"I will end today with a little fable in which I would like you just to see an example, albeit a paradoxican and demeaning one, that is yet significant for what goes on sublimation. Since we have remained today on the level of the object and the Thing, I wanted to show you what it means to invent an object for a special purpose that society may estee, valorize and approve."

..."There's a lot to say on the psychology of collecting. I am something of a collector myself. ... In analysis the object is a point of imaginary fixation which gives satisfaction to a drive in any register whatsoever. The object of collecting is something entirely different, as I will show you in the following example... once went to visit my friend Jacques Prévert in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. And I saw there a collection of match boxes (...) the match boxes appeared as follows: they were all the same and were laid out in an extremely agreeable way that involved each one being so close to the one next to it that the little drawer was slightly displaced. As a result, they were all threaded together so as to form a continuous ribbon that run along the mantlepiece, climbed the wall, extended to the molding, and climbed now again next to a door."

Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated and annotated by Dennis Porter. (New York: Norton, 1992), pp. 112-114.