Miller, Jacques-Alain. (3080).

“Six Paradigms
of Jouissance.” Translated by Janet Haney.
Psychoanalytical Notebooks, 34: 11-77.

Six Paradigms of Jouissance

Jacques-Alain Miller

The six paradigms of jouissance in Lacan, as I

presented them in Los Angeles, are simplified
snapshots. They are plotted in an attempt to
recreate, through their rapid superimposition, the
movement which is the driving force that we see
in Lacan’s teaching on the doctrine of jouissance.

Paradigm 1: The Tmaginarisation' ofJouissance

The first paradigm is that of the ‘imaginarisation’
of jouissance. Underthis title, I describe the results
of the first movement in Lacan’s teaching on
jouissance, which develops from the introduction

These three lessons were delivered as part of the course of J.-A.,Milleπ

Orientation lacanienne, HI-1, "L'expérience du réel dans la cure analytique",
(24, 31, March and 7 April 1999). This teaching took place under the auspices
of the Department of Psychoanalysis at the University of Paris VIΠ. As Miller
says at the outset, these lectures were themselves based on a series of lectures
given in Los Angeles shortly before. Those lectures must surely have been
given in English, but no record of them seems to be available. The current
text has been translated from the French text which appeared in La Cause
freudienne, No. 43, October 1999, pp. 7-29, which was established by Catherine
Bonningue and published with the authorisation of J.-A. Miller. A previous
English translation was published in Lacanian Ink, No. 17 as "Paradigms of
Jouissance", translated by Jorge Jauregui, 2000. We thought it was time to
celebrate the text with a new translation.

11
 Jacques-Alain Miller

of the symbolic as forming a distinct dimension of

analytic experience and its own order of existence.
These consequences regarding jouissance
remain hidden as long as what primarily occupies
the conceptual scene is the demonstration of the
function of speech in the provision of meaning
and of the field of language that supports it in its
structure, and of the operations of history, that is,
the retroactive dynamic of the subjectivations, the
re-subjectivations, of facts and events. What dom-
inates this first conceptual moment is communi-
cation conceived as intersubjective and dialectical.
This introductory Lacan was in place for such
a long time, that it is imagined to be the base, the
kernel, and even the sum total of his teaching.
What I call here ‘communication* first takes
the form of displaying in analytic experience
the fundamental structural character of the
relation of subject to subject, as Lacan explains
in his “Intervention on Transference”, where
he himself calls what is going on the “dialectic
of intersubjectivity” ’
This intersubjectivity is of course corrected by
the asymmetry which Lacan introduces progres-
sively into the subject-to-subject relation. The

1 Lacan, J., “Presentation on Transference” given at 1951 Congress of

“Romance Language-Speaking Psychoanalysts”, trans). B. Fink, Écrits,
Londoπ⁄New York, Norton, 2006, pp. 176-185. See also “Intervention
on Transference” transi. J. Rose, in Feminine Sexuality, ed J. Mitchell
and J. Rose, London, Macmillan, 1982, pp. 61-73.

12
 Six Paradigms ofJouissance

two subjects are not equivalent in function, since

it is the analyst-subject who mainly listens, punc-
tuates, interprets, and through this decides the
meaning. From this follows the introduction into
communication of the agency of the big Other,
even the absolute Other, a position with proper-
ties distinct from those of the subject who does
not find there his identical correlate. A little later
in Lacan’s teaching, this Other takes the place of
speech, of language, of structure, and the place of
all determinations of the subject.
This is, briefly summarised, what appears to be
the essential contribution, the innovation intro-
duced by Lacan. This relation is inscribed on the
symbolic axis, which we will write thus, and which
ends this period:

A → S

This moment, which has a certain duration in

Lacan’s teaching, shows that the conceptualisa-
tion in question remains fundamentally equiv-
ocal. It is always inscribed between two poles,
those of speech and of language. On the side of
speech, Lacan readily develops intersubjectivity,
ever subject to revision. On the side of language he
stresses, ever more so, the autonomy of the sym-
bolic, the fact that the signifying chain, as it runs
in the Other, has its own requirements, a logic.

13
 Jacques-Alain Miller

This first elaboration is made to take account

of what of the unconscious can be deciphered
during the analytic experience. This is the aim of
this construction. The initial ambiguity is there as
well. In these first years of Lacan’s teaching, the
unconscious appears sometimes as language, and
sometimes as speech. Sometimes the accent is put
on the structure which it comprises, sometimes on
the discourse that it emits, that it constitutes, to
the point that the unconscious could be described
by Lacan as a subject.
What is the effect of this introductory Lacan
on the Freudian corpus? It has the effect of a
caesura, as Lacan indicates on page 261 of the
Ecrits,z that of a separation produced in the
Freudian corpus between that which marks
the technique of deciphering the unconscious,
which justifies this extraordinary assem-
bly of communication and structure, and, on
the other hand, the theory of instincts, indeed
drives. Lacan emphasises deciphering in so far
as it depends on the symbolic, that it presup-
poses therefore the difference between signifier
and signified, and finds its place in a structure
of communication.
Whence the question of what Freud comes to
call the economic perspective, that is, the point

2 Lacan, J., “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in

Psychoanalysis”, transi. B. Fink, Écrits, NY/London Norton, 2006, p.217.

14
 Six Paradigms ofJouissance

of view of satisfaction. Something undoubtedly

ciphers itself and deciphers itself in the forma-
tions of the unconscious. Freud has given us evi-
dence of this. But also, for Freud, something is sat-
isfied in this ciphering and deciphering. Lacan,s
response, conditioned by his emphasis on sym-
bolic deciphering, is that the essential satisfaction
is to be found within communication itself, that
which derives from the liberation of meaning. In
Seminar V, Lacan devotes himself to showing the
special satisfaction which is attached to the fact
that the Other endorses, admits the curious, sur-
prising, and sometimes deviant linguistic forma-
tions that can come from the subject. This accord,
which eventually translates into laughter when it
comes to a joke, is all of a piece with whatever
constitutes a satisfaction in the semantic order.
This satisfaction can be illustrated as much
on the side of the subject as on the side of the
Other. On the side of the subject, it is the impris-
onment of meaning that causes suffering. Lacan
thus describes the symptom, as a meaning not
delivered. This imprisonment in structure is the
translation of repression. The symptom main-
tains itself as repressed meaning - when Lacan
played with the term ‘consciousness1, he even said
‘repressed by the consciousness of the subject’ -
and satisfaction comes with the reappearance of
the meaning. On the side of the Other, it is the

15
 Jacques-Alain Miller

reception, the registering, the validation of sub-

jective meaning that culminates in recognition.
If Lacan at that time emphasised the theme of
recognition in such a way as to make the desire
for recognition the most fundamental desire of
the subject, it is in so far as this recognition brings
satisfaction in the order of communication.
What happens to the economic point of view
in this construction? The first answer is that it
is symbolic satisfaction. But that does not cover
everything that is there in Freud. Where are the
drives, libidinal investment and its fixations, fan-
tasy, the superego as well as the ego? This objec-
tion meets the response that the symbolic is not
everything, that it leaves out of itself the imagi-
nary, which is another order of reality whereby
another order of satisfaction is accomplished. To
put it another way, in front of symbolic satisfac-
tion, which extends its empire throughout the
psyche, stands imaginary satisfaction, which we
will properly call jouissance.
In this first Lacanian paradigm, the libido has
imaginary status, and jouissance as imaginary
does not come from language, speech and com-
munication. It does not come from the subject,
strictly speaking. It comes from the ego as an
imaginary instance - and Lacan interprets the
ego on the basis of narcissism, and narcissism on
the basis of the mirror stage. He finds here, quite

16
 Six Paradigms ofJouissance

naturally, the Freudian formula of the ego as a

reservoir of libido, and goes as far as to say, on x>.
427 of the Écrits, “by which narcissism envelops
the forms of desire.”3
If we have to look for the place of jouissance as
distinct from symbolic satisfaction, we find it on
the imaginary axis a—a, where Lacan tries to
put everything that Freud called libidinal invest-
ment. We see Lacan going through Freud’s work
and describing everything as imaginary that can-
not be ranked as symbolic satisfaction.
Jouissance strictly speaking - imaginary jouis-
sance - is not intersubjective but intra-imaginary.
It is not dialectical, but is constantly described
by Lacan as permanent, stagnant and inert. Even
before his Rome report,4 transference is consid-
ered not as belonging to the dialectic of the ana-
lytic experience but, on the contrary, as falling
within the imaginary dimension, as appearing
in a moment of stagnation in the dialectic, and
as reproducing what Lacan calls the permanent
modes of object constitution. In the same way, in
the “Seminar on the Purloined Letter”,5 imaginary
factors are characterised by their inertia and are
considered as being only the shadows and reflec-
tions of what is achieved in the symbolic dialectic.
3 Lacan, J., "The Freudian Thing”, Écrits, op. tit., p. 355
4Lacan, J., “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in
Psychoanalysis”, Écrits, op. cit., pp. 197-268.
5 Lacan, J., “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’” Écrits, op. cit., pp. 6-48.

17
 Jacques-Alain Miller

This first paradigm stresses the disjunction

between signifier and jouissance.What has rightly-
been understood as the period of the separation
of the field of the ego from the field of the uncon-
scious, once we recognise it, is in fact the basic
disjunction of signifier and jouissance. The signi-
fier has its logic, its course, and as such is distinct,
separated from its attachment to jouissance. This
imaginary jouissance is thus susceptible to a cer-
tain number of emergences in the analytic expe-
rience - when a fault manifests itself, a rupture
in the symbolic chain.
There is a whole part of the Lacanian clinic
which consists of reporting several phenomena
of ruptures of the symbolic chain, and to the
occurrences of imaginary jouissance. Thus, his
reading of the ‘acting out’,6 taken from the case of
Ernst Kris, tells of the emergence of a primordially
entrenched oral relation, that is to say, of an ele-
ment of imaginary jouissance. Or again, Seminar
IV7 repeatedly tries to show the appearance of
transient perversions in the experience which are
regularly considered as occurrences of imaginary
jouissance there where the symbolic elaboration
is lacking or fails. It is again in the same paradigm,
that we find the formulation where Lacan first
6 Lacan, J., e.g, “The Direction of the Treatments and the Principles of
its Power” Écrits, p, 510
7 Lacan, J., Le Séminaire, livre IV, La relation d’objet (1956-57), Paris,
Seuil, 1994.

