedom or your life!” In other words, it is not a question of
seeing how the subject is structured “logically,” maybe in response to primary
affective needs. Rather, it is a question of seeing how, from the very beginning,
the human subject finds itself before a forced choice, before an only apparently
free alternative, in a bridled freedom; how the path of subjective separation is
ultimately an impossible process; and the fact that, precisely because it is impos-
sible, it is our only concrete possibility.

8 “The magnificent cuckold”

But one may ask: is there any advantage in this distortion of logical instru-
ments? Does it make anything of human life any more intelligible? Or is it a
mere lucubration with no applications? I would like to show how a particular
theatrical stunt can actually express alternatives very similar to those Lacan talks
about. A case in which dramatic artifice illustrates something profound about
118 Après-coup and the future perfect

love relations; what I would call a fundamental antinomy that bears them and
that the examples of “your money or your life!” and “your freedom or death!”
tried to make tangible.
The Magnificent Cuckold by Fernand Crommeliynck (1921) was a successful
farce, apparently with no real ambitions of psychological analysis. Stella and
Bruno are a young married couple and they love each other passionately. Stella
is very beautiful and is wooed in vain by many of the males in the Flemish vil-
lage where they live. But at one point, Bruno is suddenly seized by jealousy and
demands that Stella confess with whom she is betraying him. Bruno has a look-
alike, Estrugo (a fusion of étranger, stranger, and Iago). And despite the fact that
Estrugo doesn’t say anything, Bruno soliloquizes with him, construing his jeal-
ous lucubrations. In the end, Bruno convinces himself that it is actually Estrugo
who has instilled the suspicion in him, that the man has become his Iago.
Bruno’s jealousy puzzles us from the very start. He enthusiastically welcomes
a cousin of Stella’s into their house, inviting him to occupy the room next to
their marital chamber (to allow him to hear their coituses?) for months. He sings
the praises of his wife’s beauty, almost stripping her bare before her cousin, and
when he finally detects a lustful interest in the guest’s gaze, he slaps him. But
he immediately regrets it: he hugs him with an almost homosexual embrace and
begs to be forgiven.
Bruno becomes uglier and uglier with the passing of time; his obsessive jeal-
ousy is disfiguring him. Until he says: “to no longer doubt her fidelity, I will
have to become certain of her infidelity. . . . This very night I shall be a cuckold
or I shall be dead, the horns or the rope,” to hang himself. (Note the isomor-
phism with the Lacanian “your money or your life.”) Like Descartes, Bruno
wishes to overcome his doubt by appealing to a certainty. He forces Stella to have
intercourse with her cousin under his own roof. In this way, he thinks, he will
be able to move from apprehension to certainty. But this oxymoronic move does
not cure him of his obsession.
The paradoxical anecdote – a fervently jealous husband forcing his wife to
cheat on him – reveals an important facet about the structure of many jealousies.
We understand that somewhere Bruno needs another man to copulate with his
woman. Indeed, he affirms apodictically that if his woman will not betray him,
he will die! He cannot survive without horns. Why?
Consider also the figure of the shadow-man Estrugo, who always accompa-
nies Bruno but hardly talks. In Shakespeare’s play, Iago was other from Othello,
he was his secret enemy. Here Iago is only Othello’s shadow, the silent instigator
every jealous man needs in order to give substance and perhaps certainty to his
torment. Shakespeare is here reinterpreted by making Iago Othello’s ghost.
Psychoanalysis therefore suspects that somewhere, in a corner of their minds,
many jealous men want to push their loved ones into the arms of others. If at
the explicit level you fear something with no justification, it may mean that, on
another level, you wish for this something to happen. On a closer and more mali-
cious examination, fear and desire seem to imply rather than oppose each other.
Après-coup and the future perfect 119

Let’s return to the Flemish village. Bruno isn’t satisfied with having set up
his wife’s betrayal with her cousin: he now forces Stella not to reject any of the
men in the village between the ages of 15 and 60. Stella, who still loves him,
acquiesces and Bruno himself magnificently manages the comings and goings of
the throngs of lovers.
The point is that Bruno’s jealousy has by no mean ended, it has simply risen to
another level: it has become transcendentalized, we might say. For him, Stella’s com-
plete promiscuity is “only a game to confuse me, a trap she has laid for me.” In fact,

what I must find out, through all those who will come to woo her, is the
one who will not come. He, the only one she will want to spare from my
revenge. She conceals her malice behind an exaggerated good humour,
turn-abouts, meanders, convolutions. I pretend just as much as she does.
But her favourite – . . . – no, she will not receive him before my eyes. . . .
Woe upon the one who will not come to her!
(Crommeliynck 1921, p. 115)

For Bruno, the others who copulate with Stella are fictitious: he tries to track
down the real exorbitant Other she loves. An Other defined by his exclusion from
the series of all-the-men she gives herself to. In fact, by going to bed with every-
body, Stella proves her love for Bruno: but it is the one who backs out of her love
for her husband that our man wants to ferret out.
One evening, two masked men offer Stella a charming serenade, which really
moves her – one of the two men reminds her of Bruno before his “illness,”
young and handsome. The rule for Stella is that she must never say no to any of
her wooers, but in this case she hesitates: she can sense that the other really loves
her and in the end, after hesitating, she gives herself to him. The man in question
is actually Bruno in disguise.
Now, because Stella ultimately went to bed with him, Bruno finally has the
proof that he is a cuckold! The plethora of lovers didn’t count: what counts is
that, without recognizing him as her husband, she went with a man she really
loved. “This time – Bruno exclaims – I can have no more doubts and I shall be
cured.” But not even this capital proof is enough.
While Bruno is in doubt whether he should punish her for her “infidelity,”
a herdsman of the village comes along: he demands that Stella go and live with
him and his animals out in the country. Stella resists the boor’s violent demands
and smacks him . . . the proof Bruno was looking for: wasn’t the Other supposed
to be the only excluded one? Is Stella’s great love not then the herdsman? Bruno
grabs his rif le to kill the authentic rival he has finally discovered, but Stella, per-
haps to save him, puts her arms around the bumpkin’s neck and accepts him. She
goes away with him. And Bruno: “I’m not such a fool! . . . another of her tricks!
I’m not falling for it again.” The play finishes here, but of course the game could
go on forever. Bruno could think that she went off with the herdsman to please
him, so the real Other hasn’t been found yet, and so on.
120 Après-coup and the future perfect

9 “Either I desire her, or she will enjoy the Other”

This factitious pochade seems very far from reality. Yet something essential about
love emerges from the dizzying geometry of Crommelynck’s farce; something
Lacan tried to illustrate using the logical, mathematical, and dialectical formula-
tions we’ve discussed.
Often a beloved is elected through the exclusion of sexual consummation. In
many villages there may be a girl who goes with everybody, except for one, the
one who really loves her, and that she ultimately loves. In the most fortunate cases,
this single excluded man will become her future husband, forever. After all, this is
exactly what happened in the medieval tradition of courtly love: the poet freely
had sex with the “pastourelles,” the young shepherd girls, all dark-haired, but it was
impossible for him to have it with “his girl,” always fair-haired – perhaps because
she was already married, or too far away, or dead. The beloved was sketched out
in the negative, i.e. excluded from the series of screen-women, as they were called
in Dante; the women he pretended to love to avoid revealing his true beloved. But
perhaps even in loves in which tenderness and sensuality finally converge, something
like an election of the other by exclusion takes place. Why this intricate contraption?
To understand the alternative Bruno is taken in by, we should consider the
so-called multistable figures, which can be “read” in various ways, which can be
perceived as entirely different images. As, for example, the one in Figure 5.4:
If we take the white central part as the image standing out on the black back-
ground, we see a vase. If, instead, we make the two lateral images stand out, we
see two human profiles. We cannot capture the two structures simultaneously:
they are alternative to each other. Vel. Being vel sense.
The characters of The Magnificent Cuckold jump from one image to the other.
First Bruno is faithful to Stella and Stella to him, i.e. both exclude all other men
and women from the possibility of having sexual relationships with them. Then
the image is suddenly overturned: Stella has to go to bed with everyone, and the
Other will be the only excluded one, starting from Bruno himself – they become
like the two black profiles.

FIGURE 5.4 Rubin’s vase

Après-coup and the future perfect 121

Lacan would say that Bruno can desire and love his wife only if he assumes
the enjoyment of the Other (in both the subjective and objective sense of the
genitive). Her intercourse with all the other men does not really make her
unfaithful, because these others are not the Other. Now, if Stella authenti-
cally enjoyed the Other, and the Other enjoyed her, Bruno should punish and
repudiate her. But if Stella does not enjoy the Other, if she remains faithful to
him, she ceases to be desirable to him. It’s like finding yourself before a rob-
ber: “your money or your life!” In the same way, if Bruno decides that Stella
belongs to the Other, he loses everything: he loses Stella and his own desire.
If she decides that Stella is his, and only his, he will keep his wife but lose his
desire for her.
According to Lacan, this vice in which Bruno is trapped is not only valid for
an eccentric in a farce, but reveals alternatives in which all human beings, each
in their own way, are trapped. On the one hand, we have the alienation of every
subjectivity: for I, the subject, to enjoy, I need my loved one to enjoy the Other
and this Other to enjoy my loved one. But if I try to expel the Other, what I’m
then left with is both non-desire and the absence of enjoyment. As we can see in
Figure 5.5.
The segment the two sets share – between the desiring subject and the
enjoying Other – is the space of jealous torment, thanks to which I must
always suppose the infidelity of my partner (the fact that she enjoys the
Other) in order to refuse her: but in this way I will have neither desire nor
enjoyment.
We can see here how the two sets – “desiring subject” and “enjoying Other” –
take the respective places of “being (the subject)” and “sense (the Other)” from
Lacan’s original figure. The shadow that the enjoying Other throws over the
subjective desire of the woman makes it possible for the subject to desire her, but
without being able to enjoy her. Bruno’s jealousy occupies the middle space, the
alternative “either the Other enjoys her, or I do not desire her.” This is Bruno’s

desiring Subject enjoying Other

“The Other
enjoys her”

“I desire her”

“Either the Other enjoys her, or I don’t desire her” (jealousy)

FIGURE 5.5 Alienation in Love

122 Après-coup and the future perfect

perverse alienation. Hence the promised shore of separation, which remains,

however, undecided, imprecise: a desiring of the woman as Other, and a subjec-
tive enjoyment of her.
To come out of this impasse of alienation, every human being must find access
to what Lacan calls separation, i.e. to no longer live with the alternative “either
I desire her, or she will enjoy the Other.” It is necessary to pick out the wedge
where the two sets intersect and accept the sacramental dimension of desire and
love (Figure 5.6).
Our sexual life has a double face. Coitus between a man and a woman can be
something mechanical, a hardly significant entwining of bodies. Instead, a moving
coitus – one that makes you quiver with passion – can be experienced when your
partner isn’t merely a representative of the opposite sex, but occupies the position
of Other. It’s what I call the sacramental character of coitus. Since the 13th century,
coitus has represented for the Catholic Church the celebration of the sacrament
of matrimony: once the sexual act is consumed, the sacrament has been accom-
plished. For the Catholic Church, we shouldn’t copulate because we’re married,
but we are married insofar as we’ve copulated – as long as the copulation was
accompanied by the conjugal sentiment that commits us to loving. And coitus
is a sacrament because it takes place before God. In other words, in matrimonial
coitus the couple is never alone; God has a hand in it. In sexual commerce, it is
as if the man offered the woman to the Other, and as if the woman let herself be
penetrated by the Other, through her partner. We can be complete atheists, but if
coitus is transubstantiated by passion, then as partners we inscribe this carnal union
in a sort of intersection between ourselves and the Other, we inscribe this physi-
cal contact in a space of sense that goes beyond the material act. Therefore, even
non-believers evoke significant coituses using “mystical” terms and speak of “erotic
ecstasy,” “mysteries of love,” and so on.

SEPARATION

FIGURE 5.6 Separation

Après-coup and the future perfect 123

In the farce, therefore, Bruno tries to build this sacramental dimension of

love, but he is caught up by the alternative Lacan calls alienation, which we
illustrated graphically. He is incapable of that separation. As a result, the desir-
ing subject and the enjoying Other intersect and cut Bruno off from both the
subject and the Other. This is the space of a non-jealous sexuality – the kind
of sexuality that so many characters of Proust’s Recherche, for example, find
impossible; for them love and jealousy coincide. A sexuality in which desire
and enjoyment connect, in which what I desire is also the Other’s (the partner’s)
enjoyment, and what the Other enjoys is my desire. A difficult surgical opera-
tion, mostly an ephemeral one, but if it succeeds, it illustrates the masterpiece
of love.

References
Aristotle 1996, Poetics, Heath, M, trans., Penguin Books, London.
Benvenuto, S 2018, ‘The Après-Coup, Après Coup: Concerning Jean Laplanche Prob-
lématiques VI. L’Après-Coup’, Language and Psychoanalysis, vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 72–87.
Borges, JL 2004, ‘The Immortal’, in The Aleph and Other Stories, Penguin Books, London.
Bourdieu, P 1988, Homo academicus, Stanford University Press, Stanford.
Crommeliynck, F 1921, Le cocu magnifique: Farce en trois actes, Editions de la Sirène, Paris.
Eng. Trans. The Magnificent Cuckold, Roof Books, New York, 2007.
Freud, S 1937, ‘Constructions in Analysis (1937)’, in Strachey, J, ed., Moses and Monothe-
ism and Other Works, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud, Vol. 23 (1937–1939), The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-
analysis, London, 1964, pp. 255–269.
Kahneman D, Krueger AB, Schkade DA, Schwarz N, and Stone AA 2004, A Survey
Method for Characterizing Daily Life Experience: The Day reconstruction Method, Mimeo,
Princeton.
Lacan, J 1973, Le Séminaire, Livre XI. Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse,
Seuil, Paris. Eng. trans. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, W.W. Nor-
ton & Co., New York, 1978.
Lacan, J 2005, Le Séminaire, livre XXIII. Le sinthome, Seuil, Paris. Eng. trans. The Sin-
thome, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2016.
Lacan, J. 1975, Le Séminaire, Livre XX. Encore, Seuil, Paris.
Laplanche, J 2017, Après-coup, The Unconscious In Translation, New York.
Masson JM 1984, The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory, Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, New York.
Sartre, J-P 1981, Family Idiot. Gustave Flaubert 1821–1857, University of Chicago Press,
Chicago.
6
“PSYCHOPATHOLOGY” AND THE
CURE ACCORDING TO LACAN
Depression, psychosis, hysteria, obsessional
neurosis, perversions, transference

1 The three main structures

When asking what it is that the Lacanian vision of psychopathology consists of,
we should begin with the consideration that, for Freud and Lacan, psychopathol-
ogy does not really exist. This is the psychoanalytic turn compared to psychiatry
past and present.
As we know, Freud puts dreams, parapraxis, jokes and neurotic symptoms
on the same level – in short, both “normal” and “pathological” phenomena are
explained in the same way – because his idea is that all these are effects of uncon-
scious processes, and we all have an unconscious. Therefore, Freud assimilates
paranoiac delusion into a certain kind of metaphysical system. He thinks reli-
gions are a sort of collective obsessional neurosis. Freud also talks about the Witz,
jokes, as a kind of liberation from a repression, that is, an equivalent of psychic
healing. When an analyst says something and the analysand sincerely laughs, this
means that a turning process has occurred in the analysis.
In short, with psychoanalysis, the big split between the normal and the patho-
logical, which is at the root of the traditional medicine, vanishes. This is why I
am always surprised when I hear analysts talking about a “pathological reaction,”
or “the healthy and unhealthy part of the self ” and similar concepts. Though it
is true that Freud made use of the diagnostic language of the psychiatry of his
time (sometimes inventing his own concepts, such as obsessional neurosis), he
nevertheless gave it a new sense.
Lacan, too, does not think in terms of illness or disorders, but in terms of subjec-
tive structures. This means that you can have a neurotic or psychotic structure but
not actually develop any apparent neurotic or psychotic clinical symptoms. For
example, Freud distinguished between an obsessional character on the one hand –
pedantry, thrift, stubbornness, and a certain cold and “too rational” distance – and
126 “Psychopathology” and the cure

on the other, a blatant obsessional neurosis, which can drive a subject to despair.
According to Lacan, both the (normal) character and the pathology have the
same structure. Often something in a subject’s life occurs, given her or his own
structure, for which too high a price is to be paid: a symptom, a non-tolerable
impotence or sufferance, or both. In fact, each subjective arrangement – even one
that appears the most satisfying – excludes or sacrifices something somewhere, but
this excluded or sacrificed side can then “return” as a symptom.
According to Lacan, there are three essential subjective forms: neurosis, psy-
chosis, and perversions. Is this rigid tern a Procrustean bed as some argue? As
a matter of fact, Lacanians accept other post-Freudian diagnoses, for example
autism, eating disorders, and addiction. They mistrust the now fashionable cat-
egory of bipolar syndrome, and do not accept the very popular category of the
borderline personality, because it is in fact a form of hysteria (we need to stress that
for DSM-5, 75% of borderlines are actually women, and we could give the same
percentage for hysterics). It is as if an exchange had taken place: DSM no longer
accepts hysteria, but it includes borderline personalities; Lacanians do not accept
the borderline diagnosis, but keep, and even exalt, the diagnosis of hysteria.
In the field of neurosis, then, Lacan distinguishes rigorously between obses-
sional neurosis (renamed today obsessional-compulsive), hysteria, and phobias.
Like Freud, he basically accepts the Kraepelinian – from Emil Kraepelin –
diagnostic system of psychosis. In other words, Lacan endorses the fundamental
Freudian pathological categories of psychosis, differentiating between paranoia,
schizophrenia, and melancholia.
We can say that neuroses, perversions, and psychoses become “pathological”
because they are the effect of a negation, Verneinung, as Freud called it. As far
as each one of us is neurotic, perverse, or psychotic, all of us as subjects are the
result of a negation, yet this is not the same negation for everybody. Lacan later
says that the object of all negation is castration, that is, the impossibility of finding
enjoyment. This scheme may be useful.
Several disorders, which became a focus of attention later in time, are not
included in this picture, and it is difficult to insert them. In particular, the

Psychopathology Type of Negation

NEUROSIS REPRESSION (Verdrängung, Displacement)

Phobia
Hysteria
Obsessional Neurosis
PERVERSIONS DISAVOWAL (Verleugnung)
Fetishism – Masochism
Sadism, Sadomasochism
Voyeurism – Exhibitionism
Zoophilia, frotteurism, pedophilia,
coprophilia, etc.
“Psychopathology” and the cure 127

Psychopathology Type of Negation

PSYCHOSIS FORECLOSURE, seizure (Verwerfung;
forclusion) of the Name-of-the-Father
PARANOIAS
– Persecution Delusion
– Megalomaniac Delusion
– Erotomania
– Jealousy Delusion
– (Querulous paranoia?)
SCHIZOPHRENIAS
MELANCHOLIA
(MANIC-DEPRESSIVE PSYCHOSIS)

so-called new forms of the symptom (“true” anorexia and bulimia, addictions,
psychosomatic disorders), and autistic spectrum, which psychoanalysis too hast-
ily connected to a form of psychosis. Anyway, this is quite a simple and concise
scheme when compared to the 360 items listed in the DSM-5 pathologies.
Neurosis is correlated to a fundamental negation Freud called Verdrängung –
repression in English, but its real meaning is displacement. The Freudian model of
repression is forgetting: I forget what disturbs me. The model of all neurosis is
the fact that we all tend to displace painful things out of our memory. But to
repress is not to destroy, it is a way of putting something aside. So, the repressed
representation can always come out sooner or later.
Instead, perversions are correlated to a form of negation Freud called disavowal –
Verleugnung. We indulge in perverse acts or phantasies because we disavow some-
thing we nevertheless know. Lacan is completely original when he states that
in psychosis a third type of negation manifests itself: forclusion, foreclosure (see
especially Lacan 1981). Both in French and English forclusion and foreclosure are
legal terms. We could also use the word exclusion, in the sense of a total rejec-
tion; but I would rather say that something is seized from the subject. According
to Lacan, psychosis is the effect of a primordial foreclosure of a crucial signifier –
which he calls Name-of-the-Father – to which the subject has no access, and
never will have, in the sense that this Name is seized by the mother, who is unable
to return the paternal function to her child.
According to Lacan, the distinction between symptoms and structure is essen-
tial. It means that a neurotic subject can show blatantly perverse symptoms, but
in actual fact has a neurotic structure. Someone may manifest strong obsessional
symptoms, but the analyst understands that his structure is hysterical, and so on.
The DSM groups and classifies behaviours in a certain way, but behind these dis-
orders it does not suppose any structure. It is never clear what criteria the DSMs
follow to group certain symptoms rather than others.
The structural approach can of course be questioned. In fact, the funda-
mental distinction between structures and symptoms reminds us of a classical
128 “Psychopathology” and the cure

philosophical distinction, that between essence and accidents. I do understand

that this distinction can always be challenged, but in medicine it is focal: a fever
is a symptom, tuberculosis (which implies mostly having a temperature) is a mor-
bid structure. The paradox is that psychoanalysis – for which Lacan rejects any
assimilation to a medical specialty – actually uses a system of diagnostic classifi-
cation that is much closer to modern scientific medicine than that of the DSMs,
because psychoanalysis integrates diagnosis with aetiology.
Psychiatric disorders are like a starry sky. From the beginning, human beings
have given some order to the sky’s bungle by identifying specific constellations.
And each culture has given its own astrological order to the heavens. But these
were all arbitrary figures until the moment when, in the last century, astronomy
became strictly connected to physics. Today we know that, whilst to the naked
eye two stars can appear to be very close together, one star can in fact be much
closer to us while the other is abysmally far away. Today we are convinced that
we know the real groupings, because we believe we have discovered the true
structure of the universe we see – we trust our contemporary astronomers, just
like the Ancients trusted Ptolemy.
Lacan tried to do something about the subjective constellations that is similar
to what modern astronomy has done in relation to the sky. Unfortunately, in psy-
chopathology we do not have a rigor or strictness comparable to that of contem-
porary cosmology. We said earlier that, according to Lacan, scientific knowledge
fell to us from the sky – human beings know much more about faraway galaxies
than about their own minds. Human beings are farsighted, like in ophthalmol-
ogy: the further an object is from them, the better they see it.

