Chapter II
Fantasy and the Desire of the Other
Jacques Alain Miller
Translated by Ellie Ragland
A writing of the fantasy: Ø
(S <> a)
The excellence of the fantasy:
Diana and Achteon
Desire does not cause desire
except via the object.
The hysteric as subject.
The permanence of the
obsessional's ego.
I am going to continue today with the fantasy and the desire of the Other.
I say the desire of the Other in order to translate Lacan's writing of the barred O, Ø, in a necessarily partial way.
Each time one causes these writings to pass into current language, one, doubtlessly, adds something: That something is the meaning. Hoping to refind oneself in what it means, one removes something, at the same time, since the meaning is partial. In particular, the advantage of this writing is that it is unique, at least for two meanings: The one called the desire of the Other, and also that of the split in the signifier. There is only one writing, especially precious, then, where it is a question of what concerns us in the fantasy.
The fantasy, on the one hand, responds to what manifests itself as a split in the field of the signifier, in the signifying order - one can say order since it concerns an articulation -, and, on the other hand, responds to what in the Other's desire reveals itself from a like continuity.
These are formulae which can seem complex, and that I hope to have already justified based on clinical givens. Were it only by this: The fantasy reveals itself in the clinic of analytic experience as a stumbling block. This stumbling block is also a resistance to the signifying intervention of the analyst since it is from the side of the analyst, of the analytic interpretation, that we must approach the fantasy.
Now Freud indicated to us the character of this stumbling block to interpretation in his A child is being beaten, in these two sentences I read to you the last time. The form itself of this sentence, negative - one cannot do otherwise than recognize that the fantasy is separate from the rest of the structure of the neurosis - indicates to us that, for him, in our language, of course, the fantasy occupies the place of the real as impossible. He states it by the impossibility of reducing the fantasy to the remainder of the structure of the neurosis.
That immediately asks those who are not familiar with the phraseology we have to renounce any idea as to what the fantasy would be, first from the imagination, compared with what the well known real would be.
On the contrary, if one defines the real by the impasses of the signifier, the fantasy merits being said to occupy the place of the real - in any case, for the analyst, since it constitutes an impasse to his interpretation, unlike the symptom.
I consider that I am there, at the level of Freud's reading, not at all beyond - certainly enlightened by what Lacan could see in this reading. You only have to comprehend the Psychopathology of Everyday Life, it's funny; it's almost psychoanalysis for amusement. The Interpretation of Dreams is also an extremely distracting collection where the interpretation - one receives it with a joyful heart - of signifiers which have a repercussion on one another, join together, divide themselves . . . and then, all these little phonemes which magnetize themselves just so on one side, then, suddenly, displace themselves by what is precisely not a Brownian movement, but which resembles it, and which regroup afterwards at an other point of psychic reality. The symptom is funny; one can make people laugh with the interpretation of symptom. That is verifiable by experience. It is at the point where, among these first Freudian works, one counts with the third in the series, the Witz, the Jokes and their Relationship with the Unconscious, that one can read as a collection of good stories. Many people use them, definitively, as a collection of Jewish stories, to amuse themselves.
It suffices to imagine this counter-test: You cannot conceive of the same thing at all for the fantasy. You cannot imagine a collection of fantasies.
On the model of A child is being beaten, what would that produce? Such a collection of sentences would not be distracting at all.
What does one do? One makes collections, for example, of small, true facts, as Stendhal did. Or, one makes collections of crushed dogs, of squashed, imitated dogs - which is very complicated to do - as Félix Fénélon did - an author that Lacan practiced -, who, in three sentences, gives us a block. A block is necessary - in which the crushed dog consists - in order that one can interpret it. A collision is sufficient.
The funniest part is that at the moment when I was thinking about that, there was a car crash under my window. One only needs two cars which hit each other - besides, that sustains a universal interest, in the street, for the passers-by -, and there you have it, we are into the good story.
Very well, one cannot imagine a collection like that of Freud's Jokes for the fantasy. That has never been tried. There is a monotony which belongs, properly, to the fantasy. A work like Sade's testifies to that, a work which gives us an idea of what a collection of fantasies would be. It is a collection, but the singular part is that it is a collection of the same fantasy. He recycles that for 120 days. You see that it has nothing distracting about it. What gave it this interest - and it is not by chance - is the fact that it was extracted from public curiosity for years, in order that it be read by amateurs, more or less under cover.
