How To Read Lacan by Zizek Slavoj

Author:Zizek, Slavoj [Zizek, Slavoj]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781847085405
Publisher: Granta
Published: 2011-08-03T16:00:00+00:00

Which shows like grief itself, but is not so;

For sorrow’s eye, glazed with blinding tears,

Divides one thing entire to many objects;

Like perspectives, which rightly gazed upon

Show nothing but confusion, eyed awry

Distinguish form: so your sweet majesty,

Looking awry upon your lord’s departure,

Find shapes of grief, more than himself, to wail;

Which, look’d on as it is, is nought but shadows

Of what it is not.

(Richard II, II, ii, 14–24)

This is objet a: an entity that has no substantial consistency, which in itself is ‘nothing but confusion’, and which acquires a definite shape only when looked at from a standpoint slanted by the subject’s desires and fears – as such, as a mere ‘shadow of what it is not’. Objet a is the strange object that is nothing but the inscription of the subject itself in the field of objects, in the guise of a blotch that takes shape only when part of this field is anamorphically distorted by the subject’s desire. Let us not forget that the most famous anamorphosis in the history of painting, Holbein’s Ambassadors, concerns death: when we look from the proper lateral angle at the anamorphically extended blotch in the lower part of the painting, set amongst objects of human vanity, it reveals itself as a skull. Bushy’s consolation can be read together with Richard’s later monologue, in which he locates Death in the void in the middle of the hollow royal crown, as the secret master-jester who lets us play the king and enjoy our authority, only to pierce our swollen shape with a needle and reduce us to nothing:

for within the hollow crown

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