2 Psychopathology and science

A certain popularity of Lacan’s approach to “psychopathologies” is probably due
to the fact he seems to fulfil a very typical 20th-century dream: to create a grand
theory not separate from practice. For many of my generation, the so-called baby
boomers, Leonard, Luther, Machiavelli, Marx, Lenin, Eisenstein and Freud were
among the ideal intellectuals. What do they all have in common? The fact that
they all made a great contribution to their fields, that was both theoretical and
practical.
On the subject of Marxism, once upon a time the great Marxist theorists –
Marx himself, Engels, Lenin, Gramsci, and several others – were also political
leaders who led the masses. Then, at a certain point, almost all the important the-
oretical Marxists were university professors – Althusser, Balibar, Negri, Badiou,
Hobsbawm, Žižek, etc. Long before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Marxists had
apparently renounced the sentence engraved on the grave of Marx at Highgate in
London, “the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The
point, however, is to change it” (Marx 1976, p. 66). In fact, we have had more
and more academic Marxist interpretations and less and less successful changes
of the world in an anti-capitalist sense. I wonder whether something similar has
“Psychopathology” and the cure 129

happened or is happening in psychoanalysis, something that would be a sign of

its decline.
Lacan quotes Lenin’s sentence: “Marx’s theory is omnipotent because it is
true” ( Lacan 1966, p. 349). Here the power rests on truth. But today we tend to
think the opposite: the 20th century has been dominated by pragmatist philoso-
phy and by Poincaré’s conventionalism, which reverse the relation between truth
and power by stating: “only what is proven invincible is true.”
I should stress that my theoretical formation took place in France as a young
student within an essentially Lacanian or at least orthodox Freudian frame. Later,
in Italy, I had a clinical formation, mostly within a post-Kleinian frame. This
was fortunate, because a certain non-coincidence between theory and practice in
my training allows me to see the limits of both Lacanianism and post-Kleinism.
Moreover, one of my real masters was an IPA analyst, Elvio Fachinelli, an unclas-
sifiable personality, inf luenced at the same time by Lacan, Walter Benjamin, and
the Frankfurt School. However, even if I did have a Kleinian clinical forma-
tion, today I find it easier, when I have to frame a clinical case, to use Lacanian
categories.
I am not so naïve as to believe that I prefer a Lacanian clinical view because
it is objectively the best. I prefer it because Kleinian reconstructions lack a struc-
tural gaze, which is something that interests me very much; ultimately, Kleinians
always highlight practically the same processes; they bore me. But I do respect
those who are charmed by Kleinian “processual” reconstructions.
Until not very long ago, the prevailing trend in Italy was inspired by W.R.
Bion. When I read or listen to a smart Lacanian, I enjoy it a lot more than when I
read or listen to a smart Bionian. (Of course, I am bored by all those who are not
smart, whatever their theoretical credo may be. Today not feeling bored is rare in
psychoanalysis.) In short, my main argument for preferring the Lacanian clinical
approach is the very personal argument of boredom. In fact, is it not our mission
to make others participate in our intellectual enjoyments? The master initiates
his pupils to a form of pleasure that the master already practices alone; we teach
and write in order to find those who can play and enjoy with us.
You may say that certain truths are boring anyway. We think that truth has
nothing to do with amusement. But I don’t think that this is true. The physi-
cists who are my friends tell me that certain physical theories that may logically
be correct are quickly excluded by physicists because they think: “it can’t be
that Nature would be so rough and vulgar!” Even in mathematics and physics
elegance is fundamental.
I enjoy more of a structural vision because, instead of what one generally
believes, this allows us to get a better grasp of each human being’s subjectivity.
We often repeat that, according to science (which is always structural), human
beings are all the same; but exactly the opposite is true. Biological science effec-
tively shows that we cannot find two human beings with the same venous and
arterial system, nor with the same neural network, not even when they are iden-
tical twins. In the same way, we cannot find two human beings with the same
130 “Psychopathology” and the cure

subjectivity. But because psychoanalysis is not a science, I don’t have any decisive
argument to show that Lacanian constellations are closer to the truth than those
of other schools.

3 Melancholia, paranoias
Some say that Lacan and Lacanians have neglected the Freudian interpretation
of melancholia. In fact, Freud’s theory on melancholia – and on mania, which
is its reverse – has had a great inf luence on some psychoanalytical schools, espe-
cially on the Kleinian. A very small one, apparently, on the Lacanian. Lacan
only speaks of melancholia or depression in passing. For example in his television
interview of 1973 ( Lacan 1973, pp. 39–40).
Here Lacan talks about affections, about the “passions of the soul,” in gen-
eral. Freud had interpreted “major depression,” melancholia, as a special form of
mourning for a loss. Instead, Lacan – like phenomenologists – leads melancholia
back to sadness, quoting Dante and Spinoza: tristitia was above all a sin, a moral
blame. I have written a book about acoedia, sloth, a variant in a Christian key
of melancholia ( Benvenuto 2008). Indeed, in the Christian Middle Ages being
depressed was the fundamental guilt, because the root of sadness germinates all
the other “f lowers of evil.” Being sad is the original zero degree of guilt.
Lacan overturns the modernist point of view that says: “what religious think-
ing considered in moral terms as a guilt, we modern psychiatrists, being enlight-
ened, consider an affective illness.” Lacan instead thought that the medieval
point of view was right! What to us liberated moderns may appear an affective
irregularity should instead be considered a lâcheté, as Lacan calls it. The term
means cowardice, but it comes from lâcher, to let go, to slacken. The depressed feel
contemptible because something like divine grace has let go of them, and this
because they themselves have let go of something essential. In short, melanchol-
ics are “sinners”: they have failed to fulfil their duty, which according to Lacan
is to “speak well” [the bien-dire, the “well-spoken”]. The depressed, on the other
hand, are only capable of badmouthing themselves.
The most important Lacanian contribution to psychosis is what he said about
paranoias. In the constellation of follies, psychiatry distinguishes between vari-
ous paranoias, as we saw in the aforementioned scheme. One galaxy is persecu-
tory delusion, which sometimes evolves into delusion of grandeur. Erotomaniacs are
convinced that someone, who is usually very important and who they have often
never even met, loves them. Those suffering from jealousy delusion are certain
their partner is cheating on them in a way that seems unjustified to us.
Freud’s preconception is proving that every “psychopathology” is the work
of sexuality. Even in paranoias, which he thinks are the result of a repression of
one’s homosexuality that comes out again, crookedly, in a delusionary way.
To prove it, Freud resorts to a clever grammatical device. In delusion of per-
secution it is as if the subject, for example a male, said: “I DON’T LOVE HIM,
I actually hate him, because he hates me.” In delusion of grandeur he says “I
“Psychopathology” and the cure 131

DON’T LOVE HIM, I actually love nobody, because I love only myself.” In
erotomania the person who supposedly loves me is of the opposite sex, therefore:
“I DON’T LOVE HIM, I actually love her, because she loves me.” In jealousy
delusion: “I DON’T LOVE HIM, it is her, my woman, who loves him.”
As we can see, Freud’s explanatory mechanism is somewhat intricate. Not to
mention that there are paranoiacs who are declared and practicing homosexuals.
Lacan set himself the task of “dignifying” many of Freud’s theories, giving them
greater breadth. For Lacan, what Freud mistook as homosexuality is actually
narcissism. After all, the homosexual inclination is partially narcissistic, because
in this case one desires a sexual “double” of oneself.
Let’s take persecutory delusion. Freud noted that the persecutor is often of
the same gender as the paranoiac, which furthers his cause. Let us also add that
the persecutor is often an ideal model figure for the subject. For Lacan, this
external figure is the subject’s ideal ego, i.e. his mirror image. As we said, in the
mirror stage the child’s mirror image is also his or hers ideal image. Lacan says
the opposite of what Jean Cocteau wrote: “mirrors should ref lect a little before
ref lecting back images” (Cocteau 1964). In fact, mirrors ref lect not ourselves,
but what we would like to be. Indeed, we often find ourselves acceptable in the
mirror, while we might find a photo or video of ourselves – which is how others
see us – devastating.
Why does this ideal ref lection of ourselves turn into a persecutor at one point?
Because hatred is the reverse mirror image of love: if in the other I see my love
for him, I will perceive it as hatred towards me. The real mirror inverts left and
right, the psychic mirror inverts things in a triple way: active vs. passive, love vs.
hatred, I vs. the other.
Therefore, in persecutory paranoia, it is not I who actively hates my ideal Ego,
but I am passively hated and persecuted by him or her. This reversal occurs also
in the other paranoias.
Let’s take erotomania. A woman I know is convinced that a well-known Ital-
ian journalist and political commentator who appears very often on television,
is in love with her and sends her messages via the screen while debating, even if
she and the political commentator in question have never met. Of course, we all
think that she’s the one who has “a crush” on him. But she can only see what
she loves in a mirror: she knows her love only if it comes from the other, like in
a boomerang effect. This woman can cognize – but not re-cognize – her loving
only in the passive form of being loved. Narcissism consists essentially in the pas-
sive grammatical form.
Vampires in films have no mirror image, while paranoiacs are the opposite:
they can conceive of themselves only as mirror images. The figure of the vam-
pire can also help us understand the heart of schizophrenia: a vampire sucks the
blood of the other, and in a similar way the subjectivity of the schizophrenic is
sucked by the Other, who, even if non-existent (for Lacan, the Other does not
exist, just like the line of the horizon does not exist as a line), invades the subject’s
mind and body.
132 “Psychopathology” and the cure

Some time ago, I had a psychotic patient who thought he was a completely
normal person, and kept describing almost everybody as psychotics, consumed
by anger and envy. But in my view he was the psychotic full of anger and envy.
Now, mainstream psychoanalysis would say that the boy “projected” his psy-
chosis onto the others. But the concept of projection implies as fundamental the
distinction between “inside myself ” and “outside myself,” which Lacan rejects.
Instead, Lacan would have said that to say “I live with psychotic people” is the
patient’s way of having a cognition of his psychosis without re -cognizing himself as
a psychotic: because for him, his subjective reality is in the other, not in himself.
To say that “the other is psychotic” is his way of stating “I am a psychotic,” and
indeed, he came to me to be cured. Cured of what? He told me: “of the others’
psychosis.” He came to me to have the vampire in the mirror cured.
Paranoia is passionate madness in the etymological sense of passion: pathos,
what we suffer. Let’s imagine I’m in front of a mirror and don’t recognize it
as such: if I stretch my hand towards the gentleman facing me, I will see him
stretching his hands towards – or against? – me. In short, I, a paranoiac, do not
recognize that the other – my persecutor, sexual cheater, unreachable lover – is
my image, and for this reason I misunderstand his or her intentions.
Lacan developed a general theory of psychosis, but for him the prototype of
psychosis is paranoia. When cases were presented to him by other psychiatrists
at the Hôpital Sainte-Anne, he would only rarely diagnose schizophrenia. And
he would always refer to it as “so-called schizophrenia,” almost as if he didn’t
believe in it.
Why did Lacan have this strong preference, so to speak, for paranoias? In fact,
thanks to Freud and Lacan, psychoanalysis has developed a very attractive theory
of paranoia, without developing an equally interesting theory of schizophrenia. I
know many Lacanians who when forced to deal with schizophrenias prefer to turn
to phenomenologist psychiatrists like Minkowski, Szilasi, Binswanger, and so on.
Psychoanalysis is at its best when it interprets, not only paranoias, but also
hysteria, phobias, obsessive-compulsive neuroses and melancholia – and sorry
if that’s no big deal. It has never been equally successful with schizophrenia,
autism, drug addictions, and borderline personalities.
The various “constellations” in psychiatry remind me of what the situation
was like in optics for three centuries. From the 17th century onwards, two rival
theories battled it out. One, started by Newton, argued that light is composed
of minute particles, corpuscles, traveling in space; the other, promoted by Huy-
gens, argued that light is like the waves in the sea, a mutation in the form of the
medium known as ether. Certain optical phenomena supported the corpuscular
theory, others the wave theory. It’s only since quantum mechanics that we have
begun to understand that both theories are in fact true. In other words, that they
are both false. Light can manifest itself as particles or as waves. In physics, this is
called complementarity: a logical conclusion that surpasses the limits of logics. If
the mind sciences ever reached the precision of quantum mechanics, they would
find complementarity too.
“Psychopathology” and the cure 133

I am convinced of complementarity in all things regarding the mind too,

though it is as yet still unrecognized. Theories that today seem incompatible
could ultimately turn out to be complementary.
Claiming that our theory is capable of explaining everything is a form of mega-
lomania. Every theory – scientific or psychoanalytical – has a privileged field of
application; but as one slowly moves away from the well-lit area, the light theory
seems weaker and weaker.

4 Psychosis
As I said, according to Lacan a psychotic structure depends on a radical form of
negation that he calls foreclosure. A term which, like the French forclusion, has dif-
ferent nuances of meaning.
Some argue that a psychotic is someone whose Oedipus complex was not
structured during childhood. Now, Lacan says something similar when he tran-
scribes the Oedipus into linguistic terms. He focuses it on the signifier of the
Name-of-the-Father, alias the symbolic father. The psychotic is precluded access
to this signifier that is fundamental to subjective constitution. As always, Lacan
depsychologizes Freud as much as possible, minimizing all the inter-affective
theatre of the classical Oedipus. Lacan rewrites that sort Commedia dell’Arte of
Freud’s – according to which the male child considers his father his rival because
he wants to go to bed with his mother and the female child is in competition
with her mother to conquer her father – into strictly symbolic terms. I want to
loosen the link between Name-of-the-Father and family paternity even more,
by rewriting Name-of-the-Father with the acronym N.o.t.Father, so that we can
also read it as “not Father.” After all, with the N.o.t.Father Lacan was not refer-
ring to the patronymic. We shall shortly see to what he was actually referring.
Years ago in a French psychiatric hospital a delegation of psychotics went to
the doctors and asked for a Name-of-the-Father transplant. They’d heard that
psychosis was caused by a lack of the Name-of-the-Father. . . .
The choice of the term N.o.t.Father came to Lacan in part from a clinical
observation: very often psychotics are perplexed by what it means to be a father.
They know everything about the physiological function of the male in repro-
duction, but they do not “realize” what it means to be a father, which is different
from being a begetter.
A young patient of Kretschmer’s realized she was sexually attracted to a col-
league from the office where she worked, an attraction that was apparently
mutual ( Kretschmer 1974). This triggered off a delusion: her being pregnant.
She remembered that at the age of 12 her uncle got into bed with her, but with-
out any sort of sexual touching. She was now convinced that in the wake of that
“guilt,” she was pregnant. For her, everyone – even strangers – knew about it and
continuously made spicy allusions to her state. But who was the father of her child ?
Not the coveted colleague. She was certain that someone inoculated her with
sperm during the night. Made pregnant by X. This particular point is crucial to
134 “Psychopathology” and the cure

Lacan: we find a generating cause, the sperm, but no father. We could say that in
psychosis we have an unfather, just as we say undecided or un able.
There, breaking with so much post-Freudian psychology, which focuses
entirely on the exclusive mother-child relationship, Lacan practically says:
“remember that mum is a woman!” In other words, the child soon realizes that
his nourisher is not exclusively for him, but is also involved with a third party.
This third party is generally the woman’s companion or lover and – often – the
father of the child. But, if for example the mother is a writer or chef, her “Other”
will be literature or Grande Cuisine. N.o.t.Father is Lacan’s name for this often
materially absent “third party” in the dual mother-child relation. Now, upon
understanding that “there is an Other” between he and his mother, the child
enters a strictly mystical dimension, which according to Lacan is not only expe-
rienced by believers in some sort of transcendence, but by anyone who is not
psychotic. N.o.t.Father means that an instance drags us away from the idyllic or
lethal tango with our mother. The important thing is that the mother “wants
other things” as well as the son or daughter she still loves. Otherwise the child
will never “transcend” from a dual relationship to a social one, which is always
at least triangular (at least three people are required to form a society). Indeed,
when we see an adult who behaves awkwardly in social life, we soon think he’s a
mama’s boy, someone who hasn’t separated sufficiently from his mother.
However, I fear that in evoking the father Lacan may have limited the impact
of his theory. If he really wanted a reference to the Christian trinity, I would
have preferred “in the name of the Holy Spirit.” The latter, indeed, is the third
person who seems at once to bring together and go beyond the far more concrete
pathetic persons represented by the Father and the Son.
I think the later Lacan realized this limitation and hence began referring to
“names of the Father,” and in general the reference to the father in the parental
sense fades away.
Once a year the adults of the Hopi of Arizona show the children of the pueblo
a group of masked men, the Kachinas, telling them that they are the spirits of the
ancestors who have returned to the village and are eager to eat them. In the end,
however, the Kachinas are appeased and offer the children corn cakes.
Once the Hopi children have grown up, the adults reveal that the Kachinas
were actually their fathers and uncles in disguise; but this does not lead them to
claim that these divinities do not exist, as we come to claim of Santa Claus. The
Kachinas are at the root of the Hopi and Pueblo religious system. The adults them-
selves believe the Kachinas still return to the village to dance, but in an immaterial
and spiritual way. It’s as if, once they’ve opened the eyes of the young, the belief
is reaffirmed on another level: in a certain sense – a symbolic one – the Kachinas
really do return. Significantly, they are mainly ancestors, dead Fathers: with this rite,
Lacan would say, the Hopi stage the N.o.t.Father not as a “present” reality, which
is just play-acting, but as a transcendent reality that keeps that society together.
When a man makes a woman pregnant and accepts the fruit as “his own,” he
behaves a little like the Hopi in their religion: to the efficient cause (supplying
“Psychopathology” and the cure 135

a woman with semen) he superimposes something transcendent, accepting to

be a father, thus entering the order of the N.o.t.Father Sperm banks supply not
fathers, but spermatozoons. We could then say that the Hopi use their children
by putting them in the position of psychotics: of those who believe that the
ancestors (the N.o.t.Father) are actually present.
Lacan, by pointing out that this symbolic mystic dimension is intrinsic to our
most elementary family relations, is ipso facto telling us obliquely that insofar
as the N.o.t.Father spiritualizes the concrete reality of biological relations, it
also makes us lose our innocence once and for all. When Hopi or Zuni children
are initiated to the truth, they are given access on the one hand to the order of
symbolic (mystical) reality and, on the other, they also learn that mystical faith
is ultimately a bamboozlement. They become non-dupes, Lacan says, they are not
deceived any more. That’s why he says religious believers (and Lacan was not)
are the least naïve of people. In every non-psychotic mystic there’s a deep-down
irony, the effect of the split between “material reality” and “symbolic reality”
that the N.o.t.Father introduces.
According to Lacan, we are not psychotics insofar as we realize that the tran-
scendent is ultimately a symbolic simulation. On the contrary, psychotics, because
they have not lost their innocence, often think that reality itself is a simulation, an
artefact produced by a ploy, like in the case of Kretschmer’s patient, pregnant due
to a conspiracy. The “fictionality” non-psychotics see as the indelible shadow of
every mystical belief, psychotics see as the very essence of worldly reality.
Thanks to the N.o.t.Father all of our psyche becomes “metaphorical,” i.e.
“psychical.” We said that according to Lacan language separates us from the
world, makes it problematic for us. With the N.o.t.Father we gain access to
the metaphorical function of language. In short, we stop taking things “liter-
ally.” Just insofar as the Lacanian N.o.t.Father is what allows us to metaphorize
biological and affective relations, it should itself be taken as a metaphor. The
N.o.t.Father, which turns things into letters, should not be taken too literally.
Usually, someone who knows he is about to die shouts out “mum!” or “my
God!” The dying, in short, invoke the mother or the N.o.t.Father And it is sig-
nificant that in our monotheistic religions God has no name – neither JHWH (the
Judaic not-name), nor the Lord, nor Allah are names for God. The N.o.t.Father
essentially means that this name does not exist.
To understand the meaning of the “foreclosure of the N.o.t.Father” better,
we need to read August Strindberg’s play Father (Lacan surprisingly never quotes
Strindberg in Ecrits or in Seminars). Strindberg was a misogynous paranoiac. He
wrote the autobiographical novel The Defence of a Fool, in which he was the fool.
He wrote it because he was convinced that European women had united to
make him pass for a madman and ruin his writing career. Father, too, is a largely
autobiographical work – at the time Strindberg had a terrible doubt: that he may
not be the father of the two girls he had with the actress Siri von Essen. He was
convinced that Siri went to bed with lots of men and even with a Danish woman.
It was all a delusion of jealousy.
136 “Psychopathology” and the cure

Father is the story of man persecuted by a woman. The victim is named – a

fine mockery – the Captain. His wife Laura wants to educate their daughter
following her own criteria and convinces the village doctor and pastor that the
Captain is a lunatic. In addition, she instils in her husband the doubt that he is not
the true father of their daughter. Laura eventually reaches her goal and she herself
will force her husband into a straightjacket. Before he dies of heartache, his wife
asks whether he would like to see his child. The Captain replies:

My child? A man has no children, it is only woman who has children, and
therefore the future is hers when we die childless. Oh, God, who holds his
children dear. . . .
(Strindberg 1983, p. 40)

From such a statement, and several other passages, we gather that the Captain
does not limit himself to doubting his own paternity: he essentially excludes that
one may be a father. He invokes the unfather God, identified to a meek and subdued
mother.
It is worth noting that, according to Lacan, psychosis is a subjective structure
that cannot really be modified. Even people who have never provided a shrink
with work may have a psychotic structure, insofar as they’ve never had access to
the N.o.t.Father. Many “psychotics next door” are not recognized as such. Even
if, as sometimes happens, alas, the very nice gentleman next door kills a neigh-
bour, convinced that he has been persecuted by him for years.

