Richard Phillips

..Josefina Ayerza

[…] You stream through the oral drive. Why, call it the oral drive? Because the case is vampirism. Thus your phantasies of devouring, of being gobbled up… Indeed, everyone knows that this verging on all the resonances of masochism, is the altrified term of the oral drive. But is there a definite answer? In Lacan's terms, since we refer to the infant and the breast, and since suckling is sucking, if the oral drive is getting sucked, it is the vampire. The singular object that is trying to unstick in our minds is the breast. So the food metaphor. —Eat me, mother. —Eat me, son. The parts thoroughly active, superimposed, we have a frame of drama to be revealed in the fantasm. A drama, a structure within the confines of the organism of the mother, it is the nature of the subject's claim: it addresses something that is separated from him, however it belongs to him, in that he needs it to complete himself. objet a lacks its mirror image, is it a vampiric object? Much as we know, vampires are not likely to generate their image in a mirror. Are vampires not versions of undead partial objects? Perhaps, the exact opposite is more appropriate as an image of objet a: when we look at a thing directly, in reality, we don't see it—this it only appears when we look at the thing's mirror image, as if there is, in the mirror image, something more than in reality, as if only the mirror image can bring out the elements for which we search in vain in the object's reality." To continue in Zizek terms: the mirror image desubstantializes a thing, depriving it of its density and depth, reducing it to a flat surface, and it is only through this reduction that the purely non-substantial objet a becomes perceptible[…]