Jacques Lacan: Dialectic of Desire and Structure of the sensorial Perception

1. From the Dialectic of Desire to Logic of Fantasy

In the 1958-59 Seminar Desire and its Interpretation, Lacan provides us with an exemplary definition of what desire is in Man. Dealing more peculiarly with the clinical or psychoanalytic experience which arises from the direct experience of desire, he states that «desire at first appears as a disturbance. It upsets the perception of the object (Il trouble la perception de l’objet) […], degrades it, throws it into disorder, debases it, in any case it shakes it and sometimes manages to dissolve the one who perceives it, that is the subject»¹. Desire, Lacan adds, provokes a sort of blinding of the reality of things, or rather it produces the perception of something that «appears to be opposite to the construction of reality». In a text belonging to the same period, The Signification of the Phallus (1958), disserting on the nature of desiring (Begehren), he states: «The phenomenology that emerges from analytic experience is certainly of a kind to demonstrate the paradoxical, deviant, erratic, eccentric, and even scandalous nature of desire that distinguishes it from need»².

If need rules the animal behaviour in order to give stability to the relation between the organism and its natural environment, desire seems to work in the opposite way. As a matter of fact desire produces exactly a break or an upsetting of the entire system that determines the animal adaptation to a specific milieu that has for the animal itself the value of object-world (Umwelt). Lacan, who had used the socio-biological concept of milieu since 1932 in the thesis for his medical doctorate, had no hesitation during the seminar lesson of 7 April, 1954, in holding that the most elementary experience of language is a vital need for human life «qui fait que le milieu de l’homme est un milieu symbolique»³. For this reason, interpreting the human desire entails a revision of the concept of environment: to Man the original milieu of his specific being is his Being-in-the-language. In this way, a close relationship is established between desire, language and symbolic sphere.

Speaking of a precise phenomenology of desire, the first sign that reveals its appearance is provided by a fantasy (fantasme⁴) that distorts the perception of the object, making the whole reality the scenery of its appearance, and consequently the construction of reality itself phantasmal. A more or less extended part of reality is in some way hallucinated or upset, subverted, overturned. In being subjected to desire, reality must bear a rewriting that allows it to be used as a scene, projective screen or materialization of the fantasy. Thus the fantasy (le fantasme) works as a junction or mediation between the desire that shows the existence of the subject’s signifier, often referred to as (S), and the object that represents the remains of reality, namely the residuary object that is still legible once the fantasy has entered the hidden texture of its weft and modified its grammar. In the fantasy both the classical cogitative subject of Cartesian heritage and the object are dissolved, being the latter the significant part of reality since it represents it as something real.

The formula that Lacan gives of the fundamental fantasy is the well-known one available in an important essay, The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire (1960)⁵. The formula (S ◊ a) is greatly helpful in letting us understand how the fantasy’s space – expressed by the central quadrangular lozenge – is a geometral installation that works in being placed between the position occupied by the Subject (dissolved, divided or barred owing to desire) and the object little a (objet petit a) that represents that remnant of reality that desire makes functional to the construction of the fantasy. The name Lacan gives the lozenge is the provisional one of ‘poinçon’, meaning generically punch, stamp, and stencil in typography. In my opinion another meaning should be added, that is topo-graphic or topological matrix, because of the geometrization of the fantasy’s space produced in it.

The same fantasy’s formula is illustrated exemplarily in the well-known pages of the 1963-64 Seminar, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, dedicated to «the gaze considered as object little a». Since the ‘inaugural’ publication of this seminar in 1973, its lessons have been interpreted as an analytical reflection on the aesthetic structure of the