As Jnana Deepa, the Papal Atheneum crosses the milestone of its century, I exude with joy for my alma mater and see this important event as a paschal crossing over to us all. In this critical effort, I attempt to construct this paschal crossing over in the light of traversal subjectification of Lacan and try to manifest as well as illuminate the same through the reinterpretation of Plato’s Cave allegory through the lens of Slavoj Zizek, Bruno Latour and Michell Serres . This study is under taken with great love, reverence and honour to Jnana Deepa . To start the ball rolling , this study strives to explore what is called the science of Jouissalogy so that we can enter into the desire of Lacanian split subject and take us the traversal subjectification of a subject. Finally, the study takes up the task of critical application respectful humility where it applies the reinterpreted Plato’s clave allegory to the life and mission of Jnana Deepa and demonstrate how it becomes an emancipative space for the students (changing desire of the other) to effect a paschal crossing that transforms them into subjectified Subject who in all freedom give themselves to make a difference to themselves and our country and its people.
Towards Jouissology
Jouissology is the science of enjoyment. Term was coined by Nestor A. Braunstein Argentine-born psychoanalyst. Jouissance is a French term that belongs to the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan and is regarded as untranslatable. It seems to have become a sort of transcendental signifier and is influencing multi-disciplines today. It can only be spoken in between the lines as with it we are trying to somewhat read the unconscious.
Braunstein like the evangelist John says, ‘in the beginning there was jouissance’. In fact, he is the first scholar to critically and compressively study jouissance in his book, Goce which first appeared in Spanish ( 1990) and later got translated in French (1994) and then expanded and revised in French again in 2005, and in Spanish (2006) and Portuguese (2007). He says between jouissance and logos (the Word) one cannot say what comes first. They both delimit and overlap each other.
We are born into a world of language which will live even after we are gone. Even before we are born a place is prepared for us in the linguistic universe of our parents. The parents seek to name, imagine what would be life like with the advent of the child in their world using language which of course is handed on to them from down the centuries. They constitute the other of the language in Lacanian sense.
We can call it the other as language. We are born into this universe of language of our parents and quickly learn as we grow that we have to give up lalangue —murmurs, giggles and cries and become speakers of the language to get want we want— our needs and desire. The words that we use are certainly not our own and sometime they may not carry our desire effectively. This means as children our has desire has to be cast into language.
Lacan teaches that prior to coming to the language the infant does not know what he/she wants. It is interpreted by the parents or care givers. Often , the discomfort of hot or cold weather may be interpreted as hunger by the parents. Thus, the meaning of the cry is imposed on the infant. It is thus, determined not by the baby but by the care-givers on the basis of the language that they speak. Language thus, becomes the other insidious intruder. We are alienated in language. The Other slip into us through the back door through the language.
We call the language that we learn as infant as our mother tongue. This itself expresses that it is an Other tongue. There is the Other in the mOther. Language always already others or alienates us. This is why Lacan says that the self is an Other . The Ego is the Other. It is Ideal Ego. For Lacan there is no substantive self. The self/ ego of a infant is born through the mirror image between 6 to 18 months. Language then takes it further by triggering and carrying the desire of the self/ego which becomes Ego’s ideal.
Thus, we can see how the unconscious is structured like a language. Unconscious that operates like a language is also the Other. Unconscious, is thus, loaded with other people’s desires. The desire of the Other flows into us by way of discourse. This is why Lacan says that the unconscious is the discourse of the Other. We have the Other within us.
Even what we call our body is other to us. It is overwritten in language. Freud has already shown us how the child’s libido is progressively channeled in specific erogenous zones—oral, anal , genital — through socialization ( demands made on the child by parents or parental figures to bring about toilet training using language). The child’s body is submitted to those demands ( Perhaps never entirely , leaving space for rebellion). The body is ,thus, subdued. The ‘letter’ kills the body. The body is written in the manner of speaking. Physiology ,thus, gives way to the signifier and our bodily pleasures all come to involve a relationship with the Other.
Even mental health issues like neurosis , psychosis and perversion as well as hysteria, obsession, phobia under neurosis result on the basis of different relations to the Other. This may be the reason why Lacan tells us that one becomes a subject though one’s relation to the Other. Lacan would says subject is a stance that one takes with respect to language and law ( symbolic).
The Other is complex. To Lacan the other is language, the other is demand, the other is desire , the other is jouissance. Desire as the other is visible in the gap that the child experience in his/her desire for her mother. The child would want to be the sole object of affection of its mother. But the mother’s desire always almost goes beyond the child. There is something about her desire that escapes the child. This creates a gap that remains unfathomable for the child. Hence, in the gap is the reminder of what remains of the mother-child unity. By clinging to the rem(a)inder that the child holds on to the last trace of unity with the mother.
