Anxiety...It is therefore a compass to indicate the real. It is our compass, our orientation in clinical psychoanalysis, since it was, at the moment he uttered it, Lacan’s own reinvention.
But in both fear and anxiety, the subject is aware of a danger. He defends himself with what is for him a danger “signal,” a “signal” of the real that Lacan qualifies as opaque, since it is not signifierable [signifiantisable] and thus in contrast to the symbolic function of the signifier, whose vocation is to clarify. This is why the strange, the opaque, before which anxiety operates as “signal,” is about the “irreducible of the real”, says Lacan. And this is why he can affirm his guiding principle of his Seminar: that of all the signals, anxiety is the one that “does not deceive.” Beyond the entire signifying operation hitherto promoted by Lacan, anxiety, which escapes the signifier, thus indicates a certainty with regard to the desire of the Other and the response of the subject, and with regard to the irreducible of the real. It is therefore a compass to indicate the real. It is our compass, our orientation in clinical psychoanalysis, since it was, at the moment he uttered it, Lacan’s own reinvention.