Lacan Reframed: A Guide for the Arts Student (Contemporary Thinkers Reframed) 1845115481, 9781845115487

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Lacan � a 3

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Steven Z. Levine

Published in

2008 by I.B.Tauris

& Co. Ltd

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In the United States and Canada distrib uted by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue , New York N Y 10010

C opyright

© Steven Z. Levine, 2008

The right of Steven

Z. Levine to be identified as the author of this

work has b een ass erted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Des igns and Patents Act 1988.

All rights res erved. Excep t for brief quotations in a revi ew, this book, or any part thereof, may not be rep roduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval s y s tem, or transmitted, in any form or by any means , electronic, mech anical, p hotocopying, recording or otherwise, without the p rior written p e rmis sion of the p u b lisber. ISBN: 9781 84511 5487 A full CIP record for this book is avail able from the British Library A full CIP record for this book i s avail able from the Library of Congre s s Libray of Congress catalog card : available

ypeset in Egyptienne F by Dexter Haven Associates Ltd, London Page design by Chris Bromley printed and bound in the

K by T.J. Intenational, Padstow. Conwall.

Contents

Acknowledgements

vii

List of illustrations

ix

Foreword: Why Lacon?

xi

Chapter 1.

The Do Vinci Code according to Freud

Chapter 2.

The Do Vinci Code according to Lacan

Chapter 3.

The Thing from another world

Chapter 4.

The lost object

Chapter 5.

What is a picture?

Chapter 6.

Representative of representation

Chapter 7.

Am I a woman or a man?

Afteword: Enjoy!

Suggested reading Index

141

57

131

Selected bibliography

31

135 137

67

111

91

15

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Susan Lawson for inviting me to write this book

and for improving it with her keen e ditorial eye . I also want to thank my students and colleagues in the dep artment of History of Art and the C enter for Visual C ulture at B ryn Mawr College for tolerating my translation of their scholarship and convers ation into the Lacanian terms of the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real. Notable among them are David C ast, C hristiane Hertel , Homay King, K. Malcolm Richards, Lis a Saltzman and Isabelle Wallace, a s well as recent undergraduate and graduate seminar students Ol self portraiture and p sychoanalysis . The art histoians Benjamin Bins tock, Bra dford C ollin s , Keith Moxey and Jack Spector gave me the opportunity to present or publish some of my thoughts on art and Lacan, as did the p sychoanalysts Heather C raige and D avid S charff, and members of the Phil adelphia Psychoanalytic Center. Patricia Gherovici and Jean Michel Rabate introduce d me to Philadelphia's vibrant Lacanian community. And in the background of many of my sentences lies the phenomenology of Michael Fried. My wife Susan Levine, practitioner of psychoanalysis , and my daughter Madeleine Levine , researcher in social psycholoy, were indispensable in the completion of this project. My parents Natalie and Reevan Levine opened the space of possibility, and it is in their name and with love that I dedicate this book.

List of illustrations

Figure 1. Marcel Duchamp, L. H. o. o. Q. , 1919 (1930 replica), p rivate collection. Photo credit: C ameraphoto Arte, Veni ce/Art Resource, NY. © 2007 Artists Rights So ciety, NY/ADAGP, Parisi Succes sion Marcel Duchamp .

2

Figure 2. Leonardo da Vinci, The Madonna and Child with Saint

A nne, 1508 10, Louvre Museum, Pari s . Photo credit: Scala/Art Resource, NY. 6 Figure 3. Leonardo da Vinci, The Virgin and Child ith Saint Anne and Saint John the Baptist, 1499 1500, National Galley, London. Photo credit: Art Resource, NY.

25

F igure 4. Hans Holbein the Yo unger, The A mbassadors, 1533, N ational Gallery, London. Photo credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

50

Figure 5. Jacopo Zucchi, Psyche Surprising Cupid, 1589, Borghese Gallery, Rome. Photo credit: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

59

Figure 6. Gus tave C ourbet, The Origin of the World, 1866, Orsay Museum, Paris. Photo credit: Reunion des Musees Nationaux/Art Resource, NY.

60

Figure 7. S alvador D ali, The Persistence of Memory, 1931, Museum of Moden At, New York. Digital Image © The Museum of

Moden Art/Licensed by Scala/Art Resource, NY. © 2007 S alvador Da li, Gal a Salvador Dali Fo undation/Artists Rights S o ci ety, NY.

77

Figure 8. Diego Velazquez, Las Meninas, 1656, Prado Museum, Madrid. Photo credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

93

Figure 9. Rene Magritte, La Condition humaine, 1 93 3 , Gift of the C ollectors C ommittee, Image © 2007 B o ard of rustees , National Galley of Art, Washington. © 2007 C. Herskovici, Brussels/Artists Rights Society, NY.

1 06

Fi gure 10. Gian Lorenzo Bernini , The Ecs tacy of Saint Teresa, 1 647 52, C o naro Chapel, S anta Maria della Vittoria, Rome. Photo credit: Nimatall ah/ Art Res ource, NY.

1 16

Foreword: Why Lacan?

Why Lacan, specifi cally, for re aders such as ourselves, who are students and teachers, producers and consumers in today's complex world of vis u al culture? The French have a word for it: un visuel, a visual p erson, s omeone who s e way of b eing in the world i s primarily oriented b y vision, images , art. Jacques Lacan ( 1 901 8 1 ) was such a one, and also not such a one; a p a s sionate man o f the visual. to be sure, but still more of the inisible. Friend of modenist artists such as S alvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp, Andre Masson, his brother in l aw, and Pablo P i c a s s o , his sometime medical p atient, Lacan was an occasional collaborator with artists , a long time collector of art, and an episodic commentator on architecture, s culpture , p ainting and film, from the pal aeolithic caves to the medieval cathedrals and from renaissance to contemporary art. His voluminous contributions to the clinical psychoanalytic literature extended across h alf a century from the early 1 930s to 1 98 1 , when he died, and along his tortuous but strangely consis tent itinerary in p sychoanalytic theory and practice he regularly returned to explanatory analogies borrowed from the visual arts . In this he was not unlike the inventor of p s ychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud ( 1 856 1 9 3 9 ) , who famously wrote about the art of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo Buonarroti in the irst two decades of the twentieth century and to whos e founding psychoanalytic texts Lacan never ceased to return. Others could be Lacanian if they wished, but he always afimed his allegiance to Freud.

Ecrits, meaning 'Writings', is a lengthy volume collecting many of Lacan's formally presented lectures and essays over the course of thirty years . Published in French to acclaim and notoriety in

1 966, when the sixty five year old Lacan was near the height of his fame, Ecrits was selectively translated into English by Alan Sheri dan in 197 7 and in a more reliable and complete e dition in 2005 by Bruce Fink. Reference s to works of art adorn s everal of the essay s in Ecrits, but none is developed at length and these densely written essays are not the most accessible introduction to the thought o f Lacan. Far more numerous were the references to a t i n L a can 's weekly lectures conducted in Paris in front of packed

audienc e s of psychologi s t s , philosophers , poets , painters and other curi ous persons from 1 953 to 1 980. From 1953 to 1 963 Lacan s poke at the psychi atric h ospital of S a inte Anne to an audience composed primarily of p s ycho analysts and psychoanalysts in training from the Ps ychoanalytic Society of Pari s , which he had

j o ined in 1 934, and from the breakaway society that he had helped to found in 1 95 3 , the French Society of Psychoanalysis. Dismissed 0 >

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as a training analyst of the l atter group for the infraction of varying the standard ho ur l ong s e s s ion of p sycho analyti c treatment, Lacan founded his own training institution known as

6

the French S ch o ol of P s y choanalysis and, l ater, the Freudian

'(

Louis Althu s ser, from 1 964 to 1 968 Lacan held his seminar at a

9

S chool of Pari s , in 1 9 64. Sponsored by the Marxist philosopher p restigious Parisian centre of higher leaning, the Ecole Nomale Sup erieure, but he was m a de unwelcome there after he voiced hi s support for the s triking stu dents and workers during the revolutionary events of M ay 1 96 8 . Thereafter invited to lecture at the Faculty of Law of the University of Pari s by the cultural anthropol ogist C l aude Levi Straus s , L a c an addre s s e d his ever growing and increasingly mystified audience until the year before his death. Among L a c an's frequent auditors were m a ny of the most famous French intellectua l s fro m the 1 9505 through the 1 970s . Among them were the exi s tential p h enomenologist o f visual p erception Mauric e Merl e au Ponty, the s emiological critic of literature and culture Roland Barthes, the historian of knowledge

and power Michel Foucault, the deconstructionist philosopher of l anguage Jacques Derrid a , the feminist critic s and advo c ates Luce Irigaray, Helene C ixous and Julia Kristeva , and many more. Jacques Alain Miller, a philosophy student of Althus s er and later the son in law of Lacan, was entrusted in 1 973 with the task of transcrib ing and editing the annual volumes of the long running public seminar, Le Seminaire de Jacques Lacan, a monumental task that is still unfinished today. To date fourteen volumes out of twenty s ix have appe ared in French and s even have been translated into English, with additional transcriptions, recordings and translations of unpublished sessions available in unauthorised editions and via the Intenet. I spent the year 1 970 1 as a graduate student in Paris , and although I b egan to be exposed to Lacanian

theory that year in the cinema magazines I compulsively c onsumed instead of dutifully working on my dis sertation on the art of the impres s ionist p ainter C l aude Monet, I regret to s ay that I never attended the public seminar of Lacan, then in its eighteenth year. This little book is by way of making up, impossibly, for that failed encounter with Lacan during the brief French flower of my youth. Why should students of the visual arts bother to read the notoriously difficult writings of Lacan? The reason that I offer here is that the que stion of how to l ive our l ives is a fundamental question for us, and it is my belief that Lacan help s us to address this question in productive ways. Other species of living creatures on this planet seem to know by natural instinct how to carry on with their lives in their given ecological niches on the land, in the waters and in the skies. Ants do it, bees do it, cats do it, dogs do it, even elephants do it, but unlike these other earthlings with which we share the b iosphere of this planet we humans do not seem to know how to do it, for we no longer live in nature by ins t inct alone. We vari o u s ly envis ion our l ives in the changing style s of architecture, p a inting, film and fashion

and there's the rub .

Acro s s the s p an of human h istory and across the exp anse of the globe, we have always found ourselves ensconced not simply in

a given natural niche but, rather, in a complex cultural situation for which we have been destined by our p arents from before the moment of our birth. Bon humans all as the result of the chance intertwining of X and Y chromosomes in the universal proces s o f s exual repro duction, w e s o on o b s cure that species wide universality as we take up the tasks and opportunities of our lives withi n a s pecifi c moment in time and at a specific geographical place. We soon discover that we are not s imply part of a single family of humanity but rather of particular groupings of different l anguage s , ethnicities, rac e s , religions , s o c i al clas s e s , p olitical affiliations, family traditions and, for the readers of this book, artistic schoo l s . How we b e come new members of thes e widely vaying cultural groupings has always posed profound questions to each and every one of us. The multifarious world of art p o s e s s u c h questions to us . It is the claim of thi s book that the sp oken and written words of Lacan offer us useful approaches to the fundamental questions of life and art. For Lacan, a s I read him, the key to our questions i s t o recognis e to whom they are addressed and from whom answers are expected. Lacan's l e s s on is that our questions are always addres sed to the other who is supposed by us to know the answers , such as p arents, teachers , p hysicians, priests , friends , lovers , even enemies . In the inal analysis, our questions are addressed beyon d thes e p articular others to the generalised Other of the cultural order into which we are b orn, in which we are educated, which we willingly or unwillingly join, and in the various idioms of which we must try to fomulate answers to our nagging questions : 'hat do you want o f m e ? ' 'hat kind of a person d o you epect m e to be?' For Lacan, these existential questions were clarified by Freud in his pioneering efforts to alleviate the psychological suffering of p atients for whose enigmatic corporeal symptoms contemporary medical science could offer neither physiological explanation nor p romis e of cure. Freud learned from the stories of his p atients

that their suffering was real. and it is my belief that their anxious questions remain p ertinent to us all to day. 'Am I a woman or a man?' is the fundamental question p o s e d by the s o c alled hysterical subject, who stubbornly resists taking up one of the standard roles of masculine and feminine convention. 'Am I alive or am I dead?' is the question enunciated by the s o c alled obsessional subject, who rigidly insists on enacting the standard role precis ely as p rescrib ed by the social code. For each the vital question involves a fundamental anxiety regarding the enigmatic de sire enshrined in the demands of the repres entatives of authority, such as parents, teachers, bosses, supervisors, oficers , editors , critics, ministers , rabbis, imams , shamans, gurus , priests . E ach individual subject wonders what the Other, as represented by his or her painting p rofessor, perhap s , wants of him or her. The hysterical subject responds to thi s basic worry by resisting what she or he imagines the Other wants her or him to b e . The resistance of the hysteric is akin to that of the avant garde artist who refu s e s to abide by the s tandard artistic rules of the day. The obses sional subject academic artist

or, in our world of visual culture, the

responds to the imagined desire of the Other by

insisting that the normal order must be maintained at all costs. When enc ountering the hysterical or ob s e s s ional questioner in the course of clinical treatment today, the psychoanalyst seeks eventually to convey that there is neither a need to resist nor need to insist upon the reign of the law, for the simple reason that the Other who is s upposed to know the answers to life's fundamental questions does not in fact exist as an all knowing will that must always p revail over the subject's own d e s ire . Through the lengthy and p ainful proc e s s of calling up and eventually cancelling out this constraining fantasy of the Other's desire, the s ubject of p sychoanalysis in the end discovers that he or she is actually free to try to be what he or she uniquely desires to b e . There is in our human corporeality a real limit to this freedom of desire that we must acknowledge, but it is not the

conventional limit of the law. The greatest artists have always known thi s . I n positioning u s n o t i n the iron grip of natural instinct but in the malleable grasp of culture, Lacan distinguished three registers of h um a n exp e rience that I will try to animate and keep in play

throughout this brief book. Right now, as your eyes visually scan and m en tal ly decode these black marks that we call letters on this otherwis e blank page, we are variously immers e d in the three dimensions of experience that Lacan i denti ied a s the Real. the Symbolic and the Imaginary. The foms of these letters are graphic images - or s i gnifiers , in the terminology taken by Lacan from the Swis s lingui s t Ferdinand de S aussure

that mobilise the

register of vis ual recognition that Lacan s aw as the Imaginary realm. The meanings of thes e words and s entences are also images , mental images - or signiieds

that p articipate in the differential

interplay of verbal understanding that Lacan named the Symbolic order. Finally, the unmarked blankness against which the visual shapes of letters and verbal meanings of words s tand out in their fragile consistency constitutes a necess ary ground, which in its elf can neither be fully visualised nor verb alised. Thi s blanknes s of the page, like that of the b o dy and world prior to the mappings and markings of l anguage , is what Lacan enigmatically indexed as the Real. Lacan's uncanny paradox is that the Real comes into b eing for u s only retro s p e ctively, only after its p rimordial unmarked fullne s s has b e en irretrievably lost among the icons and inscriptions of Imaginary and Symbolic sign s . Nevertheles s , s ometimes, as o n 9/1 1 i n New York or 717 in London, the inhuman meaninglessnes s of the Real suddenly and traumatically intrudes to de stabili s e the Imaginary and Symb olic c o ordinate s of our familiar worlds . When the three initial letters of Real, Symbolic and Imaginary are pronounced in French the resulting acronym, R. S. 1., sounds like the word h3Sie. The intertwining and unravelling of material form a n d immateri al me aning in this sp oken p un is a typical

Lacanian example of the heresy of a s s erting that the s e three orders completely cover the whole truth of human experience. Indeed, in such seriously playful nonsense lies the truth according to Lacan, though not the whole truth, as he frequently insisted. On account of our transformation by the introduction of the signifiers of language from a naturally proliferating animal species into culturally regulated and historically diferentiated human grou pings we h ave l o st immediate acce s s to any instinctual fullnes s of being in the world. As sighted beings we are left to face up to that primordial loss of the world beneath the gaze of the compensato ry visual images with which our cultures confront us and console us. As s peaking beings we are asked to make some provisional sense of ours elves in the verbal meanings of the symb o l s with which our langu ages addre s s us and attire u s . And as corporeal beings w e are left t o endure the traumatic blankness that silently and invisibly enframes , and eventually expl o de s , the precarious cultural configurations in which we struggle to live. So, why Lacan? In order to try to be free.

Chapter 1

The 00 Vinci Code according to Freud

Let us begin our Lacanian inquiry in art with the most familiar yet also enigmatic work of art in the world, Leonardo's Mona Lisa ( 1 503 7) , a p erennial riddle recently explored in the b e s t selling novel and blockbuster film The Da Vinci Code. Why is the woman smiling at us? Although I have been an art historian for more than thirty years I really hae no idea, but let us see whether Lacan knew s omething of the secret of her smile. In one of his e s s ays he comp ared the enigm a of the Mona Lisa with that of the young patient known as Dora, who abruptly broke off her treatment with Freud when he plied her with too many answers , failing to ask the questions that might have helped her toward her own cure. Identifying himself more wi th Dora than with Freud, L ac an insisted that the analys t knows nothing, that the analyst, like the hysteric, only asks ques tions . That is what the enigmatic face of art makes us do . It hystericises u s , and in our anxiety we aim to resolve its enigma by historicising it. The Mona Lisa smile

What was p ainted in that famous smile, or so Freud imagined in his interpretation of the work, was the lost loving smile of the artist's m o ther that had formerly l o oked up o n him as a child. Within a decade of Freu d's discussion of the M ona Lisa the anti moderni s t artist D uchamp drew a moustache on the face of a postcard reproduction of the p ainting and ins cribed it with the letters L. . O. O. Q. ( 1 919; Figure 1 ) . Punning in French, just as his

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fri e n d L a c an woul d d o later, D u champ

Duchamp,

vulgarly tells us that she has a hot a s s , elle a

L.H.o.O,Q. (191 9),

chaud au cui, Hearing the title p ronounced in English, we are imperatively told, 'Look! ' Later, in 1965, Duchamp aixed an undefaced reproduction of the Mona Lisa to a mat, entitling it L, . 0, 0, Q, rasee, or the Mo na

Lisa shaved,

In 1 9 54 L a c an's surre ali s t collab o rator posed for a self portrait photograph as a twirlingly mustachioed hybrid Dali/Lisa. Four decades later a similar act of cro s s - gendered self projection was performed by the Japanese p o s tm o derni s t photographer Yasumasa Morimura, who presented himself as a naked, pregnant, Asian Mona Lisa in 1 998 . The Russian p ainter Kasimir Malevich in 1 9 14, the French p ainter Femand Leger in 1 93 0, the American painters Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns in the 1 960s, the television Muppet Mis s Piggy in the 1 980s , the White House inten Monicq Lewinsky in the 1 9 90s , and the film actress Jul i a Roberts in 2003 all variously re posed in their paintings , photographs and performances the enima of that smile. A contrarian catoon in the

New Yorker magazine wondered why she wasn't l aughing, and it is my gambit in this book that reading Lacan will help us clarify why these practitioners of elite and popular culture have continued to sustain an ageless obsession in seeking an answer to a question posed by a 5 00 year-old p ainting of a long deceased Florentine lady's face. Media accounts at the time of this writing suggest on the basis of her costume that she was either pregnant or had just given b irth. Is that the truth? Like many others before and since, Freud travelled to the Louvre Museum in Paris to confront the enigma of the woman's smile. Her smile has been s een by generations of commentators as deeply alluring yet profoundly troubling all at the s ame time . Later, Freud asked the infamous question 'What does Woman want? ' , and an answer of sots is already implied in the title of the little book he published a century ago , Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His

Childhood ( 1 9 1 0) . There he prop osed that, while painting the face of this Florentine lady, Leonardo was reminded of the smile of his mother at the time when he was a child, and it was this smile in all its ambiguous allure that he reanimated in a painting which he then found hims elf unable to complete. Thus the psychoanalyst sought to solve a riddle that art critic s had been unable to s olve themselves, that of Leonardo's ambivalent intention and inhibited

execution. Freud's a ccount of the recovery in a work of art of a wom

an 's lost smile

a lost object in the language of psychoanalysis

inaugurated the hundred year long altercation between art and psychoanalysis that is my subject here. The los t object was one of the key principles of psychoanalysis that Freud was elab orating in the fertile decade b etween the public ation of his most famous work , The In terp retation of

Dreams ( 1 900) , and his s p ecul ation concerning Leonardo's chil dho o d memory. Like a dream, Freud argued, Leonardo 's childhood memoy was not the objective transcription of an event in the p a s t but rather a subjective fantasy in which a wish of the arti st was visually staged. The wish of the artist was to see once again the lost s mile of his mother in his p ainting of the elegant lady's smile, but just as importantly it was to be seen by this s tand in for his mother as if in a b ittersweet moment of his mother's l o s t loving gaze. On one side was the smiling face, at once the present object of his gaze and the l o s t object of his wish. On the other side was the smiled at face of the wishing and desiring subject, the p ainter. Linking the mother, the s on and the lady was the work of art in the abiguity of its associations and ambivalence of its affections . This renewed linkage of the desiring subject and the lost object was the vital work performed by the work of art, a p sychological action that Freud called sublimation . In chemistry sublimation is the direct pass age of a s olid sub stance into a gaseous state. In psychoanalysis, s blimation is the transfomation of an intens ely private desire into a publicly valued piece of cultural expression. This is a key concept for both Freud and Lacan. As hyp othesised by Freud, Leonardo's private desire was to look and to be looked at with love , an infantile lust to see and to show voyeurism and exhibitionism

that the p sychoanalyst had

described in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality ( 1 905) . In Freud's story the young b oy's mother was imagined to be the original object of his desire, j ust as he was said to desire to be the

reciprocal object of her desire. In addition to his desire for her desire he also identified himself with her in his own m anner of desiring, as he leaned to substitute for her lost childhood embrace the subsequent objects of adult love. The mother's lost loving look was at once the specific obj ect of Leonardo's desire and the general cause of his own des irousness as he scanned the faces of potential p artners in love for the kind of loving look he had once seen in her eyes, or remembered he had seen, or dreamed he had seen, or wished he had seen. In life you do not always get what you want, but in the making and viewing of art you may get some satisfaction. nd for Mick Jagger and Leonardo that is sublimation. In identifying Leonardo's looking for l ove with his mother's loving look, Freud sought to explain the app arent historical fact of the artist's predilection to love - and to p aint

b eautiful male

youths like himself at the time that his mother had loved him. Leonardo was thus s aid to follow the pathway of the mythological hunter Narcissus, who saw in a forest pool a beautiful face looking at him and fell in love at first s i ght with that face. Initi ally the jubilant Narcissus did not realis e that the face in the pool was merely the relection of his own, but in a s econd moment of alienation he c am e to rec o gni s e that this was so. The result of this impo s s ible l ove for a relected image of himself was the splitting of his b eing between desiring subject and desired object, an unbridgeable split that was sp anned only by his dying metamorphosis into the b eautiful lower that still bears his name. What I wish to stre s s in Freud's p s ycho analyti c re ading of the myth is that the beautiful image of the self encountered by Narcissus/Leonardo was lo c ated outside the individual subject in the mirror image of the p o o l or in the mother's mirroring eye . By means of what Freud called the mode of narcissistic i dentificati o n , the corporeal look of the eye was placed in a strict but skewed correlation with the psychological birth of the Ego a s an alluring yet inac c e s s ible image p erceive d outside itself. Our own Ego is an alter Eg o . Or, as Lacan s aid in

2. Leonardo do Vinci, The (1508-10).

Madonna and Child with Saint Anne

quoting the French nineteenth century poet Arthur Rimb aud, 'I is another. ' Freud saw a redoubling of Leonardo's desire in another of the artist's p aintings at the Louvre , The Madonna and Child with

Saint Anne ( 1 508- 1 0; Figure 2 ) . Here the mother's lost smile was rep eated in the twin visages of the youthful Madonna , b ending to pull to her lap the b aby Jesus in whose eyes she looks , and the Madonna's own mother, an unc annily youthful Saint Anne, from whos e throne like l ap the Madonna twists down toward her child playing with a lamb upon the ground. Whereas this human trinity of grandmother Anne, mother May and b aby Jesus came from the Christian story of the H oly Family, the two smiling mothers were also seen to correspond to the personal history of the painter, who was irst nourished in the peasant home of his unwed mother before b eing removed to the urb an residence of his father, where he was raised by his father's mother and l awful wife. As in the blurred image of a dream, these two mothers and their unequal circumstances of matrimony, j oy and wealth appeared as if condensed into a s ingle two headed configuration in which the lost matenal look was wishfully refound by the adult p ainter not once but twice. Leonardo had thus not only recovered the lost loving look of his mothers; he had also reclaimed the lost image of himself as beloved that was relected in their eyes. In this way, according to Freud's theory of art as a sublimated s atisfaction for an unrealised desire, Leonardo was said to triumph indirectly in his art over what he could not directly triumph over in his life . There was at least a p artial cons olation there. Almost fifty years after the publication of Freud's treatis e Lacan retuned t o the analyst's interpretation i n his lectures of 1 9 5 7 , insisting not on the a rti st's supposed s atisfaction in the refinding of the mother's l o s t smile but, rather, on the representation in the painting of the Madonna's own wistful look of l o ss or lack. Unlike the nurturing breast, enlivening voice, or lingering gaze that must be lost to her son if he is to grow beyond

the limits of the nursery, the lost object that Lacan s aw in the mother's look of desire i s the b oy child himself in the form of the notorious psychoanalytic object of fantasy known as the matenal phallu s , the symb ol of the desired p enis that she is s aid not to have . This illus ory object i s a p art of the b o dy that the s o n imagines his mother to have or perhaps not to have; t o have and at the s a me time not to have; to have in the very form of a lack. Thi s imagining o f the m aternal phallus is the child's answer to the inaugural question of desire: 'What does Mother want?' hat does she want both in the sense of what does she lack and in the s ense of what might she d esire to fill up this empty pl ace? Must she really l o se her b aby and can she ever ind its like again? And can I ever be , and do I really want to b e , the Imaginary phallus that she lacks? The controversial idea of the m aternal phallus has fomented great resistance on the p art of women authors and analysts over the course of many decades, but it would take more than the little bit of exposition at my disposal to l ay out all the stakes of this ongoing debate. Suffice it to s ay that the crucial point for Lacan is to see in the so called matenal phallus not the Imaginary outline of a p enis that w o u l d be physiologically useles s to a mother's Real coporeality but, rather, the Symbolic emblem of her lack of the elevated social s tatus traditionally conferred upon fathers , brothers , husbands and sons in patriarchal societies. More simply, the matenal phallu s as lacking is the symbol of whatever it i s beyond her condition a s mother that s h e might desire, or that her son o r daughter might imagine her to desire, in her capacity as friend, lover, or perhaps writer or p ainter in a room of her own.

