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* ZRC SAZU, Institute of Philosophy, Postgraduate School ZRC SAZU, Ljubljana, Slovenia | 
 jsumr@zrc-sazu.si
Filozofski vestnik | Volume XLIII | Number 3 | 2022 | 135–153 | cc by-nc-nd 4.0 | doi: 10.3986/FV.43.3.06
Jelica Šumič Riha*
Disorientation in a Time of the Absence of Limits1
Topological Subversion of the Inside/Outside Divide1
In one of his most recent seminars, “Comment vivre et penser en un temps d’ab-
solu désorientation?”, Badiou describes the major predicament of our time in 
terms of what he calls “the implacable disorientation of humanity”2. This diso-
rientation, according to Badiou, is due primarily to “the disappearance of any 
politics aiming at its disalienation with respect to the laws of the market that 
reduce existence to the dialectic of work and the commodity.”3 But if capitalism, 
even in its current disastrous variety, which has been called “authoritarian lib-
eralism”, is far from collapsing, we should ask ourselves, “what are we being 
asked to be, for the sake of the planetary commercial order, so that we are will-
ing to tolerate it without making too much of a fuss”?4 Capitalism has little to 
fear, claims Badiou, so long as it can rely on the individualistic obsession with 
being myself, which allows us to “imagine that we are free individuals”5. On the 
contrary, it is precisely this narcissistic cult that stands in the way of any attempt 
to think and practice that which is and must be common to all. Thus, in order to 
be able to come to grips with the current subjective disorientation, the first step 
towards a new orientation in thought and existence, as Badiou outlines it, is to 
1 This article is a result of the research programme P6-0014 “Conditions and Problems of 
Contemporary Philosophy” and the research project J6-3139 “Reconfiguring Borders in 
Philosophy, Politics, and Psychoanalysis”, which are funded by the Slovenian Research 
Agency.
2 Alain Badiou, “Comment vivre et penser en un temps d’absolue désorientation”, lesson 
of 4 October 2021. Transcription available at http://www.entretemps.asso.fr/Badiou/21-22. 
html?fbclid=IwAR1oOVauXtOuGfACRHIjSXrDLmBzDgRf87rpEQxokTe_gzC-5PakoiHack, 
accessed 4 November 2021. 
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
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jelica šumič riha
break with the tyranny of liberal individualism, “the cult of the individual as the 
major prescription of the capitalist order”6. 
Curiously enough, it is to poetry, which, for Badiou, is always at the service of 
any project of orienting oneself in thought and existence, that we have to turn, 
if we are to forge an idea of what a true politics can and must be, in view of its 
present disappearance. It may come as a surprise that Badiou might find one of 
the keys to the reconceptualization of such a politics in one of Emily Dickinson’s 
most famous poems from her earlier works:
I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you—Nobody—too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! They’d advertise—you know!
How dreary—to be—Somebody!
How public—like a Frog—
To tell one’s name—the livelong June—
To an admiring Bog!
In this poem, to follow Badiou’s reading, Dickinson exploits the possibilities of 
anonymity, impersonality and insignificance as a means to go beyond the “fet-
ishism of the self” in order to build “a generic and egalitarian humanity”7 in 
which the nominally identified singularity of its members is of no account. In 
light of this, Badiou can boldly claim that the Ulysses-like proclaiming of “I’m 
Nobody!” is used by Dickinson, “this very first communist, without knowing it,” 
as a means to break with “the narcissistic imperative” with a view to building 
“a community of the anonymous”.8 While removing the burden of being myself, 
an individual taken in his/her singularity and thus incomparable to any oth-
er individual, may well constitute a necessary precondition for the possibility 
of the politics of emancipation today, it does not, by itself, provide a sufficient 
condition for what is thus atomized, disoriented humanity, in which each of its 
atoms is pinned to its proper place in the world by its proper name, to enter what 
Badiou calls “a community of the anonymous”. 
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.
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disorientation in a time of the absence of limits
To clarify this murky point, it is in poetry, again, more precisely, in Pier Paolo 
Pasolini’s poem “Victory”, that Badiou looks for a guideline.9 It is revealing that 
Badiou reads it as “a manifesto for a true negation”10, which is not to be under-
stood in terms of mere opposition, as the latter remains entangled with power 
and is, as a result, unable to propose the transformation of the structuring law 
of the world we live in, since such a transformation would require what Badiou 
calls “the creative dialectic of affirmation and negation”11. In order to unpack the 
9 Badiou quotes the following fragment from Pasolini’s “Victory”: 
“All politics is Realpolitik,” warring  
soul, with your delicate anger!  
