Jacques Lacan. 2014. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book X, Anxiety [1962-1963]. Polity.
As we read in the ... On Worse seminar, you exist qua signifier, and subjects exist as signifiers. In this seminar about anxiety, we should elucidate the nature of the signifier more deeply.
The signifier transforms, moves, or introduces the subject to another signifier. It does not transform or introduce the subject (the subject as the self, the Other, or any other "objects," see the Note in ... Or Worse) to an end, to a final stage where it can be finally delivered, understood, analyzed, and anatomized. Rather, the signifier throws the subject to another signifier, to another maze, to another world of fogs. The signifier delivers the subject to another train and not to a final station. Hence, the subject as it exists, it becomes enmeshed into a quasi-infinite queue of signifiers. Simply put, the subject can never encircle itself; it is an open circle. The subject cannot be itself fully.
In addition to that, the subject cannot exist by its own being; it needs the Other (...Or Worse), which Lacan calls the generative signifier. Then the subject finds itself in the Other (which is also a signifier); however, since the signifier throws and infinitely delivers the subject to another, the subject becomes a signifier whose traces are effaced in the Other. The subject cannot trace back its significance, and the Other must not know the subject; the Other belongs to the unconscious not to the consciousness according to Lacan. In other words, the subject exists only in the Other, but this Other does not formulate a milieu in which this subject can find its starting point, or which this subject can meet again its/his birth, or where the subject can fully trace back all the signifiers that it/he has passed through. The Other is sand that always mystifies the subject's feet steps. (This is why we cannot by nature see our backs).
Having said that, the subject discovers that it lacks itself and it cannot exist without the Other, and even with this Other, it cannot be itself fully (Lacan uses the barred S as a symbol of the lacking subject, see the figure below). The Other also is not exhaustible, and parts of it remain unknown and un-tested by the subject (in Lacan's symbols, barred A). So, the subject is always lacking in the Other and the Other is always unknown in the subject. What remains out of this dialogue is the Other's otherness; the otherness that cannot be reached by the subject but always sought by it. This Other's otherness is called by Lacan the object a; i.e., the object of desire. Then the subject always desires this a which is infinite. The object a is what the subject tries to hunt while it is forgotten and lost in the forest of the Other.
This hunting is a demand. The subject demands hunting, which is in its very nature. However, this demand is infinite and "vacuum" since the object a cannot be reached and since the relation between the subject and the Other is infinite. Whenever this demand is filled up, is met, the subject experiences anxiety. So, anxiety is that the subject cannot anymore enjoy the game of haunting the object a. Anxiety, contrary to what many psychologists believe, is not about the missing, the absence, but it is about the omnipresent presence. Anxiety is not that a child is missing his mother's breast, but that he is always threatened by being brought back to the breast. The game of presence/absence of the mother is not the source of anxiety; rather, the threat that the mother will be omnipresently present is what generates anxiety because it precludes the subject from the object a. Anxiety is generated when we are prevented from enjoying our infinity (as signifiers).
"The security of presence is the possibility of absence" (p.53)
The signifier throws the subject to another signifier. That means the signifier cuts the world, or marks the world, so the subject's existence becomes thinkable: If the world and the Other is infinite (in which the subject exists as a lost signifier and lacking subject), then the subject should have a mark, a cut, a signal in this world that gives its a value, that tells him that you exist now and here. Otherwise, this subject will not be distinguished from the vacuum, from the infinity. The infinity is not able to be demarcated. The subject to exist needs an ego, a demarcated entity, which is offered to him by the signifier as (this signifier) cuts the world, puts a mark in this vacuum. Of course, these cuts are infinite as the signifier throws the subject always to another signifier. This process is similar to putting marks on trees' trunks when we find ourselves lost, or thrown, in a forest. The only difference between this physical forest and the world in which the subject is thrown is that the latter's "trunks" efface the marks the subject leaves. This process is not what produces anxiety. Anxiety is engendered when we find our way in the forest and we think that we have nothing more to follow, we have nothing more to haunt, and we have nothing more for which we can be thrown and lost in this infinite "forest." When the signifier cuts the world in a way telling the subject, "Here you are, it is the home, it is the road that you cannot be lost anymore," then anxiety is born.
Anxiety then is a function of the lack (remember the object a is always a lack that the subject cannot get). When you look at a shelf in a library and find that this site is empty, then you know that this site is a site of the lack; the books are missing forever from it and you cannot put other books to fill this emptiness. The lack is never reducible to zero, is never met (because you can mirror the world and the other infinitely to shape your ego - as two mirrors standing in front of each other - but you cannot mirror the lack, the missing). This is the difference between lack and privation. Lack is symbolic, privation is not; lack is never met or reducible, privation is. Anxiety is not the function of the missing mother, or absent mother, as this mother can always come back or can be substituted. Anxiety is the function of a symbolic, mythical mother that can never be met, substituted, or seen again because it has never been seen before. When you resist this function of lack, you fall prey to uncertainty and pain because you try to prevent yourself from haunting the infinite object a. When you take this function of lack as such, then you snatch from the anxiety not uncertainty by certainty, sharpness that ignites you to see better, to hear better, and to understand the world better; hence you move to act.
We feel badly "anxious" when we feel that the mother, the signifier-object, is omnipresent and will never be absent; that is, the lack is what we want. When we surrender to the present mother, the anxiety makes us feel pain. When we pursue the lack, anxiety makes us feel sharper and act sharper.
