Re-Joycing the Ego

- Truth is characterised by reason of this S^: the analysand' only says The Reign of the Image
words; the one who is supposed to know something is the analyst: pure
supposition, of course.
This S^, that which the analyst is supposed to know, is never completely As the structuringpower ofthe symbolic declines, do we see
said; it is only said in the form of half-saying the truth. a corresponding rise ofthe image?Jacques-Alain Miller explores
It is through this analytic discourse that I have made the distinction the differences between master signifiers and what he calls ‘sovereign
between what is uttered and a sort of half-saying. images’. The late Serge Cottet highlights the role ofthe image in
It is insofar as the analyst is this semblant of waste {d) that he intervenes fantasies and screen memories but also in photography andpainting.
at the level of the subject $, that is, at the level of what is conditioned: AndJorge Assefwonders whether Guy Debord’s ‘Society of
1. by what he utters, the Spectacle’poses new challengesfor psychoanalysis today?
2. by what he does not say.
semblant what it states
(a)
ofwaste >- s
(silence) A
The Sovereign Image
half y what it does not say Jacques-Alain Miller
of the truU
S.
semblant of waste (silence)
t our previous Study Days at Belo Horizonte, two years ago, our
half saying the truth

A
what it states [what he utters] . Brazilian colleagues asked me to propose a title for the current
what it does not say [what he does not say] Study Days. I responded on the spot, “the sovereign image”. The
title evokes an opening rather than a closing. It is also fitting
semblant (a)---------------- ----------► S unconscious knowledge because the Study Days were going to be held in Rio de Janeiro, a city that
ofwaste is a spectacle in itself, full of beauty. Where better to study the sovereignty
(silence) A
of the image?
what the unconscious Although the “sovereign image” is not a category of what one of our
halfsaying y produces, plus dejouir colleagues called the language of our parish, the term was immediately accepted
ofthe trutt as the title of these Study Days. It has generated many works, some of which
s.
The silence corresponds to the semblant ofwaste.
parletre
have already been published in the volume associated with this encounter.

semblant of waste (silence) A Homologue of the Master Signifier

half-saying the truth
I introduced the expression “sovereign image” as a homologue, in the
unconscious knowledge
what the unconscious produces, surplus jouissance, speaking being imaginary, of the expression “master signifier” in the symbolic. The expres­
sion “master signifier” is a term from our parish. A parish, by the way, that
The silence corresponds to the semblant of waste. currently has many parishioners.

Translated by Jack W. Stone and Russell Grigg

Jacques-Alain Miller is the founder of the World Association of Psychoanalysis and an Analyst Member
1. analysand fot'analyste'. of the School (ams) and member of ECF and NLS.

38 The Lacanian Review No. 5 39

The Reign of the Image
The master signifier is not a Freudian category. It was Lacans invention,
something that he forged artificially to designate the signifier by which the
subject seeks to be represented in the symbolic and inscribed in the signi­
fying chain. If we introduce the category of the master signifier into Freud’s
work, into psychoanalytic terminology, this category attracts, regroups and
puts in series concepts that would otherwise remain disconnected - from
the ego ideal to the Name of the Father.
Our parish is accustomed to the term “master signifier”, which, one has
to say, is a term that is easily grasped. It has effects of resonance even for
those who are outside our parish. And this despite the fact that any signifier
can come to the place of another. There is, strictly speaking, no privileged
signifier. This is the very definition of the signifier - an element “x” suscep­
tible of metaphor and metonymy. Given that there is an equality between
signifiers, one should not really speak of a master signifier. By definition,
any signifier can be substituted for another. The very expression master
signifier” is thus paradoxical.
It is nonetheless possible to posit such a syntagm for reasons of pure logic,
or, let’s say, of quasi-pure logic. I am not going into the details, which could
be the topic for an entire seminar. I am simply evoking the term “master
signifier” as an introduction to the attempt to establish the term “sovereign”.
Is it useful? Can we make good use of it in the imaginary register?
