==def ==
OBJETa (see a/so JEW, MASTER-SIGNIFIER)
Oígjet a, one of Lacan's most famous "mathemes or conceptual
neologisms, is first of all that element standing in for the Real within
any symbolic system. It is at once what cannot be accounted for within
this system and yet what produces this system as the attempt to speak
of it. It is in this abstract, nonpathological sense that Žižek describes
objet a as the object-cause of desire: "The fundamental thesis of Lacan
is that this impossible object is nevertheless given to us in a specific
experience, that of the o/7jet petir a, object-cause of desire, which is not
"pathological," which does not reduce itself to an object of need or
demand" (p. 129-30). And, as Žižek goes on to say, the aim of the
analysis of ideology is to bring out the double status of this olijet a. as
both what completes the symbolic circle of authority, acting as the
guarantee or Other of its Other, and what cannot be accounted for
within it, what always appears as excessive within its officially stated
rationale: 'The aim of the "critique of ideology," of the analysis of an
ideological edifice, is to extract this symptomatic kernel which the
official, public ideological text simultaneously disavows and needs for
its undisturbed functioning" (p. 292). This olijet a can take many forms
within ideology: seemingly transgressive enjoyment, racism, paranoia,
the belief in an explanation hidden behind the public one. To this
extent, it functions as the "master-signifier' of the master-signifier -
and Zižek's point, following Lacan, is to reveal that there is no Other
of the Other, that the Other does not possess objet a or the cause of our
desire, but that in a way we do: we are ultimately our own cause. That
is, if on the one hand, "Lacan defines objet a as the fantasmatic "stuff"
of the I, as that which confers on y, on the fissure in the symbolic
order. on the ontological void that we call 'subject," the ontological
consistency of a "person" ", on the other it is what Lacan, in his last
phase at least. referred to as the "subjective destitution" which is
involved in the position of the analyst. of the analyst as occupying the
position of objet petit a' (p. 59).
