Pluth, Ed. Signifers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. Albany: SUNY Press, 2007.
The genital stage allows for the creation of a space between the nascent subject and the Other, although again it does not at all resolve the fundamental discord between the two. What is different about this stage is that in it instead of being confronted with the Other’s demand the child is confronted with the Other’s desire — an enigma that appears between the lines of the Other’s demands.
Once the Other’s desire is introduced we can speak about the production of a subject. The earlier stages fail to bring about this production. It is only with the radical lack of a place for the child, a lack that the Other’s desire implies, that a subject can get produced. The oral and anal stages offer a place for the child in the Other, but the production of a subject occurs only when the Other offers no place at all (68).
Without this trigger, there would only be a strictly determined subject-as-meaning, a fate determined by a signifying chain. Without this interruption, the subject would be nothing but a series of signifers working like sheet music in a player piano, and attempts to separate from those signifiers would always be frustrated (69).
In the oral stage, the Other’s demand was a response to the child’s demand, and the child could see himself as the object of this demand, satisfying the Other to his own chagrin. In the anal stage, the Other’s demand to the child, which was first, was also readily answered, again to the child’s chagrin. The genital stage involves a demand from the Other that the child simply cannot answer. This “absolute” demand is in fact what Lacan calls the Other’s desire. This is not a desire for anything specific, and it is not necessarily a desire directed toward the child … It presents the child with an enigma, and as a result it puts the child’s relation to the Other, and the child’s very being, into question. Without this, there would be no possible space apart from the Other (69).