Truth is Coupled with Meaning: From lie to real?

This is an amended extract of parts of a paper presented at the London Society of the New Lacanian School, working with Jacques-Alain Miller’s Truth is Coupled with Meaning, focussing here less on Miller’s paper which of course I commend to you in its own right, and more to the thread of my own question which I had posited during the previous event in this series of days of work at the London Society of the New Lacanian School, coupled with reference to a presentation of the pass which had been discussed in a limited way on that previous occasion.


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I start this work with Jacques-Alain Miller’s text Truth is Coupled with Meaning with my own question. A question which I had posited in our work last time. It’s a question I ask in relation to this paper because it’s not far from MIller’s opening problem of the non-relation of truth to jouissance. The question I asked was whether we can consider some lies to be amboceptors of a real? I will start by saying that I think the answer is no. But perhaps it’s a no with a but…

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From the perspective of truth there is a function of the work of analysis which operates at the level of revelation of a hidden or veiled truth, and we have a philosophical term for this - alètheia - in ancient Greek this is the the negation of lèthe, which is forgetfulness, concealment, oblivion, and related to oblivion we might hold aside for the moment the term obliteration, the forgetting of the letter. Thus alètheia is an un-forgetting, or un-concealment, we can also attend to the flickering quality of the negation in this un-concealment.

An un-concealed truth as meaning fluctuates in place of an open meaning, this is the setup of the transferential unconscious…

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Then there is a paradigm of jouissance that Miller elsewhere calls that of normal jouissance, that which finds its place in the normalism of the neurotic in fantasy. This is a jouissance of the object a in which fantasy functions as an amboceptor between the symbolic in the guise of the barred Subject, and the real in its guise as object a. An amboceptor is a kind of link or bridge between two distinct elements, or sets. Normal jouissance is a jouissance of agreement between registers of a void in the real of the body, in which in another register something on the signifying side settles - layering the jouissant effect of speaking with its signifying effects - with the work of analysis then as veiling/unveiling on the side of the symbolic, and obstacle/overcoming on the real of the jouissant side…

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There is something quite distinct between the lie which unveils an underlying truth, which is roughly the setup of the transferential unconscious, as well as that under which the traversal of the fantasy was formulated, and the truth which cannot help but lie as an effect of its proximity to the real - the real which is only capable of lying to the partner, or as Miller says, to the subject. Miller could have taken reference not only from Television, but from Seminar 24 with the bit of the symbolic in the real as the lie. This relation of one in the other might seem like that of an kind of amboceptor, bridge, or link, but this is not the case, rather what it indicates with wit is an impossibility marked by the lie.

I’ll note too that a lie as such is not the truth. A lie can carry a truth, and there’s no lie without the register of truth. Or a lie can mark the limit of the register in which truth operates, which is a distinct operation from than that of truth. It’s a function of truth in the mathematical sense that a function translates the content of one set to another so that an operation not possible in the first set might be possible in the different register of the second.

The real at stake here has it’s side as a nothing, a hole, and its other full side as One jouissance, absolutely inadmissible to the relative structure of the signifying apparatus.

I’m reminded of something I learned recently whilst studying the complicated calculus which falls out of Cantor’s work on infinity, and which is quite closely related to the idea in relation to the truth which Miller develops in his early paper titled Suture.

The calculus which deals mathematically with the topology of boundaried areas has a difficulty when it comes to holes in these boundaried areas. These complications come about on account of the nature of the boundaries which this mathematics engages with. The problem is that a hole has no boundary. It has no boundary insofar as a boundary is always a boundary between two areas, in the way that a signifying operation cannot work with a signifier all alone, and the nothing of a hole, topologically has no such property as an area. What is inside the hole is not an area properly speaking but a nothing. It would only be by supposing the hole as such as something with properties that it could be supposed that its boundary could be calculated in the usual way, but this is not how it is. A function is necessary to make a calculus, which makes it possible to detect and specify something of these holes without boundary.  I think we can say that an approach to the real of a hole in psychoanalysis has the same difficulty - we approach it as a border only at the expense of supposing it as something other than a nothing. In fact if there is a rim of a real, there is no border as such, no truth of the rim can be found, and we need some kind of function to approach such a rim.

In this sense I wonder if we might say that a lie, in its regristral, functional, distinction from its truth, if it does not make any kind of bridge to a real, nonetheless may occasionally allow the proximity of a rim to be located. It seems to me that it holds as a question at least.


I want to return to the presentation of Leonardo Goristiza’s pass which our colleague Juana Cavaliere Silva brought to our attention last time. You may remember the dream to which Goristiza attributes the formation of a neologism, an S1 all alone, irreducible entirely to meaning or signification, which localises something of his mode of jouissance rendered as a sinthomatic style, marking the end of his analysis.

As I pointed out last time in response to some who had criticised the dream as a failed attempt at a truthful truth, the dream has something of a joke about it, with what that implies in the register of lying truth, and reading Goristiza's presentation, he seems to agree, calling it comic and absurd.

In the dream an unknown colleague says “I am the truth”, Goristiza replies “I am the real”.

But the result of this, which if it is absurd is so, I think, because he recognises it as a lie, is not for him that of a regular joke. It doesn’t allow two meanings to flicker, but rather in this comic absurdity he has a ‘black out’ something falls dark, and sound - reabsorbed - drains away.

I have one final question - could we conceivably stretch things to say that there is a very particular mode of truth that is not coupled with meaning. Where what is unveiled in a lying truth is not the signifier in its dimension of meaning, but of the letter, an alètheia of obliteration, as un-forgetting of the letter as such, hors-sens, out-of-meaning?

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