The M\u00f6bius subject has two driving motivations, that is, motivations at the level of the drive:<\/p>\n
1. The first is to maintain the extimacy<\/strong> that is the ground of its existence: as we know, the drive circulates around objet a<\/em><\/strong>, the missing object, established by way of the encounter with the formal negation, the Non\/Nom-du-P\u00e8re.<\/em><\/p>\n 2. The second is to defend itself against the anxiety<\/strong> generated by its excessive status. This anxiety, understood in Lacanian terms, is simply affect <\/strong>itself, a function of the M\u00f6bius condition of subjectivity.<\/p>\n The motivations may be at odds, but they derive necessarily from the subject’s<\/em> founding.\u00a0 Taken together, they provide the means by which the social space itself is propagated and sustained.<\/p>\n Because, at the level of the drive<\/strong>, the subject comes into existence<\/strong> only if it seems as though objet a<\/em> is possible, prohibited<\/em> rather than impossible<\/em>, the subject has a stake in the very condition that produces anxiety \u2014 its status as a signifier depends upon the impossibility of objet a <\/em>and its status as a signifier makes its ultimate stability, its final meaning or self-consistency, unreachable.\u00a0 In this dynamic, seen from the level of Symbolic relations, it can seem that the other’s failure to stabilize the subject’s meaning is willfully aggressive (or negligent) rather than a function of\u00a0impossibility.<\/p>\n As a result, the M\u00f6bius subject relates to the other both as the solution and the obstacle to its own inconsistency \u2014 a relation of non<\/em>relation<\/strong>.\u00a0\u00a0That is, thanks to the excess that sticks to each subject, and thanks to the fantasy that the other is consistent in a way that the subject is not, the social relation necessarily emerges as a relation of nonrelation\u00a0(202).<\/p>\n In the Levinasian version the subject seeks to overcome the radical alterity that, in this view, properly belongs to the other.\u00a0 In the extimate version, the subject must perpetually seek a response from the others because, in fact the subject will never be sure of the meaning of the response it gets, yet the subject has nowhere else to go to get it.\u00a0 The other is not radically other \u2014 it is close enough to the subject in kind to warrant the desire tor the relationship while distant enough in its ability to fulfill the subject’s deepest desire to maintain its otherness.<\/p>\n At the same time, the “other” to whom the subject relates does not truly exist in the way the subject believes: the other is\u00a0a fantasmatic projection of a wish<\/strong>.\u00a0 So the subject has a relation of nonrelation to the actual others in the social space.\u00a0 It is in this relation of nonrelation that we find the sustaining of the duality of subject and other that Levinas requires for ethics but fails to provide.<\/p>\n The hatred and envy that can arise from the subject’s frustration at the other’s inability to repair the subject’s self-inconsistency could easily galvanize the destruction of the very space of the social …\u00a0(203).\u00a0 The destruction of that space, however, would spell the demise of the subject qua<\/em> subject. Subjects mobilize a number of (necessarily inadequate) defenses \u2014 including perversion and hysteria \u2014 to avoid that result.\u00a0 … We don’t want to feel that “we’re all in this together” if that means everyone is subject to excess.\u00a0 We want to feel that someone can solve this problem or be targeted as its source.\u00a0 But because these wishes do not actually resolve the excess, the best we can do is to try to send it on its rounds, even though it inevitably “returns” to us \u2014 since, of course, in reality it never left.\u00a0 We are stuck with and to excess<\/strong>. From this point of view, it appears that the motivation for the social relation is not the preservation of the other’s distinct existence, as Levinas and Critichley would have it, but rather the need to preserve the social field<\/em> itself \u2014 the field without which the subject (all subjects) as such cannot exist \u2014 from a threat of dissolution.<\/p>\n That is, the subject fantasizes that the continual dissolution and reassemblage of the social field made possible and necessary by excess is a threat to the field rather than the very condition of its perpetuation (203).<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The M\u00f6bius subject has two driving motivations, that is, motivations at the level of the drive: 1. The first is to maintain the extimacy that is the ground of its existence: as we know, the drive circulates around objet a, the missing object, established by way of the encounter with the formal negation, the Non\/Nom-du-P\u00e8re. … Continue reading “M\u00f6bius subject and the relation of nonrelation”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[125,12,21,24,40,72,123,15,118,41,20],"tags":[143],"class_list":["post-5702","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-drive","category-fantasy","category-jouissance","category-lacan","category-lack","category-objet-a","category-sinthome","category-subjectivity","category-symbolic","category-the-real","category-zizek","tag-excessive"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5702","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5702"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5702\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5704,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5702\/revisions\/5704"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5702"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5702"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5702"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}