Imaginary Signifiers in Psychoanalysis
Let us go back to the imaginary register. A question arises from the
outset -1 won’t answer it in this opening presentation, at least not comple­
tely: is the sovereign image an element of the imaginary register in the way
that the master signifier is an element of the symbolic register? In truth,
this assertion is difficult to maintain, unless we significantise the image. The
image can only really become an element of the imaginary register on
condition of making it into a signifier.
This is something to consider; images can be significantised, can be
transformed into signifiers, can be taken as signifiers, because images, like
everything else, are only named through speech. So we will speak of imagi­
nary signifiers. Is an imaginary signifier still an image? Under what condi­
tions does an image become a signifier?
These are pressing questions. It is astonishing that they have not yet
been posed, that they do not yet have established answers within our parish.
It could have led me to suggest, as a title for these Study Days, “Imaginary
Signifiers in Psychoanalysis”. Yet I preferred “The Sovereign Image”.
The Lacanian Review No. 5
40
Jacques-Alain Miller, The Sovereign Image
The Primacy of the Sayable Over the Visible
There is a world of images. Images abound. There are dream images
that do not have the same structure as the images that we perceive when
we wake up. There are images of the field of perception, where the visual
dominates. The pregnancy of some of these images has been studied by the
psychology of form. Gestaltpsychology, which has demonstrated the presence
in certain perceptual images of a formalisation that operates spontaneously
in visual perception. There are images that we try to situate as precondition
for objectivity, like those with which phenomenology, in particular that of
Merleau-Ponty, has tried to describe the world. There are the images of art,
produced and exhibited in order to liberate a satisfaction that is not very
easy to situate. There are the images derived from what academic psycho­
logy calls the faculty of the imagination, which we encounter in psychoa­
nalysis under the name of fantasy, especially correlated with a satisfaction
that one can easily situate as masturbatory.
All in all, there is an abundance of images. Let’s also not forget all the
masks, costumes, doubles, simulacrums and fetishes. There is a world lull of
im^es and of theories of the image. It is into this world that I enter with the
signifier “sovereign image”, posing the question: what are the images that
dominate the imaginary in psychoanalysis? When it comes to psychoanalysis,
are there even still images? This question is worth asking inasmuch as the
analytic operation, in its way of proceeding, seems adequate to undoing what
James Joyce in Ulysses calls “the ineluctable modality of the visible.”'
The ineluctable modality in psychoanalysis is rather that of the
“sayable”. In psychoanalysis, the sayable prevails over the visible. We can
ask ourselves what we are doing paying attention to the image, commenting
on paintings, rather than peacefully leaving this task to the art historians
or even the critics whose profession this is. Does this have anything to do
with psychoanalysis? And if yes, why?
I evoked the images of the dream. It is not, properly speaking, the dream
images that are the object of Freud’s concern, but rather the recounting of
the dream. What matters is what is said about it and not the image, some­
thing that would be seen in a very specific modality of the visible.
And in fact the analytic experience seems to rather prescribe a suspension,
a toning down of the field of perception to the exclusive benefit of speech.
To the point that receiving a patient face to face is always a little disquieting
for him, a sort of concession made to structure and offered to the subject, as
1. Joyce, Ulysses, Folio Edition, London, 1988, p. 37.
41
The Reign of the Image
if the field of the Other, abstract as such, had to lean on a corporeal support.
With the space given to seeing, to perception, in the face to fiice experience,
one can always wonder - and patients themselves wonder - whether or not
we are in the psychoanalytic discourse. It can be the case, but the insistence
of the visual, the perceptible, in the field of the analytic operation nevertheless
gives rise to a certain disquiet. In truth, in a psychoanalysis there is nothing
to see and everything to say. Even if carried out face to face, it is always an
invitation for the subject to abstract himself from the ineluctable modality
of the visible and renounce the image in favour of the signifies
Our Three Sovereign Images
In this shipwreck of the image, some images nonetheless survive. For
the following reason: they condense in the speech of patients or in the
deductions of the analyst - the elective reference to the image is not the
patient’s prerogative. We can call these images that survive the shipwreck
of the world of the image in psychoanalysis the “sovereign images” of
psychoanalysis. I find three, no more; one’s own body, the body of the
Other and the phallus.