18
 Six Paradigms ofJouissance

presents the superego as obscene and ferocious.

The superego is, for him, that which emerges from
such a symbolic failure and gives form to imagi-
nary jouissance.
In general, it is when the symbolic chain breaks
that the objects, products and effects of jouis-
sance arise from the imaginary. Everything that in
Freud is, strictly speaking, libidinal is ascribed to
imaginary jouissance as an obstacle, as a barrier.
This is why Lacan presents the axis of imaginary
jouissance as crossing the symbolic axis, as an
obstacle or barrier to symbolic elaboration.
This first paradigm is not without ambiguity
since, from one aspect, the imaginary is clearly
that which remains outside the grasp of the sym-
bolic whilst, from another aspect, Lacan always
adds that this imaginary is at the same time dom-
inated by the symbolic. We have then in his writ-
ings and in his seminars a tension between that
which maintains an ‘autonomy of the imaginary’,
which has its own properties, its own source dis-
tinct from language and speech, and at the same
time a more muted note of domination of the
imaginary by the symbolic, a refrain that swells,
obtrudes and becomes dominant.
It is a timely reminder, indeed, that, in Lacan,
the imaginary serves as material for the symbolic,
that, in particular, it serves as material for the
symptom, it is inserted into the symbolic so that

19
 Jacques-Alain Miller

the symbolic acts upon it. But at the beginning of

his teaching we only find this in the form of very
general propositions. All tire detail is devoted to the
signifying chain and to its autonomy, whilst, as if
in reserve, it is noted that imaginary elements are
susceptible to symbolic recuperation. This extraor-
dinary operation performed on Freud’s text - the
imaginarisation of jouissance - thus finds itself
accompanied by, and progressively displaced by,
outclassed by, the transposition of the imaginary
into the symbolic.
Lacan’s initial move, as liberator, was accom-
plished under the banner of the non-rapport
between the imaginary and the symbolic. He extri-
cated, in unforgettable fashion, the symbolic order
in its autonomy, and taught analysts that there was
something like logic, independent of all reference
to the jouissance of the body, to establish its laws,
to answer to the principles, and also to condition
everything that any one of us can say. This watch-
word about the purity of the symbolic can say only
one thing - its non-rapport with the imaginary as
the place which in Freud is called ‘libido’.

Paradigm 2: The Significantisation ofJouissance

The second paradigm is that of the significan-
tisation of jouissance. It is the second move in
Lacan’s teaching. It does not simply succeed the
first chronologically. It mixes with it, completes it,

20
 Six Paradigms ofJouissance

and then progressively asserts itself. It takes over

the first paradigm and finally dominates it entirely.
We witness a true conceptual re-writing which
tries to demonstrate that all the terms that have
fallen into the imaginary category are, in the final
analysis, so well incorporated into the symbolic
that they are fundamentally symbolic terms.
The first paradigm sets up this huge reserve
of the imaginary and, then, in a second move,
Lacan shows the consistency and the symbolic
articulation of what is imaginary. For example,
at first transference is related to imaginary jouis-
sance, and then, in a second moment, finds itself
displaced onto the symbolic axis.
Not only are the drives structured in terms of
language - Lacan begins to detach the drives from
jouissance, which is merely imaginary - they are
capable of metonymy, substitution, and combi-
nation, but the drive is written on the basis of the
symbolic subject, of the demand, that is to say
an eminently symbolic term. This formulation
(S 0 D) is a key moment in the significantisation
of jouissance. Lacan inscribes this demand of the
Other in the very formula for the drive, that is to
say he retranscribes the drive in symbolic terms.
This is also what happens in the case of the fan-
tasy. In the first paradigm, the fantasy is eminently
the connection which links a to a' in a transitivity
that requires, moreover, the Name of the Father

21
 Jacques-Alain Miller

to impose here the order which is superimposed.

And in Seminar K, we see fulfilled the displace-
ment of the concept of transference from the
imaginary register to that of the symbolic.
Lacan tries to show that there is no fantasy
that is not also a scenario, and then that there is
no fantasy that is not assimilable to a signifying
chain, whence the formula for fantasy which is
taken from this second paradigm (SHzr), where the
image in its signifying function is articulated to
the symbolic subject. This writing will remain for
a very long time in Lacan’s teaching as the symbol
of the connection between the symbolic and the
libidinal. It will even determine, for a very long
time, the centring of the treatment on the fantasy
as being, par excellence, the nodal point where the
imaginary and the symbolic come together, as the
essential quilting point for these two registers.
The displacement of the concept of regression
from the imaginary register to that of the symbolic
is inscribed in the same movement. Regression,
which is related in the first paradigm to a dis-
integration, a deconstruction of the ego and its
imaginary relations, is, on the contrary, shown to
be symbolic in nature, that is to say that it realises
itself through the return of signifiers that have
been used in previous demands.
The big moment of this paradigm is the moment
when the phallus, whose status as image already

22
 Six Paradigms ofJouissance

distinguishes it from the organ, is displaced in

order to privilege its symbolic status. We notice
it continuously in Seminar V, since, after his work
on “A question prior to...”,8 where the phallus
appears as imaginary, we see Lacan shifting his
orientation until he arrives at the phallus as sig-
nifier. If we compare the formulae, term by term,
we see only a contradiction, whereas the term
‘phallic’ is dragged into this significantisation of
imaginary jouissance which Lacan is applying
very systematically to all the terms.
This culminates in the general demonstration
that the libido itself is written into the signifier
- as he does in his sixth seminar, even if it is
already present in his fifth. He pushes the sig-
nificantisation of jouissance so far that he shows
it to be equivalent to the signified of an uncon-
scious signifying chain whose vocabulary would
be constituted by the drive. It is this that Lacan
called ‘desire’.
There again, this was unprecedented, since it
is in this concept of desire that the significan-
tisation of jouissance is achieved, is realised, is
carried out. It is clearly a mortified jouissance,
a jouissance that has passed to the signifier. It is
the jouissance of the kind that features on the
upper level of Lacan’s great graph, where we have

8 Lacan, J., “On aQuestion Prior to Any PossibleTreatment of Psychosis”,

Écrits, op. cit. pp. 445-488.

23
 Jacques-Alain Miller

the trajectory from jouissance to castration that

achieves this significantisation.
Once again, we can ask: where is satisfaction?
Answer: it is the satisfaction of desire. Lacan spells
out the modes of satisfaction that are attached to
the signifiers of desire: to have close to oneself a
person, a function, an authority that represents
the signifier of desire.
There is yet another satisfaction, which holds
to desire this time in the same way as the signified
runs under the signifier. It is the pure satisfac-
tion of metonymy. Whence comes the notion
of undoing those identifications, and especially
phallic identification, that would hinder the free
course of desire. This doesn’t go beyond what
is there in Freud, because it does not give the
answer to: what is the true satisfaction of the
drive? It can’t give the answer, because the drive
is reduced there to a signifying chain. Thus, any-
thing one can say about satisfaction is always said
in symbolic terms.
It is essentially the effacement of jouissance
by the signifier that appears in this paradigm,
which is determined by the model of erasure,
which highlights the effect of sublimation, the
Aufhebung. It is this that is repeated in the line
which goes from jouissance to castration in the
graph of desire. The signifier annuls jouissance
and returns it to you in the form of signified desire.

24
 Six Paradigms ofJouissance

In relation to the previous paradigm, this

paradigm responds to an inverse movement of
the absorption of jouissance into the symbolic,
with the imaginary continuing to exist in its own
dimension. It is in this movement that we see
the great Lacanian invention of the mathemes.
We suddenly see the minus phi of the phallic
image symbolised and subtracted. We see the
emergence of capital phi of the signifier of desire,
later signifier of jouissance, and also the math-
eme of the fantasy - imaginary term resituated
in the symbolic - the matheme of the drive, etc.
All these terms are enshrined in their place in
ba can's graph.
Where is jouissance then? It is essentially dis-
tributed between the two terms of desire and
fantasy. On the one hand, it is desire, that is to say
signified by the unconscious demand. It seems
justified in this respect to write it thus: the drive
as unconscious demand in the position of the sig-
nifier and desire in the position of the signified.

S (3φD)

8 d

Iouissance in one respect is nothing other than

desire, which is at the same time dead desire.
This makes all the more important the second
term where Lacan inscribes jouissance, that is,

25
 Jacques-Alain Miller

the fantasy which accounts for everything that

jouissance has of life. The fantasy consists of life,
the living body, by the insertion of petit a as an
image included in a signifying structure, an image
of jouissance captured in the symbolic. This petit
a retains all its imaginary contours and focuses
the very spot where libido is linked to the living
body. On the other hand, with the barred subject,
we have by contrast a deathly being because it is
merely a signifying function.

Paradigm 3: Impossible Jouissance

Pushing this significantisation of jouissance
to its limit introduces the necessity of a third
paradigm, that is to say, the necessity of the
extension, the correction, the addition of the
distinct paradigm introduced by the seminar on
The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, and which we can
call that of impossible jouissance, which means
real jouissance. Lacan himself indicated that this
seminar made for him a kind of cut. It constitutes
a privileged reference point in that it is the third
attribution of jouissance in Lacan, jouissance
attributed to the real.
This is what is meant by das Ding, which Lacan
highlighted in Freud’s text as a sort of Witz. It is
a term that is not constituted like Lacan’s math-
emes. Its strange - unheimlich - character shows
that it is not a question of a symbolic term.

26
 Six Paradigms ofJouissance

What then is meant by das Ding, the Thing?

