Objet petit a is a concrete universal | The antinomy of the cause-of-desire
I:
INTRODUCTION - ABSTRACT VS. CONCRETE UNIVERSALITY
In
Hegel’s philosophy we distinguish between particulars, abstract universals and
concrete universals. Simply put, the abstract universal is a whole that is not
more than the sum of its parts. The concrete universal is a whole that is
more than the sum of its parts. “Americans”, for example, is an abstract
universal insofar as we simply take it to be the collection of all individual
American citizens, while being a concrete universal if and only if we take it
to be more than the sum of its parts (ex: each individual American + an ideal
of “the perfect American”, or maybe some unattainable essence of
“Americanhood”, etc.).
The
interpretation of concrete universality differs among Hegelian scholars. For
Frederick Beiser, the concrete universal was a whole that precedes the
sum of its parts1: first we have the ideal or “perfect”
instantiation of a particular type of thing, and only “after”
having this ideal, each particular thing is an “imperfect copy” of the
ideal. For example, first you have “THE flower” as a concrete universal, as the
“perfect” or “ideal” flower, and then each individual flower is an imperfect
representation of the ultimate flower. This is not far from Plato’s concept
of the ideal form.
For Slavoj Zizek, the
concrete universal is situated differently in time2,3. The concrete
universal does not come before each particular. Instead, the concrete
universal is constantly changed and shaped through the failures inside
each particular. Thus, it is both “before” and “after”: it comes “after”, in
chronological time, but “before” in logical time; in the sense that it gives
the retroactive illusion that it came before each particular. This is
why Zizek notes that “The struggle is not between different particulars, but
between each particular and the universal”. Thus, it is not that you first have
the ideal of “the perfect ultimate flower” and then each individual flower
being a failure to represent the ideal concrete universal. Instead, you first
have each individual flower, and the imperfections inside each particular
flower retroactively creating the ideal in the first place. Thus, the “ideal
flower” is only created by the failures and gaps of what each individual flower
“could have been”, retroactively giving the illusion that each individual
flower’s purpose was to copy some sort of ideal form, when in fact the
ideal form did not exist before the particulars.
In
this article I want to analyze Lacan’s concept of the object-cause of desire
(“objet petit a”) through the lens of concrete universality, as well as compare
and contrast it to Jung’s concept of the soul-image (the “anima” or “animus”).
Then, I want to take these insights to analyze the modern problems in the
classification and labeling of various types of human relationships, and
the roles that desire, the cause of desire and the concrete universal play in
it.
This
is the first in a series of articles that I want to dedicate to the problematic
of relationship signifiers (“labels”), a problem I touched upon previously in
my book4, albeit in quite a scattered and chaotic manner. The
problematic of how we view friendship, love, sexuality and business in a
chaotic environment full of extremely fast changes in technological progress
and way of life is a more and more important one each day. Out of all the
signifiers, the only relationship signifier that has drawn significant
political attention is the “marriage” signifier, with heated debates about how
to (re-)define it in order to include or exclude homosexual marriages. There is
also growing debate regarding the signifier “(romantic) relationship” itself,
and how to (re-)define it in order to include or exclude open or polyamorous
relationships5, the difference between an open relationship and a
friend with benefits, etc. After this article, I plan on writing an article
about the history of marriage and divorce from an anthropological perspective,
viewing the changes in each economic system and seeing what role psychoanalysis
can play in that analysis; as well as an article analyzing the scenario of a
club that mandates each person to wear colored bracelets indicating their
relationship status (single/taken/etc.) as a fun semiotics6 problem.
II:
LACAN’S OBJECT-CAUSE OF DESIRE
Desire
is a lack. If I want something, it means I do not have it yet. “I want to be
famous” implies that I am not famous. “I want a piece of cake” implies that I
do not have one at my disposal at the moment. You only want what you do not yet
have. Desire is the lack or emptiness inside oneself. The question of what
someone wants can be answered from the perspective of the particular or the
universal.
