“A THING OF NOTHING”: LACAN AND THE PHANTASMATIC STRUCTURE OF POWER

Allan M. Hillani

Ph.D. Student of Philosophy

Lacan

Prof. Jamieson Webster

I. The Signifier of Power

In the concluding session of a series of lectures analyzing Shakespeare’s Hamlet,

Jacques Lacan makes an intriguing connection between the protagonist’s hesitation of killing

Claudius and the fact that also no one have assassinated Hitler. What both cases have in

common, says Lacan, is “the enigmatic manifestation of the signifier of power”.1 This is one

of the rare moments in which Lacan makes reference to political power, and it gets even

more intriguing when he links this signifier to the Oedipus complex:

When [the signifier of power] appears in its particularly striking form in reality [réel], as occurs in
Hamlet—that of a criminal who becomes instated as the usurper—Oedipus deflects Hamlet’s arm, not
because Hamlet is afraid of this man whom he scorns, but because he knows that what he must strike
is something other than what is there.2

Lacan tells us that what is at stake in this “striking something other than what is

there” is the phallus, which despite being “clearly real” cannot be struck, for “it is but a

1 Lacan, Seminar VI, p. 352 [416]. The numbers in brackets indicate the page in the original editions of Lacan’s
seminars and Écrits.
2 Lacan, Seminar VI, p. 352–3 [416–7].
shadow [ombre]”.3 And it is to this phallic shadow that Lacan links a famous passage of the

play, the one in which Hamlet denounces the king as a “thing of nothing”,4 by asking the

audience to “replace the word ‘king’ with the word ‘phallus’ to realize that it is the phallus

that is involved here. For the body is tightly bound up in the business of the phallus, but on

the other hand the phallus is bound to nothing and always slips between your fingers”.5

What is remarkable and counterintuitive in these passages is how Lacan connects the

king to the phallus instead of the father, especially given the intricate relation between the

Name-of-the-Father as signifier and the authority of the law. 6 By being a “thing”, the king is

not a person—something reinforced by Lacan’s invocation of Freud’s Group Psychology and

its description of the leader as the common object “a number of individuals who have put […]

in the place of their ego ideal”.7 The issue at stake in Freud’s and Lacan’s formulations alike

is the paradoxical constitution of this monarchical entity (the king, the leader, the Führer,

etc.) in terms of both objectification and identification—the problem hat although the ruler

has subjects it must also be a subject himself.

This oscillation between subject and object is at the core of Lacan’s reading of Hamlet,

and it is interrelated to several different issues in his theory. On the one hand, Hamlet cannot

kill Claudius—the phallus, the object of desire of his mother—because Hamlet himself is

trapped in his mother’s desire. By wishing to be himself the object of her desire, he is not

able to assume the position of desiring subject, and it is only when he recognizes that Ophelia

is his own object of desire that he can finally fulfill his deed. On the other hand, however, the

whole story is oriented by the imperative command coming from King Hamlet, the dead

3 Lacan, Seminar VI, p. 352 [416].

4 See Shakespeare, Hamlet, IV.2, 25–7.
5 Lacan, Seminar VI, p. 353–4 [417].
6 Lacan, 2006 [1958a], p. 482 [579]; Seminar V, p. 141 [155].
7 Freud, 1955 [1921], SE 18, p. 116; Lacan, Seminar VI, p. 352 [416].
father, whose assassination was the reason Claudius became king in the first place. The two

issues clearly cannot be separated, for it is by the intervention of the father as signifier (the

paternal metaphor) that the subject of desire can be constituted, but what this neat

articulation elides is precisely the mystery of Claudius’ power over Hamlet—in other words,

the link between Claudius as phallic object of desire of the mother and as usurper of the

paternal position, both being crucial for his authority.

The situation is further complicated when one tries to connect Lacan’s claims about

this “signifier of power” with the rest of his work. Slavoj Žižek, for instance, interprets this

phallic thing as a prefiguration of the object a—which in the following years will become

central in Lacan’s work—characterizing it as the “sublime body” of the king:

What is at stake is thus not simply the split between the empirical person of the king and his symbolic
function. The point is rather that this symbolic function redoubles his very body, introducing a split
between the visible, material, transient body and another, sublime body, a body made of a special,
immaterial stuff. […] The ‘thing’ is what Lacan calls objet petit a, a sublime, evasive body which is a
‘thing of nothing’, a pure semblance without substance.8

However, the same Žižek describes the king’s authority as symbolic and epitomized by the

Name-of-the-Father:

The specific mode of this symbolic authority [is] epitomized by the Name-of-the-Father […]. The Name-
of-the-Father designates the phallic metaphor (the phallic signifier), so the key to this enigma is to be
sought in the phallic dimension—it is this dimension which constitutes a link between the
Philosopher's "wise saying" about women and the paternal symbolic authority. That is to say, the same
thing that goes for women goes also for the Father as symbolic authority: Father's authority is to be
fully trusted, yet one should not put it to the test too often since, sooner or later, one is bound to
discover that Father is an impostor and his authority a pure semblance… […] Therein consists the logic
of the ‘phallic’ power: to aggravate its paradox, it is actual (i.e. effective) only as potential—its full
deployment lays bare its imposture. Every authority, in so far as it is symbolic—and every

8 Žižek, 1991, p. 255, 276n. 40; see also Hoens, 2016, p. 106.
 intersubjective authority is a symbolic one; is ultimately founded in the power of the signifier, not in
the immediate force of coercion.9

So, on the one hand, the king is associated with the real object of desire, on the other, with

the symbolic signifier of paternity. Both are linked to the phallus, but in the first case the king

is the phallus, while in the second he is the one who has the phallus—even though this

“having” is somehow imaginary.

