When the World Disappears

At what point does an object stop operating as a question and become a ghost?

It is not that the object physically disappears; it is that it stops producing an effect on us. It is still there, visible, but it no longer looks back at us. This happens when a thing or a symbol presents itself as completely known, when it is believed that everything about it is already understood. Boredom does not arise from a lack of presence, but from an excess of certainty. The object stops questioning because it has been reduced to a meaning.

The problem of our time is not the absence of meaning, but its saturation.

Everything has already been said.
Everything explained.

The world has become a system of instructions that are obeyed or ignored. Everything works, but nothing touches us as individuals. We participate as actors in a play repeated to exhaustion, while the place where something of ourselves might appear remains offstage. We do not act. We are moved.

An object truly operates in the one who receives it only as long as it keeps open a distance, a minimal separation between what is shown and what is believed to be its meaning. When that distance closes, when the object becomes transparent, it stops demanding a reading. There is nothing left to look at, because it is assumed that everything has already been seen.

When signifier and signified coincide too well, the pair is sutured and the space of desire, understood as the movement of the subject to produce meaning, disappears. Nothing remains to be added from the subject, because everything seems already given.

Need, demand, and desire

To clarify this logic, it is useful to return to Lacan’s distinction between three registers that do not overlap, although they are often confused, and that organize the movement of the human being in relation to the world and to others.

  • Need responds to a biological or functional requirement. Its circuit is closed. One acts to restore an equilibrium and, once satisfied, the need is extinguished without leaving a remainder. It addresses no one and does not involve the Other.
  • Demand introduces the Other. It may be formulated as a concrete request or appear disguised in many forms, but it always says more than it states. In a symptom, for example, demand takes shape as a question or an insistence addressed to the Other: do you love me, do you recognize me, do I have a place for you, give me what I need from you, this is what is owed to me. Curiously, the response is never obtained in the requested object. Not because something is lacking in that object, but because what is at stake is not the object itself, but the bond with the Other. Demand aims at confirmation, not satisfaction, and for that reason no response ever fully closes it.
  • Desire is not confused with either need or demand. It arises in the distance between what is said and what is meant. It is an irreducible remainder that finds no adequate or definitive response. When demand closes onto a fixed response, desire becomes concealed. It does not disappear, but it loses its possibility of appearing as a singular question.

Desire comes into play where meaning is not closed. A word like love, for example, does not refer to a single meaning. The one who hears it completes it with their own history, images, and affects. In the same way, an object such as a vehicle is not desired only for its function, but for what is projected onto it. What is desired is not the object itself, but the imagined value that accompanies it.

The desert of the predictable

Observe any pedestrian. They walk along the sidewalk, cross on the white lines, stop at the traffic light, and move forward when the green light allows it. There is no error in their path. The system works. It is safe and efficient. But in that perfectly regulated sequence there is no gap.

The act of walking coincides exactly with its social meaning. The gesture does not exceed the norm; it executes it. The body does not invent; it obeys. There is no symbolic risk because there is no void. And without void, there is no desire.

The subject moves within a circuit of need and regulation. It is not that a desire to walk differently is repressed. The point is more radical. When the only way to follow a rule is to comply with it, the gesture ceases to be a choice and becomes execution. There is no possible appropriation of the act, only compliance.

Even if the pedestrian attempts to deviate, the social fabric immediately corrects the dissonance. The coincidence between gesture and meaning is restored. The world becomes perfectly navigable and, precisely for that reason, profoundly inhospitable.

Sutured signifiers

What appears in the pedestrian as bodily execution without desire has its correlate at the symbolic level.

When a signifier and its signified present themselves as evident, natural, or unquestionable, a sutured meaning appears. The pair stops opening questions and begins to function as a closed equivalence.

  • Home = peace
  • Work = security
  • Science = progress
  • Name = identity
  • Couple = completeness
  • Walking on the sidewalk = right

When these pairs fail to deliver what they promise, a question does not open; instead, disappointment, frustration, or disenchantment is produced. Meaning was given in advance and, when it fails, leaves no space for subjective elaboration. Demand is already installed as expectation.

Where meaning is closed, the bond with the world is not organized by desire, but by demand.

This same mechanism operates in institutionalized symbols that already come with a guaranteed meaning. In the case of the cross, for example, pain has a name before the subject finds their own words. The symbol stops operating as an interrogation and becomes a point of support. It does not introduce doubt, but a prior orientation.

