there is necessarily a price to be paid in order to transform the mere failure of the sub-
jectwho is involved in the Oedipus complex into the failing subjectthat positively
emerges when the complex is resolved: the subject’s “mapping of himself as fail-
ing”^91 onto the object, the fact that the status of lack is reversed when the lacking
subject who demands is transformed into the subject-of-lack who desires, must
be paid for by the “ransom” of symbolic castration, the subject’s (unconscious)
assumption of his own structural failure as a subject. In other words, the object a
is definitely that which allows the subject to name himself on the plane of self-
consciousness through a personal pronoun—in this sense, the object aworks as
the means through which the subject’s ego-ideal is subsumed “beneath” his ideal
ego^92 —but it is concurrently that which can intervene to support this conscious
naming only by endlessly representing the imaginarization of the subject’s own
castration on the plane of the unconscious, the synchronic plane of what is indeed
repressed.
We should now be able to see why Lacan famously states that “the subject is
only in the cut [coupure], in the interval.”^93 Let us immediately ask the following
question: is he here referring to the conscious ego or the unconscious subject? Al-
though Lacan implicitly takes both levels into consideration, and avails himself of
a single concept, for the sake of clarity it is probably easier to relate the subject’s
“being-in-the-interval” to self-consciousness and his “being-in-the-cut” to the
unconscious. Diachronically, the subject as desiring manque-à-êtreis certainly to be
identified with the (abstract, never concretely present) interval between demand
as an expression of need and demand as demand for love.^94 Yet this classification
in absentiais made possible only by the fact that, already on the synchronic level,
“the subject encounters himself as cut” thanks to the support of “the form of cut”
of the object ain the fantasy. In other words, the object ashould be understood
here as the detachable part of the subject, the so-called part-object (breast, feces,
phallus) that allows him to symbolize on the imaginary plane the symbolic cut—
or, rather, the cut in the Symbolic as such—as it surfaced at the moment of the pri-
vation of the mother, “the absence of the signifier.”^95
We could thus well argue that if the subject as cut is the one who is represented
in the phantasmatic object at the moment of his own disappearance, then the sub-
ject is one (le sujet est un)in the unconscious insofar as he appears there as pas-un.^96
More precisely, the subject continuesto make one in the unconscious fantasy pre-
cisely because, as failing/fading subject, he is not-one.^97 To put it differently, the
subject can call himself “I” in self-consciousness—and thus value himself (se
compter)—only because he repeats the act of counting himself (se compter)as not-one
in the fantasy—where, in fact, the object afunctions as a “lost name.”^98the subject of the real (other)