Objet a remains a paradoxical and slippery formulation throughout Lacan’s lifework. Its formulation enables an open-system logic of “both/and” to emerge, which introduces paradox and contingency into the system of thought. In this way desire is always metonymic, never fully satisfied once and for all by any “positive,” that is, actual object. As the “cause” of desire, objet a does not refer to the normative scientific understanding of cause. It does not preexist desire as an entity that sets it in motion, arousing desire.
Rather it is a nonspectacular element that “gives body” to a felt lack; “gives body” here refers to its constitutive function of closing the system, of enabling a fantasmatic frame to emerge around it, of establishing a spurious vanishing point so that the viewer/listener is spellbound, captivated, fascinated by what s/he sees or hears. It enables the scene of fantasy to materialize within the moment. Depending on the circumstances, that same object may
lose its magical quality (objet a) and turn to “shit,” as happens so often when a love relationship breaks up. The once most loving person turns into the most vile person alive, or the opposite can happen: the ugly frog turns into a prince once the magical kiss of transference has been blown his way. Love blossoms: the frog has been endowed with the magic of objet a. A scene from Rainer Werner Faßbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) can illustrate this process quite readily.
Emmi, an elderly Putzfrau who has married Ali, a Moroccan Gastarbeiter working as a mechanic in Berlin, wants to celebrate their wedding day by going to a very special restaurant where she had heard that even Hitler him-self had dined. Emmi has the fantasy that by dining with Ali at this special and very expensive restaurant, she and Ali will be treated royally, despite the disapproving racist gaze by her family, friends, and the German social order in general. Her mention of Hitler having frequented the place to Ali gives the restaurant the added historical importance and satisfaction that even a Putzfrau can now dine where the once mighty and now despised leader had.
Ali simply shrugs his shoulders. Hitler means nothing to him.
The camera frames the Kellner waiting patiently, absolutely still, standing near the doorframe. The scene seems frozen as in the background Emmi and Ali sit at a table alone. There is no one else in the dining room. The next cut is a close up of Emmi studying the menu. She insists to Ali that the best food be ordered, especially “golden caviar,” which is said to have been eaten only by the emperor himself. Again, the caviar, like the restaurant is bestowed a magical quality (agalma, objet a) that equates and elevates her with royalty. Ali once more just shrugs. Finally the waiter comes and asks whether they have decided. Emmi orders the caviar, drinks, and Châteaubriand, which seemed expensive. “English or Medium,” asks the waiter. Perplexed, Emmi hesitates and says “English,” that sounds good. “English it is,” says the waiter.
Followed by “Raw.” Emmi and Ali look at each other in shock. “Raw?” she asks. “Yes,” says the waiter, “Raw.” “I think we’ll have the other one,” she quickly adds. “Medium” says the waiter. “Yes,” says Emmi. “That’s not raw.”
“No,” says the waiter who then proceeds to take things in his own hands and begins to decide for them what they should and should not eat and drink.
“Ordering is difficult business,” says Emmi, and breaks out into an anxious sweat, fanning herself.
This scene illustrates perfectly how the change of the signifier /English/
becomes resignified from picturing Emmi’s idea of living out a fantasy to changing into its complete opposite—the rawness of meat. It has been drained of all its magic to become a piece of inedible shit. Her fantasy becomes deflated as the waiter takes command; the objet a that structures this scene is evacuated. For Ali, he couldn’t care less as long as Emmi is happy. His only objection, a mild one at that, came with the meat. They both leave the restaurant in the pouring rain, perhaps indicative of the way the power structures beat down on their bodies as abject creatures of the social order: Putzfrau and Gastarbeiter. The important point to note here, how-ever, is the way desire emerges in these objects (restaurant, golden caviar,
Châteaubriand); that is to say, the surplus value that these objects hold speak to the social relations between Ali and Emmi. It is the desire of the Other that is at issue here. Emmi’s deep wish to “fit” into the German Symbolic Order despite her marrying Ali, which guarantees her abjection. Commodity fetishism, as Marx tried to point out, rests on the social relationships of the Symbolic Order, an order structured by a political economy. Ali is a Gastarbeiter; this entire scenario is linked to the political economy of capi-talist Germany in the mid-1970s. When we speak of youth desire and youth fantasy, they are always framed within this political economic problematic of designer capitalist society.
The scene illustrates perfectly well the commodity fetishism as already described by Marx. What is missing from Emmi’s perception in the exchange at the restaurant is the place the Hotel, the caviar, and the Châteaubriand plays in the larger structure of class differentiations. She acts as if these com-modities were not just simple objects to be consumed, but rather as objects that have been endowed with a Schein, a glow, a special appearance, and magic. Only then can an inversion take place between these “things” and the social relations that support them. That is to say, these “things” become rei-fied (“thingirei-fied”) as social relations between subjects. Even the waiter, who is structurally there only to serve, someone who is simply a helper, has taken on the magical quality of knowing what aperitif and wine to order with the meal. Emmi may be well aware that these objects don’t “really” confer the sta-tus in the Symbolic Order that she is searching for, but she acts as if they do.
She believes that they do. That is her fetishistic illusion, an illusion which operates in all such exchanges that are discussed throughout this book when it comes to fantasy formations.