It signifies that satisfaction, the true drive satis-
faction, the Befriedigung, is found neither in the
imaginary nor the symbolic, that it is outside what
is symbolised, that it is of the order of the real. This
means that the symbolic order, like the imaginary
relation - that is to say, everything in the two-level
assembly of Lacan’s great graph - is set up against
real jouissance in order to contain real jouissance.
This is a fundamental redrawing of the graph
implying a substitution of defence for repres-
sion. Repression is a concept that belongs to
the symbolic and conditions the very notion of
decipherment, whereas defence indicates a fun-
damental orientation of being. As Lacan says,
defence already exists even before the conditions
of repression as such are formulated.
In The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, we are target-
ing a zone exterior to this montage, one that in
some way determines it. It is also a question of a
barrier, but not the barrier of the imaginary. It is
the barrier that the real opposes as much to the
imaginary as to the symbolic.
Lacan describes two other barriers which adjoin
this essential real barrier: the symbolic barrier -
that of the law, that which says, you must not, you
cannot - and then the imaginary barrier which he
describes in the case of Antigone under the form
of the appearance of the beautiful preventing the

27
 Jacques-Alain Miller

attainment of the Thing, before crossing over in

the direction of the Thing. There is a symbolic
barrier, there is an imaginary barrier, but these
are conditioned by this withdrawal of the Thing
beyond symbolisation.
The discontinuity is much more marked in this
paradigm than that between the first two which
are mixed up in Lacan’s texts. Here we have a true
break. Jouissance passes to the real. It expresses
itself, is described as ‘off the grid’, and is distin-
guished by a character that is absolute. This allows
Lacan to develop a whole system of substitution
of terms which can come into this place.
This paradigm is no longer bound to a model
)f erasure of jouissance by the signifier which
is open to an Aufhebung, but to that of the vase,
which Lacan borrows from Heidegger. The vase
is a created object which is added to the world. It
has at the same time, paradoxically, the property
of introducing an absence, and in this way the
possibility of filling it.
It is on this property that Lacan pinpoints the
Thing as equivalent to the annulment that is cas-
tration. This marks in some way the reduction of
jouissance to an empty space. That space can be,
thereby, and in the same breath, equivalent to the
barred subject. But this introduces in its turn the
possibility of filling it, along with the notion of a
supplement which will never be adequate.

28
 Six Paradigms ofJouissance

It is here that the extraordinary litany of terms

opens up, imaginary and symbolic elements,
that Lacan gradually enumerates throughout his
Ethics, and which are apt to come to this place.
Any symbolic term is apt to come to this place
if it is cut off from the rest of the system, if it is
endowed with the property of absoluteness.
Lacan likes to show that Kant’s moral law, which
is a symbolic statement par excellence and which
implies the annulment of all jouissance, is the
reverse side of the Thing, of jouissance, but is at
the same time identical to dasDingy because it has
the same dumb, blind and absolute character. This
term substitutes itself for the dumb reality of das
Ding- dumb because it is outside tire symbolic. The
mother, who is the object par excellence, protected
by the Oedipal barrier, comes to the place of das
Ding. Science responds to the first demand of das
Dingy because it is absolute, and because it comes
to the same place. In a general way, a list of increas-
ingly meaningless substitute objects is introduced.
It is Jacques Prévert’s matchbox, whose drawer is a
variation on the model of the vase.
In this paradigm where jouissance is highlighted
as outside systemisation, there is no access to jou-
issance other than by a forcing, that is to say it
is structurally inaccessible, except by transgres-
sion. Hence the praise of heroic transgression and
the tribe of heroes that begins to invade Lacan’s

29
 Jacques-Alain Miller

Seminar, it is, by the way, the great figure of

Antigone who appears here in the first instance as
crossing the barrier of the city, the law, the barrier
of the beautiful, to advance into the zone of horror
that jouissance implies. A heroism of jouissance
which Lacan writes as a kind of symphonie fan-
tastique that emerges of itself in having to renounce
the purring of the symbolic and the imaginary in
order to attain the tearing of jouissance.
This third paradigm puts a strong emphasis
on a profound disjunction between the signifier
and jouissance. It recalls something of the first
paradigm, where we have the disjunction because
jouissance is imaginary. We find here something of
this disjunction because jouissance is real. Here is
a kind of loop which we follow in Lacan’s teaching.
We see clearly here the opposition between
libido transcribed as desire, where it appears
between the signifiers, and libido as das Dingy
where it appears beyond signifier and signified. I
add that in this paradigm the opposition between
pleasure and jouissance is essential. The pleasure
principle appears in some way as a natural barrier
to jouissance, and thus the opposition is estab-
lished between the homeostasis of pleasure and
the excesses constitutive of jouissance. It is at the
same time the opposition between that which is
of the order of the good - on the side of pleasure
- and that which carries the ‘always bad’ that is

30
 Six Paradigms ofJouissance

jouissance. Which is why Lacan, in his Seminar,

summons up Sadean jouissance as the epitome of
this paradigm. It is also an opposition between, on
the one side, that which deceives - pleasure, the
signifier, the imaginary and the semblant - and,
on the other side, that which is real.
This raises a small difficulty when the uncon-
scious is defined as structured like a language,
as the discourse of the Other, to the extent that
the unconscious does not include this jouissance
which is beyond symbolisation. It is, in a way,
that which cannot be spoken. That is why Lacan
can say, on page 90 of The Ethics, that at the
level of the unconscious the subject lies about
das Ding, that there is a sort of original lie about
jouissance which is the theme of this disjunc-
tion, a fundamental separation between signifier
and jouissance.
What Freud called defence is the original lie
itself, the structural lie which the subject sustains in
the space ofjouissance. Lacan doesn’t really develop
this in this seminar on The Ethics, but the symptom,
which he had spoken about until then as repression,
is there related to defence. He brings the symptom
back to the structurally disharmonious character
of the relation to jouissance. The symptom is the
way in which the subject formulates that jouissance
is bad. In other words, the symptom establishes
itself exactly on the barrier between signifier and

31
 Jacques-Alain Miller

jouissance, and it echoes the basic disharmony of

jouissance with the subject.
In the second paradigm jouissance is taken
up in the Other, jouissance in the symbolic is
reduced to desire and the fantasy. This third par-
adigm, elaborated in The Ethics ofPsychoanalysis,
consists in taking note of what of jouissance is
not covered by desire and fantasy. It is therefore
obliged to put jouissance beyond the symbolic and
the imaginary and into the real. This paradigm
puts jouissance on the side of the Thing.
What, ultimately, is the Thing? As a term, it is
the Other of the Other. It is that which, in respect
to the signifying system of the Other, swollen with
what has been translated from the imaginary, is
the Other. It does not have the signifying structure
of the Other, it is the Other of the Other precisely
in terms of what is lacking in the Other. The value
that Lacan recognises here in jouissance as the
Thing is equivalent to the barred Other. It is this
that makes jouissance the Other of the Other, in
the sense of that which lacks, of that which lacks
in the Other:

J=A

In one sense it is an impasse to isolate the Thing

as beyond symbolisation, the same impasse as that
produced by Lacan’s inaugural gesture. Lacan will

32
 Six Paradigms ofJouissance

put this impasse to work in the following semi-

nars, where he will try to think through the relation
between the signifier and that which is beyond
symbolisation. How does he do it? He does it by
making jouissance, which emerges here under the
forms of the Thing, beyond symbolisation, appear
from now on as object. The development of the
object a that follows is the precise response to
this. There is no chance of forming a new alliance
between jouissance and the Other if we don’t go
beyond the Thing as massive jouissance.

Paradigm 4: Normal Jouissance

In Los Angeles I cautiously called the fourth par-
adigm, which I refer to SeminarXI, ‘fragmented
jouissance’, but now I think I can go as far as calling
it ‘normal jouissance’.
There is an extraordinary antithesis between
The Ethics of Psychoanalysis and The Four
Fundamental Concepts ofPsychoanalysis, in which
Lacan poses a new alliance between the symbolic
and jouissance.
Throughout The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, we
have a demonstration of the massive character of
jouissance, situated in a place that is usually out
of reach, and which demands a transgression, a
forcing, into an unfathomable space that can only
be reached through transgression. In the semi-
nar on The Four Concepts we have a jouissance

33
 Jacques-Alain Miller

fragmented into objets petit a. It is not situated in an

abyss, butin a little hollow. Lacan says that the objet
petita is simply the presence of a hollow, an empty
space. Jouissance is not reached by heroic trans-
gression, as in the third paradigm, but by a circuit
of the drive, by a drive which makes a round trip.
The Stimmung., the affective colouration of the
two seminars, is absolutely opposed. In The Ethics
of Psychoanalysis we have jouissance linked to
horror; it is necessary to pass through sadism to
understand something of it. When one is in the
place of jouissance, the experience is that of ter-
rible bodily fragmentation - a single death is not
enough to account for it, Lacan adds a second.
In the seminar on The Four Concepts the model
of the relation to jouissance is art, the picture,
the peaceful contemplation of the art object. As
Lacan says, the work of art soothes people, it
reassures them, it makes them feel good.
We might speak of inverted trajectories. On
the one side, in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, we
start with the pleasure principle, with homeosta-
sis, all those symbols and images which are only
there to serve the pleasure principle, and then,
as the seminar progresses, we come to sadistic
fragmentation. In SeminarXI we begin with the
body fragmented by the partial drives, by eroge-
nous zones which are autonomous and only think
of their own good, and then by way of contrast,

