Can fantasy become commonplace?

Abstract

Starting from Lacan’s formula “the action of language in each subject produces jouissance and articulates-repeats jouissance,” the article reconstructs its transformations in Lacan’s teaching up to the crucial point represented by Seminar XIV. Initially, the Other-language operates thanks to the “Name-of-the-Father,” producing and repeating jouissance as loss and prohibition; in a second phase, the exception of the “minus-one” transforms jouissance into an impossible intrusion, while the introduction of the “semblant” lays the groundwork for an absolute and constant jouissance. In Seminar XIV the “minus-one” version still predominates, but the “Other with semblant” is already emerging, and it is then that the fantasy elevates itself from mere support to a true axiom: a phrase-formula that initiates and absorbs within itself the entire process of production-articulation-repetition of jouissance. Four passages (alienation and the erasure of the Other; the exclusion of language from jouissance; the transfer of the Other’s function to the body; the transformation of the fantasy into an axiom) plus a “plus-one” (sexuality as an objection to the non-existence of the Other) trace the threshold toward the functioning “One without Other.” From this threshold emerges a radical split between the production of jouissance and its articulation, paradoxically concealed by the very potency of the fantasy, yet already poised for transcendence through the recourse to lalangue and a primary production of jouissance unbound by fantasy-articulation—a development that will find full definition in the subsequent seminars.