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Avoiding the Void: The Temporal Loop of the Fundamental Fantasy According to Žižek’s heterodox juxtaposition of Kant and Lacan, the psychoanalytic notion of fantasy has direct relevance to this splitting of subjectivity between, on the one hand, the noumenal subject of (unconscious ) enunciation and, on the other hand, the phenomenal subject of utterances (as determinate signifier-predicates). Although, as Lacan might phrase it, the subject in the Real1 (i.e., the an sich Es) is forever out of reach of introspective self-consciousness’s grasp, the repeated attempts by reflective activity to “catch its own tail” generate a by-product, namely, fantasies as responses to this irreducible self-opacity: If . . . one bears in mind the fact that, according to Lacan, the ego is an object, a substantial “res,” one can easily grasp the ultimate sense of Kant’s transcendental turn: it desubstantializes the subject (which, with Descartes, still remained “res cogitans,” i.e., a substantial “piece of reality ”)—and it is this very desubstantialization which opens up the empty space (the “blank surface”) onto which fantasies are projected, where monsters emerge. To put it in Kantian terms: because of the inaccessibility of the Thing in itself, there is always a gaping hole in (constituted, phenomenal) reality, reality is never “all,” its circle is never closed, and this void of the inaccessible Thing is filled out with phantasmagorias through which the transphenomenal Thing enters the stage of phenomenal presence—in short, prior to the Kantian turn, there can be no black hulk at the background of the stage. (Žižek 1992a, 136) Elsewhere Žižek draws out the consequences of this, maintaining that every mediated identity, all signifier-predicates appended to the original nothingness of subjectivity in its raw negativity, are “supplements” aiming to “fill out this void”: Lacan’s point here is that an unsurmountable gap forever separates what I am “in the real” from the symbolic mandate that procures my social identity: the primordial ontological fact is the void, the abyss on account of which I am inaccessible to myself in my capacity as a real sub4 32 stance—or, to quote Kant’s unique formulation from his Critique of Pure Reason, on account of which I never get to know what I am as “I or he or it (the thing) which thinks [Ich, oder Er, oder Es (das Ding), welches denkt].” Every symbolic identity I acquire is ultimately nothing but a supplementary feature whose function is to fill out this void. This pure void of subjectivity, this empty form of “transcendental apperception,” has to be distinguished from the Cartesian Cogito which remains a res cogitans, a little piece of substantial reality miraculously saved from the destructive force of universal doubt: it was only with Kant that the distinction was made between the empty form of “I think” and the thinking substance, the “thing which thinks.” (Žižek 1994b, 144) Thus, the entire range of significations and images proposed by the subject to itself in response to the question of self-identity (“Who or what am I?”) falls under the heading of transcendental illusion. That is to say, these fantasmatic productions striving to seal this crack in reality are semblances. And yet they are the inevitable results of a structurally determined dynamic rooted in subjectivity’s internal division: “The subject is this emergence which, just before, as subject, was nothing, but which, having scarcely appeared, solidifies into a signifier” (SXI 199). What’s more, Žižek, in The Ticklish Subject, provocatively suggests that the supposedly inaccessible dimension of subjectivity in Kant, that presumed an sich kernel (access to which is barred by phenomenalreflective mediation), isn’t the noumenal Real, but rather what psychoanalysis designates as the “fundamental fantasy.”2 In other words, the horrible abyss of the Thing that Kant seeks to avoid is precisely this fantasmatic core of the subject’s very being as subject, the hidden nucleus of its identity structure. Furthermore, the fundamental fantasy, in analytic metapsychology, is directly related to the finite condition of the psyche. Consequently, Žižek’s subsequent insinuation, also in The Ticklish Subject, regarding a link between the finitude of Kantian subjectivity and mortality is far from being a careless non sequitur.3 What is the fundamental fantasy? Perhaps the finest definition of its essence is to be found in the 1964 article “Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality,” written by two of Lacan’s most prominent students, Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis. Therein, Laplanche and Pontalis...

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