The Object of the Drive
Jean Luc Monnier
The object of the drive in its relation to the body is dealt with in Seminar XI. Yet it is there in the form of the object little (a) as early as the Mirror Stage, says Jacques-Alain Miller, as a jouissance included in the image.[1]
Its status will evolve in the course of Lacan's teaching. In Transference, Lacan promotes it on the imaginary side of the object of desire, the agalma of the partial object. Then in Anxiety it shifts from object of desire to object cause of desire. Here it passes behind desire and is no longer the object to be attained.
Lacan names it object a, not to designate it as an object that would be the culmination of sexual maturity, but on the contrary, to nominate the partial objects “attached” to the different erogenous zones of the body. They constitute no consistency, other than a consistency of lack, or even of emptiness, insofar as they are only experienced coextensively with castration. The matheme that accounts for this is: a /- φ. When this is not the case, when they are not separated by the symbolic operation but in “the subject’s pocket”, the subject tends to be reduced to them. Most of the time, this takes the form of waste that tends to take over subject’s entire reality. Lacan posits that “the field of reality [...] is sustained only by the extraction of object a, which nevertheless gives it its frame.”[2] Lacan never returns to this thesis. In his Proposition of 9th of October 1967 on the Psychoanalyst of the School, he advances: “the un-known is arranged as the framework of knowledge.”[3] The object a must condense the libido into an extimate point so that the subject's reality, cleansed of jouissance, can be stabilised.[4]
This extimate status of the object a led Lacan to say that it is an incorporeal: “Let us give the Stoics their due for having known this term: the incorporeal, to designate [signer] how the symbolic holds to the body.”[5] In L'Envers de la biopolitique, Éric Laurent clarifies this as follows: “the symbolic body’s encounter with the flesh releases the object a as incorporeal, as an outside-the-body effect, as "jouis-sens.”[6]
Approaching the object a on the basis of this quality allows us to grasp how the object a is both “of the body” but that this body is only a body through the operation of incorporating the symbolic.
There are bodies, bodies that exist. Then there is what is not of the body but refers to it, such as time, the void, the sayable (dicible) and place,[7] which are effects of the signifier on the body insofar as this body becomes a symbolic body.
They are objects outside the body, moored to the edges of the body's erogenous zones. From Seminar XI onwards, Lacan attempts to make the object a a real object. Yet not quite, for in fantasy, for example, the object a has an imaginary side and a real side, insofar as it is the echo of jouissance caught in the net of the pleasure principle.
He will finally throw in the towel with this famous sentence found in Seminar XX: "On the other side we have a. Being on the right path, overall, it would have us take it for being, in the name of the following – that it is apparently something. But it only dissolves (se résout), in the final analysis, owing to its failure, unable, as it is, to sustain itself in approaching the real.”[8] He thus comes to make of the little a a semblant, that is to say, situating it on the axis that goes from the symbolic to the real.
The object a, real or semblant, is one of the pivots of our clinic. In the treatment, it gives us the means to grasp its insertion in the fantasy or its return in the real, and its possible treatment.
Translation : Caroline Heanue
Review Joanne Conway
References
[1] Miller. J.-A., “The Lacanian Orientation. “L’Un tout seul,” Course given at the Department of Psychoanalysis, University of Paris 8, lecture of 9 March 2011, unpublished.
[2] Lacan. J., “On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis, Écrits, New York/London, W.W. Norton & Co., Inc., 2006, p. 487.
[3] Lacan. J., “Proposition of 9 October 1967 on the Psychoanalyst of the School,” Autres écrits, Paris, Seuil, 2001, p. 249.
[4] Miller J.-A., “Vers un signifiant nouveau,” Revue de l’École de la Cause freudienne, Paris, Publication of l’École de la Cause freudienne, February 1992, p. 37-44.
[5] Lacan. J., “ Radiophonie,” Autres écrits, Paris, Seuil, 2001, p. 409.
[6] Laurent. É., “L’Envers de la biopolitique,” Paris, Navarin, 2016, p. 34. The theory of incorporealities was developed by the Stoics and taken up and re-examined by Gilles Deleuze in his book La logique du sens, Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1969.
[7] Cf. Laurent É., op. cit., “Topologie de l’être qui parle,” p. 31.
[8] Lacan. J., “Encore, On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge,” The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX (1972-1973). Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York, Norton, 1998, p. 95.