One of Lacan’s most oft-repeated formulas is: ‘man’s desire is the desire of the Other’. (Seminar 11). This can be understood in many complementary ways, of which the following are the most important.

1. Desire is essentially ‘desire of the Other’s desire’, which means both desire to be the object of another’s desire, and desire for recognition by another. Lacan takes this idea from Hegel, via Kojève, who states:

Desire is human only if the one desires, not the body, but the Desire of the other...that is to say, if he wants to be ‘desired’ or ‘loved’, or, rather, ‘recognised’ in his human value.... In other words, all human, anthropogenetic Desire...is, finally, a function of the desire for ‘recognition’.

Kojève, 1947:6)

Kojève goes on to argue (still following Hegel) that in order to achieve the desired recognition, the subject must risk his own life in a struggle for pure prestige. That desire is essentially desire to be the object of another’s desire is clearly illustrated in the first ‘time’ of the Oedipus complex, when the subject desires to be the phallus for the mother.

The Real is what cannot be included within any of our symbolic systems, but whose very absence skews them out of shape, as a kind of vortex around which they are bent out of true. It is the factor which ensures that as human subjects we never quite add up, which throws us subtly out of kilter so that we can never be identical with ourselves. It is a version of Kant’s unknowable thing-in-itself, and what is ultimately unknowable is Man himself.

The Real is desire, but for Lacan, so Zizek argues, more specifically jouissance or ‘obscene enjoyment’. This enjoyment, which sounds rather less suburban in French, is a sublimely terrifying affair. It is the lethal pleasure of what Freud calls primary masochism, in which we reap delight from the way that the Law or superego unleashes its demented sadism on us. Enjoyment, Lacan maintains, is the only substance which psychoanalysis recognises, and it is also Zizek’s unwavering obsession. Like Schopenhauer’s Will, it is a brute, self-serving affair, as devoid of meaning as the American waiter’s mechanical injunction:‘Enjoy!’ Like the waiter, the Law instructs us to enjoy, but does so in curiously intransitive mood: we are just to reap gratification for its own sake from the superego’s crazed, pointless dictats. In The Sublime Object of Ideology, Zizek sees ideological power as resting finally on the libidinal rather than the conceptual, on the way we hug our chains rather than the way we entertain beliefs. At the root of meaning, for both Freud and Lacan, there is always a sustaining residue of non-sense.

In order to have a subject, we first need a body. There is no subject without a body. Likewise, in order to have jouissance, one also needs a body. The analysts know this: analysis too can only be done with a body. Psychoanalysis gives the subject’s body its full importance. Let us not forget that it began with Freud’s encounter with the symptoms and bodies of his hysterical patients. The body is at stake in analysis and not only at its beginning and throughout its course, in the form of the symptom and its dissolution. The end of the cure too has, it seems to me, an impact on the body, in the sense that something returns which concerns the body and which has to do with an impossibility to tell. The body acquires a particular weight and dimension. This brings us right to the question I would like to discuss today.

What kind of body are we talking about? The organism, what we usually call the body, is what we have received from the Other. The body is the Other and it is through the Other that an organism is transformed into a body, one that is extremely sensitive to signifiers and is divided by the drive. This is the kind of body psychoanalysis is interested in: a spoken body, entangled in the network of signifiers, which can make it fall ill or bring it back to health. Language is “a subtle body but a body it is.”

To make a body, we need an organism, language and the image. These three dimensions—the real, the symbolic and the imaginary—are tied together by the Borromean knot, constituting the act of the subject. The image is essential to the human subject, who is born immature. With the concept of the mirror stage, Lacan shows us how the human subject constructs his own body, from a fragmented body to one that is unified by the image. Even though the mirror image is an illusion, to the child it is both structural and structuring.

An analysis begins, then, with a desire for truth, but in Lacan’s late teaching it has to move towards the impossibility of truth and the insistence of jouissance. The real of jouissance will not be completely taken by meaning. That is the real in psychoanalytical experience. A real that, Lacan seems to suggest, has as an outcome the satisfaction of the sinthome. That is, the style of enjoyment of the parlêtre, of the speaking being. An analysis does not end with truth, but it has more to do with how the parlêtre will manage with his or her own jouissance and hopefully will be able to transform what makes him or her suffer into something satisfying. If the analysand manages to get to the end, he or she will get to know something of what is a good failed encounter with the real.

In his return to Freud, the early Lacan focussed on the symbolic and the imaginary. Reflecting mainly on the symbolic structure of the unconscious, the conversion symptoms and the (phallic) jouissance, his references to their real dimension are few and far between. From seminar XI (1964) onwards, though, the real – and more specifically the real of the drives – is given more attention. It is at this point, when elaborating the real dimension of jouissance, that the concept of the real of the body intervenes. With the real of the body, the accent lies on the cut and alienated relation between the subject and jouissance. At first, this polarisation of the subject and its body serves Lacan's aim of situating the exact place of jouissance. Amongst other things this will enable him to determine the role played by culture and society in the genesis of neuroses. Further, the concept of the real of body has to do with the crucial question of aetiology, since the real of the drives is the cornerstone of psychopathological symptoms. As such, Lacan's notion of the real of the body picks up again and develops the crucial concept of fixation, which Freud left unfinished.

When everything is gratification of demands, something at the root of the social bond gets lost (Declercq, 2006). The search associated with living with questions of existence (“who am I?” “what do you want from me?”) is replaced by a search for solutions in dealing with corporeal tension, and for experiences of fulfillment. Yet in Lacan's view, the net result that the discourse of the capitalist and master end up with is similar. Both end up producing the object a; a component of nonsensical libidinous corporeality that is created by using signifiers, but not represented by means of the signifier.