desire – Page 9 – objet (a)

Žižek neighbor belief

Žižek, Slavoj. First as Tragedy, Second as Farce. New York: Verso. 2009. Print.

… what is toxic is ultimately the Neighbor as such, the abyss of its desire and its obscene enjoyment.

The ultimate aim of all rules governing interpersonal relations, then, is to quarantine or neutralize this toxic dimension, to reduce the Neighbor to a fellow man.

It is thus not enough to search for contingent toxic components in (another) subject, for the subject as such is toxic in its very form, in its abyss of Otherness-what makes it toxic is the objet petit a on which the subject’s consistency hinges.

When we think we really know a close friend or relative, it often happens that, all of a sudden, this person does something-utters an unexpectedly vulgar or cruel remark, makes an obscene gesture, casts a cold indifferent glance where compassion was expected-which makes us aware that we do not really know them; we become conscious of a total stranger in front of us. (46)

At this point, the fellow man changes into a Neighbor.

Is not this same attitude at work in the way our governments are dealing with the “immigrant threat”? After righteously rejecting populist racism as “unreasonable” and unacceptable given our democratic standards, they endorse “reasonably” racist protective measures . . . even the Social Democrats, tell us: “We grant ourselves permission to applaud African and East European sportsmen, Asian doctors, Indian software programmers. We don’t want to kill anyone, we don’t want to organize any pogrom. But we also think that the best way to hinder the always unpredictable actions of violent anti- immigration protests is to organize reasonable anti-immigrant protection:’ This vision of the detoxification of the Neighbor presents a clear passage from direct barbarism to Berlusconian barbarism with a human face. (48)

Kung Fu Panda, the 2008 cartoon film hit, provides the basic coordinates of the functioning of contemporary ideology. The fat panda bear dreams of becoming a sacred Kung Fu warrior, and when, through blind chance (beneath which, of course, lurks the hand of Destiny), he is chosen to be the hero to save his city, he succeeds . . . However, throughout the film, this pseudo-oriental spiritualism is constantly being undermined by a vulgar-cynical sense of humor. (50)

Niels Bohr anecdote

The surprise is how this continuous self-mockery in no way impedes on the efficiency of the oriental spiritualism—the film ultimately takes the butt of its endless jokes seriously. Similarly with one of my favorite anecdotes regarding Niels Bohr: surprised at seeing a horseshoe above the door of Bohr’s country house, the fellow scientist visiting him exclaimed that he did not share the superstitious belief regarding horseshoes keeping evil spirits out of the house, to which Bohr snapped back: “I don’t believe in it either. I have it there because I was told that it works even when one doesn’t believe in it:

This is indeed how ideology functions today: nobody takes democracy or justice seriously, we are all aware of their corrupted nature, but we participate in them, we display our belief in them, because we assume that they work even if we do not believe in them.

This is why Berlusconi is our own big Kung Fu Panda. Perhaps the old Marx brothers quip, “This man looks like a corrupt idiot and acts like one, but this should not deceive you-he is a corrupt idiot,” here stumbles upon its limit: while Berlusconi is what he appears to be, this appearance nonetheless remains deceptive. (51)

Žižek desire drive review of Fink 1996

On the web here at lacan.com

This paper was first published in the Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society 1 (1996), 160-61, as a review of Bruce Fink’s The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).

Insofar as, according to Lacan, at the conclusion of psychoanalytic treatment, the subject assumes the drive beyond fantasy and beyond (the Law of) desire, this problematic also compels us to confront the question of the conclusion of treatment in all its urgency. If we discard the discredited standard formulas (“reintegration into the symbolic space”, etc.), only two options remain open: desire or drive.

– That is to say, either we conceive the conclusion of treatment as the assertion of the subject’s radical openness to the enigma of the Other’s desire no longer veiled by fantasmatic formations,

– or we risk the step beyond desire itself and adopt the position of the saint who is no longer bothered by the Other’s desire as its decentred cause.

