The London Society of the New Lacanian School

Reading Seminar

Lacan’s Seminar XX, Encore

Chapter 3. The function of the written

Vicente Palomera

1. The unconscious is what is read.

This chapter of Encore begins with a series of considerations that aim to undo the link
which seems obvious from reading with what is written:

“A letter is something that is read. It even seems to be designed as a sort of extension (of
prolongation) of the word. It is read (ça se lit) and literally at that. But it is not the same thing
to read a letter as it is to read. It is quite clear that, in analytic discourse, what is involved is
but that –that which is read beyond what you have incited the subject to say” (p.26).

Lacan begins then by questioning the evidence of the link between reading and the
letter and proposing an original conception of reading: “read beyond what you have
incited the subject to say which is not so much to say everything as to say anything, without
worrying about saying something stupid (des bêtises)”. It is then a reformulation of the
fundamental rule: "say no matter what", but say!”.

In a cure, speech is the fundamental element but, quite easily, speech turns around in
vain, and this is also what one may complain about. This is why Lacan calls this
turning around (p.32) the “current discourse” (discours courant), playing with the
homophony: disque (disk, record), current discourse is a new name for what he called
“empty speech”. This brings us to the difference between “full speech”, parole
pleine, and “empty speech”, parole vide. This difference could give us the idea that
“empty speech” means “false speech” and full speech means “true speech” (as in
Winnicott´s opposition between the false and true self). Such a reading would be
totally wrong. “Full speech” does not present the analysand as he truly is, just as
empty speech does not necessarily present us with a false picture of the analysand.

What is interesting is to remark that Lacan uses here the term “current disk” instead
of “empty speech”. What Lacan wants to stress here is the disque, disk, record.
Psychoanalysis has actually managed to highlight what was not known about the
human being, that each human being is occupied by a disk, that the mind of each

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human being is occupied by a disk that turns around with a variable periodicity , in
the end very short. It may be "an obsession", or if it is longer could be called "a
thought", and if even longer it could be called "a teaching". This is actually what
psychoanalysis has finally discovered, that we are occupied by that insistence that
does not know any time.
Lacan doesn’t say that this “empty speech” can be made to disappear, but only that
in analytic discourse it is necessary to make another kind of speech exist, a speech
that doesn’t go around and around for nothing, a speech he calls “full speech”.
This “full speech” aims to tell the truth, but quite early on Lacan emphasized not the
truth, but the saying, that is, the “full speech” aiming at a kind of saying that could
impose itself on all the sayings. Analytical interpretation would be a saying of this
kind.

Pay attention to what J.-A. Miller writes in his subtitle: the unconscious is what is read.
Firstly, because the question in analysis is then to learn to read what is written, to
learn to read a disk, this record, with one’s ears. An analysis is a matter of talking, it
is actually built on a series of formulations and reformulations of the same thing.
The unconscious is like this record that goes around saying the same thing (p. 32). I’d
say that we don’t actually know ourselves by sight, but “by ear”. Lacan once devised
or presented the end of analysis as “le bien dire” (“saying it well”), which implies that
in analysis what you are looking for is to learn to say the same thing better and better
until you are satisfied with it. The fundamental rule is something like “say it again!”,
“say it better!” (which reminds us of Samuel Beckett’s phrase that appears five times
in his story Worstward Ho, the first of which goes like this: “Ever tried. Ever failed, No
matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better”). In this sense, you speak in analysis as if you
were reading -reading a text better and better, making of the unconscious text a
matter of reading, of reading well, which is not a matter of what you mean.
The analyst cuts the session at some point to make the analysand measure the
distance between what s/he meant and what s/he in fact said. The analyst makes the
analysand read something else in her or his speech, and this involves a reference to
the written word, in which different meanings may be attributed to the same letters
and their groupings. This is only understandable because of a constant reference of
the spoken word to the written word.
What Lacan says is that it is not enough that the signifier and the signified are
distinguished. He insists on the bar that separates them, and by doing so gives it a
radical scope:

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“If there is something that can introduce us to the dimension of the written as such, it is the
realization that the signified has nothing to do with the ears, but only with reading –the
reading of the signifiers we hear” (p. 33).