In fact, it is precisely when one tries to articulate the monarchical figure within the

Lacanian triad of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real that the paradoxical aspect of the

king as being and having the phallus becomes explicit. First, by associating the king to the

phallus, Lacan is implying that the king is an imaginary representation of the subject

spurring from the specular relation with the other.10 But if the king’s authority comes from

the Name-of-the-Father, the king becomes a symbolic position assumed by a person.11

Finally, by associating it to the object a and the overvaluation involved in it, the king becomes

a “real” object that “sustains the relationship between the subject and what he is not insofar

as he is not the phallus”.12 The king, therefore, must be understood as simultaneously an

imaginary entity, a symbolic position, and a real object.13

The aim of this paper is to try to decipher this signifier of power. To do so, I will first

articulate the relationship between the phallus and the father—and, correspondingly,

between “being” and “having” in the formation of the subject. I take that their relationship is

clarified in terms of the relation between the Imaginary and the Symbolic, which enables us

9 Žižek, 1991, p. 250.

10 Lacan, Seminar V, p. 143 [158–9].
11 As Lacan claims in a text from the same period, “we should concern ourselves not only with the way the

mother accommodates the father as a person, but also with the importance she attributes to his speech—in a
word, to his authority—in other words, with the place she reserves for the Name-of-the-Father in the
promotion of the law” (Lacan, 2006 [1958a], p. 482).
12 Lacan, Seminar VI, p. 350 [413].
13 Perhaps the problem is not the king’s two, but the king’s three bodies…
to perceive the symmetrical role of general equivalent played by both of them. Then, I will

analyze the real dimension of the father (the primal father) and of the phallus (the object a),

focusing on Lacan’s later works, in order to give an interpretation of how a symbol can enable

the wielding of power. By investigating the mythical character of the Real for Lacan, I will

attempt to formulate the phantasmatic presence that characterizes power.

II. The Father and the Phallus

The distinction (if not opposition) between the father and the phallus is crucial for

Lacan’s formulation of the process of subjectivation, but their relation is far from

straightforward. First, there seems to be a symmetrical opposition between the two, as the

R schema shows,14 with the phallus being presented as a mediator of the imaginary relation

between the between the I and the other as object, and the father as mediating the symbolic

relation between the I and the other as person:

However, both terms cannot be simply opposed, for one is the condition of the other. As

Lacan puts it, “the position of the signifier of the father in the symbolic” is foundational for

“the constitution of the phallus on the imaginary plane as a privileged and predominant

14See Lacan, 2006 [1958a], p. 462 [553]; for a previous formulation of the R schema, see Seminar V, p. 165–6
[181–2].
object”.15 And it is precisely how these two fields can be constituted as separate registers and

how the subject’s identification can cross the square—from the imaginary phallus to the

symbolic father—what, for Lacan, constitute the core of the Oedipal drama.

Lacan develops a lengthy analysis of the Oedipus complex in Seminar V, “The

Formations of the Unconscious” (1957–58). The phallus is what the mother desires, and in

order to become the object of her desire, the child identifies himself with the phallus.16 From

the start, the subject’s desire is the desire of the other17—both in the sense of the desire for

the other and from the other—but the child is not aware of it yet (he is “trapped”, so to speak,

in imaginary relations). At this point the subject is “subjected to” the mother’s desire. What

characterizes the Oedipus complex is precisely the introduction of the Symbolic in this

Imaginary relation with the mother—the appearance of the Other in the relation to the other.

In this second moment, the father intervenes in the imaginary plane as depriver of the

mother, introducing the symbolic law. The outcome of the Oedipus complex depends, finally,

on the third moment, when the child recognizes the father as the “bearer” of the law—“the

one who has, and not who is, the phallus”—and finally identifies with the paternal stance.18

It is thus the institution of the law, of the symbolic order, that characterizes the very

subjectification of the subject, who can only emerge from a previous objectal position.19

The phallus thus marks the first imaginary representation of the subject, the

necessary objectification that he has to go through in order to become a subject in the proper

sense, but it is only because of the father that the symbolic order can be instituted.20 The

15 Lacan, Seminar V, p. 167 [183].

16 Lacan, Seminar V, p. 175 [192].
17 Lacan, Seminar XI, p. 38 [38].
18 Lacan, Seminar V, p. 175–8 [192–4].
19 Lacan, Seminar V, p. 143–4 [158]; Hoens, 2016, p. 108. This is what characterizes the “substitution of erastēs

for erōmenos” in the constitution of the desiring subject (see Lacan, Seminar VIII, p. 52 [69–70].
20 It is only because of the father and the institution of the signifier that the “phallus” can assume any meaning.

“Before” such institution, the phallus can have no meaning: “the signification of the phallus […] must be evoked
in the subject's imaginary by the paternal metaphor” (Lacan, 2006 [1958a], p. 464 [557]).
paternal function is inseparable from the symbolic realm, both being mutually dependent.

“Merely by virtue of the fact that you institute a symbolic order”, says Lacan, “something

corresponds to, or does not correspond to, the function defined as the Name-of-the-

Father”.21 Accordingly, that there is a “father” in the first place already means that a symbolic

order exists, that the law of social organization—nomos over physis—was already

instituted.22 The father’s signifier is both the first element of the signifying chain—the

moment in which that person is taken to be a father, something else than who he “really” is—

and the signifier holding the chain together.23 Like a metaphysical God, he is the first term of

the signifying chain and, simultaneously, what hangs the chain together.

