The object a that haunts

I’ve been doing some writing about object a for Complex Praxis, so I’ve been on the lookout for some bits of text that describe object a in different ways.

I found this at The Lacanian Review Online.

Lacan discovered this parasite that mutated over the course of his teachings. The object a is an absence, a hole, a thing always lost, but also a presence that activates the circuits of the drive. It invites fictions of being, semblants and the forms that embody it, like the gaze and the voice, which Lacan added to the Freudian object series. This curious parasite seems to inhabit both the speaking being and the Other, belonging to neither, but connecting the two topologically through the rims of the body. Thus the reason that the object a is so hard to eradicate. It is everywhere and nowhere, wildy contagious, an epidemiological nightmare.

This way of describing object a seems to fit well with what I’ve been posting here in The Commonplace Book: the object a as an absent/presence and present/absence, the object a as a that which haunts us.