Saturday, January 16, 2010

The Plague of Fantasies (5)

From Slavoj Žižek's The Plague of Fantasies, (London: Verso, 1997)

pp. 9-10: One can clearly perceive the difference here from early Lacan, for whom the object is reduced to a token which is totally insignificant in itself, since it matters only as the point in which my own and the Other's desires intersect: for late Lacan, the object is precisely that which is 'in the subject more than the subject itself', that which I fantasize that the Other (fascinated by me) sees in me. So it is no longer the object which serves as the mediator between my desire and the Other's desire; rather, it is the Other's desire itself which serves as the mediator between the 'barred' subject ($) and the lost object that the subject 'is',--that provides the minimum of phantasmic identity to the subject. And one can also see in what la traversee du fantasme consists: in an acceptance of the fact that there is no secret treasure in me, that the support of me (the subject) is purely phantasmic.

[....] Lacan's point is thus that symbolic intersubjectivity is not the ultimate horizon behind which one cannot reach: what precedes it is not a 'monadic' subjectivity, but a pre-symbolic 'impossible' relation to an Other which is the real Other, the Other as Thing, and not yet the Other located within the field of intersubjectivity.

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