1

Habeas corpus*

Jacques-Alain Miller

Two years ago in Paris, I set our compass, the compass of the World Association
of Psychoanalysis, so that it would point in the direction of Lacans late teaching. This is
what has oriented our tenth Congress. Its title was inspired by the sentence that
concludes one of the chapters in Seminar XX: The real [] is the mystery of the
speaking body, it is the mystery of the unconscious.1 In consequence, I then suggested
the theme The Unconscious and the Speaking Body.

But we can observe, I think, that the radiance of the body has won out over the
theme of the unconscious. The novelty, which has arisen as such, has been for us to deal
with the speaking body. If Im not mistaken, the presence of the term unconscious has
been pushed entirely into the background throughout this Congress. I shall say that this
is all very well, because it has made us tackle the question with enthusiasm. This is also
what is providing me now with the opportunity to present a few punctuations to clarify
the nature of Lacans late teaching, its place in the trajectory of the whole, and the use
we can make of it in this day and age. I will stop, then, before suggesting a new title for
the Barcelona Congress, since no decision has yet been made on that subject.

Pure logic

Some time ago I took part in a colloquium on the relationships between Lacan
and mathematics. Both psychoanalysts and mathematicians took part. I titled my
contribution Un rve de Lacan2. What was the dream in question? I treated Lacans
desire to associate psychoanalysis with mathematics, especially mathematical logic, and
not only with structural linguistics, as a dream. Was this dream Lacans alone? No, it
wasnt. A whole generation, the structuralist generation, mentors and pupils alike,

*Text presented by J.-A. Miller during the closing session of the tenth Congress of the World Association
of Psychoanalysis, The Speaking Body. On the Unconscious in the XXI Century, Rio de Janeiro, 25-28 April
st

2016. During the session, titled From Rio to Barcelona, Miquel Bassols and Guy Briole also presented.

This version of the text was established by Guy Briole, Herv Damase, Pascale Fari and ve Miller-Rose.
It has not been read by the author, but is published here with his kind permission.
1
Lacan, J., The Seminar Book XX, Encore, 1972-1973, New York: Norton, 1998, p. 131.
2
Miller, J.-A., Un rve de Lacan, in Le rel en mathmatiques : psychanalyse et mathmatiques, proceedings of
the Cerisy colloquium held over 3-10 September 1999, edited by P. Cartier and N. Charraud, Paris:
Agalma/Seuil, 2004, pp. 107-133.
 2

believed in the same dream. Recall for example the hopes that the likes of Roland
Barthes invested in structuralist semiology.

To bring things into focus, Im going to single out a formula that summarises
Lacans dream. This formula has gone unnoticed because it features only in the text on
the back cover of the crits. In this text, the last that Lacan wrote for the edition of his
book, there is a sentence that indicates that he believed he had demonstrated that the
unconscious arises from pure logic.3 Lets be careful with the translation. It might be
easier to translate if we say that the unconscious, most closely examined, is constituted
only of elements of pure logic. The adjective pure is there to underscore that according
to Lacan, the Lacan of the crits, the unconscious is solely a logical affair. This logic, at
the end of the collection, even comes to dominate linguistics. Pure logic is what
explains why we speak in terms of subject of the unconscious and not in terms of
man.

Ethics

The subject of the unconscious, the subject that Lacan speaks about, the one that
he inscribes with a barred letter S, strictly speaking has no body because the body does
not arise from pure logic. The subject has an ontological dimension, which signifies
that it is not an entity, it has no determined physical manifestations. It does not belong
to the dimension of ontics. I wont be able now to go over the essential distinction in
philosophy between the ontological and the ontic, so Ill simply mention it.4 The subject
possesses an ontological dimension precisely because it has no physical manifestations.
When an entity has a physical manifestation, it arises from ontics and not from
ontology. Furthermore, its because the subject of the unconscious has an ontological
dimension that the thematic of belief can be introduced, as was shown in the sequence
of presentations by Graciela Brodsky and Jorge Forbes.5

