B—
The Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic

According to Lacan, we exist in the three orders of the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real.^[193]

[I]n the relation of the imaginary and the real, and in the constitution of the world such as results from it, everything depends on the position of the subject. And the position of the subject—you should know, I've been repeating it for long enough—is essentially characterized by its place in the symbolic world, in other words in the world of speech.^[194]

In one of Lacan's last seminars, he uses the metaphor of a "Borromean Knot" to describe the relationship between these orders. This "knot" consists of three rings that are not interlinked but are held together through overlapping.^[195] The metaphor points out that although each ring and each realm is distinct and does not interpenetrate any other, the whole of the knot and the psyche depends on the interrelationship between the three;

[193] See generally Grosz, supra note 18.

[194] Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I, Freud's Papers on Technique 80 (J.-A. Miller ed. & J. Forrester trans., 1988) [hereinafter Lacan, Seminar I].

remove one, and the whole system collapses. The metaphor of the interlocking rings is also designed to counteract the tendency to hierarchize the three regimes—placing the symbolic realm above the imaginary, and the imaginary above the real. Another advantage of the metaphor of rings is that it offers an alternative to the common internal-external metaphors for human experience. A point within a ring can be described either as external to the ring or as internal to it. Because the three rings overlap, the metaphor illustrates how (as I shall discuss later) the object cause of desire, which Lacan calls the objet petit a , can exist in more than one order simultaneously.

The symbolic is the order of law and language.^[196] Since the Lacanian subject is the speaking subject, subjectivity is primarily in the symbolic—law, language, symbolization, and signification. In other words, the subject is not only the subject of language, it is also subject to language.^[197] The imaginary, as its name indicates, concerns the order of nonverbal imagery.^[198] It includes simple identification and differentiation of the

[196] Id . at 80. Because Lacan's subject is the subject of language, his psychoanalytic theory is also a linguistic theory consisting in large part of a rewriting of Ferdinand de Saussure. See Lacan, The agency of the letter, supra note 163, at 146.

[197] "For Lacan the subject is constituted through language. . . . The subject is the subject of speech (Lacan's "parle-être"), and subject to that order." Rose, supra note 162, at 31. See also Mitchell, supra note 160, at 1, 5.

[198] The Freudian ego, for example, is imaginary in that it is one's image of oneself. The imaginary is the least worked-out of the Lacanian orders. Like all great thinkers, Lacan refined his theories constantly throughout his life. In his early work, Lacan concentratedon the distinction between the symbolic and the imaginary. In his late work, however, Lacan had changed his concentration to the distinction between the symbolic and the real, with the real taking over some of the function which had originally been ascribed to the imaginary. Compare, for example, Lacan, Seminar I, supra note 194, with Lacan's twentieth seminar, Encore (portions of which have been translated as Jacques Lacan, God and the Jouissance of the Woman, in Lacan, Feminine Sexuality, supra note 160, at 127 [hereinafter Lacan, God and Jouissance ]; and Jacques Lacan, A Love Letter (Une lettre d'âmour ), in Lacan, Feminine Sexuality, supra note 160, at 149 [hereinafter Lacan, Love Letter ]. "With the development of Lacanian teaching in the sixties and seventies, what he calls 'the Real' approaches more and more what he called, in the fifties, the Imaginary." Slavoj Zizek,^[*] The Sublime Object of Ideology 162 (1989) [hereinafter Zizek, Sublime Object]. Consequently, it is not absolutely clear what functions were left to the imaginary in late Lacan. Because my theories are based largely on the late Lacanian theories of feminine sexuality and on the works of Slavoj Zizek, this book reflects this change of emphasis to the real.

type of which animals are capable. Lacan's concept of the real is subtle and paradoxical. The real is our sense of the limit to the symbolic and the imaginary—that which cannot be captured in language or images. It is the world of impossibility, limitations, and necessity.^[199] The real is pure immediacy. It is the uterine unity that collapses all distinctions not only of people but of time and space. It is that which we feel we lose the moment we mediate our experience through imagery or language. To speak of or visualize the real is to lose touch with reality. Yet our sanity literally requires that we treat the real as though it were reality.^[200] We necessarily insist on a piece of the real in our symbolic and imaginary experience.^[201]

For some purposes it is useful, although admittedly simplistic, to say the real stands in for the physical or "object" world preexisting outside of human consciousness and language—that is, nature. Standing for the biological or natural, the real includes the realm of the infant before it

[199] The Real cannot be experienced as such: it is capable of representation or conceptualization only through the reconstructive or inferential work of the imaginary and symbolic orders. Lacan himself refers to the Real as "the lack of a 'lack.'"