To characterize the father as a signifier (the “Name-of-the-Father”) is to understand

his function as symbolic. As a “real” person, he only is a father “under the sign of this symbol”,

and it is only as such symbol that the father institutes the law.24 In this sense, what matters

in a father is strictly his name: “it is in the name of the father that we must recognize the basis

of the symbolic function which, since the dawn of historical time, has identified his person

with the figure of the law”.25 The father is “the original representative of the Law's authority”,

and it is his name qua signifier—not his real presence—that gives the law its authority.26

This is why Lacan associates the symbolization of the father to his death, as if the father

21 Lacan, Seminar V, p. 165 [181].

22 Lacan’s notion of law from the beginning have been linked—in a Lévi-Straussian fashion—to marriage ties
and kinship relations, in opposition to “natural” procreation: “The primordial Law is therefore the Law which,
in regulating marriage ties, superimposes the reign of culture over the reign of nature, the latter being subject
to the law of mating. The prohibition of incest is merely the subjective pivot of that Law, laid bare by the modern
tendency to reduce the objects the subject is forbidden to choose to the mother and sisters, full license,
moreover, not yet being entirely granted beyond them” (Lacan, 2006 [1953], p. 229 [277]).
23 Lacan, Seminar V, p. 179–80, 223 [196, 240].
24 Lacan, Seminar V, p. 171 [187].
25 Lacan, 2006 [1953], p. 230 [278].
26 Lacan, 2006 [1960]. p. 688 [813]; see also Seminar V, p. 132 [146].
becoming a signifier would be already a form of leaving the realm of the living.27 Anyone

assuming this paternal function is thus doing so as an impostor, merely acting in His name.28

Nonetheless, what is interesting to note is how a similar “death” happens to the

phallus, precisely the organ that is “severed” from existence in castration. For Lacan, the

Oedipus complex as the process in which the law is instituted for the subject is only the

beginning of another set of problems for the subject. This is where the castration complex

starts.29 If the Oedipus complex is characterized by the subject’s dilemma of “to be or not to

be” the phallus, the castration complex is about “to have or not to have” the phallus.30 Instead

of three moments, however, the castration complex is outlined by Lacan in three different

planes: castration, frustration, and privation. These planes should not be understood as

sequential stages, but as three levels of the same process, each with a different articulation

of the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real in terms of Agent, Act, and Object:

AGENT ACT OBJECT

Real Symbolic Castration Imaginary Loss
Symbolic Imaginary Frustration Real Loss
Imaginary Real Privation Symbolic Loss

Castration is characterized by a symbolic articulation of signifiers in which, by means

of a real intervention, the agent threatens the subject of losing an object, the phallus—both

threat and object being imaginary.31 Frustration, on the other hand, is the imaginary

dimension of the process, in which the subject is really deprived of his object—the mother—

27 Goux, 1990, p. 17–8.

28 Lacan, 2006 [1960], p. 688 [813]; see also Žižek, 1991, p. 250.
29 Lacan describes the castration complex as the “mainspring” of the Oedipus complex (Lacan, Seminar V, p. 163

[179]).
30 Lacan, Seminar V, p. 170 [186].
31 Lacan, Seminar V, 154–6 [170–3]; see also Seminar XVII, p. 124–5 [144–5].
who in her absence produces the “primordial symbolization” for the subject (the Name-of-

the-Father given that he gives the name for the cause of the mother’s absence). The father

frustrates the child by “taking away” his mother, but this frustration is due to an imaginary

relation to the object.32 Finally, privation characterizes the process’ real dimension, in which

the subject symbolizes his loss as something he lacks—the object of desire—and identifies

with an ideal position of someone who can have the object for himself.33

In a way, the level of castration can be understood as the fundamental process, given

that it is the one that connects the interruption of the imaginary relation of the child to the

mother by the appearance of the father and the symbolic constitution of a lack—first

perceived in the Other, and then in the subject himself. The crucial outcome of the castration

complex is precisely this institution of a symbolic lack, when “the question arises for the

subject whether to accept, register, symbolize for himself and render meaningful this

privation”.34 Not by chance, it is at this moment that desire can be constituted. Lacan’s notion

of desire cannot be confused neither with imaginary need or bodily satisfaction precisely

because it is constituted by a fundamental lack. In this sense, it marks the irreducibility of

the psychical to the biological—as the law marked the irreducibility of the social to the

natural.35

Thus, in the end, the subject is “castrated” of what “he does not have, namely

something that only exists insofar as you bring it into existence as a symbol”.36 This symbol,

32 Lacan, Seminar V, p. 157 [173], 164 [180]; see also Seminar XVII, p. 124 [144–5], and Lacan, 2006 [1958a], p.
465 [557]. It is interesting to note that Lacan affirms that it is the “symbolic mother” who is the agent of
frustration, precisely because “qua locus of the demand for love, she is at first symbolized in the twofold register
of presence and absence” and “qua real mother, she turns what the subject is really deprived of—the breast,
for example—into a symbol of her love” (Lacan, Seminar VI, p. 348 [411–2]; see also Seminar V, 156 [172]).
33 Lacan, Seminar V, p. 157–8 [173–4], 168–9 [184–5]; see also Seminar XVII, p. 124–5 [145].
34 Lacan, Seminar V, p. 169 [185].
35 See Lacan, Seminar XI, p. 31, 175 [32, 160]; Seminar V, p. 81–2 [91–2]; 2006 [1960], p. 681, 689 [804, 813–4].
36 Lacan, Seminar V, p. 168 [184–5]. It is because the castration complex is the process in which the constitutive

lack of desire is formed in the subject that it is “universalizable” for both sexes, independently of having or not
of course, is the phallus, the only signifier that “absolutely deserves to be called a symbol”.37

If the father and the law were the protagonists of the Oedipal drama, the castration complex

describes the process from the perspective of desire and the phallus. This becomes clear by

how Lacan portrays a similar articulation of the shift from the Imaginary to the Symbolic

regarding the phallus—which in the Oedipus complex had its role reduced to the Imaginary.

The phallus now will be described within the polarity between the Imaginary and the

Symbolic: between –φ (minus phi) as phallic image—the imaginary object lost in

castration—and Φ (capital phi), the symbolic phallus as a “positive” symbol. The first is “the

imaginary phallus insofar as it is concretely involved in the psychical economy at the level of

the castration complex”, while the other is “a symbol [that arises or responds] in the place

where the lack of a signifier occurs”.38

What is relevant here is that neither the imaginary phallus nor the symbolic phallus

coincide with the “real” phallic organ. As it was the case regarding the father and the law, the

penis is also an impostor, a “prosthetic phallus” akin to a fetish.39 In both cases what is at

stake is a logical exclusion that is fundamental for the institution of the symbolic order, and

a fundamental absence being “supplanted” by the presence of a “real” entity—either a person

or an organ. But this distance between the symbol and its “representative” is specifically

what enables the generalizing function of these two symbols—both the father and the

phallus—as the condition for any relation of the subject to persons and objects.

