ABSTRACT
The body is an image to be situated on the side of the imaginary; in the same way that the jouissance it experiences, in accordance with Lacan’s first conception, is narcissistic. Undoubtedly this is why, for a time, Lacan dissociated the body and the subject, privileged for analysis the aim of deciphering the unconscious enigma, and relativised the relationship to jouissance and the drive. The absence of guarantee in the Other, consequently the lack in the symbolic Other, is because of jouissance but this time jouissance is no longer conceptualised as imaginary. If for a while Lacan stated that the subject suffers from the signifier, later he gave a definition of the being of jouissance as a body affected by jouissance. In formulating that the signifier constitutes the apparatus of jouissance or that the signifier is the cause of jouissance, Lacan ceases to sever the signifier from jouissance.