34
 Six Paradigms ofJouissance

if there is an integration, it is achieved thanks

to drive jouissance, which is an automatic jouis-
sance achieved by following the normal path of
the drive, its round trip, without transgression.
What is this change from one paradigm to the
other? It is that Lacan in this fourth paradigm now
denies the cleavage between the signifier and jou-
issance. He forges an alliance, a tight articulation
between the signifier and jouissance. The seminar
on The Four Concepts revises the very basis from
which Lacan started in his Rome Discourse.
What is the purpose of the mechanism of alien-
ation and separation, of all this paraphernalia that
Lacan seeks in set theory? What is it all about? It
is about a tight articulation of the symbolic with
jouissance. It is about showing that jouissance
is not an addition in its own right, that it inserts
itself into the functioning of the signifier, that it
is connected to the signifier.
Lacan distinguishes two operations, alien-
ation and separation; separation responding to
alienation. Why two operations? The first, alien-
ation, is properly and even purely symbolic, and
he tries to show that the result of this operation
necessarily implies a response of jouissance. This
is separation.
Let us try to make a conceptual analysis in
Freudian terms of what Lacan calls alienation.
This notion aims to unite the two concepts of

35
 Jacques-Alain Miller

identification and repression. First, identifica-

tion implies a signifier that represents the sub-
ject, a signifier that is in some way absorbent,
that is in the Other, with which the subject iden-
tifies itself whilst remaining, at the same time, an
empty set. This is what Lacan calls the division
of the subject.
On the one hand, the subject exists as an empty
set, and is represented as a signifier. On the other
hand, it simultaneously meets repression. If we
take a signifying chain, of which the minimum
is S1-S2, repression says that one of the two goes
under, the one that represents the subject.
What Lacan calls separation is his way of retrans-
lating the function of the drive as responding to
identification and repression. Where die empty
subject was, there comes the lost object, the objet
petit a. Whereas, in The Ethics, we need a terrible
transgression in order to reach jouissance, here sep-
aration implies the normal functioning of the drive
in as much as it responds to the void that results from
identification and repression. It implies a superim-
position of the structure of the subject onto that
of jouissance. And, in the same way, given that the
subject is a lack-of-being, the definition of the drive
includes a gap or a small hollow.
Have you noticed that, at the beginning of the
seminar on The Four Concepts, Lacan describes
the unconscious as he has never done before?

36
 Six Paradigms ofJouissance

Everyone swallowed this because it was so well

argued. Ever since his first paradigm, Lacan had
always described the unconscious rather as an
order, a chain, a regularity, and here at the begin-
ning of The Four Concepts he re-centres all the
unconscious on a discontinuity, and not just the
discontinuity that is compatible with a signifying
order. He describes the unconscious precisely as
a rim that opens and closes.
Why choose to emphasise that which opens
and closes? The answer is clear. It is to make the
unconscious equivalent to an erogenous zone.
He describes the unconscious precisely as an
anus or as a mouth. He describes it on the model
of an erogenous zone to show that there is here
a structural commonality between the symbolic
unconscious and the function of the drive. It is
because he begins in this way that he allows him-
self to say, in a phrase which is the key phrase of
the Seminar, page 165 - Something in the appa-
ratus of the body is structured in the same way as
the unconscious.9
His procedure is very different. He has struc-
tured the unconscious in the same way as some-
thing in the bodily apparatus, like that of an

9 Laca n, J., SeminarXI, The FourFundamental ConceptsofPsychoanalysis,

ed. J.-A. Miller, transi. A. Sheridan, London, Penguin Books, 1977» p. 181:
“Well! It is in so far as something in the apparatus of the body is structured
in the same way, it is because of the topological unity of the gaps in play,
that the drive assumes its role in the functioning of the unconscious.”

37
 Jacques-Alain Miller

erogenous zone, as a rim that opens and closes.

There he fashions jouissance onto the subject
itself. This implies that he is introducing in min-
iature, and in the drive itself, the model of the vase.
The hollow with which the drive is concerned
is that which we have met as the Heideggerian
vase in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, the hollow
created by signifying annulment which comes to
find itself filled, inadequately every time, with an
object. And in this paradigm, libido is that object.

The myth of the lamella, as Lacan has intro-

duced it, is a new definition of libido, no longer
as signified desire, no longer as das Ding, that
massive jouissance beyond signification that is
only reached by transgression, but libido as an
organ, as lost object and the matrix for all lost
objects. He calls separation the recuperation of
libido as lost object. With his apparatus he tries to
show that it responds to the signifying lack which
follows from the articulation of identification
and repression.
What causes some difficulty is that this lost
object, at the point where Lacan brings it into his
SeminarXI, is a loss which is independent of the
signifier, a natural loss. This is what he introduces

38
 Six Paradigms ofJouissance

on page 847 of the Écrits - Here this libido as lost

object represents that part of living which gets lost
in what happens in the paths ofsex.10 He considers
the fact that, like the amoeba, we are individual-
ised and that sexed reproduction is equivalent to
a loss of life.
In other words, this hole is introduced here
as a loss, and proved to be a natural loss. This is
Lacan’s continual refrain. When he elaborated
the mirror stage, for example, he referred it to
the prematurity of birth, which is to say, again, a
natural lack. There is here a dissymmetry, since
on the one hand we have the signifying lack, the
5, and then it is articulated to a natural lack, to
that loss which occurs naturally.
There is, then, a new departure in this paradigm,
since, with these two operations of alienation and
separation, jouissance is, in some way, reformu-
lated in a mechanism. Whilst all the stress of The
Ethics of Psychoanalysis is put in its invariable
place in relation to mechanisms, combinations,
and slippages of the signifier and the fluctuations
of the imaginary, constitutes a reprise
of Lacan’s fundamental ambition, which was laid
down in the second paradigm. It is a reprise by
other means of significantisation, taking account

10 Lacan, J., “Position of the Unconscious", Écrits, op. cit,, p. 718: “My
lamella represents here the part of a living being that is lost when that
being is produced through the straits of sex."

39
 Jacques-Alain Miller

of the results of the researches and the elaboration

of Seminar VII. Nevertheless, at the same time this
constitutes a cut in relation to this initial ternary, to
the extent that, instead of appearing irreducible to
the symbolic, or instead of being entirely reduced
to the signifier, jouissance is distinguished as such
and at the same time inscribed upon the function-
ing of a system.
The conjunction of the two operations of
alienation and separation implies a discreet sub-
stitution where we meet the difficulty intrinsic
to this conjunction. This substitution is found
in “Position of the Unconscious" in the Écrits.
The operation of alienation only gives us the
subject of the signifier reduced to a lack of sig-
nifier, that is, the subject has no other substance
than the empty set. You can grope around for a
substance able to experience jouissance, but you
find nothing. To be able to present the operation
of separation and the introduction of objet petit a
as responding to the lack of a signifier, one must
discreetly substitute the living body, the sexed
body, for the subject. One must also introduce
the properties of the sexed body, in particular
its mortality, its relation to the Other sex, its
individuality, and by the same token that which
Lacan translates in the form of a loss of life that
the existence of the body of the subject carries.
One can then introduce the objects of the drive as

40
 Six Paradigms ofJouissance

repairing and filling in this loss of life. Jouissance

is therefore distributed in the development of
Lacan’s teaching under the figure of the objet petit
ay that is, something more modest, scaled down,
more easily handled than the Thing. The objet
petit ay in Lacan, is the loose change of the Thing.
In his seminar on Transference, he emphasises the
agalma in the transference as being something in
the object that is a hidden element, defining it,
but which has no form, no being, no nature, no
status, no signifying structure. What else is he
looking for in his subsequent Seminars IX and
X? In the seminar on Identification where he
proceeds with the significantisation of Freudian
identification, he extracts it from the imaginary,
he emphasises the structure of the signifier. And
in the seminar on Anxiety ht contrasts this with
the status, the worth, the true weight of objet petit
a which he thereby frees up, and which he is going
to seek out by superimposing “The Mirror Stage”
onto “Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety”."
This fourth paradigm frees up objet petit a as an
element of jouissance, that is, it carries out an ele-
mentisation of the Thing. It makes the Thing into
an element and into a multiple element. Because
of this, the objet petita is ambiguous from the start,

11 Lacan, J. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed

in Psychoanalytic Experience”, Écrits, op. cit.> pp. 75-81, and S, Freud,
“Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety” (1926), SE Vol. XX, pp. 87-172.

41
 Jacques-Alain Miller

for on the one hand it incarnates, it reproduces,

the Thing, it is the elemental figure of the Thing,
but, on the other hand, it is attached to the Other.
It mediates in some way between the Thing and
the Other. It is as if, in the objet petit a, the Other
of the signifier imposes its structure on the Thing.
It is, from new beginnings and on new bases, a
renewed attempt at the significantisation of the
second paradigm.
In a certain way, the objet petit a translates the
significantisation of jouissance, while respect-
ing, without doubt, the fact that it does not
involve a signifier. Lacan abandons the notion
of a signifier of jouissance. The very nature of
jouissance seemed to him to be resistant to being
pinned down by the term signifier. In place of
the signifier of jouissance, which he marked with
his symbol of capital phi - Φ - he gives us objet
petit a. Petit a is without doubt an element of
jouissance, as such substantial, which does not
answer to the law of representing the subject for
something else. It therefore has another struc-
ture, but one which is nevertheless endowed with
a signifying property, namely that of presenting
itself as an element. It is this elemental character
of objet petit a which embodies its inscription in
the symbolic order.
In SeminarXIy jouissance appears to respond to
the signifying alienation of the subject in the form

42
 Six Paradigms ofJouissance

of the object, and it is this that Lacan calls sepa-

ration. Objet petit ai this invention of Lacan’s, has
here the same elemental structure as the signifier
and is at the same time substantial, whereas the
signifier is material but without substance. There
is signifying material, but there is a substance of
jouissance, and it is this which makes the differ-
ence between the object and the signifier.

Paradigm S: Discursive Jouissance

The elaboration of Lacan’s four discourses cor-
responds to the paradigm that I call discursive
jouissance. I find this paradigm in Seminars XVI
and XVII, and in Radiophonie.12
What Lacan calls discourse is alienation and
separation unified as one. This is the import
of that phrase from The Other Side of Psycho-
analysis, “There is a primitive relationship of
knowledge to jouissance”, which is to be under-
stood as: “There is a primitive relationship of
signifiers to jouissance.”
Before this fifth paradigm, there was always
in Lacan, in one way or another, a description of
structure, of the articulation of signifiers, of the
Other, of the dialectic of the subject, and then, in
a second moment, the question was to know how

12 Lacanl J., Seminar XVJ, unpublished, Seminar XVII, The Other

Side of Psychoanalysis, 1969-1970, ed. J.-A., Miller, transi. R. Grigg,
“Radiophonie", etc.

