memory: otherwise Imago/ 3.  

Imago cannot sanction. 

"According to us, this activity retains the meaning we give it up to the age of eighteen months—a meaning no less revealing of a libidinal dynamism... than of an ontological structure of the human world that fits into our studies on paranoid knowledge. ...It therefore seems to us to manifest in an exemplary situation the symbolic matrix in which ‘I’ precipitates into a primordial form... This form situates the instance of ‘I’, even before a social determination, in a line of a fake, forever irreducible only for the individual... We ourselves have shown in the social dialectic which structures human knowledge as paranoid, the reason that makes it more autonomous than that of the animal from the field of strength for desire..."[1]

One’s capacity of attributing and sanctioning which begins with birth and with the related offer of the surrounding reality, remains a power, a laborious option[2] of the Subject, even as a newborn: not an automatism nor an ontology of the species.

Even a fake must be assented to by a Subject—though much less easily by a newborn—and such assent remains in memory, traceable, and with the power to elaborate and involve the other in their relationship.

It is indeed in memory—which is imputative every time —that Imago turns out alienated from the judgement on the other, and with it, from the desire, which results illusory and imaginary.

Marina Bilotta Membretti/ Cernusco sul Naviglio – June 19, 2026

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[1] Taken from “Lo stadio dello specchio come formatore della funzione dell’io”, p.91-93 in ‘Jacques Lacan. Scritti – Vol.I’ edited by Giacomo B. Contri/ ‘Biblioteca Einaudi’ Giulio Einaudi editore Spa (2002).

[2] ‘Inherit from a child. Why not ?’, Marina Bilotta Membretti/ NeP edizioni Srls (2024) – Chapter 3/ ‘A four-stroke start ? p.82