5 Who is a father?
Some may say that the Lacanian theory on psychosis, even if extremely elabo-
rate and refined, has something of the psychotic about it. The central role of the
N.o.t.Father makes us suspicious, precisely because it seems to take on the apo-
dictic substance of a delirious signifier. But perhaps Lacan gave a psychotic aura
to his theory on psychosis on purpose – in the same way as there’s something of
the hysteric in his theory on hysteria, of the perverse in his theory on perver-
sion . . . – on the basis of an “expressionist” principle, as I would call it, according
to which the theory should have a form similar to its object.
Others blame Lacan for the fact that his reference to “in the name of the
Father” depends on his link to Christian patriarchal culture, and is therefore
not generalizable to other cultures. In short, Lacan is criticized for what Freud’s
Oedipus theory was criticized for at the time: that the structuring function of the
N.o.t.Father can only apply to patrilineal cultures. How can it apply to matri-
lineal ones?
As early as the 1920s, Bronislaw Malinowski had opposed the Freudian Oedi-
pus with the case of the Melanesian society he had observed for years in the
Trobriand Islands. This matrilineal (which doesn’t mean matriarchal!) society
happens to deny the function of the natural father, with the paternal role exercised
“Psychopathology” and the cure 137

by the maternal uncle; the Oedipal hatred of the males is directed against this
uncle and not against the natural father, who is considered an “in-law.”
Would Lacan say that Trobriand culture, which rejects the generating func-
tion of the mother’s husband, is psychotic? Even the most primitive human
beings know that a woman must have sexual intercourse with a man for a child
to be born after nine months. Malinowski’s Melanesians aren’t naïve or ignorant
either. And it appears evident that the Trobrianders know, between the lines,
who their real male begetter is; what’s more, they believe that a child physically
looks like his or her father and not like the mother! Which is also a false state-
ment, because often a child looks more like the mother than the father. In Laca-
nian terms: with regard to family relations, the Trobrianders completely split the
Symbolic and the Imaginary. The only symbolic relation (filiation) is reserved
for the mother and her family, whilst the imaginary resemblance (in-law kinship)
is reserved for the father. In other words, the Trobrianders completely separate
the male begetter (unrecognized symbolically) from the N.o.t.Father, incarnated
by the maternal uncle.
To complicate things further, we know of populations in which the exact
opposite happens: populations where the only recognized kinship relation is
with the father, whilst the mother is only the wife of the father! This is the
system among the Lakher (Mara people), a population in Northern Burma and
Assam (but the same is true for several other cultures). The fact that mater cer-
tissima est (the mother is absolutely certain) is not enough for these South-East
Asian eccentrics to realize the kinship relation between mother and child. And,
significantly, they too operate a split between the Symbolic and the Imaginary,
though in the opposite sense from the Trobrianders: for them a child looks like his
or her mother, not like the father.
It seems that in Ancient Sparta too, the mother was only an “in-law” for her
children. This would explain the fact that Spartan men were allowed to marry
their uterine sister, but not their agnate sister (brothers and sisters are uterine
when they share the same mother and agnate when they share a common father).
In short, in Sparta the uterine sister was not a “blood relative,” as we say ( Leach
1961).
Here we can touch with our bare hands what Lacan would call the autonomy
of the signifier: every culture structures the symbolic ties between natural rela-
tives in its own way. But does this apparent arbitrariness of the Symbolic not
represent a problem for the focal function of the N.o.t.Father? With the Lakher,
for example, do we not witness instead a foreclosure of the Mother?
Now, as we said, the notion of the “paternal metaphor” is in itself a metaphor.
The notion of Name-of-the-Father, like most theoretical cruxes in psychoanaly-
sis, should be taken as an idiosyncratic creation of Lacan’s, no differently from
Nietzsche’s Eternal Return of the Same, or Kierkegaard’s Øieblikket, the moment
(literally: the blink of an eye) as eternity, and so on. And yet, the Eternal Return,
the blink of an eye, the N.o.t.Father are all dense concepts, full of resonances
for us, because they capture something we feel is important. Lacan’s boldness
138 “Psychopathology” and the cure

in relating paternity to the psychotic mode of being-in-the-world “makes us

think.” He has managed to relate our frequent ironic doubts about paternity –
as in when we say “son of a bitch!” – to the very possibility of something that
makes us non-dupes subjects: the possibility of not fully believing in something
we believe in (even if this something were to be Lacanian psychoanalysis . . .),
which saves us from the rigor of psychosis.
It is a well-known fact that after Freud many psychoanalysts, from the most
various tendencies, have tried to cure psychoses analytically, wanting in this way
to belie Freud’s opinion that psychotics were not treatable analytically. Lacan,
too, believed that the psychoanalytical technique, created for neurotics, should
not be applied to psychotics; but he also believed that psychoanalysts “should not
back down when faced with psychotics.” In short, they should encounter them,
precisely because they are psychoanalysts. Not a psychoanalysis for a psychotic,
but only a psychoanalyst and a psychotic. And their relation needs to be rein-
vented case by case. You don’t interpret a psychotic’s dreams or actions as you
would in analysis: because the psychotic tends to read the interpreting metaphor
(every interpretation is a metaphor) as a reality judgement and could receive the
interpretations as a form of persecution. By interpreting, the analyst assumes the
superior position of “the one who knows,” and psychotics tend not to tolerate
those who know. Analysts, Lacan says, should instead be “the scribes of psy-
chotics”: they should register what they say, take note, without ever presenting
themselves as “interpreters.” With psychotics, analysts need to become pupils,
“the ones who do not know.” Fully aware of the fact that the cure for psychosis
is a form of care that can often go on for the psychotic’s, and the analyst’s, entire
lifetime.

6 Hysteria
Lacan gives great importance to hysteria – and, significantly, he considers the
Discourse of the Hysteric to be one of the four fundamental social links. He
argues that psychoanalysis was invented by Freud’s hysteric patients, who used
him to express and elaborate . . . what? A sort of malaise felt by women regarding
their femininity. A discontent that emerged at the end of the 19th century, an
era that had planned a new status for women as being “equal” to men ( J.S. Mill,
one the most inf luential philosophers of the time, created this feminist project
as early as 1869 in his essay The Subjection of Women). An as yet unaccomplished
program, but quite unique in the history of humanity.
Freud dealt with the syndrome that was fashionable at the time, just like autistic
spectrum, eating disorders, and ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disor-
der) are fashionable today. Hysteric women were intriguing at the time because
they seemed to resist this modern project of finally making women the equals –
and no longer just the complements – of men. In fact, as an Hegelian, Lacan tries
to historicize the unconscious too, but in a different way from culturalists like
Karen Horney or Erich Fromm.
“Psychopathology” and the cure 139

In order to illustrate what Lacan adds to Freud’s work, I will refer to the case
of an “archetypal” Freudian patient. Cäcilie ( Freud 1895, SE, 2, pp. 176–181;
GW, 1, pp. 245–251) who was cured by Freud in 1889 through a method out-
stripping the cathartic one, can in fact be considered the first patient of psycho-
analysis. Cäcilie is the paradigmatic patient; she is the Freudian unconscious
explained to children, and she is also the ABC of the “unconscious structured
as a language.” Cäcilie, muse of psychoanalysis, was a very rich and intelligent
lady who went to Freud because of violent and abrupt trigeminal neuralgia. We
shall not go into the details of how Freud analyzed Cäcilie’s specific symptoms
by attributing them to metaphorical expressions. We will limit ourselves to a
synoptic table:

Literal Signifier Figurative Signifier

Symptoms Bad Event

Facial neuralgia “My husband gave me a moral slap in the face”

Pain in the right heel “A false step with strangers”
Pain between the eyes “My grandmother penetrated my brain [mind]”
Pangs in the cardiac region “I’ve been stabbed in the heart”
Cephalalgy “I have an idea in my head”
Sore throat “I’ve got to eat the crow”

Let us consider the case of her “facial neuralgia.” Cäcilie told Freud that,
years back, she had undergone a period of conf lict with her husband. One time,
during a quarrel, her husband made a remark that she found highly offensive. In
telling Freud this, she rested her hands on her cheeks and said that for her it had
been “like a slap in the face!” (Freud 1895, SE 2, p. 178; GW 1, p. 247). After
recalling this scene, her neuralgia had disappeared. The cause of the pain was
therefore a metaphor: it was “a moral slap in the face.”
The fact that these symbolizations are expressed through the “pathetic” body
of the subject – recorded in her own f lesh, in this case – had long been considered
a typical symptom of hysteria. Conversions are a suffering of the metaphoric flesh.
According to Lacan, by “reading” the hysteric’s body as a talking body, Freud
had discovered the unconscious. He shows that in hysterical symptoms, just like
in dreams, the two fundamental rhetorical figures, which according to post-
Saussurean linguistics correspond to the two fundamental axis of language, are
at work: metonymy and metaphor (see Benvenuto 2015).
I would like to point out that metonymy means to refer to a certain thing
through association with an element that is contiguous to it, like for example
“sceptre” for “king,” or “a skirt” for “a woman.” Metonymy corresponds to
the syntagmatic axis of any language, that is, the linear combination of words
over time.
Metaphor, on the other hand, corresponds to the paradigmatic axis of language:
every time we speak, we select one word from within a virtual paradigm. In
140 “Psychopathology” and the cure

Cäcilie’s sentence “my husband gave me a slap in the face,” for instance, the syn-
tagma “my husband” is the result of a choice from the paradigms

“my – your – his/her, etc.”

and

“husband – partner – man – spouse – sexual partner – my second half, etc.”

and so forth.
The distinction between metaphor and metonymy draws on a difference that
classic associationism had already grasped before Saussure: the signification pro-
cess proceeds from one thing to another that is similar to it (metaphor), or else
from one thing to another that is contiguous to it (metonymy).
There exist two ways of thinking that are quite different from one another:
the first one, I will call it “systematic” (metaphorical), and the second one
“historical-narrative” (metonymy). If we say “water is H 2O,” we are enunciating
something systematic – broadly speaking, metaphorical – because we are estab-
lishing an equivalence in meaning:

“Water means molecules of two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen.”

Such is the way theoretical thinking usually works. But one could also say:

“In the year 1800 chemist William Nicholson, while carrying out an elec-
trolysis of water, obtained on the surface electrodes, distinct gaseous bub-
bles of hydrogen and oxygen.”

In this second example you are not giving a paradigmatic definition of water.
Rather, you are telling a story. Do both methods of expression say the same
thing? We can say they refer to the same thing, but they say different things. Got-
tlieb Frege would have said that both have the same Bedeutung (the water) but
different Sinnen (meanings). Those with a philosophical or scientific mind are
more inclined to systematic-metaphorical expressions, whilst historical-narrative
expressions can appear as anecdotal stories, for didactic purposes. In our cul-
ture, the more “masculine” systematic metaphoricity has always prevailed over
the more “effeminate” historical metonymycity. Yet, in time, people started to
realize the powerfulness of the second way of thinking, especially in moulding
the ideas of those social groups to which each of us belong. Today you say, for
example, that “Trumpism is a narrative” rather than an ideological system.
Many analysts make the mistake of thinking that some “narrative” patients
are unable to interpret their own dreams or any “significant” event taking place
during analysis. This is because said analysts privilege the systematic way of
thinking. In fact, many of these patients, after telling a dream, make illuminating
“Psychopathology” and the cure 141

connections, tell anecdotes and fantasies expanding on the content of the dreams
themselves. In short, they interpret their dreams, although they do so in a
historical-syntagmatic manner.
It would seem that Lacan has valued the metonymic dimension – which I
have called feminine – in his own psychoanalytical practice. They used to say he
was better at curing women, and that he highly valued femininity in his female
patients.
Lacan explains this twofold axis of language by saying that metonymy is “mot
à mot,” word by word, verbatim, such is the case when we say “now repeat
what I have said word by word.” For him, metaphor is “mot pour mot,” “a word
for another” – in our example of Cäcilie, “slap” stands for “offense.” In this case
“facial neuralgia” – the symptom – is a “metonymical metaphor,” so to speak,
since “the pain in the cheek” is a metonymy for slap. As such, I would call the
hysterical conversion: suffering of the rhetorical f lesh.
Nowadays many say that hysteria no longer exists. I, instead, think that a
great deal of our female patients are hysterical. The fact is that hysteria no lon-
ger manifests itself through symptoms of somatic conversion, as it happened for
Cäcilie. Nowadays hysteria manifests itself through anorexia and so-called bor-
derline syndromes.
Lacan realized that hysteria is first and foremost an unconscious choice for dissatis-
faction. Even in the absence of “rhetorical f lesh,” a subject is hysterical because she
does everything she can to feel unsatisfied. Freud noticed this about Dora, but he
failed to find an explanation for it. What can Dora possibly want, for trying her
best to make both herself and the people around her unhappy? Lacan’s answer is:
the hysteric’s primary desire is to always have an unsatisfied desire.
Why so? Because hysterics’ primary desire is that of desiring tout court, avoid-
ing that which Lacan calls aphanisis, which means to be swept away: desire is
swept away, that is. Because the end of desire, understood in the Freudian sense,
is subjective death.
Yet, for Lacan, human desire is always desire for desire. Does this mean that
human desire is fundamentally hysterical (that is to say, intrinsically feminine)?
What then distinguishes an hysterical personality from an obsessive-compulsive
or perverse one?
What does it then mean for Lacan that desire is desire of desire? And what does
his famous aphorism “human desire is the desire of the Other” mean? “Desire
of the Other” is to be taken as both subjective and objective genitive. Subjective
genitive: the Other desires something. Objective genitive: a subject desires the
Other. The two desires, subjective and objective, are circular. Even if we are not
hysterical, our fundamental desire, in the end, is to be desired by the Other, so
that desire is always desire of the desire . . . of/by the Other.
Everyone wants to be loved! This demand for love, as Lacan calls it, carries out
a fundamental function in making our desire rotate. And if we place someone in
the position of the Other – the man or the woman we love, for example, or our
analyst – we want the Other to desire us.
142 “Psychopathology” and the cure

However, the desire of/by the Other means also to desire . . . other things.
A professionally fulfilled woman, with a good and wealthy husband, lets herself
be seduced by no one special, which undermines her satisfaction. Why? She can
only say “I was bored. I wanted something else.” For Lacan this wanting autre
chose, something else – which is not to say something satisfying – is the desire of
the Other. It is the corollary of Lacan’s Dionysian thought.
This does not mean that from time to time one can get enjoyment. If I am a
woman, I can surely “give in” to someone who desires me. However, the hysteri-
cal excludes her and the other person’s enjoyment – to say it coarsely, “she does
not put out.” Even if she decided to put out to the first comer, then, oddly and as
it is often the case, this newcomer would not “put out to her,” for the hysteric’s
desire cannot resolve in enjoyment. If she engages in sexual activity every day,
then in this case she has a frigid “soul.”
In sum, the hysteric seems to encapsulate the famous gag by Groucho Marx:
“I would never accept to be a member of a club that accepts me as a member.”
Lacan said something similar: “the hysteric needs a master over whom to exercise
her power.”
One could then ask: is it true that every desire has an object? If I desire a
woman, are not her female features the object of my desire? Being the refined
Dionysian he is, Lacan could not say something so banal. Therefore, betraying
the pompier (kitsch) analyst, Lacan says that human desire has an object that causes
it: the object a. But the object at which desire aims is never the object that causes
it. Our desire always gets its aim wrong.

7 Obsessive neurosis
It is well-known that Freud was one of the inventors of the concept of obses-
sive neurosis, today called obsessive-compulsive neurosis. For Freud, in this
neurosis – as in every psychic form of dystonia – the subject experiences a psychic
conf lict. In the case of obsessive behaviour, the conf lict – Freud tells us – is due
to a strong ambivalence towards a series of fundamental figures, which are loved
and hated at the same time. The obsessional strategy consists in satisfying alter-
natively, back and forth, love and hate. For reasons that are not easy to explain,
obsessive neurosis is more congenial to the male sex.
The Rat Man is the clinical case through which Freud illustrated the analy-
sis of obsessive neurosis. The Rat Man has a girlfriend, Gisela, who is also his
cousin, and towards whom he has ambivalent feelings. One day, before she leaves
the resort where they are vacationing, he notices a stone on the road where
the chariot carrying his belle is to go through: thinking that the carriage might
stumble on it, he kicks the stone it to the side. Once at home, he thinks “what an
absurd thing I have done!” And so he goes back to the same place and puts the
stone back where it was (Freud 1909, SE, 10, p. 189; GW, 7, p. 412). Freud inter-
prets this inconsistency – running with the hare and hunting with the hounds – as
the gratification of two conf licting impulses: when he kicks the stone away he is
“Psychopathology” and the cure 143

expressing his feeling of protection towards Gisela, whereas when he puts it back
he is expressing his hostility towards her.
The truth is that Freud cannot really explain the reason for this ambivalence.
The Rat Man sees the paternal figure, who had passed away years back, as an
alternative to his girlfriend, as if the ghost of his father was opposing his relation-
ship with the living Gisela. So how to explain this imaginary incompatibility
between the two love-objects?
Lacan tries to answer by eliminating the psychological implications of the
case. In place of the explanation that resorts to the psychological conflict, he pre-
fers the contradiction “a = not-a.” Contradiction is something less psychological
than logical. This is to say, the neurotic faces a logical impasse: he has to collect
what Lacan calls a symbolic debt.
Indeed, the neurotic often insists obstinately on books that do not balance.
He is never sure he has the maths right, he suspects that there are shortages, that
the others are cheating or that he himself is cheating. The need of the neurotic
to check and double-check relentlessly – the obsessional doubt – gives voice to the
fact that his life is built on a debt with, say, the law, which is a debt he will not
be able to honour . . . because it is not him who has to honour it! In fact, it is not
his debt, but the Other’s (in the Rat Man, it is his father’s). For this reason his
life seems to freeze, it does not have historical progression, and he obsesses over
a shortage he will never be able to cover.
In my opinion, the literary work that gets the closest to this obsessive disorder
is The Trial by Kaf ka. As is well known, it tells the story of Herr K., who one
day finds himself on trial. At the end of the book, he will be sentenced to death,
but we will never know for what crime. The charge is hidden to us, since the
crime of K. cannot be described – or as Lacan would say “imagined” – since it is
a “debt,” which is not just hyperbolic but also symbolic.
In fact, when analyzing a neurotic, it will soon come to the fore that he is
living to expiate for some sin; but what sin? During analysis, he himself will try
to find a childhood “sin,” but the mischiefs coming to mind will not justify this
never-ending expiation of his. As a result, he ignores his own desire. He does
not know what he desires, because it is the Other – perhaps a late Other – who
dictates his desire.
An obsessive once told me that at one time he had been watching shooting
stars with friends on the night of August 10, which is St. Lawrence Day. It is cus-
tomary in Italy to make a precise wish whenever you see a shooting star, so that
it might come true. Someone said “let each of us now make a wish.” My patient
concentrated, and candidly told his friends “I do not wish anything.” Now, this
person had recently gotten married. But his belief was: “I did everything I could
to marry her not because I wanted it, but because she wanted it!,” which means
“it was the Other who wanted it, not me.”
For Lacan, desire and subjectivity coincide. To put aside our own desire to the
point of not recognizing it anymore is to undergo a “subjective death.” Indeed,
Kaf ka’s Mr. K. is described a bit like the living dead: he lives on his own in a
144 “Psychopathology” and the cure

rented room, he does not have a girlfriend, the women he is courting are impli-
cated in his trial. We do not know his parents, relatives, or friends. By this I do
not mean that all obsessionals are like him, but the fact remains that K. manifests
an essential, prototypical obsession. Such a debt enslaves the obsessional subject
to his master. The immediate connection is to the dialectic between master and
slave, which we have already discussed.
In Hegel, as we may remember, we have a happy ending: when the slave
becomes a master, it is the opposition itself – “master vs. slave” – that is overcome.
On the other hand, the obsessive is a slave doomed to perpetually remain as such,
and he spends his life waiting for his master’s death. The problem though, is that
often his master is already dead.
The analysis of obsessive neurosis confronts us with the implications between
law and desire, on whose dynamics Lacan trumps all his cards. Here, too, he
overthrows the common understanding of this relationship.
We common people assume that our spontaneous and wild desires come first,
and that only subsequently do the civil and penal law intervene to control them.
Many of us wish to kill someone we hate. Likely, however, the laws punishing
murder prevent us from doing so. According to Lacan, it is precisely the law that
produces desire; first and foremost the desire to transgress the law itself.
Paul the Apostle had already noted this paradoxical dialectic:

Yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. For I would
not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, “You shall not
covet.” But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, pro-
duced in me all kinds of covetousness.
(Holy Bible 2001, Romans, chap. 7, ver. 7–8)

After all, the Bible – which I find psychologically speaking more insightful than
cognitivism – illustrates original sin in analogous terms. It is precisely because
God forbids that apple that Adam and Eve’s desire arises.

