On 3 February 2025, the WAP evening was held in Paris, inaugurating the work towards the XVth Congress, which will take place in Paris in the spring of 2026 on the theme “There is no sexual relation”. Presentation by Ricardo Seldes, director of the XVth Congress of the WAP.
The challenge facing us in the WAP in the presentation of the upcoming Congress, the title of which is an aphorism, reminds us of the excellent results of the last two. It is a short phrase that is not quite a haiku, but rather a capsule of knowledge created by Lacan, and articulated by him on various occasions. The forthcoming Scilicet will give an account of some twenty of them.
We can consider the possibility of tracing its origins both in the course of Lacan’s teachings as well as in the Freudian constructions that succeed in referring us to the logical consequences derived from the aphorism, there is no sexual relation, so as to ask ourselves how did Lacan affirm, refute and disseminate Freud’s developments, as well as his own, in order to conclude in a precise saying that is always dynamic and put into question.
A Generalised Mystery
There is no sexual relation is the spoken expression of a mystery that affects the life of all speaking subjects about their conception, their existence and, why not, about their death. The proposal of the 2026 WAP Congress is to equip ourselves with the elements that help us to bear this aphorism in mind, not in order to repeat it like a mantra, but to interrogate it, retain its coordinates, and transform it into a work-in-progress where its use can be tested or refuted via our clinical practice today. We are aware that the reference to the present time casts us into a paradox, possibly similar to Zeno’s, because at the same time that we run after it and require logical cuts to arrive at conclusive moments, we are affected by the vicissitudes into which the discourse of the master of each era sweeps us. To say “swept” may sound a little cinematic at a time when catastrophe-type streaming series have taken the lead in confronting subjects with evidence in the discussion of belief or disbelief in the climatic change that our planet, our habitat, is facing.
The Analytic Discourse Today
For Lacan, the beautiful and filthy world of which we are a part springs from the unconscious that we make exist in analytic practice. Freud’s saying is inferred from the logic that takes the said of the unconscious as its source. Insofar as Freud discovered this said, there ex-sists what Lacan anticipated in “L’Étourdit” as the stabitat of the parlêtres, since – I quote: “Is it the absence of this relation that exiles them in stabitat?”[1] It is through the analytic discourse and in their experience that “Restoring this saying is necessary for the discourse to be constituted through analysis (what I contribute to), starting from the experience in which it proves to exist.”[2] “Is it by inhabiting it that this relation can only be interdicted,”[3] entredicha [said between the lines]. The real of the unconscious will be the speaking body.
In the same text, Lacan will mention the voracities with which the inexistence of the sexual relation is plugged, pointing out that the analytic discourse attempts to account for these voracities. The habitat of language offers, through each person’s lalangue, both resources and obstacles to suffer or enjoy sexualities, to desire or reject them, to dream about them or to sink into their deadly recesses. Sexuality and death are the two Freudian impossibilities the resolution of which appeals to the refrain of the drive.
What does the clinic of the first quarter of the 21st century have in store for us, restructured by the consequences of the combination of the scientific and the capitalist discourse, which have so modified traditions, customs, and habits that in a few years they have produced bold holes in the symbolic? These voids are replaced by object-organs around which a fractured bond can be sustained in ties, couples, and families, where words hold less value than any digital application.
We have just worked on Everyone is Mad, that is, delusional, which appeals to the knowledge of all speaking beings about the same lack concerning sexuality. Thus, we have two aphorisms which together contain a knowledge produced in the analytic experience, where the results of the disorder in the real of the era where a new order has been constituted, can be transmitted, with a consistency of iron and plastic, whose beliefs [of this new order] can be questioned by us.
Lacan has argued that his n’y a pas – a mixture of “there is no” and a negation – does not prevent subjects from approaching the bodies of others to make love, supported by their fantasies – that is to say, in the modality that each one manages to invent. We are talking about partners, people who place themselves on one side or the other of the (table of) sexuation, sides that are valid even for those who proclaim themselves to be non-sexual, contra-sexual, anti-sexual, and rave about various ways of naming themselves beyond the sexual norms. Sexuality causes problems and provides solutions.
