ABSTRACT
The difference between knowledge and science appears to be fundamental in S. Lacan's epistemology, and acceptable well beyond the strict field of psychoanalysis. The classical theory of knowledge assumes a co-naturality of subject and object, a pre-established harmony between the subject who knows and the object known. It is pertinent to notice that all knowledge is fundamentally illusory and mythical, in so far as what it does is to comment on the ‘‘sexual proportion’’, a term with which David Mauri has very appropriately translated the French expression ‘‘rapport sexuel’’ used by Lacan. The feat consists in grasping, with the discourse of science, a field that science was prepared to leave to obscurantism to leave as the refuge of fantasies of sexual knowledge. Psychoanalysis can be considered as the manifestation of the positive spirit of science in a domain which has been especially resistant to the conceptual grasp of science.