8 The obsessive’s law

But what is the law? As we said, for religion law is the desire of God, which is to
say, the desire of the Other. Behind every law we presuppose the existence of the
desiderata of a legislator. Often, in the context of thorny legislative matters, law-
yers and judges ask themselves what the will of the legislator might have been.
Unfortunately though, the legislator does not exist. It is always Other from the
persons who have actually issued the law. Why not say, then, that the human
desire is to transgress the desire of the Other?
But the will to transgress is an epiphenomenon. Perhaps the real wish of the
biblical God was precisely that men and women could not enjoy the valley of
Eden, and that they spent their life desiring it instead. The prohibition of the tree
of knowledge was a trick designed to bar their enjoyment.
“Psychopathology” and the cure 145

In obsessive neurosis, however, subjective desire and desire of the Other are
distinct and in conf lict with one another. Let us take the Rat Man by way of
example. He is sure that his father does not want him to marry Gisela because she
is poor, from which his parapraxis towards the poor girl originates – parapraxis
ref lecting the “father’s” hostility. The unconscious desire of the Rat Man, then,
is the desire of (subjective genitive) his late father. But the subject also thinks
that the father has been unfaithful to his true real desire, since, when he was
young he, too, had loved a poor woman, despite ultimately preferring to marry
a rich woman (the patient’s mother). The paternal law is thus an “anti-law-of-
the-heart” that the Rat Man is tempted to follow: to marry a rich woman he
does not love. One’s own desire and the desire of the Other intersect to the point
that the subject no longer knows whose desire it is. Whereas the hysterical spends
her life protecting her own desire, the obsessive type pre-emptively gives up his
own desire.
When Lacan says that human desire is the desire to desire, he is saying that
desire will never find an object that can fulfil it. Sure, desire is the product of an
object, which, however, will not fulfil it: it is the object a that originates desire.
This links us back to the scene from Lubitsch’s film To be or not to be where we
identified this object with the spectator leaving the theatre. The spectator is the
cause of the actor’s desire, to the extent that each actor bends over backwards in
order to nab back the spectator who is already ready to leave the theatre room.
Theatre is made for those who refuse to be spectators.
To return to Kaf ka’s The Trial, it is often read quite trivially in terms of the
injustice suffered by Herr K., as the violation of his rights, rather than the most
modern novel on feelings of guilt. I wouldn’t be so sure that K. suffers an injus-
tice. We could even assume that K. knows the accusation, except that the author
does not tell us. The Trial is not a novel in defence of the civil rights of defen-
dants! Since the reader does not know the accusation, s/he thinks: “K. does not
know what he is charged with.” Not necessarily.
We have always wondered about the relationship between law and justice, and
if each law expresses an innate sense of justice, etc. In Kaf ka, as in the Jewish
tradition in general, the law is highly disconnected from justice. God commands
Abraham to offer Isaac as a sacrifice, a profoundly unjust act. And God victim-
izes poor Job (Book of Job), who is completely innocent.
Those who have been in prison know well that the vast majority of inmates
profess themselves innocent. K. is not an exception. We could say that “being
unjustly condemned” is a structural implication of every condemnation origi-
nating in the law.
For Lacan, analysis leads to more than just healing – because there is no mental
pathology – rather, soothing, pacification. The neurotic’s sufferance is war-like.
This is not, however, an internal conf lict, as psychologists believe, but rather a
war against the Other.
It often happens that I meet people who say they are approaching the end of
analysis. Still, they keep obsessing over which of their parents did wrong, and
146 “Psychopathology” and the cure

thereby made them into the neurotics they have become. I think, “this person
is far from the end of analysis!” Analysis ends with reconciliation with one’s
parents, be they living or dead. This means that the subject succeeds in discon-
necting those poor parents – whether they have been more or less good it does
not matter – from the Other. Only then is the war over.

9 Perversions
Lacan has dealt with the theme of perversions, but his most important contribu-
tion to perversions is undoubtedly sadomasochism. Psychoanalytic tradition does
not oppose sadism and masochism as two alternative models, but it considers
them as two moments of the same dynamic, meaning a subject can shift from a
sadistic position to a masochistic one or the other way around. Lacan devoted a
great deal of attention to the marquis of Sade.
Whereas outside of France, Sade is considered just a pornographic writer, in
France he is hailed as an illustrious writer and thinker, coming to the attention
of authors like Blanchot, Klossowski, Foucault, Barthes, Derrida, and Lacan.
It is not coincidental that Sade is called “the divine marquis” by the French.
Every French person knows Sade’s famous sentence at the time of the Revolu-
tion, “French people, just one last effort and we will be Republican!” And to be
“Republican” is at the centre of the political rhetoric in France; when talking
about politics with a French person nowadays, s/he will bring out his/her being
“Republican.” Politically speaking, France is Sadean.
Lacan’s masterstroke consists of making Sade into a sort of Kantian figure.
I doubt Sade had ever read Kant. The latter published Critique of the Practical
Reason – the book used by Lacan to illuminate what he calls “the Sadean fantasy
[ fantasme]” – in 1788, one year before the seizure of the Bastille, the jail where
the marquis was then incarcerated. So is the temporal coincidence between Kan-
tian ethics and Revolution a mere coincidence?
For Kant, the absence of morality has nothing to do with the pathos of real
subjects. The universal validity of the ethical law does not admit “pathological”
(from páthos) exceptions – that is to say, it does not take affects into account at
all; to be good has nothing to do with happiness. Ethics means to do one’s duty,
the absolute imperative, since it is not dependent upon the individual’s emotions.
The ethical imperative tells me “do not lie,” even though in a specific context
it would be wiser to resort to a good lie. For Kant, ethics is apathetic, indifferent
to the worries of the subject towards whom you carry out an ethical action. In
short, Kantian ethics is sadistic. Whereas the affective imperatives demand that I
do what I like or what spares me from suffering, I choose to do my duty freely.
For Kant, the only free people are those who do their duty, because they do not
submit to Lustprinzip, the despotic prince of the desire-pleasure.
Sade, according to Lacan, overthrows Kant. But we know that to overthrow
a thought is, somehow, to reaffirm its structure: for Sade the universal law that
is extraneous to the subjects’ pathos is that of nature, the cruel mother. Nature
“Psychopathology” and the cure 147

forces us to pursue pleasure. The enjoyment of nature (subjective genitive: nature

pursues enjoyment) consists of the fact that nature needs to destroy life in order
to recreate new living beings. In this way, nature forces us to pursue enjoy-
ment at the expenses of others. It follows, then, that the Sadean enjoyment is a
Kantian-like categorical imperative: it does not aim at the wellness and conser-
vation of the life of subjects, but forces everyone to be unconditional objects of
the others’ enjoyment. The sadist is thus the executioner, the hangman, of the
merciless law of nature. Yet, it would seem that to submit to the law is the only
way to attain freedom. For Kant, ethical duty and freedom coincide; for Lacan
authentic desire and being forced to do one’s will coincide. In short, for Lacan,
perversions – not just sadomasochism – are based on moral metaphysics and, like
any other metaphysic, are historically determined.
The concept of “perversion” was invented by psychiatrists at the end of the
19th century. As the term suggests, it fused moral assumption and psychiatric
categorization together. Nowadays ethical metaphysics has changed, to the point
that psychiatrists no longer speak of perversion, but of “paraphilia.” Paraphilia or
“wrong love” softens the connotation of moral condemnation.
Perverse acts are performances in which we can discern the actors, characters,
director, and author of the performance. Indeed, although the scripts of Sade’s novels
are sadistic, their author is masochistic. Sade tried really hard to spend most of his life
between prisons and madhouses following sexual jokes that are relatively mild. To
describe this differential, Lacan advances two almost identical graphics (Figure 6.1).
The first one on the left shows the sadistic position, the second one on the right
shows the masochistic one. In both the graphics, the “game” starts with a, which
is the object-thing we have already discussed. The path ends with S, the mythical
subject of pure pleasure – something in between subject and signifier. Now, to
our great surprise – we would be even more surprised if Lacan did not surprise us,
which happens very rarely – Lacan tells us that that object a is the sadistic agent
himself. This postulation would surprise us less if we thought of the number of
horror, war, or violent movies or novels that so many people are keen on. It is
evident that they enjoy watching these forms of sadism – their object a – washing
off their guilt with the excuse that they are watching mere fiction.

Schema 1 Schema 2

V S a V

d a S S S

FIGURE 6.1 Sadian Scheme

148 “Psychopathology” and the cure

Lacan notes that “sadistic” artistic works split us as subjects. Indeed, while
witnessing sadistic scenes, a good part of us refutes the horrific events we are
watching; the rest of us, however, the “aesthetic” part, will appreciate them as
strong and well-made sequences. A part of us rebels against tortures, the other
one enjoys them. We unload on a wicked person the task to act cruelly, so as to
allow ourselves to get engrossed with the sadistic act.
/] is the victim. For
If, for Lacan, the sadist is object a, then the real subject [S
Lacan, sadomasochism is not aggressiveness towards an animal or human object,
but rather an act that presupposes a subject that suffers or enjoys. The victim / S
is split. On the one hand, the subject subjects itself to his own executioner, it
subjects itself to the Sadean law: “be the object of enjoyment of the executioner
Other.” On the other hand, the subject annihilates itself to pure sufferance, to an
unarticulated scream where dignity and humanity vanish.
Liliana Cavani’s film, The night doorman, impressed the audience precisely
because it epitomized well this subjective split of the victim. An ex-Lager pris-
oner meets her Nazi persecutor in Vienna after many years; he is under cover,
disguised as a night doorman. Instead of reporting him, the woman starts a sado-
masochistic sexual relationship with him, which mirrors the relationship they
had at the time of the Lager. Please allow me to use the names of the two main
actors: Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling.
According to a Lacanian structure, the sadist Bogarde (a) acts on Rampling
/] through a will (V) that is almost transcendent: the Nazi project. This ruthless
[S
will replaces the cruel Sadean nature. The woman is split because, on the one
hand, she suffers as a victim; but on the other hand, the sadistic action yearns for
an annihilation of pain itself. As Cavani has shown allegorically, the final result
is S as a mythical subject of pure pleasure. Rampling goes from being split victim
/] to post factum S, subjectivity that enjoys, when she again meets her torturer
[S
whom she now has in her hands.
The difference between the two Lacanian graphics consists in the rotation
with respect to d (desire) – the first graphic illustrates Bogarde’s position, the
second one Rampling’s. They both attain jouissance, but from different positions.
In the first graphic, the focus of desire is on a, the torturer: it is him who starts
off the path. In graphic 2, by contrast, the focus of desire is on Rampling, / S.
To the extent that she becomes an accomplice of the sadistic act, this leads to S,
which – in a book of mine on perversions ( Benvenuto 2016) – I called salvation.
Every utopia – including Nazism – promises this S, a subject that enjoys in a
happy society. I wonder whether it might be the case that all utopias are sadistic
by definition. And in fact Sade was an utopian thinker. Sadists consider them-
selves avengers in that, by acting cruelly towards innocent people, they believe
that they are freeing the world from evil; affording the world a salvific subjectiv-
ity such that it might attain infinite jouissance.
René Girard (2013) pointed out that innocents have been persecuted since
time immemorial – they are scapegoats. Indeed, in every society you are wit-
ness to a hideous rivalry that has the potential to make the whole social body
“Psychopathology” and the cure 149

explode. This is why all the evil is unloaded on someone who is considered
“impure” and, as such, is expelled from the community, or even killed. Society
purges itself from the rivalry – that is to say, it preserves itself. This, until the
process starts again.

10 Transference
Freud thought that analysis artificially created a neurosis: transference. For him,
analysis was healing from the transference. In short, analysis has to heal from
analysis. . . . Now, for Lacan, every subject who does analysis assumes that the
analyst knows something special about him; the analyst is a subject supposed to
know. And sometimes the patient rubs it into the analyst’s face: “why don’t you
tell me what you have discovered about me?” Lacan would say, à la Socrates,
that the analyst ought to forget all she knows ( Lacan 1966). But in order for
the transference to take place, a certain degree of knowledge on the part of the
analyst ought to be presupposed by the analyzand. Why everyone undergoing
analysis ask himself/herself “what does my unconscious know?” The transfer-
ence dissolves, and analysis ends, when the subject stops believing in the analyst’s
knowledge.
IPA has long been dominated by a pan-transference tendency. If the patient
says, for instance, “yesterday I saw that hated uncle of mine,” then the analyst will
say, for example, “you are telling me that you find me as hideous as your uncle
and that you wouldn’t want to see me again etc.” Many mainstream analysts link
everything back to themselves in the attempt to untangle a subjective reality they
cannot grasp. This brings some analysts towards a sort of delusion of reference, as
we say in psychiatry: everything the patient says refers to the analyst.
The Lacanian analyst behaves differently: even when the patient says some-
thing that refers directly to the analyst, this latter brings him/her back to the
“real object.” That is to say, if the patient says: “today, my dear analyst, I find you
particularly hideous,” then the Lacanian psychoanalyst will likely say “you just
put me in the place of that famous uncle of yours that you hate.” The Lacanian
psychoanalyst does not interpret the transference, she interprets within the trans-
ference. Personally I see the shortcoming of both approaches.
I remember that, for Freud, transference is a repetition of the type of rela-
tionship with our parents – during our childhood they were the first subjects-
supposed-to-know. For the infants, parents are always right, and they know
everything about their children. Jean Piaget (2001) proved that all children are
sure about the fact that adults, and parents in particular, know their thoughts.
The first interpreters of the world and of ourselves are those inept figures of our
parents. Is it not coincidental, then, that children undergo the “why?” phase
when they are asking the subject-supposed-to-know the reason of everything.
Transference takes place because analysands infantilize themselves, trusting to
someone else, the analyst, the knowledge of the Other, thinking that she knows
their unconscious thinking. It is remarkable to observe that in patients who
150 “Psychopathology” and the cure

know Lacan well, and who are thus aware that transference is just an illusion,
that when they decide to undergo analysis with you . . . they suppose that you
have the knowledge. It is a structural effect, as the convicted they have to believe
they are innocent. If the subject does not agree to infantilize himself, you say he
resists, a Freudian term that Lacan does not like.
Some people enter analysis in order to become analysts themselves, and thus
to profess that they do not have symptoms. It is worth noting that for Lacan a
special training analysis does not exist. For him, each and every good analysis is a
training analysis. In order to do analysis, for Freud, what you need is inhibition,
or symptom, or anxiety. Inhibition-symptom-anxiety are the bread the analyst
has to “eat” in order to earn his living. The analysis of a person who wishes to
become an analyst starts when she realizes that she is not as “at peace” as she
thought, but that even without realizing it, she is at war.

11 The Phallus and the Thing

I am sometimes asked about the essential difference between object a and the
phallus, a distinction on which Lacan insists so much. In order to answer here,
allow me to recall a personal memory.
I was a child when I heard someone talking about psychoanalysis for the first
time. It was during a comic television show by Renato Rascel, a famous Ital-
ian actor-singer of that time. Rascel was rather short. At a certain point in the
show, Rascel confesses to a beautiful (tall) girl some discomfort I cannot recall.
Then the beautiful woman offers to be his analyst, and asks him to lie down on
the couch. In the end, it turned out that what Rascel wished for was . . . a cork.
Now, in the Italian language, we say that someone is “a cork” (a midget, that is)
when he is very short. Being a “cork” himself, this was what he wished to own.
At the end of the show, the beautiful analyst gives him a very long cork. . . . No
interpretation seems necessary. The show winks at the audience – who at that
time were not even familiar with Freud – on the basis of the common belief that
dwarfs, as scoliotic people, have very long penises.
That show was strictly Lacanian. The cork – that is to say, what Rascel was
missing in order to be a complete man – is a metaphor of what Lacan calls the
Phallus, with a capital P because it is not the traditional penis, but rather a unique
signifier. Like the other signifiers, but unlike them. Orwell wrote that all ani-
mals are equal, but pigs are more equal than the others (Orwell 1945). Similarly,
for Lacan, the Phallus is a signifier like the others but one that is more signifier
than the others.
Phallus surely has a great importance in Freud’s system, but in Lacan it occu-
pies a central role. Lacan seems to be polarized around the symbol of the phallus
in the same way as Indian people, who for centuries scattered the streets of their
country with many lingam, penises made of stone. The Phallus is a special signifier
because it signifies desire itself. And since for Lacan desire is subjectivity, it fol-
lows that if the subject represents himself in any way, he is a penis. I am not joking.
“Psychopathology” and the cure 151

In contrast to Winnicott’s dyad of the “good enough” mother and her child,
Lacan retraces the mother-child relationship in phallic terms. He takes seriously
Freud’s formulation that the desire of every woman who wishes to become a
mother is the desire to have a phallus for herself. Then the drama of the little
boy will be “do I have to be my mother’s phallus or rather can I have my own
phallus?” To be or to have the phallus? The little girl’s problem will be precisely
whether to be given the phallus or to be the phallus for man.
Surely the gift of the long cork given to Rascel is derisory – the analyst does
not give anything, except analysis – because the cork is a mere signifier of desire,
rather than the object of desire. Thus, what does the individual really desire behind
the cork-phallus? We could answer, in a way that is applicable to all of us nowa-
days, that the objects of human desire are essentially: power, sex and love, money,
knowledge. But all these objects are surrogates that quench our desiring thirst.
For Lacan, they are consolatory surrogates. In Naples, to say that you enjoyed
something a lot, for example a succulent dinner, you say “Me song cunsulato,” “I
solaced myself.” Pleasant experiences are mere solaces for the desolation of life.
With respect to the true object – object a – that originates desire, it will never be
possible to have it. Lacan calls this “object” la chose, “the thing.” The thing is the
black sun around which our life orbits.
Lacan commented on Antigone by Sophocles ( Lacan 1986, Chap. XIX–XXI).
Some say the fundamental difference between Freud and Lacan is that the for-
mer uses Oedipus as an interpretative key and the second uses Antigone. Lacan’s
would thus be a “feminine” re-reading of Oedipus.
Antigone transgresses the laws of the city, which forbids the burying of her
brother Polynices on account of him being an enemy of his homeland. Again,
we have here the relationship between law, desire, and transgression. Antigone
“symbolically” buries Polynices and is sentenced to a horrible death by the city’s
chief. Now – Lacan asks himself – what bonds Antigone to her brother to the
point that she would risk facing death? Under the name of which law does she
rebel against the laws of her city? There is a contradiction between two “laws.”
Lacan puts forward his odd interpretation: Antigone is a martyr, a witness,
not of the “familiar law” which would oppose the “law of the homeland” but of
das Ding, la chose, the thing itself. Polynices embodies the thing because, as Anti-
gone says, for her it is an irreplaceable unicum. She will not be able to have any
other brother, since the other brother Eteocles died at war, and her parents are
too old to procreate. Uniqueness is what bonds us for all of our life, precisely
because, being unique, it cannot be represented nor signified, not even by the
Phallus. A certain thing, if unique, cannot be represented by anything else, or
else it would no longer be unique. Then, every individual is senseless, because
she cannot be replaced by another individual. As is clear, Lacan’s theory might
appear to many to be very romantic.
And I believe that this links back to his eureka, “Y a’d’l’Un,” “there’s some
One.” The One whose existence he celebrates is that absolute uniqueness around
which our whole existence gravitates.
152 “Psychopathology” and the cure

Being unique, we are all meaningless. We are labelled with a name, but like
unique events we do not mean anything. Surely my parents desired – in the
best scenario – a boy, or a girl, but not me. This senseless uniqueness, however,
becomes our cause when we say for example “I live in the name (for the cause)
of socialism.” Polynices becomes for Antigone the cause to die for, because the
brotherly uniqueness causes the desire that makes her a heroine of subjectivity.
For this reason, those who betray their cause for opportunism feel “guilty”
according to Lacan. The obsessionals are subjects who at a certain point have
betrayed the cause, their thing (in French cause and chose are close in sound). Then
Lacan’s most famous sentence “those who give up on their own desire are guilty”
will appear less absurd. That is to say, those who give up the cause-thing which
is at the origin of their desire are guilty.
Let us move from an ancient and tragic show, Antigone, to another one, mod-
ern and comic: Sessomatto, a movie by Dino Risi. A peasant from the Italian
countryside arrives for the first time in Milan, with no previous experience of
the urban world. And so he mistakes a transvestite who sells his body at Ravizza
park for a nice lady; he falls in love with “her” and takes “her” to his house. Step
by step, the peasant will find out that this lady is in fact a male prostitute, and
what is more, that he has a wife and children. Later, the peasant will learn that
he is actually his own brother, who had left the country many years back. . . .
The peasant then mistakes the object of his desire: he believes that his desire
is to marry a nice virgin girl. But there is something that binds the peasant to
his brother, to the point of leading him to utter the incomparable sentence: “it
was enough that you were a woman rather than a man; enough that you were
engaged rather than married; enough that you were a nice girl rather than a
prostitute; enough that you were my cousin rather than my brother . . . then, we
would really be made for each other!” And indeed, at the end, they will end up
being a couple.
A kitschy analyst would say that the peasant had been in love with his brother
since he was a child, and that he has managed to retrieve his incestuous object
despite the metamorphoses etc. Lacan would not go down this road. Surely the
transvestite brother is not Polynices, but he seems to have something unique and
precious for the peasant. His object – the nice lady – was the one prescribed by
the law of his country of origin, which the peasant had mistaken for his desire.
Suddenly, however, he meets someone – or better said, a certain thing – that
seems to reveal a true “law of desire,” that is to say the irresistible attraction that
that unicum has on him.

