“opposition, the institution of the pure symbol plus or minus, presence or ab-
sence,” that is, as we have seen, the presence/absence of the symbolic mother (or,
more precisely, of her nipple) which already punctuates the mythical state of total
satisfaction (modulated by the cry only from the mother’s standpoint), and a “sec-
ond time” which consists “in the fact that the declaration you make saying evenor odd
is a sort of demand which puts you in the position of being or not being gratified
by the answer of the other.”^69 In other words, at a purely abstract level, a cry be-
comes a demand when, in concomitance with primordial frustration, the child’s
cries start to be actively modulated in order to facilitate the attainment of the (sym-
bolic) object which has by now been experienced as lacking or, more generally, to
cope with (the mother’s) absence. (To make things easier, we are here supposing
that the child’s “technical” mastery of language, his actual capacity to articulate the
first basic phonemes of his parents’ language—to say“o”/“a,” “fort!”/“da!,” “even”/
“odd,” “it belongs to me!”... —is increased at the precise moment of frustration.
But the same still holds if we presume, more realistically, that even after frustration
the child can only cry; we would nevertheless be dealing with a signifyingcry....)
Lacan could therefore be said to have rethought the Freudian Fort!–Da!game
through the dialectic of frustration. Freud’s original discovery may be summarized
as follows: a baby reacts to his mother’s absence by throwing a cotton reel with a
piece of string tied around it over the edge of his cot; while doing so, he utters
“o-o-o-o!” and “da!” (“fort” and “da,” the German words for “gone” and “there”).^70
Freud understood this game as the “child’s [first] great cultural achievement”:^71
Lacan specifies this definition by equating the Fort!–Da!with the “birth of the sym-
bol”^72 —or, better, of primordial symbolization—in the individual. What he al-
ready emphasized in his early account of the game in “Function and Field” is, once
again, the fundamental role played in the child’s early development by the pro-
ductivity of lack. If, on the one hand, the Fort!–Da!marks the first assumption of
absence (of the mother) in the child’s universe (frustration), on the other, it con-
temporaneously entails a certain domination of surroundings through the uttering
of some basic phonemes and, for the same reason, a partial symbolic overcoming
of the initial state of helplessness (radical dependency on the mother). For Lacan,
this very twofold character of the symbol is even experienced by the child when,
in the Fort!–Da!,he is confronted by the first emergence of the idea of death: death
is inextricable from the symbolic order, given that it is both passively encountered
by the child when he is forced to acknowledge his finitude (“lack of being”) due
to frustration andactively imposed by him on the mother when he replaces her
(absence) with a symbol, a phonetic oppositional couple (in this last sense, “the
symbol manifests itself... as the murder of the thing”).^73 To conclude, it shouldthe subject of the symbolic (other)