object/gift as an always insufficient sign of love. Furthermore, this newly con-
ceived role of the real object allows Lacan to clearly differentiate (animal) need
from (human) libido. It is doubtless the case that, for instance, oral libido “aims at
the preservation of the individual,” however, the libido is also inevitably influenced
by the symbolic order. “Precisely insofar as it has entered into the dialectic for
which satisfaction is substituted for the demand for love,” the libido cannot be re-
duced to need: in other words, it has become an “eroticized activity.”^64 To sum-
marize: Lacan believes that libido is nothing but the eroticization of need,the noneliminable
imprint that the demand of loveleaves on man quainstinctual animal.
( 5 ) With another brilliant move, Lacan uses his theory of “compensation” to pro-
pose a hypothesis regarding how the child learns to speak. “From the moment in
which a real object that satisfies a real need has become an element of the symbolic
object,”^65 it is possible for any other real object to take the place of the (lacking)
symbolic object. This also applies to wordswhich, as we have seen, indeed partake
of both the symbolic dimension of speech (for the Other/Mother) and the real,
“perfectly materialized,” dimension of the letter (for the child). The symbolic
speech of the mother is “devoured” by the child as a real material object which
compensates him for the lack of love.^66
Remaining at the level of language apprehension, it is important to underline how
the moment of primordial frustration and the parallel emergence of the symbolic
object also necessarily distinguish, from the child’s perspective, the child’s merely
passive cries from the active articulation of his first signifiers/phonemes. It is
clearly the case that the child is always-already immersed in the Symbolic and, for
this reason, even his less articulated cries can never function as a bi-univocal sign
(they are always openly interpreted by the mother);^67 however, if we postulate the
existence of a mythical—and, as such, concretely inexistent—state in which
everything that the child needs is perfectly satisfied, it also follows that, at this stage,
he is not yet producing any signifier for himself.^68
Despite the fact that Lacan never really developed this argument, I believe this
to be a strictly necessary implication of his overall premises. Let us then clearly
differentiate the cry,as a sign that precedes frustration and keeps the child in a state
of complete passive helplessness with respect to the signifying universe, from de-
mandas a signifier that follows frustration and which, by attempting to cope with
the latter, initiates the child’s active presence in the symbolic order while accom-
panying his permanent dissatisfaction. Let us also consider the appealas indis-
criminately applicable to both situations. As Lacan himself points out—but this
statement seems to be contradicted elsewhere—there is a “position zero,” the