Is There A Santa Claus?
Dear Jacques,
I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says “If you see it in The Sun it’s so.” Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus?
Virginia O’Hanlon,
115 West 95th Street,
New York City
Virginia, your little friends are right. So is your father (but is that not always the case…?). You have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. You strive for socio-symbolic completeness. You think that nothing can be which is not confirmed by some larger sociolinguistic entity — in Seminar XX, I call this the big Other. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s are incomplete. In this traumatic universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him and his inability to come to grips with the constitutive lack.
No, Virginia, there is no Santa Claus. Or, perhaps Santa Claus exists as exception to the universal — the not-all. Which is to say, only in the sense that he does not. Your father wants to control your jouissance. He does this precisely through the Superego imperative to enjoy!
No Santa Claus! Thank not-God he does not live, and he does not live forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now we will still reside in these elaborate fantasies constructed out of a need to explain the unexplainable. I suppose in that sense, Santa might as well exist.
Sincerely,
Jacques Lacan
