Changes

The only way for the subject to escape the perpetual cycle of incomplete identification with its residue of difference (that keeps desire alive) is to achieve complete identification, emptying itself out in a full transferal of its content into something other than itself. In other words, the subject would have to undertake the utmost realisation of the logic of predication, not only relating "I" to "that," but emptying "I" into "that" so completely that "I" would cease to signify altogether in an instant of pure subjective negation. If "the objet a is the lining of subjectivity" (Bowie 176-177), then we may think of this radical negation as an instance of the subject turning itself inside out, bringing together "the alpha of human experience" with "the omega of death" (Bowie 165). Insofar as desire is always intersubjective and bound by the law we may conceive of it as a drive towards something universal beyond the accidents of individual differentiation, but which is always haunted by the knowledge (built into the symbolic order itself as the site of the unconscious) that what lies behind those accidents is nothing at all, absence, lack as lack, the end of being in its most Heideggerean conception (Evans 31). To attain the objet a would be to identify with the manque â être that forms the ground of subjectivity, bringing being (as represented in subjectivity) together with the lack of being which prompts the advent of the subject in the first place, eradicating both in a radical negation that leaves behind no residue from which desire can start anew. As part of an elaborate mechanism whereby the psychic system guarantees its own perpetuity, then, the metonymic substitution of object after object for the real object of desire (objet a) functions as a material masking and deferral in full (though unconscious) knowledge that the end of desire is also the end of subjectivity.