Objet a

From Slavoj Žižek: Interrogating the Real, edited by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2005, 2006), p. 372:

Objet 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 objet petit a, object-cause of desire, which is not "pathological," which does not reduce itself to an object of need or demand' (p. 121). And, as Žižek goes on to say, the aim of the analysis of ideology is to bring out the double status of this objet 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. 269). This objet 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 Žižek'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 $, 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. 56).