一小时走完拉康的欲望图（重译、重校、精制字幕） A Tour of Lacan's Graph of Desire

• In this video, we're going on a tour of Laccon's graph of desire.
• We'll check in at each of its points and explain what all this algebra means.
• Plenty of real-life examples will be included for easier understanding.
• Quotations from Laccon will be shown on screen for reference.
• Subscribe to see new videos and learn more about Jacques Laccon and psychoanalysis.

In this video, we're going to go on a tour of Laccon's graph of desire. We'll check in at each of its points, explain what all this algebra means, and go through the concepts behind it. We throw in plenty of real-life examples, so if you’re not familiar with Laccon already or if, like me, you’re turned off by Lacanian jargon, it’ll still make sense.

I’ll also be putting all the quotations from Laccon on screen as we go through, so you can see what Laccon himself said about the graph of desire, and so that the more hardcore Lacanians can follow up the references. Oh, and hit subscribe to see new videos as they’re released and check out more about Jacques Laccon and psychoanalysis on laccononline.com for background in history.

First off, almost everything from Lacone comes from his seminar, the collective name for the roughly 27-year-long series of courses he did from 1952 to 1980. Each seminar is devoted to a different topic, and what you have in the ARI is basically a 900-page condensation of all this material at around the midway point of Laccon's work in 1966.

Now, Laccon develops his graph of desire throughout Seminar 5 from 1957 to 1958, which is on what he calls the formations of the unconscious. Why formations? What are they? Formations, he says, are forms. Forms have relations to each other, and when we put them together, they comprise a topology.

That's not exactly what we get in the graph of desire. But this is what Laccon tells his audience when he's wrapping up that seminar, and he says he didn't want to scare people away by talking about it at the start. When the graph of desire gets condensed for publication into the E, it's the paper, the subversion of the subject, and the dialectic of desire where we find its most succinct elaboration.

That's what most people use when they reference the graph. So it's with that text that we'll explore it here. That said, if you want a crystal clear walkthrough by Laccon himself of the graph, head to seminar five, specifically the later part of that seminar, to get your head around it and then maybe come back to subversion of the subject.

Now, the first thing to say about the graph of desire itself is that Laccon doesn't refer to it as a graph of desire anywhere in the ECRE or in seminar five when he spends months explaining it; he just calls it his graph. It was Jacques La Milaire who popularised the idea of a graph of desire with his short commentary that we find at the end of the ECRE.

So if it's not a graph for desire, what is it a graph of? Well, in the first place, Laccon says it's a graph of what psychoanalysis shows us, the practical structure of the data of analytic experience. But it is about desire insofar as Laccon says, it shows where desire is situated in relation to a subject defined on the basis of his articulation by the signifier. More on that in a moment.

The second thing to say is that as Milaire correctly notes, they are graphs, not just one graph— to be exact, and we'll walk through each of them, while the later forms are extensions of the earlier ones. Laccon uses them to elaborate on different ideas. So we will treat them like a ladder, the comparison Laccon uses, and take them step by step.

This is what Laccon calls the elementary cell of the graph of desire. Graph one has four points. Our starting point is this little triangle here, and the trajectory takes us through to the barred S, Laccon's symbol for the subject. The subject is not the individual, not the person, not the ego. But it is human subjectivity, and we should hear in this term subject. The implication of the subject is why Laccon describes the subject as a function.

Laccon makes it clear that we are not talking about the subject of psychology. Laccon takes a pretty dim view of psychology, calling psychologists philistines, referring to its lowly purpose of social exploitation, and most cuttingly saying that psychologists just do a judicial astrology. What's wrong with psychology is its criterion as the unity of the subject, he says, hence why the subject here S has a bar for it.

Laccon's dismal view of psychology is repeated throughout his work, and on laccononline.com, you can read more in my article what does psychoanalysis have to do with psychology? Here, in subversion of the subject alongside criticisms of psychology, Laccon throws in criticisms of the reduction of subjectivity to consciousness or states of consciousness, even if they are higher forms of consciousness like the degrees of samadhi in Buddhism, the trips and highs of hallucinogenic drugs, or the states of enthusiasm described by Plato.

Laccon's point in short is that no matter how much you meditate, you’re still going to be a divided subject. What are you divided by? In short, by the effect of the signifier denoted here by S. If you want to know more about the effect of the signifier, check out my videos on what's so unconscious about the unconscious and my series on repression.

Here, I'm going to flash up some quotations from Laccon for those who appreciate the references, to illustrate how fundamental the effect of the signifier is in the construction of human subjectivity. But in short, we can say that a signifier is a linguistic unit, a fragment of language. A signifier can be a word or part of a word, but one which is unhinged from any particular meaning, any fixed representational reference, and which thereby refers only to other signifiers denoted here by S prime rather than to a particular meaning or signification.

This assemblage of signifiers taken together as a structure is a key component in language—language as a formal structure rather than any particular language, like English or French. As a whole, this is sometimes loosely referred to as the symbolic, the symbolic register, or the symbolic order.

Laccon is saying that from the very start of our lives, indeed even before our births, we are flooded by the symbolic. And once you’re flooded, you can't get unflooded. So notice that in the graph, this elementary cell of the graph, we begin with the barred subject. There is no entry point into language. You are already conditioned by language.

Notice also here how the barred subject sits between two signifiers, in effect suspended in the gap between these S and S. This is why Laccon says that the signifier represents the subject for another signifier, in the same way that a lawyer represents her client for another lawyer, or an ambassador represents her country for another ambassador.

Laccon's suggestion is that Freud had some intuition about this when he described how the unconscious worked before the arrival of modern linguistic theory. Freud talked about a primary psychical process which was characterised by two mechanisms, condensation and displacement. Laccon aligns these to two linguistic mechanisms, metaphor and autonomy. In other words, he says, the effect of the substitution and combination of signifiers in the synchronic and diachronic dimensions respectively, in which they appear in discourse.

