Playing With the Object, Playing With the Void
Originally written for the 2022 Lacan Conference, this piece was an attempt to grapple with the paradoxes embedded in Lacan’s concept of the object a.
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I begin with the eminent psychoanalytic thinker Leonard Cohen, who sings:
“I can’t forget,
I can’t forget,
I can’t forget, but I don’t remember what.” [1]
I think this refrain nicely evokes the subject’s predicament with respect to the object a. The subject can’t forget this nagging sense that there is a lack, an essential something that is lost, gone missing. But what is it? Well, we can’t remember what.
In a scene from the 2013 documentary film Kingdom of Dreams and Madness we find the renowned animator and director Hayao Miyazaki frustrated, trying with increasing desperation to draw the Zero plane which will be one of the central elements of his film The Wind Rises. “It’s difficult for me,” says Miyazaki. “All these emotions jostling around inside. What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it? Not this.” [2]
We move from Miyazaki’s own perplexity to a fragment of an interview with Miyazaki’s long-time producer Toshio Suzuki. Suzuki, reflecting on his friend’s quixotic pursuit of something he cannot articulate, says the following: “He asks for the impossible. It’s not really about how Zero planes actually flew. He has a picture in his head of how he wishes Zeros flew. How could another person ever hope to draw that? It’s impossible. That’s the issue. This Zero plane in his head, how can anyone see how beautifully it flies? He should just draw it. But he’s got this fantasy that his younger self could draw this. Personally, I think it would’ve been the same.”
What Suzuki perceives is that Miyazaki has become captivated by what is both inarticulable and beyond the possibility of visual portrayal—that which eludes all representation. The “picture” that Suzuki refers to, the one in Miyazaki’s mind about how Zero planes might have flown, how he wishes they flew, is always a failed image. Miyazaki gets lost in the metonymy of trying to reproduce the mental image which is itself an inadequate rendering of something ungraspable, something that by definition can never be there because its very nature is that of absence. Hence he is reduced to the infinity of “what is it? Not this.”
Later in the film we learn that the Zero plane has a privileged status as a signifier for Miyazaki, whose own father, like the protagonist of The Wind Rises, was involved with the manufacture of planes during World War II. Miyazaki, an avowed pacifist whose relationship with his father eventually came to an impasse over the question of the father’s involvement in the war effort, is still circling the mystery of the Zero plane—a symbol overdetermined with resonances of beauty, atrocity, the horrifying encounter with das Ding, the monstrous enigma of the father—decades later. In short, like Leonard, he can’t forget what he doesn’t remember. One gets the sense here, however, that to remember could be a disaster.
When approaching the concept of object a, we perhaps have to ask ourselves, “which object a?” Or, “at what moment in Lacan’s teaching?” For while he was living, Lacan’s teaching was also living, perpetually in motion; his concepts never stopped evolving and taking on new significations.
With object a, however, I think we can discern another kind of trajectory: a shedding of significations, a gradual denuding of the concept. Increasingly it loses its objectal resonances (that is, its direct correlation with the breast, feces, the voice, and the gaze [3]) and moves toward a horizon of ineffability. What we might call its deobjectification places it beyond imaginary or symbolic capture without consigning it exclusively to the register of the real as impossible. Instead, in Lacan’s last teaching, it becomes the unique territory at the place of intersection of symbolic, imaginary, and real.[4]
The index of a loss, rather than what was lost. This is the salience of Cohen’s not remembering, or Miyazaki’s “what is it? not this,” born precisely at the juncture of the failure of the mental image. Object a does not designate this or that lost object but rather represents the very perception of having suffered a primordial loss.
Tolkien has said that there cannot be a story without a fall.[5] This does not mean that every story necessarily depicts a fall, but that a fall is a precondition for every story. The fall is what is primary, no matter where one looks in the annals of myth, story, and, as I want to argue as well, fantasy. There is no mission, nothing to seek, without something having already been lost. The fall as a generalized structure is the essential thing, the specific narratives being only its particular manifestations.
Every analysand has his or her myth, his or her private, unique iteration of the generalized condition of the fall and perhaps redemption. The loss of what he or she cannot forget and yet does not remember catalyzes the desire which sets in motion a quest. We can hear the “quest” inside the “question.” Indeed, loss drives the question, actually a plethora of questions: what was lost? How was it lost? Who is to blame? Can it be found again?
The analyst knows the secret, that what is fundamental is the sense of loss, the perception of fall, rather than the facticity of a lived trauma as a supposed actual point of shattering, of “where it all went wrong.” The void behind the enigma is a discovery that lays in wait for the analysand, only to come after much searching, after numerous answers—partial, momentary, utterly necessary, utterly insufficient.
Perhaps what is at stake in the traversal of the fantasy is a passage to the void, to a recognition—tragic and then comic—that ultimately nothing was lost, or at least not something that could ever be retrieved. That the secret of the primordial loss might be that it hides no secret after all, that the conviction of having lost something was what structured the whole journey without their having been an actual object once possessed. A bewildering and ultimately absurd irony: that the entry into language has produced the effect of a loss that in itself eludes language.