Grosz, supra note 18, at 34.

Grosz explains:

The child, in other words, is born into the order of the Real. The Real is the order preceding the ego and the organization of the drives. It is an anatomical, "natural" order (nature in the sense of resistance rather than positive substance), a pure plenitude or fullness. . . . The Real is not however the same as reality; reality is lived as and known through imaginary and symbolic representations.

Id .

[200] Indeed, in Lacanian theory, psychosis consists in large part of a subject's inability to maintain the barrier between the real and reality. See, e.g ., Zizek, Looking Awry, supra note 165, at 20.

[201] Id . at 17, 33.

develops consciousness. Psychoanalytically, it also means all other forms of limitation of which we do not have direct experience, including the gods and death.^[202] It is the hard kernel that "exists when all . . . imaginary and symbolic factors are annihilated."^[203]

Before I give the plot of Lacan's Bildungsroman of sexuality, let me once again emphasize that the story I am about to tell is a retroactive re-creation of the development of the psyche. We will speak as though the infant actually, empirically passes through three orders of consciousness even though these orders are, in fact, mutually constituting. Lacan retroactively imagines the infant passing successively through these orders, but as he passes into the next order he never leaves the previous order.

This reflects the Hegelian dialectic in which each stage in the development of the subject is sublated into the next stage. All difference is not destroyed in sublation. An unsublated trace always remains. The "earlier" orders of psychic development, the real and the imaginary, do not totally disappear into the order of the symbolic to form consciousness.

Indeed, the two seemingly "earlier" orders do not, in fact, preexist the symbolic—the three are mutually constituting. Although we experience the real as that which preexists and binds the symbolic, in fact, the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic are mutually constituting. It is the ordering of the symbolic which walls off an outside called the real which retroactively serves as the impossible limit to the symbolic. The impossibility of a closed system has been familiar at least since Gödel proved that no mathematical system can be complete. Rather its closure always depends on assumptions imposed on the system from the outside.^[204] The real is logically required by the concept of the symbolic by

[202] "The gods belong to the field of the real." Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, supra note 1, at 45.

The gods and the dead are real because the only encounter we have with the real is based on the canceling of our perceptual conscious, or our sense of being alive: the real is real whether we experience it or not and regardless of how we experience it. The real is most real when we are not there; and when we are there, the real does not adapt itself or accommodate itself to our being there. The concept of the real implies the annihilation of the subject.

Schneiderman, supra note 18, at 76.

[203] Renata Salacel, Editorial: Lacan and Love , 26 New Formations at v (1994). "The real may be represented by the accident, the noise, the small element of reality, which is evidence that we are not dreaming." Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, supra note 1, at 60.

[204] See generally Roger Penrose, Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness (1994); Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979).

the same reasoning.^[205] We retroactively abduct the existence of the real from the traces or stains it seems to have left in the symbolic. As in Hegelian sublation, the creation of the symbolic reveals the necessary precondition of the real and the imaginary. That is, consciousness is a Borromean Knot of the three orders. The knot cannot exist unless there are at least three rings to overlap.

Lacan called the process of entering the symbolic (i.e., becoming a human subject who is capable of speech) "castration." It is the understanding that we only exist as subjects within law and language, yet law and language are external to, and imposed on, our subjectivity. It is reflected in our sense of being separated from a mythical, imaginary sense of unity with the Other (associated, of course, with the uterine union with the Mother). Castration is the loss of the mythical object of desire which is called the "Phallus" —the symbol of subjectivity.^[206] This separation is the creation of law which is always the law of prohibition: Thou shall not merge back into unconscious union with the world. In the imaginary, this union is the utopian mother-child dyad. Consequently, in modern West-

[205] Miller, supra note 20, at xxiv.

[206] The école freudienne, The phallic phase, supra note 164, at 116–17; Jacques Lacan, The direction of the treatment, supra note 14, at 226, 265.