The lesson to be drawn from the book-length studies that Freud wrote on dreams, slips of the tongue, and jokes is that these all show how unconscious processes are at work which exhibit these same essentially linguistic mechanisms. Hence Laccon's most well-known maxim: the unconscious is structured like a language.

The unconscious is therefore a totally different form of psychical reality to consciousness. The unconscious is not a non consciousness, not the negation of consciousness as he refers to here. Consciousness, he says, is obsolete to us.

In grounding the unconscious, what kind of subject do we mean then by a subject of a linguistic unconscious? Laccon makes a distinction here between the subject of the statement and the subject of the enunciation. What do I mean when I say I? I by itself makes no sense. I have to follow it up with something. I am happy, I am tired, I am a man, etc.

And here we have the deferral of signification along a chain on which... More later.

But what about a sentence, "I am lying?" Is the speaker lying or is he telling the truth? Laccon uses this example because he says we can only understand it as non-paradoxical if we split the sentence into “I” and “am lying” and make a distinction between the subject of the statement and the subject of the enunciation. So is the subject lying or is he telling the truth?

Laccon's answer is that he is telling the truth. Via his lie at the level of the subject of the statement, he is lying. At the level of the subject of the enunciation, he's telling the truth about that lie.

The subject of the enunciation can be understood as the subject of the unconscious. It's a subject that emerges from within our speech through our signifiers, and which differs from or contradicts the “I” of the statement. Laccon calls the subject of the enunciation the subject not insofar as it produces discourse but insofar as it is produced, cornered even by discourse.

What Laccon is getting at is the fact that the subject is not quite the agent of what he says. As much as he speaks, he’s spoken. The words that he uses carry a meaning which exceeds the one he hoped to convey when he opened his mouth.

And it’s through the active enunciation that we have access to the unconscious in the psychoanalytic sense. This is why Laccon says that the presence of the unconscious, being situated in the locus of the other, can be found in every discourse in its enunciation.

Separating out these two subjects in speech can also help us understand how Laccon’s famous maxim that the signifier represents a subject for another signifier refers to exactly this split between the speaking subject that enunciates words or signifiers and the “I” of the subject of the statement.

As Laccon says, what the unconscious brings back to our attention is the law by which enunciation can never be reduced to what is enunciated in any discourse. In other words, an unconscious production is one in which you don't recognize yourself in what you’ve actually said. This is an experience well-known to anyone who's undertaken a psychoanalysis.

But let's take a more everyday example: what's going on? When people give advice, two salesmen are in a bar discussing work and the deals that they're expecting to close in the coming weeks. One boasts to the other that he's very confident on sealing a deal in the near future, and he’s planning to commit to his boss that he will get it signed before the end of the month.

His colleague jumps in with some words of advice given in the strongest possible terms: “Never commit, never commit.” He says these words might be taken as nothing more than sage advice. Were the men not at this particular bar on this particular evening to celebrate the colleague's engagement to his wife, with the words “never commit,” we can wonder what commitment was being warned against and therefore who the advice was aimed at.

What Laccon says in his seminar 9 on identification can tell us what's going on here by this very fact. In the enunciating, Laccon says his colleague in our example alluded to something which is properly speaking, what he cannot know, namely the name of what he is qua enunciating subject.

In the act of enunciating, there is this latent nomination. We never find the unconscious expressed with the first-person pronoun. Rather, unconscious thoughts, desires, and fantasies are often voiced through an enunciation that is ostensibly intended for someone else.

So when we receive advice, we should always ask: Who is this more relevant to, me or the person giving it? This is what Laccon calls the interdiction, which in French is also a homonym of forbidden. It is the very place at which the transparency of the classical subject dies, he says. And this is one of the reasons he calls the title of his paper in the subversion of the subject.

So, back to graph one. The elementary Cell. Think of it as like a button tie, Laccon says. Beginning on the left, we have two signifiers, S and S, which represent the signifying chain.

The signifier, Laccon says, stops the indefinite sliding of signification. What does this mean? Take the example of the phrase “the weed is.” How we finish this sentence with a further signifier will determine retroactively its signification.

The weed is getting me high produces a different meaning effect than “getting too high.” One might refer to smoking a joint, the other to gardening. One refers to me, the other refers to a plant. How we end the sentence determines how we understand its beginning and how we position ourselves relative to it.

Laccon's most famous illustration of this is with the bathroom doors analogy. From the instance of the letter—two identical bathroom doors, behind which are presumably two identical bathrooms. The only thing that determines their difference is the signifier gentlemen, ladies.

What Laccon is making is that the difference lies not in the thing, the signified, but in the signifier. Ladies and gentlemen, the signified is totally out of play in Laccon's model.

We know that young children have grasped this when they start making signifying substitutions in their use of language. The example Laccon gives here is when a child says that the cat goes woof woof and the dog goes meow, referring to the properties of things in a way that presents them as exchangeable, that one thing can stand for another, and that these two things are not inherently fixed to a given reference.

Graph 1 presents the subject as caught in the loop of the signifiers' passage. As we said earlier, the little triangle at the bottom right is the starting point of our journey through this graph, what Pont Talis calls in his write-up of Laccon's seminars that by which the human subject, in its essence as problematic subject, is situated in a certain relationship with the signifier.

What does this mean? Let's take another example. A man complains of two problems. First, he thinks he's too skinny, and so he eats large portions of high-calorie food in an attempt, he says, to gain weight. Second, he suffers from insomnia. When I ask what it is that keeps him awake, he says “some things in my life have a lot of weight.”

The same signifier in different contexts. When we say someone is unconscious of something, we shouldn't think that they’ve repressed it in the sense of pushed it down into the unconscious. It’s simply that they don't see the link between two things in different contexts—in our example, the connection between the man's eating habits and his insomnia.

