Lacan S Concept of The Object-Cause of Desire (Objet Petit A)

Lacanʼs Concept of the Object-Cause of Desire (objet petit a) - Medium 25/6/2562 BE 19*10
Lacanʼs Concept of the Object-

Cause of Desire (objet petit a)
The Dangerous Maybe
Iʼm a big fan of Jacques Lacanʼs work and Iʼve been studying his ideas for
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years now. Iʼve taken online courses that have centered around Lacanian
psychoanalysis and have engaged in countless conversations about it. I
find that one concept in particular remains incredibly difficult for people
to understand. Of course, the concept is that of the objet petit a (objet a,
a, object a, object-cause of desire, the Lacanian object, etc.). Recently,
Iʼve had a few discussions with some philosophy students about Lacan
and the question concerning objet petit a is the main one they were
interested in. What follows is my attempt to flesh out this concept. Iʼm far
from being a Lacan expert, but Iʼm going to do my best to make sense of
this concept for people who are new to Lacanian psychoanalysis. I might
end up saying some things about objet petit a that Lacanians would
disagree with, but I donʼt really care. Iʼm willing to go out on an exegetical
limb for the sake of clarification. If they can do a better job of fleshing out
the concept in an introductory fashion, then Iʼd love to read it.
Lacanʼs concept of the objet petit a is deeply inspired by the ideas of

other psychoanalysts such as Sigmund Freudʼs “lost object”, Melanie
Kleinʼs “partial object” and Donald Winnicottʼs “transitional object”. The
French term objet petit a can be translated as “object small o”, but
Lacanians usually leave it untranslated due to the fact that “object small
o” sounds terrible and is of no real help in understanding what the
Lacanian object actually is. In English, something like the little other-
object or the little object of otherness might be a tad bit more helpful, but
I think itʼs best to just go with the French term. In fact, Lacan himself said
that it should be left untranslated, “thus acquiring, as it were, the status
of an algebraic sign” (‘Translatorʼs noteʼ, Écrits: A Selection, p. xi). First
things first, objet means “object” and petit means “small”. The a comes
from autre, which is the French word for “other”. This is why the a would
be translated as “o”.
Lacan spent a lot of time thinking about various forms of otherness. The
Symbolic order (language, law, custom, etc.) is referred to by him as “the
big Other”. The Real Otherness of the primary caregiver or the Thing (das
Ding) is another type of alterity. When it comes to the Imaginary register

with all its ego identifications and aggressive antagonisms, alter-egos
(other people) are others with a small “o”. And later on in his work, the
little a (o) that is objet petit a is yet another type of otherness. Lacan
really started to develop this concept of otherness around 1962 (during
his tenth seminar on anxiety) and it would occupy a privileged position in
his work from then on. This was a big turning point in his work and it
hinges on his new ways of thinking about the Real and objet petit a (for
the later Lacan, the Real is associated with many things including drive,
jouissance, sinthome, unconscious fantasy, objet petit a, etc.). Letʼs
explore this little “object” of otherness.
Letʼs be very clear: objet petit a is not really an object in the standard
sense of the word. Itʼs not a physical object that can be weighed,
touched, seen, etc. Itʼs not like a chair or a tree. To talk like John Locke,
itʼs not the sort of object that would possess primary and secondary
qualities, that is, itʼs not the perceivable object of classical empiricism.
This is why Lacan said, “The a, desireʼs support in the fantasy, isnʼt
visible in what constitutes for man the image of his desire” (Seminar X:
Anxiety, p. 35). Or to talk like Aristotle, the Lacanian object is not a
substance. However, it does have certain relations to actual objects. In
fact, one could say that it gets “incarnated” in specific objects. Yeah, I
know, this all sounds extremely vague, but it will get clearer as we
proceed. Now, physical objects are little others to us. We are not like
rocks, hammers and cups, but the otherness of objet petit a is more
significant than this sort of alterity. This little “object” of otherness would
not exist if human beings did not exist. The objet petit a only “exists” in
the relation between humans and language. Okay, so what exactly is this
“other-object” thatʼs not really an object? To answer this question, we
must get clear on how it emerges, that is, where it comes from. In other
words, we have to get an idea of how Lacan envisions a young childʼs
transformation into a socialized human being.
To begin, objet a is a paradox. Lacan saw a certain paradox at the heart

of objet petit a. He says, “This paradoxical, unique, specified object we
call the objet a” (Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psychoanalysis, p. 268). The objet a is a paradoxical “object” directly
because of the relation between its emergence and loss. Žižek clarifies
this for us: “This coincidence of emergence and loss, of course,
designates the fundamental paradox of the Lacanian objet petit a which
emerges as being-lost” (The Plague of Fantasies, p. 15). The idea is objet
a is not an actual object we once possessed but, then, lost. The very
moment it emerges it does so as a lost object. This is its trick. We never
really had a perfect drive satisfaction (jouissance), but we retroactively
produce this illusion as soon as restrictions are placed on the jouissance
we had at our motherʼs body (das Ding). These restrictions retroactively
produced what they forbid. Thus, both Law and objet petit a (result of the
Lawʼs installation in the childʼs mind) have paradoxical origins. The Law
creates objet petit a as the little, concentrated reserve of jouissance
leftover from the original jouissance we had to sacrifice in order to
become socialized subjects. The point is that this little remainder is not
something we ever actually had in some kind of pre-linguistic, pre-
oedipal bliss.
For Lacan, a human infant is constantly immersed in drive satisfaction or

jouissance. He identified jouissance with drive satisfaction: “jouissance
appears not purely and simply as the satisfaction of a need but as the
satisfaction of a drive” (Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, p.
209). The French term jouissance is very important for Lacan. Simply put,
jouissance is pleasure-in-pain. For example, eating to the point where it
becomes greatly uncomfortable. Itʼs the excessive enjoyment that ends
up bringing pain and discomfort. Jouissance destabilizes oneself.
Jouissance can also be thought of as an abundance of intensity or
stimulation in the body. Lacan associates jouissance with repetition
compulsion or with those acts we repeat over and over again, but which
also cause all sorts of problems in our lives. For example, someone who
feels compelled to wash their hands a hundred times a day. In this sense,
repetition of the same is precisely what drive seeks. If drive could speak,
it would say something like “More! Again! More! Again!” (this is why
Lacan called his twentieth seminar Encore). This is why Lacan claims that
every drive is a death drive (drive disrupts the functioning of our social or
Symbolic selves). When you think jouissance, also think drive. Lacan
views them as going hand in hand and he opposes them to desire.
Lacanians often say that desire is a defense against drive and jouissance.
As Lacan himself put it, “Desire is a defense, a defense against going
beyond a limit in jouissance” (‘The Subversion of the Subject and the
Dialectic of Desireʼ, Écrits, p. 699).
Is jouissance not the whole of an infantʼs world? All babies do is

breastfeed (oral drive), stare at their primary caregiverʼs face or gaze
(scopic drive), listen to the primary caregiverʼs voice (invocatory drive)
and shit (anal drive). A babyʼs whole being is that of drive satisfaction or
jouissance. Early on, none of this is mediated by language, law, custom,
social norms, etc., that is, the baby is not yet a socialized subject who
has to situate and contextualize its pursuits of enjoyment. Instead, itʼs a
little bundle of non-mediated, concentrated jouissance. This is not to
romanticize jouissance. Over time, it becomes more and more
unbearable and the child seeks a way to distance itself from it. Think
about a small childʼs relation to the body of its primary caregiver (usually
its motherʼs body). The child often clings to this body, but, at other times,
it does anything it can to be freed from it. Little kids often start to throw a
fit when their moms wonʼt put them down.
Donʼt you know that itʼs not longing for the maternal breast that
provokes anxiety, but its imminence? What provokes anxiety is
everything that announces to us, that lets us glimpse, that weʼre going
to be taken back onto the lap. It is not, contrary to what is said, the
rhythm of the motherʼs alternating presence and absence. The proof
of this is that the infant revels in repeating this game of presence and
absence. The security of presence is the possibility of absence. The

most anguishing thing for the infant is precisely the moment when the
relationship upon which heʼs established himself, of the lack that turns
him into desire, is disrupted, and this relationship is most disrupted
when thereʼs no possibility of any lack, when the mother is on his back
all the while, and especially when sheʼs wiping his backside. (Seminar
X: Anxiety, p. 53)
Nevertheless, a young childʼs whole world is centered around immediate

access to jouissance and this is precisely what socialization (what Lacan
called symbolic castration) seeks to correct. In Lacanʼs words,
“Castration means that jouissance has to be refused in order to be
attained on the inverse scale of the Law of desire” (‘The Subversion of
the Subject and the Dialectic of Desireʼ, Écrits, p. 700).
There comes a point in a childʼs development when the standards and