43
 Jacques-Alain Miller

the living being, the organism, the libido were

captured by the structure. What changes with the
notion of discourse is the idea that the relation-
ship signifier/jouissance is a primitive and primal
relation. It is there that Lacan emphasises that
repetition is repetition of jouissance.
“The signifier represents the subject for another
signifier.”This is a relationship which summarises
symbolic alienation. But Lacan's discourses intro-
duce, in some way, the notion that the signifier
represents jouissance for another signifier. He
does not employ this formula because it would
create confusion with the former, or it would
harden the logic. In representing jouissance, the
signifier fails it in the same way that the signifier
that represents the subject fails, since the empty
set remains alongside it.
“The signifier represents jouissance for another
signifier.” This formula is derived from the one
where Lacan summarises for the first time the rela-
tionship between subj ect and signifier, in the Écrits,
page 694, in “The Subversion of the Subject”: “Our
definition of the signifier (there is no other) is: a
signifier is that which represents the subject for
another signifier.’”3
To start with, let us hang on to this formula
which has the advantage of being explicitly by

13 Lacan, J., “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire”,
Écrits, op. cit., p. 693-4.

44
 Six Paradigms ofJouissance

Lacan, and which is itself a formula derived from

one made by the philosopher and logician Charles
Sanders Peirce. Peirce’s formula gave the defini-
tion of the sign in the following terms: “The sign
represents something to someone.” Lacan mod-
ified it, acknowledging his debt to it, under the
form: “The signifier, unlike the sign, represents
the subject for another signifier.” This formula has
the advantage of making the someone, the recip-
ient, disappear and, on the contrary, of somehow
making the authority of the system of signifiers
attached to other signifiers appear in its place
under the guise of the signifying Other.
It is enough to begin by examining the formal
difference that there is between Peirce’s defi-
nition and that of Lacan. Lacan’s definition is
clearly paradoxical when compared to Peirce’s, in
that the term being defined, the signifier, appears
twice in the defining statement - “What is the
signifier? It is that which represents for another
signifier.” This is formally circular. The point is
to know what value one can recognise in this cir-
cularity of defining the signifier by the signifier
via the subject, particularly when you compare
it with the formally correct definition that Peirce
gives to the sign. I have previously suggested the
idea that Peirce’s definition fits the sign in as much
as the sign is onet that it appears in the form of a
unity which is called on this occasion the symbol,

45
 Jacques-Alain Miller

outside a system, and which can have there an

absolute value separated from the someone who
deciphers it.
If Lacan introduces us to the signifier by a cir-
cular definition it is because it appears structurally
and essentially as a binary, as evidenced in the
definition itself. The signifier cannot be thought
on its own. Or, to think it alone, to establish it
alone, to place it alone, is an infraction of its
normal logic. The binary that Lacan will use in
his mathemes is the minimum articulation. It is
an oriented binary, in the sense that it is one sig-
nifier having its value of subjective representation
for another.
We have here the principle of a chain, of a rep-
etition. In effect, if two is the minimum, the max-
imum is the countable infinity of signifiers. Under
the two essential forms displayed by this binary,
Lacan takes Sj as a set of signifiers linked to the
other signifier, itself unique. Playing on homoph-
ony, he came to call this Γessaim (the swarm). Or
alternatively, by contrast with S1 as unique, it is the
other signifier that can be seen as having the multi-
plicity reunited in a set. This will be the case when
Lacan distinguishes the master-signifieτ from the
signifier knowledge, which is not unique but, on the
contrary, set-like.
Lacan exploits these two versions of the initial
binary. For example, on page 694 of the Écrits,

46
 Six Paradigms ofJouissance

Lacan, as soon as he has posed it, moves from

this first version, which I put here in the follow-
ing form - All signifiers represent the subject for
another signifier that does not represent it. This
is a way to grasp the initial formula - A signifier
represents the subject for another signifier. One
can then, at this moment, consider the set of all
signifiers that represent the subject, which can
be distinguished from the other signifier which
already finds itself in breach of the initial circular
formulation. This version allows Lacan to intro-
duce immediately a signifier that is an exception,
that is, to give to this S2 the value of S(Λ), that is
to say, of a signifier that is supplementary with
respect to the set of all signifiers that represent
the subject, and at the same time inscribes itself
as a minus in this set of signifiers that represent
the subject.
To summarise. Sl-S2 is the structure of lan-
guage reduced to the signifier, a structure that
is, for Lacan, present in the unconscious. This
raises the following question: what sort of subject
corresponds to this structure? This circular and
paradoxical definition of the signifier implies a
definition of the subject that conforms to it. The
subject is that which is conveyed by one signifier
for another signifier. Because no identificatory
representation is complete, this representation
tends to repeat itself.

47
 Jacques-Alain Miller

Let us go so far as to say that if the subject is

represented, it is to the extent that it is never pre-
sented, to the extent that it is never in the present.
It is never anything but represented. This formula,
which will be found written in Lacan’s discourse
under the form Sj representing the S, attempts at
the same time to indicate that it is represented,
yes, but that it always remains, in terms of struc-
ture, un-representable. Lacan never hesitated to
couple the accomplished, which is there in the
adjective ‘represented’ or ‘articulated’, with the
impossible, which is there in the inarticulable
and the un-representable. It is representing the
un-representable that opens the signifier to its
repetition, a repetition whose principle is the fail-
ure to completely achieve the representation that
it aims at.
Lacan adds a second paradox, the one that the
figure of alienation tries to harness. The subject,
in itself quite un-representable, only emerges
through the fact of being represented by a sig-
nifier. Lacan translates this by saying - the sig-
nifier makes the subject emerge at the price of
petrifying it.
He tries to give us a sense of this by making us
write S1 in the set which includes it and where,
invisibly, the empty set appears. This empty set
is there as an element of the set, the one which
can remain after the signifier is erased. In other

48
 lSix Paradigms ofJouissance

words, when one writes S1 as a set with only a

single element, there is the representation of the
subject, but, more secretly, there is the lacking
being that is there behind it, and which would
emerge if one erased the S1.

The set itself has no existence. It only

begins to appear if a signifier is written there.
This justifies Lacan in using this presenta-
tion to indicate that the signifier makes the
subject emerge, and it makes it emerge at the
same time that it fixes it in the representation
that it has given it, thereby eluding its constitu-
tive void.
From where does it make it emerge? Out of
what primal material does the signifier make the
subject emerge? This is a question which is hinted
at but not developed by Lacan in his “Position of
the Unconscious”. The status of this primal mate-
rial is a being - “Abeing”, he says, “the being that
does not yet possess speech.” Before putting the
apparatus of the signifier to work, we have the still
mysterious instance of a prior being on which the
apparatus inscribes itself, of a being from whom
the signifier will fashion a barred subject.

49
 Jacques-Alain Miller

This is what is highlighted by the operation of

alienation on the side of the subject. Nothing of the
signifier directly touches on what is in question in
separation, since separation operates, according to
Lacan, on a lack which is a loss of the body’s life. To
stay with this signifying mechanism, the signifier
is the cause of the subject to the extent that one
could say that without the signifier there would be
no subject in the real, and that the subject is in the
real always in the form of a discontinuity or a lack
in ways that echo the empty set.
This subject is decomposed, declined in Lacan
under forms of the truth that no description of
the real will ever give - the truth inscribes itself,
inserts itself in the discontinuities of the real. It is
declined under the form of death, which is essen-
tially how Lacan conceives of the impact of the
signifier in the real, the impact, both somewhat
pathetic and deadening, of the signifier on the
real - mortification. It is also declined as desire.
That is why it comes as no surprise when, on page
518 of the Écrits, in the “Agency of the Letter”,’4
Lacan speaks of desire as dead desire, even though,
according to Freud, it is precisely this signifying
death that makes desire indestructible, quite unlike
need. It is this signifying death that lodges desire
in a cybernetic or electronic memory. This is why

14 Lacan, J., “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious”, Écrits, op.
cit. 1 p. 431. "... and which is the chain of a dead desire.”

50
 Six Paradigms ofJouissance

Lacan can say that the chain of repetition is that

of a dead desire.
This is also why jouissance proper, jouissance
as emotion, as affect of the body, cannot find a
way to inscribe itself in this configuration. It is
also why Lacan is led to state, in “The Subversion
of the Subject" that jouissance lacks in the Other,
that is to say, in order to exclude it initially from
his signifying construction he is led to state that
it cannot be spoken. He is then led to stress the
antinomy between signifier and jouissance, and
the antinomy between jouissance and the barred
subject of the signifier.
What do we see in pages 694 to 698 in the
Ecrits?'5 These pages constitute Lacan’s final
attempt to try to formulate the status of jouis-
sance in terms of signifier and signified. He says
that jouissance lacks in the Other, but tries to
apply the schema of the signifier and the signi-
fied to jouissance on the basis of the phallus. He
invents a complex mechanism - on the basis of
complexnumbers, in fact - which could articu-
late the signification of jouissance as forbidden
- lacking, barred, mortified - with the signifier
of jouissance, which itself cannot be annulled. He
tries to account for this by distinguishing minus
phi from capital phi, two signifying symbols of

15 Lacan, J., “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire”,
Écrits, op. cit.

51
 Jacques-Alain Miller

jouissance - minus phi (~ÿ) as signification and

capital phi (Φ) as signifier.
But this is only the mark in his elaboration of
the fact that the transcription of libido in terms of
desire has not saturated the Freudian properties
of the libido. For desire, even though agile, even
this desire which slips in everywhere, imposing its
quirks and varieties on everyone, is by definition
a dead desire. Thus, despite the transcription of
certain features of libido in terms of desire, there
remains jouissance, which is what remains of the
libido once it has been re-transcribed in terms
}f desire. This is impossible jouissance, beyond
symbolisation, which he tries in “Subversion of
the Subject” to take back into signification in the
form of capital phi (Φ). When he speaks of the
signifierofjouissance, he makes capital phi in some
way the symbol of das Ding, a signifier rendered
absolute. This is the culmination of his attempt to
introduce jouissance into the signifying system.
This paradigm exploits ineffectwhathas already
appeared under Lacan’s pen in “Subversion of the
Subject”, namely that at the same time that jouis-
sance is forbidden, it canbe said between the lines.
This was already sketching the metonymy of jou-
issance, already suggesting that perhaps it is not
only the barred subject, the lacking subject, which
is carried by the signifier, but also jouissance as the
lost object. In other words, this paradigm rests on

52
 Six Paradigms ofJouissance

an equivalence between subject and jouissance.

