Would it not be possible to determine the final moment of the analytical process, the pass, as the experience of the positive character of the loss, of the initial emptiness filled by the dazzling and fascinating phantasy object – experiencing the realization that the object as such is fundamentally the positivization of an emptiness? Isn’t this experience of the primacy of the place over the phantasy object the traversal of the phantasy, the moment in which, to quote Mallarmé, “nothing takes place except the place”? This is why it is so important to completely differentiate the pass from “resignation,” from “giving up”; from this perspective, analysis would be finished when the analysand “acquiesced to his symbolic castration,” resigning himself to the fact that radical Loss is part of the condition of the being-of-language [parlêtre]. This kind of interpretation turns Lacan into some kind of “wise guru” who preaches “total renunciation.” It may initially seem as if there is a lot of evidence for this interpretation. Isn’t the Phantasy fundamentally the Phantasy of the sexual rapport finally become possible, finally fully realizable? And isn’t the end of the analysis, the traversal of the Phantasy, simply experiencing the realization of the impossibility of the sexual rapport, and therefore the irreconcilably blocked, knotted, failed nature of the “human condition”? But nothing of the kind is true. If we posit as the fundamental ethical principle of analysis “not to give up on one’s desire” – from which it follows that the symptom is, as Jacques-Alain Miller pointed out, precisely a specific mode of “giving up one’s desire” – we must determine the pass as the moment in which the subject takes on his own desire in its pure, “non-pathological,” form, beyond its historicalness/hystericalness. The best example of a “post-analytic” subject is not the dubious figure of a “wise guru,” but rather Oedipus at Colonus, a grumpy old man who asks for everything, who does not want to give up anything. If the traversal of the phantasy is tied to the experience of some kind of lack, this lack is the Other’s and not that of the subject himself. In the pass, the subject undergoes the realization that the agalma, the “hidden treasure,” is already missing from the Other, the object separates itself from the I – the signifying trait in the Other. After the subject has been placed in relation to the object a, “the experience of the fundamental phantasy becomes the drive. What, then, does he who has passed through the experience of this opaque relation to the origin, to the drive, become? How can a subject who has traversed the radical phantasy experience the drive? This is the beyond of analysis, and has never been approached. Up to now, it has been approachable only at the level of the analyst, in as much as it would be required of him to have specifically traversed the cycle of the analytic experience in its totality”. (Lacan 1998a: 273) Isn’t the incessant drive of Hegelian “Absolute Knowledge [AK]” [“savoir absolu [SA]”], the infinitely repeated journey down the already traveled path, the ultimate example of how to “live one’s drive” once history/hysteria are gone? It is no surprise, then, to see Lacan, in Chapter XIV of Seminar XI, articulating the circuit of drive in terms that directly evoke the Hegelian distinction between the “finite” end and the “infinite” end. Lacan makes use of a distinction in the English language between aim and goal (cf. 1998a: 179). The circuit of drive can be determined specifically as the back and forth between aim and goal. Drive is, initially, a path toward a particular goal, and then it becomes the experience that its true goal is the same thing as the path itself, that its “goal is nothing more than turning around in circles”

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