practices of society come to put restrictions on jouissance. In the
traditional scenario, itʼs the father that finally separates the child from the
mother (primary caregiver) by laying down the Law. The father steps in
and says, “No!”, that is, he puts limitations on the childʼs drive satisfaction
(Lacan calls this No! the “name-of-the-father”). The child must now seek
enjoyment in ways that are socially appropriate. The child must accept
that it has lost the immediacy of the maternal Thing (body of jouissance)
and must seek out substitute objects of desire from now on. This is why
Lacan associates desire with language — both of them involve
metonymy, deferral, displacement, mediation, relationality,
contextualization, rules, etc. In fact, for Lacan, there is no subject proper
until one accepts the no-of-the-father and enters into the Symbolic order
(language). Lacan said, “The subject is manufactured by a certain
number of articulations that have taken place, and falls from the
signifying chain in the way that ripe fruit falls. As soon as he comes into
the world he falls from a signifying chain” (My Teaching, p. 44). This is
why the Lacanian psychoanalyst Bruce Fink titled his famous book The
Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. For Lacan, the

human subject is a particular relation between language and jouissance
and it is out of this relation that objet petit a emerges or falls away.
Remember, the being of an infant is that of unmediated jouissance or

libidinal plenitude. For a baby, to lose this sort of jouissance is to lose its
very being. The moment language takes hold and places restrictions on
jouissance is the moment when a structural lack is produced within the
human being — the lack of immediate jouissance. Now oneʼs being is a
sort of non-being. “I am my inability to be.” Now thereʼs some-thing that
Iʼm missing, that I lack, that I must have in order to be whole again.
Thereʼs some “part” of myself that I have been separated from. This
some-thing is objet petit a. We could say that objet petit a is the ghost of
oneʼs primordial jouissance that emerges through the socialization
process. The objet petit a is that little remainder of the excessive
jouissance we were once submerged in. As Lacan put it, “The objet a is
something from which the subject, in order to constitute itself, has
separated itself off as organ. . . . It must, therefore, be an object that is,
firstly, separable and, secondly, that has some relation to the lack”
(Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, p. 101).
In this context, I take it that objet petit a is the “organ” and the subject is
the “body”. The Lacanian object is an “organ” insofar as it is that lost,
sacrificed jouissance (excess or remainder) cut away from the body by
language (name-of-the-father, the signifier, Law, etc.). Jouissance is the
price of admission into the Symbolic order.
For the sake of clarification, we must understand that the world of the
infant is not a euphoric bliss. Being submerged in jouissance is not a
perfect state of being. No! At times, the child desperately seeks to
escape it. And how does the kid get away from this sphere of jouissance?
By distancing itself from the desire of the mother. The babyʼs jouissance
is fundamentally connected to the motherʼs body. This means that she
must desire the baby in order to prolong this symbiotic unity. On the one
hand, the motherʼs desire can be deeply comforting, but on the other, it
can become a sort of tractor beam one struggles to escape from. Lacan
sums up this situation in the following way:
The motherʼs role is the motherʼs desire. Thatʼs fundamental. The

motherʼs desire is not something that is bearable just like that, that
you are indifferent to. It will always wreak havoc. A huge crocodile in
whose jaws you are — thatʼs the mother. One never knows what might
suddenly come over her and make her shut her trap. Thatʼs what the
motherʼs desire is. Thus, I have tried to explain that there was
something that was reassuring. I am telling you simple things, I am
improvising, I have to say. There is a roller, made out of stone of
course, which is there, potentially, at the level of her trap, and it acts
as a restraint, as a wedge. Itʼs what is called the phallus. Itʼs the roller
that shelters you, if, all of a sudden, she closes it. (Seminar XVII: The
Other Side of Psychoanalysis, p. 112)
So what exactly is he saying? I donʼt want to go into an examination of

the phallus, but suffice it to say, the phallus is the lack the child perceives
in its mother, that is, it recognizes the motherʼs desire is lacking
something. For Lacan, the Oedipus complex is structured around the
phallus and his point is that the Oedipus complex or socialization enables
a child to free itself from the motherʼs desire, which is a good thing. He
paints the mother (primary caregiver) as a big crocodile in whose mouth
(suffocating presence) the child is located. If the kid tries to escape, the
mother slams her jaws shut. Lacan envisions the phallus as a rolling pin
that the child can place at the back of her jaws and thereby keep her
mouth pried open long enough to escape from it. But hereʼs the thing:
even though oneʼs early childhood is far from some libidinal utopia, it
retroactively seems to have been one. There is a certain simplicity that is
lost with taking on language, law, custom, and the like. Itʼs as if the
unconscious comes to idealize the past of oneʼs immersion in jouissance.
Thereʼs great ambivalence here. The child eventually yearns to be freed

from the motherʼs body (das Ding) and the jouissance that comes with it,
but once it has become the lost object it forever haunts the subject as
that missing “part” of itself, that is, it becomes objet petit a. As Žižek
explains, “das Ding is the absolute void, the lethal abyss which swallows
the subject; while objet petit a designates that which remains of the
Thing after it has undergone the process of symbolization” (The Plague
of Fantasies, p. 105). Therefore, we could say that objet petit a is the
virtual trace of the maternal Thing (body of jouissance). The objet petit a
is the becoming-virtual of jouissance. Gilles Deleuze refers to objet a as a
“virtual object”: “These partial or virtual objects are encountered under
various names, such as Melanie Kleinʼs good and bad object, the
‘transitionalʼ object, the fetish-object, and above all Lacanʼs object a”
(Difference and Repetition, p. 101). By “virtual”, in this context, we mean
something like potential. Think about how a particular crack pattern is
there in a window before it gets actualized. Before the window is actually
shattered, the crack pattern was already there as a virtual potentiality.
For jouissance to become virtual is for it to cease to be immediately
present. In other words, it is something the subject lacks. In fact, the
subject is this very lack. The desiring subject, all the days of its life, will
be unknowingly chasing this lost “object” in the form of the virtual
jouissance we call objet petit a. Sean Homer put it quite nicely:
The objet a is not, therefore, an object we have lost, because then we

would be able to find it and satisfy our desire. It is rather the constant
sense we have, as subjects, that something is lacking or missing from
our lives. We are always searching for fulfilment, for knowledge, for
possessions, for love, and whenever we achieve these goals there is
always something more we desire; we cannot quite pinpoint it but we
know that it is there. This is one sense in which we can understand
the Lacanian real as the void or abyss at the core of our being that we
constantly try to fill out. The objet a is both the void, the gap, and
whatever object momentarily comes to fill that gap in our symbolic
reality. What is important to keep in mind here is that the objet a is not
the object itself but the function of masking the lack. (Jacques Lacan,
pp. 87–88)
A lot has been said about objet petit a so far and weʼre just getting
started. Letʼs take a second and summarize what weʼve established
before moving on. The most important thing to keep in mind is that objet
a is not an actual object, but, rather, is a constitutive lack. Itʼs the lack
that produces the desiring subject caught up in the play of signifiers (the
differential and mediated structure of language), that is, it is the lost
“object” that causes you to desire in the first place. The objet petit a is
the positional void where oneʼs jouissance used to be. This is why Žižek
says, “The self-referential movement of the signifier is not that of a
closed circle, but an elliptical movement around a certain void. And the
objet petit a, as the original lost object which in a way coincides with its
own loss, is precisely the embodiment of this void” (The Sublime Object
of Ideology, p. 178). Strictly speaking, objet petit a is not some positive
reality, but, instead, is a void, an empty spot, a position of lack. Yet itʼs a
void that, for the subject, is like a thing or a missing part that has its own
substantial reality. As paradoxical as it sounds, objet petit a is a positive
negativity, a “substantial” void, a reified emptiness. The objet petit a is
the void or lack you unconsciously pursue in the hope that the attainment
of this missing part of yourself will give you an ontological completeness
you once “enjoyed” as an infant.
Lyrics from Queenʼs song ‘Hammer to Fallʼ sum up objet a: “Every night
and every day, a little piece of you is falling away”. However, this “little
piece of you” is not something you can name or point out. As far as your
first-person, phenomenological experience goes, objet petit a is never
directly perceived as the missing part of yourself, since itʼs really a void.
Thereʼs a quote Iʼve often seen attributed to André Breton that expresses
this truth: “All my life, my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name”.
Objet a eludes the capture of the subject. Lacan says, “The base of the
function of desire is, in a style and in a form that have to be specified