The 120 days of the fantasy can be taken in opposition to what in Freud's Jokes constitutes a kind of lightning flash, and, I would say, the formation of the unconscious. I cannot even imagine what it would be to spend 120 days listening to the same drole story, simply by putting Marius and Olive in the place of Totor and Nanave, as Sade did.
If one wants to rank Sade in literature, that gives us two extremes which are - Lacan was interested in that, he made a little excursion on the side of Gide, which is not an extreme in that field - Joyce-the-symptom and Sade-the-fantasy. One could make three by adding Edgar Poe-the-letter. Edgar Poe is different from the other two. One can read him, while the other two, Joyce-the-symptom and Sade-the-fantasy, are unreadable.
Joyce, on the one hand, alleviated of the object a which creates a weight, delivers himself up to the pure jouissance of the signifier. If that means something, Joyce gives us an idea of it. Sade, on the contrary, is, in his literature, crushed by the object a; he cannot extricate himself from it. He testifies there to being swallowed up by the fantasy, out of which - effectively, it is a completely singular case - he has completely succeeded in making something which resembles a sublimation. In any case, he made a work out of it.
The Unreadables, that would be a collection to create. One need not only create collections of readables. This is to be verified, however: When one makes oneself understood - I suppose Lacan has also taken that into consideration -. The result is that one ends up being taken for an idiot. The unreadable, in this regard, protects whatever it is a question of; that is why there is a certain advantage to not reading the acronym Ø.
We are in a race against reading. Things are heating up. Thirty years ago, Doctor Lacan had a great advance over the surrounding milieu. Only, as we are living off this advance, at the end of thirty years, it begins to meet itself in the middle a little bit. Now, there are people who ask to attend the seminars of the third cycle, mine or others. The terrible part is that they imagine that it is a question of the secret of secrets in these seminars, since it is a little more closed than a public course. The secret is that what is done in the most closed seminars is exactly what is diffused in 12,000 to 13,000 copies, for example in this magazine which is called L'Ane. There is strictly no difference. Evidently, the alert sign begins to be reached.
I opposed the 120 days of the fantasy to the lightning flash of the Jokes. From the temporal point of view, one can also consider that there is an inversion because the symptom, and more generally, the formations of the unconscious, include a structure of deferral in themselves; a complex temporal structure, then. That supposes, precisely, the crossings of series, of which the collision of the two cars gives the image, the most elementary emblem.
The symptom is a complex temporal structure, while the fantasy is a strictly punctual temporal structure, absolutely elementary. The time proper to the fantasy is the instant. Of course, that can be prepared by a little story, but, most profoundly, the heart of the fantasy is an instant - one can even say an instant of seeing, in order to request what the fantasy owes to the imaginary dimension. The symptom is, rather, of the type moment of concluding in the temporality focused upon by Lacan. One glimpses that very well in the fantasy that has been developed by literature - because the fantasy is shared.
Of course, there is a Hieratique, a hieroglyphic character of the fantasy, but it is not stripped of suppleness. Lacan gives it the value of a supple signifying chain. It is even so supple that it can, at certain moments, be shared by people who make a profession out of writing. This period of literature which belongs to the Baroque - a completely elective period for Lacan, even more than Surrealism - testifies to it. Very well, in Baroque poetry, one sees this putting into commonness of the same fantasy and of the suppleness to which, even in its signifying rigidity, it is capable of responding.
Since I am at the point of the fantasy as an instant of seeing, I do not see why I should not evoke Diana and Achteon, a couple one meets in a floppe [classical volume] of poems, or of writings, and also of representations of the Baroque period. It is a fantasy of fascination as such, and which has, itself, a fascinating character - which it has had, in any case, and even collectively, since it has become a topos of this literature.
I will be able, if I develop that later, to bring you a certain number of references and studies, but for now, I can be content with giving it to you as the emblem, the excellence of the fantasy.
Besides, Diana and Acteon has been revived in our epoch in a completely special way - as always with this author - by Klossowski, who is as worthy of our consideration for that work, as he is when he speaks of Sade; and Lacan, in his écrit "Kant with Sade," renders homage to him.
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