who have had such a far-reaching influence on subsequent intellectual
life in the humanities as Jacques Lacan. Lacan's 'return to the
meaning of Freud' not only profoundly changed the institutional face
of the psychoanalytic movement internationally. His seminars in the
1950's were one of the formative environments of the currency of
philosophical ideas that dominated French letters in the 1960's and
70's, and which has come to be known in the Anglophone world as
'post-structuralism'. Both inside and outside of France, Lacan's work
has also been profoundly important in the fields of aesthetics,
literary criticism and film theory. Through the work of Althusser (and
more lately Ernesto Laclau, Jannis Stavrokakis and Slavoj Zizek),
Lacanian theory has also left its mark on political theory, and
particularly the analysis of ideology and institutional reproduction.
This article, which seeks to outline something of the philosophical
heritage and importance of Lacan's theoretical work, is divided into
four parts, each of which has subsections.
1. Biographical and General Introduction
Biography
Jacques-Marie-Émile Lacan was born in Paris on April 13 1901 to a
family of solid Catholic tradition, and was educated at a Jesuit
school. After completing his baccalauréat he commenced studying
medicine and later psychiatry. In 1927, Lacan commenced clinical
training and began to work at psychiatric institutions, meeting and
working with (amongst others) the famous psychiatrist Clerambault. His
doctoral thesis, on paranoid psychosis, was passed in 1932. In 1934,
he became a member of La Societe Psychoanalytique de Paris (SPP), and
commenced an analysis lasting until the outbreak of the war. During
the Nazi occupation of France, Lacan ceased all official professional
activity in protest against those he called "the enemies of human
kind". Following the war, he rejoined the SPP, and it was in the
post-war period that he rose to become a renowned and controversial
figure in the international psychoanalytic community, eventually
banned in 1962 from the International Psychoanalytic Association for
his unorthodox views on the calling and practice of psychoanalysis.
Lacan's career as both a theoretician and practicioner did not end
with this excommunication, however. In 1963, he founded L'Ecole
Freudienne de Paris (E.F.P.), a school devoted to the training of
analysts and the practicing of psychoanalysis according to Lacanian
stipulations. In 1980, having single-handedly dissolved the EFP, he
then constituted the Ecole for "La Cause Freudienne", saying: "It is
up to you to be Lacanians if you wish; I am Freudian". Lacan died in
Paris on September 9, 1981. Intellectual Biography Lacan's first major
theoretical publication was his piece "On the Mirror Stage as
Formative of the I". This piece originally appeared in 1936. Its
publication was followed by an extended period wherein he published
little. In 1949, though, it was re-presented to wider recognition. In
1953, on the back of the success of his Rome dissertation to the SPP
on "The Function and Field of Speech in Psychoanalysis", Lacan then
inaugurated the seminar series that he was to continue to convene
annually (albeit in different institutional guises) until his death.
It was in this forum that he developed and ceaselessly revised the
ideas with which his name has become associated. Although Lacan was
famously ambivalent about publication, the seminars were transcribed
by various of his followers, and several have been translated into
English. Lacan published a selection of his most important essays in
1966 in the collection Ecrits. An abridged version of this text is
available in an English-language edition. (see Bibliography).
Theoretical Project Lacan's avowed theoretical intention, from at
least 1953, was the attempt to reformalise what he termed 'the
Freudian field'. His substantial corpus of writings, speeches and
seminars can be read as an attempt to unify and reground what are the
four interlinking aspirations of Freud's theoretical writings: (1.) a
theorisation of psychoanalytic practice as a curative procedure; (2.)
the generation of a systematic metapsychology capable of providing the
basis for (3.) the formalisation of a diagnostic heuristic of mental
illness; and (4.) the construction of an account of the individual and
specie-al development of the 'civilised' human psyche. Lacan brought
to this project, however, a keen knowledge of the latest developments
in the human sciences, drawing especially on structuralist
linguistics, the structural anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss,
topology, and game theory. Moreover, as Derrida has remarked, Lacan's
work is characterised by an engagement with modern philosophy (notably
Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger and Sartre) unmatched by other
psychoanalytic theorists, especially informed by his attendance at
Andre Kojeve's hugely influential Paris lectures on Hegel from
1933-1939.
