And why the Other with a capital O? For a no doubt mad reason, in the same way as it is madness every time we are obliged to bring in signs supplementary to those given by language. Here the mad reason is the following. You are my wife – after all, what do you know about it? You are my master – in reality, are you so sure of that? What creates the founding value of those words is that what is aimed at in the message, as well as what is manifest in the pretence, is that the other is there qua absolute Other. Absolute, that is to say he is recognized, but is not known. In the same way, what constitutes pretence is that, in the end, you don’t know whether it’s a pretence or not. Essentially it is this unknown element in the alterity of the other which characterizes the speech relation on the level on which it is spoken to the other. [1]

This passage should surprise anyone acquainted with Lacan: it equates the big Other with the impenetrability of another subject beyond the “wall of language,” putting us at the opposite end of the predominant image Lacan presents of the big Other, that of the inexorable logic of an automatism which runs the show, so that when the subject speaks, he is, unbeknownst to himself, merely “spoken,” not master in his own house. What, then, is the big Other? The anonymous mechanism of the symbolic order, or another subject in his or her radical alterity, a subject from whom I am forever separated by the “wall of language”? The easy way out of this predicament would have been to read in this discrepancy the sign of a shift in Lacan’s development, from the early Lacan focused on the intersubjective dialectic of recognition, to the later Lacan who puts forward the anonymous mechanism that regulates the interaction of subjects (in philosophical terms: from phenomenology to structuralism). While there is a limited truth in this solution, it obfuscates the central mystery of the big Other: the point at which the big Other, the anonymous symbolic order, gets subjectivized.

The exemplary case is divinity: is what we call “God” not the big Other personified, addressing us as a larger-than-life person, a subject beyond all subjects? In a similar way, we talk about History asking something of us, of our Cause calling us to make the necessary sacrifice. What we get here is an uncanny subject who is not simply another human being, but the Third, the subject who stands above the interaction of real human individuals – and the terrifying enigma is, of course, what does this impenetrable subject want from us (theology refers to this dimension as that of Deus absconditus). For Lacan, we do not have to evoke God to get a taste of this abyssal dimension; it is present in every human being.

man’s desire is the Other’s desire, in which the de /of/ provides what grammarians call a ‘subjective determination’ – namely, that it is qua /as/ Other that man desires. … This is why the Other’s question – that comes back to the subject from the place from which he expects an oracular reply – which takes some such form as ‘Che vuoi?‘, ‘What do you want?’ is the question that best leads the subject to the path of his own desire. [2]

Lacan’s formula is ambiguous. “It is qua Other that man desires” first means that man’s desire is structured by the “decentered” big Other, the symbolic order: what I desire is predetermined by the big Other, the symbolic space within which I dwell. Even when my desires are transgressive, even when they violate social norms, this very transgression is conditioned by what it transgresses. Paul knew this very well when, in the famous passage in Romans, he describes how the law gives rise to the desire to violate it. Since the moral edifice of our societies still turns around the ten Commandments – the law Paul was referring to -, the experience of our liberal-permissive society confirms Paul’s insight: it continuously demonstrates that our cherished human rights are ultimately, in their innermost, simply the rights to violate the ten Commandments. “The right to privacy” – the right to adultery, done in secret, when no one sees me or has the right to probe into my life. “The right to pursue happiness and to possess private property” – the right to steal (to exploit others). “Freedom of the press and of the expression of opinion” – the right to lie. “The right of the free citizens to possess weapons” – the right to kill. And, ultimately, “freedom of religious belief” – the right to celebrate false gods.

