Let us analyze more closely the meaning of this basic Law of the Symbolic as such.
In Seminar III, Lacan draws one fundamental conclusion from his commentary
on Schreber’s memoirs: for the deluding psychotic, the Other as universal locus
of the signifiers—Schreber’s God—is a deceiver who enacts “a permanent exer-
cise of deception which tends to subvert any order whatsoever.”^30 The psychotic
is certainabout that.^31 This is the inevitable consequence of what I have been ex-
plaining so far: when there is no Other of the Other, the Other of the signifiers—
which, because of its differential structure, is deceptive by definition—is not
guaranteed by an external nondeceptive element. On the contrary, nonpsychotic
subjects know they “are in the presence of a subject insofar as what he says and
does can be supposedto have been said and done to deceive [them].”^32 Such a sup-
position of deceit goes hand in hand with a “non-deceptive element” to which
nonpsychotic subjects secure symbolic truths as well as objects of everyday reality
insofar as these are always symbolically mediated. “The dialectical correlate of the
basic structure which makes of the speech of subject to subject speech that may
deceive is that there is also something that does not deceive.”^33 By securing the
Other’s (potentially deceiving) discourse to “something that does not deceive,” we
move from the plane of the mere feint—at which the psychotic is stuck—to that
of fictions. This is why Lacan suggests that “the fictitious is not, in its essence, that
which deceives, but is precisely what I call the symbolic” and, conversely, “every
[symbolic] truth has the structure of a fiction.”^34 The dimension of “true lies” or
“lying truths”—to which all (symbolic) truths as fictions ultimately belong—to-
gether with the related dimension of doubt can thus provide us with a minimal
definition of a symbolic order that functions properly; this is well captured by
Freud’s famous Jewish joke, endlessly recounted by Lacan: “Why are you telling
me you are going to Cracow if you really are going to Cracow?”^35 While it is pos-
sible to find instinctively deceptive behaviors—based on the Imaginary—in na-
ture, man as being of language is definitely the only animal who has the ability to
pretend to lie.
Lacan suggests that, because of the deceptive nature of the Other of the signi-
fiers, man as being of language has always needed to guarantee the objects of every-
day reality by means of “something non-deceptive.”^36 This function, however, “is
fulfilled in various ways according to the cultural region,”^37 and, above all, history.
For instance, Aristotelian science assured itself of the “truthfulness of the Other”^38
by means of a direct reference to nature, to incorruptible celestial spheres: the fact
that celestial bodies seemed to follow a regular spherical trajectory in the sky, and
thus “always returned to the same place,” offered the ancients a basic Law of non-
deception. Lacan seems to propose that in Aristotle’s universe it is still nature qua
unmediated Real that ultimately assures its own symbolically mediated forms inthere is no other of the other