« Whenever the membranes of the egg in which the foetus emerges on its way to becoming a new-born are broken, imagine for a moment that something flies off, and that one can do it with an egg as easily as with a man, namely the hommelette, or the lamella.
The lamella is something extra-flat, which moves like the amoeba. It is just a little more complicated. But it goes everywhere. And as it is something—I will tell you shortly why —that is related to what the sexed being loses in sexuality, it is, like the amoeba in relation to sexed beings, immortal —because it survives any division, any scissiparous intervention. And it can run around.
Well! This is not very reassuring. But suppose it comes and envelopes your face while you are quietly asleep. I can’t see how we would not join battle with a being capable of these properties. But it would not be a very convenient battle. This lamella, this organ, whose characteristic i s to not exist, but which is nevertheless an organ—I can give you more details as to its zoological place—is the libido.
It is the libido, qua pure life instinct, that is to say, immortal life, or irrepressible life, life that has need of no organ, simplified, indestructible life. It is precisely what is subtracted from the living being by virtue of the fact that it is subject to the cycle of sexed reproduction. And it is of this that all the forms of the objet a that can be enumerated are the representatives, the equivalents. The objets a are merely its representatives, its figures.
The breast—as equivocal, as an element characteristic of the mammiferous organization, the placenta for example —certainly represents that part of himself that the individual loses at birth, and which may serve to symbolize the most profound lost object. »
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