Lacan’s Concept of the Object-Cause of

Desire (objet petit a)

I’m a big fan of Jacques Lacan’s work and I’ve been studying his ideas for years
now. I’ve taken online courses that have centered around Lacanian
psychoanalysis and have engaged in countless conversations about it. I find
that one concept in particular remains incredibly difficult for people to
understand. Of course, the concept is that of the objet petit a (objet a, a,
object a, object-cause of desire, the Lacanian object, etc.). Recently, I’ve had a
few discussions with some philosophy students about Lacan and the question
concerning objet petit a is the main one they were interested in. What follows
is my attempt to flesh out this concept. I’m far from being a Lacan expert, but
I’m going to do my best to make sense of this concept for people who are new
to Lacanian psychoanalysis. I might end up saying some things about objet
petit a that Lacanians would disagree with, but I don’t really care. I’m willing
to go out on an exegetical limb for the sake of clarification. If they can do a
better job of fleshing out the concept in an introductory fashion, then I’d love
to read it.
Lacan’s concept of the objet petit a is deeply inspired by the ideas of other
psychoanalysts such as Sigmund Freud’s “lost object”, Melanie Klein’s “partial
object” and Donald Winnicott’s “transitional object”. The French term objet
petit a can be translated as “object small o”, but Lacanians usually leave it
untranslated due to the fact that “object small o” sounds terrible and is of no
real help in understanding what the Lacanian object actually is. In English,
something like the little other-object or the little object of otherness might be a
tad bit more helpful, but I think it’s best to just go with the French term. In
fact, Lacan himself said that it should be left untranslated, “thus acquiring, as
it were, the status of an algebraic sign” (‘Translator’s note’, Écrits: A Selection,
p. xi). First things first, objet means “object” and petit means “small”.
The a comes from autre, which is the French word for “other”. This is why
the a would be translated as “o”.

Lacan spent a lot of time thinking about various forms of otherness. The
Symbolic order (language, law, custom, etc.) is referred to by him as “the big
Other”. The Real Otherness of the primary caregiver or the Thing (das Ding) is
another type of alterity. When it comes to the Imaginary register with all its
ego identifications and aggressive antagonisms, alter-egos (other people) are
others with a small “o”. And later on in his work, the little a (o) that is objet
petit a is yet another type of otherness. Lacan really started to develop this
concept of otherness around 1962 (during his tenth seminar on anxiety) and it
would occupy a privileged position in his work from then on. This was a big
turning point in his work and it hinges on his new ways of thinking about the
Real and objet petit a (for the later Lacan, the Real is associated with many
things including drive, jouissance, sinthome, unconscious fantasy, objet petit a,
etc.). Let’s explore this little “object” of otherness.

Let’s be very clear: objet petit a is not really an object in the standard sense of
the word. It’s not a physical object that can be weighed, touched, seen, etc. It’s
not like a chair or a tree. To talk like John Locke, it’s not the sort of object that
would possess primary and secondary qualities, that is, it’s not the perceivable
object of classical empiricism. This is why Lacan said, “The a, desire’s support
in the fantasy, isn’t visible in what constitutes for man the image of his desire”
(Seminar X: Anxiety, p. 35). Or to talk like Aristotle, the Lacanian object is not
a substance. However, it does have certain relations to actual objects. In fact,
one could say that it gets “incarnated” in specific objects. Yeah, I know, this all
sounds extremely vague, but it will get clearer as we proceed. Now, physical
objects are little others to us. We are not like rocks, hammers and cups, but the
otherness of objet petit a is more significant than this sort of alterity. This little
“object” of otherness would not exist if human beings did not exist. The objet
petit a only “exists” in the relation between humans and language. Okay, so
what exactly is this “other-object” that’s not really an object? To answer this
question, we must get clear on how it emerges, that is, where it comes from. In
other words, we have to get an idea of how Lacan envisions a young child’s
transformation into a socialized human being.

To begin, objet a is a paradox. Lacan saw a certain paradox at the heart of objet
petit a. He says, “This paradoxical, unique, specified object we call the objet a”
(Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, p. 268).
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). These restrictions retroactively produced what they
forbid. Thus, both Law and objet petit a (result of the Law’s installation in the
child’s mind) have paradoxical origins. The Law creates objet petit a as the
little, concentrated reserve of jouissance leftover from the original jouissance
we had to sacrifice in order to become socialized subjects. The point is that this
little remainder is not something we ever actually had in some kind of pre-
linguistic, pre-oedipal bliss.
For Lacan, a human infant is constantly immersed in drive satisfaction or
jouissance. He identified jouissance with drive satisfaction:
“jouissance appears not purely and simply as the satisfaction of a need but as
the satisfaction of a drive” (Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, p.
209). The French term jouissance is very important for Lacan. Simply put,
jouissance is pleasure-in-pain. For example, eating to the point where it
becomes greatly uncomfortable. It’s the excessive enjoyment that ends up
bringing pain and discomfort. Jouissance destabilizes oneself. Jouissance can
also be thought of as an abundance of intensity or stimulation in the body.
Lacan associates jouissance with repetition compulsion or with those acts we
repeat over and over again, but which also cause all sorts of problems in our
lives. For example, someone who feels compelled to wash their hands a
hundred times a day. In this sense, repetition of the same is precisely what
drive seeks. If drive could speak, it would say something like “More! Again!
More! Again!” (this is why Lacan called his twentieth seminar Encore). This is
why Lacan claims that every drive is a death drive (drive disrupts the
functioning of our social or Symbolic selves). When you think jouissance, also
think drive. Lacan views them as going hand in hand and he opposes them to
desire. Lacanians often say that desire is a defense against drive and
jouissance. As Lacan himself put it, “Desire is a defense, a defense against
going beyond a limit in jouissance” (‘The Subversion of the Subject and the
Dialectic of Desire’, Écrits, p. 699).

Is jouissance not the whole of an infant’s world? All babies do is breastfeed

(oral drive), stare at their primary caregiver’s face or gaze (scopic drive), listen
to the primary caregiver’s voice (invocatory drive) and shit (anal drive). A
baby’s whole being is that of drive satisfaction or jouissance. Early on, none of
this is mediated by language, law, custom, social norms, etc., that is, the baby is
not yet a socialized subject who has to situate and contextualize its pursuits of
enjoyment. Instead, it’s a little bundle of non-mediated, concentrated
jouissance. This is not to romanticize jouissance. Over time, it becomes more
and more unbearable and the child seeks a way to distance itself from it. Think
about a small child’s relation to the body of its primary caregiver (usually its
mother’s body). The child often clings to this body, but, at other times, it does
anything it can to be freed from it. Little kids often start to throw a fit when
their moms won’t put them down.

Don’t you know that it’s not longing for the maternal breast that provokes
anxiety, but its imminence? What provokes anxiety is everything that
announces to us, that lets us glimpse, that we’re going to be taken back
onto the lap. It is not, contrary to what is said, the rhythm of the mother’s
alternating presence and absence. The proof of this is that the infant revels
in repeating this game of presence and absence. The security of presence is
the possibility of absence. The most anguishing thing for the infant is
precisely the moment when the relationship upon which he’s established
himself, of the lack that turns him into desire, is disrupted, and this
relationship is most disrupted when there’s no possibility of any lack, when
the mother is on his back all the while, and especially when she’s wiping his
backside.
(Seminar X: Anxiety, p. 53)

Nevertheless, a young child’s whole world is centered around immediate access

to jouissance and this is precisely what socialization (what Lacan
called symbolic castration) seeks to correct. In Lacan’s words, “Castration
means that jouissance has to be refused in order to be attained on the inverse
scale of the Law of desire” (‘The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of
Desire’, Écrits, p. 700).

