Editor’s Column: Fantasy’s Realities

"3 Fantasy thus serves a pedagogical purpose. [...]we might say that fantasy negotiates the relation between desire and the Other: "desire for the Other, desire to be desired by the Other, and especially desire for what the Other desires. With the help of the fantasy, the subject creates a story, which gives his or her life a perception of consistency and stability, while he or she also perceives the social order as being coherent and not marked by antagonisms."" [...]its colonization works best when fantasy remains inaccessible to the subject: "in order for a fantasy to be operative, it has to remain 'implicit' i.e., a distance must be maintained between it and the explicit symbolic texture sustained by it."i4 And when it comes to what Lacan calls "fundamental fantasy" the prospects of getting too close to the fantasy can prove psychically devastating, resulting in an undoing of the subject's symbolic identity: "it is never possible for me to fully assume (in the sense of symbolic integration) the fantasmatic kernel of my being. [...]class struggle is displaced onto the struggle against the Jews, so that the popular rage at being exploited is redirected from capitalist relations as such to the 'Jewish plot.