References
2001, Holy Bible: English Standard Version, Crossway Bibles, Wheaton.
Benvenuto, S 2008, Accidia. La passione dell’indifferenza, Il Mulino, Bologna. Spanish edi-
tion: La pereza. Pasión per la indiferencia, Machado Libros, Madrid.
Benvenuto, S 2015, ‘Hysteria, the Bet of Psychoanalysis’, European Journal of Psycho-
analysis, vol 3, no. 1. Available from: www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/hysteria-the-
bet-of-psychoanalysis/
“Psychopathology” and the cure 153

Benvenuto, S 2016, Perversions, Karnac Books, London.

Cocteau, J 1964, The Essay of Indirect Criticism, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson.
Freud, S 1895, ‘Studies on Hysteria’, in Strachey, J, ed., The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 2 (1893–1895), The Hogarth Press and the
Institute of Psychoanalysis, London, 1955.
Freud, S 1909, ‘Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis (1909)’, in Freud, S, ed., The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 10 (1909),
The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, London, 1955, pp. 155–318.
Girard, R 2013, Violence and the Sacred, Bloomsbury, New York.
Kretschmer, E 1974, ‘The Sensitive Delusion of Reference’, in Hirsch, S and Shepherd, M,
eds., Themes and Variations in European Psychiatry, John Wright, Bristol, pp. 153–195.
Lacan, J 1966, Ecrits, Seuil, Paris. Eng. trans. Ecrits: A Selection, W.W. Norton & Co.,
New York, 2004.
Lacan, J 1973, Télévision, Seuil, Paris. Eng. trans. Television: A Challenge to the Psychoana-
lytic Establishment, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1990.
Lacan, J 1981, Le Séminaire, Livre III. Les psychoses, Seuil, Paris. Eng. trans. The Psychoses,
W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1997.
Lacan, J 1986, Le Séminaire, Livre VII. L’éthique de la psychanalyse, Seuil, Paris. Eng. trans.
The Ethics of psychoanalysis, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1997.
Leach, E 1961, Rethinking Anthropology, Athlone Press of University of London, London.
Marx, K 1976, ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, in Engels, F, ed., Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of
Classical German Philosophy, Foreign Languages Press, Peking, pp. 61–65.
Orwell, G 1945, Animal Farm: A Fairy Story, Secker and Warburg, London.
Piaget, J 2001, The Language and the Thought of the Child, Routledge and Kegan Paul,
London.
Strindberg, A 1983, ‘The Father’, in Strindberg: Five Plays, University of California Press,
Oakland.
7
CAN WE BE LACANIANS
TODAY?

1 Waiting for Machiavelli

Almost at the end of our path, the reader could rightly ask: “so, Benvenuto, are
you or aren’t you a Lacanian?”
I would answer that I’m not a Lacanian, because I’m not a “-ian” or an “-ist”
in any field. I don’t even call myself a Freudian. Freud is a great creator, but I
also take into account the limits of the metaphysics on which his vision rests;
that of the “signifying f lesh.” However, I’ll admit that I’m a Lacanologist, albeit
a deconstructive one.
Derrida – who generated deconstructionism – never wasted time decon-
structing authors who he felt were alien to him. He dealt with writers, includ-
ing Lacan, in whose wake he ultimately followed. Derrida’s were actually
self-deconstructions, acts of “killing of the father,” thanks to which each father
remained as such. In other words, they were a bold distancing of himself from
himself. Deconstructing texts is secretly an act of self-criticism, and hence an act
of love. And, significantly, Derrida summed up his relationship to Lacan in an
essay entitled Pour l’amour de Lacan ( Derrida 1995 –96). My reading of Lacan also
aims at being a punctual and scrupulous one, in short a loving one, but with no
concessions. And I am not a Derrid . . . ian.
In my youth I was a fervent Lacan fan. Then, after overcoming my transfer-
ence with him, I stopped being one, and for me he was no longer the subject
supposed to know. As we said, for Lacan transference occurs because the analyst is
considered a subject supposed to know. But my “analysis” with Lacan ended long
ago. Which is not to say that someone who has ended an analysis has necessarily
been cured.
I’m not a Lacanian, but let’s say that I love Lacan. Lacan himself said that we
should love our symptom, and, indeed, I love Lacan as my symptom. But, as one
156 Can we be Lacanians today?

does with a symptom, I keep at a necessary distance from him, with a sort of
pain. Lacan is my joy and my pain.
In any case, I consider myself lucky to have had a maître, “master.” I don’t
envy those who say “I’ve never had a master.” I feel a tender pity for them, like
little orphans who have to steal hot dogs to survive. Separating from your maître
can certainly even impoverish you, but it’s not the same poverty as those who’ve
never had a true master, and have never therefore had the opportunity to “set up
their own shop.” It’s fine to be a prodigal son, but the important thing is not to
return to your father with your tail between your legs.
Lacan said, “Do as I do: don’t imitate me.” In this case Lacan isn’t very sur-
prising; several masters in various fields have said very similar things. Apparently
Marx said he wasn’t a Marxist while Jung said “thank God, I’m Jung, and not a
Jungian!” And so on, and so on. The master’s refusal to be a “-ian” or an “-ist” of
himself has become a sort of stereotype. And part of the very structure of “being
a master” is a certain self-consoling contempt towards one’s pupils, even the most
loved ones. In any case, it’s true that I am not a Lacanian precisely because I pre-
fer to do as Lacan did: i.e. I also try to separate from my masters, including Lacan.
I am a practical Lacanist, not a theoretical one.
I am an imitator of Lacan – and hence not a Lacanian – insofar as I believe
we should do to him what he did to Freud. Despite the cover-up of a return to
Freud, Lacan is the Freudian who has led us furthest away from the letter of Freud,
even though some say the contrary, because they take him too literally. He oper-
ated an après-coup with Freud that gives a new sense to the premier coup, to the
first event, making it a cause. Today we need to operate an après-coup with Lacan:
to repeat some of the things he said, but in such a way as to make them find a
different register of sense from when Lacan was alive. Today’s Lacan can’t be
yesterday’s Lacan. Now, I find that a great number of my Lacanian friends – not
all of them, to be honest – are still in the yesterday. In the same way as many
Freudians, who Lacan certainly did not appreciate, still believed in the 1960s and
70s that they were in the premier coup of psychoanalysis.
I think we have now entered a third phase of psychoanalysis. The first was the
phase when we united or split on Freud’s explicit system of thought: we inher-
ited his cardinal concepts and situated ourselves in relation to them. But Freud’s
explicit system is a metapsychology, i.e. a set of myths. Very interesting ones,
but still myths. The Oedipus, the primary scene, castration anxiety, the libidinal
phases, and so on, are all myths. They undoubtedly capture something of human
life, but they should never be turned into dogmas!
Along with authors such as Winnicott, Bion, Loewald, and so on, Lacan
marked a second phase of psychoanalysis. Freud’s concepts were no longer taken
literally, or rather, they were repositioned on a new horizon, the specific one of
each of these innovators.
But today I believe we have entered a third phase, one in which we have
lost our innocence once and for all. In other words, the creators of the second
phase must also be relativized, and analytical practice must be questioned about
Can we be Lacanians today? 157

its specificity, beyond any metapsychologies and individual theories. We must,

in short, do what Machiavelli once did with politics: before him several politi-
cal theories had f lourished, but it was Machiavelli who first looked at political
struggle as such, independently from any idea or ideal of good government. I am
waiting for the Machiavelli of psychoanalysis.

2 The matheme and la passe

Consequently, my reading of Lacan is charitable, sympathetic, deconstructive, and
textual. A sympathetic and charitable reading, neither celebrative, nor fearful, nor
propagandistic. Charitable in the sense of the “principle of charity” developed by
the analytic philosophers Neil Wilson, Quine (1975), and Davidson.
This principle consists in resisting the temptation to dismiss as illogical – or
stupid, or false – everything that at first seems complete nonsense to us. The
principle of charity is a corollary to modern relativism. Sokal and Bricmont
(2003), for example, effectively illustrate the rather uncharitable rejection of a
line of thought – French post-structuralism – they don’t understand.
A sympathetic attitude is recommended to any anthropologist who goes off to
observe a faraway culture: if he wants to understand anything about it, he must
feel a sympathy towards it. You cannot be a good anthropologist of a tribe you
loathe; otherwise its members will give you a distorted image of themselves. Let’s
say that I strive to be a good “anthropologist” of the Lacanians: I’m not a member
of their village, but I like to be welcomed there.
As for the reading I call textual, I oppose it to two extremes: the rhapsodic
reading, which concentrates only on specific fragments, and the purely “math-
emic” reading. Something needs to be said about a central expedient in Lacan:
the “matheme.”
The term “mathematics” derives from máthēma, which in Greek means “that
which one learns,” “that which one must know,” or “lesson.” Lacan exploits the
etymology of mathematics as the transmission of knowledge.
Though Lacan’s teaching was not schematic but f luid and bubbly, he thought
that, despite everything, it was possible to create a school of psychoanalysis
because we can transmit mathemes to pupils: formulae or algorithms unaffected
by the f luctuations of subjective interpretations, by imaginary liquefaction. He
thought of sequences of pure signifiers as mathematical equations.
Lacan thought that it was possible for psychoanalysis to have something like
Newton’s equation mathematizing universal gravitation. In fact, you don’t have
to be a genius like Newton to understand the equation. In mathematics and
physics, signifiers are stones. Psychoanalysis is therefore transmittable insofar as
it has a mathemic hard core.
Yet, I don’t believe that this integral transmission is possible even in the
“hard” sciences. A software can be transmitted integrally from one hardware
to another, but human minds are not hardware, they’re not made of metal. All
pupils, however bright – or rather, because they’re bright – misinterpret and alter
158 Can we be Lacanians today?

their master’s thought, even without realizing it. This is because there are no two
brains – and therefore no two minds – that are exactly the same. According to
Edelman (1992) – a nihilistic relativist neuroscientist – two identical thoughts are
not possible because there are no two brains in the world with the same struc-
ture. In every transmission there is a loss of associations on the one hand and a
f luctuating grafting of other sequences on the other. Therefore, the great schools
of thought are centres of dissemination and dispersion.
We think that Newton’s equation is perfectly transmittable to anyone who has
a minimum knowledge of physics. But complete transmission is a trompe l’oeil,
because physicists and cosmologists today share a common “linguistic game,”
as Wittgenstein would say. This collective “game” produces sufficiently agreed
upon senses for “mass,” “distance,” “gravitational force,” and so on. But if this
community stopped being cohesive, if various independent scientific communi-
ties were created, then even Newton’s equation would take on different senses.
Behind every matheme there is always a group of people who play the same game.
What the master really transmits is not so much a formal thinking, but a certain
style of being-in-the-world. This is why, about Lacan, one can write only introduc-
tions to his thought (Benvenuto & Kennedy 1986). The transmission of Lacan’s sys-
tem is made problematic by the fact that his has always been a thinking “in motion.”
As I said, trying to find a complete definition of Lacanian concepts is a dead end,
because in the Lacanian opus we find several “definitions,” often in contradiction,
for each concept. For this reason, both “scholastic” Lacanians and those who con-
demn him take part in the same flaw: they start from the presumption that, like in
mathematics, a discourse makes sense when one has provided an explicit definition
of the concepts used from the very start. “But what does Lacan really define as
desire, as enjoyment, and so on?” This is what scholars who don’t understand Lacan,
or want to understand him too much, exclaim impatiently in annoyance.
Lacan’s journey has been rather an Hegelian one. Now, the essential con-
cept of Hegelian thinking is that of Erfahrung, a term rather hastily translated as
“experience.” For Hegel, history is the experience the Mind has of itself, unfold-
ing in temporality. Now, Erfahrung derives from fahren, which in German has the
sense of to drive (and drive also translates der Trieb in the Freudian sense). In other
words, Erfahrung is the drive to drive, the drive to have experiences, always mov-
ing around. Lacan’s thought is an Erfahrung, a journey: the starting point is that
human beings are not only Homo sapiens, because they’re shaped by language.
But after this initial motive, his path doesn’t proceed in a very linear way: the
itinerary never closes in on itself.
But Lacan doesn’t fully recognize his Erfahrung, so he aims at the matheme, at
the idea that something like a sacrament exists, in the Catholic sense of the term.
Sacrament was the Latin translation of the Greek mysterion, mystery. If I am bap-
tized, I am a Christian, even if I then disavow Christianity; if I have taken the
sacrament of the priesthood, I will always be a priest, even if I become an atheist.
The matheme is an act after which I shall never be what I was before. This is why
Lacan proposed a mechanism he called passe.
Can we be Lacanians today? 159

His problem was not “how to form good psychoanalysts” but “who a Lacanian
school should accept as analysts?” The IPA schools tend to keep a close eye on
the training of analysts to co-opt: if you do a certain number of years of analysis
with a training analyst, i.e. an analyst the institution considers legitimate, and
you prove you can operate correctly with patients, then you will in turn qualify
for recognition as an analyst. For Lacan, by contrast, it doesn’t matter who you
did analysis with, you could even have done it with an unknown analyst, the
important thing is to understand whether there really was an analysis. But this is
something neither the analyst nor the analysand can say, for both are too involved
in the question. So Lacan came up with the following contrivance: those who
want to pass are required to describe their analysis to a colleague, to someone like
them, to a fellow. This colleague is then heard by a school jury, and on the basis
of what is said by the passeur (the name given to those chosen as intermediaries
to talk about an aspiring member’s analysis), the jury verifies whether there really
was an analysis. If there was, the candidate can be accepted as a “member.” A
system that doesn’t contradict Lacan’s legendary eccentricity. The École chooses
as analysts, as peers, people it has never seen, based on the account of a third
party! In any case, this strange passing of the buck has a logic: if there really was
an analysis – rather than a psychologistic blah blah blah – then the candidate
will find a way to make the passeur understand it. In other words, if the analyti-
cal act has occurred, it is a sort of matheme that can be handed over without it
changing sense or becoming distorted. It’s like transmitting Newton’s equation
or Einstein’s: they can be transmitted from physicist to physicist and all of them
will understand their impact.
The passe is very similar to the technique of psychodrama, which many Laca-
nians practice. That is, in a group someone tells their story or describes a situa-
tion they experienced and the others play the characters of this story or situation,
improvising: the often miraculous effect is that these “actors,” though they know
nothing about the context, often end up saying or doing things that are quite
important for the subject who told the story. It’s as if they had a sixth sense. Does
this occur because a matheme has been transmitted? No, because every narrative
is like opening a game: if you understand the game, you can continue it even by
improvising.

3 Lay analysis
Something ought also to be said about the state of Lacanian clinical practice
today, even though I’m not an expert on the galaxy of the various Lacanian
schools and associations.
There’s one thing, however, that worries me: for many years now there have
been no major schisms between analysts. Is this because we’ve now reached a
settling period of the various tendencies? Yet the secessionist fever is a sign of
vitality. When in the 1960s and 70s Marxism was at its peak, there were count-
less Communist, Trotskyist, Maoist, Situationist, and so on, parties and groups,
160 Can we be Lacanians today?

which often came into being by “parthenogenesis.” This multiplying was the
mark of the vitality of Marxism at the time. The fragmentation of churches and
cults in the United States is also a sign of an enormous religious vitality in the
country. In the same way, the diaspora of the Lacan-inspired associations was a
sign of life within that current. The day psychoanalysis is reduced to two or three
variants it will have reached its mummification.
Various Lacanian schools introduce into the Lacanian labyrinth medicine or
psychology graduates who had never heard of him when they were in the well-
pruned aseptic grounds of the university, and this is a praiseworthy operation.
I personally lecture in some schools with a Lacanian orientation, in Italy and
abroad. So, Lacanian schools for me are more than welcome, even though I per-
sonally work more on the “after-school activities.”
But can we generally say that Lacanians are good analysts? After all, this is the
question that concerns most of those who are interested in psychoanalysis. The
answer is that every psychoanalytic association has both excellent analysts and
mediocre ones, and this goes for the Lacanians too.
I sometime ask analyst friends from all kinds of schools: “if someone very dear
to you, a sister, a son, and so on, felt unwell, what analyst would you send them
to?” The answers are often surprising, with some saying they would not send
them to an analyst of their own association. They would address them to some-
one they personally trust. The moral: with regard to analytic trustworthiness, the
decisive differences concern individuals rather than schools.
Until recently, mainstream IPA analysts mostly considered Lacanian analysts
“savages” and blunderers. But then certain figures in Lacanian clinical practice
emerged and earned themselves the respect of non-Lacanians. This is the case,
for example, with Lacan’s friend Françoise Dolto, who died in 1988, considered
even by anti-Lacanians in many countries to be an authentic prodigy in child
analysis.
Among the analysts of the American Psychoanalytic Association and of the
associations inf luenced by it, Lacan was considered irrelevant in his lifetime, and
for many of them he still is. Then, gradually, these analysts started finding them-
selves before young non-analysts of the post-modern galaxy who basically said:
“for us psychoanalysis is Lacan. Can you analysts explain it to us?” APA analysts
found themselves in an increasingly embarrassing position, because they knew
little or nothing about Lacan and risked being totally cut off from the cultivated
crowd that was prepared to take psychoanalysis seriously. So, over the years,
these analysts searched for friends, colleagues, former partners, mostly Euro-
pean, with a reputation for being well-acquainted with Lacan. They underwent
a full immersion in Euro-Continental psychoanalysis, reading Žižek, Jacques-
Alain Miller, Darian Leader, Bruce Fink, and other bestselling authors, thanks
to whom much of Lacan has been passed on to the “masses.” “Masses” in the
relative sense, of course: I mean postmodern academic culture.
It is also true that often Lacanians come across as a cult. Some Lacanians do
tend towards an authentic “cult of personality” with Lacan, similar to the cult of
Can we be Lacanians today? 161

Lenin or Mao Zedong at the time of Communist despotism. I confess that often
a layperson like me feels quite uncomfortable when faced with iron Lacanians,
those who cite Lacan’s utterances as if they were passages from the Bible or the
Koran. I never take anything for granted, and definitely not Lacan’s thinking,
nor Freud’s or Marx’s. . . . Some concepts must always be thought over again,
starting from their origin, and we must always be ready to re-question them.
Some might say that even scientists seem to have the cult of particular
personalities – like Darwin, Einstein, or Gödel. But in this case it’s the cult of
specific theories, not texts. The man of science admires the matheme, whilst many
Lacanians consecrate a cult to everything Lacan said. And the same occurs for
the cult of Freud, which I often find obscurantist. Newton wrote several books
on theology, occultism, and even alchemy. Not having read them, I cannot say
whether in these fields too he showed his geniality. But if today someone says
they’re a Newtonian, this doesn’t imply they share his opinions on theology
or alchemy. The thought of the man Newton is distinctly separated from his
matheme, the only thing that counts for a scientist. But this doesn’t happen with
Freud, Lacan, or any other psychoanalytical guru: anything that came out of
their mouths is taken as gospel truth. These masters are deprived of the freedom
of having talked rubbish from time to time. And I think they all did, quite often.
Indeed, as I don’t suppose Lacan has the knowledge of all things, I can indulge
in a radically secular reading of his thought, and of psychoanalysis in general.
Since my early youth, though the son of theologian – even though a rather atheist
one – I have always been a layman. It’s my imprinting.
“Lay” is the opposite of “ecclesiastic.” In fact a lot of psychoanalysis presents
itself as ecclesia, as a closed corporation into which you can be co-opted through
a long and costly process of initiation. Psychoanalysis today – I’m referring to all
its currents – is therefore governed by a gerontocracy that no one tries to send to
the scrap yard. It’s like today’s China, governed by elderly men.
The opposite happens in the core sciences, theoretical physics, or mathemat-
ics, where you’re already considered past your peak at the age of 35. The “hard”
sciences are like sports, you shine when you’re young. The fact that psycho-
analysis is instead dominated by the elderly excludes it ipso facto from science.
In psychoanalysis, what counts is your Erfahrung, your traveling experience, not
your ability with the matheme.
What if it was the biological balance of power within a discipline that really
counted, and not the acclaimed “method,” which supposedly distinguishes sci-
ence from what is not science? We should be thinking about a bio-epistemology.
The feminists have had the merit of stressing how our biological gender can
inf luence our way of thinking, even philosophically, but the same can be said
about the various ages of life.
Under the umbrella of the psychoanalytic gerontocracy, some try to calculate
to which generation they belong after Freud, the forefather. All analysts have had
an analyst, and so, from analyst to analyst they can trace back their connection to
Freud. An analyst once told me: “I’m a sixth degree Freudian.”
162 Can we be Lacanians today?