If
the answer to “what I want” is a particular, specific, tangible “thing”, then
psychoanalysis calls that the object of desire (Lacanian equivalent:
“the imaginary phallus”).
If
the answer to “what I want” is a universal, or a type of thing, then Lacanian
psychoanalysis calls this “objet petit a” or the object-cause of desire.
The
object-cause of desire is a silhouette, a “ghost”, an empty form or a template
that can take on multiple forms, each form representing one specific object of
desire. For example, if I have a crush on the girl next door, she is an object
of desire. But if I want to have a girlfriend in general, the idea of
“the girlfriend” is the object-cause of desire. Or, if I desire a
specific job at this specific workplace, then it is an object of desire. “The
job” is the object-cause of desire.
For
Lacan, this universal is the cause of desire insofar as it is an unattainable
object of desire. The object-cause of desire is so perfect and ideal that it
can never be obtained, by definition. It is the permanent lack or “inner
emptiness” inside ourselves that can never be temporarily failed, although we
can obtain temporary or partial satisfaction
through attaining particular objects of desire. This is what leads Lacan to his
famous mantra, that we desire to desire. The masochistic nature of
humans does not let them rest satisfied on a single object of desire; the human
must keep on desiring. This desire can be kept alive through multiple
self-sabotaging tendencies, including but not limited to:
1. You
constantly get closer and closer to obtaining a particular object of desire but
you never obtain it, always being “almost there”.
2. You
obtain the particular object of desire but you remain unsatisfied and now crave
more of it, never being enough (ex: You are never satisfied with your
body, you want to lose more weight, be even more muscular, you always want more
and more, etc.).
3. You
obtain the particular object of desire and then throw it away as if it was
nothing very soon after obtaining it, realizing that it was overrated (“the
grass is greener on the other side”, you only want something if you do not have
it, the moment you have it you no longer want it).
An analogy often used is
that this “objet petit a” is like the tail of a dog that keeps chasing its
tail, never reaching it. Another one I’ve seen used is that of a pig chasing a
carrot that is right in front of it, tied to its back, thus never quite getting
it but always being “quite close”:
One
can immediately notice how the object-cause of desire is a concrete
universal. The illusion of “the perfect thing” is constituted retroactively
only through the failure of each individual particular object of desire to
fully satisfy us.
For
example, take Jung’s concept of “the anima”. Jung argues that for straight men,
the anima is the man’s unconscious ideal of “the perfect woman”, a woman that
he is constantly searching for in his romantic affairs but never finding her.
He describes the concept of “anima projection” as the process of a man
expecting an individual, real woman to conform to this impossible ideal of “the
perfect woman”, ultimately ending up disappointed that she is not “the one”,
destroying each of his relationships. One can obviously see how we are dealing
here with a concrete universal and not an abstract one, since the
relationship between the concrete and the universal is two-fold. Each
particular shapes the universal through its failures just like each universal
puts its stamp on the particular through high expectations. More
specifically, in the case of the anima:
1. Each
failed romantic relationships changes the man’s concrete universal of “the
ideal woman” through the failure of each particular, individual woman to
satisfy him, the concrete universal of the anima being precisely the sum
of what each individual girlfriend has not been.
2. The
concrete universal of the anima changes each man’s particular relationship through
the placement of unnecessarily high expectations, ultimately leading up to
disappointment.
Another example: let’s
say that I jump from city to city, constantly moving the place I live in,
trying to find a place that “feels like home”, a place where I feel that I can
live in forever, but never being quite satisfied, moving somewhere else every
six months. The object-cause of desire is a concrete universal: the failure of
each individual city to satisfy my desire retroactively creates the illusion of
a pre-existing “ideal city”, through the sum of what each individual city is
not, but could have been. Again, the causal relationship is
two-fold: the archetype of “the ultimate ideal city to live in” shapes my
relationship to each new particular city, just like my failed experiences with
each particular city shapes the general archetype of “the ultimate ideal city”.
