Causality & Pure Word

What is at stake in this (Lacan’s) first shift from hermeneutics to structuralism, therefore, is precisely the question of cause. As we move from signification to its cause, signification is conceived of as the effect-of-sense: it is the imaginary experience-of-meaning whose inherent constituent is the misrecognition of its determining cause, the formal mechanism of the signifying structure itself. (Zizek 1994, 29)

Zizek is right to say that Lacan’s move from Freudian hermeneutics to structuralism is a major theoretical shift in psychoanalysis, but he may not be right to elaborate this shift as a problem of cauality. Zizek’s ideas about causality is basically from Hegel — the causality of telos (purpose), a highly difficulty concept. To Hegel, he has completely discarded the principle of the linear, mechanical causality (causa efficiens) in reality. What is at stake is the causality with meaning and purpose. This may be a transcendental intentionality in disguise. One may question about the purpose: who is behind the purpose of its causality. Buddhist causality (causation) explains the self-encirclement of enquiry, an inwardly circumcised meditation. Hegel’s causality is exactly a religious temptation if it has been disguised by the coverup of absolute negation. His principal of the Spirit as a continous, gradual, historical process with series of steps through which Spirit logically returns to itself as self-actualizing. This is religion. Causality is in some sense of religious sensation while structuralism is not.

Zizek is possibily right to stress the causality as the logic that constitutes the substantiality of sign, but he is not quite right to put the signified as an object. It may be related to Zizek’s Marxian Hegelian dilemma which makes him impossible to differentiate the Real object as a perfect objectification of substantial self – which is impossible without signification – from the Marxist socio-political agent as base structure. The Real object is the product of linguistic operation,  the interactive performance of the self.  Signification is the transformation that goes through the substantial body of the being and achieves what could be the mutation of spirit and self. The signification process is the work of WORD, the big word that will change the quality of the body, the immaculated self of pure existence. This inwardly diverted process precisely is what make an object as physical existence, pure objectification.

Filed under: Hegel, Lacan, Zizek, object a, psychoanalysis, the Real , Hegel, Lacan, object, objet a, substantiality, Zizek

Rusty Existence in the Real – I

Materialism is not the direct assertion of my inclusion in objective reality (such an assertion presupposes that my position of enunciation is that of an external observer who can grasp the whole of reality); rather it resides in the reflexive twist by means of which I myself am included in the picture constituted by me — it is this reflexive short circuit, this necessary redoubling of myself as standing both outside and inside my picture, that bears witness to my “material existence.” (Parallax View 17)

Materialism exhibits what Zizekian project may intend to involve but may not want to be exposed in the Real. Talking about dialectic materialism in the situation when marxist logics has undergone serious interrogation may sound idiosyncratic. But materialism may go farther than marxist logics if we put it into the spectrum initiated by Lacan. Lacanian object opens up the access to the “object cause of desire” (Parallax View 18). Zizek is right to point out that “what is an ordinary object to you is to me the focus of my libidinal investment;” (Parallax View 18) however this objet petite a would neither be “transubstantiated” nor transformed into a Kantian “transcendental object.” For every singular subject, in contrary to Zizekian populist subjects, it seems unlikely that he will share his very private secret love to lost object within intrasubjective relations. It sounds logically and ontologically invalid for the very existence of objet petite a presupposes an individual process. This is also a relevant polemics if we have tried to find the photos of Ms. Zizek in our cyberworld. To share Zizek’s secret jouissance in a public accessible world seems inappropiate; for Zizek’s objet petite a is Zizek’s and it is neither Kant’s nor Lacan’s. Even though one tries to share it on the internet and what actually shared is not a populist cult, is still a privatized psychic reality. It is pointless to say there is transcendental objet petite a.

The substantiality of the psychoanalytic object is not relied on the minimal difference between the intrasubjective position in the parallax stance. For the minimal difference can only exhibit the infant’s play of coordination in the scenario of the Mirror Stage from which it is the subject itself entering into libidinal identification based on the imaginary reflection of his own existence in the Real with the change in partial bodily form rather than in the perspective of the subjective gaze. The pre-oedipal subjectivization is constituted from the framework of substantiality – an imago of the objectification in bodily coordination. Materialism shall be the existence of the Real “out there” which goes through the internalization of the imago and occupied the spatial preoccupation of human identification. Without this, the reflection of the imago, the identification process as well as the transaction of libidinal dynamism seems groundless.

