Category: objet (a)

calum neill wo es war

Neill, C. (2011) Lacanian Ethics and the Assumption of Subjectivity, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Neill on signifer represents the subjectt for another signifier

The ethical invocation of Wo Es war, soll Ich werden is not something than can be responded to once and for all in an attainment of subjective security.

Rather it is momentary and perpetual. It is momentary insofar as it manifests in conscious life only fleetingly. It is perpetual insofar as it is indicative of the unconscious processes which necessarily continue unobserved. 20

What Descartes does not adequately answer here, but what is nonetheless raised in his text, is the question of what is going on when I am not thinking, i.e. when ‘I’ is not (re)presented in thought.

verhaeghe pt 3 alienation separation

Verhaeghe, P. (1998). Causation and Destitution of a Pre-ontological Non-entity: On the Lacanian Subject. In D. Nobus (Ed.),  Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (pp. 164-189). New York: State University of New York Press.

In the first part, we demonstrated how the subject is caused by the primary experience of a lack. The attempt at solving this lack by using signifiers entails a confrontation with another lack, this time within the chain of signifiers.

In this second part, we will concentrate on the two constitutive processes within this causation of the subject: alienation and separation. The first one is fully elaborated by Lacan and can easily by traced back to Freud . The second one concerns Lacan’s interpretation of the end and the finality of the analytic treatment. His theoretical development in these matters comprises an ever shifting interpretation of this idea of separation.

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Verhaeghe pre-ontological pt 2

Verhaeghe, P. (1998). Causation and Destitution of a Pre-ontological Non-entity: On the Lacanian Subject. In D. Nobus (Ed.),  Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (pp. 164-189). New York: State University of New York Press.

Verhaeghe part 1
Verhaeghe part 1a

In Seminar XI, Lacan began his discussion of the causation of the subject with something that was already well-known to his audience: the drive, being always a partial drive, revolves around a lack. However, at that point, Lacan surprised his audience by stating that there are two lacks.

The first one is the lack in the chain of signifiers, the interval between two signifiers.

This is the typically hysterical – and thus Freudian – level in which desire can never be fully expressed, let alone satisfied . In Lacanian terms, this reads that the subject, confronted with the enigma of the desire of the Other, tries to verbalise this desire and thus constitutes itself by identifying with the signifiers in the field of the Other, without ever succeeding in filling the gap between subject and Other.

Hence, the continuous movement from signifier to signifier, in which the subject alternately appears and disappears. The ensuing alienation is a continuous flywheel movement around the lack in the chain of signifiers, resulting in what Lacan called l’avènement du sujet, the advent of the subject. 168

 Phylogeny: the evolutionary history of a kind of organism, the evolution of a genetically related group of organisms as distinguished from the development of the individual organism; the evolutionary history of a group of organisms, especially as depicted in a family tree.

Ontogeny:  the development or course of development especially of an individual organism; the development or developmental history of an individual organism.

*****
A total aside from Adrian Johnston

Lacanian theory does not require, as Butler vehemently alleges, a dubious dichotomy between the symbolic and the social. An easy way to clarify matters is to invoke the Freudian distinction between phylogeny and ontogeny.

The symbolic order is a historically contingent formation at the phylogenetic level, the level transcending the ontogenetic life history of the individual. In an inverse correlation, for the particular subject whose self-identity is mediated by this pre-existent system, this same symbolic order is effectively transcendental in that it serves as a possibility condition for this form of subjectivity itself.

Without a symbolic order, the individual would not be a proper subject. The massive time lag between the different diachronic speeds of phylogeny and ontogeny is partially responsible for this dual status of the symbolic as paradoxically both historical (with respect to the phylogenetic collective) and transcendental (with respect to the ontogenetic individual).

This temporal discrepancy makes it seem, from the vantage point of the individual subject’s perspective, as if the symbolic order is synchronic, which it de facto is given the slowness of its rates of change versus the comparative brevity and rapidity of the individual’s life history.

Butler fails to fully appreciate Lacan’s philosophical audacity in tacitly relying upon a rigid distinction between the historical and the transcendental to critique him. But, what about Butler’s key assertion that the Lacanian transcendental emperor wears no clothes, in other words, that the binding force of the symbolic rests upon an empty performative act? Is there no other reason for the symbolic’s authority apart from the bald, blunt assertion of this authority by those theorizing about it?