One can immediately see
the absurdity in treating them as abstract universals. Abstract universals are
nothing more than the sum of their parts: in the previous examples, abstract
universals would be “the set of all my exes” or “the set of all the cities I’ve
ever lived in”, they would be mere collections, mathematical sets. The concrete
universal is a surplus, it is that “plus-one”: you have the set of all
my exes plus “the one”, the one ideal woman that does not exist – you
have the set of all cities I’ve lived in plus the ideal city that I’ve
never lived in.
One can also see why the
name “anima” is so suggestive and wisely picked by Jung, since anima translates
to “ghost”, “spirit” or “soul”: the concrete universal (object-cause of
desire) is precisely like a ghost or silhouette. The concrete universal is not
a collection of multiple individual parts, instead it is a unitary single
thing, but a unitary single thing that does not exist in reality, but that
constantly shapes itself. When the body dies, the ghost or “soul” remains.
Precisely like that, your experience with each new particular object of desire
is haunted by the sum of the failures of all the other previous particulars,
this sum of failures constituting the concrete universal. For instance: each
new relationship confronts one to deal with the baggage of all their previous
relationships. Each new attempt at finding “the one” is an attempt to
deal with what each of your exes was not – since “the one” is precisely
the sum of the gaps and lacks in each of your exes.
One can immediately
notice a Lacanian-Hegelian theme here: how “nothing” can become “something” too,
since the difference between the abstract and the concrete universal is the
difference between “a sum of things” and “a sum of nothings”. Zizek has a
joke about this: a man enters a cafeteria and orders a cup of coffee, but
without cream. The waiter replies: “sorry, but we’ve run out of cream, would
you like a cup of coffee without milk instead?”. The absurdity of this joke
relies in the fact that, even though materially/physically, “coffee without
cream” is the same as “coffee without milk” (both of them are “just coffee”,
without either cream or milk), at a symbolic level, they are different: the
first one is “just coffee” where you expected there to be cream and the
second one is “just coffee” where you expected there to be milk.
Just like there is a
difference between “coffee without cream” and “coffee without milk”, so is
there a difference between “your ex without patience”, “your ex without a sense
of humor” and “your ex without affection”: your soul-image (anima/animus, the
object-cause of desire), or in other words, “the one”, that you
keep looking for but never find, is precisely the ideal partner that has
patience, a sense of humor, affection and everything else that all your exes
did not have. Again, while an abstract universal is a sum of particular things
(the collection of what all your exes had or actually were, summed/averaged
up into a general archetype of “the ex”), a concrete universal is a sum of nothings
or lacks (the collection of what all your exes did not have and
were not, summed/averaged up into a general archetype of “what could
have been”).
This is where we enter
into the realm of double-negation. The object-cause of desire is a
double-negation because it is a lack of a lack. Desire is already a lack, and
since the object-cause of desire is “the desire to desire” – it is, thus, the
lack of a lack, the negation of negation. If you cannot obtain the object-cause
of desire (ex: “the one ideal wife”, “the one ideal city to live in”), then you
lack a lack, since that concrete universal of the object-cause of desire was
already a sum of all the lacks of the previous failures to actualize it in
reality.
III:
DO YOU WANT TO INPUT OR OUTPUT DESIRE? YES, PLEASE!
In a previous article7,
I described the first in a series of antinomies of intersubjectivity.
Just like Immanuel Kant noticed more “antinomies of reason” – paradoxical
conclusions that you reach about reality if you try to use your mind to do it
(ex: “the universe is both finite and infinite in space and time”), so I am
trying to identify various antinomies at the level of the social: immanent
deadlocks and contradictions in the very act of social interaction,
communication or in relationships. The antinomy of intimacy was this: “on
one hand, I first need to know personal information about a person in order to
decide whether to get close to them or not, but on the other hand, I first need
to be close to them in order to be comfortable to have such personal
conversations in the first place”.