It was this strange symmetry between the two elements that allowed Jean-Joseph

Goux to elaborate an homology between the role of the father and the phallus in

an organ to be castrated. For Lacan, whether this lack is called “castration” or “penis envy” is irrelevant (see
Lacan, Seminar VIII, p. 39 [52]).
37 Lacan, Seminar VIII, p. 235 [283]; see also 2006 [1958b], p. 579 [690].
38 Lacan, Seminar VIII, p. 235 [282]; see also 2006 [1960], p. 697 [823].
39 Tomšič, 2015, p. 176–7; see also Lacan, 2006 [1958b], p. 583 [694].
psychoanalysis and of money—the general equivalent of value—in Marx’s Capital.40 What is

at stake in all these cases is precisely how a relation of equivalence—of identification—is

possible in the first place.41 The “original specular relation” of one commodity’s equivalence

to another “has precisely the same structure as the specular relationship with the other”.42

First, as Lacan introduces in his analysis of the mirror stage, the subject identifies with an

image of itself projected in the other.43 This primordial object is, at first, the mother, but the

process can be extended to other objects—brothers, sisters, father, etc.44 The Oedipus

complex describes the passage from this situation to one in which the father “becomes the

sole reflecting image of all subjects”, an inversion causing all others to only exist in terms of

the Other.45 Accordingly, the castration complex describes the passage from this situation to

one in which the phallus becomes the general equivalent of all other objects.46

As general equivalent, the father institutes the law, while the phallus institutes desire.

The two process are, in fact, inseparable, given that “the link between castration and the law

is essential”.47 However, in his 1960 essays “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic

of Desire”, Lacan will claim that the “the true function of Father”, which is “fundamentally to

unite (and not to oppose) a desire to the Law”, is a product of a neurotic fantasy that

40 Goux, 1990; See Marx, 1976 [1867/73], p. 138–63. Goux was the first to develop such analogy. His Freud,
Marx: Économie et Symbolique was published in 1973, when only Lacan’s Écrits were available in print.
41 “All signifiers are in some sense equivalent”, says Lacan, and “each is able to come to the position of master

signifier, precisely because its potential function is to represent the subject for another signifier” (Lacan,
Seminar XVII, p. 89). Slavoj Žižek develops a similar homology between Marx and Lacan to show how the master
signifier is a general equivalent (Žižek, 1991, p. 22–7; see also Lacan, 2006 [1960], p. 693–4 [819])
42 Goux, 1990, p. 13. It is not by chance that Lacan claimed that “Marx shows himself, in a note, to be a precursor

of the mirror stage”, right before introducing the development of the value form in Marx’s Capital (Lacan,
Seminar V, p. 72–3 [81]).
43 Lacan, 2006 [1949], p. 76.
44 Goux, 1990, p. 15.
45 Goux, 1990, p. 17. This is what characterizes as a non-specular identification, which he sees at work in Freud’s

Group Psychology: “the identification in question [in Group Psychology] is not specular, immediate
identification. It is its support. It supports the perspective chosen by the subject in the field of the Other, from
which specular identification may be seen in a satisfactory light” (Lacan, Seminar XI, p. 267–8 [241]).
46 Goux, 1990, p. 21–2, 24; see also Tomšič, 2015, p. 181. This would explain how Lacan can describe the phallus

as “universal object” (Lacan, Seminar V, p. 183 [199]).

47 Lacan, Seminar V, p. 153 [169].
establishes a paternal image “beyond the Mother—demand’s real Other [Autre réel]”.48 The

father in this neurotic fantasy, says Lacan, “is clearly the dead Father”, but what he wants to

communicate with this is not clear at all. What is intriguing is precisely the relationship

between the mother as “real Other” and the dead father, especially given a previous mention

in the same article to a “real other”:

The first words spoken decree, legislate, aphorize, and are an oracle; they give the real other its obscure
authority. Take just one signifier as an insignia of this omnipotence, that is, of this wholly potential
power, of this birth of possibility, and you have the unary trait which—filling in the invisible mark the
subject receives from the signifier—alienates this subject in the first identification that forms the ego-
ideal.49

Here, the real other seems to be clearly the father, but a father that is irreducible to its

symbolic function—an omnipotent father possessing an “obscure authority”. This father

does not seem to be neither simply the Name-of-the-Father, the imaginary father of the ego

ideal, not the “real” existing person that assumes the paternal role. This father is indeed the

dead father, but the one who was murdered by the band of brothers in the Freudian myth. 50

As Lacan will claim in the interrupted 1963 seminar dedicated to the Names-of-the-Father,

it is the myth of the primal father that “enables a singular equilibrium between the Law and

desire, a sort of co-conformity between them”.51 And it is only by analyzing this fundamental

48 Lacan, 2006 [1960], p. 698 [824].

49 Lacan, 2006 [1960], p. 684 [808].
50 See Freud, 1955 [1913], SE 13, p. 141–3. Lacan claims several times that the primal crime concerns a myth

(see, for instance, Lacan, 2006 [1957], p. 432 [519]; 2013 [1963], p. 74–6; Seminar III, p. 215 [244]; Seminar VI,
p. 341 [404]). The idea that the primal crime actually happened has for a long time been questioned by
anthropologists, although some scholars like Robert Paul argue that the reality of the thesis cannot be simply
disposed (see Paul, 2010). It seems to me that focusing on the accuracy of Freud’s historical claim is to miss the
point of his discussion (and also of Lacan’s interpretation). As Vladimir Safatle notes, Freud’s argument in
Totem and Taboo is not simply concerned with the anthropogenetic hypothesis concerning the original scene
of social life, but with how that original situation can help us understand our own present. The myth of the
primal killing was the way available for Freud to say that “in contemporary social relations, subjects act as who
carries the weight of the desire of assassinating a father who is nothing more than the incarnation of
phantasmatic representations of sovereign authority” (Safatle, 2015, p. 85–6).
51 Lacan, 2013 [1963], p. 76 [89].
myth, I argue, that we can get a grip on the mysterious relation between power and the

symbolic order, namely how can the signifier have power—and, consequently, how can

power be a signifier.