On the one hand, this is different from the naturalistic side of Freud which sometimes seems to argue that sexuality is literally created when the boy sees the female genitals and then for the first time understands and fears the possibility that he could lose his own, or the girl's seeing the male genitals and immediately understanding that she is maimed. On the other hand, it is also different from those object relationists who argue that "castration" is merely the culmination of numerous small natural losses, such as the loss of the breast at weaning.

Castration is not any natural (real) loss as object-relations psychologists have wrongly concluded. It is, rather, the moment our sense of loss acquires sexual signification. That is, the real of castration is an event: the Big Bang of the symbolic. In the words of Mitchell:

There is a fundamental distinction between recognizing that the castration complex may refer back to other separations and technically seeing these separations as castrations. . . . Freud's [i.e., Lacan's interpretation of the non-naturalistic side of Freud] account is retroactive: fearing phallic castration the child may "recollect" previous losses, castration gives them relevance. . . . For Freud, history and the psychoanalytic experience is always a reconstruction, a retrospective account.

Mitchell, supra note 160, at 18–19. In Lacan's words:

The fear of castration is like a thread that perforates all the stages of development. It orientates the relations that are anterior to its actual appearance—weaning, toilet training, etc. It crystallizes each of these moments in a dialectic that has as its centre a bad encounter. If the stages are consistent, it is in accordance with their possible registration in terms of bad encounters.

The central bad encounter is at the level of the sexual.

Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, supra note 1, at 64.

ern society this law of prohibition takes the form of the incest taboo.^[207] That is, the command, "Thou shalt not merge with the real" becomes "Thou shalt not identify with the Feminine" and, finally, "Thou shalt not sleep with your mother." Paradoxically, it is law's prohibition and its maiming of subjectivity in castration which create not only the possibility of but also the conditions for human growth, love, and freedom.^[208] "[L]ove is a mirage that fills over the void of the impossibility" of the relationship between the two sexes.^[209]

1—
The Opening Chapters of the Psyche's Bildungsroman

Just as Hegel "started" his analysis of property with an account of the abstract will, so Lacan "started" with the infant. When viewed retroactively, the infant seems to exist wholly in the order of the real. In the real, the infant has no consciousness. Its relation to the world is immediate; it experiences itself as one with the object world, including its "Mother." Most specifically, it has no awareness of the separation of itself and the rest of the world. As Hegel stated, the infant has being-in-itself, mere implicit being.^[210] At this point the infant experiences itself and its Mother as one.

Or more precisely, it has no sense of itself as a self, and no sense of its mother as a person.^[211] It is, therefore, misleading to say that the infant

[207] In Lacanian usage, the "incest taboo" does not refer to the literal prohibition of biological incest but to the law of exclusion:

Thus, the incest taboo is not so much a biological "no" as it is a strong cultural injunction to boys to identify away from the maternal and the feminine, to substitute the name of a lineage to the desire of a mother. . . .

Ragland-Sullivan, supra note 182, at 50–51.

[208] "Law and desire, stemming from the fact that both are born together, joined and necessitated by each other in the law of incest . . . " Lacan, Names-of-the-Father Seminar, supra note 162, at 89.

[209] Salacel, supra note 203, at v.

[210] Hegel, The Lesser Logic, supra note 29, at 181. At least one commentator has previously pointed out the similarity between Lacan's concept of the real and Hegel's concept of "being in itself." John Muller, Negation in "The Purloined Letter": Hegel, Poe, and Lacan, in The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading 343 (John P. Muller & William J. Richardson eds., 1988).

[211] Which is why I am using the impersonal pronoun "it" to describe the selfhood of the infant in the first two stages.

The child forms a syncretic unity with the mother and cannot distinguish between itself and its environment. It has no awareness of its own corporeal boundaries. It is ubiquitous , with no separation between itself and "objects", for it forms a "primal unity" with its objects. It cannot recognize the absence of the mother (or breast).

Grosz, supra note 18, at 34.

"experiences" union with the Mother because as soon as it starts becoming aware of experience, it begins to be aware of itself as distinct from the Mother. Awareness is not experience but the interpretation of experience. It is entering the mirror stage that will bring it into Lacan's next order of existence, the imaginary.

