Subjectivity and Otherness A Philosophical Reading of Lacan

“suffered” or been holed by the signifier; hence the Thing isa transcendent“inacces-

sible”^117 hole. This is precisely what differentiates Seminar VII from Lacan’s later

assumption of what is logically involved by the barring of the Other—namely, that

the primordial Real, “nature,” is in itself not-One:^118 on the contrary, here the pre-

symbolic Real is plainly said to constitute a “totality,” a One.

We can now grasp why the distinction between the Thing and the object aholds

only in Seminar VII: at this stage, the object ais the hole from the standpoint of the

symbolic order, it is the hole ofthe Symbolic, whereas the Thing quatranscendent

hole is somehow independent of the Symbolic (see graph 4. 8 ). The Thing should

be regarded as the reified negation of the primordial Real effected by the emer-

gence of the signifier. In other words, we are dealing with the presence of an ab-

sence that exists per se;as Lacan puts it: “The Thing is not nothing, but literally is

not.”^119 It is a minus that negates a mythical plus (nature that was some-thing per se).

If, on the one hand, the Thing quahole is clearly caused by the signifier, it is a

retroactive creation of the signifier; on the other, despite being its consequence, it

is also independent of the signifier inasmuch as it is the minus of a mythical pre-

signifying plus that is not caused by the signifier. From this contradictory stand-

point, object ais not the Thing, since the Thing quahole iswhat has been canceled

by the signifier. In other words, the object ais considered in Seminar VII to be a de-

rivativelack.

This last point allows us to suggest that we should understand the object a(the “real

object” of Seminar VI) as the lost object which is, strictly speaking, different from

the primordial object that was lost. Indeed, Lacan seems to postulate the existence

of: ( 1 ) a primordial objectwhich, in the end, is not an object, the “union” between

the mother and the child that precedes primordial frustration. We are dealing here

with a mythical undifferentiated whole—an “unlimited totality” in which there is

no distinction between interiority and exteriority—in which any subject-to-come

there is no other of the other

primordial

Real

Thing

Symbolic

object a

Graph 4.8