relationship to the second death,” since “there is also the libido... the access to
[massive] jouissance”: this is normally obstructed by the “barrier” of the funda-
mental fantasy, “the only moment of jouissancethat man knows.”^257 In other
words, Lacan is suggesting that the partial, “inherent” jouissanceof the funda-
mental fantasy (socially conditioned by hegemonic ideologies) is concretelythe
only possible jouissancefor man: in this sense, there is no Sovereign Good, not
even in the guise of a radical evil which could initially appear to be “better” than
the servicing of goods;^258 the task of psychoanalysis is to prepare the subject for
assuming such a lack. This, however, does not exclude the possibility that there
is “massive” jouissancein a pre- or postsymbolic “beyond” which is, as such, un-
knowable for man.
In an astonishing passage from Seminar V—a seminar which likewise pre-
supposes the existence of a primordial Real as One—Lacan carries these matters
to extremes, and ultimately turns the “inanimate” into a truly Sadean Nature
with a capital N that enjoys per sethrough suffering: “If on the one hand the re-
turn to inanimate nature is effectively conceivable as a return to the lowest level
of tension, to rest, on the other, nothing assures us that, in the reduction to noth-
ingness of everything that arose and which is life, even there, as it were, itdoes
not wag [ça ne remue pas], and the pain of being is not to be found at the bottom
of everything.... Nothing proves that this pain comes to a halt in living beings,
given all we now know about a nature which is variously animated, putrefying,
fermenting, boiling.”^259 My suggestion is that, in a similar fashion, throughout
Seminar VII Lacan still presupposes the general equation between primordial
Real, massive jouissance,and (pleasure in) pain due to his incomplete assumption
of the logical consequences of the barring of the Other. He does not explicitly
articulate such an equation because this would inevitably prove that, although
Antigone’s act is meant to “rescue” the Symbolic from the “criminal” universal-
ization of the law, she nevertheless ends up embodying one of the most tangible
fulfillments of the Sado–Kantian imperative.^260
To conclude, one may well argue that if, on the one hand, the appearance of
pure desire tacitly entails the subject’s disappearance in primordial jouissance,on the
other, the independence of the ethical act is, at least, formally preserved. All Lacan
needs to do in later years in order to overcome the impasse of Seminar VII is to
detach pure desire, the momentary disclosure of the real void of the Symbolic,
from (the failure of ) tragic transgression, and to indicate instead how the sub-
tractive moment of ethics should be conceived as a precondition for a radically
new symbolization. As we have seen, the death drive ultimately relies on the law
of the ex nihiloas the “will” to begin all over again.the subject of the real (other)