Where passion meets affection: a study about the structural lack and the function of the objet a in love and anguish

Abstract

The present research aims to engender an articulation between love and anguish, deriving from Jacques Lancan's (1901-1981) conceptions of the structural lack and the object petit a. The subject, once founded in the realm of the Other, as a locus for the signifiers and the language itself, finds himself faced with the impossibility of finding something capable of giving him an assurance of naming for himself and generating an effect that is suitable with the thing which his desire seeks from a cause. This cause is the object cause of desire, l'objetpetit a responsible for the causation of desire and love. What stands behind in the desiring/loving movement in the function of cause drives both of the passions into something that is lacking in the realm of the Other, the same lack in which the subject of the desire finds himself subjugated to his own constitution. When something arises where lacking should take place, the object petit a takes on another status, bringing up the affection of anguish which signalizes that the object is no more inscribed into the mesh of the signifier, functioning as a cause of desire from the rear, but adrift. The notion of aphanisis seems to point out something that belongs to that turning of love into anguish which is intended to be articulated here. Precisely, when Lacan proposes it as the encounter of the subject with his lack, with his vanishing, with the fact that in the extreme point of his desire subsists the aphanitic of the own subject, what begets anguish. Therefore, based on the way how the luck inherent in the subject inscription on the signifier occurs, hence the aphanisis that elapses, and on the functions of the object a, it is intended here to articulate passion with affection, i.e. love with anguish. (AU)