Objet Petit a (Object Cause of Desire)

In his words 40

“love must be so that you don't simply say I love you because this this this this but all the real properties become an expression of: there's some something in you more than you I don't know what but on behalf of that X I love you.”
41:04 The Reflection of Life in Hegel · objet petit a and love

“love always emerges as this kind of in spite of... it needs an index of imperfection.”
42:25 The Reflection of Life in Hegel · love, imperfection, and objet petit a

“you are anti-semitic if you say you are dirty exploiting because you are a Jew... that mysterious something in you more than you.”
40:02 The Reflection of Life in Hegel · antisemitism and the objet petit a

The stories that teach it

the jokes and anecdotes he reaches for when he works in this idea, ranked by how many of its talks they turn up in; each card is one story, with every retelling on its page

joke · in 20 of its talks

coffee without cream / coffee without milk

A customer orders coffee without cream; the waiter says they have no cream but can offer coffee without milk. Even though the result is identical, the absent supplement matters, Hegelian negativity in a joke.

example · in 12 of its talks

Brassed Off coffee invitation

A woman invites a man up for coffee; he says he doesn't like coffee; she says she has none, the double withdrawal of coffee produces erotic meaning far more charged than a direct proposition.

example · in 9 of its talks

Da Vinci Code / Da Vinci, sex displaced onto Jesus

In The Da Vinci Code there is no sex between the protagonists, but Jesus himself has to make love to cover for the absence of sex between Robert Langdon and the heroine. In Angels & Demons, sex present in the novel is removed from the film.

example · in 9 of its talks

Antigone rewritten, three alternate scenarios

Žižek describes his book rewriting Antigone in three alternate-history versions: (1) Sophocles' original; (2) Antigone wins the argument with Creon but this triggers revolt and ruin; (3) the Chorus executes both Antigone and Creon as traitors establishing Jacobin terror. He us…

example · in 9 of its talks

China banning time-travel and alternate-history narratives

Chinese authorities reportedly ban time-travel and alternate-history topics in narrative media. Žižek finds this a good sign: at least those in power are still afraid of the popular imagination, unlike the West, where no prohibition is needed because we cannot imagine an alter…

example · in 9 of its talks

Starbucks ethical consumerism

Buying a Starbucks cappuccino is sold as supporting Guatemalan organic farmers and saving the planet; the owner appeared like Anthony Giddens calling Starbucks an ersatz place of collective experience. The sin of consumerism and its redemption are packaged together in the same…

Heydrich playing Beethoven string quartets8 Darian Leader patient / 'Bed for two please'8 Dating agencies: 'find love without the fall'8 Stalin's dialectical synthesis on money in communism8 Lacanian jealous husband8 Native Americans prefer 'Indians'8 Niels Bohr's horseshoe9 V for Vendetta morning after8 Jaws shark as ideological condensation7 Rumsfeld's known/unknown matrix and the fourth term7

Where it comes up 156

232 moments located in the transcripts, click a timestamp to play from there

Markets without Substance2003 · 1:00:22

9:32 objet petit a

… on, signifying symbolic representation always structurally fails and the failure, this failure as it were is embodied in what Lacan calls l'objet petit a, the object-cause of desire, precisely that which remains, the leftover, the excess, that which is not caught in the logic of symbolic representation.

14:38 fantasy

… er this confrontation or like a coupling of the subject with object in the sense of object-cause of desire is for Lacan also the formula of fantasy.

18:24 Che vuoi?

… you want provides an answer to this primordial as Lacan put it referring to terms of an old novel where the words are in Italian, to this "Che vuoi?", what what do you want? And the inter we can also read this discourse in another way which maybe will make you will make it more plastic.

+1 more in this talk

The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006)2006 · 2:30:11

~1:56:05 objet petit a

it were, background of proto-reality, a real which is more dense, more fundamental than the narrative reality. the story that we observe. it is this that provides the proper density of the cinematic experience. is the gigantic tree where in vertigo, madeleine and scotty get …

1:15:23 fantasy

… within the fantasy space, he is the obstacle to sexual intercourse.

46:58 desire as a wound of reality

… desire is a wound of reality.

Slavoj Žižek. Ontological Incompleteness in Film. 20122012 · 1:36:49

40:15 objet petit a

… e kind of absolute idealist it's simply that I mean it can be read in a very simple materialist way that you see that you fully accept that object a as your cause the cause of your desire whatever is not some positive substance that is just another perspective of your own void.

50:20 fantasy

… It's a kind of a very primitive materialization of this idea that she is just the real Judy is just a fantasy screen for him.

1:29:04 object without place

… You have a place without an object but at the same time you have an object without place.

The Trouble With Pleasure: Deleuze and Psychoanalysis2016-07-19 · 1:59:32

1:16:32 objet petit a

… uld say directly in the movement of the drives but has to be represented in the unconscious by some kind of bodily representative like the *objet petit a* stands in for the missing subject.

1:17:30 fantasy

… So his un- his fantasy is he says "I would have been one of these wailers, like just who would be known as a virtuoso complainer," which wonderful.

Jealousy as a political category2009-04-24 · 1:28:39

~14:44 objet petit a

capital, there you have a pizzeria whose owner is Dalai Lama’s brother, no? That’s, that’s life, no? So but what I want to say is that really this kind of—there is none of this, you know, fascination as if the others whom I deplore have …

8:59 fantasy

… As Lacan points out, this is the fundamental subjective position of fantasy: to be reduced to a gaze which observes the world in the condition of the subject’s non-existence.