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Where Miller weeps, Lacan computes

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Le réel au xxie siècle Jacques-Alain Miller
Seminar 2.22: 22 June 1955: Psychoanalysis and Cybernetics Jacques Lacan

Exposing Jacques-Alain Miller’s sentimentality and conceptual inconsistency under the stark light of Lacan’s “Psychoanalysis and Cybernetics” seminar requires a sentence-by-sentence dismantling of Miller’s poetic but structurally vague rhetoric. Below, I follow each of Miller’s central claims, paraphrase them with clinical precision, and respond with Lacan’s logical and rigorous language from the 1955 seminar to show the naiveté or fallacy embedded in Miller’s formulations.

Paragraph 1

Miller’s message: The theme of the next congress reflects an aggiornamento of analytic practice, due to increasing cultural malaise and civilizational impasses.

Critique: Miller opens with rhetorical pomp: a therapeutic optimism in “updating” psychoanalysis for the 21st century. But he misjudges the epistemic rupture Lacan had already articulated. In “Psychoanalysis and Cybernetics,” Lacan insists:

“We are told that psychoanalysis has already established norms… that it has already told them to be nice.”

Lacan mocks the very impulse Miller exhibits here—this idea that we can “update” psychoanalysis to adjust to civilization’s breakdown. Psychoanalysis, for Lacan, is not a technology to fix a broken order but a theory that unmasks the illusion of order itself.

Paragraph 2

Miller’s message: The 20th century must be left behind, as modernity has been overhauled by science and capitalism, which together dismantle traditional human experience.

Critique: This sentimental tone—mourning the past while marveling at the “new context”—is directly contradicted by Lacan’s structural rigour. Lacan doesn’t lament the rise of science and capital; he defines their symbolic matrix:

“It is from this moment that the order of science is born… Humanity will not govern nature except by obeying it.”

Rather than reacting affectively, Lacan sees the shift to cybernetics as the structural culmination of symbolic functioning, not a cultural crisis to be “addressed” via aggiornamento. Miller projects cultural despair onto what Lacan frames as a symbolic inevitability.

Paragraph 3

Miller’s message: The symbolic order has been shattered; the “Name-of-the-Father” has lost value due to science and capitalism.

Critique: While Lacan does eventually subvert the classical function of the Name-of-the-Father, he does so not because of capitalism or science, but due to the internal logic of language and signification. He states:

“Syntax exists before semantics… Cybernetics is a science of syntax.”

Miller misreads structural transformation as moral decline. Lacan does not mourn the erosion of paternal law—he dissects the syntactic mechanics that dissolve it. Miller’s framing remains affectively nostalgic, clinging to symbolic anchors that Lacan already dissolved in structure.

Paragraph 4

Miller’s message: Lacan eventually reduced the Name-of-the-Father to a sinthome—a filler for the void of the sexual non-rapport.

Critique: Here Miller echoes Lacan’s late theory but does so passively, with a vague reverence. He concludes from this the universality of madness:

“Tout le monde est fou.”

But Lacan already clarified, in 1955, that chance is structured and not equivalent to madness:

“What is this determinism that seeks to be found in an intention of randomness?”

For Lacan, the logic of madness is cybernetically scanned, structured through syntax, not mystically evoked. Miller treats it as a metaphysical fate. That’s sentimentality, not analysis.

Paragraph 5–6

Miller’s message: We must now study “the real” in the 21st century—defined intuitively, vaguely, as disorder.

Critique: “A great disorder in the real” is pure affective abstraction. Lacan had already given us the tools to treat the real not as a romantic rupture, but as:

“The science of combinations… of encounters as such.”

He shows how binary logic, as introduced through cybernetics, allows for a formal grasp of randomness. There is no “great disorder” in the real—it is rigorously structured as lack. Lacan dismantles this kind of woolly generalization.

Paragraph 7–9

Miller’s message: Nature used to be the real. Now that’s lost. The seasons, stars, families—all once structured order. Now, disorder reigns.