And, again, Lacan insists:

“The bar, like everything involving what is written, is based only on the following –what is
written is not to be understood”

2. “A grammar of legibility”
Thus, the point is that between what is heard and what is said there is a gap.
What is said means that what is understood, what is communicated, posed as truth,
presents itself as something of the order of a proposition susceptible of being true or
false. There are two dimensions, two places of the said: what comes to the ears and
what, of that, is understood. Thus, this gap between hearing and saying, between
writing and reading, is the very gap that arranges the place of analytic interpretation
for us.
This means that between the signifier and the signified, there is interpretation, there
is a staggering between them: we do not take the signifier and the signified as the
recto and verso of a sheet of paper.

What makes the unconscious become legible? In Seminar 25 on The moment to conclude
Lacan says:

“The analyst cuts. What he says is a cut, that is to say he participates in the writing. That is
why I said that neither in what the analysand says, nor in what the analyst says is there
anything but writing” (I will come back to this quote later on).

What makes the unconscious readable is then the cut, that operates as punctuation.
The psychoanalyst adds a punctuation to speech: analytic interpretation is a
punctuation, and it is this what makes the unconscious readable.
(We know the importance of the absence or lack of punctuation is well known in
history: in ancient times it was a source of ambiguity and fights broke out over the
way to give a punctuation to a Biblical text 1. It was not until Latin was recognised to
be a foreign language, that word-separation became common in manuscripts.

1
Stock, Brian, Augustine the reader, (Belknap, Harvard, 1996)

3
Punctuation – period, comma, exclamation mark, colon, semicolon, quotation mark,
etc. – all these signs gave rise to what Malcolm Parkes calls “a grammar of legibility”2).

3. To read with one’s ears

I’ll give you now a vignette taken from the testimony of a colleague who was in
analysis with Lacan in the moment just after this Seminar. I happen to have just
edited a book by Esthela Solano called “Three seconds with Lacan”:
I quote: “I tell him: I dreamed of a woman (“j’ai eu un rêve d’une femme qui venait à
Paris”) who came (venait) to Paris ...". To which Lacan immediately responds: "That's
right", while getting up from his analyst chair and with a determined gesture, he
opens the door and I leave his office. Once again, I have not been able to relate the
entire text of my dream. But the story of my dream implied a continuation. However,
once again, due to the sharp cut practiced by the analyst, my dream was cut off from
its plot, its staging, its displacements, its condensations. Once again, I had only a bit
of a sentence between my lips and the session was over. My dream was actually
reduced to an interrupted sentence, nothing more. If I had been able to go to the end
of the story of my dream, I would have exposed a series of adventures lived in Paris
by the aforementioned woman, surely staging something of the order of her
entanglements (enredos, embrollos). But no, none of that. It was exasperating. How
long had that session lasted? Not three seconds, "the time to say one."
(…) As she crossed the courtyard to the exit of the building, as bewildered as ever,
she suddenly heard what she had said differently: "A woman who loves, wants (qui
veut)/ (naît a Paris) is born in Paris." Eureka! She laughed out loud”.

From this moment on, a new dimension opened up in her. From that day on, she was
able to read the symptom by the ears, since they were no longer plugged, closed by
the roundness of the meaning, always in solidarity with the good form (shape). The
plug of meaning suddenly peeled off like a shell, releasing lalangue from the envelope
of language: “The transience of the session (“three seconds” as she calls it) implied its
reduction to the "esp d'un laps", to the space of a lapse, and its sharp, surgical cutting
operation, making a hole in the statements, allowed her to finally sift the passage of the word
towards writing.

2
Parkes, Malcolm B., Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West (Berkeley,
1993).

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What this testimony shows us is that this writing stemmed from an initial reminder,
namely, that analytic discourse is a new kind of relation based only on what
functions as speech, in something one may define as a field:

Saying speech
______ ______
writing field

“The bar, like everything involving what is written, is based on the following: what is written
is not to be understood” ( p. 34)

Playing with the equivocation, Lacan made something else resonate than what had
been said with the intention of saying. This implies a different way of writing what is
heard, and transforms the analytical operation into a reading exercise, giving the
sentences the consistency of moterialité, the “materiality of the word”, that is, of the
thread and string with which one works in order to isolate the One, the signifier One
all alone, without any burden of meaning. It is only at this price that we have a
chance to touch the real thing.

