"Yet another thing restrains us regarding the status of truth: the fact that jouissance is a limit. This is related to the very structure that was evoked by my "quadripodes" at the time at which I constructed them for you - jouissance is questioned, evoked, tracked, and elaborated only on the basis of a semblan[t]."[1]

Even prior to the introduction of the Borromean knot, with this phrase, Lacan ties together semblant, jouissance and signifier. A bit earlier on, Lacan had put forward that the first thing binding us to the truth is its status of half-saying [mi-dire]. The term "truth", legal in origin, emphasizes that what is aimed at in a trial, is the jouissance of the witness, when he is asked to tell "the whole truth and nothing but the truth".

The limit of jouissance by the effect of discourses is the point where we are bound to truth with a second loop of the cord. " It has to do with the structure", says Lacan of the four discourses that he introduced two years prior. Far from considering this as just so many words, these discourses take into account the place of jouissance. But how do they do so?

In each one of Lacan’s four discourses, an element takes the place of the semblant and gives its name to each discourse. So, it is this semblant that has for function to interpret jouissance, to track it, and evoke it. If, in Lacan’s first teaching, the semblant was a mix of the symbolic and the imaginary in opposition to the real[2], in his very last teaching, it is "the affinity of a with its envelope"[3] that allows for touching the real by an "edge of the semblant"[4].

If "jouissance can only be called on by means of a semblant", that goes to show that the analyst uses these semblants to extract the subject’s mode of jouissance. It is a question of a true "dialectic of meaning and jouissance", that allows "to not efface the semblant, but to recuperate it"[5]. Contrary to the juridicial, psychoanalysis obtains the emergence of truth by means other than confession because it teaches us that jouissance, fundamentally unavowable, is incurable[6].

If the "semblant partner" is the inverse of the "symptom partner" [7], Lacan teaches us that the symptome, laid bare by semblants causes the subject’s "varity" [8] to emerge. It is the only way to stop producing the semblants of the sexual rapport[9] and to invent a synthome.