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Its agent is the real father (149). Both ‘‘real’’ and ‘‘agent’’ must be understood in Lacanian terms. ‘‘Real’’ means impossible, which is why Freud needed a primal father 44 Verhaeghe who was dead (143–45). The living father can never coincide with this function. Accordingly, ‘‘agent’’ must be regarded as very far removed from the idea of the almighty primal father. Agent here is nothing but an executive, ‘‘my agent,’’ who is or ought to be paid to do a certain job, that of the master agency (146, 197).

This is the very same relationship as between the signifier and the thing; the signifier can only refer to another signifier, while the thing-in-itself insists outside the chain of signifiers. The deadlock in this line of reasoning concerns the question of the origin, which, as Lacan says repeatedly throughout his oeuvre, is impossible to answer. Subject formation derives from an S1 that stems from a unary trait that needs to be repeated over an underlying absence. In my reading, this is the very same deadlock that Freud ended with, and on the very same topic.

Right from the start of the seminar, we learn that S2 is already present before there is anything like a subject. 6 The introduction of S1 is the function of the father as a structural operator (143–46). From the moment that repetition is put in motion in the dialectical exchange between S1 and S2 , the subject becomes a divided subject (18) that tries to reach S2 in an attempt to attain jouissance, even while this is precisely the cause of the loss of jouissance. ’’ Recall the master’s discourse: the divided subject is located under the bar, covered by the S1 , with all the accompanying illusions (106).