The short answer is, almost nothing
Leila asks in the comments below what I know about objet petit a, and I thought I’d reply in a post in the hope that someone reading this with some significant Lacan knowledge will see it and give us the full run-down on objet petit a. I’ve never read any Lacan, so all I know is what I’ve stuck together from bits of Žižek, which is to say, the basics (and possibly a garbled version of those).
Anyway, I think objet petit a stands for the structural role of that which is “really” desired when you get what you think you want and realize that it wasn’t what you really wanted. I say “structural role”, because Lacan argues that this isn’t just a contingent mistake that people sometimes make, but a general feature of desire. So, whenever we desire any particular, there is always that sense of something missing in what we think we desire; we might try and fill that lack by saying we desire some other particular thing, but that new object will itself be lacking; objet petit a is the name for this generalized lack.
I think this is connected with Lacan’s account of how the subject is formed. Before we can use language, we just desire in general. As soon as we start using language, we are able to articulate specific desires, but this means that we are always worried that our desire is too specific, and doesn’t capture the original complete satisfaction involved in our pre-linguistic desire. Objet petit a is a symbol for this desired thing that can’t be put into words. As I understand it, this then becomes important because how one deals with this unattainable object of desire is what distinguishes the different discourses (the master, the university, the pervert, and there’s one other I can’t remember); but I don’t really know how that actually works out.
Don’t know how much that helps; hopefully, as I say, somebody reading this can explain more (there’s also an awesomely unhelpful wikipedia page).
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hey that’s great! thank you! you know everything! marry me!
P.S I was thinking maybe that “objet a” was different to “objet petit a”??
Comment by leila @ 1/31/2006 7:11 am
Maybe so; if they are different, then I don’t know what “objet a” is (and that’s quite likely). Here’s French Wikipedia on objet a, which seems to be the same as objet petit a, at least as I understand it. If that’s any help. Actually, French Wikipedia also has a page about le petit autre, and says that le grand Autre is the opposite of both le petit autre and objet a, but le petit autre and objet a seem to be different.
Comment by tim @ 1/31/2006 4:58 pm
I vaguely remember that it is not the actual “thing” one desires, but some other “object” (or wish, etc) that stands in its place and thereby makes invisible the actual desire.
Is it not also called the “object cause of desire”?
*sigh*
I VAGUELY remember.
Comment by steff @ 1/31/2006 9:08 pm
Hmm thanks. I’m thinking about that little boy who misses his mother when she goes out to work. He has a bobbin on a string. He throws it out and says “gone” and reels it in and says “here” or something. I THINK the bobbin is the “objet a” in which case Steff’s version sounds more like it. Meanging Tim’s first idea of the “petit a” as some kind of original, general, lack would be different to it. But it seems to me it would make more sense if they were the other way round, with “petit a” describing the bobbin, perhaps a stand-in for a desire that’s limited but controllable, its passivity implied in the “petit” restrictions of the object? But that doesn’t sound right either.
That Wikipedia page is in French! Don’t even get me started on the Autres.
Comment by leila @ 2/1/2006 12:27 am
Not sure that Lacan has done a reading of that scene (which is from ‘Beyond the pleasure principle’)?
Someone else has done, though.
Also see HERE. THere’s also a dictionary of Lacanian terms, but not quite all as definite as a dictionary might be imo.
Comment by steff @ 2/2/2006 7:14 pm
Thanks. i’m sure I found it in one of his books though (or the malcolm bowie commentary)…and according to your first link, lacan has indeed done a reading of the scene:
“Lacan takes this case and focuses, of course, on the aspect of language it displays. Lacan says that the fort/da game, which Freud said happened when his nephew was about 18 months old, is about the child’s entry into the Symbolic, or into the structure of language itself. Lacan says that language is always about loss or absence; you only need words when the object you want is gone.”
Comment by leila @ 2/4/2006 2:05 pm
another way i have found helpful for understanding the objet petit is to think about it functionally from the perspective of the 4 discourses of Lacan.
#1 of which is
s1|S(bar)
– –
s2 a
(i wish i was better at HTML)
these subject positions keep switching positions. You know the picture i’m talking about.
====
anyway, there’s no petit a (as such) and should always be understood as having their own agency vis-a-vis its relation to other things like knowledge, unconcious, barred subject etc.
In a way, the “lack” is the name of the game, since it motivates the untenable relationship between the four nodes and hence accounts for agency of the sign. Lack thus animates all relations. The specific position of the petit a points to how the petit a functions in a particular context. Thus while its seems to be an object, it really isn’t… neither is the big other, neither is the barred subject, neither is knowledge: its the relation that’s important.
hope that adds to the discussion
Comment by tzuchien @ 2/7/2006 11:06 pm
Steff is correct in his comments about ‘objet a’. Like Henry Krips writes, the subject, object and ‘objet a’ can be seen in relation to each other like the suitor, the lover, and the chaperone standing in the way of the objet a. As the suitor can see only the subjet a and not realize that it is in fact merely standing in the way of himself and his real object of desire, he becomes obsessed with the ‘objet a’ instead, putting it in the position of the fetish, a substitution for his real object.
Comment by Claire @ 6/14/2006 7:05 am
Objet a is a version of Augustine’s thoughts on the articulation of desire and the emergence of speech and symbolisation. It is entirely religious.
Wittgenstein flattens this conceptualisation in his Philosophical Investigations.
Comment by Nick @ 8/16/2006 8:13 am