Glynos, Jason and Yannis Stavrakakis. (2008) “Lacan and Political Subjectivity: Fantasy and Enjoyment in Psychoanalysis and Political Theory.” Subjectivity, 2008, 24, (256-274)
The idea of the subject as lack cannot be separated from the subject’s attempts to cover over this constitutive lack at the level of representation by affirming its positive (symbolic-imaginary) identity or, when this fails, through continuous identificatory acts aiming to re-institute an identity.
This lack necessitates the constitution of every identity though processes of identification with social available traits of identification found, for example, in political ideologies, practices of consumption, and a whole range of social roles; and vice versa: the inability of identificatory acts to produce a full identity by subsuming subjective division (re)produces the radical ex-centricity of the subject and, along with it, a whole negative dialectics of partial fixation. Subjectivity in Lacan’s work, then, is linked not only to lack but also our attempts to eliminate this lack that, however, does not stop re-emerging. (260-261)
A different relation to fantasy and thus mode of enjoyment or subjectivity is possible
– phallic jouissance: a subject is in thrall to his fantasy and thus insensitive “to the contingency of social reality.” an aversion to ambiguity
A non-phallic form of enjoyment (jouissance feminine or Other jouissance) Here the subject is taken to acknowledge and affirm the contingency of social relations and to pursue an enjoyment that is not guided by the impulse to “complete”, to “totalize”, or to “make full or whole”, an enjoyment situated, rather, on the “the side of the not-whole”.