This is why the human being is not a “rational animal,” not defined by a dimension or quality which adds itself to substantial animality: in order for such an addition to occur, a space for it, its possibility, has to be first opened up by a distortion of animality itself. The Lacanian name for this distortion or excess is the objet a (surplus-enjoyment), and, as Lacan convincingly demonstrated, even Hegel here falls short, missing this dimension of surplus-enjoyment in the struggle for recognition and its outcome.
According to the standard view (propagated by, among others, Kojève), what is at stake in the Hegelian struggle between the (future) master and servant is the separation of the subject from its body: through its readiness to sacrifice its biological body (life), the subject asserts the life of the spirit as higher and as independent of its biological life. This other (higher) dimension is embodied in language, which is, in a way, the negativity of death transposed into a new positive order: the word is the murderer of the thing it designates, it extracts the concept of the thing in its independence from the empirical thing. From the Freudian-Lacanian standpoint, however, such a description of the passage from the biological body to its symbolization, to the spiritual life of language, misses something crucial: namely, how the symbolization of the body retroactively generates a fantasmatic inexistent organ which stands for what is lost in the process of symbolization:
“This lamella, this organ, whose characteristic is not to exist, but which is nevertheless an organ … is the libido. It is the libido, qua pure life instinct, that is to say, immortal life, irrepressible life, life that has need of no organ, simplified, indestructible life. It is precisely what is subtracted from the living being by virtue of the fact that it is subject to the cycle of sexed reproduction. And it is of this that all the forms of the objet a that can be enumerated are the representatives, the equivalents.”
This forever lost excess of pure or indestructible life is―in the guise of the objet a, the object-cause of desire ― also what “eternalizes” human desire, making it infinitely plastic and unsatisfiable (in contrast to instinctual needs). It is therefore wrong to claim that, since the master does not work, he remains stuck at the natural level: what the servant’s products satisfy are not merely the master’s natural needs, but his needs transformed into an infinite desire for excessive luxuries displayed in competition with the luxuries of other masters―the servant brings the master rare delicacies, luxury furniture, expensive jewelry, and so on. This is why the master becomes the servant of his servant: he depends on the servant not for the satisfaction of his natural needs, but for the satisfaction of his highly cultivated artificial needs.