Notes on the semblance

The notes on this come from an post on Lacan.com by Russell Grigg.¹ I took some rather chaotic notes on the text, and wanted to pst those notes here (in the commonplace book) just in case they could be useful to anyone else.

The Concept of Semblant in Lacan’s Teaching

This post is something I found really useful to helping me get a better grasp on the concepts of semblant, object a, φ, and (even though it is not mentioned) Das Ding

object a as semblant / semblant as object a

This post by Grigg is great as an introduction to the concept of the semblance. (It does, however, require that the reader be at least somewhat well versed in Lacanian terminology.) Grigg starts out by stating

The importance of the concept is indicated by Lacan’s description of objet a as a semblant that fills the void left by the loss of the primary object. If we can explore the nature of this semblant, we shall be able to come to a better understanding of some aspects of objet a.

Ok, the point here being: If we understand the semblant then we will have a better understanding of object a. This is important because object a is a vital concept in Lacanian theory. To put it in as clear a way as I can:

1. To understand Lacanian theory you need to understand object a.
2. To understand object a you need to understand what semblance (the semblant) is.

Greigg goes on to offer a more detailed description of a sembalnt.

semblants are false, but we still enjoy them a lot

For Lacan a semblant is an object of enjoyment that is both seductive and deceptive. The subject both believes and doesn’t believe in semblants but in any case opts for them over the real thing because paradoxically they are a source of satisfaction, better than the real thing that one avoids any encounter with at all cost. Or more accurately, because the semblant fills a lack, we should say that the semblant comes to the place where something should be but isn’t

This is very interesting! Semblants are things that the subject knows to be false, but even though the subject knows they are false the subject behaves as if they are true, because acting-as-if the semblant was real allows the subject to not see/acknowledge/experience the real.

The semblant’s strange ersatz stand-in quality such that we are capable of finding greater satisfaction in it than in the real thing.

A few things…

1. I think this is like thinking the understudy is better than the actor who is normally playing a part.
2. The Japanese fake family members.

semblants in English & French

This is brilliant! If the term _sembalnt_is so interesting and useful why has it not been more widely used in psychoanalytic theory? Grigg offers the following as an answer.

The not so common English word “semblant” means being like or resembling; seeming rather than being real; being (merely) apparent. In French the same word with the same spelling is both in common usage and richer in connotation. While it carries a similar connotation of appearance to its English counterpart, it also has the related but supplementary meaning of outer appearance, pretence, even imitation. Moreover, and this is what is most interesting about the French usage for our purposes, is that “un semblant” can carry the connotation of something man made and of not being an appearance that one is taken in by but is happy to make do with. The semblant resembles what it imitates.

To me this is has something to do with how objct a is as semblant for

1. φ (the phallus, or the “lost phallus”) or for
2. Das Ding

Freud, the uncanny, the missing (lost) object

Grigg brings Freud into this.

This makes the semblant closer to Freud’s fetish object than to the uncanny, as it both stands in for the missing object and signifies and memorializes it at the same time.

We can understand why an objet a acts as more than a substitute faute de mieux, where the original object-the uncastrated maternal phallus-is unattainable and the horror of castration drives the subject to seek a diminished and impoverished substitute. This would completely fail to explain the most significant and striking feature of fetishism, which is that the fetishist is generally more than pleased with the ingenious solution he has found and has no desire to abandon it. His troubles, if troubles he has, revolve around the delicate issue of getting the other party to accept his clever solution, and not around his own conflicts over his choice of object; and this is fundamentally different from the neurotic’s agonizing over his object choice.

The psychotic’s problem is getting other people to believe that his/her fetish object has the power the psychotic wants/believes the fetish object has. Ergo, the psychotic goes around thinking, “No one is going to believe me… but I need to make them believe me!”

The neurotic on the other hand is “agonizing over” his/her choice of a fetish object or semblant.

semblant as “the Other does not exist, except for in your head.”

Grigg wraps up by talking about how the idea of the sembalnt can/does relate to the Lacnaian aphorism “The Other does not exist.”

Thus, for Lacan “semblant” carries the connotation of being seductive and therefore deceptive. We believe in semblants, or rather we opt for a semblant over the real because semblants are a means of satisfaction or a way of avoiding unpleasure; when a semblant collapses, anxiety emerges. … Semblants are a form of substitution of something that provides a source of satisfaction for another object that would cause anxiety. The general formula is

A — φ

What the formula above shows is that A = the Other as a semblant for φ the lost object (i.e. the “lost phallus”) or Das Ding.

What is also interesting about this is that is how’s that the Other does not exist except as a semblant, except as something that we know is not real, but we still act as if it is real because acting as if it is real is satisfying.

It is the religious person saying, “Even if god does not exist, I desperate need to believe that god does exist in order to be satisfied.”

It is not difficult to see why J.A. Miller claimed that the Lacanian epoch of psychoanalysis came into its own with the recognition that the Other does not exist and that only its semblance does. The significance of the moment arises from the fact that it produced the subsequent recognition that the Name-of-the-Father is a lure, whereas it had originally been designed to guarantee the Other’s existence-the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father in psychosis producing serious disturbances at the level of the Other. This leads Lacan to the thesis there is no Other, only its semblance. “One can only make do without the Name of the Father qua real² on condition that one makes use of it as semblant. … the Other, the Name-of-the-Father, the phallus, all come to be regarded as semblants