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What was, simply was what it was, it had to be that way

I’m a huge fan of WordPress’s new rewind feature which shows what you were posting about on this day in previous years. It turns out that on 18th June 2025 I was posting about this extract from Bruce Fink’s book on Seminar XI:

By way of contrast, Lacan’s view is that losses are inevitable and irreversible, and they must be mourned. We mustn’t spend our whole lives complaining that we’ve been gypped and trying to get back what we feel we’ve lost out on. Now, once those losses are recognized for what they are and mourned, they can be sublimated or sublated in a sense, transmogrified with the coming to the fore of the phallic signifier, the Phallus with a capital P, symbolized by the matheme Φ. This is a forward-looking, as opposed to a backward-looking project. Rather than regressing to childhood to repair all the “damage” that was done, there is a push toward the recognition that what was, simply was what it was, it had to be that way (there is no point whining “If only things had been different….”); and a push toward the symbolization of something that can move things forward.

Bruce Fink, Lacan on Desire, loc 2379

I’d forgotten what a starkly beautiful expression that was: “What was, simply was what it was, it had to be that way“. If, as Ruti puts it, the melancholic subject is lost in “the labyrinth of its melancholy investments” Φ signifies the moment of suddenly realising that you’re alone in the labyrinth and walking, falteringly, out of the door and wondering what comes next as your eyes adjust to the sun and your lungs breath in the fresh air.

(I realise the proper Lacanian position would be something more like Φ making the labyrinth navigable, so it’s no longer a prison, but I like the image so much I’m not going to correct it 😊 I also think it captures something phenomenological of these kinds of transitions which structural approaches tend to miss)

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