Exit: light, Enter: night. Grain of sand…
E.T.A Hoffmann’s stories get to the heart of such an experience, “the subject goes from one inveiglement to the next, faced with this form of image that strictly speaking materializes. The doll that the hero of the tale spies through the window of the sorcerer, who is conjuring up some magical operation or other, is strictly speaking this image, i’(a) (the virtual of a real image), being finished off with what is absolutely singled out in the very form of the tale, to wit, the eye. The eye in question can only be that of the main character in the dream, the someone wanting to rob him of this eye providing the thread that explains the whole tale.” Jacques Lacan, Seminar X, Ch. lV.
The ploughshare enters into the furrow of the discovery of subjective structure. If The Devil’s Elixir contains all the occasions when the reaction of the unheimliche may occur, desire as desire of the Other is here desire in the Other. Here my desire enters the lair where it has been awaited for all eternity in the shape of the object. I am in so far as it exiles me from my subjectivity, by deciding on its own all the signifiers to which this subjectivity is attached.
In The Devil’s Elixir getting lost makes up part of the function of the labyrinth, which has to be brought to life. In following each of these twists and turns, however, it’s clear that the subject only gets to his desire by substituting itself for one of his doubles.
There’s but the one subject, not two.
The field of fiction imparts to our experience of the unheimliche. Fiction demonstrates it far better and even produces it as an effect in a more stable way. It’s a kind of ideal point, but how precious it is for us since this effect allows us to see the function of the fantasm.
This effect of fiction, spelled out over and over in The Devil’s Elixir, is that which, in the flux of existence, remains in the fantasy state. “What is the fantasy if not something that we rather suspected, ein Wunsch, a wish, and even, like all wishes, a somewhat naive one? To put it light-heartedly, I’d say that the formula of the fantasma, $ desire of a, can be translated into the following perspective—that the Other faints, swoons, faced with this object that I am, a deduction I reach on account of being able to behold myself.
“The two phases whose relations of $ to a I’ve written up here, situating this last term differently in relation to the reflexive function of the A as a mirror, correspond exactly to the distribution of the terms of the fantasma for the pervert and the neurotic.” Jacques Lacan, Seminar X, Ch. lV.
