Human beings are always subjects of lack and, therefore, always desiring subjects. We desire something and mistakenly believe that this object has an external, real counterpart.
In truth, however, this object is merely a fantasy constructed to fill the terrifying void at the heart of our existence.
Kabul 24: Desire is the product of a skewed gaze upon reality. By looking awry, the subject fabricates a surplus over and above the thing itself. This surplus, which emerges from nothing, is precisely Lacan’s objet petit a—the object-cause of desire.
It is this very surplus (produced by the distorted look) that makes the subject desire the thing. In other words, the object becomes the cause of desire.
Yet the moment we adopt a critical gaze and examine why we desire—when our look “straightens out”—or the moment we finally obtain the object of our desire, the fantasy collapses.
When we look directly at the beloved or the goal of our desire, we see nothing but an ordinary material object: a piece of flesh, a lump of metal, a political system riddled with ugliness, or a hollow social position.
In simpler terms, the moment our gaze becomes straight is the moment of fantasy’s disintegration. When the subject achieves union (conjunction), he confronts the stupidity of matter.
The beloved who yesterday was a source of inspiration suddenly turns into an ordinary human being—one who snores, makes trivial mistakes, and no longer carries that imaginary surplus.Image: The AmbassadorsIn Hans Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors, the distorted, anamorphic skull only becomes meaningful when the viewer looks at it from a sharp, oblique (“skewed”) angle.
The objet a functions in exactly the same way: it is the surplus born from the subject’s skewed gaze, and it becomes the cause of our desire.
Jamshid Mehrpour – Kabul