Again, the transcendence of the symbolic order in relation to particular subjects is of paramount importance here. Individuals neither choose what kind of symbolic order to be born into nor have the liberty to capriciously forge their own idiosyncratic symbolic orders ex nihilo. Furthermore, beyond Lacanian theory itself, psychoanalysis in general is committed to the notion that, as the saying goes, “the child is the father of the man.”
*****

The innovation begins when Lacan surprises his audience by stating that there is yet another lack, which he calls anterior and real in comparison to its counterpart.

Furthermore, the lack in the chain of signifiers is only a retake on this primal lack, the originality of which resides in the fact that it has to be understood in the context of [ ‘avenement du vivant (the advent of the living being) .

This entails the emergence of sexual reproduction in phylogeny, which is repeated with every ontogeny.

At this point, the level of Unbegriff (incomprehension), beyond the psychological comprehensibility of the previous lack, is reached .

The anterior lack concerns the price life has to pay for the acquisition of sexual reproduction. From the moment an organism becomes capable of reproducing itself in a sexual way, it loses its individual immortality and death becomes an unavoidable necessity .

At birth, the individual loses something and this loss will be represented later on by
all other substitute objects. 168

The subject encounters a lack in the discourse of the Other, in which the desire of the Other ‘crawls, slips, escapes, like the ferret, ‘ producing an enigma to which the subject has to produce an answer.

It is at that point that the subject recurs to the anterior lack which entails its own disappearance. As an answer to the riddle of the desire of the Other, it presents itself and thus its disappearance: does the Other desire me, can s/he afford to lose me?

This fantasy, in which one’s own death is depicted as a form of testing the limits of the love
of the Other, is fairly well-known in adults and children alike: Veut-il me perdre ?, Does he want to lose me?

Žižek desire Other pt2

Žižek, S. (2005). Connections of the Freudian Field to Philosophy and Popular Culture. Interrogating the Real. In R. Butler & S. Stephens (Eds.), Interrogating the Real (pp. 62-88). New York, NY: Continuum.

First, already in the 1940s, ‘Desire is the desire of the Other’ alludes simply to the paranoiac structure of desire, to the structure of envy, to put it simply.

Here, the desire of the subject is the desire of the Other; it is simply this kind of transitive, imaginary relationship. It’s basically the structure of envy – 1 desire an object only insofar as it is desired by the Other, and so on.This is the first level, let us say the imaginary level.

Then we have the symbolic level where ‘Desire is the desire of the Other’ involves this dialectic of recognition and, at the same time, the fact that what I desire is determined by the symbolic network within which I articulate my subjective position, and so on. So it is simply the determination of my desire: the way my desire is structured through the order of the big Other. This is well known.

But I think Lacan’s crucial final formulation arrives only when the position of the analyst is no longer defined as starting from the place of the big Other (A), that is to say, the analyst as embodiment of symbolic order, but when the analyst is identified with the small other (a), with the fantasmatic object. In other words, when the analyst gives body to the enigma of the impenetrability of the Other’s desire.

Here, ‘Desire is the desire of the Other’ means I can arrive at my desire only through the complication of the Other’s desire precisely insofar as this desire is impenetrable, enigmatic for me. I think this is the first crucial point, usually forgotten, about fantasy: how true fantasy is an attempt to resolve the enigma of the Other’s desire. That’s the desire that is staged in fantasy. It’s not simply that I desire something, that I make a fantasy. No.

zupančič sublimation pt 2

Zupančič, A. (2003) The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two. MIT Press

Here we come to the last grand narrative from the era of the end of grand narratives: there is no Real, everything is convention, language games, a labyrinth of different possibilities that, at least in principle, are all of equal value. What is the effect of this thesis?

Its effect is not exactly the disappearance of the Real, but, rather, its full coincidence with reality. In other words, the reality principle is now conceived of as the only and ultimate Real.

This is what Nietzsche calls “modern nihilism” and the “crisis of values,” the latter being precisely the “crisis of sublimation” in the sense described above.