We should recall that back in Seminar XI, dedicated to the four fundamental
concepts of psychoanalysis, Lacan posited that the reality of the unconscious is ethical.6
In other words, he was underlining that the reality of the unconscious stems from an
ought to be. The reality of the unconscious cannot be observed in the way of a physical

3
Lacan, J., back cover of the French edition of the crits, Paris: Seuil, 1966.
4
Cf. in particular Miller J.-A., Lorientation lacanienne, Ltre et lUn, 2011, unpublished.
5
These two presentations composed a sequence that went under the title: Becoming a dupe of a real: what
does it mean to believe in the sinthome?
6
Lacan, J., The Seminar Book XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1964, Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1994, p. 33.
 3

manifestation. We can ascertain this ethical dimension each time an analysis begins. We
try to assess in the person who comes to request an analysis whether the will not to be
indifferent to the Freudian phenomenon is indeed present. Anyone can easily say, No
way I cant hope for anything by recounting my dreams and trying to make sense of
them. Thats entirely legitimate. At the origin there has to be a subject who decides, on
the contrary, not to be indifferent to the Freudian phenomenon.

I consider that the formula on the back of the crits the unconscious arises
from pure logic, a formula which is in some sense conclusive governed Lacans
trajectory up until his late teaching. Then there was a caesura. I said csure, and not
cassure. Theres no fracture because Lacans conceptual transformations when he sets
his gear in motion and adds on different elements are always smoothed over, they
become smooth like continuous topological warps.

Speaking body

Lacans late teaching begins when this formula, the unconscious arises from
pure logic, which seemed to be constitutive of Lacanism, is disowned, renounced, and
abjured. Its replaced by another that is not uttered as such, but which I can bring out
into the open: the unconscious arises from the speaking body.

Lacan endows the subject of the unconscious with a body, and thats why its no
longer a matter of the subject of the unconscious. Lacan says, quite simply, lhomme.7
Spinoza, for instance, also puts it like this.8 It is essential to grasp this first point: unlike
the subject, man has a body. Second, this body is a speaking body. This features in the
title of this Congress. Third, the body is not doing the speaking of its own initiative. It is
always man who speaks with his body.9 With is one of Lacans cherished prepositions,
to which he gives its precise meaning: instrumentation. Man makes use of his body to
speak. Therefore, the formula of the speaking body is not designed to open the door to
the speech of the body. It opens the door to man making use of his body to speak. And,
indeed, Lacan did not include this dimension in the unconscious such as it features in
the crits.

7
Cf. Lacan, J., Joyce the Symptom in The Seminar Book XXIII, The Sinthome, 1975-1976, Cambridge: Polity,
2016, p. 145, where Lacan spells it LOM, thus condensing the noun man with its definite article. See
also the written version of Joyce the Symptom in The Lacanian Review, Issue 2, 2016.
8
Cf. Spinoza, Ethics, Book II, Axiom II: Homo cogitat. For Millers commentary on this passage, see
Spare Parts in Psychoanalytical Notebooks, Issue 27, September 2013, pp. 88-89.
9
Lacan, J., The Seminar Book XX, Encore, op. cit., p. 119: I speak with my body, and I do so unbeknownst
to myself.
 4

Moreover, there is a Lacanian topos, a frequent reference in Lacan, to a passage

from Aristotle. In De Anima, Aristotle underlines and Lacan agrees that the soul isnt
what thinks, but rather it is man, who thinks with his soul.10 Similarly, man speaks with
his body. The body is his instrument for speaking.

The unconscious and the drive

Speech goes via the body and, in return, it affects the body that emits it. In what
way and in what form does speech affect the body that is its emitter? It affects it in the
form of phenomena of resonance and echo. The resonance and echo of speech in the
body11 are the real, both of what Freud called the unconscious and the drive. In this
sense, the unconscious and the speaking body are one and the same real. Im going to
say it again so that this essential punctuation doesnt elude us. There is equivalence
between the unconscious and the drive insofar as both terms have a common origin
which is the effect of speech in the body, the somatic affects of language, of lalingua.

