Changes

If the neurotic subject does not to forego the Oedipal supposition that there is some Thing that would fully satisfy the desire of the mother, it is because s/he constructs fantasies about the nature of this lost Thing, and how s/he stands towards it. The primary means s/he deploys in this process is what I recounted above, when I noted how the difficulty in knowing the referent of the phallic master signifiers obliges subjects to construct their beliefs concerning it in a 'decentred' manner, through the Others. While the subject accepts that the Real phallic Thing is lost to him/her, that is, in his/her fantasmatic life s/he yet supposes that there are Others who do know what it is that phallic signifiers refer to, and have more direct access to the Real of jousissance. In line with this, Lacan's further argument is indeed that the deepest fantasmatic postulation of subjects is always that the Real Phallic Thing that s/he has been debarred from must be held in reserve by the 'big Other' whose law it is that discernibly structures the mother’s desire.

What follows from this is the position that the manifestations of the unconscious represent small unconscious rebellions of the subject against the loss that s/he takes him/herself to have endured when s/he acceded to socialization. They are all under-girded by the more basic fantasmatic structuration of identity as constituted by the loss endured at castration. This is why Lacan talks of a fundamental fantasy, and argues that it is above all this fundamental fantasy that is at stake in psychoanalysis. Lacan strived to formalize the invariant structure of this 'fundamental fantasy' in the matheme: $ <> a. This matheme indicates that: '$', the ‘barred’ subject which is divided by castration between attraction to and repulsion from the Object of its unconscious desire, is correlative to ('<>') the fantasised lost object. This object, designated in the matheme as 'a', is called by Lacan the ‘object petit a’, or else the object cause of desire. Lacan holds that the subject always stabilizes its position vis-à-vis the Real Thing by constructing a fantasy about how the debarred Thing is held in the big Other, manifesting only in a series of metonymic or partial objects (the gaze or voice of his/her love objects, a hair style, or some other 'little piece of the Real') that can be enjoyed as compensation for its primordial loss of the maternal Thing. Lacan's argument is that the fundamental psychological 'gain’ from the fundamental fantasy is the following. The fundamental fantasy represents what occurred at castration in the terms of a narrative of possession and loss. This fantasm thus consoles the subject by positing that s/he at one point did have the phallic Thing, but that then, at castration, it was taken away from him/her by the Other. What this of course means is that, since the Thing was taken away from the subject, perhaps also It can be regained by him/her. It is this promise, Lacan maintains, that usually structures neurotic human desire. What the fantasy serves to hide from the subject, then, is the possibility that a fully satisfying sexual relationship with the mother, or any metonymic substitute for her, is not only prohibited, but was never possible anyway. As I recounted in Part 1, the Lacanian view, which is informed by observation of infantile behavior, is that the mother-child relationship before castration is not Edenic, but characterized by imaginary transitivity and aggressivity. This is why Lacan quips in Seminar XX that 'there is no such thing as a sexual relationship' and elsewhere that the ‘Woman’, with a capital ‘W’, 'does not exist'. Note then that the deepest logic of castration, according to Lacan, is a profoundly paradoxical one. The 'no!' of the father prohibits something that is impossible. Its very prohibition, however, gives rise in the subject to the fantasmatic supposition that the Thing in question is one that is attainable but only being debarred. Lacan thus asserts that the fundamental fantasy is there to veil from the subject the terminal nature of its loss at castration. This is not simply a speculation, however. It is supported by telling evidences that he adduces. The key point that supports Lacan's position is the stipulation the objet petit is an anamorphotic object. What this means can be seen by looking at even the most well-known exemplar of the Lacanian objet petit a: the 'object gaze'. Contrary to how it is sometimes read, the Lacanian 'gaze' is anything but the intrusive and masterful male gaze on the world. For Lacan, gaze is indeed a "blind spot" in the subject's perception of visible reality, “disturbing its transparent visibility". [Zizek, 1999a: 79] What it bears witness to is the subject's inability to fully frame the objects that appear within his/her field of vision. The classic example of the object-gaze from Lacan's Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis is the floating skull at the feet of Holbein's Ambassadors. What is singular about this 'thing’ is that it can literally only be seen from 'awry', and at the cost that the rest of the picture appears at that moment out of focus. From this point on the canvas, Lacan comments, it is as if the painting regards us. What he means is that the skull reminds us that we, and with us our desires and fantasies, are implicated in how the scene appears. Here then is another meaning to $ <> a: the objet petit a, for Lacan, as something that can only operate its fascination upon individuals who bear a partial perspective upon it, is that object that 're-presents' the subject within the world of objects that it takes itself to be a wholly 'external' perspective upon. If a subject thus happens upon it too directly, it disappears, or else- as in psychosis and the well-known filmic motif of what happens when one encounter one's double- the cost is that one's usual sense of how the rest of the world is must dissipate. What this indicates is that the object petit a, or at least the fascinating effect the object which bears it has upon the subject who is under its thrall, has no 'objective' reality independently of this subject. The logical consequence of this, though, as Lacan stipulates, is that this supposedly 'lost' object can never really have been lost by the subject, since s/he can never have possessed it in the first place. This is why Lacan argues the apparently chimerical position that the objet petit a is by definition an object that has come into being in being lost.