Todd! I’m stoked to see that you’ve posted this! I’m working through Seminar 7 right now! You’re way of describing the Objet a as something that has capabilities of distorting the perceptual field, amongst all of its other qualities, she a ton of light on it for me. This is a great lecture. Thank you!
A lot of what you said resonates with Mari Ruti’s take on sublimation in The Singularity of Being. Her emphasis on it (in the way you described it) has been really important to me, and it really deserves a wider audience. (By the way, I know you cite Zizek as a critic of Antigone’s Act, but he sure did seem to spend a lot of ink in the late 90s and early 2000s claiming that it serve as the foundation of a radical political act.)
The "muddying" of singularity and transgression can stem from Freud, who notoriously identified the morality and the superego. Although Lacan in Seminar 7 tries to separate the ethics from the superego, the concept of das Ding may not be enough for it...
So what you're saying is that in your favorite movie, Pulp Fiction, objet a is the briefcase, and Das Ding is the mysterious thing inside we only see as a glow on the face of the subjects.
Funny, but kind of. The objet a is definitely the briefcase, but I think that das Ding is what's inside before it's opened. Once it's opened, that's just the banal object of desire.
@toddmcgowan8233 BTW, Mikey Downs sent me the link to this after I asked him about Lacanian as opposed to Freudian sublimation. I wanted to say, thank you for doing Why Theory, it brought me back to philosophy, which subsequently helped me find some direction in my life, at a time where I very much needed it. I drove a fedex truck while listening to you and Ryan all day. You probably contributed to some delinquent packages while I stopped to puzzle over death drive and objet a, haha.
Also, one thing that has always bothered me is that if Antigone’s brother is her das Ding, and with his death, she has essentially lost it. What exactly is being accomplished by burying him? If she wanted to “preserve his memory” that could be done in other ways. Why was burying him the only way she could remain loyal to her desire? In other words, Antigone’s actions would make more sense if her brother had been sentenced to death and she sacrificed her life to save him. Why is the act of burial the ideal form of sublimation?
I think for us today burial seems unimportant. But for the Greeks (and for most societies), it marked the singularity of the person. By giving them a burial rather than letting them rot, one signifies that this was not just another living being but a singular one that is now gone.
Is she essentially marking her brother as sacred and essentially taking him out of exchange by burying the body? (If he was just a thing, he could just sit out in the sun or be fed to the dogs)
@@ztruboff yes, taking him out of exchange. The quotation from Slavoj comes from an interview with Derek Hook published in Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society in 2010
would it make any sense to say that any objet a is tethered to its noumenal Das Ding counterpart (or maybe it's not exactly 1 to 1)? For Das Ding Lacanians, would you say that the disappearance of Das Ding is their objet a 😉?
I kept thinking of the Agalma from Seminar 8. I know you've said that the Agalma is not an early iteration of object a, or that it is different in its own right. Is it misguided or a mistake to see Agalma as the relationship between object a and Das Ding?
Agalma IS an early iteration of das Ding. That's what Guy Le Gaufey claims, and I completely agree with him. But one could see it, as you say, as a bridge concept.
But can't it be the case that das ding gets sublimated exactly through trangression or by the insistence on the act of transgressions of the law. The trangression of the law becomes the objet a which further constitutes das ding, that is emptiness of the vase. The jouissance for the subject lies in the fact that it can never be truely, or to say, fully experienced. The emptiness of the vase has now transcended and is beyond language but can only be referred through language. Sublimation in my mind is not the final destination of the drive but sublimation is to keep on sublimating.
Sure, but the problem is that when das Ding is conceived like this with the emphasis on transgression, it takes the emphasis away from the sublimating activity of the subject and puts it onto the figure of the law. It thus eliminates the autonomy associated with the act of the creation of das Ding, which is the source of the subject's freedom.