At issue is not a complaint about the corruption of values, and lack of respect for them, but a diagnosis concerning the weakening of the sublimatory force, the force that could produce or create some distance toward the reality principle and its claims.

It entails the closure of the very space of creativity. This is why it is very important to keep insisting upon the notion of the Real that, in turn, has to be defined in terms other than those of some “authentic Real” lurking behind the deceptive appearances. And the (late) Lacanian notion of the Real can help us to do precisely that.

The Real is not some authentic Beyond, constituting the truth of the reality. The Real is not the Beyond of reality, but its own blind spot or dysfunction—that is to say, the Real is the stumbling block on account of which reality does not fully coincide with itself. The Real is the intrinsic division of reality itself.

freeland ethics Sem VII pt. 2 Desire borne by death

Freeland, C. 2013. Antigone in Her Unbearable Splendour: New Essays on Jacques Lacan’s The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Albany: State University of New York Press.

borne: to bring, transported, transmitted by, spread by, carried by

Lacan probably ses the traditional philosophical persepectives on ethics as framed and trapped in the theater of a philosophical mirror stage wherein the human, ethical subject is conceived as born prematurely, a fragile, helpless and fragmented body confronting and recognizing its wholeness in the other of the mirror image before it and longing to be that wholenes.  Is Lacan’s psychoanalytic ethic not first and essentially the critical attempt to move beyond this ethical mirror stage, to move beyond the search for the anticipated wholeness of a “meaning of life”?  39

ethics for Lacan is ethics of speech … then the ethical, psychoanalytical Truth that arises in the psychoanalytic brushes with death would not wish to install or monumentalize Truth or Death itself as the ultimate and hidden meaning in life.

Its pronouncements would not articulate either a timeless Truth or a terrifying Death as the “one” meaning of life, for this might make psychoanalysis a type of hermeneutics, and “death” would then be something, a “meaning,” that, given the proper methodology, the proper hermeneutic, could somehow be brought from the depth to the surface of language and stated — phenomenalized, made to appear — perhaps in the form of a proposition, or in a form of life, as the statement of a Truth that would guarantee that life is not “for nothing.”

In Lacan’s work, the relationship between language and death is completely different than this familiar scheme. The Lacanian ethics of psychoanalysis is therefore first a disruption of this hermeneutical scheme a form of resistance to the systematic statement of philosophical meaning of life taken as the key element and link in the triumvirate of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. Must the Lacanian ethic not first and fundamentally be a resistance to the Hegelian way of taking up death, …

Is the Lacanian ethic not undermining the very meaning of “oneness” and “meaning” in life? Is the “one meaning” always going to be “not one”?  Is Lacan’s statement not the instauration of the ethical necessity of confronting the disruption and the destitution of life that abides in every such statement, a death that takes place in language, that is to say, in desire?

Disruption rather than salvation in and through the systematic statement of the ultimately religious telos of Truth and Oneness: is this not Lacan’s desire, a desire borne by the death of philosophy. 40

freeland ethics Sem 7

Freeland, C. 2013. Antigone in Her Unbearable Splendour: New Essays on Jacques Lacan’s The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Albany: State University of New York Press.

More than a “yearning,” the death drive is a drive unbound and immeasurable, a drive that defines human life.

As a work of poetic art, Antigone’s work is thus the work of truth, where gtruth in this case is the truth of desire, the death drive.  … a “zeropint” of word and image, a pooint where the word equals zero, where signification stumbles and comes to a halt. 7

his heroically implring his audience against any giving up or “giving way” on desire. and while it may not at first seem to be much, it is also here that he leveraged the only remaining posibilites for human fredom and self-assertion in the face of seemingly impcable necessity 11

il n’y a pas de sujet connaissant  there is no such thing as a knowing subject. Beyond the measured articulations of the philosophical subject “who  knows,” and who first of all has “self-knowledge,” Lacan approached through the neologism lalangue another dimension of the enoyment of speaking that he calls the jouissance of speech, “an enjoying of speech qua jouissance of speech (parole jouissance en tant que jouissance de parole),” that is quite beyond and inaccessible to the measured articulations of the philosophical subject who knows what he/she wants. But this reference to jouissance requires that not only the enjoyment but also the suffering introduced by language be stressed.

