Here we examine the impact and the clinical and subjective consequences of the virtual, such as nowadays it determines the everyday and technical environment of ordinary existence. From this point of view, we evoke and examine distinctions between the virtual and reality, the virtual and fiction, fiction and delusion, and the notion of jouissance such as it is solicited in contemporary clinic practice. We also show how reading and learning to read, and the interpretation of the symbolic trait that they make possible, can give or restore a subjective responsibility that is sometimes compromised or disoriented by a confusion of the registers cited above.