You do not recognize a soul other than this one  
which has all the prose of the clever man,  
of the revolutionary devoted to the honest  
common man (even the complicity  
with the assassins of the Bitter Years grafted  
onto protector classicism, which makes  
the communist respectable): you do not recognize the heart  
that becomes slave to its enemy, and goes  
where the enemy goes, led by a history  
that is the history of both, and makes them, deep down,  
perversely, brothers; you do not recognize the fears  
of a consciousness that, by struggling with the world,  
shares the rules of the struggle over the centuries,  
as through a pessimism into which hopes  
drown to become more virile. Joyous  
with a joy that knows no hidden agenda, 
this army — blind in the blind  
sunlight — of dead young men comes  
and waits. If their father, their leader, absorbed  
in a mysterious debate with Power and bound  
by its dialectics, which history renews ceaselessly — 
if he abandons them,  
in the white mountains, on the serene plains,  
little by little in the barbaric breasts  
of the sons, hate becomes love of hate,  
burning only in them, the few, the chosen.  
Ah, Desperation that knows no laws!  
Ah, Anarchy, free love  
of Holiness, with your valiant songs!  
In Pier Paolo Pasolini, Poems, selected and translated by Norman MacAfee with Luciano 
Martinengo, London, Random House, 1982.
10 Badiou, “Comment vivre et penser en un temps d’absolu désorientation”.
11 Ibid.
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jelica šumič riha
complexity of such a dialectic in a time in which politics seems to be impossi-
ble, it is necessary to examine the impotence of the two ways in which negation 
manifests itself today. There is, on the one hand, the fathers’ negation, which can 
only lead to a status quo and a stalemate, a negation which is indistinguishable 
from acceptance of the existing situation, inasmuch as it admits that “the laws of 
history”, as Pasolini points out, “are the same for us and for our enemies”12. And 
on the other hand, there is the sons’ negation. The latter is characterized by the 
rejection of their fathers’ complicity with power. As a result, it is condemned to 
manifest itself in a series of destructive, yet entirely ineffective rebellions.
There is perhaps no better way to shed some light on the present unbinding of 
the (revolutionary, yet through their complicity with power, compromised) fa-
thers and the (suicidal, rebellious) sons than to draw some lessons from an in-
triguing account of this impasse, which appears to be itself a direct consequence 
of the ruin of politics, that can be found in Jean-Claude Milner’s book, Constat.13 
In particular and crucially, Milner’s account of this political deadlock corre-
sponds to his larger account of a far-reaching mutation of the relationship be-
tween thought and the rebellion of the body. According to Milner, politics main-
tains its pre-eminence so long as it is grounded in the conjunction of thought 
and rebellion. What is meant by politics, is nothing less than the capacity of 
thought to produce material effects in the social field, the privileged figure of 
these effects being the insurrection of the social body. Seen from this perspec-
tive, the defeat or retreat of the emancipatory politics (in this reading, identified 
with politics tout court) that we have been witnessing since the 1970s reveals the 
powerlessness of contemporary thought to translate its effects into rebellion.
It should be noted, however, that this postulation of the thought-rebellion link 
suggests no ‘natural’ affinity between the two. On the contrary, if the emer-
gence of the conjunction of thought and rebellion marks the break of moder-
nity in the domain of politics, as Milner claims, this is only due to the fact that 
modern political thought, in opposition to classical thought which precludes 
the very idea of linking these two heterogeneous terms, is centred around their 
‘unnatural’ union. Indeed, for classical political philosophy, grounded in the 
assumption of the unbridgeable gap between thought and the body, rebellion, 
12 Ibid.
13 Jean-Claude Milner, Constat, Paris, Verdier, 1992.
139
disorientation in a time of the absence of limits
situated in the somatic moment rather than in thought, represents the impos-
sible-real of politics and, thus, remains inconceivable. The linking of thought 
and rebellion, that is, of two ultimately incompatible entities, inasmuch as the 
latter is designated as the negation of the former, would, then, mark the inven-
tion of a new politics. Setting out from the assumption that there is no intrin-
sic bond between the body and thought, nor a common ground upon which 
they could initially meet, modernity is assigned the task of providing a basis for 
their conjunction. As Milner rightly observes, in the modern universe of science 
(this being a universe without beyond, a universe that knows of no limit and 
no measure), thought and rebellion cannot meet. Hence, a third instance must 
intervene to make their union possible. This task of grounding the binding of 
thought and rebellion is assigned, according to Milner, to ethics, or, to be even 
more precise, to the “ethics of the maximum”. This is because only an ‘extrem-
ist’ ethics, one that drives the subject beyond the possible into the impossible, 
that requires a finite, mortal speaking being to act as if s/he were immortal, 
can establish a link between thought and the body, thus providing a proper 
grounding for a politics that would constitute a proper way out in the infinite 
universe. Seen in this perspective, the way out, conceived as a politics of eman-
cipation, appears to be less a matter of redemption, of repairing a wrong done to 
victims, than an experience of exploring the unheard-of, indeed ‘impossible’, 
possibilities of a given situation.
