lacan – Page 43 – 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)

stavrakakis Žižek antigone the act

Stavrakakis, Yannis. “The Lure of Antigone: Aporias of an Ethics of the Political” Boucher, Geoff, and Jason Glynos and Matthew Sharpe, eds. Traversing the Fantasy: Critical Responses to Žižek. Great Britain: Ashgate. 2005. Print.

It is difficult to see, however, how the “inhuman” position of Antigone could point to an alternative formulation of the socio-political structure. … Antigone’s intransigence, her deadly passion, may thus be what creates her tragic appeal, but even by Žižek’s 1998 standards, one has to conclude that this makes her unsuitable as a model for transformative ethico-political action (173).

Unless of course, one reinterprets her in a substantial way. But then a certain paradox emerges: Antigone can only function as a model for radical political action on the condition that she is stripped of her radically inhuman (anti-social and anti-political) desire.

🙂 Stavrakakis isn’t clear on just exactly what it is in Žižek’s argument that he finds disagreeable. He thinks that Žižek has to ‘tame’ Antigone first in order to find her suitable for politics, that is ‘give way’ on her radical desire, which means, in this case, retreat or withdraw from her radical desire. For Stavrakakis: Wouldn’t the truly radical act be to traverse the lure of Antigone altogether? (174)

🙂 Stavrakakis points out that Lacan himself moved from this position on ethics outlined in this Book 7, to a different position in the Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, where the idea of pure desire is questioned. “This shift needs to be taken into account when discussing the function of Antigone.

Desire not only loses its value as a pure force of transgression, but is also revealed as the ultimate support of power and the order of goods. As soon as jouissance acquires its central place in Lacan’s theoretical universe, desire is revealed as a defense against enjoyment, as a compromise formation, while drive emerges as the nodal point of his ethical thought (cites Zupančič, 2000:235) In that sense, desire can never be a pure transgressive force (175).

… desire also has precise limits. It [desire] is always conditioned by the structures of fantasy sustaining “hegemonic” regimes —regimes of power, consumption, and even resistance and transgression. It is always stimulated by the imaginary lure of attaining jouissance, but it is also sustained by the constitutive inability to realise such a goal. In that sense, desire”succeeds,” reproduces itself, through its own failure. This reproduction is not politically innocent. For example, consumer culture is partly sustained by the continuous displacement of final satisfaction from advertisement to advertisement, from product to product, from fantasy to fantasy (176)

The important “by-product” of this play is a specific structuration of desire which guarantees, through its cumulative metonymic effect, the reproduction of the market economy within a distinct “promotional culture“.

It is Lacan himself then who points the way to traversing the lure of Antigone by shifting his understanding of desire. This shift needs to be acknowledged as the radical break it truly represents. Any attempt to reconcile the “pure” desire of Antigone with the later conceptualisation and the critique of illusory desire and/or the ethics of desire with the ethics of drive —what Zupančič seems to attempt in the last pages of her Ethics of the Real — needs to be re-examined and further debated

*Undoubtedly desire and drive are related, but their relation seems to me to escape any logic of reconciliation or supplementation, which is how Zupančič ultimately views their relation. Her aim seems to be to “reconcile” desire with drive (Zupančič, 2000:238), something attempted through presenting drive as a “supplement” of desire (Zupančič, 2000:239): at the heart of desire a possible passage opens up towards the drive; one might therefore come to drive if one follows the ‘logic’ of desire to its limit (Zupančič, 2000: 243).

What is not given appropriate attention here is that reaching this limit entails a crossing which radically transforms our relation to desire. In other words, the limit of desire does not connote the automatic passage into a supplementary field of reconciliation; it primarily signifies a rupture, precisely because “desire never goes beyond a certain point” (Miller, 1996: 423).

Whereas Lacan’s early work and his conceptualisation of desire as something “always in violation, always rebellious and diabolical” —a position informing his reading of Antigone— leads to “the confusion between the drive and desire,” as soon as desire is reconceptualised as ultimately submissive to a law, a shift of almost “gigantic” proportions is insituted, and this shift needs to be acknowledged thoroughly (Miller, 1996: 422-423)

Miller, Jacques-Alain (1996). “Commentary on Lacan’s Text.” Reading Seminars I and II: Lacan’s Return to Freud. Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink and Maire Jaanus (Eds). Albany: SUNY Press.