@@toddmcgowan8233 I totally understand the need to subjectivize das ding or something that emerges only for the subject but I really think that instead of merely individualizing it or its opposite i.e universalizing it, can it be the case that das ding renders as 'nothing' A 'nothing' that represents contingency which can be experienced by every subject but there is no way to refer to it objectively or even intersubjectively because of it emerging as an experience totally subjective to the individual. To take it one step further, Das Ding can emerge as something that makes the individual realize about him always being the barred subject, the very fact that he or she cannot exist beyond the symbolic order.
But is not the ultimate source, the condition of possibility of our unrelenting fidelity to das Ding the fundamental law, which prohibits the impossible thing but also enable us to do the impossible, as you seem to imply in "The psychosis of freedom"? What would you say about the law which is constitutive of subjectivity with regard to this topic?
It's a very nice question. Yes, you're right that the fundamental law is necessary as a precondition for freedom or for enjoyment. But this law prohibits an impossibility, which is why there can be no enjoyment attached to transgression (sort of Lacan contra Lacan here, I think). But impossibility doesn't require prohibition, and this breaks the link between prohibition and enjoyment. That's what I was trying to get at.
@@toddmcgowan8233 That makes sense. No sure if it's relevant here, but I think what bothers me is how we are legitimate to elevate a thing or a person to the dignity of das Ding at all. If "subjective destitution" or "traversing the fantasy" in a clinical setting entails recognizing that I don't have an agalma in me (or having a certain excremental identification, may I say?), doesn't it also mean the analyst or the other don't have the agalma, too? In the case of Antigone, what could possibly make her brother so singular other than her insistence on his burial which impresses us? May we say the sublimated thing is defined simply by one's unconditional fidelity to it, and there is no reason for this fidelity? It is all strictly formal? How can I be justified to say that something or someone has a sublime value for me without certain complexes of misrecognition, narcissism, or transference? Sorry that I can't formulate my concern very well...
@@signifier4016 Right, the other doesn't have the secret within them because it exists in one's own act of sublimation, which always occurs unconsciously. This is why, in a sense, people go to analysis: to know where they have sublimated. No one can consciously sublimate. It would be like consciously deciding that one was going to fall in love with a person. Even if it worked, it wouldn't be the conscious decision that was, if you'll permit me, the deciding factor. Are there pathological elements mixed in with why one sublimates in the way one does? Sure. But so what? The point, as you suggest, is the formal operation itself that lifts the object out of the fetishized mass.
"Disappearance" in your essay only makes sense when thought of as an absence of the use of the phrase "Das Ding" (hardly a relevant finding, but noticed by many) but Lacan never abandoned Das Ding and the concept never disappeared in Lacan's work. He introduced the concept as Freud had, firmly rooted in the Real, and then spent the rest of his life explaining the mechanism through which it appears in our rendered reality, namely the circuits that produce the four (or more?) object a. IMHO, Das Ding is the TEXTURE of the self/non-self boundary, the site of psychic boundary, that is intruded upon from the real into the Symbolic, like a face full of zits or a golf course full of divots. Any metaphor, like this one, fails because the Real not only resists symbolization, but constantly demands neologisms (or new scientific findings, or continuous blah blah blah talking) to even be approached. In any event, explaining the mechanism by which the body or Das Ding interfaces with the rendered Real (reality) is much more significant to an analyst. Where it happens, Das Ding, is readily apparent, boring almost. Your presentation is, I dare say, entirely rooted in the I/ /S (Imaginary/Symbolic) and darn near ignores the third. Antigone's body was subjected to something, the sight of her rotting brother (but this subjection could be anything, a scene/vision/sound, or any experience), something that her body was unable to verbalize/rationalize/legalize/symbolize and so on - she had to move, and move in a very specific way: hide him. We can't enter the REAL and explore "the thing" that was rejected, or "the thing" that intruded on her "self-boundary" - all we can do is verbalize the byproduct, the effect, of that subjection. As a piece of her own flesh, the sight of her dead self was unacceptable to her body: either die and be like your brother, or bury him. In any event, this kind of misinterpretation of Lacan IMHO stems from our lack of bio/neuro/chemico/physico/mathematico/topologico background(s) (exposure to the Real) of which Lacan didn't suffer. He had access to the top-of-the-line thinker of each of these fields.