We can understand now why the emancipationist paradigm, so construed, is 
condemned to collapse once the alliance of thought and rebellion starts to falter 
and the process of their dissociation sets in. What is striking about Milner’s ac-
count is the judiciousness with which the negative implications of the process of 
disjunction, of the drifting apart of thought and rebellion that we are witnessing 
today, are brought to the fore: thought ceases to be politically subversive; worse, 
thought is worth its name only by being conservative, hostile to all forms of re-
bellion, while rebellion, on the other hand, is true to its nature only by express-
ing itself through a thoughtless, headless brutality. Put another way, thought 
marks the dissociation from rebellion by its growing powerlessness to produce 
material effects in the political and social field, whereas rebellion indicates its 
break with thought by turning into a resistance against thought, in short, by 
being the unthought. The present antinomic relationship between thought and 
rebellion can thus be accounted for in terms of a forced choice between ‘I am 
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(not)’ and ‘I am (not) thinking’.14 Confronted with the disjunction, according to 
which I am, the corporeal presence, there where I am not thinking and vice ver-
sa, rebellion assuredly opts for the ‘I am’ and therefore for the ‘I am not think-
ing’, suggesting that what is lost in this forced choice in any case is precisely a 
rebellious, emancipatory thought, a thought capable of inciting rebellion in the 
social body. This is evident in Badiou’s comments on Pasolini’s poem, insofar as 
that which in Vitoria is presented as a deadlock (namely the antinomy between 
thought and rebellion), is proposed as a first step towards a novel orientation in 
thought and existence.
For a politics of emancipation to be possible and adequate to the challenges of 
our time it is necessary to create the conditions for the possibility of an effective 
negation, one that would bring together fathers and sons, by mobilizing both, 
thought and rebellion. For this to be possible in the present situation in which 
politics is only conceivable in terms of Realpolitik, the seemingly unquestiona-
ble evidence, according to which ”the laws of history are the same for us and for 
our enemies”15, must be put into question, otherwise, that is to say, under the 
present conditions, where all resistance turns inevitably into complicity with 
power, there is no hope for a politics that would truly challenge ingrained pow-
er structures. Thus, for a radical change to take place in our time, the rebellious 
nihilistic youth has to engage in a dialectic between the affirmation of a new 
world that would be liberated from the tyranny of the individual’s tiny liberties, 
and the inevitable destructive negation, yet one that would be at the service of 
the affirmation of a new world.
Hence, what is required is an almost impossible topological operation. It is an 
operation by means of which, instead of with the relationship of pure exteriori-
ty between fathers – who, while being “responsible for the collective emancipa-
tory orientation”, that is, responsible for there being something like the thought 
of emancipation, by accepting the current Realpolitik, are guilty of being accom-
plices of power – and sons – who, let down by their fathers, are condemned to a 
thoughtless revolt, or, in Badiou’s words, “a kind of collective nihilist suicide,”16 – 
14 For further elaborations on the forced choice, see Jacques Lacan, Logique du phantasme, 
unpublished seminar (1966–67).
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid.
141
disorientation in a time of the absence of limits
we will be dealing with a relationship that will allow for a paradoxical conti-
nuity between the inside and the outside by bringing the outside into the very 
interiority of the political space and, vice versa, by pushing the inside towards 
an uncomfortable exteriority. But this is only possible if the figure of the father 
is split, divided between the “founding father”, so to speak, i.e., the law-insti-
tuting agency, and the father as the emancipatory agency striving for the trans-
formation of the existing world. To be able to accomplish these two, at first sight 
incompatible tasks, the father, according to Badiou (and Pasolini), would have 
to adopt the stance of a paradoxical immanent negation, a kind of strategic pos-
ture of resistance. The figure of the son, by contrast, insofar as he is seen as the 
exteriority made flesh, since the son, according to Pasolini and Badiou, incar-
nates a thoughtless barbaric revolt, would, instead of being condemned to a 
pure exteriority which predestines him to suicide, be situated, precisely due to 
his exteriority, as an “extimate positionality” vis-à-vis the position of the subject 
required and modelled by the dominant discourse.
Before proceeding any further to a consideration of the implications of this di-
agnosis of the current impasse for contemporary thought and politics as well as 
for a possible way out of this predicament, we must examine what, if anything 
at all, psychoanalysis can offer in terms of a possible way out, insofar as psy-
choanalysis, like politics, confronts the problem of the subject’s disorientation. 
