#object a

Warning: Spoilers, flashing lights, sexual imagery

Title: Object A

Editor: Ridiculous

Studio: Indigo Team

Song: Game of Survival

Artist: Ruelle

Anime: Your Name (film), Penguin Highway (film)

The concept of the objet petit a is central to Lacan’s theory of desire, which arguably represents his major contribution to psychoanalysis. It is an expression of the lack inherent in human beings, whose incompleteness and early helplessness produce a quest for fulfillment beyond the satisfaction of biological needs. The objet petit a is a fantasy that functions as the cause of desire; as such, it determines whether desire will be expressed within the limits of the pleasure principle or “beyond,” in pursuit of an unlimited jouissance, an impossible and even deadly enjoyment.

Joan Copjec, Read My Desire, “Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety”

Lacan came to the point where he recaptured the first as well as the last of Freud’s theses on the symptom: the symptom is a mode of satisfaction. It can be deciphered like a message, but it is not only a way of speaking, it is also above all a form of jouissance, the key of its rebus being always the drive which is secretly satisfied. This is also why I have called Lacan’s second step his “second return to Freud.” The first step emphasized the linguistic implications of the technique of deciphering and produced the famous thesis of an unconscious structured like a language. The second step, which is less visible, emphasized another aspect: the language of the symptom is, so to speak, incarnated, embodied; it organizes and regulates jouissance. Hence, the surprising formula one finds close to the end of Encore: “The real, I will say, is the mystery of the speaking body, the mystery of the unconscious” (S XX, p. 131).

For Lacan, the unconscious is made of the collective of signifiers and stories that a subject has received from significant others, determining the subject’s identity, symptoms, dreams, lapses, etc. What Lacan emphasizes through his concept of the Symbolic, is how subjectivity, meaning and the unconscious are dependent upon the mechanisms of language. The core of subjectivity is constituted by otherness: “the unconscious is the discourse of the Other” (Lacan, 1957, p. 10). For Lacan, meaning is not the expression of an interior state, but is constituted from outside, from what he calls the Other; it refers to language as a collection of signifiers and signifieds and to significant others (parents, educators, family, etc.). This dimension of otherness becomes most clear if we consider how subjects are first and foremost born into a web of words. Parents already talk about their desire for a child even long before the actual conception. They talk about the desired life through signifiers that circulate in familial and cultural discourses. The different stories they tell are marked by their history, their desire (and thus also their lack).

A psychoanalysis, consists in speaking freely, in not hushing the ideas that go through your head, like we’re doing right now. Little by little, from within your own words, another meaning forms and surprises you, then falls apart, taking the pain with it. Usually, you discover just how conditioned you had been by apparently minute elements encountered in hazardous circumstances: things from childhood, meetings, certain words said to you, and we keep coming back to them until the malevolent charge of these elements softens. Each case is different.”