Lacan's Lack

Everything I know about Lacan I learned from this long (but quite readable) essay explaining his concept of "object a".  This term, which Deleuze mentions a couple of times, is meant to be read "object lowercase a".  Understanding it at least roughly can help us uncover more of what he has in mind by his virtual objects.  Which means I need to start by summarizing the important points I took from the essay; from there we can go on to see how it fits with Deleuze.

First, object a is a paradoxical object because it's the form we only retrospectively project on our experience.

The objet a is a paradoxical "object" directly because of the relation between its emergence and loss. Žižek clarifies this for us: "This coincidence of emergence and loss, of course, designates the fundamental paradox of the Lacanian objet petit a which emerges as being-lost" (The Plague of Fantasies, p. 15). The idea is objet a is not an actual object we once possessed but, then, lost. The very moment it emerges it does so as a lost object. This is its trick. We never really had a perfect drive satisfaction (jouissance), but we retroactively produce this illusion as soon as restrictions are placed on the jouissance we had at our mother's body (das Ding).

Jouissance could use a whole 'nother essay, but it seems to be roughly pleasure, or maybe more accurately the pleasure principle we saw associated with drives and which implies the whole cycle of alternating need and fulfillment.  Probably the easiest way to understand this paradoxical quality of object a is to think about our everyday reminiscences of pleasurable moments.  Memory is a funny thing, much more creative than we give it credit for.  We don't remember something as we actually experienced it, as if we were watching it on film.  What we live is a sort of recreation of some aspect of that experience.  In our airbrushed memory, the experience is way more fulfilling than it was at the time.  I get older, but it stays the same age, so to speak, and that immortality or immemoriality is what we love about it.  Object a is an image of this lost paradise, a reminder of something that never really existed on its own.

Second, Lacan's idea seems to be that the subject, the whole ego, develops around this longing to recapture something ineffable that never was.  This leads him to describe the subject as defined by its structurally lacking something.  The always missing part of ourselves is object a; this image of a pleasure we lack comes to define us.

Remember, the being of an infant is that of unmediated jouissance or libidinal plenitude. For a baby, to lose this sort of jouissance is to lose its very being. The moment language takes hold and places restrictions on jouissance is the moment when a structural lack is produced within the human being — the lack of immediate jouissance. Now one's being is a sort of non-being. "I am my inability to be." Now there's some-thing that I'm missing, that I lack, that I must have in order to be whole again. There's some "part" of myself that I have been separated from. This some-thing is objet petit a. We could say that objet petit a is the ghost of one's primordial jouissance that emerges through the socialization process. The objet petit a is that little remainder of the excessive jouissance we were once submerged in. As Lacan put it, "The objet a is something from which the subject, in order to constitute itself, has separated itself off as organ. . . . It must, therefore, be an object that is, firstly, separable and, secondly, that has some relation to the lack"

You can probably already see where this is going.  He fixes the cable.   The "organ" in question is the phallus, and we are separated from it by symbolic castration. So the phallus becomes the ur-symbol of how we need some symbolic memory of what never happened in order to experience what happens. The phallus is the head virtual object.  

For jouissance to become virtual is for it to cease to be immediately present. In other words, it is something the subject lacks. In fact, the subject is this very lack. The desiring subject, all the days of its life, will be unknowingly chasing this lost "object" in the form of the virtual jouissance we call objet petit a.

The objet a is both the void, the gap, and whatever object momentarily comes to fill that gap in our symbolic reality. What is important to keep in mind here is that the objet a is not the object itself but the function of masking the lack. 

From the sounds of this essay, Lacan and especially Žižek have written themselves in circles about the "substantial void" at the heart of the subject (its "constitutive lack" or "reified emptiness") and the tragic consequences of the fact that we only want what we can't get.  These psychoanalysts always seem frightfully obsessed with having their Johnson cut off.  Bunch of fucking amateurs.

