What was, simply was what it was, it had to be that way

I’m a huge fan of WordPress’s new rewind feature which shows what you were posting about on this day in previous years. It turns out that on 18th June 2025 I was posting about this extract from Bruce Fink’s book on Seminar XI:

By way of contrast, Lacan’s view is that losses are inevitable and irreversible, and they must be mourned. We mustn’t spend our whole lives complaining that we’ve been gypped and trying to get back what we feel we’ve lost out on. Now, once those losses are recognized for what they are and mourned, they can be sublimated or sublated in a sense, transmogrified with the coming to the fore of the phallic signifier, the Phallus with a capital P, symbolized by the matheme Φ. This is a forward-looking, as opposed to a backward-looking project. Rather than regressing to childhood to repair all the “damage” that was done, there is a push toward the recognition that what was, simply was what it was, it had to be that way (there is no point whining “If only things had been different….”); and a push toward the symbolization of something that can move things forward.

Bruce Fink, Lacan on Desire, loc 2379

I’d forgotten what a starkly beautiful expression that was: “What was, simply was what it was, it had to be that way“. If, as Ruti puts it, the melancholic subject is lost in “the labyrinth of its melancholy investments” Φ signifies the moment of suddenly realising that you’re alone in the labyrinth and walking, falteringly, out of the door and wondering what comes next as your eyes adjust to the sun and your lungs breath in the fresh air.

(I realise the proper Lacanian position would be something more like Φ making the labyrinth navigable, so it’s no longer a prison, but I like the image so much I’m not going to correct it 😊 I also think it captures something phenomenological of these kinds of transitions which structural approaches tend to miss)

Is There a Universal Enjoyment? —Todd McGowan

https://quokk.au/c/zizek/p/964833/is-there-a-universal-enjoyment-todd-mcgowan

Is there a psychoanalytical concept for how one frustration can be a synecdoche for frustration as such?

I came across a reference to the abjet petit a and immediately had a flash of what it might mean For Lacan the objet petit a is the object cause of our desire, it is the slither of the sublime which invests a concrete object with a sense of wondrous desirability. The sense of a deeper primordial loss from the trauma of socialisation lurks in the background of our psychic machinery, leading us to invest a flicker of what we feel was lost into the objects we now encounter in the present.

When I encountered the abjet petit a term, I hoped it described a parallel experience of frustration. There are times when a particular frustration takes on an outsized significance beyond what it is actually stopping us doing or impeding. A particular annoyance exists as a synecdoche for annoyance as such: this one thing we can’t control, this one thing which frustrates us, condenses the weight of all the things we can’t control, all the things which frustrate us. This one event becomes a spot where you feel the sheer traumatic weight of the world’s fundamental intransigence. What realists think of as the recalcitrance of reality (the causal criterion of existence) sometimes manifests itself as an affront to us which is deeply painful. If objet petit a is about desire, abjet petit a I hoped would be about castration: the trauma of recognising our limits.

Unfortunately this is not what Lacan meant. It seems to just be a late spin on the original concept which is slightly more inflected towards the Real. Is there an existing concept for what I’m describing here? I feel that there should be. Now back to being inexplicably pissed off with the cyclists riding on the pavement on my way to work.

Qui, sur Mastodon, a lu et étudié sérieusement la théorie psychanalytique de Jacques Lacan ?

Ma connaissance dans ce domaine reste assez rudimentaire, mais mon mentor français à l’université, il y a vingt-cinq ans, appliquait la pensée lacanienne aux textes, au cinéma et presque à tout. J’étais fasciné.

J’aimerais beaucoup approfondir ma propre compréhension de Lacan, s’il y a ici quelqu’un qui voudrait et pourrait m’y aider.

Merci d’avance.

#Lacan #Psychanalyse #ThéorieCritique