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→Distortion and Desire
If language has a capacity to transmit a message, it also has a redundant side. It's the different between a letter and a telegram. The telegram conveys the minimum information content quickly, whereas the letter may dwell on details, use rhetorical devices and bow to the requirements of etiquette. Now, if we are to track down desire, Lacan says, we will do best by ''focusing not on the message, but rather on the points of redundancy'', the little details which do not really need to be there.
=====The Maternal Phallus=====If desire here is a process of distortion, a force at work in between signifiers, how can we speak about an object of desire? It would seem, on the contrary, as if desire did not have any object. Lacan replies that the object is of a very particular kind: an ''absent one''. It is not any absent object but, for Lacan at this moment in his work, a very precise one: ''the maternal phallus''. Freud and his followers, despite many disagreements, had always stressed the centrality of the [[castration complex]]. The key is less the possession by the [[subject]] of a [[phallus]], but where the [[mother]] has one or not. (The phallus is not the same thing as the penis: it is the penis plus the idea of [[lack]].) (if you think that you might lose your penis and that other people do not have this organ, the idea of loss will become linked to the organ in question. It will never be a penis again. In Freudian theory it will be a ''penis plus the idea of its absence''. Hence what one searches for in the [[mother]] cannot be seen: how can one see something which is not there?
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