Another way to make the same point would be to emphasize how, in today’s art, the gap that separates the sacred space of sublime beauty from the excremental space of trash (leftover) is gradually narrowing, up to the paradoxical identity of opposites: are not modern art objects more and more excremental objects, trash (often in a quite literal sense: faeces, rotting corpses … ) displayed in – made to occupy, to fill in – the sacred place of the Thing? And is not this identity in a way the hidden ‘truth’ of the entire movement? Is not every element that claims the right to occupy the sacred place of the Thing by definition an excremental object, a piece of trash that can never be ‘up to its task’? This identity of opposite determinations (the elusive sublime object and/or excremental trash) – with the ever-present threat that the one will shift into the other, that the sublime Grail will reveal itself to be nothing but a piece of shit – is inscribed in the very kernel of the Lacanian objet petit a. In its most radical dimension, this impasse is the impasse that affects the process of sublimation – not in the common sense that art production today is no longer able to generate properly ‘sublime’ objects, but in a much more radical sense: the very fundamental matrix of sublimation, that of the central Void, the empty (‘sacred’) place of the Thing exempted from the circuit of everyday economy, which is then filled in by a positive object that is thereby ‘elevated to the dignity of the Thing’ (Lacan’s definition of sublimation), seems to be increasingly under threat; what is threatened is the very gap between the empty Place and the (positive) element filling it in. If, then, the problem of traditional (premodern) art was how to fill in the sublime Void of the Thing (the pure Place) with an adequately beautiful object – how to succeed in elevating an ordinary object to the dignity of a Thing – the problem of modern art is, in a way, the opposite (and much more desperate) one: one can no longer count on the Void of the (Sacred) Place being there, offering itself to be occupied by human artefacts, so the task is to sustain the Place as such, to make sure that this Place itself will ‘ take place’ – in other words, the problem is no longer that of horror vacui, of filling in the Void, but, rather, that of creating the Void in the first place. Thus the co-dependence between an empty, unoccupied place and a rapidly moving, elusive object, an occupant without a place, is crucial. The point is not that there is simply the surplus of an element over the places available in the structure, or the surplus of a place that has no element to fill it out – an empty place in the structure would still sustain the fantasy of an element that will emerge and fill out this place; an excessive element lacking its place would still sustain the fantasy of an as yet unknown place waiting for it. The point is, rather, that the empty place in the structure is in itself correlative to the errant element lacking its place: they are not two different entities, but the obverse and reverse of one and the same entity – that is, one and the same entity inscribed into the two surfaces of a Moebius strip. In other words, the paradox is that only an element which is thoroughly ‘out of place’ (an excremental object, a piece of ‘trash’ or leftover) can sustain the void of an empty place, that is, the Mallarméan situation in which rien n’aura eu lieu que le lieu (‘ nothing but the place will have taken place’) – the moment this excessive element ‘finds its proper place’, there is no longer any pure Place distinguished from the elements which fill it out. For Lacan, creative sublimation and the death drive are strictly correlative: the death drive empties the (sacred) Place, creates the Clearing, the Void, the Frame, which is then filled in by the object ‘elevated to the dignity of the Thing’. Here we encounter the third kind of suicide: the ‘suicide’ that defines the death drive, symbolic suicide – not in the sense of ‘not dying really, just symbolically’, but in the more precise sense of the erasure of the symbolic network that defines the subject’s identity, of cutting off all the links that anchor the subject in its symbolic substance. Here, the subject finds itself totally deprived of its symbolic identity, thrown into the ‘night of the world’ in which its only correlative is the minimum of an excremental leftover, a piece of trash, a mote of dust in the eye, an almost-nothing that sustains the pure Place–Frame–Void, so that here, finally, ‘nothing but the place takes place’. So the logic of displaying an excremental object in the sublime Place is similar to the way the Hegelian infinite judgement ‘The spirit is a bone’ functions: our first reaction to Hegel’s ‘The spirit is a bone’ is ‘But this is senseless – spirit, its absolute, self-relating negativity, is the very opposite of the inertia of a skull, this dead object!’ – however, this very awareness of the thorough incongruity between ‘spirit’ and ‘bone’ is the ‘Spirit’, its radical negativity … Along the same lines, the first reaction to seeing faeces in the sublime Place is to ask indignantly: ‘Is this art?’ – but it is precisely this negative reaction, this experience of the radical incongruity between the object and the Place it occupies, that makes us aware of the specificity of this Place. In other words, the point of the claim that even if I were to possess all knowledge, without love I would be nothing, is not simply that with love, I am ‘something’ – in love, I am also nothing but, as it were, a Nothing humbly aware of itself, a Nothing paradoxically made rich through the very awareness of its lack. Only a lacking, vulnerable being is capable of love: the ultimate mystery of love is therefore that incompleteness is in a way higher than completion. On the one hand, only an imperfect, lacking being loves: we love because we do not know all. On the other hand, even if we were to know everything, love would inexplicably still be higher than completed knowledge. Perhaps the true achievement of Christianity is to elevate a loving (imperfect) Being to the place of God – that is, of ultimate perfection. --

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