Žižek's ultimate position is that there is no 'Other of the Other', that is, no final guarantee of the symbolic order: 'There is no "big Other" guaranteeing the consistency of the symbolic space within which we dwell: there are just contingent, punctual and fragile points of stability' (p. 306). More precisely, a certain 'lack' in the Other at once is necessary for the symbolic order to function and offers a way of thinking an 'outside' of or 'beyond' to the symbolic order. That is, on the one hand, 'if the Other is not fractured ... the only possible relationship of the subject to the structure is that of total alienation, of a subjection without remainder; but the lack in the Other means that there is a remainder, a non-integratable residuum in the Other, objet a, and the subject is able to avoid alienation only insofar as it posits itself as the correlative of this remainder' [here follows Lacan's formula for fantasy: the split subject in relation to the objet a] (p. 31).
And, on the other [hand], 'This other, hidden Law acts the part of the "Other of the Other" in the Lacanian sense, the part of the meta-guarantee of the consistency of the big Other (the symbolic order that regulates social life)' (p. 230). This lack of the Other of the Other has immense consequences for the thinking of ethics and the political: their basis would not be some 'respect for the Other' but the attempt, for a moment, to become the Other or embody the symbolic order, with the symbolic order itself arising only as the after-effect of such 'free' actions: 'For Lacan, the ultimate horizon of ethics is not the infinite debt towards an abyssal Otherness. The act is for him strictly correlative to the suspension of the "big Other"' (p. 318). This will lead Žižek towards consideration of the Pauline notion of love: love as the giving of that which one does not have, that is, something not backed by any symbolic guarantee.
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