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Filozofski vestnik | Volume XLI | Number 1 | 2020 | 307–330 | doi: 10.3986/FV.41.1.12.
Jelica Šumič Riha*
Truth between Semblance and the Real
1
From
1
the outset the relation between semblants and psychoanalysis was mark-
ed by a profound ambiguity. The birth of psychoanalysis, by introducing a new 
kind of knowledge, that of the unconscious, provoked a tremendous shake up 
of the moral and social ideals of the epoch, which Lacan in his later teaching 
qualified precisely as semblants in order to highlight their fictitious character 
in relation to what really matters to the subject: the real of jouissance and its 
grappling with it. The precious indications of the function of semblants as a 
barrier, a defence against the real of jouissance, can be found in Freud’s article, 
“‘Civilised’ Sexual Morality”, in which he brings to light the antagonism be-
tween the semblants of civilisation and the real of the drive, and its devastating 
repercussions: “Experience teaches us that for most people there is a limit be-
yond which their constitution cannot comply with the demands of civilisation. 
All who wish to be more noble-minded than their constitution allows fall victim 
to neurosis; they would have been more healthy if it could have been possible 
for them to be less good.”
2
Freud was indeed the first to identify the symptomatic value of the modes of en-
joyment as a mark of civilisation’s discontent. In fact, according to Freud, sex-
uality as such can only be conceived as a symptom of civilisation itself. While 
criticising the ruthlessness of the cultural demand, which involves a repression 
of drive-jouissance, Freud points out that the growing difficulties of the sexual 
relation resulting from “the domination of a civilised sexual morality” can lead 
only to a promotion of ‘other modalities’ of sexual practice: “It is not difficult 
to suppose that under the domination of a civilised sexual morality the health 
1 This article is a result of the research programme P6-0014 “Conditions and Problems of 
Contemporary Philosophy” and the research project J6-9392 “The Problem of Objectivity 
and Fiction in Contemporary Philosophy”, which are funded by the Slovenian Research 
Agency.
2
 Sigmund Freud, “‘Civilised’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness” (19 08), trans. 
by. J. Strachey, SE, vol. 9, p. 191.
* Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Institute of philosophy, Postgraduate 
School ZRC SAZU

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jelica šumič riha
and efficiency of single individuals may be liable to impairment and that ul-
timately this injury to them, caused by the sacrifices imposed on them, may 
reach such a point that, by this indirect path, the cultural aim in view will be 
endangered as well.”
3
Once the social dimension of the symptom has been established, Freud goes on 
to remind the psychoanalyst that he has the ethical duty not only to disregard 
prejudices imputable to the sexual morality of his time, i.e. to detach himself 
from the cultural demands that society imposes on the individual, but also to 
expose these ideals diffused in society through prohibitions as being nothing 
but semblants. 
Lacan continues in this vein, taking up Freud’s idea of the intimate relation be-
tween the mode of jouissance and the semblants of the civilisation and the role 
of psychoanalysis in guiding the subject through the evolution of the semblants 
of civilisation since the mutation of the Other of civilisation leads to a modifi-
cation of the form and usages of jouissance: “Psychoanalysis has played a role 
in the guidance of modern subjectivity, and it would not know how to support 
it without organising it in accordance with the movement in science that eluci-
dates it.”
4
 Indeed, what place falls to psychoanalysis when the social Other itself 
strives to inscribe the modes of joussance, that precisely which Freud already 
considered to be symptoms of civilisation, while assuring them a wholly new 
legitimacy, and promoting the rules instituting the norms of their integration? 
5
 With the decline of the Other there is no instance to prevent “our jouissance 
going off track”, as Lacan puts it. As a consequence, “our mode of jouissance”,  
takes “from now on … its bearings from the ‘surplus-jouissance’”
6
.
To inscribe contemporary modes of jouissance in the current context of the so-
cial bond, that is to say in an epoch in which the figure of the Other and its 
ideals are declining, it is necessary to account for the substitution which has oc-
3 Ibid., p 181.
4 Jacques Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis”, in 
Écrits, trans. B. Fink, W.W. Norton & Company, New York/London 2006, p. 235.
5 Éric Laurent, Jacques-Alain Miller, « L’ Autre qui n’existe pas et ses comités d’éthique », La 
Cause freudienne (35/1997), pp. 3–20.
6 Jacques Lacan, Television. A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, trans. D. Hol-
lier, R. Krauss, and A. Michelson, W.W. Norton, New York, Longon, 1990, p. 32.

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truth between semblance and the real
curred at the level of the instance which situates jouissance in the social bond. 
There are two ways in which jouissance can be situated: by setting up the agent 
of castration, the second way, on the contrary, involves the investment of the 
remainder, the stopper/plug of castration, what Lacan termed the surplus-en-
joyment, plus-de-jouir. It is precisely at this level that Lacan’s remark that “our 
jouissance… takes its bearings from the ‘surplus-jouissance’”
 7
 takes on its full 
value. What Lacan calls “our jouissance” is exactly the contemporary mode of 
enjoyment, that is to say jouissance in an epoch in which the Other does not 
exist, a jouissance which cannot therefore be situated by means of the agent 
of castration. Joussance today is not situated by means of the ideal, the master 
signifier, it is not located on the side of the annulment of jouissance, rather, it 
is situated on the side of the surplus-jouissance as a stopper of castration. It is 
from such a perspective that human rights are today downgraded to the rights 
of the surplus-enjoyment.
What is new is that today, instead of being forbidden by the Ideal, jouissance is 
on the contrary commanded. What has changed is the way in which mass pro-
duction, through its imperative ‘Consume!’, proposes jouissance as a semblance 
for everybody. This phenomenon which could best be described as “haunting 
the surplus-jouissance” creates the illusion that through the good use of the 
object a, the surplus-jouissance, we could achieve the complete satisfaction of 
desire. We can talk of the primacy of the object a over the Ideal which, in turn, is 
denounced as a mere semblant. The epoch of the inexistent Other is at the same 
time the epoch of the limitless production of semblants. Thus, it could be argued 
that the primacy of the surplus-jouissance goes hand in hand with the general-
ised “semblantification”: where there is no instance to keep jouissance in check.
Thus, what were in Freud’s time considered to be scandalous, new practices 
of perversion, are today considered to be an opportunity for the innovation of 
new semblants in order to inscribe all these various new modes of jouissance. 
Indeed, it is the new modes of jouissance that present themselves today as a 
condition for inventing new modes of the social bond, new fictions in Bentham’s 
sense of the word, destined to secure the individual’s right to his/her particular 
mode of jouissance. Hence, the invocations of semblants that organise the so-
cial bond and the sexual relation.
7 Ibid. 

