ABSTRACT
The chapter begins with a recapitulation of the theme of the partner-symptom developed in the previous chapter, which addresses the register of real jouissance of the sexuated bodies and complements Lacan’s earlier thesis on the partner of desire, predicated on the phallic dialectic and object a. It explains that the notion of the partner-symptom, “extimate” to the subject conduced Lacan to formulate that “woman is symptom for a man” and that “we enjoy our own unconscious” even in bed.
It then discusses the difference between the real jouissance of the symptom and the jouis-sens of the fantasy. It explains that the real jouissance of the letter-symptom is opaque, without representation and antinomic to the register of truth: an element of language that has passed to the real and therefore consists in the enjoyment of linguistic material without the representations of discourse. Jouis-sens of the fantasy, on the other hand, is not opaque but is the most real of sense. It is a mental representation of the jouissance of the drives, is constructed in analysis, and functions as a quilting point to the half-said of truth.
The chapter continues to question Lacan’s last elaborations regarding the end of analysis by identification to the symptom and the different Ones at play: the phallic One, decipherable, the opaque One of the letter-symptom and the One of sense. It develops the notion of the Borromean One, a One-saying that knots the heterogenous jouissances of the knot. It ends by emphasising that identification with the symptom is “each one’s identification with one’s Borromean unarity”, the One of the knotting between sense and real, between the opaque jouissance, which is parasitic, and that of sense – which is not.
It ends by clarifying that this knotting is the affair of the subject of consciousness, the analysand; it is a knotting which is rectified all along by the saying of the analysis, by what is being written by the operation of speech. Therefore, if analysis is oriented towards the real, it is ultimately towards the real of the knot.
