I am deprived of even my most intimate “subjective” experience, the way things “really seem to me,” that of the fundamental fantasy which constitutes and guarantees the kernel of my being, since I can never consciously experience it and assume it… . According to the standard view, the dimen- sion which is constitutive of subjectivity is that of the phenome- nal (self) experience—I am a subject the moment I can say to myself: “No matter what unknown mechanism governs my acts, perceptions and thoughts, nobody can take from me what I see and feel now.” Lacan turns around this standard view: The “sub- ject of the signifier” emerges only when a key aspect of the sub- ject’s phenomenal (self) experience (his “fundamental fantasy”), becomes inaccessible to him, i.e., is “primordially repressed.” At its most radical, the Unconscious is the inaccessible phenomenon, not the objective mechanism which regulates my phenomenal experience. So, in contrast to the commonplace, according to which we are dealing with a subject the moment an entity dis- plays signs of “inner life,” i.e., of a fantasmatic self-experience which cannot be reduced to external behavior, one should claim that what characterizes human subjectivity proper is rather the gap which separates the two, i.e., the fact that fantasy, at its most elementary, becomes inaccessible to the subject—it is this inac- cessibility which makes the subject “empty” ($). We thus obtain a relationship which totally subverts the standard notion of the subject who directly experiences himself, his “inner states”: an “impossible” relationship between the empty, nonphenomenal sub- ject and the phenomena which remain inaccesible to the subject.

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