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 Here is Part 1
In the Ur-event of identification, the primal scene of mirroring, the child’s entranced enchantment by the power-and-salvation-promising image in the shiny surface leaves him/her blind to the surrounding framing functions — these functions include the looks, gestures, speech, and various expressions of interest in the body of the child by its supporting big(ger) Others — responsible for constituting (invisibly off-stage, as it were) this visuallymediated experience as what it appears to be. Lacan’s list of spatio-temporally incarnate instances of object a (again, breast, feces, phallus, gaze, and voice) makes a
lot of sense in this connection.
These specular, body-related libidinal coordinates are the visible placeholders, the objective representational inscriptions, of the impossible-to-pin-down, non-objectifiable (hence non-specularizable) desire of the Other(s), a desire setting in motion and decisively influencing the temporally-elongated takingshape of the ego as initially rooted in reference to a visual register. All of this is compactly conveyed by the abbreviation i(a).
and this insofar as objet petit a, Lacan’s central analytic ‘‘discovery,’’ is both transcendental qua non-specular(izable), as the fantasy-constellation(s) ‘‘causing’’ desire, and empirical qua specular(izable), as the concatenation of tangible spatio-temporal object-choices ‘‘caused’’ by desire and its fantasies.
So, the libidinal center of gravity that is the ego-object as a(utre), whose
matheme, as seen earlier in connection with the thirteenth seminar, is i(a), is
established against ‘‘a background of organic disturbance and discord.’’63 What’s
more, this ground-zero absence of organic harmony is a contingent material
condition of possibility, as a necessary but not sufficient condition, for the eventual
(although far from guaranteed qua predestined) ontogenetic emergence of the moi
and its dialectical relations with subjectivity-beyond-the-ego (as per the mirror
stage).
the yawning discrepancy (i.e., ‘‘tension’’) between, on one side of the mirror, the phenomenology of the embodied and affective experience of the body-in-pieces (corps morcele´) in its biologicallydetermined prematurational Hilflosigkeit (i.e., ‘‘tendencies which are experienced… as disconnected, discordant, in pieces’’), and, on the other side of the mirror, the unreachable (i.e., ‘‘there’s always something of that that remains’’) donkey’s carrot of coordinated integrity as the elusive and illusory vanishing-point of coherent, unified wholeness reflected back to the consciousness of the gazing subject á venir as an infuriatingly impossible ideal;
this ideal of one-ified selfhood, represented by the imago-Gestalt, as never-to-be-attained but nonetheless determinative of the subject’s desire thereafter until death (in this vein, the hybrid Imaginary-Symbolic structures of ego-level identities, infused with the enigmatic desires of Real Others, are objects-causes of desire á la Lacan’s objet petit a as a Borromean knotting of the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic).
the nature of Lacanian ‘‘human nature’’ is naturally inclined toward the dominance
of nurture over nature, that is, hard-wired/pre-programmed to be (socio-symbolically)
re-wired/programmed (as per the preceding quotation, ‘‘his own milieu is grafted onto him, i.e., the society of his fellow men’’— or, as per the canonical Écrits-version of the mirror stage, a socio-symbolically-mediated ‘‘gestalt may have formative effects on an organism’’ for a denaturalization-destined human animal caught within ‘‘this intersection of nature and culture’’).
Such a radical reconceptualization of nature is integral to a transcendental theory of subjectivity — this would be a meta/ultra-transcendentalism in that it focuses on the possibility conditions for subjects rather than on subjects themselves as ensembles
of always-already-in-place possibility conditions — that is nevertheless simultaneously
genetic and materialist (by contrast with Kant’s static and idealist transcendentalism).
One of this theory’s tasks is responsibly to integrate evidence from the life sciences into a dual philosophical and psychoanalytic explanatory framework bearing upon the emergent subject. 265
I likewise am convinced that, despite long-prevailing opinion to the contrary, the distinction between Nature (Natur) and Spirit (Geist), for Hegel, is a distinction internal to Nature itself (and not one internal to Spirit instead).
Put differently, the non-natural history of Geist is itself the unfolding of a self-sundering, auto-denaturalizing Natur; the spiritual crises giving rise to new forms of mindedness and like-mindedness (such as those witnessed throughout the Phenomenology) are modified, sublimated repetitions of the Ur-crisis of nature’s groundless ground out of which more-than-natural monstrosities (i.e., human subjects) surface and with which they rebelliously break.
This Hegelian-Lacanian ‘‘dehiscence from natural harmony’’ manifestly on display in multiple guises at various moments in both thinkers’ bodies of work, is something in nature more than nature itself. Such conflict, discord, and tension helps to make possible humanity’s distinctive existence-over-essence
Circling back to the title of Lacan’s thirteenth seminar and this seminar’s treatment of objet petit a as glossed herein, I can say that one of my guiding agendas is to explore the invisible negativity behind the visible ‘‘object of psychoanalysis’’ with the resources furnished by a hybrid Hegelian-Lacanian materialism operative at the crossroads of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and the sciences. 267