The imaginary is the order of the image and, therefore, of identity and difference.^[212] It is the order of meaning, of captivation and ensnarement.^[213] Based on mirror images, the imaginary sees difference in terms of simple negation—the sexes are imagined to complement each other perfectly as yin and yang, active and passive, autonomous and connected, individualistic and nurturing, and so on. In this mirror stage, the child starts becoming aware of itself as separate through the mediating function of sexuality.^[214] This is the beginning of the subject/object distinction.^[215] The infant becomes aware of the Mother as Other—as radical alterity.^[216]

Note that the term "Mother" means the person initially recognized by the infant as the other, rather than his female parent. Consequently, it is sometimes written as "(M)other" by English-speaking Lacanians. In a patriarchal family structure, this person is also usually the child's mother in the usual sense, or a person socially recognized as a mother surrogate (i.e., nanny, nurse, guardian, widower, or whatever), hence the choice of terminology. The fact that the other, as second term, is identified with

[212] Rose sees Lacan as assigning unity to the imaginary in his earlier texts, but as identifying the fantasy of sameness within language (i.e., the symbolic) in his later work. I agree that it is not clear precisely what role the imaginary plays in late Lacan.

[213] Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III, The Psychoses 1955–56, at 54 (Jacques-Alain Miller ed. & Russell Grigg trans., 1993) [hereinafter Lacan, Seminar III].

[214] Jacques Lacan, The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience [hereinafter Lacan, The mirror stage ], in Lacan, Écrits, supra note 14, at 1, 2.

[215] Grosz explains this as the beginning of the subject/object distinction. Grosz, supra note 18, at 35. Rose observes:

For Lacan the subject is constituted through language—the mirror image represents the moment when the subject is located in an order outside itself to which it will henceforth refer. The subject is the subject of speech (Lacan's "parle-être "), and subject to that order. But if there is division in the image, and instability in the pronoun, there is equally loss, and difficulty in the word. Language can only operate by designating an object in its absence. Lacan takes this further, and states that symbolization turns on the object as absence.

Rose, supra note 160, at 31. According to Jane Gallop: "But Lacan posits that the mirror constructs the self, that the self as organized entity is actually an imitation of the cohesiveness of the mirror image." Jane Gallop, Reading Lacan 38 (1985).

[216] Grosz, supra note 18, at 42. Grosz explains, "It is by identifying with and incorporating the image of the mother that it [the infant] gains an identity as an ego." Id . at 43.

(m)other in our society (and that, as we shall see, the third term will be identified with father) will determine the positions of sexuality.

Lacan's punning and metaphoric terminology is intentional. The infant sees its mirror —thereby enters the image -inary—in the mirror stage .^[217] It recognizes itself by seeing itself reflected in Mother who functions as its mirror. The experience of recognition is primarily one of vision—it sees the Mother, it sees its hand and begins to recognize parts of its body.

This concept of the Feminine as alterity has been misunderstood by so-called different-voice feminist legal scholars, such as Robin West, who are strongly influenced by the works of Carol Gilligan and other object-relations psychologists. On the basis of the assertion that most empirical psychological studies of childhood have concentrated on boys, they conclude that theories that claim to explain the development of personality, generally, are, in fact, accounts of masculine personality, specifically. They presume from this that since mainstream theory asserts that personality (i.e., masculinity) originates in a recognition of difference from the Mother, then feminine personality must originate in a recognition of similarity to the mother. From this they conclude that although men (whose development is characterized by separation) may be the autonomous individuals of liberal philosophy, women (whose development is characterized by connection) are more interrelated, following an ethic of care rather than justice.^[218] This vision of an affirmative Feminine which is the simple negation or mirror image of the Masculine is, as well shall see, not merely imaginary, but a masculine fantasy. Moreover, this particular conclusion is a non sequitur which springs from a fundamental confusion about the level of differentiation on which the theory relies.

The initial differentiation which is the starting point of Lacanian per-

[217] In this stage the child becomes fascinated with actual mirror images. Grosz, supra note 18, at 36–37. This phenomenon is familiar to all of us who have seen infants squealing with delight at their reflected images, pictures in books, and other newly discovered "mirror images."

Lacan points out that the difference in capacity for language between human and ape first becomes apparent in this stage. Human and simian infants experience similar development up to this point. Both become fascinated with mirrors at approximately the same age. Eventually both the child and the chimp realize that the image in the mirror is itself, and not another animal on the other side. The chimp loses most of its interest. The child's fascination increases. Lacan, The mirror stage, supra note 214, at 1.