Lacan places what he calls Object a in this gap. It is shows that the child’s desire that is based on the other’s desire begins to function as if it is really the desire of the child. Jouissance, thus, comes to substitute the lost child-mother unity. Now that the desire, being that of the other , it is never really fully satisfied. Lacan says needs can be fullfiled but desire cannot be satisfied. This means jouissance also becomes Other to the ego. Ego’s ideal never can be achieved or reached in its fulleness. We need to transverse the fantasy of desire (ego’s ideal) and reconfigure the mother-child unity that haunt us realistically again. This might enable us to disentangle the chains of the unconscious .
Subjectification of the Subjected Subject
Object Petite a in Lacan becomes the subject’s desire. It enables the subject to recover a rem(a)inder thereof by which to sustain himself/ herself as a being of desire, desiring being feeling complete. Thus, the subject remains as the subject of fantasy. Hence, crossing over or traversing the fantasy brings about a reformulation of the desire. To bring about this crossing over Lacan says that the analyst has to play the role of object petite a and keep away from the role that often the analysand cast him/her as all knowing and all seeing Other.
To be able to take the place of Object Petite a, the analyst has to give the analysand as little concrete information about his/her aspiration, character and tastes as possible for they all furnish fertile ground in which identification can take place. Maintaining his/her desire for something else Lacanian analyst aims not to model analysand desire on his/her own but rather at shaking up the configuration of the fantasy of the analysand, changing the subject relation to the cause of desire: object petite a.
The reconfiguration requires a construction of new fundamental fantasy which will let the analysand build a most fundamental relation with the Other’s desire. Traversing involves that subject takes a new position/stance with respect to the Other as language and the Other as desire. This means a move is made to inhabit that brought him/her into existence as a split/ alienated subject , to become that which caused him/her. This enables the subject to say where the Other’s discourse ridden with Other’s desire to say I and not it happened to me , they did it to me, fate had it in store for me . Thus, the analysand is enabled to say , I was , I did , I cried out , I saw.
This makes the subject his or her own cause and thus come to be a subject and not the cause. This leads the subject to take responsibility for the Other’s desire that brought him/her into being and make it one’s own. The encounter with the Other’s desire was a traumatic experience of pleasure/ pain ( Jouissance). Traversing leads the subject to take responsibility for the jouissance. Traversing fantasy, therefore, is a process by which the subject subjectifies trauma, takes responsibility for the traumatic even upon himself / herself and assumes responsibility for that jouissance.
To Lacan the subject is always on the verge of arrival or will have arrived by some later moment in time. There is literally no way of determining whether the subject has arrived or not. Subject, thus, arrives only retroactively. The arrival is a second event that anticipate the first event. Thought this way, subjectification occurs at a chronometrically in calculable time. The first event is alienation. It opens up the possibility for the second event, the second separation that marks the end of the process.
Traversing of the fantasy, thus, may be formulated in terms of ‘ signifierization’— a turning into signifiers— of the Other’s desire. Thus, subject /analysand finds a new position in relation to the desire of the Other , object a the Other’s desire is not simply named, as it was through the action of paternal metaphor (the name of the father). When the cause is subjectified , the Other’s desire is simultaneously fully brought into the movement of signifiers of the Other’s desire. This enables the subject to access the signifier’s of the Other’s desire which results in the separation from language and subject becomes the cause and frees himself/ herself from the weight of the Other. The discovery that there is hole in the discourse of the other (realization that the other’s signifiers remain incomplete) enables the subject to subjectify the other and thus, become the author of one’s destiny.
Subjectification takes the subject from being subjected to being a subject. The analysand is moves, thus , from an objectified position to a subjective one. This means the analysand arrives from a position that laments , it happened to me or they did it to me to a position that takes responsibility that says I saw , I heard , I acted. This enables the analysand to submit to the demands of the other ( the symbolic order , language , the desire of the Other) .
Subjectification of the subject can be understood through the prism of the cave of Plato as taught by Salvoj Zizek. Lacanian Plato’s cave would entail the process where why the analysand is let out to confront the hole in the signifying chain of the Other return to the cave to become subject and not subjected to the chains of desire of the other. It is from within the cave of the desire of the Other that subject emerges.
In Lacanian terms, the cave represents the symbolic and imaginary orders: a structured illusion of signifiers (shadows) that constitute everyday reality and ideology. The prisoners are subjects trapped in méconnaissance, perceiving fragmented appearances as whole, much like the ego formed in the mirror stage. The fire behind them symbolizes the unconscious or the big Other, casting these deceptive forms, while the wall acts as the screen of language, filtering and distorting perception. Escaping the cave analogs to confronting the Real—the traumatic, un-symbolizable kernel beyond language and fantasy. This ascent is akin to the psychoanalytic process, particularly the traversal of the fantasy, where the subject penetrates the fundamental fantasy that organizes desire, recognizes the lack in the big Other (the Other does not possess wholeness), and separates from object a. The sun, in this reading, is not Plato’s transcendent Good but the blinding, burning Thing (das Ding)—the Real as internal excess, a “Thing from inner space” that overwhelms and “burns” the subject with its traumatic intensity.