As Žižek himself has pointed out in another text, “[t]here is ethics —that is to say, an injunction which cannot be grounded in ontology— in so far as there is a crack in the ontological edifice of the universe: at its most elementary, ethics designates fidelity to this crack” (Žižek, 1997c:214).

In order for a truly ethical fidelity to an event ot become possible another fidelity is presupposed, a fidelity that cannot be reduced to the event itself or to particular symbolisations of the event and has to retain a certain distance from them: a fidelity to event-ness as distinct from particular events, a “fidelity to the Real qua impossible” (Žižek, 1997c:215).

Such a standpoint not only presents the necessary symbolic prepartions for the proper ethical reception of the act/event, but also offers our best defense against the ever-present risk of being lured by a false event, a satanic miracle, against the ever-present risk of terror and absolutisation of an event, to use Badiou’s vocabulary (Badiou, 2001:85).

Of course, one should be aware that fidelity to event-ness, to what ultimately permits the emergence of the new and makes possible the assumption of an act, presupposes a certain betrayal, not of the act itself, but of a certain rendering of the act as an absolute and divine positivity.

In that sense, fidelity to an event can flourish and avoid absolutisation only as an infidel fidelity, only within the framework of another fidelity — fidelity to the openness of the political space and to the awareness of the constitutive impossibility of a final suture of the social — within the framework of a commitment to the continuous political re-inscription of the irreducible lack in the Other (180).

The transformative potential of a Lacanian ethics of the political is a crucial issue that is far from settled.

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).

dean democracy

Dean, Jodi. Žižek’s Politics. New York: Routledge. 2006. Print.

🙂 Why do we all have such a hard on for democracy?

Žižek’s answer is

democracy is the form our attachment to Capital takes; it is the way we organize our enjoyment. He writes, “what prevents the radical question of ‘capitalism’ itself is precisely belief in the democratic form of the struggle against capitalism.” Faithful to democracy, we eschew the demanding task of politicizing the economy and envisioning a different political order. (102)

With respect to the moral law, the stain of enjoyment does not involve any pathological content or empirical object. Rather, the wiping out of all pathological objects produces a new kind of nonpathological object — objet petit a, the object-cause of desire. (108)

Thus, the crucial link between Kant and the Jacobins, between the categorical imperative and democratic invention, involves objet petit a: just as superego stains the moral law, so does it appear as a stain on the empty place of democracy. … This stain onthe empty place of democracy takes the form of the sublime, pure, body of the People, that is, of the Nation. … In this way, formal democracy is tied to a contingent, material contnet, to some sort of nation or ethnicity, to a fantasy point that resists universalization (109).

… democracy is ultimately inseparable from nationalist violence. It is linked to the fantasy point of a people that calls it into being (113).

Once cultural politics morphed into capitalist culture, identity politics lost its radical edge (116).

dean capitalism discourse of university

Dean, Jodi. Žižek’s Politics. New York: Routledge. 2006. Print.

Discourse of the University


S2 —> a
S1      $

S2 (knowledge, the string of signifiers) is in the first position, that of the agent or speaker. This tells us that under capitalism, the facts speak. They are not grounded in the Master (S1), although they rely on a hidden or underlying supposition of power, of the authority that they command (S1 is in the position of truth). Because this authority is hidden, the facts claim that they speak for themselves. What do they mean? Well, that is a matter of opinion — and each is entitled to his own opinion. The facts, or the knowledge that speaks in the discourse of the university, are not integrated into a comprehensive symbolic arrangement; instead, they are the ever conflicting guidelines and opinions of myriad experts. Thus they can advise people to eat certain foods, use certain teeth-whiteners, wear certain clothes, and drive certain cars. The experts may evaluate and judge all these commodities, finding some safer or more reliable and others better values for the money. Experts may make economic and financial suggestions, using data to back up their predictions.

