An Overview 5 1 The Subject of the Fantasy and the Function of the Death Drive:
the Death Drive: An Overview
The reformulation of the Oedipus complex through the theory of the paternal
metaphor and the related notion of the Name-of-the-Father allows Lacan to put
forward a series of definitions which emphasizes the key function of the signifier
in the emergence of subjectivity. Continuing a critique that had already character-
ized his research in the sphere of the Imaginary, Lacan refuses to conceive the sub-
ject in terms of a mere “individual reality which is in front of you when you say
the subject,”^1 especially if one were to relate such an individual reality to the pri-
mordial mythical condition of the baby’s pure instinctual need (“need is not yet a
subject”).^2 As we saw in detail in Chapters 2 and 3 , the subject is a subject only in-
sofar as he is a “speaking subject” and, as such, his “position” is constituted by the
big Other.^3 Yet, at the same time, this dependency on the symbolic order paradox-
ically “structures the subject [only] through a decomposition of himself,”^4 it di-
vides the subject between self-consciousness (the ego) and the unconscious while
rendering these two scenes unable to account for him except by relating to each
other. Indeed, if, on the one hand, “there is no subject if there is no signifier that
founds him,”^5 on the other hand, relying on the differentiality proper to the logic
of the signifier and the process of repression to which it gives rise, Lacan is also
adamant that the subject is not signified(in self-consciousness) by any given signi-
fier, noris it to be identified with a particular (unconscious) signifier.^6
Are we then to infer that Lacan is proposing here a notion of a “quasi absent
subject, a sort of support that would only serve to send back [renvoyer] the ball of
the signifier”?^7 The answer to this question can only be negative, even if one
refers to the period in which Lacan, somehow contradictorily, believes in the self-
guaranteed autonomy of the symbolic order. It is doubtless the case, however, that
in his later theoretical elaborations, especially after the notion of the Real acquires
preeminence, he perceives the necessity to explain in more detail his claims in fa-
vor of a substanceless subject which is nevertheless not fully comprised of signi-
fiers. As Lacan himself openly acknowledges in Seminar X, “the problem is now
that of the entry of the signifier into the real and to see how from this the subject
is born.”^8 The function of the subject is to be located in between the idealizing
effects of the signifying function and the Real of the drive.^9
I suggest that the well-known formula according to which “the signifier is that
which represents a subject for another signifier”^10 should itself be related to this
kind of programmatic statement. It is definitely not a “structuralist” formula but
one which gives full expression to the subject of the Real, or, more precisely, to the