First of all, ones own body. This is the body that belongs to me. To each
his “my body”. In his mirror stage Lacan considered this body as a visual
form. He wanted to show that it was the matrix of the ego. He gave the
Freudian concept of narcissism its reference starting from the image of one’s
own body. Thus he made of the ego nothing other than the idea ofoneself
as a body^ a definition he gave in his seminar on Joyce, in other words at
the very end of his elaboration. I could say much more concerning the
image of one’s own body, but I will spare you this.
Second, the body ofthe Other. This is the body on which, according to
Freud, we read castration. For Freud castration is, so to speak, an optical
castration. His reference to anatomy, “anatomy is destiny”, concerns in the
first instance not scientific anatomy, but the field of vision.^ At the same
time, this form lends itself to signifying formalisation since it is the support
of a presence and an absence.
This is precisely what Lacan underlines about the third sovereign image,
the phallus. The phallus is not the male organ of reproduction, but rather
its form erected and transformed into a signifier, while preserving all its
imaginary articulations. It is furthermore in relation to the phallus that
2. Lacan, Seminar XXIII, The Sinthome, Polity, Cambridge, 2016. Lacan says, “The idea of the self,
the idea of the body, carries weight. This is what is called the Ego", p. 129.
3. Freud, S., “The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex” (1924), SB Volxix, p. 178.
42 The Lacanian Review No. 5
Jacques-Alain Miller, The Sovereign Image
Lacan ventured the expression “imaginary signifier”, which we could come
back to.^ It is from the phallus that are derived the objects that in the clinic
warrant being called fetishes.
So this is what psychoanalysis extracts from the world of images; three
sovereign images. I would like to add that each of these images calls for a
specific operator deployed in the field of vision. In the first instance, the
mirror, which redoubles and divides space in three dimensions. Second, the
veil — which we call clothing when it covers the body — which operates the
magical and metaphysical conversion of the nothing into something. There
is nothing more precious than to veil something when it is the nothing that
is veiled. To veil the nothing is without doubt to make it exist. The veil can
thus be designated as the veil of the nothing, leaving to others the task, in
the end, of making it reveal something for good. This is the subde operation
of the transvestite.
In the third instance, a series of words — the support, the pedestal, the
frame, the fissure, the window — a whole series of visual operators that
delimit and isolate that which in this way can be offered, exhibited, as One
image. It is in this series that we encounter the operators that, in the best
possible way, make signifiers out of images. This is equally true of the mirror
and the veil, given that these operators isolate the image by accentuating,
marking its unity, its unitary value. As soon as there is One image, it is
significantised.
Here then are the three sovereign images. I have merely put three sove­
reign images and three operators together, a series of operators of the visible
that have a signifying effect. So we could ask whether it is worth adding
this category of the sovereign image given that, in the final analysis, when
an image is real it is a signifier. Why not just be satisfied with the category
of the master signifier?
The Image: An Ineluctable Modality of the Fantasy
There is at least one difference between the master signifier and the sove­
reign image: the sovereign images do not represent a subject, they are coor­
dinated with its jouissance. I propose for discussion the fact that these three
sovereign images are implicated in the fantasy. In order to not remain in a
world so devoid of images, I bring these three sovereign images together to
the degree that they are present in fantasy.
4. See Lacan, J„ “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Uncon­
scious. ” ^critSy Norton, NY/London, 2006, pp. 67T702.
43
The Reign of the Image
The fantasy is without a doubt a term from our parish. Considered as
a phrase, it has the function of an axiom. But there is no fantasy that does
not present itself in the register of the imaginary. In the end, the image is
an inevitable, ineluctable, modality of the fantasy. When there is only a
phrase, not linked to an image or a representation, it is difficult to qualify
this instance as a fantasy. In our practice, we require an imaginary element
in order to speak of a fantasy, to recognise it as such.
There is no objection to my speaking here of a “phrase-image” in refer­
ring to the fantasy. A phrase-image, as we know, is usually a fixed image.
Obviously, this stasis is magnified when we are captivated by it. A fixed
image can be an image-movement. But when a fantasmatic image is
involved, what always prevails is a repetitive movement that is closed on
itself. The fantasmatic image is essentially an immobile image, a suspended
element, fixed and erratic.