There is, however, another meaning to “man’s desire is Other’s desire”: the subject desires only insofar as it experiences the Other itself as desiring, as the site of an unfathomable desire, as if an opaque desire is emanating from him or her. The other not only addresses me with an enigmatic desire, it also confronts me with the fact that I myself do not know what I really desire, with the enigma of my own desire. For Lacan, who follows Freud here, this abyssal dimension of another human being – the abyss of the depth of another personality, its utter impenetrability – first found its full expression in Judaism with its injunction to love your neighbor as yourself. For Freud as well as for Lacan, this injunction is deeply problematic, since it obfuscates the fact that, beneath the neighbor as my mirror-image, the one who is like me, with whom I can empathize, there always lurks the unfathomable abyss of radical Otherness, of someone about whom I ultimately do not know anything – can I really rely on him? Who is he? How can I be sure that his words are not a mere pretence? In contrast to the New Age attitude which ultimately reduces my neighbors to my mirror-images or to the means on the path of my self-realization (as is the case in the Jungian psychology in which other persons around me are ultimately reduced to the externalizations-projections of the disavowed aspects of my own personality), Judaism opens up a tradition in which an alien traumatic kernel forever persists in my neighbor – the neighbor remains an inert, impenetrable, enigmatic presence that hystericizes me. The core of this presence, of course, is the neighbor’s desire, an enigma not only for us, but also for the neighbor himself. For this reason, Lacan’s Che vuoi? is not simply an inquiry into “What do you want?” but more an inquiry into “What’s bugging you? What is it in you that makes you so unbearable not only for us, but also for yourself, that you yourself obviously do not master?”

The temptation to be resisted here is the ethical domestication of the neighbor – for example, what Emmanuel Levinas did with his notion of the neighbor as the abyssal point from which the call of ethical responsibility emanates. What Levinas obfuscates is the monstrosity of the neighbor, monstrosity on account of which Lacan applies to the neighbor the term Thing (das Ding), used by Freud to designate the ultimate object of our desires in its unbearable intensity and impenetrability. One should hear in this term all the connotations of horror fiction: the neighbor is the (Evil) Thing which potentially lurks beneath every homely human face. Just think about Stephen King’s The Shining, in which the father, a modest failed writer, gradually turns into a killing beast who, with an evil grin, goes on to slaughter his entire family. No wonder, then, that Judaism is also the religion of divine Law which regulates relations between people: this Law is strictly correlative to the emergence of the neighbor as the inhuman Thing. That is to say, the ultimate function of the Law is not to enable us not to forget the neighbor, to retain our proximity to the neighbor, but, on the contrary, to keep the neighbor at a proper distance, to serve as a kind of protective wall against the monstrosity of the neighbor. As Rainer Maria Rilke put it in his The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge:

There exists a creature that is perfectly harmless; when it passes before your eyes, you hardly notice it and immediately forget it again. But as soon as it somehow, invisibly, gets into your ears, it begins to develop, it hatches, and cases have been known where it has penetrated into the brain and flourished there devastatingly, like the pneumococci in dogs which gain entrance through the nose… This creature is Your Neighbor.

It is for this reason that finding oneself in the position of the beloved is so violent, traumatic even: being loved makes me feel directly the gap between what I am as a determinate being and the unfathomable X in me which causes love. Lacan’s definition of love (“Love is giving something one doesn’t have…”) has to be supplemented with: “… to someone who doesn’t want it.” Is this not confirmed by our most elementary experience when somebody unexpectedly declared passionate love to us? The first reaction, preceding the possible positive reply, is that something obscene, intrusive, is being forced upon us. In the middle of Guillermo Arriaga’s 21 Grams, Paul, who is dying of a weakened heart, gently declares his love to Cristina, who is traumatized by the recent death of her husband and two young children; when they meet the next time, Cristina explodes into a complaint about the violent nature of declaring love:

“You know, you kept me thinking all day. I haven’t spoken to anyone for months and I barely know you and I already need to talk to you … And there’s something the more I think about the less I understand: why the hell did you tell me you liked me? Answer me, because I didn’t like you saying that at all. You can’t just walk up to a woman you barely know and tell her you like her. Y-o-u-c-a-n’t. You don’t know what she’s going through, what she’s feeling. I’m not married, you know. I’m not anything in this world. I’m just not anything. [3]