Critique: This is pure elegy, nostalgic and regressive. Miller confuses a shift in symbolic coordinates with the loss of ontological order. But Lacan already warns us in his seminar:

“The symbolic order does not derive from nature… It organizes nature.”

Miller laments the fall of an imaginary natural harmony. Lacan had already moved past it in 1955. This is the very imaginary confusion that Lacan diagnosed as analysis’ great danger.

Paragraphs 10–14

Miller’s message: Christianity tried to preserve the order of nature; the Church resists the real’s decay. Modernity destroys it.

Critique: Miller openly admires the Catholic Church’s futile defense of a fictional real. He says:

“I find it admirable… a cause perdue.”

This is not analysis. This is reactionary nostalgia dressed in analytic language. Lacan, by contrast, asserts:

“Humanity thought that through rituals it maintained the order of nature. Was it right or wrong? We don’t know.”

He offers no moral positioning—only structural analysis. Miller inserts morality and admiration, thereby betraying psychoanalytic neutrality.

Paragraph 15–18

Miller’s message: The real escapes nature. Magic was an early attempt to control nature; science made nature silent.

Critique: Miller again speaks as if these are tragic transformations. But Lacan already identified cybernetics—science’s child—as precisely that:

“The real is what one finds in the same place… Cybernetics articulates this through the symbolic.”

Miller turns history into allegory; Lacan formalizes it. The contrast is stark: symbolic logic vs. poetic lamentation.

Paragraphs 19–22

Miller’s message: Science revealed that nature is written mathematically. Yet belief in laws is a veil we must lift.

Critique: Miller half-embraces and half-rejects the mathematization of the world. But Lacan had already seen this ambivalence as misguided. He says:

“Cybernetics is the realization that the symbolic can operate without subjectivity.”

Miller cannot decide if this mathematical real is liberating or horrifying. Lacan is clear: syntax precedes sense; no mystery here, only structure.

Paragraphs 23–27

Miller’s message: The real is without law. Biology, sex, and nature are all unraveling. This is Marx’s capitalism too.

Critique: Miller romanticizes breakdown as revelation. He quotes Marx emotionally but misaligns this with Lacan, who insisted that:

“The real is what resists symbolization absolutely.”

Not what symbolizes chaos. Miller imagines a world “falling apart”; Lacan sees a syntax unfolding. The “lawlessness” Miller intones is already inscribed in logic—through Lacan’s formalism, not poetic collapse.

Paragraphs 28–35

Miller’s message: Lalangue, contingency, and jouissance reveal a real without sense. Interpretation belongs to a fantasy overlay.

Critique: Here Miller echoes some late Lacan, but his tone is still mystical, not operational. He treats “lalangue” and “jouissance” as if they open a door to poetic realness.

But Lacan said:

“The foundation of any kind of machine arises from the possibility of scansion… ordered assemblies.”

Even if the real is outside sense, its articulation in analysis is still through logic and scansion. Miller invokes the real as shock, trauma, rupture—but fails to formalize its place in the symbolic.

Final Paragraphs

Miller’s message: Analysis must now dismantle defenses against the real, working “beneath” the Freudian unconscious to pure contingency.

Critique: Again, this is affective depth metaphysics. “Beneath” is a topographic fantasy. Lacan says:

“If this were within a machine, it would simply fall away. It would demand nothing.”

The unconscious is not “deeper”—it’s structured like a language, symbolically indexed. Miller replaces structure with sacral rupture. Lacan called this misreading out:

“Reducing psychoanalysis to the emergence of coaptations with imaginary themes… fundamentally perverts analysis.”

Conclusion

Jacques-Alain Miller’s sentimentality lies in:

  • Misreading Lacan’s real as tragedy rather than structure.
  • Mourning the symbolic dissolution Lacan already mapped cybernetically.
  • Injecting moral admiration (for religion, for the lost cosmos) into a theory that had abolished subjectivity as guarantor.
  • Treating the symbolic as if it were threatened by the real, rather than producing it as its own outside.

Lacan had already deconstructed these illusions—in 1955. Miller, in 2014, regresses to an imaginary position, lamenting the death of meaning where Lacan simply traced the syntax of its disappearance.

