the unconditionality of the demand for love, and in so doing he subjectivizes him-
self and emerges as a desiring lack-of-being (manque-à-être).On the other hand, dur-
ing the dialectic of frustration, the demand for love led the assujetsimply to demand
what the (m)Other demanded: the symbolic “beyond of satisfaction” was in that
case exclusively demanded by demanding the contingent objects demanded by the
(m)Other (with which the child also imaginarily identified). Such an inversion of
the function of lack can take place only if the (m)Other is perceived as lacking, as
desiring “beyond her demands,”^64 and such a lack is successively “organized” in
the fundamental fantasy by the phallic signifier due to the subject’s own symbolic
castration. This is the reason why Lacan is able to speak of the “Aufhebung” of the
phallus with regard to lack.^65
To recapitulate: desire is an unconscious “beyond” of demand “where need re-
gains the first place”;^66 however, if, on the one hand, desire is necessarily “bor-
rowed”^67 from the appetite for satisfaction of particular needs, and thus supersedes
the negativity of the lack which is consubstantial with the unconditionality of
demand, on the other hand it gives rise to an “absolute condition” which is “with-
out measure” with respect to any particular need. More specifically, such a “con-
dition” of desire should be regarded as a positivization of the lack that surfaced
with demand, and “can be named absolute in that it is a necessity [exigence] for
which the Other does not have to answer ‘yes’ or ‘no.’”^68 In other words, the in-
version of lack is that which allows subjectivation.We should now ask a key question: how are we to account for everyday consciousde-
sire? Lacan does not conceal the fact that “desire is necessarily articulated [in self-
consciousness] through demand since we can approach it only by means of some
sort of demand.”^69 In other words, the diachronic dimension of conscious desire
is to be identified with the dimension of post-Oedipal demand which, as in the
pre-Oedipal scenario, depends on the demand of the Other. Although the subject
has acquired a certain separation from the Other (and from his demands) which
makes it possible for him actively to enter the Symbolic as a desiring manque-à-être,
his desire is nevertheless necessarily repressed in the unconscious insofar as it was
achieved only by paying the “ransom”^70 of castration. What is repressed in the un-
conscious, what generates the unconscious tout courtand is somehow “veiled” in its
own defensive mechanism, is first and foremost: ( 1 ) symbolic castration, the sub-
ject’s assumption that, as a result of his attempt phallically to come to terms with
the lack in the Other (A barred), with the Other’s desire, he himself became a
barred subject S; ( 2 ) the fact that the subject’s (S) own desire ultimately relies on—
and is caused by—such an unbearable lack.
We are therefore confronted with what Safouan, commenting on Seminar VI,
calls “a forced neurotization of desire”:^71 desire—and the subject’s symbolic indi-the subject of the real (other)