ABSTRACT
For J. Lacan there is no erotic thrill or moralism attached to this act, always only offered as a possibility. If he focuses on it, it is because in his return to S. Freud these were the consequences, drawn out to their most extreme edge, of his discovery of unconscious desire. Lacan tries to set up the conditions for what it might mean for any one of us to find a way beyond our own neurosis. He does this throughout his twenty-eight years of teaching, tracing the dilemma in a multitude of differing ways: from his re-reading of Freud, to his use of mathemes, philosophy, clinical forays, and his parables of art and literature. In his work The Function and Field of Speech and Language, Lacan plays with the word arbre, or tree. Language happens not because of a successful substitution but by virtue of a radical separation.
