Looking for interpretations of the following passage from "The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious". Looks like Lacan may have borrowed the phrase from the poem "Ébauche d'un serpent" by French poet Paul Valéry.
Source: https://mission17.org/documents/SubversionOfTheSubject_LACAN.pdf (page 13)
"Ébauche d'un serpent" by Paul Valéry: https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/%C3%89bauche_d%E2%80%99un_serpent/(1921))