Nanjing University Foreign Language and Literature Graduate Forum 2023

August 15, 2023

“Traversing Fantasy: An Event of Subjectivity.” Presented on Aug 15, 2023.

Imagine walking through the long underwater corridor of an aquarium. Above you is the transparent glass arcade and fish swim past overhead. You know this is not the real ocean, and in truth, something in you recoils from such an experience being “real.” The glass protects you from drowning, from sharks, from the danger that lurks in the sea and therefore conjures a safe viewing space, an illusion so vivid that it can provoke genuine awe, even fear. The eventness of this experience, however, does not arrive when you first step into the aquarium, nor in the shock of its vividness, nor in the lingering wonder after you exit, but arrives at a subtler moment of recognition – that the glass arcade in a sense does not make your experience “less real,” because the way the aquarium functions is how we are living in the world.

That vitreous protection could be regarded as a materialized metaphor of fantasy, a significant concept in psychoanalysis that both reveals the constructedness of reality and sustains subjectivity as a structural defense against the Real. Meanwhile the Real remains irreducible, as we cannot shatter the glass and swim among the fish, just as the deep sea and the desert mark the outer limits of our reach. But this impossibility is not a defeat. According to Jacques Lacan, what marks the success of psychoanalytic therapies is the reconstruction of the analysand’s fantasies by the analyst, which enables the subject to traverse the fantasy. Slavoj Zizek further points out that to traverse fantasy is not to destroy it or eliminate all the symptoms, but to see through its structuring illusion while remaining inside it. Out of this process a parallax view is formed, a new life is established, and traversing fantasy thereby becomes an event of subjectivity.