Psychoanalytische Perspectieven, 2021, 39, 4: 499-523

REALITY’S SLIP OF THE TONGUE

ON THE RELATION BETWEEN CONCEPT AND REALITY

Arthur Sollie

PhD. researcher, Universiteit Gent

arthur.sollie@ugent.be

Summary: Regardless of the type of theory or knowledge praxis one engages in, the
question of the relation between theory and practice or theory and reality arises as a
problematic one. To address this issue, this article explores the limits of the nominalist
argument that views concepts as post res labels attached to concrete objects. Among other
things, the reality to which the number zero (as a concept) corresponds constitutes a major
difficulty for nominalism. Based on this difficulty, the article elaborates another
epistemological view, a specific kind of rationalism or dialectical materialism that can be
found in the work of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. This dialectical materialism
emphasizes the specific ability of concepts to mark and realize negative features in reality,
making it possible to effect changes in it. In this sense, both the question of the relation of
theory to reality and that of change in psychoanalytic practice can be viewed from a
different angle than that of a simple one-to-one correspondence. To put this view to the test,
the article explores the extent to which it can get a grip on some of the slippery fundamental
concepts of psychoanalysis, such as the unconscious and sexuality.

Keywords: theory, practice, reality, epistemology, nominalism, dialectical materialism,

realism

Received: 14 December 2021; Accepted: 13 January 2022.

Jean Hyppolite: “That is Hegelian logic.”

Jacques Lacan: “Is it liable to attack on that account?”
(Lacan, 1991a, p. 178)

Introduction

When we raise the question of how psychoanalytic theory relates to

its practice, we run into something which cannot be but a problematic
gap. What is the relation between the one and the other? Do they ever
touch? Clinical practice is a fleeting, concrete, context-specific and
singular production of words and deeds, whereas theory has fixed
general concepts as its building blocks. Concepts generalize individual
experience and subtract from it its concrete context, time, space. So,
500 ARTHUR SOLLIE

why theory? Is not the use of theory and concepts in practice an

‘intellectualizing’ or ‘rationalizing’ defense mechanism by which one
rather swiftly moves away from one's personal difficulties by
‘explaining’ them through pre-existing general laws and concepts? At
first sight, there seems to be no place for theory in the psychoanalytic
clinic, except as a means of defense against the reality of the analysand's
troubles. Furthermore, might an all too strong belief in theory not blind
the analyst for the singular distortions in the analysand’s speech?
Should an analyst not ‘forget theory’ once he is in the consulting room?

What then, is the purpose of theory? This question becomes all the
more tangible when it does not simply concern the systematization of
practical techniques. At first glance theory appears to be just something
too much, an unnecessary production of intellectualistic self-
gratification that distracts us from what really matters. Opening a book
on ‘high theory’ might well reinforce that idea, leading to the question
of what it has to do with concrete clinical practice, in particular when
one stumbles upon Lacan's formulas, ‘mathemes’, topologies, optical
diagrams, mathematical and logical derivations. Such experiences can
provoke a desire to return to the ‘real’ of the concrete clinic and to
discard unnecessary conceptual load. As early as his first seminar,
Lacan emphasizes this gap: “There is, without doubt, a world of
difference between what we actually do in this sort of den where the
patient talks to us and where, from time to time, we talk to him–and the
theoretical account that we give of it” (Lacan, 1991a, p. 15).

Once we recognize that there is a gap, what do we do with it? It is

clearly not enough just to mention it, as if mentioning a gap between
theory and practice in itself shows that we are not avoiding it, so that
the reader can safely continue to read without being bothered by this
problem. But if it does not have consequences for practice or for theory,
mentioning the gap between them would simply equal not mentioning
it. After evoking the passage quoted above, Lacan refers to some texts
by Freud by which we learn a little more about his concrete
psychoanalytic technique. While this may be interesting, it does not
really tackle the issue. By contrast, at the end of the same lesson Lacan
twists the stakes of this gap in an interesting way:

“If we have to differentiate the actions and the behaviour of the

subject from what he says to us about them in the session, I would
say that our actual behaviour in the analytic session is just as far from
REALITY'S SLIP OF THE TONGUE 501

the theoretical account that we give of it. But this is only a first truth,
which only has significance in so far as it may be reversed, and at
the same time mean – just as close.” (Lacan, 1991a, p. 17).

The struggle of the analyst to conceptualize his practical experience

can be redoubled by the analysand’s struggle to put his everyday
experience into words. The fundamental gap is not to be found between
theory and practice, but within the two. Both struggle with the gap
between signifier and signified, in which the problem is reduced to its
minimum. The point at which conceptualizations of practice most
fundamentally run into impasses is not simply the point at which theory
and practice are most distant from each other, but surprisingly also the
point at which the one suddenly appears at the heart of the other.

The gap between concepts and (clinical) reality might therefore itself
contain the key to the problem it raises. Let us therefore examine what,
exactly, is at stake here. The gap between signifier and signified,
between words and things, between concepts and reality, rests on an
elementary fact. Namely that a word is not the thing it names. A word
represents a thing, it is present ‘in name of’ a thing, but it is not itself
this thing. The distance between the two renders language into a means,
an instrument, a way of talking about the thing, to talk about it from a
distance, that is to say, without its presence. We can only represent its
presence. The word indeed takes away from the thing the concrete time
and space in which it occurs. A word names something and forms an
obstacle to it, because ‘it is only about words’. When representing
something by means of its name, one ‘loses’ its reality. Words are
therefore double – they are a means by which I can conceptualize
clinical reality or tackle my psychological difficulties in therapy, but by
naming this reality or these difficulties, I’m presenting something else
(words, names, concepts) instead of the reality I was meant to treat.
Words therefore frustrate our treatments of reality. Which is why one
often attempts to downgrade words and concepts and tends to prefer to
deal with things immediately. We can recognize such downgrading
when something is said to be ‘too theoretical’, i.e. when one wants
‘practical’ techniques, ‘real’ solutions, ‘clinical’ material. The former
is said only to refer to general ideas, while the latter at least refers too
something ‘real’.

It may surprise to note that Lacan denounces this “clinical attitude”,

as a “refusal of the concept” (Lacan, 1998, p. 18), of which he accuses
502 ARTHUR SOLLIE

the post-Freudian tradition. Not because Lacan denounces ‘clinical’

material as such, but because he rejects the idea that, unlike ‘theory’
(made of ‘mere representations’), ‘clinical material’ would not be
contaminated by the very gap proper to representation and words. Such
a ‘refusal of the concept’ is a nominalist position. Nominalism holds
that only singular things are real, while naming them generalizes things
into categories and conceptions that only exist ‘in our head’. Lacan
speaks of nominalism as the idea that naming a thing is the same as
attaching a label to it: if one attaches a label to something – or if one
detaches a label from something – the thing remains exactly the same.
Nominalism implies that language in no way participates in the real. It
names what is already entirely at hand.1 This is considered to be true,
even if naming distorts our view of it and makes us forget that names
are abstract and generalized representations of things. Indeed, if we
consider things this way, we should never forget that what we think to
be ‘reality’ is necessarily altered by the psychological or linguistic laws
(categorizations, distortions, abstractions, fantasies) to which
representations are subject. The nominalist viewpoint argues that lack
is something inherent in representational language: language cannot fail
to lag behind the complexity of concrete singular reality. Therefore,
language is deficient – while reality is not. Indeed, from this standpoint,
to consider lack as something in reality is an illusory projection of the
lack proper to our linguistic representations into the things themselves.

