by Apostolis Artinos
During the mirror stage, this coming-into-beingexperience of the psyche, the subject does not simply assume its image as this is mirrored in the framingof its reflections, but is deflected in the event of a liminal and ultimate image. The mirror image is not my image, the image of my world, but the image of the world beyond; a marginal ontology that shatters my libidinal nature. What is reflected in the mirror is also that which was permanently and instantaneously detached from the Being of the mirrored subject. Its image, the image of its formal wholeness, "opens up" the body and ingrains in its consciousness a state of a discontinuity, of a division that shatters it while it devotes it to its iconic duplicate. I no longer belong to my biological Being-in-the-world but to a fantasy of death instead, to the astonishment of a vision that prefigures my definitive loss in the hologram of a completed form. And it is precisely this image of the imaginary that will permanently mark the subject with the reason of its summoning: its existential deficiency. A deficiency that opens up the circle of its perpetual narcissistic becomings and at the same time the horizon of an inescapable and irresistible nostalgia for its lost centre. The defunct part dismisses its part-hood and establishes itself as a central, existential reference. While I amthe status of this loss, this tragedy, I am also the nostalgia of its fulfillment. In this way, the mirror puts forward a scene of death, the image of a haunted representation, which also becomes, as Lacan would note, "the threshold of the visible world", the threshold of visibility itself ambushed by the di-visibility of the object. Lacan talks about this entrapment, this irreversible imprisonment of ours by the imaginary unity of the specular image that makes up for all our gaping shortcomings. An "orthopaedic unity", as he characterizes it, that puts together the pieces of our innerfragmentation, our partial losses, this internal landscape of our death. The re-weldings of this fragmented Ego take place in an imagined field that is validated in its progressive formulation. The gaps created by these shortcomings – that will also become the gaps of a perverse pleasure – result in a castrated subject but they also exhibit the reflection of its imaginary superiority. ΙnLacan’s discourse the disappearance of the subject is registered in this imaginary order, where the imaginary image is abandoned in its enthusiasm and vigor in an orbit that excludes its origins. The mirror before the subject's lack becomes for the imaginary the Archimedean point of its launch. In this foreclosure of the world, of its names and signifiers, and amidst a delirium of narcissism, the imaginary image exhausts the libidinal tension of the subject, exhausts its body down to its blood and guts and leaves behind a dehydrated, emaciated trace, a fossilized version only of imagined. An imaginary excitement and a narcissistic delirium that have as their starting point the recognition of the Other, its symbolic truthfulness which solidifies its specular projection and alienates, divides and eliminates our subject. I recognize my own image, that is to say my own lack, when I identify in the place of the Other the trace of my difference; a fundamental difference that defines and determines the psyche and which also stimulates desire. The image registers in this way its own pleasure and becomes itself the Real of this pleasure, our sublimate deflection in the scale of the imaginary.
Desire returns when we inoculate this image, the image of the Other; an image that stimulates, challenges and deflects our vision; a devotion that also forms our most internal nucleus, our linguistic standing, the multitude of our namings and their durability as they play host to this energy, encasing it in the folds of the self, a self however that is deeply fragmented, incorporating in its cracks all the fragments of the Other. Desire is what forms our subject, but it is also what keeps letting it go, the black hole of the self, its lack, its opening up, the quest for its wholeness, an untraceable and ultimately unfulfilled completion, as the Other, this signifier of the Other, is also the point of our wandering, of our surrender to what only appears to be and will never actually become its realization. Our lack is what opens us up to a beyond, the beyond of our deficit but also the beyond of our desire, in a horizon where the object of desire lays us bare to the point of its escape as well as its dispersion but also to the point of the addresses of our desiring power. The location of this object is not registered in the field of an objectivity, in a well-defined point, but only in the polysemy of its dispersion, which at the same time transcends the horizon of our unique wandering. Its almost indiscernible trace in the universe of our desire also gives rise to its impossibility. The more our desire misses the mark through its narration, the more it traces the impossibility of its enjoyment. This is precisely the impropriety of desire; the untraceable location of its object due to its hyperactivity. In the horizon of this impossibility, that is in fact a sexual, relational impossibility, the Lacanian gesture of eliminating its linguistic point, traces the misfire of the Thing itself, a Thing that for Lacan cannot do anything but miss, leaving us deprived and disappointed in the glimmer of its dark attraction.