2. Lacan's Philosophical Anthropology: Human-Being as a Decentred Animal
a. The Mirror Stage
Lacan's article "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I" (1936, 1949)
lays out the parameters of a doctrine that he never foreswore, and
which has subsequently become something of a post-structuralist
mantra: namely, that human identity is 'decentred'. The key
observation of Lacan's essay concerns the behaviour of infants between
the ages of 6 and 18 months. At this age, Lacan notes, children become
capable of recognising their mirror image. This is not a dispassionate
experience, either. It is a recognition that brings the child great
pleasure. For Lacan, we can only explain this 'jubilation' as a
testimony to how, in the recognition of its mirror-image, the child is
having its first anticipation of itself as a unified and separate
individual. Before this time, Lacan contends (drawing on contemporary
psychoanalytic observation), the child is little more than a 'body in
bits and pieces', unable to clearly separate I and Other, and wholly
dependant for its survival (for a length of time unique in the animal
kingdom) upon its first nurturers.
The implications of this observation on the mirror stage, in Lacan's
reckoning, are far-reaching. They turn around the fact that, if it
holds, then the genesis of individuals' sense of individuation can in
no way be held to issue from the 'organic' or 'natural' development of
any inner wealth supposed to be innate within them. The I is an Other
from the ground up, for Lacan (echoing and developing a conception of
the ego already mapped out in Freud's Ego and Id). The truth of this
dictum, as Lacan comments in "Aggressivity and Psychoanalysis", is
evident in infantile transitivity: that phenomenon wherein one infant
hit by another yet proclaims: 'I hit him!', and visa-versa. It is more
simply registered in the fact that it remains a permanent possibility
of adult human experience for us to speak and think of ourselves in
the second or third person. What is decisive in these phenomena,
according to Lacan, is that the ego is at base an object: an
artificial projection of subjective unity modelled on the visual
images of objects and others that the individual confronts in the
world. Identification with the ego, Lacan accordingly maintains, is
what underlies the unavoidable component of aggressivity in human
behaviour especially evident amongst infants, and which Freud
recognised in his Three Essays on Sexuality when he stressed the
primordial ambivalence of children towards their love object(s) (in
the oral phase, to love is to devour; in the anal phase, it is to
master or destroy …).
b. Desire is the Desire of the Other
It is on the basis of this fundamental understanding of identity that
Lacan maintained throughout his career that desire is the desire of
the Other. What is meant by him in this formulation is not the
triviality that humans desire others, when they sexually desire (an
observation which is not universally true). Again developing Freud's
theorisation of sexuality, Lacan's contention is rather that what
psychoanalysis reveals is that human-beings need to learn how and what
to desire. Lacanian theory does not deny that infants are always born
into the world with basic biological needs that need constant or
periodic satisfaction. Lacan's stress, however, is that, from a very
early age, the child's attempts to satisfy these needs become caught
up in the dialectics of its exchanges with others. Because its sense
of self is only ever garnered from identifying with the images of
these others (or itself in the mirror, as a kind of other), Lacan
argues that it demonstrably belongs to humans to desire- directly- as
or through another or others. We get a sense of his meaning when we
consider such social phenomena as fashion. As the squabbling of
children more readily testifies, it is fully possible for an object to
become desirable for individuals because they perceive that others
desire it, such that when these others' desire is withdrawn, the
object also loses its allure. Lacan articulates this 'decentring' of
desire when he contends that what has happened to the biological needs
of the individual is that they have become inseparable from, and
importantly subordinated to, the vicissitudes of its demand for the
recognition and love of other people. Events as apparently 'natural'
as the passing or holding back of stool, he remarks in Ecrits, become
episodes in the chronicle of the child's relationship with its
parents, expressive of its compliance or rebellion. A hungry child may
even refuse to eat food if it perceives that this food is offered less
as a token of love than one of its parents' dissatisfaction or
impatience.
