Savoir y faire

Savoir y faire ("knowing one's way around," or more idiomatically, "knowing how to handle it") is a phrase Lacan introduces in Seminar XVI precisely in order to contrast it with—and ultimately displace it in favor of—a different formulation: savoir y être, "knowing how to be with it." The distinction marks a fundamental claim about the nature of psychoanalytic knowledge. Savoir y faire belongs to the register of technique, skill, or practical mastery: it implies that one can "navigate" the sexual field as if it were a domain with knowable coordinates, a territory one can learn to manage. Lacan's move is to show that this framing is structurally inadequate, because it presupposes that the sexual act exists as an achievable, completable goal toward which knowledge can orient itself.

Against this, Lacan insists that the sexual act does not exist in any structural sense. The drives are "montages" oriented toward satisfaction within a sexual horizon, but they are always partial—they never represent the totality of sexuality—and the field they traverse is one of constitutive non-relation. Analytic knowledge, therefore, cannot be a technique (savoir y faire) because there is no "it" to handle in the sense of a masterable object. What remains is a more passive, implicating mode: savoir y être, knowing how to be in the sexual field—a mode in which one is always already caught, always already duped, without ever having chosen to enter. Savoir y faire thus functions in Lacan's argument as a foil: the concept of competent navigational knowledge that psychoanalysis must refuse, because to claim it would be to participate in the same dupery that implicates all fields of knowledge in the denial of the sexual non-relation.

Savoir y faire appears in jacques-lacan-seminar-16 (p.200) as the negative pole of a conceptual pair, immediately overturned by savoir y être. It lives at the intersection of several cross-referenced canonicals. From the perspective of Knowledge (savoir), the concept stages Lacan's persistent insistence that analytic knowledge cannot be self-certifying or technically applicable: savoir y faire would be exactly the fantasy of le savoir qui se sait, knowledge that knows itself and its object — precisely what Lacan refuses. The analyst cannot occupy a position of mastery (savoir y faire) without regressing to the University Discourse's claim that S2 is its own ground. Against this, savoir y être is consistent with the analyst's proper position: not mastery but implication, being-with rather than handling.

From the perspective of the Drive and Jouissance, savoir y faire implicitly assumes the sexual act as a completable aim — but because drives are partial montages that circle their object without ever consummating it, and because jouissance is structurally inaccessible and opaque, no such completed act is available. The very structure of the drive as encircling, looping, and partial forecloses the practical navigational knowledge that savoir y faire promises. Similarly, the concept brushes against Consciousness and Ideology: the belief that one knows one's way around the sexual field is a form of imaginary misrecognition — a dupery, as Lacan explicitly says — in which the subject behaves as though it has mastered what is in fact the constitutive non-relation of sexuality. Repression is relevant here too: the non-existence of the sexual act is precisely what is repressed or denied in the ordinary assumption that one can handle sex. Savoir y faire, in this sense, is not merely a rejected alternative term — it names the ordinary ideological position that psychoanalysis must undo.

Seminar XVI · From an Other to the otherJacques Lacan · 1968 (p.200)

knowing one's way around, savoir y faire… It is rather 'knowing how to be with it, savoir y être'

The quote is theoretically loaded because it performs a lexical substitution that is simultaneously an ontological argument: the replacement of faire (to do, to handle, to make) with être (to be) rejects the model of sexual knowledge as practical competence and replaces it with a mode of implication — one is with the sexual field rather than operating on it. The ellipsis between the two phrases enacts Lacan's signature rhetorical gesture of offering and immediately withdrawing a concept, marking savoir y faire as the wrong answer before installing savoir y être as the analytic truth.