Lack on Lacan
5 min readAug 12, 2021
Lacan has given a fictive name to the god-name (the Name of the Father) in the Seminar XI: "EL CHABDALAH" that means "Difference" and it is the name of the minute when Shabbat's "departure" enters…(when the "Rest" is ending. And weekday Daemons do reappear...) The Name of the Father in Lacanian theory is the instance where the Mother-Son fusion is dissolved by the Paternal metaphor, the phallus. Lacan says that the infant sees that it is not the most important object of desire for the Mother, as she also desires the Phallus. (In Kabbalah it is called Yesod. Or hinted at in the basic concept of Zivug, "coupling". )
So the infant imagines itself to be the Phallus. This is forbidden by the Father (by the Non of the Father with a French rhyme between Nom/=Name/ and NON/=no/.It is a fundamental part of Lacan’s innovatitive Freudian Revival, that if someone rejects /”forecloses” the Paternal Metaphor (the Name of the Father,th Symbolic Prohibition/Castration) it is constitutive of psychosis (symbolic words will seem real as hallucinations.) Lacan gave a never-before-mentioned new name to the Father (referring to the LACK, the "difference" (=Chavdalah) which in Lacan’s theory is the most important „creative” element: we as humans need LACK or absence as that can give space to desires, to the desiring subject.In lurianic Kabbalah (XVI. century) the creation myth part mentions that the Eternal has created a Void as the place of the world by diminishing itself by Tzimtzum. ("Shrinking")The shortest summary of this principle is in Raul Moncayo (in 2017): "Emptyness opposes anxiety." And creates desire, the antidote of anxiety (Samuel McCormick, 2020).The main source of this absence is the emptyness of signifers (sound-forms) which randomly create our words to make the shifting of meaning possible. Our agency the subject consists of signifiers, or letter sounds. As Kabbalist tradition also states that we were created by the "verb", by words and letter-numbers.Still, can we explain that Lacan’s own rejection of the Name of the Father did not and does not cause some tragic symptom in all of his analysands (clients)? Or at least for the perverts who do have this name as master signifier.After all, Lacan - whose structure was psychotic - rejected the original Name of the Father (the Hebrew god-name) and only if there is a version of human desire that can remain symptomless even if it rejects the Paternal castration (separation from the Phallic omnipotent Mother fantasy) can we avoid psychosis.First we have to see how important the original Biblical name is. For that we have to turn to the Lacanian interpretators who do place him in the Judaizing Theological tradition (as he himself accepted to be descibed as th „last Christian Kabbalist”.)We can read in Agata Bialik-Robson's article on lacan and Gnosticism - that the most important fact of Judaism is that the word YHWH has a very concrete meaning: Existentiator or rather "Futurator". (The active future of the verb to be, to exist).
(As Lacan explains it how Moses explains in Moses II 3:14 where the Lord presents himself as "EHYEH ASHER EHYEH - "meaning: " I will be who will be " which is interpreted as an allusion to the future of humans with eternal life ...
It refers to existential" moments or creative instances ... unlike words like "Gott" or "dieu" or "bog" which have no imaginable referents. Lacan invents one: "Dieu" for him refers to "dire" (to speak).Here is the original text from 1963:
https://ecole-lacanienne.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/ndp.pdf
He wanted this word "Name of the Father" to be the Master Signifier (like the Phallos)... but he knows we have lost the original meaning of this word, just by accepting a false translation "I am" instead of "I will be" (obviously substituted by scholastics, says Lacan, to simplify it.)/It is in the Séminaire VII/. It means "becoming" as it is the gap or "difference" between desire and jouissance : or between the present and future. So, yes, in Hebrew "différence" is "Chavdalah." (The “différence” or switching in the signifiers of sound-forms during analysis of meaning.)But he still „foreclosed” the Name of the Father by substituting it by some playful other word explaining his own theory on the functioning of signifiers by hidden „differences”.We must find a version of „foreclosure” that does not cause psychosis.In the Ph.D. thesis of Kevin Murphy on Asexuality (towards a Freudian-Lacanian Understandig), 2019, (PDF, Deakin University)we can find an innovative approach in mapping asexuality where the child „reverses” the dependence from the m/Other’s omnipotent devouring desire by „annulling” the Imaginary Phallus of the mother and reaching an asexual position, where the object cause and master signifier of desire is not the phallus. but the the „nothing”.Kevin Murphy does a „close reading” of Lacan in his thesis and presents asexuality as similar to anorexia (where the infant reverses dependence by „eating nothing”) and also similar to hystery (where the subject rejects the desire of he Other. The distinctive character of asexuality is that – in opposition to anorexics and hysterics and psychotics – they do not suffer pain during this peculiar pre-oidipal defensive process – which is contrary to the oidipal phase with the appearance of the Name of the Father..I had a client who recounted a traumatic situation when he lost his mother in her first 6 months and was hospitalized in an orphanage. When the infant must „reverse his dependence” on a dysfunctional (but omnipotent) mother he may decide to separate from the mother – with diminishing value of the phallos (the object of the mother's desire) and there may be hysterical (reject wishes) or psychotic symptoms (like paranoia). But since Lacan we know that we have to reject Freud who has ordered us to seek satisfaction and escape frustration – and follow Lacan who said that frustration and lacking are good because they are creating desire. And not demanding satisfaction is also better for the same reason: staying on the level of desire.Lacan simplifies and shortens therapy a lot, because the disorders of the imaginary “sexual” relationships do not have to be "cured" because they are only fantasies, illusions... Instead you have to look for the basic fantasy of the inner baby (in present dreams) and then it turns out that we do not need a "total connection" at all because in asexuality, (which exists as a pre-oidipal fetishistic level in everyone) we may reach the "Nirvana principle".(Proposed by Barbara Low.) Freud says that we must seek satisfaction in the form of "sublimation”. Lacan says that when we are finishing analysis by traversing the /fundamental/ fantasy" - of wholeness and fusion - we can reach this "asexual" level of our early defenses (against the omnipotent or unwelcoming m/other.) Lacan has emptied the Name of the Father, because "emptyness opposes anxiety" or due to his psychotic stucture (that may exist without outer disturbing behavioral symptoms.) BIBLIOGRAPHYAgata Bialik-Robson, : Solid Hatred Addressed to Being,2019, chapter In Esoteric Lacan, eds. Mahdi Tourage and Philip Valentini, London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019, pp. 15-46.Kevin Murphy, Asexuality (towards a Freudian-Lacanian Understandig), 2019, (PDF, Deakin University)Raul Moncayo, Lalangue, Sinthome, Jouissance and Nomination, 2017, karnacSamuel McCormick: The Chattering Mind, 2020 U. Ch. Press