All Crippled by Sexuality
We attempt to argue about the aphorism and approach it in different ways: we can take excerpts of sayings, allude to cases, recall references to moments in civilisation where it is most evidently at play. Let us return to the questions that attempt to find partial answers to what we call the impossible, the real of sex.
There is an early work by Freud in which he questioned the aetiology of the psycho-neuroses and placed, quite deliberately, the sexual cause as the origin of the symptoms. He dealt with what he called neurasthenia, defining it as being actual in nature and without reference to infantile nature as in the neuroses [of defence]. Without disregarding the mixed cases, he differentiated them by pointing out the excess of autoerotic satisfaction that he could hear in the actual neuroses, while in the others he attributed the aetiology, on the contrary, to the repetition of the containment or dissatisfaction of sexual jouissance. Let us recall that his essential thesis was that anxiety is generally libido diverted from its intended use.[4] According to his own words, he had an extensive archive of cases in the exploration of a desirable therapy, and he assured Fliess that in the case of the excess of neurasthenia, this led him to conclude that they were not victims of civilisation or heredity but “sit venia verbo– [pardon my words] – [they were] crippled in sexuality.”[5] He uses the expression Sexualkrüppeln, where krüppeln refers to the invalids, the crippled. It is a word whose etymology comes almost unchanged from Middle Low German, kröpel “the bent one” in its reconstructed Proto-Germanic root krupilaz implying “prone to crawl.” The word also applies to people who have developed an undesirable habit which they cannot shake off, alluding to an excessive jouissance, impossible to give up, which limits the bond with the Other. It is interesting to grasp how this 1898 article caused Freud himself a great deal of discomfort because of the scandal he knew it would produce, speaking so openly about masturbators, and the men, women, and couples who inflicted sexual dissatisfaction upon themselves. The varied symptoms caused by these dysfunctions transformed them into Sexualkrüppeln. Freud referred to this work as “Gartenlaube” in a letter to Fliess, the title of a household magazine that had become famous for its sentimental stories but completely alien to the style of the publication for dealing so openly and shamelessly with a subject that he himself understood as destined to provoke a scandal, and not only within the science of the time. Sexualkrüppeln, cripples of sexuality, and Gartenlauben, garden gazebo, are two signifiers that say something more about Freud’s later works, “On the Psychic Mechanism of Forgetfulness,” in which he refers to the Signorelli case, and “Childhood and Concealing Memories.” Sexuality and Death. Herr is at the limit of what can be said when it comes to a patient’s suicide due to sexual impotence. Herr is the absolute, death “one cannot look at directly.”[6]
Knowledge and Belief
Is knowledge about the sexual relation obtained in the analytic experience? With Lacan, we have learnt that there is a presumption that a knowledge of truth can be constituted.[7] When truth takes the juridical form and someone is asked to tell the whole truth about what they know, is this not already done in the knowledge that it is an impossible demand, except for the fact that it seeks to capture something of the enunciation at stake? It is the demonstration of a will to judge what concerns jouissance, that jouissance be confessed, precisely because it is un-confessable. There is no sexual relation confronts us with the evidence that jouissance is only interpellated, evoked, harassed, or elaborated through the semblant, which includes being, believing oneself to be, but also love with its infinite questions. The issue shifts to how one reaches the true/what is true, if not by winding pathways.
Is saying “There is no sexual relation” a simple truth? And that it cannot be written – is it an axiom from which we start, or is it a point of arrival for each analysand who decided to commit to the analytic discourse? We accept that knowledge is valuable and has a price and that one has to risk one’s skin, because it is less difficult to acquire it than to enjoy its exercise. Perhaps the widespread actual practice of incest, generalised nowadays as child sexual abuse, will shed some light on the consequences for the subjects affected by this despicable practice.
