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The knowing the analyst listens to issues from the articulation of what the analysand says, not of what he thinks. Don't we read a text without paying too much attention to what the author thinks about it? If the author is an effect of the text, this is because the latter is a product.

Language produces a text of which the author is the effect. In Jacques Lacan the old ideology of expression is subverted, that of imitation and reflection as well. The unconscious knowledge, the articulation of desire in language, implies that the word does not express the subject any more than it reflects the world.

Beginning with the idea that language is an instrument, one is forced to conclude that language should communicate knowledge, should express the subject, should reflect reality. The discovery that language does not communicate knowledge imposes the idea that language is a flawed system, the discovery that the subject does not express itself implies that the subject is deceitful, the discovery that language does not reflect reality leads one to the ineffable. At once, evil, falsehood, and mystery are introduced. Wouldn't such bitter conclusions imply that the premises are false? In fact, language jouis. And what is worse, it jouis behind the speaker's back, with no concern for his well-being.

Sleep, delirium, lapse: discourse of the unconscious that has no other purpose — says Freud — but satisfaction. It raves about what it jouis as much as it jouis that about which it raves, even though the subject ought to repress it. Does the suggestion that the poet is devoured by the verse not come from Plato?

The idea of sign as a contract loses ground: the poet should be expelled from the Republic. The moral of the sign produces a semiotics which proposes it as object. But if the sign is an object, again the signifier is lost, as are its production and effect. Therefore Jacques Lacan reduces the sign of Saussure and criticizes any semiotics built upon the sign. Neither Good nor Evil exist when language is involved.

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* This Essay is one of a series in the book of G. García, Psicoanálisis dicho de otra manera, printed in Spain, 1983.