is suspended due to the excessive proximity of the Other’s real desire (beyond my
fantasy). This is nothing but the uncanny moment when lack is itself lacking in
self-consciousness. Undoubtedly, the diachronic dimension of demand is charac-
terized by the metonymic empty place of agalma;lack is present in imaginary self-
consciousness; this, however, by no means implies that we normally have an image
of this lack. Anxiety emerges precisely when the subject acquires a “positive” image
of lack^137 —when a “window” is opened onto the void concealed by his specular
projections—and the agalma,“the absence where we are” beyond specularity,^138 is
thus revealed in its true nature: a “presence elsewhere,” a “pound of flesh,” the
part-object a(the image of lack) that I am for the Other’s desire in my fantasy. Anx-
iety thus corresponds to the fleeting surfacing of the part-object, to the appear-
ance of the double who gazes at the subject with the subject’s own eyes. In other
words, anxiety is the appearance of the disappearance of my own fantasy in self-
consciousness, the intolerable appearance of my being nothing other than the
phantasmatic object of the Other’s desire: the “conscious” appearance of the fan-
tasy thus necessarily coincides with its demise, and with the concomitant loss of
self-consciousness. Here, it is important to emphasize that anxiety is not the
“sentiment” experienced indisappearance but a signal that stages the riskof dis-
appearing, being engulfed by the Other, the temporary appearance of what utter
de-subjectivation might be....^139 For one instant, the real desire of the Other (A
barred) which primordially caused the loss of the part-object aemerges together
with the part-object; for one instant, the object ais simultaneously perceived as
both the object and the cause of desire.^140In one of the most important passages of Seminar X, Lacan criticizes Freud for iden-
tifying the anxiety of castration with the insurmountable impasse that necessarily
terminates psychoanalysis. On the contrary, as we have just seen, Lacan believes that
anxiety arises precisely when castration (−φ) is suspended; indeed, the neurotic
does not “recoil” from castration, since it is an “imaginary drama”^141 he was con-
fronted with during the Oedipus complex and, after all, his own subjectivation re-
lies on castration. What the neurotic refuses to carry out, and which causes anxiety,
is the positivization of his castration.
How should we interpret such a distinction? I think we are obliged to ac-
knowledge that here Lacan tacitly presupposes two notions of castration: in anxi-
ety, imaginarycastration (−φ), which is nothing but the post-Oedipal dialectic of
demand, is suspended, and thus potentially allows the full “conscious” assumption
of symboliccastration, the real desire of the Other, which neurotics normally frame
in the unconscious fantasy through repression. This reading seems to be confirmed
by the fact that Lacan appears to suggest that the positivization of castration impliesthe subject of the real (other)