Vénus et le Nom du Père: l'objet et ses vicissitudes chez Jacques Lacan

Abstract

The shift of Lacan’s thought from the symbolic to the real is due to his examination of the antinomy of the law of desire, which turns around the absence of the object. This antinomy has an ethical dimension (D. Juan) and an epistemological one which appears in the ambiguous connection between Venus and the Name of the Father in Du Trieb de Freud. Such an ambiguity points out the discrepancy between the Freudian and the Lacanian conceptions of reality and object. Rethinking the status and function of the object, Lacan shapes the notion of objet a and redefines concepts like structure, symbolic, desire, subject. Moving the object into the Name of the Father field, Lacan assumes that Freudian and structural don’t coincide (the unconscious doesn’t fit completely into the signifier); far from being a compromise with the goddess-mother, the second Lacan highlights his inscription in the Judeo-Christian epistemology (castration, phallic signifier sexual difference).