infancy. Against this stance, which considers genitality to be the harmoniously
preestablished goal of psychosexual development, Lacan argues that “nothing
seems to confirm that there is... an exact correlation between the perfect achieve-
ment of a world so well kept in hand in the ordering of all its activities, and a per-
fect harmony in relationships with one’s counterpart.”^101
Lacan examines the status of the Real of the object of desire (the object of
psychoanalysis) vis-à-visthe object of (scientific) knowledge more closely in two
successive lessons of Seminar VI. We could summarize his conclusions in the fol-
lowing six points:( 1 ) The objects of everyday reality are secured for us by the hold modern science
has on the world. In paradoxical opposition to the enormous development of tech-
nology, however, not only is the “objectivity,” the “disinterested perspective,” of
science historically determined but, in our epoch, it also clearly reveals itself to
be highly disappointing according to its own (philosophical) criteria: indeed, “we
have less than ever the feeling of attaining... the end of knowledge, namely the
identification by thought of the subject... to the object of his contemplation.”^102
( 2 ) Freudian psychoanalysis is an answer to such a “crisis of the theory of knowl-
edge”; its most revolutionary message consists in suggesting that “the real of the
subject is not to be conceived of as a correlative to a knowledge,”^103 that “the real
as real” should thus be opposed to the objects of everyday reality insofar as the lat-
ter are nothing but objects of knowledge.
( 3 ) Although the “real as real... is not situated with respect to the subject of
knowledge because something in the subject is articulated which is beyond his
possible knowledge,” it is nevertheless the case that this “real as real... is already
the subject... who recognizes himself in the fact that he is the subject of an ar-
ticulated chain.”^104 What does this mean specifically? As Lacan suggests, the Real
as real is “a real which has taken its place in the symbolic, and which has taken
its place beyond the subject of knowledge.”^105 The Real as real obliges us to pos-
tulate a Real which is, at the same time, within the Symbolic, a Real-of-the-
Symbolic, and beyond (symbolic) knowledge; the Real as real is a beyond within the
unconscious....^106
( 4 ) The Real as real, the real object of the subject’s desire, isthe subject, or, more
precisely, the Real-of-the-Symbolic is “the elective point of the relationship of the
subject to what we can call his pure being as subject.”^107
( 5 ) The “real object”—the object of the subject’s desire that coincides with his be-
ing—is an object which is “in a close relationship to... the subject” only insofar
as it is “detached from him.”^108 In other words, the real object is what is cutfromthe subject of the real (other)