The effects of the introduction of language into the living human being are not always so salutary in Lacan’s view as they may be for the philosophical ethical tradition, where the measured eloquence of truth brings self-mastery and has a healing effect, for language in the Lacanian universe introduces not only mastery an salvation, it also brings subjection.

It can even be seen as a parasite, a disease, virulence, an Other in which the subject from the day it is named, from the day it is a subject, is captured and defined. 19-20

The individual who is affected by the unconscious is the same individual who constitutes what I call the subject of a signifier. It is this subject — and not the subject as one “who knows” (connaissance) — that must also become the ethical subject caught in the knots of desire and moral-ethical law, a subject that is bound by the limits of language and that is inscirbed within the limits of the symbolic order.

Among the affects of the unconscious on the subject, would also include a desire to transgress those limits, a desire, and an unavowed passion to get back behind or beyond the limits of language, to exceed the limits of the law. This is a desire for the “Real,” … With the insciption in to the symbolic order comes order, comes regulations, and the reign of moral. law. The real is whatever disrupts that order and that law; whatever breaks the operation of the symbolic order.

Access to the real is difficult and perhaps danbgerous, but also not without a certain enjoyment, a certain jouissance  23

Todestrieb

Badioiu marks this lmit and present the psychoanalytic rupture with Platonic ontology by way of a resonance he brings into view between Lacan and the pre-Socratic philosophers, especially Heraclitus. deconstructs Plato by going back behind him, or before him, to a pre-Platonic thinking, … that came before the ontological metaphysics of Plato, and that may have in fact conditioned it, but which was subsequently silenced, left in fragments by the tradition of thought that emerged from Plato. … where Plato is the philosopher of the great higher unity of a transcendental Eidos, a true philosopher of the infinite, Hereclitus is a thinker of difference and of the gap, a philosopher of the enigmas of finitude and of the lack of final resolution andclosure in being. 36

It is in tragic drama, not philosophy, according to Lacan, that one encountes the drive and the distress of death. It is by “digging into verse,” as Mallarmé put it, that one encounters the abyss of death and the absence of God, forfeits the sureties of being, and is thereby brought to the limit where one must break with everything, even the traditional horizons of truth and the promise of futurity.

johnston vicious super-ego part 2 of 2

Johnston, A. (2001) The vicious Circle of the Super-Ego: The Pathological Trap of Guilt and the Beginning of Ethics. Psychoanlytic Studes (3): 3/4. 411-424.

Lacan is not so much interested in proposing a new prescriptive ethics as in comprehending the precise nature of ‘moral masochism’, in fully grasping how the constellation of the id, the super-ego, and the socio-symbolic Umwelt of reality ‘pathologize’ the ethical field.

At most, this Lacanian analytic diagnosis of moral masochism should be interpreted as a preparatory clearing of the ground for a genuine ethics, as a mapping out of the obstacles hindering the construction and enactment of a non-pathological ‘metaphysics of morals’.

The introduction of the Law generates desire ex nihilo. Instead of forbidding a pre-existent set of urges in the individual, it teaches the subject what to covet, if only as an inaccessible vanishing point whose appearance of possible accessibility is a mirage engendered by the seemingly contingent nature of the Law and its authority.

Lacan is not so much interested in proposing a new prescriptive ethics as in comprehending the precise nature of ‘moral masochism’,

in fully grasping how the constellation of the id, the super-ego, and the socio-symbolic Umwelt of reality ‘pathologize’ the ethical field. At most, this Lacanian analytic diagnosis of moral masochism should be interpreted as a preparatory clearing of the ground for a genuine ethics, as a mapping out of the obstacles hindering the construction and enactment of a non-pathological ‘metaphysics of morals’.

At the beginning of this quotation, Lacan alludes to an observation that Freud formulates in his 1924 paper ‘The economic problem of masochism’. In the concluding paragraphs of that essay, Freud notes that the more the subject complies with reality’s prohibition of aggression, the greater the guilt the subject feels, the harsher the demands of the super-ego become.

Unlike external authorities, which can only observe and punish externalized acts of transgression, the super-ego sees and judges the subject’s ‘inner’ intentions. Freud pinpoints this as a paradox of sorts: the more the subject overtly obeys the rules of reality, the more the super-ego (unconsciously) inflicts the negative affect of guilt.