III. Beyond Myths and Phantoms

In Seminar XVII, “The Other Side of Psychoanalysis” (1969–70), Lacan returns to the

three levels of the castration complex developed more than a decade earlier.52 He gives

especial attention to the notion of “real father”, but there is a fundamental change in the

meaning of the expression. Of course, this shift could not be towards the biological reality of

paternity. “If the symbolic context requires it”, Lacan would still say, “paternity will

nevertheless be attributed to the woman's encounter with a spirit at such and such a fountain

or at a certain rock in which he is supposed to dwell”.53 The father has always mattered

because of his name, a signifier with the specific function of instituting and sustaining the

symbolic order, while his “real” person was simply a substitute of this symbol. But during

the 1960s, Lacan’s notion of “Real” would address a completely different issue.54

Since the first elaboration of his famous triad of the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the

Real in 1953, the Real was a problem for Lacan.55 In the following decade, the term would be

52 Lacan, Seminar XVII, p. 125 [145].

53 Lacan, 2006 [1958a], p. 464 [556]; see also Seminar V, p. 165 [181].
54 Lacan’s oscillation between two notions of the Real in his work becomes especially clear in the rest of the

previously quoted passage, when he claims that “this is clearly what demonstrates that the attribution of
procreation to the father can only be the effect of a pure signifier, of a recognition, not of the real father, but of
what religion has taught us to invoke as the Name-of-the-Father” (Lacan, 2006 [1958a], p. 464 [556]). In this
case, “real father” would be associated to the “real agent of procreation”, and it is precisely against this notion
of “real” that Lacan will argue in other places such as Seminar XVII, for instance. What does not change in both
cases is the relevance and necessity of symbolization for the paternal figure to exist—the first, as the only
“reality” of paternity; the second, as a form of symbolization of the Real.
55 “The real is either totality or the vanished instant”, Lacan answers ambiguously to Serge Leclaire’s remark

that he had not explained the real in his presentation on the triad (Lacan, 2013 [1953], p. 42 [53]).
used inconsistently both as something linked to “reality” and as a never-defined hole in the

relationship between the Imaginary and the Symbolic. With time, however, the Real assumes

most prominently the role of a “disruptive force” that can never be symbolized or properly

captured in the Imaginary—what Lacan describes as the “impossible” itself.56 By being

unsymbolizable and unpicturable, the Real can only be grasped in its effects on the

arrangement between the Imaginary and the Symbolic. The point is not if something “really”

exists or if it occurred in some kind of objective reality, but that it “really” caused its effects

independently of any objective reality. The Real only appears retroactively.57

The real father Lacan is talking about in Seminar XVII is the primal father (Urvater) of

the Freudian myth. The entwinement of the Real and myth is an interesting aspect of Lacan’s

theory and it goes back at least to Seminar VIII, “On Transference” (1960–61). At that time,

speaking of the role played by the gods in Greek mythology, he claimed that the gods “belong

to the real”, that they are “a mode by which the real is revealed”, and that “every myth is

related to the inexplicable nature of the real”.58 Myth is the only possible way of talking about

gods59 precisely because the Real cannot be symbolized nor reduced to an image—in a sense,

it is an effort of imagining by means of words in a way that cannot be located neither in the

Imaginary nor in the Symbolic registers.

What is implied in Lacan giving so much attention to this Freudian myth, is that it is a

way of addressing the Real, something that the interplay between Imaginary and Symbolic

in the Oedipus complex and the castration complex—at least the way he theorized them until

then—were insufficient to account for. This is what I suggest calling the Real of the law and

56 Lacan, Seminar XI, p. 167 [152]; see also Seminar XVII, p. 123 [143].
57 Žižek, 1989, p. 182.
58 Lacan, Seminar VIII, p. p. 44, 52 [58, 69]. In 1964 he will make the same claim: “The gods belong to the field

of real” (Lacan, Seminar XI, p. 45 [45]).

59 Not by chance Lacan described the primal father as a “formless god” (Lacan, Seminar XVII, p. 66 [74]).
of desire, meaning that what Lacan enables us to understand from the primal myth is not

only how law and desire are intimately related, but how both depend on a phantasmatic

structure sustained both by the fantasy of the father’s omnipotence and the phantom of his

absent presence. Thus, in order to properly analyze this myth, one needs to pay attention to

how the two fundamental elements of law and desire are constituted in it.

I have already mentioned that the death of the father amounts to its symbolization as

Name-of-the-Father. However, as Lacan claims, “it is not just the father’s death that is at

issue, but the father’s murder”.60 The murder “is the fertile moment of the debt by which the

subject binds himself for life to the Law”,61 and it is only insofar as the father is murdered

that the law can be instituted as a prohibition—not only of incest, but also of murder among

the brothers. This indebtedness, as is known, comes from the guilt that arises after the deed:

They hated their father, who presented such a formidable obstacle to their craving for power and their
sexual desires; but they loved and admired him too. After they had got rid of him, had satisfied their
hatred and had put into effect their wish to identify themselves with him, the affection which had all
this time been pushed under was bound to make itself felt.62

What calls attention in this passage is the mention of love. Something crucial in

Freud’s myth is that this guilt spurs from the love the brothers discover they had for the now

dead father.63 It is thus the combination of love and murder that creates the guilt necessary

for establishing the law, but the idea of the father being some kind of primordial object of

love scrambles the properly paternal and maternal functions in the traditional formulations

of the Oedipus complex. Lacan himself notes the oddness of this:

