Orbiting the Sublime: Lacan’s Objet a and the Aesthetic Function of Desire

Midnight Bloom, 2025. Johannes Scott. Ceramic earthenware.

Johannes Scott, 2025

By the late 1960s, as modern aesthetic theory approached its twilight, Jacques Lacan was reconfiguring both Freudian psychoanalysis and Saussurean linguistics into a radical new framework for understanding subjectivity, desire, and representation. Though his seminars circulated in French intellectual circles for decades, Lacan’s full impact on Anglophone theory only crystallized in the early 21st century—just as postmodern aesthetics began to lose momentum. His work now undergirds interdisciplinary inquiry across sociology, ethics, political theory, and the arts, offering a singular lens through which to read the psychic and symbolic coordinates of cultural production.

One of Lacan’s most resonant contributions to aesthetic theory is his reworking of Freud’s uncanny—not as the return of the repressed, but as a structural effect of subjectivity itself. Slovene philosopher Mladen Dolar, co-founder of the Ljubljana Lacanian School, reframes this uncanny effect through Lacan’s neologism extimacy (extimité): a paradoxical fusion of intimacy and exteriority. Extimacy names the intrusion of the foreign within the familiar, the eruption of the Real within the symbolic order. Like a Möbius strip, it collapses binary oppositions—inside/outside, self/other—into a single, twisted topology.

To account for this paradox, Lacan introduces objet a—the object-cause of desire, also known as “the Thing.” Unlike conventional objects, objet a is not a thing one can possess or name. It is the remainder, the excess, the unassimilable kernel that resists symbolization. In his Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan elaborates how our experience of reality is not direct but mediated through language. We do not perceive brute reality; we register signifiers, mental images structured by symbolic relations. In this process of signification, something is always lost—some primal Thing that escapes capture and leaves behind only a trace, a void, a placeholder.

This loss is not incidental but constitutive. Meaning is built around absence. The signifier signifies not by referring to reality, but by its differential relation to other signifiers. The original object and its symbolic substitute are forever parted. This irretrievable gap—between the Real and its representation—is the source of psychic anxiety. What remains is a hollow core, a vacancy around which desire circulates. Lacan’s objet a is this absent center: the imaginary residue of the lost object, the structural kernel of the uncanny.

Sublimation and the Aesthetic Function

Where Freud saw sublimation as the redirection of libidinal energy into socially acceptable forms, Lacan radicalizes the concept. Sublimation, for Lacan, is not merely repression made productive—it is the aesthetic elevation of the lost object. Any object, regardless of its social value, can be unhooked from its symbolic coordinates and repositioned as the object-cause of desire. In this act, the object becomes extimate—both central and foreign, familiar and strange.

Sublimation thus involves a double movement: decontextualization and reconfiguration. The object, once stripped of its conventional meaning, is sutured into a new constellation of signifiers. It becomes the uncanny center around which fragmented meanings proliferate. This aesthetic displacement does not restore the lost object but dramatizes its absence, allowing for a new symbolic trajectory. As Lacan writes, “If it is a satisfaction, it is in this case one that doesn’t ask anything of anyone.” The sublimated object offers a form of satisfaction that bypasses recognition, utility, or exchange.

Reception plays a crucial role here. The viewer’s gaze, slowed by defamiliarization, enters a phantasmatic orbit around the aesthetic object. Sublimation coordinates a consequential aesthetic experience—one that reimagines fantasy, reconfigures symbolic order, and sustains desire without closure. It is precisely in this orbiting gaze—neither too close to pierce the illusion nor too distant to disengage—that the aesthetic object as objet a reclaims the philosophical terrain of the sublime. Lacan’s theory of sublimation does not merely elevate the lost object; it stages a drama of desire at a safe remove, where the viewer is invited to admire without consummation. This “Goldilocks distance,” calibrated by fantasy and sustained by symbolic elevation, echoes the classical sublime: an encounter with excess that overwhelms without engulfing.

But unlike the premodern sublime, which gestured toward transcendence or divine magnitude, Lacan’s aesthetic sublime is resolutely immanent—structured by lack, sustained by absence, and animated by the viewer’s own desiring gaze. In this sense, the aesthetic object becomes a site of critical admiration, philosophical reflection, and psychic negotiation. It is here, in the extimate space of art reception, that the sublime returns—not as grandeur, but as the uncanny kernel of desire itself.

Johannes Scott received the BA degree in English and Theory of Literature at UNISA in 2011; postgraduate studies in Theory of Drama (2013), Narratology (2014), Critical Theory (2015); and with specialisation in Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction and Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory of aesthetics.

Sources

Borch-Jacobson, Mikkel. 1991. Lacan: The Absolute Master. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

De Kesel, Marc. 2009. Eros and Ethics: Reading Jacques Lacan’s Seminar VII. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Lacan, Jacques. Seminar VII: The ethics of psychoanalysis 1959-1960 (J-A. Miller, Ed. And D. Porter, Trans.) (1992). New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company.

Mladen Dolar (1991). “I Shall Be with You on Your Wedding-Night”: Lacan and the Uncanny. Author(s): Mladen Dolar Source: October, Vol. 58, Rendering the Real (Autumn, 1991), pp. 5-23 Published by: The MIT Press.