Jacques Lacan: Dialectic of Desire and Structure of the sensorial Perception

Antonio Rainone

• Publisher: Youcanprint
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9788892633506
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This book aims at outlining what the Dialectic of Desire is in Lacan. Starting from the analysis of the concept of desire-for-desire, I dwell on considering the function that "the desire for the Other" has in structuring, both in the Logic of Fantasy (or of Unconscious) and in the way the phenomenic representation of the Real is established. Moreover I examine how the classical aesthetic theory, subjected to the Logic of Fantasy, is taken back to an ethic of intersubjectivity and how, within this step, a "topological" redefinition of language and of the space of subjectivity is achieved.

1. From the Dialectic of Desire to Logic of Fantasy

In the 1958-59 Seminar Desire and its Interpretation, Lacan provides us with an exemplary definition of what desire is in Man. Dealing more peculiarly with the clinical or psychoanalytic experience which arises from the direct experience of desire, he states that «desire at first appears as a disturbance. It upsets the perception of the object (Il trouble la perception de l’objet) […], degrades it, throws it into disorder, debases it, in any case it shakes it and sometimes manages to dissolve the one who perceives it, that is the subject»¹. Desire, Lacan adds, provokes a sort of blinding of the reality of things, or rather it produces the perception of something that «appears to be opposite to the construction of reality». In a text belonging to the same period, The Signification of the Phallus (1958), disserting on the nature of desiring (Begehren), he states: «The phenomenology that emerges from analytic experience is certainly of a kind to demonstrate the paradoxical, deviant, erratic, eccentric, and even scandalous nature of desire that distinguishes it from need»².

If need rules the animal behaviour in order to give stability to the relation between the organism and its natural environment, desire seems to work in the opposite way. As a matter of fact desire produces exactly a break or an upsetting of the entire system that determines the animal adaptation to a specific milieu that has for the animal itself the value of object-world (Umwelt). Lacan, who had used the socio-biological concept of milieu since 1932 in the thesis for his medical doctorate, had no hesitation during the seminar lesson of 7 April, 1954, in holding that the most elementary experience of language is a vital need for human life «qui fait que le milieu de l’homme est un milieu symbolique»³. For this reason, interpreting the human desire entails a revision of the concept of environment: to Man the original milieu of his specific being is his Being-in-the-language. In this way, a close relationship is established between desire, language and symbolic sphere.

Speaking of a precise phenomenology of desire, the first sign that reveals its appearance is provided by a fantasy (fantasme⁴) that distorts the perception of the object, making the whole reality the scenery of its appearance, and consequently the construction of reality itself phantasmal. A more or less “extended” part of reality is in some way hallucinated or upset, subverted, overturned. In being subjected to desire, reality must bear a rewriting that allows it to be used as a scene, projective screen or materialization of the fantasy. Thus “the fantasy” (le fantasme) works as a junction or mediation between the desire that shows the existence of the subject’s signifier, often referred to as (S), and the object that represents the remains of reality, namely the residuary object that is still legible once the fantasy has entered the hidden texture of its weft and modified its grammar. In the fantasy both the classical “cogitative subject” of Cartesian heritage and the “object” are dissolved, being the latter the significant part of reality since it represents it as something “real”.

The formula that Lacan gives of the “fundamental fantasy” is the well-known one available in an important essay, The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire (1960)⁵. The formula (S ◊ a) is greatly helpful in letting us understand how the fantasy’s space – expressed by the central quadrangular lozenge – is a “geometral” installation that works in being placed between the position occupied by the Subject (“dissolved”, divided or barred owing to desire) and the object little a (objet petit a) that represents that remnant of reality that desire makes functional to the construction of the fantasy. The name Lacan gives the lozenge is the “provisional” one of ‘poinçon’, meaning generically punch, stamp, and stencil in typography. In my opinion another meaning should be added, that is topo-graphic or topological matrix, because of the geometrization of the fantasy’s space produced in it.

The same fantasy’s formula is illustrated exemplarily in the well-known pages of the 1963-64 Seminar, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, dedicated to «the gaze considered as object little a». Since the ‘inaugural’ publication of this seminar in 1973, its lessons have been interpreted as an analytical reflection on the aesthetic structure of the “geometral mechanism” (term used by Desargues in a renowned text of projective geometry dating 1648), as it is expounded in the modern art of perspective. Technically we are facing a matter which typically pertains the figurative aesthetics. At the same time Lacan, in order to explain how the fantasy’s logic works, keenly dismantles any possibility to imagine its existence as an «aesthetic visual field established as such». Thus it is improper to talk of aesthetics, or of an aesthetic experience, as regards its sensorial representation, since it is the perceptible Being of the object, the mode of its “identification” and its biological (animal) aisthesis that are revolutioned to the extent of a complete subversion of the way the object is perceived.

According to my thesis, in Lacan’s view aesthetics is completely absorbed by ethics, modifying thus consequently even the classical philosophical concept of ethical space which is based on the clear separation between aesthetics and ethics. Lacan himself states it in a passage of The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: «L’esthétique freudienne n’est là que pour autant qu’elle nous montre une des phases de la fonction de l’éthique, et il est bien étonnant qu’on ne l’accentue pas plus»⁶. I underline: aesthetics must be considered as one of the phases that constitute ethics. In other words: aesthetics is a mode of the phenomenal appearance of the «image» in the Dialectic of Desire, so if we want to grasp the ethic nature of aesthetics we need to decipher what the phantasm’s space consists in, since it establishes the scene where the Dialectic of Desire is staged. Now, in order to better understand what this “scene” is, we must reconsider the Lacanian formula for Fantasy. This step is necessary if we want to understand how it is this peculiar “space of the Fantasy” – meant properly as symbolic and imaginary milieu – that makes the aesthetic perception of the phenomena ethical.

Inside the formula for Fantasy, besides the subject’s scission, symbolized by (S), there is also the appearance/disappearance of the object, symbolized by (a). It is clear that the formula does not symbolize an aesthetic-phenomenological representation resulting from the analysis of the way the object is perceived by the subject. This formula completely rewords the geometrical space, or the topological structure, inside which both the subject and the object are placed. This means that the real objective of mathematical formalism contained in it pertains where to place the object of the look and at the same time, where to place the subject of the gaze, once agreed that subject and object of the look/gaze⁷ cannot co-exist inside the same space.

Now, what allows the fantasy to establish itself as space/scene of this impossible meeting between subject and object is due to the fact that only representatives, substitutes or semblances of both subject and object enter this space/scene. Given that, even in a provisional way, it is possible to conclude that if on one hand the real object of the gaze is the disappearance/substitution of the subject, on the other hand the real subject of the gaze is the appearance of a substitute of the object that “looks at itself - sees itself” inside the scene of representation⁸. This means that “the space of the look/gaze” establishes itself inside the Logic of Fantasy through the combination of two replacements that subvert and reword both the position “of the subject” and the position “of the object”. Thus, in some way, subject and object exchange their “space” and invert also their respective functions, namely the object becomes alive and active, while the subject vanishes or disappears as subject, precisely barring and representing itself as (S). The object on the other hand is camouflaged and transmuted into “subject of the representation”⁹. In simpler words, we can say that the fantasy’s space is not an aesthetic space in the traditional sense, because it is devoid of both subject and object, since both of them have been replaced by something else.

It is advisable to mark that Lacan founds his revolutionary analysis of the vision by releasing the Eye from the restricted field of optics where it had been confined by a highly corroborated philosophical and scientific tradition of Cartesian, Newtonian and Kantian mould. The Eye is no longer a mechanism of projective observation that ...