each and every time, the pivotal object a insomuch as it stands, not only
separated, but always eluded, somewhere other than where it sustains
desire, and yet in a profound relation to it” (Seminar X: Anxiety, p. 252).
In light of these words, we are ready to understand why objet petit a is
the object-cause of desire (the “object” that causes desire) and not the
object of desire.
The Lacanian object or objet petit a is not the object of desire. Instead, it
is the object-cause of desire, that is, it is the object that causes you to
desire the object you actually desire. Imagine being in a theater watching
a graceful ballerina perform a spotlit solo. You find yourself completely
captivated and memorized by this dancer. However, what in this analogy
is the condition of this enchantment? It is the very spotlight in which the
ballerina stands out from the darkness. In a sense, we are not even
conscious of this light — it is “unconscious”. Analogously, it is this
“object” that causes the ballerina to attract our attention. In other words,
in this analogy, the object-cause of desire (objet petit a) is the spotlight
and the object of desire is the ballerina.
In his tenth seminar, Lacan discussed the object-cause of desire in terms

of Husserlian intentionality. Desireʼs intentionality is always fixed on the
object of desire, not the object-cause of desire, which means that the
object-cause is off in the background or is at work behind the scenes. In
other words, objet petit a eludes phenomenological experience. Lacan
said, “To set our target, I shall say that the object a — which is not to be
situated in anything analogous to the intentionality of a noesis, which is
not the intentionality of desire — is to be conceived of as the cause of
desire. To take up my earlier metaphor, the object lies behind desire”
(Seminar X: Anxiety, p. 101). Now, perhaps he would reject this idea, but I
think we could argue that there are always two separate beams of
intentionality when it comes to desire. The beam of the unconscious
focused on objet a or the object-cause of desire and the beam of
conscious experience focused on the object of desire. Think about it.
There has to be some awareness of objet petit a in order for it to cause
us to consciously desire specific objects. The object-cause of desire is
like the proverbial donkeyʼs carrot that functions as an unattainable lure
or enticement.
As weʼll shortly see, objet a does come to have idiosyncratic

determinations for each desiring subject, which is why we all desire
different things and have our own personal histories of desire. The objet
a is incredibly mysterious and elusive. Itʼs not the object of my desire,
but, rather, the “object” that causes me to desire the object of my desire.
Thus, the objet a is behind desire. Itʼs “off stage” in relation to
fantasmatic desire. It seems to be completely indeterminable, but maybe
itʼs not entirely. Why and how does it cause me to desire specific things?
If we can, in theory, desire anything, then what is the mechanism of a
particular desire? What x caused me to desire y? There are two main
senses in which objet a is the cause of desire (itʼs worth noting that
Lacan devoted a whole session to this concept of the cause in Seminar
X). First, objet a is literally the cause of all desire, that is, itʼs emergence
is the very reason why human beings start to desire at all. Before the
“falling away” of objet a, we are not desiring subjects, but, instead, are
little bundles of wild drives and unregulated jouissance. The “breaking
off” of objet petit a is precisely what causes desire as such. This is easy
enough to understand, since we already know that the Law (name-of-
the-father, prohibition) separates us from das Ding (maternal body of
jouissance) and, thereby, produces a fundamental lack (objet a) “in” us
that causes us to desire. This constitutive, structural lack is one that all of
us as desiring subjects have in common. However, the objet a also comes
to cause specific desires. We all have our own particular histories of
desire and objet a in its idiosyncratic dimension is the hidden cause at
work behind the scenes.
Letʼs explore the specificity of the “object” that causes particular desires.
The objet petit a is essentially a lack, a void or an empty spot, but
throughout the course of oneʼs life, this void comes to be associated with
specific features, traits, qualities, determinations, etc. This is where its
specificity and uniqueness come from. Žižek is very helpful here:
In what precise sense is objet petit a the object-cause of desire? The

objet petit a is not what we desire, what we are after, but, rather, that
which sets our desire in motion, in the sense of the formal frame
which confers consistency on our desire: desire is, of course,
metonymical; it shifts from one object to another, through all these
displacements, however, desire nonetheless retains a minimum of
formal consistency, a set of phantasmic features which, when they are
encountered in a positive object, make us desire this object — objet
petit a as the cause of desire is nothing other than this formal frame of
consistency. (The Plague of Fantasies, p. 53)
Pay close attention to what Žižek just said. He identifies objet a with a
“set of phantasmatic features” and this is precisely where its particularity
is found. This set of phantasmatic features or desireʼs “formal frame of
consistency” is what bestows objet a with determinacy, i.e., provides the
constitutive lack with positive qualities. Each of us in our own ways (via
fantasy) come to unconsciously associate certain empirical features with
that missing “part” of ourselves. If we can just find the right object of
desire, then we will finally fill the void and. If we can just get ahold of IT
(no, not that killer clown), then we will be complete. Of course, this is
impossible, but itʼs the impossibility that makes desiring subjectivity
continue to be possible.
Put differently, objet petit a gets linked to certain idealized and libidinally-
invested traits. One of the easiest ways to see this mechanism at work is
to consider that many men end up marrying women that strikingly
resemble their mothers. The traits of the mother (das Ding) get laid down
in the mind as the most basic coordinates of jouissance. In Lacanʼs
words, “The world of our experience, the Freudian world, assumes that it
is this object, das Ding, as the absolute Other of the subject, that one is
supposed to find again. It is to be found at the most as something
missed. One doesnʼt find it, but only its pleasurable associations” (The
Ethics of Psychoanalysis, p. 52). These specific qualities or traces of the
maternal Thing form fundamental “pleasurable associations” with

jouissance or drive satisfaction. As these impressions get imprinted and
stored in the psyche, they produce the most fundamental configuration
of the childʼs libidinal economy. These features are the primary markers
of jouissance, that is, they become master signifiers. They donʼt have any
signifieds (meanings) proper, but simply mark points in oneʼs
environment (the maternal body) that are reserves of jouissance, e.g.,
breast, gaze, voice.
This line of thought comes from Freudʼs work, so we must take a quick
detour through some of his ideas to better understand it. In a short paper
called ‘A Note upon the “Mystic Writing Pad”ʼ, Freud provides us with an
image of how these markers of jouissance (master signifiers) get
established. Freud characterized the unconscious as timeless, but in
what sense? According to him, all of the various aspects of oneʼs life
history such as the different memory-traces or signifier-like inscriptions
left behind by perceptual experiences are permanently and eternally
stored in the unconscious. The following is from an article published by
The Atlantic and authored by Rebecca J. Rosen called “The ‘Mystic
Writing Padʼ: What Would Freud Make of Todayʼs Tablets?” (Jan 25,
2013):
In 1925, Sigmund Freud published an essay, “A Note upon the ‘Mystic

Writing Pad.ʼ” In it, he considered a recent market arrival, the Mystic
Writing Pad (of course), as a sort of metaphor for the human mind. At
base, the Mystic Pad was “a slab of dark brown resin or wax” on
which sat a translucent sheet of wax paper covered by a transparent
sheet of celluloid. When a person set a stylus to it, the dark resin
would become visible through the wax paper at the points of contact,
and thus one could write. When the record was no longer desired,
erase it by simply lifting the wax paper off of the slab. The celluloid
served merely to protect the wax paper from ripping as the stylus ran
across it. This may not sound like much of a metaphor for the human
mind, but one unintended consequence of this procedure struck

Freud as quite significant: “The permanent trace of what was written
is retained upon the wax slab itself and is legible in suitable lights.”
The Mystic Pad had a particular kind of memory. “I do not think it is
too far-fetched,” Freud wrote, “to compare the celluloid and waxed
paper cover with the system of Pcpt.-Cs. [Perception-Consciousness]
and its protective shield, the wax slab with the unconscious behind
them, and the appearance and disappearance of the writing with the
flickering-up and passing-away of consciousness in the process of
perception.
In other words, traces of all our experiences get retained in the

unconscious, which is basically a super-memory system. Consciousness
forgets all kinds of things, but the unconscious remembers it all. Once an
perceptual impression gets registered and inscribed in the indelible
recording surface that is the unconscious, it can never be completely
erased from it. The unconscious eternalizes the past. And so, for our
purposes, we can say that the unconscious never forgets qualitative

