various Ur-Ich,the consolidation of the ego tout court.In other words, the self-
conscious ego emerges only insofar as one “has it” at the price of “not being it”:
this payment (castration) is precisely what is concomitantlyrepressed in the fantasy.^106
It goes without saying that beyond all objects of demand in self-conscious life, the
subject ultimately seeks to take possession once again of that which he no longer
is (φ) and which necessarily remains concealed for the ego.^107
At this stage, we should be able to distinguish five overlapping functions of the ob-
ject awhich all depend on Sa:
( 1 ) The object ais the imaginary representation of lackin the fundamental fantasy, the im-
age of the cut produced by ΦquaS (A barred); as such, it should also be under-
stood as the consequence of castration (−φ).
( 2 ) The object ais the detachable part-objectwhich is imaginarilycut from the subject
and thus, by definition, “what one n’a plus”;^108 contrary to ( 1 ) above, in this sense,
the object aand the imaginary phallus φare not mutually exclusive. In Seminar VI,
Lacan explicitly defines the object aas the “effect” of castration brought about by
Φand the imaginary phallus as the “object” of castration;^109 this distinction, how-
ever, is complicated by the fact that part-objects are also called object aand, above
all, one of the part-objects is precisely φ. (In addition to this, the pregenital part-
objects, the breast and the feces, are retroactively phallicized through φwhen the
fundamental fantasy is formed.)^110
( 3 ) The object ais the real lackprior to its imaginarization in the fantasy; it is
A barred before its signifierization, S (A barred), produces ( 1 ) above. In this sense,
the object ais a real object that was lost: first and foremost, the maternal breast,
whose loss is phallicized retroactively in the fundamental fantasy through φ, the
only part-object which is not lost in the Real. One could well argue that functions
( 2 ) and ( 3 ) are, after all, expressing one and the same point; such a distinction,
however, is pedagogically interesting insofar as it shows how Lacan—toward the
end of Seminar VI, and especially in Seminar X—is progressively obliged to pos-
tulate a real dimension of object a,a Real qualack-in-the-Symbolic, an “irrational
remainder” which “is after all the only guarantee of the alterity of the Other.”^111 It
goes without saying that the first two (opposed) functions of the object alogically
rely on the third.
( 4 ) The object ais the enigmatic desire of the (m)Other;^112 it should be easy to see how
this relates to function ( 3 ). The breast was originally lost by the child when the de-
sire of the (m)Other caused primordial frustration; this desire was later perceived
as such at the moment of privation, and retroactively signifierized/“mitigated”