In the case of the saint, the subject, in an unheard-of way, “causes itself”, becomes its own cause. Its cause is no longer decentred, i.e., the enigma of the Other’s desire no longer has any hold over it.

How are we to understand this strange reversal on which Fink is quite justified to insist? In principle, things are clear enough: by way of positing itself as its own cause, the subject fully assumes the fact that the object-cause of its desire is not a cause that precedes its effects but is retroactively posited by the network of its effects: an event is never simply in itself traumatic, it only becomes a trauma retroactively, by being ‘secreted’ from the subject’s symbolic space as its inassimilable point of reference.

In this precise sense, the subject “causes itself” by way of retroactively positing that X which acts as the object-cause of its desire. This loop is constitutive of the subject.

That is, an entity that does not ’cause itself’ is precisely not a subject but an object. However, one should avoid conceiving this assumption as a kind of symbolic integration of the decentred Real, whereby the subject ‘symbolizes’, assumes as an act of its free choice, the imposed trauma of the contingent encounter with the Real.

One should always bear in mind that the status of the subject as such is hysterical: the subject ‘is’ only insofar as it confronts the enigma of Che vuoi? -“What do you want?”- insofar as the Other’s desire remains impenetrable, insofar as the subject doesn’t know what kind of object it is for the Other. Suspending this decentring of the cause is thus strictly equivalent to what Lacan called “subjective destitution”, the de-hystericization by means of which the subject loses its status as subject.

The most elementary matrix of fantasy, of its temporal loop, is that of the “impossible” gaze by means of which the subject is present at the act of his/her own conception. What is at stake in it is the enigma of the Other’s desire: by means of the fantasy-formation, the subject provides an answer to the question, ‘What am I for my parents, for their desire?’ and thus endeavours to arrive at the ‘deeper meaning’ of his or her existence, to discern the Fate involved in it.

The reassuring lesson of fantasy is that “I was brought about with a special purpose”. Consequently, when, at the end of psychoanalytic treatment, I “traverse my fundamental fantasy”, the point of it is not that, instead of being bothered by the enigma of the Other’s desire, of what I am for the others, I “subjectivize” my fate in the sense of its symbolization, of recognizing myself in a symbolic network or narrative for which I am fully responsible, but rather that I fully assume the uttermost contingency of my being.The subject becomes ’cause of itself’ in the sense of no longer looking for a guarantee of his or her existence in another’s desire.

Another way to put it is to say that the “subjective destitution” changes the register from desire to drive. Desire is historical and subjectivized, always and by definition unsatisfied, metonymical, shifting from one object to another, since I do not actually desire what I want. What I actually desire is to sustain desire itself, to postpone the dreaded moment of its satisfaction.

Drive, on the other hand, involves a kind of inert satisfaction which always finds its way. Drive is non-subjectivized (“acephalic”); perhaps its paradigmatic expressions are the repulsive private rituals (sniffing one’s own sweat, sticking one’s finger into one’s nose, etc.) that bring us intense satisfaction without our being aware of it-or, insofar as we are aware of it, without our being able to do anything to prevent it.

In Andersen’s fairy tale The Red Shoes, an impoverished young woman puts on a pair of magical shoes and almost dies when her feet won’t stop dancing. She is only saved when an executioner cuts off her feet with his axe. Her still-shod feet dance on, whereas she is given wooden feet and finds peace in religion.

These shoes stand for drive at its purest: an ‘undead’ partial object that functions as a kind of impersonal willing: ‘it wants’, it persists in its repetitive movement (of dancing), it follows its path and exacts its satisfaction at any price, irrespective of the subject’s well-being. This drive is that which is ‘in the subject more than herself’: although the subject cannot ever ‘subjectivize’ it, assume it as ‘her own’ by way of saying ‘It is I who want to do this!’ it nonetheless operates in her very kernel.

As Fink’s book reminds us, Lacan’s wager is that it is possible to sublimate this dull satisfaction. This is what, ultimately, art and religion are about.