4. Lalangue and language

If in the analytic experience we operate with meaning, how can we resolve the part of
jouissance that escapes meaning? How are we to deal with the semblance which
responds to the register of the imaginary and the symbolic, and also with what is
outside meaning, and even with real jouissance?
It is the disjunction of the semblant and the real that allows Lacan to distinguish
jouissances (in plural): that which condenses in the surplus object of jouissance (a),
that which relates to the jouissance of speech, and, distinct from both of these, that
real jouissance which in the final instance unseals the symptom.
It is this distinction that leads Lacan to consider the object little a as an articulable
nucleus of jouissance, as pertaining to semblance, like phallic jouissance too which
results from what is inscribed of the sexual in terms of the signifier.
It is the differential status of jouissances that explains the distinction made by Lacan
between lalangue and language.

The register of lalangue is that of the sounds of the signifier, before any grammatical
and syntactical ordering, which is why it is open to homophonic ambiguities.

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When one doesn’t yet know how to read is open to mishearing. I´ll take an example
told by an analysand. It turns around a name “Berazategui”. It’s the name of a town
near BsAs. If you go from BsAs to the city of La Plata, you have to go through the
city of Quilmes, then Hudson, and Berazategui, and finally you reach La Plata. Well,
this analysand said in a session that “when I was 2 and a half, I did poo in the potty
and then my mother threw the poo in the toilet. Bewildered, she asked her mother:
“Where does it go? Mother: It goes to Berasategui (meaning by this the channel of
Berazategui, this town with the Basque name. But what she heard was that “the poo
went to see someone called Sategui (“a ver –to see- a sategui”). Well, what Lacan
calls lalangue is Berasategui.
Lalangue is then what one makes of language through writing. While language will
be defined by Lacan as being an elucubration of knowledge upon lalangue, which
supposes a structural ordering of the signifiers of lalangue, based on the signifying
pair S1-S2, responsible for the effects of meaning.
This example shows us that, from the encounter of the body and lalangue, there come
the marks whose effects are the affects to be understood as the effects of jouissance.
If the signifying pair (S1-S2) is specific to the articulation of language, and if this is
responsible for the effects of meaning, then the signifiers of lalangue, on the other
hand, do not relate to the Other of meaning, but to the One all alone, and their trace
in the body takes on the status of a letter of jouissance.

Because speech and the slips it makes lead back to the effects of meaning, Lacan is
led to promote writing, and to thereby give a new definition of the unconscious , not
as a chain:

S1––> S2
But as an essaim (p.143), a “signyfying swarm”, a buzzing swarm (an essaim is
pronounced in French exactly like S1):

(S1(S1(S1(S1))))

Lacan proposes a solution which first involves taking into account the distinction
made by linguists between the register of the signifier and that of the signified. From
there Lacan radically disjoins the signifier and the signified, since he introduces the
notion of a non-relation between the two:

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« Distinguishing the dimension of the signifier only takes on importance when it is posited
that what you hear, in the auditory sense of the term, bears no relation whatsoever to what it
signifies » (p.29).

Thus, the signified that does not relate to what is heard becomes a consequence of the
reading of what is meant as a signifier. If the signified depends on the reading we do
of what is heard as a signifier, then the signifier effect as a reading effect takes us
from speech to writing: what is at stake in analytic discourse is always the following:
you give a different reading to the signifiers that are enunciated (ce qui s’enonce de
signifant) than what they signify.

If analytic discourse shifts speech to the written side, it is only to the extent that
interpretation involves this:

«It is quite clear that, in analytic discourse, what is involved is but that –that which is read,
that which is read beyond what you have incited the subject to say » (p. 26). «The letter is
something that is read » (p. 26) .
The letter is the signifier alone, separated from the other signifiers. The letter is a
signifier separated from the signified, separated from the effects of meaning, it takes
the status of letter.
The analytical interpretation, aiming at the real, must be the conceived as an
operation of reading. In this sense, Lacan argues that when it comes to the real, it is
about something that is written, that it is a question of reading, of reading by
deciphering it.