Remember that when we ask someone to describe some aspect of their life, they could say whatever they like. That they use the same term to describe two things which to them have no connection indicates to us that there may indeed be a link and that this link is worth exploring.

But why does this vector run backwards in a negatively oriented direction with the signifiers vector, as Laccon puts it? Exactly because of the retroactive effect of signification that we saw earlier with the weed example.

What’s at work here is what Freud calls the effect of (Nachtricht), translated by Laccon as “après-coup”, and translated better by Lacan as “afterwardsness.” It’s a crucial concept in psychoanalysis that Laccon pulled out of Freud and which Laplance built pretty much an entire career around.

Unfortunately, in straight translation of the standard edition, Freud’s German is rendered as “deferred action,” which doesn't quite capture the subtleties of afterwardsness. In English, we can also read this negatively oriented direction to refer to the way that the subject receives his message back from the other in inverted form. More on that later.

And so on to the second version of the graph where Laccon introduces a new set of terms. Let’s start with A and S; SA here, A is the other with a capital O, the so-called big other, because it's not an other like another person, but instead what he calls the locus of the treasure trove of signifiers.

One way to think of the other is like a switch point in a network. In any network, it's not the input that matters, but the passage through just such a junction. In the same way that a train station is indifferent to the trains that pass through it.

So the other has no subjectivity or intentionality in its own right. It's like the pure subject of modern game strategy, Laccon says, the preliminary sight of the pure subject of the signifier, like the traffic flowing through a junction at any one point.

Laccon describes the other as the inscription of a combinator whose combinations may be exhaustively enumerated. It's the Other of language or the other of language in its otherness. So it's not the place where everything gets a meaning, like the key to the code, even if we might appeal to the Other in order to find meaning.

It’s rather the space where speech and language are constituted. Because language, the words we use, can be distant or foreign to us even as we speak them. Even if we speak a particular language very well, we can think of the other as the site where language as a purely differential structure comes together.

A network of signifiers that only makes sense collectively founded on binary opposition to each other, like night and day, odd and even, or ladies and gentlemen in Laccon’s analogy. Now, this only makes sense when we look to the left S brackets, and we see punctuation.

Laccon says the effect of punctuation on a signifying chain. Just as we saw in the elementary cell with the weed example. As Laccon says, one is a locus, a place rather than a space. The other is a moment, a punctuation rather than a narrative.

So let's trace this line that runs from signifier on the left to voice on the right by thinking about how the infant negotiates its entrance into the symbolic order. The child is born into a signifying universe that precedes him and which divides him. A world of signifiers which in their brute raw materiality are absolutely meaningless.

The significations that are communicated to the child by the other, let’s say from the caregivers incarnating for the child, the other, are denoted by small s. But to the mother or caregiver, these significations are themselves alien because their signifiers will always carry a signification of which they are unaware.

This otherness is an aspect we see in the voice, which can be thought of as a signifying chain minus the effect of meaning, as Laccon puts it. There’s a great example of this trajectory in action in Freud's case history of Little Hans, real name Herbert Graff. This young child, four and a half years old, has just taken a bath and notices that when his mother dries and powders him, she takes care to avoid one special part of his body.

Hans finds this odd and asks his mother why she doesn’t want to touch it. "Because that’d be piggish," his mother replies. "What's that piggish? Why?" Hans retorts. "Because it's not proper," she snaps back. Notice how we have two signifiers that make no sense—piggish and proper. And they're given that signification by the mother, even though she herself doesn't know where they come from and what they really mean. They are in void—excellent term. Presxual, sexual.

But it's great fun, Hans, for tests demonstrating how the register of language can be used as both a condition and prohibition of enjoyment. So let's trace the line that runs from the barred subject up and over the graph via the other to the significations from the other s brackets A.

And let's explain this with an example from another of Freud's case histories—the Ratman, real name Ernst Lanzer. Ernst shared a memory with Freud when he was very young. He'd done something wrong and was beaten by his father. In response, the Ratman put up a verbal fight, but as he knew no bad language, Freud relates he’d called him all the names of common objects that he could think of and had screamed, “You lamp! You towel! You plate!” and so on.

As Freud tells it, so shaken was the Ratman's father by the fury of this outburst that he stopped and declared that the child would either be a great man or a great criminal. Freud notes, the patient believed that the scene made a permanent impression upon him as well as upon the father. The beating stopped and never happened again.

But the Ratman attributed his later fear of violence at his own rage to this scene. In psychosis, we have something a bit different going on. Code messages and message codes separate out into pure forms in the psychotic subject. The subject who makes do with this preliminary other alone.

Laccon says, what is he talking about? At the onset of psychosis, we find something that the German Swiss psychiatrist Karl Yaspers called elementary phenomena. This was picked up by Laccon as early as his doctoral thesis on paranoia in the early 1930s.

Laccon gives an example in seminar three of how this works. The subject sees a red car passing on the street. He doesn't know what this means, but he knows it means something and that this meaning pertains specifically to him. This is the appearance of meaning as such, and it's one of the early signs that a delusion is about to crystallize.

Thus we run from the barred subject via the image to the presence of meaning as such in psychosis. We might also find auditory hallucinations whereby the signifier is divorced from the signifying chain and thereby from any signification. So we can understand the location of the voice here in this context too.

So what about these two? This is the image of or from the other. Notice the big other as denoted by the capital A. And this is the image of or from the other. Notice the small a denoting the syllable, the mirror image.

The capital A is the point of the ego ideal, and the small a is the point of the ideal ego.

What’s the difference? The ideal ego is the person you identify with; it is the person you would like to be. The ego ideal is the point from which that image takes on a value, the point that sanctions or invests that image as being worthy or lovable.

What Freud points out in chapters 7 and 8 of Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego from 1921 is that what's at work in identification is not a kind of mirroring, not a specular, immediate identification, but the support given to that identification.

