ABSTRACT
The Real can emerge in speech and limit the infinite drift of both deciphering and meaning. Jacques Lacan put forward three successive elaborations of the Real that imply, moreover, three definitions of the final pass of analysis and not just one. Lacan first took phantasy to be that which functions as the real by virtue of the impossible to say of this "object that lacks", this object which one "no longer has", even though it provides the surplus jouissances through which desire is linked to jouissance. This is the Lacanian hypothesis emphasised in 1973 at the end of Encore, but to author it seems consistent with the very notion of "knowledge without a subject" that Lacan formulated well before then. This implies that the signifier itself is at the level of jouissance, that it is "the apparatus of jouissance". The living being is its "point of insertion", as he said from the start of the seminar The Other Side of Psychoanalysis.