Such a nominalist position might offer a spurious way to understand

Lacan’s insistence on the lack proper to language. It all too quickly
concludes that words simply fail to name the richness of the individual
experience of the real. Moreover, this nominalist stance might offer a
way to account for Lacan’s complex and controversial statements as
‘the woman does not exist’ or ‘there is no sexual relationship’, namely
in an anti-platonic way: universal ideas like ‘the woman’ and ‘the
sexual relationship’ blind us for the fact that there only exists a
multiplicity of individual women and sexual relationships – all attempts
to unify them are dangerous generalizations. While Lacan recognizes
that his conceptualizations might be interpreted in such a nominalist
fashion, he explicitly rejects such a reading:

1. “… according to it [idealism], we are only supposed to know the real from representations, it
is clear that this position, from a certain schema is irrefutable, can all the same be refuted once
one does not make of the representation the pure and simple reflection of the real.” (Lacan, 1968-
69, XVIII 1)
REALITY'S SLIP OF THE TONGUE 503

“If it is clear that if there is something that I am, it is not a nominalist,

I mean that I do not start from the fact that the name is something
that is stuck like that onto the real. And you have to choose; if one
is a nominalist, one must completely renounce dialectical
materialism, so that in short the nominalist tradition, which is
properly speaking the only danger of idealism that can be put
forward here in a discourse like mine, is very obviously rejected.”
(Lacan, 1971, p. 22)

The nominalist ‘danger’ resides in the fact that besides its idea about
the relation between words and reality, it also implies a ‘program’: the
only ‘non-ideological’ way of dealing with representations is to connect
every word to a the pre-existing thing it is supposed to correspond to.
In so doing they sweep the disturbing tension between word and thing
under the rug. The nominalist program seeks to erase this tension by
substituting words with their signification, with their ‘real’ referent. In
doing this, it aims to reduce the linguistic system into a system of one-
to-one relations between signs and their real equivalents.2

Such a nominalist operation for example reduces the value of the

term ‘unconscious’ to some substantial thing it immediately ‘is’
external to our representational mode of thinking about it – something
‘out there’, an obscure will pulling the strings or a reservoir of primitive
instincts hidden in our mind. We can also find an example of this
nominalist stance in the neuroscientist idea of ‘higher order brain
processes’. This idea holds that something processes our thinking which
is at the same time inaccessible to this limited kind of thinking itself –
which is why one refers to it as ‘higher order’. Both examples imply

2. For Lacan, a word, a signifier is not determined by a preceding signification or referent but
the other way around. It is the singular tension that arises with the emergence of a specific
signifier which calls for resolving the tension by finding its correspondent signification. To
nuance things, the specified tension emerges because a specific signifier is at once just one
signifier among others and a singular point which opposes itself to all other signifiers. A signifier,
so to say, internally excludes itself from other signifiers – it is at once identical to and different
from other signifiers. The emergence of a signifier therefore coincides with the emergence of a
split between itself and what is called its signified. Indeed, a signifier would be none if it would
simply be identical to itself, it includes others which together ‘are’ not the signifier, but rather
are what the signifier ‘is not’. Without the negative reference to other signifiers, any
determination of a signifier’s signified would be impossible. But because of this essential
coincidence of identity and difference, a fully determined signified does not annihilate the split,
the cut between signifier and signified. Consequently, a third, the referent, ‘signification’ or the
thing comes into play, not, to finally resolve the tension between signifier and signified (which
would amount to nominalism), but simply as something which manifests its split. We will come
back to this further on.
504 ARTHUR SOLLIE

that some reality inaccessible to consciousness nonetheless controls it.

But if we take these theories seriously, thought is entirely immersed in
these kinds of inaccessible control, so it should never have been
possible to even think of the ‘unconscious’ or this ‘higher order
processing’ in the first place. The mere existence of these concepts
therefore rather hint at a kind of short circuit between concept and
reality which one might name an ‘impossible representation’.
Interestingly, they suggest almost the opposite of ‘something
controlling us’, pointing rather towards the limits of being blindly
immersed in thought. In what will follow we will concentrate on how
we can think this apparent gap between word and thing from a different
angle.

The impossible representation

We could say that for nominalism, errors of thought exist when

words do not correspond to their real equivalents while for Lacan the
error is to consider this an error. The nominalist matching of a word
with its real equivalent has the character of an unsatisfied wish, an
imaginary misrecognition that seeks to erase the source of this wish,
namely the disturbance proper to the non-match of the two.

Much like nominalism, for Lacan a signifier always has a

counterpart, some object or referent that occupies the place opened up
by the signifier.3 However, this counterpart does not abolish the non-
match between the two, neither does it imply a one-to-one relationship
between the two. Quite on the contrary, the objective counterpart makes
the non-correspondence itself appear, the very ‘bar’ between signifier
and signified. The counterpart is therefore not a solution but a
manifestation of the ‘problem’. Nonetheless, only by means of such a
manifestation of the problem, of the question ‘what reality corresponds

3. Lacan elaborates this point from the Fregeian concepts of sense and reference: “It is then
through the mediation of the relationship of the signifier to the referent that we see the signifier
emerge. There are no valid instances of meaning which do not make a circuit, a detour, by way
of some referent. The bar, therefore, is not as has been said, in commenting on me, the simple
existence, fallen from heaven in a way, of the obstacle, here entified. It is first of all a question
mark about the return circuit. But it is not simply that. It is this other effect of the signifier by
means of which the signifier only represents the subject, and a little earlier I wanted to incarnate
the subject in what I called sense, where he vanishes as subject. Well that’s it. At the level of the
bar an effect of sense is produced, and what I started from today in my example, is there to show
you how much the effect of the signified can be bent to every sense, if we do not have the referent
at the beginning, but that the effect of sense is something different.” (Lacan, 1964-65, p. 10)
REALITY'S SLIP OF THE TONGUE 505

to this word?’, the search for the specific meaning in reality is opened
up. Therefore, for Lacan, the non-correspondence between the name
and its counterpart is not merely an obstacle to finding a counterpart in
reality but its condition. Furthermore, the non-correspondence makes a
real disturbance, a disturbance in reality appear.4

The disturbance due to the non-correspondence of a signifier with

its ‘real’ object is not simply a thought, a representation, but something
real to the extent that it makes the pursuit of meaning, thoughts and
representations possible to begin with. It produces the movement of the
attempt to its overcoming. Indeed, the lack proper to words, signifiers,
representations or concepts finds its true expression – not in real
objects, but in the ever-repeated attempts to ‘get over’ this disturbing
lack by means of which the lack propels the monotonous metonymy
proper to thought or speech. The lack within language is thus not only
negative. It is not a mere error since we are dealing here with the lack
as cause. It demonstrates its active structuring function (Lacan, 1998,
p. 29) as the condition of ever proceeding language productions. It
initiates a debilitating metonymic repetition. In this sense, the
productivity proper to overcoming lack, linguistic or otherwise, is
primarily a product of defense against the real of this lack itself. It is a
defense satisfying the imaginary function – it constitutes the
(nominalist) attempt to eliminate lack by making the produced
signifiers fixate on an ideal of one-to-one correspondences.

