The absolute Other (in the form of the superego) is there in order to guarantee that there will always be a lack on the other side (the side of the subject); that this lack will never ‘run out’, and that ‘it’ (the act) will never succeed. If an accomplished (or ‘successful’) act is always related to the dimension of the ‘lack that comes to lack’, the superegoic version of the (moral) law focuses on preventing the act from even taking place. But the only real guarantee that can be fabricated to prevent the act from even taking place is the advent of the figure of an absolute Other. If there is ‘an Other of the Other’, the very possibility of the act is excluded by definition. And such an exclusion, in spite of the humiliation and torment that the subject must endure at the hands of this Other, is, in fact, pacifying. -Zupancic

Jujutsu With Zizek

The object of desire is simply the desired object: let’s say, in simple sexual terms, the person whom I desire. The object­ cause of desire, on the other hand, is that which makes me desire this person. And the two are not the same. Usually, we are not even aware of what was the object-cause of desire - it requires psychoanalysis to learn what, for example, made me desire that particular woman. This is something along the lines of what Freud already called the unary feature - and on which Lacan later devel­oped a whole theory: i.e. some feature which triggers my desire in the other. And I think this is how one should read Lacan’s statement that there is no sexual relationship. This means precisely that it is never simply me and my partner. There is at the centre of any relationship the object-cause of desire. - Zizek

Jujutsu With Zizek

The Other does not exist as the Guarantor of Truth, as the Other of the Other. … It is in this hole within the substantial Other that the subject must recognize its place: the subject is interior to the substantial Other insofar as it is identified with an obstruction in the Other, with the impossibility of achieving its identity by means of self-closure. The ‘abolition of the object’, in turn, represents the flip-side: it is not a fusion of the subject and the object into a subject-object, but rather a radical shift in the status of the object itself - the object here neither conceals nor fills the hole in the Other. Such is the post-fantasmatic relationship with the object: the object is ‘abolished’, ‘suppressed’, it loses its fascinating aura. That which at first dazzles us with its charm is exposed as a sticky and disgusting remainder. - Zizek

Jujutsu With Zizek

In the case of the saint, the subject, in an unheard-of way, “causes itself”, becomes its own cause. Its cause is no longer decentred, i. e. , the enigma of the Other’s desire no longer has any hold over it. … The status of the subject as such is hysterical: the subject ‘is’ only insofar as it confronts the enigma of “What do you want? ” … By means of the fantasy-formation, the subject provides an answer to the question, ‘What am I for my parents, for their desire? ’ and thus endeavours to arrive at the ‘deeper meaning’ of his or her existence, to discern the Fate involved in it. The reassuring lesson of fantasy is that “I was brought about with a special purpose”. At the end of psychoanalytic treatment, instead of being bothered of what I am for the others, I fully assume the uttermost contingency of my being. The subject becomes ‘cause of itself’ in the sense of no longer looking for a guarantee of his or her existence in another’s desire. http://zizek.livejournal.com/2266.html

Jujutsu With Zizek

In “pure” sex, the partner is reduced to a fantasy object, that is to say, pure sex is masturbation with a real partner who functions as a prop for our indulging in fantasies, while it is only through love that we can reach the Real (of the) Other. (This also accounts for the status of the Lady in courtly love: precisely because of its endless postponing of the consummation of the sexual act, courtly love remains on the level of sexual desire, not love – the proof of this is the fact that the Lady is reduced to a pure symbolic entity, indistinguishable from all others, not touched in the Real of her singularity.) Lacan’s extensive discussion of love in Encore is thus to be read in the Pauline sense, as opposed to the dialectic of the Law and its transgression: this second dialectic is clearly “masculine”/phallic, it involves the tension between the All (the universal Law) and its constitutive exception, while love is “feminine,” it involves the paradoxes of the non-All. -Zizek

Jujutsu With Zizek