This use rested upon a paralogism of extrapolation that in fact constituted Oedipus's formal cause an extrapolation whose illegitimate nature weighed on the whole operation: the extraction of a transcendent complete object from the signifying chain, which served as a despotic signifier on which the entire chain thereafter seemed to depend, assigning an element of lack to each position of desire, fusing desire to a law, and engendering the illusion that this loosened up and freed the elements of the chain.