The bird's tale Let us return to the memory of Leonardo's childhoo d not a s ambivalently enshrined in a p ainte d smile b u t as enigmatically recorded in the written pas s age that provided the basis for Freud's expl anation of the artist's p erplexing inhibition to complete his

work s . In the midst of a discus sion in his notebook on the light of birds Leonardo interrupted himself to record his only self des cribed childhood memoy. In this memory the adult artist and scientist s aw himself as a b aby in a crib b eing visited by a large bird , which ins erted its tail in his mouth, b eating it about inside. What might this strange tale have possibly me ant to the artist, and what might it mean to us? According to the substitutive mechanisms of fantasy a s proposed b y Freud, the representation of s omething of disturbing affective interest was replaced in Leonardo's recorded memory by the repres entation of something else of les s dis turbing intensity. Here the s triking insertion of the bird's tail in the child's mouth replaced in disgui sed form the infantile s cene of nursing at the nipple that Freud b elieve d was too full of disrup tive emotion for direct repres entation in Leonardo 's text. Thi s first level of the scenario's disguise

or displacement, in p sychoanalytic parlance

- corresponded to the location of the event in early childhood; but Freud s aw more here as well. The displaced memory fantasy of the bird's tail inserted in his mouth as a child also s creened from the adult artist the soci ally unacceptable wish of having a penis inserted in his mouth in an a dult sexu al act. Thus , in one fell swoop Leonardo 's disupted love for his mother and censored love for beautiful young men was b oth revealed and concealed in the intrusive oral thrust of a bird's tail. As we will see in many other examples to come, the double function of the fantasy, the dream and the work of art was to reveal the truth and conceal it as well. Freu d was keenly aware that most e arly twentieth c entury readers would have found it distasteful in the extreme to follow him in his apparently mad s u b s titutive leaps along a chain of association b etween a tail , a penis and a nipple, between a natural human ins tinct, a tab o o homo sexual act and a biz arre onithological s cene. In unravelling the tangled knot of Leonardo's personality Freud sought documentay support in an ancient myth that might have b e en known to the renai s s ance artist. In thi s

Eptian mth Freud found the same motifs of the bird, the breast and the penis united in the erection bearing body of the vulture

h eaded mother goddess Mut. This was a p otentially signi ficant corrob oration for Freud, but it turned out that in p ursuing the mythology of the phallic female vulture Freud went astray in re lying on an erroneous German translation of Leonardo's original Italian word for his b ird of childhood memory. That word, nibbio, o ught to have been translated as k ite, a hawk l ike b ird of p rey unencumbered by the myth of the maternal phallus . Much has b een made of Freud's unwilled, or perhaps even w il lful, error of tran slation in the voluminous criticism that has delighte d in debunking his work, but the p sychological p o int for which Freud

was s e eking mythol ogical and archaeological c onfirmation rema ine d intact nonethele s s . This was the attribution of the

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p hallus to the mother by her young son on the assumption that this s eemingly all powerful nourisher of life must not be thought to l ack the sa me useful and pleasurable organ that he himself ejoyed

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The fetish of LiHle Hans

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Basing h is a s s ertions on the clinical case of a ive year old boy known as L ittle Hans that he had p u b l ished just a year before his Leonardo tale, Freud claimed that the boy's attribution to his

mother of a phallus might persist even in the face of contradictory o:s ervations of the real or represented b o dy of a woman or girl. According to the notorious Freudian s cenario of penis envy, the young boy's s is ter might blame her mother for failing to provide hr with the phallus that her brother enjoyed. As for Little Hans, it

was his stubb orn belief that his mother had to have a penis even thJugh it was hidden from view; his sister's p enis couldn't be s een b Ecause it was still little and would grow later; or p erhap s the ir p nises had become detached, by accident or in p nishment, and if s operhaps his could b ecome detached as well. n order to overcome s 1ch castration anxiety, as it was called, Little Hans fashioned for

hims elf the n eurotic symptom of a fea r of horses in the street, in which his intolerable fear of castration was effectively displaced. In his commentary on the case of Little Hans , Lacan stressed that the horse of the boy's phobia m ay have functioned as a fetish in which the fantasy of the maternal phallus was both affirmed and denied. Lacan insisted that it was this Symbolic negation of Imaginay visual experience

the obsevable presence or absence

of the genitals of the mother or the horse

that constituted the

fundamental discovery of Freud . Do not trust what you see with your eyesight but what you s ay with your insight according to the gaze of your desire. This split between the Imaginay eye and the Symb olic gaze is one of the key ideas of Lacan for those of us who are students and practitioners of the visual arts . Please stay tuned. The unconscious

Lacan always insisted that he was nothing but a Freudian and that his teaching was nothing but a return to Freud by way of a clo se rereading of his fundamental text s . First and foremost for Lacan was The Interpreta tion of Dreams, where Freud articulated the grammatical mechanisms through which were linked the words and pictures of the dream and the uns aid and unseen desire of the dreamer. Jus t as important for Lacan were Freud's discussions of our bungled actions and slips of the tongue - the famous Freudian slip s

in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life ( 1 90 1 ) , and his

treatment o f the comp act formul ation and explosive release of unspoken o r socially censored desire in Jokes and Their Rela tion

to the Unconscious ( 1 905). It was in the name of the transformative wordp lay of dream s , slips and p un s that Lacan's most famous dictum was spoken again and again in his work: 'The uncons cious is structured like a language . ' The unconscious. There, I've finally said it! But just what is the unconscious? Or, better, what is it not? The Freudian unconscious as understood by Lacan was not s o me primal repertoy of bestial instincts that inexorably motivated human beings to perpetrate

horren dous deeds of murder, maiming, mayhem and lust. For Lacan, the Freudian uncons cious was not s ome darkly hidden re s evoir o f animal instincts imperfectly suppressed by civilisation b ut, rather, an inescap able domain of language literally lying in plain view, for instance in the full black letters and emp ty white bl anks of the very lines of type you are reading now. As the s e words are written and as they are read in turn, a s ubj ect

the subject of the uncons cious

intermittently fli ckers

into being and just as quickly fades from view, retaining the trace of the word just read, hanging on the anticipated word to come, and retroactively confering meaning at the end of this unwinding chain of words. The ins tability of this position of the subject in l anguage is a function of our deciphering of these letters and blanks all the way to the end of this book and beyond. Such reading is an unending process of subjecting ourselves to these graphic I )

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images of words according to our grasp of the current idioms of the E nglish language. We would not be the paradoxical psychological s u bjects we are but merely the physiol ogical organisms and physical objects we are as well without this matter of language, which constitutes the unconscious and delineates the contours of the worlds in which we b elieve we live. The jouney of this book will take us across an Imaginary tightrop e perilou sly suspended acro s s an abyss between a vanishing subjecthood unconsciously encoded in the Symbolic puls ati ons of our language and an o b durate objectho o d indes crib ably embedded in the Real pulsations of our b o dy. And, to leap in a single bound acro s s this internal chasm of mind and body, ' art' will b e the general name offered here for many of our most p recious cultural practices that may help to stabilise the rope and s ave us from falling into the void. Freud acknowledged frankly that his study of Leonardo da Vinci might b e nothing other than a psycho analytic nove l . In s eeking to understand the motivations of the artist he admired, he admitted that he might have been duped into eror by the enigmatic tale of a bird in the mouth and the enigmatic depiction of a

woman's smile. But if the m aternal interpretation of the smile was not the historical truth of L e onardo's art it was a monument to

psychoanal Y tic theory itself, for Freud used that smile to construct a scenario of ambivalent affect in which mother and child cleaved

together and were cleaved a s under as well . From the Desire of the Mother to the Name of the Father

What is the enigmatic Desire of the Mother as theorised by Lacan? What does the painted woman known as the Mona Lisa want in smiling at me in that ambiguously alluing yet alienating way? And what do I want from her in ambivalently facing and defacing her smile in order to bring her close and at the s ame time to keep her at b ay? If the anxiety of castratio n was irst mobilised in the baby boy by comp aring his little penis with the maternal phallus that he imagined to be lacking, then perhaps her unspoken desire was for him to be that Imaginary p hallus for her so as to make good that lack. It was in the face of the mother's invitation or threat to reclaim the child as her own lost object that the child required a champion to protect him from that fate and, equally, from his own desire to embrace that fate. In the traditional family the one who exercised the function o f separating the child from the mother was , of course, the father

he who had the culturally mandated task of

stepping in and s aying an unequivocal 'No' to the double sided Desire of the Mother, hers for the child and the child's for her. In desiring hi s mother for himself and thus fearing the castrating punishment of his father, Little Hans was, in Freud's words , a little Oedipus , modern heir of the man of ancient myth who killed his father and wed his mother. According to Lacan, the father of Little Hans did not fulil his duty to negate the private Desire of the Mother by offering the chil d an altenative identification with the N ane of the Father on which the family's public identity was based. This ineffectual father did not do his duty early enough or fully enough in the twin case histories of Little Leonardo and Little Hans .

At s take in Freud's psychob iographical interpretation of a childhoo d memory of a renaissance genius was nothing less than the autobiographical proclamation of the genius of Freud himself in his signature i nventi on of the O e dipus complex, in which tragedy ensued when the son murdered his father and married his mother, whether in mythological deed or in psychological fantasy. The preferred outcome was o therwi s e . In the Name of the Father the child must lean to tear himself away from the seductive Desire of the Moth e r, to i dentify himself with the father's naysaying to incestuous desire, to renounce the impossible burden of b eing the Imaginary phallic object that the m other lacks , to accept the Symbolic promise of becoming a father in the future, but only after having waited his turn. But in leaving his smiling p aintings unfinished Leonardo had remained transfixed upon the mirror stage of the nursery, failing to take responsibility for his p aintings'

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care just as his father had left him to linger too long in the ebrace

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of a mother who lacked a lover and who thus became the enigmatic

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exp l anation o f the riddle o f Leonardo 's art and character a s

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s e ductres s of her s on's uncomp rehending desire. That was the prop osed by Freud, but it was not altogether what motivated the commentary of Lacan, to who s e altern ative articulation of the question of art and psychoanalysis we now tun.

Chapter 2

The Do Vinci Code according to Lacon

hereas Freud lo oked to the unconscious fantasy of an individual artist in order to throw light on the singularity of his works , Lacan looked inste a d to works of art in order to exemplify the universal structures of mind and b o dy that he hoped to articulate in the cours e of his p s ychoanalytic teaching. Freud's treatise on Leonardo took the biographical form of the monograph, in which the images and themes o f an artist's works were meant to be illuminated by the facts

in this cas e , the allege dly unconscious facts

of the

atist's life. For his part, L acan discuss e d Freud's study of Leonardo at the end of a s eries of lectures in

1 95 7 . I will have more to s ay

about the p e dagogical circumstances of the seminar that Lacan conducted for almo st thirty years , but for the moment let us take a brief look at this early phase of his teaching.

From Ego, Superego and Id to Imaginary, SymboliC and Real In his first year of public te aching, in

1 9 534, Lacan focused on

Freud's e s s a y s on p sycho analytic techni que. Lacan took p ains to distingui sh b e tween two orders of exp erience encountered in the treatment of p atients: the domains of deceitful images and truthful words that he called the Imaginary and the Symbolic. At this time Lacan's contributions to intenational psychoanalytic debates were ro oted in h i s di stinction b e tween the Imaginary (or image based) and Smbolic (or word based) ways of structuring human experience upon the formle s s ground h e called the Real. In this shifting dialectic of mute m ateriality, frozen images and mobile

words Lacan provides us with a rich triple p aradigm for differentiating the physical materials, illusoy forms and inferred

meanings of works of art. Lacan s aw the Imagin ary register as con s i s ting in the individual's largely conscious but distorted visualis ations of Self and Oth ers that Freud had situated in the so called E go (in German, Ich, or II. In The Ego and the Id ( 1 923) Freud had postulated a p s ychic app aratus of three distinct agencies . The Id

(Es, or It) was the hypothetical s ite of the drives (rieben) , ideational representatives o f the human organism's primordial instincts for nouri shment, s exual attraction and aggres sive self protection. The Ego took on the dificult task of reconciling the demand of the dives for immediate pleasurable discharge with the p o s tp onements and constraints imposed upon the individual by the demands of society. These demands were brought to b ear C >

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upon the partly consciou s , partly unconscious interplay between the Ego and the Id by the so called Superego jber Ich, or Over I) , the intenalised imperative of social noms . This Freudian triple mapping of the p s ychic app aratus can be s e en roughly to corre s p ond to the Lacanian tri a d of the Imaginary (Ego) , the Symb olic (Superego ) and the Real (Id) . It was Lacan's distinctive contribution to the theory of the Ego to propose a visual s cenario by which the Ego irst came into being. Ba sed on the alien but alluring images glimp sed in the mirror in chilhood, the E go was seen by Lacan to be crystallised in response to the admiring behaviour of the mother and to the actions of a dmired counterp arts such as older siblings with whom the individual subsequently came to identify both in opposition and in emulation. We can see this formative interplay at the mirror of mother and child in numerous works of art across the centuries, notably in the late eighteenth century colour woodblock prints by the Japanese master Kitagawa Utmaro and in the paintings, prints and p a stels of the nineteenth century American impressionist

Mary Cass att. In contrast to thi s private maternal pres erve, the

Symb o l i c order was

s a i d to

be c o n s titute d by the chi l d 's

introduction to the public world of cultural meaning that was associated by Lacan with the father's s p eech . For the p atients who came to speak to Lacan of their intransigent sfferings of b o dy and thought, the motor of the cure was the uncens ored outpouring of their words in the p resence of the a n a ly s t . Punctuated

enigmati c ally by the unpredictable interventions of the analyst, this mobilisation of signiiers was me ant to generate new sets of Symbolic meanings so that the p atient might move b eyond the maternal idealisations and fixations of the Imaginary E g o . I n the second year of h i s seminar Lacan continue d to elaborate upon Freud's theoy of the E g o . Lacan insis ted on the alienating implications of the chi l d 's discovery of its Ego a s an alter E go relected in the image of the m/other of the mirror stage, a s tage (in French,

stade)

that was at once a p assing p h a s e o f childhood

deve l o pment and a l i felong arena or stadium o f p s ycho l o g i c a l conlict. In order t o clarify t h e complex mirror stage dynamic s o f s e l f a n d other, Lacan retuned to a distinction that Freud had not fully devel oped b etween two aspects of the Superego: on the one han d, there was the i d e a l Ego of the Imaginary other that the emerging Ego aspires to be like; and, on the other hand, there was the E g o i deal, the p o s i ti o n of S ymb o l i c sp eech fro m which the aspiring Ego wished to b e judged as wholly exemplifying its ideal. At its core the Ego was split, alienated from itself a s an alter Ego, constructed on the b as i s of a vi sual mo del found outside itself. To add insult to injuy, the E g o was oriented toward an impossible project of i d e al self fashioning with respect to which it could never be judged as anything o ther than unsucces sful and incomplete. The dual relation b etween the asp i ring Ego and the alienate d E g o was thus

a

duelling relation as well. Within t h e indivi dual

there l oomed a tension packed stand of between the intenalised alter Ego

the me I see mys elf a s b eing

ideal Ego or miroing other

and the image of the

the me I want to b e and can never be.

In order to dislodge the individual from this p aralysing visual

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fac e off Lacan instead endorsed the p acifying rel atio n of the speaking subject with another Other, the Ego ideal. Lacan sp elled the first other, which was visualis e d as a counterp art and rival in the mirror, with a lower case 'a' for the French word autre. The second Other he spelled with an upper case '' for Autre, the image less Other of l anguage's impersonal storehouse of words in which we dwell even when we are expre ssing our most p ersonal selve s . It was the w i dely held delusion of an inner self b a s e d on the Imaginary other of the mirror stage that Lacan was most at pains to comb at. His altenative champion was the subject of the unconscious , the Symbolic subject of speech. We see his friend Pic a s s o alternating in the p o rtrayal of his teenage m i s tre s s Marie-Therese Walter b etween the anxiety of c onfronting the Imaginay other relected in Girl Before a Mirror ( 1 932, Museum of

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Moden At, New York) and the appeasement of identification with the Symb olic Other of language in Girl Reading at a Table ( 1 934, Metropolitan M u s eum of Art, New York) . In the l atter p ainting a b l a ckened mirror hangs on the wall b ehind her flower wreathed head. In his insistence on the dangerous duel of s elf and other in the Imaginary dimension of the Ego, Lacan was extending Freud's formulations on the self loving and s elf loathing narcis sism of the Ego that we encountered in the stoy of Leonardo. Lacan claimed to be faithfully retuning to Freud's fundamental theories in respect to the meaning making resources of the Symbolic dimension of the subject in l angu age through which Imaginary misperceptions might b e dispelled.

Schema L In a memorable iagram addressed to the aid eye of visual culture, Lacan s chematised the troubled crossing of the maginay and Symbolic axes of conscious and unconscious experience. C alled S chema L o n a c c o unt of its resemblance to the capital l etter lambda in Greek, thi s crossing will help to envision a key lesson

of psychoanalysi s for both novice and expert users of images and word s . In the di agram, one of many blackb o ard aids drawn by Lacan during hi s l ecture s , the Imaginary relation is fixed in a straight line of afectual reciprocity between the alienated alter Ego of the individual, denoted as (a) , and the unattainable image of the other, denoted as ( a ' ) , the i deal Ego with which it vainly identiies and seeks to resemble and replace. It might help here to visualise a painter (a) looking at his relection (a') in a mirror in the process of painting a s elf portrait, a complex triple s cene famously depicted on a

1 960 magazine cover of The Saturday Evening Post

by the American illustrator N orman Rockwell. As a result of the illusory and elusive face off with his Imaginary mirror image, the self p o rtraitist must sacriice that major p art of the authenticity of his Real and Symb olic being that is not adequately expressed in his extenal appearance . But the physically awkward sixty six year o l d Ro ckwell is supported at his e a s el by an array of Symb o l i c attributes of arti stic glory, including a gilt American eagle and a golden armoured helmet. Quizzically b espectacled in the mirror but clear eyed and glasses free in the portrait, Rockwell attests that the recording of mere Imaginary resemblance need not be all that a self p o rtraitist aspires to p o rtray. Unlike the glassy vacancy o f the mirror, Rockwell's white canvas proudly b e ars the black block letters of his name.

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other

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C ros sing the Imaginary vector of the alter Ego facing the miror image of the i deal Ego in Lacan's diagram (a a') is the interrupted p l ane of the Symb olic relation ( S

/

AJ . This vector attemp ts to

traverse the gap b e tween the indivi dual Subject (Sujet) of s p eech, denoted in French and English as a capital ' S ' , and that Other place of the Ego ideal designated by the capital letter ': (for Autre) , the never completely excavated archaeological site of the buried tr e a s ure trove of our artefacts and language . To travers e this gap b etween Subject and Other the inteupted vector S

/ A mus t leap

over the Imaginary wall of language , in which the uncons cious s ubjective connotations of words are consciously congealed into b rick like units of objective denotation. The initial ' S ' s ound of the name of the unconscious Subj e ct of free sp eech puns upon the German s ound of Es, Freud's ordinary daily word meaning 'It' that was misleadingly Latini s e d by his English translators into the 0 l

s c i entific s ounding word ' I d ' . L a c an's retrans lation p o ints to

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uncon s c ious I d driven urgency that re sults from the l o s s of

9

For the s elf p o rtraiti s t at the mirror, the equivalent of the

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a n indwelling within the s p e e ch of the human b eing of an

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immedi acy of ins tinctual life .

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unconscious addre s s of the subj e c t to the golden s toreho u s e of language ( S

/

A) i s t h e exhibition of h i s or h e r p ainting in

the Virtu al Museum within which s elf p o rtraits by the great masters appear alongside his o r her own. Tacked onto Rockwell's c anvas are colour reproductions of s elf p ortraits by Albre cht Direr, Rembrandt van Rijn and Vincent Van Gogh, as well as a surrealist portrait by Picas s o of a female model with the p ainter's profil e peeking out b ehind her from

a

mirror on the wall. For

it i s to the words and i m a g e s of our c o l l e c tive tre a sury of l anguage and art and their inherit e d forms of meaningful expres sion that the s p e aking or p ainting individual is unrep ayably indebte d if he or she is to exp r e s s the s ingul arity of his or her b eing

by means

or wor d s .

of a unique s e l ection and comb ination of images

With his diagrammatic image of the cri s s - cros s e d and s t ar cros s e d rel ati ons of the s e eing E g o , the v i s u a l i s e d other, the speaking Subj e ct , and the mute Other of l anguage , Lacan was ironically showing u s that there is more to our b eing than may b e seen in a single mirror image, that there is more t o our b eing than will ever meet the instantaneous glimp se of the eye. In this visual diagram Lacan was telling u s that it is only in the intersubj ective and mobile medium of speech that p sychoanalytic treatment artistic practice

or

m ay hope to res tore to the p atient p ainter the

ufo lding p otentiality of our fullness of being in time. We may be inescapably alienated from our primordially embodied experience in the words and images of o thers , but it is, p aradoxically, only in the transpers onal linguistic and arti stic discourse of the O ther that we can get b ack some s crap of the vitality we feel ourselves to have lost. In the third year of his public teaching Lacan return e d to Freud's writings on psychosis in order to dramati s e the m a l a dy of l anguage that a ffl i cted tho s e who s uffered from external persecutory voices rather than the guilty internal recriminations of neurotic i l l n e s s . In the c a s e o f neuro s i s , the indivi d u a l 's impos sible attempt to be the Imaginary fulilment of the mother's imp uted d e s ire for the phallus m ay be overcome through identiication with the father's forbidding of incestuous desire that Lacan called Symbolic cas trati on. Thi s process is not, however, without symp tomatic res i du e . On the one h a n d , the hys teric rep eatedly re enacts the Imaginary wound of the mother's phallic loss in her own b o dily malfunctions , thus re sisting the p aternal regulation of the roles of the sexes and putting the unc ertain question of sexuality directly to the test: 'Am I a woman or a man?' On the other hand, the obses sional stages fantasies of p aternal phallic p otency in the form of compulsive rituals or recurrent thoughts that insist upon the father's authority and thus avoid confronting the insoluble questions of life and death: 'To b e or not to be?'

In both the hysterical and obsessional forms of neurosis I l o s e b y giving up t h e i l l u s i o n of b eing t h e Im aginary phallus of the

m o ther. I grieve for my l o s s in the uncon s c i o usly meaningful suffering of my symptom in b o dy o r mind, but at the s ame time I gain a Symbolic p ower of negation over the mother's enigmatic d e sire in my ledgling c ap acity as an indivi dual s p eaker of the c o llective dis course a s s o ci ated with the father's wider role beyond the Imaginay confines of the nursery. In p sycho s i s this critical father-functi o n is n o t adequ ately p erformed in the name o f s e parating t h e s ubject from t h e Imaginay drama o f the mother's desire. This failure of Sybolic castration nd its enabling accession to subjectho o d m ay l e a d to p aranoid fears o f dis memberment or delusions of phallic omnipotence, but the crucial c omponent for Lacan was the lack of the phallic signiier of p atenal negation that might counter the regre s sive p ull of m aternal desire . In French C )

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6

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le nom du pere, le non du pere.

the Name of the Father, father's ' No ' ,

is s ounded just like the

In the presence or absence of a Symbolic identity made of nothing but a No and a N ame (Non/Nom) lies the fateful difference between the neurotic's relatively succes sfu l management of un acceptable des ire by means of obsessional thinking or hysterical smptom formation and the much more disastrous mental illnes s of p sychosis . hereas the neurotic p o s se s s e s a suficiently stable form of i dentity for it to b e the s ubject of extremely vexing questions, the p sychotic's lack of such an identity forecloses on the very possibility of meaningful convers ation with others within the fundamental framework of the Other's s o cial norms . I am irst and my M/other is s econd, but we can c o nvers e only by way of the Other/Father of l anguage that is our shared third. And so we s e e the solitary self- p o rtraitis t labouring on the surface o f the canva s , anxio u s ly p o sitioned b etwe en a v i s u al likene s s seen in the nostalgic matenal mirror and the uncompleted painting still to be shown to the p atenal Other. Real corporeality, Imaginay love, Symbolic recogniti on. Me, Mommy, D addy. Now we are Three.

Lacking a stable i dentiication with the anchoring signifiers of the s o cial realm of the father, the Symbolically deficient world of the p sychotic is pulled b ack into the l ethal gravitational pull of the omnip o tent phallic mother of t errifying Imaginary fantasy. Just this sot of vampiric fantasy was expressed acro s s the ages in the troubl e d response of many male writers to what they s aw as

the Mon a Lisa's blood curdling smi l e . According to Lacan, th i s anxious fate of matenal dominance and p atenal inadequacy was

share d at l e a s t in part by Leonard o . Unlike the intenally riven world of the p sychotic, however, Leonardo's world was held more or less together through the s tructures of art by means of which Symb o l i c r e p r e s entatives o f Mother, Father and S elf were precariously fixed in place. Near the end of this book we will see how Lacan, i n his late s emina r on the revolutionary verbal art of James Joy c e , came to sp eak of the w o rk of art as a fourth tem providing the artist with a crucial s emblance of self consistency by tying t o g e ther the otherwi s e d i s s ociated orders

of the

Imaginary, Symbolic and Real.

From the Imaginary Mother to the SymboliC Father Lacan offered his audience an extended discussion of Freud's account of Leonardo during the final l ecture prior to the s ummer break of his

1 9 56-7

s eminar on o bject relations . Unlike the

American p sycho analytic orientatio n known as Ego psychology which focused its theory and treatment on the strengthening of the defens e s of the Ego against the dis ruptive p r e s s ure of un c o n s ci o u s l y repres s e d s exual a n d aggre s s ive drive s , British object relations theory foc u s e d i n s t e a d on s trengthening an individual's interpersonal relationship s against the fragmenting forc e s of the uncons ciously interna l i s e d objects repres enting persons o r p arts of p ersons from his or her early life history. Rather than a loved or hated whol e o bject such as the mother or a parti al o bj e c t s u ch a s the b re a s t , the Frenchman was more interested in Freud's theoy of the o bject that was not there, the

Imaginay matern a l phallus that Freud had p o stulated as lost in the s t ories of the hors e p h o b i a of Little Hans and the bird fanta s y of Little Leonardo . In s ummarising Freud's account of the bird's tail ins erted in the infant's mouth, Lacan questioned the sup erimp o s ition of the two repressed wishes concening sucking at the breast and sucking on the peni s . Ins tead, Lacan insisted on reattributing the s e wishes to the Imaginary an d Symbolic registers of Leonardo's nconscious mental life . At the Imaginary level Lacan interp reted Leonardo's memory of the bird's tail a s s creening from consciousness the overwhelming intrusiveness of his mother during the time she was b ereft of Leonardo's father and took her b aby as a comp ens atory love object. Lacan reinforced the hyp othesis of damage done to the young Leonardo by the suppo s e d selfishne s s of his mother's desire by referrin g not to the ancient folklore of the mother

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vulture , erroneo u s ly intro d u c e d by Fre u d , but to that of the

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1 6

the s cholarly challenges to Freud's interpretation, Lacan was here

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as envi ous and abusive of her b aby bird s . Fully convers ant with

citing a recent article in the

Journal of the History of Ideas

by

the American art h i storian Meyer Schapiro. L a c an opposed to the idealised duality of mother and child in object relations theory his own insistence on the tri adic nature of the mother child relation as mediated by the lacking phallus . The D esire of the Mother was for s omething b eyond the symbiotic embraces o f her child, something lacking that was symb olically repres ente d by the phallus of her lover, the child's father. By exten s i o n , the p aternal phallus b e c a m e the s ignifier of the Symbolic order as such, a verb al signifier that might fill in a Real vo i d with an ab stract word but was not to b e v i s u a li s e d a s a concrete thing. The metaphorical op eration of replacing the Imaginary phallus of the Desire of the Mother with the Symb olic p hallus of the Name of the Father was called Symb olic castration on account of its signifying cut into the lost sub stance of the Real.

3 . Leonardo do Vinci , The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Saint John the Baptist

( 1 499 1 500).

Think of the p e n of the cl erk i n s c ribing your name on your certiicate of birth. Think of the chisel of the s culptor incising your name on the stone of your grave. Thus, unlike Freud, Lacan s aw no blis sful reconstitution of the Imaginary reciprocity of mother and child in the Madonna's smile. It was not her eyeing an Imaginary phallus in her b aby son that woul d bring her j oy. Instead, Lacan stre s s e d the active role of the father's Symbolic phallus displaced within the figure of the l amb (like the h o r s e o f Littl e Hans) with which the H o ly Child was playing. S tanding for the crucifixion, the Lamb of God was also the name through which Jesus the p l ayful son o f Mary was transforme d into C hrist the s acriic e d son of God. From the isible to the invisible, the Imaginary human trinity of S aint Anne, the Virgin M a ry and the b aby Jesus was superseded by the Symb o l i c divine trinity of G o d the Fathe r, the crucifi e d and

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resurr ec t e d C h ri s t the S o n , and the disembodied Holy S p irit signifying the univers ality of the C hurch and the etenity of the Soul. The necessity for this soroful but s aving displacement was

6

regis tered in the p ainting in the impassive face and hidden hand

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her c hi l d in her d e s iring gra s p , thus a l l owing the child to

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of S aint Anne, who prevents her d aughter Mary from retaining

a s s ume his Symbolic mandate as the s aciicial lamb for his lock. In contrast to Freud's Leonard o , who emb r a c e d in his art the Imaginary recove ry of the mother's lost smile of d e s ire, Lacan's Leonardo p ointed to the Sybolic separation from her body that every one of us must make along his or her individual way toward an eventual death . Of course , neither Freud nor Lacan ever alleged that L e o nardo would have been c o n s cious o f the un c o n s c i o u s meanings they dis cened in h i s work.