As Laccon puts it in his remarks on this in seminar 11, the ego ideal is the point from which the subject will see himself as others see him. Laccon introduces the ego ideal with reference to what he calls the unary trait, a concept more crucial than Laccon scholars usually give it credit for.

Here he says that the unary trait performs the role of filling in the invisible mark the subject receives from the signifier, which alienates this subject in the first identification that forms the ego ideal.

What does this mean? Again, it's an idea that has its heritage in Freud. In chapter seven on identification in Group Psychology, Freud gives the example of his patient Dora, who imitated the cough of her father. In this case, identification, Freud writes, has appeared instead of object choice. Object choice has regressed to identification.

Dora's identification is not to a person as such, but to a particular trait of that person, which borrows what Freud in German calls eins—a single trait. Unu-trait is the term that Laccon uses. He talks at length about this in the seminars of the mid-60s.

Halfway through seminar 11, for instance, Laccon refers to how prehistoric cavemen would signify the killing of an animal they’d hunted by marking it off with a single stroke, perhaps on a cave wall or on their weapon. The killing of the animal is represented by a 1, and the subject counts his first kill as 1.1. Each mark is a signifier. And Laccon's idea is that human subjectivity is essentially suspended in the gap between signifiers.

But this doesn't mean that human subjectivity is some kind of effervescent antimatter or insubstantial pure lack. The marks or strokes just give him a place, enable him to situate himself in a signifying structure. The subject is barred but not entirely swallowed by the other.

A point that Laccon makes in seminar 11 when he tells his audience that this single stroke, this einz-trait, constitutes the subject at the level at which there is a relation of the subject to the other. Two reasons why we are dwelling on the unary trait: first, because the idea from Freud is that when identification occurs via this single trait or characteristic, it's not a form of identification that's linked to a libidinal attachment or love interest in the person.

The einz-trait simply provides what Laccon accords in Seminar 8—the sign of the other's assent. It's the reference to the einz-trait that gives the fantasy of the ideal ego its weight. The gaze of the other is internalized via e einz-trait as a sign. There is no need, as Laccon puts it, for the whole organised field or for some sort of massive interjection.

What this means is that a particular trait, an X, is valued by the other in some way. Hence why it's a sign as something that has a meaning to someone and in that respect gives the child a fixed point he can relate to amongst all the specular identifications and mirroring relations around him.

So that all of the ideal egos that follow will depend on the ego ideal. The second reason we're dwelling on the unary trait is that it's a kind of a frontier concept between the imaginary and the symbolic. It's the object raised to the status of the signifier.

It's not an imaginary representation of the object, like a little sketch of the animal that's killed on a cave wall. It's simply a notch, a stroke, or a mark. This is what Laccon means when in seminar nine he says that the einz-trait functions as a support for difference. It designates the paradox of radical otherness.

This unary trait can give to the subject a place in the symbolic order. It provides both a substantive presence and a singularity, a uniqueness that is the opposite of the pathological coincidence of self and other, which is a feature of the imaginary register.

Now, notice that in graph 2, the ego ideal comes in the place where we found the barred subject in graph one, the elementary cell of the graph. What’s this about? Laccon is trying to present a retroversion effect by which the subject at each stage becomes what he was to be. A beautiful line from earlier in the ARI may help us explain this:

“What is realized in my history is neither the past definite as what was, since it is no more, nor even the perfect as what has been in what I am, but the future anterior as what I will have been, given what I am in the process of becoming.”

Packed into this denational quotation, we find the idea of afterwardsness mentioned earlier; we also see notions of fate, destiny, repetition, and transmission. And even though he says he won't talk about the mirror stage, here, Laccon goes on to give it a more developed elaboration than the purely specular one that the theory received in his original 1936 Mariambad paper.

In particular, here we get the idea of an anticipation of bodily mastery that is at the core of the mirror stage theory. In short, this is the idea that we identify with an image outside ourselves, an image which presents to us a model of corporal unity in order to achieve motor coordination and mastery over our own body.

But that comes at the price of our fundamental alienation in the image of the other. Hence Laccon's line, "There arises the ambiguity of a misrecognition that is essential to know myself."

To explain this, we now have to trace the journey along the bottom quadrant of graph two, the journey that goes from the barred subject to the ego ideal to the ego and to the ego ideal. Let's explain this vector running from the ideal ego to the ego a bit more.

This is the image of the other, or the image as other in the imaginary register. The IE here is the image, the A, the other. In order for the infant to achieve motor mastery, coordination, and to be able to identify its image, why not the image it sees in a mirror as its own? It has to model itself on the image of another.

This is how the ego is constructed. There is no other way to get to the ego, except via the image of the other. This vector is at the level of the imaginary in Laccon—the realm of images. But as we can see from its connection to the ego ideal and the barred subject, it's not possible to separate off the imaginary from the symbolic.

The fretful preoccupation with the image in the Instagram age shows this dynamic in action. We are ceaselessly harangued by images, images through which we see ourselves, but only at the expense of how others present their own image—that is, how they would themselves like to be seen.

What Laccon says about this dynamic is so relevant to our day and age that it almost feels surprising. It was written 60 years ago and not late last night. But for Laccon, the rivalry inherent in this imaginary relation has a really dark side. The ego is thus a function of mastery, but it's at the same time a game of constituted rivalry, he says, which casts a shade of hostility onto the other that can rapidly boil over into an intense violent outburst.

As we see in these passages from subversion of the subject, in the Mirror Stage paper, and in his paper on aggressivity, there is a rivalry inherent in the imaginary register. Anytime it is not mediated by a symbolic operator, whether that symbolic operator is inefficient or simply not present, Laccon warns in no uncertain terms that it can become murderously violent.