Upon this, Cristina looks at Paul, raises her hands and desperately starts kissing him on the mouth; so it is not that she did not like him and did not desire carnal contact with him. The problem for her was, on the contrary, that she did want it – the point of her complaint was: what right does he have to stir up her desire? It is from this abyss of the Other as Thing that we can understand what Lacan means with what he calls the “founding word”, statements which confer on a person some symbolic title and makes him or her what they are proclaimed to be, constituting their symbolic identity: “You are my wife, my master…”. This notion is usually perceived as an echo of the theory of performatifs, of speech acts which accomplish in their very act of enunciation the state of things that they declare (when I say “This meeting is closed,” I thereby effectively close the meeting). [4] However, it is clear from the passage which opens this chapter that Lacan aims at something more. Performatifs are, at their most fundamental, acts of symbolic trust and engagement: when I say to someone “You are my master!”, I oblige myself to treat him in a certain way and, in the same move, I oblige him to treat me in a certain way. Lacan’s point is that we need this recourse to performativity, to the symbolic engagement, precisely and only insofar as the other whom we confront is not only my mirror-double, someone like me, but also the elusive absolute Other who ultimately remains an unfathomable mystery. The main function of the symbolic order with its laws and obligations is to render our co-existence with others minimally bearable: a Third has to step in between me and my neighbors so that our relations do not explode in murderous violence.

Back in the 1960s, in the era of “structuralism” (theories based on the notion that all human activity is regulated by unconscious symbolic mechanisms), Louis Althusser launched the notorious formula of “theoretical anti-humanism,” allowing, demanding even, that it be supplemented by practical humanism. In our practice, we should act as humanists, respecting others, treating them as free persons with full dignity, as creators of their world. However, in theory, we should always bear in mind that humanism is an ideology, the way we spontaneously experience our predicament, and that the true knowledge of humans and their history should treat individuals not as autonomous subjects, but as elements in a structure which follows its own laws. In contrast to Althusser, Lacan asserts that we recognize practical anti-humanism, an ethics that goes beyond the dimension of what Nietzsche called “human, all too human,” and confront the inhuman core of humanity. This means an ethics which fearlessly takes into account the latent monstrosity of being-human, the diabolic dimension which exploded in phenomena usually covered by the concept-name “Auschwitz”.

Perhaps the best way to describe the status of this inhuman dimension of the neighbor is with reference to Kant’s philosophy. In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant introduced a key distinction between negative and indefinite judgment: the positive statement ‘the soul is mortal’ can be negated in two ways. We can either deny a predicate (‘the soul is not mortal’), or affirm a non-predicate (‘the soul is non-mortal’). The difference is exactly the same as the one, known to every reader of Stephen King, between ‘he is not dead’ and ‘he is undead’. The indefinite judgment opens up a third domain which undermines the distinction between dead and non-dead (alive): the ‘undead’ are neither alive nor dead, they are precisely the monstrous ‘living dead’. And the same goes for ‘inhuman’: ‘he is not human’ is not the same as ‘he is inhuman’. ‘He is not human’ means simply that he is external to humanity, animal or divine, while ‘he is inhuman’ means something thoroughly different, namely the fact that he is neither human nor inhuman, but marked by a terrifying excess which, although it negates what we understand as humanity, is inherent to being-human. And, perhaps, one should risk the hypothesis that this is what changes with the Kantian philosophical revolution: in the pre-Kantian universe, humans were simply humans, beings of reason, fighting the excesses of animal lusts and divine madness, while with Kant, the excess to be fought is immanent and concerns the very core of subjectivity itself. (Which is why, in German Idealism, the metaphor for the core of subjectivity is Night, the ‘Night of the World’, in contrast to the Enlightenment notion of the Light of Reason fighting the darkness around.) In the pre-Kantian universe, when a hero goes mad, he is deprived of his humanity and animal passions or divine madness take over. With Kant, madness signals the unconstrained explosion of the very core of a human being.

How are we to avoid the traumatic impact of the being too directly exposed to this terrifying abyss of the other? How are we to cope with the anxiety-provoking encounter of the other’s desire? For Lacan, fantasy provides an answer to the enigma of Other’s desire. The first thing to note about fantasy is that it literally teaches us how to desire: fantasy does not mean that, when I desire a strawberry cake and cannot get it in reality, I fantasize about eating it; the problem is rather, how do I know that I desire a strawberry cake in the first place? This is what fantasy tells me. This role of fantasy hinges on the deadlock of our sexuality designated by Lacan in his paradoxical statement “there is no sexual relationship”: there is no universal guarantee of a harmonious sexual relationship with one’s partner. Every subject has to invent a fantasy of his or her own, a “private” formula for the sexual relationship – the relationship with a woman is possible only inasmuch as the partner fits this formula.