“Lay” derives from the Greek laikos, which derives from laos, people. Laikos
means “of the people,” “something for the commoners, for the vulgus,” some-
thing vulgar, in other words. Like these conversations of mine, which try to
popularize the subject. I confess, as a layman I think that what is really profound
in Freud is his vulgar materialism. Even the famous philologist Sebastiano Timpa-
naro (author of The Freudian Slip [2010]) used to say “the more vulgar material-
ism is, the more I like it!”
What was actually the core of Freud’s message a century ago? Paraphrasing
Pascal, we could say “Le cul a ses raisons que la Raison ne connaît pas,” “the arse
has its reasons of which Reason knows nothing.” Vulgar materialism is Freud’s
“poetry.” Of course, when I said that, for Freud, the human being is caro signifi-
cans, the Latin appeared a little less vulgar.
The lay position is therefore a non-initiatory, more laid-back position that
calls upon a knowledge that can be popularized.
One of the best-known avant-garde playwrights and actors of 1960s and 70s
Italian theatre, Carmelo Bene, recited a monologue in his Our Lady of the Turks
on two possible types of person: “fools who see the Madonna” and “fools who
do not see the Madonna.” Well, I belong to the breed of fools who do not see the
Madonna – who will never enjoy direct contact with truth. I say this without
insinuating that the fools who have not seen the Madonna are less foolish than
those who have. Perhaps it is wiser to have seen the Madonna, at least once.
Having been a Lacanian in my youth, I think I know what goes on in the
mind of those Lacanians who, coming from a scientific background, are careful
(as I was) not to throw rationality into the sewers. Plunged into the plethora of
the Lacanian signifier, we constantly encounter passages, sentences, statements
that challenge our charitable indulgence, especially when Lacan uses concepts
from fields we happen to specialize in. What did Lacan mean by pronouncing
such apparently – deliberately? – freaky judgements? But, as Lacanians presume
Lacan has the knowledge – as theirs is what I would call a logical transference with
him – they squeeze their brains for months, years or decades, not only to try to
figure out what Lacan meant to say – taking for granted that “he was speaking
the truth, though not the whole truth” – but also to make everything work
out in the end. A wealth of acumen spent to prove that, despite the appearances,
Lacan is entirely logical when he uses logic, correctly philosophical when he uses
philosophy, and so on. When charity coalesces with faith, it always nourishes the
hope of explaining the text exhaustively.
Therefore, many Lacanian commentaries are like Talmudic exegeses. This
hermeneutics of the Lacanian text is based on the assumption that Lacan is the
bringer of a revelation. Freud was the Old Testament, Lacan the New. And quite
a few are convinced they’re developing the Acts of the Apostles. (But it seems to
me that none of them adumbrate the Apocalypse.) I say this not out of derision,
as I’ve often taken an interest in some forms of biblical and theological exegetics.
I am among those who, precisely because they do not have the grace of faith, find
enjoyment in following the topo-logical torment of those who do.
Can we be Lacanians today? 163

I’m interested in the cogitations of those who have faith because – as Lacan
would write – they are sinthomes, sinthoms. He used to say that psychoanalysis
is an historical symptom, the price that our era has to pay in order to keep the
balance. Which was a way of turning to the benefit of psychoanalysis what Karl
Kraus (1990) caustically said in the Vienna of Freud: that psychoanalysis is that
mental illness for which it regards itself as therapy. Psychoanalysis, including the
Lacanian variety, should be interpreted as an unbalancing symptom thanks to
which our society is kept in balance.
This hermeneutics of the text of revelation is something monotheistic the-
ologies, Marxist scholastics, and psychoanalytic hermeneutics have in common,
because all these forms of life and thought are based, as I’ve said, on a promise of
salvation. The Lacanian variety lets us glimpse the possibility of saving ourselves
from alienation, from being totally determined by the Other, by the symbolic.
It promises a release from an inevitable, blinding, average, human (too human)
idiocy.

4 Logical fundamentalism
So, what is there to save in Conversations with Lacan? Perhaps it’s easier to state
which, according to me, are the aspects of Lacan’s thought that should be scaled
down or scrapped.
I think that today we should set aside – anathema! – Lacan’s logocentrism,
the primal transcendentality of language. But is a Lacan without the primacy of
the signifier like staging Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark? And, besides,
did I not say earlier that recognizing the power of the signifier is fundamental
to the understanding of history, politics, economics, and so on? Of course, but it
is one thing to recognize the dominance of the signifier, but it is quite another
to consider language, as Lacan does, as the transcendental condition of subjec-
tivity. In the wake of Derrida and Agamben, I try instead to return humans to
the domain of animality. Lacan, in my opinion, is too dependent on Heidegger,
one of the philosophers who went the furthest in separating the human from life
forms in general.
We must however recognize that Lacan did pose a fundamental question: in
what way does human access to the symbolic profoundly pervert, so-to-speak,
our relation to the world? Even if we say that his answers are not satisfactory, the
matter is definitely essential. Because language is not only the origin of what we
call self-consciousness, but also of what I would call unconsciousness.
I appreciate, of course, that his logocentrism is inspired to the specificity of
the analytic cure, which is always a “logical” cure. But the risk many Lacanians
take is that of abandoning themselves to a modernistic sort of spiritualism.
A patient of mine in her sixties told me that she slipped on a damp f lower one
evening, fell on the ground, and broke her foot. It took her a month and half to
recover. Such falls weren’t uncommon and she’d broken her foot before, some-
times by slipping on something, as in this case, or at other times by misplacing
164 Can we be Lacanians today?

her foot. Analysis had helped her recognize these falls as a symptom. We recon-
structed – Konstruktion – their context. It turned out that she had always fallen
during periods of splendid achievements; either when she had seduced an impor-
tant man, had enjoyed professional success, and so on. This latest fall was no
exception: she was going through a very positive period. And so she slipped on a
damp f lower. The analyst then says “there is logos in this!”
In short, every time she had taken “a great step forward,” the Other, the
symbolic, imposed a “step back” of at least a month with these convenient falls.
An Other obviously jealous of her successes, called her back to her rank which,
in fairy tale terms, was: “you’ll never be the Cinderella who meets her prince.”
Cinderella lost her shoe, this patient would lose her foot for a variable period of
time. Feet and shoes, as every fetishist knows, are significant, and it is no coinci-
dence that the name Oedipus means “swollen foot.”
This to say that the work of the analyst is quite different from that of all other
useful operators such as counsellors, support psychologists, and so on. As Lacan
says, the analyst is interested in pathetic, painful, and disabling events, insofar as
they are logical events.
The problem, however, is that this specialization of analysts often leads them
to developing global anthropologies. And this is where dogmatism slips in. We
should always remember that Lacan’s theory is the theoretical projection of a
specific practice, that of analysis, that feeds on logos. But human reality is not
only logos: some Real always surfaces.
The subject that Lacan speaks of, that psychoanalysis in general speaks of,
is the ref lection of a practice on the screen of knowledge. But this doesn’t take
away from the fact that there is plenty of the “animal” in human beings. And this
is something many Lacanians are happy to forget. Those we consider the most
“human” sentiments – compassion, being faithful to someone, the mix of desire
and love for a person, empathy, the pleasure of being together . . . – are all things
that animals are perfectly capable of, superior mammals in particular. What
marks us as humans is probably the most “inhuman” part of us, “inhuman” in
the common sense of the word. What could be more inhuman than language?
I dislike logical (from Logos) fundamentalism. Fundamentalisms, in any field,
only see one aspect of things, always the same one, whilst everything else is
reduced to a corollary or epicycle. Some are convinced, for example, that the ori-
gin of all important political and social events is always and exclusively economic
interest and conf lict. Even the civil war in Syria, which essentially opposed the
signifier Shiite to the signifier Sunni, together with the signifiers of the for-
eign “powers,” is said to have broken out for economic reasons, even though
Syria does not possess great riches. Economic factors are certainly essential to
understanding history, but history is not reducible exclusively to an expression
of economic conf licts. The signifiers count too, as we’ve seen, together with
philosophies, religious beliefs, individual will to power, the collective desire for
war, and so on. In psychoanalysis, too, it is a mistake to think that everything
that happens to a human being is the effect of the arché of language.
Can we be Lacanians today? 165

We shouldn’t ignore the fact that we are also zoé, i.e. non-linguistic beings.
Today if we say purely “biological” we refer above all to a genotype. In an organ-
ism everything derives from environmental interactions except for our genes,
which will never change whatever happens. A question we often ask – “does this
trait have a genetic or environmental derivation?” – makes no sense, because for
most aspects of our lives, it is impossible to separate what is derived from our
genes and what is supposedly the result of our history. The genetic cause of some
things is clear, like for example Down syndrome, which is solely due to an extra
copy of chromosome 21. Yet, in most instances, whilst our genes determine cer-
tain outcomes, our predispositions are formatted by a weft of historical events.
Of course, it is due to genetics if I’m short because I have short parents or tall
because I have tall parents. But it is also true that my diet since early childhood
can inf luence my growth, therefore it will always be difficult to understand the
extent to which my height is due to the genes my parents transmitted to me or
to how they fed me.
We can say that our life is like a river: the mass of water that comes down from
Lake Itasca into the Minnesota river is the analogon of the genetic; the course of
the Mississippi to its delta is like our real life. Now, take the fact that, before St.
Louis, the Mississippi curves towards the north and then bends towards the east.
It would be absurd to ask, “is this due to the conformation of the terrain or to
the mass of the source water?” This question makes no sense. Life, like a river, is
always the effect of a genetic primum, and then the course of life depends on the
asperities and external conformations that every being encounters.
Now, it’s as if logical fundamentalism said: “the Mississippi is its course alone,
the water doesn’t count.” But if there was no water there would be no river.
Our genetic heritage will always produce slopes, that will then be shaped by the
chances of life. This persistent clinamen – the swerve – should not be ignored. In
essence, our genes are our peculiar difference, the reason why we are all different
from each other.

5 The ultimatum of the drives

But all this sounds like pure theory. What does it mean for clinical practice when
we say we should to never forget we are zoé, the expression of our genes? Above all,
it means that we shouldn’t believe we’re all exclusively the effect of our relations to
others, and to our mothers in particular. Our lives are not only and entirely rela-
tional lives. Our mothers are crucial to imprinting a particular course to our lives,
but that’s not all. We all play our part too, we all respond with our own specific
senseless difference, which is not caused by events. From the very beginning we’re
all difference . . . difference from our parents, from our siblings. . . .
We’re all born with particular dispositions that relations to others can modify
only with great difficulty. The course of the Mississippi is due to the terrain it
f lows over, true, but its origin is that lake with a certain slope. Lake Itasca cannot
be ignored, or else we fall into idealistic naivety.
166 Can we be Lacanians today?

Language, therefore, gives the form of the signifier to drives that are not sym-
bolic. For example, language gives shape to a Trieb that Freud doesn’t recognize,
and which I would call competition compulsion.
In fact, Lacan does discuss competition and connects it to a sort of constituent
envy in human beings. He often quotes the following passage from the Confes-
sions of Saint Augustine:

I have myself seen jealousy in a baby and know what it means. He was not
old enough to talk, but whenever he saw his foster-brother at the breast, he
would grow pale with envy.
(Saint Augustine 1961, Book 1, chap. VII)

The chapter of the Confessions in which this passage appears is eloquently called
“The Miseries of Childhood.” The moral: we humans are born envious, and
thus, alas, we remain. Some more so and some less so.
Instead, the last of the Ten Commandments concerns the miseries of adults:

You shall not covet your neighbour’s house, you shall not covet your
neighbour’s wife, or his male servant, or his female maidservant, or his ox,
or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbour’s.
(Holy Bible 2001, Exodus, chap. 20, ver. 17)

It strikes me in this very politically incorrect commandment that the house

comes first: it is the most important possession, being the extension of the body
that contains all the other possessions, including the wife.
Now, for Lacan the impulse to covet other people’s possessions belongs to
the imaginary dimension of narcissism. I shall compete with my mirror images.
Lacan heeds to the Chinese proverb, “if you do not know your enemy, you do
not know yourself.” Because my enemy is “myself,” i.e. my image. As we said,
Lacan sends to the imaginary anything that we, less dandy than him, add to the
bill of our being zoè.
It is evident that political events broadly speaking, those the entire planet fol-
lows more than all the others, are sports competitions – the Olympics, the World
Series. The great entertainment for humans, apart from sex, is competitive sports
(and war). Competing with others to beat them. Competitions are an endless
amusement. After all, the supermarket in which to find symbolic idealities for
which to fight others, and perhaps even sacrifice one’s life for, is well equipped.
Our competitive drive will then take on the aspect of “my Cause.” The one that
makes us vibrate with life until we suffer death, in the way of kamikazes.
Freud didn’t stress enough the fact that if you put a handful of people together,
sooner or later they will come into conf lict, and not only to ensure for them-
selves the best samples of males or females for copulation. Deep down there’s
always a biological power fuelling struggles for symbolic power. The signifier
may have the primatum, but the ultimatum always belongs to the drives, which are
Can we be Lacanians today? 167

not a product of logos. In any case, for Freud psychoanalysis was a temporary
science, the truths of which would one day be absorbed by biology.

6 Drive and addiction

The essentiality of drives in psychoanalysis should never be forgotten. In the
seminar The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis Lacan examines the drive
as one of these four ( Lacan 1973). The other three are the unconscious, repeti-
tion, and transference. The drive, as a concept at least, therefore occupies an
absolutely eminent position in Lacan too. But, according to some philosophers –
such as Jean-Luc Nancy (2010) – the Trieb is even more fundamental than the
other concepts. Unconscious, repetition and transference are supposed epipha-
nies of the drive. In any case, Lacan places drives in an essential position, even
though he transubstantiates them into desire.
Many today attack the Freudian “primacy of the drive,” which they find
to be vulgar, and prefer to replace it with an “intersubjectivistic,” “relational,”
or “complex” approach. As I said, a particular sector of psychoanalysis (Roy
Schafer’s work, for example) wishes to dissolve the coarse individualism of psy-
choanalysis into intersubjective dialectics, invoking the Mit-Sein (being-with)
of Heidegger, the “communication community” of Habermas or other philoso-
phies interpreted, rightly or wrongly, as promoting the primacy of the com-
munity over the individual. I think all these socialistic currents derive from a
metaphysical ethics that expresses its awe for what Lacan calls the Real. Because
das Trieb, the drive, in Freud has the substance of the Real.
These anti-drive currents are organic to a culture, our culture, that wants to
entirely humanize the planet, i.e. to reduce to a minimum the sovereign amoral-
ity of nature (of which humankind is a fragment) by totally submitting it to politi-
cal and technological will. If all our problems derive from a defect in our relations
with others, from our being trapped in paradoxical or vexatious intersubjective
systems, the opacity of our body – Körper – is dissolved in the sweet or bitter
honey of being-with, Mitsein. For Freud, instead, das Trieb is not something that
belongs only to our lived body (Leib), but also to the body that we do not consciously
live but that spurs us. In other terms, the project of psychoanalysis is radically anti-
phenomenological, i.e. it deeply diverges from all forms of spiritualism.
I’ll be frank: it’s still worth reading Conversations with Lacan because he
steers clear from a cheap spiritualization of psychoanalysis. I therefore object to
the operation, which some are attempting, of leading Lacan back to phenom-
enology, Sartre and intersubjectivity . . . I perceive it as a castration of the mate-
rialistic pudenda of psychoanalysis.
Freud’s fundamental premise is that our drives are constant, they never let go
of us, they express “internal tensions.” For Freud, the human being is above all
tense flesh. Always tense.
Some have pointed out that this Freudian premise is in contrast to biologi-
cal data. In fact, things similar to drives – hunger, thirst, anxiety, boredom,
168 Can we be Lacanians today?

anxiety, interest, and so on – are discontinuous, they come and go and depend
on different situations. In other words, Freud apparently uses the rude biological
metaphor of the drive to say that it is actually our consubstantial intersubjective
tension towards others, that it’s not something of the body, and so on.
So many analysts insist on the fact that the Freudian drive has nothing to do with
instinct, that it is a biological function. But these analysts are referring to an entirely
imaginary biology. When we’re attracted to an heterosexual partner, to what extent
is it instinct and to what extent is it a drive? When we eat tasty treats, also to satisfy
our hunger, to what extent is it an instinct and to what extent is it an oral drive?
Expressed in this way the division between instinct and drive doesn’t hold.
What counts in the debate within the evolution sciences today is instead the
question: is everything in the phenotype, in the organism, adaptive? Hence, are the
drives of psychoanalysis – sucking for the pleasure of sucking, being a voyeur in
a public park, being in love with Jesus, enjoying reading the Ecrits, everything –
adaptive or not? Very few – two names are Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini (2010) –
argue that not everything in life is adaptive, that Darwin was wrong, that life
produces a non-adaptive waste. In short: “there are more things in animals and
humans than in all your Darwinism.” Not everything in life is useful, yet it exists.
Therefore, the biologism these analysts distinguish themselves for is a fantasy.
A Lacanian would say that a not-entirely-Darwinian theory could be refor-
mulated as “Homo sapiens are not-all-adaptation, hence not-all-Homo.” An
enunciation with a seductive homology with “the woman is not-all.” It seems to
me that Lacan does not follow this spiritualistic slide, that he remains somehow
faithful not to the letter of Freud, but to the Freudian metaphysical challenge.
In fact, hypothesizing libido as a continuous never-alleviated tension, Freud –
according to my reading of his work – tries, using a biological imagery, to indicate
what for him is the quid, the essence of human beings beyond hormonal variations
or environmental provocations. Indeed, an essence is not something that comes
and goes: the drive, as an essence, Eros, is always there. The Trieb is our f lesh,
which comes before and is on this side of any imaginary or symbolic construction,
of any intersubjective sense structure. Being alive is a constant promise of pain; we
can never ignore the fact that we are f lesh. Because we are not f lesh alone, we suffer
f lesh: there’s a distance between us and our f lesh, which also makes us its effects
and victims. The drives are the opacity that forces the drug addict, for example,
to use his drug again and again, to constantly repeat the same enjoyment. Many
analysts fail with drug addicts because they try to find a sense to their “monkey.”
Addicts say they experience an initial phase of honeymoon with their drug –
during which the Ego and the Id dance together, even coincide. But then, in
time, as “ego” they no longer enjoy: they are subjugated by Her, by Lady Drug,
they have become the slaves of Her enjoyment. So, the same enjoyment which
had been egosyntonic, becomes persecutory; the weight of the monkey/enjoyment
to bear on your back.
Therefore, paradoxically, Lacan himself, despite – or perhaps precisely because
of? – his Hegelian and Heideggerian roots, makes in his twilight years a similar
Can we be Lacanians today? 169

landfall to Freud’s: where neurosis and psychosis are different forms of addiction,
of highs. By centring on enjoyment as something that has the consistency of the
Real, Lacan, who had begun with a logocentric subversion of psychoanalysis,
in his later years real-ly returned to Freud. To the fact that drives – a fictional
concept, like every concept – refer back to something non-interpretable, non-
subjectivizable, to the fact that we are f lesh that signifies and suffers. That the
basis of everything that creates a well-ordered society in which all are expected
to set up a family, to produce and reproduce, to have sex, to build good schools of
psychoanalysis . . . that the basis of all this colossal construction of sense, to which
religion, science, politics, education, and so on, contribute . . . is the tension of
life as zoé. This is the Nietzschean root of psychoanalysis.

