"It is no surprise that Coke was first introduced as a medicine - its strange taste does not seem to provide any particular satisfaction, it is not directly pleasing and endearing; however, it is precisely as such, as transcending any immediate use-value (like water, beer or wine, which definitely do quench our thirst or produce the desired effect of satisfied calm), that Coke functions as the direct embodiment of “IT,” of the pure surplus of enjoyment over standard satisfactions, of the mysterious and elusive X we are all after in our compulsive consumption of merchandise. The unexpected result of this feature is not that, since Coke does not satisfy any concrete need, we drink it only as a supplement, after some other drink has satisfied our substantial need - it is rather this very superfluous character that makes our thirst for Coke all the more insatiable: as Jacques-Alain Miller put it succinctly, Coke has the paradoxical property that, the more you drink it, the more you get thirsty, the greater the need to drink more of it - with its strange bittersweet taste, our thirst is never effectively quenched. So, when, some years ago, the publicity motto for Coke was “Coke, that’s IT!” we should discern in it the entire ambiguity: “that’s it” precisely insofar as that’s NEVER effectively IT, precisely insofar as every satisfaction opens up a gap of “I want MORE!"

"This tension between an ethics of desire and an ethics of drive further determines Lacan’s shift from distancing to identification. That is to say, up to the last stage of his teaching, the predominant ethical attitude of Lacanian psychoanalysis involved a kind of Brechtian gesture of distancing: first the distancing from imaginary fascination through the work of symbolic “mediation”; then the assumption of symbolic castration, of the lack constitutive of desire; then the “going through the fantasy”: the assumption of the inconsistency of the Other concealed by the fantasy-scenario. What all these definitions have in common is that they conceive of the concluding moment of the psychoanalytic cure as a kind of “exit”: as a move out, out from imaginary captivation, out from the Other. In his very last phase, however, Lacan outlines a reversal of perspective, unheard of as to its radicality: the concluding moment of the psychoanalytic cure is attained when the subject fully assumes his or her identification with the sinthome, when he or she unreservedly “yields” to it, rejoins the place where “it was,” giving up the false distance which defines our everyday life."

"The basic paradox of the Freudian notion of fantasy resides in the fact that it subverts the standard opposition of ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’: of course, fantasy is by definition not ‘objective’ (in the naïve sense of ‘existing independently of the subject’s perceptions’); however, it is also not ‘subjective’(in the sense of being reducible to the subject’s consciously experienced intuitions). Fantasy rather belongs to the ‘bizarre category of the objectively subjective – the way things actually, objectively seem to you even if they don’t seem that way to you’."

"The ontological necessity of “madness” lies in the fact that it is not possible to pass directly from the purely “animal soul” immersed in it’s natural life-world to “normal” subjectivity dwelling in its symbolic universe. The “vanishing mediator” between the two is the “mad” gesture of radical withdrawal from reality which opens up the space for its symbolic (re)constitution."