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jelica šumič riha
Paradoxically enough, psychoanalysis is not without responsibility for this dis-
orientation of the contemporary subject in relation to jouissance since psychoa-
nalysis has itself contributed to the undermining of ideals. Freud, like Bentham, 
detected behind the ideals of civilisation the modes and the forms of jouissance, 
in short, the presence of the libido, since, for him, the instance of the superego 
testifies to a paradoxical satisfaction of the drive disguised as a renouncement 
of satisfaction.
Yet something has radically changed, insofar as today, psychoanalysis seems to 
be oddly incapable of effecting a cut, a fracture in the dominant discourse and 
thereby of undermining contemporary moral and social semblants. On the con-
trary it seems to be rather a prolongation of this discourse. And it is precisely 
today, when psychoanalysis seems to be unable to disturb contemporary sem-
blants, to fracture the dominant ideological discourse, that the semblant and its 
opposite, the real, is the decisive issue. This is why, despite the fact that nothing 
appears to stop the expansion of the empire of semblants, psychoanalysis has 
to maintain the real as its compass. But in order to succeed in it, psychoanalysis 
has to rediscover once more as its proper place the interval between the real and 
the semblant. Thus, the present interrogation of the semblant stems from the 
urgency of advancing a new, i.e. ‘realist’ orientation of psychoanalysis, in an era 
in which the Other does not exist. Indeed, in an epoch in which the figure of the 
Other and its ideals are declining, the question of the nature and the use of sem-
blants in psychoanalysis looms higher than ever in the history of psychoanalysis.
 
*
The semblant is a term forged by Lacan in the last period of his teaching in or-
der to rework the relation between the symbolic and the real. The introduction 
of the semblant into psychoanalysis charts a moment of inversion in Lacan’s 
teaching from Lacan’s “structuralist phase” to his later teaching centred on the 
primacy of the real. From the perspective of this shift, the status of the signifier 
is radically modified: situated within the category of the semblant, the signifi-
er instead of being perceived as a means to secure access to the real, is rather 
envisaged in terms of a defence against the real. It is this downgrading of the 
signifier from the structuring principle to the status of a mere semblance that we 
will be concerned with in this contribution. 

311
truth between semblance and the real
Although the semblant is relevant to numerous contemporary discourses, it is 
only in psychoanalysis that this term was raised to the level of concept when 
Lacan, in the course of his elaboration of the psychoanalytic discourse, took 
up this question to highlight the relation that exists between the signifier and 
jouissance. And to a certain extent, the semblant is a problem specific to psy-
choanalysis. 
There is indeed a special problem with the semblant in psychoanalysis. Omni-
present, unsettling, yet unresolved, the problem of the semblant comes to the 
fore at critical moments in the history of psychoanalysis, thereby marking turn-
ing points at which the orientation of psychoanalysis is at stake. Thus, Freud 
himself already tried to circumscribe the problem of the semblant by claiming 
that “there are no indications of reality in the unconscious, so that one cannot 
distinguish between truth and fictions cathected with affect”
8
. Thus stumbling 
across what could be termed a primordial deceitfulness at the level of the un-
conscious, Freud nevertheless refused to consider the distinction between truth 
and fiction as an operational conceptual opposition in psychoanalysis, thereby 
indicating that another dimension, that namely what Lacan later names the real 
of jouissance, is to be taken as compass to orient oneself in the unconscious 
swarming with semblants. One is almost tempted to say that the price to be paid 
for the orientation of psychoanalysis towards the real is the downgrading of the 
concept of truth. 
Lacan, likewise, encounters the problem of the semblant at a crucial moment 
of his teaching, in particular in his seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, in 
which he sets out to forge new conceptual tools to treat the real at stake in the 
analytical experience. More particularly, Lacan broaches the question of sem-
blants at a point in his teaching at which he seems to be turning away from 
the problematic of truth, that is to say, from that problematic which previously 
constituted the focal point of psychoanalysis and its specificity in relation to the 
discourse of science. Indeed, it is under the guise of fiction, a concept borrowed 
from Bentham, that Lacan first tackles the question of the semblant. The task 
is to understand, Lacan insists, that what he means by fiction, is not to be con-
fused with its commonly accepted sense: illusion. “Fictitious is not”, he claims, 
8 Freud’s letter to Fliess, dated 21
st
 September 1897, Sigmund Freud Briefe 1873–1939, S. Fi-
scher Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1968.

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jelica šumič riha
“in effect, in its essence that which deceives, but is precisely what I call the 
symbolic”
9
. Moreover, the very fact that the fiction is situated by Lacan in the 
symbolic order involves the displacement of the notion of truth: it is not enough 
to state with Freud that the opposition between fiction and truth is untenable 
since truth itself has the structure of fiction.
10
One might say that, from the outset, the semblant is conceived by Lacan as a 
paradox of the relation between the symbolic and the real. In this respect, it 
is interesting to note that although both French terms, ‘semblant’ (semblance) 
and ‘semblable’ (similar), have the same root: the Latin word similes, Lacan’s 
category of semblance is not a new name for the imaginary. On the contrary, 
semblance, as conceived by Lacan, is intended to designate that which, coming 
from the symbolic, is directed towards the real. This is precisely what charac-
terises Bentham’s fictions. Indeed, as a fact of language, made of nothing but 
the signifier, Bentham’s legal fictions are nonetheless capable of distributing 
and modifying pleasures and pains, thereby affecting the body. Thus, what 
held Lacan’s attention in reading Bentham’s Theory of Fictions was precisely 
that something which is ultimately an apparatus of language, since fictions owe 
their existence to language alone, this being properly Bentham’s definition of 
fictions, is capable of inflicting pain or provoking satisfaction that can only be 
experienced in the body. It appears as if with Bentham’s fictions Lacan found at 
last a missing link, a quilting point between the signifier and jouissance. This is 
why in Seminar XX, that is to say in a period of his teaching in which the notion 
of the semblant is well established, he can still remark, in referring expressly to 
the Benthamite fictions, that the whole purpose in using “the old words” is in 
their ability to capture jouissance.
11
 
There is yet another aspect to the Benthamite fiction that Lacan brought to light, 
although rather late in the day, in his seminar D’un Autre à l’autre, to be precise. 
In Lacan’s reading, what sets apart Bentham’s approach to fictions in his The-
ory of Fictions from the usual understanding of this term is that Bentham with 
9
 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 
trans. D. Porter, Tavistock/Routledge, London 1992, p. 12. 
10
 “’Fictitious’ means ‘fictive’ but, as I have already explained to you, in the sense that every 
truth has the structure of fiction.” Ibid.
11
 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XX: Encore, trans. B. Fink, W . W . Norton 
& Company, New York, London, 1998, p. 58.

