Good since this is what the moral law, in founding itself, forbids as supremely
evilfor the subject: “The [barred] Sovereign Good is das Ding.”^158
Lacan does not hesitate to identify such a forbidden Sovereign Good in the sense
of das Dingwith the mother, the object of incest.^159 He also, more importantly, spec-
ifies that the (maternal) Thing is intrinsically inaccessible, even if it were not ex-
plicitly prohibited by the moral law.^160 What does this mean? Here we should
remember how, in spite of the fact that Lacan often confuses these two terms, he
definitely believes that the Thing is notthe primordial Real: in the context of Sem-
inar VII, the Thing is in fact a hole effected by the signifier in the primordial Real;
hence, it is by definition a lossof jouissancewhich, as such, can only be always-already
lost for the symbolic subject independently of any positive interdiction. In Semi-
nar VII, however, this in no way contradicts the logical possibility of the existence
of a mythical pure jouissance—mythically experienced by all children, “the subjects
of jouissance,” prior to their alienation in the Symbolic^161 —which is consubstantial
with the primordial Real, and can thus be regained exclusively through symbolic
death. As we have seen, symbolic death is, after all, possible only at the moment of
the death of the Symbolic—the “Last Judgment,”^162 as Lacan has it—or in myths
(e.g. Sadean fantasies) which project the possibility of exiting the symbolic order.
Such a mythical return to the primordial Real would inevitably entail the disap-
pearance of the Thing quahole.
It is therefore easy to see why Lacan admits that if, on the one hand, the prohi-
bition of incest can easily be accounted for in terms of the “utilitarian” necessity
to exchange daughtersin order to found new alliances, on the other hand, the ques-
tion “Why doesn’t a sonsleep with his mother?”^163 can be answered only if one
locates the prohibition of incest on the level of the phantasmatic unconscious re-
lationship which man has with das Ding:“The desire for the mother cannot be sat-
isfied because it is... the abolition of the whole world of demand, which is the
one that at its deepest level structures man’s unconscious.... The function of the
pleasure principle is to make man always search for what he has to find again, but
which he can never reach.”^164 The key point to grasp here is not merely that the
desire for the (m)Other must notbe satisfied because this would entail our utter
conscious and unconscious desubjectivation, but that the desire for the (m)Other
cannotbe satisfied because it would be the end of the mirage of “massive” jouissance
generated by the Mother as das Ding.In other words, there is a perfect compatibil-
ity between the desire for incest as “fundamental desire”^165 and the repetition of
the “unsatisfied” desire for the Other’s desire as “mitigated” phantasmatic lack;
the desirefor incest, the desire for the mother as lost object (the Thing as hole),
is indeed nothing but the desire to be desired by the (m)Other’s desire as lack.