The pointing finger Lacan s aw evidence of a displacement from the Imaginary relation to the m o ther to the Symb olic rel ation to the father not only in Leonardo's painting in the Louvre, but also in an earlier large

drawing or c artoon of this same subject in the National Gallery in London

( 1 499 1 500; Figure 3). Referred to in a footnote by Freud as

a dream like melting together of the b o dies of the two mothers into a single hybrid fantasy, the drawing uncannily positioned the b aby Je sus as if he were a marionette like extension of his mother's b o dy s p ringing upward from b etween her legs . Thi s Imaginary phalli c signifier o f the maternal b o dy is s upplemented by the Symb olically elevated index inger of S aint Anne pointing upwards beyond the frame of the drawing to the realm of God the Father, in who s e name the s acriice of Christ will have taken place. All of Lacan is in the following pas s ag e : 'This is s o m ething that images very well the ambiguity o f the Real mother and the Imaginary mother, the Real infant and the hidden phallus . If I make of the finger its smbol, it is not because it crudely reproduces its proile, but because this finger, which one inds thro ughout Leonardo da Vinci, i s the indication of that l ack of-being o f which we fin d the inscri b e d term throughout hi s work . ' In the inger that p o ints to something uns een Lacan moved from the enigmatic question of the Imaginary matenal phallus

' D o I see it or do I not?'

to the

appeasing answer of the Syb olic p atenal phallus whose invisible pres ence is necess arily a matter o f p ure blind faith. D etachable from the body like the phallus and thus susceptible for appropriation as a Symb olic marker, the p ointing finger of S aint Anne was made by enc l o s ing the emptines s of the s urface of the paper with the b arest indication of a drawn line. As such it was a concise indication of the fundamental dilemma of human development, namely the indirectly inferred role of the father versu s the directly obseved role of the mother in the life of the child. The finger pointing b eyond the frame tells us that in visual art there is always m o re than meets the eye . Any a e s thetic exp erience in the realm of the senses is implicitly frame d by the Symb o l i c c ontract of a share d s o cial me aning that cannot be reduced to an empirical visual representati on of the worl d . Here again is the split between the animal-eye of the p erceptual organ

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of sight and the human I of the affectual organ of desire that in art Lacan called the g a z e . I n h i s commentary on Leonardo, Lacan questioned t h e concept o f sub limation upon which the edifice of Freud's p sycho analytic a e s thetics was built. For Freud, Leonardo's sublimation wa s the achievement o f a substitute s atisfaction in his p aintings of smiles for an unsatisfied unconscious wish to recover a love he had lost. Less focused on the individual psychology of the artist. Lacan saw s u b l imation as a general s tructure in s o ci e ty whereby the Imaginay world of present p erceptual exp erience was covered over by a Sbolic grid of signiiers pointing to a p a s t life of Real primordi al b eing and a future path to a meaningful human death. S ecular scholars steeped in the s criptures of Ju daism and Christianity, Freu d and L a c an were non religi o u s h e i rs to a cultural tradition in which the Symb olic inscription of the Name

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of G o d the Fath e r h e l d sway over the Imaginary depiction of the D e s ire of the Mother N a ture G o d d e s s . B u t in their evi d ent enj oyment of the Roman C atholic art of Leonardo b o th men were susceptible to the b eauty of the mother's fac e . Freud wa s moved by the maternal mirage of androgynous bli s s that Leonardo had narcissistically fa shioned upon the faces of his male and female figures from S aint Anne to S aint John the B aptist, also in the Louvre. Lacan, however, was moved more by the sight of the s aints' index fingers emphatic ally p ointing to the invisible realm of heaven's gaze b eyond the s ensuous pleasures of the eye's vision. In spite of thi s p otential p aternal identification, Lacan noneth e l e s s i n s i s t e d that L e o n a r d o primarily i d entifi e d him s elf w i t h t h e Imaginary m/other of a natural worl d of fulfille d physical b l i s s rather t h a n w i t h the S ymb o l i c O t h e r of c o rp o r e a l death a n d s p i r i t u a l c ommemoration. T h i s maternal fixatio n , rather than homos exuality a s such, was what Lacan referred to a s Leonardo's inversion, a trait he i dentifie d in the artis t's idio syncratically rever s e d mirror writing as if i t were perfo rme d to be re ad not by the Ego looking into the mirror but by the idealised other looking

back at the Ego from the matenally mediated matrix of the mirror. In referring in his notebooks to his daily activities and artistic o r scientific aspirations, Leonardo habitually spoke from the inverted Imaginay p o sition of the little other in the mirror and addressed himself a s 'You' . In concluding this chapter I want to l o o k again at Schema L (page 1 9) , a c c o rding to who s e Imaginary a n d Symb o l i c vectors Lacan charted the mirror inversion o f the renaissance mas ter. At the upp er left let u s place the Symbolic lamb in the place o f the unconscious subject of speech ( S ) , which, like the s acriice of Christ, the Lamb o f God, must also undergo Symbolic castration. The Symb o l i c function i s that o f the Freudian death drive , inasmuch as the Real

Of the organi s m must be metaphorically

put to death in o rder for it to gain access to its humanity by way of the grammatical workings of the inhuman mechani sm of speech. Acro s s the fragile Imaginary membrane of the mirroring gazes o f the Madonna and Child (a a ' or me youl . the disemb o died subj e c t o f s p eech must l o c ate that Other s p ace of the p aternal dictionary, where it must ind the imp ersonal teus of its Symbolic inscripti o n ( S

/

A, I

/

It) . I n L e o nardo 's p ainting this final

resting place is occupied by the grave like marker of the p ointing index finger of S aint Anne . The Symbolic axis (S

/

A) travers es Leonardo's s chema from

the l amb to S aint Anne; it commemorates the two superimp osed deaths o f Real c o rporeal loss and S ymb olic inscripti on in the afterlife of cultural memory. After all, this is a p ainting made by a dead p ainter's hand, not sainted fle s h . Interrupting the Symbolic axis of the p ainting is the Imaginay screen (a a') upon which are projected the l oving and sorrowing images of the Ego and its i deal mate , the Madonn a and Chil d . We find o urs elves seduced by the beautiful Ego in the smiling face s of the b aby Jesus and his mother Mary, b o th miraculously imp ervious to corp oreal dec ay. It was from the inverted feminine p o sition o f the ideal Ego of the Virgin Mary that Leonardo saw hims elf seen as an o bject, an alter E go of

androgynous gender (a' a) . It was this reframing of the bo dily Ego a s the Imaginary object of des ire of the feminine or feminised other that Lacan defined as Leonardo's act of sublimation, an act through which the renais s ance artist transformed himself into an

admired work of art. C arrying his p aintings with him on his inal

j ourney, Leonardo ended his days according to legend, in the ,

p atenal arms of the King of Franc e.

For Lacn, Leonardo's Imaginay sublimation of the Ego in the deathles s smile of the b eautiful woman was achieved at a high pice. Leonardo's Imaginary sublimation as the mother's cherished object c onstituted a denial of the father's truth that he was als o the precious subject o f unconscious desire and Symbolic speech.

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Chapter 3

The Th i n g from a n oth er world

'Who are you looking at? Are you looking a t me? In looking a t m e are you acknowle dging me a s the object o f your desire, the beneficiay of your love, the victim of your lust?' These, and others , are the unanswerable que stions we unc onsciously pose to the staring eye s of the Mona Lisa and her myriad sister paintings, from wide eyed Byzantine Madonnas to Edouard Manet's Olmpia ( 1 863, Orsay Museum, Paris) , Pblo Picasso's Demoiselles d'Aignon ( 1 907, Museum of Moden Art, New York) , Willem de Kooning's

Wo man I ( 1 9 5 0 2 , Museum of Modern Art, New York) , Andy Warhol's Gold Marilyn ( 1 962, Museum of Mo den Art, New York)

' Jenny Saville's Banded ( 1 99 2 , Saatchi Gallery, London) and Cindy Sherman's many untitled l arge scale colour photographs of the 1 9 90s showing herself looking out of the frame in the disguis e of famous holy women and femmes fatales from the history of art. Am I the eye to who se view you wish to s how yourself in the fear and fearsomeness of your gaze? We want the work of art to conirm us in the wished for unity of our being, we want the work of art to appear to want us to b e its ideal viewer. B ut all this is an Imaginary illusion, because as we move aside and another viewer comes to stand before the work in our stead we come to realis e that the gaze of the painting does not address us at all in the uniqueness of our own corporeal being. The painting's gaze addresses its elf to an Other place, the empty Symb olic place of the s p ectator of art in which we s e e our subjecthood come and go. For an instant the work holds us with its

gaze, and our eye and I are jointly appeased. This was what Lacan called the princip le of artistic creation: that the world we see in art is the world of our desire. The dilemma, however, is that the Imaginary world of our infant desire was misconstructed from the outs et from the enigmatic traces of another's desire, perhap s the mother's , and therefore we never simply desire on our own.

Sublimation For many years Lacan taught that the goal of psychoanalysis was to assist suffering individuals to sublimate their di s s atisfaction . Their exceedingly diicult task was to renounce inhibiting ties to an Imaginary maternal p aradise of lost bodily bliss by way of a Symbolic identification with the collective ideals of a particular social group. The induction of the novice into the norms of the group was traditionally the responsibility of the father, but this

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acculturating role could b e performed by the mother herself in

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his name . The Imaginay o bject of incestuous s atis faction might

6

exemplary instance of the Smbolic transformation of impos sible

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thus be transfomed into a Symbolic object of creative passion. The Imaginary demands is the work of art, which Lacan deined in a 1 93 8 essay on the pathologies and sublimations of moden family life as an ordinary object erected into the light of astonishment. The subject might be nothing m o re than a l owly still life of pots and p ans but its p ictorial refashioning as the material signiier of an ab sent presence might transform the work into an amazing masterpiece. In 1 95 9 60, in the s eventh year of his public seminar, Lacan devoted the majority of his lectures to the question of the work of at. Lacan aimed that the Sbolic labour of artistic sublimation illuminated what he called the ethi c s of psycho analysis, namely the analyst's duty to facilitate the articulation of the patient's imp eded desire. The Symbolic articulation of unconscious desire in the course of p sychoanalytic treatment offered the possibility of an art like sublimation of the regressive allure of the inaugural.

inaccessible, intangib l e , invi sible, imp o s sible object of desire. Following Freud, Lacan called this mysterious obj ect 'the Thing'.

The Thing In his posthumously published Project for a Scientiic Psychology

( 1 895) Freud made the distinction that Lacan exploited in his Ethics sixty ive years later, between the representation of a thing

(in German, die Sache) and another kind of thing altogether (das Ding) . whose unrepres entable existence could only retro actively be inferred. The Lacanian Ding (in French, la Chose) was also related to the transcendental Thing in Itself (das Ding an Sichl of the German philos opher Immanuel Kant that, l ike God or the ininity of the cosmos, was posited as being beyond the perceptual capacities of human exp erience. For Lacan, the Thing was the retrospective name for that nameles s entity of b eing that would have engaged the full scope of infantile experience prior to the acquisition of language. Thus , there was not yet a Thing as such until the time it woul d h ave become irrevocably lost when the immediacy of wordles s experience first c ame to b e mediated by words. The momentous result of this intrusion of the signifier into the life of the human o rganism was a s p litting between conscious and unconscious representations, and the Thing became that spectral being which lingered in the unconscious as that which could not be named. In Harry Potter's world of wizards, Lord Voldemort (Full of Deathl is the not to be named Thing. In Lacan's world of psychoanalysis , the mother was p laced in the mythic p osition of the Thing. She was the Thing of the infant prior to its cap acity for linguistic repres entation not because of her instinctual provision of corporeal s atisfaction to her needy, dependent b aby. The mother became the child's lost Thing when she frustrated its demands for her loving attention during a time of her own corporeal s atisfaction, for example when she was eating, defecating or h aving s ex. Such independence of maternal enjoyment would have been beyond the child's capacity to accept.

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This self abs orbed, unavailable Thing would thus have become an object of discordant fantasy offering the child no satisfaction at all. In its withdrawal from the enclosed mother child duality of c o rporeal need and urgent demand, the autonomously desiring Thing b oth provided the initial cause of an unassuageable desire and als o constituted its unattainable object. This Thing that was also No Thing situ ated the individual vi s . vis a p sychological space that might be made indirectly accessible through the Imaginay and Symbolic mediation of memorial images and words . But this Thing also situated the individual outside the inaccessible space of the Real, lying entirely b eyond the grasp of its flimsy images and words . So what does this Thing have to do with the work of art? In the formula for sublimation that Lacan repe ated throughout the seminar, the work of art was seen to negate the apparent reality I l

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of thing s and rais e eveyday objects susceptible to word and image representation to the dignity of das Ding, the Thing, that lies beyond the cap acities of representation. In its split between

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incalculable proximity and distance of this intimate yet wholly

9

dignitelDing was itself a characteristic verbal enactment of the ' extimate' Thing, b oth inside and outside at one and the same time. Much of the doublenes s and duplicity of Lacan's sublimated wordp l ay is lost when we read written trans criptions and translations of his s poken seminar. Like his friend and neighbour ristan Tzara, the original Dadaist poet of the provocative spoken word, L a c an was a brilliant performance arti st, and his oral s eminar was his art. If artistic sublimation enacts an appeasing play of words and/ or images in place of a persistent Dlockage in s exual satisfaction, complete s atisfaction nevertheless remains unachieved. The work of art provides a genuine substitute satisfaction for the l ack of a successful sexual relation, but it does not thereby eliminate the p ermanent deficit of desire. In L a c an's view, Freu d l e d many of

his followers in E go psychology and object rel ations theory to underestimate the stubb orn pressure of uncon s cious desire by maintaining that sublimation p rovided a change of aim for the sexual drive, for example from the b o dy of the mother in neurotic fantasy to a p icture's p ainted smile . In contras t, Lacan proposed that the crucial change in sublimation did not alter the aim of the drive from a forb i dden object of s exuality to a socially sanctioned asexual substitute. Lacan affirmed that in the act of sublimation there was a reconstitution in fantasy of the object itself, a transformation of the object from its ordinary appearance into its extraordinary manifestation as the Thing . 2

Formula o f fantasy Lacan agreed ith Freud that members of society took consolation from the mirages of art, but he did not attribute the power of art to the mere fact of social consensus. Rather, Lacan insisted on the force of the fundamental fantasy of artistic sublimation, whereby the subject of unconscious desire was safely positioned face to face with the inaugural cause and impossible object of its unrelenting coporeal dive. Lacan's juxtapo sition of subject and object in the sublimated fantasy of the work of art was written in the quasi algebraic form $@. I hop e that you will not be put off by the mathematical appearance of this fomula, for I b elieve that it can be a vey us eful memory aid. I have no other aim in this little book than to intrigue you with the idea that this discreet secret formula may be all you need to know about Lacan and the work of art. Lacan introduced the formula of fantasy during the fifth year of his s eminar on the formations o f the unconscious such as symptoms , dreams, slips of the tongue and jokes. In the following ye ar he elab orate d upon his cryp tic formula in connection to Shakesp eare's Ha mlet when he p l a c e d the title character's famously obses sional question

'To be or not to be?'

at the

centre of the seminar on desire and its interpretation. Filling the blackboard with a puzzling series of diagrams featuring Greek and

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Roman letters as well as symbols of his own invention, Lacan reproduced the so called complete form of the Graph of Desire in

a 1960 essay published in Ecrits, 'The subversion of the subject and

the dialectic of desire in the Freudian unconscious ' . The graph has b een known, if not well understood, by English readers since its inclusion in the 1977 selected translation of Ecrits. Graph

of Desire

The graph ofered Lacan's colleagues a memorable image with which to orient their treatment of p atients who, like Hamlet or Leonardo , were inhib ited in the enactment of their desire. As artists and art historians we need not grasp all the implications for p sycho analytic treatment that may be encoded in the Graph of Desire, but in my own p ractice of teaching and writing I have become convinced that crucial elements , such as the formula of 0 I

fantasy, can help clarify fundamental is sues at stake for us in

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the graph m ay be somewhat difficult to abs orb . Please don't get

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the pro duction and consumption of works of art. Although I will attempt to be clear, my explication of the symbols and vectors of anxious if you don't manage to take it all in on the first try, and just go on to the next section. The Graph of Desire charts the emergence of the subject's desire a s it intersects with the conscious and unconscious articulation of the desire of the Other in speech. C ro ssing the boomerang trajectory of the subject's arrow of desire are the twin trajectories of the desire of the Other running from Signiier to Voice and from Jouissance to C astration. The lower arrow running from the selection of the S ignifier to its enunciation as Voice designates the level of sp oken m e aning where the conscious denotation of a statement is articulated. In contrast, the upper arrow from Jouissance to C astration, the definitions of which I defer for a while, designates the level of unsp oken implication where the unconscious connotation of the statement remains obscure . It is in its fraught encounter with the mixed messages

C astration

Signifier

Voice

of the cons cious and uncons cious desire of the Other that the subject's desire comes to b e . The subject's path of desire consists of a long, looping arrow often described as an upholstery stitch. Using a curved needle that pierces the fabric twice, the upholsterer sews don a strategically located button on the outer surface of a piece of funiture in order to stabilis e the shap eless stuffing inside. It is by means of such a stitching together of interior and exterior elements that a more or less successful articulation of conscious and uncons cious desire is made possible for the ebodied human being that speaks . On Lacan's graph, the skewering movement of this needle of the self retuns to its point of oigin after passing through four logical moments

shown as four sp atial levels

in the articulation of

desire. S ome of the elements of the graph are already familiar to us from S chema L . S tarting a t the lower right o f the l o o p w e find the symb ol $ , the s plit subject o f the unconscious ( i n Schema L , 'S' for Sujet i n French, Es for I t i n German a n d Id in Latin) . Thi s Subject is not present at bith, and it is only by means of the acquisition of language that it b ecomes the speaking delegate of b odily need. The urgency of its inborn need is represented immediately ab ove the s ubject by the triangular Greek letter delta (�) , which triggers the upward drive of desire. Born in a state of helples sness with resp ect to the s atisfaction of its needs for nourishment and protection from the environment, the human infant will die unless it is nurture d by another, typically the mother or her surrogate. For the s ake of its suvival the as yet speechless infant must learn to indicate its needs in the form of demands a ddre s s e d to the

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face of the Imaginary m/other orients the infant s ubj ect in its

§ 6

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chil d as all knowing, all powerful, and wholly without lack. The understanding of desire. This primordial face is represented on the first level of the graph by i(a), for image of the other (autre, little other) ' In Schema L this is designated (a') for the image in the mirror of the ideal Ego. All but the most s everely imp aired human children eventually lean to express their needs beyond the mimicking of the mother's facial affect. The child leans to speak in the precisely articulated sounds of its m other tongue. This parental repository of language i s represented on the second level of the graph by the encircle d capital A (Au tre, Other, B i g Other) . The upward line from $ t o A repeats the Sbolic axis of Schema L (S / A) , and, like it, it too is interrupted by the Imaginary axis of the mirror stage. In Schema L the Imaginary axis of rivalry and reciprocity of the alter Ego and the ideal Ego is represented as a a ' . In the Graph of Desire this Imaginary vector is drawn a s the leftward line of force that imp acts upon the lower case letter m (moi, me) on the left slope of

the loop from the direction of the image of the ideal Ego

ita). The

ideal Ego is either the unified image of its body that the child sees in the mirror or the alluring image of the mother or some other that it takes as its model or c ounterp art. It is upon the reflected instance of this idealised other that it c ons olidates itself as an alter Ego, an alien p ers o n a or s tatu e -like mask. A double self portrait of 1 922 by the Greek Italian p ainter Giorgio di C hirico shows the anxious face off between the artist's colourful living embodiment and his white marble bust, which gazes at him with blind eyes of stone (Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio) . Through the imitati o n of the language of its p arent s , the subject leans to aticulate its bodily needs in the fonn of spoken demands . The discours e of m/other and child is represented on the second level of the graph by the vector that runs from left to right, from Signifier to Voi c e . We might think that the meaning of the subject's mes sage would derive from its own choice of signifiers from among the available s ignifiers of its p arent s ' language, b u t L acan's understanding was just the reverse. The meaning of our messages is not detennined by the vector of the authorial subject, running from left to right, but by the reverse leftward vector curving ab ove it on the graph. According to this understanding of the retroactive s tructure of l anguage, it i s actually the other

the mother of the child, the reader of this

book, the viewer of a p ainting by Pic a s s o or a ilm by Fellini who wields the p ower to determine what the subject's mess age will b e taken to mean. Thi s revers e vector of me aning runs from the encircled A, where the vocabulary and grammatical rules of the Other are to b e found, b ack to the encirc l e d locus labelled s IAl. for s ignified o f the Other. Here th e m/other detennines the signifi e d (with lower c a s e ' s ' ) of the subject's Signiier (with upper case 'S') in tenns of the available signifieds of the Other (capital '') . The Big Other of Lacan is a twin of George Owell's unseen Big Brother who se framework of p enissible meanings c onstitutes the linguistic coordinates of the social and

p olitical worlds

'the War on Terror'

in which we are forced

to live .

As children we articul ate our needs as s poken demands by

s electing our words from the parental storehouse of signifiers designated on the graph as the linguistic circle A. If we are to make o u rselves understood, however, it i s only the other with whom we enter into the pact of communication who will determine the meaning of our demand in the form of his or her response from within his or her own p articulari s e d circle of l anguage

s (A) .

Although the emergent subject initially endows the m/other with the knowledge of what s/he and the subject want, the evolving s ubject b egins to develop a sense of s o mething that lies beyond its demanded s atisfaction of needs a s well as beyond its ability to provide for the m/other's own s atisfaction. Lacan called this lacking or lost object the Imaginary phallus , and its absence is 0 )

repre s ented on the third level of the graph by the letter 'd', for

E

unconscious desire.

6

and child, our spoken demands for love fail to fulil the subject of

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Distorted by impossible images of full satisfaction of m/other affectual need. In the representation of corporeal need as spoken demand there remains the ineliminable resi due of uncons cious desire. The l ower half of the graph corresponds to the Imaginary order and the conscious demand for love from the mother and other counterp arts of the mirror stage (including the Imaginary loving father) . In contrast, the upper half of the graph designates the Smbolic register and the unconscious articulation of desire for a nameless something b eyond what we currently h ave . Thi s s omething e l s e is whatever stands in for the Symbolic phallus as that which would represent s omeone as complete. Lacan claimed that we learn to desire this nameless othernes s by i dentifying with th e a p p a rent fre e dom of the father to transcend the m aternal p rivacy of the home. So we leave home to create a new name for ours elves in the public worl d, and we sign our works of art with our uniquely s elf authorising name s .

The Name of the Father is the Symbolic function of saying 'No' to the Desire of the Mother to keep her child at home and 'No' to the Desire of the Mother on the p art of the child who wants to b e kept a t home as well. T h e afirmation of this limit setting and boundary bre aking 'No' might be p erformed by an actual or surrogate father, by an actual or surrog ate mother's sexual or non s exual p artner of either sex, or indeed by the mother herself in her Symb olic role. However articulated, this patenal 'No' leaves behind a remainder of uns atisfied desire for the intimacy of the nurs ery. Regardless of s atisfactions received, this unconscious desire m aintains its constant impetus or drive. The strange fomula at the upper right of the graph the Subject in relation to D emand

$D,

shows the subject relentlessly

driven to ty to be what it c an never be: the mis sing phallic object of completeness that the M/other s eems to demand. Unlike the subject's confrontation with the Imaginary p artner of the mirror stage that i s figured on the second level of the graph in the face off between the alter Ego and the ideal Ego, the fouth level fomula $D designates a far more traumatic, faceless encounter. This i s the fomula for what Freud and Lacan c alled 'the drive' . I t is the encounter b etween the subject of l anguage and the internalis e d voice resounding i n i t s head that inc e s s antly makes upon it a series of ever more rigorous , impos sible demands . This is the cruel voice of the Sup erego, the impl acable command of the murdered mother, made manifest in the homicidal b o dy of Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho ( 1 960) . The diss atisfaction that the uncons cious subj ect of language is forced to endure in its failed encounter with its relentl e s s corporeal drive is labelled ' C astration' on the t o p level o f the graph . This castration is Symbolic because it does not cut directly into the incestuous s u b stance of our l o s t mother child fle s h . Instead, Sybolic castration cuts into our anxious representations of that joint lesh by means of the surgical signiiers of language. Symbolic castration is the price paid by the newly minted human

subject as it leaves b ehind the natural enjoyment of its wordl e s s

mother child b o dy and s teps i n t o i t s s evere d , i l l fitting skin o f words . Michelangelo represents himself in t h e disguise of S aint B a rthol emew holding his own horrific suit of flayed skin in the S i stine C h ape l ' s fre s c o of The Last Judgment ( 1 5 3 54 1 ) . Empti e d of natural vitality, I a m

$ , the subject split from i t s s ubstance by

the signifier's unnatural cut. At the top o f the Graph of D e s ire the flight of the arrow fro m Joui s s an c e to C a s tration and b ack again repres ents the uncons cious connotation of speech. This is an elusive supplement to the conscious denotation of speech repres ented by the lower arrow from Signifier to Voice. Just as the retroactive movement fro m Vo i c e to S i gnifier represents the p ower of the p arent to enforce his o r her me anings upon the subj e c t , the p arallel movement from C a s trati on to Joui s s ance repres ents his or her

l

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impoten c e to do s o . O riginally it was th e omnipotent and omnis cient Imaginay mother who was believed to have the p ower to determine the si gnified of the m e s s age fashioned by the child from the s ignifi ers of the Other

s (A) on the s ec o n d level of the

graph. In the s trange fourth - l evel formula

S ( { ) , however, we

encounter the unconsciously known truth that the m/other is not whole, that there i s a Signiier

the Syb olic phallus

that she too

lacks to render her complete. It is not only the s elf but also the m/other who is c a s trated, and the Symb olic father as well . Still more, the Big O ther of L anguage and Law is itself not whole, for there is always a missing signifier

somethin g more to b e said,

more words to b e invented, more works of art to b e made. There is no One final Word to b ring an end to the dnamic desire to create something more, something else, s omething new. So Lacan s trikes through the capital letter 'A' of the Other with a diagonal slash of the p e n . The sham omnipotence of the Other i s annulled in the b arred Other of lack. The emperor is naked in his suit of no clothes. B e c a u s e l anguage can only p arti ally express the corp oreal urgency of the subj e ct's needs , its enunciation of signifiers will

inevitably dis close a realm of dis s atisfaction beyond what its words can s ay. It i s this unconscious connotation of the message of the subject that is interpreted by the psycho analyst on the fourth level of the graph. Unlike the m/ other on the second level of the graph who s tabilises the meaning of the subject's signifiers in the leftward return movement from A to s iAl , in the retroactive movement from $D to S ( . ) the analy s t liberates the silent and stammering s peech of the subject from its stalled and s tifled meanings . Thi s i s the movement fro m the C astration th at i s produced under the pressure of the Other's unfulfillable demands to the Jouis s ance that i s procured in the jubilant recognition of the O ther's constitutional l ack.

