In Seminar X, Lacan clearly describes the fundamental fantasy as a “picture
which is located over the frame [encadrement] of a window”: the purpose of this
absurd technique” is precisely “not seeing what one sees out of the window,”^123
the barred Other, the lack in the Other which emerged at the moment of privation.
In Chapter 3 , we examined the way in which the child is inserted into the sym-
bolic dialectic of frustration long before realizing that the Other is barred; to be-
gin with, there is a window insofar as protosymbolization, the first stage of the
Oedipus complex, is initiated. At the onset of the second stage of the Oedipus com-
plex, the child realizes that the window frames an abyss, and that he might easily
fall out of the window (be engulfed by the mother): thus the scene depicted by the
picture has the function of covering the abyss.
More importantly, in Seminar X, Lacan implies that such a “defensive” scene,
whatever its particular traits in different subjects, always portrays the unspecular-
izable image of the other as double.In other words, the imaginary other is “seen” in
the fundamental fantasy as the nonlacking image which owns the part-object lost
by/castrated from the subject—the double is thus i′(a) +a,the imaginary other
plus the object a.This emerges particularly clearly in Freud’s famous case study of
the Wolf Man, whose repetitive dream, Lacan says, provides us with an excellent
example of the “pure fantasy unveiled in its structure”:^124 a window is opened,
wolves are perched on a tree and stare at the patient with his owngaze (as non-
specular remainder of his own body). Lacan also refers to a similar scene in Hoff-
mann’s tale The Sand Man:the doll Olympia can be completed only with the eyes of
the student Nathaniel.
These examples show how the lost part-object a,first and foremost the phalli-
cized gaze, is precisely that which veils the void in the Other—his pure desire as
A barred—who therefore appears as a double in the unconscious fundamental fan-
tasy. In the fantasy, I see myself as the phallicized object of the Other’s desire, I see
myself inthe Other in order not to “collapse” into his real desire: it is therefore no
longer sufficient to talk about the subject’s desire as the desire of the Other, inso-
far as we are here more specifically dealing with a “desire inthe Other [Autre] ...
my desire enters into the antrum [antre] [for instance, the eye socket] in the guise
of the object that I am.”^125 At its purest, the object of my phantasmatic desire (as a
defense) is thus the Other’s desire in which I am myself an object.^126 This explains
why the fantasy, despite being that which allows secondary identification and in-
dividuation tout court,is per sea structure based on a “radical desubjectivation” due
to which “the subject is reduced to the condition of a spectator, or simply an
eye.”^127 In interpreting this quotation, we should avoid the risk of surreptitiously
considering such a vision as a (specular) individuated action: as I have just dem-
onstrated with the examples given above, the fantasy is, rather, an “interpassive”the subject of the fantasy... and beyond