In Seminar X Lacan discusses* the developmental progression through a sequence of partial objects, stressing how “a residue remains” which “isn’t signifiable in the articulated register” (pg 66). The first objects were “located in the structure of the drive” whereas their later replacements can be characterised by an artificiality, which is both functional (insofar as it is adapted to the drive) and a devastating loss of the primary object which has been withdrawn. The form of our drives are bound up in those initial objects and their subsequent replacements both resonate with and are unavoidably lacking in comparison.
They are the kinds of things I want, but not what I want; at a distance they can promise a return to a dimly remembered and inarticulable lapsarian state but in practice they are marked by deficiency and loss, priming us to search elsewhere for the lost object which we never really possessed. It’s a potentially bleak picture of human existence as forever caught in circuits of fantasy and striving, increasingly captured at the molecular level by the social industries. The possibility of emancipation collapses into clinical intervention which mitigates the harmfulness of this process, leading us into an ordinary level of suffering at best. However there is a sense of biographical progression which can be read into Lacan’s account, oddly through a comparison with animal behaviour:
Is there something here which is impenetrable to a conception that I would call everything that is most natural? The dimension of the signifier, what is it, if not, if you wish, an animal who in the hunt for his object is caught up in something such that the pursuit of this object must lead him onto another field of the trace where this pursuit itself as such no longer takes on anything but an introductory value.
https://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/THE-SEMINAR-OF-JACQUES-LACAN-X_l_angoisse.pdf, Pg 59
In our strivings we move forward as we pursue these objects, with past objects fading gently into the past, now coming to possess ‘introductory value’. We can make peace with what helped us get to where we are, even if it was a painful and disappointing process to get there. As a biographical sociologist I see this momentum as a rich explanatory notion, suggesting the motors which lead us to take significant life decisions and give shape to our lives. It reminds me of earlier in Seminar X when he observes how inhibition entails the halting of movement and to be impeded has its roots in being ensnared.
(The idea of a kinetic psychic ontology appeals to me immensely, as does Sloterdijk’s kinetic social ontology. It’s not just thrownness in the Heideggerian sense but rather movement, or the struggle to move, as a defining category of analysis. I should really finish Sloterdijk’s Infinite Mobilization as well as get a copy of his Heidegger book)
The ‘residue’ referred to earlier could be framed in a more humanistic register as becoming who we are: or to use Nick Cave’s words the accumulation of losses which turn you into an actual person. I find the image of the roaming animal whose territory waxes and wanes as they pursue successive objects, “structuring a certain field of its Umwelt, its surroundings, by way of traces that punctuate this field and define its limits” (pg 63).
The difference is, as Lacan points out, animals don’t leave false traces. If I understand him correctly, he’s suggesting that in this capacity to leave false traces the “traces of my true passage” become ontologically opaque. The speaking subject comes to stand in as the cause of my momentum, rather than the complex machinery of desire which drives my movement through the world, including my speech. The predicament comes in the attempt of the former to grasp the latter, the gap between how I narrate my movement through the world and the complex interplay of forces which drives my actual movement.
In the previous session Lacan described how Freud “knew how to make use of [his fantasy] so as to project the case onto the radiographic screen of his fidelity to the fantasmatic object” (pg 51). Again I’m far from confident of my reading here but I find the image of the fidelity to the object, being faithful to the depths of our desire, acting as a radiographic screen incredibly evocative.
The fantasy of the powerful self would involve imagining the speaking subject can ultimately take over the driving seat, leaving us fully determined by our own reflexive capacities. This would draw an ontological veil over the social and psychic forces which prevent such self-mastery from ever being possible. But those fantasies can be inhabited, they can be sat with and listened to in ways which elucidate our present situation, holding out the possibility of a precarious accommodation between the speaking subject and the drives. Which is perhaps what the outcome of analysis must ultimately be, even if this entirely the analysis continuing in a monological mode for as long as this accord will be hoped to last.
*I’m oscillating between Cormac Gallagher’s translation and the Jacques-Alain Miller edition, partly because I took messy notes and partly because each is clearer at different points. When there are page numbers it’s the latter.
Mark Carrigan 