It is therefore necessary to see what psychoanalysis means by this notion. It is 
noteworthy that psychoanalysis tackles the problem of the current disorienta-
tion starting from the always traumatic encounter between the signifier and the 
body which orients psychoanalysis towards the singular, the “like no other”, 
the inassimilable, in short, the incomparable. The emphasis on the incompara-
ble which, as the word itself makes obvious, is an objection to comparing, im-
poses on psychoanalysis the treatment of the singular as an experience of the 
absence of all criteria, of guarantees, in a word, as the experience of a kind of 
“destitution”, to borrow Lacan’s expression.17 It is worth noting that Lacan uses 
the expression “scattered” and “ill-assorted individuals” in order to character-
ize “those who are prepared to run the risk of attesting at best to the lying truth” 
in the pass that he refrains from imposing it “on one and all because, as it hap-
17 Jacques Lacan, My Teaching, trans. D. Macay, London/New York, Verso, 2009, p. 113.
142
jelica šumič riha
pens, there is no all but only ill-assorted oddments.”18 We cannot but notice the 
distance that separates Lacan in his orientation towards the singular which tar-
gets the irreducible jouissance, the kernel, which is the most incomparable and 
the most real in each of us, and his quasi-scientific ambition in the “Proposition 
on the Psychoanalyst of the School” that refers to the “culmination of experi-
ence, its compilation and elaboration, an ordering of its varieties, a notation 
of its degrees.”19 If psychoanalysis targets the singular, there is no matheme for 
this, only the singular, incomparable ways of naming something that appears to 
be unsayable. Does the focus on the singular, incomparable, inassimilable inev-
itably point to relativism? 
At first sight, it may seem that Badiou makes a similar point, but with a slight-
ly different emphasis. The dominant ideology of our times that he calls “dem-
ocratic materialism” is characterised by what Badiou terms its axiom rendered 
in a single, condensed statement: “There are only bodies and languages.”20 As 
the globalisation of relativism, the epoch of democratic materialism can be de-
scribed as the post-truth epoch. The very term “post-truth”, which inscribes 
truth in a temporal dimension, clearly indicates that the era of truth is some-
how behind us, thereby marking a remarkable devaluation of truth. Hence, if 
the reference to truth seems to have lost all of its authoritative appeal and power 
of conviction for contemporary subjects, this is precisely to the extent that the 
relationship to truth is grounded in a relationship to the Other and knowledge, 
both called into question and splintered into fragments with the emergence of 
a new symbolic order. Indeed, what characterises this new symbolic order that 
produces subjects as its effects is the inconsistency of the Other.
The Crisis of Belief and the Lying Truth
The inconsistent Other signals a major shift in the organisation of our world: 
from the universalist paradigm – according to which the world is organised by 
the master-signifier marking a constitutive exception that assures the unity and 
18 Lacan, Jacques, “Preface to the English Edition of Seminar XI”, trans. R. Grigg, The 
Lacanian Review, (6/2018), pp. 25–27.
19 Jacques Lacan, “Proposition of 9 October 1967 on the Psychoanalyst of the School,” trans. 
R. Grigg, Analysis (6/1995), p. 8.
20 Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds. Being and Event II, trans. A. Toscano, London/New York, 
Continuum, 2009, p. 1.
143
disorientation in a time of the absence of limits
totality of the world – to the paradigm of globalisation and non-totalisability, a 
paradigm according to which the world is organised by a host of master-signifi-
ers whose very multiplicity prevents the world from constituting a whole, a uni-
ty. Elaborating on the structural shifts in the symbolic order and the production 
of a social not-all, Lacan proposes a striking image of what he calls a “buzzing 
swarm” of S1s: “From the one-among-others – and the point is to know wheth-
er it is any old which one – arises an S1, a signifying swarm, a buzzing swarm 
[…] the swarm or master signifier, is that which assures the unity, the unity of 
the subject’s copulation with knowledge.”21 A swarm without an outside is a 
much better image of our globalised world, which was made possible through 
a peculiar alliance between the discourse of science and capitalism that has 
produced a new figure of the master, one that is seeking to impose what could 
be called a subjective rectification on a mass scale. The image of our globalised 
world is that of a world that is both open to all, all-inclusive, so to speak, and 
hostile to exceptions. Evidence of this ambiguity that characterises the present 
conjuncture can be seen in the injunction of today’s superego, forcing the sub-
ject to find his/her position in the social bond by passively “accepting” a place 
that is already provided for him/her. In the globalised world, with its imposi-
tion of mass communication, where contemporary subjects have found them-
selves trapped in the contradictory demands for transparency, mass narcissism 
and the quantification of being, the dominant social bond is the negation of all 
bonds as it manifests itself as an untotalisable, open series of homogeneous, 
identical Ones. 
Seen from the perspective of the inconsistency of the Other, the post-truth era 
can be considered to be an era emerging from a crisis in belief in the existence 
of the Other, which is to be taken in a twofold sense: as a belief in the Other’s 
authority (the Other of the Other, that is, the Other of Law) and a belief in the 
Other designated as the subject that is supposed to know. The contemporary 
subject does not want to know anything about this “condition of belief” with-
out which no knowledge, and therefore no truth, are possible. Hence, the crisis 
of belief not only affects the Other. It also affects the subject. This can be seen 
in the fact that the failing belief in the Other and knowledge, considered as a 
distinctive feature of our profoundly unbelieving times, is accompanied by an 
21 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX. On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits 
of Love and Knowledge, trans. B. Fink, London, W.W. Norton & Company, 1999, p. 143.
