Lacan characterizes the libido as an imaginary bodily organ he calls the lamella or l’hommelette. The latter term means both "omelet" and "little feminine man"; Lacan offers it as a witty play on Plato’s myth that human beings were originally egg-shaped androgynes who were only later divided into the two sexes. Lacan, knowing how to make a good French omelet, also knows how to capture the floating, insistent, sometimes queasy character that desire assumes when imagined or intuited apart from its objects. He simply breaks some eggs: "Let us imagine it, a large crepe moving about like the amoeba, ultra-flat for passing under doors, omniscient in being led by pure instinct, immortal in being scissiparous. Here is something you would not like to feel creeping over your face, silently while you are asleep, in order to seal it up." Isn’t it possible that what is thrown toward the opera in the dream of Freud’s young man is not something proper to the dreamer’s body but the adhesive substance of l’hommelette? And since the throw targets no specific scene, but only the operatic conjuncture of music and drama, orchestra pit and stage, wouldn’t it be possible to see in the throw a recognition that opera is always already the site of l’hommelette, always already covered at every point of its surface with the substance of desire?
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