KERRAY: Cha! To Slavoj Zizek tomu teprve umi nasadit korunu ;o) (mimochodem, text mi prijde brilantni, nununu, byt ponekud hermeticky):

Our first result, therefore, is that the act and the big Other, far from being simply opposed, are intertwined in a constitutive way: the symbolic order qua 'atemporal' transsubjective structure which predetermines the subject's placehinges on a temporal act (of precipitate recognition) not 'covered' by the big Other (in the banking-financial meaning of the term). When I recognize myself as a 'Socialist', I thereby posit the very 'objective' frame of reference which allows for my 'subjective' identification. Or — to put it in a slightly different way — the 'objectivity' of the big Other implies a redoubled 'subjective' reflection: I am what (I think that others think that I think that) I am.... This precise formulation also places an obstacle in the path of the 'humanist' misreading of the interdependence of the subject and the big Other: the point isnot that the big Other (the symbolic structure) is 'always- already here', but incomplete, 'non-all', and that the subject somehow finds a niche of his own, a margin of freedom, in the inconsistencies and lacks of the big Other. When Lacan asserts that there is a subject only in so far as there is a lack in the Other, only in so far as the structure is `non-all', inconsistent, he has something quite different in mind: it is the very supplement of my `subjective' act of decision (of precipitate identification) which changes the dispersed, `non-all' collection of signifiers into the `objective' order of the big Other.

From a strictly Hegelian standpoint, the alternative between persisting in the solitude of the act which suspends the big Other and `compromising one's desire' by accepting one's place in the big Other (the socio-symbolic order) is a false one, the last trap laid by abstract Understanding in order to prevent us from attaining true philosophical speculation. The ultimate speculative identity is the identity of the act and the Other: an authentic act momentarily suspends the big Other, but it is simultaneously the 'vanishing mediator' which grounds, brings into existence, the big Other. In other words, the proposition `A is a' displays the precise structure of speculative judgement in which the identity of the two elements is mediated by a central impossibility: A, the big Other, the symbolic order, is inherently `barred', hindered, structured around the void of a central impossibility; it always falls short of its notion; this central impossibility is its condition of possibility, and the objet ais precisely the paradoxical object which gives body to this impossibility, which is nothing but the materialization of this impossibility." In this precise sense,a is the object-cause of desire:it does not effectively pre-exist desire as that which arouses it, it merely gives body to its inherent deadlock, to the fact that desire is never satisfied by any positive object, that is to say, apropos of every positive object, the subject's experience will always be a `this is not that '.

Or — to put it in a slightly different way — one should draw all the consequences from the fact that the big Other is the field of supposed knowledge, that is, that it is strictly correlative to the effect of transference (in exactly the sense in which Kant claims that the moral Law acquires actual existence only in the subject's respect for it). `Transference' designates the subject's trust in the meaning-to-come: in the psycho- analytic cure, for example, the transferential relationship with the analyst bears witness to the patient's confidence that the analyst `is in the know' — the analyst's presence is the guarantee that the patient's symptoms possess some secret meaning yet to be discovered. Consequently, in so far as the big Other functions as the guarantee of the meaning-to-come, the very fact of the big Other involves the subjective gesture of precipitation. In other words: how do we pass from the `non-all', dispersed, inconsistent collection of signifiers to the big Otherqua consistent order? By supplementing the inconsistent series of signifiers with a Master-Signifier, S1, a signifier of the pure potentiality of meaning-to-come; by this precipitation (the intervention of an `empty' signifier which stands in for the meaning-to-come) the symbolic field is completed, changed into a closed order.' Since, however, the transferential relationship is by definition dependent on a subject which is in itself divided/split, a subject which stands under the sign of lack and negativity (only such a dislocated subject has the urge to establish a support for itself in the big Other via the gesture of precipitate identification), this means that the big Other hinges on a divided/split subject. For that reason, the dissolution of transference (at the end of the psychoanalytic cure), the experience that `the big Other doesn't exist', and `subjective destitution' are strictly equivalent.

