THE LETTER 53 Summer 2013, pages 87-99. 

This paper looks to Lacan’s formulae of sexuation in an effort to clarify the meaning of the ‘not-all’. It explores how Lacan interrogates logic to produce the ‘not-all’ and questions what is at stake clinically by means of this production. Greatly influenced by the work of Guy Le Gaufey, this paper looks to a slightly different reading of the formulae. It is hoped that this presentation of the theory opens up space for another way of looking at the ‘not-all’ which is not all about feminine sexuality.

Keywords: enjoyment, speaking, ‘not-all’, maximal particular, exception, logic, Encore

Many post-Freudians are preoccupied with the contentious and allusive notion of feminine sexuality. Indeed the Miller translation of Encore, On Femi-nine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge1 and Barnard and Fink’s accompanying Reading Seminar XX: Lacan’s Major Work on Love, Knowl-edge, and Feminine Sexuality, by their very titles, are caught up in this ques-tion of feminine sexuality which has been raging within psychoanalysis since at least the Great Debate. Yet this question is completely distracting and leads only to a cul-de-sac rooted in some notion of inequality erroneously attrib-uted to Freud in his efforts to explore subjectivity.