60 Lacan, Seminar XVII, p. 120 [139].

61 Lacan, 2006 [1958a], p. 464 [556].
62 Freud, 1955 [1913], SE 18, p. 143.

63 Lacan, Seminar XVII, p. 101 [115].

 Concerning the father one thinks one is obliged to begin with childhood, with identifications, and then
it's something that can tend toward extraordinary nonsense, a strange contradiction. One will speak
about primary identification as what binds the child to the mother, and indeed this seems self-evident.
However, if we refer to Freud, to his work of 1921 called Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,
it is quite precisely the identification with the father that is given as primary. This is certainly very odd.
Freud indicates there that, completely primordially, the father happens to be the one who presides
over the very first identification, precisely in that in a privileged way he is the one who deserves to be
loved. This is very odd, to be sure, and is to be placed in contradiction with everything that the
development of analytic experience is found to have established concerning the primacy of the child's
relationship with the mother. There is an odd discordance between Freudian discourse and the
discourse of psychoanalysts.64

Nevertheless, Lacan’s reference to the love for the primal father becomes crucial if we

understand that it is very similar to the primordial love relation one has for the mother—i.e.

the imaginary relation with the other prior to the institution of the law. If Lacan describes

the primal father as a “tyrant”,65 he also portrays a tyrannical relationship between the child

and the mother’s desire, famously comparing her to a “a huge crocodile in whose jaws you

are”.66 In both cases what is at stake is an imaginary omnipotence unlimited by any law, the

subject experiencing himself as “profoundly subject-to the capriciousness of what he is

dependent on”.67

64 Lacan, Seminar XVII, p. 88 [100]. Speaking again about Freud’s Group Psychology in Seminar XI, he describes
this primary identification as “a sort of primal model which the father assumes, anterior even to the libidinous
investment on the mother—a mythical stage, certainly” (Lacan, Seminar XI, p. 256 [231]).
65 Lacan, Seminar XVII, p. 127 [147].
66 Lacan, Seminar XVII, p. 112 [129]. Geneviève Morel describes this tyrannical power of the mother’s desire as

a “mad law”: “while we are still infans, we are confronted with our mother’s jouissance. In order not to become
swamped by it, we have to separate ourselves from it—as it imposes itself on us with the force of a law, a
strange and mad law which turns us into ‘subjugated subjects’. Our unconscious retains traces of this first
subjugation for the rest of our lives. But separating from ‘the law of the mother’ comes at a cost: we create
separating symptoms which, in fact, are a cover for the only universal law recognised by psychoanalysis: the
prohibition of incest. While not separating from one’s mother would constitute a most severe pathology, the
symptom that separates us from her is another pathology, but a necessary and inevitable one” (Morel, 2019, p.
12).
67 Lacan, Seminar V, p. 173 [189]. This omnipotence, it is worth sating, is necessarily imaginary: “Women are

not in themselves omnipotent […]; what is at issue here is the presumed omnipotence of the subject to whom
one’s first demands are addressed” (Lacan, Seminar VI, p. 308 [365]).
 Thus, if the primal crime is “Freud’s dream”,68 the primal father works as a

condensation in the same structural operator the mother’s imaginary omnipotence and the

symbolic function of establishing the law as dead father—both the institution of the law and

as object of desire. Ironically, what the primal father reveals is the mother’s true function as

“mediator” between the symbolic father and the imaginary phallus—between the realm of

objects and the realm of subjects—in the Oedipus and castration complexes, and it is hardly

surprising that the entity incarnating her power would be a fantastical Real father having a

Real phallus. However, as seen in the development of the Oedipus complex, this maternal is

revealed to be imaginary with the disclosure of the law to which the mother also abides.69

But if the moment of institution of the law in the Oedipal drama is the symbolic intervention

of the father in the child-mother relation, this instituting moment in the Freudian myth is

precisely when the omnipotent primal father is killed, revealing his true impotence.

But before analyzing further this imaginary omnipotence of the primal father, another

reason for Freud to speak of the love for the father deserves attention. In his Three Essays on

Sexuality, Freud characterizes love as the “source of authority”,70 and in Group Psychology he

claims that it is “the illusion that the leader loves all of the individuals equally and justly”—

in fact sustained by the love that they, as group, have for him—that enables his ruling

position.71 In other words, love, for Freud, is what enables someone to be more than who he

or she really is, something that have important consequences for political life.

68 Lacan links the myth of the primal crime to the manifest content of a dream-like narrative (see Lacan, Seminar

XVII, p. 113, 117 [130, 135]; see also Zafiropoulos, 2016, p. 121–2).
69 Žižek, 1991, p. 265.
70 Freud, 1953 [1905], SE 7, p. 150.

71 Freud, 1955 [1921], SE 18, p. 124 ; see also p. 113, 120 .

 Lacan too paid attention to this aspect of love. Invoking Plato’s Symposium, he will call

this “something more” in the loved object72 the agalma, the hidden and mysterious element

that makes an object “valuable beyond its obvious, tangible qualities”.73 Lacan also links the

agalma to authority, claiming that it is this mysterious property that makes the lover fall

under “the spell of the commandments” of the person who possesses it.74 This will have

crucial implications for his understanding of the primal myth, for it is only because of the

brothers’ love for the father that the latter could sustain his tyrannical position in the first

place. As Mladen Dolar puts it, love “marks the point where power affects the subjects in

their innermost being, where they submit even before any devices of force or persuasion are

used”.75 In this sense, what is relevant in the notion of the agalma is precisely this

“impassioning” capacity of the “object of desire”,76 which cannot be reduced to the symbol of

the lack. It too must denote something mysteriously Real, something that, like the primal

father, also exceeds symbolization.