Despite its ‘wrong’ suppositions, this imaginary productivity makes

signifiers signify reality and renders it into something potentially
meaningful. The problem with nominalism is therefore not that there is
never some kind of correspondence, some kind of meaning, but that its
metonymic production misses something: it primarily satisfies a

4. This manifestation of non-coincidence in reality is of course what Hegel’s speculative phrase

‘Spirit is a bone’ is about. In his book A Philosophy of Madness, The Experience of Psychotic
Thinking, Wouter Kusters (2020) makes a similar excellent remark on the preoccupation to find
the corresponding trace of ‘madness’ in our brain or genes. He illustrates the non-coincidence of
the two in analogy with Patrick Bateman’s search for the essence of femininity in American
Psycho: “Bateman is so eager to learn the secrets of femininity that he saws a few women in
pieces to find out. After frantically rooting through their bowels, it gradually dawns on him that
a woman’s inner nature is not to be found in her physical insides. … But what is often forgotten
is that if you reduce something – whether it be mind, love, or madness, and whether the result is
called matter, hormones, or neurons – you first have to know what it is you are reducing. In other
words, if madness – or love, or even God – is ‘located’ on gene X or in brain area Y or on neuron
bundle Z, what is it that is located there? What indeed is madness?” (Kusters, 2020, p. 6). The
result in no way solves the problem, it manifests it.
506 ARTHUR SOLLIE

defense, an imaginary function whose purpose is to postpone the

confrontation with a fundamental non-correspondence. Meanwhile, this
postponing metonymic production is itself dependent on the lack that it
attempts to cover up. The intended procrastination therefore fails to
simply solve or even procrastinate the problem, given that it cannot
itself postpone its own incessant procrastination. The procrastination
takes the place of the problem it seeks to solve. In its attempt to form a
defense against non-correspondence, the metonymic function in fact
cannot but repeat it. In this way, amidst the one-to-one
correspondences, a disturbance appears as that which grounds the
series, a disturbance that embodies the underlying non-correspondence
(an ‘impossible representation’). Because the metonymic production is
reinforced by what it is a defense against, its own incessant activity is
nothing but a permanent reminder of what it seeks to erase. In its
reproduction, the defense constantly manifests non-correspondence,
nourishing again and again the necessity of its own production.

In this sense, the monotonous movement of repetition also produces

the manifestation of its own lack in the form of a disturbance. Every
particular attempt to overcome the limit of mere representation also
repeats the same disturbance, which in turn can start to function as some
kind of signifier or representation itself. When the impossibility of
representation gets elevated into an ‘impossible representation’, the
endless one-way ticket of failing representation gets internally reversed,
for it succeeds by failing to have failure as its evoked reality in a
transparent way. The lack in representation, then, happens to be a proof
of a productive lack of reality itself. If the nominalist stance can be
formulated as ‘representative forms of thought never reach the real’, the
formula reverses its own statement once one considers that this
impossibility is real and represented in the formula. Instead of never
being able to reach the real, representations rather cannot avoid it.

A leap, or how a concept realizes a limit

One can reinterpret this impossibility as the master signifier’s (S1)

missing counterpart (object a), opening up the attempt to re-find it. The
master signifier produces an enigma, a question mark of what exactly it
represents (for example, the question ‘what is it that is so unconscious
about the unconscious?’). This tension (what Lacan also calls the
repression of the binary signifier (Lacan, 1998, p. 218)) is what
commands the production of a (n)ever satisfying chain of signifiers (S2).
REALITY'S SLIP OF THE TONGUE 507

The subject, here, perceives the disturbance proper to the produced

knowledge as a distance between himself and possible knowledge, to
be overcome by acquiring more knowledge, more signifiers, in order to
acquire the signifier still missing. Seen from within university
discourse, ‘theory’ or ‘conceptual work’ is understood as something
desperately anticipating the still inaccessible knowledge able to hit the
mark of what the master signifier really represents. But what escapes
this knowledge, is the absent partner of the master signifier, the null
content it represents. Indeed, Lacan states that the master signifier
‘hides nothing’, the master signifier is a ‘signifier without signified’,
something which, by its abstract emptiness, can only provoke the
reaction of going out to look for what it means, exactly, only not to find
exactly what one was looking for, and to repeat this process again and
again. As Žižek (2021, pp. xiv-xv) states, (conceptual) work is not done
by the master (who is supposed to know already), but by the hysteric
who, by constantly blaming and questioning the master signifier’s
inertial presence, causes the production of knowledge and reinforces the
enigmatic power of the knowledge still missing. The missing
knowledge is indeed what is constituting the production of knowledge
itself. The lack of knowledge produces knowledge, but a knowledge
that never ceases not to represent and therefore continues to nourish a
transference to what is still Other (S1+a).

The specificity of the analyst’s discourse is that it produces a master

signifier, a concept which marks this ‘absent partner’ as such. (Lacan,
2018, p. 98) Such a production brings an end to the repeated failure to
bridge the gap between knowledge and its Other Side by marking the
failure itself as constitutive of this Other Side. During an analysis,
sooner or later, the lack itself appears within the repetitive metonymy,
as the unsatisfied nature of its own defensive function, as the
monotonous resistance of the many signifiers to signify the reality
escaping the signifier, revolving around and anticipating what is still
absent, the minus-one, the something that is yet to come and is supposed
to hit the mark. In the analyst’s discourse, the analyst responds to the
frustration of the analysand with a reflection of his or her own words,
in order to make its enunciation present, or, in other words, in order to
“re-present” the difference between word and thing causing the
analysand’s speech. The analyst makes the difference between
semblance and corresponding reality present within reality, which, in
first instance, cannot but seem absurd. When the nominalist analysand
on the sofa says: “It is impossible to say what I desire”, the analyst’s
508 ARTHUR SOLLIE

procedure does not consist of suggesting this or that solution to this

inconvenience, but to respond for example simply by repeating: “It is
impossible to say what I desire”. This reflection turns the ‘lack of
corresponding reality’ into the ‘corresponding reality of the lack’. It
introduces a twist from the ‘lack of concepts’ to a ‘concept of lack’
(Lacan, 1998, p. 26). Putting things boldly, we might go so far as to say
that a rupture by means of the production of a concept is the only
psychoanalytic event. It’s a conceptual creation which does not simply
designate a predefined object, but intervenes itself in the real by
realizing a separation in it, a ‘leap’ similar to what happens within
infinitesimal calculus. Lacan puts it as follows:

“[…] our conception of the concept implies that the concept is

always established in an approach that is not unrelated to that which
is imposed on us, as a form, by infinitesimal calculus. Indeed, if the
concept is modelled on an approach to the reality that the concept
has been created to apprehend, it is only by a leap, a passage to the
limit, that it manages to realize itself.” (Lacan, 1998, p.19)

Infinitesimal calculus is one of mathematics’ historical controversies

that shook up its base foundations. Similar events happened earlier. The
first one is the occurrence of the number zero that has conditioned the
later appearance of infinitesimal calculus (Badiou, 1968). Instead of
focusing on the historical occurrence of the infinitesimal, we focus here
on the number zero. It presents, at its base, the same kind of insight,
without getting into all too technical mathematical issues.

Nothing’s name

Before the occurrence of zero as a mark, zero – nothing – is simply

nothing and therefore something which literally cannot be talked about.
The problem occurs once zero becomes something marked.
Historically, this happens in various places and various ways–for
example to denote the place of the absence of tenths in the number 101.
(Kaplan, 2000; Seife, 2000). The number zero at first does not appear
as an independent number, but simply as a practical mark. Nonetheless,
once it is marked, the genie is out of the bottle and the question of what
the symbol ‘stands for’, becomes unavoidable. Zero, as a sign is
therefore not a sign one invented to name the corresponding reality of
‘nothing’. On the contrary, it is the fact of being named which raises
questions about its corresponding reality.
REALITY'S SLIP OF THE TONGUE 509

For Pythagorean mathematics, the issue of number zero is inherently

problematic, not only because the content of the marked zero is nothing,
but because, once it is marked, one can enter it into the use of
mathematical calculations as if it existed. But if one introduces zero into
the series of ‘all possible numbers’, it shakes up the foundations of what
was considered to be a number. For example, one of the Pythagorean
axioms about ‘all numbers’ was that the more one adds a number to
itself the result becomes an ever-greater number (e.g. 1+1+1+1+1+…).
On the other hand, once we accept zero as a possible number, this does
not apply anymore. Furthermore, what to do with the multiplication of
a number by zero? And what about the division by zero? It is clear that
the previously found axioms about mathematical operations are not
suitable with zero. If one would accept this ‘impossible number’ as a
possible one, the discovered field of mathematics itself would lose its
ground. Therefore, the number zero was primarily something dangerous
to be prohibited because of its potentiality to subvert the field of
mathematics into an unknown chaos.

The element might at first merely appear as a false element,

something which simply is no number and therefore not real. In this
case, ‘zero’ represents nothing, it has no content and therefore does not
exist. Thus, stating that nothing ‘is not’, is enough to come to grips with
it.5 And still, one cannot resolve the problem by prohibiting it. There is
a difference between something being simply inexistent and not present
to us in any way, and the insistence of what does not exist, as a result
of the surplus proper to being named. The number zero as an excluded
impossibility continues to haunt the field of mathematics and its reality.
It continues to haunt it because, once represented, one cannot exclude
its exclusion.

Therefore, once the ‘uninvited’ zero-mark appears, it acquires a

specific status, having its effect within the reality from which it is
excluded. Indeed, the fact of being represented demands for its
exclusion, which at first glance seems to be a procedure happening
outside of the discovered field of mathematics. The ‘naturalness’ of
numbers presupposed that numbers are simply unconditionally given,
so that mathematicians only discover pre-existing natural numbers and
their lawfulness. In this sense, the number zero’s ‘being-represented’

5. This is in reference to the title of Kaplan’s (2000) book The Nothing That Is, A Natural History
of Zero.
510 ARTHUR SOLLIE

seems to disturb mathematics from without. But once the zero-mark

appears, the presupposition of mathematics as an ‘undisturbed natural
reality’ to be discovered becomes undefendable precisely because it is
conditioned by the exclusion of the zero-mark which disturbs the field.
In this sense, the number zero is not simply disturbing mathematical
content from without, because it already creates mathematical content
by disturbing it (thereby provoking its exclusion). If mathematical
content can only be stabilized by excluding something, numbers cannot
be simply given anymore. This is why the real is not the natural
givenness of numbers but manifests itself as the content-creating
element which is the artificial excluding of the number zero itself.

The dynamic that is being exposed with the disturbance of the

naturalness of numbers concerns the myth of an untouched content, an
undisturbed reality that we merely discover and name. The
representational surplus proper to the number zero operates a rupture, a
separation, a ‘negation’ (in Hegelian terms) from this ‘natural
givenness’. It reveals that its supposed naturalness is an imaginary
defense against the real that disturbs and creates it. From the viewpoint
of the myth, the signifier ‘zero’ can be considered as a ‘proof’ that
representations disturb our access to reality, but this is only possible
insofar as our idea of possible reality is one without disturbance. The
representational surplus reveals that we have to add something to it
(operation of exclusion) in order for it to be natural. It reveals that
‘natural reality’ is itself the most artificial reality – a reality dependent
on our constant subjective effort.

Conceptual leaps like the emergence of ‘zero’ confront us with the

possibility that content, knowledge or clinical experience arises in
response to a disturbance. In other words, the experience of not fully
grasping reality means that we are already at the heart of it. Therefore,
the ancient mathematicians were not simply afraid of the number zero
as we know it. What they were afraid of was the abyssal origin of their
own mathematics and the consequences this has for the cosmic
harmony they envisioned. The fact that only zero qua representational
mark could operate a rupture in it, should not force us to consider that
the disturbance happened ‘from without’ the mathematical field. One
can say that the disturbing ground always existed but appeared only
here and there as a fleeting interference. The concept ‘zero’ turns this
ephemerality into something marked, it realizes it into something
indestructible that one cannot get rid of. Zero, then, refers not only to
REALITY'S SLIP OF THE TONGUE 511

groundlessness in general but also to groundlessness from which the

mathematical system emerged. Thus, the emergence of zero as a leap
‘reveals’ that this fleeting disturbance always already was the universal
content-creating element constituting the particular elements of
mathematics.6 Following Lacan we could conclude that a fundamental
concept ‘leaps’ by operating a violent separation within the positive
reality it disturbs. It opens up the construction site of what reality
always already was, by including in it its constitutive gap.