Lets say that the sovereignty of the image, if it exists, stems from a signi­
fying capture of jouissance. Is it an ultimate sovereignty? These images are
without a doubt under dominion, the dominion or empire of the gaze. I
am saying empire because the gaze is not a sovereign image. Moreover, in
its definition, the gaze is properly speaking what is without image.
Through it, we find a representation, a supplement. I will return to this
point. The gaze is “enplus”, something extra, but it is not a sovereign im^e.
These three sovereign images all pertain to the body. It is a question of
the body. They mark a fascination for the body, in particular for the body
that belongs to man, the speaking being. The unique prevalence of the gaze,
in comparison with the animal world, denotes a certain disharmony of man
with the world. In truth, this prevalence of one’s body stems precisely from
signifying disharmony.
The Place Where the Imaginary Is Moored to Jouissance
The analytic body is distributed according to these three sovereign
images, to the point where we can say: “The body, it’s that, we know what
it is”. But we do not know what it is.
Ifwe were to ask, for example, what was the sovereign image for the ancient
Greeks, who were not familiar with psychoanalysis, they would answer “the
fece”, or at least they would inscribe it among the sovereign images.
The Greek word for face, prosopon, designates what presents itself to
the sight of others, precisely in contrast with the rest of the body, more
or less veiled by clothing. More precisely, it is the face, the part that
comes below the metopon, the head. Aristotle defines the prosopon exactly
44 The Lacanian Review No. 5
Jacques-Alain Miller, The Sovereign image
as the part of a man that is encompassed between the head and the neck.
He celebrates the function of the face as what is presented to the other.
Because man, as Freud also observed, is the only animal that stands
upright, looks in front of him and projects his voice forward. The Greek
face is that which emits both the gaze and the voice, it is that which
speaks and sees and at the same time is seen, in a perfect reversibility. It
follows that the Greek prosopon is the coat of arms of the subject. It is
what each one carries in himself and exposes to the eyes of all, in this
way manifesting his own individuality. The face, then, is the image as
signifier of the subject.
Curiously, the same word in Greek is used to designate the mask. But
the Greek mask, as is shown to us by a scholar in a work I have just finished
reading, does not mask anything. In contrast to what the mask is for us
today, the Greek mask represents and identifies.
There is one exception in all of Greek literature, a single instance, a
unique character whose face is described as a mask, Socrates - precisely for
whom the face is nothing but appearance. Socrates is the only Greek who
thinks that the face is merely an appearance of being. This is why Plato
underlines that Socrates does not address himself to the face of Alcibiades
but to his soul. In fact, Socrates is the paradigm, the perfect example of his
theory, because Socrates had a perfect ugliness, an accomplished ugliness.
We can say that his face was a mask in the sense that we understand it today,
that is, it dissimulated the beauty hidden inside. You know that Socrates
had a face like the mask of a Silenus, a not very likeable mask that hid,
beneath this appearance, the precious object, the agalma.
Lacan suggests that it is perhaps here that something of psychoanalysis
effectively begins. The analyst aims to be “faceless”, in as much as he dissi­
mulates the invisible image of the agalma, the object with which a veil is
intimately associated, a veil that dissimulates precisely the nothing. Among
the Greeks it is only Socrates who announces psychoanalysis, since psychoa­
nalysis consummates the decadence of the sovereign image of the face, of
the prosopon.
Let us leave the Greek fece to its andquity, it is no longer ours, except when
we are, like Socrates, containers of the agalma. But let us observe that the sove­
reign images are the place where the imaginary moors itself to jouissance.
The Secret of Surplus Jouissance
I will now approach what I had in mind when I proposed “the sovereign
image” — not without thinking about the visual splendour of Rio. We all
45
The Reign of the Image
know the reference, Freud’s turmoil on the Acropolis in Athens and the
title that he gave to it: “A Disturbance of Memory..This is the crux of
the question: when Freud finds himself moved by the magnificent spectacle
of the Acropolis in Athens, there is no disturbance of memory. The title
chosen by Freud is the result of what follows, something that comes to the
consciousness of the subject Freud, which he expresses in the following
manner: “So all this really does exist, just as we learnt in school!”^
Freud observes that this statement implies a split, a subjective division
before the splendid image. There is in him, on one hand, a person who
knows that all this really exists and, on the other, “another person” (accor­
ding to Freud’s expression) who seems to doubt it. I will not have the plea­
sure here of following the lengthy analysis in its meanders of his
“confusion”; this is the word that Freud uses. I will go directly to the solu­
tion that, for him, resolves the problem that he analyses.