For Freud, the unconscious is a knowledge that is not known but can be deciphered, read, and, perhaps more importantly, it serves to make one speak. Perhaps there is something of what is attributed to the unconscious in women, that they can make others speak and obtain their jouissance from there. As Silvia Tendlarz reminds us, if what one chooses as a symptom is a woman who speaks to us, one believes in her, then the symptom becomes speaking and can be heard.[8]
It is striking that when Lacan says that life reproduces, he points out that the answer only becomes a question where there is no relation sustaining the reproduction of life.[9] It is clear that – for parlêtres – questioning is a way of accessing the “there is no.” The unconscious itself seems to be a way of encrypting the non-answer and, as the story of Little Red Riding Hood shows us, where the answer would be: “To make you speak,” a way of demanding the deadly banquet, to eat you better, to kill you better. Lacan aims to obtain two halves that do not become too entangled in the sexual act, when they can get to it, which is not always possible, because of how complicated access to a woman’s body can be.
If the body of speaking beings is subject to being separated from their organs, it is to find a function for them, says Lacan.[10] This gives us a certain proximity to psychosis, but also to the fact that an organ, the male organ, becomes the signifier, becomes the phallus, to serve as bait in the function assigned to it by discourse. There is no phallus without a discourse that sustains it. And he will give two characteristics: that of an appendage thanks to its appearance as a mobile attachment accentuated by its erectility, and the lure to catch all these voracities. And here we have the drive trait with which the non-existence of the sexual relation is plugged. This organ, which has become the signifier, pierces the place from which it takes effect for the speaking being. Lacan will conclude by stating that to be or to have the phallus is the function that supplants the sexual relation,[11] [the function] with which he will elaborate the formulas of sexuation.
It is then a question of the defence against the real and the limit of what can be said. What beliefs, what forms, will questions about conception take in the future when, thanks to the progress of reproductive technologies, this objective is achieved in such diverse and innovative ways, in order to realise the desire to conceive a child? Analytical practice allows us to approach cases where we can verify the existence of current myths about coming into the world. We know the importance Lacan placed on whether or not one has been desired by those called mother or father. In what way does the mass and permanent use of gadgets that connect children directly with universal knowledge – fake or otherwise – affect them?
What does the direct jouissance of brutal pornographic scenes – so easily accessible on mobile phones, so chillingly near, organising and partnering with increasing solitudes – provide for adolescents and the not-so-adolescents? How distant and naïve those searches in books, pictures and dictionaries, of striking words that could bring us closer to the imagined secrets of storks coming from Paris, seem. In language, something of the truth always escapes, even if it involves the popularisation of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale.
What kind of knowledge is belief that makes us seek its relation to conviction, incredulity, doubt, and certainty? We have the volume from the Ornicar? Collection, called “Believing” where Deborah Gutermann reminds us that for Lacan, belief compensates for the absence of sexual relation and, for this reason, masks death, working for eternity.[12] In that issue, François Leguil pointed out that the certainties transmitted by science do not require the commitment of our faith, and are thus distinguished from certainty in psychosis.[13] Lacan referred, in his seminar on The Psychoses, to a universal belief in Father Christmas, which implies that tomorrow will be better than today. When he recommends interpreting “from the father to the worst,” it will no longer be a belief, but a wager of an operator that is not based on suggestion but on the objective of certainty, the localisation by the subject himself of the real determination of his division, because it is a certainty linked to an impossible to say embedded in our body.
The Symptom as Partner
I thus consider that the determining point in our clinic, which is based on the consequences of the aphorism “There is no sexual relation,” is what J.-A. Miller announced, and from my perspective, has been a sensational discovery: his reading of the syntagm partner-symptom and the enormous possibilities of its use. The first consequence is the question we face: what does it mean to be Lacanian today? And Miller gives a simple answer in its great complexity: it is always having to deal with a problem of the articulation between the libido and the symbolic.[14] Lacanians, he says, are entangled with this question of how do you go from the signifier to jouissance? And there we have the symptom as that which serves the jouissance of the living body.
