Predication and Being

Predication and Being names the structural impossibility of locating being within the predicative order — the insight that whatever "supports" predicates (i.e., the subject of predication, the ontological ground) is necessarily absent from the predicates themselves. In classical logic, predication assigns properties to a subject: "S is P." But Lacan's move here is to note a paradoxical temporal and ontological inversion: being appears only after predicates have been laid out, as a retroactive effect of the predicative chain, yet it is precisely what was supposed to come before and ground that chain. The "being" that subtends predicates cannot itself be captured by any predicate, because it is structurally that which is "not in the predicates." This produces a constitutive hole: the search for being through the sectionioning or dissection of predicates always misses its object, because being is defined as the remainder — what falls outside the predicative series while ostensibly grounding it.

This account resonates directly with Lacanian maeontology (the ontology of the not-being, or non-being as constitutive) and with the broader claim that there is no sexual relationship — i.e., that the Real is precisely what cannot be predicated, what leaves a hole in the symbolic. The passage's emphasis on "stupidity" (la bêtise) as the condition of analytic discourse reinforces this: the analyst's discourse, placed in the position of the object a rather than master knowledge, is oriented precisely toward what the symbolic cannot say — toward a being that is "not in the predicates," a void that the predicative/symbolic order can only circumscribe from the outside.

This concept appears in jacques-lacan-seminar-20-cormac-gallagher (p.23), embedded in a context where the Recanati intervention brings Peircean semiotic structure to bear on Lacanian repetition. The concept of Predication and Being operates as a specification of several cross-referenced canonicals. Most directly it is an instance of Aphanisis: just as the subject of enunciation fades behind the subject of the statement — being eclipsed by the very signifiers that represent it — so too the ontological "subject" of predication fades behind its predicates; being is what "is not in the predicates," the vanished ground. The structure is identical: presence as meaning entails disappearance as being. It also connects to Lack and Maeontology: the being that should ground predicates is precisely constituted as a lack, as the hole that the symbolic chain of predicates circles without ever filling. This aligns with Lacan's maeontological project of treating non-being as structurally productive rather than simply absent.

The concept further articulates the condition of the Discourse of the Analyst: if being cannot be located within the predicative (symbolic, S2-knowledge) order, then the analyst's proper position — the objet a as cause of desire — is precisely to hold open the place of that unpredicable being rather than to supply more predicates. And through the lens of Jouissance, the passage implies that what jouissance "is" also resists predication: it is the body's being that exceeds every symbolic attribute assignable to it, the remainder that falls outside the predicative chain. The Peircean "hole between object and representamen" mirrors this gap between being and predicate, reinforcing the structural analogy between semiotic impossibility and the impossibility of the sexual relationship.

Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and KnowledgeJacques Lacan · 1972 (p.23)

being, what supports the predicates before, is presented after the predicates. And in a certain way, if there is a sectioninging of predicate in order to find the being, that means that what supports the predicates, is what is not in the predicates.

The quote is theoretically loaded because it identifies a double paradox: being is both logically prior ("supports the predicates before") and phenomenologically posterior ("presented after the predicates"), and the effort to reach it by "sectionioning" — dissecting or subtracting — predicates only confirms that being is constitutively outside the predicative order ("not in the predicates"). The phrase "what supports the predicates is what is not in the predicates" crystallizes the Lacanian Real as the condition of possibility of the symbolic that is itself unsymbolizable — a structural lack rather than a present ground.