144
jelica šumič riha
unprecedented rise in anxiety at the social level, as contemporary subjects who 
do not believe in the (existence of the) Other are singularly defenceless before 
the irruption of the real. With truth losing its power to name the real, the subject 
itself as a singular response to the real is becoming ever more precarious. Which 
is why, when faced with the erratic irruption of the real, contemporary subjects 
are condemned to a desperate search for certainties. 
To shed some light on the present quest for certainty — the only option that 
appears to be open to the subject in these uncertain times — we should turn to 
psychoanalysis. It is noteworthy that, for Freud and Lacan alike, certainty is to 
be distinguished from belief, indeed, it should rather be situated on the side 
of unbelief. Lacan’s elucidation of the Freudian notion of Unglauben, usually 
translated as unbelief, can help us clarify what appears to be an almost counter-
intuitive opposition between belief and certainty. To grasp what is at stake in be-
lief, according to Lacan, we have to distinguish between “the divided subject”, 
who believes, and “the subject supposed to know”, to whom we grant cred-
it. Unbelief, by contrast, is not simply the negation of belief; as Lacan clearly 
points out, it “is not the not believing in it, but the absence of the term in which is 
designated the division of the subject.”22 To the extent that unbelief refers to the 
absence of the first element constitutive of belief — the divided subject — what 
characterises unbelief, according to Lacan, is the solidity and the “mass seizure 
of the primitive signifying chain,” which “forbids the dialectical opening that is 
manifested in the phenomenon of belief.”23 Hence, although paranoia seems to 
be stirred by belief, as Lacan notes, it should be situated on the side of unbelief 
since it is the latter which, due to the exclusion of dialectics between belief and 
knowledge, involves the search for certainty, which is one of the defining traits 
of paranoia. So, how are we to account for the present apparent decline of belief 
in the Other at the level of contemporary subjects, on the one hand, and the ob-
sessive quest for certainty, on the other?
While disbelief, suspicion, and a total absence of trust have been recognised by 
a number of contemporary thinkers as a telling sign of our profoundly unbeliev-
ing era, certain disquieting phenomena, such as the rise of conspiracy theories, 
22 See Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book IX, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 
trans. A. Sheridan, London, Peguin, 1979, p. 238.
23 Ibid.
145
disorientation in a time of the absence of limits
cannot simply be explained away by referring to the collapse of belief, but need 
to be related instead to unbelief – to be taken in the sense of Unglauben, a term 
used by Freud in relation to paranoia where blame is ascribed to the Other, who 
is considered to be responsible for the paranoiac’s troubles. Distrust, one of the 
primary symptoms of paranoia, is now considered to constitute a common trait 
of contemporary subjects.
The phenomenon of conspiracism can certainly be seen as one of the most strik-
ing indicators of the frantic quest for certainties we are currently witnessing. 
In the current climate of incredulity, conspiracy theories arise from a drive for 
certainty whose true source is a paranoid defence against the real. This also ex-
plains why the contemporary subject prefers automaton to tuché, a term Lacan 
borrows from Aristotle to name the unpredictable, erratic encounter with the 
lawless real. The rise in contemporary conspiracism can be seen as a phenome-
non resonating with the structure of paranoia in the Lacanian sense, where the 
delusional constructions of the paranoiac are precisely compensatory make-be-
lieves that try to fill the gap where the absent master signifier, whose role is to 
allow a socio-symbolic structure to constitute itself, should be. In this way, con-
temporary conspiracism both reveals the inconsistency of the Other and covers 
it up with the construction of a semblant of the master signifier. Because the 
master signifier is lacking, various scraps of the symbolic are used as tempo-
rary quilting points to restrain or contain the unbridled jouissance. In busying 
itself with the construction of the absent master signifier, conspiracism can be 
viewed as a delusional production of semblants of the exception in a paranoid 
attempt to hold onto the master’s discourse. But contemporary conspiracy theo-
ries could also be seen as a response to the collapse of belief in the subject sup-
posed to know. Designed to make sense of a chaotic, senseless world, conspir-
acy theories strive to fill the interpretative vacuum by promising to make clear 
what was once obscure and confusing. But in order to do so, conspiracy theories 
are obliged to postulate some evil Other whose scheming and machinations are 
responsible for otherwise inexplicable effects. This explains why distrust is the 
principal cause of conspiracism, and, indeed, it is precisely this trait that links 
it to paranoia. 
Thus, in an era in which the Other is denounced as a semblant, we must un-
derstand what a semblant is, especially if we are to take our distance from the 
conspiracy theorists’ approach where the semblant is nothing but a deceptive 
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appearance. In introducing the dimension of jouissance, Lacanian psychoanal-
ysis allows us to consider the semblant as having three interrelated roles: firstly, 
it plugs the gap from which anxiety arises. Secondly, it is itself a form of jouis-
sance or, more appropriately, a surplus-jouissance to the extent precisely that 
in a particular situation the subject prefers the semblant to the “real thing”, the 
absence of which it covers; characteristically, in allowing the subject to draw 
from it a certain amount of surplus jouissance, this experience outweighs the 
semblant’s deception, which is why the semblant is marked by a fetishistic dis-
avowal: “I know, but all the same.” Thirdly, the semblant takes on the function 
of the quilting point. At the level of the symbolic, the phallus, the Name-of-the-
Father, or the master signifier stands for the semblant of exception. Where con-
spiracy theories promise to finish with deceptive appearances in order to reach 
the real hiding behind them, the psychoanalytic approach does not claim to be 
able to access the truth of the real except by means of semblants.