Žižek Marx’s mistake

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.

However, precisely as Marxists … we should discern the mistake of Marx. On the one hand, he perceived how capitalism unleashed the breathtaking dynamics of self-enhancing productivity — see his fascinated descriptions of how, in capitalism, “all that is solid melts into air,” of how capitalism is the greatest revolutionizing force in the entire history of humanity. On the other hand, he also clearly perceived how this capitalist dynamic is propelled by its own inner obstacle or antagonism, so that the ultimate limit of capitalism (of the capitalist self-propelling productivity) is capital itself. the incessant development and revolutionizing of capitalism’s own material conditions, the mad dance of its unconditional spiral of productivity, is ultimately nothing but a desperate flight forward to escape its own debilitating inherent contradiction (125).

Marx’s fundamental mistake was to conclude, from these insights, that a new, higher social order (communism) is possible, an order that would not only maintain, but even raise to a higher degree and effectively fully release the potential of the self-increasing spiral of productivity which, in capitalism, on account of its inherent obstacle (“contradiction”), is again and again thwarted by socially destructive economic crises.

In short, what Marx overlooked is that, to put it in the standard Derridean terms, this inherent obstacle/antagonism as the “condition of impossibility” of the full deployment of the productive foreces is simultaneously its “condition of possibility”: if we abolish the obstacle, the inherent contradiction of capitalism, we do not get the fully unleashed drive to productivity finally delivered of its impediment, but we lose precisely this productivity that seemed to be generated and simultaneously thwarted by capitalism. If we take away the obstacle, the very potential thwarted by this obstacle dissipates. (Therein would reside a possible Lacanian critique of Marx, focusing on the ambiguous overlapping between surplus value and surplus enjoyment.) (126)

… what if his [Marx’s] mistake was also to assume that the object of desire (unconstrained expanding productivity) would remain even when deprived of the cause that propels it (surplus value)?

… For Lacan, however, desire has to be sustained by an object cause: not some primoridal incestuous lost object on which desire remains forever transfixed and whose unsatisfying substitutes all other objects are, but a purely formal object that causes us to desire objects that we encounter in reality. As in the case with Marx, Deleuze’s failure to take into account this object cause sustains the illusory vision of unconstrained productivity of desire … (127)

Žižek four discourses desire drive

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).

sharpe jouissance mother

Sharpe, Matthew. Slavoj Žižek: a little piece of the real. Burlington Vt: Ashgate, 2004.

… the maternal body is held to be subjects’ first love object. … Her body is at least retroactively perceived by the subject ot have been the repository of a sovereign jouissance yet unhindered by the sacrifices demanded of us as speaking, socialised subjects.

So, by asserting that the imposition of the Law of culture actually liberates the child’s desire from its abjection before the mother, Žižek contends that unshackled jouissance is far from the untarnished Good … What Žižek suggest, indeed, is that the ‘primordial repression’ of this Thing operated by the absolute prohibition of incest is minimally necessary for subjectivity to emerge. This action ‘castrates‘ the subject — no matter of which sex — not in any literal sense, but in the sense of cutting it off irrevocably from its first object of desire [da Mada RT]. It frees subjects from an over-proximity to the lethal substance of jouissance that would render them incapable of anything resembling normalised social existence. (67)

pluth desire demand

Pluth, Ed. Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Act. Albany: New York, 2007.

An identity politics usually makes a demand for recognition by appealing to notions of justice and equality, but there is often something more in its demands. For this reason, the recognition and victories obtained may be unsatisfying, because for many in the movement the movement was not just about the recognition of specific demands. … On Žižek’s account such scissions happen in political movements because there is always a desire lurking behind the demands that group makes: a desire that cannot be satisfied the way a demand can be (1999 Ticklish Subject, 266-268)

This desire is, as Žižek describes it, essentially negative. A movement that would respect the negative desire that constitutes it is one that might demand nothing in particular, yet would still protest. (140)

For Žižek and Badiou, a movement’s inability to articulate a specific demand, in contrast to movements that are quite specific and goal oriented, is an important marker of its political status (140).

pluth subject as meaning junction disjunction

Pluth, Ed. Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. Albany: SUNY Press, 2007. Print.