313
truth between semblance and the real
remarkable lucidity reveals how all human institutions have as their ultimate fi-
nality jouissance. Hence by openly stating that fictions are nothing but an artifi-
cial device, “a contrivance”, to use Bentham’s proper term, designed to provoke 
either pain or pleasure, Bentham brings into question all human institutions, 
in so far as they are an apparatus destined to regulate the modes of jouissance 
by dressing them up in virtues of the useful and the good.
12
 And it is precisely 
to the extent that the human institutions are recognised as semblants, i.e. as 
the means and the modes of jouissance, that Bentham’s concept of fictions can 
be seen as a means of denouncing the moral and social ideals of the epoch, of 
exposing them as being nothing but semblance, a make-believe. In other words, 
what is scandalous about the Benthamite conception of fictions is precisely this 
hardly concealed cynicism reminding us of the primacy of jouissance. Indeed, 
unlike the rest of human institutions, in order to be operational Bentham’s fic-
tions can do without the masquerade, more precisely, without the belief in mor-
al or cultural ideals. From the perspective of Bentham’s cynicism, a crucial fea-
ture of semblants is thus brought to light: the constitutive role of belief. Broadly 
speaking, the semblant is present in any form of belief. So if semblants are des-
tined to cover up the economy of jouissance, they can only succeed in their task 
if we believe in them, that is to say, if we take their make-believe at face value. 
With Bentham’s fictions, on the contrary, we are dealing with a semblant which 
openly declares that it is nothing but a make-believe. Bentham’s fiction is then 
a paradox of semblance, a paradox of lying truly. 
From the moment fictions are conceived by Lacan as the very means with which 
to modify the subject’s relation to jouissance, his whole elaboration of the an-
alytical practice changes. The lesson to be dawn from Bentham’s cynical use of 
fictions is the following: If the fiction is in itself, strictly speaking, a fallacy, a 
make-believe, a semblance, yet a semblance which presents itself as semblance, 
hence, a reflexive semblance, this means that it is possible to use fictions in order 
to attain the real without believing in them. As such, the fiction is capable not 
only of touching the real but also of denouncing, exposing semblants disguised 
as moral virtues. And it is precisely in this double capacity of a semblant hostile 
to semblants, if we may put it so, which is nevertheless able to attain the real, 
that the question of the semblants is posed to Lacan first of all as the question of 
how to put semblants to good use. Indeed, what use is to be made of semblants 
12
 Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, livre XVI, D’un Autre à l’autre, Seuil, Paris 2006, p. 190. 

314
jelica šumič riha
in psychoanalysis is of paramount importance to Lacan once it is admitted that 
fictions are in themselves indifferent to either “good use” or “abuse”. Actually, it 
is for that very reason that Bentham sets out to replace the existing unjust legal 
fictions, which profit the shrewd and powerful, with a system of fictions which 
would assure the maximising of pleasure and minimising of pain for the society 
as a whole. Yet the question of know-how with fictions, as a symbolic apparatus 
destined to intervene in the real of the body, demands a radical reorientation of 
psychoanalysis in which the role of the structuring principle is attributed to the 
opposition between the real and semblants. 
We can see now how Lacan’s redeployment of Bentham’s concept of fiction 
made it possible for the real at issue in psychoanalysis, the real of jouissance, 
to emerge as such. In view of this shift in Lacan’s teaching which defines psy-
choanalysis not in its relation to truth but in its relation to the real, a shift which 
coincides with his elaboration of the notion of the fiction, it may appear odd that 
the notion of the semblant did not find what might be called its proper place 
until the seventies, as testified by the title of the seminar which was intended to 
specifically address the issue of the semblant: D’un discours qui ne serait pas du 
semblant (A Discourse Which Would Not Be of Semblant).
There is one further consideration about the Lacanian concept of the semblant 
that should be mentioned. The fact that this notion, which could truly serve us 
as a key to Lacan’s later teaching, did not receive the attention it deserves until 
recently, can be attributed in large part to the circumstance that the seminar 
in which the problem of the semblant is discussed, A Discourse Which Would 
Not Be of Semblant, occupies a transitional place between Seminar XVII, On the 
Other Side of Psychoanalysis, and Seminar XX, Encore. Unlike the seminar of the 
semblant, these two landmark seminars which discuss two issues of general in-
terest, power and sexual difference, have come to take up a prominent place in 
contemporary debate across an impressive range of disciplines. Consequently, 
the semblant as a key concept which marks a momentous shift in Lacan’s teach-
ing from the symbolic to the real as a focal point of psychoanalysis has passed 
largely unnoticed.

315
truth between semblance and the real
As has already been pointed out,
13
 at the beginning Lacan used both terms, 
‘semblant’ and ‘fiction’, practically as synonyms. To account for this equiva-
lence of both terms we propose the following hypothesis: it is because Lacan 
grasps the specificity of the function of the semblant, regardless of the term 
used in the knot it effects between the symbolic and the real, that ‘semblant’ 
and ‘fiction’ are in Lacan’s view exchangeable. Nevertheless, in the seventies, 
the term ‘fiction’ practically disappears from Lacan’s vocabulary. One reason 
why he gives up the notion of the fiction in the end lies no doubt in the fact that 
the concept of the fiction is too restrictive: whereas the fiction is strictly speak -
ing language dependent, the semblant, insofar as it exists in nature, does not 
owe its existence to language. Actually, all the examples used by Lacan to illus-
trate the notion of the semblant in his seminar D’un discours qui ne serait pas 
du semblant, are exactly non-discursive semblants, semblants in nature, such 
as rainbow, thunder, and meteors.
14
 This very fact indicates that the concept of 
the semblant, while partly overlapping with that of the fiction, is nonetheless 
irreducible to it. Here, one finds a shift in Lacan’s theory of the semblant and a 
break with the Benthamite paradigm. While one of our aims is to briefly outline 
the development of the Lacanain concept of the semblant, we also wish to draw 
attention to some difficulties that highlight the ambiguous status that the sem-
blant has in psychoanalysis. Indeed, in an epoch in which the figure of the Other 
and its ideals are declining, this question of the nature and the use of semblants 
in psychoanalysis looms higher than ever in the history of psychoanalysis. But 
to what function exactly, one might wish to ask, does this notion of the semblant 
respond in the psychoanalytic discourse? 
It should be noted, however, that ‘semblant’, as a term, may well have been 
a late entry into Lacan’s vocabulary, that which appears to be essential in the 
question of the semblant: the articulation between two radically heterogeneous 
if not antinomic registers, the symbolic and the real, is, on the contrary, a persis-
tent problem throughout his teaching. As a matter of fact, Lacan never stopped 
inventing new terms destined to hold together that which does not hold togeth-
er. Jouissance and the signifier. In the course of his teaching, he explored the 
13
 The genesis of Lacan’s notion of the semblant has been outlined by P.-G. Gueguen in a 
session of the 17 December 1997 during J.-A. Miller’s course “Le partenaire-symptôme,” 
1997–98.
14
 Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, livre XVIII : D’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant, Seuil, 
Paris 2006. 

