Žižek explains it all…
… there is another joke…which exemplifies the logic of the
object: the joke about the conscript who tries to evade military service by
pretending to be mad. His symptom is
that he compulsively checks all the pieces of paper he can lay his hands on,
constantly repeating: “That is not it!” He is sent to the military
psychiatrist, in whose office he also examines all the papers around, including
those in the wastepaper basket, repeating all the time: “That is not it!” The psychiatrist, finally convinces that he really is mad, gives
him a written warrant releasing him from military service. The conscript casts
a look at it and says cheerfully: “That is it!’
We can say that this little piece of
paper finally found—a warrant of release—has the status of an object in the
Lacanian sense. Why? Because
it is an object produced by the signifying texture itself. It is a kind of object that came to exist as
a result of all the fuss about it. The “mad” conscript pretends to look for
something, and through his very search, through its repeated failure (“That is
not it!”), he produces what he is looking for.
The paradox, then, is that the process of searching itself produces the
object which causes it: it is an exact parallel to Lacanian desire which
produces its own object-cause. The error
of all the people around the conscript, the psychiatrist included, is that they
overlook the way they are already part of the “mad” conscript’s game. They think they are examining him from an objective,
metalanguage distance…. [Žižek, The Sublime Object of
Ideology (1989), p. 160]
* * *
* *
Here, however,
we must distinguish carefully between this Lacanian notion of the divided
subject and the “post-structuralist” notion of the subject-positions. In
“post-structuralism,” the subject is usually reduced to so-called
subjectivation, he is conceived as an effect of a fundamentally non-subjective
process: the subject is always caught in, traversed by the pre-subjective
process (of “writing,” of “desire,” and so on), and the emphasis is on the
individual’s different modes of “experiencing,” “living” their positions as
“subjects,” “actors,” “agents” of the historical process. For example, only at
a certain point in European history did the author of works of art, a painter
or a writer, begin to see himself as a creative individual who, in his work,
gives expression to his interior subjective richness. The great master of such analysis was, of
course, Foucault: one might say that the main point of his late work was to
articulate the different modes by which individuals assume their
subject-positions.
But with Lacan, we have quite
another notion of the subject. To put it
simply: if we make an abstraction, if we subtract all the richness of the
different modes of subjectivation, all the fullness of experience present in
the way individuals are “living” their subject-positions, what remains is an
empty place which was filled out with this richness; this original void, this
lack of symbolic structure, is the
subject, the subject of the signifier. The subject
is therefore to be strictly opposed to subjectivation:
what the subjectivation masks is not a pre- or trans-subjective process of
writing but a lack in the structure, a lack which is the subject. (Sublime Object, p.174)
* * * * *
What emerges
under the guise of the phantom-like "living dead"--of the specter
which hinders the "normal" sexual relationship--is, however, the
reverse of the Name of the Father, namely the "anal father" who
definitely does enjoy: the obscene
little man who is the clearest embodiment of the "uncanny" (Unheimliche). He is the subject's double
who accompanies him like a shadow and gives body to a certain surplus, to
"what is in the subject more than the subject himself": this surplus
represents what the subject must renounce, sacrifice even, the part in himself
that the subject must murder in order to start to live as a "normal"
member of the community. [Enjoy your
Symptom! Jacques Lacan in
* * *
* *
It is therefore
clear why vampires are invisible in the mirror: because they have read Lacan
and, consequently, know how to behave--they materialize objet a which, by definition, cannot
be mirrored. (Enjoy your Symptom!,
p. 126)