On the diverse spectrum of contemporary psychoanalytic theory in the Freudian and post-Freudian fields, the Lacanian orientation has acquired a formidable and controversial reputation for obscurity. Within Jacques Lacan’s opus of teaching, objet a
can be considered one of the most difficult and enigmatic formulations to apprehend because of its polyvalent complexity. Rather than a linear progression where the formulation gained greater clarity and specific conceptual definition, objet a continued
to expand throughout Lacan’s oeuvre, gaining multiple facets and attendant nuances of
modification without nullifying any of its previous theoretical incarnations. Indeed, considered in a linear mode of development, the nuances that emerge in Lacan’s later
work inevitably reflect and refract in a retroactive effect upon many of the earlier formulations providing a kaleidoscope of partial and positioned perspectives:
Few concepts have so many avatars in Lacan’s work: the other, agalma, the golden number, the Freudian Thing, the real, the anomaly, the cause of desire, surplus jouissance, the materiality of language, the analyst’s desire, logical
consistency, the Other’s desire, semblance/sham, the lost object, and so on and so forth. (Fink, 1995, p.83)
Nevertheless, in the later stages of his career Lacan contended that objet a constituted the most important innovation and intervention that he had introduced into
psychoanalytic praxis(Fink, 1995, p.83). As the quotation above suggests, however, the status of the formulation evolved in multiple manifestations across nearly three decades
of Lacan’s seminar teaching and clinical practice. Conceived in the light of clinical practice, the descriptors of ‘innovation’ and ‘intervention’ signal that rather than a
purely abstract theoretical construct, Lacan was gesturing towards the primary experience of the clinic and the practical import of objet a. Indeed, Seminar X on the clinical salience of anxiety is testament to this orientation. The theorisation of this aspect of the psychoanalytic encounter, however, proved to be an arduous if not impossible task that Lacan was to pursue throughout his entire opus, forever opening out to further
topological forms and quasi-mathematical formulas and algorithms of the core element that, by definition, cannot be grasped within the linearity of language and its attendant retroactive effects of meaning.
During the first decade of Lacan’s seminar teaching (1953- 63), ‘the object’ of
traditional philosophical rumination and psychoanalytic investigation underwent a transformation that led to the emergence of the opaque formulation he termed objet a.
This transformation coincides with the ascendance of Lacan’s conceptualisation of the register of the Real in relation to the Imaginary and Symbolic registers; the two planes of human relationality that the graph of desire attempts to depict in dynamic interaction. Indeed, as Chapter 1 concludes, it is the fledgling manifestations of objet a that appear
on the graph of desire that not only mark the limit of Lacan’s theoretical formulation of
the analytic process at the end of the first decade of his teaching, but gesture towards the further development and importance of the register of the Real in the Lacanian oeuvre.
Briefly to recapitulate the point from the graph of desire: the process of
symbolisation – the entwinement of both the Imaginary and Symbolic registers – leaves a remainder that Lacan labels voice, the outcome of the signifying chain on the lower right vector of the graph. Similarly, the matheme for fantasy in the upper portion of the graph() places the emergent split subject of desire in relation to a. Most obviously
at this point in Lacan’s opus, the lower case italicised a is an abbreviation for autre (the other), and furthermore, the enigmatic question that emerges for the neurotic subject, mired between demand and the equivocal desire of the o(O)ther. As Dolar (2006, pp.35- 6) points out, however, the outcome of the lower vector as voice, is an elusive reference to an element that emerges as a product of the signifying operation, but remains outside the knot of meaning. These indications remain open-ended and appear to extend beyond any direct explanation provided at the time the graph was presented. Both instances,
however, signal the direction in which Lacan’s thought was to expand with the
ascendance of the register of the Real and its discernable but elusive representative,
objet a. As a surplus kernel of jouissance around which the fabric of the
Symbolic/Imaginary constellation circulates, Lacan formulates objet a as a radically
Reconfigured on the intersecting yet incommensurate planes of the Imaginary,
Symbolic and Real, Lacan’s extension of ‘the object’ eclipses any former philosophical
or psychoanalytic conceptualisations, and arguably transforms it beyond recognition (Fink, 1995, p.93). The resultant reconfiguration of the object as objet a nevertheless owes its genesis to those numerous philosophical traditions and psychoanalytic
conceptualisations. In this respect, Lacan routinely engaged with a formidable array of sources in his seminar teaching and theoretical endeavour, and his formulations were brought forward in contradistinction to these numerous references. In the case of objet a, this is especially pertinent because the only available option to theorise the clinical encounter with objet a (an objectthat, by definition, cannot be described in words) is to
offer an account of a radically different ‘object’ to the object of traditional philosophical and psychoanalytic interest. Put simply, much of Lacan’s elaboration is, necessarily, a
negative delineation that circumscribes precisely what objet a is not. Although notorious for neither providing adequate references nor ascribing credit to his various
interlocutors, Lacan directly acknowledged the significant psychoanalytic
conceptualisation of the ‘part object’ by Karl Abraham and Melanie Klein, and the
further development of the ‘transitional object’ by Donald Winnicott as important predecessors to his formulation of objet a (SX, 26.6.63, p.4; Fink, 1995, p.93).34 As Fink suggests, however, it is to Freud’s concept of the ‘lost object’ (that activates the
compulsion to repeat, with its accompanying uncanny effects) that Lacan is most indebted.
Although it is beyond the parameters of the present discussion to attempt a detailed explication of every facet of objet a offered in Lacan’s oeuvre, Lacan’s attempt
to render minimal form to objet a can be approached from both theoretical and clinical perspectives. In terms of psychoanalytic theory, Lacan delineates objet a from Freudian and post-Freudian conceptualisations of the subject/object relation, and offers a more
34
Although Lacan’s oeuvre has a reputation for obscurity and often lacks direct references, the
inaccessibility of much of his work in the English speaking academy – combined with the editorial licence assumed by Jacques-Alain Miller in the presentation of the seminars that have been published in English to date – sounds a warning against the assumption that Lacan did not give credit or clear references to the work of others. As Marc de Kesel points out in his close reading of Seminar VII, Miller has chosen to omit many of the references that Lacan gave to the students of his seminar, thus enlarging the perception of Gallic arrogance with which Lacan’s work is often characterized in the secondary literature. See de Kesel
nuanced concept of the object that emerges from the circumstance of trans-subjective exchange through language.35 The particular orientation of the divided or barred subject
in relation to this radically different ‘object’ is theorised as the fundamental fantasy (), and, for Lacan, becomes the central pivot of the psychoanalytic encounter. In
practice, Lacan’s pedagogical and clinical modes of engagement emphasise the incitement of tangible anxiety, the primal influence that objet a imposes on the human condition. His linguistic reconfiguration and theoretical extension of Freudian
psychoanalysis always refers to the context of the practical experience of the clinical encounter. To begin, therefore, the discussion returns to Seminar X on anxiety, and
Lacan’s analysis of Freud’s essay on the Uncanny. From this basis, the discussion will then turn to consider the status of objet a in the structure of fantasy ( on the graph of desire) and the significance it assumes as a pivotal lever in Lacan’s clinical and
pedagogical practice.