I described the subject as meaning. What I am saying here adds an important supplement to this notion of a subject represent in and for the Other.

First, there is meaning: I am something for the Other, an object that satisfies the Other’s demands, or a significant, desirable object of the Other (like Xenophon). Then, either because of bodily experiences that cannot be signified or an encounter with the Other’s desire, or both, this position as a meaning is called into question. In the wake of these encounters, there are two major possibilities.

1. My position as a satisfying object or meaning for the Other can be reaffirmed. Fantasy is Lacan’s account of how this happens. In fantasy I try to reassert my position as the object of the Other’s desire, and my own desire is to remain such an object.

2. Another way is possible, and Lacan’s theory of the act discusses this. An act involves a different reaction to both the Other’s desire and the meaning constructed for us in the Other (78).

On my reading, Lacan does not come up with a unique and rigorous theory of the subject until his fourteenth and fifteenth seminars (79).

This subject can still be thought of as an “organized system of symbols,” but it is not something that gives this order meaning. Rather, the subject is identified with a meaning. This corresponds to what I spoke of in chapter 3 as the “subject-as-meaning,” a subject represented in the Other, and part of the Other’s discourse. But I have been claiming that Lacan was not satisfied with this version of the subject either. Again, the subject is always something like a consistency of signifiers in Lacan’s opinion, but this is actually only one aspect of the subject.

Lacan’s ultimate vision of the subject is achieved when the subject is portrayed as something between an organized system of symbols and what motivates that organization in the first place — events such as sexuality, jouissance, and the Other’s desire, all of which can be correlated with the real (79-80).

The definition of the subject that I want ot focus on now comes from Lacan’s fourteenth seminar.

A SUBJECT IS SITUATED AT THE JUNCTION AND DISJUNCTION OF THE BODY AND JOUISSANCE

It is not so much of a stretch then, to suggest that when Lacan says “body” here, we could also just as well say language. So not only does this definition reaffirm that a subject is neither language nor jouissance, it also tells us more about the structure of the subject. … in his ninth seminar Lacan was content with saying that the subject is between the two poles of language and the real. In this definition, the subject’s position is given more elaboration. The subject is situated at a junction and disjunction of the two with each other (80).

pluth jouissance

Pluth, Ed. Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. Albany: SUNY Press, 2007. Print.
excessive unbearable tension, a tension that does not go away a tension that cannot be “relieved” by means of signifiers, because there is no signifier for it

for which the language of pleasure and displeasure is not adequate.

There is thus a radical tension between this jouissance beyond the pleasure principle and the order of signifiers (75).

For this reason, jouissance should be thought of in terms of real2 — something that is not prior to and outside of signifiers but that appears within signifiers as an impasse in signification (77).

Jouissance is an impasse in the fabric of meaning, but in neurosis it is at least put into a relation with that fabric. In psychosis, this relation is missing, and there is a radical gulf between the symbolic and the real. In neurosis, there is also a gulf, but here is also a project to build a bridge across the gulf, an attempt to elaborate on a relation between the two.

This study has at least given an indication now of how the body plays a role in Lacan’s theory of the subject. The body is the site and origin of a signifying impasse. Now this is not what Lacan usually calls the body in his theory. As we have seen the body is usually for Lacan something “overwritten” with signifiers. For this reason, Lacan was not inclined to say that the “stirring” in Little Han’s genitals was something that involved his body. Little Hans already had a body image prior to this stirring. The emergence of genital sexuality introduced something that did not fit into this image — and so, Han’s penis, when it started acting up, was not something he experience as “his.” Nevertheless, from another point of view, this jouissance was indeed coming from Han’s body. What needs to be explained now is how this impasse originating in the body — an impasse that can be abbreviated under the heading of sexuality — plays a role in the production of the subject (78).

pluth difference between lacan and levinas

Pluth, Ed. Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. Albany: SUNY Press, 2007. Print.

