representation of objects in everyday reality is concomitant with the emergence of
an unconscious Real-of-the-Symbolic (the object a) which Seminar VII primarily
associates with the superegoic jouissanceof the commandment. What one finds in
the place of the object that cannot be refound is not only everyday reality, since
“in the same place... something [else] substitutes itself for that dumb reality
which is dasDing—that is to say, the reality that commands and regulates.”^124 In
other words, if on the one hand it is only by means of the law, “the moral com-
mand”—the prohibition of incest that resolves the Oedipus complex—that “the
real [everyday reality] is actualized” for the subject in our symbolically structured
experience,^125 on the other hand it is equally the case that “something in this very
regulation is paradoxical... intemperate”^126 —that superegoic jouissanceconsti-
tutes the other side of the symbolic law.
( 3 ) Topologically speaking, the subject and his representations emerge in relation
to what Lacan calls the “extimité” of the Thing.^127 As Miller observes: “Extimitéis not
the contrary of intimité. Extimitésays that the intimeis Other—like a foreign body, a
parasite.”^128 The Thing is thought as something that lies “at the centre [of the sub-
ject] only in the sense that it is excluded”;^129 it is that around which the subject of
the unconscious (and, in parallel, his self-consciousness) is organized in signify-
ing—representative—relationships. More specifically, Lacan says that the Thing is
“something entfremdet[alienated]... that on the level of the unconscious only a rep-
resentation can represent.”^130 What does this mean precisely? Here Lacan is refer-
ring to the Freudian notion of Vorstellungrepräsentanz:the profoundly different ways in
which this term is translated into French (“représentant-représentation”) and English
(“ideational representative”) makes Lacan’s point sound more enigmatic than it
really is. In Chapter 3 , I explained how, in addition to representing the—signify-
ing—content of the unconscious (which is repressed in secondary repression),
the ideational representative—to be understood as a sign—also sets upthe uncon-
scious tout court,since it is responsible for primal repression. In Lacan’s own lan-
guage, this means that the unconscious is initially structured in a fundamental
fantasy Sawhen the loss (alienation) of the Thing—which occurred in con-
comitance with the traumatic irruption of the Desire-of-the-Mother after primor-
dial frustration—is retroactively signifierized (represented) in the object a qualost
object (by means of a primitive phallic Vorstellungwhich allows lack to be counted
as −1 or +1). As Safouan insightfully observes, the object ais thus here “a ‘repre-
sentation’ that designates itself in the impossibility of the representation of a void
that remains outside of all representations [the Thing] even though it determines
their gravitation.”^131the subject of the real (other)