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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

http://lacaniancompass.org/

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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


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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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.


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

[email protected]

For more information and to access the archive, visit

lacaniancompass.org

Translated by Samya Seth




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