S2 addresses a and, hidden underneath a is the subject $. This tells us that knowledge, or the experts, address the subject as an object, an excess, or a kernal of enjoyment. The object addressed by the experts, then, might be the person as a body or set of needs, the person as a collection of quantifiable attributes, or the person as a member of a particular demographic,

but the person is not addressed as what we might typically understand as the reasonable subject of liberal democratic politics.The person is addressed as an object and thus is less a rational chooser than an impulse buyer, a bundle of needs and insecurities, desires and drives, an object that can be propelled and compelled by multiple forces. As a version of university discourse, capitalism does not provide the subject with a symbolic identity. (98)

The formula shows that $ does not identify with S1. The subject is merely the remainder of a process in which knowledge addresses enjoyment.

Recall that Žižek argues that late capitalist societies are marked by (1) an injunction to enjoy and (2) the decline of symbolic efficiency.

Late capitalist subjects are encouraged to find, develop, and express themselves. They are enjoined to have fulfilling sex lives and rewarding careers, to look their very best — no matter what the cost — and to cultivate their spirituality. That these injunctions conflict, that one cannot do them all at once, and that they are accompanied by ever present warnings against potential side effects, reminds us that we are dealing with the SUPEREGO. (99)

The decline of symbolic efficiency (or the collapse of the big Other) refers to the ultimate uncertainty in which late capitalist subjects find themselves.

dean discourse of analyst pervert on lenin

Dean, Jodi. Žižek’s Politics. New York: Routledge. 2006. Print.

Discourse of the Analyst

The discourse of the analyst has the same structure as the perverse discourse. The difference between the discourse of the analyst and the perverse discourse rests in the ambiguity of objet petit a (occupying here the position of agent).

In the perverse discourse, objet petit a designates the subject’s ($ in the position of addressee) enjoyment. That is, the pervert is the one who knows what the subject desires and makes himself into an instrument of that desire. Accordingly we see how the formula places knowledge (S2) in the position of truth, supporting the object that speaks. (89)
In the discourse of the analyst, this knowledge (S2) is the “supposed knowledge of the analyst.” This means that in the analytic setting, the subject presumes that the analyst knows the secret of its desire. But, this presumption is false. The enigmatic analyst simply adopts this position, reducing himself to a void (objet petit a) in order that the subject will confront the truth of her desire. The analyst is not supported by objective or historical knowledge. rather, the position is supported only by the knowledge supposed by the subject through transference. Analysis is over when the subject comes to recognize the contingency and emptiness of this place. Žižek follows Lacan in understanding this process as “traversing the fantasy,” of giving up the fundamental fantasy that sustains desire. (89)

Thus, whereas the pervert knows the truth of desire, the analyst knows that there is no truth of desire to know.

The process of traversing the fantasy, of confronting objet petit a as a void, involves “subjective destitution” As the addressee of the speaking object, the subject gives up any sense of a deep special uniqueness, of certain qualities that make him who he is, and comes to see himself as an excremental remainder, to recognize himself as an object. Neither the symbolic order nor the imaginary realm of fantasy provides any ultimate guarantees. They cannot establish for the subject a clear, certain, and uncontested identity. they cannot provide him with fundamental, incontrovertible moral guidelines. What is left out, then, is the authority of the Master (S1, now in the position of production). (89)

Žižek views the discourse of the analyst as homologous to revolutionary emancipatory politics. What speaks in revolutionary politics is thus like objet petit a, a part that is no part, a part that cannot be recuperated into a larger symbolic or imaginary unity. Such a part, in other words, is in excess of the whole.