If we start from the antinomy between meaning and the real, there is no relationship between them, except for one infraction, that of the symptom. And since Freud warned that it functions as a substitution for a drive satisfaction, we can affirm that it takes the place of the object which would be the one that would suit the drive which, although it seeks its objects in the field of the Other, remains fundamentally autoerotic. According to Freud, one must defend against this jouissance, because it threatens the principle of homeostasis.
If the absence of the sexual relation is what makes discourse necessary, if it is a matter of a plugging by signification, what kind of bond is that of the analysand-analyst that allows us to access the real that establishes the incommensurable, the unspeakable, with what is located in the symptomatic nature of that relation founded on love and supposed knowledge? A relation of words and silences that leaves the sexual outside, even if we only talk about the logical and real complications of this lack of relation.
Courtly Love as a Mysterious Artifice
This leads us to Lacan’s statement about how the real, to which we have been alluding, has left its sediment over the course of the centuries. And it is through lalangue that these marks have been constituted. For this presentation we will consider a creation that has been another important reference for Lacan.
Courtly love is the literary, poetic, and musical invention of the trouvères and troubadours of the Occitan courts of the 11th century. Their works introduced important changes in the society of the following centuries. From the Occitan Fin’amors, perfect love, this literature, which was originally intended for a courtly audience, became part of everyone’s life. It evoked both the exquisite politeness and refinement of aristocratic society as well as its opposite, a crude way of using the signifiers referring to love as forbidden and hidden, idealised, humiliating yet exalting, excessive and poetic, erotic and stark. It is a love that demands the man to be both loving and servile, while the woman is elevated into the category of dominant and indulgent.
Its consequences endured for centuries. Essentially, they consist in stripping love of its sexual content, a process by which the sexual relation ceases to be impossible to inscribe. If, a contrario sensu, we start from the assertion that jouissance is the insurmountable obstacle for the sexual relation to be inscribed in any way, this would indicate that courtly love is an artifice to grapple with this jouissance. A mysterious artifice. Lacan has said that courtly love is, as such, “pure” love in the style of a spiritual bond, albeit an impure one. Lacan studied the troubadours and noted that this love arose at a time when “we see it develop at a period of uninhibited fucking. I mean that they didn’t attempt to hide it, didn’t mince their words.”[15] This love is as heretical as the troubadours who extolled it at the time of the Cathars. It is also a position that respects the semblant, insofar as good manners are the semblants required in relation to lack: there are no other good manners than those that surround the hole, the index of the real. It does not imply the deep sacrifice of nothingness that is demanded in the proof of love, it is delicate and subtle, yet it produces real effects. In this way, it shares something with the fabric of the real in its essence or texture, as erotomania demonstrates.
The Secret of the Sexual
Just as there are forbidden words, or those that hurt, those that kill, those that offend, those that burst like a parasite into everyday speech, into contingent sayings that leave a mark of jouissance, there are also the more private words, perhaps the most secret ones, those that caress, those that seduce, those that are necessary and lead someone to obtain maximum sexual pleasure. Or prevent them from doing so.
In this era of total exposure, what remains a secret? What inventions sustain the practice of sex, insofar as we can maintain that it is a secret that applies both to those who engage in it and to those who do not? What would we now add about analytic practice with neurotic subjects, who, as Dalila Arpin rightly reminded us at the end of the last Congress, avoid encounters with the Other sex? We are well aware of the phobic’s difficulty in exposing oneself to the Other, as well as the hysteric’s pleasure in recounting her adventures to her girlfriends rather than living them, not to mention the obsessive’s confusion, bothered by his infinite doubts… Ultimately, says Lacan, the only room where one comes, but nothing happens, where “the sexual act presents itself as a foreclosure…,” is the analyst’s consulting room.