experiences of jouissance. As the young child forms associations
between jouissance and certain empirical traits, it involutionary
establishes the basic coordinates of its libidinal economy. Eye color, tone
of voice, hair color, facial gestures, interpersonal dynamics, dispositions,
etc., can all become fundamentally linked to jouissance and the memory-
traces of these traits comprise a set of master signifiers, jouissance
indicators or phantasmatic features. This is the determinate content of
objet petit a that produces specific desires.
Lacan articulated the relation between the body, jouissance and signifiers
in the following way: “I will say that the signifier is situated at the level of
enjoying substance (substance jouissante). . . . The signifier is the cause
of jouissance. Without the signifier, how could we even approach that
part of the body? Without the signifier, how could we center that
something that is the material cause of jouissance? However fuzzy or
confused it may be, it is a part of the body that is signified in this
contribution (apport) . . . the signifier is what brings jouissance to a halt.”
(Seminar XX: Encore, p. 24). So Lacan claims that the signifier is the
cause of jouissance, but, then, immediately adds that the signifier is that
which brings jouissance to a stop. How are we to make sense of these
two seemingly incompatible statements? By distinguishing between two
types of jouissance. The signifier (language) puts an end to the
unmediated jouissance experienced by the infant, but also produces a
second-order, mediated jouissance through coming to represent it. The
“set of phantasmatic features” Žižek described are the causes of the
virtual jouissance we unknowingly pursue as desiring subjects. The
marker of unmediated jouissance is not itself unmediated jouissance but
comes to get libidinally invested or associated with it. The signifier takes
us from unmediated jouissance to mediated jouissance. The Signifier
giveth and the Signifier taketh away. The map of jouissance is not the
original territory of jouissance, but the map itself becomes its own
territory. But, of course, mediated jouissance, mapped jouissance,
socially approved jouissance, is never quite the Real Thing forever lost.
This leads us to Lacanʼs concept of the pure materiality of the signifier.

The idea is that memory-traces of past experiences of bodily jouissance
are fundamentally related to our bodies, sense organs, sensations, etc.
These memory-traces or master signifiers are material owing to the fact
that they are the traces of the sensations of jouissance that were actually
perceived by the body and inscribed on our “mystic writing pad”
(unconscious memory-system). The materiality of the signifier stems
from the materiality of our senses and the sensations they have
perceived. These master signifiers, therefore, have far more to do with
bodily sensations of jouissance than they do with any cognitive content
(concepts, signifieds, meanings).
To talk like Charles Sanders Pierce, these signifiers are more like indices
and icons of jouissance than they are symbols of it or of anything else.
They are indexical insofar as they point towards jouissance and they are
iconic because they resemble (are similar to) former experiences of
jouissance. The moment when the master signifier (S1) has been
thoroughly inscribed in the young childʼs mental apparatus is also the
moment wherein the split between the desiring subject ($) and object
petit a (a) occurs. Lacan said, “it is at the very instant at which S1
intervenes . . . this $, which I have called the subject as divided, emerges.
. . . Finally, we have always stressed that something defined as a loss
emerges from this trajectory. This is what the letter to be read as object a
designates” (Seminar XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, p. 15). In
becoming the representation, the marker, the stand-in, for original,
unmediated jouissance, the master signifier (S1) forces the virtual
“object” (a) to slip out of the subject, thus, producing the barred,
desiring or divided subject ($). The spilt subject and objet petit a are the
results of the initial inscription of the master signifier(s). We can
formulate this Lacanian insight in the following way: S1 → $/a.
Another way to put all this is to say that objet petit a is the “object” (void
with specific determinations added to it) around which your history of
desire turns. It is the secret cause at the empty center of your personal
narrative. It is that which organizes the plot of your life story without your
knowing so. As far as phenomenological consciousness goes, it couldnʼt
care less about objet a. However, all of our conscious activity is set in
motion by this inconspicuous bait, this evasive motivator, that remains
tucked away in the background of desireʼs story. This is why Žižek likens
objet a to the Hitchcockian plot device known us the MacGuffin as well
as to Iraqʼs alleged “weapons of mass destruction”.
To mention the final example: the famous MacGuffin, the Hitchcockian

object, the pure pretext whose sole role is to set the story in motion
but which is in itself ‘nothing at allʼ — the only significance of the
MacGuffin lies in the fact that it has some significance for the
characters — that it must seem to be of vital importance to them. The
original anecdote is well known: two men are sitting in a train; one of
them asks: ‘Whatʼs that package up there in the luggage rack?ʼ ‘Oh,
thatʼs a MacGuffin.ʼ ‘Whatʼs a MacGuffin?ʼ ‘Well, itʼs an apparatus for
trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.ʼ ‘But there are no lions in the
Scottish Highlands.ʼ ‘Well, then, thatʼs not a MacGuffin.ʼ There is
another version which is much more to the point: it is the same as the
other, with the exception of the last answer: ‘Well, you see how
efficient it is!ʼ — thatʼs a MacGuffin, a pure nothing which is none the
less efficient. Needless to add, the MacGuffin is the purest case of
what Lacan calls objet petit a: a pure void which functions as the
object cause of desire. That would be, then, the precise definition of
the real object: a cause which in itself does not exist — which is
present only in a series of effects, but always in a distorted, displaced
way. (The Sublime Object of Ideology, pp. 183–4)
The notorious Iraqi ‘weapons of mass destructionʼ offer another

example of the objet petit a: they are an elusive entity, never
empirically specified, a kind of Hitchcockian MacGuffin, expected to

be hidden in the most disparate and improbable places, from the
(rather logical) desert to the (slightly irrational) cellars of presidential
palaces (so that when the palace is bombed, they may poison
Saddam and his entire entourage); allegedly present in large
quantities, yet magically moved around all the time by workers; and
the more they are destroyed, the more all-present and all-powerful
they are in their threat, as if the removal of the greater part of them
magically heightens the destructive power of the remainder — as
such, by definition they can never be found, and are therefore all the
more dangerous . . . (The Fragile Absolute, p. 21)
Letʼs make all of this even clearer. In good Žižekian fashion, we can use a
couple examples from popular films to illustrate these tricky concepts.
First, we find an analogy for the desiring subjectʼs relation to objet petit a
in the Sci-Fi classic Terminator 2: Judgment Day. As the cyborg goes
about searching for John Conner (object of desire), he is constantly
scanning the faces of all the people in his surrounding environment for
those specific features (object-cause of desire) that would identify John
for him. This analogy is weak if we donʼt make one important clarification.
The Terminator is performing this scanning process at a conscious level,
whereas the desiring subject does it on an unconscious one.
Nevertheless, itʼs like my unconscious is constantly scanning the objects
I encounter for those libidinally invested traits I unknowingly associate
with my fantasies of becoming-whole again, that is, of regaining that lost
“part” of myself (objet petit a).
We find an even better example of the object-cause of desire in Paul

Thomas Andersonʼs Boogie Nights. Itʼs almost as if this scene was
purposely shot just to express the workings of objet petit a. The
sequence I have in mind is the one in which Philip Seymour Hoffman sees
Mark Wahlberg for the very first time (the former is strongly attracted to
the latter). The sequence is a panning shot of a pool party thatʼs being
thrown at Burt Reynoldsʼ house. As Hoffman turns his head, he takes in
the whole party for the sake of gaining a basic orientation with the festive
environment, but something unique happens the moment he sets his
eyes on Wahlberg. Suddenly, the rest of the party fades to darkness
while Wahlberg remains the only person visible in the “spotlight” of
Hoffmanʼs perception (desire). This single shot perfectly captures objet
petit a. Why? The surrounding darkness represents objet petit a as well
as all of the imperceptible markers of jouissance (phantasmatic features,
libidinal attractors, master signifiers) stored within the unconscious. The
objet a and the specific traits linked to it are not present in Hoffmanʼs
conscious experience of Wahlberg, in his perception of the object of his
desire, but they are what cause Wahlberg to be the object his desire
becomes fixated on. For Hoffman, Wahlberg has a kind of sublime
presence that foregrounds itself, but, in reality, it is the dark
(unconscious) background that causes him to stand out to Hoffmanʼs
conscious desire. Now, in this example from Boogie Nights, we donʼt
know what specifics traits cause Hoffman to desire Wahlberg, but we do

get a vivid picture of how objet a mechanistically causes a specific object
(person) to become the object of desire. We see how one object among
many becomes positionally transfigured into the object of pure splendor.
This brings us to a key aspect of objet petit a . This virtual “object” is the
je ne sais quoi or the “I donʼt know what” that makes a certain object or
person become unexplainably special, that is, objet a is the x-factor or
the it-factor, the indefinable quality or elusive detail that makes
something distinctive, sublime or attractive. You know thereʼs something
special about the person, but you never can quite put your finger on what
exactly it is about them that does so. The objet a is the hidden treasure
or agalma (a term Lacan borrowed from Platoʼs Symposium) that turns an
ordinary thing into a radiant prize. This can work in different ways.
Sometimes, the other person is positioned as objet a (agalma), but at
other times, you are in this position so as to imagine yourself as

