‘ A major cut separates the system of thought of Antiquity from the modern system of thought.’¹ This is how Jean-Claude Milner summarises the central epistemological thesis of the great Hegelian philosopher Alexandre Kojève, a fundamental influence on the thinking of the French psychoanalytic successor to Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan. In Stanley Kubrick’s collaborative film adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke’s sci-fi novel(isation) 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) such a cut is ostensibly portrayed; that is, in the famous jump from a bone lobbed into the air by an angry ape on a desert Earth to an unidentified spacecraft floating amidst the dark of space just off Earth, an edit we might construe as a cut from the quick, if ‘to cut to the quick’ literally means to slice through flesh to the bone.² Yet, whilst separating them, this cut of course ties the two scenes together, the first being linked to the second through the filmic consuetude of an image-match edit—the bone falls alike to how the spacecraft is seen floating; their shapes are similar—and what is elided in the cut nonetheless suggests some continuity between the planet of the apes and the space conquest of the humans. It is as if—to combine G. W. F. Hegel and Martin Heidegger—here Spirit has derived from bone, in its thrownness.³ However, the impression that one has led to the other is not given through an explicit statement (and therefore does not necessarily betray what Milner extrapolates from Kojève as his theorem, that ‘there is never any synonymy between a notion belonging to Antiquity and a modern notion’⁴): the cut is ambiguous, something is subtracted in it, perhaps similarly to the manner in which—in the Lacanian psychoanalytic conceptualisation—one’s very own subjectivity is premised on its own subtraction, or cut; here in the subjective, rather than epistemological, definition.

As the popular Slovenian philosopher and Lacanian psychoanalytic theorist Slavoj Žižek might say, the barred subject—that is, in Lacan’s notation: ‘’; the subject (S) cut by a rivening bar: ‘/’—is unseeable to itself, because it is this cut itself: its being cut out (of its reality) enframes it, constituting its reality. It is thus barred from being completely homogeneous with its reality, as its subtraction is constitutive of its reality. This is where Lacan’s distinction between ‘reality’ and ‘the Real’ comes in: if the subject were to be homogeneous with(in) ‘reality’—that is, due to the lack of subtraction productive of distinction or differentiation—this would thus entail the inexistence of both subject and reality as such; there would only be a homogeneous Real, indistinguishable as any element unto itself, as it is (subtracted) subjectivity that is required to produce any distinguishability whatsoever.⁵ In other words, the subject cannot see itself seeing; it necessitously cannot see itself, in the third-person (dreams aside). Such an impossibility can only ever be anxiety-provoking fantasy, such as in the ‘impossible sight that threatens you, of your own eyes lying there on the ground’, as Lacan puts it, in relation to Oedipus unable to see his denucleated eyeballs, rent from their sockets by his own hand.⁶ (The ‘beyond of the infinite’ that Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) experiences during the Stargate sequence in the closing part of 2001 perhaps reaches this moment of anxiety of seeing; first, through to unconscious structuration itself, as if he were melding with it, after which is a series of cuts to and from the subject seeing himself in the film’s last scenes).

However, to launch from this famous cut in 2001, as is so often done, is to ignore the integrality of the monolith that precedes it. (In a similar vein to this appurtenance, Lacan mentions the huge stingray-like creature with abyssal black eyes caught at the end of Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960).⁷) A dark precursor if ever there was one; the monolith is a rectangular block as black as blackest night, unreflecting and impermeable. It has a likeness to a blank cinema or TV screen—like that over which the music of 2001’s overture is played at its very beginning—yet it is precisely not a screen, due to its homogeny; for a screen separates, and through separating links, whereas the monolith is a Thing that only intrudes, interrupting previous continua and coordinates. It is in fact here that the true cut lies.

As an element of the Real, the only way to conceptualise its unrepresentability is through abstract aporias: it is like an impossibly complete set (in set theory), or an equally impossible reality without a lack, without the excerption-inclusion of a subject, or of object a (Lacan’s always-already-lacking object), which—as Jacques-Alain Miller has stated—the subject becomes strictly equivalent with, qua subtracted, qua cut. This is an equivalency disavowed by the subject in their fundamental fantasy—that is, they do not see themselves as barred (i.e., sees itself as S)—hence Lacan’s formula for fantasy: ‘ ◇ a’ (the barred subject and a separated by the multiform middle symbol, an enigmatic lozenge, which here can denote equivalency and disavowal at once).⁸ Thus, to use Gottlieb Leibniz’s famous word, the Thing is ‘windowless’, whereas—as Miller illustrates—a window is needed to get to anything like the soul (Fig. 1.1):

It is precisely because the object a is removed from the field of reality that it frames it. If I withdraw from the surface of this picture the piece I represented by a shaded square, I get what we might call a frame: a frame for a hole, but also a frame of the rest of the surface. Such a frame could be created by any window. So object a is such a surface fragment, and it is its subtraction from reality that frames it. The subject, as barred subject—as want-of-being—is this hole. As being, it is nothing but the subtracted bit. Whence the equivalency of the subject and object a.⁹

The monolith knows no such subtraction or withdrawal, but as the Thing it begins things: it does not screen, it does not frame, and most of all, it does not deceive, which is Lacan’s definition for the cause of anxiety. ‘Anxiety’, Lacan states in his tenth Seminar; ‘not only is it not without object, but it very likely designates the most, as it were, profound object, the ultimate object, the...