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C h ap t e r 2 ................................... Lacan, Desire, and the Originating Function of Loss The object is never for [the subject] definitively the final object, except in exceptional experiences. But it thus appears in the guise of an object from which man is irremediably separated, and which shows him the very figure of his dehiscence within the world—object which by essence destroys him, anxiety, which he cannot recapture, in which he will never truly be able to find reconciliation, his adhesion to the world, his perfect complementarity on the level of desire. It is in the nature of desire to be radically torn. —Jacques Lacan1 There’s something very strange in the way Hamlet speaks about his dead father, an exaltation and idealization of his dead father which comes down to something like this: Hamlet has no voice with which to say whatever he may have to say about him. He actually chokes up and finally concludes by saying . . . that he can find nothing to say about his father except that he was like anyone else. What he means is very obviously the opposite. —Jacques Lacan2 I describe as philosophical everything that tends to mask the radical character and the originating function of loss. —Jacques Lacan3 If psychoanalysis can teach us anything, it is the formative effect upon the subject of the father’s death, the fantasy of which provides the conditions for the emergence of subjectivity. Freud’s various parables of parricide and incest (re)enact the experience of rupture that characterizes subjectivity: You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. 36Dead Letters to Nietzsche the radical break from one’s original state of coincidence with the mother’s body; and the violent overthrow of one’s paternal rival—a crime without which there would be no law. The originating function of this crime—for which, as Foucault relates,4 the harshest punishment is reserved—is of course only imagined. Even if, as Freud contends, this fantasy connects us to our phylogenetic heritage5 —to actual events of our prehistory—this crime still exhibits the curious structure of having always already taken place. It is the fantasy upon which social order rests; the fantasy of what social order must resist. As such, this primordial fantasy exerts a great deal of power over the imagination. This is the fantasy that keeps the subject in line: law abiding, certainly, but also desirous of the social order not simply out of fear, but because this order reflects back to the subject his “innermost self.” The law furnishes the subject with an identity, because it is the structure with reference to which the subject places himself. The paternal law provides the proper name: this is the meaning of Lacan’s well-known pun concerning le nom du père (the name of the father), which is also le ‘non’ du père (the father’s prohibition). It is the ‘no’ of the father—or the law—that delimits the child’s identity, while the parricidal and incestuous fantasy thus represents excess. It is the outside that necessitates the law: that provides its meaning, and generates the anxiety that brings the subject into line. If a writer were to provide an access to this fantasy through his texts, then he might also be able to exert the force of law over his readers, and so have a formative effect upon their subjectivity and desire. In this chapter I suggest that this is how Nietzsche’s text operates: that the Nietzschean’s relation to Nietzsche is characterized by mourning. The field of Nietzschean scholarship is thus as contested as any last will and testament wherein “the estate” is large—concerning, in this case, the future of Western culture. In grief, one must reconstruct oneself. Mourning is a dual process, first of reconstituting the concrete practices of one’s existence and, second, of establishing within oneself a reason and authority to keep living, and to keep writing, in the face of death. What mourning “addresses” is the anxiety generated by primordial loss, and the illusion that one is essentially separated from an original context or knowledge, the inclusion of which would make one whole. The work of mourning is to recover to the self this sense of wholeness—a work that the speaking subject is never...

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