It is thus not by chance that Lacan will link the agalma with the object a, which in

parallel to the father, also assumes a Real dimension in the 1960s. Real here once again does

not mean being a “real” entity, to be finally found at some point. As Lacan defines it, the object

a is “a hollow, a void, which can be occupied […] by any object”.77 It is just the “objectification”

of a void, its only function being the capacity to stir desire.78 As the primal father in the myth,

the object a is nothing more than “a cause which in itself does not exist—which is presented

72 Itmust be noted that object here is used in a sense wide enough to include people, not simply “objects” in the
usual sense. Love relations in psychoanalysis always involve some kind of “objectification”: “the other, insofar
as he is aimed at in love, is, as I said, aimed at as a beloved object” (Lacan, Seminar VIII, p. 51 [68]).
73 Hoens, 2016, p. 105.
74 Lacan, Seminar VIII, p. 139 [171].
75 Dolar, 1998, p. xix.
76 Lacan, Seminar VIII, p. 146 [180].
77 Lacan, Seminar XI, p. 180 [164].
78 Žižek, 1989, p. 104; Hoens, 2016, p. 104.
only in a series of effects, but always in a distorted, displaced way”.79 This, in fact, is how we

can make sense of Lacan’s definitions of love as “the making present of a lack”80 and as

“giving what you don't have”.81 The lover doesn’t have the object of desire, but in being in

love, he “gives” it to the beloved, who now seems to really have what he was looking for.

In this sense, the agalma of the beloved is constituted by the love of the lover, and not

the other way round. It is for this reason that the agalma marks the “fetishistic function of

the object”.82 The link between fetishism and love is far from artificial, given that Freud had

already stated that “a certain degree of fetishism is thus habitually present in normal love,

especially in those stages of it in which the normal sexual aims seems unattainable or its

fulfillment prevented”.83 The fetish, as Freud defined it, “is a substitute for the woman’s

(mother’s) phallus”,84 but more than just the lack of an organ, what the fetish supplants is

the fundamental lack in the Other. It is for this reason that Lacan claims that “all of desire’s

objects are fetishistic in character”,85 for every object of desire, in the end, is supplanting a

lack in the Other.

But beyond the fundamental role of the fetish in desire, the notion is relevant because

it is what enables the disavowal of the primal father’s lack—and, consequently, sustains the

fantasy of his omnipotence. If the fetish supplants the disavowed lack with a substitute,

fantasy characterizes the staging of the encounter of the subject to the lost object, of a subject

that is ultimately non-castrated. In this sense, fantasy is “a way of sustaining the Other

without a lack”, simultaneously revealing and disguising the void of the Real.86 This is why

79 Žižek, 1989, p. 184.

80 Lacan, Seminar XVII, p. 76 [87].
81 Lacan, Seminar VIII, p. 34 [46].
82 Lacan, Seminar VIII, p. 140 [172].
83 Freud, [1953] 1905, SE 7, p. 154.

84 Freud, 1961 [1927], SE 21, p. 152; translation amended.

85 Lacan, Seminar VI, p. 312 [371].
86 Dolar, 1998, p. xxi–xxii ; see also Žižek, 1991, p. 266.
fantasy is more than just “hallucinatory satisfaction of desire”: by staging the object a—the

lack itself—in a bearable way, fantasy is the very condition for any desire at all.87 What the

formula of fantasy ($◇a) represents is precisely the being in the presence of the Real object,

which is in itself deceptive, but for this very reason can work as the “support of desire”.88

Thus, what fantasy actually reveals is the father’s true impotence, the void sustaining

his sublime figure.89 This void, of course, is the fundamental lack in the Other symbolized by

the phallus.90 But as Real object, this void can never be fully symbolized, the very reason why

it can keep animating the subject’s incessant desire of achieving it, and the corresponding

fantasy that someone must have it. In fact, one sustains the other, enabling both “the empty

place of power” and the possibility that the person sitting on it be “endowed with a fetishist

aura”.91 In this sense, before murdering the father, the brothers are all fetishists, all of them

trapped by the fantasy of his omnipotence.

The crucial contribution of psychoanalysis to political thought, nevertheless, is that

to believe that anyone can really occupy the seat of power is always a deception. This is what

characterizes what Lacan calls the “big secret of psychoanalysis”, namely that “there is no

Other of the Other”.92 As Real, the primal father is simply the void sustaining the law in the

87 Dolar, 1998, p. xxii.

88 Lacan, Seminar XI, p. 185 [168].
89 Dolar, 1998, p. xxi. As Žižek claims, “the sublime object is an object which cannot be approached too closely:

if we get too near it, it loses its sublime features and becomes an ordinary vulgar object—it can persist only in
an interspace, in an intermediate state, viewed from a certain perspective, half-seen. If we want to see it in the
light of day, it changes into an everyday object, it dissipates itself, precisely because in itself it is nothing at all”
(Žižek, 1989, p. 192).
90 The object a, says Lacan, “serves as a symbol of the lack, that is to say, of the phallus, not as such, but in so far

as it is lacking” (Lacan, Seminar XI, p. 103 [95]).

91 Dolar, 1998, p. xvi. It is interesting to note that in his reading of Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of

the Ego in Seminar XI, Lacan claims that it is the leader as object that enables “the conjunction of the a with the
ego ideal […] by superposing at the same place the objet a as such and this signifying mapping that is called the
ego ideal” (Lacan, Seminar XI, p. 272 [244].). In being so, the leader’s influence is nothing but the effect of the
subjects’ love for him—and not the way round. As Marx once wrote, “one man is king only because other men
stand in the relation of subjects to him. They, on the other hand, imagine that they are subjects because he is
king” (Marx, 1976 [1867/73], p. 149n. 22.).
92 Lacan, Seminar VI, p. 298 [353]; see also Lacan, 2006 [1960], p. 688 [813].
same way that the Real object is the void sustaining desire. But this is not the same as saying

that the seat can simply remain empty, as the liberal utopia of representative democracy

always hopes—the problem is precisely that the impossibility of occupying the seat of power

is what drives the attempts of doing so.

That the Real resists full symbolization means that it keeps producing effects in the

symbolic order, that the primal father haunts the polity established after his murder.

