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« I love you, but, because inexplicably I love in you something more than you—the objet petit a—I mutilate you.
This is the meaning of that breast-complex, that mammal-complex […] except that the orality in question has nothing to do with food, and that the whole stress is placed on this effect of mutilation.
In the fable I read, when I was a child, in these early forms of strip cartoon, the poor beggar at the restaurant door feasted himself on the smell of the roasting meat. On this occasion, the smell is the menu, that is to say, signifiers, since we are concerned with speech only. Well! There is this complication— and this is my fable—that the menu is written in Chinese, so the first step is to order a translation from the patronne. She translates—imperial pâté, spring rolls, etc. etc. It may well be, if it is the first time that you have come to a Chinese restaurant, that the translation does not tell you much more than the original, and in the end you say to the patronne—Recommend something. This means: You should know what I desire in all this.
But is so paradoxical a situation supposed, in the final resort, to end there? At this point, when you abdicate your choice to some divination of the patronne, whose importance you have exaggerated out of all proportion, would it not be more appropriate, if you felt like it, and if the opportunity presented itself, to tickle her tits a bit? For one goes to a Chinese restaurant not only to eat, but to eat in the dimensions of the exotic. If my fable means anything, it is in as much as alimentary desire has another meaning than alimentation. It is here the support and symbol of the sexual dimension, which is the only one to be rejected by the psyche. The drive in its relation to the part-object is subjacent here. «
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