deserving of the other personʼs desire. Žižek writes, “In late Lacan, on
the contrary, the focus shifts to the object that the subject itself ‘isʼ, to
the agalma, secret treasure, which guarantees a minimum of phantasmic
consistency to the subjectʼs being. That is to say: objet petit a, as the
object of fantasy, is that ‘something in me more than myself on account
of which I perceive myself as ‘worthy of the Otherʼs desireʼ” (The Plague
of Fantasies, p. 9).
However, this whole process can quickly take a turn for the worse.
Thereʼs actually something very violent and dehumanizing when it comes
to the workings of desire, sexuality and objet petit a. Lacan knew this all
too well, “I love you, but, because inexplicably I love in you something
more than you — the objet petit a — I mutilate you.” (Seminar XI: The
Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, p. 268). His point is that
you are merely using the other person as a means to actually get your
hands on your objet petit a (as weʼll see, this can never really happen). In
other words, your desire for the Other is just a go-between in the relation
between you ($) and that lost “part” of yourself (a). Desire never cares
for the Other as an actual person, but, instead, is only interested in
treating them as a sexual prop. Now, what Lacan means here by “love” is
sexual desire or erotic attraction, but he came to make a famous
distinction between desire and love. Both Žižek and Badiou can help us
to understand Lacanʼs later distinction.
For Badiou, like the later Lacan, desire and love are opposed. However,
love does involve desire. Desire relates to the body with its partial objects
(Lacanian objets petit a), that is, desire is invested in certain physical
features that it finds sexually attractive (the traits desire seeks out vary
from person to person or from fantasy-structure to fantasy-structure).
Love, on the other hand, is geared towards the totality of the being of the
Other, i.e., the beloved. Desire aims at parts — love aims at the whole.
Badiou borrows this distinction between desire and love from the Lacan
of the twentieth seminar. There, Lacan says, “For it is love that

approaches being as such in the encounter” (Seminar XX: Encore, p.
145). Again, this means that love loves the whole person, the person in
their “being”, in the fullness of their pure singularity and Otherness, in
their thisness or haecceity. Love loves that about another person which is
theirs alone while desire fixates on specific traits (objet a) that are shared
by many people. Badiou puts it like this: “Lacan also thinks . . . that love
reaches out towards the ontological. While desire focuses on the other,
always in a somewhat fetishist manner, on particular objects, like breasts,
buttocks and cock. . . . love focuses on the very being of the other, on the
other as it has erupted, fully armed with its being, into my life thus
disrupted and re-fashioned” (In Praise of Love, p. 21).
Lacan famously said, “thereʼs no such thing as a sexual relationship”

(Seminar XX: Encore, p. 12). What he meant is that sexuality never
involves two people establishing a compatible, complimentary and
mutually satisfying oneness. Sexuality (desire) is a lot of things, but a yin-
yang it is not. In fact, Lacan goes on to argue that love is what attempts
to make up for the lack of a sexual relationship. “What makes up for the
sexual relationship is, quite precisely, love” (Seminar XX: Encore, p. 45).
However, desire, sexuality, bodily pleasure, etc., are key elements of love,
but, on their own, they are something quite different. As Žižek likes to
say, “Sex without love is just masturbation with a partner”. Badiou
describes all this in the following way:
Jacques Lacan reminds us, that in sex, each individual is to a large

extent on their own, if I can put it that way. Naturally, the otherʼs body
has to be mediated, but at the end of the day, the pleasure will be
always your pleasure. Sex separates, doesnʼt unite. The fact you are
naked and pressing against the other is an image, an imaginary
representation. What is real is that pleasure takes you a long way
away, very far from the other. What is real is narcissistic, what binds is
imaginary. So there is no such thing as a sexual relationship,
concludes Lacan. His proposition shocked people since at the time

everybody was talking about nothing else but “sexual relationships”. If
there is no sexual relationship in sexuality, love is what fills the
absence of a sexual relationship. Lacan doesnʼt say that love is a
disguise for sexual relationships; he says that sexual relationships
donʼt exist, that love is what comes to replace that non-relationship.
Thatʼs much more interesting. This idea leads him to say that in love
the other tries to approach “the being of the other”. In love the
individual goes beyond himself, beyond the narcissistic. In sex, you
are really in a relationship with yourself via the mediation of the other.
The other helps you to discover the reality of pleasure. In love, on the
contrary the mediation of the other is enough in itself. Such is the
nature of the amorous encounter: you go to take on the other, to make
him or her exist with you, as he or she is. It is a much more profound
conception of love than the entirely banal view that love is no more
than an imaginary canvas painted over the reality of sex. (In Praise of
Love, pp. 18–9)
Like the later Lacan and Badiou, Žižek leaves open the possibility of true
love — love that fully embraces the Other despite the aspects which do
not conform to the coordinates of desire and fantasy. However, of course,
true love is quite rare. Most of the time we merely mutilate, cut and edit
the Other for the sole purpose of creating a prop on which we can project
our fantasies centered around objet a. “Love” (desire, sexuality) reduces
the Other to the status of a sex doll. This is why people fear the
premature “I love you”. It fails to allow the beloved to gain enough
temporal support for the fantasy that posits that the lover loves you for
the fullness of your being and not merely because you happen to
possess certain traits that easily and isomorphically align to those of the
loverʼs objet petit a (colloquially speaking, the loverʼs type). This is why I
like the example of the sex doll — it is a generic canvass on which gets
projected a fundamental fantasy. The reason that most people are
disgusted by the thought of having sex with a doll is because it gets too
close to the Real, that is, it mirrors a terrible (unconscious) truth — that
“love” turns actual people into sex objects. Again, this is why the
premature “I love you” shatters the fantasy. It discloses that what the
other “loves” is not you but, rather, that “object” inside you that is more
than you, that is, objet petit a.
The objet petit a is that sublime “object” inside of an ordinary object that
makes the ordinary one become sublime. But this requires that all of
those imperfections in the ordinary object (another person) must be
bracketed out,”cut off” or remain out of sight. This is desireʼs violence —
the mutilation of the Other. If these imperfections come to overshadow
the traits desire finds enticing, then desire simply abandons this object
and moves on to another one that more fully embodies objet a. However,
when it comes to desire, thereʼs is a way in which things can go wrong
with objet a itself. This is the excremental aspect of objet a. In Lacanʼs
words, “I give myself to you . . . but this gift of my person . . . is changed
inexplicably into a gift of shit.” (Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental
Concepts of Psychoanalysis, p. 268).
How does objet a go transform from the sublime object into a piece of
shit, a waste product? The reason why an object (person) can suddenly
go from sublime to excremental is because it can never really fill in the
void that is the absence of the original object or Thing (das Ding,
maternal body of jouissance). Every substitute, no matter how sublime it
may seem, is just that — a substitute. Žižek writes,”Is not every element
that claims the right to occupy the sacred place of the Thing by definition
an excremental object, a piece of trash that can never be ‘up to its taskʼ?
This identity of opposite determinations (the elusive sublime object
and/or excremental trash) — with the ever-present threat that the one
will shift into the other, that the sublime Grail will reveal itself to be
nothing but a piece of shit — is inscribed in the very kernel of the
Lacanian objet petit a” (The Fragile Absolute, p. 23).
In a lengthy passage, Žižek draws a multifaceted analogy between objet

petit a and Coca-Cola. Since this sheds lots of light on the subjectʼs
relation to objet a, itʼs worth reading in its entirety. We will also use these
insights to better understand how objet a can shift from sublime object to
excremental remainder.
What is crucial here from the psychoanalytic perspective is the link

between the capitalist dynamics of surplus-value and the libidinal
dynamics of surplus-enjoyment. Let us elaborate this point apropos of
Coca-Cola as the ultimate capitalist merchandise and, as such, as
surplus-enjoyment personified. It is no surprise that Coke was first
introduced as a medicine — its strange taste does not seem to
provide any particular satisfaction; it is not directly pleasing and
endearing; however, it is precisely as such, as transcending any
immediate use-value (unlike water, beer or wine, which definitely do
quench our thirst or produce the desired effect of satisfied calm), that
Coke functions as the direct embodiment of ‘itʼ: of the pure surplus of
enjoyment over standard satisfactions, of the mysterious and elusive
X we are all after in our compulsive consumption of merchandise. The
unexpected result of this feature is not that, since Coke does not
satisfy any concrete need, we drink it only as a supplement, after
some other drink has satisfied our substantial need — rather, it is this
very superfluous character that makes our thirst for Coke all the more
insatiable: as Jacques-Alain Miller put it so succinctly, Coke has the
paradoxical property that the more you drink the thirstier you get, the
greater your need to drink more — with that strange, bittersweet
taste, our thirst is never effectively quenched. So, when, some years
ago, the advertising slogan for Coke was ‘Coke is it!ʼ, we should note
its thorough ambiguity: ‘thatʼs itʼ precisely in so far as thatʼs never
actually it, precisely in so far as every satisfaction opens up a gap of ‘I
want more!ʼ The paradox, therefore, is that Coke is not an ordinary
commodity whereby its use-value is transubstantiated into an
expression of (or supplemented with) the auratic dimension of pure
(exchange) Value, but a commodity whose very peculiar use-value is