I will now introduce a
second antinomy: the antinomy of the cause-of-desire. It goes like this:
“On one hand, I need to know what I want in order to know what to try to
obtain. On the other hand, I need to experience particular objects of desire in
order to know what I want in the first place”. It is somewhat similar to
the deadlock of employment (“You need experience to get a job… you need a job
to get experience”) – only that in this case, it is about forming a concrete
universal of the object-cause of desire, raising another similar “chicken and
egg” question: is each particular, individual object of desire a way of you getting
what you want, or a way of you finding out what you want? And the answer
is, paradoxically, yes! The paradox of desire makes it in such a way
such that the failure of each particular gives rise to the concrete
universal of what everything in the past “could have been”, as I explained in
the previous section.
In a previous article I
introduced the concept of “the fantasy of dating”8 as the
story sold to us by capitalism as to “how love happens” (the “free market” of
potential partners - you choose between potential romantic and sexual partners
in a casual way, the same way you would choose what to eat for dinner: “girl 1
has 3/10 boobs, 6/10 ass, 7/10 face, 5/10 personality; girl 2 has 5/10 boobs,
4/10 ass, 9/10 face, 7/10 personality; and so on and you add up the scores and
marry the person with the most points”). Fantasy in psychoanalysis is not a
separate imaginary realm from reality but the filter through which we
view reality, it is not the real behaviors we are engaging in either, but the story
we tell ourselves in our head to justify certain behaviors.
Fantasies come with
certain inner dialectical tensions, “deadlocks”, paradoxes and other
“antinomies” that constantly push the limits of individual people under their
spell in two opposite directions. You can view the fantasy of dating as one
example of a fantasy of contradictions, in which the story of capitalism is
that dating is both a process of obtaining what you want and a process
of figuring out what you want at the same time.
The antinomy of the
cause-of-desire has two “sides” of the dialectic: where desire is either the
input or the output. If the search for particular objects of desire
is a way of figuring out what you want, then desire is the output (ex:
each individual relationship changes what I want out of relationships in
general). If instead it is thought of as a way of getting/obtaining what
you want, then desire is the input (ex: each individual relationship is an
imperfect actualization of my already pre-existing ideal of “the perfect
relationship”, in other words, here I (believe that) I already know what I am
looking for). Yet these two sides are not a mutually exclusive choice, in fact,
it is precisely the dialectical tension between the two that produces the
surplus known as the concrete universal or the object-cause of desire,
in this case.
The antinomy works on two
layers: at the layer of the universal, and at the layer of the particular.
In the case of human relationships, for example, it would look like this:
-UNIVERSAL: “I first
need to know what type of relationship I am looking for in order to start
looking for it” vs. “I first need to start looking for a relationship in
order to figure out what type of relationship I want”
-PARTICULAR: “I first
need to want some sort of type of relationship9 in order to justify
starting to interact with this particular person” vs. “I first need to
interact with this particular person in order to know what type of relationship
I want with them”
Let us draw a table with four quadrants to see the logical relations between each quadrant here:
This
table has four quadrants:
1. Universal
desire as input (top-left)
2. Universal
desire as output (top-right)
3. Particular
desire as input (bottom-left)
4. Particular
desire as output (bottom-right)
Let us now look at the
logical relations between each combination of two quadrants:
1. There
is a relation of contradiction between two universals and between two
particulars. This means that if one is true, then the other is automatically
false and vice-versa. Both of them can’t be “on” at the same time or “off” at
the same time. These are the relationships between two quadrants on each
horizontal row.
2. There
is a relationship of one-way implication between a particular and its
correspondent universal. These are the relationships between two quadrants on
each vertical column. However, the direction of this implication changes
on each column: particular input implies universal input, while universal output
implies particular output. This means that knowing what particular relationship
you want with one specific person implies knowledge of the concrete
universal type of relationship; but the opposite is true on the column
on the right: wanting to find out what type of relationship you want
implies not knowing and seeking to find the individual actualization of that
type of relationship inside the particular individual.
