ABSTRACT
This chapter characterizes the ego as needing 'cultural materials' to underpin its fantasy of being whole. The horror of the Real, viral contagion, the struggle against the material: what connects Jacques Lacan, Karl Fortlage and Adolf Bernhard Marx is an epistemological structure, a highly generalized symptom of a much longer and older European disenchantment with modernity, with the world as it appears to be presented in all its dispersed empirical complexity. The gap that separates beauty from ugliness is thus the very gap that separates reality from the Real: what constitutes reality is the minimum of idealization the subject needs in order to be able to sustain the horror of the Real. In this Lacanian context, it is interesting that, in writings on music from the middle of the nineteenth century, and in Adolf Bernhard Marx's work in particular, discursive 'gaps' or discontinuities in public discourse occasion an anxiety about personality formation.
