be channeled in a socially acceptable way, unlike Freud, he also thinks that these
objects are not acceptable just because they are useful to society. They are also ac-
ceptable because, on the level of “collective” fantasies (ideology and its superegoic
jouissance) that are “historically and socially specified,” they allow the subject to
“colonise the [useless and even harmful] field of das Ding”^142 in a “domesticated”^143
manner. In other words, the structural necessity of sublimation as considered by
Lacan is intimately related to a dimension beyond the pleasure principle which,
although it is “domesticated,” would definitely not be regarded as “sublimated”
according to Freud’s criteria.
( 5 ) Lacan reminds us that the notion of sublimation is usually understood, even in
everyday language, in terms of creation.^144 But what, more precisely, is creation?
He believes that authentic creation can only be symboliccreation ex nihilo.What is
again at stake here is the issue of the simultaneity between the initial “fashioning
of the signifier” and the introduction of a void, a nihil(the Thing) in the primor-
dial Real. With the introduction of the first signifier, “one has already the entire
notion of creation ex nihilo” which is itself “coextensive with... the Thing”:^145 the
nihilmust clearly be associated with the void/hole of the Thing whose emergence
is concomitant with that of the signifier, not with the primordial Real for which
the notions of fullness and emptiness have as yet no sense.^146 This, after all, is what
sublimation is all about. Every successful sublimation—first and foremost that
which allows the formation of the fundamental fantasy after castration has resolved
the Oedipus complex—will ultimately correspond to a reinstatement, on the in-
dividual level, of the mythical birth of the first (Master-)Signifier that founded the
universal order of the Symbolic and, at the same time, lost the Thing. Lacan thus
claims that he is showing us “the necessityof a point of creation ex nihilofrom which
originates what is historic [on the individual and universal level] in the drive”:^147
in other words, the “point” of creation ex nihilois the mythical point at which man’s
animal instincts are sublimated into the subject’s drive.In Chapter 5 , we shall look at how the drive should always be understood as a death
drive: the “point” of creation inevitably coincides with that of the fall. For the time
being, I limit myself to observing that the notion of creation ex nihiloas the extrac-
tion of the symbolic signifier which simultaneously annihilates the real Thing of-
fers the most conclusive explanation of Lacan’s recurrent reference to the opening
line of St. John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word.”^148 The word that was
in the beginning—the Holy Spirit that created the unconscious power plant in
Seminar IV—is nothing but “the entrance of the signifier into the world.”^149 Here
one might well be tempted to ask: is there any more need to confirm that Lacan’sthere is no other of the other