To paraphrase Lacan one final time:

“The real does not disappear. It insists. But it does not mean.”

The Naive Sentimentality of Miller’s “La Fuite du Sens” Exposed by Lacan’s Psychocybernetics

La fuite du sens Jacques-Alain Miller
Seminar 2.22: 22 June 1955: Psychoanalysis and Cybernetics Jacques Lacan

Jacques-Alain Miller’s 1995–1996 seminar La Fuite du Sens attempts to offer a contemporary reading of Lacan’s psychoanalytic project. Yet what becomes starkly clear, especially when contrasted with Lacan’s rigorous and demystifying 1955 seminar “Psychoanalysis and Cybernetics,” is that Miller cloaks the real issues of psychoanalysis in an affect-laden fog, retreating into a kind of reverent, melancholic mythologizing. In what follows, we will trace Miller’s key theses and confront each with the clarity and precision of Lacan’s cybernetic logic—revealing the sentimental evasions that Miller, perhaps unknowingly, performs.

Thesis 1: Psychoanalysis as a Profession Amidst Civilization’s Malaise

Miller’s Message:
Miller opens by grounding psychoanalysis in a triad: the analyst’s profession, the demand for analysis, and the general “malaise” of civilization. This sociological tethering renders psychoanalysis as a kind of market-responsive craft, sustained by the needs and sufferings of the modern subject.

“Il y a donc le métier de psychanalyste, il y a la demande de psychanalyse, et il y a un contexte de ce métier et de cette demande…”

Lacan’s Refutation:
This sociologizing is exactly the trap Lacan sought to avoid. In Psychocybernetics, Lacan bypasses any sociological justification for analysis and focuses on the formal, symbolic structure that undergirds the unconscious. The symbolic, for Lacan, exists independently of professions, demands, or social malaise:

“Through cybernetics, the symbol is embodied in a way that is literally transubjective, and which can, as such, be embodied in an object, an apparatus… a symbolic play as such and a play that contains what? Dimensions that are its own.”

Miller sentimentalizes psychoanalysis as a socio-professional endeavor. Lacan evacuates it from such sentimental trappings and installs it squarely within the rigor of symbolic calculus.

Thesis 2: Interpretation Aims Toward the “Rien” (Nothingness)

Miller’s Message:
For Miller, the end of analysis is the subject’s encounter with “désêtre”—a non-being or disappointment of desire. He ties this to philosophical traditions of wisdom and mortality.

“La psychanalyse, en effet, retire de l’être… réduit au semblant tout ce qui ne mérite pas mieux que ça…”

He leans into the metaphor of death and philosophical detachment, making the culmination of analysis a kind of spiritual wisdom about the futility of desire.

Lacan’s Refutation:
Lacan, by contrast, does not elevate death or disappointment to the status of psychoanalytic truth. His orientation is toward structure, not existential meaning. What Miller calls “rien,” Lacan treats formally—as the absence marked by a 0 in binary logic, not an existential abyss.

“In the realm of the message and probability calculus, as information arrives, the inequality differentiates.”

There is no poetic “rien” here—only difference, scansion, and the binary law of presence and absence.

Thesis 3: From Signifying Chain to Jouissance and the Collapse of Meaning

Miller’s Message:
Miller identifies a progressive movement in Lacan’s work: from the dominance of the signifier to its collapse in favor of jouissance. He dramatizes this shift as a melancholic undoing of Lacan’s early clarity, leading him to declare even: “Adieu au signifiant.” (goodbye signifier)

“Ce système n’est pas fait pour inclure la jouissance.”

Lacan’s Refutation:
Lacan does not dramatize this shift. He incorporates jouissance precisely by formalizing its place in the symbolic—through the inclusion of the object a and through structures like ($ ◊ a). Far from abandoning the signifier, Lacan shows its limitation and necessity within a broader syntax.

“Syntax exists before semantics in this perspective… Cybernetics is a science of syntax.”

Lacan is not mourning the symbolic; he is restructuring its logic to account for what cannot be fully captured by semantics. Miller’s pathos obscures this structural maneuver.