This insight enables us to understand fantasy as a material simulacrum as already suggested by Democritus in fourth century BCEGreece. He had the idea that light emitting from the object (what Lacan called the gaze)—in this case we call it the Schein, meets the look (perception) of the viewer creating a simulacrum between them. That simulacrum we take as our “reality frame,” a fantasy. Lacan went one step further in S XI, Four: the frame of the simulacrum was a lure, a veil that “covered over” the objet a of our desire and/or of our anxieties. In the above scenario, the glitz that emitted from those objects in Emmi’s Imagination constituted a scene where she felt special and accepted, covering over something more foreboding: the xeno-phobic gaze of the German society as represented by the stare of the waiter in the scene. Emmi’s fantasy frame shattered as that “raw” gaze came through with the fall of the signifier that had transfixed her fantasy. As viewers we see the Châteaubriand in another light—anamorphically for what it really was: the shit that both of them had to “eat” daily as an old lowly paid Putzfrau married to a virile Moroccan Gastarbeiter some 30 years her junior.
As a touchstone with Winnicottian object relations theory, one may liken these objects (hotel, caviar, Châteaubriand) to “transitional objects” in the sense that such objects of desire hold an identification and a disidentification
in their bodily affectivity; they blink on and off in their fascination for us.
In youth cultures what is “cool” and “hot” in one instance can fall quickly out of fashion in the next. This affect, however, can be contagious. Possessing the “it” of the object’s power, as in the phrase— “she got it,” confirms a group fantasy where identity becomes solidified. The anxiety of not fitting
“in” becomes dissipated as the paradox of becoming like everyone else whose
“cool,” whose got “it” (e.g., in dress, looks, manners) means that a camou-flage of individuality is being expressed. This is a good example of fantasy of symbolic fiction, which acts as a stabilizing force by disavowing the antag-onism that holds it together. The group’s “impossibility” is to be found at its very heart. No one dares to denounce the “cool” kids for being arrogant and above it all, because to do so would be to betray oneself and not belong to the group. A high price to pay if you want to stay with the “in”
crowd.
In Austria, the figure of Jörg Haider, the Landeshauptmann of the province of Kärnten, gives a material body to such a disavowal as well. Haider is a politician who constantly irritates the political scene by saying things in public that taps into the deep resentment of foreigners that the conservative element in Austria have, but who themselves would never consider coming out in public to express such a sentiment. Haider does it for them, and con-sequently seems to defy political suicide. He forms their “spectral apparition”
in the way that he remains “above it all,” telling the “truth,” like Pat Buchanan’s moral spiritualism allows him to say things about American cap-italist greed, which his political opposition cannot. In both cases the dis-avowal of the antagonism against foreigners and the antagonism against capitalism enables their supporters to maintain their cohesion around these figures without denouncing their (own) racism or their (own) moralism (see alsoZizek 1996b, 112–118).
For an object to enter and maintain its iconic sociocultural fascination (e.g., the hotel’s historical significance, the expensive yellow caviar, the most tender part of a filet of beef ) means that a sign’s affective value has to be
“anchored” and maintained through a particular symbolic discourse by an interest group. In Emmi’s case, such status objects are maintained by an upper class. Emmi believes that by consuming them her status would also be elevated. But she finds herself “out of place.” These objects have become
“anxious objects,” uncanny (unheimlich in Freud’s terms) as she cannot con-trol them in her Imaginary. The image of raw meat disgusts her. Its affective trace will remain as she eats it “medium.” These objects begin to exceed her framing of them to the point where the waiter “takes over.” The caviar will not taste as “golden” any more, and the restaurant has become empty, cold, and unwelcoming. Ali, on the other hand, doesn’t have any cathexed invest-ment in these objects. It’s “no sweat” in his case. We find out later in the film that it is couscous that he longs for; perhaps the very antithesis in looks and taste of the fine meal that Emmi had ordered. Couscous, the staple of his Moroccan village, embodies the desire of his homeland, the memories of friends and times past, his own nationhood. We find out at the end of the
film that Gastarbeiters suffer from terrible stomach ulcers. The anxiety of working in a country whose gaze is one of hate, which both literally and figuratively “eats at the soul,” eats at the “Real,” Ali’s fundamental fantasy of who he is. He cannot “live” in Germany. As the doctor says, the ulcers are chronic, repetitive, they are the symptom of his anxiety. In three months Ali will be back in hospital again.
Emmi’s food fantasies enables a better grasp of the paradoxical nature of fantasy itself; its status of being “objectively subjective,” as Zizek (1997a, 119–122) calls it, neither existing in a subjective realm (“in” Emmi), nor in an objective realm (“in” the food). Rather, fantasy is a transitionary phe-nomenon that emerges in their overlap, in an “extimate” space in Lacan’s topology, a neologism referring to the paradoxical interplay between the inside and the outside (see Miller 1994). As “objectively subjective” Emmi’s fantasy, on the one hand, appears objective: the high-status food eaten in a high-status local confers her status. On the other hand, this (objective state) is her “subjective” state as well. We know as viewers that this is simply not the case. She is “kidding” herself about acquiring status, for she is not aware how she is “really” perceiving the food. Her unconscious desire prevents her from such knowing, for it appears to her that this food will indeed confer her status and make her a queen for the day, but the Symbolic Order of 1970s Germany already mitigates this possibility. She is caught by this double bind, trapped by her fundamental fantasy of wanting to belong, to fit in to a higher class, and at the same time being rejected by a Symbolic Order that makes no space for a Putzfrau who marries a foreigner. She is already denied her fantasy even before she desires it.