itself already a direct embodiment of the supra-sensible aura of the
ineffable spiritual surplus, a commodity whose very material
properties are already those of a commodity. This is brought to its
conclusion in the case of caffeine-free diet Coke — why? We drink
Coke — or any drink — for two reasons: for its thirst-quenching or
nutritional value, and for its taste. In the case of caffeine-free diet
Coke, nutritional value is suspended and the caffeine, as the key
ingredient of its taste, is also taken away — all that remains is a pure
semblance of, an artificial promise of a substance which never
materialized. Is it not true in this sense, in the case of caffeine-free
diet Coke, we almost literally ‘drink nothing in the guise of something?
What we are implicitly referring to here is, of course, Nietzscheʼs
classic opposition between ‘wanting nothingʼ (in the sense of ‘I donʼt
want anythingʼ) and the nihilistic stance of actively wanting
Nothingness itself; following Nietzscheʼs path, Lacan emphasized how
in anorexia, the subject does not simply ‘eat nothingʼ — rather, she or
he actively wants to eat the Nothingness (the Void) that is itself the
ultimate object-cause of desire. (The same goes for Ernst Krisʼs
famous patient who felt guilty of theft, although he did not actually
steal anything: what he did steal, again, was the Nothingness itself.)
So along the same lines, in the case of caffeine-free diet Coke, we
drink the Nothingness itself, the pure semblance of a property that is
in effect an envelope of a void. This example brings home the inherent
link between three notions: that of Marxist surplus-value, that of the
Lacanian objet petit a as surplus-enjoyment (the concept that Lacan
elaborated with direct reference to Marxian surplus-value), and the
paradox of the superego, perceived long ago by Freud: the more Coke
you drink, the thirster you are; the more profit you make, the more you
want: the more you obey the superego command, the guiltier you are
— in all three cases, the logic of balanced exchange is disturbed in
favour of an excessive logic of ‘the more you give (the more you repay
your debts), the more you oweʼ (or ‘the more you have what you long
for, the more you lack, the greater your cravingʼ; or — the communist
version — ‘the more you buy, the more you have to spendʼ): that is to
say, of the paradox which is the very opposite of the paradox of love
where, as Juliet put it in her immortal words to Romeo, ‘the more I
give, the more I haveʼ. The key to this disturbance, of course, is the
surplus-enjoyment, the objet petit a, which exists (or, rather, persists)
in a kind of curved space — the nearer you get to it, the more it
eludes your grasp (or the more you possess it, the greater the lack).
(The Fragile Absolute, pp. 19–21)
To state the obvious, Žižek just said many important things about objet
petit a via its likeness to Coke. The objet a is (1) the it that is never really
it, (2) that which keeps us consuming commodities, (3) surplus-
enjoyment, (4) useless supplement, (5) paradox, (6) pure semblance or
artificial promise, (7) Nothingness or Void. To summarize, objet a causes
our desire but it also increases and intensifies it due to the fact that it is
unattainable. The more we try to fill the void “in” ourselves, the more we
end up desiring, since we are pursuing an impossible “object”, that is, a
void or nothingness. Picture a car stuck in the mud: the more it spins its
wheels, the more it gets stuck in the mud. The more you try to get
traction (or satisfaction), the less you have it. This is why Žižek compares
objet a to Coca-Cola (“the more Coke you drink, the thirstier you are”).
This is also what gives objet petit a its own unique type of jouissance
called surplus jouissance. This is not the original jouissance enjoyed at
the maternal body (the Thing), but a second-order jouissance produced
by our failed attempts (via desire) to regain the original object. Surplus
jouissance is the excess jouissance we get from chasing objet a but
never actually catching it. Likewise, we get enjoyment from drinking Coke
precisely because it does not satisfy us. Both objet a and Coke are the it
thatʼs not really it. We see this mechanism at work in consumerism with
its false promise that claims some commodity will finally come along and
complete us by bestowing upon us the Great Satisfaction or Happiness
with a capital “H”. As the Narrator in Fight Club says, “When you buy
furniture, you tell yourself, thatʼs it. Thatʼs the last sofa Iʼll need. Whatever
else happens, got that sofa problem handled. I had it all. I had a stereo
that was very decent. A wardrobe that was getting very respectable. I
was close to being complete.”
Let us briefly return to the idea that objet a can quickly shift from sublime
object to excremental trash by connecting this transition to Coke. While
Žižek didnʼt explicitly make this connection in the long passage above, Iʼd
argue itʼs there at a tacit level (he alludes to this connection in The
Pervertʼs Guide to Ideology). Coca-Cola perfectly embodies the shift
from sublimity to shit. How? Just think about what happens to Coke
when itʼs been left out too long — “it” goes flat. The sublime taste of
Coke turns putrid. I canʼt even count how many times Iʼve seen people
spit out flat Coke or pour out the remainder of an old can or bottle. The
conditions (cold temperature, recently opened, etc.) have to be just right
for Coke to have that sublime taste just as the scenery (fantasmatic
staging, ideal setting) has to be right for objet petit a to shine in the Other
(other person, object of desire, sexual partner, commodity). When Coke
goes flat, you pour it out. When objet a turns to shit, you discard the
grotesque Other. When objet petit a departs from the Other, all desire is
left with is flat Coke. Any number of things can cause this shift to occur,
for example, changes in the Otherʼs physical appearance (weight, aging,

hair, fashion, tattoos), manifestation of an annoying flaw or deep
insecurity, loss of a certain social status, etc.
I now want to briefly discuss how objet petit a relates to fantasy. Lacanʼs
famous formula of fantasy is $◊a, that is, the desiring subject in relation
to objet a. According to Lacan, all desiring subjects ultimately have a
fundamental fantasy at their unconscious foundation which organizes
their idiosyncratic relations to objet a. This structural fantasy is an
unconscious scenario, foundational dynamic, underlying outline or
interpersonal blueprint. In other words, the fundamental fantasy is the
skeleton of desire. This is why Žižek likens it to Immanuel Kantʼs concept
of transcendental schematism.
The first thing to note is that fantasy does not simply realize a desire
in a hallucinatory way: rather, its function is similar to that of Kantian
‘transcendental schematismʼ: a fantasy constitutes our desire,
provides its coordinates; that is, it literally ‘teaches us how to desireʼ. .
. . fantasy mediates between the formal symbolic structure and the
positivity of the objects we encounter in reality — that is to say, it
provides a ‘schemaʼ according to which certain positive objects in
reality can function as objects of desire, filling in the empty places
opened up by the formal symbolic structure. To put it in somewhat
simplified terms: fantasy does not mean that when I desire a
strawberry cake and cannot get it in reality, I fantasize about eating it;
the problem is, rather: how do I know that I desire a strawberry cake in
the first place? This is what fantasy tells me. (The Plaque of Fantasies,
p. 7)
In fantasyʼs formula ($◊a), the fundamental fantasy is the organizing

principle of desire and is primarily identified with the lozenge sign (◊).
This diamond-shaped symbol is a condensation of four other symbols:
(1) ∧ (conjunction sign), (2) ∨ (disjunction sign), (3) < (greater-than sign),
(4) > (less-than sign). Oneʼs fundamental fantasy can involve all sorts of
desirous structures: conjunctive scenarios (fusion, synthesis, merger),
disjunctive scenarios (repudiation, rejection, distancing), greater-than
scenarios (superiority, domination, sadism), less-than scenarios
(submission, dependency, masochism). Each desiring subject has a
fundamental fantasy with one of these basic dynamics. In fact, oneʼs
fundamental fantasy is what gives each personʼs desire a certain
individuality. The fundamental fantasy is the fingerprint of subjectivity.
Žižek calls this the “factor”: “The Freudian point regarding fundamental
fantasy would be that each subject, female or male, possesses such a
‘factorʼ which regulates her or his desire: ‘a woman, viewed from behind,
on her hands and kneesʼ was the Wolf Manʼs factor; a statue-like woman
without pubic hair was Ruskinʼs factor; and so on” (The Plague of
Fantasies, p. 8). When thinking about the ◊ in $ ◊ a, think about the lyrics
from Sweet Dreams by Eurythmics: “Some of them want to use you.
Some of them want to get used by you. Some of them want to abuse you.
Some of them want to be abused.”
However, we must resist the impulse to think of fantasy as an obstacle in