Jouissance he encircled locus S I A l , where the phallic Siiier of completenes s is l acking, i s the unconscious focus o f the Other's l o s t corp oreal Jouissance. Just what is Jouissance? n ob solete word in English deriving from the word me aning 'enj oyment' that retains its currency in French, 'jouissance' in the Lacanian sense implies both the enjoyment of rights of property and the enjoyment of s exual orgasm in which a tolerated pleasure may get out of hand and become an intolerable p ain. In the unconscious circulation of speech from Jouiss ance to C astration the subject moves joyous ly from lost possession to desired disposses sion around and around, again and again. In the punning s ounds of jouissance Lacan asked us to hear the made up word jo uis sens, the sense or nons ens e that resides beyond the enjoyment of the organ in the enjoy meant of speech. Inspired by the name of Freud, the meaning of which is joy in German, Lacan may even have heard in jouissance a certain juif sens or Jew essence, a playful practice of reading exempliied both

in the R abbinic interpretation of the Hebrew letters of the Torah and in the Jewish jokes in Freud's 1 905 book, which Lacan often retold in the course of the seminar. Also heard in jouissance is the

obedient resp o n s e j'ouis, French for 'I hear' , as if the subj ect of speech unconsciously acnowledges a call coming from beyond the conscious meanings of language, from the realm of the meaningless cries and sighs of its own mythical animal copulation. In order to take up places a s speaking beings in society we must endure the Symb olic castration that incises a cut or limit upon our corp oreal enjoyment. Nevertheless , in our sensuous s avouring of the sights and s ounds of the signifiers of reading, writing, rapping and reciting, the subject of the unconscious s ustains the sublimated enjoy meant o f s p eech its elf. The movement from Joui s s ance to C a s tration represents the l o s s of primordial enjoyment that the human body forfeits in its a c c e s s ion to human subjecthood. The countermovement from C astration to Jouiss ance restores s omething of this loss in the corporeal enjoment of speech. Nevertheless , in the incompletenes s

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of the signifying chain the Other has been revealed as lacking. The unconscious fantasy of the subject is to be c ome the object to fill this lack, and thus b eyond the lack of the Other on the Graph of Desire Lacan writes the formula of fantasy

$@. Located on the

third level of the graph, this is the uniquely pers onal fantasy that the subject of unconscious desire must travers e on its looping p ath of s elf discovery. To sum up: the arrow of desire of the human subject

-

$

is shot

into the air from the deep, dark delta of organic need 1. The arrow of subjectivity seeks to pin down the desire of the m/other as an Imaginary ideal Ego

Ha)

by aixing itself to a series of Signifiers

from the Symb olic father's store of words upward, the arrow of desire

d

-

A. Forging its way

falters in the turbulent wake of

the Other's impo s sible Symbolic demands

$D. Freed to retun

to its point of origin by the disclosure of the Other's ultimate lack of force

S(.)

fantasy

$@

the arrow of desire follows the path of unconscious -

as it seeks to make good that lack. The Symbolic

s cenario of the fantasy aims to bridge the gap between the dis embodied subject o f unconscious speech and the abject shred of lost

mother child embo diment that fell away under the blade of the Signifi er that severe d it from the Thing . Falling to e arth with accelerated momentum, the arrow of desire pierces the m/other's pretence of stable meanings

s (A)

thus releasing the moi

m

of

the alter Ego from its miror stage enslavement to a false self image. At its point of terminus in the burial ground of the human subject, the arrow of desire arrives at

its own grave marker, its com

memoration as Smbolic Ego ideal

I(A) in the pure inscription of -

a N ne. So goes the light of the unconscious subject of the Signifier, from womb to tomb, from Imaginary mirror to Symbolic stone. From maternal ideal Ego to paternal Ego-ideal

The Symbolic identiication with the Name of the Father positions the subject of speech at a safe distance from the mesmerising immediacy of the maternal Thing. The lower case i (a) repres ents the alluring but decep tive Imaginary realm of fulfilled maternal love. This unstable position of the matenal ideal Ego is sublimated and provisionally stabilised by the stitching in place of the upper case I (A) of the patenal Ego ideal. Here the immediate perception of the Imaginary organ of the eye is exchanged for the mediated conception of the Symbolic letter 1. Here the creative inference of a patenal order of culture beyond the natural realm of the mother is sustained. This is the cucial difference between Freud's Imaginay reading of mother child bliss in Leonardo's Madonna and Child

ith Saint Anne and L acan's Symbolic reading of the elevated index finger of S aint Anne p ointing toward God the Father's spiritual realm . Along its circuitous path of desire the abstract subject of patenal denomination repeatedly comes face to face with concrete remnants of its lost embodiment. These remnants bear the traces of its split into the bodiless s ubj e ct of l anguage , on the one hand, and, on the o th er the l o s t joint embo diment pre s e rved ,

in the fantasy of the primordi al maternal Thing. The cryptic formul a of fantasy

$@

is an uncanny juxtap osition of a

lack and a void, a hole in b eing that permits a view of being's l o s t whole. In the grip of the fundamental unconscious fantasy, the empty subject of lingui stic meaning is for an instant held in place in the fac e of the lost object of corp o real being. Facing the m aterialised fantasy of the work of art, the thoughtful subject of uncons cious desire is temp orarily able to fuse with the thoughtles s s ubject of the s exual drive . Hence the vibration of b l i s s and menace in a p ainted lady's smile that for the past 500 years has b e en held in fragile equilibrium by the engine of perpetual desire that is the work of art. In an echo of Freud's offering of the Mona Lisa as the pictorial p aradigm of the sublimated Thing, Lacan's pimary example in his lectures on sublimation was the inhumanly beautiful woman of courtly love. This frozen statue of female inaccessibility provoked

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the p o etic devotions of her male suitors and at the s ame time s p ared them from the imp o s s ibility of any p ermanent s exual s atisfaction. She was not the Imaginary Mother who had become the unfairly forbidden object of the Symb olic Father's threat of castration. Rather, she was the monumental primordial Thing with whom no reciprocal bliss of Imaginary enjoyment could have b een p os s ible for the tiny human infant. It was thus that the Symbolic operation of p atenal castration cane to the fore to s ave the newly created subject of language from its unspeakable fascination with the matenal Thing.

The Kleinian mother In situating the mythic body of the mother at the place of the Thing Lacan acnowledged the precedence of the Austrian p sychoanalyst Melanie Klein, who sp ent m o s t of her c areer in England. Her writing and teaching was the primary s ource of object relations theory. Klein was the psychoanalyst of the generation after Freud who s e work was perhap s most respected by Lacan, though this regard w a s generally expres s e d as s trong dis agreement. As

summarised by Lacan in Book VI of his Seminar, the Kleinian theory of sublimation s aw art as performing a restitutive function in which fantasies of aggres sion toward the mother's b o dy were rep aired in the fomal medium of the work. Lacan objected to this formulation as fal s ely s i tu ating the work of art at the Imaginary level of the matenal mirror stage of s elf and other reciprocity. As we have s een, Lacan located the work of art at the Symbolic level of i dentification with the figure of the father indeed, the dead father

and the cultural order of the Other

b eyond the family that he traditionally repres ented. Lacan al s o criticised the Kleinian view of art as ahistorical. Lacan insisted that the work of art was always to be understood historic ally and that the sublimations of a twentieth century arti st would neces sarily differ in artistic style from those of an artist of another time and place. Unlike Freud, who cared little for the art of his centuy and whos e cons ervative tastes in art Lacan challenged, the Frenchman prided hims elf on his collection of works by avant garde Parisian contemporaries such as Picas s o , whom h e h a d known socially since the surrealist years o f the 1 93 0 s and for whom he had s erved as physician and even as psychiatist to the artist's mistress Dora Maar. Lacan often quoted Picasso to the effect that he, like the artist, did not seek but, rather, found. This was another way of stating his axiom of the sp lit between the eye and the gaze, whereby the world appeared to him not as an object of dispassionate obs ervation but as a disruptive force field of desire that grabbed him irresistibly in its p assionate web . Lacan a l s o quoted the do ctrine of the chance finding of the object of ' mad love ' (amour fo ul by another avant garde contemporary, the surrealist writer and polemicist Andre Breton. In his lectures on s ublimation, Lacan paid clo se attention to a landmark article of 1 92 9 by Klein, 'Infantile anxiety s ituations relected in a work of at and in the creative impulse'. In this essay, Klein presented the story of a depressed woman who tuned to p ainting in order to fill up an empty space that she felt within.

Klein understood this intenal void as the product of the daughter's aggre ssive attacks in fantasy upon the mother's body for having b een deni ed the b o dily and emotional sus tenance she craved . Instead o f stres sing the role of maternal inadequacy and infantile aggression, Lacan s aw the empty space described by Klein as the

result of the linguistic severing of the child from the mother's body.

As a consequence , the child created the fantasy of an internal

corporeal void and of a lost matenal object that had to be refound in order to fill it up.

Art a nd emptiness In insisting on the emptying out of a Symbolic void from the unbroken continuum of actual exp erience, Lacan also cited the example of the artisan's vase that created a void and the possibility of filling it. Lacan appropriated this example from a 1 9 5 1 essay

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entitled 'The Thing' (Das Ding) by the German philosopher Martin

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Heidegger, whom he met in 1 955 and whos e notoriously dense

6

Heidegger, Lacan proposed his own startling deini tion of the work

;

around the emptiness of the Thing . '

(

3

writing he trans lated. C omb ining the insights of Klein and of art: 'All art is characterized by a certain mode of organization According t o Lacan, religion avoided this primal emptines s by

filling it with God. Science rejected this void, attempting to fill it with the equations of natural l aw. Art alone manifested the emptiness of the Thing, in the illusorines s of its form s . Lacan had sought to specify this constitutional emptiness on the Graph of Desire in the formula S ( A ) , the lack of a definitive Signiier in th e l anguage store of the Other to answer one's own most fundamental questions of existence . From the p alaeolithic p aintings of the animals o f the hunt on the stone walls of the c aves of Lascaux ( 1 5 , 000 B C E ) to the renais s ance peopling of the frescoes of the churches of Rome ( C . 1 500) , art h a s endlessly emptied out a sacred space only i n order to fill it up. Ins ofar as we believe in a transcendental presence that

guarantees the truth of the artistic representation we remain at the level of the Imaginary, imagining that there is an Other, a god in the temple, who can supply the answers that we demand. We accede to the Symbolic level of unders tanding only when art presents u s with the means of recognising that its impressive perspectives are constructed illusions , as in the stage set of the Olympi c Theatre in Vicenza ( 1 580) by

the Italian architect An d r e a

Palladio . In the Symbolic art that Lacan admired, there was an airmation of the opening up of an empty space as necessarily prior to the s u p erimp os ition of any representational markings upon it, no matter how convincing thes e Imaginary illusions may be to the b eholder's eye . Anamorphosis

Lacan likened the s elf negating illusionism of art to the illusion rupturing practices of p sychoanalysi s . As a key example he introduced the audience of his seminar to The Ambassadors ( 1 533; Figure 4) by the German painter Hans Holb ein the Younger. The painting is a full length double portrait depicting two richly attired men in the pime of life, Jean de Dinteville, French ambassador to England, and his friend Georges de S elve, Bis hop of L avaur, standing on a marble mos aic floor against a p atterned wall hanging of deep green brocade. The abassadors' boastful mastery of their intenational network of religious, political, economic and scientific interests is projected in the wealth of objects laid out upon the two tiers of a tall, carpet covered table, upon which they conidently lean. Prominent among these objects are celestial and terrestrial glob e s , a sundial and other instruments of scientific measurement, a lute and a case of flute s , and a book of religious hymns and a m athematical text. Almost unseen in the upper left comer of the painting is a small silver cruciix that interrogates the worldly vanity of the two ambass adors . And, at the bottom of the painting, diagonally set between the feet of the two men, there looms a l arge , illegible object that challenges still further the

4. Hans

persp ectival stability of the s cene. The

Holbein, The

proper form of this illegible object becomes

Ambassadors

app arent only if one moves sharply away

( 1 533)

from the standard frontal view in order to take up an unconventional viewing position beyond the p ainting's right hand edge . This sidelong gaze at the p ainting repeats the structure of psychoanalytic treatment, in which the analyst does not face the eyes of the p atient but instead listens to the

signifiers of his or her unconscious dis cours e from an uns een position b eside the couch on which the patient reclines . Similarly, it is only from the side of the painting that the enigmatic fonlessness that Lacan compared to frie d eggs is resolved by the perspectival trick known as anamophosis into an eeily hovering image of a huge human skull. The skull may be an uncanny signature of s orts , for in Genan Holb ein's name means 'hollow bone'. Indeed, the overall iconography of the painting relates it to the genre of still life known a s vanitas , in which the vanity of transient lesh is humbled by the changeless face of death. By means of naming the frontally indeterminate visual blob a skull or death's head, the Symb olic order of religious iconography obliterates the Imagin ary illu s ion of a directly perceived naturalism. This act of naming opens up a radic ally new space for human m eaning, like that of Adam and Eve in the instant of assigning names in the Garden of E den. The Smbolic act also leaves behind an unsignified residue of the Real that, ever after, haunts the s ubject with the ghostly b eing of the nameless Thing. Holbein's anamorphosis of the skull provi ded the cover illustration of Book XI of Lacan's 1 964 Seminar when it was published in 1 973, but already here in Book I we can see at work the fundamental split that Lacan l ater elaborated between the eye and the gaze. ransixed by the mesmerising illusioism of Holbein's art, the frontally aligned eye of the spectator complacently surveys a world made in its own image , with its b odily likeness and creaturely c omforts temptingly displayed as if to the mythic Narcissus in his irst moments at the mirror or the modem subject upon the mirror stage of illusory s elf love. Like the psychoanalyst who sits outsi de the line of sight of the p atient the b etter to attend to the Symbolic meanings of his or her discours e rather than b e caught in t h e Imaginary face off of a dmiration, rivalry and pretens e, s o too the s p ectator at the side of the painting may accede to the Symbolic level of interpretation by looking obliquely past the b lurred images of worldly wealth in order to bring into

foc u s the empty eye sockets of the skull, the blind gaze of death. Lacan called this perspectival anamorphosis the painting's sinister truth, the signifier of the subject's death. This sidelong image of the skull c annot simultaneously be held in focus along with its frontal appearance as an amorphous stain. And yet, Lacan insisted, we get p l e a s ure a s we repe atedly rep o sition ourselves from the

fro n t to the side and s avour the o s cillating appe arance and di s appearance of an illus ory image from out of a nothingness to

which it returns . Like the child with its teddy bear, comfort bl a nket o r thumb, we gain an Imaginary mas tery over the unavoidable contingency of life by p l aying with a Symb olic representation of the cranial bone of death . This emergent anamorphic thing of the skull is not in itself the Thing . The Thing its elf always remains inaccessible, but with the aid of the signifying trait of l anguage that irst severed

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us from the p rimordial Thing we can at least p oint to its

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withdrawal from us. Thus the deinition of s ublimation: 'A work of

§

yes , but only from the s afety of aesthetic distance . Lacan affirmed

:

object of realistic imitation. The work of art wa s not realist but

:

9

art alway s involves encircling the Thin g . ' Encircling the Thing, that the aim of artistic repres entation w a s not to b e come an other than realist, and through its deployment of the s ignifying elements of art it repres ented the Thing in its illus ory pres ence and actual absence at one and the s ame time. To come too close to the Thing of our fundamental fantasy would endanger the very stability of our i dentity as a named individual. Lacan himself may have manifested anxiety about the unspeakable Thing he was en deavouring to s p e ak about by mistakenly p lacing Holb ein's p ainting in the collection of the Louvre rather than in its proper place at the N ational Gallery in London. The unc anny duality of showing and hiding in Holbein's anamorphic skull may b e compared to a notorious Dadaist object of 1 9 20, The Enigma of Isadore Ducasse, by the American artist M an Ray, in which an unseen s ewing machine i s wrapped in a

blanket (Tate Gallery, London) . More recently, something of the unc anny hiddenn e s s of the Thing has b e e n made manifest at the centre of our cities in the wi dely p ublicised proj ects of the Bulgarian and French team o f marri e d arti sts C hristo and Jeanne Claude, such as the Wrapped Pont Neuf in 1 985 in Paris or the Wrapped Reichstag in 1 995 in Berlin. In his lectures on the ethics of psychoanalysis, Lacan tuned to works of art in order to exemplify his thesis on the sublimation of the disturbing leshly allure of Imaginay maternal pres ence in the pacifying formal structures of Symbolic paternal inference . Echoing the evoc ation by the French writer Paul Claudel of the trans cendent dignity of the ordinary obj ects depicted in D utch seventeenth centuy still life p aintings , Lacan asserted the special status of this genre of nature morte ('dead nature' , in French) . For Lacan, these p aintings of still life vibrated b etween the everyday utilitarianism of the depicted objects and an extraordinay mirage of b eauty that s eemed to stop the flow of time in which tho s e objects would normally be consumed. I n a 1 936 essay o n the origin of the work of art, Heidegger had found a transcendent dignity o f the object i n t h e still life p aintings of shoes b y the Dutchman Van Gogh. In his own discus sion of Van Gogh's Shoes ( 1 88 6 , Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam) , Lacan again stre s s e d art 's poised equidistance b etween the mundane repro duction o f objects of ready u s e and the arbitrary creation o f a signifying order that resisted useful appropriation in the name of the sheer uselessness of beauty. In its negation of the accident of life p ainted b eauty wears the absolute mask of death, the sublimated representation of the trans cendent dignity of even the merest empty shoe. In his remarks on nature morte Lacan silently tuned to a 1 945 e s say by his friend, the philos opher M erleau Ponty, on the art of the French p ainter Paul Cezanne. For Lacan, Cezanne's still life of

Apples ( 1 8 7 8 , Fitzwilliam Museum, C ambridge) succeeds as art precisely by failing to appear as the convincing imitation of edible

pieces of fruit according to the reigning pictorial conventions of his age . In indicating the formal mechanism by which the illusion of Cezanne 's Apples was both accomplished and at the same time undone, Lacan touched on the shifting history of art as well as what he considered to be its enduring transhistorical mystery. On the one hand, C ez anne's efforts were to be understoo d in a relation of subj ective opposition to the conventional work of his financially succes sful counterparts. On the other hand, Cezanne's art was also to b e s e en as manifesting a relation of objective indebtedne s s to the Symb olic order of the signifier as such. Thro ugh a novel manipulation of the formal properties of the Symb olic l anguage of art, s ome outstanding members of earlier generations of artists had also attempted to renew the dignity of the Thing that had become c ompromis e d by overexp o s ure and routine u s e . In his App le s C ez anne endeavoured to raise

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an ordinary, visible, Imaginary thing to the Symbolic l evel of

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thus have been b o th a s h owing of the l o s t materi ality of

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the extraordinary, invisible Thing. C ez anne's p ainting would the maternal Thing and its hiding beneath the p aternal veil of artistic language. According to Freud's s c enario of s ublimation, the artis t gained satisfaction without the p ain o f neurotic repres sion by trans forming the maternal object of patenal interdiction into a work of art. The s ucces sful artist was rewarded with fame and money by a grateful public that uncons ciously recognised in the artist's works the traces of its own censored dreams and desires . Lacan argued that thi s account of the commercial valoris ation of art was merely a short circuiting of the problem of b eauty, about which Freud had often conceded that he had nothing of value to say. Lacan was not similarly reticent on the subject, proposing that the creation of the effect of b eauty in art succeeded by disaming the darts of desire. Duchamp's 1 9 5 1 Objet-D ard (Object Dart,

Object ofA rt) simultaneously offers the viewer the exterior form of the p enis and the interior mold of the vagina while being neither

the one nor the other but, rather, their impossible co relation in the Symb olic fom of art. The beautiful appearance of the work of art damps the fires of unfulfilled desire s , but this is a beauty that may not be touched. Look all you like but don't touch the art object, the sign in the museum s ays . To this amonition regarding the proper enjoyment of artistic propety the p sychoanalyst adds that it behooves us to maintain a safe distance for our own sake, all the while keeping the object of our desire directly in our sights . In this erotic tango of distance and proximity we ind the elements of the formula of fantasy, the split subject of the unconscious steadfastly facing the object's swirling hypnotic voi d

$@. One might think here of

Duchamp 's breast like mechanical Rotay Demisphere of 1 925 or the equally hypnotic metronome of Man Ray's eye emblazoned

Indestructible Object of 1 923 (both Mus eum of Mo dern Art, New York) . Caried along in the unending stream of signiiers , unassuaged desire splits the subject of sp oken language into conscious and unconscious constituencie s . Although not s anctioned by Lacan's own typ ographical practi c e , I believe that this split s ubj ect is appropri ately designated throughout this text by the dollar sign -

$

-

inasmuch as it is the global low of capital that constitutes us

as conscious and unconscious consumers within the worldwide store of commo dities on which our moden subjecthoo d of lack so largely depends. Objecthood for us resides in the empty fom of the commodity itself

for beyond it lies the unattainable

object of the endlessly circling coporeal drive, designated by the typ ographical sign for both an individual item's price

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as

well as a named individual's concrete e mail link to the disemb o died web of commercial cyberspace. Barbara Kruger, an American graphic artist who escaped from the consumerist world of advertising, challenges us with a huge photograph of an empty hand seeming to hold a s ign that declare s , 'I shop therefo re I am' ( 1 987).

In the dollar sign the s ubj ec t of the desired commodity is cleft

in twain, m a kin g it an alienated Symbolic object

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to itself. Into

the empty frame of the commodity is p rojec t ed the Im ag ina y object

-

that is desired just because it is that which the

other is p r es umed to desire from among the ever changing high

glo s s and hard sell images of the mass media. And in its repetitive circling of the Real Thin g

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as a p op ular cola c alls its elf, the

corpo re a l drive p ays again and again the price of its mad roulette

wager to r e c ov er the original s take it has i rrev ersi bly lost. In the face of the unre l entin g demand of the Other

Its lost obj e c t , I fas hi o n for myself a fantasy

p ro t e c t my se l f from b eing

drawn into

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for me to be in order to

the Other's l e tha l grip. In

the variegated foms of artistic sublimation I retri eve some abject s crap of m at eri a lit y, which is all that remains from the primal

severi n g of th e voice, gaze and fle sh of the Thing Subject, object, .

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abject. Symbolic, Im ag in a ry Real. $@. ,

Chapter 4

The l ost

object

Book eight o f Lacan's s eminar transcribes his lectures o n the topic of transference. As understood by Lacan , trnsference describes the patient's wishful, though erroneous, endowment of the analyst with a presumption of the nowledge that will provide relief from her or his suffering. Also projected upon the person of the analyst are feelings of love and h ate derived from the patient's most intimate rel ations with parent s , teachers , colle agues , friend s , sibling s , children, lovers . n refusing t o gratify the demands o f the p atient for reciproc a l declarations of love, direct answers to questions, even normal convers ation between social peers, the analyst requires a high degree of libidinal sublimation from the analys and in order to allow repressed signiiers to emerge and the fundamental fantasy to be freed. Rather than the dyadic other of the Imaginary patner of the mirror stage or the triadic Other of the impersonal Symbolic code , the analyst must position himself or herself in relation to yet another other. This other is the s ame for everyone regardless of familial or cultural situation; this other is the monadic or absolute other of the Real. This is the One other that was lost to each and every human subject upon its traumatic entry into the world of articulated demands and unsatisied desires and around which the drive continuously tun s . It is because of this invariable One that Lacanian p sychoanalysis is neither histoicist nor relativist with respect to the lost animal embo diment of every woman and man. Irrevocably severed from its animal being a s a result of the Imaginay and Symbolic failure to represent it fully in either image

or word, the s ubj ect can s ignify the Thing o nly in its a b s ence from the rep ertory of repre s entation. S ymb olic cas tration is the consequence of this ab sence of immediate animal pres ence in our mediated forms of representation; and the signifier of thi s ab sence is the Symb olic phallus. This phallus is not the symbol of any existing entity of lesh, such as a p articular man's penis , but is , rather, the Lacanian name for the substitution of a present word for an absent thing in the creative act of signiication. This phallus occupies the empty sp ace of disembo diment that the signiier carves out of the Real. In short, the popular conception of the Freudian phallus of paternal potency and power is a fallacy, a fraud.

Castration

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Lacan b rought to his l ectures on castration a repro duction of Psyche Suprising Cupid by the little knon Italian painter Jacopo Zucchi, which the p sychoanalyst had recently seen in the Borghese Gallery in Rome ( 1 589; Figure 5 ) . He also exhibited a sketch of the p ainting made expressly for the s eminar by his brother in law, Andre Masson. Masson had similarly p rovided Lacan with an updated version of a painting by the Frenchman Gustave C ourbet entitled The Origin of the World ( 1 866; Figure 6 ) , which s everal years earlier Lacan had acquired for his pivate collection. Seving as a sliding cover to hide an object to be seen only with discreet precaution, Mas son's brushstrokes shrouded in snowscape like outlines the contours of the sho ckingly naked female b o dy beneath . As framed by the realist painter C ourb et and reframed by the surrealist p ainter Mass on, this was a clos e up view of a reclining woman who s e b o dy was cut off at the thighs and shoulders by the picture's bottom and top edges and whose opened legs reve aled her genital s , her b elly and her p arti ally covere d breasts . Given to the French state by Lacan's heirs in lieu of taxes on his estate, the painting now launts itself at the Ors ay Museum in Pari s as the most celebrated image of the Lacanian maternal

5. Jacopo Zucchi, ( 1 589) .

Psyche Surprising Cupid

6, Gustave Courbet, The Origin of the World ( 1 866) ,

Thing , In the vulgar pun of L a ca n lZa

con, C ourbet's pi cture of the I maginary female phallus becomes a Symbolic allegory of the analyst's name. It provi d e s the unsuspected p rivate backdrop for Lacan's public remarks on Zucchi's painting of Cupid and Psyche, an ancient erotic narrative that also figure d among the semi pornographic nudes of C ourbet. In Zucchi's painting we see the nearly nude figure of Psyche, a drawn dagger in her right hand, and a lamp held high in her left hand to illuminate the sleeping igure on the bed at her feet. This is C upid, son of Venus, the goddess of love, who had made love to the

mortal woman Psyche under the cover of darkness and who had forbidden her from seeking to gaze upon his face. Her nascent pregnancy covered by the merest veil of diaphan o u s drap ery, Psyche appe ars to be looking directly down at the penis of Cupi d , which the p ainter has h i dden from the spectator's view by placing in front of it a large bouquet of lowers in a vase . As in Holbein's Ambassadors, with its conlicting persp ectives of Imaginary life and Symbolic death, here we have the split betwe en Psyche's eyeful of the impregnating member of her divine lover and the gaze of the bouquet that keep s us from seeing what we would like to see. If the Real penis of ins emination appears only in the abs ent fom of the Smbolic phallus of castration, this severing is sutured together by the reassuring fetish of the Imaginay maternal phallus in the erect figure of Psyche hers elf. The figure of Psyche is the traditional symbol of the Soul seeking to face the mystery of corporeal Love to which it is driven despite the prohibition of the Law. P syche is also a p ersonifi c ation of p sychoanaly s i s its elf, which in Freud's compound German phra s e of Psych O A n a lyse would be b etter trans l ated as 'Analys i s of the Soul ' . I n the title o f Psyche Suprising Cupid, Lacan's listeners may have h eard an allegory of the psycho analytic technique of free association, whereby the analyst listens to the analysand's spoken discourse in order to surprise the signifiers of unco n scious desire in the unpredictable instant of their emergence from the fetters of repression. Zucchi's painting is yet another example of the dialectic between the eye and the gaze, between the visible and the invi s i b l e , between the b o dy and the s oul, between the Imaginary register of immediate perception and the Symb olic register of mediated conception. Fearing that her lover and the father of her unb orn child might be a hideous monster, Psyche looks b etween the legs of C upid in a desire for carnal knowledge. E qually des irous for knowledge, the spectator finds in that place of would be certainty that there is precis ely nothing to see, no

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meaningful word to s ay. Refering in his essay 'The signiication of the phallu s ' 1 1 958) to a mural p ainting of a shrouded s culptural phallus in the Villa of the Mysteries at Pompeii 150 B C E ) , Lacan insisted that the phallus plays its Symbolic role in s ociety only when it is veiled. Only a s veiled is the phallus the signifier of its own abs ence, its own castration. The anxiety of Imaginay castration arises from the rivaly of the egos of the mirror stage, between oneself as alter Ego and the image of the ideal Ego of the m/other. In Zucchi's p ainting a direct expre s s i on of this fear would have b een to depict Psyche cutting off the p enis of C up i d with her dagger. Symb olic ca s tration repres ents the overcoming of the axiety of Imaginary mutilation by enabling the subject to separate itself from the intimate impasse with the m/other by way of an identification with the public signiier of the p atenal Ego ideal. Zucchi may have b een locked in

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personal rivalry with any numb er of contemp oraries, but he also had the chance to become an arti s t with an indep endent s tyle, because the theme of C upid and Psyche was freely available in

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his cultural tradition for formal elaboration and reinvention.

