Stavrakakis, Yannis. Subjectivity and the Organized Other: Between Symbolic Authority and Fantasmatic Enjoyment Organization Studies 2008 29: 1037
Indeed, as Laclau and Mouffe have put it, objectivism and subjectivism are symmetrical expressions of the desire for a fullness that is ultimately impossible. In Lacanian theory, moving beyond the Scylla of objectivism and the Charybdis of subjectivism entails the formulation of a novel conception of subjectivity; in fact, it is this new subject, the subject as lack that, through its continuous dialectic with the (equally lacking) Other, symbolic reality, signifies the collapse of subjectivism and objectivism.
Already from his Rome Discourse Lacan formulates his strong objection towards any reference to a closed totality both at the collective and the individual level. And he concludes: ‘it is the subject who introduces division into the individual, as well as into the collectivity that is his equivalent. Psychoanalysis is properly that which reveals both the one and the other to be no more than mirages’. Cederstrom and Willmott are correct to point out that this way in which Lacan intervenes in the agency/structure debate ‘holds out the promise of allowing us to deal with issues of desire and de-centring without falling prey to determinism’. And this applies both to subjective determinism and objective determinism: ‘By advancing a notion of the agent that is predicated on a negative ontology, we challenge the common assumption that the agent either is a free and self-reflexive entity or is a constrained and fully pre-determined category’.
Lacan’s theory of the subject emphasizes thus the notions of ‘desire’ and ‘lack’, the constitutive dialectic between lack and desire. This helps theorists avoid the usual traps of reductionism and essentialism when trying to consider the relationship between subjectivity, society and politics. This relationship is theorized as a function of political identification, leading to a picture of the socio-political field characterized by a complex play of (ultimately failed) identifications, disidentifications and renewed identifications.
Isn’t Ernesto Laclau pointing to the same necessary/impossible dialectic when he highlights the fact that the obstacle limiting my identity and showing its ultimate impossibility is also its condition of possibility insofar as there is no identity without difference and no desire without lack (Laclau 1990: 39)? True, ideological/discursive determination is unavoidable, even necessary. No social reality and subjective identity can emerge without it; and no management of subjective lack. At the same time it is ultimately impossible.
No ideological determination is ever complete. Social construction is always an imperfect exercise, and the social subject cannot transcend the ontological horizon of lack. Something always escapes from both orders — Lacan reserves a special name for that: the Real, an excessive quantum of enjoyment (jouissance) resisting representation and control. Something that the subject has been forced to sacrifice upon entering organized society, and which, although lost and inaccessible/unrepresentable for ever, does not stop causing all our attempts to encounter it through our identification acts.
Subjectivism posits a source of power external to the subject, immanentism posits a source of power internal, intimate to the subject, while what is needed is to conceptually grasp a form of external intimacy, what Lacan calls extimité. This is the realm of the real as extimate kernel of the subject, as the lost/impossible enjoyment that, through its constitutive lack, kicks off a whole socio-political dialectic of identifications aiming to recapture it.
In other words, the administration of this constitutive lack of enjoyment takes place in a field transcending simplistic dichotomies (individual vs. collective). How can we access this field? And what can Lacanian theory contribute to our understanding of its constitution and functioning? Of how subjects are constituted, human lives lived and social orders and institutions organized and sustained?
Where is power and authority exactly located in this play? And how are their symbolic and fantasmatic dimensions, language and enjoyment, interimplicated?