In 1973, this phrase¹ used by Lacan in "L'étourdit"² sparked a general perplexity in the analytical field and beyond. However, it was a statement that Lacan had been preparing for several years: in Seminar XIV: The Logic of Fantasy (1966),³ Lacan had already repeated that there is no sexual act, and that there can be no sexual satisfaction. This shock phrase from 1973, now known to a much wider public, continues to raise questions, not least in the world of analysis. The fact that it has been chosen as the theme of a world congress of psychoanalysis should come as no surprise, as the phrase always calls for new interpretations.

In 1972, in the Seminar Encore, a year before "L'étourdit," Lacan said the following:

I state that analytic discourse is premised solely on the statement that there is no such thing, that it is impossible to found [poser] a sexual relationship [le rapport sexuel]. Therein lies analytic discourse's step forward and it is thereby that it determines the real status of all the other discourses.⁴

The statement: "There is no sexual relation," is posited here as a condition of the analytic discourse, and consequently of all discourse.

The impossibility of an encounter of the jouissance of the body between man and woman in Lacan's Encore takes up and specifies what he put forward in Seminar XIV about the incommensurability between the signifier and jouissance (jouissance and its object). In our contemporary world, the denial of this incommensurability makes it desirable to examine this phrase anew.

Lacan says in Seminar XIV: "There is no sexual act […] the unconscious keeps shouting at the top of its lungs."⁵ It shouts out, but to what extent is it still heard? Everything in our world points to a denial of the unconscious. And the denial of the unconscious translates principally into the fierce determination to make the sexual relation exist by any means.

For our two years of reflection on this theme, I would like to propose three avenues of work, among many others to come:

1) gender transition
2) the murderous instinct
3) object rather than organ.

In my opinion, these are the three major ways of trying to make the sexual relation exist in the present day.

Jacques-Alain Miller has once again shown us the way by defining a new cogito: The dico: "I say there I am" or "I am what I say"—which replaces the Cartesian cogito: "I think therefore I am." The dico denies the fundamental division, the separation between thought and being, or in other words, between the signifier and jouissance. This new dico, "I am what I say," allows us to believe and to make us believe that the sexual relation exists.
The first path, transsexuality, the "free" choice of gender and mode of jouissance, responds perfectly to the new dico: all you have to do to become a man, is say you are a man. But changing one's body does not mean changing one's jouissance, as we see every day in the clinic. In some cases, we see the melancholic effects that follow because changing gender in the body does not resolve the question of the impossibility of sexual jouissance between a man and a woman.
Saying "I am a woman" or "a man" is not enough to become one.

One sign indicates it: many young people in transition have no difficulty whatsoever with their bodies; they modify them, sometimes changing them completely, and in the vast majority of cases they are happy with the result.
But what do they do with it? One notices that many of them have no sexuality whatsoever, have great difficulty approaching other people's bodies, and don't know what to do with them. They don't know whom to address their desire, if they have one. Except in certain cases, for those who make it their profession, such as escorts or sex workers, of which there are many and we might wonder if this isn't a way of getting round the sexual question. Most of them don't have a sex life. One may think that the denial of the sexual non-relation is coming back through the window here.

The second path, which I have entitled "the murderous instinct" is a reminder of the state of our world and its pervasive wickedness, but it should be pointed out here that it is very often the wickedness of the One-all-alone that plays its part.
It is less and less a group instinct, a political instinct, what is at stake is the solitary exercise of the death drive.

I think it's essential to remember this sentence by Lacan in his Ornicar? In 1979:

The sexual relation, there is none, but that is not obvious. That's very precisely what Freud argued—there is none, except in the case of incest or murder. The Oedipus myth means that the only person you want to sleep with is your mother, and as for the father, you kill him.⁶

Of course, the father was killed symbolically when he consisted symbolically. But today, killing the father symbolically means what?
It seems to me that we could reflect on the current tendency to make the sexual relation exist by killing the father no longer in the symbolic but in the real, hence the torments of our world.

Third path: the object rather than the organ. Man is confronted with another real, which Lacan addresses in the Seminar on Anxiety, concerning the inevitable detumescence of the penile organ, a real that puts a stop to the satisfaction of sexual jouissance.
In mating, the subject cannot really possess the body he embraces. As soon as he reaches jouissance, satisfaction stops. An instant of enjoyment [jouir]!
The man, in this fading moment, loses not only his instrument, but also the third element in the relation of the couple (the penis and the phallus).
One "solution" for avoiding this real now seems to be emerging from a number of others. Nowadays, the phallus is increasingly replaced by objects of surplus enjoyment [plus de jouir] for which detumescence is not summoned. J.-A. Miller addressed this question in "The Unconscious and the Speaking Body,"⁷ through the proliferation of porn, which increasingly brings into play a jouissance of the object rather than of the phallic organ; multiple objectal surplus enjoyments making it possible to escape the real inconvenience of the organ and thus to believe in the sexual relation.

So there you have it, three paths! There are many others.
My intention over the next two years will be to work on trying to identify how the contemporary clinic might be defined as a clinic that aims to counteract the sexual non-relation.

^[1] Text presented at the end of the most recent WAP Congress in 2024 as an introduction to the theme of the next Congress in 2026.
^[2] Lacan, J., "L'étourdit," in Autres écrits, Paris, Seuil, 2001, p. 455.
^[3] Lacan, J., Le Séminaire, livre XIV, La Logique du fantasme, ed. J.-A. Miller, Paris: Champ freudien, Seuil, 2023.
^[4] Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. B. Fink, New York/London: Norton, 1998, p. 9.
^[5] Lacan, J., Le Séminaire, livre XIV, La Logique du fantasme, op. cit., p. 260.
^[6] Lacan, J., "Vers un significant nouveau," in L'escroquerie psychanalytique, Ornicar?, no. 17/18, Spring 1979, pp. 8-9. This is the French publication of the lesson of 15 March 1977, Seminar XXIV: L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile a mourre.
^[7] Miller, J.-A., "The Unconscious and the Speaking Body," in Scilicet, The Speaking Body, On the Unconscious in the 21 st Century, New Lacanian School, 2016, pp. 27-42.