ABSTRACT
The chapter begins with the question posed at the end of the previous one: Why does the identification with the phallus, central to Lacan’s elaborations at that period, not appear anywhere in the graph of desire?
It then suggests that the answer lies in the link between the three identifications inscribed in the graph, the image of the ego, the ideal and the object of the fantasy, and the phallus. It is a link in which the phallus plays its role as veiled and therefore is not inscribed as such in the graph.
The chapter clarifies this thesis: the veiling effect of the phallus comes from its definition as the signifier, which designates the “effect of the signifier on the signifiable”, the real of the living. It produces the subject but also represses it, Verdrängung, and is thus the signifier of desire. Its veiling means it is not encountered as such, but only through recognising the desire of the Other, and this is the reason behind the intermediate graph with its question mark that provides the path of access to this invisible phallus.
The chapter then demonstrates that where the phallus is veiled, what appears in the graph are the three identifications, all of which are determined by desire and function to cover the repressed presence of the phallus.
It ends with a discussion about the genealogy of the phallus, showing that Lacan had reversed his conception of the phallus as presented in the paternal metaphor, and in the graph, the phallic register is without recourse to the Father. It explains that as a signifier of lack, the phallus plays a copulatory function at the level of the subject and the Other, the “identification with the phallus” being a dialectical identification with the Other’s lack of which the phallus is the signifier.
