Text first published in L’Hebdo-blog, a publication of the ECF, the ACF and the CPCTs, June 2026.
The “push for transparency”, particularly in the field where those who are suffering are received, goes hand in hand with an increasingly protocol-driven, universalising world. This demand for transparency brings with it a promotion of communication at the expense of the fact of speaking – the objective being entirely transmissible information. What is the driving force behind this? The ever-expanding empire of knowledge that covers over the truth, as demonstrated by the scientific regime with which we are familiar. Yet, people speak! Better still, they are speaking bodies, suffering from symptoms that render them opaque to themselves: truth makes holes in knowledge. And so, we can wish to know what we do not know, but are the seat of.
Desire and Knowledge
The kind of knowledge encompassed by the desire to know at work in an analytical experience plays its part alongside science. Scientific knowledge, born at a certain point in our civilisation, has become desirable, as we see in Balzac’s novels; it has taken the political form of progressivism. But the belief in progress has misfired, particularly in the case of the atomic bomb. A movement arose from this, advocating the virtues of peace, humanism and ignorance. Yet the desire to know at work in an analysis belongs neither to scientific knowledge nor to a learned ignorance.
The Truth? An Enunciation
The relationship between knowledge and truth can be better understood by introducing a third term: that of enunciation. Freud reintroduces the idea of truth into the realm of science by allowing it to speak: he gives enunciation a central place, which is none other than the place of truth. Lacan says much the same when he makes it speak: “I, the truth, speak.” Knowledge and truth become knotted provided that the question of saying is not left forgotten behind what is said. Jacques-Alain Miller said that “The desire to address this question [of truth] in a novel way—this is what Lacan calls the desire to know, which is like the transformation of the desire for science when it touches upon what it excludes, and even what it forecloses, that is to say, the question of truth”.[1] Truth is also the sister of jouissance. Like jouissance, it lies outside discourse: its site is beneath the bar. If we speak from the standpoint of jouissance, we also speak from the standpoint of truth. We can only half-say it, and the four discourses demonstrate this.
The Opacity of Truth
In the four discourses, truth is a fixed site, beneath the bar, where S1, S2, the object a and the subject will pass through. In each discourse, one truth is therefore the driving force behind that which comes to dominate and which claims to say, with complete transparency, The truth, which cannot, however, be fully said. The master’s discourse conveys a truth that purports to be universal, a “for-all” forgetting its subjective condition. The university’s discourse claims that truth is knowledge—absolute, of course! In the hysteric’s discourse, it is the subject itself that embodies truth, but for what kind of knowledge? And what is in command in analytical discourse is the object a; this is trickier because the object a does not belong to the register of the signifier, but to the semblant, between signifier and jouissance. It is therefore an exception: “Every discourse would take itself for the truth, with the exception of analytical discourse, which would state: “I am the truth.”[2]
- Miller J.-A., “La passe de la psychanalyse et le désir de savoir“, Comment finissent les analyses. Paradoxes de la passe, Paris, Navarin, 2022, p. 118. (not available in English) ↑
- Miller J.-A., “Everyone is mad”, English: https://congresamp2024.world/en/everyone-is-mad‑2/ (in French: Quarto, no. 137, September 2024, p. 14) ↑