3. The
particular input (“top-left”) is a powerful quadrant in this table in the sense
that if it is true, then that automatically implies the truth-status of
the entire table: the universal input is true, and both outputs are false (ex:
If I already have a crush on one particular individual, that implies that I am
looking for a romantic relationship in general as well, and it implies that I
am not trying to find out either one specific individual or one specific
relationship-type since I already settled on a decision).
4. The
universal output (“bottom-right”) is the second powerful quadrant in this table
for the same reason – if it is true, then it implies that the particular
output (“top-right”) is true and both inputs (left column) are false. In this
case,
Let’s now take another example, the man who moves every six months in another house to find “the house” that feels like home but never quite finding it:
One can notice the same
relations:
If I already settled on a
house I want to buy (top left is true), that implies that I know what type of
house I want as well (bottom left is true), and that the outputs (right column)
are false (since I settled on an option).
If I am still undecided
as to what type of house I want to buy, trying to figure that out
(bottom right is true), then it implies that I am undecided on the particular
house as well (top-right is true) and that the inputs (left column) are false
(since I haven’t settled on anything).
And similarly enough for
the horizontal rows: if I know what particular house I want to buy, then it
means that I figured it out and I am not trying to find out (and vice-versa);
and if I know what type of house I want to buy, then it means that I
have figured that out and am not looking to find out “my type” (and
vice-versa). Hence the relations of logical contradiction between the two
quadrants on the horizontal (if one is true, the other must be false).
Each socio-economic
system is a set of contradictory demands and expectations in which the subject
is pulled in opposite directions at the same time: in capitalism, the
master-signifier10 is the object-cause of desire, and hence the
contradictions are the ones in the table of desire. The subject feels a demand
from society to keep all four squares of this table “on” at the same time
despite this being impossible. Out of necessity, this leads to a temporary
repression of at least certain “quadrants” of this table at any point in time –
the specific configuration of repression leads to certain symptoms and
psychological disorders over others, hence why mental illness is a combination
of individual biological predispositions interacting in certain environmental
factors. You change the environment (ex: feudalism -> capitalism), you
change the way those biological predispositions manifest themselves as well.
IV:
IF PARTICULAR-OUTPUT (“TOP-RIGHT”) IS ON… WHAT THEN?
In the tables of desire that
I outlined above, if the top-right square is true or “on” in a certain context,
this can lead to multiple configurations. The particular-input (“top-left”)
will automatically be false/”off”, but which square of the universal (“bottom”)
row is true or false can change.
FIRST SITUATION - universal input is true, universal output is false:
This leads to a situation in which one has a certain universal or ideal “type of” object one is looking for and is simply looking for particulars in the universe and checking to see how much they compare to the universal. Examples: I know “my type” of partner (blonde hair, blue eyes, sense of humor, whatever) and am looking for particular individuals as close as possible to that; I know what “type” of relationship I’m looking for (friendship, one-night stands, marriage, long-distance, etc.) and am looking for specific individuals to fulfill it with; I know what “type of” house I want to buy and am checking to see specific houses that compare with that ideal form, etc.
SECOND SITUATION – universal input is false, universal output is true:
This leads to a situation
in which the only thing that one knows is that one doesn’t know – a “go with
the flow” type of situation, one in which one is “shopping around”, not for one
particular thing, but in general. This can be interpreted either literally or
metaphorically: one can literally enter a supermarket and either look for one
specific type of product and buy something as close as possible to that ideal (first
situation) or enter the supermarket to “shop around” not knowing what one wants
to buy in the first place. More or less metaphorically, one can “look for
something specific” or “shop around” in all the other markets created by
capitalism since the French revolution: the dating market of potential marriage
partners, the liberal-democracy where politicians are a commodity to be bought
and sold, etc. For instance, in the “first situation”, you are looking for “the
one”, in the “second situation”, you fall in love someone who changes what you
want out of relationships in general, or who changes “your type”, and so on.