This paradox is illuminated by the theory of the super-ego as presented in Civilization and Its Discontents: the super-ego is a subliminatory channel for the id’s sadism; the id diverts the aggressive drives onto the subject’s own ego when the reality principle prevents it from discharging this aggression against others;

thus, the more the ‘moral’ subject refrains from enacting these aggressive drives in reality (i.e., the more he/she heeds the ‘ethical’ principles of his/her social milieu), the more the id is compelled to utilize the super-ego to ‘work off’ aggression against the ego (hence, the greater the feeling of guilt, since Freud claims that guilt is the ‘pain’ consciously experienced by the ego as a result of the unconscious subliminatory dynamic occurring at the level of id and super-ego). How does Lacan integrate this line of Freudian reasoning?

it isn’t simply a matter of claiming that the Law arouses desire out of nowhere through its prohibitions: it’s also the case that obedience to the Law is cemented in place by the struggle to fend off these desires, that the more rigid the subject’s adherence to the rules, the presumably greater is his/her need to repress increasingly powerful urges to contravene it.

Consequently, when Lacan speaks about being guilty for having ‘ceded’ or ‘given ground’ relative to one’s desire, what he really means is the following:

the more the subject surrenders (to) his/her desires by obeying the restrictions of the Law, the more guilty he/she feels,

since such concessions only aggravate the (unconscious) volatility and intensity of these same desires (namely, ‘internal’ repressed desires which never fail to escape the notice of the omniscient authority of the sadistic super-ego). 419

Near the end of his 1974 television interview, Lacan clearly advances this claim in saying that, “Freud reminds us that it’s not evil, but good, that engenders guilt” (Lacan, p. 45). At no point does Lacan contest the Freudian definition of guilt as a negative affect resulting from the super-ego’s punishment of the ego.

Hence, Lacan, in following Freud here, isn’t treating guilt as a properly ethico-moral sentiment, but, rather, as a symptom of super-ego aggression (with this aggression itself being acknowledged as arising from ceded, aim-inhibited desires whose intensity increases the longer and more severely they’re held in check).

Consequently, one can be ‘guilty’ before the tribunal of the super-ego without, for all that, being actually guilty in an ethico-moral sense per se. 419

Lacan merely brings one to the point where the essential question that must be answered if a psychoanalytic ethics is to be possible at all poses itself:

Can conscience function beyond the super-ego, namely, is the subject able to break out of the cycle running from Law to desire to guilt?

If not, then the Freudian diagnosis of conscience as a symptomatic by-product of the superego’s id-driven sadism really does represent the end of ethics in any meaningful, philosophically consistent mode.

Both Freud and Lacan have made signiŽficant inroads into demystifying the origins and mechanisms of feeling guilty. However, it remains doubtful if psychoanalysis has yet pronounced its deŽfinitive verdict as regards being guilty.

vanheule

Metaphor in psychosis: on the possible convergence of Lacanian theory and neuro-scientific research. HYPOTHESIS AND THEORY, 03 June 2015

Lacan considers the subject as an effect of this connotation and thus concludes that the subject is only half-said, which is expressed by the bar through S in the symbol for the subject: $.

In terms of the process of signification, $ is the result of a dialectical tension. At the level of the message, speech functions to build images regarding who we are. These images make up the ego, but are selective imaginary self-representations that exclude certain signifiers.

The unconscious subject consists of these“forgotten”signifiers,acrosswhichthe
subject is fundamentally scattered; hence the idea that the subject is divided.

In neurosis this division is experienced as internal, hence the neurotic tendency
to repress, where as in psychosis it is experienced as disconnected from one’s own intentions and as coming from without.

In his interpretation a special signifier is installed during the Oedipus complex: the paternal signifier or Name-of-the-Father. This signifier nominates the desire of the maternal figure with which the child is first confronted, and it opens up the
dimension of the law.

Through the Name-of-the-Father people understand themselves and others in terms of rules and standards that one should obey. They use this signifier to make sense of
desire and it helps them to experience permanency in social relations.

duras Lol Stein vanheule

Page 144 Vanheule:  Lacan doesn’t emphasize Lol’s failure to signify her existence, but indicates that by occupying the a-subjective position, and becoming totally absorbed in her fascination with the dancing couple, Lol copes with the desiring relation that unfolds between her financé and Anne-Marie Stretter.