[218] I use the term "different-voice feminism" because the psychological study which has had the greatest influence on American feminist jurisprudence is Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (1982). This school of feminism is often called "cultural" feminism. See, e.g ., Robin West, Jurisprudence and Gender , 55 U. Chi. L. Rev. 1 (1988).

sonality is the awareness that I and the Mother are not literally the same person—that is, the ability to formulate the third person pronoun (which precedes the development of the first person, let alone the second person). This cognitive step of recognizing the existence of another person as different must take place before the ability to identify, let alone evaluate, similarities to and differences from that other person. The former—mere imaginary identification of identity and nonidentity—is purely dual in nature and must be the same for both the girl and the boy in the mirror stage. That is, in the mirror stage, all children, male and female, both identify with the Mother yet recognize their difference from the Mother.

Indeed, for the different-voice feminist to posit that the girl child initially recognizes her similarity to the Mother and the boy initially recognizes his difference prior to the oedipal stage is to presuppose a natural or biological sexual difference which does not explain the psychoanalytic and social significance of sexuality.^[219] The two-party mother-child dyad is an imaginary relationship. In the imaginary, one can identify "meaning," in the sense that one can identify that X is like or not like Y, but all meanings (i.e., differences and similarities) have the same valorization because there is no external standard of comparison. For example, the blue-eyed little boy would see himself as like his mother in that she has blue eyes and different from her in that she lacks a penis, and the brown-eyed girl may see herself different from her blue-eyed mother despite their similarity in genitalia. But neither specific difference nor similarity could have precedence over the other.

Signification is not imaginary but symbolic. In order for a child to learn to privilege a specific anatomic difference, he must identify a third term to serve as the basis of comparison—what Lacan will call the Father. Consequently, the creation of sexual differentiation cannot take place in the mirror stage but must wait until the oedipal stage.

In other words, although both different-voice feminists and Lacanians agree that femininity is identification with the Mother and masculinity is identification away from the Mother, their respective interpretations of

[219] Most different-voice feminists, including Carol Gilligan, present their theory as a psychological or social construction account of empirically observable gender differences. West is one of the very few who recognize that the theory implicitly requires a presumed natural, biological sexual difference. Unfortunately, her "connectedness thesis" uses bodily metaphor to explain supposedly psychic differences. She argues that women are more socially connected and interrelated than men, because women are physically connected to other human beings through childbearing, nursing, being penetrated during sexual intercourse, and through menstruation (which presumably reflects the ability to bear children). West, supra note 218, at 14.

this phenomenon are wildly disparate. Different-voice feminists believe that children identify with or away from their mother on the basis of their pre-given (i.e., natural) sexuality and that this difference causes gender characteristics. In contradistinction, Lacanians believe that sexuality is itself the decision to identify with or away from the mother. This decision can only be made when the child enters into the symbolic. Accordingly, one's sexuality is not necessarily correlated with one's biology.

Consequently, although the mirror stage is the child's first awareness of self, at this point it can only experience itself as that which it is not.^[220] It is not the "Other"—Lacan's term for radical alterity, which is identified with the role of the Mother, the unconscious, and the symbolic order.

The infant is not yet a subject, and to say the same thing, it does not yet recognize the Mother as another subject. She is just Other. Infant and other are merely negatives, oppositions. It is not an individual, it is not-Mother.^[221] It can now conceive of mother in the third person as "she" (or, perhaps at this stage, "it") but cannot yet think of itself as "I," let alone recognize "you."

The infant during the mirror stage, existing only in the real and the imaginary, resembles the Hegelian abstract personality—pure negativity.^[222] The mirror stage is consequently both a stage of great gain—the experience of self—and incalculable loss and violence. Since the child has no memory of alterity prior to the mirror stage, in the imaginary the in-

[220] Only at this moment [i.e., the mirror stage] does [the child] become capable of distinguishing itself from the "outside" world, and thus of locating itself in the world. Only when the child recognizes or understands the concept of absence does it see that it is not "one" complete in itself, merged with the world as a whole and the (m)other.

Grosz, supra note 18, at 35.

For Lacan the subject is constituted through language—the mirror image represents the moment when the subject is located in an order outside itself to which it will henceforth refer.