There comes a point in a child’s development when the standards and practices
of society come to put restrictions on jouissance. In the traditional scenario, it’s
the father that finally separates the child from the mother (primary caregiver)
by laying down the Law. The father steps in and says, “No!”, that is, he puts
limitations on the child’s drive satisfaction (Lacan calls this No! the “name-of-
the-father”). The child must now seek enjoyment in ways that are socially
appropriate. The child must accept that it has lost the immediacy of the
maternal Thing (body of jouissance) and must seek out substitute objects of
desire from now on. This is why Lacan associates desire with language — both
of them involve metonymy, deferral, displacement, mediation, relationality,
contextualization, rules, etc. In fact, for Lacan, there is no subject proper until
one accepts the no-of-the-father and enters into the Symbolic order (language).
Lacan said, “The subject is manufactured by a certain number of articulations
that have taken place, and falls from the signifying chain in the way that ripe
fruit falls. As soon as he comes into the world he falls from a signifying chain”
(My Teaching, p. 44). This is why the Lacanian psychoanalyst Bruce Fink titled
his famous book The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance.
For Lacan, the human subject is a particular relation between language and
jouissance and it is out of this relation that objet petit a emerges or falls away.

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” (Seminar XI: The Four
Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, p. 101). In this context, I take it
that objet petit a is the “organ” and the subject is the “body”. The Lacanian
object is an “organ” insofar as it is that lost, sacrificed jouissance (excess or
remainder) cut away from the body by language (name-of-the-father, the
signifier, Law, etc.). Jouissance is the price of admission into the Symbolic
order.
For the sake of clarification, we must understand that the world of the infant is
not a euphoric bliss. Being submerged in jouissance is not a perfect state of
being. No! At times, the child desperately seeks to escape it. And how does the
kid get away from this sphere of jouissance? By distancing itself from the
desire of the mother. The baby’s jouissance is fundamentally connected to the
mother’s body. This means that she must desire the baby in order to prolong
this symbiotic unity. On the one hand, the mother’s desire can be deeply
comforting, but on the other, it can become a sort of tractor beam one struggles
to escape from. Lacan sums up this situation in the following way:

The mother’s role is the mother’s desire. That’s fundamental. The mother’s
desire is not something that is bearable just like that, that you are
indifferent to. It will always wreak havoc. A huge crocodile in whose jaws
you are — that’s the mother. One never knows what might suddenly come
over her and make her shut her trap. That’s what the mother’s desire is.
Thus, I have tried to explain that there was something that was reassuring.
I am telling you simple things, I am improvising, I have to say. There is a
roller, made out of stone of course, which is there, potentially, at the level
of her trap, and it acts as a restraint, as a wedge. It’s what is called the
phallus. It’s the roller that shelters you, if, all of a sudden, she closes it.
(Seminar XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, p. 112)

So what exactly is he saying? I don’t want to go into an examination of the

phallus, but suffice it to say, the phallus is the lack the child perceives in its
mother, that is, it recognizes the mother’s desire is lacking something. For
Lacan, the Oedipus complex is structured around the phallus and his point is
that the Oedipus complex or socialization enables a child to free itself from the
mother’s desire, which is a good thing. He paints the mother (primary
caregiver) as a big crocodile in whose mouth (suffocating presence) the child is
located. If the kid tries to escape, the mother slams her jaws shut. Lacan
envisions the phallus as a rolling pin that the child can place at the back of her
jaws and thereby keep her mouth pried open long enough to escape from it.
But here’s the thing: even though one’s early childhood is far from some
libidinal utopia, it retroactively seems to have been one. There is a certain
simplicity that is lost with taking on language, law, custom, and the like. It’s as
if the unconscious comes to idealize the past of one’s immersion in jouissance.

There’s great ambivalence here. The child eventually yearns to be freed from
the mother’s body (das Ding) and the jouissance that comes with it, but once it
has become the lost object it forever haunts the subject as that missing “part”
of itself, that is, it becomes objet petit a. As Žižek explains, “das Ding is the
absolute void, the lethal abyss which swallows the subject; while objet petit
a designates that which remains of the Thing after it has undergone the
process of symbolization” (The Plague of Fantasies, p. 105). Therefore, we
could say that objet petit a is the virtual trace of the maternal Thing (body of
jouissance). The objet petit a is the becoming-virtual of jouissance. Gilles
Deleuze refers to objet a as a “virtual object”: “These partial or virtual objects
are encountered under various names, such as Melanie Klein’s good and bad
object, the ‘transitional’ object, the fetish-object, and above all Lacan’s
object a” (Difference and Repetition, p. 101). By “virtual”, in this context, we
mean something like potential. Think about how a particular crack pattern is
there in a window before it gets actualized. Before the window is actually
shattered, the crack pattern was already there as a virtual potentiality. 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. Sean
Homer put it quite nicely:

The objet a is not, therefore, an object we have lost, because then we would
be able to find it and satisfy our desire. It is rather the constant sense we
have, as subjects, that something is lacking or missing from our lives. We
are always searching for fulfilment, for knowledge, for possessions, for
love, and whenever we achieve these goals there is always something more
we desire; we cannot quite pinpoint it but we know that it is there. This is
one sense in which we can understand the Lacanian real as the void or
abyss at the core of our being that we constantly try to fill out. 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.
(Jacques Lacan, pp. 87–88)
A lot has been said about objet petit a so far and we’re just getting started. Let’s
take a second and summarize what we’ve established before moving on. The
most important thing to keep in mind is that objet a is not an actual object,
but, rather, is a constitutive lack. It’s the lack that produces the desiring
subject caught up in the play of signifiers (the differential and mediated
structure of language), that is, it is the lost “object” that causes you to desire in
the first place. The objet petit a is the positional void where one’s jouissance
used to be. This is why Žižek says, “The self-referential movement of the
signifier is not that of a closed circle, but an elliptical movement around a
certain void. And the objet petit a, as the original lost object which in a way
coincides with its own loss, is precisely the embodiment of this void” (The
Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 178). Strictly speaking, objet petit a is not some
positive reality, but, instead, is a void, an empty spot, a position of lack. Yet it’s
a void that, for the subject, is like a thing or a missing part that has its own
substantial reality. As paradoxical as it sounds, objet petit a is a positive
negativity, a “substantial” void, a reified emptiness. The objet petit a is the void
or lack you unconsciously pursue in the hope that the attainment of this
missing part of yourself will give you an ontological completeness you once
“enjoyed” as an infant.

Lyrics from Queen’s song ‘Hammer to Fall’ sum up objet a: “Every night and
every day, a little piece of you is falling away”. However, this “little piece of
you” is not something you can name or point out. As far as your first-person,
phenomenological experience goes, objet petit a is never directly perceived as
the missing part of yourself, since it’s really a void. There’s a quote I’ve often
seen attributed to André Breton that expresses this truth: “All my life, my heart
has yearned for a thing I cannot name”. Objet a eludes the capture of the
subject. Lacan says, “The base of the function of desire is, in a style and in a
form that have to be specified each and every time, the pivotal
object a insomuch as it stands, not only separated, but always eluded,
somewhere other than where it sustains desire, and yet in a profound relation
to it” (Seminar X: Anxiety, p. 252). In light of these words, we are ready to
understand why objet petit a is the object-cause of desire (the “object” that
causes desire) and not the object of desire.

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. In other words, in this analogy, the object-cause of desire
(objet petit a) is the spotlight and the object of desire is the ballerina.