I don't think that exploring lack and emptiness in any depth is going to help much with Deleuze.  The idea of a memory that functions as a creative force in its own right is clearly relevant and interesting.  But I don't think Deleuze intends to take us into the Hegelian and ultimately Christian territory Lacan's and Žižek's theory seems to lead towards.  Negation negating itself and our experience of ourselves as primordially fallen from joy is not really Deleuze's style.  In fact, though it's been 20 years since I read it, I now suspect that the sustained critique of "lack" that I recall occupying a big chunk of Anti-Oedipus Volume 1 is directed as much at Lacan as at Freud.  I think Deleuze prefers to conceive of the lack or partiality of object a less as a "substantial void" than as a line of flight -- a gap that sets things in motion and opens up the edge of an expanding space, ultimately a positive potential.  In other words, the lack isn't an identity, but a difference -- not a thing but a process.  We always get something different than what we want because we are always in a sense inventing exactly what it is we want.

Which brings us to the third and final takeaway from this essay on Lacan.  

The Lacanian object or objet petit a is not the object of desire. Instead, it is the object-cause of desire, that is, it is the object that causes you to desire the object you actually desire. Imagine being in a theater watching a graceful ballerina perform a spotlit solo. You find yourself completely captivated and memorized by this dancer. However, what in this analogy is the condition of this enchantment? It is the very spotlight in which the ballerina stands out from the darkness. In a sense, we are not even conscious of this light — it is "unconscious". Analogously, it is this "object" that causes the ballerina to attract our attention.

The object-cause of desire is like the proverbial donkey's carrot that functions as an unattainable lure or enticement.

[The essay also gives several other interesting images to illustrate the object-cause of desire.  Check them out if the prima donna doesn't do it for you]

I think this idea of object a as the object-cause of desire helps us understand better why Deleuze calls it both a virtual object and a partial object.  It's virtual because it differs in kind from a real object.  It's not the object itself we want, but the aura of satisfaction that we associate it with and that sets in motion a process which constructs both the "we" and the "what we want".  Like we saw with Klein, object a is not an external object, but an internal one, though now this internal object is understood not as something we have but as something we lack -- namely the direct pleasures the drives have become cut off from as the ego begins to form.  

There are two main senses in which objet a is the cause of desire (it's worth noting that Lacan devoted a whole session to this concept of the cause in Seminar X). First, objet a is literally the cause of all desire, that is, it's emergence is the very reason why human beings start to desire at all. Before the "falling away" of objet a, we are not desiring subjects, but, instead, are little bundles of wild drives and unregulated jouissance. The "breaking off" of objet petit a is precisely what causes desire as such. This is easy enough to understand, since we already know that the Law (name-of-the-father, prohibition) separates us from das Ding (maternal body of jouissance) and, thereby, produces a fundamental lack (objet a) "in" us that causes us to desire.  This constitutive, structural lack is one that all of us as desiring subjects have in common.

Virtual objects are also inherently partial because they are only a part of the real object and only a part of us.  We've already talked about how they are like idealized memories of some experience.  They abstract some trait or aspect of our particular experience.

However, the objet a also comes to cause specific desires. We all have our own particular histories of desire and objet a in its idiosyncratic dimension is the hidden cause at work behind the scenes.

Each of us in our own ways (via fantasy) come to unconsciously associate certain empirical features with that missing "part" of ourselves. If we can just find the right object of desire, then we will finally fill the void. If we can just get ahold of IT (no, not that killer clown), then we will be complete. Of course, this is impossible, but it's the impossibility that makes desiring subjectivity continue to be possible.

Put differently, objet petit a gets linked to certain idealized and libidinally-invested traits. One of the easiest ways to see this mechanism at work is to consider that many men end up marrying women that strikingly resemble their mothers.

Though we've also touched on it, but it's much more difficult to understand how virtual objects are partial "on the inside", so to speak.  They are our own autonomous drives reflected back to us as part of a self.  They no longer appear as self-sufficient forms seeking nothing more than to repeat themselves.  They have gained a "higher" purpose they didn't have to begin with.  Lacan seems to look at this partiality from the perspective of the global ego.  There's a primordial lack of fulfillment for some local egos implied by the ordering and regulation of all those "wild drives".  Deleuze might be trying to looks at the situation from the perspective of the component drives.  Some may indeed be cut off from their goal, from their self, while others are gratified, but all of them shift from being ends in themselves to being a parts of some global ego.  Perhaps this is why he seems to focus on the lack, the negative, or the void, and instead talks more about how the virtual object is missing from its place, no matter where it's at.  But we'll come back more specifically to what use Deleuze makes of Lacan next time.