From the first lesson of his course "On the Nature of Semblants," Jacques-Alain Miller maintains that "the semblant is a category " invented by Lacan in the wake of his seminar The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, and that it has its place next to the three categories R, S, I[1]. He ascertains that "as a category, the semblant is the antonym, the opposite of the real," and specifys: "Strictly speaking, this is the modern sense of the semblant." The semblant constitutes an essential theoretical perspective: "I’m emphasizing the term semblant because it organizes in a different way the ternary concept (RSI) that Lacan introduced to psychoanalysis"[2].

It is through a reassessment of semblants that he first intends to make a clarification between the category of the real and the scories of being, of essentialism. J.-A. Miller reintroduces, with Lacan, the inscription of semblants in nature[3], establishing what one could call a physics of semblants. From this point of view, the explicit reference to Lucretius supports a classical criticism of metaphysics and constitutes a decisive phase. For it is not just a matter of establishing a hierarchical overturn between essence and existence, but of extricating from Lacan’s teachings that which constitutes the "front door" to the future knot theory.

First there will be the introduction to the term ‘semblant’ based on Lacan’s shema at the beginning of Chapter VIII, "Knowledge and Truth", in the Seminar Encore [4]. It represents "the framework where the semblant is declined into three types: strictly speaking; the semblant on the path of the from symbolic to the real; and the true and reality"[5]. This framework "is necessary if we want to depart from that which, from philosophy, is being infiltrated even to psychoanalysis, if we call philosophy the discourse that puts being in the place of the real". Putting being in the place of the real is "the illusion that, through the symbolic, through the articulation of the signifying chain, one can deduce from what is, a "there is".

In fact, the object a is in the place of the semblant[6]. Its "real nature" is not of the real, even if it is found on the path to the real. Its nature pertains to being, emphasizes Lacan in 1973. Thus J.-A. Miller explains : "To displace the object a from the real to being is to highlight its affinities with the semblant."

"Semblants spare us from the real." This conclusive phrase[7] echos Lacan’s fundamental statement : "Jouissance is only questioned, evoked, pursued or elaborated upon from the semblant". In adding that "the semblant is not vain illusion, the semblant operates", J.-A. Miller incites us to draw our own conclusions, in a practice where the analytical act operates on the real of jouissance. And he insists: "Opposing the semblant to the real is in the very spirit of psychoanalysis which itself constitutes a return towards the real of sex"[8]. It is in this spirit that we will address the category of semblant, with a clinic of the sinthome, where the semblant that is put into function will be the object little a.