Many commentators on Lévinas, as well as Lévinas himself, have tried to ground the subject in an address from the Other. This makes the subject fundamentally ethical, fundamentally indebted to the Other …

… what is called the subject in Lacan’s threory begins when the Other no longer addresses you. According to Lévinas, what is traumatic is the encroachment of the Other on my own psychic space. According to Lacan, what is traumatic is finding out that the Other’s desire concerns something that leaves you out of the picture. Being “touched” by the other is traumatic too, but not being touched at all is at least as bad, and in this absence of a touch can be found the core of Lacan’s theory of the subject (73).

This encounter with the Other’s desire motivates a quest for a signified and an eventual identification with that signified. The Other’s desire plays a role diferent from that played by the image in the mirror stage.

In the imaginary and symbolic identifications, a meaning or an identity is produced, and an individual is presented with a place that is already his or hers. In the encounter with the Other’s desire, I am not given any place at all, and my very being is put into question. The Other’s desire is a mirror that does not return my reflection. (74).

Because of this, the subject in Lacan’s work is not just something determined. It is also a position with respect to a determination, an affirmation or a rejection of it. The subject is some kind of negation of determination. But this negation actually originates from the resistance to signification that is found in the Other’s desire. The Other’s desire is opaque and abyssal. For this reason, it makes any determination appealing, because it is something I can always fall back on (74).

pluth genital stage subject

Pluth, Ed. Signifers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. Albany: SUNY Press, 2007.

The genital stage allows for the creation of a space between the nascent subject and the Other, although again it does not at all resolve the fundamental discord between the two. What is different about this stage is that in it instead of being confronted with the Other’s demand the child is confronted with the Other’s desire — an enigma that appears between the lines of the Other’s demands.

Once the Other’s desire is introduced we can speak about the production of a subject. The earlier stages fail to bring about this production. It is only with the radical lack of a place for the child, a lack that the Other’s desire implies, that a subject can get produced. The oral and anal stages offer a place for the child in the Other, but the production of a subject occurs only when the Other offers no place at all (68).

Without this trigger, there would only be a strictly determined subject-as-meaning, a fate determined by a signifying chain. Without this interruption, the subject would be nothing but a series of signifers working like sheet music in a player piano, and attempts to separate from those signifiers would always be frustrated (69).

In the oral stage, the Other’s demand was a response to the child’s demand, and the child could see himself as the object of this demand, satisfying the Other to his own chagrin. In the anal stage, the Other’s demand to the child, which was first, was also readily answered, again to the child’s chagrin. The genital stage involves a demand from the Other that the child simply cannot answer. This “absolute” demand is in fact what Lacan calls the Other’s desire. This is not a desire for anything specific, and it is not necessarily a desire directed toward the child … It presents the child with an enigma, and as a result it puts the child’s relation to the Other, and the child’s very being, into question. Without this, there would be no possible space apart from the Other (69).

recognition and desire

Sean Homer, Critical Thinkers: Jacques Lacan, New York: Routledge, 2004.

Between 1933 and 1939 the philosopher Alexandre Kojève conducted a weekly seminar on the philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel (1770– 1831). Kojève’s influential seminar was attended by almost all the major figures of France’s immediate post-war intellectual life – Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Georges Bataille to name just a few – including Lacan himself. Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel was to have a profound influence on this whole generation of thinkers and dominated French philosophy until the mid-1960s, when Hegelianism was finally displaced by Structuralism and Post-structuralism.

