LCExpress 6 is available on line.
In a presentation on October 30, 2022, to Lacanian Compass towards the Clinical Study Days, The Empire of the Images, Sophie Marret-Maleval elucidates aspects of the subjective position from the perspective of Lacan’s reading of The Ravishing of Lol Stein, Marguerite Duras’ masterpiece. In this conference, the presenter remarked that the ball scene in which the character, Lol V. Stein, was trapped into a traumatic scene, was crucial to a possible development of a subjective position. She was the object of shame, but at the same time the voyeur of a loving encounter between her fiancé and a charming woman. All turns around the gaze, and this object gaze becomes a mark in Lol’s experience as an abandoned woman. Sophie takes the function of the narrator in the story, pointed by Lacan, as a subject that gives consistency to Lol as an object. From being invisible, she appears in the scene of the social bond. This emphasizes the importance of the imaginary in the construction of the fantasy. Lacan distinguishes the object a from i(a) and their relation to desire or the absence of it. For Lol V. Stein, there is a dress of another character that gives consis- tency to a body. This dress becoming a wordhole for this character, more than a fetishistic object, becomes the veil of a feminine body that couldn’t exsist.