But what status can be assigned to the real if truth is no longer the place where 
the real comes to be named and to be symbolised? Indeed, of which real does 
one speak today? Curiously, this question, i.e. What is the real?, while it might 
appear to be the inevitable departure point, is, in fact, a question that could 
not, or to be even more precise, should not be formulated, because, if we are to 
follow Miller, “the very form in which it is presented is not appropriate to the 
elaboration of the real as it imposes itself in the analytic experience.” This is be-
cause “the very procedure of definition” is one that “is appropriate to the search 
for a truth, whereas the real is not adjusted to this.”24 Hence, properly under-
stood, “the real is not adjusted to the truth,” nor therefore to an interrogation 
seeking the truth about the real by way of a definition. Its elaboration has to be 
pursued instead by an examination of the responses of the real.25 This is precise-
ly the path taken by Lacan, who gave various characterisations of the real in the 
course of his teaching, insisting on the very instability of the concepts by means 
of which he tried to localise the real proper to the analytic experience. Insisting 
on the variability itself of these solutions, Miller calls these variations “the am-
phibologies of the real.”26 This is because the real does not always mean the 
24 Jacques-Alain Miller, L’expérience du réel dans la cure analytique, 1998–1999, unpublished. 
25 Ibid.
26 Jacques-Alain Miller, L’Etre et l’Un, lesson of 2 February 2011, unpublished.
147
disorientation in a time of the absence of limits
same thing in Lacan’s use, which allows us to distinguish three principle con-
ceptualisations that can be found in Lacan, as outlined below.
The first notion of the real forged by Lacan is one according to which the real 
is simply situated outside the analytic experience. The real here is a real prior 
to and exterior to the effects of the signifier, which is precisely what the analyt-
ic experience deals with. This preceding and exterior real is not to be confused 
with the psychoanalytic real, which, at the beginning of Lacan’s teaching, is 
nothing but the signified itself. The real is considered to be meaning. The second 
notion of the real is one in which the real is situated from the perspective of the 
signifier. At this stage of Lacan’s teaching, which addresses the alliance of psy-
choanalysis and science, the unconscious itself is deemed to be evidence that 
there is a knowledge in the real, hence the real presents itself under the guise of 
knowledge. And just as with the real in science, this real identified with a knowl-
edge is a real regulated by a law. It is only with Lacan’s final teaching that we 
are dealing with the “real” real since the real here is assimilated with the inas-
similable traumatic encounter, to a tuché as essentially a failed encounter with 
the real.27 In separating the real from the signifier and its laws, Lacan opens the 
perspective of “the real is without law.”28 
This formulation of the real as something distinct from the signifier and from 
knowledge, that is, from the semblant, requires an interrogation of the psycho-
analytic use of semblants. Because what is a practice of psychoanalysis that op-
erates by no other means than speech, when the real is conceived as that which 
evades speech itself, as something that rebels against its powers and which, 
ultimately, excludes meaning? Lacan is bothered by the semblant as the inev-
itable access to the real in psychoanalysis to the point of questioning whether 
psychoanalysis, from the perspective of the semblant, could itself be nothing 
but a swindle: 
Contrary to what is said, there is no truth about the real, given that the real is pro-
filed as excluding meaning. It would nonetheless be too much to say that there is 
such a thing as the real, because saying this is to suppose a meaning. The word 
real itself has a meaning, and I myself played with evoking the echo of the word 
27 Lacan, The Seminar, Book XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, pp. 53–64.
28 Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre XXIII, Le sinthome, Paris, Seuil, 2005, p. 137.
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reus, which in Latin means culpable – one is more or less culpable of the real. 
This is why psychoanalysis is something serious, and it is not absurd to say that it 
could slide into becoming a swindle.”29 
It is precisely at this point that the relationship between truth and the real re-
quires some additional clarification. If the Latin veritas, designating truth and 
reality, signals that these two notions, i.e. truth and the real, have been almost 
synonymous since the Middle Ages, today they have drifted apart. For psycho-
analysis, the question of truth is therefore primarily the question of its articu-
lation with the real. Hence, if the experience of an analysis still presents itself 
to the speaking being as a quest for the truth about his/her being, there is nev-
ertheless a shift in emphasis: from a position that turns the truth of the uncon-
scious into the agalma of the analytic experience, to a position that uncovers 
the incapacity of truth, indeed, its powerlessness to name the real, to name that 
which, for a speaking subject, irrupts as a meaningless, which is to say, impos-
sible traumatic encounter with jouissance. 