So much of Laccon's early work is about how this alienation in the image produces aggressive outbursts. And so many of the clinical cases that interested him exhibit this feature. His commentary on the infamous case of the Papances sisters and his doctoral thesis on self-punitive paranoia in which his subject stabbed a well-known Parisian actress of the day serve to show how seriously Laccon took this.

But let's take an example from more recent times. On 30 July 2008, a man called Vincent Lee boarded a Greyhound bus travelling from Edmonton to Winnipeg in Canada. He sat next to a 22-year-old man named Tim McClane, who barely acknowledged him and fell asleep with his head against the window of the bus. Shortly after, Lee pulled out a hunting knife and began stabbing McClane.

As the terrified passengers evacuated the bus, Lee began cutting off his victim's head and dismembering him. With Lee locked aboard the bus, he brandishes McClane's severed head to the passengers and begins to eat the eyes and part of the heart of the body. When he's finally arrested, police find other body parts stuffed into his pocket.

At his court appearance, Lee is bereft with remorse. The only words he utters to the judge is the plea: “please kill me.” He's devastated to hear that the Canadian legal system does not allow for capital punishment. In this sad and shocking case, we see exactly the phenomenon that Laccon is talking about.

Just as in the Papance case, and just as in Laccon's case, a paranoid delusion fixes on the image of an ideal—in this case, the young, trendy male. And there follows an abrupt and violent outburst that leads to the destruction of that image. Because the ego is founded on the image of another and because, as Laccon hypothesized in the Papance case, paranoia has this self-punitive dimension in which the paranoid destroys the other he would like to be.

When this image is destroyed, the ego is destroyed with it. Hence Lee's desperately pleas to be killed. Something we also see in the case of Christine Papin, who after the crimes, attempts to gouge her own eyes out and eventually dies from malnourishment in prison.

Now let's look at the third form of the graph. We have a new upper portion framed by A O Y. What do you want? Which Laccon took from a 1772 novel by the French author Jacques Caottte, Diable Amoureux (Devil in Love). It's no accident that the curve of the graph resembles a question mark.

We also have two new symbols in the third form of the graph: this diamond symbol or lozenge, which in French is called l'os and which does quite a lot of work as it indicates the relationship between the other two symbols it conjoins. Laccon says that it registers the relations in development, conjunction, disjunction, and we will explain later the use of it.

In this formula, it's helpful to see this lozenge as the soldering together of the mathematical symbols for less than and more than because taken together, they don't just indicate a relation but a contradictory relation. How can something be both less than and more than?

Secondly, we have the appearance of a lowercase d that indicates desire. But in order to explain desire, we're going to have to first explain demand, which Laccon writes with an uppercase D. What is demand for Laccon? It's not a demand for anything as such, any particular object, whether one that can satisfy need or not.

Instead, it's a demand for recognition, or as Laccon says, a demand for love. As such, it’s an appeal to the other. Notice that there's no need. In the graph, Laccon criticises those analysts of his time who were so caught up on the notion that subjectivity is formed in relation to experiences of helplessness by the newborn infant and its caregiver's willingness or otherwise to satisfy its needs.

We talk about need only in order to distinguish it from demand and desire. Need is almost totally out of play for Laccon because we never really find a pure need. It's always polluted by the order of language, which means that what we experience as need is never pure, even basic biological needs.

Let’s take the example of the newborn infant. It wants to be fed, it cries. It may or may not get the bottle or a breast, but it may cry for other reasons, and the caregiver may still respond with a bottle or a breast. Thus, the experience of even the most basic needs are already conditioned through the significations given to them by the other.

As Laccon says, needs have been diversified and geared down by and through language to such an extent that their import appears to be of a quite different order. Needs are always expressed as demands, which are never demands for a particular object, but an appeal to the other.

As such, there is no demand that does not in some respect pass through the defiles of the signifier. He says, now on to desire. And notice that to get to desire, we have to pass through the other. Let us begin, Laccon says, explaining desire with the conception of the other as the locus of the signifier.

When Laccon says that there is no other of the other, he means that there’s nothing to which the other can refer for legitimacy, no ultimate guarantor of truth, meaning it's a locus, not a person. And therefore, Laccon can say that anyone who claims to offer this ultimate guarantee is an impossibility.

Incidentally, although Laccon gets accused of emboldening patriarchy, he also says here that it's not the father who embodies this other; it's the mother. Desire begins to take shape in the margin in which demand rips away from need.

Laccon says, imagine a young baby who is hungry and cries out for milk. The need is the hunger, the cry is the demand. What’s left over in the margin between the two? Desire. The thing about desire is that it is need-less—in both the sense of being split off from need and in the sense of being contingent, totally senseless.

The best way to explain the difference between need, demand, and desire is in reference to the object. Now, this term object means something different in psychoanalysis to what it means in everyday talk. Normally we use the term object in the sense of a thing, like an object on a table. And we also talk about an object in the sense of an aim or goal.

The object of your affection, the object of this exercise, for instance. The psychoanalytic object is kind of halfway between the two. Take happiness, for instance. Happiness might be a goal or an aim in your life, but there's no one object or thing that if you got it, you could say would make you happy.

This is why psychoanalysis opposes its happiness and why Freud thought that there was a fundamental discontent baked into civilization. Thus, Umbrehagen and De Cour. As Jizek points out, happiness is a category of what Freud calls the pleasure principle.

So what's wrong with happiness is that it relies on the subject's inability or unreadiness to fully confront the consequences of their desire. The price of happiness is that we remain stuck in the inconsistency of our desire. We believe that having this or that thing will make us happy, and we fail to see that it’s happiness itself, which is infinitely hypocritical in that the quest for happiness only leads to the infinite metonymic deferral of desire.

So, with these two meanings of an object, we can make sense of the difference between desire and demand. Desire has an object in the sense in which we speak about the desire for something or someone. But desire has no object in the sense of an aim or a goal.