Concept as a rupture from and within immediate reality

That conceptual ruptures are possible does not mean that what is real
is simply illusory, historicist or relative, reducing every real to ‘what
the symbolic field considers to be reality’.
On the contrary, such a rupture confronts us to something real. A
real from which the fantasy of ‘naturality’ tries to escape. What is more,
the liberating potential of concepts are not in spite of but because of
their ‘alienating’, ‘abstracting’ and ‘limiting’ character. The experience
of language cutting us of from ‘natural reality’ works as a proof that
concepts can be perfect weapons to mark a cut from the imaginary
presupposition of a natural, ‘holistic’ real. Only the inertia of an abstract
empty element can force a rupture from the concrete, thereby realizing
a cut which was retroactively always already operative within the
concrete.

Lacan’s concept of the real thus literally cuts in reality. Reality is

not simply disturbed by language use (which would again presuppose a
full natural reality as opposed to our disturbed discursive access to it),
language use manifests a ‘real’ disturbance within reality, a disturbance
that language itself can neither deal with nor do without, and in response
to which language brings itself into (metonymic) being. A nature or
reality without this disturbance is thus not ‘real reality’ prior to – or
without – ‘contamination’ by language and concepts, but a fantasy
inherent in the lack-erasing attempt of metonymic language use itself.
For if anything can be said about ‘real reality’ prior to language, it is at
least that language was already possible in it and that reality always
already contained that condition. Language and its conceptual ruptures
in particular are thus in a way slips of the tongue of reality, they are

6. The specific way in which it is excluded is discussed in Miller (1966) and Badiou (1968).
512 ARTHUR SOLLIE

points at which the lack (disturbance) proper to reality appears in one

of its productions (language).

How does conceptual rupture appear in analytic sessions? By

marking this missing point inside the analysand’s repetitive search as a
point, a gap realizes itself (by means of the surplus of representation).
An implicit failure that the repetition could not come to terms with
becomes something explicit and causes the coordinates of this repetition
to shift (thereby initiating real change). One can speak of a leap,
because one never reaches the sought-after missing reality merely by
getting closer and closer to it. A concept leaps to put an end to the
infinite progression that never reaches what it seeks, that never
eradicates what disturbs it, by marking its impossible endpoint that
reflects what fails in the production of the ever-continuing sequence.7
The concept can be regarded as ‘impossible’ to the extent that it comes
in the place of the ‘absent partner’, not by replacing this partner (which
would rather be a metonymic repetition), but by offering ‘absent
partner’ itself as the ‘not yet realized’ in the search. We can illustrate
this with a joke that Žižek (2008, p. 178) refers to in his Sublime Object
of Ideology, albeit with a slightly different interpretation. The joke goes
like this: In a museum there is a painting entitled ‘Lenin in Warsaw’ on
which Lenin's wife is painted frolicking in bed with a young Bolshevik.
“Where is Lenin?” asks a visitor to the museum guard who can't seem
to find Lenin in the painting. ‘Lenin in Warsaw’ says the guard.

The title and what the guard says are twice the same, but the title
functions as a master signifier within a master's discourse, while the
guard takes the place of the analyst. Here, the master signifier produces
a separation proper to analytical discourse. As a title, it compels the
hysterical museum visitor to find the corresponding partner of the title
between the ‘possible depicted objects’ in the painting. When this fails,
and he asks his question with the intention of finding out where he can
find Lenin in the painting anyway (metonymic repetition), ‘Lenin in
Warsaw’ becomes the actual ‘absent partner’ opened up by the surplus
of representation proper to the painting’s title. It manifests the
difference between the external title and the internal ‘painted content’

7. “Begriff evokes grasping because it is from running after the grasp of an object of our desire
that we have formed the Begriff. And everyone knows that everything that we want to possess
for desire, and not for the satisfaction of a need, flees us and slips away from us.” (Lacan, 1961-
62, XXI, 230)
REALITY'S SLIP OF THE TONGUE 513

itself within the real ‘issue’ the painting is about, thereby changing our
idea of what a painting can be/is.

The death drive of Freud’s rationalism

One can consider this view, in which words do not merely name
corresponding realities (nominalism), but also realize a gap, to be
Lacan's epistemological approach underlying his theoretical
elucubrations. Lacan himself recognizes this stance in Freud’s work.
Lacan at times refers to this position as ‘dialectical materialism’ (see
quote above), as well as ‘realism’ and ‘rationalism’8, as opposed to
nominalism, idealism, and empiricism. At first glance, rationalism
might seem like a problematic term to refer to the epistemology of
psychoanalysis. Is psychoanalysis not precisely about the fact that we
do not always make rational decisions, that our reason cannot control
our primordial unconscious urges? Is the unconscious not precisely
something that escapes the rationalizing tendencies of the Ego? This
would precisely be a nominalist view, which fundamentally considers
our reason to be limited but at the same time cannot but consider the
reality escaping our reason as an inaccessible beyond.

Lacan's rationalism is different, it shifts this gap between ratio and

reality towards one within both. In Lacan’s second seminar (1999b), he
and Hyppolite discuss Freud’s introduction of the term ‘death instinct’
or ‘death drive’ in his text Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The term,
according to Hyppolite, points to a certain enigma, a kind of ‘beyond
reason’. During this discussion Hyppolite presents the problematics of
this purported enigma to Lacan: “Isn't the discovery of the death instinct
tied to that deeper aspect which the rationalist does not express?”
(Lacan, 1999b, p. 69) Lacan then goes on to counter his question by
way of underlining the radicality of Freud’s rationalism:

“His thought deserves to be qualified, at the highest level, and in the

firmest manner, as rationalist, in the full sense of the word, and from
one end to the other. This text [Beyond the Pleasure Principle] so
difficult to penetrate, around which we have been turning, makes
present the most lively, the most pressing demands of a reason which
never abdicates, which does not say – Here begins the opaque and

8. Miller (2011, p. 20) argues that Lacan never abandoned Hegel's adage “what is real is rational
and what is rational is real.” Lacan of course substitutes the rational with the symbolic.
514 ARTHUR SOLLIE

the ineffable. He enters, and even at the risk of appearing lost in

obscurity, he continues with reason. I don't believe there is any
abdication on his part, nor any final prostration, nor that he ever
renounces working with reason, nor that he retires to the mountains,
thinking that everything is just fine as it is. … Its [his rationalism’s]
antithesis – let us call it that–is precisely the death instinct. It is a
decisive step in the grasp of reality, a reality which surpasses by far
what we designate as such in the reality principle. The death instinct
isn't an admission of impotence, it isn't a coming to a halt before an
irreducible, an ineffable last thing, it is a concept.” (Lacan, 1999b,
pp. 69-70)