Jean Pierre Deffieux, at the same closing sequence, noted the following: “Nowadays, the phallus is more and more often replaced by objects of plus de jouir for which detumescence is not summoned.” Miller addressed this question in “The Unconscious and the Speaking Body,” through the excrescence of pornography, which increasingly brings into play the jouissance of the object, rather than the phallic organ. The multiple plus de jouir objects make it possible to escape from the real discomfort of the organ and thus believe in the sexual relation. Pornography exhibits, in a banal and excessive manner, what the dignity of the Baroque veiled, despite its displays of enjoying bodies.[16]
In following the traces left by the troubadours, we find some clues in the texts that remain of their sayings. The secret is one of them. Magic will be the other. Why the secret? The secret is a knowledge that is not exposed, it is a knowledge under a veil. There is something secret about sexuality for everyone, and the sexual non-relation is secret for those who practice it as well as for those who do not. Jorge Luis Borges says it much better than us in “The Sect of the Phoenix,”[17] while Lacan will refer to it in his own clinic: “And one of the purposes of the silence that is the rule of my listening is precisely to silence love. I will therefore not betray their trivial and peerless secrets.”[18]
J.-A. Miller evoked Borges’ short text[19] to account for the hole in what is commonly called universal knowledge. It is a scholarly tale, with multiple references to antiquity, about a sect that revolves around a conspiratorial knowledge that is essentially veiled, a secret that divides humanity into two distinct classes, those who know and those who do not. As is often the case, the secret for some, is also a secret to themselves, says Miller. The text refers to coitus and succeeds literarily in making it an enigma, a knowledge to be deciphered, something that can in many ways be compared to an analytical session.
It can be said that in this text, the fact of nature, the work of flesh placed in the hands of a sect, is detached on account of the semblant. And “it is the human condition as such that seems foreign, enigmatic, […] [that makes one wonder] how it can be that one surrenders oneself to something as incredible as that which is called lovemaking.”[20] The phoenix is none other than the phallus; the sexual act consummates its disappearance and the phallus is reborn from its ashes.
In one of the talks Lacan gave at Sainte-Anne at the time of Seminar XIX, he questioned the current state of thought; he was not interested in pointing out that things had always been the same as they were at that moment, or their contemporary nature if you like. However, he indicated something that he saw as the glimpse of the future of what is considered normal in each epoch. Philipe Hellebois reminded us in his participation in February 2024, at the closing of the previous Congress, that Lacan said that Gide wanted homosexuality to be something normal. And in 1972 Lacan already added “there is a multitude going in this direction,”[21] referring to the power-groups fighting for their rights.
What is happening fifty years later? Normality changes at the pace of technological advances, both on the side of those who, rightly, demand community acceptance of their modes of jouissance, as if jouissance were something generalisable and not singular, as well as on the side of those who not only resist the new evidenced forms of dealing with the non-existence of the sexual relation, but also persecute and want to punish them, in order, in turn, to reject the unconscious and the “there is no.” The real of the social bond is the non-existence of the sexual relation.
I am what I say can find normalised forms or fall into incomprehensible extremes. The undifferentiated claim to rights deserves the opportunity to interrogate the consequences of the impossible “there is no” of subjects subsuming themselves under this or that nomination. As Éric Laurent has suggested, the use of generalised semblants indicates that we must revisit this question from the perspective of the drive at play in order to interrogate the impossible within the system.[22] That is to say, to interrogate the euphoria of the innovation of semblants, given that they have brought about a resurgence of the fundamentalist establishment of traditions, which, in our view, seems to be increasingly cruel and contagious.
To Conclude
Let us return to our starting point to ask ourselves about the difference between phallic jouissance, which does not relate to the Other as such, and that different symptomatic jouissance, which does sustain what is revealed to us of the Other. This is to say that drive jouissance does not establish a relation and that: “If there is an Other at the level of jouissance, it is only reconstituted at the level of the symptom, and even only reconstituted in symptomatic character.”[23] Of course, it is worth clarifying that the Other we are referring to is not the one Lacan alluded to at the beginning of his teaching, since this Other implied an exclusion of jouissance.
This perspective allows us to take the development of the “equivocations about the Other” to arrive at the question, why does one go to speak to an analyst? What jouissance is obtained there in this couple-symptom, what are its initial characteristics, and how does the elucidation and transmission of analysis verified by the pass teach us the singular modalities of reaching the end?
