"The semblant consists in making believe that there is something where there is nothing"[1]
"The semblant is not a vain illusion. The semblant operates."[2]

The Lacanian clinic turns around a hole. Whether it be question of (-phi), of castration, of forclosure or of the inexistence of the sexual relation, the hole, the lack, the void of the reference constitutes the structural linchpin around which the scaffolding of the speaking-being [parlêtre] may be constructed. In order to situate what is at stake in the question of the semblant, Jacques-Alain Miller differentiates the system of the One-all [Un-tout] from that of the not-all [pas-tout]. He sets out the system of the One as that of Oedipal logic that articulates the different levels of "lack" with what comes in this stead, what plugs it: "The hole, the loss, the castration are only thinkable under the system of the One"[3]. Jacques-Alain Miller articulates the not-all [pas-tout], notably, with the system of the constancy of the drive: here it is a question "of something other than the lack and its plugs" because "the constancy of the drive knows nothing of lack". The drive, as it is one of the Freudian names for jouissance, has a "positivity" that "ignores the transformations [avatars] and the efficiency of lack"[4].

Leading to "think together the symbolic and the imaginary"[5], as opposed to the real, the category of the semblant comes in the stead of what there is not within the system of the One. In the series of semblants that J.-A. Miller takes up in his Class, a fundamental triad is extracted. It is that of the father, the phallus and the object a [6]. J.-A. Miller considers them as "names of jouissance": they are the three semblants that belong to the logic of the One. It is from the symbolic that they offer a perspective on jouissance.

If the object a is "the signifier of jouissance as the remainder of castration, [or] that part that resisted to the operation", it belongs nonetheless to the system of the One-all, to the Oedipal logic as it is articulated to castration as lack. In his Class of this year, J.-A. Miller reminds us: the object a is the compliment of lack: of the (-phi) of castration, of the subject of the fundamental fantasy... If it is a "condenser of jouissance", it is no less a semblant, effect of the symbolic resulting from the effort to apprehend the real, as Lacan puts it in his Seminar Encore.

Lacan encourages the analyst to "be fooled by" [se faire la dupe] the semblants that allow the emergence of the supposed subject of knowledge. It is in putting the object a as semblant in the place of the agent in the analytical discourse that the analyst operates. The semblant is, according to J.-A. Miller’s term, the "analyst’s instrument in the treatment"[7]. Coming in the stead of..., the semblant occupies the place of what cannot be said: it is operational insomuchas it is the indication of a real at stake. That is why J.-A. Miller invites us to give prominence to this "edge of semblant that locates the kernel of jouissance"[8].