S(Ø): 대타자 속의 결핍의 기표 ―사회적 불가능성의 변증법

S(Ø): Signifier of the Lack in the Other - Dialectics of Social Impossibility

This essay is an examination of the lack in the Other and its implications of the dialectics of social impossibility. The Lacanian subject is lacking, split and divided, as is symbolized by the barred S: ?. But it is the big secret of psychoanalysis that ‘the big Other, the symbolic order itself, is also barre, crossed-out, by a fundamental impossibility, structured around an impossible/traumatic kernel, around a central lack.’ The barred symbol ? refers to a fault, hole or loss in the symbolic Other; There is no Other of the Other. Just like the subject's ‘radical ex-centricity’ to itself, the social Other is eccentric to itself due to a radical exteriority that dislocates it. This has to do with the real simultaneously presupposed and posed by the symbolic. The present essay focuses on the three levels of the descending vector on the left side of the Graph of Desire presented in Lacan's pivotal essay, ‘The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious’: S(?)→??o→s(Ο). S(?) marks the lack of the Other, the inconsistency of the symbolic order when it is penetrated by jouissance. Meanwhile, ??o, the formula of fantasy concerns the way in which this lack and inconsistency are 'sutured' and covered over. Primarily fantasy appears as an answer to ‘Che vuoi?,’ serving as a screen for the desire of the Other. Lastly, s(Ο) marks the effect of signification, or the symbolically/discursively represented world as dominated by fantasy. Here fantasy functions as ‘absolute signification’ in which we can experience the world as meaningful and consistent. Translated into the social terms, this paradigm can effectively explain the dialectics of social impossibility, accounting for the idealogical ‘dominant fiction.’