Paradoxically enough, as Freud put it, it is the father’s absence that makes him even more

powerful than when he was present: “the dead father became stronger than the living one

had been”.93 Thus, the Real father is not himself a fantasy, even though fantasy is what

sustains his position regarding his subjects. More precisely, the father is a phantom,94 an

entity that can only have effect in reality as necessarily dead, as a spectral presence

producing effects because of his absence—and it is not by chance that both fantasy

(fantasme) and phantom (fantôme) share their etymological origin in the Greek word

phantasma. But more importantly, the phantom is what reveals the imaginary aspect of

fantasy, the dead father revealing the impotence of the living father. If fantasy is what

sustains the father’s imaginary tyrannical stance, the “phantom [fantôme] of Omnipotence”

is what establishes the “necessity that the Other be bridled by the Law”,95 i.e. that

omnipotence is in fact an impossibility. The paradox is that it is only by dying that someone

can really be all-powerful.

This impossible position of being omnipotent only as being dead is what characterizes

the fundamental aspect of the primal father, and if this paradox of death is what in the myth

denotes the real of the law, what needs also to be analyzed is the real of desire, also

93 Freud, 1955 [1913], SE 13, p. 143.

94 Lacan describes the symbol of the lack as “the apparition of the phallic phantom [l'apparition du fantôme
phallique]” (Lacan, Seminar XI, p. 88 [82]; translation amended).
95 Lacan, 2006 [1960], p. 689 [814].
characterized by an impossibility. This is the paradox of enjoyment, according to which

“what is prohibited is something already in itself impossible”.96 The primal father represents

the unlimited enjoyment that the subject desires but can never achieve, he is the “subject

supposed to enjoy”,97 at the same time symbol of the law and of its transgression. As such, he

constitutes a “logical obstacle of what, in the symbolic, declares itself to be impossible”,98

namely absolute satisfaction, fulfilling of the constitutive lack of desire.

What results from this prohibition of an impossibility—the impossibility of

satisfaction, the absolute “originary” enjoyment that the law supposedly interdicts—is an

inversion between law and desire explained by the myth: instead of realizing that the

institution of the law is what creates desire in the first place, the subject sees the law as

prohibiting desire’s ultimate satisfaction. What is at stake in this inversion is a symbolization

of the Real embodied in the figure of the primal father, but the Real that is symbolized by the

myth—both the Real of the father and the Real of the object—is, once again, a void. It can

only exist in such symbolization, and can only be made present by fantasy and fetishism. “The

splendour of full enjoyment”, “the hypothetical place of full enjoyment” as Dolar names it,

always coincide with emptiness.99

This is why the father must be killed. It is only when he becomes a phantom that

absolute enjoyment can become a fantasy, just like his omnipotence. In this way, his figure

can at the same time sustain a fantasy and reveal its impossibility. This is what characterizes

the phantasmatic structure of power: as living, the father is taken to have an imaginary

96 Žižek, 1989, p. 8–9. It is worth adding that the impossibility of incest in Freud’s myth is double: not only is
impossible for someone to assume the tyrannical position of the father that has all the women for himself; the
fact that there is no law—that is, no kinship relation between those men and women—established yet makes
the incest an “impossible crime”, in the sense that it depends on the violation of the law to be considered incest.
97 Dolar, 1998, p. xviii.
98 Lacan, Seminar XVII, p. 123 [143]; see also Žižek, 1991, p. 266–7; Tomšič, 2015, p. 131.
99 Dolar, 1998, p. xxi.
absolute power; as dead, he becomes a symbolic source of power in general. Far from a

misconceived story, Freud’s myth is our fundamental political myth, accounting for both the

symbolic structure of power and the persisting fantasies of omnipotence driving the

attempts to fill the Other’s gap. This is how we can make sense of a fundamental duality in

Freud’s references to really existing political forms in Totem and Taboo, where he constantly

oscillates between the notion that rulers are incarnations of the father and that rulers are

limited by their ruling position. He claims, for instance, that when the totem animal lost its

sacred character, “Gods and kings” became “the two new father-surrogates”;100 but, at the

same time, his analysis of the taboo surrounding rulers and the strict rules imposed in the

exercise of power101 seems to suggest that the phantom of the dead father hinders anyone

from actually achieving a power like his.

But the main proof of such reading seems to lie in the truly political outcome of the

primal crime: “the original democratic equality that had prevailed among all the individual

clansmen”.102 Freud’s lesson is that this democratic equality, in which there are no Real

fathers, paradoxically depends on a phantasmatic structure to be maintained. The Father

with the aura of the big F must remain a specter in order to sustain the equality among the

brothers, and only this can prevent one of the brothers of trying to assume his previous

position and start a permanent struggle for power. Anyone who claims to be in a position of

power can only do so as an impostor, no matter how much power he supposedly has. Power

is always sustained by a phantasmatic structure—the phantom of the primal father being the

source of both the impossibility of omnipotence and the constant emergence of this fantasy.

100 Freud, 1955 [1913], SE 13, p. 150-1.

101 Freud, 1955 [1913], SE 13, p. 41ff.
102 Freud, 1955 [1913], SE 13, p. 148-9.
 I started this paper trying to make sense of the “signifier of power” inhibiting Hamlet’s

action. Hamlet, like the brothers in Freud’s myth, is also trapped in the fantasy of

omnipotence of the usurper. The inexplicable love his mother had for Claudius endowed him

with an inscrutable agalma that Hamlet assumed for himself too. It is only when he realizes

that both the Other and himself are lacking subjects—when he realizes that the Other is “no

longer guaranteeing and supporting the symbolic, political order”103—that that he can finally

fulfill his destiny. In doing so, Hamlet not only assumes a desire for himself; he also reveals

that it is because of a phantom—the phantom of the dead father—that the usurpers’ position

is never secure. The king, after all, is a “thing of nothing”, and that a sword crosses his heart

or a guillotine slashes his neck will always remain an inevitable possibility.

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