Freud writes that the statement that came to his mind implies that he
had doubted that the Acropolis effectively existed. And that this was the
defence against another statement. Ffe doubted the existence of the Acro­
polis and this evoked for him an older doubt, inasmuch as he defends
himself against another statement. It is the key with which, he says, “the
whole psychical situation, which seems so confused and is so difficult to
describe, can be satisfactorily cleared up”. This other statement, which
Freud does not consider a disturbance of memory, is: “What I am seeing
here is not real.”^ The image of the Acropolis provokes in Freud this state­
ment: WasIch da sehe (what I am seeing here) ist nicht wirklich (is not real).
It is not a question here of Realitdt, but of Wirklichkeit.
Thus a second division of the subject is hidden behind the first that
Freud evokes. And we can name it with a term used for perversion: Verleu-
gnung, namely: a true denial that affects a piece of reality. What is the cause
of this division? Faced with the perceived reality, the uncanny feeling does
not manage to express itself. Freud prefers to talk of a “disturbance of
memory” and to elude the uncanny feeling. But what is the cause of the
feeling against which Freud defends himself? The text leaves no ambiguity
on this point: it has to do vdth a jouissance, an intense pleasure of the order
of “it is too beautiful to be true.” There was an excessive jubilation linked
to the perception of the image, which was for this reason forbidden. This
provoked the first division of the subject and the uncanny feeling against
which he defended himself with the “disturbance of memory”.
5. Freud, S., “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis” (1936), SE VoL XXII, p. 241.
6. Freud, S., ibid., p. 244.
46 The Lacanian Review No. 5
Jacques-Alain Miller, The Sovereign Image
Without doubt, as Freud himself says, this involves a guilt “attached to
the satisfaction of having gone such a long way.”^ But this remains fixed to
a visual surplus jouissance. Behind this complex mechanism appears the
figure of the father. Freud comes to evoke the severe superego whose censor­
ship falls on the visual surplus jouissance and impedes the jouissance (the
word GenuJ?, jouissance, is present in his text). He then evokes Napoleon
who, at the moment of his coronation, turns towards his brother to say to
him: “What would our father say if he could be here now?”, in other words,
“If he could see us?” Thus, what disturbs in Freud the perception of the
imaginary spectacle of the Acropolis is the gaze of the father.
The Freud brothers go to the Acropolis. The sight of it fulfils them. It
is here that emerges the gaze of the father, falling on them in their jouis­
sance. Do we need to add that these two, two Jews from Moravia (for
whom, according to tradition, the most elevated must remain without
image) are like a stain in the picture radiant with Greek beauty? The Acro­
polis thus becomes the equivalent of the famous sardine can that looks at
Lacan.® You are all familiar with the example in Seminar XI. It is also for
this reason that Lacan could say that “Freud does not need to see me in
order for him to gaze at me.”^
I do not think that I am distorting Freud’s text in showing that the gaze
that he evokes - which might also have to do with the register of guilt - emerges
above all from the surplus jouissance contained in the perceptual image. It is
this surplus jouissance that provokes the censorship. The very beauty of the
image, which contains the surplus jouissance, hides the gaze of the fether.
And in fact, what is also veiled, beyond Freud’s horror, his impotence?
In the preamble, Freud presents himself as a weakened man, whose produc­
tion has dried up. Behind the surplus jouissance, behind object a as we
write it in our parish, there is the minus phi of castration. Freud is a man at
the end of his life, he presents himself clothed in the emblem of castration,
which he encounters precisely in what has been elided by the scopic field.