In emphasizing the structural identity between revolutionary politics and the discourse of the analyst, moreover, Žižek is arguing that the revolutionary act proper has no intrinsic meaning. It is a risk, a venture that may succeed or fail. Precisely what makes revolution revolutionary is that it leaves out (produces as remainder) the authority of a Master: there are no guarantees.(90)

For Žižek, what was remarkable about Lenin was his willingness to adopt this position. Žižek emphasizes two specific moments: 1914 and 1917. In 1914 Lenin was shocked and alone as all the European Social Democratic parties (excluding the Russian Bolsheviks and the Serb Social Democrats) turned to patriotism … falling ini with the prevailing nationalist fervor. Yet this very catastrophic shattering of a sense of international workders’ solidarity, … “cleared the ground for the Leninist event, for breaking the evolutionary historicism of the Second International — and Lenin was the only one who realized this, the only one who articulated the Truth of the catastrophe” … Likewise in April 1917, most of Lenin’s colleagues scorned his call for revolution. Even his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, worried that Lenin had gone mad, but Lenin knew that there was no proper time for revolution, that there are no guarantees that it will succeed. More importantly he knew that waiting for such an imagined proper time was precisely the way to prevent revolution from occuring. … Lenin is remarkable in his willingness to take the risk and engage in an act for which there are no guarantees. We should recall that the odds were fully against Lenin — in peasant Russia he did not even have a working class that could take power. (90)

Against communist dogma regarding the laws of historical development and the proper maturity of the working class, Lenin urged pushing through with the revolution. He did not rely on objective laws of history. He also did not wait for permission or democratic support. He acted without grounds, inventing new solutions in a moment when it was completely unclear what would happen. He refused to wait for authorization or do what other thought he “ought” to do, doing instead what he had to do. Lenin, then, takes the position of objet petit a. The truth of his view does not rest in laws of history but in its own formal position in an uncertain situation, a position marked by the Leninist Party (91).

Unlike (Agamben), Žižek does not abandon law and sovereignty. Lenin’s greatness is not simply that of a risk taker but of a founder, one who takes responsibility for introducing a new order. … addressing the fundamental political problems of the day — antatgonism in an era post-property and the exclusions and violence of neoliberal capitalism — is a matter not of escaping or abandoning the law but of traversing the fantasies that support the law, confronting the perversity and enjoyment in our relations to law. … possibility of moving from law to love. (92-93)

dean university discourse as capitalism

Dean, Jodi. Žižek’s Politics. New York: Routledge. 2006. Print.

Discourse of the University


S2 —> a
S1      $

S2 or knowledge is in the position of the speaking agent. S2 addresses objet petit a the little nugget or remainder of enjoyment.
S1 (the Master) is in the position of truth, and the subject ($) is in the position of production.
This is a discourse in which knowledge speaks, the rule of experts.
What is hidden under the facts however, what the facts want to deny, is the way they are supported by power and authority (S1 below the bar, in the lower left-hand corner; the Master in the position of truth).
As Žižek argues, the “constitutive lie” of university discourse is its disavowal of its own performative dimension. University discourse proceeds as if it were not supported by power, as if it were neutral, as if it were not, after all, dependent upon and invested in specific political decisions.
Capitalism and bureaucratic socialism, as a generation of critiques of technocracy and instrumental reason made clear, emphasize expertise. Capitalists ground the expertise in efficiency as understood by economic theory. Capitalism addresses the subject as a kind of object, providing no real ideological or symbolic locus of subjective meaning. We see this in the way capitalism undermines symbolic identities, how it undermines such forms of attachment through the revolutionary force of ever expanding and intensifying markets. Instead of a symbolic identity of the kind provided by a Master, capitalism offers its subjects enjoyment (objet petit a). (83-84)

For Žižek, the most interesting aspect of modern power captured by the formula of the discourse of the university stems from the distinction between the upper and lower levels of the diagram. The upper level S2 —> a expresses the fact of contemporary biopolitics (knoweldge addressing objects, treatinig subjects as objects) while the lower S1 —> $ marks the “crisis of investiture,” or the collapse of the big Other …

In contemporary capitalist society biopolitics appears in two forms: the life that has to be respected and the excess of the living other that one finds harassing, unbearable, and intolerable.

