the subject of desire, it is precisely what ismissing from him.^109 Hence one must
conclude that the Real-of-the-Symbolic (as being of the subject) is a lack: however,
we shall now have to see how this lack profoundly differs from that of the “prim-
itive reality,” the “primordial Stoff,” that is always-already lost.
( 6 ) The real object as lack is an “object which can support fantasies.”^110
These dense formulas from the concluding lessons of Seminar VI prepare us for the
discussion of the Real in Seminar VII. It is now my intention to demonstrate how
Seminar VII could be located “in between” two Lacans, the transcendent Lacan for
which “there is an Other of the Other” and the Lacan of the Other barred by the
Real. I think my hypothesis can initially be supported by one straightforward piece
of evidence: the notion of the real “Thing,” around which the entirety of Seminar
VII revolves, disappears almost completely from later Seminars. Conversely, the
“dumb” Thing of Seminar VII differs by definition from the Thing “that speaks”
in earlier essays: this is why I believe that Lacan’s explicit attempt to consider them
as interchangeable notions is far from convincing.^111 While the Thing “that speaks”
in the mid-195 0s is completelyidentifiable with the unconscious as a fully symbolic
locus structured like a language, the dumb Thing of Seminar VII is related to the
unconscious structured like a language only in an indirectway. Here the Thing cor-
responds to the mythical primordial object that was always-already lost for the sub-
ject, whereas the unconscious is regarded as a consequenceof this loss. In other words,
the unconscious as such, its phantasmatic structure Sais supported by the object
awhich is related to the Thing but also differs from it.^112 Seminar VII is probably
the only place where Lacan founds his examination of the Real on a neat distinc-
tion between the “real object” (the object a) and the real Thing—as he repeatedly
states with various formulations, the object a“is a thing that is not the Thing.”^113
In contrast, the detailed analysis of the object acarried out in the late 196 0s and
197 0s leaves no doubt that the “real object” is at this later point the only Real.
Let us now look closely at three quotations which are crucial for my inter-
pretation of Seminar VII. Lacan states that: ( 1 ) The Thing is a “void at the centre
of the real”;^114 ( 2 ) “The Thing is that which in the primordial real[ce qui du réel pri-
mordial], suffers from the signifier—and you should understand that it [primordial
real] is a real that we do not yet have to limit, the real in its totality,both the real
of the subject and the real he has to deal with as exterior to him”;^115 ( 3 ) “There
is an identity between the fashioning of the signifier and the introduction of a
gap, of a hole in the real.”^116 By superimposing these three sentences, we are
forced to deduce that Lacan is here assuming that, before the advent of the sig-
nifier, there was a mythical Real with nohole.... The “primordial real” (always-
already) wassomething. The Thing quahole is the primordial Real insofar as it has