memory” can be memorized only thanks to the screen provided by the “screen
memory.” Initially, there is only the purely chaotic encounter with the desire-of-
the-(m)Other, which is not subjectively experienced as such by the child. Strictly
speaking, the real scene of the horror film will have become something more than
a purely chaotic event—and thus something to be afraid of—only after it has been
imaginarily frozen. In addition to this, the (retroactive emergence of the) real
scene should now be regarded both as a lack, a reminder of the lost chaotic event
that the child now desires as such, and precisely as lack, as the “witness” of the
event, its “support that remains.”^48
If we translate all this into Lacanese, we are able to maintain the following: be-
fore the emergence of the fundamental fantasy Sathrough symbolic castration
and the resolution of the Oedipus complex, before the retroactive sublimation of
the lack in the (m)Other through the imaginary, albeit unconscious, function
of the object a—the lack in the (m)Other being here nothing but the anxiety-
provoking emergence of her desire during the second stage of the Oedipus
complex—the subject’s desire,as well as its real object, is notyet formed. The un-
conscious desire of the subject for the real object, for the lack which coincides with
the desire of the Other, is ultimately dependent on the imaginary function of the
fundamental fantasy: unconscious desire can desire only the lack beyond the
screen/veil insofar as the screen/veil is present. Therefore, in order to desire the
lack that (the) desire (of the Other) is, desire has to remain fundamentally unsat-
isfied; it has to continue to desire, to desire desire.
This elucidation—which, incidentally, also functions as an introduction to the
next section of this chapter—is needed in order to answer, or at least to prob-
lematize further, a legitimate objection: if the real object of desire—or, more pre-
cisely, as should by now be evident, the real “object-cause”^49 of desire—is nothing
but the desire of the Other as lack, why can the subject not desire it “directly”? Why
is it necessary to keep on desiring the lack?
I shall go over this important argument once more: it is possible to desire the
lack only insofar as it emerges as lack through the retroactive reification of the
imaginary “veil” in the fundamental fantasy. The desire of the Other cannot be de-
sireddirectly, and so one repeatsone’s desire for it. What happens when the subject
faces it directly—as is the case at the moment of privation, as well as at the end of
the psychoanalytic treatment, when symbolic castration is “consciously” assumed
by the subject? This is precisely what Lacan calls “subjective destitution.”^50 Given
that desire is, by definition, the “essence” of the subject, we must also conclude
that subjective destitution, a radical manifestationof desire, causes the terminationof
desire at the same time. In the rest of this book, my attempt to articulate this para-the subject of the real (other)