There is no better example for understanding that object a, the surplus jouis­
sance, in this case visual, secretly bears castration. Freud confesses that this
episode ravaged him in his old age. He deciphers this disturbance of
memory which he cannot forget only at the moment when he approaches
the minus phi as an old man, almost impotent, appealing to the indulgence
of the other.
7. Freud, S., op. cit, p. 247.
8. hican,].. Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts ofPsychoanalysis,'Hott.oa,'^l\joTi6.on, 1981,
p. 96.
9. Lacan, J., Le Siminaire, livrexyi, D'un Autre d I’autre, Seuil, Paris, 2006, p. 92.
47
The Reign of the Image
A New Theory of the Image
Read from this angle, this example gives us a good indication of the
conditions under which the field of perceptual reality sustains itself.
“Perceptual reality” is without doubt a complex expression. The field of
perceptual reality sustains itself to the extent that we say: “What I am seeing
is real.” We are not in the position in which Freud was cast: “What I am
seeing is not real.” We usually go around in the world with the conviction
that what we see is real. This example shows us that this banal statement
supposes the repression of the subject, of desire and everything that Freud
was led to analyse here. It supposes what we have just recounted about the
extraction of the object a, which came to inscribe itself for him in the spec­
tacle as visual surplus jouissance and as gaze. Thus homeostasis is verified
in perception, whereas the lifting of repression, concomitant with the emer­
gence of the object a, comes with an uncanny feeling: “WTiat I am seeing
is not real.”
An antinomy between the wirklich of perception, the real of perception,
and the wirklich of object a is marked here. We cannot have both at the
same time. It is for this reason that each can, in turn, become unreal. This
is at the heart of the examples that Lacan gives in his Seminar that we are
using as reference. The Four Fundamental Concepts ofPsychoanalysis. Before
addressing the painting, anamorphosis, etc., Lacan poses the question:
“What is it that wakes the sleeper?” with reference to an example from his
personal life and one of the dreams from The Interpretation ofDreams.
Flis entire analysis aims to show that what wakes us is not the perception
of the real world. Even when a door slams, what wakes you is the object a
in the dream, the encounter in the dream with a traumatic jouissance.
Perception does not give rise, at least not directly, to the awakening of
consciousness, unlike the moments where the subject encounters object a
in his dream. Everything takes place in a space between perception and
consciousness, a space in which, through what we perceive of the
perceptum, of the perceived reality, the relation of the subject with jouis­
sance repeats itself. In this sense, it is the Freudian Trieb, it is the drive
that wakes you up.
One could explore the parallel that imposes itself between the dream of
the father, to whom the dead son says, “Father, don’t you see that I am
burning?”, and the disturbance of the son reported by Freud in his example
from the Acropolis. Both the dream from The Interpretation of Dreams,
10. Lacan, ]., Seminarxi. op. cit., p. 58.
48 The Lacanian Review No. 5
Jacques-Alain Miller, The Sovereign Image
where the father, in his pain, comes to see his son at the very heart of his
absence, and the episode from the Acropolis turn around the same thing.
Lacan proposes, and this is why we are gathered here around the theme
of the sovereign image, a new theory of the image insofar as the field of
perception is interrogated on the basis of desire and jouissance. Before Lacan,
in the margins of Freud, the field of perception has been approached only
on the basis of the repression of the subject, eluding the surplus jouissance.
Before Lacan, the field of perception had always appeared as the very model
of homeostasis, and this involved a certain blindness about jouissance.
If the Greeks were able to elaborate something like contemplation, it
was to the extent that the field of perception, especially the visual, appeared
to them as dominant, with the surplus jouissance kept at a distance,
excluded, dominated, levelled. The phenomenology of our century has
included the presence of the body in the spectacle of the world, but it has
not freed us from the proscription of jouissance from the field of perception.
It tried to describe the world perceived in its purity, that is to say, without
jouissance, on the basis of the pure presence of that which is perceived.
Lacan re-established that the perceptum, the Latin word for “the perceived”,
is, as such, impure. He thus re-established the drive in the scopic field and
strove to conceive the scopic field on the basis of the drive.
Beyond the Mirror
This supposes a complete reversal, especially for Lacan, because note
carefully that this effort implies not reducing the imaginary, the scopic, to
the specular. It implies no longer thinking the imaginary on the basis of
the mirror. Yet, we are focused on the mirror as soon as the field of percep­
tion is involved.
