# Tiresias the Transgender

- Link: https://eksis.eu/tiresias-le-transgenre/?lang=en
- Published: 2026-10-17T11:24:11+00:00
- Author: 

It is a pleasure for me to follow the path opened by Fabienne Guillen, whom I warmly
thank for allowing me to speak before you today, as well as by Christine Larroque
and Pascale Macary. I retain three points in particular from their intervention:
first, the question of detumescence from which the phallus truly comes into play;
second, a certain rapprochement between the phallus and the object small _a_ to 
be questioned; and finally, the idea that the reality of sex (which tends toward
an imaginary formalization of male and female positions) only partially covers the
impossible as the real of jouissance. Today I will add another point: jouissance
correlated with sex as a calling into question, indeed a putting to the test, of
transcendental reality.

To address these questions, it seems wholly fitting to return to the lesson given
by Lacan on March 20, 1963 in his seminar on _Anxiety_. In addition to elevating
him to the rank of “patron saint of psychoanalysts”, Lacan mentions three times 
the mythical figure of Tiresias, or more precisely evokes three very different figures
of the seer: as depicted by Ovid, struck blind and made an oracle by capricious 
gods; under the figure of Thérèse-Tiresias in Guillaume Apollinaire’s scandalous
play; and finally as the narrator of a scene of modern life set forth in T.S. Eliot’s
poem “The Waste Land”. Three approaches to Tiresias that I propose to visit.

### Part 1: The Lesson of March 20, 1963

In this lesson, Lacan seeks to situate anxiety—to indicate its site or zone, returning
to what he calls “the central field, already outlined in the seminar on _Ethics_,
as being that of jouissance”, conceived as profoundly independent of the articulation
of desire, because desire is constituted on this side of the zone that separates
jouissance and desire—which is the fault line where anxiety occurs. From there, 
Lacan formalizes a schema structured by a movement initiated by the question of 
the meaning of being (“what am I?”), comprising three levels: the principle of jouissance(
as Christian Fierens names it), the fault line of anxiety, and dialectical desire—
undergoing an inversion where the division of the subject by the questioning Other
becomes the division of the big Other ($S(not{A})$) by the subversive question of
a subject in becoming. […]