Johnston, A. (2013) ‘The object in the mirror of genetic transcendentalism: Lacan’s objet petit a between visibility and invisibility,’ Continental Philosophy Review 46:251–269.
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The object of Jacques Lacan’s thirteenth seminar of 1965–1966, entitled ‘‘The Object of Psychoanalysis,’’ is, unsurprisingly, none other than his (in)famous objet petit a
This a quickly becomes, after Lacan’s introduction of it as a concept-term to his theoretical arsenal in the late 1950s, a condensed knot of associated meanings and references tied together with varying degrees of tightness over time.
On the one hand, objet a is said to be ‘‘non-specularizable,’’ namely, impossible to inscribe within the spatio-temporal registers of representation
On the other hand, it is equated with a series of determinate libidinal coordinates (i.e., breast, feces, phallus, gaze, and voice), coordinates marked by entities and events situated in space and time
How can this object simultaneously be utterly beyond representability in space and time and yet concretely incarnated in ‘‘specularizable’’ spatiotemporal avatars?
Within the confines of the thirteenth seminar, Lacan introduces the non-specular
status of object a through a comparison of it with the Möbius band, one of his
favorite topological structures
Topology being a mathematical science of configurations formed through continuous series of permutations of surfaces — Lacan’s turns to topology enable him to abandon the problematic Euclidean geometrical picture-thinking permeating the depth-psychological discourse, with its misleading metaphors of outer layers and inner recesses, from which he rightly wants to dissociate Freudian psychoanalysis.
As is common knowledge, this sort of strip is a single surface twisted such that uninterrupted movement along it transports one between two opposed faces.
The distinguishing warp of the Möbius band makes two seemingly separate sides seamlessly communicate with one another; this twist is the mere inflection of a single surface nonetheless generating a manifest distinction between a recto and a verso.
The comparison between objet a and the Möbius strip already suggests that this a is to be construed as an insubstantial distortion of the lone immanent plane of psychical reality, a contortion forming a switch-point at which apparently separate conscious and unconscious dimensions intersect and pass into each other.
following this introduction of object a qua non-specularizable via topology — any appearance of this analytic object is said to defy capture by mirroring, to reflect nothing in reflecting devices. Like a vampire, whose menacing shadowy presence is disturbingly palpable and yet an invisible blank in the clear surfaces of surrounding mirrors, objet petit a tangibly haunts its subject in a similarly elusive, hard-to-see fashion.
So, with this frame in place, how is the mirror stage relevant to the project of elucidating the status of object a as in-between visibility and invisibility? An answer to this question can begin with a detail contained in the 1949 narration of this stage contained in Écrits.
Therein, Lacan, speaking of ‘‘the striking spectacle of a nursling in front of a mirror who has not yet mastered walking, or even standing’’ (i.e., an infant, a nascent subject-to-be, still very much mired in the affective muck of an anxiety-inducing prematurational helplessness … describes the young child in this psychoanalytic Ursituation as ‘‘held tightly by some prop, human or artificial (what, in France, we call a trotte-bébé [a sort of walker]).’’
This detail comes to serve as a lever for certain of Lacan’s later recastings of the mirror stage. These recastings are deployed so as to combat crude developmentalist (mis)readings of his theory according to which Imaginary identification with the imago-Gestalt of the moi is a phase chronologically situated between a prior phase of immersion in the ‘‘blooming, buzzing confusion’’ (as William James would describe it) of the primitive Real and a posterior phase of ascension to the proper social mediation of Symbolic structures setting in with language acquisition.
In seminars eight, ten, and twelve, the trotte-bébé , as an inert, inhuman object, drops out of the picture, with only the speaking subjectivity (parlètre) of older Otherness remaining instead.
These post-1949 presentations of the mirror stage in le Séminaire insist upon the necessary role of a parental ‘‘big Other’’—such a figure is both physically bigger (i.e., not prematurationally helpless like the infant) as well as an instantiation of the socio-symbolic grand Autre — in initially prompting and thereafter maintaining the small child’s multi-level investments (simultaneously cognitive, affective, and libidinal25) in his/her ‘‘selfimage.’’
Identification by the germinal subject á venir with the Gestalt of the imago in the reflective surface of the mirror is triggered by bigger supporting Other-subjects who communicate encouragements of and urgings to latch onto the image by employing a combination of words and gestures (i.e., linguistic and proto/quasilinguistic mechanisms—the archetypal example of this would be the mother’s speech exclaiming things like ‘‘That’s you there!’’ while she points with her index finger at the reflection of the delicate, diminutive body held up to the mirror).
Especially for this later Lacan, the imago-Gestalt of the moi is overdetermined from the start by the pre-existent universe of signifiers into which the child is thrown (a thrown-ness preceding even the biological moment of birth) and within which his/her specular reflection is embedded and contextualized. From the get-go, the image is suffused by the mediation of the signifier, rather than being a self-sufficient stand-alone phenomenal immediacy unto itself only secondarily taken up into symbolico-linguistic constellations.
The upshot of this is that figurative, metaphorical ‘‘mirroring’’ of the tiny, fragile human by the more-than-visual looks, gesticulations, and utterances of the larger people involved in this situation is a prior possibility condition for the literal, non-metaphorical mirroring fixated upon the spectacle of the (‘‘self’’-)image.
In the latter, the sight of the picture of the whole body contained in a shiny, reflective surface becomes an alluring, captivating mirage of anticipated cohesion and mastery, a virtual reality eliciting triumphant jubilation and provoking venomous aggression (aroused by envy and frustration visa`- vis this unattainable ideal) at one and the same time.
In the updated, 1960s version of the mirror stage, language-using (and language used)
big(ger) Others bathe the infant in a cascade of statements and behaviors whose saturating effects endow the specular components of the mirroring moment, Lacan’s primal scene of inaugural identification, with their special, fateful status.
The petit a(utre) of the child’s forming ego, partially bound up with imagistic representation, is originally and primordially a precipitate of ‘‘the desire of the
Other.’’
In other words, this moi begins condensing on the basis of the conscious and
unconscious fantasies of the familial actors surrounding the child, actors who both
wittingly and unwittingly transfer their desire-organizing fantasies regarding the
child’s past, present, and future into his/her psyche via the discourses and actions
through which they frame the mirror-experience for him/her.
Insofar as the ego itself, as what becomes intimate ‘‘me-ness,’’ is born by crystallizing around a core kernel of external Other-subjects’ fantasy-formations, it could be said to be an instance of extimacy in Lacan’s precise sense of this neologism.
Put differently, at the very nucleus of the recognized ‘‘me’’ resides a misrecognized (á la Lacanian méconnaissance) ‘‘not-me,’’ something ‘‘in me more than myself,’’ as the Lacan of the eleventh seminar (1964) might phrase it.
Similarly, invisible traces of alterity, impressed upon the body-image by desire/fantasy-conveying Others (with their
gazes, voices, demands, loves, jouissance, and so on), are infused into the visible avatars of this estranging, ego-level identity, this ‘‘self’’ created and sustained within a crucible of unsurpassable otherness.
one could say that the desires of Others inscribe a Möbius-type twist within the surface of the mirror such that the specular side of the ‘‘little other’’ of the Imaginary ego/alter-ego axis (i.e., a—a’) is in seamless continuity with its constituting envers qua the non-specular (and largely unconscious) flip-side of libidinal and socio-symbolic forces and factors stretched across vast swathes of different-but-overlapping temporalities.