316
jelica šumič riha
different ways of capturing jouissance via the signifier. Starting with the phal-
lus, also designated as the signifier of jouissance, Lacan inaugurates an extraor-
dinary series of terms that replace one another in this function of the anchoring 
point, the nodal linkage between the symbolic and the real: the-Name-of-the-
Father, the master signifier and finally the object a. Each of this terms will come, 
in the course of Lacan’s teaching, to fulfil the quilting function, provided that it 
responds to the structurally necessary demand of building a bridge between two 
antinomic instances: the signifier and jouissance. On the other hand, the very 
fact that Lacan invented a new category, that of the semblant, and introduced 
it into psychoanalysis, along with his major categories of the real, the symbolic 
and the imaginary, testifies to the fact all these various attempts at solving the 
problem of the disharmonic relation between the real and the symbolic, in the 
final analysis, the relation of the subject of the signifier and the real of jouis-
sance, proved to be unsatisfactory. 
Thus, considered in retrospect, it is perhaps no accident that Lacan raised the 
thorny question of the semblant in the wake of his seminar on The Other Side of 
Psychoanalysis. The elaboration of the four discourses is for Lacan an opportu-
nity to revisit his initial departure point: the disjunction between the signifier 
and jouissance, in such a way that behind the overt antithesis between signifier 
and jouissance, their clandestine solidarity is revealed. 
In this seminar Lacan namely argues that discourse is a structure which is able 
to subsist due to certain fundamental relations that would not be able to be 
maintained without language.
15
 The distinction between discourse and speech, 
the latter being always more or less occasional, is crucial here insofar as it trans-
lates, at the level of language, the distinction between variable and invariable. 
Indeed, by opposing discourse and speech, Lacan clearly aims at situating dis-
course on the side of that which remains invariable, which remains the same, 
untouched by what is meant or said of it. One is almost tempted to say that dis-
course, to the extent that it is defined as a structure, is an instance of the real in 
language. Indeed, Lacan’s theory of the four discourses is grounded in an idea 
which traverses the whole of his teaching, namely that for psychoanalysis, just 
like for science, there should be some symbolic in the real. If psychoanalytic 
15
 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 
trans. R. Grigg, W.W. Norton & Company, New York/London 2007, p. 13.

317
truth between semblance and the real
theory has for its object the unconscious, then it has as its charge the task of 
demonstrating that this peculiar kind of knowledge which cannot be assigned 
to an ’I’, keeps returning to the same place, i.e. is situated in the real. Clearly, 
mathematical writing provides a model in this regard insofar as Lacan indicates 
that there is discourse in the real, that there are formulae, which the subject 
obeys without knowing it.  It is from such a perspective that Lacan states that 
discourse should be taken as a social bond, and sets out to articulate the four 
distinct discourses in order to show what distinguishes psychoanalysis qua so-
cial bond from other discourses.
The structure of discourse itself is determined on the basis of the dominant po-
sition of the master signifier, S
1
, in the master’s discourse since the master dis-
course is that discourse from which all the other discourses are derived. The 
master’s discourse is, in effect, constructed as an elementary matrix of language 
that is the condition for the unconscious: one signifier, S
1
, represents the subject 
(placed under the bar) for another signifier, the product of this structure is its 
waste product, that which drops out: the objet a, an incalculable, inassimilable 
remainder of jouissance termed by Lacan the plus-de-jouir, surplus enjoyment 
which the system cannot absorb. By occupying the place of the agent in a given 
discourse, any of these four terms, $, S
1
, S
2
, and a, reveals at the same time its 
true character of the semblant. What Lacan called the structure of discourse 
gives us already a signifying structure that includes as one of its elements some-
thing which is not a signifier, a disparate element: the object a, a paradoxical 
symbol which, without being a signifier, obeys the laws of the signifier, inter-
relating with other signifiers: S
1
, the master signifier, $, the divided subject, S
2
, 
knowledge. In the analyst’s discourse the psychoanalyst is positioned precisely 
in the place of the object a as the surplus-jouissance. In the four discourses, 
Lacan reverses the formula of fantasy, the barred subject and the object a, in 
order to inscribe the object a, in the analyst’s discourse, in the place of agent, 
thus showing that the object a functions there as a signifier.
Psychoanalysis is based on the assumption that the treatment of the real, more 
specifically, the real of jouissance, by the signifier is only possible within the 
framework of discourse. Not just any discourse, of course, but that which, like 
Freud’s “maintains itself as close as possible to what refers to jouissance”.
16
 In 
16
 Ibid., p. 71.

318
jelica šumič riha
other words, the pivotal point in the analyst’s discourse is the relation between 
the signifier and jouissance. It is for that reason that, according to Lacan, the 
discourse that brings the other three to light is the analyst’s discourse. Indeed, 
from the perspective of the relation between the signifier and jouissance, the 
task of the analyst’s discourse is to expose the surreptitious alliance between 
the signifier and jouissance as constitutive of any social bond. Lacan’s definition 
of discourse as a social bond can thus be understood also in the sense that it is 
a bond between the signifier and jouissance. From such a perspective, the ana-
lytic discourse can then be seen as a specific apparatus destined to uncover how 
instead of being a defence against jouissance, the signifier appears to be the 
condition of its possibility, moreover, an apparatus that produces jouissance.
Before the signifier could be situated in the order of the semblant, it was there-
fore necessary for Lacan to expose the duplicity of the signifier: the signifier 
which was initially defined by Lacan through the exclusion of jouissance, a bar-
rier against jouissance, is revealed to be an apparatus of jouissance.
17
 Indeed 
there is a dialectic of the lack and the supplement at work in the relation be-
tween the signifier and jouissance. On one hand, the signifier involves the loss 
of jouissance, its annulment. On the other, however, this very loss, as effect of 
the signifier responds to the supplement of jouissance termed by Lacan as the 
object a, the surplus-jouissance. Thus it could be said that the loss of jouissance 
produced through the signifier is the condition of the possibility of repetition, 
encore, once more, again and again, and it is precisely through this repetition 
that a surplus is produced. Hence, the lesson to be drawn from the seminar 
On the Other Side of Psychoanalysis, is that the loss of jouissance and the sur-
plus-jouissance, the plus-de-jouir, are both produced through the functioning of 
the signifier. Indeed, what is seen from one perspective as a loss of jouissance 
is seen from another as the production of a surplus. The signifying articulation 
thus appears to be an apparatus in which a loss, the minus, is converted into a 
gain, the plus. It is from such a perspective according to which the loss of jou-
issance produced through the functioning of the signifier is converted into the 
surplus-jouissance, the plus-de-jouir, that it could be argued that Seminar XVII, 
in a sense, anticipates the seminar D’un discourse qui ne serait pas du semblant.
17
 See Jacques-Alain Miller, “Equivalence Between the Other and the Symptom”, Psychoana-
lytical Notebooks (12/2004), p. 12.

