Captain Fantasmatic

In the most Lacanian film of 2016, Captain Fantastic with Viggo Mortensen, a single father raises his four children in the forest, outside of the demeaning burdens of everyday idiocy. They become elite athletes and geniuses, thanks to their isolation and his endeavors—“We are philosopher kings”—they holler as they hunt, read, and do university level mathematics. A Rousseauan fantasy no doubt, but what this film does above all is to demonstrate the fictionality of the paternal signifier. The father has erected an order of his own. For instance, this family does not celebrate Christmas; they celebrate Noam Chomsky day. I think that Lacan would have been totally in favor of this negotiability of the paternal signifier, but not, perhaps, with Chomsky as the replacement.

In the seminar Le Sinthome (1975-6), Lacan tells of his meeting with Chomsky in America, who tells him that language has its origins in the body. What this means is that Chomsky is dealing with evolutionary theories of language. If there is anything that Chomsky the linguist does not understand, it is the irreducible nature of the signifier, Lacan says. The signifier, he says, tears out a hole in the real. And it is precisely this tearing which is at stake in the Lacanian theory of the signifier at this point in Lacan's development. It is a tearing that does something not only to the status of the paternal signifier, which becomes hollowed out and fragile, but also to the body.

The aspect of foreignness which is torn out through the signifier can perhaps be translated as corporeality, as flesh, as drives, and so on. But there is no evolutionary drama taking place from the real to the signifier; the signifier is a drama of creation ex nihilo, through what he calls the Borromean knot between the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real.

Perhaps it is Laplanche whom Lacan is really complaining about as he tells of his meeting with Chomsky—both come across as a kind of Captain Fantasmatic from a Lacanian perspecti