I really like the analogy he draws in this video: the objet a is like the wrapping paper which turns an exchangeable commodity into a gift. if you put unwrapped Christmas presents under the tree they would not provoke the desire of children in a way that the wrapped presents do. McGowan describes the objet a as ‘erecting a barrier between the subject and object of desire’ which stimulates the former’s desire for the latter. This departs slightly from my own understanding of the dynamic as one of elusiveness rather than inaccessibility. It’s the fact you can’t find the thing which you ‘know’ is there which stimulates the drive towards something that is constantly escaping your grasp. The sense that you almost have everything you want yet in that chasm inheres all the frustrations of experience.

It made me think of the U2 song where still not having found what you are looking for becomes the occasion for music. The real of the desire exists in the pursuit of the object rather than the possibility of it ever being acquired. The point is that you only desire it because you can’t have it, because it is fundamentally unavailable and out of reach. In which case I guess I do see what McGowan means by the ‘barrier’ even if I would frame the concept in a slightly different way. He stresses how it shapes the perceptual field of the subject, representing a curvature rather than an element in its own right, constituting the object of desire as exceptional in some way.

He emphasise how you can’t simply recover this in consciousness because once you see it the objet a pops up somewhere else. We can have moments of fleeting insight into these dynamics but we can’t sustain them in a deliberately conscious way because they are a condition of possibility for that purposive orientation. But we can I would suggest sustain an awareness of the structure of fantasy involved in the objects we imagine would lead us to a full enjoyment if only we could attain them.