One of the concepts which fascinates me in Lacan psychoanalysis is castration, which assumes a complexity which it lacks in Freud. Zizek summarises it as “the loss of something which the subject never possessed in the first place”, leaving her with “a purely potential, nonexistent X, with respect to which the actually accessible experiences appear all of a sudden as lacking, not wholly satisfying”. The X in this formation is the elusive objet a, lurking behind the objects of our desire in order to make ordinary things seem like glittering prizes, only to find itself displaced in an endless sequence when we get our hands on the sought after prize.
As I understand it objet a is the remainder left over in castration. This is a matter of how we live with limitations. As Bruce Fink puts it in Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique “We are not immortal, our days being numbered; we do not know when we will die; we cannot do all things, become proficient in all areas, or master all fields; and there are limits to our knowledge” (pg 90). This is something we are forced to confront as a consequence of our induction into language as infants. As he puts it in Lacan on Love it follows “from the fact that we are required to express our needs in words, in a language not of our own making (Lacan calls this “alienation”), and from the sacrifice of satisfaction or jouissance each of us has had to make in being weaned, toilet trained, and separated from our primary source of satisfaction – our mothers in most cases” (loc 1337).
To become a human subject involves controlling and channeling our impulses, trying to fix diffuse and multifaceted experiences into the containers of language while getting caught up in the swirling complexity of our dependence upon other similarly limited subjects. At the heart of Lacan’s thought is the propensity to fantasise we can escape this moras and return to the immediacy and fullness which marked our prior immersion in the real. We chase the possibility of such a return incessantly through the insistence on trying to exceed these limitations, which can drive transformation but in pursuit of a promise land we can never reach. No matter how close we get, the fullness which resists symbolisation will retreat just beyond us, lending itself to the conviction that the next object might finally bring us peace.
What I find so startling about Lacan’s thought is his conviction that we could not, indeed should not, seek to expunge fantasy. In fact doing so itself involves the structure of fantasy, predicating an experiential fullness which we could reach through a particular journey of working on ourselves. Instead he argues for traversing the fantasy, which I understand to mean finding ways to reorientate our fundamental fantasy (the poetics of how the objet a establishes itself in our existential field) and the associated enjoyments so that we become less trapped by them. The possibility of creativity inheres in this lack and how respond to it, the possibility for growth and transcendence, as the mirror image of the self-mortifying neurotic compulsions and constant cycles of self-defeating hope which lack can otherwise provoke.
See also: the sociology of everythingism. This is something which fascinated me for years, but Lacan is providing me with a conceptual vocabulary adequate to it which sociology could not.
Mark Carrigan 