7 The letter and the machine

Of course the symbolic – in Lacan and in life – is essential, but, to be frank, logo-
centrism is idealistic. I think that in time Lacan realized and tried to decentralize
it, so to speak. He removed the logos from the centre.
I think the importance the late Lacan gave to Borromean knots marked his
overcoming of the Hegelian vision from which he began; the idea, in other
words, that analysis is an Aufhebung, an e-raising of something already given.
The idea of Aufhebung implies a hierarchy, a qualitative leap, an elevation, whilst
the Borromean knots are “democratic”: the important thing is not that one ring
takes away from the other and elevates itself over it, but how the rings link. Con-
sequently, the symbolic ceases to have pre-eminence over everything else: it is
only one of the three rings. The Borromean chain marks a sneaky exit from the
primacy of the symbolic.
Years ago I recommended that a child psychotherapist friend with a Kleinian
training read several Lacanian contributions on childhood by Maud Mannoni,
Dolto and others. Some time later she thanked me enthusiastically: “with the
Lacanians, at last, children are no longer little animals!” She understood that
leading childhood pathos back to language can spiritualize the unconscious, but
not in a crude way, without the scent of incense.
I wonder, however, whether ultimately Lacan hasn’t actually brazenly laid
bare a spiritualist base to psychoanalysis, but has in this way allowed the Aufhe-
bung, the overcoming, of this aspect.
John Bowlby was an English psychoanalyst who trained with Melanie Klein
before becoming famous for attachment theory, which is based on the immense
power that the mother has in determining the child’s mental destiny. Bowlby
profited from Konrad Lorenz’s work on animal ethology, in order to decipher the
mother-child relationship. At the time, the 1950s, Bowlby’s ethologism caused
some unease among British analysts; it appeared too mechanistic – Bowlby
saw human beings as animals. Today, Bowlby’s theory would seem to have tri-
umphed; in Italy psychology students are trained in accordance with attachment
theory above all, not psychoanalysis. But at the time it was Bowlby who had been
170 Can we be Lacanians today?

marginalized, because, as Hyatt Williams said, he was “taking the poetry out of
analysis” (Grosskurth 1988, p. 474).
In actual fact, there was very little of the poetic in British analysis at the
time, yet what steered them towards psychoanalysis was the same “poetry” that
Lacan stressed in his theories: that the reconstruction/construction of significa-
tion processes replaces causal explanation. Breaking your foot doesn’t matter,
what matters is what the accident means for you. This “poetry” of psychoanaly-
sis is connected to the fact that, through the “formations of the unconscious”
(symptoms, dreams, parapraxis, jokes), a subject expresses much more than they
realize. But I am not an idealist. Nor am I a materialist.
Lacan realized that reducing the Freudian unconscious, with its caro significans
substance, to a code in the structuralist sense would disembody psychoanalysis too
much. Therefore he spoke of the letter, particularly in his essay “The Instance of
the Letter” and even more so in the text that – not incidentally – opens the Ecrits:
the seminar on Poe’s The Purloined Letter. With this text, it is possible that Lacan
wanted to insinuate that his own newly published writings had been purloined.
Where does the difference between signifier and letter lie? In the fact that the
latter has something material – this when letters were still written on paper and
not on electronic devices like today – whereas the signifier, Saussure said, has only
one identity: being distinct from any other signifier. Being distinguishable from any
other is what distinguishes the signifier in general. The letter would then be the
material face of language, and indeed Lacan would speak of the signifier (read:
the letter) as material cause. Here he evokes the four causes according to Aristotle:
material, formal, efficient, final. I.e. analytic work is more an act of reading than of
listening. He would say that magic is a practice that essentially aims at the efficient
cause; that religions give primacy to the final cause; whereas the sciences seek the
formal cause. The only “materialist” discipline that believes in the now discredited
material cause, is psychoanalysis (Lacan 1966b, p. 319; pp. 351–358). It would seem
that for Lacan psychoanalysis alone is materialistic.
But it’s not enough to promote the signifier “matter” to be authentically
materialistic. Derrida (1987), in his commentary on Lacan’s seminar on Poe’s
tale has brilliantly shown that Lacan actually uses the letter (the signifier) as
something “ideal.” Lacan in fact says that we cannot make a letter disappear by
tearing it; but we know that it is absolutely possible! In that seminar Lacan said
that “a letter always reaches its destination,” but Derrida points out: “how can
he be so sure?” Here Lacan seems to fall back into a “communicational” vision
of language by which human beings exchange messages. Yet the “pure” Laca-
nian signifier is by no means a message. It’s easy for Derrida to show that, under
a materialistic cloak, Lacan’s system – founded on the transcendentality of the
logos – is an idealistic one. I agree with Derrida.
And I don’t give “idealism” any negative connotation, in contrast to the ten-
dency in the decades dominated by a self-styled Marxist materialism. At the time
“idealist” was an insult. There’s nothing wrong with being an idealist; the point
is understanding that you are one.
Can we be Lacanians today? 171

But Lacan knew that not even Marxism is really materialistic. He would say,
as I’ve already mentioned: Marxist theory is the message of Good Tidings, a
Gospel ( Lacan 2001, p. 506). It is based on the assumption of labour as value, on
the idea that economic value – and what in general is worth something – is given
by work as labour, experience, the sweat of one’s brow, lost time. . . . But it is
a theory based on a moral metaphysics, on the primacy of praxis as poiesis, on
productive human activity, which originally gives value to things and the world.
Materialism is no less metaphysical and moralistic than idealism, in the sense that
it is based on a priori postulates that “found” a predication to “save the world.”
True materialism, I fear, is actually mechanistic, far from Marxism or psy-
choanalysis. It is the confidence – also metaphysical – that the world as a whole,
and thus the human mind too, is a machine. Even if it is a machine that is of no
use, that is without aim; a machine that is the product of a huge silent explosion.
Deleuze, who lived at the same time as Lacan, and in the same city, understood
that there is no true materialism without the machine – so he spoke of desiring
machines. Significantly, over psychoanalysis Deleuze preferred Wilhelm Reich,
a very popular post-analyst at the time. Reich’s therapy was based on a bizarre
machine – in which I once had the honour of being “cured” for a while – known
as the orgone energy accumulator, orgones being quanta of vital energy.
It’s part of the slang of psychologists, and of many psychoanalysts too, to speak
of “psychic mechanisms,” usually to decry them. I reject this conventional term
because its use implies a spiritualistic premise, i.e. that we are “pathological” as
long as we are prey to blind psychic mechanisms, but that thankfully the psy-
chotherapeutic light will liberate us from “mechanical” determinism and enable
us to finally act freely. Thank goodness neither Lacan nor authentic mechanistic
philosophers have ever believed in this “machine vs. liberty” alternative. Lacan,
like Augustine, Luther, and Spinoza, never believed in free will. The mechanis-
tic ones don’t believe in it because whatever we do we will always be machines.
For Lacan, on the other hand, we are subjected to the mechanics of signifiers,
even if it is by accepting this mechanism that we can turn it into an Aufhebung.
Since the 17th century science has been mechanistic. In physics we have
only mechanics: first classical mechanics, then relativist mechanics and quantum
mechanics. Modern materialism no longer has anything to do with the “mate-
rial cause” Aristotle spoke of, if only because modern science has reduced matter
to electromagnetic force plus gravitation, i.e. to formal equivalences, to math-
ematical matrixes, to “powers.” Lacan is right: the formal cause (in the sense of
Aristotle) has devoured the material cause. Materialism today is the calculability
of the machine, and the Lacanian letter is an ideality.

8 An animal philosophy
This has led some to say – for example Julia Kristeva, in a conversation with me
in 1994 ( Kristeva and Benvenuto 1996 –97) – that there is a connection between
Lacan and cognitivism. Is this true?
172 Can we be Lacanians today?

Now, cognitivism proper, which derives from Chomsky and Fodor, has
sustained – in contrast to the behaviourism that prevailed in psychology – that
scientists must consider mental processes. Therefore cognitivism is mildly mate-
rialistic: it fuses together an Aristotelian functionalism with the Cartesian idea
of autonomous cogitation.
Kristeva saw an affinity between Lacan and cognitivism because both
approaches give a primacy to cogitatio in contrast to what Freud called libido. In
both, signification overpowers corporeal causality.
I said before that so-called continental thought today seems polarized by the
image of zoè, of animal life. This is partly due to the pressure of new forms of
life in our societies, in particular cognitive technologies, Artificial Intelligence,
computer simulations, and so on. What I’m about to say may sound paradoxical:
that the decline of the “signifier” in philosophy is the product of the triumph of
electronic language technologies.
When information science began with the Turing machine, scientists were
still dominated by a Cartesian assumption: that what fundamentally distinguishes
human beings and animals is cogitatio, thinking activity. According to Descartes,
science, mathematics, and logic are mental substance, whereas animals are only
machines, extended substance. The development of machines that simulate human
activities – it was thought – would have made it much easier to imitate the most
elementary animal activities, whereas it would have been far more difficult to
imitate superior intellectual ones, such as for example proving theorems. Well,
things have gone in precisely the opposite direction.
Today computers exist that are capable of beating even the greatest chess or go
champions and others that are able to prove even very complex theorems. Yet,
machines fizzle when it comes to imitating the simplest human functions. Even
the most sophisticated robots aren’t capable of something any dog can do quite
easily: recognizing its owner’s silhouette from a distance.
The moral: what for centuries philosophical arrogance considered the highest
activity of the mind – logical and demonstrative ability – today has turned out
to be entirely mechanizable. This has caused cogitatio a certain discredit. Today’s
biopolitical philosophers, who reconsider our societies according to the model
of our immune system – such as, for example, Roberto Esposito (2008, 2011) –
breathe this discredit. New ideas don’t come from our brain but mostly from the
air around us.
Perhaps one day machines will even be able to demonstrate Gödel’s theorem –
the most important mathematical theorem of all time, which was the basis of the
huge development of computation. But I fear that they will never be able to
imitate the way of thinking of Heidegger or Lacan. And not because their think-
ing is too sophisticated for a computer program, but because their thoughts . . .
breathe. The philosophical positivists don’t like an “animal,” drive-led, non-
computational philosophy.
Some will object: in principle, life, even human life, remains mechanizable.
They will say: life is far more complex than cogitatio, therefore the simulation of
Can we be Lacanians today? 173

human beings is technically impossible. From this point of view, only a merely
technological limit, not an ontological one, hinders the creation of robots
entirely equivalent to human beings. I can reply that today only the recognition
of a huge complexity can legitimize the suspicion of, perhaps not a freedom, but
at least an unpredictability of life. A certain spirituality can find scientific space
only in pure chance. And it offers a glimmer for us to think that a certain human
unpredictability could be the mark of a mysterious, improbable freedom.

9 The invention of the Real

Lacan’s thought should then be reread in the light of the biopolitical ref lections
that have developed in the West since Foucault.
Now, there are different sorts of biopoliticians. Some completely ignore the
biological sciences, and often boast about it. But can one talk about immunity
in social systems without confronting oneself with the Darwinian theory of the
immune system that earned Edelman (1988) – evoked earlier – the Nobel prize
in medicine
Others seem to know the biological sciences and to take them into account.
Because a bifurcation presents itself in biopolitics: i.e. should the “linguistic game”
known as philosophy consider the models the sciences propose today or not?
I am among those who hope for what I would call the phenomenological
preamble (the setting aside of all established knowledge, especially scientific
knowledge) to be overcome. And I’d go as far as to say that today we can come
out of the dead channel of analytical philosophy only if we non-scientists man-
age to mount some serious challenges to the sciences, and to the life sciences
in particular. At the end, I shall mention the one challenge I think is the most
important.
The phenomenological setting aside of worldly knowledge is expressed by
what Heidegger said about science, and about all metaphysics: that it does not
think. I would say the opposite; that science thinks too much, whilst for philoso-
phy, and even more so for psychoanalysis, what is important is sensing, breathing
in, sniffing. . . . Psychoanalysts shouldn’t think too much, otherwise they will
fail to capture that opacity of the unconscious that Lacan put in the register of
the signifier. Perhaps this is why we associate the theory of universal gravitation
with an apple falling on Newton’s head: important theories don’t arise from our
brains, instead they fall on our heads. Which takes us back to what Lacan called
the Real.
The more insightful Lacanians say that the most important thing about Lacan
is his appeal to the Real, whatever he means by it. I agree with them. But we’ve
seen how easy it is to misapprehend the Real as Lacan meant it.
Allow me an anecdote, an apparently true one. Two analysands of Lacan’s
meet in a café near their analyst’s practice. One has just come down from a ses-
sion and is feeling down; the session didn’t go so well. The other asks him why
and the man complains that he didn’t manage to tell Lacan what he really wanted
174 Can we be Lacanians today?

to tell him. The other analysand says: “so, why don’t you go back up and tell
him?” This was possible with Lacan, who was very f lexible. The man replies:
“great idea, I’ll ask for another session.”
After a while the fellow analysand comes back down, looking jubilant this
time; the second session obviously went well. His friend asks him: “well then?”
And he replies: “as soon as I walked in I said ‘Je me sens vraiment foutu’ – I feel
really fucked – and Lacan replied ‘you feel fucked? You are fucked.’ So everything
went fine.”
This story shows the extent to which Lacan was thoroughly alien to the idea
that dealing with sentiments, with feeling fucked or happy and so on, was the
main task of analysis. He thought that the raw material and final product was the
Real, meant as what one is, not how one feels. Strangely enough, in saying that
the unconscious is structured like a language, Lacan doesn’t state that everything
may be interpreted: on the contrary, it’s not sentiments or affects, nor even inter-
pretations, that are at the bottom of things, but the Real.
I would say that – in general – subjects who seek an analysis rather than a
cognitive therapy or therapies of other kinds, are people in search of at least a
scrap of Real. It won’t do for them to just feel better or happily adapt to reality,
but they wish to know. They wish to know what? I would be tempted to say: the
difference that they are but cannot think.
Let’s not forget that Lacan coined, with reference to Freud, the definition of
the “invention of the unconscious.” With it he intended to replace the “discov-
ery of the unconscious.” Can we then say that Lacan is the author of the “inven-
tion of the Real,” and hence that the latter is thematizable only in and starting
from an analytical discourse? Or does Lacan indicate the possibility of thematiz-
ing the Real outside analytical discourse too?
Talking of the “invention of the unconscious” rather than the “discovery
of the unconscious” is an index of Lacan’s intellectual honesty. On another
occasion – I can’t remember which – he spoke of psychoanalytic knowledge as
an “invented knowledge.”
As I remarked in the fifth conversation, Lacan exploits Freud’s ambiguity as
much as possible, namely that on the one hand one wants a reconstruction of
something that already exists in the experience of the subject, but on the other,
that one also wants the construction of a psychic reality that wouldn’t exist with-
out psychoanalysis. Lacan tries to undertake a third way, between “interpreting
comprehension” and “scientific explanation,” that circumvents both hermeneu-
tics and science. But we find turning to this path, for which nothing in our
culture has prepared us, terribly difficult.
Meanwhile, the Real as meant by Lacan is inseparable from the Symbolic, a
little like the two sides of a coin, heads and tails, are inseparable. For this reason,
here the Real is not what in common language we call “reality,” as what is dis-
tinguished from everything that exists only in our head.
I shall describe three cases in which we may speak of the Real, concerning
which the psychoanalyst is an amateur.
Can we be Lacanians today? 175

10 Experiences of the Real

The first concerns psychosis. When I spoke about it in the previous conversation,
I didn’t mention something essential. For Lacan, psychotic hallucinations, and
delusions in general, are a return into the Real of what had been foreclosed by
the Symbolic. There is an ambiguity here: “ forclos du symbolique” can mean both
“foreclosed from the symbolic” and “foreclosed by the symbolic.” So, one may
understand either that what a hallucination manifests is a piece of the symbolic
that has been rejected, exiled from the symbolic realm, or that this something is
kept out of the symbolic and hence has never been part of it.
Lacan gives the example of a hallucination suffered by Freud’s patient the
Wolf Man at the age of five (Freud 1918, SE, 17, pp. 71–88; GW, 12, pp. 103–
121). Playing around with a penknife cutting a tree, with his nanny present, he
was horrified to “see” that his little finger had come off his hand and was hang-
ing from it. But it was a hallucination, which Freud interprets in relation to the
Verwerfung – foreclosure in Lacan – of castration ( Lacan 1966a, p. 383). In fact, the
hacked finger signifies the cut penis that the patient is unable to “symbolize.”
It is not the repressed – which Freud turned into the cause of the unconscious –
that returns in the hallucination: a prior foreclosure of something has to occur
first. In this case, what is foreclosed is obviously not the real castration, but its
signifier. I.e. the Wolf Man allegedly never symbolized castration – in Lacan’s
terms, he never symbolized the phallus as missing.
Therefore, a hallucination like this one is a return into the Real of something
non-symbolized. It is yet another case of overturning “normal” ideas. We all
think hallucinations are something imaginary, even if the subject takes it for
something real. The hallucination would then be an image so strong as to be
mistaken for the actual. Instead, Lacan says that something in psychosis returns
into the Real. But in the Real for the hallucinating subject. The Real is not the
objective reality we appeal to when we have divergences. Here we are talking
about the topological Real: the space every subject considers “not a part of me,”
which is situated entirely outside me, and which varies from subject to subject.
For the psychotic, the Real is made up of something excluded that I, a non-
psychotic, have not excluded.
The Real is like the central void around which the torus opens. The Real is
the topo-logical space produced by the symbolic crown that I am. But then is
the Real, in which something that has been foreclosed befalls, or falls upon the
psychotic, the equivalent of what we non-psychotics call reality? Well, things
aren’t so simple.
For Lacan the Real of psychotic hallucinations and delusions is quite dissimi-
lar to the “reality” we all speak about when we are not hallucinating or being
delusional. Therefore, when the Wolf Man sees his finger dangling he does not
describe the experience as one we have with regard to an actual event. In hal-
lucination, Lacan says, the subject plummets into a sort of “temporal funnel”
( Lacan 1966a, p. 388). Hallucinations are the experience of a rupture from the
176 Can we be Lacanians today?

continuity of experience of the world. Psychotics often hear voices, but they
don’t confuse them with real voices and sometimes, significantly, consider them
voices of the dead, voices not of “this” world. The psychotic has devastating
contact with the Real insofar as reality is suspended, interrupted. Reality is the
world that we “are” thanks to mirror neurons.
Very often clinical psychoses dawn with a strange uncanny feeling, known as
“derealization.” This is when subjects, though aware that the world is carrying
on as always, feel an indefinable alienation, as if the world were no longer real, as
if it had become an opaque backdrop to which they no longer belong. The term
“de-realization” is an eloquent denial, because Lacan would instead say that this
is the dawn of a contact with the Real, one that could become overwhelming.
The emergence of a no-longer-being-in-the-world, which is not merely absence
but the wasteland to which the psychotic has been confined, corresponds to the
twilight of the Real.
For this reason, so many films that aim at making us experience “from inside”
what a mad person hears and feels are quite misleading, such as, for example,
A Beautiful Mind (by Ron Howard), on the life of the psychotic mathematician
John Nash. Now, only more than half way through the film do we realize that
various situations and characters we have seen earlier were actually Nash’s hal-
lucinations, that we saw and believed as spectators to what the psychotic saw and
believed. But the Real in which real delusions take place has an extra-mundane
quality, it doesn’t feature the level of reality shown in this film. And, in fact,
psychotics often say that the world is solely the effect of manipulations by con-
spirators who use lasers, computers, and so on. The Real of the psychotic is an
artificial pseudo-reality, at times shamefully sloppy.
But then does only the psychotic really have any contact with the Real? Here’s
another paradox. I would rather say that the psychotic has the privilege, accord-
ing to Lacan, to look at this Real straight in the face.
But is it then possible according to Lacan for us to have a relation to the Real
beyond the relation the psychotic has to it? We experience the Real as something
beyond experience.
We need only to think of common expressions such as “I still haven’t realized
I’m a widower.” And to those who still “don’t realize” we say “you have to come
to grips with it.” In Italian “come to grip” is said “ farsene una ragione,” literally “to
do a reason of it for oneself.” We imply Real and reason. These expressions sug-
gest that while it is one thing for me (the Ego) to know certain things, it is quite
another for me to “realize” them. One thing is the lost concrete object – a dead
wife, for example – whilst the other is the libidinal object, the loved or loathed
thing that keeps on living for me independent of its worldly disappearance.
Now, the common expression doesn’t say “effectively detach yourself from
the dead woman,” but “realize you’re a widower.” When a loved one suddenly
dies, the first thing we instinctively say is “I can’t believe it!” We don’t believe
it precisely because the event is real, Lacan would say, i.e. not inscribable into
our symbolic. The death of the adored person is like a gap in the gold chain of
Can we be Lacanians today? 177

signifiers that give consistency and credibility to our life. My wife continues
being there as my significant other, and the Real is this “impossible” discordance
of my loved one being there on the one hand and not being there on the other.
In Naples, it was believed that the recent dead appeared as ghosts to their loved
ones, especially during sleep, and gave them useful advice and information; but
only during the first six months. Realizing she is no longer there is a “coming
to grips with it,” not because this disappearance has a sense, but because it finds
its signifier, thanks to which I accept that I am, for example, a “disconsolate
widower.” In this way, the crevice of the Real is led back to reason, and I no
longer “suffer like a dog” . . . as is commonly said in Italian: here the dog is an
image of the crude Real, of a dehumanization that loss and pain inf lict on us, but
without which there would perhaps be no humanity. Because what an unctuous
rhetoric calls “having humanity,” “being human,” is in fact a “realization” that
we suffer like dogs because of the Real and that this absolute lack of reason in the
event means that we must come to grips with this event without the reason that
we ourselves are. Our only possibility is accepting the impossibility of an event
having a sense, an impossibility we call the Real.