It is possible to indicate a work on the ways in which couples are constituted, according to J.-A. Miller’s proposal, considering them in terms of love and desire, in the imaginary, in the symbolic, and in the real, in order to try to locate the couple of jouissance.
In short, access to the Other is possible through jouissance, and it leads to the object a, which reveals the jouissance of one’s own body, and we have access through love, which leaves aside the body and clings to words.
Both forms of access are valid for both sexes, but here Lacan can say that the former is above all for the male, the male access to the Other, the access through jouissance; while on the female side, access to the Other is more usually through love.[24]
The latter is on the side of an open, limitless jouissance.
The preparation of a psychoanalytic Congress opens doors for us, just as the beginning of an analysis does. We use our signifiers, the resources of knowledge that we have accumulated over the years within the Lacanian orientation to interrogate Freud, Lacan, and the findings of our colleagues in practice. This leads us not to fear new elements that suddenly shine in our transmissions. It implies confronting prejudices so that after more than a year of research and clinical discussions, these glimpses will shape theory and be put back into continuing questioning and critique.
We wish our emerging and transient organisation a determined and joyful work, and for all of you, that you may find ways to speak of your constructions, your obstacles, and your discoveries, so as to provoke even more desire for this wonderful epidemic we call analytic practice.
[1] Lacan, J., “L’Étourdit,” in Autres Écrits, Paris, Seuil, 2006, p. 455.
[2] Ibid., p. 454. [Author’s italics]
[3] Ibid., p. 458. [Author’s italics]
[4] Freud, S., “Sexuality in the Aetiology of the Neuroses” (1898), The Standard Edition of The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, VolumeIII, London: Hogarth Press, 1955, p. 267.
[5] Ibid., p. 273.
[6] Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book V: The Formations of the Unconscious, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. B. Fink, Cambridge: Polity, 2006, p. 31.
[7] Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. B. Fink, New York: Norton, 1998, p. 96.
[8] Tendlarz, S., El Inconsciente Enamorado, Buenos Aires: Grama ediciones, 2024, p. 131.
[9] Lacan, J., “L’Étourdit,” op. cit., p. 456.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid., p. 482. “There is nothing excessive, in view of what experience gives us, in placing at the head of being or having the phallus […] the function that supplants the sexual relation.”
[12] Gutermann-Jacquet, D., “Luminaria,” Ornicar? Creer no. 2, Buenos Aires, Navarin-Grama ediciones, 2024.
[13] Leguil, F., “Anatomía de una paradoja,” Ornicar?, op. cit., p. 51.
[14] Miller, J.-A., El partenaire-síntoma, 1997-1998, Buenos Aires: Paidós, 2008, p. 47.
[15] Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. D. Porter, London/ New York: Norton, p. 136.
[16] Miller, J.-A., “The Unconscious and the Speaking Body,” in Scilicet: The Speaking Body. On the Unconscious in the 21st Century, Paris: New Lacanian School, 2016. pp. 27-41.
[17] Borges, J. L., “Artificios, La Secta del Fénix,” Obras completas 1923-1972, Buenos Aires: Emecé editores, 1974, p. 522.
[18] Lacan, J., Ethique de la psychanalyse: La psychanalyse est-elle constituante pour une éthique qui serait celle que notre temps nécessité?, Facultés universitaires de Saint-Louis, Bruxelles, 9 March 1960. [Unpublished]
[19] Miller, J.-A., Les us du laps, 1999-2000, L’orientation lacanienne (annual course delivered within the framework of the Department of Psychoanalysis, The University of Paris VIII, lesson of 24 November 1999).
[20] Ibid., p. 39.
[21] Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XIX, …or Worse, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. A.R. Price, Cambridge: Polity, 2012, p. 57.
[22] Miller, J.-A., Piezas sueltas, Buenos Aires: Paidós, 2013, p. 397.
[23] Miller, J.-A., El partenaire-síntoma, op. cit., p. 236.
[24] Ibid., p. 275.