Lacan was in fact the first to construct the foundations for the reduc­
tion of the imaginary to the specular, to the mirror. The mirror introduces
with certainty, into three-dimensional space, a division between the One
and the Other, between being and appearance. This is what allows us to
think the identifications of the ego. But, under the pretext of thinking the
identifications of the ego, for a long time Lacan neglected the beyond of
the mirror stage, which we might try to open up in the course of these
Study Days.
I will say a few words about Lacan’s trajectory, which I have studied
meticulously during my course of this year.” What led Lacan to the mirror
11. Miller, “L’orientation lacanienne. Sile^ (1994-1995), course delivered at the Department of
Psychoanalysis, University of Paris VIII (unpublished).
49
The Reign of the Image
was the Freudian concept of narcissism, from which he deduced that libido
was narcissistic in essence. There is a whole part of Lacan’s teaching which
takes its support from this and inscribes jouissance in the specular order.
The drive is as a result placed under the dominion of the image. The image
is thus sovereign in the sense that it seems to dominate jouissance.
I detailed in my course the symbolic transcription of the libido that Lacan
attempted with the term “desire”, conceiving it as a metonymy. It was when
he realised that libido could not be reduced to desire that he gave The Ethics
ofPsychoanalysis, situating The Thing in opposition to the big Other, just as
object a is situated in opposition to the subjea. It is for this reason that follo­
wing The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, he gave his Seminar on transference,
centring it on a libidinal object that we do not see, an invisible agalma.
After having situated the object between the signifier of identification
and the affect of anxiety, he then situated the scopic drive as a paradigm.
Our references are Seminar XI, and also the seminar on The Object of
P^choanalysis. At the end of this trajectory, he considered the scopic drive
as a paradigm for object a within the limits of the analytic experience. Why
are we still seeking today to situate the object a in relation to the scopic
function?
A Pure Signifying Formula
I believe that there is something about this object a that remains poorly
understood. We believe that it is a thing. We always think object a on the
model of the breast or of excrement, or even the phallus, that is, as a full
object in relation to the emptiness of the subject.
For years I tried without success to eliminate from our usage the expres­
sion “semblant of the object”, which leads us to believe that the object a is
different from the semblant. Yet, if Lacan refers electively to the scopic drive
to deal with object a, it is to show that this object is neither the breast, nor
the excrement, nor the phallus, nor the gaze, nor the voice. That this object
a is as such a semblant of being which does not exist, which is not wirklich.
And when it is real, everything else disappears.
Given that we have spoken a lot about the scopic drive, I am going to
take the example of the oral drive. Lacan indicates that the paradigm, the
ideal model given by Freud regarding the oral drive, is that of a mouth that
kisses itself This is to say that the object of the oral drive is in no way some­
thing that can be eaten. The oral object as something that can be eaten
would precisely be a lure, a faux semblant of the oral drive. It would leave
the drive eternally unsatisfied.
50 The Lacanian Review No. 5
Jacques-Alain Miller, The Sovereign Image
When Lacan invents the object a, it is not as a double of the oral drive,
but as a hole, a void, a semblant that obliges the impulse of the drive to
turn around it. One must think of it on the basis of the topological example
of the torus whose central hole is not real because there is nothing beyond
its topological surface. If you trace circles along the length of the torus, it
is what prevents them being reduced to a single point. It is simply a question
of this impossibility of reducing the circles to a single point. It is for this
reason that Lacan resorts to topology, to an ideal topology, in order to
situate what he calls the object a.
The images proposed by Lacan, his topological surfaces, are the sove­
reign images of psychoanalysis. The object a is only localisable on these
surfaces, because in three dimensions it becomes impossible. It is a pure
signifying formula. What we normally call object a is simply the support
or the incarnation of the formula of the object a. It is as if the logical and
topological function that Lacan baptised object a effected an extraction
from the body, a subtraction which is necessary to give to it its value as plus-
de-jouir. This is a point that I would like very much to insist on in a seminar
in order to put an end to the expression “semblant of the object”, which
goes in the opposite direction to what is at stake.
