the same time that which lurks beneath the subject’s imaginary dimension. In
Chapter 5 I shall also be concerned with the exploration of this issue: this will give
me an opportunity to show that, by the early 196 0s, Lacan arrives at a thorough re-
working of the theories I have discussed in the opening part of this book. Simply
put, in Lacan’s late work, the specular nature of the imaginary order is ultimately
dependent upon a real element which cannot be specularized. As he himself states
in Seminar VII, “man... as image is interesting for the hollow the image leaves
empty.”^6 At this point, the subject is deemed to be especially “interesting” for what
is in the image (of his body) more than the (specular) image itself: this is what
Lacan names “object a,” a nonspecularizable remainder, a void (“hollow”) that re-
sides at the frontier between the Imaginary and the Real.
It must be noted that this frontier itself borders on the domain of the Symbolic.
The notion that lies at the junction of the three orders—and will be dealt with
meticulously in three long sections of Chapter 5 —is the notion of the fundamen-
tal fantasy. As we have already seen, the formula of the fundamental fantasy is in
fact precisely Sawhich should be read as: the subject barred by the symbolic effect
of the signifier in relation to the real object a.It is under the apparently trivial phrase
“in relation to” and its many possible readings that Lacan groups two of the most
significant concepts of his theory of the subject: desire and the drive. I will follow
his analyses in an attempt to demonstrate how desire—which Lacan, like Spinoza,
considers to be “the very essence of man”^7 —and the drive—which, for the time
being, is simply to be understood as that which partially satisfies desire—can ad-
equately be interpreted only if they are located within the framework of the fun-
damental fantasy.
At this preliminary stage, it is sufficient to introduce the fundamental fantasy
by roughly outlining its increasing importance in Lacan’s thought. If in its first ar-
ticulated appearance, in Seminars IV and V, it is deemed exclusively to characterize
the (unconscious) psychic economy of perverse masochists,^8 in the second phase
of its elaboration, beginning with Seminar VI, Lacan is progressively obliged to as-
sume it as a universal structure that provides the basis for the unconscious of all
subjects (apart from psychotics, who do not have an unconscious). As I argued in
Chapter 3 , the “standard,” phallic version of the fundamental fantasy is in point of
fact already implicitly presupposed by Lacan’s reading of the Oedipus complex in
terms of a paternal metaphor that guarantees the subject in the Symbolic thanks to
a transcendent “Other of the Other,” the paternal Law. On the other hand, the sub-
sequent conclusion that all fundamental fantasies—and not only (pathologically)
perverse fantasies—ultimately participate in a psychic economy whose nature is
fundamentally masochisticwill be one of the consequences of the recognition that
“there is no Other of the Other,” that the Real “holes” the Symbolic.^9 This last junc-the subject of the real (other)