In so far as, according to Lacan, the status of the act is ultimately that of the object (objet petit a), it would be expedient to mention here Dieter Hombach's recent attempt to account for the status of strange objects like quarks or gluons in quantum physics: although theory itself defines these objects as entities which can never be empirically isolated and verified, one has to presuppose them if the theoretical edifice is to maintain its consistency. According to Hombach, these objects are a kind of pseudo-object brought about by the self-referential generative movement of the theory itself: they merely materialize, give body to, a statistic fictional entity.Our point, of course, is that the status of the Lacanian objet petit a is exactly homologous: is notlanguage, the symbolic order, the crucial example of a `self-organized' system, a system which itself brings about the otherness to which it refers, a system which always self-referentially intervenes in (`disturbs') its object, so that it ultimately speaks only about itself? Andobjet petit a is precisely the paradoxical object generated by language itself as its `fall-off', as the material left- over of the purely self-referential movement of signifiers:objet a is a pure semblance of an object which gives body to the self-referential movement of the symbolic order.

One can also put it in the following way: the symbolic order (the big Other) is organized around a hole in its very heart, around the traumatic Thing which makes it `non-all'; it is defined by the impossibility of attaining the Thing; however, it is this very reference to the void of the Thing that opens up the space for symbolization, since without it the symbolic order would immediately `collapse' into the designated reality — that is to say, the distance that separates `words' from 'things' would disappear. The void of the Thing is therefore both things at the same time: the inaccessible `hard kernel' around which the symbolization turns, which eludes it, the cause of its failure, and the very space of symbolization, its condition of possibility. That is the `loop' of symbolization: the very failure of symbolization opens up the void within which the process of symbolization takes place.

This ultimate identity of opposites, the identity of the Thing and the Other, perhaps the hardest speculative nut to crack, also enables us to provide an answer to a criticism of Lacan which — on a first approach, at least — cannot but strike us as convincing: is not Lacanian theory confined to a very limited aspect of subjectivity — to what keeps us, human subjects, caught in the vicious cycle of compulsion-to-repeat, constrained by the phantasmatic frame, overdetermined by the symbolic network, captivated by the mirror-image, and so on? Does not Lacan's fundamental triad of Imaginary—Symbolic—Real effectively amount to a matrix of the three modes of a subject's captivity, of its being at the mercy of some external mechanism or cause: imaginary captivation, overdetermination by the symbolic structure, the attraction exerted by some traumatic encounter of the real? But is this the whole truth? Is there not also another side to human experience, the dimension of invention and creativity, the subject's capacity to define his/her own space of realization, to concoct his/her own existential project, to 'define' him- or herself? Is there a place in Lacan's theoretical edifice for this dimension?

The answer is a definite 'yes' — it is contained in Lacan's unexpected vindication of the notion of creativity at its most radical, that is, as creatio ex nihilo: by means of reference to the void of the Thing in the midst of the symbolic structure, the subject is able to 'bend' the symbolic space she inhabits, and thus to define his/her desire in its idiosyncrasy. The paradox, again, is that there is by definition no 'proper measure' here: there is simultaneously not enough and too much creativity. Not enough, since the symbolic structure which is always-already here overdetermines my acts; too much, since I am none the less fully responsible for the way I relate to the structure. I am never 'caught in the structure without remainder'; there is always a remainder, a void around which the structure is articulated, and by locating myself at this void I can assume a minimal distance towards the structure, 'separate' myself from it.

Although one has to be careful here not to confound the act qua real with the performative gesture of the Master-Signifier, the two are none the less closely connected: the ultimate paradox of the process of symbolization, its 'highest mystery', is the fact that the act qua real (i.e. the gesture which, once the symbolic order is established, functions as its suspension, as excessive with regard to it) is simultaneously the `vanishing mediator' that founds the symbolic order. An act, in its most fundamental dimension, is the 'vanishing mediator' between the In-itself and the For-itself: between the pre-symbolic, 'virtual', not yet fully actualized reality, and the reality which is already re-marked, symbolized. A symbolic order involves the structure of the hermeneutic circle: it is by definition 'auto-poetic' and all-encompassing; as such, it has no externality, so that the human subject who dwells in language can never step out of it and assume a distance towards it — the very `external' reality always appears as such from within the horizon of language. The act, however, is precisely the 'impossible' gesture which opens up the unfathomable line of separation between `things' and `words'(der Unter-Schied, as Heidegger put it), the gesture which is `repressed' once we are 'within' (the domain of Meaning). And the Master-Signifier is the act itself, perceived only 'from within', from the already-established symbolic horizon. In short, the act qua real and the Master-Signifier are not 'substantially' different, they are one and the same entity, conceived either in the mode of 'becoming' or in the mode of 'being'.