Seminar XXIV Final Sessions 1 - Lacan in Ireland

that the little o-object is not uniquely, as one so often hears it said,essentially characterised by the fact that it is the missing object, it iscertainly the missing object, but its function of being the missing object isspecified very particularly, let us say, in the phenomenon of anxiety butbesides this function, one could say that its fundamental function is muchmore rather to fill in this radical gap which renders so imperious thenecessity of demand. If there is really something lacking in this speakingbeing, it is not the little o-object, it is this gap in the Other which isarticulated with the S of Ø. That is why at the end of this instinctual circuit,to account for the experience of the listener, I am putting forward the ideathe nature of the enjoyment to which one can accede at the end of thejourney is not at all on the side of a ‘surplus enjoying’, but precisely on theside of this experience of this enjoyment, that perhaps one might call‘ecstatic’, enjoyment of existence itself – moreover as regards the term‘ecstatic enjoyment’ I was struck at finding Levi-Strauss writing on the onehand, in a number of Musique en jeu where Levi-Strauss puts very preciselyin perspective the nature, not of the enjoyment, in fact the experience ofmusic and that which appears to him to be that of mystical experience.Freud himself, in a letter to Romain Rolland, finds himself answering,spontaneously articulating that he refused himself musical enjoyment andthat this musical enjoyment appeared to him as strange as what RomainRolland was saying to him about enjoyments of a mystical order; anyway itis he himself who articulated the two, who had the idea of introducing musicinto it.Final moment then, where the subject will make the leap, I don’t knowwhether one can say ‘beyond’ or ‘behind’ the little o-object, but willmanage to break through and arrive at this locus, one might say of thecommemoration of the unconscious being as such, namely, the joining up ofthe most radical lacks which are those which constitute the gap of thesubject of the unconscious and that of the unconscious, namely, to put theexperience of this..., one might say that in the final moment, if you wish,one might say that the real as impossible is a white heat, is raised toincandescence; at that very moment, I mean, I would indicate, for my part,39