containment action which is usually accomplished by the “standard” Name-of-the-
Father if the latter does not function properly. Joyce’s paternal metaphor was defec-
tive: it had to be supplemented by the writer. Thus, the name “Joyce” literally
embodies a subjective placeholder for the lack in the Other, and it does so by means
of a particular way of writing. The name “Joyce” is a “singular universal”: Joyce
reaches a substitutive version of the Name-of-the-Father—thus individualized and
anti-ideological by definition—precisely by writing his jouis-sens.^287
As for Miller, he reminds us that in his late work Lacan often suggested that the
end of the psychoanalytic treatment should be understood in terms of a “getting
by” with the symptom, a “know-how of the symptom.” He is then led to the fol-
lowing question: “Does [the know-how of the symptom] entail the cessation of
repetition or a new manner of repetition?”^288 I must point out that, for Miller, both
alternatives exclude a priori the fundamental fantasy, since he strangely opposes
jouissance“conceived as repetition” to jouissance“conceived as fantasy.”^289 Even more
unexpectedly, he opposes the know-how of the symptom to the traversalof the
fundamental fantasy, defined as a mere “transgression which is put to work in anal-
ysis... an invitation to go in the direction of the void and of the destitution of
the subject.”^290
I think that these sharp oppositions are extremely dubious and not sufficiently
argued for. For instance, it is astonishing that Miller unhesitatingly proposes the
assumption of the (repeated or unrepeated) symptom as the end of analysis with-
out problematizing the fact that the symptom is by definition ideologized unless
subjective destitution occurs. However, I believe that Miller’s question remains
extremely interesting if one reformulates it as follows: afterthe traversal of the fun-
damental fantasy, which is a necessary precondition for a nonideological know-
how of the symptom, does the subject form a newfundamental fantasy? In other
words, does the new way of desiring brought about by the sinthomeinclude or ex-
clude the (necessarily repetitive movement of a new) fundamental fantasy?
In my opinion, if the sinthomewere to exclude the formation of a (radically new)
fundamental fantasy, then it would be extremely difficult to articulate its precise
status exclusively on the basis of Lacan’s own work. In this case, I do not see how
we could define it as something more accurate than a (nonpsychotic) overturning
of the relationship between the Symbolic and the Real in favor of the latter—an
“inverted” sublimation or, as Miller has it, “a Symbolic [that] remains very real.”^291
Furthermore, what should we say about the political implications of this new kind
of symbolic identification? To put it bluntly, apart from their partial compromise
with the existing hegemonic Master-Signifier—Joyce certainly did not speak the
way he wrote... —how do sinthomescommunicate with each other if there is no
common phantasmatic background at the level of the individual naming of thethe subject of the real (other)