In his tenth seminar, Lacan discussed the object-cause of desire in terms of

Husserlian intentionality. Desire’s intentionality is always fixed on the object of
desire, not the object-cause of desire, which means that the object-cause is off
in the background or is at work behind the scenes. In other words, objet petit
a eludes phenomenological experience. Lacan said, “To set our target, I shall
say that the object a — which is not to be situated in anything analogous to the
intentionality of a noesis, which is not the intentionality of desire — is to be
conceived of as the cause of desire. To take up my earlier metaphor, the object
lies behind desire” (Seminar X: Anxiety, p. 101). Now, perhaps he would reject
this idea, but I think we could argue that there are always two separate beams
of intentionality when it comes to desire. The beam of the unconscious focused
on objet a or the object-cause of desire and the beam of conscious experience
focused on the object of desire. Think about it. There has to be some awareness
of objet petit a in order for it to cause us to consciously desire specific objects.
The object-cause of desire is like the proverbial donkey’s carrot that functions
as an unattainable lure or enticement.

As we’ll shortly see, objet a does come to have idiosyncratic determinations for

each desiring subject, which is why we all desire different things and have our
own personal histories of desire. The objet a is incredibly mysterious and
elusive. It’s not the object of my desire, but, rather, the “object” that causes me
to desire the object of my desire. Thus, the objet a is behind desire. It’s “off
stage” in relation to fantasmatic desire. It seems to be completely
indeterminable, but maybe it’s not entirely. Why and how does it cause me to
desire specific things? If we can, in theory, desire anything, then what is the
mechanism of a particular desire? What x caused me to desire y? 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. 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.

Let’s explore the specificity of the “object” that causes particular desires.
The objet petit a is essentially a lack, a void or an empty spot, but throughout
the course of one’s life, this void comes to be associated with specific features,
traits, qualities, determinations, etc. This is where its specificity and
uniqueness come from. Žižek is very helpful here:

In what precise sense is objet petit a the object-cause of desire? The objet

petit a is not what we desire, what we are after, but, rather, that which sets
our desire in motion, in the sense of the formal frame which confers
consistency on our desire: desire is, of course, metonymical; it shifts from
one object to another, through all these displacements, however, desire
nonetheless retains a minimum of formal consistency, a set of phantasmic
features which, when they are encountered in a positive object, make us
desire this object — objet petit a as the cause of desire is nothing other than
this formal frame of consistency.
(The Plague of Fantasies, p. 53)

Pay close attention to what Žižek just said. He identifies objet a with a “set of
phantasmatic features” and this is precisely where its particularity is found.
This set of phantasmatic features or desire’s “formal frame of consistency” is
what bestows objet a with determinacy, i.e., provides the constitutive lack with
positive qualities. 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 and. 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. The traits of the mother (das Ding) get laid down in the mind as the
most basic coordinates of jouissance. In Lacan’s words, “The world of our
experience, the Freudian world, assumes that it is this object, das Ding, as the
absolute Other of the subject, that one is supposed to find again. It is to be
found at the most as something missed. One doesn’t find it, but only its
pleasurable associations” (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, p. 52). These specific
qualities or traces of the maternal Thing form fundamental “pleasurable
associations” with jouissance or drive satisfaction. As these impressions get
imprinted and stored in the psyche, they produce the most fundamental
configuration of the child’s libidinal economy. These features are the primary
markers of jouissance, that is, they become master signifiers. They don’t have
any signifieds (meanings) proper, but simply mark points in one’s environment
(the maternal body) that are reserves of jouissance, e.g., breast, gaze, voice.
This line of thought comes from Freud’s work, so we must take a quick detour
through some of his ideas to better understand it. In a short paper called ‘A
Note upon the “Mystic Writing Pad”’, Freud provides us with an image of how
these markers of jouissance (master signifiers) get established. Freud
characterized the unconscious as timeless, but in what sense? According to
him, all of the various aspects of one’s life history such as the different
memory-traces or signifier-like inscriptions left behind by perceptual
experiences are permanently and eternally stored in the unconscious. The
following is from an article published by The Atlantic and authored by Rebecca
J. Rosen called “The ‘Mystic Writing Pad’: What Would Freud Make of Today’s
Tablets?” (Jan 25, 2013):

In 1925, Sigmund Freud published an essay, “A Note upon the ‘Mystic

Writing Pad.’” In it, he considered a recent market arrival, the Mystic
Writing Pad (of course), as a sort of metaphor for the human mind. At
base, the Mystic Pad was “a slab of dark brown resin or wax” on which sat
a translucent sheet of wax paper covered by a transparent sheet of
celluloid. When a person set a stylus to it, the dark resin would become
visible through the wax paper at the points of contact, and thus one could
write. When the record was no longer desired, erase it by simply lifting the
wax paper off of the slab. The celluloid served merely to protect the wax
paper from ripping as the stylus ran across it. This may not sound like
much of a metaphor for the human mind, but one unintended consequence
of this procedure struck Freud as quite significant: “The permanent trace of
what was written is retained upon the wax slab itself and is legible in
suitable lights.” The Mystic Pad had a particular kind of memory. “I do not
think it is too far-fetched,” Freud wrote, “to compare the celluloid and
waxed paper cover with the system of Pcpt.-Cs. [Perception-
Consciousness] and its protective shield, the wax slab with the unconscious
behind them, and the appearance and disappearance of the writing with
the flickering-up and passing-away of consciousness in the process of
perception.
In other words, traces of all our experiences get retained in the unconscious,
which is basically a super-memory system. Consciousness forgets all kinds of
things, but the unconscious remembers it all. Once an perceptual impression
gets registered and inscribed in the indelible recording surface that is the
unconscious, it can never be completely erased from it. The unconscious
eternalizes the past. And so, for our purposes, we can say that the unconscious
never forgets qualitative experiences of jouissance. As the young child forms
associations between jouissance and certain empirical traits, it involutionary
establishes the basic coordinates of its libidinal economy. Eye color, tone of
voice, hair color, facial gestures, interpersonal dynamics, dispositions, etc., can
all become fundamentally linked to jouissance and the memory-traces of these
traits comprise a set of master signifiers, jouissance indicators or phantasmatic
features. This is the determinate content of objet petit a that produces specific
desires.
Lacan articulated the relation between the body, jouissance and signifiers in
the following way: “I will say that the signifier is situated at the level of
enjoying substance (substance jouissante). . . . The signifier is the cause of
jouissance. Without the signifier, how could we even approach that part of the
body? Without the signifier, how could we center that something that is the
material cause of jouissance? However fuzzy or confused it may be, it is a part
of the body that is signified in this contribution (apport) . . . the signifier is
what brings jouissance to a halt.” (Seminar XX: Encore, p. 24). So Lacan
claims that the signifier is the cause of jouissance, but, then, immediately adds
that the signifier is that which brings jouissance to a stop. How are we to make
sense of these two seemingly incompatible statements? By distinguishing
between two types of jouissance. The signifier (language) puts an end to the
unmediated jouissance experienced by the infant, but also produces a second-
order, mediated jouissance through coming to represent it. The “set of
phantasmatic features” Žižek described are the causes of the virtual jouissance
we unknowingly pursue as desiring subjects. The marker of unmediated
jouissance is not itself unmediated jouissance but comes to get libidinally
invested or associated with it. The signifier takes us from unmediated
jouissance to mediated jouissance. The Signifier giveth and the Signifier
taketh away. The map of jouissance is not the original territory of jouissance,
but the map itself becomes its own territory. But, of course, mediated
jouissance, mapped jouissance, socially approved jouissance, is never quite
the Real Thing forever lost.