A couple of years ago, Slovene feminists reacted with great outcry at the publicity poster of a large cosmetics factory for sun lotion, depicting a series of well-tanned women’s behinds in tight bathing suites, accompanied with the logo “Each has her own factor.” Of course, this publicity was based on a rather vulgar double-entendre: the logo ostensibly referred to the sun lotion, which was offered to customers with different sun factors so as to fit different skin types; however, its entire effect was based on its obvious male-chauvinist reading: “Each woman can be had, if only the man knows her factor, her specific catalyst, what arouses her!” The Freudian viewpoint is that each subject, female or male, possesses such a “factor” which regulates her or his desire: “a woman, viewed from behind, on her hands and knees” was the “factor” for Wolfman, Freud’s most famous patient; a statue-like woman without pubic hair was John Ruskin’s factor. There is nothing uplifting about our awareness of this factor: it is uncanny, horrifying even, since it somehow depossesses the subject, reducing her or him to a puppet-like level beyond dignity and freedom.

However, the thing to add immediately is that the desire staged in fantasy is not the subject’s own, but the other’s desire, the desire of those around me with whom I interact: fantasy, the fantasmatic scene or scenario, is an answer to “You’re saying this, but what is it that you effectively want by saying it?” The original question of desire is not directly “What do I want?”, but “What do others want from me? What do they see in me? What am I for the others?” A small child is embedded in a complex network of relations, he serves as a kind of catalyst and battle-field for the desires of those around him; his father, mother, brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, who fight their battles around him, the mother sending a message to the father through her care for the son. While being well aware of this role, the child cannot fathom what, precisely, an object he is for the others, what the exact nature of the games they are playing with him is. Fantasy provides an answer to this enigma: at its most fundamental, fantasy tells me what I am for my others. This intersubjective character of fantasy is discernible even in the most elementary cases, like the one, reported by Freud, of his little daughter fantasizing about eating a strawberry cake: what we have here is by no means the simple case of the direct hallucinatory satisfaction of a desire (she wanted a cake, didn’t get it, so she fantasized about it). The crucial feature is that, while voraciously eating a strawberry cake, the little girl noticed how her parents were deeply satisfied by seeing her fully enjoying it. What the fantasy of eating a strawberry cake really was about was her attempt to form such an identity (of the one who fully enjoys eating a cake given by the parents) that would satisfy her parents and make her the object of their desire.

Since sexuality is the domain in which we get most close to the intimacy of another human being, totally exposing ourselves to him or her, sexual enjoyment is real for Lacan: something traumatic in its breath-taking intensity, something impossible in the sense that we cannot ever make sense of it. This is why a sexual relation, in order to function, has to be screened through some fantasy. Recall the love encounter between Sarah Miles and her illicit lover, the English officer, in David Lean’s Ryan’s Daughter: the depiction of the sexual act in the midst of the forest, with waterfall sounds supposed to render their subdued passion, cannot but strike us today as a ridiculous bric-a-brac of cliches. However, the role of the pathetic sound accompaniment is profoundly ambiguous: by way of emphasizing the ecstasy of the sexual act, these sounds in a way derealize the act and deliver us of the oppressive weight of its massive presence. A small mental experiment is sufficient to make this point clear: let us imagine that, in the middle of such a pathetic rendering of the sexual act, the music would all of a sudden be cut out, and all that remained would be quick, snappy gestures, their painful silence interrupted by occasional rattle and groan, compelling us to confront the inert presence of the sexual act. In short, the paradox of the scene from Ryan’s Daughter is that the waterfall sound itself functions as the fantasmatic screen obfuscating the Real of the sexual act.

