The Indivisible Remainder (23)

Using Lacan to reactualize Hegelian dialectic

From The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters, by Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 1996 & 2007). The following citations are from the 2007 edition.

p. 143: Our first result, therefore, is that the act and the big Other, far from being simply opposed, are intertwined in a constitutive way: [....] the 'objectivity' of the big Other implies a redoubled 'subjective' reflection: I am what (I think that others think that I think that) I am.... This precise formulation also places an obstacle in the path of the 'humanist' misreading of the interdependence of the subject and the big Other: the point is not that the big Other (the symbolic structure) is 'always-already here', but incomplete, 'non-all', and that the subject somehow finds a niche of its own, a margin of freedom, in the inconsistencies and lacks of the big Other.

p. 144: [....] it is the very supplement of my 'subjective' act of decision (of precipitate identification) which changes the dispersed, 'non-all' collection of signifiers into the 'objective order of the big Other.

From a strictly Hegelian standpoint, the alternative between persisting in the solitude of the act which suspends the big Other and 'compromising one's desire' by accepting one's place in the big Other (the socio-symbolic order) is a false one, the last trap laid by abstract Understanding in order to prevent us from attaining true philosophical speculation. The ultimate speculative identity is the identity of the act and the Other: an authentic act momentarily suspends the big Other, but it is simultaneously the 'vanishing mediator' which grounds, brings into existence, the big Other. In other words, the proposition 'A is a' displays the precise structure of speculative judgement in which the identity of the two elements is mediated by a central impossibility: A, the big Other, the symbolic order, is inherently 'barred', hindered, structured around the void of a central impossibility; it always falls short of its notion; this central impossibility is its condition of possibility, and the objet a is precisely the paradoxical object which gives body to this impossibility, which is nothing but the materialization of this impossibility. In this precise sense, a is the object cause of desire: it does not effectively pre-exist desire as that which arouses it, it merely gives body to its inherent deadlock, to the fact that desire is never satisfied by any positive object; [....]

pp. 144-5: [....] the big Other is the field of supposed knowledge, that is, [....] it is strictly correlative to the effect of transference (in exactly the sense in which Kant claims that the moral law acquires actual existence only in the subject's respect for it). 'Transference' designates the subject's trust in the meaning-to-come: in the psychoanalytic cure, for example, the transferential relationship with the analyst bears witness to the patient's confidence that the analyst 'is in the know'--the analyst's presence is the guarantee that the patient's symptoms possess some secret meaning yet to be discovered. Consequently, in so far as the big Other functions as the guarantee of the meaning-to-come, the very fact of the big Other involves the subjective gesture of precipitation. In other words: how do we pass from the 'non-all', dispersed, inconsistent collection of signifiers to the big Other qua consistent order? By supplementing the inconsistent series of signifiers with a Master-Signifier, S1, a signifier of the pure potentiality of meaning-to-come; by this precipitation (the intervention of an 'empty' signifier which stands in for the meaning-to-come) the symbolic field is completed, changed into a closed order. Since, however, the transferential relationship is by definition dependent on a subject which is in itself divided/split, a subject which stands under the sign of lack and negativity (only such a dislocated subject has the urge to establish a support for itself in the big Other via the gesture of precipitate identification), this means that the big Other hinges on a divided/split subject. For that reason, the dissolution of transference (at the end of the psychoanalytic cure), the experience that 'the big Other doesn't exist', and 'subjective destitution' are strictly equivalent.