view the mythical origin of many of the axioms of psychoanalytic theory does not
by any means diminish their epistemological validity. The quotation from Seminar
XVII is widely known, but commentators do not pay sufficient attention to a sim-
ilar quotation from Seminar VII which, I believe, reveals the hidden motivation be-
hind the former: “Freud contributes what some call the discovery and others the
affirmation, and what I believe is the affirmation of the discovery,that the fundamental
or primordial law,the one where culture begins in opposition to nature, is the law
of the prohibition of incest.”^49 A scientific discovery is not merely “discovered” but
must also be “affirmed”; it ultimately entails—as modern Cartesian science dem-
onstrates—an “act of faith.” In other words, we are facing here an irreducible
tension between the conviction of the scientific “objectivity” of the theory of
the Oedipus complex/Name-of-the-Father throughout human history, and the
admission of the historical contingency of its universal validity as a specific (post)
modern episteme—one which is nevertheless also applied transhistorically in a
retroactive way.... Lacan often closely associates the notion of retroaction with
that of the myth. First and foremost, he deems the origin of the Law (of the Sym-
bolic) to be mythical insofar as it is retroactive. In discussing the fact that, accord-
ing to Freud’s Totem and Taboo,the symbolic Law originates from the killing of the
primordial (real) father, Lacan states that such a notion is mythical—that is, it
implies a “categorization of a form of the impossible”—given that the primordial
father’s basic trait is that “he will have been killed.”...^50 And yet, as I have just il-
lustrated, Lacan assumes that all science—as the gem of the Symbolic—is, by def-
inition, retroactive.... A detailed investigation of these difficult issues would, first
of all, entail an accurate examination of the multiple links that, for Lacan, exist be-
tween science, history, and the myth—an examination which, unfortunately, I am
not able to carry out in this book.^51
4 3 to “There Is No Other of the Other”
If one were to select a specific text in which Lacan finally assumes the fact that
“there is noOther of the Other,” and manages to provide an elaborate explanation
of such a formula, I believe it should definitely be “The Subversion of the Subject
and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious” (196 0). This reinterprets
one of the most important conclusions of Seminars III, IV, and V. In this article, it
is indeed clear that, despite preserving its key role in the resolution of the Oedi-
pus complex, the Name-of-the-Father can no longer be considered an “external”
metaguarantor of the Other of the signifiers. In Lacan’s own words: “Let us set out
from the conception of the Other as the locus of the signifier. Any statement of au-
thority has no other guarantee than its very enunciation, and it is pointless for it to