The singing of the International in Reds plays exactly the same role as the waterfall sound in Ryan’s Daughter: the role of the fantasmatic screen which enables us to sustain the Real of the sexual act. Reds integrates the October revolution, the most traumatic historical event for Hollywood, into the Hollywood universe, by staging it as the metaphorical background for the sexual act between the movie’s main characters, John Reed (played by Beatty himself) and his lover (Diane Keaton). In the film, the October revolution takes place immediately after a crisis in their relationship. By delivering a fierce revolutionary oration to the aroused crowd, Beatty mesmerizes Keaton; the two exchange desirous glances, and the cries of the crowd serve as a metaphor for the renewed outburst of passion. The crucial mythical scenes of the revolution (street demonstrations, the storming of the Winter Palace) alternate with the depiction of the couple’s lovemaking, against the background of the crowd singing the International. The mass scenes function as vulgar metaphors of the sexual act: when the black mass approaches and encircles the phallic tramway, is this not a metaphor for Keaton who, in the sexual act, plays the active role, on top of Beatty? Here we have the exact opposite of the Soviet socialist realism where lovers experience their love as a contribution to the struggle for socialism, making a vow to sacrifice all their private pleasures for the success of the revolution and to drown themselves in the masses: in Reds, on the contrary, revolution itself appears as a metaphor for the successful sexual encounter.

The common wisdom, usually attributed to psychoanalysis, about sexuality as the universal hidden reference of every activity – whatever we are doing, we are “thinking about that” – is here inverted: it is real sex itself which, in order to be palatable, has to be sustained by the asexual screen of the October revolution. Instead of the proverbial “Close your eyes and think of England!”, we have here: “Close your eyes and think of the October Revolution!” The logic is the same as that of a native American tribe whose members have discovered that all dreams have some hidden sexual meaning – all, except the overtly sexual ones: here, precisely, one has to look for another meaning. (In his recently discovered secret diaries, Wittgenstein reports that, while masturbating at the front during World War I, he was thinking about mathematical problems.) And it is also the same in reality, with so-called real sex: it also needs some fantasmatic screen. Any contact with a real, flesh-and-blood other, any sexual pleasure that we find in touching another human being, is not something evident, but something inherently traumatic, and can be sustained only insofar as this other enters the subject’s fantasy frame.

What, then, is fantasy at its most elementary? The ontological paradox, scandal even, of fantasy resides in the fact that it subverts the standard opposition of “subjective” and “objective”: of course, fantasy is by definition not objective (referring to something that exists independently of the subject’s perceptions); however, it is also not subjective (something that belongs to the subject’s consciously experienced intuitions, the product of his or her imagination). Fantasy rather belongs to the “bizarre category of the objectively subjective – the way things actually, objectively seem to you even if they don’t seem that way to you.” [5] When, for example, we claim that someone who is consciously well disposed towards Jews, nonetheless harbors profound anti-Semitic prejudices he is not consciously aware of, do we not claim that (insofar as these prejudices do not render the way Jews really are, but the way they appear to him) he is not aware how Jews really seem to him?

In March 2003, Donald Rumsfeld engaged in a little bit of amateur philosophizing about the relationship between the known and the unknown: “There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.” What he forgot to add was the crucial fourth term: the “unknown knowns,” things we don’t know that we know – which is precisely the Freudian unconscious, the “knowledge which doesn’t know itself,” as Lacan used to say, the core of which is fantasy. If Rumsfeld thinks that the main dangers in the confrontation with Iraq are the “unknown unknowns,” the threats from Saddam about which we do not even suspect what they may be, what we should reply is that the main dangers are, on the contrary, the “unknown knowns,” the disavowed beliefs and suppositions we are not even aware of adhering to ourselves, but which nonetheless determine our acts and feelings.

This is also one of the ways of specifying the meaning of Lacan’s claim that the subject is always “decentered.” His point is not that my subjective experience is regulated by objective unconscious mechanisms that are decentered with regard to my self-experience and, as such, beyond my control (a point asserted by every materialist), but, rather, something much more unsettling: I am deprived of even my most intimate subjective experience, the way things “really seem to me,” that of the fundamental fantasy that constitutes and guarantees the core of my being, since I can never consciously experience it and assume it.