The importance of this
analysis lies in the fact that everyday conversations around the most seemingly
“apolitical” topics, or topics most unrelated to economics, are still infused
with the most capitalist language as possible. By “language” I don’t refer
necessarily to specific words or expressions, but to the very way words are
used in context and “re-arranged”: everyday we speak of freedom of choice,
private/personal vs. public possessions and propriety, having to choose between
multiple options, etc. This entrance of the political into the seemingly
“apolitical” is what Zizek calls ideology: which always presents itself
as non-ideological, apolitical, universal, all-encompassing, “standard
practice”, “normal”, “obvious”, inevitable and so on (when it isn’t). Hence, I
hope that this table of desire that I presented deconstructs the fundamental
structure of most conversations involving any freedom of choice in our modern
society, thus helping us construct better arguments and opinions in those
debates.
For example: the “social
libertarian” attitude that states that two consenting adults should be able to
do whatever they want to each other. This attitude is a lazy argument (or
better yet, a lazy lack-of-an argument) in the way it is used in most
contexts because it chooses a specific configuration of the table of desire (in
most cases, it chooses what I previously called “the first situation” –
universal input and particular output are true and the rest are false/”off”) without specifying how we got there in the first
place. For instance: in a large and very fast change in the way we treated love
and sexuality in the past decades, more rather conservative and reactionary
attitudes called for a “return to tradition”, to traditional gender norms,
demonizing casual sex, etc. The social libertarian attitude to this (ex: “People
who are looking for casual sex should find other people who do the same and
people who are looking for a serious relationship should find other people who
do the same and everyone is happy and satisfied, problem solved”) is less
of an argument to the debate and more of a meta-argument, a reframing of
the very way we talk about the issue to a capitalist marketplace where people
already know what they want (for some unknown reason) and are simply shopping
for some specific particular that best matches the universal. This leaves in
the air the question of the cause of desire, which is the most central
question inside capitalism: why do you want whatever it is that you
think you want? Why do so many people in our society suddenly want different
things? What environmental factors (ex: technological progress and the
internet, culture driven by market forces and the profit incentive, advertisement,
political propaganda, etc.) are changing our desire? On top of this, we
add the fact that even the people who think that they know what they want
actually don’t, we get what we want and we are not satisfied, we realize it was
underrated, we move to something else, we are driven by unconscious desires,
etc. In other words, the libertarian attitude is another way of saying: “let’s
act like Freud didn’t exist” and it’s a good example of the sublime
object of ideology: sublime in the way that it very subtly infiltrates itself
into public and private discourse as non-oppressive: “do whatever you want,
just do not question why you want whatever you want”.
FOOTNOTES AND REFERENCES:
1: Frederick Beiser, “Hegel”, Chapter Six: The
Religious Dimension
2: https://youtu.be/2rzMkvf1Ess?t=9100
3: https://www.reddit.com/r/zizek/comments/12bbv67/i_finally_understood_hegels_concrete_universal/
4: Love, Politics, Social Norms and Sex: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0BNLJDBGT
5: Here is an article I wrote in the past in which I
try to define a relationship from a Lacanian perspective: https://lastreviotheory.blogspot.com/2022/10/capitalism-america-relationships-and.html
6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics
7: https://lastreviotheory.blogspot.com/2023/03/compatibility-paradox-of-intimacy.html
8: https://lastreviotheory.blogspot.com/2022/12/the-real-phantasy-of-dating-of.html
9: I don’t necessarily mean “romantic relationship” in
this case
10: Master-signifier = the thing around which
everything else revolves around, like the planets revolve around the sun, also
see this: https://nosubject.com/Master-Signifier
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