By being the mere observer, Lol positions herself as an a-subjective observer in relation to the desiring couple, and gains a feeling of being: ‘this [Lol’s] being is never really specified, personified, presentified in her novel, in so far as she only exists in the form of this core object, this object a of something that exists as a gaze, but which is a gaze, a scattered gaze, a gaze-object, a gaze that we repeatedly see’ (Lacan Sem XII).

Indeed Lol’s a-subjective position as observer is functional: it helps her deal with social situations and avoid the position of the object a in relation to a ferocious Other.

By observing others and by explicitly positioning herself as the ‘excluded third’ (Lacan Other Ecrits) she avoids being the passive object of the gaze. With her outrageous reaction, by contrast, Lol’s mother destroys this a-subjective position vis-a-vis the desiring couple and creates a dual situation. Out of great concern, she actively addresses Lol, expresses her wish that the scene at the party hadn’t taken place and physically touches her. Lol can’t cope with this direct appeal by her mother, which urges Lol to manifest herself as a subject, and attacks her mother.

Another triangular situation, which Lol actively organized, consists of her relationship with Jacques Hold, the narrator of the story, and Tatiana Karl, ‘her best friend during her school years’ (Duras 1965 p. 1). Jacques Hold is fond of Lola Valerie Stein, but has an affair with Tatiana. Lol supports this affair and puts herself in the position of observer, where she watches love scenes between them. Lacan views this situation as subjectively interesting for Lol, and claims that ‘a knot is made again there’. Indeed, by occupying the a-subjective position of observer Lol revives from her lifeless marriage.

However, this triangular situation does not last, and ends up in a dual relationship when Jacques Hold falls in love with Lol. He seduces her, they plan to make love, yet at the moment Hold undresses Lol she literally goes mad. She suddenly thinks the police are in the buidling and that people are being beaten on the stairway, and starts to refer to hereself as Tatiana Karl and Lol Stein at the same time. The direct confrontation with Hold’s desire is a situation she cannot cope with.

[…] It appears that by evading physical interaction with a man who is attracted to the female body, Lol feels at ease and maintains a feeling of identity. obviously abstinence guarantees that she is not overwhelmed by jouissance: the a-subjective position as observer protects her from being the object of jouissance of the Other. At the same time her position qua gaze seems to provide her with a surplus jouissance, and a bearable level of sexual excitation. Through her a-subjective position Lol delimits her own being and creates an experience of consistency. 145

What is innovative about Lacan’s discussion of this fictional case is that it bears witness of a positive view of the object a in psychosis. Although the story does not have a happy ending, it shows tht Lola Valerie Stein’s position as observer doesn’t necessarily exclude her from social bonds. As long as desiring others do not come too close and she can maintain her abstinent position, she is not a victim of the non-instalment of a belief in the Other as a reference for making sense of desire.

Lol’s abstinent sexual attitude is a sublime coping mechanism by means of which she keeps the pressure emanating from desiring others at bay and prevents herself from being the object of jouissance of a cruel Other. The only problem is that she did not remain faithful to this non-physical sexual attitude, which suited her so well. 146

boothby objet a

Boothby, R. (2001) Freud as Philosopher. New York: Routledge. Reprinted Figurations of the Objet a. In Jacques Lacan Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory Volume II Philosophy Edited by Slavoj Zizek, London: Routledge, 2003. pp. 159-191.

In toilet training, the anus is “colonized,” to invoke a happily apt pun, by the other’s desire.

Throughout the future life of the individual, the contractions and relaxations of the anal muscle will inevitably call up immensely more global connotations of mastery or submission, independence or dependence. Taken up into this physiologico-emotional complex, the fecal material becomes freighted with significance that utterly outstrips all natural or animal attitudes toward excrement. In accord with a symbolic equivalence already familiar to Freud, the feces become privileged tokens in an exchange of love — excrement as primordial gift.

Lacan extends this distinction between eye and gaze to propose a general theory of vision in which the act of seeing functions precisely to avoid the gaze.

