4 1 Introduction
In Chapters 4 and 5 I propose to explore Lacan’s late theory of the subject, cen-
tered as it is on the notion of the Real. In this chapter, I initially intend to analyze
fully the meaning of the formula “There is no Other of the Other” and its para-
digmatic function in summarizing Lacan’s work of the 196 0s and 197 0s. What
does the Other stand for here? How is this formula related to the decline of the
hegemony of the symbolic Other—the Other of the paternal Law, the “signifier
of signifiers”—and to the simultaneous emergence of the “absolute Other of the
subject”?^1 And, last but not least, why does Lacan superimpose this notion of “ab-
solute otherness” with what he calls “the Real”?
Secondly, I aim to show how the explicit thematization of the Real and its com-
plex relationships with the Imaginary and the Symbolic directly imply a thorough
reconsideration of the field and function of the subject. The Real “subverts” Lacan’s
previous notions of subjectivity insofar as it obliges him to reconsider the precise
role of the signifying structure that founds the subject of the unconscious. Un-
doubtedly, the main focus of Lacan’s late research is still directed at the subject of
the unconscious, but the unconscious is now to be conceived as not being com-
pletely exhausted by the presence of signifiers: there is something real in it which
escapes the Symbolic, something which renders the symbolic Other “not-all” and,
for the same reason, makes it possible precisely as a differential symbolic structure.
As Lacan himself clearly states in Seminar VII (1959‒1960), “the subject is not
simply the subject subjected to the mediation of the signifier,” but is also a “middle
term between the real and the signifier.”^2 Such a qualification of the subject of the
unconscious should immediately strike the reader for its incongruity with what
Lacan had repeatedly expressed in his earlier work, most noticeably in his article
“The Freudian Thing” ( 1955 ): at that stage, the unconscious was fully reducible to
the signifier and, indeed, straightforwardly defined as the “rational” Thing that
speaks. On the other hand, by the time of Seminar VII, the unconscious is some-
how bound to a real Thing whose main characteristic is—rather surprisingly—its
“dumbness,”^3 its being “outside-of-the-signified.”^4 As we shall later see in more
detail, although Lacan’s claim that in these two instances he is, after all, delineat-
ing exactly the same notion of the unconscious is unconvincing, it is nevertheless
the case that we are not simply being presented with two opposed theories of the
subject. In other words, it is important to insist on the fact that, despite some sub-
stantial changes, it is yet again the subject of the unconscious structured like a lan-
guage that finds a new elucidation through the notion of the subject of the Real.^5
In addition to this, it is essential to emphasize that the order of the Real does
not exclusively appear in the margins of the subject’s symbolic functions: it is at