The gaze is precisely the incarnation of the object a. It is a material incar­
nation because the relation to light is necessary to it. It is for this reason
that in the painting of Rubens that illustrates the poster for these Study
Days, one seeks to highlight the brilliant element that gives substance to
the logical function of object a. Freud’s Acropolis is undoubtedly an Acro­
polis inundated with light. In other words, this logical function finds its
incarnations in the luminous point, in the opaque point or in the stain,
but always in relation with light. The gaze can of course be seen as delimited
and isolated, piercing the metric of space. But Lacan maintains that if I see
the gaze, I do not see the space from where I am being looked at. This is
why the point of the gaze always seems to come from another dimension.
It is in anamorphosis that another dimension of space is deployed. This
is clear in Las Meninas, where it is necessary to pass through the projective
plane in order to meet the invisible object minus phi. Object a involves a
structural elision that can only be represented by a supplement. As hole,
object a can thus be equivalent to the frame, to the window, as opposed to
the mirror. Object a cannot be captured, especially in the mirror. Lacan,
who spent a lot of time with the mirror, says ^s much. It is rather the
window that we ourselves constitute in opening our eyes. This is something
that should occupy us in the course of these two days, because it is this
object a that is in question in the experience of the pass.
51
The Reign of the Image
It is not a substantial object that is involved, but rather a pure formula.
The fall of object a that connotes the pass should thus not be conceived as
a renunciation to a substantial having. It is not a question of renunciation,
nor of resignation. The pass as fall of the object a concerns being, and what
you are as window onto the real. The pass means something like seeing the
window and knowing oneself as subject of the drive, that is, what you enjoy
by circling around it in a perpetual failure.
In leaving, you will find that the sun in Rio is slightly overcast. You will
be able to say: “What I am seeing is real.” And so you will let the image
quietly rule over you.
Translated by Frederic-Charles Baitinger and Azeen Khan
Revised by Roger Litten
The Lacanian Review No. 5
52
Indelible Images Revisited
Serge Cottet
he 30* issue of the journal La cause freudienne [henceforth, LCF
T
30] transcribes the interventions made at the Study Days of the
ECF held in 1994 on the theme “indelible images”.' More than
twenty years later, there is still a case to be made for reviving this
question. The red thread that runs through this issue concerns a treatment
of images - from dreams, memories - on the basis of the signifier and of
repressioii. This involves images produced by the subject, their representa­
tions under the species of a recurring dream or of an obsession. Treated on
the basis of the formations of the unconscious, they are not easily distingui­
shed from the screen memory as Freud speaks about it in his article of 1909.
The category of the real is not put at the forefront and the imaginary is
still conceived of as deficient in relation to the symbolic when, for instance,
the image is treated as a succedaneum taking the place of an absent symbolic
function. Neither the autonomy of the image nor its continuity with the
real are particularly emphasised. In our field, moreover, we are accustomed
to dealing more with the imaginary than with the image, and when the
image is truly in question it is that of the body which is privileged. In Lacan,
the specular image opens the field to the imaginary with the mirror stage.
Only later on in his teaching do we find the metaphor of the two mirrors,
distinguishing the real image from the virtual image in order to figure the
montage of the drive object in relation to the narcissistic image.
We could start from there: the image is neither a copy of an original,
nor purely reducible to the symbolic, as one says about an image or a rheto­
rical figure. There is something of the real in the image, a real often marked
by a hole, or by a stain, or by an element irreducible to language.
We will be able to see in more detail:
- the status of the dream image in Freud, its status of metaphor;
- the status of the image in the fantasy, where it is more difficult to
reduce to an interpretation (for example, the indelible image of “a child is
being beaten”, which is nourished by a more or less eroticised iconography);
Serge Cottet was AMS and member of the ECF and NLS. The paper was originally published in
Vagraphe, Le corps parlant etses pulsionst Publication of the Clinical Section of Rennes, Oaober 2016,
and is available online at Lacan-Unversite.fr.
1. “Images indd^biles,” La Causefreudienne^ No. 30, May 1995. Papers from the 23*^ Study Days of
the ECF, Paris, 1994.
53