Thanks to Sean Sturm’s blog for this illustration of Lacan’s 4 Discourses.
On page 46 from Vighi’s book On Žižek’s Dialectic: … the advent of capitalism coincides with the passage from the discourse of the master to the discourse of the university, whereby the hegemonic place comes to be occupied by knowledge (S1). … At this historical turning point something crucial takes place: the entropy which in the discourse of the master was hidden below knowledge suddenly starts to move, to speak, it becomes visible, turning into the motor of a new discourse where all knowledge passes into value. In Lacan’s words, ‘it is a matter of the transference, plundering, spoliation of what, at the beginning of knowledge, was inscribed, hidden, int eh slave’s world’ … the genie, as it were, escapes form the bottle and enters every little object around us. The formula of fantasy that belonged to the lower level of the master’s discourse ($ <>a) is thereby dealt a moral blow. We go from a social link where the entropic libido-object remained hidden (and yet available to the master thanks to the mediation fo the slave who produced it), to another link where this very object acquires centre-stage and full visibility, inasmuch as it occupies the place of the slave, the other qua mediator. Vighi, Fabio. On Žižek’s Dialectics. New York: Continuum, 2010.