17. Lacan explicitly criticizes Darwin as early as 193 8in “Les complexes familiaux dans la
formation de l’individu” (in Autres écrits[Paris: Seuil, 2001 ], especially p. 39 ). See also
Écrits: A Selection,pp.25‒26; The Seminar. Book I,p. 177. Why is Darwin wrong? Because ( 1 )
human evolution is not based on (natural) adaptation; ( 2 ) human (disadapted) evolu-
tion does not depend on a particularly successful “struggle for life” (“Everything tells
against this thesis of the survival of the fittest species,” ibid., p. 177 ); the opposite is true:
“the struggle for life” is a consequence of human—particularly successful—disadapted evolution.In Lacan’s
own words: “Aggressivity demonstrates itself to be secondary with respect to [imagin-
ary] identification” (“Les complexes familiaux,” p. 39 ); aggressivity cannot be explained
in terms of a real vital rivalry (“the Darwinian idea according to which struggle lies at
the very origins of life,” ibid., p. 39 ). If Darwin’s “myth” has been so popular, this “seems
to derive from the fact that he projected the predations of Victorian society... and to the
fact that it justified its predations by the image of a laissez-faire of the strongest predators
in competition for their natural prey” (Écrits: A Selection,p. 26 ).
18 .Écrits: A Selection,p. 4.
19. “It is worth noting, incidentally, that this is a fact recognized as such by embryologists
[Lacan has Bolk in mind—see Écrits,p. 186 ], by the term foetalization,which determines
the prevalence of the so-called superior apparatus of the neurax, and especially of the cor-
tex, which psycho-surgical operations lead us to regard as the intraorganic mirror”
(Écrits: A Selection,p. 4 ).
20. “The spatial captation manifested in the mirror stage [is] the effect in man of an organic
insufficiency in his natural reality—in so far as any meaning can be given to the word
‘nature’” (ibid., p. 4 ).
21. Ibid.
22. On this parallelism, the most important reference is Lacan’s dialogue with Hyppolite in
The Seminar. Book I,p.14 8. Many years after formulating the mirror-stage theory, Lacan con-
volutedly expresses the same point in “Des nos antécédents” (p. 70 ). Here, in the new
context of his theory of the subject of the Real, he states that the mirror stage should be
reinterpreted, concisely speaking, as “the part for the whole”: the whole (imaginary
identification) can be achieved only at the price of the contemporaneous emergence of
a correlated, inassimilable remainder or part (the images of fragmentation). There is no
(image of the) whole without (an image of ) the parts. Lacan seems to suggest that the
notion of (the imagoof ) the fragmented body is nothing but an anticipation of the the-
ory of the object a.
23. Lacan thinks that the hysteric’s local paralyses are strictly related to the primordial un-
conscious image of one’s fragmented body (see Écrits: A Selection,p. 5 ).
24. On the relationship between (primordial) aggressivity and the fragmented body, see
Écrits: A Selection,pp.11‒12. Imagosof the fragmented body “represent the elective vectors
of aggressive intentions” (while the specular imagorepresents the vector of narcissistic
love).
25. See, for example, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge.
Book XX, Encore, 1972–1973(New York: Norton, 1999 ), p. 90.
26. See Écrits: A Selection,p. 24.
27. Ibid., p. 16.notes to pages 17–24