The return to the cave is the crucial moment for understanding the “birth of a subjectified subject.” In Plato, the enlightened prisoner descends not to retreat but to liberate others, risking rejection. Lacanically, this return marks the completion of the traversal: the subject, having faced the Real’s deadlock (the impossibility of full satisfaction), re-enters the symbolic order transformed. No longer a prisoner of illusion, the subject assumes the gap or lack as its own, achieving a new subjectification beyond alienation. This “subjectified subject” emerges desubjectivized yet reaffirmed—stripped of fantasy’s support but capable of sustaining itself through the sinthome (a unique, inventive knotting of imaginary, symbolic, and Real that holds the psyche together).
Critically, this returned subject takes the place of object a. In analysis, the analyst occupies the position of object a, embodying the enigmatic cause of the analysand’s desire, facilitating transference. Post-traversal, the analysand internalizes this position: by identifying with the lack (rather than filling it), the subject becomes the object-cause for others or itself— a “subjectivized object” that circulates drive around the void without illusory closure. Žižek describes this as the subject’s inscription into reality via its gaze, turning the horrifying Thing into a manageable “sober colouring.” The return thus completes the “crossing over”: mere escape (ascent) risks madness or isolation (e.g., Hölderlin’s poetic breakdown from overexposure to the Real), while re-immersion integrates the Real’s burn into social praxis, subverting the cave’s illusions from within. It shifts from desire (vigilant pursuit of wholeness) to drive (repetitive circulation around loss/ sacrifice ), enabling ethical acts like fidelity to a revolutionary Event or artistic sublimation of the Real’s excess.
This analogy underscores Lacan’s inversion of Plato: the Real is not an external harmony but an immanent antagonism, and true subjectification arises not from transcendent knowledge but from embracing the cave’s inconsistencies as constitutive. The returned subject, embodying object a, disrupts the prisoners’ fantasy, risking violence but offering liberation—mirroring the analyst’s role in producing new subjects capable of their own traversals.
Jnana Deepa as Theatre of Lacan’s Subjectification
In Jacques Lacan’s framework, subjectification unfolds as a dialectical process where the individual enters the symbolic order, becoming a barred/split subject alienated by the Desire of the Other—a demand mediated through language, institutions, and social structures that impose lack and propel desire . We have seen that this desire is intertwined with jouissance, an excessive, painful enjoyment beyond pleasure, often experienced as a burdensome ecstasy tied to the big Other’s inscrutable will.
Applying this to Jnana-Deepa (JD), a Pontifical Athenaeum of Philosophy and Theology in Pune, dedicated to forming Christian leaders through rigorous academic and spiritual training, we can reimagine it as a contemporary Plato’s cave. Here, students—arriving as subjected subjects from diverse regions of India—are further subjected to the cave’s fantasies, yet hold the potential for a transformative traversal, emerging as subjectified subjects freed from the weight of the Other’s desire.
Plato’s cave allegory as we have already seen depicts prisoners mistaking shadows for reality, bound by chains and deceived by manipulated forms. In Žižek’s Lacanian lens, this cave embodies the symbolic order: a network of signifiers where subjects are interpolated into ideology, perceiving fragmented illusions as coherent wholes. The big Other—embodied in authority figures and institutional norms—orchestrates this deception, sustaining desire through the objet petit a, the elusive cause that promises but withholds completion.
With fear and humility and great reverence to Jnana Deepa my alma mater, I do a Lacanian reading here which is merely an instrumental reading for the purpose of this paper draw an insight that enables us the great mission that the institution acomphishes. At Jnana Deepa, Plato’s cave manifests in the academic program: a structured regimen of philosophy, theology, and spiritual formation under papal gaze, designed to mould seminarians into Christian leaders. The big Other appears multifaceted—as overseeing authorities (e.g., the Vatican Congregation for Catholic Education), teachers as transferential figures embodying knowledge’s enigma, and fellow students reinforcing peer norms through communal living and collective expectations.
Students, arriving from varied Indian contexts (rural villages, urban dioceses, diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds), enter as already barred subjects, split by prior symbolic inscriptions (family, caste, regional identities). Yet, JD’s symbolic order further subjects them: rigorous requirements like canonical philosophy courses, spiritual exercises, and communal disciplines demand submission, channelling desire toward ecclesiastical ideals.