our view of reality. Žižek claims that fantasy is what actually gives us
access to the world. He says, “With regard to the basic opposition
between reality and imagination, fantasy is not simply on the side of
imagination; fantasy is, rather, the little piece of imagination by which we
gain access to reality — the frame that guarantees our access to reality,
our ‘sense of realityʼ (when our fundamental fantasy is shattered, we
experience the ‘loss of realityʼ)” (‘Is It Possible to Traverse the Fantasy in
Cyberspaceʼ, The Žižek Reader, p. 122). To put this in Martin Heideggerʼs
terms, for Žižek, fantasy is the individualistic aspect of the clearing,
fantasy is the mineness of disclosure as such. What makes the shared,
social clearing mine is the fantasy through which I comport myself
towards the beings I encounter in the world. For Heidegger, authentic-
being-towards-death is that on the basis of which Dasein could be truly
individuated, but Žižek thinks weʼre always already individuated in
relation to das Man (the big Other, the Symbolic order) before we ever
have a resolute confrontation with death, since the fundamental fantasy
is the hidden individualizing mechanism of Daseinʼs existence. Fantasy is,
thus, the unconscious, pre-authentic individuality of Dasein. Simply put,
all desiring subjects unconsciously pursue objet petit a, that lost
remainder of themselves, but fundamental fantasy gives each of them a
way to stage a scenario in which they regain it. The fundamental fantasy
is a roadmap to that lost part of yourself (of course, the problem is that it
can never actually be regained, but one feature of fantasy is that it
conceals this impossibility).
Nonetheless, the idiosyncratic aspect of fantasy should not prevent us

from seeing how fantasy can function at a general level. Žižek has
highlighted time and time again the significant role fantasy plays in
society, politics and ideology. For him, there are ideological fantasies the
various members of communities share and have in common. Yet these
ideological fantasies, like personal ones, are centered around objet petit
a. In fact, objet petit a is the “sublime object” in the title of Žižekʼs The
Sublime Object of Ideology. As he says there, “When, for example, in his
speech at Leninʼs funeral, Stalin proclaims, ‘We, the Communists, are
people of a special mould. We are made of special stuff, ‘ it is quite easy
to recognize the Lacanian name for this special stuff: objet petit a, the
sublime object . . .” (The Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 162). His point is
that all ideologies elevate a particular object to the sublime status of
objet a or das Ding, for example, “freedom”, “the people”, “the Nation”,
“God”, “the church”, “history”, “blood and soil”, “equality”, “the free
market”, “competition”, “proletariat”, “the King”, etc.
This is also the fundamental feature of the logic of the Lacanian

object: the place logically precedes objects which occupy it: what the
objects, in their given positivity, are masking is not some other, more
substantial order of objects but simply the emptiness, the void they
are filling out. We must remember that there is nothing intrinsically
sublime in a sublime object according to Lacan, a sublime object is an

ordinary, everyday object which, quite by chance, finds itself
occupying the place of what he calls das Ding, the impossible-real
object of desire. The sublime object is ‘an object elevated to the level
of das Dingʼ. It is its structural place — the fact that it occupies the
sacred/forbidden place of jouissance — and not its intrinsic qualities
that confers on it its sublimity. (The Sublime Object of Ideology, p.
221)
The next aspect of objet petit a that I want to briefly discuss is how it is
the object of anxiety (for more on this, see my other blog post titled Why
So Anxious?: Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Lacan on Anxiety). For Lacan,
objet petit a is not only what causes desire but also causes anxiety. “The
most striking manifestation of this object a, the signal that it is
intervening, is anxiety” (Seminar X: Anxiety, p. 86). Whenever objet a
gets too close to the desiring subject, that is, when it gets too close to
conscious experience, anxiety assails the subject. Anxiety is a warning
system that warns the subject of the proximity of objet petit a.
Remember, objet a only works so long as it remains at a distance, so long
as it is just a lure. According to Lacan, anxiety is about the lack of a lack
or the presence of something that was and/or is supposed to be absent.
Anxiety is about some overbearing presence that threatens to consume
the subject — the overwhelming presence of objet petit a. The desiring
subject only exists as a desiring lack, so the presence of objet a, the Real
of jouissance, is the threat of Imaginary-Symbolic death (the
deconstruction of our socialized egos). For fantasy (◊) to function, objet
a must remain off its stage or out of its frame, that is, it must remain
something absent that weʼre unconsciously searching for in order to
work.
This nightmarish dimension of objet petit a puts things in a different light.

So far, weʼve seen how the desiring subject is always unconsciously
pursuing objet a, but what if we perform a simple parallax (shift in
perceptive) and view it as that which is always pursuing us? The horror
film It Follows perfectly represents this idea. Thereʼs an old horror trope
of a monster relentlessly chasing its victim. We see this in Dracula, The
Wolf Man, Jaws, Halloween, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street,
Childʼs Play, etc. However, It Follows takes this to a whole new level. This
it, this monster, in and of itself, is imperceptible — it reveals itself only in
illusory forms (just like objet a). Also, the it is like an STD, since is
sexually transmitted from one victim to the next. In other words, it
emerges in your life as the remainder or trace of a past jouissance (just
like objet a). In this horror film, the it never stops pursuing you. It never
gets distracted and never rests. All it does is chase you. If it catches you,
you die. One is left in constant anxiety by the imminence of this object,
this lack of a lack (just like objet a). On the one hand, objet a is what
keeps us living life, what keeps us striving for new and better things, but
on the other, it is simultaneously what prevents us from ever having
peace, satisfaction and contentment. It is the “bone in the throat” of
human existence.
There is one more facet of objet a that makes it unnerving and that is its
relation to the desire of the Other, since the latter often occupies the
position of the former. One of Lacanʼs most famous saying is “desire is
the desire of the Other”. This contains multiple meanings. We desire what
other people desire. We desire to be desired by others. We desire to
satisfy the Otherʼs desire. We desire to know what the Other desires.
Desire desires desire. However, there is a fundamental enigma at the
heart of the Otherʼs desire, that is, we can never be sure when it comes
to the desire of the Other. Think about. We never know for sure what we
desire, so how can we possibly be certain when it comes to the Otherʼs
desire? People do things all the time in the name of their desire that we
never see coming. Desire as such, yours and mine, is enigmatic. Why?
Because the unconscious is always involved with it. We lack direct
access to both our unconscious dynamics as well as those of the Other,
which means we can never master desire and all its secrets. We are
never safe and secure when it comes to desire. Lacan provides a great
image of the enigmatic nature of the Otherʼs desire:
Iʼll recall the fable, the apologue, the amusing image I briefly set out
before you. Myself donning the animal mask with which the sorcerer
in the Cave of the Three Brothers is covered, I pictured myself faced
with another animal, a real one this time, taken to be gigantic for the
sake of the story, a praying mantis. Since I didnʼt know which mask I
was wearing, you can easily imagine that I had some reason not to feel
reassured in the event that, by chance, this mask might have been
just what it took to lead my partner into some error as to my identity.
The whole thing was well underscored by the fact that, as I confessed,
I couldnʼt see my own image in the enigmatic mirror of the insectʼs
ocular globe. (Seminar X: Anxiety, pp. 5–6)
To clarify, Lacan wants us to envision ourselves standing before a giant

praying mantis. Hereʼs the catch: we are wearing a mask and we do not
know what mask it is. Is the mask that of the mantisʼ lover, enemy,
offspring? We simply do not know what we are to the Otherʼs desire.
Using the gaze of an insect is very appropriate, since insects are the
creatures humans typically feel no warmth towards due to their radical,
alien Otherness. But, in truth, there is an aspect of every human that is
insectival — namely, enigmatic desire. Oftentimes, the Otherʼs desire is
objet petit a or the cause of oneʼs desire and fantasy serves to answer
the question “What do you want from me?”
One should always bear in mind that the desire ‘realizedʼ (staged) in
fantasy is not the subjectʼs own, but the otherʼs desire: fantasy,
phantasmic formation, is an answer to the enigma of Che vuoi? —
‘Youʼre saying this, but what do you really mean by saying it?ʼ —
which established the subjectʼs primordial, constitutive position. The
original question of desire is not directly ‘What do I want?, but ‘What
do others want from me? What do they see in me? What am I to
others?ʼ A small child is embedded in a complex network of relations;
he serves as a kind of catalyst and battlefield for the desires of those
around him: his father, mother, brothers and sisters, and so on, fight
their battles around him, the mother sending a message to the father
through her care for the son. While he is well aware of this role, the
child cannot fathom what object, precisely, he is to others, what the
exact nature of the games they are playing with him is, and fantasy
provides an answer to this enigma: at its most fundamental, fantasy
tells me what I am to my others. (The Plaque of Fantasies, p. 9)
If thereʼs an upside to the anxiety-provoking desire of the Other, then it is

