New Guises of the Object
Florencia F.C. Shanahan
There is a strong and firm orientation towards the 2023 NLS Congress. It is the orientation by the real in the clinic and in civilisation by means of the path that anxiety constitutes. And, in this orientation, it is that which Lacan called his only invention, the object a, that becomes the function of this passage whereby, according to Daniel Roy’s presentation of the theme, “anxiety is the trace of our body’s contribution to civilisation’s discontent.”[1]
This trace is signalled by the object which Jacques-Alain Miller highlighted as having risen to the social zenith, “an intensive element, which outdates any notion of measure, which goes toward the measureless, following a cycle […] of accelerated renewal, of frenetic innovation.” It is the “compass of civilisation today, the principle of the hypermodern discourse of civilization.” [2] Let us underline this syntagm “frenetic innovation,” and its resonances, for the exploration of these “new guises of the object.”
We can read this together with Zigmundt Bauman’s thesis about our times: “If in solid modernity, inclined to produce solid seats in which to re-root what had been uprooted, the royal road to success was to accommodate oneself, to fit into that prefabricated seat, in liquid modernity, the secret of success lies in not being unduly conservative, in avoiding making any particular seat habitual, in being mobile and always at hand, in proving oneself to be the genuine article necessary for flexibility, always at a disposal, ready to start again, rather than conforming and sticking to a form that had once been set.”[3]
D. Roy states in his argument: “This object at the heart of the discontent and the place of the cause of anxiety will therefore be the object of all our attention.”[4]
It is not by chance that attention deficit has become the name of a disorder, often accompanying the so-called hyperactivity of our youngest ones. Overflowing bodies that will not stand still. Hypervigilant bodies as well. Alarmed, paralysed, or secluded. Sedated or hyped up by substances, filled, emptied, cut, pierced, tattooed, beaten up, burned out with work or numbed, the topology that allows for a body and the world it is immersed in to constitute liveable places is far from evident. The object a comes to indicate the place where a link can be produced.
This body and this world are not, however, what we might think, and the object a is there to remind us that “the subject does not have a direct relationship with the world, but that there is a fundamental mediation of desire […] In the affect it is undoubtedly the body that is at stake, but more exactly the effects of language on the body […] effects of cutting up, devitalising, emptying of jouissance, that is to say, according to Lacan’s term, of otherification of the body.”[5]
To speak of “guises of the object” already indicates the dimension of appearance, of semblance, but also of disguise, dressing up, even of habit, custom, mode, and style.
Psychoanalysis is an experience born out of the verification that our attention is never where we believe it is and that it is the scraps, the residues and the failures of what we think are volitively oriented actions that contain the key to that which moves us in life, what animates us.
The object a is not only the in-form of the Other but also the core of the drive.[6] “The little a, when it is designated as a topological structure and as a logical consistency, has the substance of the hole, and it is then that the spare parts of the body come to mould themselves on this absence.”[7]
Faced with the new guises of the object, an analysis is the wager that a subject comes to know about the cause of his desire and also of his jouissance, and to invent a new use for the incurable of the drive, one that does not rely on the for-all but on the particularised function of the object a for each.
The Lacanian object is not an object of the world, but the function of the hole that loss introduces for the speaking-body. As such it will always implicate the body and what exceeds it. Beyond images and their forms, beyond names and their metaphors, the enjoying substance finds in the mark of the singular the way of the symptom.
There where capitalism, by proposing the object of consumption as partner, leaves out “the matters of love,”[8] psychoanalysis offers a path that is not without anxiety – the path of transference, able to make the unconscious as knowledge exist.[9]
A young person comes to speak of how difficult it is “to form a love relationship in the current dating scene.” She is being pushed by her peers to stuff herself with apps and signifiers that would plug her into prêt-à-porter modes of jouissance. She chooses instead to do an analysis, to find her own way. She meets someone and not without anguish she exclaims, “To give you an idea of how much I like him... I listen to his voice messages in 1x!”
References
[1] Roy D., “Discontent and Anxiety in the Clinic and in Civilisation,” Argument of the NLS Congress 2023, https://www.amp-nls.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Argument-FINAL-VERSION-DISCONTENT-AND-ANXIETY-IN-THE-CLINIC-AND-IN-CIVILISATION.pdf
[2] Miller J.-A., “A Fantasy,” Conference in Comandatuba, 2004, http://2012.congresoamp.com/en/template.php?file=Textos/Conferencia-de-Jacques-Alain-Miller-en-Comandatuba.html
[3] Bauman Z., and Tester K., La ambivalencia de la modernidad y otras conversaciones, Barcelona, Paidós, 2002 (my translation and italics ).
[4] Roy D., “Discontent and Anxiety in the Clinic and in Civilisation,” op. cit.
[5] Miller J.-A., “Les affects dans l'expérience analytique,” La Cause du désir No. 93, 2016, p. 109.
[6] In French: « enforme ». Cf. Lacan J., Le Séminaire, Livre XVI, D’un Autre à l'autre, Paris, Ed. Seuil, 2006, p. 311.
[7] Miller J.-A., “Une lecture du Séminaire D’un Autre à l'autre," La Cause freudienne, No. 64, 2006, p. 149.
[8] Lacan J., Talking to Brick Walls: A Series of Presentations in the Chapel at the Sainte-Anne Hospital, tr. A. R. Price, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2017, p. 91.
[9] Cf. Miller J.-A., “A Fantasy,” op. cit.