Henceforth, the unconscious at issue is not an unconscious of pure logic but, so

to speak, an unconscious of pure jouissance. To designate this new unconscious, Lacan
forged a new word, a neologism that is starting to repeat, the parltre, which is
altogether distinct from the Freudian unconscious that belongs to the ontological and
ethical order, as we have seen. On the contrary, the parltre is an ontic entity, because
this entity necessarily has a body, since there is no jouissance without a body. The
concept of parltre hinges this is what I am putting forward on the originary
equivalence between unconscious and drive.

Therefore, this involves an unconscious that is different from the Freudian

unconscious, which gives Lacan occasion to make a prediction: the Lacanian parltre
shall one day supersede the Freudian unconscious.12 This prediction is not entirely
serious. Lacan knew that the traditional names have an enduring and resistant power
that its hard to put an end to. But he is indicating here that he has crossed the limits
that Freud ascribed to what is involved in the unconscious, since at the level on which
Lacan places his measure, the binary difference between unconscious and drive

10
Aristotle, De Anima, 1.4, 408b 14. In the J. A. Smith rendering: It is doubtless better to avoid saying that
the soul pities or learns or thinks and rather to say that it is the man who does this with his soul. The first
reference to this passage in Lacans teaching is in The Seminar Book III, The Psychoses, Norton/Routledge,
1993, p. 14. Among the many further occurrences, cf. The Seminar Book XX, Encore, op. cit., p. 110 (man
thinks with instrument his soul) and the written version of Joyce the Symptom.
11
Lacan, J., The Seminar Book XXIII, The Sinthome, op. cit., p. 9: [] the drives are the echo in the body of a
fact of saying.
12
Lacan, J., Joyce the Symptom (written version): Hence my expression parltre, which will supersede
Freuds UCS (unconscious: let it be read).
 5

disappears. It cannot be said that the late teaching prolongs Lacans trajectory. It marks
a swing, a reversal, that goes hand-in-hand with a critique of the vast architecture
shaped by his previous conceptualisation.

This reversal brought about another, one that is more obvious, and which
astonished the structuralist generation (at least the French generation, though it had a
wider reach than that): that of Roland Barthes. The whole of Paris was stupefied by the
fact that he who had been known as the promoter of a methodical semiology should
become the author of a little work bearing the title The Pleasure of the Text.13 Everyone
deciphered in this a sensational reversal in the direction of a hedonism that until then
had been more discreet. As one of the young ones at the time of the structuralist
generation, I can say that Barthes had been sensitive to the new emphasis that Lacan
was putting on jouissance, and that for his part he had learnt lessons from it. The title of
the book ought to have been The Jouissance of the Text, but that would have immediately
flagged up the influence of Lacan under which Barthes had found his inspiration.

From langage to langue

Another analogy occurred to me. Two major philosophers of the twentieth

century underwent reversals in their late teaching one could even draw up a
catalogue of reversing thinkers : Martin Heidegger, who speaks explicitly of the
Kehre, the sharp turn in his thought, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. I will leave Heidegger to
one side to say a word about Wittgenstein.

Wittgenstein developed two very distinct philosophies. The first made Bertrand
Russells logicism the principle of a conception of the world. Adopting the Lacanian
formula, we could say that the world of Wittgensteins first philosophy arose from pure
logic such as he conceived of it. This philosophy is set out in the famed Tractatus Logico-
Philosophicus14 one might say that the crits are a Tractatus Logico-Psychoanalyticus.
After the Tractatus, Wittgenstein took a hairpin turn. Criticising and abandoning the
model of pure logic, he showed that all that is logical depends upon the life and
customs of a group. All that is logical is nothing more than a language-game. Before
the Tractatus, Wittgenstein believed in one sole logic. After, he showed that there are as
many variants of logic as there are language-games and forms of life.15