Jouissance emerges in this subjection—the ecstatic-painful intensity of ascetic practices, intellectual rigor, and vocational calling, where the subject’s lack is filled by the Other’s gaze (e.g., “What does the Church want from me?”). This is not mere education but an ideological apparatus, according to Žižek, where the cave’s shadows (doctrinal certainties, hierarchical obedience) mask the Real’s traumatic void—the impossibility of fully embodying divine will or resolving India’s socio-political -religious complexities.
The challenge for the “subjected subject” is subjectification: traversing the fantasy that sustains this subjection. In Lacanian terms, this involves confronting the lack in the big Other (JD’s structures are not omnipotent but contingent, riddled with contradictions). Moving from the cave analogs to this traversal—penetrating the fantasy , separating from petite object a (e.g., the idealized priestly image , Lacan’s ideal ego), and facing the Real’s burn (personal doubts, cultural dislocations, or the raw demands of pastoral service in a pluralistic India).
Žižek inverts Plato: the ascent is not to transcendent truth but to the Real as immanent antagonism, a “Thing” that disrupts illusion. Returning to the cave completes the traversal, birthing a “subjectified subject” who occupies object a’s place—embodying the lack to subvert from within. For JD students, this traversal might occur through critical Philosophy and theology, personal crises, or encounters with India’s realities (poverty, secularism, interfaith dialogues). The return transforms them: freed from the Other’s desire (no longer chained to rote obedience), they re-engage the symbolic as desubjectivized yet empowered, motivating communal change. This echoes Christian vocation—returning to “make a difference” through pastoral service, leading Christianity in India with fidelity to an Event (Christ’s resurrection) rather than ideological shadows.
To enrich this understanding of subjectified subject, Bruno Latour and Michel Serres offer complementary reinterpretations, framing the traversal not as linear escape-return but as a networked, immersive “crossing over”—a Paschal mystery where death to old forms yields resurrected agency. In Christian theology, the Paschal crossing (from Good Friday’s descent to Easter’s ascent) involves kenosis (self-emptying) and rising, mirroring Lacan’s separation and subjectification.
Latour, in works like Politics of Nature, critiques Plato’s cave for enforcing a modernist dualism: an “outside” of pure forms versus an “inside” of deceptive shadows. He argues that we have never truly escaped; instead, reality is a flat ontology of actor-networks—hybrids of humans, nonhumans, and quasi-objects circulating without hierarchical gaps. The cave is not to be fled but reassembled: true knowledge emerges by tracing associations “inside,” rejecting the Platonic outside as illusory.
For JD, this traversal means crossing over by mapping the cave’s networks—the interplay of texts, rituals, technologies (e.g., digital philosophy and theology resources), and socio-political actors (Indian government’s policies on religion). The student “dies” to the big Other’s transcendent authority (symbolic chains), resurrecting as a networked subject: a leader who returns to motivate by forging alliances, e.g., interweaving Christian doctrine with Indian ecological or social justice networks. This Paschal act births a subject of destiny—one who lives to transform India, not through escapist idealism but immanent praxis, making pastoral service a dynamic assembage of differences.
Serres, in texts like The Five Senses and his poetic invitations to ‘enter the cave,’ flips Plato entirely: rather than ascending to the sun, we delve deeper into the cave’s sensory, parasitic multiplicities. The fire is not distant but intimate, revealing a noisy, material world of fluxes, interruptions, and hospitable parasites (e.g., the “third” that disrupts binaries). Verne’s subterranean adventures undo Plato by celebrating the cave’s depths as sites of invention.
Serres’s traversal is an anabasis through immersion: crossing over by embracing the cave’s chaos, transforming shadows into vibrant, porous boundaries. In JD’s context, this Paschal crossing involves “dying” to abstract doctrines (the Other’s desire) via sensory-spiritual engagements—embodied liturgies, cultural encounters, or the jouissance of India’s diverse faiths.
Resurrection emerges as a subject attuned to fluxes: returning to the cave, the leader finds motivation in hospitable parasitism, e.g., “infecting” rigid structures with inclusive dialogues, serving India’s people by bridging Christianity with local multiplicities (Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Jains, Sikhs, Animists and Secular). This yields a destiny-oriented subject—alive to ethical as well as Christian calling, making differences through pastoral acts that honour the Way of Christ.
Conclusion
Our study reveal how the Jnana Deepa’s cave becomes a site for Lacanian subjectification via Žižekian subversion, Latourian networking, and Serrian immersion. The traversal— a Paschal crossing over—frees the subject from jouissance-laden subjection, birthing one who returns not as prisoner but as transformative agent/ missionary disciple. For Indian Christian leaders, this means motivation rooted in destiny: living to address India’s challenges (inequality, poverty, casteism, communalism, injustice, religious pluralism etc.,) through pastoral service, embodying object a as a cause for communal desire. Such subjects disrupt the cave’s illusions, fostering a Christianity that illuminates rather than chains, true to the Event of resurrection and true to knowledge that enlightens becoming authentic embodiments of Jnana Deepa.