The pleasure principle and the reality principle both state that
subjective productions aim to dissolve the troublesome tension between
(the representation of a) desire and its corresponding reality. The
dissolution of that tension is how Freud conceptualizes the stimulus of
pleasure. Freud, on the other hand, notes that this model is not
foolproof. He begins his text with a number of subjective productions
that precisely repeat the tension one is ‘officially’ trying to erase (the
re-experiences in post-traumatic stress, for example). At the same time,
Freud is faced with a theoretical problem. The pleasure and reality
principles can only be absolutely general if there is a tension. This
means that the principles can only be general if they do not conclusively
resolve the disturbing tension, since that would make them redundant.
The ever-recurring tension is thus not only an external disturbance of
the workings of the pleasure principle (and the reality principle), but
also the very condition for pleasure. This is a theoretical contradiction.
However, at the same time Lacan notices, this theoretical contradiction
is not merely an error, it is the point at which Freud’s ‘clinical problem’
(the repetition rather than the resolution of the tension between desire
and reality) is at work in the deadlocks of the process of writing his text.
Lacan says:

“There's something at work in him. And at the end, he himself admits

the extremely speculative nature of the whole of his argumentation,
or more precisely of his circular interrogation. He constantly returns
to his starting points, and completes another circle, and again
rediscovers the passage, and finally ends up making a leap, and
having made the leap, admits that there is something there which
does indeed move completely off the edges of the blueprint, and can
in no way be grounded solely in a reference to experience [note that
REALITY'S SLIP OF THE TONGUE 515

‘experience’ within French philosophy epoch of that time is used to

mean immediate empirical reality]. He asserts finally that if this
articulation has seemed to him to be worth communicating, it is
because he was of necessity brought down the path of this
problematic. (Lacan, 1999b, p. 67)

Lacan reads the clue to what death drive is about, not simply in
Freud’s clinical experience or in empirical reality, but in what happens
at the place of a repetitive failure in his conceptualization (which is the
reason why Lacan does not try to find Freud’s secrets in the
corresponding reality of his speculative examples, but rather in the
irresolvable urge of his writing). The repeated failures demonstrate a
surplus which leads Freud to a conceptual separation by naming it
‘death drive’. This points towards some kind of reality beyond the
shackles of the reality principle. It is therefore crucial to understand the
symbolic operationality of the repeated failure itself as the reality – or
rather the real – to which the concept of death drive corresponds. The
conceptual invention of ‘death drive’ marks a shift between the
debilitating repetition and the liberating opening up due to its naming.
By naming the repetition which haunts both theoretical work and
clinical experience, one marks an impossibility (the real) that structures
them both. We cannot access this real when we are too immersed in the
everyday automaticity of the pleasure – and for that matter, reality –
principle because this automaticity is part of the problem we are stuck
with. The conceptual invention of the death drive momentously puts
Freud’s theoretical attempts and the clinical inconsistencies he notices
on the same level. In this precise sense, for Lacan the real emerges from
conceptualization and speech productions of analysands in
psychoanalysis in the same way.9

Lacan’s rationalism therefore is not only about the incessant attempt

to rationalize things external to ratio, but about recognizing that the real
manifests itself within this attempt as its proper impossibility. This,
indeed, is Lacan’s response to nominalism:

“If I am anything, it is clear that I’m not a nominalist. I mean that

my starting point is not that the name is something that one sticks,

9. Note his saying during his seminar: “This [in the analyst’s discourse] S One, S1, is precisely
what I’m trying to produce for you, here, in so far as I am speaking. As I have said several times,
it is in this respect that I am in the place of the analysand, and this is instructive.” (Lacan, 2018,
p. 98)
516 ARTHUR SOLLIE

like this, on the real. … what is at stake is to mark off the fact that
our discourse, our scientific discourse, only finds the real in that it
depends on the function of the semblance” (Lacan 2006a, p. 28).

Both theory and practice depend on the function of the semblance

(linguistic representation) on something which is not immediately real.
But if the real is not just the real of what semblance represents, it must
be the real of the limit of the semblance itself. So if psychoanalytical
ontology/epistemology is concerned with the question ‘to what real do
concepts refer?’, one should be able to interpret its basic notions as
unconscious and sexuality in this dialectally-materialist/rationalist way.

The unconscious, reality’s slip of the tongue

Freud founds his psychoanalytical method of dream interpretation

on the fact that there is no code to translate a manifest dream element
into a corresponding latent meaning.10

If dream-analysis focuses on the search for latent meaning, it

suggests that one suffers from a lack of knowledge concerning this
unconscious latent meaning, and that cure consists of restoring this lack.
The unconscious, then, can easily be understood as something one’s
knowledge has no access to, but which nonetheless causes suffering. In
other words, here, we are dealing with the hypothesis of an underlying
unconscious reality which manifest representations fail to represent
correctly due to repression. In this sense, the unconscious is a kind of
being to which our access (knowledge) is limited due to a repressed
mediation between our knowledge and reality. If, on the other hand, this
mediating code does not exist as Freud states – what we suffer from is
not a disturbing underlying latent reality, but the reality of a lack of
mediation, a lack which makes us seek for a correspondent reality. The
unconscious, in this way, is not the inaccessible totality of latent
thoughts (which are, after all, more or less accessible remainders of the
day before), but a lack of reality somehow represented within manifest
thoughts, something missing, something disturbing and shifting, a lack
producing manifest content itself.11 In other words, what is repressed is

10. “In the case of the decoding method everything depends on the trustworthiness of the ‘key’
– the dream-book, and of this we have no guarantee” (Freud, 1971, p. 100).
11. For example, Freud writes about the slip of the tongue: “we have so far paid no attention
whatever to the product of the slip considered by itself, without reference to its origin. If we
REALITY'S SLIP OF THE TONGUE 517

not simply a content, but the content-creating lack itself, by means of

which content (repetition) exists ultimately only as the return of the
repressed. One might therefore say that repression finally is a repression
of (the function of) repression itself.

That is why Lacan baptizes the unconscious as a lack in knowledge,

an ‘in-su’ (‘Unbewusste’, ‘un-known’) represented, a lack that has no
prior correspondence in reality (and thus corresponds only to a void in
reality, a non-realized something12) but which precisely because of that
problem and its own failed search for it, unintentionally realizes itself,
troubling the reality that is used to be the source for symbolic
productions and representations. The unconscious in our manifest
productions is therefore not simply something I think, but the
manifestation of the fact that some kind of thinking has taken place, that
symbolic manifestations have been produced (what Lacan entitles by
saying ‘ça pense’, ‘it thinks’) (Milner, 2003, p. 270).

The concept of the unconscious is what marks this surplus, the leap
in causality to which the subject is subjected. The unconscious and the
subject are therefore concepts that manifest the realization of the
difference between the signifier (‘ça pense’) and reality (‘ça pense’) as
a surplus in the reality that signifiers are ‘meant to’ merely represent.
The signifier is here not simply knowledge, but a failure of knowledge
that cannot remain silent, a non-knowledge that corresponds to some
not fully realized reality. This non-knowledge disturbs mental life in a
fleeting way and which only its conceptual marking by the concept of
the unconscious can get hold off.

