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Transcript of LCE (07.07.2014)[1].pdf
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Volume 2, Issue 11 July 7, 2014
LC EXPRESS
Discussions of Her
Pierre Gilles Gueguen
Introduction
In this issue, Pierre Gilles Gueguen reviews the movie Her . The film, Gueguen
suggests, well depicts our use of objects a in the 21st century. The voice, as
deployed through the operating system of a smartphone, is central to the film’s
narrative. Through his analysis of the film, Gueguen shows how the
protagonist successfully reconnects with his desire.
1lacaniancompass.org
Gary Marshall, Co-Editor
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Volume 2, Issue 11 July 7, 2014
Discussions of Her
Since its release, the film Her has been a part of contemporary
cultural discourse. Why such success for this film? Film
enthusiasts will find all the reasons they want from the point of
view of aesthetics, poetics, and acting and they will be right. Butthe true fiction of the film is that a man falls in love with a piece of
computer software, i.e. with a woman who does not exist,
reduced to an object a : the voice. Hence, the New York Times is
not wrong to title one of its reviews: “Disembodied, but, Oh, What
a Voice” (Manohla Dargis, 17 December 2013).
Her , need we repeat it here, is not She . Her indicates the object
complement. Very male one will say, very Lacanian also: the
man initially seeks in the woman the object that he lacks, and he
fetishizes it. In this case: the voice. So for those psychoanalysts
who practice analysis by telephone, start to worry!
The plot thickens when the protagonist, a little tired of this good
“Turing tested” understanding through head-phones, demands
that his fetish become embodied. From that point everything goes
awry. The forsaken lover discovers that the voice is not the woman, and that
there is an I-know-not-what beyond the object that is essential so that “it works”
between a man and a woman. “I love you, but, because inexplicably I love in
you
something more than you – the objet petit a – I mutilate you.” In short,1
love holds only if it makes a bridge over the void of the non-rapport between
the sexes and thereby maintains desire. True love like the true object imposes
this dimension of the void that Lacan tried to make us hear in speaking of the
object a as vacuole, its “color of vacuum”, or again its “episodic substance” as
so many ways of grasping that the drive, finally, is not without object, but also
that it does not have an object in the sense of a unique drive object: oral, anal,
scopic, invocatory etc… From where we have the so very essential pages of
Seminar XI on the stain in the gaze and the radical critique of Jean-Paul Sartre
and also of Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
The delicious and “sexy” voice of Scarlett Johansson, Joaquin Phoenix’s partner,
seducing, geeky, slightly bohemian-bourgeois, attempts to make us believe the
opposite. In any case, he believes her before realizing that he believes in her
what is happy all in all. At that moment his fantasy starts to yield. He becomes the
2lacaniancompass.org
The LC EXPRESSdelivers the
Lacanian Compassin a new format. Its
aim is to deliver
relevant texts in adynamic timeframefor use in the clinicand in advance of
study days andconference
meetings. The LCEXPRESS publishesworks of theory andclinical practice and
emphasizes bothlongstanding
concepts of theLacanian tradition
as well as newcutting edgeformulations.
Seminar XI, p. 263, Epigraph of Chapter 20 “In you more than you”.1
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Volume 2, Issue 11 July 7, 2014
non-dupe of his own fantasy: to believe that a woman is an “object” in his hand.
What was coming through his fantasy to plug the nostalgia where he used to find
himself with his ex-wife, whom he was in the process of divorcing, finally finds
embodiment in a partner who, she also, shows herself lacking: his neighbor who
also has just been dumped by her companion. The two failures in love, both
similarly lacking, find themselves making the best of this displacement fromsolitary jouissance towards the partner symptom, for newer and less fictitious
adventures in love.
3lacaniancompass.org
The LC EXPRESS is produced and distributed by
The Lacanian Compass
Maria-Cristina Aguirre, Editor
Gary Marshall, Co-Editor
Pierre-Gilles Gueguen, Advisor
The Lacanian Compass is a group dedicated to the
development and promotion of the Lacanian
Orientation of Psychoanalysis in the United States,
psychoanalysis as first described
by Sigmund Freud
and further elaborated by Jacques Lacan and
Jacques-Alain Miller.
To subscribe to Lacanian Compass,
send an email to
For more information and to access the archive, visit
lacaniancompass.org
Translated by Samya Seth