319
truth between semblance and the real
The very fact that Lacan invented this category after the deployment of the four 
discourses as the foundation of any possible social bond signals that a neces-
sary step in the genesis of the Lacanian concept of the semblant was precisely 
the uncovering of the solidarity between the signifier and jouissance, a solidari-
ty in which the social bond as such is grounded. Thus, in following the construc-
tion of the discourses we can see that the social bond as such concerns not only 
the signifier but also jouissance.
We will argue that this inversion of perspective is inscribed in the very logic of 
permutation which enables the passage from one discourse to another. What 
is crucial in this respect is the relationship between the master discourse and 
the analyst’s discourse, since, as indicated by the title of the seminar, the mas-
ter’s discourse is the reversal or the other side of the analytic discourse. While 
the master’s discourse “has only one counterpoint, the analytic discourse”
18
, as 
Lacan states, their relationship is rather intricate. On the one hand, the mas-
ter’s discourse is defined as the cause of the analyst’s discourse, since, as Lacan 
claims, “analytic practice is, properly speaking, initiated by this master’s dis-
course”
19
. On the other hand however it is remarkable, as Lacan himself con-
cedes, that “it is fairly curious that what [the analyst’s discourse] produces is 
nothing other than the master’s discourse, since it is S
1
 which comes to occupy 
the place of production”, but in saying that Lacan seems to be opening up the 
possibility that “perhaps it’s from the analyst’s discourse that there can emerge 
another style of master signifier.”
20
 It could then be said that, in a general way, 
the four discourses are interrelated insofar as the term produced as a waste by 
one discourse migrates to the place of the agent in another discourse. 
In the analyst’s discourse, the place in the upper left-hand corner of Lacan’s 
quadripartite structure of the discourse qua social link, the place of the agent, is 
attributed to the psychoanalyst in so far as s/he assumes the function of the ob-
jet a, i.e. the place of the plus-de-jouir, surplus jouissance. This particular prop-
erty of the analyst’s discourse singles out the place of agent as equivalent to the 
semblant. Indeed, semblant is the name by which Lacan designates this place 
of the agent or ‘dominant’ place, as he calls it, in all four discourses. For Lacan 
18
 Lacan, The Seminar Jacques Lacan, book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, p. 100.
19
 Ibid., p. 152.
20
 Ibid., p. 176.

320
jelica šumič riha
this brings the question of semblance, that is to say, the question of the instance 
occupying the place of agent, the dominant place. We will address this ques-
tion by following Lacan’s indications in his seminar entitled Encore: “Before the 
semblance, on which, in effect, everything is based and springs back in fantasy, 
a strict distinction must be made between the imaginary and the real. It must 
not be thought that we ourselves in any way serve as a basis for the semblance. 
We are not even semblance. We are, on occasion, that which can occupy that 
place, and allow what to reign there? Object a.”
21
In this quotation Lacan revisits his own theory of the four discourses, question-
ing, in particular, that there is a link between semblance and the place that the 
psychoanalyst occupies in the matheme of the analyst’s discourse. More pre-
cisely, he notes the fact that in this construction of the four discourses, the sem-
blant is already slipping in. It is precisely from this perspective, according to 
which, as speaking beings, we are subjects, condemned even, to semblance, 
that Lacan revisits his theory of the four discourses, in showing that the analyst, 
by positioning himself or herself as objet a in the place of the agent, the domi-
nant place, occupies the place of semblance. 
While, strictly speaking, the analyst’s discourse can not be considered to be a 
discourse that is not of the semblant, its privilege consists nevertheless in its 
ability to perceive the semblant for what it is: precisely a semblant. The very fact 
that in the analyst’s discourse the analyst is situated in the place of the agent, 
permits it, by using the very mechanism of the production of the social bond, 
i.e. through this peculiar mode of  mimicking the structure of the social bond 
which is sustained only by virtue of the make-believe situated in the place of the 
agent, to reveal the semblant itself. By exposing the semblant as a deceitful fic-
tion, the analyst’s discourse is for that reason able to subvert the make-believe 
of the social bond that is present in the other three discourses, the master’s, the 
hysteric’s and the university discourse. 
It is from such a perspective that Lacan himself underlined the fictional founda-
tion of psychoanalysis: paradoxically one should pay respect to the psychoanal-
21
 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jaques Lacan, Book XX: Encore, or On Feminine Sexuality, 
The Limits of Love and Knowledge, trans. B. Fink, W . W . Norton & Company, New York/Lon-
don, 1998, p. 95.

321
truth between semblance and the real
ysis of our time, he said, in so far as it  “is a discipline which produces itself only 
through the semblant. The latter in it is denuded to the point that it unsettles 
the semblants which support religion, magic, piety, all that which conceals the 
economy of jouissance”.
22
 This remark assumes its full value on the condition 
that one treats the semblant through the psychoanalytic discourse. 
23
The very promotion of the social bond implies for Lacan the radicalisation of the 
relation between the real and the semblant. Indeed the point of departure of the 
Lacanian concept of discourse is the steady erosion of the Other and its ideals. 
If the question of the real was encountered so acutely by Lacan in his Seminar 
XVII, it is because, from the perspective of the inexistence of the Other, from a 
perspective in which the Other with its ideals is downgraded to the status of the 
semblant, the real itself seems to vacillate. Indeed, what remains of the real if 
the Other is not real, if it has the structure of a fiction? Actually, the very idea 
of the four discourses, four mathemes, four discursive structures, is inspired by 
the knowledge in the real that the discourse of science in transcribes in math-
ematical formulae. In a way, the four discourses are Lacan’s desperate attempt 
at restoring the Other – under the guise of the discourse structure. Just as for 
science there is a knowledge in the real, there are discourse structures in the real 
for psychoanalysis. Lacan’s concept of discourse could then be considered to be 
a new edition of the Other as a structure in the real. 
Of course, the Other in this new edition is not to be confused with the master 
signifier. The Other may well be concentrated in the place of the master signifier, 
but it could also be situated in the place of knowledge, that of product, in short, 
it would be more appropriate to situate knowledge at the level of the discourse 
as such. It is the structure of the discourse which can now be identified with the 
Other. Only in this sense can Lacan maintain in his seminar Encore that “the 
notion of discourse should be taken as a social link, founded on language.”
24
 
