experience of “fallingin love,” the fleeting moment in which the Real as void, the agalma,
pierces the imaginary-symbolic veil of reality and appears in self-consciousness. Ulti-
mately, this is precisely the difference between relating to the Other’s demand (de-
manding something of him, being frustrated in our demand, and consequently
identifying with him) and temporarily relating to the pure desire of the Other (and thus
purely desiring). I have elaborated these points in “Le Ressort de l’Amour:Lacan’s Theory
of Love in his Reading of Plato’s ‘Symposium,’” in Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Human-
ities 11 , no. 3 ( 2006 ): “Encounters with Ancient Thought,” ed. J. Sellars.- Safouan, Lacaniana,p. 240. Or, rather, only insofar as the object arapidly disappears af-
ter temporarily emerging....
117 .Le séminaire livre X,p. 127.
Ibid., pp.127‒128.
In his first detailed analysis of the object ain Seminar VI, Lacan clearly associates the
“privileged” part-object which retroactively signifierizes pregenital part-objects with
the phallic Gestalt.This is certainly no longer a case a few years later (suffice it to recall
here that the phallic Gestaltdoes not figure among the four part-objects accurately de-
scribed by Lacan in his discussion of the drive circuit in Seminar XI). So how should
we understand the hidden part-object a(or φ) which creates the illusory “optical
effect” of agalmaas the ultimate object of desire in conscious life? In being that which,
by definition, lies beyond specularity, the hidden part-object a(or φ) is nothing but the
gaze.For Lacan, the gaze qua ais one with the phallic part-object which is imaginarily
lost when the fundamental fantasy and individuation simultaneously emerge through
castration; the gaze is the privileged “genital” object athat retroactively phallicizes (the
loss of ) the two kinds of “pregenital” object a(the breast and the feces). In other words,
there is no all-encompassing genital/phallic drive per sebut, rather, genitality—post-
Oedipal desire—is sustained by the partial scopic drive (and by the invocatory drive
which revolves around the voice as part-object): one “phallically” falls in love with the
je ne sais quoiwhich lies beyond the eyes (or the voice) of the beloved....
12 0.Le séminaire livre V,p. 329.
121 .Le séminaire livre X,p. 14.
- It should be specified that the subject is the object of the Other’s desire in the subject’s
own fantasy. Although the subject is, at the same time, an object in the Other’s own fan-
tasy—in which the Other’s desire ultimately consists of being the object of the subject’s
desire as phantasized by the Other—it is nevertheless clearly the case that the Other’s
own fantasy remains as unknowable for the subject as the Other’s pure desire.
123 .Le séminaire livre X,p. 89.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 61.
“The object ais this distinctive object that I put in the place of the Other’s lack... it is
the nonconfessable object that I am myself in the [phantasmatic] scenario which fas-
cinates and fixes my desire” (M. Borch-Jacobsen, “Les alibis du sujet,” in Lacan avec les
philosophes[Paris: Albin Michel, 1991 ], p. 310 ).
127 .Le séminaire livre IV,p. 125.