ABSTRACT
Key concepts: ‘Quidditas’, what is it? Das Ding and the undoing of the master’s discourse.
There is a remainder of ‘quidditas’ that doesn’t come into the being of the signifier. There is a remainder of the quidditas or the ‘thing in itself’ or the ‘no thing’ that is subtracted from whatever it is we say about Being per se. There remains the point about what ‘could have come to be’. So there’s something that didn’t come into being and this is a definition of the objet a that withdraws and stays out of the discourse of the master. Another way of saying it is that it is the Real unconscious that withdraws from speech and remains as ‘what is it?’ or the question of the ‘quidditas’. Here, the ‘What’ is in the Real: “Idizwadidiz”.
Quidditas comes from Aristotle. ‘What is it’ or the ‘quiddity’ is the ‘thing in itself’, which, in Lacan, takes the form of das Ding as the ‘thing’ or the ‘no thing’, and they both ‘ex-sist’. In Seminar XXIII, Lacan says that the voice of the master and the false hole it creates must be undone. The master’s discourse seems to impose an Imaginary meaning on the Symbolic which turns the Symbolic into a discourse of domination.
