Che Vuoi?

And why the Other with a capital O? For a no doubt mad reason, in the same way as it is madness every time we are obliged to bring in signs supplementary to those given by language. Here the mad reason is the following. You are my wife - after all, what do you know about it? You are my master - in reality, are you so sure of that? What creates the founding value of those words is that what is aimed at in the message, as well as what is manifest in the pretence, is that the other is there qua absolute Other. Absolute, that is to say he is recognized, but is not known. In the same way, what constitutes pretence is that, in the end, you don't know whether it's a pretence or not. Essentially it is this unknown element in the alterity of the other which characterizes the speech relation on the level on which it is spoken to the other.

This passage should surprise anyone acquainted with Lacan: it equates the big Other with the impenetrability of another subject beyond the "wall of language," putting us at the opposite end of the predominant image Lacan presents of the big Other, that of the inexorable logic of an automatism which runs the show, so that when the subject speaks, he is, unbeknownst to himself, merely "spoken," not master in his own house. What, then, is the big Other? 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.

-Slavoj Zizek, "From Che Vuoi? to Fantasy: Lacan with Eyes Wide Shut"