Kojève was particularly interested in Hegel’s account of the emergence of self-consciousness as an account of the transition from nature to culture, or to put it another way, as the transition from animal existence to human existence. According to Hegel, self-hood emerges through a process of developing self-consciousness through the activity of self-reflection. For the human subject to emerge it must not simply be conscious of its own distinctiveness but must be recognized as a human subject by another. Hegel sketched out this process as the dialectic of ‘Lordship and Bondage’, more commonly known as the ‘Master/Slave’ dialectic. In this account two subjects – a ‘Master’ and a ‘Slave’ – are apparently locked in a reciprocal relationship of recognition. In order for the Master to be a subject he must be recognized by the Slave as such; in turn, the Slave knows he is a Slave because he is recognized by the Master as one. The Master is thus free to pursue his life in the firm knowledge that his identity is affirmed by the recognition of the Slave. The paradox of the dialectic, however, is that a positive always turns into a negative. Because the Master is dependent upon the Slave for the recognition of his identity he can never be truly ‘free’, whereas the Slave is not dependent on the Master in the same way because he has another source of self-affirmation, his work. If the Slave’s identity is affirmed through his work as a Slave, it is not the Master who is free but the Slave. 23

Kojève read this dialectic as essentially a struggle of desire and recognition. The Master and the Slave are locked in a mutual struggle for recognition: neither can exist without the recognition of the other, but at the same time the other also requires his/her own recognition. It is then for Kojève a struggle to the death, but the death of one will also be the death of the other. The Master and the Slave are locked within a struggle whereby one cannot do without the other but at the same time each is the other’s worst enemy. It is this dialectic, according to Lacan, that permeates the imaginary.

Moreover, this dialectic introduces into the psychological account of mirroring outlined above the element of aggressivity, that is to say, it posits the relationship between self and other as fundamentally conflictual. It was Hegel’s great insight, contends Lacan, to reveal how ‘each human being is in the being of the other’ (Lacan 1988b [1978]: 72).

We are caught in a reciprocal and irreducible dialectic of alienation. There are, however, two moments of alienation for Lacan, first, through the mirror phase and the formation of the ego, and, second, through language and the constitution of the subject. 24

glynos on logic of desire logic of capital

Glynos, Jason. “‘There is no Other of the Other’ Symptoms of a Decline in Symbolic Faith, or, Žižek’s Anti-capitalism” Paragraph vol 24, no. 2, July 2001 (78-110).

The subject of capitalism is empty
The subject of desire is empty

Lacan’s logic of desire and the logic of capitalism share a deep homology in structuring contemporary subjectivity (87).

In both cases the logics are purely formal and independent of the particular concrete contexts wherein they function.
Fetishism of the new keeps desire alive
- Insatiable desire for new products
- In order to sustain itself it must prevent itself from satisfaction
Subject of desire constant never-ending desire after desire
Fantasy covers over the necessary dissatisfaction of the subject
- Dissatisfied are we? Blame immigrants, jews etc.

The depoliticized economy is the disavowed “fundamental fantasy” of postmodern politics

Slavoj Žižek The Ticklish Subject. 1999, 355.

The capitalists erosion of the big Other’s efficiency, therefore, throws the subject of desire into a panic. When symbolic authority qua prohibition gives way to a more permissive society, when object of desire are more readily available and less subject to social prohibition (you are free to invent your own marital and/or sexual arrangements, however perverse these might appear; others will tolerate your actions and opinions), the social subject comes that much closer to realizing its desire. But … this proximity to fulfilment simply arouses anxiety. Why? Because it threatens to extinguish the subject as a subject of desire: a subject of desire sustains itself only on condition that its ultimate object of desire remains inaccessible. Thus, the structural consequence of the growing collapse of symbolic efficiency is not a healthy burgeoning of pleasurable experiences and increased well-being. Instead, it is a desperate attempt to cling to this kind of subjectivity by making the big Other exist. And in a situation of generalized cynicism, in the absence of symbolic faith, we witness ‘the proliferation of different versions of a big Other that actually exists, in the Real, not merely as a symbolic fiction (90).

This is precisely the role that ethical committees, sex guides, and manuals of political correctness play; or the role that various moral, political and religious fundamentalisms play. They do not so much succeed in establishing some unitary empty prohibition characteristic of past subjectivities. Instead they are characterized more by a proliferation of rules and regulations that provide a whole host of imaginary ideals (about what to say, about what to eat, etc.). In the absence of symbolic faith, we attempt to recoup certainty with even greater urgency by means of the decentred sprouting of bureaucratic apparatuses (90).

