Changes

On the Father's side, the disappointment is beyond remedy: "There is no Other of the Other." The dead King wanders in quest of an impossible redemption. The Other, the place of truth, does not contain the signifier that could be the guarantor of such truth. The phallus is unavailable in the Other, which is rendered by the sign: - F. This would explain the almost desperate tone in Lacan's next seminar, L'éthique.... What if the masculine subject turns toward his mother to praise her woman's dignity? Then he comes up against what she manifests of her desire: "not desire, but a gluttony that is engulfing." The horror of femininity rules over the play and hits Ophelia, the virgin fiancée, in the face. Her character is fascinating because it embodies "the drama of the feminine object caught in the snare of masculine desire," but above all because she is at the same time the object and the touchstone of desire: objet a (part object) of desire and phallus (present in Ophelia). The two terms are not quite distinguished and if Ophelia can only be discovered in mourning - "I loved Ophelia" - such mourning is both that of the object and that of the phallus. Against Jones, whose definition of aphanisis was an attempt to find in the fear of being deprived of one's desire a factor common to both sexes, Lacan maintains a radical asymmetry in the rapport to the phallic signifier. Man "is not without having it" and woman "is without having it." The only object of desire, and at the same time its only signifier, seems indeed to be the phallus, which only appears "in flashes," during decisive phallophanias where death is at the rendez-vous.

Slavoj Zizek notes that for Lacan the phallus is the pure signifier that stands for its own opposite, that it functions as the signifier of castration. The transition from pre-symbolic antagonism (the Real) to the symbolic order where signifiers are related to meaning takes place by way of this pure signifier, without signified. "In order for the field of meaning to emerge, for the series of signifiers to signify something, there must be a signifier that stands for nothing, a signifying element whose very presence stands for the absence of meaning, or rather for the absence tout court." This nothing is the subject itself, "the subject qua S." This Lacanian matheme designates the subject deprived of all content.