According to the standard view, the dimension that is constitutive of subjectivity is that of phenomenal (self)experience: I am a subject the moment I can say to myself, “No matter what unknown mechanism governs my acts, perceptions, and thoughts, nobody can take from me what I see and feel now.” Say, when I am passionately in love, and a biochemist informs me that all my intense sentiments are just the result of biochemical processes in my body, I can answer him by clinging to the appearance: ̶#8220;All that you’re saying may be true, but, nonetheless, nothing can take from me the intensity of the passion that I am experiencing now…” Lacan’s point, however, is that the psychoanalyst is the one who, precisely, can take this from the subject: the analyst’s ultimate aim is to deprive the subject of the very fundamental fantasy that regulates the universe of his (self)experience. The Freudian subject of the unconscious emerges only when a key aspect of the subject’s (self)experience (his fundamental fantasy) becomes inaccessible to him, primordially repressed. At its most radical, the unconscious is the inaccessible phenomenon, not the objective mechanisms that regulates my phenomenal experience. So, in contrast to the commonplace that we are dealing with a subject the moment an entity displays signs of inner life (of a fantasmatic experience that cannot be reduced to external behavior), one should claim that what characterizes human subjectivity proper is, rather, the gap that separates the two, namely, the fact that fantasy, at its most elementary, becomes inaccessible to the subject. It is this inaccessibility that makes the subject “empty,” as Lacan put it.

We thus obtain a relationship that totally subverts the standard notion of the subject who directly experiences himself via his inner states: a strange relationship between the empty, non-phenomenal subject and the phenomena that remain inaccessible to the subject. In other words, psychoanalysis allows us to formulate a paradoxical phenomenology without a subject – phenomena arise which are not phenomena of a subject, appearing to a subject. This does not mean that the subject is not involved here – it is, but, precisely, in the mode of exclusion, as divided, as the agency which is not able to assume the very core of his or her inner experience.

It is precisely this paradoxical status of fantasy which brings us to the ultimate point of the irreconcilable difference between psychoanalysis and feminism, that of rape (and the masochistic fantasies sustaining it). For standard feminism, at least, it is an a priori axiom that rape is a violence imposed from without: even if a woman fantasizes about being raped or brutally mistreated, this is either a male fantasy about women or a woman does it insofar as she “internalized” the patriarchal libidinal economy and endorsed her victimization – the underlying idea being that the moment we recognize this fact of daydreaming about rape, we open the door to the male-chauvinist platitudes about how, in being raped, women only get what they secretly wanted, and about how their shock and fear only express the fact that they were not honest enough to acknowledge this. So the moment one mentions that a woman may fantasize about being raped, one hears cries: ‘This is like saying that Jews fantasize about being gassed in the camps or African-Americans fantasize about being lynched!’ From this perspective, the split hysterical position of the woman (complaining about being sexually misused and exploited while simultaneously desiring it and provoking man to seduce her) is secondary, while, for Freud, this split is primary, constitutive of subjectivity.

The practical conclusion from this is that, while (some) women effectively may daydream about being raped, this fact not only in no way legitimizes the actual rape – it makes it even more violent. Let us take two women, the first, liberated and assertive, active; the other, secretly daydreaming about being brutally handled by her partner, even raped. The crucial point is that, if both of them are raped, the rape will be much more traumatic for the second one, on account of the very fact that it will realize in “external” social reality the “stuff of her dreams”. There is a gap which forever separates the fantasmatic kernel of the subject’s being from the more superficial modes of his or her symbolic or imaginary identifications. It is never possible for me to fully assume (in the sense of symbolic integration) the fantasmatic kernel of my being: when I approach it too much, when I come too close to it, what occurs is what Lacan calls aphanisis (the self-obliteration) of the subject: the subject loses his/her symbolic consistency, it disintegrates. And, perhaps, the forced actualization in social reality itself of the fantasmatic kernel of my being is the worst, most humiliating kind of violence, a violence which undermines the very basis of my identity (of my self-image). [6] Consequently, the problem with rape, in Freud’s view, is that it has such a traumatic impact not simply because it is a case of brutal external violence, but because it also touches on something disavowed in the victim herself. So, when Freud writes, ‘If what /subjects/ long for most intensely in their phantasies is presented to them in reality, they none the less flee from it,’[7] his point is not merely that this occurs because of censorship, but, rather, because the core of our fantasy is unbearable to us.