11 Event and chaos

If we then consider science, it constantly takes the Real into account, but with
the aim of relegating it, of “do[ing] a reason of it” as we say in Italian. Science
wants to marry the Real; it is not enough for it to be its enthusiast or lover. In
fact, science itself is an apparatus created by the Symbolic. But its task is to give
shape to “sufficient reason,” i.e. to explain everything that happens in the world.
The principle of sufficient reason says: “nothing is without reason.” And explain-
ing is not only, and not essentially, predicting. Darwinian theory, for example,
predicts absolutely nothing about the animal life of the future. Explaining means
above all making the world intelligible, i.e. reconstructing it according to a cer-
tain model so that reality and the symbolic will overlap exactly. Science gives
reason to the world; by capturing particular regularities, it describes the world
as if it followed a rule, as if a secret language “spoke” the world – the great book
of nature. But beyond the regularized world, the regulated world computed by
science, there’s a limit: chaos. Science calls it entropy: the destruction of every
sense of things, nothing but heat.
There’s a branch of research, a minoritarian one and especially in mathemat-
ics, that thematizes chaos. In Santa Fe, New Mexico, many are devoted to it. But
chaos theories are scientific insofar as they want to prove that “order disguises
itself as chaos.” The latter would be a semblance, superficial special effects, but
science finds the secret order in chaos, for example a rigorous fractal order. The
systems these theories on the edge of science deal with are described as being
“on the edge of chaos.” In other words, there is a risk that our world will fall into
the gorge of chaos, of the Real. Into the non-symbolizable abyss around which
symbolization turns again and again.
178 Can we be Lacanians today?

Now, Freud grasped the ineliminability of chaos from our lives when he
spoke of Thanatos, the death drive. Analysts who rejected the death drive have
proven their awe of the Real. They hope that everything will ultimately be
interpreted, reconstructed, that life is like a Hollywood movie with an ending,
a happy or edifying one.
And if the Real – in the para-Lacanian sense we have given it – is the pure
event, and as such not pre-scribed symbolically and as yet not symbolized, then
we can say that the Real does ultimately coincide with reality. Because the uni-
verse in which we live, the one described by the various sciences, is in turn a
pure event. Bang! If we consider the universe accessible to us in its totality, it is
pure existence that defies the principle of sufficient reason. It’s just there, period.
The theory of the universe as an ongoing explosion only postpones the ques-
tion of the origin of everything: why did the energy concentrated in an atom
explode at one point creating space? The primal cause is postponed further and
further away, into the heart of singularity. For this very reason Aristotle had to
resort to divinity as the primal cause: it appeared as the only way, at the time, to
come to grips with the fact that the chain of causes and effects that is the universe
could be harked further and further back vertiginously. For centuries, minds
have striven to plant this volatile world in the stable soil of the divine. We could
also say: the Real is that infinite in which every explanation loses itself. The
eventful remainder of every reason.
It is here that philosophy, together with the experience of psychoanalysis, can
dare mount the challenge to the sciences I mentioned earlier. The sciences study
Homo sapiens like any other animal organism: as inseparable from its environ-
ment. Yet for science, the human being is sensitive not only to its own environ-
ment, but is also concerned with the Real, which is never its own. The point is
that biological science, by stating that the Homo sapien has access not to reality
itself but to its own environment, places itself outside the human environment.
Science is like Epimenides, the Cretan who stated that all Cretans are liars. Lacan
would say that scientific truth is always not-all.
This to say that it is thanks to science that an extra-environmental vocation of
Homo sapiens emerges, which could result in a sort of self-refutation of biologi-
cal knowledge. In other terms, science should recognize its limits insofar as the
Homo sapien is a bizarre animal that allows itself, like Ulysses, to listen to the
siren of the Real.

12 What future for psychoanalysis?

Returning to psychoanalysis as a concrete historical fact, what can we predict
about the future of Lacanianism? Despite its eccentricity compared to main-
stream psychoanalysis, I don’t think the historical future of Lacanianism is sepa-
rable from that of psychoanalysis as a whole. So, the real question should be:
What future for psychoanalysis?
I’m not a prophet, but I can say something about what, in my opinion, the
specificity of psychoanalysis is; a specificity around which its survival is at stake.
Can we be Lacanians today? 179

Aristotle told an anecdote on the life of Heraclitus, which Heidegger commented

on in his “Letter on Humanism” (Heidegger 1964, pp. 144–147) – and which the
writers of the film Matrix took up in a sci-fi version:

Even as Heraclitus is said to have spoken to those strangers who wished to

meet him but stopped as they were approaching when they saw him warm-
ing himself by the oven – he bade them enter without fear, “for there are
gods here too.”
(Aristotle 2001, Book 1, chap. 5, 645a 17–21)

Today we think that these visitors were dignitaries of the time who were expect-
ing to see the famous philosopher absorbed in deep thought, with one hand
under his chin as befits a thinker. Instead they see a poor man trying to fight the
cold with a furnace, laying bear all his destitution.
It came to my mind that this encounter illustrates the situation of psycho-
analysis today. Psychoanalysis is a poor art, despite the high incomes of some
analysts. In fact, in the early decades of the 20th century, psychoanalysis attracted
many prestigious “strangers” – writers, artists, philosophers and scientists. Even
Einstein wanted to meet Freud and the two began a famous correspondence on
the subject of peace and war. But then these “strangers” wanted to take a closer
look at psychoanalysis, either by becoming patients of Freudians or by care-
fully studying its theories, and by doing so they noticed that psychoanalysis was
something quite fragile. Two people meet at regular intervals for years and the
therapeutic results, though not zero, are not always decisive. In addition, Freud’s
ideas come across as non-scientific, full of contradictions and inconsistencies and
so on. In short, today “the strangers” withdraw, perplexed before a theory and
practice that openly shows its destitution.
What can a psychoanalyst say to these eminent representatives of the scientific
rationality that – together with religion – dominates the world today? It can
invite them to approach analysis in any case, saying “they’re present here too.”
But not the gods. In fact, we no longer know what this reference to the divinities
meant for someone like Heraclitus. What were gods for the Greeks in the end?
Today I think the psychoanalyst can only encourage all those who back away
perplexed by saying: “even here there is contact with the Real.” Ultimately, what
really counts in a work or practice – whether art, literature, science or religion –
is whether or not it touches something of the Real. Psychoanalysis can lay claim
to a commerce with the Real, however scanty.

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INDEX

addiction 42 , 92 , 126, 127, 132 , 167, 169 Bene, C. 33, 40, 46, 73, 74, 162 , 163
Adler, A. 36 Benjamin, W. 3, 7, 129
àgalma 43, 109 Bentham, J. 75
Agamben, G. 53, 163 Benveniste, E. 49
Aimée, case of 1 Benvenuto, Bice 158
Alcibiades 43, 58 Benvenuto, Renato xi
Almodóvar, P. 45 Benvenuto, Sergio 31, 54, 109, 130, 139,
Althusser, L. 36, 85, 128 148, 171
Angelus Silesius 94 Binswanger, L. 33, 132
Anna O., case of 9 Bion, WR 3, 10, 16, 27, 31, 35, 64,
Antigone 68, 151, 152 81, 129
aphanisis 62 , 141 biopolitics 53, 173
après-coup 103 –113, 156 Blanchot, M. 95
Aquinas, Thomas 40 Bogarde, D. 148
Aristotelian: functionalism 172; physics 52 Borch-Jacobsen, M. 28
Aristotle 39, 40, 64, 105, 171, 172 , 179 borderline personalities/syndromes 126,
Aufhebung, philosophical concept 12 , 23, 132 , 141
83, 169, 171 Borges, JL 72 , 110
Augustine of Hippo 63, 166 Borromean knot – chain 41, 41, 169
Austin, J. 4 Botticelli, S. 88
autism 31, 81, 126, 127, 131, 138; autistic Bouveresse, J. 28
spectrum 127, 138 Bowlby, J. 169
Braque, G. 15
Badiou, A. 20, 36, 63, 128 Brancusi, C. 4
Balibar, E. 128 Breuer, J. 9
Barthes, R. 2 , 73, 146 Bricmont, J. 97, 157
Bataille, Georges 65, 66, 68, 95 Buddhism 37, 64
Bataille, Sylvia 65 Butler, J. 73
Bateson, G. 31, 49
Baudelaire, C. 5 Cäcilie (Freud’s patient) 139
Baudrillard, J. 66 Cage, J. 21, 51
“beautiful soul” (Hegelian) 35 Carlyle, T. 74
Beckett, S. 3 Caruso, P. 4
182 Index

Castoriadis, C. 68 Fabian socialist 12

cathartic method 34 Fachinelli, E. 36, 45, 60, 129
Cavani, L. 148 “famillionaire” 6 –7
Cervantes Saavedra, M. de 72 fascism 46, 47
Cézanne, P. 4 Faulkner, W. 104
Charcot, J-M 44 Ferenczi, S. 31
Chomsky, N. 31, 49, 80, 172 Fermi, E. 17
Cimino, C. 19 fetishism 126
Cini, G. xi Fink, B. 160
Cioran, E. 6 Finnegans Wake ( Joyce’s novel) 1, 15, 95
Clinton, H. 23 Flaubert, G. 104
Cocteau, J. 131, 153 Fodor, J. 168, 172
cognitivism 31, 33, 51, 70, 74, 80, 144, 172 foreclosure 32 , 127, 133, 135, 137, 175
Connolly, R. 31 Foucault, M. 2 , 31, 53, 73, 146, 173
Coppola, FF 88 Frege, G. 98, 140
Cratylus, Plato’s dialogue 5 Freud, Anna 40
Crews, F. 28 Freud, S. – ubiquus 23, 36, 38, 46, 51, 54,
Croce, B. 40, 73 66, 90 –91, 105, 139, 142 , 175
Crommeliynck, F. 118, 119 Fromm, E. 31, 36, 138

Dalí, S. 21 Gall, FJ 32
dandy 1, 4, 5, 11, 64, 66, 67, 108, 166 Gallese, V. 81
Dante Alighieri 120, 130 Gandhi, Mahatma 42
Darwin, C. 53, 112 , 113, 161, 168, 173 Gentile, G. 73
Darwinism 53, 112 , 113, 168 Giannini, G. 23
Dasein 58, 62 , 74, 75, 95 Girard, R. 148
Davidson, D. 157 Gödel, K. 99, 161, 172
Dawkins, R. 53 Gramsci, A. 53, 73, 128
Debord, G. 66 Grosskurth, P. 170
Debussy, C. 4 Grünbaum, A. 28
Defferre, G. 38 Guattari, F. 66
Deleuze, G. 11, 66, 171
Dennett, D. 53, 99 Habermas, J. 167
Derrida, J. 40, 41, 49, 51, 58, 64, 89, 146, Hamlet 40, 55, 86, 163
155, 163, 170 Hausmann, R. 5
Descartes, R. 172 Hegel, JWF 2 , 12 , 53, 55, 58, 60 – 61, 64,
disavowal 126, 127 144, 158
Dolto, F. 160, 169 Heidegger, M. 6 –7, 15, 18, 21, 40, 42 ,
Don Quixote 72 54 –58, 62 , 64, 74, 89, 94, 163, 167,
Dora (Freud’s case) 141 172 –173, 179
drive (der Trieb) 54, 158, 166, 167 Heideggerism 95, 165
Heine, H. 6
Edelman, G. 32 , 158, 173, 180 Heraclitus 5, 6, 179
Ego Psychology 17, 32 , 41 Hirsch, S. 133
Eisenstejn, S. 128 Hobbes, T. 85
Einstein, A. 128 Hobsbawm, E. 128
empathy 15, 33 –35, 80, 94, 164 Hölderlin, F. 8, 42
Epimenides paradox 99 homosexual, homosexuality 12 , 27, 62 ,
Ernst, M. 64, 65 88, 118, 130 –131
Eros 47, 56 –58, 62 Horney, K. 31, 138
Es 12 , 14, 66 Howard, R. 176
Esposito, R. 172 Hughes, E. xi
Euthyphro 13 Hume, D. 54
exhibitionism 126 Husserl, E. 59, 89
Index 183

Huygens, C. 132 Loewald, H. 156

hypnosis 34 Lombroso, C. 32
hysteria 29, 36, 44, 61, 86, 125 –126, 132 , Lorenz, K. 169
136, 138 –139, 141 Löwenstein, R. 40
Lubitsch, E. 86, 145
imaginary, Lacanian register 50, 53, Lucci, A. xi
57–58, 70 –71, 77– 81, 86 – 89, 91, 137, Luhmann, N. 49, 75
143, 157, 166, 168, 175 Lust, die 54 –56
IPA, International Psychoanalytic Luther, M. 39, 128, 171
Association 12 , 16, 19, 36, 39, 129, 149, Lyotard, J-F 36
159 –160
Islam 36, 83 Machiavelli, N. 128, 155, 157
Maffesoli, M. 66
Job, Book of 145 Mahler, Alma 22
Jabif, E. 22 Mahler, G. 22
Jakobson, R. 65 Malevič, K. 20 –21
jouissance 12 , 14, 54 –55, 148 Malinowski, B. 136 –137
Joyce, J. 1, 3, 15, 42 , 95 –96 Mallarmé, S. 4
Judaism 36 Mannoni, M. 169
Jung, CG 10, 36, 64, 156 Mao Zedong 161
Marcuse, H. 11, 36, 40
Kaf ka, F. 94, 143, 145 Marone, F. 29
kairos 22 Marx, K. 22 , 36 –39, 60, 85, 128, 142 ,
Kant, E. 40, 64, 114, 146 –147 156, 161
Kennedy, R. 158 Marxism 30, 36 –38, 41, 84, 128,
Keynes, JM 75 159 –160, 171
Kierkegaard, S. 7, 14, 63, 137 masochism 126, 146
Klein, M. 10, 31, 40, 64, 70, 129 –130, 169 Masson, J. 106
Klossowski, P. 146 mathema 97–99, 157
Kohut, H. 27 Matrix, The 51, 179
Kraepelin, E. 126 melancholia 60, 126, 127, 130, 132
Kraus, K. 5, 163 Metternich, K. von 84
Kretschmer, E. 133, 135 Miller, Arthur 69, 160
Kristeva, J. 171–172 Miller, J-A 12 , 63
Krueger, AB 109 Millot, C. 42
Minkowski, E. 33, 132
Lacan, J. – ubiquus 1–3, 8, 11, 23, 27, 29, mirror neurones 80
36, 38, 67, 70, 74, 82 , 84, 93, 96, 103, mirror stage 50, 79, 131
115, 127, 129, 149, 151, 171, 175 Montessori, M. 23
Lacan, Marc-François 74 Moretti, N. 85
Laclau, E. 36, 53, 84 Morrison, J. 5
Lacoue-Labarthe, P. 64 Mussolini, B. 46
Langer, M. 61
Laplanche, J. 23, 107–108 Name-of-the-Father 127, 133, 136 –137
law 1, 12 –14, 67, 81– 84, 91, 96, 143 –148, Nancy, J-L 64, 167
151–152 Napoleon Bonaparte 70
Leach, E. 137 Narcissus, narcissism 47, 68–71, 79, 131, 166
Leader, D. 92 , 160 Nash, J. 176
Lenin, VI 36, 128 –129, 161 Nazism 46, 62 , 148
Leonard da Vinci 128 Negri, A. 128
Leoni, F. xi Newton, I. 132 , 157–159, 161, 173
Lessing, GE 40 – 42 Nicholson, W. 140
Lévi-Strauss, C. 8 –9, 77 Nietzsche, F. 3, 7, 15, 22 –23, 37, 46,
linguistérie 65 55 –56, 63 – 64, 137
184 Index

object 45 – 46, 78, 86 – 87, 108, 113, 142 , Rogers, C. 32

145, 147–148, 150 –151 Rorty, R. 49
object relations theory 41 Rotblat, J. 17
obsessional neurosis 44, 125 –126 Rousseau, J-J 63
Oedipus complex 133 Roussel, R. 5
Onfray, M. 28 Russell, B. 11, 98
Ortega y Gasset, J. 47
Orwell, G. 150 Sacks, O. 52
Sade, Marquis of 68, 146
Palazzoli Selvini, M. 49 sadism 126, 146 –147
paranoia 1, 60, 69 –71, 78, 125 –126, 127, Sartre, J-P 11, 50, 75, 83, 104, 111, 167
130 –132 , 135 Satori, Buddhist 22
Pascal, B. 63, 162 Saussure, F. de 9, 65, 77, 139 –140, 170
Pasolini, PP 11 Saviano, R. 14
Père Lachaise, cemetery 5 schizophrenia 126, 131–132
perversion 126 –127, 136, 146 –148 Schkade, DA 109
phallus 87, 98, 150 –151, 175 Schmitt, C. 84
phenomenology 33, 49, 53, 59, 74 –75, Schopenhauer, A. 24
89, 167 Schwarz, N. 109
phobia, phobic 12 , 32 , 61, 126, 126, 132 Self psychology 27
phrenology 32 Senia, G. xi
phronesis, prudentia 23 Shakespeare, W. 39 – 40, 46, 118
Piaget, J. 75, 149 shaman 9 –11
Piattelli Palmarini, M. 168 Shamdasani, S. 28
Picasso, P. 4, 15 Shepherd, M. 133
Pinker, S. 53, 73 Sherif, M. 81, 84
Pinter, H. 2 Sica, L. xi
Pirandello, L. 71 Simmel, G. 75
Plato 5, 13, 43, 58 –59, 64, 81, 99 sinthome 24, 95 –96, 163
Poe, EA 58, 170 situationist 159
Poincaré, H. 129 Sloterdijk, P. 4, 60
Popper, K. 22 , 29 Socrates 6, 13, 23, 43, 45, 47, 58, 98, 149
post-modern 160 Sokal, A. 97–99, 157
pragmatism 22 Sollers, P. 66
Protagoras 64 Sophocles 151
Proust, M. 18, 123 Spinoza, B. 58, 130, 171
psychosis 1, 36 –37, 56, 86, 95, 107, 126 –127, Stalin, J. 20
130, 132–134, 136, 138, 169, 175 Stirner, M. 46 – 47
Ptolemy (astronomer) 53, 128 Stone, AA 109
Strachey, J. viii, 23, 36, 38, 54, 66, 139,
Quine, WVO 49, 157 142 , 175
Stravinsky, I. 50
Rampling, C. 148 Strindberg, A. 135 –136
Rank, O. 31, 39, 164 Sullivan, H.S. 31
Rascel, R. 150 –151 Super-Ego 12 –14, 67, 112
Rat Man (Freud’s case) 142 –143, 145 surrealism 21, 64
Ratzinger, J. 99 Symbolic, Lacanian register 77
Real, Lacanian register 77 symptom 3, 6, 9, 12 , 17–20, 24, 34 –35,
Reich, W. 11, 171 37, 55, 61, 66, 82 – 83, 92 , 95 –96, 105,
Renik, O. 31 109, 116, 125 –128, 139, 141, 150,
repression 6, 13 –14, 125, 126, 127, 130 155 –156, 163 –164, 170
Rimbaud, A. 50 Szilasi, W. 132
Risi, D. 152
Risset, J. 38 Thanatos 47, 56, 178
Rizzolatti, G. 80 – 81 Timpanaro, S. 162
Index 185

torus, toroide – topological figure 91, 91 Warhol, A. 49

transference 15, 35, 43, 125, 149 –150, Wallon, H. 16
155, 162 , 167 Watzlawick, P. 31, 49
Trieb, das 54, 167 Weber, M. 75
Trump, D. 23, 30, 71, 87, 140, 144 Wedekind, F. 4
Wilde, O. 5 – 6, 11, 12 , 67
utilitarianism 54 –55, 66, 75 Williams, H. 170
Uvarova, S. 132 Wilson, N. 157
Winnicott, D. 31, 60 – 61, 64, 70, 96,
van Gogh, V. 4 151, 156
Varela, F. 33 Wittgenstein, L. 8, 23, 49, 58, 63, 98
Vattimo, G. 23 Witz 6 –7, 63, 125
Vaughn, C. xi Wolf Man (Freud’s case) 106, 108, 175
von Essen, Siri 135
voyeurism 126 Zen Buddhism 22
Vygotsky, L. 16 Žižek, S. 36, 61, 128, 160