It's infinitely metonymic, which means that as a byproduct of the split between need and demand, it appears only as a consequence of them. Demand has an object in the sense of an aim or goal, but its object is not material in the sense of a thing; its object is the recognition of the other. All demand is a demand for love, as Laccon says.

This is what Laccon refers to when in a cryptic passage, he talks about the odd symmetry by which desire reverses the unconditionality of the demand for love in order to raise it to the power of an absolute condition. If we think about the example of sexual desire, this becomes clear.

Sexual desire has an absolute condition—the presence of a certain object that is necessary to get off. But it doesn’t necessarily have an object in the sense of a thing. The gaze and the voice are two examples that Laccon uses often. A certain look that someone gives is enough to excite sexual desire. Same goes for the tone or timbre of someone's voice.

Laccon calls them object a, that is, little object with the a denoting the small other as opposed to the big other. They are objects that exist at the margins or edges of the body but lack a specifiable substance. They do not have a specular dimension in the same way as we can’t point to the gaze; we can't point to the look, because when we do, we just end up pointing at the eye.

In a beautifully poetic way, Laccon describes objects, say, as substance caught in the net of shadow, which, robbed of its shadow, swelling volume, holds out once again the tired lure of the shadow as if it were substance. Laccon calls object a the object cause of desire. Its paradoxical status as both the object and cause of desire is something he picks up on later in subversion of the subject, where he describes it as like an agalma—a precious treasure hidden in a worthless box.

This is part of the extended reference he gives to the strange attraction of Alcibiades to Socrates in Plato’s the Symposium, building off a long commentary in Seminar 8 on that text. In relation to transference, this is the formula for fantasy, the subject in relation to the object a.

What Laccon calls the structure of fantasy is built from three elements. In the barred subject, we have the moment of a fading or eclipse of the subject, which is closely tied to the splitting he undergoes due to his subordination to the signifier.

In object a, we have the condition of an object, the object cause of desire. The link between the two is what constitutes fantasy. To see this in action, we can turn to Freud's work on fantasy, where we see these three elements that Laccon shows here as comprising the structure of fantasy.

Where Laccon has barred subject relation, object a, for Freud it has subject, verb, object. Fantasy entails the infinite combination of these elements, which is why Laccon says that his formula is designed to allow for 101 different readings.

Freud's idea was that fantasies were, thinking particularly of sexual fantasies here, could be formulated as a sentence. Freud picked one that he found cropping up with unusual regularity in his patients—“A child is being beaten,” and he showed how the fantasy is rephrased in a series of grammatical inversions.

Likewise, Freud says that every sadist is also a masochist. He or she can enjoy from both sides of this formula. As Laccon’s son-in-law Jacques Milaire puts it when commenting on the difference between the drive and the fantasy: “Fantasy is a misrecognition of the drive.”

Fantasy is that by which desire sustains itself in order to misrecognize the direction pointed out to it by the drive. The same goes for fantasy in a wider sense. Take the case of Scher, for instance.

Daniel Paul Schreer wrote what is probably the most famous account of psychosis from the inside in his Memoirs of My Nervous Illness in 1903, and it has fascinated people for over a century. Freud thought that the appearance of his paranoia directed towards his psychiatrist Flecing was a result of repressed homosexuality, which morphed into paranoia.

The grammatical inversions in this case were “I love the man.” This idea is rejected, “I hate the man.” Also problematic—“The man hates me,” in which we have the paranoid crystallization.

Reading the lozenge as a combination of less than more than, we see that it presents a situation of impossibility. Now, regardless of what we think of Freud's reading of the Schreer case, we can see that it’s these lexical configurations which propel and sustain all the transformations of the fantasy scenario that Freud had noted in the production of sexual fantasies.

Thus, Milaire defines fantasy as meaning related to satisfaction, and fantasy is their conjoining. As for Laccon, he describes his formula for fantasy as an absolute signification. This denotes the more general sense of the term fantasy. What Leader describes as a compass or a rule that governs our lives.

Fantasy is the pattern we repeat, the groove we fall into, our modus operandi. This is why in psychoanalysis it's always important to locate the fantasy to understand what particular relation that person has constructed between meaning and satisfaction.

It may be the pattern of always putting oneself in the position of a victim or always striving for dominance. For Freud, according to a brilliant analysis made by Leclerc in a paper called Unconscious Desire with Freud reading Freud, this formula was to reveal a secret. Seriously, go read this paper.

The fantasy will draw toward it all of the little contingencies of life and fit them into a single frame. This is why in his third iteration of the graph, Laccon talks about how desire adjusts to fantasy like the ego does in relation to the body image.

Now onto the final complete version of the graph. Because we explained demand earlier, we can now explain the drive, which is denoted with this formula: the subject in relation to demand.

What does demand have to do with the drive? A link between these two is already made by Freud, whose brilliantly enigmatic definition of the drive is as the demand made upon the mind for work in consequence of its relation to the body—a definition he gives twice in the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and then the Metapsychological paper from 1915.

Drives and their Vicissitudes, Trib unibikala. Laccon attempts to locate the drive on his graph here by saying that the drive is what becomes a demand when the subject vanishes from it. Okay, so we're talking about a kind of pure demand.

But then he continues, it goes without saying that demand also disappears. Oh, except that the cut remains, for the latter remains present in what distinguishes the drive from the organic function it inhabits, namely, its grammatical artifice so manifest in the reversals of its articulation with respect to both source and object.

How do we make sense of this? Take the example of alcohol addiction. We have a split from the organic function—drinking to quench thirst. But for the alcoholic, drink inhabits that function in the way that the Trojan horse inhabits a citadel.

Source and object are reversed, as Laccon says here, in that the source of the drive from where the organic need for thirst arises, the or zone in this case with its locus at the mouth, is given over to the object. The organic need is cheapened in favour of the object. Alcohol becomes more important than water, and thirst for water becomes thirst for alcohol.

