Object a and the Symbolic Dimension of Subjectivity

From Bruce Fink's The Lacanian Subject (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1995), p. 94:

"We could account for the lost object in yet another way. The breast is not, during the first experience of satisfaction, constituted as an object at all, much less as an object that is not part of the infant's body and that is largely beyond the infant's control. It is only constituted after the fact, after numerous vain attempts by the infant to repeat the first experience of satisfaction when the mother is not present of refuses to nurse the child. It is the absence of the breast, and thus the failure to achieve satisfaction, that leads to its constitution as an object as such, an object separate from and not controlled by the child. Once constituted (i.e., symbolized, though the child may as yet still be unable to speak in any way intelligible to others), the child can never again refind the breast as experienced the first time around: as not separate from his or her lips, tongue and mouth, or from his or her self. Once the object is constituted, the "primal state" wherein there is no distinction between infant and breast, or between subject and object (for the subject only comes into being when the lacking breast is constituted as object, and qua relation to that object), can never be re-experienced, and thus the satisfaction provided the first time can never be repeated. A kind of innocence is lost forever, and the actual breasts found thereafter are never quite it. Object (a) is the leftover of that process of constituting an object, the scrap that evades the grasp of symbolization. It is a reminder that there is something else, something perhaps lost, perhaps yet to be found."

The Fundamental Lesson of Dialectics

From Žižek 's The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieślowski between Theory and Post-Theory (London: British Film Institute, 2001), p. 8:


"[...] the fundamental lesson of dialectics is that universality as such emerges, is articulated 'for itself', only within a set of particular conditions. (All great historical assertions of universal values, from Ancient Roman Stoicism to modern human rights, are firmly embedded in a concrete social constellation.) However, one should avoid here the historicist trap: this unique circumstance does not account for the 'truth' and universal scope of the analysed phenomenon. It is precisely against such hasty historicisers that one should refer to Marx's famous observation apropos of Homer: it is easy to explain how Homer's poetry emerged from early Greek society; what is much more difficult to explain is its universal appeal, i.e., why it continues to exert its charm even today."

Žižek's "The Lamella of David Lynch"

From Reading Seminar XI: Lacan's Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, edited by R. Feldstein, B. Fink, and M. Jaanus (Albany, SUNY Press, 1995), pp. 214-215:

"Doesn't the elementary structure of subjectivity consist in the fact that not-all of the subject is determined by the causal chain? Isn't the subject the very gap that separates the cause from its effect? Doesn't it emerge precisely insofar as the relationship between cause and effect cannot be accounted for? In other words, what is this feminine depression that suspends the causal link, the causal enchainment of our acts to external stimuli, if not the founding gesture of subjectivity, the primordial act of freedom, of breaking up our insertion into the nexus of causes and effects. The philosophical name for this 'depression' is absolute negativity, i.e., what Hegel called 'the night of the world,' the withdrawal of the subject into itself. In short, woman, not man, is the subject par excellence. And the link between depression and the bursting of the indestructible life-substance is also clear: depression and withdrawal-into-self is the primordial act of retreat, of acquiring a distance from the indestructible life-substance, which makes it appear as a repulsive scintillation."

Žižek on the Process of Symbolic Identification

From Žižek's The Fragile Absolute (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 49-50:

"And it is crucial to note how this passage from symbolic identification to identification with the excremental leftover turns around--accomplishes in the opposite direction--the process of symbolic identification. That is to say, the ultimate paradox of the strict psychoanalytic notion of symbolic identification is that it is by definition a misidentification, the identification with the way the Other(s) misperceive(s) me. Let us take the most elementary example: as a father, I know I am an unprincipled weakling; but, at the same time, I do not want to disappoint my son, who sees in me what I am not: a person of dignity and strong principles, ready to take risks for a just cause--so I identify with this misperception of me, and truly 'become myself' when I, in effect, start to act according to this misperception (ashamed to appear to my son as I really am, I actually accomplish heroic acts). In other words, if we are to account for symbolic identification, it is not enough to refer to the opposition between the way I appear to others and the way I really am: symbolic identification occurs when the way I appear to others becomes more important to me than the psychological reality 'beneath my social mask', forcing me to do things I would never be able to accomplish 'from within myself'."

