While he examines the proper name, Lacan introduces thematically for the first time in his writing the concept of pleasure. At that time he was wondering how to designate the being of the subject without doing the same for the proper name. "Lacan says" for all eternity! And here is the lacking name which must be discovered, that is, the name of pleasure, the name of my being as a being of pleasure. We can't call it my objet a, it is not a proper name, but in spite of everything... In the diagnostic a subject is not designated, rather a clinical structure more or less elaborated is classified, and one speaks then of an obsessive, an hysteric, a phobic. However, the true proper names in the clinic include the surplus of pleasure of a subject, its objet a. When we refer to the "Rat Man," or to the "Wolf Man," we give them proper names which have nothing to do with the Name-of-the-Father.

And there is Little Hans, the Little Horse Man. It isn't by chance that in this name, there is an animal, since this is, according to Freud, is what escapes the lack-in-being. The objet a is perhaps a name which is not a metaphor, a name in which father and pleasure are included together. What better to prove that the Name-of-the-Father is semblance than psychosis, where we see a real father operate, in a most brutal manner? The foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father supposes that there is no semblance of the Name-of-the-Father, that there is no semblance of the father. Inasmuch as the father is impossible for a subject, there can be the real of the father, and he can be found.

Ultimately this is the only thing that interests me. This examination will be based on the following conceptual triplet: truth, knowledge (savoir), Real. My argument is that "l'Étourdit" is a proposition that creates a disjuncture between analytic discourse and philosophical discourse, based on their two entirely different ways of joining together this grouping of truth-knowledge-Real, a triplet which in truth could be said, assuming we keep it in the right order, to be in itself common to the discourses of both the philosopher and the analyst. This triplet is indeed the borderline between two discourses.

In "l'Étourdit" the Real is clearly definable based on the absence of sense. The result of this is that the truth-knowledge-Real triplet must be juggled around a bit with respect to the question of sense, if we are to be able to think it through completely. In her brilliant commentary on "Book Gamma" of Aristotle's Metaphysics, Barbara Cassin speaks of a "decision of sense," and it could be said that l'Étourdit is another kind of sense decision, different from the Aristotelian one. With respect to this decision, the Real may be defined as a sense which is ab-sense. The Real is ab-sense, and therefore an absence of sense, but which absence of course implies that sense does exist.

The point that needs to be understood, as concerns the complex decision Lacan is formulating here, is that ab-sense must be held absolutely distinct from nonsense. Lacan's argument is not absurdist or in a general sense existentialist. He is not asserting that the Real is nonsense. He is asserting that an opening onto the Real cannot be breached save through the presupposition that it is an absence in sense, an ab-sense, or a subtracting of something from, or out of, sense. Everything depends on this distinction between ab-sense and non-sense.

Religion-especially Christianity-gladly speaks of God as of a father, as of Father par excellence; and the Name-of-the-Father figures in the triad together with the Son and the Holy Spirit. That's why Lacan always reminds us that he borrows this concept from the tradition (in "L'etourdit," you find, regarding Schreber's psychosis, that the Name-of-the-Father "indicates that it is the responsible one according to tradition").

With you slavoj Zizek on "Danish Pastry, or the Euthanasia of Tolerant Reason"

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