ジャック＝アラン・ミレールはジジェクの師であり、ジジェクは８０年代後半、教育分析（パス）をミレールに受けている。ジジェクのラカン解釈は、その多くをミレールに負っているのは周知の事実だ。
ところで、ジジェクは、この比較的新しい論文“Jacques Lacan's Four Discourses”で、ミレールのラカン「四つの言説」をめぐっての修正案（「現代」に合わした）に異議を呈している。
【ミレールの提議】
Jacques-Alain Miller has recently proposed that today the master's discourse is no longer the "obverse" of the analyst's discourse. Today, on the contrary, our "civilization" itself-its hegemonic symbolic matrix, as it were-fits the formula of the analyst's discourse. The agent of the social link is today a, surplus enjoyment, the superego injunction to enjoy that permeates our discourse; this injunction addresses $ (the divided subject) who is put to work in order to live up to this injunction. The truth of this social link is S2, scientific-expert knowledge in its different guises, and the goal is to generate S1, the self-mastery of the subject, that is, to enable the subject to cope with the stress of the call to enjoyment (through self-help manuals, etc.).
【ジジェクの疑義】
Provocative as this notion is, it raises a series of questions. If it is true, in what, then, resides the difference between the discursive functioning of civilization as such and the psychoanalytic social link? Miller resorts here to a suspicious solution: in our civilization, the four terms are kept apart, isolated; each operates on its own, while only in psychoanalysis are they brought together into a coherent link: "in civilization, each of the four terms remains disjoined... it is only in psychoanalysis, in pure psychoanalysis, that these elements are arranged into a discourse."
【ジジェクの疑義説明】
Miller's formula misses the true paradox or, rather, ambiguity of objet a: when he defines objet a as the object that overlaps with its loss, that emerges at the very moment of its loss (so that all its fantasmatic incarnations, from breasts to voice and gaze, are metonymic figurations of the void of nothing), he remains within the horizon of de- sire- the true object cause of desire is the void filled in by its fantasmatic incarnations. While, as Lacan emphasizes, objet a is also the object of the drive, the relationship is here thoroughly different. Although in both cases, the link between object and loss is crucial, in the case of objet a as the object cause of desire, we have an object which is originally lost, which coincides with its own loss, which emerges as lost, while, in the case of objet a as the object of the drive, the "object" is directly the loss itself. In the shift from desire to drive, we pass from the lost object to loss itself as an object. That is to say, the weird movement called "drive" is not driven by the "impossible" quest for the lost object, bur by a push to directly enact the "loss" - the gap, cut, distance - itself. There is thus a double distinction to be drawn here: not only between objet a in its fantasmaric and posrfantasmatic status, but also, within this postfantas-matic domain itself, between the lost object cause of desire and the object loss of the drive. Far from concerning an abstract scholastic debate, this distinction has crucial ideologico-political consequences: it enables us to articulate the libidinal dynamics of capitalism.
ジジェクの説明によれば、ミレールでさえ、欲望と欲動の混乱が見られる、ということのようだ。それは対象aの捉え方に起因する。
Following Miller himself, a distinction has to be introduced here between lack and hole. Lack is spatial, designating a void within a space, while the hole is more radical-it designates the point at which this spatial order itself breaks down (as in the "black hole" in physics). Therein resides the difference between desire and drive: desire is grounded in its constitutive lack, while drive circulates around a hole, a gap in the order of being. In other words, the circular movement of drive obeys the weird logic of the curved space in which the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line, but a curve: the drive "knows" that the shortest way to attain its aim is to circulate around its goal-object. At the immediate level of addressing individuals, capitalism of course interpellates them as consumers, as subjects of desires, soliciting in them ever new perverse and excessive desires (for which it offers products to satisfy them); furthermore, it obviously also manipulates the "desire to desire," celebrating the very desire to desire ever new objects and modes of pleasure.
However, even if if already manipulates desire in a way that takes into account the fact that the most elementary desire is the desire to reproduce itself as desire (and not to find satisfaction), at this level, we do not yet reach the drive. The drive inheres to capitalism at a more fundamental, systemic level: drive propels the entire capitalist machinery; it is the impersonal compulsion to engage in the endless circular movement of expanded self-reproduction. The capitalist drive thus belongs to no definite individual - it is rather that those individuals who act as direct "agents" of capital (capitalists themselves, top managers) have to practice it. We enter the mode of the drive when (as Marx put it) the circulation of money as capital becomes "an end in itself, for the expansion of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement. The circulation of capital has therefore no limits." One should bear in mind here Lacan's well-known distinction between the aim and the goal of drive: while the goal is the object around which drive circulates, its (true) aim is the endless continuation of this circulation as such.
“desire to desire”でさえもなく“drive”であり、つまりはgoalではなくaimとしての欲動。もちろん上記の記述でもわかるように、ミレールは「欲望と欲動」の区別をしているのだが（参照：資料：欲望と欲動(ミレールのセミネールより）、現代的な言説を捉え直す上で見解の相違があるようだ。
終点は最終目的地だが、目標はわれわれがやろうとしていること、すなわち道wayそのものである。ラカンが言わんとしたのは、欲動の真の目的はその終点（充分な満足）ではなく、その目標である。欲動の究極的目標は、たんに欲動それ自身が欲動として再生産されること、つまりその循環的な道に戻り、いつまでも終点に近づいたり遠ざかったりしつづけることである。享楽の真の源泉はこの閉回路の反復運動である。
※Marx put it) the circulation of money as capital becomes "an end in itself, for the expansion of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement. The circulation of capital has therefore no limits."―――ジジェクがマルクスを引用するこのあたりの記述は、岩井克人の「資本の欲動」、あるいは「不均衡動学」などの概念を思い出さざるをえない。（参照：岩井克人教授について）
