TRAVERSING THE FANTASY

From Du Maurier to Beckett

Samuel Beckett, Not I, 1977, video, black-and-white, sound, 15 minutes 6 seconds. From “Acts of Voicing.”

The common wisdom tells us that, according to psychoanalysis, whatever we are doing, we are secretly "thinking about THAT" - sexuality is the universal hidden reference of every activity. However, the true Freudian question is: what are we thinking when we ARE “doing that”? It is the real sex itself which, in order to be palatable, has to be sustained by some fantasy. The logic is here the same as that of a native American tribe whose members have discovered that all dreams have some hidden sexual meaning - all, except the overtly sexual ones: here, precisely, one has to look for another meaning. Any contact with a "real," flesh-and-blood other, any sexual pleasure that we find in touching another human being, is not something evident, but something inherently traumatic, and can be sustained only insofar as this other enters the subject's fantasy frame.     What is a fantasy? Fantasy does not simply realize a desire in a hallucinatory way; it rather constitutes our desire, provides its coordinates - it literally "teaches us how to desire." To put it in somewhat simplified terms: fantasy does not mean that, when I desire a strawberry cake and cannot get it in reality, I fantasize about eating it; the problem is rather, how do I know that I desire a strawberry cake in the first place? This is what fantasy tells me. This role of fantasy hinges on the fact that, as Jacques Lacan put it, "there is no sexual relationship," no universal formula or matrix guaranteeing a harmonious sexual relationship with one's partner: every subject has to invent a fantasy of his own, a "private" formula for the sexual relationship - for a man, the relationship with a woman is possible only inasmuch as she fits his formula.

In order to relax, Jesus played golf with one of his apostles on the shore of the Galilee sea. There was a difficult shot to be performed, Jesus hit it badly and the ball ended up in the water, so he walked on the water to the place where the ball was, reached down and picked it up. When he tried the same shot again, the apostle told him that this is a very difficult one, only someone like Tiger Woods can do it; Jesus replied “What the hell, I am the son of god, I can do what Tiger Woods can do!” and took another strike. The ball ended again in water, so Jesus again took a walk on the surface of water to retrieve it; at this point, a group of American tourists walked by and one of them, observing what was going on, turned to the apostle and said: “My god, who is this guy there? Does he think he is Jesus or what?” The apostle replies: “No, the jerk thinks he is Tiger Woods!” This is how fantasmatic identification works: no one, not even god himself, is directly what he is, everybody needs an external, decentered point of identification.