That is why I have allowed myself to substitute the
term ‘jouissance’ in Lacan’s defining proposition
for the term ‘subject’.
We have here a determination of the nature of
the being prior to the launching of the signifying
system, and in a more precise form. The prior
being is a being of jouissance, that is to say, a
body affected by jouissance. This is why Lacan
spells out fully in SeminarXVlΓf, that the point of
insertion of the signifying apparatus is jouissance.
This point of insertion was never mentioned as
such up until then and required a surreptitious
substitution of the body for the subject, because
before that we had a more or less autonomous and
self-enclosed functioning of the symbolic order.
This is what leads Lacan, going beyond and
against any idea of the autonomy of the sym-
bolic, to propose that the signifier is the appa-
ratus of jouissance. This renunciation, which is
not achieved until paradigm 5, is in a way Lacan’s
abandoning of the autonomy of the symbolic.
What had been approached up until this point
as iwhat is in motion in the signifying chain is the
barred subject, truth, death and desire∖ is retrans-
lated as twhat is in motion in the signifying chain
is jouissance ∖

16 Lacan, J., Seminar XVII, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, ed. J.-A.
Miller, transi. R. Grigg.

53
 Jacques-Alain Miller

What primitive relation is involved here? It is

a double relation.
On one side, there is an annulment, a mortifi-
cation of jouissance, but this time conceived of
as a loss of jouissance, a fading of jouissance, of
entropy, but situated as an effect of the signifier.
This is no longera loss considered as coming from
the nature of sexuated life itself, as in paradigm
4 but a loss that is completely significantised.
In other words, just as what Lacan had previ-
ously imputed to a fundamental prematurity,
that is to say a natural lack, with the splitting
giving rise to this duplication embodied in
“The Mirror Stage”, a gap which he subse-
quently significantised, so here what appears
in paradigm 4 as a natural loss in life appears
in paradigm 5 as an effect of the signifier. And
Lacan changes the formulas around this signify-
ing loss of jouissance.
The second aspect of this primitive relation,
which responds here to the first, is a supplement
of jouissance. Lacan then introduces the objet
petita as surplus jouissance, as a supplement to
the loss of jouissance. As he says himself, it is a
complete break with the terms of his paradigm
3. He says it on page 18 - this is not linked to
force or to transgression. On page 19 - there
is no transgression. To slip through is not to
transgress. Or again, page 23, to exclude the

54
 Six Paradigms ofJouissance

term ‘transgression’ - transgression is a lubri-

cious word}7
What is the term that he opposes to ‘transgres-
sion’? It is signifying repetition pure and simple,
which equals repetition of jouissance.
In The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, it is the
signifying chain that Lacan presents as repeti-
tion or as knowledge. Signifying repetition had
previously always been required by the subject
for its signifying representation and by its divi-
sion, which always leaves a part of the subject
un-representable. All of SeminarXVII shows the
repetition required by jouissance. As Lacan puts
it: “Repetition is based on a return of jouissance.
Repetition is directed at jouissance.” This trans-
poses what he had previously said about the sub-
ject, namely that jouissance is at once represented
by the signifier whilst at the same time this rep-
resentation is not exhaustive, but rather a failure,
and it is precisely this that conditions repetition.
In this seminar, the emphasis is put both on
the signifier as the mark of jouissance - he can
say that “the master signifier commemorates an
irruption of jouissance” - and at the same time he
introduces the loss of jouissance which produces

17 “The relationship to jouissance is suddenly made to appear in a

different light by this still virtual function called the function of desire.
Moreover, this is why 1 'm describing what appears here as ‘surplus jouis-
sance’ and not forcing anything or committing any transgression." Ibid.,
p. 19. “We don’t ever transgress. Sneaking around is not transgressing.”
And, “the lubricious word ‘transgression’.” p. 23.

55
 Jacques-Alain Miller

the supplement of jouissance. By an analogy with

the term ‘entropy’, which he borrowed from ther-
modynamics, he says - “Entropy takes over as sur-
plus jouissance to be recovered.” And elsewhere
in the seminar - “Surplus jouissance takes shape
as a loss.”
From now on, access to jouissance is no longer
essentially by way of transgression, but by way
of entropy, the wastage produced by the signi-
fier. Thus, Lacan can say of knowledge that it
is a means to jouissance. There can be no better
renunciation of the autonomy of the symbolic
order. It is the means of jouissance in a double
sense, in that it has the effect of a lack and that
it produces the supplement, the surplus of jou-
issance. This also is what warrants his saying, in
another formulation, page 76, that truth is the
sister of jouissance. To say that it is the sister of
jouissance is doubtless to say that it is inseparable
from the effects of language and that it is espe-
cially linked to barred jouissance, jouissance as
forbidden. This is to say that truth occupies the
place where jouissance is annulled, mortified. We
would have to add - truth, the sister offorbidden
jouissance. This is why it is necessary to complete
things with what Lacan has to say on page 202 -
truth is the dear little sister of impotence™ Which

18 Ibid., p. 174.

56
 Six Paradigms ofJouissance

shows clearly that when he says truth, sister of

jouissance, he aims at {-φ), what is, there, the effect
of signifying annulment.
In other words, phallic jouissance, which is
exemplary, perfect, paradigmatic jouissance, is
forbidden, whilst something comes to make up for
it, surplus jouissance, which is the embodiment of
the loss of entropy. This repetition is conditioned
and animated by the gap between (-φ) and a, that
is to say, between the lack and its supplement.
This is the principle of encore, of repetition as a
fundamental form of the signifier.
This is the place to say that the signifier, the
symbolic order, the big Other, this whole dimen-
sion is unthinkable without its connection to jou-
issance. This gives a new value to metonymy, since
there where the subject was, there is from now on
the lost jouissance. And this bears on the use and
the demonstration that Lacan made previously
when he gave a touch of formalism to the signi-
fier. When Lacan gave us the scheme of alpha,
beta and gamma, this was not at all thought in its
connection with jouissance but, on the contrary,
to teach us that there is an autonomous logic of the
signifier independent of bodies, in some way tran-
scending the body. Now there is indeed a return
to the body. All that logic, whose elaboration still
holds, is reinvested and motivated through the
relation to the body.

57
 Jacques-Alain Miller

In addition, this necessarily raises a new prob-

lematic about the end of analysis. The end of
analysis, according to Lacan, always concerns the
relationship of the subject to jouissance and the
modification which it allows. But to think about
this relation in terms of fantasy is not the same
thing as thinking about it in terms of repetition.
There is a clear shift in Lacan between the
relation to jouissance thought as fantasy and the
relation to jouissance thought as repetition, since
it is precisely thinking it as repetition which will
lead him instead to giving a new value to the
symptom. On this occasion I am using a capital
R in a special sense to mean repetition.

To think the relation to jouissance under the

form of fantasy, is to think the obstacle under the
form of a screen to be passed through. Indeed, I
am led to say, in my own construction of these
paradigms, that the crossing of the fantasy is in the
end a variant of the paradigm of transgression. It

58
 Six Paradigms ofJouissance

is transgression dressed up in analysis as the end

of analysis, with the invitation to go beyond, in
the direction of the void, of subjective destitution,
the fall of the subject supposed to know, and the
assumption of the being of jouissance.
The anticipated effect nevertheless has both the
form and the structure of an effect of truth, even
if this effect of truth is the evaporation of the poor
truth that is the sister of impotence. It is very dif-
ferent to think the relation to jouissance under the
form of repetition. Repetition is to some extent the
elaborated form of fantasy just as fantasy is like the
concentrated form of repetition.
Repetition is what deserves to be called the
symptom, which shows us in effect a repetition
of jouissance and hence even a permanence but
one that is not concentrated on the fundamental
fantasy. It is rather a permanence which stretches
out, which lasts. It is not as if it were condensed
into the formula of the fantasy, which would have
to be extricated, extracted, to permit a crossing.
The symptom, in the form that it takes in Lacan’s
final teaching, carries in itself the temporal devel-
opment of this relation to jouissance, which does
not lend itself to transgression, all the more so
since Lacan calls it, in the seminar The Other Side
ofPsychoanalysis, the slipping-through, or what he
sometimes calls the savoiryfaire, the knowing-how,
concerning the symptom. This knowing-how is

59
 Jacques-Alain Miller

a kind of slipping-through which precisely takes

on a quite different value from an accomplished
transgression. Evidently, this leaves a question
about the end of analysis. Is it a question of put-
ting an end to repetition, or is it rather a new use
for repetition?
The idea of surplus jouissance - plus de jouir
- clearly brings something new to jouissance.
Jouissance as das Ding is thought of as a place
beyond symbolisation and also as an identity. Das
Ding is highlighted as a thing-in-itself, to distin-
guish it from the variations of the symbolic and
the imaginary. When jouissance is presented as
the objet petit a of the drive, it belongs in a list, on
the basis of the list of drives drawn up by Freud,
as developed by Lacan - the oral object, the anal
object, the scopic object, the vocal object, and
finally, to complicate things a little, the nothing.
Lut when you think of jouissance as surplus jouis-
sance, that is to say as that which fills in, but never
exactly fills in, the loss of jouissance, that which,
while giving enjoyment, maintains the lack of
enjoyment, here the list of objets petita increases
and extends itself. The objects of sublimation are
included in the list of objets petits a. The notion
of surplus jouissance in Lacan has the function
of extending the register of objets petits a beyond
those objects in some way considered ‘natural’,
extending them to all the objects of industry,