5. A question of logic.

The unconscious as writing entails bringing the analytic operation back to logic.
Regarding the question of how to treat the unconscious, Lacan says that it is a
question of logic, of manipulating logic more than anything else, because both the
unconscious and logic have to deal with what is written, with writing:

« Pour ce qui est de traiter l’inconscient, nous sommes beaucoup plus près à manipuler la
logique que toute autre chose, parce que c’est du même ordre. C’est de l’ordre de l’écrit »
( J.Lacan, january the 8th, 1974).

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Logic implies another use of the signifier, one which is not a matter of rhetoric. As
Jacques-Alain Miller pointed out (« Un Rêve de Lacan», in: Le Réel en mathématiques,
Seuil):

«The rhetorical use of the signifier is the use everyone makes of it…it affects the Other by
meaning and even by satisfaction, and even the jouissance it gives » ( L’usage rhétorique
du signifiant , c’est l’usage de tout le monde…il affecte l’Autre par le sens, et même
par la satisfaction et, disons-le, par la jouissance qu’il procure »).

Logic appeals to the mathematical use of the signifier, which supposes an emptying
of meaning and enjoyment, the element of which is the letter, as an element of
writing reduced to the extreme.
This is why Lacan defines logic as the "science of the real". Logic is inaugurated by
the operation of Aristotle. This operation involves emptying the syllogisms of their
meaning « by transforming them into letters, that is to say into things which by themselves
mean nothing, and thereby gives us an idea of the dimension of the real» (J.Lacan, january
the 8th, 1974).

So, treating the unconscious with logic consists in emptying words of their meaning,
in order to substitute for them letters. This is Lacan's proposition. Promoting the
function of the letter opens the way from analytical practice to the real, insofar as "the
letter is inherent in this passage to the real». ( J.Lacan, march the 12th, 1974).

Psychoanalysis operates with meaning, but it only operates with it in a suitable way
by reducing it, in order to access the real of the symptom, that is to say its letter, what
the symptom writes.
How can the analytical operation strip meaning down (decaper) in order to obtain an
effect of real meaning?
Lacan's answer to this question consists in the proposition that one can only operate
on the symptom by equivocation. The symptom presents a special greediness, a
special voracity with regards to meaning, meaning feeds the symptom. Equivocation,
on the other hand, is not the meaning.

The equivocation operates like the Witz: “Interpretation, as a practice of Witz, goes
through this "forcing through which a psychoanalyst makes something sound other than
meaning” (J.Lacan , may the 17th, 1977).

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Meaning is what crystallizes from use, where the routine of the signified dominates.
And this is due to the fact that "our signifiers are always received", says Lacan.
The analytical interpretation which makes use of equivocation involves a kind of
violence done to the everyday use of a language, in order to carry the effect of
meaning beyond speech. In the Witz, we can "use a word for a use other than that for
which it is intended, we crumple it up a bit (“on le chiffone un peu”) and it is in this
crumpling that its operative effect lies” (idem).

Lacan will therefore aim to accord psychoanalysis to the letter, to the One of lalangue,
in order to have an impact on the consistency of jouissance produced by the marks of
lalangue on the body, that is, as a way of treating the sinthome.
In this way, Lacan proposes to operate in analysis starting from the radical
disjunction between the signifier and the signified, to the point of arguing that
between these two orders there is no relationship (rapport): « The signifier is posited
only insofar as it has no relation to the signified » (p. 29), Lacan says, not without
pointing out that the signifier comes from the dimension of sound, from what we
hear «in the auditory sense of the term» (p.29), which «has nothing to do with what that
means» (p.31).

Along this path, which favours the dimension of the signifier all alone, Lacan comes
to conceive of interpretation as falling within reading: «What is at stake in the analytic
discourse is always the following: you give a different meaning to the signifiers that are
enunciated (ce qui s’enonce de signifiant) than what they signify» (p.38)

Interpretation is then a reading of the «  moterialisme » of lalangue. Interpretation aims

at affecting the initial trauma, affecting the letter of jouissance which is translated
into a body-event. The mark that the body enjoys is part of the One and ex – sists the
Other.

