sofaconfessions

The truly radical otherness is … the “stranger in our heart”, but the Otherness of the other itself to itself. … Love is always love for the other insofar as he is lacking.

the typical hysterical fear is to become a tool of the other. So the basic constituent of subjectivity is hysterical: I don’t know what I am for the other. Hysteria, or neurosis in general is always a position of questioning. The hysterical subject doesn’t materialize his dreams in a perverse scenario, not because he or she is afraid of repression or the law, but because he always has this doubt: I can do this, but what if even that won’t satisfy me.

justice begins when I remember the faceless many left in shadow in [love’s] privileging of the One. … justice … has to be blind; it must disregard the privileged One whom I “really understand

The ego is an imaginary construct. The ideal ego is the image one forms of oneself in order to make sense of one’s sense of self - it is the image of what one wants to be. Although one’s imaginary self is a necessary part of one’s personality, one’s “true” (or complete) self cannot be reduced to the ego.

In the imaginary, the subject builds fantasy structures to … convince himself that the symbolic order in which he acts is like the real he desires and dreads. It is these fantasies … that enable him to get through the day, and live his life. … One should not condemn the imaginary as delusion it is also creativity. The imaginary requires acts of imagination that temporarily stop the slippage of signification to allow communication to occur.

The imaginary is a world without contradiction or ambiguity, It is the fantasy that one can preserve the reassuringly static aspect of the real without submitting to its terrifying deadly aspect of atemporal negativity. The imaginary is the fantasy that one can achieve the freedom, moral responsibility … of the symbolic without risking its unpredictability and ceaseless change.

Empirical reality falls within Kant’s category of phenomena. Lacan’s conception of the real does not question the existence of phenomena, but questions Kant’s theory that there exists in addition to empirical reality, some nonempirical, purely rational thing-in-itself that exists outside human understanding (the noumena). … Kant believes that only noumena are hidden, and one can know phenomena through experience. … For Lacan, in contrast, the real is not a … thing-in-itself. It is negativity as such which is not beyond the symbolic, but entirely within it. The real is the limit t the symbolic . … This sense that the thing-in-itself exists outside of empirical phenomena is itself only an appearance generated by … misunderstanding.

The real can be thought of as Kant’s misunderstanding that there is a noumenon, a thing-in-itself, that is beyond our phenomenological understanding. … The real is not the noumenon itself but the misperception that there is a noumenon distinct from the empirical phenomenal world. The “real” is not, therefore, the physical reality or the “object world” per se. … The real … is that [order] … that cannot be reduce to our words or pictures. … [Located within the real] is our understanding of … death, and everything else that we sense is beyond the limitations of human speech and imagery.

objet petit a is not … the absence the subject identifies in herself and the big Other. That absence is the radical negativity or lack of the real. … Objet petit a is loss positivized. It is … imaginary. It is something affirmative that is actually missing in the subject’s life that stands in for the internal lack that the symbolic expels, but around which the symbolic is structured. … Objet petit a is the place where … an imaginary object … stands for the real within the symbolic.

desire … is … mediated by reference to Nothingness: the true object-cause of desire (as opposed to the objects that satisfy our needs) is, by definition, a stand-in for Nothingness. … Objet petit a as the object-cause of desire is the originally lost object: … not only that we desire it in so far as it is lost - this object is nothing but a loss positivized.

In the process of moving from one object to another, we find desire in its purity. … In changing, desire undergoes catharsis. It is sublimated or, in the Latin root, sublimationem, purified. Desire does not find its proper object in the new object. It is not that desire was somehow aimed incorrectly, an error to be rectified in the location of the ‘correct’ object. It is rather that, in undergoing change, desire is experienced in its proper sense as the moment of change. Such would be the moment of traversing the fantasy, of the subject’s locating themselves as the cause of their desire in place of objet petit a.

Sublimation … does not … mean that the object must be changed or mutated. It means, rather, that desire can only be experienced when the object is no longer confused as … the true source of satisfaction, … the object is no longer assumed to the cause of desire. In experiencing or recognising desire qua desire, beyond the misrecognition of this or that object as the object of desire, the subject would not simply be recognising that which was there all along but neither would they be venturing headlong into the desert of the Real.” (Neill 2011, p. 243) “[To conceive] the Real … as the site of the ethical beyond signification [and beyond the social/symbolic] … misses two points. … Without retaining a relation to knowledge, with the social, with the symbolic, what would be termed the ethical is utterly devoid of meaning. This links to the second point …; the ethical … is not concerned with maintaining desire. The ethical is concerned with recognising desire for what it is and with the assumption of responsibility for and as the cause of the desire that is in one.” (p. 241)

Traversing the fantasy … would be for the subject to constitute itself in a relation with the other which maintains the necessary support of fantasy without imputing the lack inherent in itself to the other. … The subject … assumes the burden of the other’s lack … in this irreversibility of the assumption of responsibility. … The fantasy, the other constituted in fantasy, would be that which would support such desire without allowing it to extinguish itself in impossible satisfaction. … Traversing the fantasy [leads the self to] reconstituting itself as the cause of its own desire