Žižek, Slavoj. “Object a in Social Links.” Clemens, Justin, and Russell Grigg eds. Reflections on Seminar XVII: Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. 107-128. Print.
Discourse of the Master
S1 —> S2
$ a
Discourse of the Analyst
a —> $
S2 S1
Today’s hegemonic symbolic matrix fits the forumula of the analyst’s discourse. The agent of the social link is today a, surplus enjoyment, the superego injunction to enjoy that permeates our discourse; this injunction addresses $ (the divided subject) who is put to work in order to live up to this injunction. The truth of this social link is S2, scientific-expert knowledge in its different guises, and the goal is to generate S1, the self-mastery of the subject, that is, to enable the subject to cope with the stress of the call to enjoyment (through self-help manuals, etc.). Provocative as this notion is, it raises a series of questions (110).
When, exactly does the objet a function as the superego injunction to enjoy? When it occupies the place of the master signifier … when the short circuit between S1 and a occurs. The key move to be accomplished in order to break the vicious cycle of the superego injuction is thus to enact the separation between S1 and a. Consequently, would it not be more productive to follow a different path, that is, to start with the different modus operandi of l’objet a, which in psychoanalysis no longer functions as the agent of the superego injunction — as it does in the discourse of perversion? (114)
The difference between the social link of perversion and that of analysis is grounded in the radical ambiguity of objet ain Lacan, which stands simultaneously for
- the imaginary fantasmatic lure/screen and
- for that which this lure is obfuscating, for the void behind the lure.
Consequently, when we pass from perversion to the analytic social link, the agent (analyst) reduces himself to the void, which provokes the subject into confronting the truth of his desire. Knowledge in the position of “truth” below the bar under the “agent,” of course, refers to the supposed knowledge of the analyst, and, simultaneously, signals that the knowledge gained here will not be the neutral objective knowledge of scientific adequacy, but the knowledge that concerns the subject (analysand) in the truth of his subjective position.
one could say that, even if most of the Nazi claims about the Jews were true (they exploit Germans, they seduce German girls), their anti-Semitism would still be (and was) pathological – because it represses the true reason the Nazis needed anti-Semitism in order to sustain their ideological position. So, in the case of anti-Semitism, knowledge about what the Jews “really are” is a fake, irrelevant, while the only knowledge at the place of truth is the knowledge about why a Nazi needs a figure of the Jew to sustain his ideological edifice. In this precise sense, the analyst’s discourse produces the master signifier, the swerve of the patient’s knowledge, the surplus element that situates the patient’s knowledge at the level of truth: after the master signifier is produced, even if nothing changes at the level of knowledge, the same knowledge as before starts to function in a different mode. The master signifier is the unconscious sinthome, the cipher of enjoyment, to which the subject was unknowingly subjected.
The crucial point not to be missed here is how the late Lacan’s identification of the subjective position of the analyst as that of objet petit a presents an act of radical self-criticism. Earlier, in the 1950’s, Lacan conceived the analyst not as the small other (a), but, on the contrary, as a kind of stand-in for the big Other (A, the anonymous symbolic order). At this level, the function of the analyst was to frustrate the subject’s imaginary misrecognitions and to make them accept their proper symbolic place within the circuit of symbolic exchange, the place that effectively (and unbeknownst to them) determines their symbolic identity. Later, however, the analyst stands precisely for the ultimate inconsistency and failure of the big Other, that is, for the symbolic order’s inability to guarantee the subject’s symbolic identity. (116)
One should thus always bear in mind the thoroughly ambiguous status of objet a in Lacan. Miller recently proposed a Benjaminian distinction between “constituted anxiety” and “constituent anxiety”: while the first designates the standard notion of the terrifying and fascinating abyss of anxiety that haunts us, its infernal circle that threatens to draws us in, the second stands for the “pure” confrontation with objet a as constituted in its very loss. Miller is right to emphasize here two features: the difference that separates constituted from constituent anxiety concerns the status of the object with regard to fantasy. In a case of constituted anxiety, the object dwells within the confines of a fantasy, while we get the constituent fantasy only when the subject “traverses the fantasy” and confronts the void, the gap, filled up by the fantasmatic object. Clear and convincing as it is. Miller’s formula misses the true paradox or, rather, ambiguity of objet a: when he defines objet a as the object that overlaps with its loss, that emerges at the very moment of its loss (so that all its fantasmatic incarnations, from breasts to voice and gaze, are metonymic figurations of the void of nothing), he remains within the horizon of desire – the true object cause of desire is the void filled in by its fantasmatic incarnations. While, as Lacan emphasizes, objet a is also the object of the drive, the relationship is here thoroughly different. Although in both cases, the link between object and loss is crucial, in the case of
- objet a as the object cause of desire, we have an object which is originally lost, which coincides with its own loss, which emerges as lost,
- while, in the case of objet a as the object of the drive, the “object” is directly the loss itself.
In the shift from desire to drive, we pass from the lost object to loss itself as an object. That is to say, the weird movement called “drive” is not driven by the “impossible” quest for the lost object, but by a push to directly enact the “loss” — the gap, cut, distance — itself. There is thus a double distinction to be drawn here: not only between objet a in its fantasmatic and posrfantasmatic status, but also, within this postfantasmatic domain itself, between the lost object cause of desire and the object loss of the drive. Far from concerning an abstract scholastic debate, this distinction has crucial ideologico-political consequences: it enables us to articulate the libidinal dynamics of capitalism. (117)
Following Miller himself, a distinction has to be introduced here between lack and hole.
– Lack is spatial, designating a void within a space,
– while the hole is more radical-it designates the point at which this spatial order itself breaks down (as in the “black hole” in physics).
Therein resides the difference between desire and drive:
– desire is grounded in its constitutive lack,
– while drive circulates around a hole, a gap in the order of being.
In other words, the circular movement of drive obeys the weird logic of the curved space in which the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line, but a curve: the drive “knows” that the shortest way to attain its aim is to circulate around its goal-object.
At the immediate level of addressing individuals, capitalism of course interpellates them as consumers, as subjects of desires, soliciting in them ever new perverse and excessive desires (for which it offers products to satisfy them); furthermore, it obviously also manipulates the “desire to desire,” celebrating the very desire to desire ever new object and modes of pleasure. However, even if it already manipulates desire in a way that takes into account the fact that the most elementary desire is the desire to reproduce itself as desire (and not to find satisfaction), at this level, we do not yet reach the drive.
The drive inheres to capitalism at a more fundamental, systemic level: drive propels the entire capitalist machinery; it is the impersonal compulsion to engage in the endless circular movement of expanded self-reproduction. The capitalist drive thus belongs to no definite individual — it is rather that those individuals who act as direct “agents” of capital (capitalists themselves, top managers) have to practice it.
We enter the mode of the drive when (as Marx put it) the circulation of money as capital becomes “an end in itself, for the expansion of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement. The circulation of capital has therefore no limits.” One should bear in mind here Lacan’s well-known distinction between the aim and the goal of drive:
– while the goal is the object around which desire circulates,
– its (true) aim is the endless continuation of this circulation as such (117-118).