to be found in how it gives us a certain freedom. This encounter can
actually bring us to a moment of self-determination wherein we take
control of our own desire. This is something like desireʼs authenticity.
Here, oneʼs desire ceases to be the puppet of the Otherʼs desire and
affirms its own freedom to choose for itself. As Žižek explains:
There is no freedom outside the traumatic encounter with the opacity

of the Otherʼs desire: freedom does not mean that I simply get rid of
the Otherʼs desire — I am, as it were, thrown into my freedom when I
confront this opacity as such, deprived of the fantasmatic cover that
tells me what the Other wants from me. In this difficult predicament,
full of anxiety, when I know that the Other wants something from me,
without knowing what this desire is, I am thrown back into myself,
compelled to assume the risk of freely determining the coordinates of
my desire. (The Puppet and the Dwarf, p. 129)
To conclude, it should be said that objet petit a is at the center of the

human condition (for lack of a better word). Lacan says, “Effectively,
everything turns around the subjectʼs relation to a” (Seminar X: Anxiety,
p. 112). In his Borromean knot of the Real, Symbolic and Imaginary, objet
a is located at the center of the three of them. The objet a is in the Real
insofar as it is that lost remainder of ourselves that is operative only so
long as it remains the unconscious cause of desire. Itʼs in the Symbolic
due to the fact that language itself is what produced it as the remainder
which all language circles around without ever grasping — not to mention
that fantasy is Symbolically mediated and its object is objet petit a. It also
belongs to the Imaginary because it is the last missing part of itself that
the ego needs in order to be “whole” (wholeness has been the main
motivating factor for the ego since its emergence in the mirror stage).
With all that being said, there is a tragic, pessimistic dimension to the
subjectʼs relation to objet a. Lacanian psychoanalysis can be summed up

with the words of Oscar Wilde: “There are only two tragedies in life: one
is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it” (Lady
Windermereʼs Fan, Mr. Dumby, Act III). The lack of jouissance is
unsatisfying, but so too is jouissance itself. The Lacanian subject says,
“neither desire nor jouissance”, but those are ultimately its only two
options. We desire in order to escape jouissance (drive), but, then, we
spend all of our lives trying to regain it. Yet those who do find themselves
submerged in jouissance, e.g., drug addicts, desperately yearn to get rid
of it. Jouissance brings suffering because it is also located beyond the
Law. This is why Lacan said, “jouissance is evil” (Seminar VII: The Ethics
of Psychoanalysis, p. 184). He also explained, “It begins with a tickle and
ends in a blaze of petrol. Thatʼs always what jouissance is” (Seminar XVII:
The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, p. 72). What does this mean? It means
that going beyond the pleasure principle starts off with a mild sensation
but ends up quickly engulfing one — jouissance goes from zero to sixty
in a split second. And thereʼs no sense of a nice middle ground or
habitable in-between (Aristotelian mean) on this continuum. With
jouissance, one goes from too little to too much in a snap of the fingers.
However, desire has its own type of built-in suffering. Desire is always
desire for something else: “And the enigmas that desire . . . poses for any
sort of “natural philosophy” are based on no other derangement of
instinct than the fact that it is caught in the rails of metonymy, eternally
extending toward the desire for something else”(‘The Instance of the
Letter in the Unconsciousʼ, Écrits, p. 431).
The objet petit a is at the heart of this tragedy. It is that lost “part” of
jouissance we sacrificed on the alter of language and that which we
unconsciously seek out our entire lives. It is also a false promise of an
ontological completeness we can never achieve. The objet petit a is the
impossible object, the unattainable it. As long as the subject “is”, it
remains a lack. All it can do is chase that “part” of itself that is no part at
all. The subject is a lack that pursues a reified lack.
That is to say, for Lacan, the subject ($ — the ‘barredʼ, empty subject)
and the object-cause of its desire (the leftover which embodies the
lack that ‘isʼ the subject) are strictly correlative: there is a subject only
in so far as there is some material stain leftover that resists
subjectivization, a surplus in which, precisely, the subject cannot
recognize itself. In other words, the paradox of the subject is that it
exists only through its own radical impossibility, through a ‘bone in the
throatʼ that forever prevents it (the subject) from achieving its full
ontological identity. So we have here the structure of the Moebius
strip: the subject is correlative to the object, but in a negative way —
subject and object can never ‘meetʼ; they are in the same place, but
on opposite sides of the Moebius strip. (The Fragile Absolute, p. 28)
So much more needs to be said about objet petit a. I feel like I barely
scratched the surface of this concept, but this post must come to an
end. I do plan on writing more posts on objet a in the future. Iʼd like to go
into greater detail on its place in fantasy and ideology. Iʼd also like to
discuss how the psychoanalyst must become positioned as objet a in
order for psychoanalytic work to be effective. Anyway, I hope this
analysis of objet petit a has been helpful.

Lacan S Concept of The Object-Cause of Desire (Objet Petit A)

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Lacanʼs Concept of the Object-Cause of Desire (objet petit a) - Medium 25/6/2562 BE 19*10

Lacanʼs Concept of the Object-

Lacanʼs concept of the objet petit a is deeply inspired by the ideas of

Ding) is another type of alterity. When it comes to the Imaginary register

To begin, objet a is a paradox. Lacan saw a certain paradox at the heart

For Lacan, a human infant is constantly immersed in drive satisfaction or

Is jouissance not the whole of an infantʼs world? All babies do is

absence. The security of presence is the possibility of absence. The

Nevertheless, a young childʼs whole world is centered around immediate

There comes a point in a childʼs development when the standards and

Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. For Lacan, the

Remember, the being of an infant is that of unmediated jouissance or

The motherʼs role is the motherʼs desire. Thatʼs fundamental. The

So what exactly is he saying? I donʼt want to go into an examination of

Thereʼs great ambivalence here. The child eventually yearns to be freed

The objet a is not, therefore, an object we have lost, because then we

function of desire is, in a style and in a form that have to be specified

In his tenth seminar, Lacan discussed the object-cause of desire in terms

As weʼll shortly see, objet a does come to have idiosyncratic

In what precise sense is objet petit a the object-cause of desire? The

maternal Thing form fundamental “pleasurable associations” with

In 1925, Sigmund Freud published an essay, “A Note upon the ‘Mystic

mind, but one unintended consequence of this procedure struck

In other words, traces of all our experiences get retained in the

purposes, we can say that the unconscious never forgets qualitative

This leads us to Lacanʼs concept of the pure materiality of the signifier.

To mention the final example: the famous MacGuffin, the Hitch​cockian

The notorious Iraqi ‘weapons of mass destructionʼ offer another

empirically specified, a kind of Hitchcockian MacGuffin, expected to

We find an even better example of the object-cause of desire in Paul

know what specifics traits cause Hoffman to desire Wahlberg, but we do

other times, you are in this position so as to imagine yourself as

of the twentieth seminar. There, Lacan says, “For it is love that

Lacan famously said, “thereʼs no such thing as a sexual relationship”

Jacques Lacan reminds us, that in sex, each individual is to a large

concludes Lacan. His proposition shocked people since at the time

In a lengthy passage, Žižek draws a multifaceted analogy between objet

What is crucial here from the psychoanalytic perspective is the link

(exchange) Value, but a commodity whose very peculiar use-value is

for example, changes in the Otherʼs physical appearance (weight, aging,

In fantasyʼs formula ($◊a), the fundamental fantasy is the organizing

However, we must resist the impulse to think of fantasy as an obstacle in

Nonetheless, the idiosyncratic aspect of fantasy should not prevent us

This is also the fundamental feature of the logic of the Lacanian

sublime in a sublime object according to Lacan, a sublime object is an

This nightmarish dimension of objet petit a puts things in a different light.

To clarify, Lacan wants us to envision ourselves standing before a giant

If thereʼs an upside to the anxiety-provoking desire of the Other, then it is

There is no freedom outside the traumatic encounter with the opacity

To conclude, it should be said that objet petit a is at the center of the

subjectʼs relation to objet a. Lacanian psychoanalysis can be summed up

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To mention the final example: the famous MacGuffin, the Hitchcockian