a,the leftover of the Real in the Symbolic. In other words, the subject is now con-
sidered to be a “middle term between the real and the signifier.”^16 The first chap-
ter begins with a detailed analysis of the meaning of the formula “There is no Other
of the Other,” and argues strongly in favor of the suggestion that, in this case, Lacan
radically reverses his previous “structuralist” reliance on a transcendent “Other of
the Other,” namely, the Name-of-the-Father as the “signifier of signifiers.” This ex-
amination is paralleled by a meticulous scrutiny of the changing status of the or-
der of the Real in the late 195 0s; one can plausibly argue that, for Lacan, the
“holing” of the symbolic Other results from, among other things, the necessity fi-
nally to thematize the Real in a more direct and convincing way. Here the focus of
my analysis will be on the productive inconsistencies of Seminar VII, whose con-
tradictory statements allow us to regard it as “in-between two Lacans.” Moving on
from these considerations, the second chapter investigates the subject of the Real
as the subject of the fundamental fantasy, then raises the open question of how
Lacan proposes individually to subjectivize the real lack beyond the dimension of
collective (ideological) fantasies. This will first involve an examination of the no-
tions of (death) drive and desire around the pivotal point of the object aas re-
mainder and reminder of the Real (here, key passages from Seminars V, VI, and X
will carefully be analyzed) and will finally lead, in the last two sections, to the is-
sue of the “pleasure in pain” of jouissanceto be understood primarily as the subject’s
structural enjoyment of the object a.
This book presupposes that Lacan’s teachings subsequent to Seminar X should,
first and foremost, be labeled under the heading of jouissance,and that such a classi-
fication makes it impossible to dissociate any serious consideration of his late the-
ory of the subject of the Real from issues that are essentially ethical and political.
Although the concluding sections pay considerable attention to the innovative aes-
thetic and ontological coordinates of the ethics of psychoanalysis as an ethics of the
ex nihilo,as well as to the related deadlock of “pure” desire and its possible super-
seding through an antitransgressive individuation of jouissance,I am well aware of
the fact that they function solely as a platform, albeit an indispensable one, for fu-
ture research.
“Nothing goes unmarked by that powerful articulatory necessity that distinguishes
[Freud’s texts]. That’s what makes it so significant when one notices places where
his discourse remains open, gaping, but nevertheless implying a necessity.”^17 This
observation leads Lacan elsewhere to render explicit one fundamental method-
ological tenet of his exegetical approach to Freud’s oeuvre: “To interpret even what
is implicit in Freud is legitimate in my eyes.”^18 In a similar fashion, I am convinced