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The primary aim of this article is to clarify Lacan’s understanding of the graph of desire through a close reading of Seminar V, in which a double debate with Klein and Marx is engaged. With this clarification, I contest Žižek’s view that identifies the lower level of the graph with the symbolic, and the upper level with the symbolic shot through by the real. According to him, while at the lower level the “alienation” of the subject in the symbolic transpires, at the upper level the “separation” of the subject from the symbolic itself becomes conceivable as the dimension of the real is introduced. Against this construal, I identify the lower level with the imaginary, and the upper level with the symbolic. Žižek’s misapprehension results from neglecting the distinction Lacan makes between the symbolic that arrives in advance in the imaginary phase itself and the symbolic proper. In the concluding section, I attempt to draw out some of the main implications that this clarification has for the Lacanian critique of ideology.