REꓷЯUM

I don't mean to scare you, but the hard part is coming up.  We have to figure out what a virtual object is supposed to be.  I'm still pretty confused about this concept.  But I had a preliminary breakthrough today that involved thinking about the (self) image of an object reflected in a mirror.  A reflection still looks a lot like a real object (ie. it's 'objectal'), but actually it is the effect of the subject unknowingly reflecting 'itself', just like Narcissus see 'himself' in the image he contemplates in the water.  The 'scare' quotes here are simply meant to indicate that the self that is reflected doesn't pre-exist the reflection in this case; it's more constructed like a video feedback loop.  So this object is actually a subject, or more precisely, I think we'll find that it's some part of the subject, and that part only as given back to the subject in a reflection.  Since it's not a real object, but the image of an object, Deleuze calls it a virtual object.  In addition, this image gives us a sense of how a virtual object could be paradoxically cleaved, doubled, or split from itself and lacking an identity of its own.  Finally, the metaphor of the mirror image accounts for both the connection between virtual objects and memory (which always seems to pre-exist our present and come from somewhere outside it) and their link to a different type of repetition than we saw in the case of habitus (the round trip process of mirroring means that the image is only given as given back).  This metaphor is just meant to give us an intuitive orientation though.  It's going to take a lot of pixels about Freud, Lacan, Edgar Allen Poe, and Gogol's nose to make it more precise.  Pop some popcorn.