Thus, in one respect, the other is fragile and vulnerable. It must be fully respected.
In another, the fragility of the other is so great, the need for respect so strong, that anything can harm it; everything is dangerous

Žižek argues that the discourse of the university enables us to understand how these two attitudes are two sides of the same coin. They are both brought about by a crisis in meaning, by “the underlying refusal of any higher Causes, the notion that the ultimate goal of our lives is life itself.” That is to say, the structure of university discourse reminds us that authority is presupposed yet denied by expert rule; the Master does not speak and does not occupy the position of agent; rather, he occupies the position of Truth (85).

Yet whereas capitalism is a self-revolutionizing economic form, one in whose very crises, inequities, and excesses drive its productivity, Stalinism was a self-revolutionizing political form. Stalinism tried to attain (and surpass!) capitalist productivity without the capitalist form, without, in other words, class struggle. Once class struggle officially ended with the 1935 constitution, the revolutionizing impulse of capitalism came under the control of the political domain in the form of terror. As a consequence, the inequities of capitalism shifted into social life as more direct forms of hierarchy and domination. Žižek writes, “In the Soviet Union from the late 1920s onwards, the key social division was defined not by property, but by direct access to power mechanisms and to the privileged material and cultural conditions of life (food, accommodation, healthcare, freedom of travel, education). For this reason, Žižek can say that Stalinism was the “symptom” of capitalism. It was a symptom insofar as it revealed the truth about the social relations of domination that capitalist ideology presents as free and equal. (86)

decline of paternal function

Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2004. 155

However, this identificatory process also fails to properly secure and maintain the paternal function. In Lacan’s account of the modern family, the paternal figure is subject to constant attack. For this reason, he perceives ‘the social decline of the paternal imago’ (1938a: 200, FC: 72).

Lacan’s argument in his later seminar Le sinthome (1975– 1976) (S23) (1975d) echoes this claim that the father is a position which must continually be upheld, as there is no support for the paternal function, no Other of the Other. Roudinesco argues that ‘[t]he story is that of modern man, man in our modern civilization, marked by the ineluctable decline of the ideals of the paternalistic family’ (1997: 215). Accordingly, the mark of modernity is not a normative, integrating Oedipus complex that succeeds; but rather one that fails.

The decline of the paternal function structures the modern subject in a failure to surmount its Oedipus complex. The failure of this complex should be understood as the failure of its resolution. A ‘successful’ resolution of this complex involves a repression of the desire for the mother, and the concomitant formation of the ego-ideal and super-ego in paternal identification.

When Lacan describes a ‘failure’ of the Oedipus complex, his argument is not that the complex itself fails, but rather that there is a failure of its paternal resolution. Lacan argues that in the failed modern Oedipus complex the structure of subjective identification shifts from that of traditional patriarchy to its modern form.

In making this argument, Lacan develops the otherwise blurred distinction in Freud’s work between the super-ego and the ego-ideal (Borch-Jacobsen 1991: 37). Lacan draws out two aspects of the paternal function, one that forms the imaginary ego-ideal – ‘be like me, the father’ – and the other which forms the repressive super-ego – ‘do not be like me, because you cannot have the mother’. 155

Lacan’s description of the ‘failed’ Oedipus complex posits a successful sublimation of the imaginary ego-ideal with its injunction ‘be like me’, but also a failure of the formation of the repressive super-ego with its categorical imperative of ‘do not be like me’. The subject does not repudiate maternal desire because the father says ‘no’, but rather because the subject gives up that desire in order to be like the father.154

identification with the socially privileged paternal figure rather than the repressive patriarchal father produces the modern subject.
… the subject sacrifices the mother for paternal identification, and receives in return the power and prestige that the father offers.

In the modern social world, the father represents (and has) social power and prestige in the parental relationship (Brennan 1993: 58). This symbolic and material economy privileges the bearer of the phallus, which the father claims or is given. For this reason, the child perceives the father as having power, prestige and privilege.

Teresa Brennan describes this operation of paternal identification as a process of the recognition of power, where the masculine subject recognizes the father ‘as a shaper and acknowledged recognizer, a namer, into whose dominating kingdom he will one day come’ (1993: 53). With paternal identification, the masculine subject accepts the Law of the Father – ‘I cannot have the mother’ – in return for the power of the father and access to other women.

