In 1964, whilst Lacan was giving his seminar on ‘The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis’, Jacques-Alain Miller questioned him on his ontology (13 May 1964)[1]. The question pursued Lacan for many years and it is particularly in the Seminar ‘Encore’ that he brings an assured though fairly discrete response.

As for J.-A. Miller, in his lesson of the 8 April 2009, ‘Choses de finesse en psychanalyse’, reaffirmed that Lacan’s effort was to ‘turn jouissance into the cause of desire by means of his object a’, but that he had to renounce it, notably transferring the place of the Other to the body. According to J.-A. Miller, Lacan’s last response is found in the Seminar ‘Le Sinthome’, in the following form: ‘The jouissance of the Other, there is none; there is only jouissance of the body proper’. It results from this that ‘Object a is no being. This means that it does not belong to ontics’. The reference he gives to Lacan in this lesson is: Encore, p. 87 and p. 114 [English version: p 126 -TN].

This is not the first time that J.-A. Miller has brought up this question. In fact, it insists in diverse ways, notably concerning the ends and the end of analysis.

On the 11 May 1988, whilst making a commentary on Freud’s paper ‘ Formulations on the two principles of mental functioning’, he pointed out that two successive ways to treat the question of Being [Etre] in Heidegger. He can be the philosopher for whom freedom is the abandonment to the unveiling of being; it is here, notes J.-A. Miller, that he introduces the theory of existence[2]. But he is also the philosopher of the forgetting of being, of the veiling of Being [Etant]: ‘At the same time, there is a second Heidegger’, he says, ‘who simultaneously, correlatively, emphasises the profound dissimulation of Being [Etant][3]. He points out that philosophy is, par excellence, the discourse that confuses being [être]with the real.

Hence the importance of the Freudian theme of the perpetual avoidance of reality for the neurotic. At this moment, J.-A. Miller indicates that it is important to respect the distinction between the neurotic avoidance of what has to be done and the psychotic avoidance of Realität, where it is a replacement reality that is installed. He interprets the Freudian beyond the pleasure principle as working for jouissance, which leads him to say: ‘The Freudian subject in no way devotes himself to the world, even when it is a question of exterior reality. He devotes himself solely to jouissance’. Psychoanalysis thus obliges us to separate the question of being and that of the real.

Going back to the Seminar of 1992, ‘De la nature des semblants’, J.-A. Miller affirms once more concerning the object a that: ‘It is not being, it is but a semblant of it’. From his commentary on the triangle in Chapter 8 of the Seminar Encore, he detaches it with force basing himself on some of Lacan’s brief notes. This entire chapter of his Seminar is devoted to it[4].

Some of the central statements:

‘The true nature of object a (…) is not in relation to the real; even if it is in the inclination in the movement from the Symbolic to the Real, baptised ‘reference’ in the vain efforts of mathematical logic to apprehend the real – even if it is on this path towards the Real that it is encountered, this true nature is in relation with Being [Etre]’.

Or again :

‘The departure point that we take from the want-of-being is precisely what leads us to confuse being – the positive being- with the real’.

In this chapter of his Seminar, J.-A. Miller recalls, notably, that the question of Being is, since Parmenides and Plato, the philosophical question, but that for psychoanalysis the equivalence between the cause of desire and the drive object as such is only treated by semblants: ‘Object a, its position, responds to what the subject can encounter, can complement itself of being, of a being. What we call object a, is what, in the disaster of the subject called the want-of-being, seems to give support to the being, to take up Lacan’s expression…’

Finally, it is in this chapter of his Seminar ‘De la nature des semblants’ that J.-A. Miller develops the ontological argument, recalling that it is true that in the pass ‘there is something like a show of ontological argument’. This evokes what Lacan said about the pass in his October proposition: it ‘makes being’ [‘fait être’]. Today, J.-A. Miller pursues this theme showing that, in fact, with the pass it is a question of a ‘new alliance with jouissance’ that is, as such, impossible to negative.