I saw her today at the reception
I bite on mirrors with every word. Shards of reflections puncturing every vital organ. The uttering of I, a mistake, a folly, a dream. Lacan reminds us that identity is a misrecognition—that to say “I” is to say “not quite.” The ego is a fiction stitched from reflections, a phantom born in glass. He gave us the mirror stage: the moment the infant glimpses itself and believes the image whole. It is the first wound of consciousness—to recognize yourself and know it is not you.
Pour quelle autre?
Desire, for Lacan, is a game of hopscotch whose prize is lack, absence. We do not want what we want, we want wanting. We circle the objet petit a. Lacan laughs, from the analyst’s chair, ungraspable poet and theorist of ache. He knew that the unconscious murmurs not in truths, but in slips, knots, puns, mistakes, through the gaping veil of language. And so I speak desperately, seductively, into the chasm, hoping for recognition, hoping for the reverberation of desire reciprocated, hoping for you.
The words of The Rolling Stones echo through my void-filled head: “You can’t always get what you want.”
But if you try sometimes
-Ruby Thelot