#boothby

While the backstory of a librarian does cover the Why Would He Know All This Shakespeare Shit, it fundamentally misses the point that in a Star Trek future someone can pursue a career of hands on physical labor with a fervent passion and still have the resources and education to be a wise mentor and learned individual. That’s the utopia aspect. That’s what Star Trek is all about.

In our daily existence, we are immersed In "reality" (structured-supported by the fantasy), and this Immersion is disturbed by symptoms which bear witness to the fact that another repressed level of our psyche resists this Immersion. To "traverse the fantasy" therefore paradoxically means fully identifying oneself with the fantasy— namely with the fantasy which structures the excess resisting our immersion into daily reality, or, to quote a succinct formulation by Richard Boothby:

"Traversing the fantasy" thus does not mean that the subject somehow abandons its involvement with fanciful caprices and accommodates itself to a pragmatic "reality," but precisely the opposite: the subject Is submitted to that effect of the symbolic lack that reveals the limit of everyday reality. To traverse the fantasy in the Lacanian sense is to be more profoundly claimed by the fantasy than ever. In the sense of being brought into an ever more intimate relation with that real core of the fantasy that transcends imaging.

“Nothing you ever did surprised me, son.”