Le sujet prend conscience de son désir dans l'autre, par l'intermédiaire de l'image de l'autre qui lui donne le fantôme de sa propre maîtrise. -- Jacques Lacan, 1954

In episode eleven of In Search of Zelda the protagonist, Louis, experiences a confrontation with radical alterity, or "the Big Other," which causes a rupture in both the Imaginary and Symbolic orders. But it is precisely Louis's perpetually unfulfilled desire for the Real--in other words, the simulacrum of fulfillment, his wish to find his soi-disant "sister Zelda" (who is nothing but a projection of himself, a "little other")--that leads him to the fracturing of the Real. For, as Žižek puts it, "desire's raison d'être...is to reproduce itself as desire," not to achieve an objective or the Ding an sich.

Let us begin with Louis's vision of Zelda's sneakers dangling like limp phalli atop a telephone wire. The lines of communication, of the linguistic, Symbolic order, are crossed. Ordinary speech will not suffice. The shoes, emblematic of Louis's desire (for the sister/self function), a narcissistic object-choice, reveal the splitting of the ego, as Louis is both there, below, gazing up at the sneakers like Tantalus, and yet he is the sneakers, rendered impotent in his quest, arrested in a state of childhood incompetence, looking down at himself as if from a mirror, at once mocking and mourning his own progress. Once transitional objects for Louis, imaginary material attachments replacing the real umbilical attachment to the mother-function, the hermaphroditic sneakers have now morphed into useless father-functions, too high up and too empty (of feet) to perform any action. Louis must get them down or remain symbolically castrated. Thus he grabs a heavy brick, a temporary replacement for the phallus, and fruitlessly lobs it at the sneakers. But this task of combating father-function with father-function backfires: instead of releasing the sneakers to return Louis's ego to himself, the phallobrick nearly hits Mayor Bloomberg, an Übermensch so important in the story's Imaginary order, that he represents the Phallus of phalli. Even his name is heavy with such symbolism, meaning "great blooming mountain."

The radical confrontation with alterity--when Louis confronts the other with the Other--occurs after the psychoanalytic temptress Dana has whisked the protagonist inside 3372 33rd St. (perhaps the repetition of "3" here suggests an unholy trinity of self, ego, and Other, or perhaps the hegemonic family triangle that must be deconstructed). Dana stands before Louis as an apparition, wearing nothing but the bright yellow sneakers. A large and beautiful African-American woman who greatly resembles the civil rights activist Angela Davis in her heyday, Dana is the epitome of alterity in jouissance, an alluring but monstrous unbarred (m)Other masquerading as l'homme-elle,who has taken possession of Louis's "little other," the once impotent sneakers, and rendered them potent again, on her feet. An inversion of the "Hottentot Venus," Dana is not controlled by the gaze of her white, male oppressor, but rather, by re-appropriating the phallosneakers as her own, she controls him. Thus in Dana, Louis experiences both the ultimate desire and the ultimate fear: as Other and other are reunited, so too are the mother and the phallus. Dana therefore deconstructs familialism, transforming Louis, in Deleuze and Guattari's terms, into the Anti-Oedipus, while at the same time returning him to the Primal Scene.

Such rupture and re-appropriation can only result in a breakdown of all three orders, Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real. Thus Louis's acid-trip-like phantasmagoria represents the symbolic fracturing and confrontation of alienated self, language, and presence/absence. The end of the dance--an image of Zelda contorted into the ancient Yogic pose of "the crow"--traumatically reveals to Louis that Zelda is simply an unconscious projection of himself, and that his "desire" to find her is rather a desire to control and take possession of himself. The sneakers themselves are nothing but a Symptom, a phenomenon of Louis's false belief in his sister's existence. They exist, Zelda (objet petit a) exists, because Louis wants to believe in them, in her. Louis himself exists only as a cancerous BwO (body without organs), caught in an endlessly reproducing pattern of sameness. This is both his Eros and his Thanatos.