60
 Six Paradigms ofJouissance

culture, sublimation, that is to say, anything that

can come to fill in for minus phi, without ever
succeeding in completely doing so.
This is what Lacan calls the minor objets petit
ai those that abound in society to cause our desire
and mop up the lack of enjoyment, but only for
a moment, as the repetition never stops. All that
we are permitted to enjoy is in little bits. This is
what Lacan calls, with an apt phrase, the crumbs
of jouissance. We see our cultural world inhabited
by substitutes for jouissance, which are little noth-
ings. These are the crumbs of jouissance which
give a particular style to our way of life and our
way of enjoying.
To explain this, an increasingly clear division
has to be introduced between the body and its
jouissance, since in the end it is in the products
of industry and culture that the body finds the
wherewithal to feed its jouissance and its lack
of jouissance. This even implies introducing, as
Lacan does in The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, a
cut between libido and nature. One needs to add
that it is precisely this cut between libido and
nature which introduces a connection between
libido and culture.
When Lacan writes in his discourses the sig-
nifying couple, the barred subject and the objet
petit a in the fourth position, and when he rotates
these terms, it is clear that the objet petit a admits

61
 Jacques-Alain Miller

to functioning as a signifier. Jouissance itself is

as close as possible to being reduced to the func-
tioning of a signifier, clearly with the reservation
that it is not a signifier. The couple 'alienation and
separation’ become almost a relation of cause and
effect. In the first place, the signifier is the cause
of jouissance, the means of jouissance, which
implies that jouissance is the aim of the signifier.
And, secondly, the signifier rises up from jouis-
sance, emerges from it, since it commemorates it.
This fifth paradigm is completely conditioned
by relationship. The relationship between signi-
fier and jouissance, between knowledge and jou-
issance, is primal, but this relation is even closer
for being primitive. Lacan insists on denying any-
thing that might stay outside the relation between
signifier and jouissance. He shows on the contrary
to what degree the introduction itself of the sig-
nifier depends on jouissance, that jouissance is
unthinkable without the signifier, and that there is
a sort of primitive circularity between the signifier
and jouissance.

Paradigm 6: The Non-Rapport

With paradigm 6, which I take from the seminar
Encore® an inversion takes place with respect to
Lacan’s entire trajectory up to this point, while
19 Lacan, ]., Seminar XX, Encore, On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of
Love and Knowledge, 1972-1973, ed. J.-A. Miller, transi. B. Fink, London/
New York, Norton, 1998.

62
 Six Paradigms of Jouissance

pushing the indications of paradigm 5 to their

conclusion. What distinguishes this sixth para-
digm is that it starts out from the fact of jouis-
sance. It is in a way a return to the Thing, to the
extreme of the attempt to reduce the Thing to
that objet petit a.
At the culmination of this paradigm, I have
placed the formula that can be found in the last
chapter of Encore, which is the following: “The
signifier is the sign of the subject.” This formula
constitutes a kind of return to Peirce. Lacan’s
movement leads him in some way to define the
signifier as a sign, with the attendant difficulty of
integrating this latest expression into his concep-
tual framework. It is with the aim of reaching the
threshold of this formula, which appears to con-
tradict the definition which Lacan himself said
was the only definition of the signifier, that I go
back to the wish, which was also Lacan’s wish, for
a canonical formula for the signifier.
In Encore, Lacan begins with the fact of jouis-
sance, although his starting point was the fact of
language and the fact of speech as communication
addressed to the Other. In relation to language and
speech, to the structure which supports it, it was a
question of the capture of the living organism. In
the fifth paradigm, with the notion of idiscursivity,,
Lacan went as far as posing a primal relationship
between the signifier and jouissance. I myself have

63
 Jacques-Alain Miller

been trying to transcribe this in terms of represen-

tation: the signifier represents jouissance.
In paradigm 5 Lacan truly cuts the branch on
which all his teaching was sitting, and in the final
part of his teaching there will be an attempt to build
another conceptual apparatus out of the debris of
the preceding one. In Encore, he puts into question
the very concept of language, which he considers
to be derivative, not primary, in relation to what he
calls lalangue, which is speech before its grammat-
ical and lexicographic ordering. Similarly, he puts
into question the concept of speech, now conceived
of not as communication but as jouissance. Whilst
jouissance was, in his teaching, always secondary
with respect to the signifier, and even though in
paradigm 5 he develops it into a primal relation-
ship, language and structure, hitherto treated as
primordial givens, will now appear, in this sixth
paradigm, as secondary and derivative.
What he calls lalangue is speech disconnected
from the structure of language, which now appears
as derivative with respect to that primary exercise
and separated from communication. It is under
these conditions that he can then pose a primal
inclusion of jouissance, speech and lalangue under
the heading of the jouissance of blahblah. In this
paradigm, the concept of language, the earlier con-
cept of speech as communication, as well as the
concepts of the big Other, the Name of the Father,

64
 Six Paradigms ofJouissance

and the phallic symbol are all pushed to the point of

collapse into semblants. All these terms find them-
selves reduced to a function of stapling together
elements that are fundamentally disconnected.
This paradigm is based essentially on the
non-rapport, on disjunction - the disjunction
of signifier and signified, the disjunction of jou-
issance and the big Other, the disjunction of
man and woman under the heading of There is
no sexual rapport. This is truly the seminar of
non-rapports. All the terms that, in Lacan, provide
connection - the Other, the Name of the Father,
the phallus - which used to appear as primordial
terms, even as transcendental terms since they
condition all experience, are reduced to being
connectors. In place of transcendental terms of
structure, coming from an autonomous dimen-
sion, prior to experience and conditioning it, we
have the primacy of practice. Where there was
transcendental structure, we have a pragmatic,
and even a social pragmatic.
I represent this last paradigm, which is indexed
on disjunction, by these two Eulerian circles
whose intersection is marked as empty.

65
 Jacques-Alain Miller

This empty intersection can be filled in by

several terms which we can consider, from this
perspective, as substitutes, operators of connec-
tion between the two sets. These ‘intersectors’
are various and belong, in Lacan, to two large
registers. Whatever can fill in for this missing
connection comes under either ‘routine’ - a dep-
recatory term to qualify what is glorified under
the name of tradition, the heritage of past ages
- or else can be written into the register of‘inven-
tion’, or indeed, if we are optimistic about what
unfolds in front of our eyes, the experimentation
of the bond. The current debate, concerning the
sexual bond in particular, plays out, as foreseen
by Lacan thirty years ago now, between ‘routine’
and ‘invention’.
Lacan’s sixth paradigm allows us to locate the
place where routine and invention are operative.
In giving you this schema, I thematise as such the
concept of non-rapport that Lacan puts to work
with regard to the sexual, making us repeat: There
is no sexual rapport. The surprise on reading his
seminar Encore, when one was acquainted with
Lacan, when one got into the spirit of his teaching,
comes with the evident extension of this concept
of non-rapport, which needs to be set against that
of structure. The reference to structure led us to
establish, to take as given, a multitude of rela-
tions which we simply called articulation. This

66
 Six Paradigms ofJouissance

word ‘articulation’, which we exemplify by the

structural minimum S1-S2, is the formulation of
relations, in the plural, to which, without further
thought, we attribute the quality of being real in
the form of necessity, that is to say, that which
never stops writing itself.
The seminar Encore introduces another kind of
relation that limits the empire of structure. This
other type of relation needs to be generalised. It is
the non-rapport which shakes up everything that
we were mistakenly inclined to consider as given
under the banner of structure: the articulation
S1-S2 in so far as it has signifying effects, the Other
as prescribing the conditions of all experience,
and also the paternal metaphor, the nodal artic-
ulation of the Freudian Oedipus, which is part of
the structural order, that is to say, of a relation that
is taken as given, a given relation that, of necessity,
never ceases to be written.
Structuralism, in the end, was nothing other
than the sanctification, under the guise of science,
of a certain number of relations that are precisely
called into doubt by the following question: would
it not rather be a case of non-rapport, that is to
say, a relation made up of routine or invention?
The empire of the non-rapport, in Lacan’s final
teaching, goes on to question the pertinence of
trying to operate on jouissance on the basis of
speech and meaning. This indication is like tire

67
 Jacques-Alain Miller

summit of what the empire of the non-rapport

is capable of, and, in this respect, the invention
of the psychoanalytic discourse as well.
Concerning psychoanalysis, Lacan was very
careful to distinguish between what it was capable
of at the time of its invention by Freud, in its earli-
est days, and what is possible for it when this very
invention becomes routine. Halfway through the
century of psychoanalysis, he was already point-
ing out that the effects of this invention were
questionable, becoming blocked by its routine
use. He gave psychoanalysis a new lease of life
for a further fifty years by his own invention. We
must not hide from ourselves that today Lacan’s
re-invention is itself progressively blocked by its
routine use, and is it not for us once again to fix
it by re-inventing it?
This reinvention is what we are invited to by
this sixth paradigm, that based on the non-rap-
port. The starting point for this perspective is
not ‘there is no sexual rapport’ but on the con-
trary a ‘there is’ - there is jouissance. Lacan’s
original starting point in 1952 was in fact ‘there
is psychoanalysis.’ It exists, it functions. That
is to say, at the point we are at, that there is
a satisfaction which comes from the act of
speaking to someone, under the conditions of
psychoanalysis, and from the various mutative
effects that follow. Someone is spoken for -