He thus suggests that painting produces a “pacifying, Apollinian effect” that feeds the eye with reassuringly stable objects in order to allow the viewer to put the gaze out of play.

In painting, “something is given not so much to the gaze as to the eye, something that involves the abandonment, the laying down, of the gaze” (FFC, 101). How are we to understand this laying down of the gaze? The painter offers the picture to molify the gaze of the spectator, as if the gesture of painting were a matter of escaping from a predator by distracting it with a piece of meat.

The painter gives something to the person who must stand in front of his painting which, in part, at least, of the painting, might be summed up thus — You want to see? Well, take a look at this! he gives something for the eye to feed on, but he invites the person to whom this picture is presented to lay down his gaze there as one lays down one’s weapons. (Lacan, 101)

By referring the act of seeing to some third point off the axis of seer and seen, Lacan succeeds in revealing the internal complexity of the scopic drive. The third position, itself invisible yet functioning continually to reenergize the subject’s investment in the object of sight, is none other that the objet a.

Its presence-by-absence serves to produce “the ambiguity that affects anything that is inscribed in the register of the scopic drive” (FFC, 83). To illustrate this point, we can return to the example of the voyeur who, relentlessly goaded on by the scopic drive, is most completely reclaimed by the force of the drive precisely when he fails to see what he is looking for.

That is to say, as a search for the objet a, an object that by definition cannot be given, the scopic drive is most surely reinforced and recreated at the moment when it appears to draw closest to its objective, yet fails to grasp it.

It is as if this very failure is the evidence that the objet a is there. The point is perfectly demonstrated by the essential pose, the veritable sine qua non, of soft-core pornographic magazines: the so-called spread shot.

The centerpiece of this shot is the vulva spread wide for the camera to inspect. Seeking to explain the appeal of this defining image we might naively suppose that the spread shot satisfies insofar as it “shows all.” It leaves nothing to the imagination.

The viewer has finally won unimpeded visual access to the inner secret of the feminine. From a Lacanian point of view, however, the conclusion is exactly the opposite.

What attracts the scopic drive to the vaginal spread shot is precisely what it doesn’t show, to what in fact cannot be shown. The result of the “show all” strategy is to create even more intense hunger for the thing that cannot be imaged: the objet a.

The more you see, the less you find what you are really looking for. The “proof” of the Lacanian view lies in the compulsiveness with which the consumer of pornography moves from one girlie image to another, to another, and so on.

If the spread shot really succeeded in “showing all,” then one image would be enough. But the pornographic drive shows its real essence less in the excitement created by one image than by the insatiable hunger it generates for yet another image.

The enormous commercial potency of pornography derives in part from the fact that it succeeds in continually restimulating the very hunger it promises to satisfy.

The investment of interest in pornography depends upon the subject’s relation to something that ceaselessly escapes the roving, lustful eye, some moment of ultimate satisfaction that is continually promised but never fully given.

In this way, the example of the pornographic image shows very well what Lacan means by saying that the objet a is not the aim of the drive but rather the perpetually eccentric point around which the drive revolves.

The point of crucial theoretical importance in all of this concerns the way in which the objet a irrecoverably triangulates the subject’s relation to the aim of the drive.

The Lacanian gaze is thus understandable only in the triadic structure of desire, the Oedipal structure in which the subject is faced with the question of the Other’s desire.

In the actual experience of the Oedipal stage, the experience of the gaze begins to unfold when the mother no longer simply presents an image to the child but is seen to be looking for something herself, the moment when the suspicion dawns that the mother’s desire is directed beyond the child itself to some third position.

Said otherwise, the gaze is one of the prime figures in which the imaginary relation opens out upon a symbolic horizon.

It is by virtue of its capacity to excite an experience of this dimension of the gaze, precisely through preventing the analysand from seeing the eyes of the analyst, that psychoanalysis sets up the special force field of the transference.

Its place will come to be occupied by the entirety of the symbolic order. In the place of the gaze, the subject will come to experience the call of the signifier.

Correlatively, it is a certain suspension or avoidance of the gaze that founds the entirety of the imaginary register, both the ego and its objects. This elision of the gaze is the very essence of imaginary méconnaissance