The Deceivers live outside the world; they think that we have built the world out of lies. They think the whole of Creation
is a jungle of deceit that we have put up to keep from seeing ourselves the way we really are.
Kinder Surprise, one of the most popular chocolate products on sale all around Central Europe, are empty egg shells made of chocolate and wrapped up in brightly colored foil; after one unwraps the egg and cracks the chocolate shell open, one finds in it a small plastic toy (or small parts from which a toy is to be put together). A child who buys this chocolate egg often nervously unwraps it and immediately breaks the chocolate, not bothering to eat it at first and worrying only about the toy in the center. Is such a chocolate-lover not a perfect case of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s dictum “I love you, but, inexplicably, I love something in you more than yourself, and, therefore, I destroy you”? And, effectively, is this toy not l’objet petit a at its purest, the small object filling in the central void of our desire, the hidden treasure, agalma, in the center of the thing we desire?
I’d never heard of Kinder Surprise until the year after college, when a friend of mine who’d just traveled to Europe introduced me to the concept. It sounded kind of fun in a campy way, and there was a nearby imported-foods store, so I bought one on a lark.
So, hells yeah, the thing in the middle of a Kinder Surprise egg is l’objet petit a. Quite rightly and sanely. How could anything beat that, in terms of unimagined cosmic joy? What better satiation of the vast fathomless hunger of human existence could there be?
(Needless to say, I never got anything nearly that awesome out of a Kinder Surprise egg again.)
