Resolving the Žižekian Indecision by Settling the Location of the Fantasy — Işık Barış Fidaner

Femininity was the “dark continent” for Sigmund Freud who failed to answer his own question “What does the woman want?” With Jacques Lacan, “the woman” no longer existed, but she still (encore) remained somewhat obscure. Slavoj Žižek brought much clarity to the fair sex by identifying femininity with the core of subjectivity. But a certain indecision remained.

Žižek couples Lacan’s formulations by locating S₁ and S₂ on the masculine side of the formulas of sexuation and $ and objet a on the feminine side. On the masculine side, it is clear that S₁ is the exception to castration and S₂ is the universal rule of castration. But on the feminine side, it is unclear how $ and objet a should be matched with no-exception and non-all. In Less Than Nothing (2012) Žižek asserts that $ (the agent of hysteria) is no-exception and objet a (the agent of analysis) is non-all:

The hysterical subjective position allows for no exception, no x which is not-Fx (a hysteric provokes its master, endlessly questioning him: show me your exception), while the analyst asserts the non-All — not as the exception-to-All of a Master-Signifier, but in the guise of a which stands for the gap/inconsistency.

Howewer, he switches his position in Incontinence of the Void (2017) and asserts that $ (the agent of hysteria) is non-all and objet a (the agent of analytic drive) is no-exception:

The hysteric’s logic is that of the non-All (for a hysteric, the set is never complete — there is always something missing, although one can never pinpoint what, exactly, is missing), while drive involves the closure of a circular movement with no exception (the space of drive is like that of the universe in relativity theory: it is finite, although it has no external boundary).

To resolve this indecision, we should recall Lacan’s figure from Seminar 19: …or Worse page 186:

Here, the terms on the left (necessary, contradiction, possible) characterize the masculine side, while the terms on the right (impossible, undecidable, contingent) characterize the feminine side [1]. On the masculine side, “necessary” designates the exceptional S₁, “possible” designates the rule of S₂, and “contradiction” emerges between those two. On the feminine side, “impossible” designates the no-exception, “contingent” designates the non-all, and “undecidable” emerges between those two.

It is ironic that Lacan seems to have already predicted the present Žižekian indecision by warning about the “undecidability” among the feminine terms. On the other hand, Lacan put the objet a at the bottom, effectively associating it with the contingent non-all. Therefore we should associate the barred subject with the no-exception, impossibility, inexistence. Once we have the terms “impossible” and “contingent”, it is easy to match them with $ and objet a respectively. Thus the location of the fantasy ($ ◊ a) is finally settled on the feminine side [2].

This means that Žižek’s initial decision in Less Than Nothing was the correct one, whereas the other version in Incontinence of the Void was an experimental version that ultimately does not count. Or we could explain the difference as follows: In Less Than Nothing, he was correctly referring to the “agents” of the discourses, whereas in Incontinence of the Void, he was actually referring to the “truth” and “other” of the discourses: In hysteric’s discourse, the no-exception agent relies on a non-all truth, whereas in the analytic discourse the non-all agent deals with a no-exception other.

Finally, let’s draw some conclusions about the four discourses: In University discourse, possibilities reproduce impossibilities by processing contingencies while discreetly relying on necessities. In hysteric’s discourse, impossibilities reproduce possibilities by questioning necessities while discreetly relying on contingencies. In Master’s discourse, necessities produce contingencies justified by possibilities while discreetly relying on impossibilities. In the analytic discourse, contingencies produce necessities by traversing impossibilities while discreetly relying on possibilities [3].

Işık Barış Fidaner is a computer scientist with a PhD from Boğaziçi University, İstanbul. Admin of Yersiz Şeyler, Editor of Žižekian Analysis, Curator of Görce Writings. Twitter: @BarisFidaner

Notes:

[1] The fact that the masculine terms look more convenient and easy-going whereas the feminine terms look more difficult and “worse” should not make you think that Lacan is favouring his own sex. You should keep in mind that convenience may often support fraudulence whereas difficulty may often be a sign of substantiality and truthfulness.

[2] A more nuanced approach should also admit that the unsettling non-being of S(Ⱥ) underlies this supposedly settled fantasy. The “impossible” is more fundamentally associated with S(Ⱥ) which is not-yet-feminine and not-yet-subjective. The barred subject $ originally emerges from the “contradiction” between S₁ and S₂ on the masculine side. When discourses take place, the impossible S(Ⱥ) cannot directly take part in them, so the masculine contradictory $ is “necessarily” projected over the impossible S(Ⱥ) to have something that can at least be represented, and this projection constitutes feminine subjectivity proper. This is why Lacan’s famous figure from Seminar 20 page 78 shows the barred subject $ originally on the masculine side aimed towards the objet a on the feminine side.

[3] In a previous text I associated $ with contingency and objet a with necessity: “What Makes a Symbolic Order?” Those previous associations must be qualified and relativized: $ merely points to a contingency insofar as the analytic discourse is only available through the hysteric’s discourse; and objet a signifies necessity only when it remains to be the unseparated support of the S₁.