What unites these otherwise disparate phenomena is our contemporary subjective stance. The disintegration of our faith in the big Other, then, creates anxiety in subjects of desire and it becomes imperative that new obstacles are introduced to regain a sense of balance. In other words, the logic of desire reproduces exactly the logic of capital which requires for its survival new frontiers, new enemies (91).

When symbolic Other doesn’t meet expectations, what comes to forefront is (void-) cause of our desire which is misperceived as an obstacle: soft permissive liberal, Jew, immigrant, paedophile
Making the Other exist
- Returning to basic morals in various fundamentalisms
- Complaining to the Other (complaint culture)
- Provoking the Other by cutting into the real of the body (body piercing, self-inflicted harm, suicde, s&m)
- Accusing the Other for allowing others to steal our way of life (discourses targeting immigrants)
- Bypassing the Other through direct reference to real of science (expert committees)
- Positing an Other of the Other (conspiracy theories) (91)

Fantasy provides a rationale that premists us to avoid confronting the Other’s inconsistency and incompleteness, thereby generating an Other of the Other, a real Other of the symbolic Other.

A properly authentic, ethical act, is one that manages to effect a traversing of the social fantasy, thereby exposing the lack in the big Other, the ultimate impotence of the dominant politico-economic discourse.

What sustains [capitalism] are the social subject’s disavowed social fantasies and their constitutive ‘threats – those, in other words, who take advantage of our present system, like single mothers, immigrants, … It is precisely there that the battle against capitalism should properly be fought (as opposed to engaging only in rational-deliberative political sarugument which is sustained by these social fantasies).

[W]hat is most traumatic is not that I am subject to the rule of the big Other, to the Master. Far more traumatic is the possibility that the big Other does not exist. This is ultimately what we cannot accept as subjects of desire and this is ultimately the reason for our ready recourse to fantasies of the ‘Other of the Other’ who ‘steal’ our enjoyment. This is why, for Žižek, the aim of ideological critique is to create the conditions in which we can ‘experience how there is nothing “behind” it, and how fantasy masks precisely this “nothing”. … this ‘crossing of the fantasy’ ushers in a distinctively novel ethical horizon and a corresponding mode of subjectivity (97).

Crossing [Traversing] the Fantasy

1. Devaluing the object of desire we think the Other has stolen (or threatens to steal) from us:

Deflate publicly supported imaginary ideals, our precious treasures that appear to be threatened by the intrusion of an evil menace
- Jew, Freud attempted just such a strategic move by portraying the Jew as someone who does not in fact possess the precious treasure that anti-Semites insist on imputing to him
Paedophiles by demonizing them and stressing the innocence of our children, no, do not exacerbate the problem by heightening the privileged status of the victim, “making their torture and rape all that harder to resist.
Instead the equivalent strategy would be to emphasise how children are in fact not as innocent as we might imagine them, to highlight their already polymorphously perverse sexuality, etc.

Of course this strategy (regarding both the Jew and the Paedophile) does not mean that their offences should go unpunished. The point, however, is that without intervening with an eye on the fantasy structuring the social symptoms, not only do we miss an opportunity to sap the jouissance invested in them, we often in fact simply reinforce it (note 75, 109).

2. Confronting the social subject with the obstacle qua cause of desire. This obstacle is often perceived in terms of a threat, as is the case in UFO conspiracy theories.

The crucial, hitherto underestimated ideological impact of the coming ecological crisis will be precisely to make the ‘collapse of the big Other’ part of our everyday experience, i.e., to sap this unconscious belief in the ‘big Other’ of power … exposing the power’s ultimate impotence. Our ‘spontaneous’ ideological reaction to it, of course, is to have recourse to the fake premodern forms of reliance on the ‘big Other’ (‘New Age consciousness’; the balanced circuit of Nature, etc.). Perhaps, however, our very physical survival hinges on our ability to consummate the act of assuming fully the ‘nonexistence of the Other,’ [of abandoning our attempts to find another Other behind the big Other] (99).

