ject that Lacan did not consider for an instant what is obviously the main issue at
stake here: how was the power plant built in the first place? In fact he does give an
answer, a provocative one, which we shall be able to explore in due course: the
power plant was built by the Holy Spirit; creation should always be regarded as cre-
ation ex nihilo.^95
Toward the end of Seminar VI—a seminar principally devoted to the discussion of
unconscious desire and the way in which it is organized in the fundamental fan-
tasy—Lacan returns on various occasions to a classification of the distinct forms of
the Real. The strict coherence of the development that links these passages with
Seminar IV, however, is obfuscated by the use of an altogether different terminol-
ogy. First of all, Lacan talks about a “twofold reality,”^96 indicating that there is “an-
other dimension” of reality (that of the object a,the Real-of-the-Symbolic) which
must be separated from everyday reality; the latter is merely that which “could be
inscribed in a behaviorist experience” whereas the former represents “eruptions
in the behavior of the subject.”^97 This other dimension of reality should also not
be identified with “primitive reality.”
Consequently, we are actually dealing with three realities: ( 1 ) everyday “behav-
iorist” reality; ( 2 ) “primitive reality”; ( 3 ) a dimension of reality that differs from
the first two and is given two basic attributes: first, it locates itself in a “beyond”
with respect to everyday reality; secondly, it has been there “from the beginning”
(as we shall soon see, this beginning should be identified with primordial frustra-
tion).^98 Although Lacan does not explicitly affirm this here, contrary to what one
might suppose, “primitive reality” was notconcretely there at the “beginning,”
since it was always-already lost—this issue will be developed in Seminar VII,
where Lacan will show how everyday reality and the Real which “erupts” in it are
both the consequences of the lossof “primitive reality.”
For the time being, Lacan focuses on the fact that psychoanalysis must extract
the Real from everyday reality in order to avoid confusing two different kinds of
objects: the (imaginary) object of knowledge (connaissance) and the (real) object of
desire. The first notion of the object, that of scientific objectivity, “has been the
fruit of the elaboration of centuries of philosophical research,” and proposes “a
relationship of the object to the subject by means of which knowing involves a
profound identification,... a connaturality through which any grasp of the ob-
ject manifests something of a fundamental harmony.”^99 The tacit superimposition
of this notion of the object, the object of knowledge—which is, after all, “histor-
ically definable”^100 —onto the second notion of the object, the object of desire, is
what leads many psychoanalysts mistakenly to promote the idea that the matura-
tion of the subject’s desire—and of his sense of reality—logically entails a matu-
ration of the object of desire beyond the polymorphous sexuality that characterizes