Issue 26 is taking up on Anxiety as it breaks in with the notion that lacanian anxiety is an access route to the real. What real? Lacan calls it objet a, and he calls it a left-over. The objet a is what in anxiety has fallen from the subject, precisely the cause-of-the-desire. Again, anxiety as such is not signifier. Says Jacques-Alain Miller in his Reading of Lacan's Seminar X, "as access route to the left over which is not signifier Lacan chose an equivocal route...which is that of an affect." And this is an affect of the subject..." a "subject that talks," set up and determined as an effect of the signifier.

Of affects and effects... How soon, asks Lacan, is this subject affected by anxiety? In the event of anxiety, the subject is affected by the desire of the Other: d(A), in a direct manner - in a non-dialectical way. And this shows how, relative to the affect of the subject, anxiety doesn't lie. What doesn't lie is the radical point at which anxiety functions in the guise of a sign, actually, how it gets written. Little Hans, for example, talks about anxiety-producing horses, Angstpferde. And Lacan corrects him: "No, not at all, they are not anxiety-producing horses. What he experiences with horses is fear."

Those who remember the story know that there was a fugitive moment in which Little Hans signals that, in front of the horse's mouth, in front of the muzzle, there was a kind of stain. It is not the construct of phobia which interested Lacan, not the removal of anxiety by the phobia, but rather the reprise of this stain, of this singular residue which is also a blur to make an object of it, to make the objet a of it.