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than the gaping cut b etween what we directly s e e and what we

9

We should understand Symbolic castration a s nothing o ther indirectly s ay we see by means of the signifier. For Lacan, the Real corp oreal p enis offered its elf up for transfo rmation into the disembodied Symbolic phallus insofar as its rhythm of tumescence and detumescence, of appearance and disappearance in copulation, mimes the filling and emptying of the signifying void that it is the task of the signifier to accomplish. In his analysis of Zucchi's p ainting, Lacan insisted that the b ouquet of flowers was not p ainted over a pre exi s tent rep res entation of the penis of Cupid but, rather, proided a veil behind wich there was no actual p enis to see but only the void of the name of the Symbolic phallus to s ay. Following a fundamental premise of Freud, Lacan afirmed that the sublimation of animal nature into human culture was best exempliied by the supplementation of the perc eptually evident

connection of the mother and her child at birth with the abstract inference of p aternity and the attribution to the child of the father's Symbolic name . Borrowed from the dictionary of the Other, the signiier confers upon the emergent subj ect the power of naming its needs in the

fom of demands addressed to other subjects, beginning with the pimay caregiver, wh o is most often the mother. At the s ame time,

however, the signifier cuts into the subject's experience of un divided mother child embodiment, leaving behind the scar of that severed pound or ounce or shred of lesh that goes under the name of the lost o bj ect. This object of primal loss remains an object of desire only a s long as it is not posses sed, for it b ecomes an object of anxiety if it is felt to get too clos e . In Book X o f The Sem in a r, o n the topic o f anxi ety, Lacan illustrated h i s conc ept o f the obj e c t from which the subject must lean to separate itself by appealing to old master paintings he had recently seen. The s e were a p air of p aintings by the Spaniard Francisco de Zurbanin, who s e standing, h alf life sized representations of Saint Agatha ( 1 63 3 , Fine Arts Museum, Chartres) and Saint Lucy ( 1 6 3 6 , Fabre Museum, Montp ellier) show them calmly displaying the cut off body p arts of their torture and martyrdom to the b eholder's gaze. Richly dres sed in red, yellow and black against a b are, shadowy ground, S aint Lucy appears to cast her heavily lidded gaze down at her exorbited eyes lying upon a platter she holds at her waist. Similarly attired, S aint Agatha tuns her gaze outward as if to offer the spectator her two severed

breasts on a plate as objects of canal sacriice. In these sep arated body p arts L acan s aw the Imaginary envisioning of the abject remainder of the Real, the uncanny object that was left behind as an irretrievable residue of lesh upon the subject's entry into the fl eshle s s realm of the Symbolic s ignifier. The formul a of fantasy

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captures the prec arious sublimation whereby

the alienated subject of linguistic signiication must endeavour to hold in check the primordial anxiety of corporeal mutilation that

clings to the app earance of the severed object. C astration anxiety is merely a s econdary mask that prevents the subject from having to face its still more archaic s evering from the mother's placenta, breast, voice and gaze. In Western art, the mutilation of the male body is repeatedly staged in scenes from C ain killing Abel in the book of Genesis to the G ospel accounts of the lagellation and cruciixion of Christ. Powerful women are p e rp etrators of this violence in Biblical paintings by the Dutch master Rembrandt of Delilah cutting off the hair of S amson ( 1 6 3 6 , Stidelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt) and of Judith b eheading the Assyrian general Holofenes ( 1 5 9 9 , Pal azzo Barberini, Rome) b y the Italian master Michelangelo d a C aravaggio. I n an autobiographical version of the latter subject, the p ainter C ri stofano Allori is thought to have depicted his own fe atures in the decapitated head that is held in the grip of his

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by means of the fictive scenario of her painting may be taking

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subject by Allori's female contemporary Artemisia Gentileschi, who revenge on a male artist who had a s s aulted her and on account of which she had endured public tri al and torture ( 1 620, Uffizi Gallery, Florence) . The equally popular subject of Salome carrying the s evered head of John the Baptist on a platter provided the British artist Aubrey B eardsley an occasion to relish the peverse fantasy of masculine humiliation at the hands of the femme fatale in his controversial illustrations of Os car Wil de's notorious play of 1 8 94. The traumatic cut of s ep aration became a matter of personal rather than art historical concen to Lacan in late 1 96 3 , when his colleagues in the French Society of P sychoanalysis acquiesced to a demand of the International Psychoanalytical Association that he be formally s ep arated from their group. They were required to cut Lacan from the ranks of their training analysts in order to enjoy all the prerogatives of institutional membership. By this time

Lacan had been promoting his controversial views in his public seminar for more than a decade, but it was his heterodox practice of varying the duration of his clinical s e s s ions with p atients that precipitated the defini tive break with the international organi sation. Lacan maintained that varying the duration of the ses sion enab led the analyst to p unctu ate the dis cours e of the patient at whatever point repressed signifiers seemed to break free from the patient's resistance, but the intenational govening body held that the practice viol ated the patient's legitimate expectation to have the analyst fully available for the entirety of the hour. At the lone seminar on the N ames of the Father in November 1 96 3 , h i s last held a t the hospital of S ainte Anne, where he had been teaching since 1 9 53, Lacan likened his institutional fate to the excommunication from the Jewish community of the seventeenth century philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Lacan had long identiied with Spinoza's dictum that desire i s the ess ence of man. I n the philos opher's acknowledgement of the intellect of God in every p arcel of matter in the universe, Lacan recognised the univers ality of the signifying cut of the word, whereby the world's materiality took on meaning for man. Lacan exemplified this idea of the sh attering, world creating p ower of the word with the Biblical story in which the Jewish p atriarch Abraham made ready to s acrifice his son Isaac on the authority of nothing other than the word of an invisible God with an unpronounceable Name . As depicted by C aravaggio around the year 1 600 (Uizi Gallery, Florence) , the bald and bearded father, his heavily d raped figure cut off at the knee s by the p ainting's lower edge, holds d own the head of his bound and naked son upon a stone altar with his left hand while his right hand grips the sacriicial lmife at the centre of the painting. This hand, in tun, i s held i n check b y the right handed grasp of a naked winged angel, cut off by the frame on the left, who p oints with his left index finger across the span of the compo sition to a ram, cut off by the frame at the right, that will be the sacrificial substitute for the

son in accordance with God's word. The pointing inger, the drawn blade, the ram, and the cut off igures of the angeL the father and the son are all so many embo diments of the cut of the signifier its elf by which the world's random array of visible m atter i s sublimated into the Symb olic repres entation o f an idea. I t was on account of this abstract idea of Symbolic sep aration that a particular family trio Abraham, I s aac and his mother S arah cut itself off from its extended kin

Abraham's concubine Hagar

and her son Ishmael, forefather of the Arab s

in order to take on

the new name of the Jewish nation. This Symb olic split within a single family tragically reverb erates today in the Middle East and around the glob e . I n C aravaggio's composition, the Imaginary coniguration is transigured by a Symbolic name beyond which lies the nameless anxiety of the Real. The remnant of the Real i s the foreskin of the

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penis, the abject piece of flesh cut off by the s ignifying blade in the identity conferring rite of circumcis ion that Abraham and Isaac p a s s e d d own to th eir male descendants . The ritual act of

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circumcision provided the Imaginary b asis for Lacan's doctrine of Symbolic castration. In the accession to cultural identity by way of Symbolic i dentiication with a community's arbitrary signiier, a p iece of the Real of universal embodiment is sacriiced. Here again we find our formula of sublimation: the split subject of the signifier facing the lost remnant of its primordial embo diment from across the empty frame that is provisionally filled out by the work of art

$@. In the s acrifice of Isaac the lost joui s s ance

of the lesh became the Symbolic e ssence of the Jew.

Chapter 5

What is a p i cture?

'Excommunication' i s the title of the op ening chapter o f the first of Lacan's annual Seminars to b e published, the irst s eminar not held at the psychi atric hospital of Sainte Anne as a pedagogical program of the French Psychoanalytic Society, and the first held under university auspices at the prestigious Ecole Normale Superieure. Initially announced under the title The Foundations ofPsychoanalysis, the seminar was summarised by Lacan in 1 965 under the fourfol d rubric of the unconsciou s , the rep etition compulsion, the transference and the drive. TURD (transference unconscious rep etition drive) strikes me as an appropriate device for the recall of Lacan's four fundamental concepts, especially in vi ew of the new stress in thi s seminar on the s o called object ' a ' . Object 'a' designates the lost object as an abject remnant and uncanny revenant of the Real. Its lower case 'a' stands for autre or l ittle other in order to distinguish it from the Big Other of the general l anguage system. In French objet a was pronounced by Lacan as objet petit a, 'object small a ' , both in order to preserve its quasi algebraic character as an abstract symbol for the absence of the lost object and also to s ound like

objet petit tas, ' a little pile of shit' . In 2007 broadsheet manifestos on behalf of the unmediated actualis ation of desire were p asted on top of New York C ity street art murals with the title 'Art: The Excrement of Action' . Reduce d to the status of a commodity, the

objet d 'art, the object of art, i s the objective turd of the arti st's lost labour of love.

Pub l i s h e d as Th e Fo u r Fu n d a m ental Con cep ts of Psychoanalysis, the chapter headings and s ectional notations of

Book XI of The Seminar are the artefact of Jacques Alain Miller's editorial punctuation of his father in law's spoken discourse that a stenographer had more or less accurately transcribed on the spot. The result may b e as much Millerian as Lacanian, an interp o s e d ilter between the l o s t voice of the analyst and the dead letter of the dis ciple's written law. Coming seven years after the pUblication of Ecrits in 1 9 6 6 , the 1 9 7 3 publication consoli dated Lacan's reputation in French intellectual circles, just as the translation of these s ame two volumes did for English readers in 1 977. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis expanded the exposure of Lacan's doctrine to univers ity audiences in literature and philos ophy but did little to alter the dis approbation of Lac an's

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technical dissidence and theoretical dificulty for the membership of British and North American p sychoanalytic societies. Despite

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in the 1 9 7 6 preface to the English translation, the widespread

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attention on the part of artists and critics to the four lectures entitled 'The split between the eye and the gaze', 'Anamorphosis ' , 'The line and light' and 'What is a p icture?' has made a reading of Book XI of The Sem i n a r an indi s p ensable component in understanding the culture and commentary of the visual arts over the course of the past twenty ive years. Three internationally prominent artists who have called upon Lacanian theory in their writings, images and installations are the English Victor Burgin, the American Mary Kelly and the Israeli Bracha L. Ettinger.

The split between the eye and the g aze A chance impetus behind Lacan's lecture on the split between the eye and the gaze was the po sthumous publication in 1 964 of the fragmentary manuscript The Visible and the Invisible by Merleau Ponty. In an obituary tribute written at the time of his friend's early death in 1 96 1 at the age of fifty three, Lacan had remarked

on the phenomenologist's tentative strivings b eyond the visibility of the eye of perception into the invisible domain of the gaze of signification that seemed to him to abut his own efforts in psycho analysis . In Cezanne's little blue and brown brushstrokes, already the subj e ct of Lacan's commentary in Book VI on sublimation, Merleau Ponty had perhaps b egun to see a signiier like character whereby the painter laboured, as he himself wrote, to make his works speak. For Lacan, this was a fun damental instance of the split in the experience of the speaking subject between the Imaginary eye of conscious visual perception and the Symbolic gaze of meaning mediated by the invisible network of signifiers through which the work of visual art was made and viewe d . Just like the vacillating p o s ition of the subject of unconscious desire in language, Cezanne's position as the subject of unconscious desire in p ainting was suspended in the blank intervals b etween one and another signifying touch of p aint. It was in this sense that Lacan argued that, unlike a sign that represents something for someone according to the classic definition of the Ameri c an philos opher Charle s S anders Peirce, a signifier repre sents the subject for another signifier. As disclosed by Lacanian p sychoanalysis, the inscription of C ezanne's subjectivity was precis ely nowhere to be fo und other than in his little p ats of paint. Following Merleau Ponty's lead, Lacan insisted on the pre exi stence of the overall ield of visibility to the agency of any individual eye looking at the world. Whereas the individual sees from one specific p oint in space, that s ame in divi du al is susceptible to being seen on all sides . For the psychoanalyst, however, this was not simply a question of the corporeal limits of vision. In its expo sure to the invisible gaze of others , the subject discovers itself a s prey to the discompo sure and objectification that Lacan saw as the equivalent of castration anxiety in the visual field. It was in this split b etween the subject's seeing eye and the subject's expo sure to the other's gaze that Lacan situated the

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relexivity of the scopic drive . Als o known as scop ophilia, the libidinal drive of the look is not only to see the obj ect of desire (voyeurism) but also to make ones elf seen by the o ther as the desired object of its gaze (ehibitionism) . The subject is in part produced as the invisible lost object of the m/other's gaze that the scopic drive insistently demands to recover but can only revolve around its absent place. This is why I use the typographical symbol @ to mimic the circular revolution of the drive around the void of the lost object. The s ubject in its role as the m/other's lost obj e ct i s one of the primary forms of the object ' a ' . On the level o f the Imaginary this is the familiar s cenario o f the Mona Lisa, where the artist rep ositioned himself in unconscious fantasy to b ecome once again the l o s t object o f his mother's childhoo d gaze. We can extend that scenario to include the desire to be gazed at on the p art of the woman of the portrait hers elf. 0 1

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Here Lacan s aw the satisfaction of a beautiful woman who knows that she is b eing observed, who does not show that she knows, and who se observers do not show that they know that she knows. Basing his views on an essay of 1 929 by the English p sychoanalyst Jo an Riviere, 'Womanlines s as a m a s quera d e ' , L a c an regarded the wom an's beautiful appearance as an aesthetic strategy of sublimatio n whereby she transformed herself through co smetics and fashion from a lesh and blood creature in the Imaginary order of visible things into an abstract, imp ersonal, Symb olic ideal. In the p aradoxical presence of her mas querade she made app arent the absence of the Real Thing. The illusion of autonomous agency of the ' I see' of the Ego corresp onded for Lacan to the Imaginary self deception of the famous ' I think' of the French s eventeenth century philos opher Rene D e s c arte s . Expre s sing the des ire for c ertain human knowledge, the philos ophical theorem 'I think therefore 1 am' (in Latin , Cogito ergo sum) was to be replaced by Lacan's p sychoanaltic aiom of the uncertainty of human desire, Desidero

ergo sum, 'I desire therefore 1 am' . On account of the lost object

I am a creature of lack. On account of my lack I am a creature of desire. And because the acquisition of any p articular thing I see can never be more than a meagre sub stitute for the lost desire of the m/other, the persistent desire for s omething other remains my pemanent condition. In the tragic split insisted on by Lacan, the eye was on the side of the Imaginary C artesian delusion of subj ective agency

I s ee

- and the gaze was on the side of the Real object of anxiety

I am

seen, I am shown

caused by the subject's double exp osure to

the enigmatic desire of the Imaginary m/other and the Symbolic Other: 'What the hell does S he/He/They want with me ?' In the consciousness of waking life I may imagine that I initiate the seeing of what I see, but in the unconsciousness of sleep it becomes apparent that I do not actively see but, rather, am p a ssively shown the dream s c enario in which I am put on di splay. This coercive showing to the dreamer of the gaze · of the dream is similar to the posture in which the spectator stands in front of the vacill ating op art of the 1 960s by the Hungarian born French artist Victor Vas arely or the English p ainter Bridget Riley. Anamorphosis

The uncanny visibility of Smbolic castration in painting was the subject of Lacan's lecture on the visual distortion of anamorphosis. Here Lacan returned to his e arlier m e ditation on Holbein's anamorphic skull by way of the recent eulogy of Merleau Ponty. In Lacan's return to the subj ect of death he was re enacting the repetition compulsion itself, one of the four fundamental concepts of p sycho analysis that it was his concern to expound. In the original topography of the drives of around 1 900 Freud had postulated a fundamental conflict between the self preservative and sexual drives, but with his development of the theoy of narcissism around 1 9 1 0 the Ego itself was discovered to be not only the s ource of sexual interest in others but also the recurrent object of auto erotic sexual regard. In working with the recurrent

nightmares of surviving soldiers of World War

I,

Freud began to

formulate the notion of a repetitive drive in which indivi duals se emed to p refer to revisit past situations of pain rather than to s e ek new avenues of pleasure. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle of 1 920, Freud launched his second topography of the subject in which the interp ersonal intercourse of the erotic drive was said to be in continuous conflict with the destructiveness and s elf destructiveness of the death drive. The majority of Freud's fo ll owers in Ego p sychol o gy failed to fo llow their master's s p e culations in this lethal direction, but Melanie Klein s aw the outward projection of the death drive in children's aggres sive fant a s i e s

of d i s m emb erment o f the mother's b o dy

a

dismemberment that could be rep aired in the sublimated formal unity of the work of art. In

his early paper on the mirror stage written in 1 936 and

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revised in 1 949, Lacan also s aw the death drive at work within the

i

b etween the uncoordinated and fragmentary movements of the

9

confronted it in the mirror. In that widely read essay (included a s

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subject in the violent disparity that the young child experienced p arts of i t s b o dy and the s e aml e s s unity of the image that the op ening chapter in the s elected transl ation of Ecrits in 1 977), Lacan exempliied the fantasy of the fragmented body by appealing to the visionary works of the Netherlandish master Hieronymous Bosch, who depicted around the year 1 500 the tortured limbs and distended organs of the pers ecuted s ouls in Hell in The Garden

of Earthly Delights (Prado Mus eum, Madri d) . In 1 964 this bl atant Imaginary fantasy of the b o dy in-pieces was replaced with the latent image of Symbolic castration of Holbein's anamorphic skull that remaine d invis ible when viewed in the frontal manner of Merleau Ponty's phenomenology of perception. Nevertheles s , t he phil o s o pher's p o s thumous p ages on t h e emergence of the individual seeing eye from the primordial lesh of the world evoked a tantalising glimps e of the amorphous space of the Real that invisibly undergirded the articulation of the uncons cious.

Nonethel e s s , L acan maintained that Merleau Ponty did not adequately acknowl edge the death drive of the Symbolic order whereby the continuity of the Real was broken down by the discontinuity of the signiier into that which could be articulated and the remainder that could not. The bre akdown of the myth of corporeal unity upon which phenomenology depends is aptly illustrated in Rene Magritte's Eternal Evidence of 1 93 0 (Meni! C ollection, Houston) ,

a

series of five vertically hung p aintings of

fragments of a woman's naked body from head to toe. B ecause I can never look at mys elf from the p o s ition of my mother's gaze I take what s atisfaction I can by looking at myself in the mirror instead. For Lacan, this narcissistic s atisfaction in seeing oneself seeing oneself was a defensive effort aimed at eluding the objectifying consequences of the outside gaze. When, as an artist, I look in the mirror to p aint my self portrait I see mys elf seeing mys elf, but what I do not see is the invisible gaze of the Other to which I uncons ciously show mys elf in order to be acknowledged as worthy of recognition. Firstly, at the level of the Imaginary, the other, the little other, is someone like me, my i deal Ego, on the p attern of which I fa shion myself a s alter Ego . Secondly, at the level of the S ymbolic, the Other, the Big Other, is the comunal storehouse of signifiers from which my mother and father selected a name b efore my birth and a set of descriptions thereafter that circumscribed me as the anxious object of their enigmatic desire . Thirdly, at the level of the Real, the other, the lost object or object 'a', is the fallen leshly p art of me from which I wa s severed upon my forced enty into the Symb olic order of speech. Previously Lacan had stressed that this lost object was an object of desire that could be aimed at by putting an image or a name in the place of the desired Thing. Now Lacan insisted that the object ' a' was visually unimaginable and literally indescribable, but should be understood instead as the irrecuperable object around which the libidinal drive incessantly tuned. The desire to recover the lost object 'a' is impos sible to s atisfy, but thi s imp a s s e is

, .

circumvented in the working of the drive . The drive finds its satis faction not in the ultimate attainment of some inal goal. but in the unending process of seeking itself. The lost o bject 'a' of the oral drive is the weaned, rejected breast that once constituted a p art of the joint flesh of the mother child dyad that the speaking subject may later grieve as lost even thou gh it doesn't truly want it b ack. Similarly, the lost object 'a' of the anal drive that one doesn't want b ack is the b owel movement offered as an appeasing gift in response to the m/other's toileting demand. Freu d and Klein had written extens ively of the oral and anal drives and their corresponding objects , but Lacan introduced two a dditional drives as related l e s s to the imperative of the m/other's demand and more to the enigma of the m/other's desire. The lost object 'a' of the invocatory drive is the s ound of the l/other's voic e prior to its decipherment by the subject a s a

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signifying word. And the lost object 'a' of the scopic drive , the object of Lacan's closest attention in Book XI, is the reciprocal gaze of the mother and child, the vani shing of which constituted me as a mutilated eye in my 1's exile from the Real. Previously, in Book VI, s ublimation was s een to offer the Symb olic subject of desire in l anguage the cultural opp ortunity to position its elf by means of the Imaginary s emblance of the wo rk in a face to face relationship of fanta sy to the l o s t o bject of desire $ @ . N ow, in Book XI, the s ubject was invited to cro s s the plane of the fantasy

and separate itself from the

alienation of its Symb olic identifi c atio n

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in order to

exp erience the j o ui s s an c e of the drive in its repetitive encirclement of the object 'a'

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a s a l o s t remnant of the

R e a l . And what does the drive encircle? It encircles the void of the subj e c t itself. We see this endl e s s sp inning around an emptines s in the first of Duchamp 's famous ready mades , the spinning Bicycle Wheel of 1 9 1 3 , the o riginal of which is appropri ately l o s t ( 1 9 5 1 repli c a , Museum of Mo dern Art, New Yorkl .

The mask Within the circuit of the scopic drive the lost remnant of my primordial s eparation from the mother is the gaze. Painter s , Lacan claimed, have managed to recapture s omething of the pre Smbolic blankness of that gaze in what he called the mask, as , for example, in The Maja and the Masked Men ( 1 777, Prado Museum, Madrid) by the Spanish master Francisco de Goya . Another arti s t remarked b y Lacan who played extensively with the mask and the gaze is the B elgian p ainter James Ensor in his Self portrait with

Masks ( 1 8 9 9 , private collection) . In Book VIII of The Seminar, Lacan discus sed the function of the mask in relation to the work of the Italian p ainter Giuseppe Arcimb oldo. It was Arcimboldo's unusual conceit to create the illusion of a human face by means of the artful arrangement of inhuman elements such as fruits, flowers, or, in the example cited by Lacan, books , as in a 1 5 6 6 portrait of a librarian (Skoklo ster Castle, Sweden) . What was at s take in a p o rtrait was not the visual trickery of p ainting an Imaginary s embl ance of a human being but, rather, the frank declaration of the artifice of its Symbolic identity as a subject of the Other's enigmatically masked desire. So why do I don the Symbolic disguis e of my social persona, Latin for 'mask'? In o rder to fend off the suspicion that beneath the m a s k there is in fact nothing of sub s tance to s e e . C l aude C ahun, a member of Lacan's surrealist s o cial circle of the 1 930s, has recently a chieved posthumous acclaim for her self portrait photographs , in which she often appears masked: 'Under this mask, another mask. I will never be fini shed removing all these faces.' Lacan coupled his references to Arcimboldo in Books vm and I with references to the art of Salvador Dali, his long time friend and fellow agent provocateur. In his autobiography, The Secret Life of

Salvador DaZi ( 1 942) . the p ainter report e d that at their first meeting in Paris he and Lacan were astounded at the congruence of their views on the primacy of p aranoia as a form of active

p sycholo gical invention, contrary to the pas sive exp erience of the dream that previously had provided the p aradigm for the surrealist appropriation of the Freudian theory of the unconscious . Back to-back articles by Lacan and Dali in 1 933 in the jounal Minotaure articulated the inters ection b etween the research on p aranoia of the psychiatrist and the s elf styled p aranoiac critical method of the p ainter. Whereas Lacan insisted on the systematic meaningfulne s s of the delusions and hallucinations of clinical p aranoia that orthodox p sychiatry still judged to be meaningless, Dali proj ected his hallucination like surre alist visions onto the perspectival coordinates of traditional realism. Under the pressure of unconscious desire the realist vision of the eye was transformed into the surrealist haunting of the gaze. According to Lacan, the suffering subject o f p aranoid p sychos i s lacked a stable signifier of the father with which to

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fashion a normative social identity. In consequence of this deficit, the p aranoid s ubject experienced the world at large as centring its overwhelming gaze on him or her as the unwilling object of incestuous desire, matenal engulfment, or p aternal castration. It was L a c an's clinical finding that the p aranoid subject uncons ciously preferred to be the object of an Imaginary persecutory gaze rather than to be unseen and disregarded within the intimate matrix of the family. Dali insisted that the difference between himself and the paranoid p sychotic was that he was not mad. His hallucinatory p aintings were not delusional but, rather, a lucid critique of the conventional p erception of realism in art a s a geometrical matter of persp ectival illusion. After meeting Dali in London in 1 938, Freud rote that, whereas in the works of the old masters he sought the hidden note of the unconscious ; in D al i 's art it was the conscious intention that he s aw.

In

drawing the dying Freud's head according to his method of simulated delusion Dali depicted a human skull with the involuted form of the shell of a snail ( 1 939 4 1 , Dali Theatre Museum, Figuere s , S p ain) .

In La can and DaB the optical regularity of persp ectival projection was displaced by the p ara n o i d dis to rti ons of anamorphos i s . Lo oking at the amorphous blot of Holbein's skull through surrealist eyes, Lacan s aw in the unrecognisable shape the profile of the masculine erectile organ. He later noted Leonardo 's recommendation , in Book XIX of his Sem inar, that artists should look for figures hidden amidst the shapeless stains of old maso nry

walls . B e yond Lacan's mock-p aranoiac finding of the Imaginary phallus in Holbein's stain Lacan also pointed to its Symb olic disappearance as the signifier o f castration. Now it surges forth in its erect visible form, now it shrinks back, and in its abject

. .

7.

Salvador

Doli.

depletion signifies the negation o f its formerly

The

replete state. The Lacanian phallus is the

Persistence of

s ymbol of lack in the Imaginary field of vision

Memory ( 1 93 1 ) .

as well as in the invisible Symbolic domain,

where its p hysical swelling and shrinkage mimic s the now you see it now you don't substitutbiliy o f the signifier in the arti cul ated chain of signification. Wh en viewed s h arply from the s i d e , the foreground anamophosis in The Ambassadors can b e perspectivally re conigured as a skull, the symbol of the earthly vanity of Holbein's handsomely attired men. In the hmorous delirium of his paranoiac reading, what Lacan stressed instead of the conventional symbol of death was the actual appearance of the amorphous shape itself, which reminded him of the s agging two pound loaf of bread on the head of a woman in a s culpture by D ali (Retrospective Bust, 1 93 3 , Museum of Moden Art, New York) , not a loaf comp o sed of two books according to Sheridan's English mistranslation, the word

livre meaning either a book or a unit of weight. The anamorphic distortion of the skull a l s o evoked for L acan the signature

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Dalinian effect of hard forms becoming soft, as in the soft watches

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York; Figure 7 ) , perhap s the artist's single most famous work.

