Lack Logic

The Liberation of Nothing

May 07, 2023

In the opening pages of Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud recalls a conversation with a colleague who proposes that humanity’s inclination towards religion, spirituality, and the search for something beyond ourselves, comes from a particular orientation towards an "oceanic feeling," referring to "a sensation of 'eternity'," a feeling of "being one with the external world [or reality] as a whole." Something like a perfect, all encompassing, and cohesive sense of pure being itself.

Now, it goes without saying that for the vast majority of us we aren’t experiencing this oceanic oneness as our default state day to day. We encounter it more as a nostalgic longing. We’re subtly (or not so subtly) aware of this homeostasis as something we’ve lost, or as something that is lacking.

Maybe we experience this as a lack in ourselves, or maybe as a lack in our reality itself. The point is, that a central component of the human experience is one of inexplicable lack.

What if, however, oneness, eternity, and this original equilibrium do not and have never existed?

Lack feels like a problem, like a loss. We unconsciously “know” that we’ve somehow forgotten the supposed harmonious and foundational oneness we once knew and consequentially we’re now lacking. It is this very lack that generates our unconscious desire. Put another way, if we weren’t a lacking subject, we would not be a desiring subject.

Psychoanalysis draws a distinction between conscious wants and needs and unconscious desire. We instinctually express our wants and needs starting from the time we’re an infant. We need food, we need safety, etc. and these needs are generally met by an other’s intervention.

Upon all of our conscious wants and needs being satisfied, the Other starts to take on a position of importance in itself. This surplus, beyond conscious want and need, is the realm of desire. To quote Lacan, "Desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction, nor the demand for love from the other, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second."

Lacan tells us that “all desire is the desire of the Other,” and this desire can never be satisfied.

This is purposefully vague, meaning both that we desire what the other desires, and/or that we desire the other themself. This speaks to the impossibility of desire being quenched, because since desire is itself unconscious, we can never truly know what the other desires (they don’t even know it themselves) just as we cannot fully access the other as our object of desire.

The name given to the force behind our desire is objet a, or the lost object. This is inherently tied to our fundamental feeling of lack. This is not a literal object that we desire, rather, it is the object cause of our desire. Our conscious desires vary - a new car, a new job, the perfect romantic partner, chocolate cake. The objet a, however is nothing. This nothing, or no-thing, is lack itself. It is the foundational feeling of our loss of equilibrium and it is constantly sustaining our desire as we move through life.

I apologize in advanced for a trip down Philosophy 101 avenue, but trust me, it’s relevant. To paint with very broad strokes, there are three main categories through which philosophy has attempted to understand reality.

Dualism - the idea that opposite, polar, and opposing forces are the basis of reality. Light and dark, good and evil, love and hate, spiritual and material, etc. This we see manifest in many fundamentalist religious environments, as well as in pop-morality and political spheres.

Monism - this theory denies duality, and sometimes distinction all together, in favor of a reality that is one unified, ultimate, organic whole with no divided or independent parts.

Pluralism - ultimately a theory of multiplicity (as opposed to “oneness” or “two-ness”), pluralism says that reality is made up of many different “substances.” Often this is related to Nominalism, which states that any universals or ideas exist only as concepts or names, and the only thing that actually exists are particular substances or objects.

Let’s reject all of those formulations.

Psychoanalysis, with a sprinkling of Hegel’s philosophy, gives us a Dialectical understanding of reality.

For psychoanalysis, reality is a one that is not-at-one with itself.

This contradiction of the not-one-oneness is integral to our understanding of the lack generated in and intuited by us as subjects of desire. Lack is not a problem of subjectivity, or a deficiency to be fixed or overcome, it is constitutive of reality itself. Not only that, but this fundamental contradiction is what drives reality into dynamic motion. It manifests in nature as evolution. It manifests politically as democracy. It manifests socially as language. Finally, it manifests subjectively as the unconscious.

In a dialectical dance: 1. We as subjects encounter this lack as a lack in ourselves and in the Other. 2. This traumatic encounter retroactively generates the felt “loss” of a non-lacking reality we’ve strayed from. 3. This in turn generates our desire for this lost no-thing that ultimately cannot be satisfied, given its foundation in reality itself. 4. We become a subject of desire.

Lack doesn’t feel good. It feels like a loss precisely because we falsely believe that the default proper state is oceanic oneness. Paradoxically, embracing lack, incompleteness, and contradiction as a fundamental reality rather than as something to be overcome is ultimately a liberating shift. We assume the opposite - that true liberation and peace will come when we finally reach eternity, or when we finally can reclaim the truth of homeostasis. In reality, the pursuit of this lost oneness is a tyrannical and never ending cycle of constant anxiety and disappointment.

Embracing our lack, and our existence as a subject of desire, is a reconciliation that doesn’t remove obstacle or contradiction. Rather, it reorients ourselves around the knowledge that what we desire is desire itself, and this can bring a satisfaction that is no longer predicated on the false promises of new-age oneness, religious fundamentalism, or capitalist consumption.