51. The two different ways in which this dictum can be understood seem to offer additional
proof of love’s separation from sheer narcissism: it is only desire as the desire to be rec-
ognized—and thus desired—by the other that can be related to love as I explained it
above; on the contrary, desiring to destroy the other is synonymous with narcissism.
In other words, love, unlike narcissism, presupposes a—minimal—recognition of the
other’s desire.
52. This is the oxymoron presupposed by recurrent, everyday expressions such as “Iwould
like to be X.”
53. See The Seminar. Book I,pp.168‒170.
54. Ibid., p. 174.
55. “Les complexes familiaux,” p. 29.
56 .Écrits,p.17 9. Lacan discusses Merleau-Ponty’s notion of consciousness in more critical
terms in Seminar II (The Seminar. Book II,pp.77‒78); Merleau-Ponty is correct to empha-
size the importance of a phenomenology of the Imaginary beginning with the Gestalt,but
he is incorrect in relating it to a “notion of totality, of unitary functioning” which “leads
him back to a vitalism... the idea of living evolution, the notion that nature always pro-
duces superior forms, more and more integrated.” Merleau-Ponty thus fails to recognize
the centrality of the Symbolic in man’s successful disadaptation. Merleau-Ponty com-
ments abundantly on Lacan’s mirror stage in a university course entitled “Les relations
avec autrui chez l’enfants” (Centre de Documentation universitaire, 1975 ). Lacan re-
turns to Merleau-Ponty shortly after his death in “Maurice Merleau-Ponty,” in Autres écrits,
pp.175‒184.
57. With reference to Lacan’s early theory of the subject, Miller writes that “the Lacanian
twist is to transfer the phenomenological view of consciousness [quaintentionality] to
the concept of the subject, that is, the subject of the unconscious.... What phenome-
nologists like Husserl and his French pupils, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, developed
through their concept of consciousness was the fundamental anti-objectivist or non-
objectivist status of consciousness.... What had developed in phenomenology since
Husserl was the concept of unconsciousness”( J.-A. Miller, “An Introduction to Seminars
I and II—Lacan’s Orientation Prior to 1953 (III),” in Reading Seminars I and II—Lacan’s Return
to Freud,ed. R. Feldstein, B. Fink, and M. Jaanus [Albany: State University of New York Press,
199 6], pp.26‒27).
58 .The Seminar. Book II,p. 177.
59. As Lacan himself observes, the most straightforward way to define complexes is by stat-
ing that the unconscious has its own “complex” logic, and does not amount to a reser-
voir of repressed, irrational drives. (See The Seminar. Book I,p. 65 .)
60. See especially “Les complexes familiaux,” pp.28‒29.
61. A. Di Ciaccia and M. Recalcati, Jacques Lacan. Un insegnamento sul sapere dell’inconscio(Milan:
Bruno Mondadori, 2000 ), p. 82.
62. See “Les complexes familiaux,” p. 34.
63. Ibid., p. 33. Consequently, “it is the refusal of [‘ancient’] weaning that founds the posi-
tivity of the complex, that is to say, the imagoof the feeding relationship which [the com-
plex] tends to reestablish” (ibid., p. 31 ).notes to pages 25–32