In other word, the Other, from the perspective of the four discourses, is not an 
instance that can be isolated, rather it is the very knot of all four instances. It 
is an attempt at maintaining the function of the quilting point without it being 
22
 Jacques Lacan, « Discours à l’École Freudienne de Paris » in Autres écrits, Seuil, Paris 2001, 
pp. 280–281.
23
 Jacques Lacan, « L’ Étourdit » in Autres écrits, pp. 449–495.
24
 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore, p. 17.

322
jelica šumič riha
assigned to a particular instance. In this sense, the four discourses as a figure of 
the Other already announce the Borromean knot insofar as the Borromean knot 
is a solution proposed by Lacan to show how three heterogeneous orders the 
imaginary order of meaning, the symbolic order of knowledge and the real order 
of jouissance, hold together. 
The four discourses can then be perceived as a desperate attempt to elevate psy-
choanalysis to the level of science. The idea according to which the structures 
of discourse are inscribed in the real is an ingenious invention which permits 
psychoanalysis to determine the specificity of the real that is at the core of its 
experience, and at the same time to avoid the snares of contemporary relativ-
ism according to which everything is semblant. The construction of the four dis-
courses is an operation comparable to Galileo’s and Newton’s founding gesture 
of science, a gesture which consists in the strict separation of the real from the 
semblant. In other words, the four discourses are Lacan’s attempt at circum-
scribing the place of the real in psychoanalysis while limiting the imperialism of 
semblants. And just like the knowledge in science that not only “reads”, deter-
mines, deciphers the knowledge in the real by writing it down in mathematical 
formulae in order to transform it, psychoanalysis also presumes to be able to 
determine the real it deals with and to find a way to transform it. 
The opposition of the real and semblance is therefore a crucial step in the devel-
opment of Lacan’s teaching: it is a radicalisation of the opposition introduced 
in his seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis between the real on one hand 
and the symbolic and the imaginary on the other, so that it could be said that, 
from the point of view of the real, the symbolic and the imaginary appear to 
be equivalent. Yet this opposition between the real and the semblant became 
a structuring opposition only once Lacan accomplished the construction of the 
four discourses.
Contrary to what one might believe – guided solely by the title which is rath-
er equivocal since it evokes the possibility of a discourse that would not be a 
semblant – the central issue in the seminar D’un discours qui ne serait pas du 
semblant  is not the elaboration of a discourse that would not be a semblant, 
with the surreptitious implication that psychoanalysis might be, together with 
science, this discourse. On the contrary, from the beginning of this seminar, 
Lacan states in no uncertain terms that insofar as the signifier itself is the sem-

323
truth between semblance and the real
blant, all that belongs to the discursive order necessarily falls under the rubric 
of the semblant.
25
 In other words, the semblant is a category inherent to the 
discourse as such.
Having established that in discourse the semblant is irreducible and that, con-
sequently, there is no discourse that is not of semblant, the discourse of psy-
choanalysis being no exception, Lacan moves on to broach the question which 
is udoubtedly the crucial issue around which the major part of Seminar XVIII 
revolves, namely: once the constitutive lack, absence, the lack of the discourse 
of the real is admitted, how the problem of holding together the symbolic and 
the real, two heterogeneous registers, while maintaining their irreducible heter-
ogeneity, be solved. 
This constitutive lack of the discourse of the real is what leads Lacan to deploy 
a new category and to pose the question of knowing what is the real from a 
new perspective. If the question of the real poses itself to Lacan so persistently 
in the final period of his teaching, this is precisely because the real proper to 
the analytic experience is now considered to be resisting signifierisation, i.e. 
its conversion into the symbolic. In view of such a radicalised conception of 
the real, both, the imaginary and the symbolic, appear as a mere make-believe. 
This question of the real as being both, outside the imaginary and the symbolic, 
prompts Lacan to entertain the hope of a psychoanalysis which would not be 
founded on semblant. By naming his seminar consecrated to the question of 
the semblant “Of a Discourse Which Would Not Be of Semblant”, Lacan seems to 
be nourishing, encouraging the mere hope of the possible elaboration of a dis-
course that would not be reducible to a mere semblant, like the rest of them, but 
would rather be a discourse of the real. To the extent that since the symbolic is 
now seen to be downgraded to the order of semblant, this seminar which evokes 
the possibility of a discourse which would take its departure point from the real 
thus signifies a turning point, a pivoting of perspectives in Lacan’s teaching in-
sofar as, at the outset, Lacan proposed to ground psychoanalysis as a discourse 
on the symbolic. It is at this point in Lacan’s later teaching, at which psychoa-
nalysis is ordered by the relations of the semblant and the real, that a large part 
of Lacan’s theorisation which had been deployed in the register of the symbolic, 
appears to be reduced to the mere status of semblance: sicut palea.  
25
 Lacan, Le séminaire, livre XVIII: D'un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant, p. 14.

324
jelica šumič riha
In a sense it is only from the perspective of the semblant that one can realise 
that what creates an impasse here is that, actually, the cleavage between the 
signifier and jouissance was surreptitiously created by Lacan’s proper definition 
of the subject. Conceived in terms of the signifier – the subject is what one signi-
fier represents for another signifier – the Lacanian subject is essentially empty, 
dead, devoid of “enjoying substance”, severed from jouissance. The outcome of 
this irreducible disjunction between the subject of the signifier and the real of 
jouissance entails the coupling of the empty subject with the remainder of jouis-
sance: the object a. With the object a as an answer to the lack of signifier, Lacan 
inscribed in what he called the four discourses a real that is within the reach of 
the subject of the signifier. 
In Seminar XVIII Lacan started to bring into question the union of the symbolic 
and the real, and by so doing he proposed at the same to reconsider psychoa-
nalysis and its practice from a different perspective: that of the disjunction of 
the symbolic and the real, from a rapport of the exteriority between the two, 
ultimately, from their non-rapport. From this perspective of non-rapport Lacan’s 
seminar D’un discourse qui ne serait pas du semblant marks a crucial turning 
point at which the future orientation of psychoanalysis is at stake. Hence, de-
spite Lacan’s usual style of self-assurance and confidence, this seminar is nev-
ertheless a seminar of hesitation as regards the possible ways of overcoming 
the impasse implied in the non-rapport between the signifier and jouissance. In 
fact, the question of a new departure point involving a radical inversion of per-
spectives plays across the whole surface of this seminar. The deployment of the 
notion of the semblant throughout this seminar allows it to gather its consist-
ency, while at the same time providing the points of vacillation and resistance 
necessary for it to establish the themes that he pursues in the final period of his 
teaching. Lacan tentatively proposes various solutions to the problem that the 
articulation of registers which are absolutely heterogeneous poses, while avoid-
ing at the same time the previously privileged device: the quilting point.
Thus, by taking up the question of the semblant in its relation to the real, Lacan’s 
Seminar XVIII is therefore, from the beginning, quite radically a question of de-
fining a new type of articulation separating jouissance and the signifying artic-
ulation. In the context of Lacan’s project thus outlined, the theory of semblants, 
insofar as it breaks with his previous assertion of the primacy of the symbolic, 
can be perceived as a “vanishing mediator”, a necessary step on the path to the 