In this sense, the invention of the concept of the unconscious

introduces a surplus. It renders a practice and a theory possible which
pushes the consequences of representation to its utter limit, by means

decide to do so, we are bound in the end to find the courage to say that in a few examples what
results from the slip of the tongue has a sense of its own. What do we mean by ‘has a sense’?
That the product of the slip of the tongue may perhaps itself have a right to be regarded as a
completely valid psychical act, pursuing an aim of its own, as a statement with a content and
significance. So far we have always spoken of ‘parapraxes [faulty acts]’, but it seems now as
though sometimes the faulty act was itself quite a normal act, which merely took the place of the
other act which was the one expected or intended.” (Freud, 1981b, p. 35)
12. “Indeed, what became apparent at first to Freud, to the discoverers, to those who made the
first steps, and what still becomes apparent to anyone in analysis who spends some time
observing what truly belongs to the order to the unconscious, is that it is neither being, nor non-
being, but the unrealized.” (Lacan, 1998, pp. 29-30)
518 ARTHUR SOLLIE

of which it gets included in the reality one is troubled with.13 The

unconscious as concept is therefore maybe itself the ultimate ‘slip of
the tongue’ of reality. It attests to how an epistemological limit (the gap
between signifier and signified) spills over into an ontological
production (the unconscious). It opens up the path to a different kind of
‘being’ or ‘reality’ than one could possibly have thought of before the
concept’s invention.

Impossibility, sexuality’s sexual character

A second basic feature psychoanalysis and the unconscious are

entangled with is sexuality. Here, again, the problem of the
corresponding ‘natural’ reality the notion of sexuality is supposed to
represent (genital coupling in view of reproduction), is fundamentally
problematic.

Freud (1981a) noted that the question as to what exactly ‘sexuality’

corresponds to is one that children struggle with: ‘Where do children
come from?’ ‘How do they get into the womb and how do they get out?’
‘What does the fact that there is a difference in sexual organs mean
(with theories often tending to negate the difference itself by assuming,
for example, that everyone had a penis at birth, that it has yet to grow,
etc.)’? ‘What are adults not telling me?’. Children address this to adults
who, in a sense of embarrassment, attempt (not) to answer accordingly.
The embarrassment already betrays to the children the very ‘fraught’
nature of the issue which might compel them to seriously question their
answers. The unsatisfying replies lead children to invent their own
‘infantile theories of sexuality’. These theories may be wrong,
‘grotesque’ as Freud calls them, but, as Freud also points out, “each one
of them contains a fragment of real truth; and in this they are analogous
to the attempts of adults, which are looked at as strokes of genius, at
solving the problems of the universe which are too hard for human
comprehension” (Freud, 1981a, p. 215).

The failures peculiar to adult answers can make it seem as if adults,

because of their moral prudence, do not want to expose everything
about “raw” sexuality for children. In this sense, the lack of answers is
something that in itself has nothing to do with the reality sought for, but
13. “It [the unconscious] represents my representation there where it lacks, where I am nothing
but a lack of the subject. [L'inconscient […] représente ma représentation là où elle manque, où
je ne suis qu'un manque du sujet.]” (Lacan, 2001, p. 334).
REALITY'S SLIP OF THE TONGUE 519

rather with the conventional nature of moral laws. For Freud, however,
this embarrassment does not simply serve to cover up something
morally indecent but reveals something fundamental about both (adult)
sexuality and knowledge acquisition in general14. The insistence of a
source of truth in spite of the overall error, that is how, according to
Freud, infantile theory formations correspond to theories about the most
unfathomable problems of the universe. Freud clarifies this point by
stating that:

“What is correct and hits the mark in such theories is to be explained

by their origin from the components of the sexual instinct which are
already stirring in the childish organism. For it is not owing to any
arbitrary mental act or to chance impressions that those notions arise,
but to the necessities of the child's psychosexual constitution.”
(Freud, 1981a, p. 215)

According to Freud, when children come upon ideas of anal or

sadistic births, oral conceptions, or castration fantasies, it means that
the ‘theorizing activity’ itself is not without some physical stimulus.15
Thus, the enigmatic ‘reality’ of sexuality (the fact that adults conceal it,
etc.) does not merely mean that sexuality is effectively withheld from
children, but that sexuality is already ‘at work’ in their very
conceptualizations of the ‘inaccessible’ nature of sexuality. Sexuality
can therefore rightly be called the dead end of the nominalist search.
This is something which Lacan is well aware of as he points out that
sexuality shares an inherent problematic with epistemological issues16.
Sexuality (its object and drive) is ultimately endowed with the kind of
ontological gap to which the ‘unconscious’ as a concept corresponds.
The object of sexuality concerns the ‘ineffable Other’ in the sought-
after object (the opposite (or same) sex), against which ‘problematic’
positions can be defined as obsession, fascination, repulsion,
domination, rejection, limitation, sacrifice, and so on, coupled with a
variety of fantasy theories. The failure of nominalism consists in the
impossibility of finding a non-problematic, ‘direct’ way of dealing with

14. For an excellent elaboration of this point, see the book of Alenka Zupančič (2018): What IS
Sex?.
15. Recall Lacan’s saying that: “For the moment, I am not fucking, I am talking to you. Well! I
can have exactly the same satisfaction as if I were fucking.” (Quoted in Zupančič, 2018, p. IX)
16. Note the subtitle of Lacan’s (2006) Seminar XX: ‘on female sexuality and the limits of love
and knowledge’.
520 ARTHUR SOLLIE

this otherness without completely losing its specifying ‘sexual’

character.

Lacan ‘marks’ this shift by writing that “one cannot write the sexual
relationship” (Lacan, 2018, p. 20). And this is not simply the case
because representation/formalization fails to represent reality, but
because, as the infantile theories of sexuality show us, the ‘real’ that the
theories try to account for (the real of sexuality) already appears at the
place of their failed attempt. Nominalism’s fear of error – to paraphrase
Hegel – therefore appears to be rather a fear of truth. Indeed, one cannot
write the relationship, but one can write its impossibility.17 This, then,
is how Freud’s ‘rationalist’ position translates for Lacan into a method
of profound ‘formalization’: “The real can only be inscribed on the
basis of an impasse of formalization” (Lacan, 2006b, p. 93). Lacan,
therefore, like Freud, is not left open-mouthed before the ‘ineffable
enigma of sexuality’, before something knowledge cannot ever reach
but marks it as the realization of an impossible point in knowledge,
which, in its ‘realization’ gives sexuality its ‘real’ or ‘sexual’ character.