Vampire movies play on this trope very well. There’s no better illustration of the oral drive at work than the undead vampire driven by a lust for blood, which neither quenches its thirst nor keeps it alive.

Laccon's own example here of Pavlov's dog is also not bad either. Now, turning to this formula, the signifier of a lack in the other, which Laccon describes as a lack inherent in the other's very function as the treasure trove of signifiers.

This means that there's no other of the other, as we saw earlier. But note that here there is a signifier that itself denotes this lack. A signifier that signifies a fundamental lack of any possible signification. To make sense of this, think of the pure signifier 0. What is 0? Ontologically, it's nothing, but as a signifier, it still needs to denote the fact of nothing.

The paper for which Jacques La Milaire made his name, Suture Elements of the Logic of the Signifier, is a meditation on this paradox, and Alan Badu calls it the first great Lacanian text not to have been written by Laccon himself.

This is not some abstract theoretical point. It’s a very personal question for each of us to deal with because it signifies that there is nothing which can ultimately guarantee the other's consistency, that there is ultimately no answer to what the other wants from us.

Now, in Lacanian jargon, one way to think of this signifier of the lack of the other is with Laccon's concept of the phallus. The phallus, for Laccon, acts as a signifier or memorial of lack. It's a kind of positivization of an absence; it occupies a very privileged place because the phallus is also the signifier of desire and the signifier of sexual difference too.

Which means that the signification of the phallus is the point around which all articulations of sexuality are referenced. To illustrate this with an example, the centre of my city, London, is Charing Cross. It's the junction where six roads meet.

And when people measure the distance of any other place relative to London, Charing Cross is taken as the ground zero. The official centre of central London is the point from which distances from London are calculated. The site takes its name from a memorial erected by King Edward I to his wife, Eleanor of Castile.

Grief-stricken, he placed monuments at each station marking the procession of her funeral cortege. Thus Charing Cross is both an orientation point and a signifier of lack. But the signifier of the lack in the other is also a very necessary structural element because it allows for the flexibility or mobility of the signifying chain.

Without one special signifier denoting the lack in the other, there would be no chain of signifiers, no sliding of the signified under the signifier, and each signification would be fixed into a closed code. Imagine something like a jigsaw puzzle. If all the pieces were locked into place, nothing would move and would be stuck with one image as defining the whole of reality.

But with one piece missing, the others can shift. New significations can become possible. And thus all the practices that depend on being able to play with the signifier and signified to create new significations—the world of art, literature, culture—all become possible.

When at this point, Laccon gives his definition of the signifier. A signifier is what represents the subject to another signifier. We can see that logically there has to be a chain of signifiers because, as he puts it, this latter signifier is therefore the signifier to which all the other signifiers represent the subject.

Which means that if this signifier is missing, all the other signifiers represent nothing. For something is only represented to just to the left of the signifier, the lack in the other. We have jouissance, a difficult term in itself, and there's a full article explaining Laccon's idea of jouissance on laccononline.com.

But here we can approach jouissance by asking: What does Laccon mean when he says that jouissance is prohibited to whoever speaks as such? Or put differently, it can only be said between the lines.

Well, notice the play that Laccon makes in French between dire and interdire—between saying and forbidden. Elsewhere, Laccon talks about jouissance as being a caustic enjoyment, a backhanded enjoyment that begins as a tickle and turns into an inferno.

Complete enjoyment is impossible because it must run through the signifier. The child's entrance into language, with its inherent structural lack, as we saw, means that enjoyment or excitation is sort of progressively drained from the body, so that its only refuges are at the margins of the body—what we know as the erotogenic zones, the place where the object a are found in places of exquisite and complete subjugation.

And with the critical function of protecting us from it, we get a kind of Pauper’s jouissance, to use Bruce Fink's term. Desire is a compensation for jouissance and the defense against it, Laccon says, it's a kind of a cac-handed, roundabout way of enjoying.

Roundabout because it passes through the defiles of the signifier. And because of this, desire manifests itself in odd places, appearing in the half-said, in the slips or parapraxes, in the stifling or bungling of some other articulation. Desire is the very consequence of this impossibility.

Let's take an example from Freud's practice of what this looks like. He sees a man who is attracted to women who have what he refers to as a certain shine on their nose. Freud's understanding of this is based on the fact that the patient had been brought up in an English nursery, but had later come to Germany, where he’d forgotten his mother tongue almost completely.

The fetish, Freud calls it a fetishistic precondition, which originated from this earliest childhood, has to be understood in English, not German. The shine on the nose in German "Glanz nach Nasen" was in reality a glance at the nose, where the ability to look or gaze was restricted and the enjoyment curtailed its mangled and metabolized via the signifier, resulting in "Glanz nach Nase" = shine on the nose being what excites the man.

Notice, Laccon says, that there's no agency forbidding jouissance. No one’s telling us that we're not allowed to enjoy whatever kinky perversion we please. It's not the law itself that bars the subject's access to jouissance. He says it simply makes a barred subject out of an almost natural barrier.

The symbol of this effect is the phallus, defined as the signifier of jouissance insofar as it finds incarnation in the erectile organ. But even this imaginary incarnation still retains symbolic effects because the phallus is the male organ plus the idea of lack.

And so Laccon gives it a symbolic form, the square root of minus 1. What does this mean? Laccon's English translator Bruce Fink helps us out. The phallus represents what is missing in the desired image. Incarnated as the male organ, the phallus is negativized where it's situated in the specular image.

It is a part that’s missing in the desired image. Thus we have minus phallus, not included here, but which is the algebraic form Laccon uses for castration at the end of this vector. In symboling this loss, the phallus is transformed.

Think of this as the post-castration phallus, and you get some sense of why reading the phallus as the penis makes no sense. Castration here refers to the evacuation of enjoyment of the margins of the body, a draining of excitation to the body's extremities at localized points that Laccon aligns with the source of the drive—oral, anal, copulative, invocatory.

