ABSTRACT
When the term first appears, in 1955, lack designates first and foremost a lack of BEING (there are close parallels with Sartre here; see Sartre, 1943). What is desired is being itself. ‘Desire is a relation of being to lack. The lack is the lack of being properly speaking. It isn’t the lack of this or that, but lack of being whereby the being exists’ (S2, 223). Lacan returns to this theme in 1958, when he argues that desire is the metonymy of the lack of being (manque à être; translated by Sheridan as ‘want-to-be’ and by Schneiderman as ‘want of being’; see E, 259). The subject’s lack of being is ‘the heart of the analytic experience’ and ‘the very field in which the neurotic’s passion is deployed’ (E, 251). Lacan contrasts the lack of being, which relates to desire, with the lack of having (manque à avoir), which relates to demand (Ec, 730). AGENT LACK OBJECT Real father Symbolic castration Imaginary phallus
Source: Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire. Livre IV. La relation d’objet, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, Paris: Seuil, 1994.