This leads us to Lacan’s concept of the pure materiality of the signifier. The

idea is that memory-traces of past experiences of bodily jouissance are
fundamentally related to our bodies, sense organs, sensations, etc. These
memory-traces or master signifiers are material owing to the fact that they are
the traces of the sensations of jouissance that were actually perceived by the
body and inscribed on our “mystic writing pad” (unconscious memory-system).
The materiality of the signifier stems from the materiality of our senses and the
sensations they have perceived. These master signifiers, therefore, have far
more to do with bodily sensations of jouissance than they do with any cognitive
content (concepts, signifieds, meanings).

To talk like Charles Sanders Pierce, these signifiers are more like indices and
icons of jouissance than they are symbols of it or of anything else. They are
indexical insofar as they point towards jouissance and they are iconic because
they resemble (are similar to) former experiences of jouissance. The moment
when the master signifier (S1) has been thoroughly inscribed in the young
child’s mental apparatus is also the moment wherein the split between the
desiring subject ($) and object petit a (a) occurs. Lacan said, “it is at the very
instant at which S1 intervenes . . . this $, which I have called the subject as
divided, emerges. . . . Finally, we have always stressed that something defined
as a loss emerges from this trajectory. This is what the letter to be read as
object a designates” (Seminar XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, p. 15).
In becoming the representation, the marker, the stand-in, for original,
unmediated jouissance, the master signifier (S1) forces the virtual “object” (a)
to slip out of the subject, thus, producing the barred, desiring or divided
subject ($). The spilt subject and objet petit a are the results of the initial
inscription of the master signifier(s). We can formulate this Lacanian insight in
the following way: S1 → $/a.

Another way to put all this is to say that objet petit a is the “object” (void with
specific determinations added to it) around which your history of desire turns.
It is the secret cause at the empty center of your personal narrative. It is that
which organizes the plot of your life story without your knowing so. As far as
phenomenological consciousness goes, it couldn’t care less about objet a.
However, all of our conscious activity is set in motion by this inconspicuous
bait, this evasive motivator, that remains tucked away in the background of
desire’s story. This is why Žižek likens objet a to the Hitchcockian plot device
known us the MacGuffin as well as to Iraq’s alleged “weapons of mass
destruction”.
To mention the final example: the famous MacGuffin, the Hitchcockian
object, the pure pretext whose sole role is to set the story in motion but
which is in itself ‘nothing at all’ — the only significance of the MacGuffin
lies in the fact that it has some significance for the characters — that it
must seem to be of vital importance to them. The original anecdote is well
known: two men are sitting in a train; one of them asks: ‘What’s that
package up there in the luggage rack?’ ‘Oh, that’s a MacGuffin.’ ‘What’s a
MacGuffin?’ ‘Well, it’s an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish
Highlands.’ ‘But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands.’ ‘Well, then,
that’s not a MacGuffin.’ There is another version which is much more to the
point: it is the same as the other, with the exception of the last answer:
‘Well, you see how efficient it is!’ — that’s a MacGuffin, a pure nothing
which is none the less efficient. Needless to add, the MacGuffin is the purest
case of what Lacan calls objet petit a: a pure void which functions as the
object cause of desire. That would be, then, the precise definition of the real
object: a cause which in itself does not exist — which is present only in a
series of effects, but always in a distorted, displaced way.
(The Sublime Object of Ideology, pp. 183–4)

The notorious Iraqi ‘weapons of mass destruction’ offer another example of

the objet petit a: they are an elusive entity, never empirically specified, a
kind of Hitchcockian MacGuffin, expected to be hidden in the most
disparate and improbable places, from the (rather logical) desert to the
(slightly irrational) cellars of presidential palaces (so that when the palace
is bombed, they may poison Saddam and his entire entourage); allegedly
present in large quantities, yet magically moved around all the time by
workers; and the more they are destroyed, the more all-present and all-
powerful they are in their threat, as if the removal of the greater part of
them magically heightens the destructive power of the remainder — as
such, by definition they can never be found, and are therefore all the more
dangerous . . .
(The Fragile Absolute, p. 21)
Let’s make all of this even clearer. In good Žižekian fashion, we can use a
couple examples from popular films to illustrate these tricky concepts. First,
we find an analogy for the desiring subject’s relation to objet petit a in the Sci-
Fi classic Terminator 2: Judgment Day. As the cyborg goes about searching
for John Conner (object of desire), he is constantly scanning the faces of all the
people in his surrounding environment for those specific features (object-cause
of desire) that would identify John for him. This analogy is weak if we don’t
make one important clarification. The Terminator is performing this scanning
process at a conscious level, whereas the desiring subject does it on an
unconscious one. Nevertheless, it’s like my unconscious is constantly scanning
the objects I encounter for those libidinally invested traits I unknowingly
associate with my fantasies of becoming-whole again, that is, of regaining that
lost “part” of myself (objet petit a).

We find an even better example of the object-cause of desire in Paul Thomas

Anderson’s Boogie Nights. It’s almost as if this scene was purposely shot just to
express the workings of objet petit a. The sequence I have in mind is the one in
which Philip Seymour Hoffman sees Mark Wahlberg for the very first time (the
former is strongly attracted to the latter). The sequence is a panning shot of a
pool party that’s being thrown at Burt Reynolds’ house. As Hoffman turns his
head, he takes in the whole party for the sake of gaining a basic orientation
with the festive environment, but something unique happens the moment he
sets his eyes on Wahlberg. Suddenly, the rest of the party fades to darkness
while Wahlberg remains the only person visible in the “spotlight” of Hoffman’s
perception (desire). This single shot perfectly captures objet petit a. Why? The
surrounding darkness represents objet petit a as well as all of the
imperceptible markers of jouissance (phantasmatic features, libidinal
attractors, master signifiers) stored within the unconscious. The objet a and
the specific traits linked to it are not present in Hoffman’s conscious
experience of Wahlberg, in his perception of the object of his desire, but they
are what cause Wahlberg to be the object his desire becomes fixated on. For
Hoffman, Wahlberg has a kind of sublime presence that foregrounds itself, but,
in reality, it is the dark (unconscious) background that causes him to stand out
to Hoffman’s conscious desire. Now, in this example from Boogie Nights, we
don’t know what specifics traits cause Hoffman to desire Wahlberg, but we do
get a vivid picture of how objet a mechanistically causes a specific object
(person) to become the object of desire. We see how one object among many
becomes positionally transfigured into the object of pure splendor.

This brings us to a key aspect of objet petit a . This virtual “object” is the je ne
sais quoi or the “I don’t know what” that makes a certain object or person
become unexplainably special, that is, objet a is the x-factor or the it-factor, the
indefinable quality or elusive detail that makes something distinctive, sublime
or attractive. You know there’s something special about the person, but you
never can quite put your finger on what exactly it is about them that does so.
The objet a is the hidden treasure or agalma (a term Lacan borrowed from
Plato’s Symposium) that turns an ordinary thing into a radiant prize. This can
work in different ways. Sometimes, the other person is positioned as objet
a (agalma), but at other times, you are in this position so as to imagine
yourself as deserving of the other person’s desire. Žižek writes, “In late Lacan,
on the contrary, the focus shifts to the object that the subject itself ‘is’, to
the agalma, secret treasure, which guarantees a minimum of phantasmic
consistency to the subject’s being. That is to say: objet petit a, as the object of
fantasy, is that ‘something in me more than myself on account of which I
perceive myself as ‘worthy of the Other’s desire’” (The Plague of Fantasies, p.
9).

