Issue 39 (Autumn 2008)

Dear Christian Fierens,

So then I have read your text ‘The act of saying notall’ and I thank you.sincerely for it. For if this book (contrary to the preceding ones) has met with some serious readers, I have not had the privilege up to now of a work as consistent as yours. True, your Lecture de l ’étourdit opened up for youthe path to this critique that you make.

I recognize right away that it is quite justified. Naturally, when I wrote this book I re-read and re-re-read l ’étourdit, but in the end I took the decision, after writing some pages, to leave this text to one side because I told myself that what I would have been able to bring forward from it would not fulfil the purpose in terms of quality/price relationship. I will explain myself. I wanted above all to produce a reading of the formulae, which presupposed something other than a continuation (suivi) of the LacaniantexTTTwas necessary to bring in largely external data (like Brunschwig orBlanché, or the Kantian nihil negativum, etc). From the start therefore I had problems of coherence and dimension. I also left to one side, for example, some important developments about the exception that I had made at a first public presentation of what was going to become this book (because I think the examples furnished by Lacan are misleading)…….