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Sublimation avoids repression, and this characteristic partly provides metapsychological interest to the concept. A quick survey of the answers to this question provides only fragments of clarity. We thus consider another explanation, following the hypothesis that sublimation is opposed to the act, in the Lacanian sense of the term. Indeed, the act generates a deficiency because it is a transgression of the (“moral”) law; it highlights the subject’s division, because it is a separation. Based on the examples of “the great sublimators” such as Da Vinci, Freud, or Lacan, sublimation can be viewed as a permanent interrogation of the division, which consequently is no longer contested, but examined and explored.