However, this whole process can quickly take a turn for the worse. There’s
actually something very violent and dehumanizing when it comes to the
workings of desire, sexuality and objet petit a. Lacan knew this all too well, “I
love you, but, because inexplicably I love in you something more than you —
the objet petit a — I mutilate you.” (Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental
Concepts of Psychoanalysis, p. 268). His point is that you are merely using the
other person as a means to actually get your hands on your objet petit a (as
we’ll see, this can never really happen). In other words, your desire for the
Other is just a go-between in the relation between you ($) and that lost “part”
of yourself (a). Desire never cares for the Other as an actual person, but,
instead, is only interested in treating them as a sexual prop. Now, what Lacan
means here by “love” is sexual desire or erotic attraction, but he came to make
a famous distinction between desire and love. Both Žižek and Badiou can help
us to understand Lacan’s later distinction.

For Badiou, like the later Lacan, desire and love are opposed. However, love
does involve desire. Desire relates to the body with its partial objects
(Lacanian objets petit a), that is, desire is invested in certain physical features
that it finds sexually attractive (the traits desire seeks out vary from person to
person or from fantasy-structure to fantasy-structure). Love, on the other
hand, is geared towards the totality of the being of the Other, i.e., the
beloved. Desire aims at parts — love aims at the whole. Badiou borrows this
distinction between desire and love from the Lacan of the twentieth seminar.
There, Lacan says, “For it is love that approaches being as such in the
encounter” (Seminar XX: Encore, p. 145). Again, this means that love loves the
whole person, the person in their “being”, in the fullness of their pure
singularity and Otherness, in their thisness or haecceity. Love loves that about
another person which is theirs alone while desire fixates on specific traits
(objet a) that are shared by many people. Badiou puts it like this: “Lacan also
thinks . . . that love reaches out towards the ontological. While desire focuses
on the other, always in a somewhat fetishist manner, on particular objects, like
breasts, buttocks and cock. . . . love focuses on the very being of the other, on
the other as it has erupted, fully armed with its being, into my life thus
disrupted and re-fashioned” (In Praise of Love, p. 21).

Lacan famously said, “there’s no such thing as a sexual relationship” (Seminar

XX: Encore, p. 12). What he meant is that sexuality never involves two people
establishing a compatible, complimentary and mutually satisfying oneness.
Sexuality (desire) is a lot of things, but a yin-yang it is not. In fact, Lacan goes
on to argue that love is what attempts to make up for the lack of a sexual
relationship. “What makes up for the sexual relationship is, quite precisely,
love” (Seminar XX: Encore, p. 45). However, desire, sexuality, bodily pleasure,
etc., are key elements of love, but, on their own, they are something quite
different. As Žižek likes to say, “Sex without love is just masturbation with a
partner”. Badiou describes all this in the following way:

Jacques Lacan reminds us, that in sex, each individual is to a large extent
on their own, if I can put it that way. Naturally, the other’s body has to be
mediated, but at the end of the day, the pleasure will be always your
pleasure. Sex separates, doesn’t unite. The fact you are naked and pressing
against the other is an image, an imaginary representation. What is real is
that pleasure takes you a long way away, very far from the other. What is
real is narcissistic, what binds is imaginary. So there is no such thing as a
sexual relationship, concludes Lacan. His proposition shocked people since
at the time everybody was talking about nothing else but “sexual
relationships”. If there is no sexual relationship in sexuality, love is what
fills the absence of a sexual relationship.
Lacan doesn’t say that love is a disguise for sexual relationships; he says
that sexual relationships don’t exist, that love is what comes to replace that
non-relationship. That’s much more interesting. This idea leads him to say
that in love the other tries to approach “the being of the other”. In love the
individual goes beyond himself, beyond the narcissistic. In sex, you are
really in a relationship with yourself via the mediation of the other. The
other helps you to discover the reality of pleasure. In love, on the contrary
the mediation of the other is enough in itself. Such is the nature of the
amorous encounter: you go to take on the other, to make him or her exist
with you, as he or she is. It is a much more profound conception of love
than the entirely banal view that love is no more than an imaginary
canvas painted over the reality of sex.
(In Praise of Love, pp. 18–9)

Like the later Lacan and Badiou, Žižek leaves open the possibility of true love
— love that fully embraces the Other despite the aspects which do not conform
to the coordinates of desire and fantasy. However, of course, true love is quite
rare. Most of the time we merely mutilate, cut and edit the Other for the sole
purpose of creating a prop on which we can project our fantasies centered
around objet a. “Love” (desire, sexuality) reduces the Other to the status of a
sex doll. This is why people fear the premature “I love you”. It fails to allow the
beloved to gain enough temporal support for the fantasy that posits that the
lover loves you for the fullness of your being and not merely because you
happen to possess certain traits that easily and isomorphically align to those of
the lover’s objet petit a (colloquially speaking, the lover’s type). This is why I
like the example of the sex doll — it is a generic canvass on which gets
projected a fundamental fantasy. The reason that most people are disgusted by
the thought of having sex with a doll is because it gets too close to the Real,
that is, it mirrors a terrible (unconscious) truth — that “love” turns actual
people into sex objects. Again, this is why the premature “I love you” shatters
the fantasy. It discloses that what the other “loves” is not you but, rather, that
“object” inside you that is more than you, that is, objet petit a.

The objet petit a is that sublime “object” inside of an ordinary object that
makes the ordinary one become sublime. But this requires that all of those
imperfections in the ordinary object (another person) must be bracketed
out,”cut off” or remain out of sight. This is desire’s violence — the mutilation of
the Other. If these imperfections come to overshadow the traits desire finds
enticing, then desire simply abandons this object and moves on to another one
that more fully embodies objet a. However, when it comes to desire, there’s is a
way in which things can go wrong with objet a itself. This is the excremental
aspect of objet a. In Lacan’s words, “I give myself to you . . . but this gift of my
person . . . is changed inexplicably into a gift of shit.” (Seminar XI: The Four
Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, p. 268).

How does objet a go transform from the sublime object into a piece of shit, a
waste product? The reason why an object (person) can suddenly go from
sublime to excremental is because it can never really fill in the void that is the
absence of the original object or Thing (das Ding, maternal body of
jouissance). Every substitute, no matter how sublime it may seem, is just that
— a substitute. Žižek writes,”Is not every element that claims the right to
occupy the sacred place of the Thing by definition an excremental object, a
piece of trash that can never be ‘up to its task’? This identity of opposite
determinations (the elusive sublime object and/or excremental trash) — with
the ever-present threat that the one will shift into the other, that the sublime
Grail will reveal itself to be nothing but a piece of shit — is inscribed in the very
kernel of the Lacanian objet petit a” (The Fragile Absolute, p. 23).

In a lengthy passage, Žižek draws a multifaceted analogy between objet petit

a and Coca-Cola. Since this sheds lots of light on the subject’s relation to objet
a, it’s worth reading in its entirety. We will also use these insights to better
understand how objet a can shift from sublime object to excremental
remainder.