Hence why the phallus is the signifier of jouissance. So Fink tells us, think of the phallus—this symbolic phallus—as a minus one. We go from a minus value to a plus that neutralizes the imagined loss. And think, he says, that this is exactly what the signifier does.

It makes the absent thing present. Just as a young child that Freud observes uses the signifiers f and du to make absence into present. When it throws the cotton reel over the side of its bed and pulls it back again in an attempt to master the presence and absence of its mother.

We make of pure loss an absence only when the thing in question is granted a representation. Now Fink refers us to Laccon’s signification of the phallus paper at this point, and to a gorgeous German term that Laccon uses to illustrate this along. This curious term has a rich history in philosophy as it connote several seemingly contradictory meanings, including to lift up, to abolish, to cancel or suspend, to preserve, and to transcend.

In English, it’s often translated rather meekly as to sublate, which means nothing to anyone. To quote Fink's explanation, the phallus is the symbol of this positivation of the loss that language performs. It represents lack despite it being present.

And what is the best way to represent in an image something that is lacking but at the same time present? You veil it. This is why in the signification of the phallus, Laccon says that the phallus can only perform its function when veiled.

A weird example that he offers at the end of subversion of the subject illustrates such is a woman concealed behind her veil. It is the absence of the penis that makes her the phallus, the object of desire.

Evoke this absence in a more precise way by having her wear a cute fake one under a fancy dress, and you'll have plenty to tell us about. The effect is 100% guaranteed for men who don't beat around the bush.

Here I take to mean sexual attraction on the part of men who don't beat around the bush. I take to mean men who are straight. Towards the end of subversion of the subject, Laccon brings these different formulas together to describe the situation of the neurotic, whose defining problem is a conflation of the other's lack with the other's demand.

Consequently, the neurotic is he or she who takes seriously the other's demand so seriously as to make of it their object. Now the mistake that many analysts made, Laccon thinks, is to see this as evidence of frustration, whereas it's actually covering over the anxiety induced in him by the other’s desire.

Phobia is the perfect example of this. But the other neuroses can be defined in terms of their configuration of this fantasy. The obsessional strategy is to deny the lack in the other, to believe that nothing is lacking. He has a fundamental need to be the other’s guarantor, Laccon says. And hysteria, rather than being a 19th-century pathologization of unruly women in Laccon’s hands, is defined as a position in which the faithlessness of hysterical intrigue is the result of desire for desire itself.

In other words, desire for a lack of satisfaction, for a margin to be retained in which something is lacking. The hysteric aims at infinitely perpetuating the other's desire and thereby would always strive to create situations in which the other is shown to be lacking.

What the neurotic aims at, says Laccon, is to have the perfect master of his desire. The name of this agent for Laccon is the father. Like the other, the father is less a person than a place, or more precisely a function which is to measure desire not in the sense of restricting it but in the sense of ensuring its proximal distance from an overwhelming enjoyment that Laccon calls elsewhere “the thing,” borrowing Freud's term “das Ding.”

Now, although it's not depicted on the graph, Laccon's masterly rereading of the Oedipus complex by way of what he calls the paternal metaphor —the substitution of the desire of the mother for the name of the father—looms large. This function of the father is thus an important operator, not in some vague fashion, but for the analyst to use in clinical practice.

Laccon thinks that how we work with the position or function of the father is one of the really useful levers we can pull in order to have a psychotherapeutic effect. An effect that is produced by shifting the subject's perspective relative to his or her fantasy. If the neurotic wants to find the perfect master of his desire, as Laccon says, the analyst should take care not to incarnate this figure in the transference but to bring it into play in order to destabilise or undermine it.

Practically speaking, this means it's not always going to be the best strategy for the analyst to remain neutral, passive, or silent. Because this would position them in the very masterly position they should attempt to question. Let's take an example from the Ratman's case history.

At one point, Freud's notes simply record: December 28th—he was hungry, and was fed. While it may seem unorthodox for a psychoanalyst to be preparing his patient a meal during a session, an intervention like this is justified if it produces more associative material, more grist for the mill of the analysis.

This example isn't the one that Laccon uses. And Laccon says he's not making any recommendations on technique. But what he does say is super instructive. How the analyst must safeguard the imaginary dimension of his non-mastery and necessary imperfection for the other is as important a matter to deal with as the deliberate reinforcement of an ever-renewed ignorance.

So that no one is considered a typical case. So that no one is considered a typical case. At the end of subversion of the subject, Laccon talked a bit more about the position of the neurotic, which is to say most of us, relative to castration.

Castration slips under the barred subject. In the fantasy life of the neurotic, he says, what covers over this castration is his ego. Yes, it's behind this ego that the neurotic hides the castration he denies. Laccon says if you approach psychotherapy aiming at strengthening the ego, it's missing the point because it misses the point of castration as a defense against jouissance on the one hand and as a yardstick of desire on the other.

And as such, it misses what lies beneath, namely that contrary to appearances, he cleaves to this castration. The point is not that he wants to deny it, but rather that he doesn’t want to sacrifice it to the other’s jouissance—that is, to allow the other to exploit his lack for its own gain.

The neurotic gets that things must come at a price, but to pay that price by allowing the other to enjoy is intolerable for him. So if we look at the arc that runs from fantasy and jouissance on the left to castration and desire on the right, we can see the central dilemma of the neurotic—that is, of most of us.

To get over this curve towards castration we have to refuse jouissance full enjoyment and accept the fact that the best satisfaction we're going to get is the one that desire offers despite its infinite autonomy, its twists and turns, its perpetual dissatisfaction with an object.

This is what Laccon means when he ends the paper with one of the most beautiful lines in the whole ARI and which we can take as something of a mantra for a life resigned to the reality of constant striving: “Castration means that jouissance has to be refused in order to be attained on the inverse scale of the law of desire.”

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