Mitchell, supra note 160, at 31.

[221] In the mirror stage the child develops an imaginary body-image.

This is the domain in which the self is dominated by images of the other and seeks its identity in a reflected relation with alterity. Imaginary relations are thus two-person relations, where the self sees itself reflected in the other. This dual, imaginary relation—usually identified with the pre-oedipal mother-child relation—although structurally necessary, is an ultimately stifling and unproductive relation. The dual relationship between mother and child is a dyad trapping both participants within a mutually defining structure. Each strives to have the other, and ultimately, to be the other in a vertiginous spiral from one term or identity to the other.

Grosz, supra note 18, at 46–47.

[222] The mirror stage both affirms and denies the subject's separateness from the other. If we look more directly at the privileged stage for acting out of the drama of the mir-ror stage—that is, at the mother-child relation, in which the mother takes on the position of the specular image and the child that of incipient ego, the mirror stage is an effect of the discord between the gestalt of the mother, a total unified, "completed" image, and the subjective, spatially dislocated, positionless, timeless, perspectiveless, immersing turmoil the child experiences.

Grosz, supra note 18, at 42.

fant retroactively imagines that it had once been one with Mother before the mirror stage (as opposed to having been merely unaware of alterity). Consequently, as we shall see, when the child enters the symbolic, he will identify his subjectivity (castration) as loss or denial of the Feminine.

In other words, the relation between the infant and the object world, like the relationship between the will and the object of property in possession and enjoyment, is ostensibly dual. Because the relationship between the infant and the Mother is not yet mediated by a third term, the infant can only imagine union as absorption and destruction of separate personhood.^[223] This binary system is unstable and looks forward toward, and presupposes, its own overthrow. The self in the imaginary is contradictory in the same way as property before exchange—the infant is now both separate from and dependent on the defining Other. This can only be resolved by the addition of a third term. Or, more accurately (as we are looking backward over our shoulders), the third term is not added but is revealed as being always already there. The very act of recognizing the third term is simultaneously the creation of the imaginary binary mother-child opposition in the mirror stage and the real mother-child union prior to the mirror stage, as necessary preconditions to the tertiary symbolic relationship of adult sexuality.

2—
Longing in the Three Orders

Before discussing the third term, it is helpful to consider the categories of longing which correspond to the orders of the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic: "need," "demand," and "desire," respectively.^[224] In the first stage, the infant experiences the real longing of need.^[225] Needs are particular by definition. If one can be satisfied by a substitute, then one didn't need the missing ob-

[223] Id . at 50–51.

[224] Need, demand, and desire are expressions or effects of the orders of human existence Lacan defines as the Real, the imaginary, and the symbolic. . . . The child's "development" from need to demand and desire is congruous with its movement out of the Real and into the imaginary and symbolic.

Id . at 59.

[225] Id . at 59–60.

ject, one only wanted it. For example, if one is dying of thirst, only drink will do. Need is always full in the sense that it is either fulfilled or not. That is, either you need something or you don't.

We have seen that, in the mirror stage, the realization that the Mother is Other—radical alterity—is the start of the infant's realization of self. As a result, it not only has needs.^[226] It also recognizes that it lacks^[227] —it demands of the (M)other.

Demand takes the form of the statement, "I want . . . " or the command "Give me . . . ". In Lacan's understanding, the demand is always transitive for it is always directed to an other (usually the mother). By being articulated in language, a language always derived and learned from the (m)other, demand is always tied to otherness.^[228]

Demand is not yet conscious language. It is the call to the Other.^[229] Unlike need, demand is not full. The infant can and does demand because it is aware that it wants something, and that there is someone else who has something which it does not have.^[230] "Ask yourselves what the call represents in the field of speech. Well, it's the possibility of refusal."^[231] As a result, unlike need, demand is general. "From this point on, the particularity of his need can only be abolished in demand, a demand which can never be satisfied, since it is always the demand for something else."^[232] That is, even if the Mother gives us everything we ask for, we are never satisfied because we really want her love and our demand is for an irrefutable proof

[226] Id . at 60.

[227] Id . at 35.

[228] Id . at 61.

[229] Lacan, Seminar I, supra note 194, at 84.

