[excerpt]
translated by Barbara P. Fulks
Jacques Lacan's Anxiety (II)
J - A
MILLER
The Names-of-the-Father
J - A
MILLER
The Formulas of
L'Étourdit
ALAIN BADIOU
On Giorgio Agamben's
Profanations
MEHDI BELHAJ
KACEM
The Fundamental Perversion
SLAVOJ ZIZEK
[...]
The figure of the father is not a concept born in psychoanalysis, but rather a figure inherited by psychoanalysis. If the plural is an allusion to the end of this cursed tradition, it is because it is introduced in a logic of the Name-of-the-Father in which the latter appears as a function that can be sustained by diverse statements, which, from then on, play the role of said name.
Thus the Name-of-the-Father, as one of these elements, should not be the ultimate instance nor the ultimate response. It remains to be given a status and distinguished as element and as function. But, what function? If we refer to what Lacan denominated the paternal metaphor, it is the function of metaphorizing the desire of the mother, of barring it. In this sense, the Name-of-the-Father is, par excellence, an operator of metaphorization, to such an extent that, as element, it already is in itself the metaphor of the father, of the presence of the father. Let us write it this way:
The Name-of-the-Father can not only operate in the absence of the father (this is why Lacan criticizes the theories that relegate psychosis to the lack of the father), but it can also make him absent. If it is a matter of the father spoken through the mother, as a theme of the discourse, it is well to stress that it is an empty reference there, that he is made absent by the verb. And for that reason, without myth, one can affirm that it is a matter of the dead father as the subject of the signifier, which is written 
.
[...]
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