I came across a reference to the abjet petit a and immediately had a flash of what it might mean For Lacan the objet petit a is the object cause of our desire, it is the slither of the sublime which invests a concrete object with a sense of wondrous desirability. The sense of a deeper primordial loss from the trauma of socialisation lurks in the background of our psychic machinery, leading us to invest a flicker of what we feel was lost into the objects we now encounter in the present.
When I encountered the abjet petit a term, I hoped it described a parallel experience of frustration. There are times when a particular frustration takes on an outsized significance beyond what it is actually stopping us doing or impeding. A particular annoyance exists as a synecdoche for annoyance as such: this one thing we can’t control, this one thing which frustrates us, condenses the weight of all the things we can’t control, all the things which frustrate us. This one event becomes a spot where you feel the sheer traumatic weight of the world’s fundamental intransigence. What realists think of as the recalcitrance of reality (the causal criterion of existence) sometimes manifests itself as an affront to us which is deeply painful. If objet petit a is about desire, abjet petit a I hoped would be about castration: the trauma of recognising our limits.
Unfortunately this is not what Lacan meant. It seems to just be a late spin on the original concept which is slightly more inflected towards the Real. Is there an existing concept for what I’m describing here? I feel that there should be. Now back to being inexplicably pissed off with the cyclists riding on the pavement on my way to work.
Mark Carrigan 