Belsey, Catherine. Culture and the Real : Theorizing Cultural Criticism.<\/p>\n
In Beyond the Pleasure Principle <\/em>Freud recounts the story of his grandson, who was greatly attached to his mother. At the age of one and a half, the child invented a game which he played again and again. This involved throwing away a wooden reel attached to a piece of string with a sound his grandfather, perhaps optimistically, interpreted as \u2018fort\u2019 (\u2018gone\u2019), and then recovering it with a joyful \u2018da\u2019 (\u2018there\u2019). Freud reads this game as a way for Ernst to allow his mother to go away without protesting: 47\u00a0 for the child the reel compensated for her absences, took her place (Freud 1984: 283\u2013 6). It was the first action, throwing away the reel, that the child repeated tirelessly.<\/p>\n This construction of a symbolic opposition between two terms, \u2018fort\/da\u2019, with the emphasis on the first, marks, Lacan affirms, the advent of language, of the signifying subject, and the splitting off of the real that that entails.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n What Ernst translates into representation, as he throws the symbolic reel, is not a need that might require his mother\u2019s return. On the contrary, he does not even look at the door in expectation of her return. Nor in Lacan\u2019s reading does the reel symbolize the child\u2019s mother as such. Instead, the object attached to the string represents a part of himself, stands in for the child\u2019s loss of continuity with the world around him, replaces and supplants the lost real of the connection that meets his needs, the particularity of his organic relationship with his mother.<\/strong> The reel takes the place of the real in the symbolic<\/strong>. And Lacan adds his own story to Freud\u2019s. He too, he says, has seen a child traumatized by the fact that he was going away, and has returned to find the same child ready to fall asleep on the shoulder of \u2018the living signifier that I had become\u2019 (1979: 62\u2013 3).<\/p>\n The wooden reel, this \u2018privileged object\u2019, that has emerged from the primal separation between the subject and the organism, from the \u2018self-mutilation\u2019 that cuts off the possibility of encountering the real, is the objet a<\/strong><\/em> (1979: 83), and it is in itself nothing much. Indeed, by way of compensation, it is nothing at all. Ernst will go on to abandon the plaything, but not the lack it symbolizes. And in later life he will no doubt seek a succession of stand-ins to fill this lack. None of them, however, will fully do so. Like the wooden reel, the object of love can never replace what is lost<\/strong>. Instead, \u2018that\u2019s not it\u2019.<\/p>\n \u2018\u201cThat\u2019s not it\u201d means that, in the desire of every demand, there is but the request for object a, for the object that would satisfy jouissance\u2019 (1998: 126). No such object exists. As \u2018the void presupposed by a demand\u2019, the objet a<\/em><\/strong> represents non-being more explicitly than the Thing (1998: 126). It constitutes the nothing that is to be found behind the veil, the object-cause, both object and cause, of desire. In love, \u2018I love in you something more than you \u2013 the objet petit a<\/strong><\/em>\u2019 (1979: 263). 48<\/p>\n Like the Thing, it has no existence in the real, since no actual object can satisfy the unconscious desire that pure loss serves to perpetuate. 49<\/p>\n The real, then, surrounds us. It also inhabits us as the condition of our ex-sistence. Human beings remain uneasy composites, the conjunction of an unreachable real organism and the subjects they become.<\/strong><\/p>\n The unconscious is not the real, nor the repository of the real, but the consequence of its loss.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Driven though it is, and constituted by culturally constructed images of reality, the subject remains ultimately empty. A drive is not an instinct, but its representative in the psyche, like a delegate sent to take its place. Lacan insists that the drive<\/strong> is not to be understood as the pressure of a need, such as hunger or thirst. Nor is it the incursion into the mind of the real, living organism (1979: 164). But the real of the organism as lost to the subject remains the condition of the existence of the drive.<\/strong> \u2018The real . . . is the mystery of the speaking body, the mystery of the unconscious\u2019 (1998: 131). 50-51<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Belsey, Catherine. Culture and the Real : Theorizing Cultural Criticism. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud recounts the story of his grandson, who was greatly attached to his mother. At the age of one and a half, the child invented a game which he played again and again. This involved throwing away a wooden reel … Continue reading “objet a”<\/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":[111,125,24,40,119,72,15,118,41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6617","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-desire","category-drive","category-lacan","category-lack","category-language","category-objet-a","category-subjectivity","category-symbolic","category-the-real"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6617","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=6617"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6617\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9349,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6617\/revisions\/9349"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}