325
truth between semblance and the real
final solution: the Borromean knot, this being exactly the perspective in which 
all three registers, the symbolic, the imaginary and the real are considered to be 
independent and autonomous registers, absolutely equivalent at the level of the 
knot. Lacan’s project thus becomes that of separating the three orders, while at 
the same time exploring many different ways in which it is possible to produce 
a new kind of knotting at the level of jouissance. The issue here is of course that 
of jouissance and the different ways in which it is elaborated at the level of the 
knot. In fact, we would argue that it is above all in order to explore this trans-
formative aspect of knotting that Lacan explores jouissance as an enigma which 
drills a hole in sense. It is obvious that such a project has many consequences 
for the way in which psychoanalysis tries to situate the real form the perspective 
of the outside-sense. But it is also from this perspective that the notion of the 
semblant assumes its full value. 
Lacan’s theory of the semblant clearly follows a certain dynamic, a logic of its 
own. In Seminar XVIII, we can witness the displacement of this concept in re-
lation to the quilting point. With his elaboration of the notion of the semblant 
Lacan throws precisely the quilting function of the signifier into relief. And it is by 
redefining what is at stake in this function that Lacan comes to effect,  by replac-
ing the term ‘fiction’ with that of ‘semblant’ a singular devaluation, the down-
grading of the term whose role is precisely to pin down the real to the symbolic. 
The notion of the semblant, under the guise of the fiction, was initially intro-
duced by Lacan into psychoanalysis as an instance designed to situate the real 
in the symbolic, (which is to say, to make the real obey the rules of the signifier), 
in his later teaching, the same instances that were previously considered to se-
cure access to the real, (the phallus, the master signifier, the Name-of-the-Father, 
the Other, the object a), and were as such valorised, now, under a new light, 
appeared to be the very obstacle on the path to the real, and were consequent-
ly downgraded to the status of semblance. In fact, the substitution of the term 
‘fiction’ by ‘semblant’, to the extent that it implies a certain downgrading of the 
instance desigated as semblant, involves at the same time a shift of paradigms. 
In this regard, it is perhaps not for no reason that Lacan, starting with Seminar 
XVIII, preferred the term ‘semblant’ to that of ‘fiction’. However, this final choice 
cannot be justified by saying that the semblant, as a concept, is broader and 
can include the fiction, neither is it enough to insist on a distinction between 

326
jelica šumič riha
discursive and non-discursive semblants, semblants in nature, since Lacan is 
primarily interested in discursive semblants. On the contrary, what justifies 
the substitution is Lacan’s re-examination of the nature of the semblant and 
the function attributed to it. Thus one could say that it is the inversion of per-
spective which makes Lacan downgrade the semblant. More particularly, an 
instance is denounced as semblant insofar as it responds to the function of the 
quilting point. What downgrades the semblant is precisely its function. From 
this inversed perspective which takes as its departure point the non-rapport of 
the symbolic and the real, all these instances of the quilting point are seen now 
as being but a mere make-believe, a cover-up.
Indeed, the semblant is essentially a make-believe: by pinning down the im-
aginary, the signifier which operates the quilting makes us believe that it is the 
thing itself. In other words, the semblant is a symbolic instance which, by oper-
ating the quilting, makes us believe that it is the other of the symbolic, namely 
the real. This is why, for Lacan, the father is by definition a semblance. The 
father namely only exists in the form of the signifier and it exists so long as this 
signifier, the Name-of-the-Father, produces certain effects. The phallus, from 
this view, is also seen as a semblant since, strictly speaking, it is but a support-
ing evidence for the semblance of the father. And there is yet another, a third 
figure of the semblant, more delicate than the other two, the object a, a name 
invented by Lacan to designate the remainder of jouissance which is not con-
verted into the signifier, which remains outside the signifier’s operation of quilt-
ing. If the object a, from this perspective, is yet another name for the semblant, 
alongside the father and the phallus, this is because it is strategically positioned 
at a place where instead of the expected jouissance one only encounters its loss. 
The object a is the semblant as this operator effecting the conversion of the loss 
of jouissance, its lack, into a surplus, a surplus which, curiously is not to be 
found on the side of the real jouissance, but on the side of the symbolic. Hence 
the equivalence, established by Lacan, between the jouissance under the guise 
of the plus-de-jouir, and the sens-joui [enjoy-meant],  the only jouissance that a 
speaking being can attain is precisely a sens-joui.
In fact, we might say that with the quilting point thus exposed, the affinity of the 
semblant to the hole, the void, is also brought to light. From such a perspective, 
all these various names of the quilting point have something in common: their 
only function is to veil, to cover up, with their flimsy materiality, a hole, a void 

