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.

Lacan's Theory of Desire and Its Practical Value

The word "desire" is one of the core terms in Lacan's psychoanalysis. As the famous saying of Lacan: "the desire of man is the desire of the Others", Lacan's theory of desire is based on Hegel - Koyev's theory of desire. By falsifying the subject, Lacan developed a unique theory of desire, that is, desire is the alienated subject, the fantasy formed in the pursuit of what Freud called the Das Ding which Lacan called the Objet petit A, and finally the fantasy constructs desire retrospectively. The study of Lacan's theory of desire helps to provide more sections for the study of contemporary social phenomena and social development.

Waldo's Beautiful Things: Possession and Possessing in Otto Preminger's Laura

Despite its highly subjectivised title, Laura – Otto Preminger's dazzling 1944 noir classic – is, according to this article, a film not so much about persons as things. And what spectacularly beautiful things Laura proffers: exquisite objets d'art, chic fashion, striking design. All of which points to a certain psychic condition that underpins Laura: namely, fetishism. Of course, the fetish nonpareil in the film is Laura herself; she is the not so ‘obscure object of desire’ for all and sundry, possessing everyone in the film, and, in turn, being treated by those possessed, as a possession herself. Though the nature of these sorts of possessory regimes differs dramatically, being contingent upon the psychic profile of the possessor: love interest Shelby Carpenter, police detective Mark McPherson and wealthy mentor, Waldo Lydecker. This article will explore Laura's competing possessory regimes, utilising psychoanalytic concepts such as hysteria, repetition compulsion and the death drive, as well as fetishism and sado-masochism to unpack this vivid filmic representation of the ‘Law of Desire’ as a desire for what is, here, law's objet petit a – feminine sexuality itself.

Murphy and the Tao of Autism

The purpose of this chapter is not to discover the presence of autism in Samuel Beckett’s Murphy, but to bury its recent discovery in order to relocate autism as a magnetising and mobilising absence in the novel – not something that is lacking or deficient in itself, as the ableist constructions of autism propose, but a difference that is lacking, or better yet wanting, in the eponymous non-autistic protagonist and, by metaphorical extension, in neurotypical subjectivity as such. I denominate this lack, this want, the objet petit a(u), with the translingual pun that entails on the Lacanian Other.

On the Acousmatics of Enunciation: Back to the Suture

With Kaja Silverman’s works, a reversal within Lacanian theory becomes abundantly clear that turns away from the old identification paradigm of imaginary misjudgement in the mirror stage. Following Lacan’s reformulation of the gaze as an “objet petit a,” the gaze is thought of as divided from the subject and placed on the side of the object. In the synthesis of Copjec’s/Žižek’s work with Michel Chion’s theories of voice and sound, my aim is to conceive of a fundamental acousmatics of film: not only the voice, but also the gaze in film is structurally acousmatic. In Lacan’s understanding, gaze and voice are strictly equivalent objects. As such, it is my intention to conceive of a political aesthetics from a psychoanalytic acousmatics of film. In the point-of-view paradoxes and transsubjective gazes in Rossellini’s and Antonioni’s post-neorealist films, I analyze the political and social dimension of this acousmatics.