Because he Ignores this excess of drive, Stavrakakis also operates with a simplified notion of "traversing the fantasy"—as If fantasy is a kind of illusory screen blurring our relation to partial objects. This notion fits perfectly with the common-sense idea of what psychoanalysis should do: of course It should liberate us from the hold of idiosyncratic fantasies and enable us to confront reality the way It effectively is . . . but this, precisely, is what Lacan does not have In mind—what he aims at is almost the exact opposite.
In our daily existence, we are immersed In "reality" (structured-supported by the fantasy), and this Immersion is disturbed by symptoms which bear witness to the fact that another repressed level of our psyche resists this Immersion. To "traverse the fantasy" therefore paradoxically means fully identifying oneself with the fantasy— namely with the fantasy which structures the excess resisting our immersion into daily reality, or, to quote a succinct formulation by Richard Boothby:
"Traversing the fantasy" thus does not mean that the subject somehow abandons its involvement with fanciful caprices and accommodates itself to a pragmatic "reality," but precisely the opposite: the subject Is submitted to that effect of the symbolic lack that reveals the limit of everyday reality. To traverse the fantasy in the Lacanian sense is to be more profoundly claimed by the fantasy than ever. In the sense of being brought into an ever more intimate relation with that real core of the fantasy that transcends imaging.
In Defense of Lost Causes S. Zizek