A couple of years ago, a charming publicity spot for a beer was shown on the British TV. Its first part staged the well-known fairy-tale anecdote: a girl walks along a stream, sees a frog, takes it gently into her lap, kisses it, and, of course, the ugly frog miraculously turns into a beautiful young man. However, the story wasn’t over yet: the young man casts a covetous glance at the girl, draws her towards himself, kisses her – and she turns into a bottle of beer which the man holds triumphantly in his hand. For the woman, the point is that her love and affection (signalled by the kiss) turn a frog into a beautiful man, a full phallic presence; for the man, it is to reduce the woman to a partial object, the cause of his desire (the objet petit a). On account of this asymmetry, there is no sexual relationship: we have either a woman with a frog or a man with a bottle of beer. What we can never obtain is the natural couple of the beautiful woman and man: the fantasmatic support of this ideal couple would have been the figure of a frog embracing a bottle of beer – an inconsistent figure which, instead of guaranteeing the harmony of the sexual relationship, renders palpable its ridiculous discord. [8] This opens up the possibility of undermining the hold a fantasy exerts over us through the very over-identification with it: by way of embracing simultaneously, within the same space, the multitude of inconsistent fantasmatic elements. That is to say, each of the two subjects is involved in his or her own subjective fantasizing – the girl fantasizes about the frog who is really a young man, the man about the girl who is really a bottle of beer. What modern art and writing oppose to this is not objective reality but the “objectively subjective” underlying fantasy which the two subjects are never able to assume, something similar to a Magrittesque painting of a frog embracing a bottle of beer, with a title “A man and a woman” or “The ideal couple”. (The association with the famous surrealist “dead donkey on a piano” is here fully justified, since surrealists also practicized such over-identification with inconsistent fantasies.) And is this not the ethical duty of today’s artist – to confront us with the frog embracing the bottle of beer when we are daydreaming of embracing our beloved? In other words, to stage fantasies which are radically desubjectivized, which cannot ever be assumed by the subject?

This brings us to a further crucial complication: if what we experience as ‘reality’ is structured by fantasy, and if fantasy serves as the screen that protects us from being directly overwhelmed by the raw Real, then reality itself can function as an escape from encountering the Real. In the opposition between dream and reality, fantasy is at the side of reality, and it is in dreams that we encounter the traumatic Real – it is not that dreams are for those who cannot endure reality, reality itself is for those who cannot endure (the Real that anounces itself in) their dreams. This is the lesson Lacan draws from the famous dream, reported by Freud in his Interpretation of Dreams, dreamt by the father who falls asleep while keeping the guard of his son’s coffin; in this dream, his dead son appears to him, pronouncing the terrible appeal ‘Father, can’t you see that I am burning?’ When the father awakens, he discovers that the cloth on the son’s coffin caught fire, since one of the burning candles fell down. So why did the father awaken? Was it because the smell of the smoke got too strong, so that it was no longer possible to prolong the sleep by way of including it into the improvised dream? Lacan proposes a much more interesting reading:

__If the function of the dream is to prolong sleep, if the dream, after all, may come so near to the reality that causes it, can we not say that it might correspond to this reality without emerging from sleep? After all, there is such a thing as somnambulistic activity. The question that arises, and which indeed all Freud’s previous indications allow us here to produce, is – What is it that wakes the sleeper? Is it not, in the dream, another reality? The reality that Freud describes as Dass das Kind an seinem Bette steht, that the child is near his bed, ihn am Arme fasst, takes him by the arm and whispers to him reproachfully, und ihm vorwurfsvoll zuraunt: Vater, siehst du denn nicht, Father, can’t you see, dass ich verbrenne, that I am burning?