327
truth between semblance and the real
in the structure. Indeed, we would argue that there is a structural, constitutive 
relation between the semblant and the hole. The question of the semblant is 
essentially the question of the relation between void and veil. By following J.A. 
Miller, we could propose the following succinct definition of the semblant: the 
semblant is a mask of nothing.
26
 As a matter of fact, the semblant is only en-
countered there where something is expected one encounters a hole, a void, an 
emptiness, an absence. The function of the semblant is then no other than to 
cover up, by its very presence, the empty place of an instance which is consti-
tutively lacking. But in so doing the semblant at the same time reveals that this 
instance ex-sists only through this empty place. 
In this regard psychoanalysis seems to be inversing Leibniz’s famous question: 
instead of asking why there is something rather than nothing, the question with 
which psychoanalysis is preoccupied is rather: why is only a void, absence, 
emptiness is encountered there where something is expected? All semblants 
deployed by Lacan (from the phallus to the Other and Woman) are as many de-
ceitful answers to this question. Semblants, in the final period of Lacan’s teach-
ing, are therefore all the instances designed to veil, to mask the nothing. Thus, 
the phallus is an instance covering up the castration, the Name-of-the-Father 
can be considered to be a mask concealing the hole in the Other of language, 
and finally Woman is nothing but a veil to disguise that there is no such a thing 
as a sexual relation. The semblant can then be designed as an envelope of noth-
ing, an envelope which conceals precisely that behind the semblant there is 
nothing but the void.
Thus, it is precisely in throwing into relief the dialectics of void and veil that the 
concept of the quilting point comes undone. This conveys a profound switch 
in the line of Lacan’s elaboration of the relation between the symbolic and the 
real which implies a renouncement of any kind of quilting point. In fact, this 
question of the articulation between the symbolic and the real, while giving up 
the operation of quilting these two orders, is one which offers a guiding thread 
through Lacan’s seminar D’un discourse qui ne serait pas du semblant. Indeed, 
we would argue that it is precisely in order to overcome the impasse left over at 
the end of his seminar on the four discourses in which the revolving circle of the 
26
 Jacques-Alain Miller, “Of Semblants in the Relation Between Sexes”, in Psychoanalytical 
Notebooks, (3/1999), p.10.

328
jelica šumič riha
four discourses leads to a somewhat unexpected and certainly unwanted con-
clusion: if there is no discourse which is not of semblant, this only means that 
any attempt at converting the real into the signifier brings about the emergence 
of the semblant. By paraphrasing Miller, one could thus say: what is signifyer-
ised is by the same token ‘semblentified’.
Certainly, taking seriously the real as a compass for psychoanalysis entails at 
the same time  pushing psychoanalysis itself to its limits: not only beyond the 
Name-of-the-Father, that semblant which, according to Freud, represents the 
unsurpassable horizon for psychoanalysis, but even further: beyond the Freud-
ian unconscious itself. One is almost tempted to say that the price to be paid 
for the orientation of psychoanalysis towards the real is the downgrading of the 
concept of the unconscious. From the perspective of the real, as has been un-
derlined by Jacques-Alain Miller, “the unconscious itself appears as a response 
made to the real, at the level of the semblant, a response to the hole in the real,[ 
due to the fact that there is no sexual relation] a response which has to do with 
the vain effort to make the absence of sexual programming signify at the level of 
the real”.
 27
 One of the unexpected, indeed, paradoxical, consequences of such a 
radical position regarding the real, was that this reference to the real appears as 
a problematic as well as a problematising reference in Lacan. At the end of his 
teaching, Lacan even suggests that the status of the real is that of the symptom, a 
deduction made from the unconscious, that is to say, that the notion of the real, 
in the last analysis, is nothing more than his invention. However, if the question 
of the real poses itself to Lacan so persistently in the final period of his teaching, 
this is precisely because the real proper to the analytic experience is now consid-
ered to be resisting signifierisation, i.e. its conversion into the symbolic. 
This is why Lacan in the Liturattere, the published part of the Seminar XVIII, 
proposes as a possible solution for holding together that which does not hold 
together a new concept, that of the littoral. To propose the littoral as a solution 
consists in nothing other than to propose the void itself as the mediator, the 
“void-median”, as Lacan calls it. The operation of the “void-median” or the litto-
ral is the inverse of the quilting operation since, with the littoral, the void holds 
together by keeping the heterogeneous instances apart. “… between knowledge 
27
 Jacques-Alain Miller, unpublished cours entitled L’exprérience du réel dans la cure analy-
tique, lesson of the 25 November 1998.

329
truth between semblance and the real
and jouissance, there is a littoral that only turns towards the literal on condition 
that this turn may be taken likewise at any instance.”
28
 Littoral, by activating 
the void itself as a mediator is certainly a way of relating to jouissance which 
can do without the semblant. On the other hand, when Lacan posed a rhetori-
cal question: “Is it possible for the littoral to constitute such a discourse that is 
characterised by not being issued form the semblant?”
29
 his answer is clearly no. 
The littoral can only testify to the fracture of which it is itself an effect. But it is 
unable to effect the cut. Only a discourse can produce a cut. One can see in what 
sense the theory of semblants constitutes a clearing gesture: indeed, it is only 
after bringing into question any instance of quilting that something as a littoral 
can be established, an empty plane in which something new can be inscribed. 
In the seminar D’un discourse qui ne serait pas du semblant Lacan seems to be 
still harbouring the hope of writing the formula of the sexual relation, a hope 
quenched with the seminar Encore. But just like the formula “there is no sexual 
relation” does not abolish the contingency of the encounter, the littoral propos-
es itself as a virgin canvas on which new combinations of knotting the real, the 
imaginary and the symbolic can be inscribed.
References
Freud, Sigmund, “‘Civilised’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness” (1908), trans. 
by. J. Strachey, SE, vol. 9
— Freud’s letter to Fliess, dated 21
st
 September 1897, Sigmund Freud Briefe 1873-1939, S. 
Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1968
Lacan, Jacques, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” in 
Écrits, trans. B. Fink, W.W. Norton & Company, New York/London 2006
— Television. A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, trans. By D. Hollier, R. 
Krauss, and A. Michelson, W.W. Norton, New York, London, 1990
— The Seminar ofJacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore, or On Feminine Seuxality, The Limits 
of Love and Knowledge, trans. B. Fink, W.W. Norton & Company, New York 1998
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Tavistock/Routledge, London 1992 
— Le séminaire, livre XVI, D’un Autre à l’autre, Seuil, Paris, 2006 
— Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, livre XVIII : D’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant, 
Seuil, Paris 2006 
28
 Jacques Lacan, Liturattere, in Autres écrits, Seuil, Paris 2001.
29
 Ibid., p. 18.

330
jelica šumič riha
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Grigg, W.W. Norton & Company, New York/London 2007
— « Discours à l’Ecole Freudienne de Paris », in Autres écrits, Seuil, Paris 2001
— « L’Étourdit » , in Autres écrits
— « Liturattere » ,  in Autres écrits
Laurent, Éric, Miller, Jacques-Alain, « L’ Autre qui n’existe pas et ses comités d’éthique », 
La Cause freudienne (35/1997)
Jacques-Alain Miller, “Of Semblants in the Relation Between Sexes”, in Psychoanalytical 
Notebooks, (3/1999)
— “Equivalence Between the Other and the Symptom”, Psychoanalytical Notebooks, 
(12/2004)
— “Le partenaire-symptôme,” unpublished course of the 1997-98