The phantasm as a subject

Abstract

This contribution explores Jacques Lacan’s Seminar XIV. The Logic of the Fantasy starting from a series of statements which, due to their obsessive reiteration, constitute its theoretical framework: “there is no metalanguage,” “no signifier can signify itself,” “and so on.” These formulas do not raise questions of truth, but of implication: what does their insistence imply? What is the effect of their repetition? The analysis shows how the chain of signifiers moves horizontally, in a perpetual slippage, but precisely because it is driven by something that, while not belonging to the order of signifiers, silently guides its movement: the object petit a. This object exceeds representation, signifying itself without signifying itself, and manifests in the grammatical form of the middle voice, a figure of subjectivity at its inception, unthinkable in the traditional terms of active/passive, subject/object. The article thus proposes a reading of the Seminar as a device aimed not at transmitting knowledge, but at provoking an experience: that of the knot between the kath’autò and the pros ti, between the “for-itself” and the “in-the-other,” between instituting and destituting. From this perspective, Lacanian formalism reveals itself not as an exhaustive knowledge, but as a failed and necessary exercise, aimed at circumscribing that which continuously escapes in writing: the very act of the formation of form.