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in The Persistence of Memory ( 1 93 1 , Mus eum of Moden Art, New Like the Lacanian phallus that is nothing but the signifier of its s elf cancellation, soft objects are propped up and flop over everwhere in Dali's oeuvre. Always depicting the same Imaginary melting away of physical sub stance, this is the destiny of the Real libidinal being condemned to live out the issed encounters of its s exual drive in the shadow of the Symbolic foreknowledge of its own death. This is the fate of The Great Masturbator ( 1 929, Queen S ofi a Mu seum, Madri d) , a soft s elf p o rtrait enco ding m any o f D aB's overtly Freudian symb o l s of sex with his mother a n d castration by h i s father. Lacan singled o u t this work in Book X o f

The Seminar, on i dentification, in 1 96 1 , where h e commented o n the ability of s ome authentic works o f art t o retain a s c andalous , critical edge at a time of increasingly b anal and sarcastic diffusion of p sychoanalytic imagery in the mas s media. From the campy a dvertis ements for C hiquita b ananas to the e anest commercials for Vi agra t o d ay, the phallus never fails t o app e ar but as an

inflation of its elf. The mas sive erections of Internet pornography and the endless e mail offerings of penis enhancement products are two fall acious fa ces o f contemp orary p hallic frau d . Al s o available o n the Internet i s a trenchant s et of trading cards by

blogger C arl Steadman and illustrator Anda Brubaker, Kid A in

Alphabetland: An Abecedarian R oller Coaster Ride through the

Phallocratic Obscuan tism of Jacq ues Lacan ( 1 993).

Comparing Holbein's and Dali's distended foms, Lacan averred that the latter were no less phallic than the former, although once again the Sheridan translation errs in stating the contrary. In the anamorphic dialectic between the frontal gaze of the stain and the sidelong glimp s e of the skull , Holbein made visible the os cillation between the Imaginary s ubj ect of b o dily affirmation and the Symbolic subject of linguistic negation. At the Imaginary level thi s evoked i n Lacan the masochistic fantasy o f physical castration brought about by b eing shown the image of his own soft watch

(montre molle) , a slang French expression for 'limp dick'. At the Symbolic level, however, the very thing Lacan lost in the image of self dismemberment was returned to him in the artful words of re memb ering that the play of the signifier made possible . In the virtuoso perfomance of his long running one man show entitled 'Symbolic castration', Lacan gained a temporary protection from hi s inevitable obje ctifi c ation b eneath the cruel s earchlight o f posterity's gaze. It is i n this manner that I propose t o understand Lacan's most famous declaration about p ainting: ' This picture is simply what any picture i s , a trap for the gaze . ' I perform the painting of the p icture in order to trap within the caged emptiness of its frame the voracity of the Other's gaze. A more literal example of c aged emptines s i s found in the minimalist l attice cub e s of American conceptual arti st S ol Lewitt.

The line and the light In his lecture on the opp o s ition b etween the geometric line of the eye and the enthralling light of the gaze, Lacan drew on his

blackb o ard yet another of the diagrams with which he hop e d to transmit the teachings of psychoanalysis in easily rememb ered visual fom. L acan's gazing triangl e s have become quite famous among artists , historians and critic s of art.

e u�j"t f reprmaliol

In the first triangle Lacan drew a likenes s of the three dimensional space that the eye surveys in its capacity as an optical len s . From the geometral p oint of the p ainter's eye the Imaginary rays of vision go out to encounter any object in the world. The res ulting image i s situated in the diagram midway between the object and the eye, where the easel of the p ainter might stand. This i s the paradigm of linear p erspe ctive as formulated by theorists o f the renaissance such as the Italian Leon Battista Alberti and the German Albrecht D u rer the latter of whom ,

invented a framed gridwork of threads by means of which the three dimensional cuvature of an object could be transferred as a two dimensional projection on a lat surface. This , Lacan insisted, merely yielded a geometrical mapping of three-dimensional space

rather than an adequate understanding of the libidinal dynamics of emb odied human vision. In the second triangle L a c an a s s igned the inauguration of human vision not to the geometrical capacities o f the eye but, rather, to the emanating power of the p oint of light, which seems to flow outward from the obj ect in the world toward the subject. Illuminated by the light of the worl d, the subj ect is

a

picture to be

seen . In the first diagram it i s a matter of linear rays connecting the eye to the object, whereas in the second it is the radiance of light that engulfs the s u bj e ct in its gaze. This i s the sort of primordial s e eing of the s ubject that seemed to emanate from the m/other, causing the subject to wonder: 'What do you want from me by looking at me in that way?' Lacan was not denying that a geometrical perspective o f the world is registered in the eye of the s eeing s ubject. What he wished to affirm was the ethical priority of the sp eaking s ubj ect over the seeing subj e ct, the nece s s ary s u p p l ementation of the Symb o l i c questions of meaningful exi stence over the ocular mechanics of Imaginary perception. On such a viewing the world is not s imply what I choose to regard visually with my eye but, rather, what I ind myself having a vital regard for in my imp a s sioned encounter with the world. In the second triangle this encounter between the subject of the unconscious and the environing world takes place at the midway location that L acan labelled the s creen (ecran) . It is in the screen that I am in the picture . I am in the picture not as an objectively seeing eye but, rather, as a subjectively seeking I. Ufortunately for the reception of Lacan among English language readers , just where the analyst said 'I am in the picture' the translator ins erted the di ametric ally incorrect 'not' . Thi s h a s led to the erroneous impres s i o n in the English s p e aking world that the Lacanian subject is merely the passive target of the Other's gaze, as in the view of the French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre. On the contrary, Lacan's p s ycho analytic rej e c tion of S artrean phenomenology

p resupposes the intimate implication of the seer in the seen by means of its Symb olic identification with the Other as Ego ideal. The screen is the singular set of signiiers that has detemined me in the uniquenes s of my history. It is the S ymbolic grid through

which I ty to map my desired po sition within the s ight of my family and my world. Lacan also called the s creen o f s ignifiers interp o s e d b etween m y subj ectivity and the objectivity of light the tache, trans l ated a s either ' s tain' or ' s p ot' . Like the physiological eye cautiously lo oking at the sun's corona around the periphery of an interp osed opaque s creen, the p sychological I must s imil arly p r otect its elf from the overwhelming s timulation of being seen by the Other with the aid of the filter of the signifying s creen . It is the suns creen ointment that spots and stains my sensitive skin s o a s to keep it from b eing ba dly burned at

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the b e ach. My s ubj ective s creen or s tain of visual regard s imilarly stabilises my point of view and keep s me from being undone by the raw p ower of a p ainting's dazzling, ambiguou s , enigmatic gaze. As in the ecological phenomenon of c amoulage, in which the animal adapts its appearance to the enviroment in order to elude the gaze of its p redators or the buning rays of the sun, so too in the art of p ainting the p ainter manipulates the screen in order to evade incineration under the gaze of the Thing. And who or what is the p ainter's Thing? It is the Other to whos e gaze the artis t ofers the painting as a n Imaginary lure in the hope that i t s duly constituted repres entatives Critic, Public

Mother, Father, Monarch, Patron,

will lay down the formidable weapon of their gaze

and look kindly upon the work of art as an acceptable sacriicial gift. 'ho you lookin' at? You lookin' at me? Well, don't look at me, look at this instead and let me be.' The p ainted canvas is a cast off skin to throw the Other off my trail. The p ainter's desire is the desire of the Other, the desire to fill in the Symbolic l ack in the Other with the Imaginay s emblance of

the beautiful work of art. But there is no guarantee that the Other will see in the wo rk what the p ainter s eeks to show. Lacan illustrated this disparity between the eye and the gaze, b etween what I risk to show and what the other deigns to see, with the ancient Greek l egend of the competiti o n b etween the painters Zeuxis and Parrhasios. hereas Zeuxis tricked the eyes of the birds by p ainting illus ory grapes on which the creatures tried to feed, Parrhasios tricked his colleague's eye by p ainting the lifelike image of a curtain on a wall (engraving by Jo achim von Sandrart, 1 6 7 5 ) . Parrhasios won the comp etition b y evoking Zeuxis's desire t o see what was hidden behind the veil , but of course there was nothing to see but the veil itself. For the hungry eyes of the birds it was the visual illusion of the object that was at stake. For the inquisitive I of the painter it was , rather, what seemed to lie unseen beneath the p ainte d curtain that aro u s e d his d e s ire to s e e . B ene ath the Imaginary mask of the Ego that we s how the world there i s n o hidden s elf t o s e e , only the invisibility of o u r Symb olic

identification with a p articular s et of signifiers that always remains open to change. This misrecognition or meconnaissance (punningly doubled as 'me knowledge ' ) was for Lacan the fundamentally paranoid condition of the E go . Facing the enigmatic gaze of the Other, the paranoid subject suspects the Other's hidden designs upon it beneath the deceptive appearance that the eye sees.

What is a picture? So what, then, is a picture? L acan answered this question by superimpo s ing the tiangle extending from the geometral point of the physiological eye upon the triangle emanating from the point of light in the p sychological field. In the first, Imaginary triangle the eye perceives a visual image of an object, while in the s econd, Symbolic triangle the point of light emitted by the object passes through the invisible s creen o f signifi ers in order to make a picture for and of the seeing eye. The two opposed tri angles are fused together in the third diagram just as are fused together the

Imaginay and Symbolic registers of daily experience

where the

gaze inscribes the subj ect of visual representation into the p ainted image in the fo rm of the image s creen of desire. Like Zeuxi s looking at the curtain of Parrhasio s , I ask: 'Why am I looking at this picture? What does the painter des ire in showing it to me? What kind of spectator must I desire to b e in order to face up to this enigmatic gaze that looks blankly out of its frame at me? What words can I u s e to fill up the troubling gap of uncertainty that the work of art opens up in the scopic field? ' Lacan insisted that i n the scopic field the gaze was outside the subject, lo oking at the subject, tuning the seeing subj ect into a seen object, into a picture. In the visual ield 'I am photo graphed: he wrote

illuminated, lit up, written on, graphed onto a set of

geometric coordinates by the emblazoning power of light. In Book XI Lacan no longer made explicit reference to the Thing from Book 0 l

VII as the origin of the gaze that shone its light on me, preferring

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instead to point to the invisible object 'a' in order to give a vanished

6

my flesh with the flash of its gaze. In the s c opic field of the

;

behind the abject bodiless residue of object 'a'. Object 'a' is the cause

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9

canal presence to the primordial matenal face that once ignited subject the s evering of the joint gaze of mother and child leaves of the desire to recover the lost gaze of the Thing and also the cause of the drive to reframe the visual s emblance of that lost gaze in the work of art. On the one hand, from the point of view of desire , the image s creen of the diagram pres ents an Imaginay schema of the lost object that suggests the desire for its retrieval. On the other hand, from the p oint of view of the drive , the interpositioning of the screen image protects the Smbolic subject from b eing reinundated by the unbearably Real radiance of the gaze. This is the gaze of the Sun, the Mother, the Son, the Matter a s p arkling watch, a glistening glass , a shiny apple, a relective pond, a haunted house

that seems to face the subject from the

transcendent place of the lost Thing. Spectators of the visual arts rep eatedly encounter this object gaze in p aintings , s culpture s ,

photographs , and ilms exhibited on the white walls of churches, museums and galleri e s , or the illuminated s creens of m ovi e s , computers and high deinition TV. The bl ank windows of the house of the incestuously murdered mother in Hitchcock's Psycho stare at us with the intolerable gaze of the Thing. The subject of Imaginary representation is also the subject of Symb olic castration, the leshly price of which is well spent in ac quiring the shield of the signifier to deflect the traumati c renewal of the p rimordial gaze. The image s cre en/screen image i s the m a s k that p ainters manipul ate i n o rder to keep the gaze a t bay. O p e n your b o dy a n d s oul to the full force of the s u n a t your peril, but if you hold out an image in front of you at arm's length , such as your canva s on its easel, you can screen out the centre of the s un's fac e , too terrible to behold, and s till perceive some of its less powerful rays around the m argins of the work. The Real is the uns eeable central field of the gaze around which our Imaginary schemas and Symbolic signifiers unfurl their babbling banners and erect their fragile frames , and the object 'a' is the remnant revenant of the Real that we can u s e to plug up the central void. The object 'a' fills up the void of the lost object's gaze and sutures the void of the signifying subject as well, three voids tied together in an empty knot

$@ . In the art of painting an

exampl e of the object ' a' is the meaningl e s s s ingularity of the painter's material touch that yet confers a Symbolic identity upon the work. 'Look, it's a Monet,' we say. The fear of being exposed to the force of the gaze leads the painter to offer up the painting not only as a means of tricking the eye (trompe l'oeil) of the Imaginary other

Zeuxis vs . Parrhas i o s ,

Monet vs. Manet - b u t also of taming t h e gaze (dompte regard) of the Symbolic Other, the prime example of which in the Wes tern tra ditio n is the all s eeing gaze of the p agan or Christian g o d . Employing the aesthetic terminology of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietz s che, Lacan called the p acifying efect of p ainting Apollonian after the Greco Roman god of p o etry and light, in

opposition to the dark ferocity of the gaze that Nietzs che c alled D iony s i an after the god of madnes s and win e . Classical, renaiss ance and realist art typically seek t o tame or divert the omnip otent gaze by giving it s omething harmonious to look at. In contrast, expressionist art crudely exposes itself to the fierce s crutiny of the gaze. Lacan located a direct appeal to thi s anxiety provoking gaze i n the work of the Norwegian E dvard Munch, who se most famous painting, The Scream ( 1 893, National Gallery, Oslo) , is now repro duced in the millions on po stcards , p osters and T shirts around the world . The gaze silently demands , 'Show yourself to me! ' , and the painter complies by thrusting foward

a

contorted figure seeking to answer the eni gmatic call

with a s tiled cry, 'What do you want? ' Thi s i s the anguished question that the murderer asks in Hitchc ock's Rear Window

( 1 954) when he is blinded by the lash of the faceless photographer

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who has been s ecretly obs erving him. That explosive lash in the

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Informed of contemp orary trends in the art world by his

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b rother in law Masson, Lacan claimed to see a direct exposure of

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war American art. Willem de Kooning's violently brushed s eries

9

the p ainting to the gaze in the abstract expressionism of p o st of contorted, self displaying Women are easily recruited into the expres sionist lineage of Munch , but e qually exp o s e d to the ravenous appetite of the gaze are the non igurative canvases filled with sulphurous colour or writhing line by M ark Rothko and Jackson Pollock. Rather than analysing a speciic movement in the his tory of p ainting Lac an always insi sted that it was only his purpose to inquire into the fundamental s ocial and p sychological function of art. In probing the function of art in s o ciety, L ac an sought to distinguish his views from Freud's . H e acknowledged Freud's modesty with respect to solving the riddle of artistic creation, given that it w a s Freud's purp o s e to s o lve a different riddle altogether, that of the neurotic inhibition of the sexual drive in

certain individuals as opposed to the non neurotic sublimation of that s ame drive in others . In studying the life histoy of Leonardo as if it were a clinical case, Freud connected artistic creation and neurotic inhibition in the p ainting of the two mothers in who s e eyes the p ainter w a s s aid to see t h e childhood love h e had once enj oye d and sub s equently l o s t . For Lacan this was to restrict the analysis to the Imaginary level of intersubjective reciprocity rather than to situate it at its properly Symbolic level, where the unconscious introjection of the patenal signiier would not

or would

effectuate the necess ary sep aration of the nascent subj ect

from its unfree maternal prehistory. The Lacanian displacement of the Imaginay matenal fantasy by the Symbolic paternal s ignifier was grounded in the Freudian notion of the rep res entative o f repres entation (in German,

Vo rs tellungsreprasen tanz) . Lacan extracted this concept from Freud's writings on dreams and other language like formations of the unconscious . As Lacan relentles sly stressed, the Freudian unconscious was not an amophous jumble of images and affects but, rather, a space of linguistic articulation different from that of conscious speech but no less structured by the linkage and substitution of signiiers . Literally 'the setting before the subject', the Vorstellung is the representation in its Imaginary dimension as an image of the lost Thing. The Vorstellung, however, c annot repres ent itself directly as an image in the uncons cious but must be indirectly re presented there by its linguistic delegate or repres entative, its signifying Reprasentanz. The R eprasentanz re pres ents the Imaginary repres entation in its crucial Symb olic dimension, because the image of the Thing c an be repres ented in the unconscious only in the form of a linguistic signifi er. The image o f the Thing may be hauntingly irrepres sible, but its lingu i s ti c signifi er may b e repre s s e d and thus , p erhap s, reconigured and released. Given the universal task of answering the question 'Am I a man or a woman?' , there was for Lacan one signiier that represented the

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entire fiel d of unconscious signification for men and women alike. This s ignifi er-without signiied was the Symb olic phallus in its func tion of instituting a p rovi sional space of lack which other signifi ers c o uld rise up to fill . The self negation of the phallus, whereby its temporary tumescence was cancelled in its inevitable

detumescence, equipped it to inhabit the purely ambassadorial role of representative of representation. As Vorstellungsreprisentanz, the phallic signifier inaugurates the Smbolic play of absence and presenc e that structurally undergirds the representation of any content whatsoever. In its self annihil ation as organ, the phal lus of Symb olic castration constituted exhibit one of L acanian sublimation. In Lacan's curt summary, Freud's understanding of sublimation was said to mis s this ess ential Symb olic dimension. The work of

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at not only gratiied the artist, Freud claimed, but also others , who were conso led that at least some in s ociety could ind s atisfaction of their desire. Lacan radically reversed this i dea by insisting that it was the renunci ation of s ati sfa ction that art afforded the spectator. Art p ermitted the indivi dual to renounce the neurotic compulsion to enjoy. Whereas Freud was claiming that the artist and sp ectator wished for the s ati sfaction of their incestuous maternal fantasy, Lacan was declaring instead that it was art that protected the artist and spectator from getting too close to the incestuous m aternal Thing. And how does art protect us? By making clear the diference between the welcome pleasure of the repres entation of the Thing and the undesirable enjoyment of the Thing itself. From the most realist to the most abstract of works, art openly pretends to b e what it is not. Even the most literal minded installation a rt, such as One and Three Chairs ( 1 965, Mus eum of Modern Art, New York) by American conceptual artist J o s ep h Kosuth, involves the spectator in a fictive dimension within the artificially fra me d space of the gallery. Lacan indicated that we take cognisance of this productive p retence when the mobility of

our gait causes the momentary stasis of the gaze of the work t o

fail . We have but t o move to escape the Mo na L isa s sinister gaze, '

to elude The Ambassadors' unsightly stain, at which p oint the Imaginary allure of the work is reduced to the depleted status o f the severed object ' a ' . The subject of art was rep eatedly urged by

Lacan to eschew the illusoy plenitude of the image and identify itself with that abject material turd. Despite

his

objection to p erforming an act of art historical

narration, Lacan nonethel e s s offered his audience a whirlwind tour of the gaze in its various epochs of incanation. There was the gaze of Byzantine icons of C hrist that held the medieval community of worshipp ers within its heavenly thrall. Lacan note d that the icon p ainter would have unconsciously counted on the fact that Christ hims elf would be looking with pleasure at thi s gift of hi s own represented gaze. Following the medieval reign of the gaz e o f G o d came that o f the renaissance ruler, who se invisible gaze the spectators would h ave unconsciously registered b ehind their backs , as it were, in the Venetian p alace of the doges or in the palace of the kings at Vers aille s . And then, in the third ep och of po st antique Western art, it was the capitalist gaze of the buyers and sellers in the commercial art market of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through which ordinary people would have uncons ciously processed the signiiers of the works on display. 'I may not be a Rothschild, a Rockefeller, or a Saatchi , but I know what I like . ' I t was Lacan's conviction that the fundamental function o f art had little to do with the realistic imitation of the visual appearance of the world for the p l e a s ure of the human eye . He credited Merleau Ponty for helping to overturn this optical prejudice by un derstanding the p ainter's material b rushwork not a s th e fashioning of a visual equivalent of a seen object but, rather, as the terminal result of a p assionately embodied sacrificial gesture in the face of the hungy gaze of the Thing. The primary example that

Lacan took from Merleau Ponty was Cezanne's application of p aint

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to the s uface of the canvas . In these individual pats of paint Lacan saw not

a

deliberate intellectual choice, but the involuntay trace

of an almo st instinctual act that he likened to the falling of rain. Preserved on the c anvas was C ezanne's unconsciously coerced re s ponse to the gaze of the Other b efore which he anxiously laid down the arms of his gaze. Lacan p redicated the mirror stage face off of the alter Ego of the subject and its specular ideal Ego upon the asymetrical encounter of the speechless infant with the unfathomable mystery of the gaze of the Thing. It was this primordial stage of encounter with the Other that invested art with a fundamental theatricality and made the manufacture of every work into a b attle where victory could not be guaranteed. Therefore, a piece of painting, s culpture or architecture should never b e revers ed in the misprojectio n of a photographic slide because the e s s ence of art was to enshrine in

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a l iving showcase a unique s eries of ritual gestures by means of which one hoped to appease the silent demand of the inscrutable gaze. From shitting in a pot b eneath the gaze of the Other we subsequently find ourselves squeezing our coloured pigments from a tub e. In that maso chistic separation from ourselves of the abject part, the faeces , the droppings of matter that we offer to the Other's sadistic gaze, we participate in the simultaneous co production of the mutilated object 'a' and the evacuated signifying self $@. In -

1 96 1 the Italian conceptual artist Piero Manzoni produced ninety cans of Merda d 'A rtista (A rtist's Shit) , one of which is on display at the Tate Mo den in London today. But if the demand of the gaze is silent so too is the response. Th e eye made desperate by the gaze seeks relaxation fro m its dure s s by m aking still more art, by showing still more art, by viewing still more art, again and again and again. nd that i s why we h ave an endle s s ly changing yet repeating history of art. For Lacan, the multifariousnes s of historical change in art amounted to so many failed efforts of the s ubject permanently to p arry the power of dis array of the Other's gaze.

Chapter 6

Representative of rep resentati o n

Organised around the emptiness o f the lost object, the painting is a trap for the gaze (piege a regard) . The avid eye of the spectator is trick e d (trompe l 'oeil) into fee ding on the Imaginary fruit of the visual repre s e ntati o n so as to enable the p ainter to tame the adversarial force of the other's insubordinate gaze (domp te regard) . The ordinary spectator may give in to the p ainter's gambit and lay down the weapon of his or her gaze, but tradition's old masters will resp ond to the painter's gamble with nothing but a blind, inhuman stare . The truth i n p ainting is articulated in the face of this enigmatic silence by means of the Smbolic language of visual repres entation Here the Imaginary unity of the work with which .

the p ainter captures the eye of the spectator is shown to be the ictive product of Symbolic construction. The transp arent window of perspective is shown to be what it truly i s , an opaque s creen. This upsurge of the screen is what took place when L acan looked away from the Imaginary transpareny of The Ambassadors' frontal gaze. Looking from the side, Lacan found that the illegible foreground shape of the frontal view addre s s e d him as the Symb oli c cypher of death, the signifier of his own castration.

Disclosed as the signifier that rendered null and void all Imaginary effects of vivid life , the death drive of the anamorphic skull was reinscrib ed in the artist's signature on the marble floor of the painting: Holbein, H o llow B on e . It was thus that the artist sublimated himself as a b eing not wholly given over to the animal cycle of life but consecrated instead to a meaningful human

death. No t vis ually depicted within the Imaginary space of the work, the author was made Symb olically pres ent in the signature that functione d as an indexical X marking the spot where once he had been. Las Meninas

In a month of unpublished lectures from Book XII of The Seminar, on the object of p sychoanalys i s , Lacan fo cus e d on a p ainting that put the p ainter inside his own work. This was the 1 65 6 masterpiece at the Prado Musem i n Madrid b y Diego Velazquez in which the painter showed hims elf at work on a large canvas in the royal p alace a l o ng s i de the five year old Prince s s Margarita and

her m a i ds of honour, the latter providing the S p anish titl e , Las Meninas, by which the p ainting is known today (Figure 8 ) . As in the seminar o f 1 964, it was again a cultural event in Paris that

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inspired Lacan's encounter with the art of painting: the anticipated

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pUblication in 1 9 6 6 of Les Mots et les Choses (translated as The

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Order ofThings) by Michel Foucault, the controversial philo s opher and his tori an of p sychi atry, s exuality, knowle dge and p ower.

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Originally published as an independent e ssay the previous year but sub sequently given the position of honor as the irst chapter of the book, Foucault's virtuoso analysis of the complex play of gazes between the p a inter, the spectator, the princess and her royal parents, who se faces are dimly seen in a mirror in the b ackground, immediately gained an authoritative place in art history and cultural studies that it has not forfeited since. C o nversely, in the subsequent proliferation of commentary on Las Meninas , Lacan's unpub lishe d l e ctures h ave b e en virtually nowhere taken into account. Here was a painting of the gaze before which the spectator could not help but to experience dis array. In placing his analysis of Las Meninas at the beginning of The

Order ofThings: An A rchaeology of the Human Sciences, Foucault was literally proposing a picture of the intellectual representation of the world during the early moden period of the seventeenth and

8. Diego Velazquez, Meninas

eighteenth centuries. In this 'representation of Las

( 1 656.)

representation' there was an essential void, as Foucault put it, that marked the absence of the obs erving subj e ct from the observed object, an object that was imagined to exist in the worl d independently o f the subject's act o f observation. In Las Meninas this meant that the p ainter working on his p ainting could represent either the represented object, the canvas turned away from our gaze, or the representing subject, the

painter looking out of the p ainting . He could not repres ent at the same time b oth the active subject of repres entation and the p a s sive object of representation. Since what we see is the frontal image of the painter in a suspended instant of the act of p ainting, we cannot see the depicted content of the b ack tuned painting upon which, supposedly, h e has just been at work and to which, supposedly, he will soon retun. Lo oking away from the large c anvas upon which hi s work app e ars to be suspended, Velazquez seems to be addressing a subject outside the visible space of the p ainting where the model would initially have stood, and where every spectator thereafter woul d come to stand in the model's stead. For Foucault, the painter's once living model was none other than the royal couple, King Philip IV and Queen Mariana, w h o s e p ale visages are reflected in the mirror hanging on the wall behind the p ainter.

