(“desire inthe other”); and (b) a symbolically mediated desire which makes the
subject desire the other: he desires that the other recognize and desire him—his desire—and
in order to do so he can recognize the other only by temporarily overcoming ag-
gressivity, by entering/accepting the mediation of the symbolic Law through
speech (“desire forthe other”).^51
And the formula has yet another sense—one that Lacan tends not to distinguish
explicitly from the first, but one that is nevertheless presupposed by his overall the-
ory of the imaginary subject. “Desire is the desire of the other” should also be re-
ferred to a primitivedesire which would be a desire forthe other at the imaginary
level: I desire the other since the other is the locus of my alienating identification
(my primordial ego), he usurps my place and I want to eliminate him. This level
is strictly related to the first, but the first does not map onto it exactly. Why? Be-
cause in this last case I do not want to destroy the other because he hasthe object
of my desire; on the contrary, I want to destroy him because he isthe object of my
primordial desire: the otherqua specular image literally stands in my place, there
where I desire to be a unity, and supersede alienation. In other words, the first two
readings of the formula that Lacan provides us with both presuppose a clear dis-
tinction of the ego from the other, while this last reading—logically the first—
presents us with the subject’s desire at a stage when he cannot yet make such a
distinction (the mirror stage). Desiring what the other desires (the first reading of
the formula) corresponds to a narcissistic, destructive desire that nevertheless pre-
supposes an initial, minimal recognition of the other as other: such a recognition
can occur only when desire is enacted according to the second reading of the
formula. Indeed, in this case, I desire what the otherdesires; we could define this
desire as an intrasymbolic imaginary desire. To put it in simpler terms: having rec-
ognized the other as other, I do not desire to bethe other—with whom I identify—
but I desire what the other desires, or, I contradictorily desire to be exactly like the
other withoutwanting to be (the) other.^52
All this amounts to emphasizing once more the problematic status of the passage
from the purely narcissistic reality of the mirror stage to the point at which the
child is for the first time able to recognize the other as other. I believe that in his
early theory of subjectivity Lacan is not able to solve this deadlock satisfactorily,
mainly because his notion of the Symbolic is here only embryonic. His arguments
on this topic are often incongruous. For example, in Seminar I he seems to suggest
that the child becomes able to distinguish his ego from the other as other when he
is around eighteen months old, at the moment of the dissolution of the mirror
stage, that is, long beforerecognizing the desire of the other through (the resolution
of ) the Oedipus complex.^53 From what we have just seen, logically this cannot