is initially located; ( 2 ) the Thing (the mother) as a transcendent lack which is the
primordial object as always-already lostfor the subject; one realizes that one “had”
the primordial object only after one has lost it;^120 ( 3 ) the object awhich is, for the
subject, the lost object,an immanent lack that is accessible to the Symbolic. In Sem-
inar VII, object ais considered only as a −1 or +1, as a lack-of-the-Symbolic. The
problem with this seminar is therefore that, in creating the notion of the Thing, it
associates the real lack as it is in itself, before being counted symbolically in the
fantasy Sa, with the transcendent “back” of the primordial Real. Against this
stance, Seminar X will show that the real lack is in itself always immanent to the
Symbolic, since there is no-thing presymbolic that could be holed; or that object
ais to be situated on two inextricable levels—that of the real lack “in itself ” and
that of the lack-of-the-Symbolic.
Despite its mistaken, transcendent approach, Seminar VII lays the foundations of
Lacan’s theory of the subject of the Real in a number of different ways:
( 1 ) The real object, the object a,is always-already a lost object. If in Seminar IV
Lacan had already proposed that the subject’s relation to the object had to be
thought in terms of a relation to the lack of the object, in Seminar VII he re-
assesses this issue by problematizing the status of the Freudian notion of das Ding
(the Thing), which for the father of psychoanalysis indicated precisely the pri-
mordial object of a mythical primitive satisfaction that was lost. Freud insisted on
the fact that the subject can find the objects of reality only insofar as he is actually
engaged in a search for the primordial object that was lost (the Mother). In other
words, all objects—which are never fully satisfying—are found through a repetitive
movement relying on a fundamental discordance: that which is found in repeti-
tion is not the object for which the subject is looking and which could never be re-
found. Repetition is therefore nothing but the impossibility of repetition, the
consequence of a necessarily failed attempt to repeat a primordial experience.
( 2 ) Lacan follows Freud in maintaining that the entirety of man’s representative
activity as a desiring being of language, and consequently the constitution of con-
scious and unconscious subjectivity tout court,revolves around the primordial
extraneousness of das Ding,its being “alien.”^121 The primordial object that was lost
has thus a causallydeterminative value^122 with respect to the structurally insatiable
nature of the subject’s desire: this is what we shall be looking at closely in Chapter
5. As for the effects caused by the loss of the primordial object on the level of rep-
resentations, Lacan unambiguously states that what one has found at the place of
the object that cannot be refound is “precisely the object that one refinds always in
reality... the world of modern physics.”^123 In addition to this, the self-conscious