In this sense, Jacques Alain Miller pointed out that lalangue should be understood as
being in relation with the Un-corps (One-body), that is to say the body proper, not as
an imaginary consistency but as a substance of jouissance. He adds that
psychoanalysis is thus moved by Lacan towards the register of the One, and its
practice rethought according to the sinthome of the One.
This perspective is linked to the substitution of the concept of parlêtre for that of the
unconscious, insofar as the parlêtre is the one who by speaking superimposes a being

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on the body he has. This new name for the unconscious includes the body which
"enjoys itself".

6. “To read itself” (se lire)

According to this, what then becomes of the transference in Lacan's last teaching? As
J.-A. Miller has pointed out: Lacan shifts psychoanalysis into the register of the One
All alone and rethinks the practice from what the absolute sinthome of the One is
(cours du 14 mars 2007). This perspective is that of separate, unarticulated ones,
without the Other, whereas the transference supposes the signifying articulation
from which comes the supposition of a subject to knowledge. This means that the
Subject supposed to know does not belong to the One All alone, but to the Other.

If we now move on to the last chapter, we’ll find a beautiful apologue which situates
the point at which the reading of the unconscious ends up in an analysis. Now let’s
move on to page 37, where Lacan says that in an analysis one doesn’t only learn to
read, but also learns to read oneself (à “se lire”). Notice that he says this with the same
reflexive effect as the drive. The drive is headless (acephale): it consists of making
oneself seen, shitted, eaten, heard. Let’s take, for example, making oneself eaten, se
faire bouffer, as the emblematic formula of the drive. This “to make oneself” indicates
that we have something done to us by someone else, for instance, bouffer means to
eat, se faire bouffer (get oneself fed) implies that someone is going to accomplish it for
you because you cannot do it yourself. You need an other. You need the Other’s
demand. “Se faire” implies both the Other’s demand and your utilization of the
Other’s demand in order to obtain satisfaction. When we reach this point, (of the
absence of the ego, where a new knowledge is held) then "we are in the register of analytic
discourse" says Lacan (p. 37).
Now let’s take this “se lit” (reads itself). In analytical discourse, there is no longer any
opposition between the reader and the text, the two interpenetrate. There is no more
ego (moi) to take charge of reading. The final apologue takes up this requirement at
the beginning of the chapter: to locate the function of writing, but by shifting it.
At the beginning of this chapter Lacan says:

"It is quite clear that, in analytic discourse, what is involved is but that –that which is read
beyond what you have incited the subject to say” (p.26).
And at the end of this last chapter, in the apologue, we go from reading to “reading
oneself” (“se lire”). Lacan questions not only the unconscious, but also the subject of

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the unconscious, the bond this subject maintains with the Other of the analytical
discourse.
In this apologue, Lacan speaks about the flight of a bee and the flight of swallows. The
bee goes from flower to flower searching for the nectar, sucks the nectar from the
flower. A knowledge produces a reading of this action. The bee carries pollen from
one flower to another with its paws. So, to read the flight of bees is to know that they
serve the reproduction of plants. But does the bee know that? In the same way, in the
flight of the birds, we can read that there’s going to be a storm, but does the swallow
read the storm?

7. Supposed to know how to read …differently

Lacan does not yet have at his disposal the category of the parlêtre, but he moves on,
at the end of this chapter, from the subject of the unconscious to a mode of the living
being, and to a beautiful and simple definition of the course of an analysis: “In your
analytic discourse, you assume that the subject knows how to read. And this business of the
unconscious is nothing other than that.” (p. 38)

