scene in which one “makes oneself be seen” by “his” gaze as lost part-object lo-
cated in the double.
It is only in this context that we can make sense of the following enigmatic def-
inition of fantasy provided in Seminar X: “I would say that the formula of fantasy
S desire of acan be translated as ‘may the Other fade away, faint, before the object
that I am as a deduction from the way in which I see myself.’”^128 What fades away
in the visual interpassivity of the fantasy is undoubtedly the Other’s desire as real
lack, the real object a:Lacan can thus propose that the imaginarization of the ob-
ject ain the (neurotic) fantasy defends the subject from anxiety “insofar as the
[imaginary] object ais artificial [postiche].”^129 Yet at the same time—as I have al-
ready illustrated with the example of the frozen horror film—in “framing” anxi-
ety, in being “the first remedy beyond Hilflosigkeit,”^130 the fundamental fantasy is
also that which retroactively renders the Real of anxiety effective on the uncon-
scious level; “It is the [subject’s] constitution of the hostile as such,”^131 the birth of
what Freud named “erotogenic masochism” and Lacan rebaptizes jouissance.
We should therefore distinguish three logical times of anxiety vis-à-visthe ob-
ject aand the fundamental fantasy:
( 1 ) The prephantasmatic leaning out of the window at the onset of the second stage
of the Oedipus complex, the chaotic encounter with the desire of the (m)Other
quareal object athat will have been perceived as such only after its mitigation in
the formation of the fundamental fantasy. Here anxiety is both the mere “presen-
timent of something,” Lacan says, but also the “pre-sentiment,” the “terrible cer-
titude” which precedes all (symbolically) deceitful sentiments and in reaction to
which the initial doubt “what does the (m)Other want?” is formulated.^132 In this
first sense, “[unstructured] anxiety is a sharp cut,” the original emergence of A
barred “without which the presence of the signifier, its functioning, its entrance,
its mark [sillon] on the real would be unthinkable.”^133
( 2 ) The “framing of anxiety” in the “picture” of the fundamental fantasy due to
the imaginarization of the object a:here that which is hostile (l’hostile)is “tamed,
placated, admitted,”^134 and becomes a guest (l’hôte).In order to frame the anxiety
produced by the desire of the (m)Other, however, the subject must undergo cas-
tration, appear as an object in the Other, and “this is what is intolerable.”^135 In other
words, from this standpoint, what is fundamentally repressed in the fantasy is the
revelation of the “non-autonomy of the subject”;^136 this is why the subject is not
without having it and can say “I” in self-consciousness only at the price of “not
seeing it”....
( 3 ) Anxiety stricto sensuthat occurs when the signifier of lack, S (A barred), respon-
sible for the framing of anxiety in the fantasy is itself missing, when castration (−φ)