What is crucial here from the psychoanalytic perspective is the link

between the capitalist dynamics of surplus-value and the libidinal
dynamics of surplus-enjoyment. Let us elaborate this point apropos of
Coca-Cola as the ultimate capitalist merchandise and, as such, as surplus-
enjoyment personified. It is no surprise that Coke was first introduced as a
medicine — its strange taste does not seem to provide any particular
satisfaction; it is not directly pleasing and endearing; however, it is
precisely as such, as transcending any immediate use-value (unlike water,
beer or wine, which definitely do quench our thirst or produce the desired
effect of satisfied calm), that Coke functions as the direct embodiment of
‘it’: of the pure surplus of enjoyment over standard satisfactions, of the
mysterious and elusive X we are all after in our compulsive consumption
of merchandise.
The unexpected result of this feature is not that, since Coke does not satisfy
any concrete need, we drink it only as a supplement, after some other
drink has satisfied our substantial need — rather, it is this very superfluous
character that makes our thirst for Coke all the more insatiable: as
Jacques-Alain Miller put it so succinctly, Coke has the paradoxical
property that the more you drink the thirstier you get, the greater your
need to drink more — with that strange, bittersweet taste, our thirst is
never effectively quenched. So, when, some years ago, the advertising
slogan for Coke was ‘Coke is it!’, we should note its thorough ambiguity:
‘that’s it’ precisely in so far as that’s never actually it, precisely in so far as
every satisfaction opens up a gap of ‘I want more!’ The paradox, therefore,
is that Coke is not an ordinary commodity whereby its use-value is
transubstantiated into an expression of (or supplemented with) the auratic
dimension of pure (exchange) Value, but a commodity whose very peculiar
use-value is itself already a direct embodiment of the supra-sensible aura
of the ineffable spiritual surplus, a commodity whose very material
properties are already those of a commodity. This is brought to its
conclusion in the case of caffeine-free diet Coke — why? We drink Coke —
or any drink — for two reasons: for its thirst-quenching or nutritional
value, and for its taste. In the case of caffeine-free diet Coke, nutritional
value is suspended and the caffeine, as the key ingredient of its taste, is
also taken away — all that remains is a pure semblance of, an artificial
promise of a substance which never materialized. Is it not true in this
sense, in the case of caffeine-free diet Coke, we almost literally ‘drink
nothing in the guise of something?
What we are implicitly referring to here is, of course, Nietzsche’s classic
opposition between ‘wanting nothing’ (in the sense of ‘I don’t want
anything’) and the nihilistic stance of actively wanting Nothingness itself;
following Nietzsche’s path, Lacan emphasized how in anorexia, the subject
does not simply ‘eat nothing’ — rather, she or he actively wants to eat the
Nothingness (the Void) that is itself the ultimate object-cause of desire.
(The same goes for Ernst Kris’s famous patient who felt guilty of theft,
although he did not actually steal anything: what he did steal, again, was
the Nothingness itself.) So along the same lines, in the case of caffeine-free
diet Coke, we drink the Nothingness itself, the pure semblance of a
property that is in effect an envelope of a void.
This example brings home the inherent link between three notions: that of
Marxist surplus-value, that of the Lacanian objet petit a as surplus-
enjoyment (the concept that Lacan elaborated with direct reference to
Marxian surplus-value), and the paradox of the superego, perceived long
ago by Freud: the more Coke you drink, the thirster you are; the more
profit you make, the more you want: the more you obey the superego
command, the guiltier you are — in all three cases, the logic of balanced
exchange is disturbed in favour of an excessive logic of ‘the more you give
(the more you repay your debts), the more you owe’ (or ‘the more you have
what you long for, the more you lack, the greater your craving’; or — the
communist version — ‘the more you buy, the more you have to spend’):
that is to say, of the paradox which is the very opposite of the paradox of
love where, as Juliet put it in her immortal words to Romeo, ‘the more I
give, the more I have’. The key to this disturbance, of course, is the surplus-
enjoyment, the objet petit a, which exists (or, rather, persists) in a kind of
curved space — the nearer you get to it, the more it eludes your grasp (or
the more you possess it, the greater the lack).
(The Fragile Absolute, pp. 19–21)
To state the obvious, Žižek just said many important things about objet petit
a via its likeness to Coke. The objet a is (1) the it that is never really it, (2) that
which keeps us consuming commodities, (3) surplus-enjoyment, (4) useless
supplement, (5) paradox, (6) pure semblance or artificial promise, (7)
Nothingness or Void. To summarize, objet a causes our desire but it also
increases and intensifies it due to the fact that it is unattainable. The more we
try to fill the void “in” ourselves, the more we end up desiring, since we are
pursuing an impossible “object”, that is, a void or nothingness. Picture a car
stuck in the mud: the more it spins its wheels, the more it gets stuck in the
mud. The more you try to get traction (or satisfaction), the less you have it.
This is why Žižek compares objet a to Coca-Cola (“the more Coke you drink,
the thirstier you are”). This is also what gives objet petit a its own unique type
of jouissance called surplus jouissance. This is not the original jouissance
enjoyed at the maternal body (the Thing), but a second-order jouissance
produced by our failed attempts (via desire) to regain the original object.
Surplus jouissance is the excess jouissance we get from chasing objet a but
never actually catching it. Likewise, we get enjoyment from drinking Coke
precisely because it does not satisfy us. Both objet a and Coke are the it that’s
not really it. We see this mechanism at work in consumerism with its false
promise that claims some commodity will finally come along and complete us
by bestowing upon us the Great Satisfaction or Happiness with a capital “H”.
As the Narrator in Fight Club says, “When you buy furniture, you tell yourself,
that’s it. That’s the last sofa I’ll need. Whatever else happens, got that sofa
problem handled. I had it all. I had a stereo that was very decent. A wardrobe
that was getting very respectable. I was close to being complete.”

Let us briefly return to the idea that objet a can quickly shift from sublime
object to excremental trash by connecting this transition to Coke. While Žižek
didn’t explicitly make this connection in the long passage above, I’d argue it’s
there at a tacit level (he alludes to this connection in The Pervert’s Guide to
Ideology). Coca-Cola perfectly embodies the shift from sublimity to shit. How?
Just think about what happens to Coke when it’s been left out too long — “it”
goes flat. The sublime taste of Coke turns putrid. I can’t even count how many
times I’ve seen people spit out flat Coke or pour out the remainder of an old
can or bottle. The conditions (cold temperature, recently opened, etc.) have to
be just right for Coke to have that sublime taste just as the scenery (fantasmatic
staging, ideal setting) has to be right for objet petit a to shine in the Other
(other person, object of desire, sexual partner, commodity). When Coke goes
flat, you pour it out. When objet a turns to shit, you discard the grotesque
Other. When objet petit a departs from the Other, all desire is left with is flat
Coke. Any number of things can cause this shift to occur, for example, changes
in the Other’s physical appearance (weight, aging, hair, fashion, tattoos),
manifestation of an annoying flaw or deep insecurity, loss of a certain social
status, etc.

