In what place does the a stand? At what level could it be recognised, if indeed this were possible? I told you earlier that to recognise oneself as the object of one’s desire is always masochistic, but the masochist only does so on the stage and you’re going to see what operates when he can’t stay on the stage any longer. We aren’t always on the stage, even though the stage stretches out far and wide, right up to the domains of our dreams. When we aren’t on the stage, when we stay just shy of it, and when we strive to read in the Other what it revolves around, we only find there, at x, lack.
The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book X, pg 107
What is it that we call a fugue in subjects who have always more or less been put into the infantile position, who cast themselves into it, if not this stage exit, roving off into the pure world where the subject sets off in search of something that’s been rejected and refused everywhere. Il se fait mousse, as one says, he goes off to become a ship’s lad and, of course, he comes back, which can be his opportunity to se faire mousser, to sing his own praises. The departure is precisely the passage from the stage to the world.
This is precisely why it was so useful to set out in the first phases of this disquisition on anxiety the essential distinction between these two registers – on one hand, the world, the place where the real bears down, and, on the other hand, the stage of the Other where man as subject has to be constituted, to take up his place as he who bears speech, but only ever in a structure that, as truthful as it sets itself out to be, has the structure of fiction.
The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book X, pg 116
Mark Carrigan 