… that ‘the modern form of the Oedipus, characterized by an ambivalent and “devouring” identification with the real father’, produces a subject that engages in aggressive rivalry with the father (1991: 40). This father is the symbolic father, the paternal legislator whose position the son usurps in his incorporating identification, as he cannot do in reality. With that identification, the son commits a symbolic murder of the father. The symbolic father comes to represent the real father of the subject, who can then incorporate the paternal figure as ego-ideal.

This process is an identification of the order of ‘wanting to be like’. That identification incorporates what Lacan describes as the single mark (trait unaire), the unifying trait of the phallus of the father, which functions as a representative of the Law of the Father and of a cultural order which privileges him.

real of woman

Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2004. p 127-131

The production of the excluded ‘reality’ of women is evident in, for example, the case of sexual harassment.

Before feminist activism in this area, social discourses did not represent the ‘experience’ of sexual harassment. Sexual harassment existed as a social practice, but it was not possible to articulate that experience as such within the symbolic economy of existing social discourses. These experiences were literally ‘not spoken of’.

Yet at the same time, the sexual harassment of women is a social practice that is produced by gendered social relations. The social discourse produces both the practice and its disavowal. The exclusions of social fictions can be traced to the operation of a phallic Symbolic order that produces discourse as discourse and subject as subject.

In Lacanian terms, the production of the real of women as an excluded term of discourse is linked to the impossibility of symbolically rendering women in a phallocentric Symbolic order. The Lacanian position links the excluded real of women to the symbolically repudiated female body of the Mother in a phallic Symbolic order. In feminist terms, this symbolic economy renders ‘women’ as either the phantasy of The Woman or as an excluded term. In this formulation, feminist discourses articulate the founding symbolic repudiation of the excluded real of women.

Unlike social fictions, feminist discourses render the real of women not as lack but symbolize and reinscribe it into the signifying chain. This reinscription shifts the relation of symbolic elements within the chain, producing a new chain of signifiers. This reinscription produces a new discourse and thus a different representation of women.

Instead, the a should be understood as analogous to the Lacanian concept of the Real. This concept is one of Lacan’s most difficult and complex, as he uses it in many linked senses and its meaning changes over the course of his work. … Lacan posits the Real as excess, impossibility and lack. In Lacan’s earlier work, it is a material plenitude which exceeds the Symbolic order, and in which nothing is lacking … In Lacan’s later work, the real is impossible (‘le réel, c’est impossible’) (S17: 143). It is a logical obstacle that cannot be represented within the symbolic (S17: 143). For this reason, the Real is also lack in language, because it marks that which the Symbolic cannot symbolize. No signifying chain can represent it in its totality – hence its impossibility. Something must always fall out of discourse, which is its excluded a. 131

In this way, the Real can also be understood as the hole in the Symbolic order, the impossibility on which that order is predicated and the absence that it encircles. 131

It is not the matching of a signifier to its correlative signified, because there is no metalanguage able to tell the truth about truth and no transcendental signifier that can fix meaning as a correlate of reality (Lacan 1965: 16, Éc: 867– 868). Knowledge is a discourse of the Real, diffracting it through the prism of discursive structures. The production of a new signifying chain represents a different relation to the Real, and with it a new ‘real’.

My account of feminist knowledge does not understand the Real as a fixed entity that the act of knowing passively uncovers. Rather, it is the constitutive ‘outside’ of the existing limits of discourse. An effect of the excess plenitude of the Real is theoretical and political possibility.

If the Symbolic order does not represent the totality of being, then language can take a different form, can represent a different relationship to the Real, and can represent a different Real. It becomes possible to signify the Real differently. Such a conception grants a utopian dimension to knowledge, for if it is not immutable, then the world that it represents is not given, and it can describe a different Real.

Accordingly, knowledge exists in both a present and a future signifying relation to the Real. If the Real is an impossible plenitude, it becomes possible to accept that we can never fully know or represent it, while also accepting that it offers a multiplicity of possibilities.

There can be other symbolic exclusions from discourse, such that the operations of discourse are less costly to those excluded others of the Symbolic order.

