Psychoanalysis k – Sam Franz – rks seniors Cover Letter

The impulse to minimize the place of rhetoric in Lacan’s work comes into sharpest relief around Žižek’s treatment of the object relation. Focusing on Lacan’s transition from “symptom to object,” Žižek claims that Lacan “enables us to see [the] place outside the Symbolic as an emptiness opened by the hole in the Symbolic. The . . . object is always the presentification, the filling of the hole around which the symbolic command articulates itself, of the hole retroactively constituted by this command itself, and in no way by a prelinguistic fact.”57 Žižek figures the relation to objects as a materially centered process because the object relation does not rely only on discourse but also on the enjoyment entailed in it; thus Žižek focuses on the ways that the object relation is a result of the “hole” or lack in the Symbolic, as opposed to a function of the operations of discourse in isolation from their material and ontological preconditions. Though this critique provides a powerful antidote to the idea that the world is reducible to a formal understanding of the properties of language, implicitly reaffirming a limit to rhetoric, a rhetorically tinctured reconfiguration of Lacan’s conception of trope locates language’s formal charge at the core of psychoanalytic thought without sacrificing attention to the material world. Žižek is right to claim that the object relation is a significant element of the subject’s relation to the material world that is not reducible to the role of discourse. But the object largely achieves this status as a result of the work of trope, which stems precisely from a failure or hole in the symbolic command as a form of feigned unicity in the context of failed symbolic unicity. The relationship to an object serves as both a kind of proxy for the failed relationship to reality of the sign and as a tropologically inflected mode of organizing the subject’s relationship to itself and to affect that metaphorically stands in for and therefore sutures the hole in the symbolic command.

Thus, the labor of trope is the condition of possibility for the object serving as a metaphorical stand-in for an inaccessible other (as I discuss in chapter three). Although Žižek would reclaim materiality of the object, the object only functions this way as a configuration of tropes organizing the subject’s affects. Therefore, to dismiss the idea that discourse shapes reality in the name of a conception of the object is to miss the work of rhetoric in articulating objects as sites of feigned unicity in the context of failed unicity. Though the spirit of Žižek’s critique is correct in complicating the automatic relationship between discourse and the production of reality in the name of the material and affective, the means by which he achieves this critique ignore the dual character of failed unicity (which is the site where objects and affects become necessary) as simultaneously a mode of feigning unicity (which re- quires the supplementary work of trope to produce objects as feigned proxy that covers over the failure of the symbolic command).Were Žižek to accept a framing of rhetoric that, instead of seeing it as an ornament or add on to a more fundamental conceptual or material process, embraced its ontological and material character, the concept of rhetoric would become a useful supplement to his understanding of the object as opposed to a specter invoking the worst tendencies of “postmodern” thought to reduce the construction of the material world to an epiphenomenon of discourse.