Subjectivity and Otherness A Philosophical Reading of Lacan

of the phallus S (A barred). The signifier primordially holes the Real; such a hole

transforms the “neutrality” of the Real into a lack which is then inextricable from

the Symbolic as such; it cannot be “filled in,” despite the fact that the phallus man-

ages to “organize”/mark it.

Let us now take a step back and recapitulate all this in simplified terms. Since there

is no Other of the Other, it follows that the symbolic Other is in contact with the

radical otherness of the Real. The Real stands for that which cannot be symbolized:

but now this impossibility is inherent to the Symbolic—that is, the Symbolic as

Symbolic is inherently prevented from fully symbolizing itself. More precisely, the

Real with which the symbolic Other is now in direct contact is a leftover, a re-

mainder of the primordial Real: Lacan defines it as object a,the “peu de réel”^67 which

is left to us. There is just a little piece of Real, since the primordial Real is that which

was eliminated by the emergence of the signifier: this “murder” occurred in a

mythical but logically necessary time; it is retrospectively indispensable to postu-

late it. In parallel, by being the remainder of the Real, object awill also be its re-

minder,that which reminds us of the loss of an always already-lost Unity.

Here, one point should be made absolutely clear: the reminder actually reminds

us of something which ultimately neverexisted. Indeed, there is/was/will be no

possibility of having the whole Real since, strictly speaking, there is no Real be-

yond the symbolic order. Lacan invites us to acknowledge that not only is it pos-

sible to posit the primordial Real solely from the standpoint of the Symbolic, in a

retroactive way, but that it is precisely because this homeostatic 0, this no-Thing,

was holed that the Real (as lack of the Symbolic) was created. Thus all of the Real is

nothing but the Real-of-the-Symbolic.Nonetheless, as we have just seen, this Real-of-the-

Symbolic resists the Symbolic which consequently cannot be whole: a whole Sym-

bolic would in fact correspond to a real-ized Symbolic, a mythical return to the

primordial Real (as 0) by means of a “saturation” of the Symbolic.

In the end, all this amounts to saying that the dictum “There is no Other of the

Other” entails at least three different, though strictly interrelated, conclusions:

( 1 ) There is no Name-of-the-Father as a supreme, “external” guarantor of the

symbolic order. This spells the end of Lacan’s conciliatory, “structuralist” moment.

( 2 ) There is a real “absolute” otherness that enters into contact with the symbolic

Other. Consequently, from this standpoint, the fact that “there is no (symbolic)

Other of the (symbolic) Other” implies that there is a “new” (real) Other of the

(symbolic) Other. The relativization of the Name-of-the-Father entails the forma-

tion of a necessary relationship between the Other of the signifiers and the Real of

the object a.The notion of the phallus and the related theory of the fundamental

the subject of the real (other)