The discovery of the unconscious concerns not only the history of desire and subjectivity, but also the nature and boundaries of truth. In Lacan’s hands, truth works as a kind of limit-concept between clinic and philosophy. Truth is the starting point of a psychoanalytical treatment; but it is not possible to conceive it without resorting to an intricate conceptual field of forces in which various discourses cross each other, such as philosophy, logic, linguistics, literature. Lacan goes through these fields without asking permission, with speed and nimbness enough to arouse suspicions or fascination!

This book is a detailed study of the problem of truth in Lacan and it begins with the paradoxical coexistence of two axioms: “there is truth” and “there is no truth of the truth”. Within those limits the author examines the thesis of disagreement between knowledge and truth; reconstructs step by step all the stages of the lacanian criticism of metalanguage; approaches the problem of the relations between science and psychoanalysis; and finally examines lacanian style as an effort to formalize, in the writing of psychoanalysis, the deadlocks of a truth that we can say but incompletely.