What is the big other?

Slavoj Žižek, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

Slavoj Žižek answers

The big Other is the virtual symbolic order that structures reality for us — not a person, not a god, but the network of rules, presuppositions, and meanings within which we speak and act.1 When I open my mouth, I am never simply expressing my inner state; I am already caught in a web of grammatical rules I follow blindly, shared life-world assumptions that make communication possible, and unconscious prohibitions I obey without knowing them.2

The subject, in this sense, does not speak — he is spoken by the symbolic structure. The big Other pulls the strings.3 But here is the crucial point, the one that separates Lacan from any naïve structuralism: the big Other does not exist in any full, consistent sense. It is barré — crossed out, perforated by a fundamental impossibility.4 The symbolic order is structured around a traumatic kernel it cannot symbolize, and this is not a defect to be corrected but its very condition of possibility.

Without this lack in the Other, the subject would have no room to breathe — only total alienation in the signifier would remain open to him.5 This is why paranoia is the permanent temptation of social life. When you sense that the big Other is inconsistent — that society does not add up, that there are unforeseen effects nobody intended — the paranoiac move is to posit an Other of the Other, a hidden master who secretly guarantees the consistency that the visible order lacks.6

The Jewish conspiracy, the CIA plot, the reptilian elite: these are all attempts to fill the gap, to restore to the Other the wholeness it never had. Fantasy serves exactly the same function — not to fill the subject's lack, but to fill the lack in the Other, to (re)constitute its consistency.7 And there is a further dimension. The big Other must always be present as witness — even in the most intimate moments, we perform for it.8

The peasant joke makes this concrete: a man marooned on an island sleeps with Cindy Crawford, then needs to tell his best friend about it, even if that friend is Cindy Crawford in disguise. Sex, pleasure, experience — none of it fully registers without the Third who watches. This is not perversion; it is the structure of the symbolic as such.

The political consequence follows directly. Any politics that imagines it can bypass the big Other — that it can act in pure immediacy, without symbolic mediation — is deluded. But equally, any politics that treats the big Other as fully consistent, as a stable guarantor of social meaning, is ideological in the strict sense: it conceals the lack that is actually there.

Sources

  1. The 'big Other' is the name for the social substance, for all that on account of which the subject never fully dominates the effects of his acts, that is on account of which the final outcome of his activity is always something else with regard to what he aimed at or anticipated.
    Enjoy Your Symptom!, p. 165
  2. When we speak (or listen, for that matter), we never merely interact with others; our speech activity is grounded on our accepting and relying on a complex network of rules and other kinds of presuppositions.
    How to Read Lacan, pp. 21–22
  3. the big Other pulls the strings, the subject doesn't speak, he 'is spoken' by the symbolic structure.
    Enjoy Your Symptom!, p. 165
  4. the big Other, the symbolic order itself, is also barré, crossed out, by a fundamental impossibility, structured around an impossible/traumatic kernel, around a central lack.
    The Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 168
  5. Without this lack in the Other, the Other would be a closed structure and the only possibility open to the subject would be his radical alienation in the Other.
    The Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 168
  6. paranoia is at its most elementary a belief into an 'Other of the Other', into another Other who, hidden behind the Other of the explicit social texture, programs what appears to us as the unforeseen effects of social life and thus guarantees its consistency.
    Enjoy Your Symptom!, p. 165
  7. fantasy is an attempt to fill out this lack of the Other, not of the subject (i.e. to (re)constitute the consistency of the big Other).
    Enjoy Your Symptom!, p. 165
  8. This Third, which is always present as the witness, belies the possibility of an unspoiled innocent private pleasure. Sex is always minimally exhibitionist and relies on another's gaze.
    How to Read Lacan, pp. 21–22