The passage from premodern subjectivity to modern subjectivity (and the accompanying shifts in socio-political arrangements) was made possible by the emergence of monotheistic religions; while the passage modern to postmodern (and the accompanying shifts in socio-political arrangements) was made possible by the scientific revolution and the birth of capitalism. In this view, monotheistic Prohibition marks the primordial repression that gives birth to a whole series of fantasies that support socio-political discourse; and the subsequent modern and postmodern eras presuppose a subjectivity that operations within this fantasmatic framework (100).

Žižek’s anti-capitalism, then, amounts to nothing short of a call to another fundamental mutation in human subjectivity corresponding to the passage through fantasy and entailing an ethical stance that is adequate to this task.

The prospect of a fundamental mutation, however, evokes horror. Just as the demand to replace polytheism with monotheism, or secularism with monotheism could not but be perceived as idealist, even terroristic, so too will the anti-capitalist demand to move beyond fantasy. Why? Because it implies a complete revamping of our economic, social, and political institutional arrangements, and the standards of evaluation they presuppose. This, ultimately, is why it is not possible to give concrete content to the new ethics of the drive. What will emerge on the Other side of fantasy cannot be predicted in advance, much less judged on the basis of contemporary standards of evaluation. Any such attempt to predict outcomes can only rely on current standards and ideals, reducing reformist cautionary projects to a consequentialist calculus that seeks foundational guarantees rooted in our current ethico-political horizon. It would simply reiterate through other means the thesis that there is an ‘Other of the Other’.

This, indeed, gives some rationale to Žižek’s ‘returns’ to the Stalinist terror, the Nazi horror, or the various ethnic wars. When he subjects these phenomena to analytical treatment, his aim is not directly to propose a new concrete socio-political framework which would prevent such atrocities in the future. He does not argue that we need more human rights, more political will, more sophisticated legal systems, etc. Instead, his aim is to show that what is responsible for such ‘extraordinary’ outbursts is nothing Other than the very ‘ordinary’ and normal contemporary subject, with all his or her foibles (i.e., the subject of desire) and that we must find a way out, a way through fantasy, a way to fully assume that ‘there is no Other of the Other’ and thus no longer to be ‘bothered’ by the lack in the Other. Žižek effectively implies that the modality of such outbursts is simply unavailable under the regime of an ethics of the drive; that the kind of subjectivity which makes them possible is absent. Thus, his aim is a purely negative one: he cannot offer up a concrete vision of what such a regime would look like, only what it would not look like. In this view, our passage through the fundamental fantasy of capitalism will await the spontaneous invention of new models of socio-political arrangement, just as the spontaneous formation of the Paris commune can be seen as a model for Marx’s communism. This is, perhaps, one way to read Žižek’s call to the ‘socialization of productive forces’. This empty signifier is one that has been foreclosed by current capitalist discourse. His recourse to it, therefore, invests it with a dimension of impossibility, a radical emptiness that new forms of post-capitalist socio-economic arrangements will attempt to fill with concrete meaning (102).

[C]rossing the fundamental fantasy would involve, in some sense, leaving behind the whole fantasy structure installed by the Prohibition of monotheistic religions. What is required here, is not so much an account of what will follow in concrete and predictive detail, but a precise, even if speculative, theoretical account of what the possible modalities of a subject of the drive might be a the social level. In Other words, what kind of community is (even theoretically) possible for subject s of the drive? What insights can Lacanian clinical theory offer us? Since a Lacanian conception of community eschews ideas of shared values or common symbolic identification; and since it suggests that our social bond should also not be based on a common fantasmatic transgression (which makes possible a community of subjects of desire), what others ways of there of thinking a community of subjects? Indeed, is a social subject of the drive possible? (103)