Filed under: Lacan, Zizek, object a, the Real , imaginary order

Lust, Caution

Sorry to say it is not easy to view the award winning film from Ang Lee “Lust, Caution” as a romantic story as it is supposed to be (although someone may not agree). For us, lust is the language of Lacan – the jouissance of the impossible, the pleasure out of extreme painful experience. Sexual excitement may not be the only possibility of desire – as desire is someone one can not have or afraid of getting hold.

Desire is the alibi of the Other, the impulsive seeking of fulfillment which is impossible except with Death.  I do not see any lust in the movie although it is the dilemma of lust and caution putting into question.  Who’s lust? The Man’s or the Woman’s or no one at all.  I think this is basically a love story about scarification, socially unacceptable (barred) love and the secrecy of romance that both the Man and Woman do not aware.

What the girl seeking for in the plot against the enemy she sleeps with is nothing but negation -  against the father in absence, the coward schoolboy and at the end the miserable of life. Neither does she identify with the non professional spy group formed by her old schoolboys, nor does she need to be a patriot in whatever sense. She is indifferent, subtle and knows exactly her own demand, but she never shares the vision of being  an assassin. She may need the extreme kind of revenge against her schoolboy’s cowardice, against her father’s insufficiency, against the nation. Revenge at the end of existence is a kind of jouissance through which she identifies with the Thing that she may not have for life. The Thing could be, in face value, the marvelous diamond ring in question – the extravagance of existence, love or peacefulness.

But at the end, who cares where does the Thing drift. It ends up in void – the signification of the Thing dissolved as the substance of the Thing archived.

Filed under: Lacan, object a, psychoanalysis, symbolic order, the Real , , Ang Lee, Caution, Chinese Film, Lust, The Thing

Object of Psychoanalysis

The object of psychoanalysis is no other than what I have already proposed about the function played in analysis by object a. Is knowledge of object a thus the science of psychoanalysis?This is precisely the equation that must be avoided, since object a must be inserted, as we already know, into the division of the subject by which the psychoanalytic field is quite specifically structured — this is the point with which I resumed my seminar today. This is why it is was important to promote firstly, and as a fact to be distinguished from the question of knowing whether psychoanalysis is a science (that is, whether its field is scientific), the fact that its praxis implies no other subject than that of science. (“Science & Truth” in Ecrits)

Object a denotes the residual of symbolization through which the object a, as the reflective externality of inner most psychic reality splitting up into fragmentation, achieves its undeniable status in the psychoanalysis. It is the only that is created out of the symbolic order but exists in the realm of the Real. The real is the unspeakable, the realm that language can not pass through. It is also the case with the object a which is not a signifier or no longer at all. It is the only possible substance that is created out of symbolization. Similar to what cosmological black hole it can be, the internal tension of the object a is created out of the extensive reaction of symbolization. It is the residual of the signification, but in the meantime it is no longer within the realm of symbolic. As in the black hole, one says there is distortion of substance, speed or even time. The internal power to absorbing substance makes existence beyond it impossible. Object a is an agent already beyond the usual practice of understanding. It may have no meaning (as it is the residual) but it also in the same time the only substantial agent that have retained the trace of symbolization. The archic trace of sign that is exactly what Derrida mentioned in the scenario of the “Mythic Writing Pad.”
Object a is the only possible evidence of psychoanalysis as science. It is the Virgin Mary of existence that the holiness of the highest existence (i.e. language as God is existed) has passed through her body and makes her the only possible existence that evidence the very action of holy experience. The language operation again the object a is similar to the said holy action. It offers the prestigious status to the object a and makes it the key for understanding of psychoanalysis as science. That is the experience that even the son of man does not have, even though he is always regarded as immortal.

Filed under: object a, symbolic order, the Real , christian, Derrida, imaginary order, mythic writing pad, object a, symbolic order, the Real, virgin mary