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Facing the p ainter's outward gaze, the spectator would come to

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space. In Foucault's imagining of an endless exchange of gazes

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feel as if he or she were a usurper of the monarchs' s overeign between the historical p ainter and his royal models as well as b etween the p ainting and l atterday s p ectators , there w a s an illusory structure of reciprocity that Lacan had identiied as that of the Ego and the other upon the mirror stage. It was the rupturing of this Imaginary visual reciprocity with the Symbolic sigiiers of unconscious desire that provided the basis for Lacan's critique of Foucault. A s enunciated in The Fo ur Fundamental Concepts of

Psychoan alysis, the sp ectator in front o f a p ainting not only s e e s the picture from the geometric point of the eye but is also turned by the p ainting into a target like picture as the desiring s ubj ect of repres entation. I may imagine that I c ontrol the angle of visual access to the space of the p ainting that I look at, but somethin g in the p ainting surprises me with its retun g a z e from a decentred p o int that strike s me in the s ubj ective intimacy of my desire. S p e aking of photography in Camera

Lucida ( 1980) , Roland B arthes later distinguished between the app earance of the image that all are free to study (studium) and the singular p oint that punctures (p unctum) the avid eye/I of an individual viewer. Just as the incorporeal subject of linguistic repres entation is a signifier for another signifier (and another and another . . . ) in the endless unrolling of the chain of signiication, so too the embodied subject of visual representation is nothing more than a coloured spot for another coloured spot during the moment to moment process of optically s canning the framed surface of the painting. I accede to the kind of vitual subjecthood that language affords

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by attaching myself to the signifiers that one ater

another are articulated, for example, right here on this printed page by means of the more or less competent gestures of my tping finger s . I accede to the different s o rt of concrete objectho o d that painting affords

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b y finding that my gaze is attached

to one after another s p o t of coloured paint, the afectual accumulation of which constitutes me a s a wordless subject of the scopic drive . In the Symbolic register of words I repres ent the worl d to myself through an intervening s creen fabricated from the signifiers ass ociated with the drama and trauma of my own unique history as a woman, a man, an Asian, an African, a Christian, a Muslim, a Hindu, a Jew. In the Real dimension of the visual domain that lies b eyond the reach of words I expose myself to the world through an interposed window ringed with the colours and shapes that are the remains of my missed libidinal encounters in the s copic field. The Real window of the drive and the Symb olic screen of des ire are mutually sustained by the Imaginary frame of the work of art

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If the signiier of my name is my representative or delegate to the interp ersonal community of l anguage and language like codes in which I live my sp eaking life, my equivalent representative in the setting of visual repres entation is the invisible phantom of

my own o bject ' a ' . In the face of the challenging looks inscrib e d within L a s Men inas, what falls within the interval b etween m e a n d m y depicted co untep arts i s the elusive object of the g a z e . Lacan s ai d that I lower m y eyes b eneath the force of the g a z e of the painting as I might drop my p ants in the face of the Other's compelling demand for the discipline of the potty. The essence of painting i s therefore not the Imaginary s emblanc es of repres entation but, rather, the Symbolic sublimation of Real shit. If I sub tract the Imaginary ideal Ego I would like to be as an exemplary spectator excretor from the Symbolic Ego ideal that transixes me in front of the p o tty p ainting, there remains a wordl e s s and imageless remnant of the Real. This is the object a , the m e aningl e s s residue of undi sciplined visual and fecal j o u i s s an c e around which the drive s tubb ornly turn s . Whereas

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Freud concentrated his investigation on the role of the unconscious s i gnifi e r in the rep ression and exp ression of desire, L a c an claimed that it was his original contribution to psycho analytic theory to insist on the division of the subject not only by the rhetorical effects of language, but als o in regard to the visual top oloy of the s copic drive . In the irst decade of Lacan's s eminar, between 1 953 and 1 96 3 , t h e stres s w a s on the division of t h e s ubject b y t h e efect of the s ignifier, the alien mark that constituted the unconscious at the moment of the death of the creature of ixed animal instincts and its simultaneous rebirth as the nascent subject of highly vaiable human drives . In the exchange of Real animal being for Symbolic human meaning a force of signification was set in motion to counteract the co ercive i dentifi c ation with the Imaginary counterpart of the mirror stage. This vexed encounter of the self and the other was not yet seen to leave behind the Real residue of the object 'a'. This uncanny object b egan to come to the fore in the formula of fantasy of the Graph of Desire

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visual fantasy was s een to hold together in precarious b al ance the split subject of the unconscious and the lost obj ect 'a' of

primordial corporeal enj oyment . The Real pre s s ure of bo dily ne ed s could be translated i nt o the Symb olic arti cul ation of spoken

demands for attention and love, but an inevitable residue of uns atisfied desire endured . In the s econd decade o f Lacan's teaching, roughly from 1 964 to 1 9 73, the stress shifted from the alienation of the subject in its speaking role of Symbolic castration (or loss of corporeal being) to the separation of the embo died subject from the s ignifying chain upon which its subjecthood had hitheto s eemed totally to depend. Now Lacan looked more and more to painting rather than language as the medium within which a shred of lost corp o real enjoyment might be redeemed in the form of the object 'a'. Standing in front of

Leonardo's Madonna and Child with Sa int Anne in 1 9 5 7 , Lacan saw in the infant Jesus the image of the lost maternal phallus of

clas sical Freudian doctrine. Standing at the side of Holbein's

Ambassadors in 1 964, Lacan s aw in the ana m o rp h i c skull the symbol of his own excommunication from the official institutions of psycho analysi s . ravelling beyond the boundaries of orthodox Freudian theory, Lacan carved out for special investigation the subjective space of the scopic drive. The loss of the Imaginay object of visual desire continued to be understoo d in relation to Symbolic castration, but also increasingly in relation to the Real loss of the matenal infant gaze .

Moebi us strip In thinking about the gaze as the Real object of the scopic drive , Lacan insisted on the topology of the eye as an erogenous zone, opening and c los ing itself to extenal stimuli such a s naked bodies and bared surfaces of paint. The rhythms of the eyelids mediate the ocular rel ation of the b o dy to the world, and Lacan was struck in

Las Meninas by the heavily lidded gaze of the depicted painter, who appeared to him to look inside as much as o utside from his ambiguous position within the shadowy space. One of Lacan's images for this o s cillation of the gaze between outwardly turned

visi on and inwardly turned fanta sy was the Moebius stri p , a structure consisting of a continuous loop with only one side. Imagine a loop made of a tailor's measuring tape with inches m arked in red on one side and centimetres marked in black on the other and upon which a red ant traverses the outer side marked in inches while a black ant does the same thing on the inner side m arked in centimetres. Isolated from one another in this fashion, the red ant will never encounter the world of black landmarks nor will the black ant ever cro s s the red demarcations on the nether side of its world. This either/or exclusion, however, i s overcome in the Moebius strip, where a single twist of the tape permits the red side to be directly connected to the black. In the time and space of a single step the red ant traversing its familiar pathway of red inch markers traumatically finds itself caught up within an alien network of differently c alibrated black line s . The 0 l

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woo dcut Moebius Strip II (Red A nts) of 1 963 by the Dutch artist M . C . E s cher p r ovides the striking cover art for the 2 004 p ublication of Book X of Lacan's seminar on anxiety of 1 96 2 3 . In Lacan's appeal to a continuous surface of mathematical topoloy rather than the discontinuous s egmentation of language, he was a sking his audience to imagine the interaction of art and the human being a s a Moebius membrane connecting the outside to the inside acro s s the threshold of the b o dy's orifices. Foo d enters the mouth and spit and vomit are exp elled from i t . The p enis is ins erted into the vagina or the anus and urine, faeces and menses are excreted from the b o dy. Sights penetrate the eyes and tears spill outward upon the surface of the skin and drip, perhap s , into the morning coffee. So it i s with the affectual residue of the invisible scopic object that b inds together the physicality of the b o dy and the materiality of the work of art in a continuou s , s ublimated loop. As the world of the ant is transformed in its Real crossing of the Imaginary border from red to b lack, so too the Real imp etus of the scopic drive p ropels the Symb olic s ubj ect of language b eyond the Imaginary

boundaries of the b o dy as it encircles the lost object reframed in the work of art . After encircling the object 'a' located outside itself in the wo rk of art the s ubject of the drive returns to itself renewed. In works of artistic sublimation the Smbolic subject envisions the maginary object in order to extract from it a surplus spurt of Real jouissance. Like the p atient in analysis who s eeks to traverse the p ath of his or her innermost fantasy through the depl oyment of spoken signiiers in the silent presence of the analyst, the isual artist p erfoms the risy business of self analysis by conjuring up in material form the uniquely configured contours of his or her object 'a '. Neither exterior nor interior, conscious nor unconscious, the twisted topology of thi s intimate object was described as 'extimate' by Lacan. The lost object 'a' of the scopic drive is neither the gaze that once glowed in the mother's eyes nor that which once glistened in the eyes of the child, although this is the reciprocal model relied upon in Freu d's tale of Leonardo's lost smile. The gaze that Lacan found materialising itself between his desiring eye and Velazquez's desire inducing painting was an uncanny object impos sible to describ e in words . Nevertheles s , I like to imagine it as an inlatable b alloon with four prongs that once filled up the interval between

and p lugged into the optical orifices of

the

primordial Thing and the wordless infant. So why do we look at art? In order to breathe fresh air into the deflated balloon of the invisible lost gaze. Human desire is the desire of the Other, Lacan said tirelessly. Whose desire, then, was at stake in Las Meninas? Lacan conceded that Velazquez surely had a desire for the Other's desire, p erhap s in the form of the cross of nobility that was ultimately awarded to him and which, according to legend, was p ainted on the breast of his s elf portrait in Las Meninas by the king himself. But Lacan always insisted that his interest was not in the art historical or psychoanalytic reconstruction of the lost intention of the artist.

His concen was to lay b are the scopic structure of the painting as an analogy for the uncons cious structure of the s ubject as it was exposed in psycho analytic treatment. For Lacan, Las Meninas exhibited the fundamental dialectic of human desire, here made manifest in the enigma that the p ainter's turned away canvas represented for the gaze of the princip al actor at the centre of thi s little play, the Princess Margarita, who demands : 'Show it to m e ! ' S p e aking from the p o sition of the analyst situated in the conSUlting room behind the analysand who wants to know what she supposes the analyst knows about her, Lacan's Velazquez replies: 'You don't see me from the place that I see you. You look at me with the Imaginary eye of wishful reciprocity, whereas I look at you with the disillusionment of the Symbolic gaze within whose signifiers the articulation of your desire is trapped. Whatever I ! /

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might fei gn to show you would not be what you want to see.' This asymmetry between the gazes of the analyst and the analysand was recently restaged in the installation of an analytic couch and chair in a l arge ventil ated pl astic bubble by the Argentinian artist Pablo Reino s o , The Cabinet of D r. Lacan ( 1 99 8 , private collection, Paris) ' We can recognise in the p sychoanalytic scenario of duelling desires a repetition of the demand of the ancient Greek p ainter Zeuxis for his rival Parrhasios to show him what was behind the cutain that he saw on the wall. Here again we encounter the trick of fooling the spectator into believing that there is something b eyond the mask of appearance even though there is not. There is no Other of the Other, Lacan repeatedly insisted; no guarantee that there is someone who knows what is going on b ehind the scenes, not God, not the Wiz ar d of Oz, not the p sychoanalyst, although p erhap s with this difference that the Lacanian analyst claims to know that she or he does not lmow the secret of the analys and and that that is the truth. In the age of clas s ical repres entation the philosophical certainty of one's on physical existence required the guarantee of

an omnip otent, omniscient and benevolent God. Such a God could not be exp ected to take advantage of the fallibility of our senses as revealed in hallucination s , fevers and dreams. Similarly, it was the implicit presence of the all seeing gaze of the absolute ruler of the seventeenth century that guaranteed the effective force of the representation to which all its subjects were subjected. In Las

Meninas the signicance of the repres entation of the princes s and her maids of honor depended upon the disembodied gaze in the mirror of her royal parents , whose ruling desire it was that she was to be their heir. For Lacan, however, Vel azquez put that fundamental law of courtly repres entation into doubt by revealing that its elaborate visual fab ric was the pro duct of nothing more than a figment of pigment applied to a canvas that might forever remain blank. The rationalist slogan of Descates, I think therefore I am

in French, je pense done je suis

was thus challenged by the

materialist rebuttal of Velazquez, je peins done je suis: I p aint therefore I am. I, the subject of the p ainted signifier, accede to a small measure ofj ouis s ance by smearing on canvas the pigment shit of object ' a ' . Foucault w a s pers onally in attendance a t one of the lectures in which Lacan elab orated his altenative libidinal approach to the topological mapping of Velazquez's picture puzzle. What did the mirror show? Foucault cl aimed that in the mirror we s ee the reflection of the monarchs who are standing outside the vis ible scope of the p ainting as if in the place that we spectators now stand. The invisible rulers are the object of regard of the princess and her attendants and the object of the pose by the p ainter, who represented himself portraying the king and queen on the l arge canvas whos e back alone we see. Lacan dis agree d with this view of the picture, insisting that the b ack tuned p ainting was Las

Meninas itself. For Foucault, the mirror exhibited a Real relection. For Lacan, the mirror was not to be understoo d a s the Imaginary s emblance of the royal personages within an actual physical space but, rather,

as the Symboli c inscription of their ab solutist gaze within the world of repres entation that was the Spanish court. Velazquez's p ainting within the p ainting further called attention to the repres entational status of the entire painting, thus , in Lacan's metaphor, supers aturating the p ictorial s o lution so that it precipitated out into the crystalline structure that captivates our gaze. Las Meninas was understood by Lacan as the pictorial repres entative of the i deological repres entation of the Spanish court, the Vorstellungsreprasentanz by which the unrepresentable anxiety of the Real was given a nece s s ary but insufficient Imaginary repres entation in the Symb olic art of a painted sign. As the material repres entative of an immaterial representation, the p ainting s uture d together two incompatible elements according to the formula of fantas y " )

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from its immediate c o rporeal enjoyment by the mediation of language, and the invisible object ' a ' , the remaining shred of unmediated scopic contact with the terrifying desire of the wild Thing. The reappearance of the lost scopic object reframes the penetrating gaze in which the D esire of the M/Other was enigmatic ally emb odied in the past. 'Why are the painter, the princess, and her parents looking at me? What do they want? And what do I want of them?' Lacan approached these questions in the Freudian language of phallic desire . He s aw the gaze in the p ainting aiming at him in the intimacy of his own castration anxiety from beneath the dress of the princes s , where he imagined an unseen crack fente) in the royal representation. In the invisible place of the future sexuality of the five year o l d prince s s Lacan envisioned the Imaginary phallus in its illus o ry capacity to gratify the desire of the king and queen that Margarita be their heir and the redemptive hope of their failing royal fortunes. Whereas Foucault analysed Las Meninas in tems of the realist sight in the mirror, Lacan encountered the work with a paranoid surrealist insight regarding the deception of optical appearances.

In a prefatory statement on his intellectual antecedents written in 1 9 6 6 for the pub l i c ation of Ecri ts, Lacan acknowledged the inluence of Dali on the development of his anti realist stance. The paranoid D alinian universe of s o ft p enile watche s had already b een invo ked in 1 9 64 in the face of the anamorphic skull of Holbein's The Ambassadors, so it should come as no surprise that the Oedipal drama of incest and castration would again igure at the heart of Lacan's analysis of Velaz quez's 'Family of the king ' , this being one o f the early titles of the work. For i n the demand of the princess to see the hidden truth of the p ainting we h ave a version of the female hysteric who challenges the masculine figure who woul d wield authority over her person. In Lacan's delirious fantasy the princess repudiates her assigned role in the drama of dynastic marriage in which her body was the predestined curency of p atriarchal exchange. At the time of being painted in 1 656 Princess Margarita was the oficial heir of her father, King Philip IV of Spain. His s on by his irst wife had died in 1 646, and soon atewards , at the age of forty nine, he marrie d his dead son's fiancee, his own fourteen year old niece, Mariana of Austria, whose face alongside his on we see in the mirror on the b a ck wall. Within a year of Velazquez's painting the queen gave birth to a son and with that Margarita ceased to occupy the centre of her father's dynastic aspiration s . Here , however, the five year o l d princ e s s is s till uncomprehendingly a sking, 'What do you want of me? What does it mean for me to b e treated a s the Imaginary phallus of the Hapsburg House?' Her dress tightly nipped in at the waist above a lateral exp anse of fabric that constructed the visual fantasy of a mature pelvic girth that was not really there, the young princess ebodied a wishful emblem of royal fecundity. A loral bouquet of marriage is prominently pinned upon her breast and a pronounced dark shadow marks the split b etween her legs directly b elow the broad fabric crescent that both screens her genitals from sight and also p o ints to their absence .

Thi s duplicity of revealing and concealing the Imaginary phallus cons titutes the psychoanalytic deinition of the fetish, and as such the mas culine fantasy of the phallic princes s comprised for Lacan an exemplary sign of cas tration anxiety. In the smooth verticality of the prepubescent girl's body Freudian psychoanalysts and surrealist artists saw an e quivalent of the Imaginary phallus. Her p remature s exual ity and p ervers e erectile function are emphasised in many of Picas so's forty four p ainted variations on his predecessor's masterpiece that he made in a great burst of activity in 1 95 7 , and which L acan might well have known. In one telling picture Picasso extracted the princess from the group p o rtrait and showed her reaching for a phallic p aintb ru sh proffered to her on a plate (Picas s o Museum, B arcelona) . The p ainter, the princess and one of her dwarf attendants look out from the foreground of Las Men inas into the spectator's space.

l

E 2 i �

6 l 3 �

Entering into this space of uneasy encounter, we bring with us the habits of seeing and knowing through which we have come to repres ent the worl d to ourselve s . On the one hand, there are the screens of linguistic signifiers that we hold out in front of us to accommodate the p ictorial representation to the predetermined repres entations of reality that we are variously prepared to acknowledge as women and men. On the other hand, there are also the characteristic voids left b ehind in us in the wake of the loss of our own most intimate objects . These pimordial objects constitute no s creens of articulate language nor surfaces of visual relection, but their l o s s opens up the very p o s s ibility of representation as such. The s e are the precurs ors of the representatives of repres entation of which the template was set at the time and place of the mirror stage. There the non speaking child found itself p l aying a subjectifying game of p eekaboo with its obje ctifying image, b eing sure all the while to check the efects of this game of enticements and feints upon the adult or adults who supported its unste ady body in front of the looking gla s s . Unstably fused together, our screens of language and s p a c e s of l o s s construct

the fragile frames of the windows through which we regard the world. The spe ctator stands in his or her window lo oking at Las

Meninas, and from inside its frame Las Meninas looks back. If the diameter of that frame exactly matches that of the spectator's window there will arise an Imaginary effe ct of reali sm, with Velazquez's representation coinciding with the repres entation unconsciously brought to the encounter by the spectator, whether king, queen , prince s s , dwarf, Picas s o , Fou cault, Lacan, me, o r you . But the app arent veracity o f Las Meninas will b e call e d into question, a n d i t s preten s e of rep res entation l a i d b are a s the pro duct of the Symb olic manipul ation of repres entati on's representatives , if so much as a crack of discrepancy lies between the painting's frame and the window through which the spectator unconsciously looks. According to Lacan, Velazquez undercut the Imaginary consistency of the court by p ainting an uncanny image of the king and his queen in a Symb olic mirror that appeared to violate optical law. In the dark glimmer of the royal mirror Lacan s aw a premonition of the television screen of the media age. Relations of insatiable desire between the post war European subject and the commodities of merican style capitalism were offered a spectral existence on the black and white electronic screen . Given h i s harsh criti que that American style Ego p sychol ogy merely encouraged patients to adapt thems elves to prevailing capitalis t norms , Lacan might have b een amu sed t o rebrand the USA national coporate logo as U$@. My condensed fomula is meant to convey the idea of the Unconscious repression of the structural conlict between the empty formal $ubject of liberal democracy One man, one vote consumerism

and the harassed physical @bject of global

Shop till you dro p ! Although artworks are often

reduced to plaing the role of luxuy commodities, in the authentic work of art subject and object are uneasily brought together fac e to face. I n 1 9 86, o n a large electronic billb oard in front of the

9. Rene

Magritte ,

C aesar's Palace casino in Las Vegas, La

Condition humaine

( 1 933).

the merican conceptual artis t Jenny Holzer erected one of her trademark signs that s p e aks dire ctly to the contradi cti o n s o f cap itali s m and desire: 'PROTE C T ME FROM WHAT I WANT. '

Vel a z q u e z

underlined

the

statu s

of

his

p i c torial

representation as the material repres entative of a fictive courtly representation in a number of ways . The painter indicated the gaze of the sun, upon which pictorial representation depends , in the luminos ity of a window aperture that is all but unseen at the right edge of the p ainting. He imitated the perspectival piercing of pictorial space by opening

a

door in the b ack wall

onto a flight of stairs to a d i stant hall. And he p ainte d images of other framed paintings on the walls of the room. Above all, Velazquez a cknowledged the fundamental constructe dne s s of pictorial representation by depicting himself next to a massive canvas on its wooden s tretcher with p aintbrush and palette in hand at a moment of arrested gesture and suspended gaze. It was the presence of this p ainting in the p ainting that freed Las

Meninas from the illusory repres entation of representation that Foucault insisted upon, m aking it instead into a frankly declared representative of repres entation in the l anguage of Lacan. The Human Condition

In order to clarify his claim, Lacan tuned to a surrealist work by Magritte, who shared with the psychoanalyst the desire to lib erate twentieth centuy culture from the Imaginary shackles of realist representation. In The Human Condition of 1 933 (National Galley of Art, Washington; Figure 9 1 . Magritte situated a l andscape p ainting on an easel in front of a window opening onto that very s ame landscape in such a way as to make the painting all but disappear into the exterior view. Cruci ally, however, Magritte repudiated the illusion of continuity between the work and the worl d by twisting the p l ane of the painting out of a s trictly parallel relation with the p ane of the window. As a result of this displacement the p ainted canvas was s hown as b o th p a s s ing beyond the limit of the outside view and failing to achi eve coincidence with it: on the left, the edge of the l andscape on the easel very slightly overlaps the curtain that enframes the window

b ehind it, and, on the right, the p ainting's unp ainted edge of tacke d on c anvas narrowly obtrudes upon the transparency of the window view. Seen from the side in thi s fashion, like Holb ein's

anamorphic skull, Magritte's p ainting within the p ainting was freed from the i deological duty of ratifying the conventional representation of reality. nstead, the canvas openly proclaimed the artificial s t atus of the work as a Symbolic representative of an Imaginary repres entation of the world. And the Real distortion pr o duc e d by the slightly skewed angle of vision opened up an irreducible gap between the eye and the gaze, between the maginary representation of the view through the window and the Symbolic representative of the p ainted surface of the c anvas . This gapng wound in the human condition is the lost place of the object 'a'.

As for the back tuned c anva s in Las Men inas, we can make it approximate the orientation of the canvas in The Human

�

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6 J S g

Condition by swivelling it to the left around the hinge of its visible left edge , until the hidden front s urface of the p ainting b egins to emerge into view and eventually superimposes itself completely over the depicted scene. If the resulting superimposition of the painting were totally to coincide with the view of the room that remains visible beyond its margin s , it would then conform to Foucault's Imaginary repres entation of repres entation. If, however, with Magritte , we were to arrest the swivelling gait of the canvas acro s s the painting's front just before its unpainted edge disappeared into shadowy oblivion, then, with Lacan, we would be confronted by the literal materiality of the Symb olic repres entative of repres entation. In this respect Vela z quez the painter would b e like L acan the analyst, poised to remark upon the Real uncons cious b reaks in the consciously sp oken discours e of the analys and. As for the honorific cro s s painted on the artist's chest, which dedicated his efforts to a Symbolic company o f the noble dead rather than to the Imaginary flux of daily life , Lacan conirmed his own p aranoia of martyrdom by in sis ting that he did not regard himself as having b een

crucified by his exc ommunic ation from the internati onal psycho analytic community. Lacan s p ent the b etter p a rt of six lectures in 1 9 6 6 reconstructing the deadly play o f the gaze i n Las Men inas i n view of his creation of a new psychoanalytic entity, the lost object of the scopic drive, the primordial cause of the severed subject's scopic desire . Lacan returned to the example of Las Meninas in the unpublished fifteenth book of The Seminar on his conception of the p sychoanalytic act. He did s o in order to clarify the ethical responsibility of the analyst to account for the presence of his or her own gaze within the discourse of desire of the analysand. Lacan claimed that the analyst had to take up a position within the work of analysis like Velazquez within the work of art. In painting, as in p sychoanalysis , the gaze is both present and veiled. The analyst is suppo sed to know the hidden cause of the suffering of which the patient is ignorant, just as the painter is presumed to know the laws of perspective by which the worl d takes on its fo rm for the p rinc e s s at her father's court. In Las

Meninas, however, the painter did not represent his presence in the p ainting as the ab s ent Imaginary eye of the objective perspective . He portrayed his own subjective gaze pres ent but suspended within the Symbolic setting of the artist's studio in the palace of the king. Lacan e quated this hi atus between seeing and painting to the gaps in dis course through which the cons ciously unknown knowledge of the s ubject was unconsciously given voice. In Velazquez's self repres entation as both the active painter of a picture and a pas sive picture within that very painting , the courtly spectator might have felt robbed of the comforting illusion that art can array the worl d before his o r her eye as an object of Imaginary perception without implicating his or her own gaze of Smbolic agency. Even in the painter's s elf portrait Lacan s aw that there was no mirage of immediate presence . Adhering to cultural convention, Velazquez depicted himself wielding his brush not with his left (sinister) hand , as the reversed image in the mirror

would have shown, but, rather, with the right (dexter) hand with its superior Symb olic connotati ons . In Sel-portrait with Palette fro m 1 879 (private collection) , Velazquez's admirer E douard M anet repeated the Smbolic stance of the master, but unlike his Sp anish

r e al i s t

predecessor

the

French

moderni s t

acknowledged t h e Imaginary revers al of the mirror according to which his apparent left hand holding the brush was reduced to the imp o s sible Real blur of the lost object ' a ' . A s Manet's s elf portrait demonstrates , a h a n d engaged i n the dynamic act of p ainting on c anvas cannot at the s ame instant take on the stilled appearance of an object seen in a mirror. For Lacan there was a similar split b etween the analyst's active attention to the articulation of the analys and's discours e and the analyst's passive relection of the analysand's image of the analyst as an all knowing gaze. It was to this presupposed gaze of knowledge that the patient's dis cours e had b een addressed since the moment when its suffering had b ecome a question to be answered by a knowing Other. As with the p ainter and the p rinces s , the transference of the supposition of the knowing gaze to the psychoanalyst was the p rojection on the part of the p atient that there existed s omeone who truly sees and truly knows. 'So show me ! ' , she s aid. But the p ainter of the p rincess did not budge, because, like the silent analyst, the Other sees and nows nothing at all.

Chapter 7 Am I a wo m a n or a man?

Lacan's s eminar on the psychoanalytic act was disrupted, like all things in France, by the revolutionary acts of May 1 9 6 8 . Diss atisfied with conditions i n the government run universities, students took to the streets, chanting revolutionary slogans with a di stinctly Lacanian ring : ' B e realistic, demand the imp o ssibl e ! ' Although Lacan regarded the violent confrontation with the police not as a prop erly psychoanalytic act couched in the Symbolic

me � ium o f words but, rather, as an Imaginary, inarti culate acting out by the students addre s s e d to a govenment that was

deaf to their desires, he nevertheless suspended his s eminar for a month in soli darity with their grievances . A year and a half later, in an impromptu meeting at the experimental branch of the University of Paris at suburb an Vincennes founded in 1 969 in response to the protests of the previous year, Lacan cautione d his still confrontational auditors that they take care not to squander their revolutionary ardour in narcissistic self display. As a cautionary image he offered the students the futility of the bri d e o b s e ssed b a ch e l o rs who grind their cho c o l a t e themselves in the signature work by h i s recently deceased friend Duchamp , The Bride St ripped B a re by Her Bachelors, Even, commonly known as The Large Glass ( 1 9 1 5-23 , Philadelphia Mus eum of Art) . The first three l etters of bride bachelor

C ELibataire

MARiee

and

spell out the artist's bi gendered name,

Marcel/Marcelle, in a Duchampian wordplay that is typically Lacanian as well.

In June 1 968 Lacan retuned for a final session of his seminar after civil order had b een restored in France. Perhaps we can see an eloqu ent image of the nation's tragic self stifling in Lacan's reading o n that o ccasion of Munch's famous p ainting of 1 893, The

Scream, as the s ilenced voice of desire subjectively annihilating with its hysterical shock waves the rigid, black frocked masters of bourgeois conventi on who are shown walking imperturb ably along the vertiginous perspective of the bridge. Making himself the s uffering mouthpiece of the Symbolic truth of unconscious speech, Lacan returned to his reading of Munch's Scream a s a muted cry into the unheeding void at the first session of the sixteenth year of his s eminar, the l a s t to b e held under the a u s p i c e s of the E cole Normale S uperieure . Dismissed for his role in promoting the s ubversive discourse of p sycho a n alysis in the French 0 ,

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university, Lacan could take perverse pleasure in yet another excommunication like that of his beloved Spinoz a . But not for l ong. Starting in 1 969 his s eminars would henceforth be hosted at the L aw School of the University of Paris at the Pantheon. Entitled From one Other to an other, Book XVI of The Seminar distinguished between two forms of the other/Other: the upper c a s e , general i s e d Other of lingui sti c , cultural and p olitical authority in who s e signiiers the subject fails to a chieve anything but an empty shell of rhetorical consistency, and the lower case, s ingular other of the object 'a' in the lost physicality of which the s ubject may find its only Real coherence of self. The object 'a' of Munch's silent scream represented for Lacan the trace of a lost emb odiment once situated within the matrix of the mother infant embrace. Only a hole in the subject's b eing subsisted as a place holder of this evacuated jouissance, a hole which the reanimated object 'a' of the work of art sought imp o s sibly to fill. As Lacan memorably s aid, the ess ential merit of the work of art was to reach b ack in fantasy to tickle the Thing from within. Whereas for Freud artistic sublimation entailed the socially acceptable objectific ation of an unacceptable p rivate wish, Lacan

depreciated the objective work as n othing more than the merest shred of material hanging on a wall that nevertheles s managed to grip the viewer with the emancip atory promise of a forbi dden and imp ossible joui s s ance.