We need not conflate the lack in the symbolic with a Symbolic that represents femininity as lack. To claim that it is possible to change a signifying relation to the Real (and with it the signifying relation to object, self and others) is not to claim that it is possible to obtain a mystical fusion with the plenitude of the Real, in which language is adequate to its all and the speaking being suffers no loss. My conception of feminist discourse assumes that there is no knowledge that can ever provide a full and adequate representation of the world. Rather, knowledge is necessarily incomplete, situated and partial, such that it cannot ever represent all, or be a transcendental Truth.

Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology.
Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2004. p 132.
http://site.ebrary.com/lib/oculryerson/Doc?id=10098962&ppg=145

discourse social fictions excluded objet a

Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2004. p 127-128

In my earlier model of feminist discourse, I propose that feminist knowledges articulate what a phallocentric Symbolic order does not represent. In this model, these knowledges articulate the symbolic a of discourse. By linking this model to the theory of social fictions, it becomes possible to include an account of intersubjective relations. The theory of social fictions gives social content to the concept of ‘discourse’, which otherwise functions as an abstract term.

Social fictions produce imaginary identities. These identities collapse fantasies of self and the ‘idealizing capital I of identification’ (S11: 272), so that they operate as the phantasy that ‘I am a woman’ or ‘I am a man’ and so on. We can therefore understand social fictions as producing the self as imaginary a – an imaginary object filled with phantasmic content (the objet petit a):

Social fictions: s-s-s-s-s-s identity (imaginary a)

However, Zizek points out that the a ‘stands simultaneously for the imaginary fantasmic lure/screen and for that which this lure is obfuscating, for the void behind the lure’ (1998a: 80). Social fictions therefore have imaginary and symbolic registers:

Social fictions: s-s-s-s-s-s identity | symbolic a

That ‘void behind the lure’ is the symbolic a, that which marks the excluded term of discourse, the gap in or void of its symbolic structure.

Feminism traverses the phantasies of identities that social fictions produce, insisting that those social discourses found themselves upon a repudiated term. This recognition of the symbolic a of social fictions symbolizes it, so that it no longer functions as a term which social discourse excludes. Like psychoanalytic discourse, feminist discourse seeks to sustain the distance between the imaginary object and identity so that it becomes possible to articulate the repudiated a of discourse. Unlike psychoanalytic discourse, feminism seeks to interrogate social discourses. Feminist discourse symbolizes the excluded a in relation to social fictions as descriptions of social relations. A feminist politics permits recognition of this founding lack or excluded a term of social fictions. This repudiated other is the a, the excluded and necessary term of that discourse. Feminist knowledges link that excluded a to women.

For example, two classical themes of feminist analysis concern the exclusion of particular realities of gendered identity from the social representation of women, whether the unequal distribution of wealth between men and women, or the cost of a normative ‘feminine’ identity. In each case, feminist discourses identify the social discourses of gender and the reality of the social experience of women that those discourses exclude. Social fictions represent a fictional identity that excludes from that representation the complex and specific social experiences of women.

An example of this operation can be seen in sexual difference. The operation of social fictions substitutes an imaginary and fictional myth of ‘The Woman’ for the complexity of social experience of women. In their operation, social fictions repudiate that reality and put in its place certain fictional ways to be a female subject. For example, those fictional representations of ‘The Woman’ render her as ‘sexuality’. Yet at the same time, those representations refuse the real bodies of women that have physical existence and functions, a refusal that manifests itself in an array of social taboos that surround the female body. This conception of social fictions does not claim that ‘women’ do not exist (either as fact or in discourse). However, social fictions produce their social experiences as the excluded of discourse, namely as its repudiated a term.

This excluded a of social fictions is the ‘real’ of women. Social fictions do not represent the ‘reality’ of women’s experience – an experience of oppression and domination as well as pleasure and desire …

That excluded term, the symbolic a, is an effect of discourse, just as much as the social fiction is. Social discourses produce it as a term that is excluded from a hegemonic ordering of representation.

S2 —> a S1 $

S2 —> a S1 $