Thus, for the Lacan of the 1950s, “in psychoanalytic anamnesis, what is at stake 
is not reality, but truth,”30 precisely to the extent that, in rediscovering the pow-
er of truth in our very flesh, an analysis allows true speech to restore the sub-
ject’s history where there had been a blank, an absence, and situates truth at 
the heart of psychoanalysis's concerns since it aims to uncover the power of the 
truth in the speaking being’s body, because the truth of the symptom takes hold 
of the body, and inscribes itself in the flesh of the living body.
Yet, for late Lacan, the quest for truth would rather not only mark its inability to 
change anything in the existence of the subject, but would also make a hole into 
which the subject can fall, and from which it is up to the subject to try to pull 
him-/herself out, by undoing, through words, what was hollowed out for him/
her in his/her existence. Thus, in discovering that truth is not the final word of 
the analytic experience, Lacan will be forced to explore the consequences of the 
untying of the truth and the real in his last teaching, yet this disentanglement of 
29 Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre XXIV, L’insu que sait de l’une-bévue s’aile à mourre, 
(1976–1977), lesson of 15 March 1977, published in Ornicar? (17–18/1979), p. 9.
30 Jacques Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis”, in 
Écrits, trans. B. Fink, New York / London, W.W. Norton & Company, 2006, p. 213.
149
disorientation in a time of the absence of limits
the true and the real will be accomplished not in the name of a post-truth, as one 
might assume, but rather in the name of a truth that holds onto the real. 
This emphasis on the powerlessness of truth in grasping the real in psychoa-
nalysis leads Lacan towards an examination of the effects of the signifier on the 
speaking body. Behind – or rather below – the effects of meaning that Freudian 
and early Lacanian psychoanalysis aims at deciphering and interpreting, there 
are effects that appear to be clearly meaningless and that psychoanalysis strives 
to circumscribe not via the signifier, but rather via writing. It is precisely the af-
finity between truth and the signifier, on the one hand, and the alliance between 
the real and the letter or writing, on the other, that leads Lacan to distinguish the 
domain of meaning as that of the signifier and the domain of the real as that of 
the letter: “Writing, the letter, is in the real, and the signifier is in the symbolic.”31
Lacan called this last version of truth – the truth with regard to the effects of an 
encounter with the real, i.e. a truth that aims at circumscribing what is written 
in the real – the “lying truth”.32 In this sense, truth is always, to some extent, 
of the order of fiction, but, paradoxically, it is only by means of this fiction that 
something of the real can be said. Truth therefore has a function in psycho-
analysis on the condition that we start from its powerlessness rather than its 
omnipotence, as it is only by encountering what cannot be said that it evokes 
all that it cannot say; ultimately, on the condition that it recognises that about 
the real, it lies.
It is only on the condition of holding onto the impossible, only insofar as it aims 
at the real, that truth still has a role to play in psychoanalysis. As Lacan says in 
Television: “I always speak the truth. Not the whole truth, because there’s no 
way to say it. Saying it all is literally impossible: words fail. Yet it’s through this 
very impossibility that the truth holds onto the real.”33 For the truth that holds 
onto the real is the truth that does not seek to give meaning to a traumatic event, 
i.e. an encounter with jouissance, while starting out with the obscureness of its 
31 Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre XVIII, D’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant, Paris, 
Seuil, 2006, p. 122. 
32 Jacques Lacan, “Preface to the English Edition of Seminar XI”, trans. R. Grigg, The Lacanian 
Review, (6/2018), p. 22.
33 Jacques Lacan, Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, ed. Joan 
Copjec, New York/London, W.W. Norton & Company, 1990, p. 209.
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jelica šumič riha
effects. It is that which sometimes leads the subject to invent a name in order to 
say the unsayable. A name that aims to say the impossible to symbolise it.
In Guise of Conclusion
If believing is to believe in the Other, then the loss of belief primarily concerns 
the domain of semblance, those phenomena, namely, that depend on belief, 
the phenomena that can be situated on the side of “make-believe”. In this re-
spect, the role of the semblant is that of a defence against the disruptive real. 
The current climate of incredulity and the total loss of trust can be explained by 
another essential feature of our times: that of a generalised semblantification. 
The contemporary subject, enlightened by deconstruction and cultural relativ-
ism, already knows that there is no such thing as “objective reality”, that real-
ity is a symbolic construction. For this subject, who, because he/she does not 
believe in the Other, demands certainty, i.e. proofs, everything is semblance, a 
make-believe.
