The Hysterical Question - Che Vuoi?

The anonymous mechanism of the symbolic order, or another subject in his or her radical alterity, a subject from whom I am forever separated by the "wall of language"? The easy way out of this predicament would have been to read in this discrepancy the sign of a shift in Lacan's development, from the early Lacan focused on the intersubjective dialectic of recognition, to the later Lacan who puts forward the anonymous mechanism that regulates the interaction of subjects (in philosophical terms: from phenomenology to structuralism). While there is a limited truth in this solution, it obfuscates the central mystery of the big Other: the point at which the big Other, the anonymous symbolic order, gets subjectivized.

The exemplary case is divinity: is what we call "God" not the big Other personified, addressing us as a larger-than-life person, a subject beyond all subjects? In a similar way, we talk about History asking something of us, of our Cause calling us to make the necessary sacrifice. What we get here is an uncanny subject who is not simply another human being, but the Third, the subject who stands above the interaction of real human individuals - and the terrifying enigma is, of course, what does this impenetrable subject want from us (theology refers to this dimension as that of Deus absconditus). For Lacan, we do not have to evoke God to get a taste of this abyssal dimension; it is present in every human being:

man's desire is the Other's desire, in which the de /of/ provides what grammarians call a 'subjective determination' - namely, that it is qua /as/ Other that man desires. ... This is why the Other's question - that comes back to the subject from the place from which he expects an oracular reply - which takes some such form as 'Che vuoi?', 'What do you want?' is the question that best leads the subject to the path of his own desire.

-Slavoj Zizek, "From Che vuoi? to Fantasy: Lacan with Eyes Wide Shut."
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In order to understand the point here we must remember Lacan’s notion that ‘desire is ultimately the Other’s desire: the question-enigma of desire is ultimately not "What do I really want?", but "What does the Other really want from me? What, as an object, am I myself for the Other" - I myself (the subject), as the object-cause of the Other's desire, am the object whose overproximity triggers anxiety (Zizek 2000: 363-364). So the actors become 'suspects' of the big Other when they are 'reduced to the object exchanged or used by the Other (ibid), in this case, the Author.

Bearing this in mind, the actors qua 'suspects' are left with the question 'Che vuoi?' ('What does the Other want from me?'), which signals the role of the hysteric: to constantly question his/her position in relation to the big Other. What we can further claim, in this role, is that the Author appears to act as the Ego-Ideal. This is a term often confused with its obverse, the ideal ego. For Lacan, the ideal ego is simply the image I would like to present to the world of myself - how I wish to be seen. It is therefore considered part of the imaginary. The Ego-Ideal, on the other hand, is the 'agency whose gaze I try to impress with my ego image' (Zizek 2006:80). In this case it is the Author who the Actors perform for; it is his ideal-artistic vision - which is impossible to distinguish beforehand in so far as it is unknowable even to the Author himself until he has already witnessed it - that they wish to actualize. However, if my claim were to stop there it would miss the role of the superego: that which makes us suppress our 'sinful strivings': namely, that which turns actors into 'suspects'. Although the Author's desires may appear senseless he should not be confused with the G_d of the Old Testament (Yahweh), who is full of tautologies 'I am what I am' or irrational commandments; '[i]n short, this G_d is the G_d of pure Will, of the capricious abyss that lies beyond any global rational order of logos, a G_d who does not have to account for anything he does'(Žižek 2000: 318)

- Bryce Lease, "How Badly Do You Want to Kill Your Father?"