Lacan’s last teaching: There’s something beyond language

Abstract

The centrality of the symbolic instance in Jacques Lacan has become an icon of this author, one of the most prominent of psychoanalytic theory. However, what we call three teachings of Lacan is, in fact, a path from the centrality on language to the focus on the real instance. This path radically altered concepts, imposed the creation of others and established the existence of a kind of writing which exceeds the production of meaning and any communicative intent. Jouissance has a specif writing that marks the parletre’s body forever. In this conception, what Lacan calls letter is the minimal particle of the signifier, not tied to any chain yet, targeting only the jouissance itself. This paper presents a theoretical research through Lacan’s work and some of its major contemporary readers, to focus in the last moment of the Lacanian teaching, that features the real instance.

Keywords: subject, symbolic instance, jouissance, writing, letter.