such traumatic encounters, such penetrations into the forbidden or damned domain, in Antigone , are called ate , and can only be sustained for a brief moment. These authentic moments are rare; one can only survive them if one soon returns to the safe domain of semblances—truth is too painful to be sustained for more than a passing moment. At other times (especially in his ruminations about the symptom towards the end of his life), Lacan adopts the opposite (but effectively complementary) attitude of wisdom: the analyst never knows what will happen when he pushes analysis too far and dissolves the analysand’s symptoms too radically—one can get more than one expected, a local interpretive intervention into a particular symptomal formation can destabilize the subject’s entire symbolic economy and bring about a catastrophic disintegration of his world. The analyst should thus remain modest and respect appearances without taking them too seriously; they are ultimately all we have, all that stands between us and the catastrophe. It is easy to see how these two stances complement each other: they rely on a (rather Heideggerian) image of human life as a continuous dwelling in “inauthentic” semblances, interrupted from time to time by violent encounters with the Real. (What this entire field encompassing the two stances excludes is the Christian “work of love,” the patient work of continuous fidelity to the encounter with the Real.) This modest approach of merely “making life a little bit easier,” of diminishing suffering and pain, forgetting about capitalized Truth, makes the late Lacan almost a Rortyan

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