Thesis 4: The Analyst as Destitute Subject

Miller’s Message:
He elevates the analyst as one who achieves a kind of subjectivity-through-destitution—désêtre as spiritualized abandonment of the ego. This is framed as a condition for the interpretation to be effective:

“Ce serait toujours l’analyste comme moi mort qui interpréterait…”

Lacan’s Refutation:
Lacan’s vision of the analyst is not of a passive, death-haunted figure. It is one embedded in a precise circuit—functioning as object a, not an existential void. The analyst intervenes not by being dead, but by occupying a position within a cybernetic feedback loop of symbolic exchange.

“We have the ability to establish, thanks to ‘the fairy electricity,’ circuits… based on the existence of doors, that is, cybernetized doors…”

This is not mysticism. It is a functional position in the structure of speech and desire.

Thesis 5: The Decline of Interpretation and the Rise of Forgetting

Miller’s Message:
In a nostalgic tone, Miller laments the “decline of interpretation” in modern psychoanalysis. He interprets this as a sign that interpretation has become internalized, forgotten, dissolved into the subject’s own elaboration.

“L’interprétation se dissout nécessairement dans la citation, et qu’il n’en surnage… qu’une épave de savoir.”

Lacan’s Refutation:
For Lacan, interpretation is not meant to be remembered—it is a punctuation, a scansion, a cut in the chain. Its efficacy lies in its structural place, not in its symbolic content or memory trace.

“The machine must move in a certain direction… the result would be read. The foundation of the system is already embedded in the play itself.”

Miller’s romanticism about lost interpretations misses the point: interpretation functions structurally, not mnemonically.

Thesis 6: The Flight of Meaning as the Highest Truth

Miller’s Message:
Miller elevates the “flight of meaning” (la fuite du sens) to a kind of final truth, associating it with poetic enigmas, philosophical mystery, and ultimately a celebration of what cannot be grasped.

“L’énigme… elle est honnête, honnête parce qu’elle ne bouche ni ne voile le trou par où le sens fuit.”

Lacan’s Refutation:
Lacan’s view of the enigma is precisely to disarm it. The enigma is not a place for reverence but for formalization. It is scanned, dissected, and encoded within a system.

“The science of combinations… organizes itself around something precise: the correlation between absence 0 and presence 1.”

Where Miller sees poetry, Lacan sees logic. Where Miller retreats into mystique, Lacan imposes syntax.

Conclusion: Lacan Against Miller’s Sentimentalism

Miller’s La Fuite du Sens is a sentimental meditation on psychoanalysis; it reads like a requiem for a lost symbolic order. But Lacan’s Psychocybernetics seminar is anything but elegiac. It is a battle cry for rigor, an insistence on structural clarity in the face of mystifying discourse.

Miller wants to say: “the signifier is dead.”
Lacan shows us: “the signifier is a door—open, closed, open again.”

Miller’s idealization of loss is no match for Lacan’s structured confrontation with absence.

In short: Where Miller weeps, Lacan computes.

Prompt: Study Miller’s text, study Lacan’s text. Write a detailed article that exposes Miller’s naive sentimentality in every paragraph he wrote here, in light of Lacan’s clear and decisive Psychocybernetics seminar! For each sentence, you will precisely paraphrase the essential message of Miller, then you will quote Lacan to show the message’s nonsensicality. Fully English! (“Le réel au xxie siècle” Jacques-Alain Miller, Seminar 2.22: 22 June 1955: Psychoanalysis and Cybernetics Jacques Lacan) / Study Miller’s text (attached), study Lacan’s text (below). Write a detailed article that exposes Miller’s naive sentimentality in every thesis he asserted here, in light of Lacan’s clear and decisive Psychocybernetics seminar! For each thesis, you will precisely paraphrase the essential message of Miller, then you will quote Lacan to show the message’s nonsensicality. Fully English! (La fuite du sens Jacques-Alain Miller, Seminar 2.22: 22 June 1955: Psychoanalysis and Cybernetics Jacques Lacan)

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