Desire is not articulated there as one’s own question, but as a demand addressed to the Big Other. The subject does not speak from what they do not know about themselves, but from a language already authorized to ask for what they assume the Other expects from them.

The cross does not symbolize something new nor does it demand interpretation. It settles in as a recognizable demand. And in that demand no remainder is left. There is no symbolic excess that forces the invention of a new word. The world becomes legible, but mute.

The power of the incomplete

If we think of a different object, such as a triangle, something else happens. The triangle has no obligatory history that closes its meaning. It does not point to a single event nor promise salvation. It is a simple and incomplete form in terms of what it may come to signify.

Precisely for that reason, it does not fix meaning. It does not express a need nor articulate a demand. It keeps desire open as movement.

The triangle does not contain meanings. It summons them. Meaning is not given in advance; it shifts, tests, insists, until something resonates in the one who looks at it. And only then, provisionally, does a signifier signified pair form. Not because meaning has closed, but because something has found a place to lodge.

It is not that the triangle is better than the cross. It is that it does not demand obedience. It demands looking. And looking always implies exposing oneself to not fully knowing.

Symbols and words operate through what they withhold. They signify because they refer to an absence, to a point where the subject does not coincide with themselves. It is in that lack that the world appears again.

This is what sustains much of contemporary art. Meaning is not in the work as a closed object, but in the encounter between the work and the one who looks at it.

The ethics of the crack

If the contemporary world pushes us to be pedestrians of our own existence, circulating along routes of meaning already traced, the task is not to destroy sidewalks nor tear down symbols. The task is another: to inhabit the interval.

To sustain a bond, to carry out a task, or to look at an object without trying to exhaust it with meanings is today a form of silent resistance. It is what Simone Weil called attention without return to the self.

Learning to see again is not recovering a lost innocence. It is renouncing the temptation to understand too quickly. Accepting that desire only breathes where something escapes us.

The world does not disappear when objects are lacking.
It disappears when we have too many answers.

Perhaps living, in the most radical sense of the word, consists in protecting that minimal remainder of uncertainty. Because only where meaning fails can the subject begin to speak in the first person.

:.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Unmasking Evil: The Truth Behind Our Darkest Desires

Image
Evil, as an action, could be a thought, but that is usually forgotten, a damned intranscendent mental Sin. In general, evil is only evil when it becomes action and comes out of us as a manifestation of our darkness. But, as an action, it is not inherently evil; rather, it is evil only in relation to other actions or, better yet, perceptions of actions—interpretations. Above all, evil is a function of one's relationship with one's manque, the fundamental lack that structures one's desire. Most of the time, what is evil is not determined by an external reaction, but by the accusation of one's inner Other, nor by the moral codifications that attempt to define it. Rather, evil’s true weight emerges in the subjective coordinates of one's own lack, in how one's act situates itself in relation to this void that constitutes one. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the subject is always structured around the manque-à-être—the lack of being. It is this absence that fuels desire, ...
Read more

The Anxious Cat: The Case of Q

Image
Everybody who has had pets knows that they all have unique personalities, fears, and desires, and in some cases, they can experience emotions such as shame, guilt, playfulness, and anxiety. I have been living with a cat for some time now. During this period, I have learned to understand him beyond his normal behavior; I can recognize when he is anxious. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, anxiety arises from the delicate and ever-shifting interplay between three fundamental registers of human psyche: the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real. The inherent tension and potential for disruption within their interconnectedness generate anxiety. Here's a brief breakdown: The Imaginary: This realm encompasses identification, the ego, and the formation of the self through specular images and identifications with others. It is where we develop a sense of bodily unity and coherence, primarily during the mirror stage, when an infant recognizes themselves in the mirror. This sense of self, however,...
Read more

The Cat F. and her object of desire

Image
There is a toy the cat I live with, F., loves. A small, insignificant object by itself—a hair band—but for her, it is everything. She plays with it, run with it, and then—loses it. Again and again, it disappears under the sofa. At first, I thought it was mere accident, an unfortunate consequence of her wild enthusiasm. I would retrieve it (with difficulty, moving the whole big and heavy sofa), place it back in front of her, and she would resume the game. Then I noticed something strange: F. was not merely losing the toy—she was hiding it, pushing it carefully under the sofa and then wait. Not searching for it, not retrieving it herself, but waiting for it to come out, like a mouse. This is the game. Not the toy, not the having of it, but the not having it—the game of waiting. Lacan taught us that desire is not for the object itself, but for the dream of having it, and the wonderful things that it will make us feel. The objet petit a , that little elusive remainder, is not what we want...
Read more