The Lacanian Object

My starting point in this chapter is that although the Lacanian subject is of great importance for socio-political theory (some of its political implications were explored in the previous chapter), it is Lacan’s insights on the objective level which reveal the importance of his work for political theory. What must be stressed from the beginning, however, is that this is not some kind of zerosum game; obviously, one doesn’t have to concentrate either on Lacan’s comments on the subjective or on his treatment of the objective, these are not two incompatible approaches. In fact, it is the Lacanian conception of the subject itself which permits the articulation of Lacan’s novel approach to the objective level; precisely because it ultimately entails the deconstruction—but not the ‘destruction’—of the dominant bipolarities individual/collective and subjective/objective, and moves beyond all subjectobject imaginary relations (seminar of 23 May 1962). ¹ In his seminar on The Psychoses Lacan pointed out that it is an illusion that the subjective is the opposite of the objective (III:80) and in Anxiety he locates the split subject, the subject as marked by the signifier, on the objective side, the side of the Other (seminar of 21 November 1962). ² These two levels are not, of course, identical but in any case they are not antithetical; there is something linking the individual to the collective, the subjective to the objective, the universal to the particular; but this is not a fundamental essential identity, an identity already realised or in the making. It is exactly the opposite: it is the subject, symbolic lack itself, which splits the essentialist conceptions of individuality; it is the same subject as lack that introduces division into human collectivity. Hence Lacan’s position:

let me simply say that this is what leads me to object to any reference to totality in the individual, since it is the subject who introduces division into the individual, as well as into the collectivity that is his 41equivalent. Psychoanalysis is properly that which reveals both the one and the other to be no more than mirages.

(E: 80) This is then the radical view that Lacan introduces to our conceptions of collectivity, reality, social objectivity. All these mirages, that capture social imagination and guide political praxis, are revealed as lacking; this lack is located at the centre of the dialectic between the subjective and the objective, the individual and the collective, revealing it as a dialectic of impossibility.