Is there not more reality in this message than in the noise by which the father also identifies the strange reality of what is happening in the room next door? Is not the missed reality that caused the death of the child expressed in these words? [9]

So it was not the intrusion of the signal from external reality that awakened the unfortunate father, but the unbearably traumatic character of what he encountered in the dream – insofar as âdreaming’ means fantasizing in order to avoid confrointing the Real, the father literally awakened so that he could go on dreaming. The scenario was the following one: when his sleep was disturbed by the smoke, the father quickly constructed a dream which incorporated the disturbing element (smoke-fire) in order to prolong his sleep; however, what he confronted in the dream was a trauma (of his responsibility for the son’s death) much stronger than reality, so he awakened into reality in order to avoid the Real.

In contemporary art, we encounter often brutal attempts to âreturn to the real’, to remind the spectator (or reader) that he is perceiving a fiction, to awaken him from the sweet dream. This gesture has two main forms which, although opposed, amount to the same. In literature or cinema, there are (especially in postmodern texts) self-reflexive reminders that what we are watching is a mere fiction, like the actors on screen addressing directly us as spectators, thus ruining the illusion of the autonomous space of the narrative fiction, or the writer directly intervening into the narrative through ironic comments; in theatre, there are occasional brutal events which awaken us to the reality of the stage (like slaughtering a chicken on stage). Instead of conferring on these gestures a kind of Brechtian dignity, perceiving them as versions of extraneation, one should rather denounce them for what they are: the exact opposite of what they claim to be – escapes from the Real, desperate attempts to avoid the real of the illusion itself, the Real that emerges in the guise of an illusory spectacle.

What we confront here is the fundamental ambiguity of the notion of fantasy: while fantasy is the screen which protects us from the encounter with the Real, fantasy itself, at its most fundamental – what Freud called the “fundamental fantasy,” which provides the most elementary coordinates of the subject’s capacity to desire – cannot ever be subjectivized, and has to remain repressed in order to be operative. Recall Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, the apparently vulgar conclusion of the film, when, after Tom Cruise confesses his nightly adventure to Nicole Kidman and they are both confronted with the excess of their fantasizing, Kidman – upon ascertaining that now they are fully awakened, back into the day, and that, if not forever, at least for a long time, they will stay there, keeping the fantasy at bay – tells him that they must do something as soon as possible. “What?” he asks, and her answer is: “Fuck.” End of the film, final credits. The nature of the passage a l’acte (“passage to the act”) as the false exit, as the way to avoid confronting the horror of the fantasmatic netherworld, was never so abruptly stated in a film: far from providing them with a real life bodily satisfaction that would render superfluous empty fantasizing, the passage to the act is presented as a stopgap, as a desperate preventive measure aimed at keeping at bay the spectral netherworld of fantasies. It is as if her message is: let’s fuck as soon as possible in order to stifle the thriving fantasies, before they overwhelm us again. Lacan’s quip about awakening into reality as an escape from the real encountered in the dream holds more than anywhere apropos of the sexual act itself: we do not dream about fucking when we are not able to do it; we rather fuck in order to escape and stifle the excessive nature of the dream that would otherwise overwhelm us. For Lacan, the ultimate ethical task is that of the true awakening: not only from sleep, but from the spell of fantasy which controls us even more when we are awake.

Notes:

[1] Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III: The Psychoses, London: Routledge 1981, p. 48.

[2] Lacan, J., Écrits: A Selection, New York: W.W. Norton, 1981.

[3] Guillermo Arriaga, 21 Grams, London: Faber and Faber 2003, p. 107.

[4] The link between Lacan and J.L. Austin, the author of the notion of performative, was Emile Benveniste.

[5] Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained, New York: Little, Brown and Company 1991, p. 132.

[6] This is also the reason why men who actually perform rapes do not fantasize about raping women – on the contrary, they fantasize about being gentle, about finding a loving partner; rape is rather a violent passage a l’acte emerging from their incapacity to find such a partner in real life.

[7] Sigmund Freud, Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, New York: Macmillan 1963, p. 101.

[8] Of course, the obvious feminist point would be that what women witness in their everyday love experience is rather the opposite passage: one kisses a beautiful young man and, after one gets too close to him, i.e. when it is already too late, one notices that he is effectively a frog.

[9] Lacan, J., The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1979, p. 57-58.