What We Need Is Even More Hatred

From Žižek's The Fragile Absolute (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 10-11:

"Although Francis Fukuyama's thesis on the 'end of history' quickly fell into disrepute, we still silently assume that the liberal-democratic capitalist global order is somehow the finally found 'natural' social regime; we still implicitly conceive of conflicts in Third World countries as a subspecies of natural catastrophes, as outbursts of quasi-natural violent passions, or as conflicts based on fanatical identification with ethnic roots (and what is 'ethnic' here if not again a codeword for nature?). And, again, the key point is that this all-pervasive renaturalization is strictly correlative to the global refexivization of our daily lives. For that reason, confronted with ethnic hatred and violence, one should thoroughly reject the standard multiculturalist idea that, against ethnic intolerance, one should learn to respect and live with the Otherness of the Other, to develop a tolerance for different lifestyles, and so on--the way to fight ethnic hatred effectively is not through its immediate counterpart, ethnic tolerance, on the contrary, what we need is even more hatred, but proper political hatred: hatred directed at the common political enemy."

From "Slavoj Žižek or How to Philosophize with a Hammer (and a Sickle)"

Article by A. Beilik-Robson, 2008 Apr 1.
International Journal of Žižek Studies [Online] Vol 2:0, "Žižek po Polsku".
Available at http://zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/article/view/102/194

"Assuming an attitude which Alain Badiou, a French philosopher of a similar stripe, called (incidentally also inspired by Lacan) passion du Réel, Žižek despises all that which he regards as a syndrome of escape from the "tragic" reality of the human psyche. Mere happiness as a goal of the liberal-democratic consensus seems to him a laughable play of appearances, sported by the "Last People" who, in Nietzsche's Zaratustra, are a declining race of Westerners engaged only in the quest of individual illusions of pleasure. Any ethic of heroism is alien to them, they are incapable of sacrifice, they do not want to die for any Cause--they only want to live a comfortable life. Žižek paints such a contemptful portrait of contemporary Westerners, condemning their political indolence and intellectual hypocrisy. And the most blame-worthy culprit here is the New Left, accused by Žižek of being unable to oppose modern capitalism and letting itself be seduced by its trivial pursuits of happiness and gratification."

From Marcus Pound's Žižek: A (Very) Critical Introduction

Excerpts from Žižek's Afterword:

"The true adultery is not to copulate outside of marriage, but to copulate in a marriage without love: the simple adultery just violates the law from outside, while marriage without love destroys it from within, turning the letter of the law against its spirit. So, to paraphrase Brecht yet again: what is a simple adultery compared to (the adultery that is a loveless) marriage! It is not by chance that Wagner's underlying formula 'marriage is adultery' recalls Proudhon's 'property is theft'--in the stormy 1848 events, Wagner was not only a Feuerbachian celebrating sexual love, but also a Proudhonian revolutionary demanding the abolition of private property; so no wonder that, later on the same page, Wagner attributes to Jesus a Proudhonian supplement to 'Thou shalt not steal!': 'This also is a good law: Thou shalt not steal, nor covet another man's goods. Who goeth against it, sinneth: but I preserve you from sin, inasmuch as I teach you: Love thy neighbor as thyself; which also meaneth: Lay not up for thyself treasures, whereby thou stealeth from thy neighbor and makest him to starve: for when thou hast thy goods safeguarded by the law of man, thou provokest thy neighbor to sin against the law." (p. 152)

[...] "These lines cannot but evoke the famous passages from The Communist Manifesto that answer the bourgeois reproach that Communists want to abolish freedom, property, and family: it is the capitalist freedom itself that is effectively the freedom to buy and sell on the market and thus the very form of unfreedom for those who have nothing but their labor force to sell; it is the capitalist property itself that means the 'abolition' of property for those who own no means of production; it is the bourgeois marriage itself that is the universalized prostitution. In all these cases the external opposition is internalized, so that one opposite becomes the form of appearance of the other (bourgeois freedom is the form of appearance of the unfreedom of the majority, etc.). However, for Marx, at least in the case of freedom, this means that Communism will not abolish freedom but, by way of abolishing the capitalist servitude, bring about actual freedom, the freedom that will no longer be the form of appearance of its opposite. It is thus not freedom itself that is the form of appearance of its opposite, but only false freedom, the freedom distorted by relations of domination." (p. 153)