The Lacanian 'subject' names a gap in the symbolic, its status is real. This is why, as Balmès has pointed out, in his crucial seminar on the logic of the fantasy (1966-7), after more than a decade of struggling with Heidegger, Lacan accomplishes his paradoxical and (for someone who adheres to Heidegger's notion of modern philosophy) totally unexpected move from Heidegger back to Descartes, to the Cartesian cogito. There really is a paradox here: Lacan at first accepts Heidegger's point that the Cartesian cogito, which grounds modern science and its mathematical universe, announces the highest forgetting of Being; but, for Lacan, the Real of jouissance is precisely external to Being, so that what is, for Heidegger, the argument against the cogito is, for Lacan, the argument for the cogito - the Real of jouissance can only be approached when we exit the domain of being. This is why, for Lacan, not only is the cogito not to be reduced to the self-transparency of pure thought, but, paradoxically, the cogito is the subject of the unconscious - the gap/cut in the order of Being in which the Real of jouissance breaks through.

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¶ 7:10 AM