The Plague of Fantasies (14)

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

p. 37: [....] Lacan increasingly focuses his theoretical attention on drive as a kind of 'acephalous' knowledge which brings about satisfaction. This knowledge involves neither an inherent relation to truth nor a subjective position of enunciation--not because it dissimulates the subjective position of enunciation, but because it is in itself non-subjectivized, ontologically prior to the very dimension of truth (although, of course, the very predicate 'ontological' thereby becomes problematic, since ontology is by definition a discourse on truth...). Truth and knowledge are thus related as desire and drive: interpretation aims at the truth of the subject's desire (the truth of desire is the desire for truth, as one is tempted to put it in a pseudo-Heideggerian way), while construction expresses the knowledge about drive. [....]

pp. 38-9: Within psychoanalysis, this knowledge of drive, which can never be subjectivized, assumes the form of knowledge about the subject's 'fundamental fantasy', the specific formula which regulates his or her access to jouissance. That is to say: desire and jouissance are inherently antagonistic, even exclusive: desire's raison d'etre (or 'utility function', to use Richard Dawkins's term) is not to realize its goal, to find full satisfaction, but to reproduce itself as desire. So how is it possible to couple desire and jouissance, to guarantee a minimum of jouissance within the space of desire? It is the famous Lacanian objet petit a that mediates between the incompatible domains of desire and jouissance. 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 none the less 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. In a slightly different way, the same mechanism regulates the subject's falling in love: the automatism of love is set in motion when some contingent, ultimately indifferent (libidinal) object finds itself occupying a pre-given fantasy-place.