If we cannot know what object a is, we can nevertheless map something of how the subject comports him or herself in relation to this effect of a primordial loss or lack. What we try to decipher in the fundamental fantasy then is something like a subjective choreography—individual to each analysand: the way that he or she dances with the void. How the subject moves in the perceived aftermath of the fall, what itinerary of restoration or return he or she follows again and again, with the inevitable misfiring that we have come to associate with repetition in the sense first articulated by Freud [6][7] and then expanded by Lacan [8] to include the sense of a failed encounter at the core of which is an elusive scrap of the real. There is the mythical fall, the lapsus that bungled it all, prompting the quest to restore or return, followed by a second lapsus, another bungle: the failure of the quest, and the paradoxical fact that that which was never actually broken never gets repaired either.
But there is also the promise that in analysis something can fundamentally change about the fundamental fantasy. I don’t know if I would want to call it a change to its choreography or to how one decides to dance the steps, though I’m compelled by what the analyst Leonardo Leibson once said to me: that one can play the game differently when one knows what game one is playing.
Playing is not unlike the other correlates of fantasy that I’ve cited: story, for instance. For Winnicott, playing is always symbolic, and a symbol is what suffices in the absence of the thing, which means playing is always playing with loss.[9] This is seen also in Freud’s meditation on the child’s fort-da in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Not uncommonly, we encounter subjects who are resistant to the recognition of loss, and therefore resist desire itself—and yet it is the wager of Winnicott that analysis might help these subjects also to learn to play with the void, generating representations of the unrepresentable. Perhaps in time they too will be obsessively drawing their own Zero planes, whatever that may be for them (all the more poetic given that the number zero can be used here to refer to the void, the hole, the index of absence from which all counting, all measure, begins).
The composer John Adams once gave a nice explanation of how Debussy ushered in musical modernism around the turn of the twentieth century, most notably in pieces like his Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune. In referring to what he calls Debussy’s “liberation of harmony from the straitjacket of tonic-dominant attraction,” Adams says, “Conventional tonal music, whether it’s a Bach fugue or a Beatles song, is bound together by the magnetic attraction of chords, which, reduced to their essence, function as question-and-answer, the ‘grammar’ of music, as it were. If we think of the first two phrases of the song ‘Happy Birthday,’ we experience the first as the ‘question,’ and the second as the ‘answer.’ Almost every familiar musical motto obeys that polarity. What Debussy did was to pull apart the epoxy-strength attachment those chords share and allow them to float, not entirely free from each other, but in a more polyvalent, even ambiguous relation to each other.” [10]
One thinks immediately of the epigraph to Bion’s Attention and Interpretation here: “the answer is the death of the question.” [11] We might say that like Debussy, the analyst can, if he or she is so lucky, help the analysand to pull apart these epoxy-strength question-and-answer pairings which have the effect of quelling the question. The question liberated is like the musical interval no longer subjugated to the laws of resolution which had domesticated it until the advent of modernism.
The example is worthwhile, I think, because in Debussy’s musical art we find an analogue for an art of living that does not merely impose another answer, another confusing of the index of loss with some reified object that can be grasped. This art would be the uniquely symptomatic and sublimatory creation of the subject who can bear the mythical loss that never actually was but nevertheless endures as cause of desire. We might think of this as a form of maturity only if we define the idea as Nietzsche did in perhaps his most Winnicottian moment: the rediscovery, as an adult, of the seriousness of a child at play.[12]
Notes:
1. Cohen, L. (1988). I can't forget [Song]. On I'm your man. Columbia Records.
2. Sunada, M. (Director). (2013). The kingdom of dreams and madness [Film]. Studio Ghibli.
3. Lacan, J. (1977). The four fundamental concepts of psycho-analysis (A. Sheridan, Trans.). W. W. Norton & Company.
4. Lacan, J. (1974-1975). Seminar XXII: RSI [Seminar transcript]. Translated by C. Gallagher. Retrieved from https://www.lacaninireland.com
5. Tolkien, J. R. R., & Carpenter, H. (Ed.). (2006). The letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. HarperCollins.
6. Freud, S. (1955). Beyond the pleasure principle. In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVIII (1920-1922): Beyond the pleasure principle, Group psychology and other works (pp. 7-64). The Hogarth Press.
7. Freud, S. (1958). Remembering, repeating and working-through (Further recommendations on the technique of psycho-analysis II). In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XII (1911-1913): The case of Schreber, Papers on technique and other works (pp. 145-156). The Hogarth Press.
8. Lacan, J. (1977). The four fundamental concepts of psycho-analysis (A. Sheridan, Trans.). W. W. Norton & Company.
9. Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and reality. Tavistock Publications.
10. Adams, J. (2018, November 19). John Adams on Debussy, the first modernist. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/19/books/review/claude-debussy-stephen-walsh-biography.html
11. Bion, W. R. (1970). Attention and interpretation. Tavistock Publications.
12. Nietzsche, F. (2002). Beyond good and evil: Prelude to a philosophy of the future (J. Norman, Trans.). Cambridge University Press.