The Voice and the Gaze as ‘objet petit a’

Repression of the Real is a function of the coming-into-being of the Symbolic Order. That which is repressed resurfaces in the Symbolic, thereby threatening its order. What resurfaces is the non-repressible remainder, an excess that can neither be conceptualized nor can be eliminated. This remainder of the Real is what Lacan refers to as objet petit a or simply objet a. Objet is French for object, petit is French for small, and a is the first letter in the French autre, meaning other. In casual English translation, therefore, the objet a is essentially the small other. For Lacan, the objet a is a signifier of the Real that is lost in the process of symbolic constitution of the subject which resurfaces in the Symbolic Order. Its name is a misnomer in that it is not an object at all. It is rather a non-object because what is originarily lost is nothing—the original loss or the lost object is only a retroactive construction. And it is this loss that becomes the cause of desire, precisely because of the fact as a loss/lack it provides the necessary immaterial basis for desire—we desire what we have lost or currently lack. In other words, objet a is the object-cause of desire. It is equivalent of the partial object in Freud. Freud speaks of three partial objects—namely, breasts, faeces, and phallus; in Lacan, we find two more—namely, the voice and the gaze. This paper examines the voice and the gaze as objet a in Lacan.

Recovering the Irrecoverable: Blackness, Melancholy, and Duplicities That Bind

In this article, I critically engage Stephen Best’s provocative text, None Like Us. The article agrees with Best’s general concerns regarding longings for a unified black community or a We before the collective crime of slavery. Yet I contend that melancholy, which Best associates with black studies’ desire to recover a lost object, can be read in a different direction, one that includes both attachment and wound, investment and dissolution. To think with and against Best, I examine Spike Lee’s School Daze in conversation with Freud, Benjamin, and Morrison.

Travel planning in men and women. Who is better?

Gender differences are often reported in spatial abilities, most of the times favouring men. Even during wayfinding, which requires planning and decision-making, such as choosing roads to take or shortcuts, men are in general better and faster than women. Although different interpretations have been proposed to explain men’s advantage in navigation, no study has explored the possibility that it could be due to men’s better travel planning ability. This latter has been recently identified as a distinct kind of planning that allows implementing an efficient navigational strategy in accordance with the environmental features. Therefore, the present study was aimed at investigating gender differences in travel planning ability. We compared men and women in performing the Key Search Task that requires to implement a strategy to search for a lost object in a wide imagined space. Results showed that men outperform women in both the overall performance and in some specific indexes of the total score. Men had a better travel planning ability with respect to women, outperforming women in configuring the planned strategy and choosing the best point to enter the imagined field. Therefore, men seem to plan the best navigational strategy and appear more cognitively flexible than women in adapting the strategy at the environmental features. The two genders did not differ in the time spent to solve the task. This finding suggests that differences in travel planning skills can contribute in explaining gender differences in wayfinding and spatial orientation.

An advanced implementation idea for detecting real-time object occupancy

Object detection is a title that has earned significances over several fields which have always benefitted socially during circumstances, namely incidents involving human endangerment such as natural disaster where threat may occur in the form of an earthquake, human entrapment underneath rubbles per se. The usage of PIR (Passive Infrared Rays) motion detector to detect humans, objects and other living beings through their movement, has proven the ability in handling situations where such detection is the best chance. However, this approach is not utilized in every situation. In the proposed research paper, an object occupancy detection technology notion is detailed which will describe the function to detect the occupancy or presence of human in an area, specifically transport vehicles that will help in determining passengers inside and to find lost objects as well. The motive behind raising this technological need is to aid or assist in occurrence wherein facing difficulty to find an object being lost or misplaced in a space, as well to detect the humans occupied. This assistance shall ease the detection of occupancy and identifying the lost object. The comprehended object occupancy idea is utilized to recognize the humans and object detection. The implementation idea shall facilitate the utilization of PIR-based motion detector sensor to recognize human presence as well as SlimYOLOv3 framework to identify objects. Circumstances where the occupancy of humans are counted and object to be identified are the main output.

The Essay

A found object might bring sorrow or delight, but a lost object presents a question mark. Its absence can feel like a cleave, a permanent one, in our memory. Absences inevitably lead us to quests. In this personal essay, which is linked with a larger writing project on family and material memory, I search for the contents of an “essay” written by me when I was ten years old, on the very day that India’s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated. In searching for this lost object, I excavate and access childhood memories that were forgotten or, perhaps, lay dormant waiting to be awakened. The essay remains unfound (lost), but in looking for it, this essay that you are reading here, emerges, showing me why the object, the essay must remain lost, so that a forgotten moment of my childhood can live.

Genealogy of Stories: Constraction of the Subject by Vanishing Images

The article offers an essay on the genealogy of stories’ phenomenon from the self-eliminating pictures of private correspondence on Snapchat to “classic” public stories on Facebook and Instagram. Social media are usually associated with a space driven by the logic of the like economy or with the environment that nurtures a user to be a narcissistic subject. The survey proves stories to be an alternative mode of being online along with the way of depreciation of likes and other attributes of public recognition in the web (including comments and shares). In addition, the investigation points to the link between sensor technologies’ proliferation and a corresponding information structuring as a flow and stories’ emergence. The separate part of the article is devoted to analyzing the mechanisms of the stories’ subject structuring. Applying Lacanian distinction between Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real, the author demonstrates how stories force a user to identify with a lost object and, consequently, how mechanisms of stories automatically reproduce a structure of a depressive disorder.

Writing (in) melancholy. Loss and remembrance in the works of two contemporary Hindi writers

The paper aims at analysing the question of melancholy and memory in contemporary Hindi literature. The author selected works by two Hindi writers (T. Grover and U. Vajpeyi), who represent similar approach towards literature and use similar means of expression. The two main motifs characteristic for their writing – love (pyār) and loss (a-bhāv) – are closely related to the creative process: the loved one is the lost object, the one subjugated to melancholy, who can be remembered through writing. In the light of A. Świeściak’s idea of “melancholic subject” and S. Bahun’s concept of “performing melancholia”, the author discusses ways in which both the writers construct their literary world, inhabit it with loved/absent objects (beloved, father), and mourn their loss. The subject in their writing is both fictional and biographical, so the loss relates to literary as well as real events, becomes multidimensional. In Grover’s Blue, the subject’s separation with the beloved leads her to realise the loss of her father in childhood, and thus unveils the mourning and melancholy (symbolically represented by blue/Blue). U. Vajpeyi’s poems create a space for meeting his lost love, for weeping and remembrance, for exchanging letters (and writing). The results of the present study show that melancholy – as a consequence of loss, mourning, and remembering - becomes a creative force, inducing the author (narrator, subject) to write.