If psychoanalysis is being profoundly reconfigured in its continuous effort to 
bring its theory and practice up to date, it is crucial that psychoanalysts, as 
interpreters of our time, a role Lacan ascribed to analysts in guiding the sub-
ject through the evolution of semblants of civilization since the mutation of the 
Other of civilization leads to a modification of the modality and usages of jou-
issance,34 take account of the profound change in the matrix of civilisation cap-
tured in Lacan’s condensed formula: “There is no Other of the Other.” Indeed, 
for psychoanalysis, the crisis of belief, insofar as it affects the semblant, raises 
the question of how to operate in times of incredulity and a lack of belief in the 
Other with the means proper to psychoanalysis, that is to say, with semblants.
Analytic discourse does not lend itself to any form of mass subjective rectifica-
tion, because it draws its power precisely from what is demassifying. Rather, 
psychoanalysis accompanies the subject in his/her protest against the discon-
tents of civilisation. The task of psychoanalysis is to accompany the subject in 
his/her solitude, in his/her own exile, there where only the One all alone exists. 
34 “Psychoanalysis has played a role in the direction of modern subjectivity, and it cannot 
sustain this role without aligning it with the movement in modern science that elucidates 
it.” Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,”, p. 235. 
151
disorientation in a time of the absence of limits
But this path is not without risks. Instead of interpreting the subject based on his/
her sayings, slips of the tongue, contradictions, psychoanalysis today grounds its 
interpretation on what the body “says”, i.e., on jouissance that affects it. It is as 
if psychoanalysis sets out from the assumption that it is the body that tells the 
truth, rather than the subject whose speech always fails in saying it all. 
This may explain Lacan’s move that concludes one of the chapters in Seminar 
XX: “The real … is the mystery of the speaking body, the mystery of the uncon-
scious.”35 Although it may seem that in his last teaching Lacan claims that the 
speaking body is the unconscious, this may appear to be misleading. Indeed, 
Lacan was extremely careful in making this distinction. Referring to this point, 
Lacan claimed: “It is to the extent that the unconscious is not without reference 
to the body that I think the function of the real can be distinguished from it.”36 
This distinction allows, in addition, a further distinction, namely a distinction 
between the effects of the signifier on the speaking body: there are, on the one 
hand, the traces of the signifier that affect the subject that have produced the 
effects of meaning and, on the other hand, the traces inscribed on the body that 
have produced jouissance effects. Consider the following remark by Lacan: “The 
drives are the echo in the body of the fact that something is said.”37 
It is in light of this partition that Lacan can separate truth, whose reference is 
language, and the real of jouissance, whose reference is lalangue, the embodi-
ment of the meaninglessness of the real to the extent that the signifiers of which 
lalangue consists are to be taken in their materiality, i.e., in their pure senseless-
ness. In this regard, the term “symptom” is best suited for the signifier insofar as 
it aims at meaning, whereas the term “sinthome”, which incarnates the invisi-
ble, yet ineffaceable mark that is the remainder of the impact of the signifier on 
the body of the drive, to borrow Miller's formulation, “pushes-toward-oneism”. 
Disconnected from the unconscious that calls for interpretation and meaning 
and detached from the Other, the sinthome is an invention of the speaking be-
ing that provides him/her with an identity, or, to be more exact, singularity, in-
comparability at the level of the jouissance of the speaking body. The One that 
35 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XX. Encore, On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of 
Love and Knowledge (1972–1973), p. 131.
36 Lacan, Le séminaire, Livre XXIII, Le sinthome, p. 135. 
37 Ibid., p. 17.
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jelica šumič riha
is in question here is the one that stems from the singularity of jouissance of the 
speaking-being, parlêtre, that is to say, from what separates him/her from other 
Ones. 
In dealing with the one-all-alone that is centred on modes of immediate jouis-
sance that necessarily excludes the social bond insofar as the latter supposes 
both exchange and its misunderstandings, psychoanalysis appears to provide 
to the speaking being an apology for irresponsibility. In a society that is organ-
ised around the real produced through the alliance of capitalism and science 
only the day to day counts: hedonism, where jouissance for all would immedi-
ately curb jouissance of the parlêtre. Paradoxically, psychoanalysis in taking 
seriously its mission, i.e., to be part of this world, would not provide a solu-
tion, a way out, by manufacturing made-to-measure sinthomes, according to 
each singularity. This is not a solution precisely to the extent that it succeeds 
in reducing the sinthome to a semblant. One of the challenges to psychoanaly-
sis in the era of the inexistent Other and the lawless real is rather the question 
of knowing how knowledge and time are to be tied together in order to obtain 
“donc”, therefore, that will stop the endless metonymy that characterises the 
world of globalisation. If “the question of the contingent future is the very place 
where the tension between knowledge and time becomes extreme,”38 than the 
paradox that psychoanalysis has to deal with today is that only the contingent 
can become the limit of the jouissance offered in the current scientico-capitalis-
tic conjecture. And it is up to the parlêtre to counter it, bypass it, quash it or, on 
the contrary, to make use of the sinthome which, despite the fact that it pushes 
towards the one-all-alone of the speaking being, can also provide a solution 
that allows the speaking-being, parlêtre, to deal more or less efficiently with so-
cial relations with others. 
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