[230] Let us, therefore, start with lack, inscribed at the roots of the structure in so far as the subject is constituted in a dependency on the speech of the Other. From this point on, the particularity of his need can only be abolished in demand, a demand which can never be satisfied, since it is always the demand for something else. This is also why the particularity of need has to resurface in the desire which develops on the edge of demand.

The école freudienne, The phallic phase, supra note 164, at 116. The anonymous authorship of this article is a good example of Lacan's insufferable egotism.

François George mocks the Lacanians who swallow the gross injustice that no one has the phallus except Lacan: an injustice manifested, for example, in the outrageous fact that, in the Lacanian journal Scilicet , all articles were published anonymously except Lacan's, which bore his signature.

Gallop, supra note 215, at 42–43.

[231] Lacan, Seminar I, supra note 194, at 87.

[232] The école freudienne, The phallic phase, supra note 164, at 112.

of the love. This, of course, is the inherent anxiety of deductive reasoning. No amount of positive evidence provided by the mother can ever verify the hypothesis that "Mommy loves baby" while every instance in which a demand is not instantly satisfied threatens to falsify it.

The infant desperately wants and demands to reexperience union with the lost Mother. This is a terrible, violent, and frightening demand.^[233] If it and the Mother become one again, then they will no longer be two. One must disappear.^[234] The new infantile self is terrified that it is the infant who will disappear. After all it is the Mother who is all-powerful, who has been the source of fulfillment of its needs, and who is now the object of its demands. But if it is the Mother who disappears, then the infant will no longer have a mirror. If the infant has no mirror in which to see itself, will the infant disappear?^[235] In the binary Mother-child relationship, the infant is like the abstract person in enjoyment—totally dependent on the object as other: a Mother-addict.

When the third term is added, the child enters the symbolic and becomes a subject, who, like a Hegelian subject, desires. Desire is what is left when need is separated from demand. "[T]he particularity of need . . . resurface[s] in the desire which develops on the edge of demand."^[236] Desire is sexual in that it is the creation of the linguistic categories of sexuality, but it is a conflation to identify it with anatomical sexual urge. Lacan is talking about the desperate Hegelian drive for recognition. "[D]esire is intrinsically inter-subjective. Consciousness desires the desire of another to constitute it as self-consciousness. . . . [D]esire is thus a movement, an energy that is always transpersonal, directed to others."^[237] For the subject, desire is the symbolic experiential counterpart of need and demand

[233] Grosz, supra note 18, at 61.

[234] At first, before language, desire exists solely in the single plane of the imaginary relation of the specular stage, projected, alienated in the other. The tension it provokes is then deprived of an outcome. That is to say that it has no other outcome—Hegel teaches us this—than the destruction of the other.

The subject's desire can only be confirmed in this relation through a competition, through an absolute rivalry with the other, in view of the object towards which it is directed. And each time we get close, in a given subject, to this primitive alienation, the most radical aggression arises—the desire for the disappearance of the other in so far as he supports the subject's desire.

Lacan, Seminar I, supra note 194, at 170. See also Grosz, supra note 18, at 62.

[235] Grosz, supra note 18, at 50–51.

[236] The école freudienne, The phallic phase, supra note 164, at 116. Grosz, supra note 18, at 66.

[237] Grosz, supra note 18, at 65.

in the real and imaginary. Like demand, and unlike need, desire is always incomplete.

Desire is a fundamental lack, a hole in being that can satisfied only by one "thing"—another('s) desire. Each self-conscious subject desires the desire of the other as its object. Its desire is to be desired by the other, its counterpart.^[238]

Thus

any satisfaction that might subsequently be attained will always contain this loss within it. Lacan refers to this dimension as "desire". The baby's need can be met, its demand responded to, but its desire only exists because of the initial failure of satisfaction. Desire persists as an effect of a primordial absence and it therefore indicates that, in this area, there is something fundamentally impossible about satisfaction itself. It is this process that, to Lacan, lies behind Freud's statement that "We must reckon with the possibility that something in the nature of the sexual instinct itself is unfavorable to the realization of complete satisfaction."^[239]

Just as the Hegelian abstract person desired recognition from another subject, the child now desires that the Mother desire him. As the Hegelian person sought to possess objects so that he could be recognized by other subjects, the Lacanian seeks to identify and possess whatever object it is that the Mother desires.