13
Barthes, R., (1973) The Pleasure of the Text, Hill & Wang, 1975.
14
Wittgenstein, L. (1921) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Paul Keegan: 1922.
15
Wittgenstein, L., (1953) Philosophical Investigations, revised Hacker & Schulte edition, Hoboken: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2009.
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Mutatis mutandis, the disparity is the same in Lacan between, first, like a
language, and then, second, la langue. First, that the unconscious is structured like a
language implies that the structure is the same for any language. Like a language is
actually a universal of structure. Second, on the contrary, la langue is always particular.16
It consists only in its particularities. Consequently, there is no universal of tongues, one
cannot make an all of tongues.

The Lacanian reversal

Lets try to be precise about what the Lacanian reversal was. Lacans initial
orientation consisted in cleaving the Freudian legacy. Elsewhere, thats what the
Americans and the British were doing on their side, which the IPA were doing, too.
They cleaved Freud into a first and second topology. They chose to follow the second
topology, abandoning the first. Lacans operation was more complex, but it was also an
operation of division that consisted in clearly separating the technique of deciphering
the unconscious from the theory of the drives, as he puts it in his Discours de Rome.17
In other words, Lacan was seeking a clear separation of the unconscious from the
drives. This is spelt out in full. The orientation of his first movement is this separation.
What interested Lacan was to develop this deciphering, that is, to theorise this
technique with the aid of linguistics. At that time, the drives, drive satisfaction, and
jouissance, were in his view part of the imaginary, with the symbolic intervening
through speech only to master and efface.

We can take our bearings from the canonical example of the Fort / Da, where
Lacan shows at the start how the subject of the signifier dominates jouissance, and
becomes the master of jouissance. What might be said about this from the standpoint of
the late teaching? Well, on the contrary, the Fort / Da shows us that at the very
beginning of the signifying chain there is jouis-sens.18 The Fort / Da pair brings about an
effect of meaning and allows for a production of jouissance. In the end, the Fort / Da
shows us the child acceding to the parltre, acceding to his parltre by nature19.

16
Cf. Lacan, J., Radiophonie, in Autres crits, Paris: Seuil, p. 412, among other occurences.
17
Lacan, J., Fonction et champ de la parole et du langage en psychanalyse, crits, op. cit., p. 261; &
Discours de Rome, in Autres crits, op. cit., pp. 137-141.
18
Lacan, J., Television in Autres crits, ibid., p. 517. This spelling matches the imperative jouis [enjoy]
with sens, which on p. 10 of the English-language edition is rendered as enjoy-meant, but consider also
jou-sens [I hear meaning]. Both versions are homophonic with jouissance. Cf. Lacan, J., The Seminar Book
XXIII, The Sinthome, p. 58.
19
Lacan, J., Joyce the Symptom (written version), op. cit.
 7

I have set out in detail in several of my courses Lacans efforts to model the drive
on the signifying chain. I showed that the principle of Lacans graph, the graph of
desire, consisted in identifying the drive with the signifying chain on the upper level of
the graph, along with its treasure of signifiers and its quilting point of a signifier of the
barred Other. This is a way of writing the drive as though it were nothing but a
signifying chain, as though it had the same structure as the signifying chain.

The main solution that Lacan found and used for many years was the object a,
which he turned into his major invention. At the same time, the object a is part of the
armature of the fantasy, it lies at the heart of the drive, and it possesses certain
properties of the signifier. Notably, it presents through units. It is countable and
numerable, and therefore is already a jouissance. If it is surplus jouissance, its a surplus
jouissance that is already a shading off of jouissance, a modelling of jouissance on the
model of the signifier.

The reversal will only be brought about when Lacan throws off the straightjacket
in Seminar XX, where we see the object a downgraded as a sham semblance [un faux-
semblant].20

Translated by A. R. Price

20
Lacan, J., The Seminar Book XX, Encore, op. cit., pp. 90-95, in particular.