Confabulating the "other's" Desire...

Until the end of the 1950s, the pleasure principle was identified with the imaginary level: the symbolic order was conceived as the realm 'beyond the pleasure principle'. But starting from the late 1950s (the Seminar on the Ethics os Psychoanalysis), it is, in contrast, the symbolic order itself which is identified with the pleasure principle: the unconscious 'structured like a language', its 'primary process' of metonymic-metaphoric displacement, is governed by the pleasure principle; what lies beyond is not the symbolic order but a real kernel, a traumatic core. To designate it, Lacan uses a Freudian term: das Ding, the Thing as an incarnation of the impossible jouissance (the term Thing is to be taken here with all the connotations it possesses in the domain of horror science fiction: the 'alien' from the film of the same name is a pre-symbolic, maternal Thing par excellence).

The symbolic order is striving for a homeostatic balance, but there is in its kernel, at its very centre, some strange, traumatic element which cannot be symbolized, integrated into the symbolic order - the Thing. Lacan coined a neologism for it: l'extimite - external intimacy, which served as a title for one of Jacques-Alain Miller's Seminars. And what, at this level, is the death drive? Exactly the opposite of the symbolic order: the possibility of the 'second death', the radical annihilation of the symbolic texture through which so-called reality is constituted. The very existence of the symbolic order implies a possibility of its radical effacement, of 'symbolic death' - not the death of the so-called 'real object' in its symbol, but the obliteration of the signifying network itself.

This distinction between the different stages of Lacan's teaching is not of purely theoretical interest; it has very definite consequences for the determination of the final moment of the psychoanalytic cure:

In the first period, in which the emphasis is on the word as a medium of the intersubjective recognition of desire, the symptoms are conceived as white spots, non-symbolized imaginary elements of the history of the subject, and the process of analysis is that of their symbolization - of their integration into the symbolic universe of the subject: the analysis gives meaning, retroactively, to what was in the beginning a meaningless trace. So the final moment of the analysis is reached when the subject is able to narrate to the Other his own history in its continuity; when his desire is integrated, recognized in 'full speech [parole pleine]'.

In the second period, in which the symbolic order is conceived as having a mortifying effect on the subject, as imposing on him a traumatic loss - and the name of the loss, of this lack, is of course symbolic castration - the final moment of analysis is reached when the subject is ready to accept this fundamental loss, to consent to symbolic castration as a price to be paid for access to his desire.

In the third period we have the big Other, the symbolic order, with a traumatic element at its very heart; and in Lacanian theory the fantasy is conceived as a construction allowing the subject to come to terms with this traumatic kernel. At this level, the final moment of the analysis is defined as 'going through the fantasy [la travese du fantasme]': not its symbolic interpretation but the experience of the fact that the fantasy-object, by its fascinating presence, is merely filling out a lack, a void in the Other. There is nothing 'behind' the fantasy; the fantasy is a construction whose function is to hide this void, this 'nothing' - that is, the lack in the Other.

-Slavoj Zizek, "The Sublime Object of Ideology"