Transience and Lack of Being

The essay aims at reading Freud’s essay “On Transience” through the prism of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. The claim of the essay is that transience results from the subject’s inability to ensnare the present in its actuality. On account of the unbridgeable gap between the subject’s supposed initial perception and its symbolization, the world is present to the subject only insofar as it already belongs to the past. It follows that the subject can neither achieve coalescence with itself nor discover the world around him in a complete fashion. What is lost in the symbolized present is either fantasized in the past or anticipated in the future. In Lacan’s perspective, these fantasies are never fulfilled: the actual present is utterly impossible in the discursive reality of the human subject. In this way, the Lacanian thesis that every drive is a death drive is reaffirmed in this essay: since there is nothing outside the symbolic order for Lacan, the present in its actuality can only be associated with the death of the subject. Furthermore, the essay argues that the present as such is nothing other than an impossible event of temporal being which is, however, essential for the constitution of time.