It is not until Seminar 25 that Lacan asks himself what the "supposed to know" in
question can mean. And he answers: "the supposed to know how to read differently", but
on the condition of linking this «reading otherwise to S with a barred A, which
designates a hole».3
To appeal not to the lack, but to the category of the hole, in the place of the
incompleteness and inconsistency of the Other, is to recall that the characteristic of
the symbolic dimension relates to the hole, because the signifier makes a hole in the
real.
We can find here a fruitful indication, one that is supported not on the effects of
meaning that block the hole in the symbolic, but on the function of the hole that
favours the "emptying, or better, the hollowing out of meaning".
As I mentioned above, Lacan then gives us a new version of interpretation, following
the line already opened up in this Seminar, Encore. «The analysand speaks, and the
analyst cuts», Lacan says, and he adds:

« What he says is a cut, that is to say participates in writing, except that he is ambiguous
about spelling. He writes differently so that by the grace of the spelling, a different way of

3
Lacan J., Séminaire 25, Le moment de conclure, january, the 10th,1978.

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writing, things sound different from what is said, from what is said with the intention of
saying, that is to say consciously».4

Interpretation is based on homophonic equivocation, which does not mean that the
analyst engages in the exercise of word games, but on the contrary, that as soon as he
makes a break in the sentence uttered by the analysand, he argues for another way of
writing, making resonate anything else that is unrelated to the intention of meaning.
It is the operation of the analyst that shifts the speech of the analysand to the side of
writing. Here we find a new definition of the analytic act conceived as a participant
in writing, and even as being responsible for making a cut at the level of the
signifying articulation in order to shift the signifier to the side of the letter.
In this way, Lacan aspired to put into practice a dimension of the act «which would
not be mental debility».5
Mental debility responds to the dimension identified in the Borromean perspective,
according to which the effects of the symbolic in the imaginary, that is to say the
effects of meaning, have solidarity with sphericalness, that is, with the good form
relative to the body image.
From these two registers results the “mentality" that Lacan characterizes with an
adjective, "debile" (weak), with weakness (debilité), insofar as this contains a bias that
bars us from accessing the real without meaning. This is the domain proper to the
impotence of thought. Thought is “debile”, weak, because it is impotent to think the
real outside of meaning.
Consequently, Lacan aspired to a dimension of the analytic act that would not be
supported by thought. Although Lacan had already formulated the logic of the
analytic act as falling under an "I do not think", we find here a radicalization of the
formula, indicating to analysts that they must regulate their position according to a
rupture with the "I think" that is supported by the intention of meaning, of the
analysand’s meaning.

8. Surgery
There is another pitfall that emerges vis-à-vis the analytic act: the path of delirium,
that is to say, the path of the elucubration of knowledge as a fictional veil vis-à-vis the
real jouissance of the One. How are we then to conceive of the path of the analytical
act that would not be “debile” (weak) and that would not come to fuel delirium?

4
Ibidem, december the 20th, 1977.
5
Ibidem, april the 11th, 1978.

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The answer we find in Lacan is that of raising the analytical act «to the dignity of
surgery»6.
This is a powerful proposition, based on the reduction of the analytic operation to the
cut. But we can also deduce that if Lacan uses the term "surgery", this is because the
analytic act does not exclude the question of the body.
The cut aims to touch "the echo in the body of the fact that there is a saying", and
even touch the traces, the marks, of lalangue through which the body "enjoys itself"
(dont le corps «se jouit »).
We can also see that when Lacan answers the question he is addressing (by asking
himself what he meant when he conceived the transference in terms of a subject
supposed to know), he responds by providing a clarification: « Supposed to know how to
read differently»7; and by eliminating, this time, the term "subject".
Thus, we find that this elision corresponds to a new orientation of the analytic practice,
as this aims to define not the transferential unconscious, but the real unconscious.
In this regard, the analysis of the parlêtre, which stems from the new orientation
proposed by Lacan, consists in a disarticulation of language, in a making a hole in
language, in an emptying of meaning, in order to make lalangue emerge, with its
letter of jouissance parasitizing the body.
This operation takes its orientation from the legibility of the letter, a legibility whose
limit is posed by the illegibility of the hole, of the unconscious as a hole.
This implies a dissolution of the subject supposed to know, and aims beyond the
subject's supposition to the ek-sistence of the real unconscious, in relation to which
the transferential unconscious constitutes only a fictional envelope.

6
Ibidem.
7
Lacan J., Le moment de conclure, january the 10th, 1978

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