Another way of saying this is: just as there is no non-alienated

unconscious (a reality before representation), there is no non-alienated
sexuality prior to the detours and deviations involving attempts to
understand what ‘all the fuss is about’, the attempts to ‘naturalize’ it, to
represent it, to take an attitude towards it, and so on. Subtract these
attempts from sexuality, and you lose what is ‘sexual’ about it. The
‘failed repetitions’, the deviations, and the detours around them
themselves make up sexuality’s sexual character. These detours
constitute the place of the sought-after (missing) core of sexuality. They
themselves place the relationship in the center by drawing out the way
they approach it. But in these iterations sexuality's alienation is not yet
fully assimilated, there remains an assumption that an Other, an
appropriate partner or formula will yet emerge. The concept that marks
this place but does not abolish this alienation. The concept realizes the
sought-after object by taking its place. The concept is in fact a linguistic
entity that, by definition, has nothing to do with the original reality of
the object searched for. It is precisely for this reason that the concept or
the logical formula might be the perfect way to mark the ‘alienated’

17. These are the stakes for Lacan (2018, p. 20): “Last year, I took the step of announcing to you
that this non-relation, if I can put it like that, needs to be written. It needs to be written at any
cost. I mean that the other relation needs to be written, the one that blocks the possibility of
writing the first one.”
REALITY'S SLIP OF THE TONGUE 521

‘unnatural nature’ of sexuality. In this situation, the distance between

word and thing is not just something that will never allow the two to
come into contact, but the very inner ‘unnatural’ reality of the thing
itself.

Conclusion

We began the article with the problem of the gap between theory and
practice, which we restated as the gap between words and reality. A
nominalist position holds that language lacks. It warns you of the
danger of abstract and universal theories, concepts and categories
blinding you to singular reality or clinical concreteness. The oft-heard
adage to let go of theory in the clinic definitely contains a valuable
stance, but it might also serve to suggest that it is possible to step outside
the distorting characteristics of concepts and general words towards a
reality beyond them. This elevates reality to an ideal beyond the limits
of language.

According to Lacan, such a position is a priori impossible. ‘There is

no meta-language’, a formula that Lacan repeats so often, means here,
there is no ‘real, non-alienated language’ beyond that abstract language
of theory. The patients who come into analysis struggle with the same
thing – for them, too, the impossibility of putting their problems into
words, already brings about the real problem. So, there is no clinical
reality beyond the limits of language. The productivity of language
already proves there is a lack in the real with which language can do
neither with nor without. Lack is therefore essentially something
redoubled. It concerns both language and reality. Reality without lack
is ideal, it lacks its ‘real’ character.

The fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis contain this redoubled

lack. The ‘things’ that the concepts designate always bear a trace of the
‘history’ of the concepts themselves, of the repetitive discursive failures
trough which they first appeared. Inversely, when language or concepts
begin to show their limitations, the issue is to find out what kind of real
appears through them. Such a limit is real in the sense that it was always
already there, unnoticed, unrealized or even excluded, but nonetheless
defining the coordinates of a repetitive effort to (not) attain its
resolution in a reality beyond its own limit. This ‘piece of the real’
produces something new only when it is marked, when it appears to
522 ARTHUR SOLLIE

have always already been at work in discursive productions, because

only then does it break the laws of what was previously considered
(im)possible.

Bibliography

Badiou, A. (1968). La subversion infinitésimale. Cahiers pour l'analyse, 9, 118-137.

Freud, S. (1971). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud, Volume IV (1900): The Interpretation of Dreams (First part). London: The
Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1981a). The Sexual Theories of Children. In S. Freud, The Standard Edition of
the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume IX (1906-1908):
Jensen's Gradiva and Other Works (pp. 205-226). London: The Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1981b). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud, Volume XV (1915-1916): Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (Parts I and
II). London: The Hogarth Press.
Hegel, G. W. (1977). Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hegel, G. W. (2010). The Science of Logic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kaplan, R. (2000). The Nothing That Is, A Natural History of Zero. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Koyre, A. (1943). Galileo and the Scientific Revolution of the Seventeenth Century. The
Philosophical Review, 52(4), 333-348.
Kusters, W. (2020). A Philosophy of Madness, The Experience of Psychotic Thinking.
Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Lacan, J. (1961-1962). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book IX: Identification (unpublished
document translated by Cormac Gallagher). Retrieved from Lacan in Ireland:
http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Seminar-IX-
Amended-Iby-MCL-7.NOV_.20111.pdf
Lacan, J. (1964-1965). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XII: Crucial Problems for
Psychoanalysis (unpublished document translated by Cormac Gallagher). Retrieved
from Lacan in Ireland: http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/wp-
content/uploads/2010/06/12-Crucial-problems-for-psychoanalysis.pdf
Lacan, J. (1968-1969). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVI, From an Other to the
other (unpublished document translated by Cormac Gallagher). Retrieved from Lacan
in Ireland: http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Book-16-
from-an-Other-to-the-other.pdf
Lacan, J. (1971). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVIII: On A Discourse That Might
Not Be A Semblance (unpublished document translated by Cormac Gallagher).
Retrieved from Lacan in Ireland: www.lacaninireland.com/web/wp-
content/uploads/2010/06/Book-18-On-a-discourse-that-might-not-be-a-semblance.pdf
Lacan, J. (1991a). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique,
1953–1954. (J.-A. Miller, Ed.) New York: W. W. Norton.
Lacan, J. (1991b). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud's Theory and
in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-1955. (J.-A. Miller, Ed.) New York: W. W.
Norton.
Lacan, J. (1993). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III: The Psychoses. (J.-A. Miller,
Ed.) New York: W. W. Norton.
Lacan, J. (1998). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts
of Psychoanalysis. (J.-A. Miller, Ed.) New York: W. W. Norton.
Lacan, J. (2001). Autres Écrits. Paris: Seuil.
REALITY'S SLIP OF THE TONGUE 523

Lacan, J. (2006a). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII: The Other Side of
Psychoanalysis. (J.-A. Miller, Ed.) New York: W. W. Norton.
Lacan, J. (2006b). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore: On Feminine
Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge. (J.-A. Miller, Ed.) New York: W. W.
Norton.
Lacan, J. (2007). Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English. New York: W. W. Norton.
Lacan, J. (2014). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X: Anxiety. (J.-A. Miller, Ed.) New
York: Polity.
Lacan, J. (2018). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book IXX: ... or Worse. (J.-A. Miller, Ed.)
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Miller, J.-A. (1966). La suture, Éléments de la logique du signifiant. Cahiers pour l'analyse,
1, 37-49.
Miller, J.-A. (2011). L'un tout seul (unpublished seminar). Retrieved from
http://jonathanleroy.be/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/2010-2011-LUn-tout-seul-JA-
Miller.pdf
Milner, J.-C. (2003). The Doctrine of Science. In S. Žižek (Ed.), Jacques Lacan, Critical
Evaluations in Cultural Theory, Volume I: Psychoanalytic Theory and Practice (pp.
264-294). London: Routledge.
Seife, C. (2000). Zero, The Biography of a Dangerous Idea. London: Penguin Books.
Žižek, S. (2008). The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso.
Žižek, S. (2021). For Lacan, against Lacanian ideology. In Tupinamba, G., The Desire of
Psychoanalysis, Exercises in Lacanian Thinking. Illinois: Northwestern University
Press.
Zupančič, A. (2017). What IS Sex? Massachusetts: The MIT Press.