Desire is exposed then in these signals of the Other, substantiating its reflections in the body of pleasure, in our very own body, our ultimate confirmation, where Lacan will once more recognize the locale of the Other. Devoted to desire, we also devote ourselves to the impossibility of its fulfillment. The subject of desire does not belong to the present of its realization, but to the time of its imaginary articulation; an associative fixation with an earlier time that also pinpoints its lost parts. The present event is an impossible duration exposed to its imaginary promise as it requires of the subject a consciousness that does not belong to the present. This consciousness of being then is an impossible consciousness, the lost consciousness of an active presence within the I am of pleasure. An I am, that as Jacques-Alain Miller will also point out, is a deficit of Being, the very concession of Dasein. What is interesting at this point is the reaction of the subject as it attempts to overturn this truth, to divert the points of the Other to a reversed perspective, to reflect them not in its bareness, as is the case with the subject of desire, but in the dispersionof its cosmic explosion. The emancipation of the neurotic subject for instance, the recognition of its objectified position, as well as the autoerotic fixation of the psychotic with the part of his body, or of the obsessive-compulsive disorder sufferer with the multiplicity of traces and with the failure of its decentralization to the space of the Other, all attest to a defensive entrenchment. And it is of course in "Kant avec Sade" that Lacan will put forward, in a thought of revealing clarity, the exorbitance of this desubjectification: the sadic humanoids of Sade. Beings that consolidate their inner sense of division in the diversion of a total objectification, when they do not reconsider their actions and when they do not stand down, but are instead abandoned in the thingly nature of their rawness; an epiphany that is also identified in the being of their victims, as they endure their alienation from the body and its horrific representations, this signifying function of the Thing. In all the examples discussed above that are by nature limited, the Other becomes a manageable object, its parts foreshadowed, and in its instrumentalization it also raises the fantasy of its fulfillment.
In this gloominess, or better still within it, Lacan demonstrates the imbalance of a promise, its impossibility, the impossible of a relational sequence that dictates its inconsistency. As a result, reality is traced to the melancholic symptom of its truth, to a beginning-of-language imprint that internalizes our disappointment; an innermostemotional thrill that for Lacan will also be the ultimate degree of pleasure. Pleasure needs this abandonment, this separation, the scene of death. Because in order for pleasure to be pleasure for life it needs to go through a death drive; where we also identify a unique, existential species: the Lacanian speaking being, a being completely submitted to its linguistic articulation. When man utters words he automatically lets go of something but also he takes charge of something, takes pleasure in somethingas Lacan would probably put it. And that is because when the subconscious is articulated it is distorted in an objectivity that conceals it, and along with it also conceals the truth of our loss. The speaking subject is a “suffering subject”,a subject that suffers the speech of the Other, that tunes in and at the same time goes out of focus, upon hearing this speech and upon hearing its own words, its own weak voice that sometimes also gives the impression of being the voice of the Other. In this way words articulate their failure, a failure that concerns Being itself, its ontological division. But then again, it is through this failure that language constructs and constrains in the fragility of its moments the possibility of a meaning, of a weak meaning. A linguistic (im)possibility, which constantly revises the traces of the Real, of a Real that will always escape us. Pleasure is preserved in these traces of escape and it is ultimately a linguistic pleasure, which also means that it is a pleasure of loss, of a defamated point that is not mathematicized by any continuity, but only by the discontinuity of its desiring deadlock.
So there is an image, the image of the Οther, even when this Other assumes my own trace and becomes as Esa Kirkkopelto would put it, my congenial uncanny, an image that can represent everything, even a negated self. The uncanny that I carry within me is this Other that stimulates me, that determines me, that renders me visible. He is there almost before me, opening up space and keeping time for me, forcing upon me what will become my own convictions, beliefs, worries, anxieties, and ultimately this: my only death. The Other that has taken hold of me is this something that was lacking within me, a wound that does not heal but only embodies its loss and renders it visible within its own darkness; a darkness that wipes out all terms of visibility, all plains of the imaginable. My eye, a defenseless organ, a weak gaze which does not record the Other, does not identify him within the field of its range. "Youneverlookatmefrom the place from which Isee you", this alluring phrase of Lacan’s.Therefore, communion with you is impossible and will forever remain a double deficit. The fascination of the gaze does not belong to my own gaze but to the gaze of the Other. When this gaze falls down upon me and examines me it shrinks me in its light. I am the embodied ghost of this gaze, the uncanny of my own being, her counterweight, as Emmanuel Levinas would say.
Our fantasy registers us to the Other and assimilates us into its trace. It is a place of pleasure and participation that is identified in the scene of death, in the drama that it opens up; an interstice that shifts the trace of life to its symbolic ground. It is language that illuminates the object, that challenges it anddistorts it. An idiom thattransfigures the pleasure of the Other making it possible within the oblivion and withdrawal of life. But we already find ourselves within a discourse on art. An art that can transfigure, and why not also raise in us suspicions and expose what is undisclosed, the dark side of pleasure. In the imagery of contemporary art, in a catalogue that the present text forms part of, the image of the Other, the image of our lack, of our castration, regains all the concealed rawness of its earlier history. The Other is not exposed to the allure of its name but to its untranslatable and indisposed version. The extinction of the Other becomes in the work of art its statutory condition. Α gap, as Lacan characteristically noted in his 11thseminar, that delineates the work, a gap from where the gaze looks; yet another event of pleasure.
translation: Irini Bachlitzanaki
artork: Anastasia Douka