The statue and the Ego In his p ronouncements on the work of art Lacan was always concerned to rip away its deceptive Imagin ary mo orings in everyday vis u al exp erience and establish it in the dignity o f

a

Symbolic dis course with the p ower to create a new order o f s atisfaction from the manipulation of the signifier itself. Mo s t o f Lacan's remarks o n art touched on the medium of painting, b u t in

Book XVI of The Seminar he initiated an extended commentay on the s eventeenth century sculpture of Roman C atholicis m at the time of its resurgence in the war for the s oul of Christendom

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against the austere repudiation of s acred images of the Protestant

c o

Reformation. Lacan analysed at length the Imaginary spell of

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religious statuary, much like Freud, who in 1 9 1 4 had publi shed an essay on Michelangel o 's sculpture of Moses ( 1 5 1 5, San Pietro in Vincoli, Romel in which the liberator of his people was said to be mastering his wrath at the idolatrous dancing of the Israelites around the Golden C alf and restraining himself from smashing

the twin tablets of the Law. Imagining himself in the place of his

forebears in the Egyptian desert, Freud confessed how his eye trembl e d beneath the force of the p atriarch's terrible gaze. In a lecture published in the International Journal of Psycho­

A nalysis in 1 953 entitled 'Some refl ections on the ego ' , Lacan spoke of the impres sive stature of s t atues a s s etting the style according to which the bo dily Ego erected itself as an Imagina ry armoured entity capable of withstanding the withering gaze of the public sphere. At the time this was seen as an alienating efect of the Ego's illus o ry consolidation upon the mirror stage. Not quite two decades l ater, however, Lacan stre ssed the insuficiency of the bodily Ego insofar as the stony p ermanence of the statue pointed

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I

to s omething mis sing in the subject's living lesh, the lost object 'a' of a deathless joui s s ancp In his zeal to deny not only his own Symbolic c astration but alsu the incompletenes s of the idealised Other who s e faithful s ervant he wished to b e , the p ervert was s een by Lacan as stopping up the unavowable hole in his carnal b eing with the fetishistic device of the statue. Like the glamorous image of the Hollywood movie star that was a fo cus of

the first generation of Lacanian film criticism in the 1 970s , the exhibitionism of the martyred saint or swooning Madonna incited in the viewer the peverse pleasures of voyeuri sm in which the uncastrated phallus might b e seen to remain on unending display. The leshless stone of the s culpture projected an enduring, undead gaze in front o f which the spectator surrendere d his or her mortal being to the immortal Thing . The culmination of Lacan's ruminations on the art of sculpture came in Book XX of The Seminar under the title En core. Meaning 'More ! ' or 'Again ! ' , in Lacan's spoken French encore also sounded like en cops, 'in the b o dy', the deteriorating b o dy of his l ater years . Published in French in 1 9 7 5 , Book XX was actually the second of the oral seminars to be committed to written form, but it took more than twenty years for it to appear in a complete English edition even though excerpts on feminine s exuality had appeared in a volume edited by Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose as early a s 1 982. Against Lacan's earlier articulation of ' The signification of the phallus ' , the title of the widely read 1 958 essay that app e ared in the 1 977 s elected translation of Ecrits, in

En core he supplemented his notion of the m eaning making joui s s ance of the Symbolic phallus with an elaboration of what he called the other joui s s ance of the woman about which nothing precise could be said. With regard to this app arently meaningless yet vital joui s s ance the example o f Roman b aroque s culpture played a key, and even notorious, role. App earing as the cover illustration of the p ublished seminar, thi s w a s the famous sculptural s t a ging of the e c stasy of the

mystical Spanish s aint Teresa of Avila, who surrenders herself to a smiling C upid like angel wielding the pointed arrow of divine love. In her spiritual autobiography the saint des cribed the p aradox of a piercing bodily pain which, in its surpas sing sweetnes s , she did not want to stop. This was the very deinition of Lacanian joui s s ance, a transgres sive s exuality already remarked upon in early responses to the s culp tural work. Theatrically orchestrated for the burial chapel of C ardinal Federico C ornaro in the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome by the Italian s culptor and architect Gian Lorenzo B enini, the bent back body of the s aint in her billowing robes was bone up upon a marble cloud high above the altar ( 1 647 5 2 ; Fi gure 1 0) . The ecstatic ravishment of the saint was raised into this position of Imaginary visibility for the principal benefit of C ardinal C ornaro and his deceased relatives , some of whom were represented o n the nearby side walls ratifying the Symbolic significance of the s cene in the sidelong gazes they

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cast upon the work. This confirms Lacan's view that the destiny

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of the work of art is not to be seen by the artist himself or even

o

by some random other who might be his s ocial peer. Rather, the work of art is fashioned to be shown to the ins crutable gaze of the Other, as repres ented here by the blank marble busts of the cardinal and his ancestors . In contras t to the oblique disclosure of the skull anamophically embedded within Holbein's

Ambassadors, the very acute viewpoint of the C ornaro family would have trans formed the me aningful frontal view of the altarpiece into a shapeless marble mas s . In this Real disruption of the Imaginary i l l u s i o n , B e rnini c a u s e d the e s s enti al meaningles sness of the signifier repre sentation

the material representative of

to appear. Furthermore, when we turn our eyes

away from the rea s suring illusion of the frontal plane and cast down our gaze to our feet we find inscribed upon the loor of the chapel a skeletal spectre of death. As in the case of Velazquez's theatrical tableau of dynastic love at the Hapsburg court, Bernini has included the courtly viewer

�

10,

Gian Lorenzo

Bern i n i , The

Ecstacv

o f Saint Teresa

( 1 647 52)

of the repres entation of divine l ove within the s p ace of the representation its elf. We latterday spectators stand outside the privileged precinct of the cardinals, who bear witness to the s aint's ecstasy from within the sacred conines of the illusionistic sp ace, but we are not entirely excluded from the work of art. Just as in Las

Meninas, where the perspective exp ands outward to incorp orate us in a window like frame, here again we occupy a position as the posthumous object of the work's gaze in a virtual window of our own b eyond the chapel's rails .

Feminine jouissance The discussion of Bernini's Ecstacy of Saint Teresa flared up in

Enco re in the aftermath of the Roman orgy of mus eums and churches from which Lacan had recently retuned. As always, the reference to the work of art exempliied in visual form an element of p sychoanalytic theoy that Lacan was trying to articulate in

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words. Here he was attempting to provide reasonable grounds for

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his seemingly outlandish claim that there could be no hamonious

o

s exual relationship b etween women and men b ecause of the asymmetrical positions they occupied with regard to the Symbolic phallic signifier. Where a s all men were said t o b e subjected to the function of castration such that their lives were played out as a fraudulent farce of app e aring to have or not t o have Symbolic title to the paternal phallu s , there was one man considered t o be exempt from this univers al rule. This was the uncastrated father of unlimited jouiss ance who, ac cording to Freud's myth of the primal horde, had possessed all the women of the clan prior to his murder at the hands of his frustrated sons. In contrast to this masculine logic of the universal l aw and its singular exception, there was no woman, according to Lacan, who was not subject to the function of castration. In compens ation for this Symb olic l ack, women were made t o don the masquerade of femininity and thus b ecome the Imaginary phallic object and cau s e of masculine desire.

�

Insofar as a visual fantasy of woman embodied the lost object of masculine desire she was aligned with object ' a' in the Lacanian calculus, but in his view thi s was not all she was for hers elf. Although women as s peaking beings were said to be subject to Symbolic castration without exception, because a woman was not

defined by the mas culine quandary of having or not having the

ph allus, Lacan argued that not all of her was sub ordinated to the phallic function. Lacan relate d the feminine quality of not being entirely subjected to Symb olic castration to the lack of a signiier in the phallic vo cabulay of the Other for the lost corporeality of jouissance. On the upper tier of the Graph of Desire this strange lack of los s in the joui s s ance of the woman was indicated by the formula S ( ( ) , the Signifier of the Other's lack. Lacanian man had b ecome the bearer of the Symbolic mark or link of s ignification . The Symbolic phallus was understood as being either present or absent on the basis of the Imaginay model of the erect or flaccid penis of sexual copulation. In contrast, Lacanian woman was des cribed as the signiier that signified no one thing in itself - Woman with a capital letter

but instead

inaugurated a space in the Real without which no particular signifier could come to take on any Symb olic meaning at all. The jouissance of the castrated man was subject to the rigi d phallic code of either/or, but woman was neither c a s trated nor uncastrated . Hers was a supplementary jouissance beyond the phallus adrift in the flow of an endless signification, a Real jouissance of the body, en cops, of which nothing inal but always s omething more, encore, could be s aid. As for B enini's Saint Teres a , she was coming, Lacan avowed, twi sting i nto a positive light earlier condemnations of the saint's orgasmic corp oreality. Whereas Saint Teresa was alleged to know nothing of the nature of her jouissance, Lacan provoc atively claimed that psychoanalysis did. In this way L acan rep eated the implication of Freud's infamous question, 'What does Woman want? ' , Was ill das Weib ?, that the woman hers elf d o e s not know what she want s . But

perhap s Saint Teresa did know s omething whereof she spoke, for in writing of her ecstacy she insisted that the pain she enjoye d was not o f the body, but o f the spirit, even if the body h a d its share in it. That was the jouissance of writing itself. Many femini s ts have taken harsh exception to the Lacanian scenario of the all or nothing of masculinity and the not all of femininity, just as other feminists have s aluted Lacan for hi s emancip atory displacement of the totalitarian reign of the phallic signiier. The point that I want to stress is that, according to Lacan in Encore, women and men alike are abl e to situate themselves o n one side o r the other o f the Smbolic divide o f sex irrespective o f the biological attributes of their bodies , as seen in the transgendered performances of Jaye D avid s o n in The Crying Game ( 1 9 9 2 ) o r Hilary Swank in Boys Don 't Cry ( 1 999) , t o take just two notab l e examples from recent films. Lacan insisted that history was full of phallic women and

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non phallic men, mystics such as Saint Jon of the Cross , or indeed

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Lacan himself in the mystical j aculations, as he called them, of

o

his Ecrits. In front of his mystified seminar Lacan repeatedly hysterically

exhibited himself in the p o s ition of the non

phallic joui s s ance of the not whole woman. Identifying his lack with the other jouissance of the woman, Lacan's transgressive enjoyment was not in the masturb atory orgasm of the bachelors in the lower s ection of The L a rge Glass but, rather, in h i s p aroxysms of s peech in t h e m anner o f Bernini's s aint and Duchamp 's similarly airb orne female app arition in the upper register of The Bride Stripped Bare. As an historical function of the addre s s of feminine jouiss ance to the ear of the divine Other, the Other's unseen face took on the all seeing invisibility of the gaze of God. For Lacan, the name of that gaze was simply love , the non s exual regard of the analyst for the e s sential suffering of the p atient. Similarly, for Duchamp, the ecstatic sufering of his quasi mechanical bride was fuelled by the gas oline of l ove

(essence d 'amour) .

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There is no sexual relation

The aim of Lacan's teaching on the non recipro city of the sexual relation was to distinguish the s o called masculine enjoyment of the fantasised lost obje ct embedded in the p artner's maternalised b o dy from the so called feminine j o u i s s an c e of the p artner's mutil ated b o dy ins ofar a s he o r she bore the mark of b eing castrated, not whole, and therefore in vital need of the selfles s gift of l ove. One form of the acknowledgement of the lack in the other was the amb iguous smile we e n c o untere d on the fa ce of Saint nne at the s tart of this book. Here, near the end of the book, we encounter another such smile on the face of the angel who sutured together the s evered unity of the Real b o dy and Imaginay soul of Saint Teresa with the Symbolic arrow of love. Like the andronous smiling ange l s of Leonardo, who, for Freud, harboured the indescribable s ecret of bliss, Bernini's angel also became the

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wordless instrument of feminine joui s s a n c e . It was not S aint Teresa's fantasised possession of the lost matenal phallus, breast, gaze or voice that could be successfully targeted by the thrusting a rrow of phallic jouissance. Rather, in her wound L a c an s aw the inadequacy of any Imaginary visualisation of the saint's transverberation. No single Smb olic signifier could fill that Real

gap of inexpre s s ibility, but p e rhap s the boundl e s s encore of love could. One of the key blackboard diagrams reproduced in the pages of

Encore is an equilateral triangle repres enting the interaction of the Imaginay, Symb olic and Real dimensions of gendered and sexed human experience. O n the sides of the triangle between the Imaginary and the Real lies the meagre reality of the corporeal peni s , designate d by > the capital letter phi . Between the Imaginary and the Symbolic lies the truth of the lacking signiier of feminine joui s s ance, designated by S ( A ) . And b e tween the Symbolic and the Real lies the semblance of lost vitality that is the object 'a'. Using Lacan's triangular template, I can map out the

distribution of e lements in Bernini's work in the following way.

The Imaginary s chema of the s culptural tableau is visually uniied by a comp ositional link between the concrete reality of the angel 's arrow of phallic jouissance and the ineffably represented truth of the s aint's other joui s s ance of enraptured s ilence . The Symb olic scenario of the work is s u s p ended between the s acred narrative of the saint's endlessly deferred coming and the profane semblance of the lost phallic object that would miraculous ly accomplish the deed. B u t the e arthb o und Real of the s culptor'S chi sel l e d ston�s re s i s t their clo u d b orne visualis ation and symbolis ation, for there i s an almost comic disjunction in the bronze arrow between its obtusene s s as a material prop for the lost object ' a'nd the inadequacy of any actual biological organ to maintain a woman in such a state of everlasting erotic bli s s . In Lacan's diagram the igid sides of the triangle constrain a perilous pool o f joui s s ance from overflowing its b o undaries while maintaining it a s a precious flu i d res erve . The unc anny

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liquefaction of B enini's frozen marble is the sublimated sign of a

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surreal jouissance that sp ares the subject from the compulsions

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and frus trations of any actually attempted s exual enjoyment. Lacan called this artistic exposure of the faulty infrastructure of the human sexual relation an X ray of the soul. What Bernini's flamboyant style was to the high period of the Roman b aroque Lacan's verb al pyrotechnics was to the later decades of Parisian surrealism, even if he sometimes disavowed his early connections to the movement. hereas his ornate and oney play on words was oten thrown in his face in the disdainful criticism of his self styled scientiic peers , Lacan openly embraced baroque excess as his personal emblem in Encore. His alliterative and a s s onant manipulation of language constituted a formal fashioning of the verbal s ignifier that mimed the overtly theatrical display of the baroque style. Lacan's verbal style also enacted something of the tortuous rhythms of the signifier as enunciated in the analysand's dreams , slips of the tongue and free association s . Lacan was e s p eci ally keen o n p u s hing h i s public speech, like

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Benini's sot stone, to a point of communicative excess where the artistic sublimation of the failure of the sexual relationship might be felt to release a compensatory visceral renant of unrepressed, wholly unreasonable j o u i s s ance. L a c an's weekly oral seminar was nol fucking, he once s aid, but it w a s his object

'a',

the s ensual

m ateriality of speech that reconnected him to the primal voi d of his lost mother child lesh. Identifying hims elf with the delirious ecstacy of the female saint in the seminar of 1 972 3, the s eventy year old Lacan found himself again, encore, in the grip of the visual delusions of the female p atient upon who s e case of p aranoid criminal assault his doctoral diss ertati o n of 1 9 3 2 had b een b a s e d . Named Aimee ('Beloved', in English), hers was a notorious case of transgres s ive joui s s ance that greatly stirred the masculine circles of surrealism

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and provided the link that first drew together Lacan and Dali. Just as the painter had claimed of his p aranoiac critical method that the only difference between his visions and tho s e of the insane was that he was not mad,

so

Lacan claimed in Encore that the

difference b etween himself and the mys tical women who displayed the non phallic jouissance of the Other was that he knew a bit about it but they did not. Besides Dali's 1 954 photographic imp ersonation of the Mona Lisa that I have already noted , an earlier artistic precedent for Lacan's gender bending identiications were Man Ray's famous photographs of Duchamp in the gui s e of his feminine alter Ego, Rrose Selavy ( 1 920 1 , Philadelphia Museum of Art) . Pronouncing the Real double 'R' of the name in French, we discover in this Imaginary blending of woman and man the Symb olic dictum that 'Eros , c'est l a vie' , 'Eros is life'. From Lacan's perspective of the speaking being facing up to the Real void of the object ' a ' , the vis u al and verb al exc e s s e s of Christian art and mysticism sublimated the impasse of s exual relations in the form of s acred ecstacy and martyrdom. That was what the kilometres of renaissance and b aroque p aintings in our mus eums and churches bore witness to, until the slate was wiped

clean by the modenist preoccup ation with the geometric relations of the little s quares , s ay, of Kasimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian, who s e austere axial crossings derive, respectively, from Russian Orthodox icons and the architecture of Dutch Reformed churches . L a c an's p o st Christian and mo derni st preoccupati o n with mathematical topology and the theoy of knots was nothing les s . O n e of L acan's final written texts was the intro duction to

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exhibition in 1 978 of abstract p aintings of inticately knotted and woven strands and bands of colour by the French painter Fra:oi s Rouan. Rouan in turn s aluted Lacan's formula for the work of art as the formal encircling of the void at the human being's heart. His elegant stained glass windows for the cathedral of Nevers in central France ( 1 99 1 ) retun the triadic interlace of the Real, the Imaginay and the S ymb olic to its roots in the C h ristian theol ogy of the trinity and the elaborate geometrical tracery of Gothic windows . Lacan's seminars after Encore repeated many of the themes

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that had preoccupied him for years . On the one hand, in the

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rhetori c a l p rovo c ations of his speech, Lacan rep eatedly put

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himself in the place of the hysterical p atients of Freud who se unconstrained talk of their bo dily symptoms challenged the so cial convention of proper feminine behaviour and led to the invention of the talking cure , a tem offered to Freud by one of tho s e turn of the century women. On the other hand, in the nearly compulsive repetition of his quasi mathematical formul as and diagrams , Lacan positioned himself in the typically masculine role of Freud's obses sional p atients who sought to e stablish the uncastrated wholenes s of the father through their ritualised adherence to the letter of an obscure law.

The symptom Freud had claimed a common obsessional structure for art and religion, but Lacan apologised to the artists in his audience in this respect. In his later years Lacan insisted on the affinity between the working procedures of the artist and the analyst in l aying

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b are the obj ective framework of the subject's carnal symptom. The emancip atory promise in art and analysis was no longer to eliminate the symptom through Symbolic interpretation by reducing it to the physical effect of a repres sed childhoo d memoy, as Freud in his treatise on Leonardo appeared to b elieve. Rather, the goal in at and analysis was to scrutinise the symptom from all sides , to take resp onsibility for the unique formal organis ation of one's most intimate jouiss ance, to recognise the unbreakable link b etween one's ineffable subjectivity and the sens eless objectivity of the symptom, to identify with this link, and then to let it b e . Already a t t h e e n d of his 'Mirror stage' essay Lacan h a d borrowed the s acred Hindu formula, ' Thou art that ! ' , in order to regi ster something o f the p aradoxical conjunction between the subject's disembo died Symb olic consciousness and the abject traces of its own vanished embodiment in the Real .

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The unpublished seminar twenty one, in which Lacan remade these points, was named for the fundamental uncertainty of the p atenal foundation of the Symbolic order. Les Non dupes errent was a phonetic retranscription of Les Noms du p ere, the name of the abortive seminar of 1 963 on the Names of the Father. Sounding the s ame , this inventive p unning on the father's names took on the new meaning of the error of those who did not let themselves be dup ed. The e rror of the subj ect was to remain trapped in the perceptual immediacy of the Imaginary relation to the mother rather than to allow its elf to be productively dup e d by the Symbolic iction of the father's name . And it was in the Symbolic freedom of the movement of the brush upon the Real wap and weft of the canvas that something new in painting might b e bon. With the pointed application of a painted mark the p ainter might parry the Imaginary gaze of the Thing that would pull him or her b ack from the bink of public achievement into its regressive embrace. Faced by the daunting void of the blackboard upon which he hoped to transmit the formulas and diagrams of his p sychoanalytic legacy, Lacan was like Vel azquez, recoiling from the b lanknes s of

the unseen canvas that taunted him in Las Meninas . Ten years after his lectures on the painting Lacan repeated his identiication with the enigmatic gaze of the s eventeenth century artist in the unpublished seminar twenty two entitled R. S. . A c atchy acronm for the p sycho analyti c tri ad of the Real, the Symb olic and the Imaginary, when p ronounced in French R . S. 1. sounded like h?sie, heresy. Stubbornly s u s taining his subvers ive superimposition of the s ecular trinity of p sychoanalysis upon the religio'ls trinity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, Lacan was a haunted heretic who could n ever wholly renounce the scripture in which he had been rai s e d and to which his brother Marc Marie devoted his life as a monk. The surging forth of jouissance was not the caus e but, rather, the effect of the Symbolic act of creation that took its primary model from the Gospel of Jon, in which it was written that in the beginning of the

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World was the Word. The Word in its World making power was the shared medium

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of s criptural. analytic and artistic creation. In Book XXIII of The

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Seminar, from 1 975 6, Lacan returned to the formative years of Parisian surrealism, when he had first encountered the religious and artis tic transgressions of James Joyce, the avant garde Irish C atholic author of Ulysses ( 1 922). In the s eminar he conducted fifty years after witnes sing Joyce read from his landmark text in an avant garde Pari s ian b o okstore, L a c an prop o s ed an archaic s p elling for the symptom

sinthom e

that was itself a

thoroughly Joycean bilingual pun. In distinguishing the Imaginary perceptual s o und of sympt8me from its imperceptual Symb olic s p elling of sinthome, Lacan invited his initial listeners and subsequent readers to hear and see a profusion of signifiers variously related to the theme of sin. In the letters of sinthome we ind the indelible stain inscribed up on the tome of the book and the tomb of the body. This tome/tomb is the memorial home of homme or man. As pronounced in French, sin s ounds like saint, s p ecifically S aint Thomas , the doubter of the resurrecti on o f

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C hrist, and S aint Thomas Aquinas, the author of the doctrine of the resurrection of the b o dy that Lacan himself no longer shared. In the diagram strewn p ages of this seminar Lacan worked out in obsessive detail how the disp arate o rders of Joyce's personal histoy, hysteria and heresy were precariously kno tte d together to p rovide the author with a crucial consistency of being in the fom of the sin t ho m e symptom of the literary work of art. In Totem -

an d Taboo of 1 9 1 3 Freud had called the physical symptom of the hys teric a c o rporeal caric ature of the physical materiality of a work of art, a definition that was sil ently endors ed sixty years later in Lacan's seminar on Joyce .

Borromean rings For several years Lacan had been knotting rings of string and drawing blackboard pictures of these rings in an effot to constuct a topology of the human s ubject in which the intertwining of the Real. Symb olic and Imaginary dimen sions of b eing c ould b e grasped directly. A variation o n a medieval emblem i n which the unity of the trinity was repres ented as the interlacing of three rings, the version of the knot that caught Lacan's fancy was named B o rromean, after the coat of arms of a Milan e s e clan of the fifteenth century who s e power depended on the joint alliance of three noble families . In spite of this visual affirmation of unity, we should remember that the word for knot in French, noeud, is a nearly indistinguishable s ound twin of ne, the sign of negation, just as in English the word knot is the strict homophone of not. The purely Symb olic silence of the letter 'k' is all that i s needed to make s omething of nothing, as we know. To make a Borromean knot of three rings

Lacan distinguished

them on the b oard with blue, white and red chalk, the French tricolour

each ring must be passed over and under its mates in

such a manner that the resulting three in one unity will come undone with the s evering of any one of the rings . Whereas Freud ' awarded inger rings to the inner circle of his dis ciples, Lacan

appeared to aspire to the title of Lord of the Borromean Rings, a version of which is illustrated below. Let the ring at the top repres ent the Imaginary, the ring at the right the Symb olic and the ring at the left the Real. Moving our eyes in a clockwise direction, we see that the right hand edge of the ring of the Imaginay goes over the ring of the Symbolic beneath it, under the ight hand edge of the ring of the Real above it, over the left hand edge of the Symbolic b eneath it, and under the 1eft hand edge of the Real above it. In the inters ection at the right b etween the Imaginary and Symb olic rings, Lacan placed the illusoy effect of freezing the multiple potentiality of the siniier into a unitary signiied meaning. In the intersection at the bottom of the Symbolic and Real rings , he situated the space where the p athetic reality of the penis met the limited experienc e o f joui s s ance permitted b y t h e p aternal regime of Symb olic

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rings , he located the joui s s ance of the Other of which nothing

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definitive c ould be said due to the lack of an a dequate signiier.

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This was also the place of an heretical hole in being, for on Lacan's

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atheistic account there existed no Other of the Other, no One to guarante e the knowl edge of what it would take to recover paradise lost. Therefore, in the central void where the three orders were sup erimposed, Lacan inscrib ed the suturing effect of the object ' a ' , the endles sly circular pursuit of which maintained a minimal semblance of being for the divided subject of language and joui s s ance. Failure on the p art of the Symbolic paternal metaphor to sustain its interlocking p o sition with regard to the Imaginary demands of matern al desire and the Real needs of corporeal jouiss ance would result in the unravelling of the p erceptual physical p sychic knot and the p sychotic disintegration of the subject's world. As in the cases of Leonardo and Little Hans, this failure was what Lacan dis cened in the inadequacy of the father of Joyce , but it was Joyce's singular joy to author in the signifiers of his art an originality and consistency of style that prevented the trip le knot of his world from coning ap art. C onstituting a precio u s fourth ring forging a single chain from the disparate links of the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary, the unique style of the artist was now s een by Lacan in a new light. Not only was the creation of the work an act of sublimation whereby the subject of unconscious desire was safely able to stage a visual fantasy of the lost Thing , the creation of the work of art was also the direct production of a dazzling object of jouissance for the symptomatic subject of the irrepressible drive . Art was a practical form of knowledge , a savoir faire o f jouiss ance, as L a c a n affirmed i n h i s unpublished twenty fourth s eminar on the punning wit of unconscious knowledge. In the s trictly untranslatable title of the seminar

l 'une bevue s 'aile a mourre

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LInsu que sait de

Lacan fused the formalist 'wordjoy'

of Dublin, Vienna and Paris in an intoxicating cocktail of s ounds and meanings in which the unsuccess blundering

lune bevue

German, das Unbewusste

l 'insucces

or lunatic

of the subject of the unconscious was a game of chance

mourre

in in

which one sailed off to mortal love and de ath A n d the transgendered pun on the initial letter

L

a m o ur/m o rt. elle, s h e of

Lacan's name was perhaps to be heard in the word for wing

aile

as well. As for art, Lacan opined in the seminar that the abstract painter, like the i dealist philosopher, was a metaphysician insofar as his or her crude Imaginay s chemas were torn away from any erroneous notion of a d i re c t corresp ondence with reality by the

simp le S ymbo l i c exp edient of providing an arbitrary verb al title for the vis ual work. C o rresp onding to the endless elaboration of the Smbolic titles of p aintings, even when the title of a work was

Untitled, truth was to be discovered in art not in some Imaginary verity of visual reflection, but in the Real va riety of p i c torial matter in which was made manifest the artist's own smptomatic organis ation of jouissance. As the psychoanalyst punctuated the low of signiiers of the analysand's dis course in order to bring o ut the invisible structure of its underlying formal relations, so too the critic or histoian cu t into the seamles snes s of t h e image with a singular articulation of signifiers , a novel interpretation of the work that rendered it p artial, poetic or partisan, and therefore

not whole. Now it was the moment to conclude, this being the title of Lacan's unpublished twenty fifth s eminar, in which the aging analyst continued to practice his endles s art, like Ulys s e s ' wife Penelope at her loom, of weaving and unweaving the tricoloured

strands of Real life , Imaginary love and Symbolic death. In the unpublished twenty sixth seminar the tragicomic Lacanian drama was entitled Topology and Time, an imp o s sible twining of the disp arate strands of subj ective existence that can neither recapture the irst object lost nor forestall the inal objectification to come. Nonetheless, for all his fantasy, fallacy and failure, Lacan faltered on to the end.

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