Impossibility of the Object

The "impossibility of the object" names the constitutive structural condition of the objet petit a as the object-cause of desire: it is not a possible object that happens to be missing or withheld, but one whose very mode of being is impossibility. In Lacanian terms, the object of desire is always already lost — not empirically unavailable but ontologically foreclosed — because desire is itself produced in the gap opened by the signifier's castrating operation on the body. The object cannot be possessed, recovered, or fully represented; it functions precisely as a void around which desire endlessly circles. This is what McGowan, drawing on Lynch's film, renders as the "impossible object-cause of desire": the gap that Diane's fantasy cannot fill but must manage, cover, and transform.

What is theoretically distinct about this concept — and why it merits its own name — is the move it enables regarding fantasy's relation to desire. Rather than treating fantasy as a secondary response to an impossibility that pre-exists it, the passage argues that fantasy is more primordial: it actively transforms the raw impossibility of the object into a positive, navigable form — "mystery." The impossible object (Camilla Rhodes, as the foreclosed cause of desire) becomes the mysterious object (Rita, as a solvable enigma with a hidden but in-principle-recoverable identity). This transformation is not simply a consolation; it is a re-ontologization. Fantasy does not merely paper over lack — it converts impossibility (a structural, irreversible condition) into mystery (a contingent, reversible withholding), thereby generating the very questions that desire appears to answer. Impossibility becomes the raw material that fantasy processes into livable desire.

This concept appears in the-impossible-david-lynch-todd-mcgowan (p. 108) and sits at the intersection of the corpus's accounts of Fantasy, Desire, and the objet petit a. Within the supplied canonical syntheses, Desire is defined as structurally incomplete — circling das Ding, never reaching satisfaction — and Fantasy ($◇a) is the formula that gives desire its coordinates, constituting reality while screening the Real. The "impossibility of the object" is a specification of the objet petit a's structural status: it names, from the side of the object, exactly what the Desire and Fantasy entries describe from the side of the subject and the formula respectively. Where the Fantasy entry stresses the "traversal" (la traversée du fantasme) as the analytic endpoint and notes that fantasy "covers the constitutive impossibility of the sexual relationship," the present concept names what is being covered — namely, the object's irreducible impossibility — and traces the mechanism of that covering as a conversion into mystery.

The concept also resonates with the Anxiety entry, which establishes that anxiety arises not from the object's absence but from its threatening proximity — the risk of closing the lack that sustains desire. The "impossibility of the object" is the structural guarantee that this proximity can never fully materialize; fantasy, by transforming impossibility into mystery, sustains desire precisely by keeping the object nominally reachable yet perpetually deferred. The Imaginary register is also implicated: the transformation from Camilla (impossible) to Rita (mysterious) is precisely the kind of imaginary re-clothing — a specular, narrative re-composition — that the Imaginary canonical entry associates with consistency and body-image construction. The concept thus extends the Fantasy account by foregrounding fantasy's generative, quasi-ontological power to produce the phenomenological shape of desire's object, rather than merely managing a pre-given lack.

The Impossible David LynchTodd McGowan · 2007 (p.108)

Diane's fantasy transforms Camilla Rhodes, the impossible object, into Rita, the mysterious object. This transformation offers Diane an escape from the impossibility of the object-cause of desire.

The quote is theoretically loaded because it places two modal predicates — "impossible" and "mysterious" — in direct structural contrast, marking the precise operation fantasy performs: it does not eliminate the impossibility of the object-cause of desire (a Lacanian technical term for the objet petit a) but re-codes it as epistemic mystery, converting an ontological foreclosure into a contingent concealment and thereby making desire livable as a quest rather than a confrontation with the void.