68
 Six Paradigms ofJouissance

psychoanalysis makes this clear - and, in speak-

ing for someone, there follow the effects of truth
which reorganise the subject from top to bottom.
The relation to the Other appears there at the
origin, at the beginning, as a given.
The point Lacan now arrives at is: ‘psycho-
analysis does not work.’ And he asks himself
why it does not work. It is quite another thing
to start from the evidence that ‘there is jouis-
sance’. There is jouissance as the property of a
living body. This is a definition which brings
back jouissance exclusively to a living body. All
there is for psychoanalysis is a living body - one
that speaks, of course. Moreover, the ‘and which
speaks’ [et qui parle] is again, for Lacan, in this
seminar, something that must be described as a
mystery - he ends one of his lessons of that year
with this. Put another way, the assumption is,
‘through the body’ [parle corps]. You find this on
page 26 - Isn't that precisely what psychoanalytic
experience presupposes? - the substance of the
body, on the condition that it is defined only as
that which enjoys itself.20
This starting point implies a disjunction
between jouissance and the Other. This point of
departure which privileges jouissance is by itself
enough to establish the non-rapport between
jouissance and Other. Here ‘disjunction’ means

20 Lacan, L, Encore, ibid., p. 23.

69
 Jacques-Alain Miller

‘non-rapport’. This makes the Other of the Other

appear in the form of the One. Around this time,
Lacan had come to stress the One as the true Other
of the Other. In thinking about the Other of the
Other, one sees the Other and then the Other of
the Other, in some way as above and guaranteeing
the former.
A
r____
A

We then pose the question - Is there truly

a guarantee? And the answer is no, there is no
guarantee. Here, the Other of the Other appears
as below, not above, in the form of the One

A
X
One

Starting from jouissance leads back to a One-

all-alone, separated from the Other. Here it is the
Other that appears as the Other of the One.
This very elementary schema is useful for grasp-
ing what it is that Lacan is concerned with through-
out this seminar, namely, to emphasise everything
in jouissance that is jouissance One, in otherwords,
jouissance without the Other. One can even hear

70
 Six Paradisms ofJouissance

the title of Encore as a homophone, as Lacan sug-

gests at one point - En-corps. It is the body that is
at stake here, far more than the repetition he spoke
of in his The Other Side of Psychoanalysis in the
marriage of jouissance and knowledge.
This is to rediscover, in psychoanalysis itself,
what prevails today in the social bond, that which
we call, without further thought, modern indi-
vidualism, which indeed renders problematic
everything that is relationship and community,
including even the marital bond, where even
those whom we can call conservatives, those
who sanctify routine as tradition, are irresist-
ibly taken by the movement of invention, to
establish through the means of positive law - as
voted for in parliaments - relationships between
individual atoms. The starting point found in
jouissance is the true basis of what appears as
the extension, as the madness even, of contem-
porary individualism.
Lacan's seminar is thus a declension of jouis-
sance One. Just as, originally, he tried to show that
jouissance was from top to bottom, from head to
toe, imaginary, now he shows that jouissance is
fundamentally One, which is to say that it does
without the Other.
The primary requirement is to situate the place
of jouissance without any idealism. At this point,
the place of jouissance, as the cynics perceived,

71
 Jacques-Alain Miller

is the body itself. What Lacan shows is that all

effective jouissance, all material jouissance, is jou-
issance One, that is to say jouissance of the body
itself. It is always the body that enjoys itself, by
whatever means available.
Another figure of jouissance One that Lacan
exposes is the jouissance that is especially con-
centrated on the phallic part of the body. There
is clearly a possible dialectic between the jou-
issance of the body itself and phallic, that is to
say, specialised jouissance, but if Lacan puts the
emphasis on phallic jouissance, it is to the extent
that it is another type of jouissance One, of the
One-jouissance. He describes this phallic jouis-
sance as the jouissance of the idiot, of the solitary,
a jouissance which is set up in the non-rapport to
the Other. That is why Lacan pins this figure of
jouissance One as masturbatory jouissance.
A third figure of One-jouissance is jouissance
of speech. Throughout Lacan’s teaching we have
been led to believe that speech connects to the
Other as addressed speech, communicative
speech. However, the jouissance of speech only
appears here in Lacan as a variant of jouissance
One, that is to say cut off from the Other, which
indicates that speech is essentially jouissance and
not communication with the Other.

72
 Six Paradigms ofJouissance

This is what is at stake in blahblah, as he puts it,

which is the last degree of the pejorative qualifi-
cation of speech. Blahblah, means precisely that it
is not a question of communication, that from the
perspective of jouissance speech does not aim at
recognition, or comprehension, but that it is only
a modality of jouissance One. There is a body that
speaks. There is a body that enjoys in different
ways. The place of jouissance is always the same,
the body, which can enjoy through masturbation,
or just by speaking. Although it speaks, this body
is not thereby linked to the Other. What matters
to it is its own jouissance, its jouissance One. This
is seen in psychoanalysis, particularly in shorter
sessions. It is not the complex elaboration of sig-
nification and the solving of an enigma that keeps
it going. It is through taking speech as a specific
mode of satisfaction of the speaking body.
Fourthly, Lacan goes as far as to implicate sub-
limation at this point, and to give us a version
of sublimation that does not involve the Other.
This is the last straw, because what was essential
in Freud’s elaboration of sublimation, when he
invented the term, when he grasped its import,

73
 Jacques-Alain Miller

was that sublimation was essentially, inevitably,

recognition by the Other. For sure, Lacan makes
use of the connection between sublimation and
recognition by the Other. Sublimation only finds
completion through the satisfaction of the Other.
But, in Encorey Lacan gives us a version of subli-
mation as not involving the Other, but as being the
legitimate outcome of the speech of jouissance,
solitary speech. You find on page 109 - “When
one leaves it all alone, the speaking body always
sublimates with all its might.”21 This is really to
indicate to us that it is in the place of the jouis-
sance One that sublimation finds its true home.
Thus, jouissance One, this One-jouissance
presents itself as jouissance of one’s own body.
It does not follow on from bodily jouissance. It
is both interpolated and displaced. Sometimes,
Lacan is interested in the connections between the
different jouissances. He contrasts them, defines
them in relation to one another. Jouissance One,
examined closely, might appear as bodily jou-
issance, as phallic jouissance, as jouissance of
speech, or as sublimatory jouissance. In each case,
it is not, as such, related to the Other. Jouissance
as such is jouissance One. This is the reign of the
One-jouissance.
All this construction renders the jouissance
of the Other extremely problematic. Its very

21 Ibid., p. 121.

74
 Six Paradigms ofJouissance

existence is cast in doubt. In any case, if it exists,

it is not on the same level as jouissance One.
Jouissance One is real, whilst the jouissance of the
Other now appears as a problematic construction.
From the perspective of jouissance, the jou-
issance of the Other is sexual jouissance, the
jouissance of an Other body differently sexed.
When starting from the signifier, from communi-
cation, where wit rules, it is the Other subject that
answers you. It is the place of code, the place of
the signifier, that which ratifies. But, starting from
jouissance, the Other is the Other sex. To begin
with, jouissance One, solitary, is fundamentally
asexual, so much so that until then, for Lacan,
the relation to the Other was primal, structural.
Structure denatures the world, but at the same
time, more subtly, structure can naturalise, that
is to say, structure itself appears to be beyond
question, a priori. But from the perspective of
jouissance, the relation to the Other will appear,
on the contrary, as problematical and derivative.
It is on this basis that “ There is no sexual rapport”
is justified, becomes in some way inevitable. aThere
is no sexual rapport? means that jouissance as such
comes under the sway of the One, that it is jouis-
sance One, whilst sexual jouissance, the jouissance
of the body of the Other sex, has the distinction
of being specified by an impasse, by a disjunction
and by a non-rapport. This is what allows Lacan to

75
 Jacques-Alain Miller

say that jouissance has nothing to do with a sexual

relationship. Jouissance as such is One, it falls under
the One, and it does not, of itself, set up a relation to
the Other. “There is no sexual rapport' means that
jouissance is basically idiotic and solitary.
This concept of non-rapport which dominates
the sixth paradigm puts a limit to the concept of
structure. When, for example, Lacan tried to find
a formula for the Oedipus complex under the form
of metaphor, as in the mathemes, he emphasised
the fact that structure is some tiring that is writ-
ten, which never stops writing itself, and which
then appears as a necessity which imposes itself
on everything that shows itself, on all phenom-
ena. In this way, structure is seen, in structural-
ism, as a kind of a priori form, as incorporating
given categories, already present and unfalsifi-
able, which cannot be done away with. Structure
was always seen as omnipotent when exposed.
However, its limitation appears here in the sexual
jouissance of the Other as sexed being, because
here there is a relation given up to contingency, to
the chance encounter, a relation subtracted from
any necessity.
With Encore Lacan began to explore everything
that was freed from necessity, everything that is,
on the contrary, given up to routine and invention.
In other words, it substitutes the pragmatic for
die transcendental of structure. 'Transcendental’

76
 Six Paradigms ofJouissance

means exactly what conditions experience, the

markers that delimit all possible experience - with
a Kantian stress which is there in Lacan in “On a
Question Preliminary to any Possible Treatment
of Psychosis”. We are much more demanding as
to what is necessary and what is not. Structure is
full of holes and, in these holes, there is room for
invention, for novelty, for connections that have
not always been there.
It is rather like a version of the Enlightenment.
The eighteenth century was fascinated by - and
catalogued - all the ways in which other peo-
ples handled sex, how they articulated jouissance
and the Other by other means. Since when, as
a rebound from this freedom glimpsed for a
moment, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
have to some extent erected a so-called globalis-
ing routine, have deified what remained of tradi-
tion, and have sought to give it shape.
We, however, live with the reopening of this
empty intersection. With gathering momentum,
the transcendental gives way to the pragmatic.
This does not mean that there is no structure, that
everything is semblance. There is the real, but it is
much more difficult today than formerly to isolate
and discern what is structure and what is real.

Translated by Janet Haney

Revised by Roger Litten

77