I now want to briefly discuss how objet petit a relates to fantasy. Lacan’s

famous formula of fantasy is $◊a, that is, the desiring subject in relation
to objet a. According to Lacan, all desiring subjects ultimately have
a fundamental fantasy at their unconscious foundation which organizes their
idiosyncratic relations to objet a. This structural fantasy is an unconscious
scenario, foundational dynamic, underlying outline or interpersonal blueprint.
In other words, the fundamental fantasy is the skeleton of desire. This is why
Žižek likens it to Immanuel Kant’s concept of transcendental schematism.
The first thing to note is that fantasy does not simply realize a desire in a
hallucinatory way: rather, its function is similar to that of Kantian
‘transcendental schematism’: a fantasy constitutes our desire, provides its
coordinates; that is, it literally ‘teaches us how to desire’. . . . fantasy
mediates between the formal symbolic structure and the positivity of the
objects we encounter in reality — that is to say, it provides a ‘schema’
according to which certain positive objects in reality can function as
objects of desire, filling in the empty places opened up by the formal
symbolic structure. To put it in somewhat simplified terms: fantasy does
not mean that when
I desire a strawberry cake and cannot get it in reality, I fantasize about
eating it; the problem is, rather: how do I know that I desire a strawberry
cake in the first place? This is what fantasy tells me.
(The Plaque of Fantasies, p. 7)

In fantasy’s formula ($◊a), the fundamental fantasy is the organizing principle

of desire and is primarily identified with the lozenge sign (◊). This diamond-
shaped symbol is a condensation of four other symbols: (1) ∧ (conjunction
sign), (2) ∨ (disjunction sign), (3) < (greater-than sign), (4) > (less-than sign).
One’s fundamental fantasy can involve all sorts of desirous structures:
conjunctive scenarios (fusion, synthesis, merger), disjunctive scenarios
(repudiation, rejection, distancing), greater-than scenarios (superiority,
domination, sadism), less-than scenarios (submission, dependency,
masochism). Each desiring subject has a fundamental fantasy with one of these
basic dynamics. In fact, one’s fundamental fantasy is what gives each person’s
desire a certain individuality. The fundamental fantasy is the fingerprint of
subjectivity. Žižek calls this the “factor”: “The Freudian point regarding
fundamental fantasy would be that each subject, female or male, possesses
such a ‘factor’ which regulates her or his desire: ‘a woman, viewed from
behind, on her hands and knees’ was the Wolf Man’s factor; a statue-like
woman without pubic hair was Ruskin’s factor; and so on” (The Plague of
Fantasies, p. 8). When thinking about the ◊ in $ ◊ a, think about the lyrics
from Sweet Dreams by Eurythmics: “Some of them want to use you. Some of
them want to get used by you. Some of them want to abuse you. Some of them
want to be abused.”

However, we must resist the impulse to think of fantasy as an obstacle in our

view of reality. Žižek claims that fantasy is what actually gives us access to the
world. He says, “With regard to the basic opposition between reality and
imagination, fantasy is not simply on the side of imagination; fantasy is, rather,
the little piece of imagination by which we gain access to reality — the frame
that guarantees our access to reality, our ‘sense of reality’ (when our
fundamental fantasy is shattered, we experience the ‘loss of reality’)” (‘Is It
Possible to Traverse the Fantasy in Cyberspace’, The Žižek Reader, p. 122). To
put this in Martin Heidegger’s terms, for Žižek, fantasy is the individualistic
aspect of the clearing, fantasy is the mineness of disclosure as such. What
makes the shared, social clearing mine is the fantasy through which I comport
myself towards the beings I encounter in the world. For Heidegger, authentic-
being-towards-death is that on the basis of which Dasein could be truly
individuated, but Žižek thinks we’re always already individuated in relation
to das Man (the big Other, the Symbolic order) before we ever have a resolute
confrontation with death, since the fundamental fantasy is the hidden
individualizing mechanism of Dasein’s existence. Fantasy is, thus, the
unconscious, pre-authentic individuality of Dasein. Simply put, all desiring
subjects unconsciously pursue objet petit a, that lost remainder of themselves,
but fundamental fantasy gives each of them a way to stage a scenario in which
they regain it. The fundamental fantasy is a roadmap to that lost part of
yourself (of course, the problem is that it can never actually be regained, but
one feature of fantasy is that it conceals this impossibility).

Nonetheless, the idiosyncratic aspect of fantasy should not prevent us from

seeing how fantasy can function at a general level. Žižek has highlighted time
and time again the significant role fantasy plays in society, politics and
ideology. For him, there are ideological fantasies the various members of
communities share and have in common. Yet these ideological fantasies, like
personal ones, are centered around objet petit a. In fact, objet petit a is the
“sublime object” in the title of Žižek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology. As he
says there, “When, for example, in his speech at Lenin’s funeral, Stalin
proclaims, ‘We, the Communists, are people of a special mould. We are made
of special stuff, ‘ it is quite easy to recognize the Lacanian name for this special
stuff: objet petit a, the sublime object . . .” (The Sublime Object of Ideology, p.
162). His point is that all ideologies elevate a particular object to the sublime
status of objet a or das Ding, for example, “freedom”, “the people”, “the
Nation”, “God”, “the church”, “history”, “blood and soil”, “equality”, “the free
market”, “competition”, “proletariat”, “the King”, etc.

This is also the fundamental feature of the logic of the Lacanian object: the
place logically precedes objects which occupy it: what the objects, in their
given positivity, are masking is not some other, more substantial order of
objects but simply the emptiness, the void they are filling out. We must
remember that there is nothing intrinsically sublime in a sublime object
according to Lacan, a sublime object is an ordinary, everyday object
which, quite by chance, finds itself occupying the place of what he calls das
Ding, the impossible-real object of desire. The sublime object is ‘an object
elevated to the level of das Ding’. It is its structural place — the fact that it
occupies the sacred/forbidden place of jouissance — and not its intrinsic
qualities that confers on it its sublimity.
(The Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 221)

The next aspect of objet petit a that I want to briefly discuss is how it is
the object of anxiety (for more on this, see my other blog post titled Why So
Anxious?: Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Lacan on Anxiety). For Lacan, objet
petit a is not only what causes desire but also causes anxiety. “The most
striking manifestation of this object a, the signal that it is intervening, is
anxiety” (Seminar X: Anxiety, p. 86). Whenever objet a gets too close to the
desiring subject, that is, when it gets too close to conscious experience, anxiety
assails the subject. Anxiety is a warning system that warns the subject of the
proximity of objet petit a. Remember, objet a only works so long as it remains
at a distance, so long as it is just a lure. According to Lacan, anxiety is about the
lack of a lack or the presence of something that was and/or is supposed to be
absent. Anxiety is about some overbearing presence that threatens to consume
the subject — the overwhelming presence of objet petit a. The desiring subject
only exists as a desiring lack, so the presence of objet a, the Real of jouissance,
is the threat of Imaginary-Symbolic death (the deconstruction of our socialized
egos). For fantasy (◊) to function, objet a must remain off its stage or out of its
frame, that is, it must remain something absent that we’re unconsciously
searching for in order to work.

This nightmarish dimension of objet petit a puts things in a different light. So

far, we’ve seen how the desiring subject is always unconsciously pursuing objet
a, but what if we perform a simple parallax (shift in perceptive) and view it as
that which is always pursuing us? The horror film It Follows perfectly
represents this idea. There’s an old horror trope of a monster relentlessly
chasing its victim. We see this in Dracula, The Wolf
Man, Jaws, Halloween, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Child’s
Play, etc. However, It Follows takes this to a whole new level. This it, this
monster, in and of itself, is imperceptible — it reveals itself only in illusory
forms (just like objet a). Also, the it is like an STD, since is sexually transmitted
from one victim to the next. In other words, it emerges in your life as the
remainder or trace of a past jouissance (just like objet a). In this horror film,
the it never stops pursuing you. It never gets distracted and never rests.
All it does is chase you. If it catches you, you die. One is left in constant anxiety
by the imminence of this object, this lack of a lack (just like objet a). On the
one hand, objet a is what keeps us living life, what keeps us striving for new
and better things, but on the other, it is simultaneously what prevents us from
ever having peace, satisfaction and contentment. It is the “bone in the throat”
of human existence.
There is one more facet of objet a that makes it unnerving and that is its
relation to the desire of the Other, since the latter often occupies the position of
the former. One of Lacan’s most famous saying is “desire is the desire of the
Other”. This contains multiple meanings. We desire what other people desire.
We desire to be desired by others. We desire to satisfy the Other’s desire. We
desire to know what the Other desires. Desire desires desire. However, there is
a fundamental enigma at the heart of the Other’s desire, that is, we can never
be sure when it comes to the desire of the Other. Think about. We never know
for sure what we desire, so how can we possibly be certain when it comes to the
Other’s desire? People do things all the time in the name of their desire that we
never see coming. Desire as such, yours and mine, is enigmatic. Why? Because
the unconscious is always involved with it. We lack direct access to both our
unconscious dynamics as well as those of the Other, which means we can never
master desire and all its secrets. We are never safe and secure when it comes
to desire. Lacan provides a great image of the enigmatic nature of the Other’s
desire:

I’ll recall the fable, the apologue, the amusing image I briefly set out before
you. Myself donning the animal mask with which the sorcerer in the Cave
of the Three Brothers is covered, I pictured myself faced with another
animal, a real one this time, taken to be gigantic for the sake of the story, a
praying mantis. Since I didn’t know which mask I was wearing, you can
easily imagine that I had some reason not to feel reassured in the event
that, by chance, this mask might have been just what it took to lead my
partner into some error as to my identity. The whole thing was well
underscored by the fact that, as I confessed, I couldn’t see my own image in
the enigmatic mirror of the insect’s ocular globe.
(Seminar X: Anxiety, pp. 5–6)

To clarify, Lacan wants us to envision ourselves standing before a giant praying

mantis. Here’s the catch: we are wearing a mask and we do not know what
mask it is. Is the mask that of the mantis’ lover, enemy, offspring? We simply
do not know what we are to the Other’s desire. Using the gaze of an insect is
very appropriate, since insects are the creatures humans typically feel no
warmth towards due to their radical, alien Otherness. But, in truth, there is an
aspect of every human that is insectival — namely, enigmatic desire.
Oftentimes, the Other’s desire is objet petit a or the cause of one’s desire and
fantasy serves to answer the question “What do you want from me?”
One should always bear in mind that the desire ‘realized’ (staged) in
fantasy is not the subject’s own, but the other’s desire: fantasy, phantasmic
formation, is an answer to the enigma of Che vuoi? — ‘You’re saying this,
but what do you really mean by saying it?’ — which established the subject’s
primordial, constitutive position. The original question of desire is not
directly ‘What do I want?, but ‘What do others want from me? What do
they see in me? What am I to others?’ A small child is embedded in a
complex network of relations; he serves as a kind of catalyst and
battlefield for the desires of those around him: his father, mother, brothers
and sisters, and so on, fight their battles around him, the mother sending a
message to the father through her care for the son. While he is well aware
of this role, the child cannot fathom what object, precisely, he is to others,
what the exact nature of the games they are playing with him is, and
fantasy provides an answer to this enigma: at its most fundamental,
fantasy tells me what I am to my others.
(The Plaque of Fantasies, p. 9)

If there’s an upside to the anxiety-provoking desire of the Other, then it is to be

found in how it gives us a certain freedom. This encounter can actually bring us
to a moment of self-determination wherein we take control of our own desire.
This is something like desire’s authenticity. Here, one’s desire ceases to be the
puppet of the Other’s desire and affirms its own freedom to choose for itself. As
Žižek explains:

There is no freedom outside the traumatic encounter with the opacity of

the Other’s desire: freedom does not mean that I simply get rid of the
Other’s desire — I am, as it were, thrown into my freedom when I confront
this opacity as such, deprived of the fantasmatic cover that tells me what
the Other wants from me. In this difficult predicament, full of anxiety,
when I know that the Other wants something from me, without knowing
what this desire is, I am thrown back into myself, compelled to assume the
risk of freely determining the coordinates of my desire.
(The Puppet and the Dwarf, p. 129)

To conclude, it should be said that objet petit a is at the center of the human
condition (for lack of a better word). Lacan says, “Effectively, everything turns
around the subject’s relation to a” (Seminar X: Anxiety, p. 112). In his
Borromean knot of the Real, Symbolic and Imaginary, objet a is located at the
center of the three of them. The objet a is in the Real insofar as it is that lost
remainder of ourselves that is operative only so long as it remains the
unconscious cause of desire. It’s in the Symbolic due to the fact that language
itself is what produced it as the remainder which all language circles around
without ever grasping — not to mention that fantasy is Symbolically mediated
and its object is objet petit a. It also belongs to the Imaginary because it is the
last missing part of itself that the ego needs in order to be “whole” (wholeness
has been the main motivating factor for the ego since its emergence in the
mirror stage).

With all that being said, there is a tragic, pessimistic dimension to the subject’s
relation to objet a. Lacanian psychoanalysis can be summed up with the words
of Oscar Wilde: “There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what
one wants, and the other is getting it” (Lady Windermere’s Fan, Mr. Dumby,
Act III). The lack of jouissance is unsatisfying, but so too is jouissance itself.
The Lacanian subject says, “neither desire nor jouissance”, but those are
ultimately its only two options. We desire in order to escape jouissance (drive),
but, then, we spend all of our lives trying to regain it. Yet those who do find
themselves submerged in jouissance, e.g., drug addicts, desperately yearn to
get rid of it. Jouissance brings suffering because it is also located beyond the
Law. This is why Lacan said, “jouissance is evil” (Seminar VII: The Ethics of
Psychoanalysis, p. 184). He also explained, “It begins with a tickle and ends in
a blaze of petrol. That’s always what jouissance is” (Seminar XVII: The Other
Side of Psychoanalysis, p. 72). What does this mean? It means that going
beyond the pleasure principle starts off with a mild sensation but ends up
quickly engulfing one — jouissance goes from zero to sixty in a split second.
And there’s no sense of a nice middle ground or habitable in-between
(Aristotelian mean) on this continuum. With jouissance, one goes from too
little to too much in a snap of the fingers. However, desire has its own type of
built-in suffering. Desire is always desire for something else: “And the enigmas
that desire . . . poses for any sort of “natural philosophy” are based on no other
derangement of instinct than the fact that it is caught in the rails of metonymy,
eternally extending toward the desire for something else”(‘The Instance of the
Letter in the Unconscious’, Écrits, p. 431).

The objet petit a is at the heart of this tragedy. It is that lost “part” of
jouissance we sacrificed on the alter of language and that which we
unconsciously seek out our entire lives. It is also a false promise of an
ontological completeness we can never achieve. The objet petit a is the
impossible object, the unattainable it. As long as the subject “is”, it remains a
lack. All it can do is chase that “part” of itself that is no part at all. The subject
is a lack that pursues a reified lack.

That is to say, for Lacan, the subject ($ — the ‘barred’, empty subject) and
the object-cause of its desire (the leftover which embodies the lack that ‘is’
the subject) are strictly correlative: there is a subject only in so far as there
is some material stain leftover that resists subjectivization, a surplus in
which, precisely, the subject cannot recognize itself. In other words, the
paradox of the subject is that it exists only through its own radical
impossibility, through a ‘bone in the throat’ that forever prevents it (the
subject) from achieving its full ontological identity. So we have here the
structure of the Moebius strip: the subject is correlative to the object, but in
a negative way — subject and object can never ‘meet’; they are in the same
place, but on opposite sides of the Moebius strip.
(The Fragile Absolute, p. 28)

So much more needs to be said about objet petit a. I feel like I barely scratched
the surface of this concept, but this post must come to an end. I do plan on
writing more posts on objet a in the future. I’d like to go into greater detail on
its place in fantasy and ideology. I’d also like to discuss how the psychoanalyst
must become positioned as objet a in order for psychoanalytic work to be
effective. Anyway, I hope this analysis of objet petit a has been helpful.