The Letter 59 & 60 Summer – Autumn 2015, pages 1-37

The Psychoanalytic Discourse.A Second Reading of Lacan’s L’Étourdit

CHAPTER 3

THE LOGICS Of SEXUATION

For classical logic, the real is approached in the order of truth: in principle it
would be a matter of finding, of producing, of guaranteeing the truth of propositions,
namely, the equivalence between what is said and the real to which
the said is referred. It is a logic of saids.

The discourse of analysis brings out what is forgotten in the saids, namely,
the saying. Freud’s saying re-centres psychoanalysis on the phallus not as the
meaning of a pivotal said or of a general statufied symbol, but in the sense of
a re-launching saying. If Freud saw in the Oedipus complex the shibboleth of
psychoanalysis and if the phallus is what is at stake in the Oedipus complex,
it is not to produce saids that are true and applicable to all, men and women, it
is in the experience of the re-launching of the saying of the treatment for the
analyser and for the analyst.

The logic of the psychoanalytic discourse is distinguished from any other by
its specific ‘reference’ to the phallus. One speaks of nothing but that. On
condition of clearly understanding that the sense of the psychoanalytic ‘reference’
is not to refer a said to a real thing, but to refer the said to the unconscious
saying that remains forgotten in the said. The specific reference of the
psychoanalytic discourse is classically named ‘phallus’, it is fundamentally a
re-launch starting from the unconscious. The phallus is not the sexual organ
(le sexe) or the cut, but the re-launching of sense starting from the cut or from
the sexual organ, or again the sense-ab-sex.

It matters little in psychoanalysis whether a said is ‘true’ or not. A said is correct
(juste) in psychoanalysis if it refers to the phallic re-launch. The decisive
question is then: how can such and such a said be referred to the movement
of phallic re-launching? How bring out the sense of saying starting from sex
and from transference?…