In this light, Lacan's important recourse to game theory also becomes
explicable. For game theory involves precisely the attempt to
formalise the possibilities available to individuals in situations
where their decisions concerning their wants can in principle both
affect and be affected by the decisions of others. As Lacan's article
in the Ecrits on the "Direction of the Treatment" spells out, he takes
it that the analytic situation, as theorised by Freud around the
notion of transference (see Part 2), is precisely such a situation. In
that essay, Lacan focuses on the dream of the butcher's wife in
Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. The said 'butcher's wife' thought
that she had had a dream which was proof of the invalidity of Freud's
theory that dreams are always encoded wish-fulfilments. As Freud
comments, however, this dream becomes explicable when one considers
how, after a patient has entered into analysis, her wishes are
constructed (at least in part) in relation to the perceived wishes of
the analyst. In this case, at least one of the wishes expressed by the
dream was the woman's wish that Freud's desire (for his theory to be
correct) be thwarted. In the same way, Lacan details how the deeper
unconscious wish expressed in the manifest content of the dream (which
featured the woman attempting to stage a dinner party with only one
piece of smoked salmon) can only be comprehended as the coded
fulfilment of a desire that her husband would not fulfil her every
wish, and leave her with an unsatisfied desire.
c. The Oedipal Complex, Castration, The Name of the Father, and the Big Other
The principle that desire is the desire of the Other is also decisive
in how Lacan reformulates Freud's theory of the child's socialisation
through the resolution of its Oedipal complex in its fifth or sixth
year. Lacan agrees with Freud that this event is decisive both in the
development of the individual, and in the aetiology of any possible
subsequent mental illness. However, in trying to understand this stage
of subjective development, Lacan distances himself from Freud's
emphasis on the biological organ of the penis. Lacan talks instead of
the phallus. What he is primarily referring to is what the child
perceives it is that the mother desires. Because the child's own
desire is structured by its relationships with its first nurturer
(usually in Western societies the mother), it is thus the desire of
the mother, for Lacan, that is the decisive stake in what transpires
with the Oedipus complex and its resolution. In its first years, Lacan
contends, the child devotes itself to trying to fathom what it is that
the mother desires, so that it can try to make itself the phallus for
the mother- a fully satisfying love-object. At around the time of its
fifth or sixth desire, however, the father will normally intervene in
a way that lastingly thwarts this Oedipal aspiration. The ensuing
renunciation of the aspiration to be the phallic Thing for the mother,
and not any physical event or its threat, is what Lacan calls
castration, and it is thus a function to which he thinks both boys and
girls are normally submitted.
The child's acceptance of its castration marks the resolution of its
Oedipal complex, Lacan holds, again shadowing Freud. The Oedipal child
remains committed to its project of trying to fathom and fulfil this
desire. It accordingly (and famously) perceives the father as a rival
and threat to its dearest aspirations. Because of this, in a maverick
theoretical conjunction, Lacan indeed likens the father-child relation
at this point (at least as it is perceived by the child) to the famous
'struggle to the death for pure recognition' dramatised in Hegel's
Phenomenology of Spirit. In this struggle, of course, the child
invariably loses. But everything turns, according to Lacanian theory,
on whether this loss constitutes a violent humiliation for the child
or whether, as in Hegel's account of 'Lordship and Bondage', its
resolution involves the founding of a pact between the parties, bound
by the solemnification of mutually recognised Law. If the castration
complex is to normalise the child, Lacan argues, what the child must
be made to perceive is that what satisfies or orders the desire of the
mother is not any visible (imaginary) feature of the father (his
obviously better physical endowments, and so on). The child must come
to see that the whims of the mother are themselves ordered by a Law
that exceeds and tames them. This law is what Lacan famously dubs the
name (nom) of the father, trading on a felicitous homonymy in French
between nom (name) and non (the 'no!' to incestuous union). When the
father intervenes, (at least when he is what Lacan calls the symbolic
father) Lacan's argument is that he does so less as a living enjoying
individual than as the delegate and spokesperson of a body of social
Law and convention that is also recognised by the mother, as a
socialised being, to be decisive. This body of nomoi is what Lacan
calls the big Other of the child's given sociolinguistic community.
Insofar as the force of its Law is what the child at castration
perceives to be what moves the mother and gives the father's words
their 'performative force' (Austin), Lacan also calls it the phallic
order.
d. The Law and Symbolic Identification
The Law of the father is in this way theorised by Lacan as the
necessary mediator between the child and the mother. A castrating
acceptance of its sovereignity precipitates the child out of its
ambivalent attempts to be the fully satisfying Thing for the mother.
As Lacan quips, when the child accedes to castration, it accedes to
the impossibility of it directly satisfying its incestous wish. If
things go well, however, it will go away with 'title deeds in its
pocket' that guarantee that, when the time comes (and if it plays by
the rules), it can at least have a satisficing substitute for its
first lost love-object. What has occurred, in this event, is that the
individual's imaginary identifications (or 'ideal egos') that
exclusively characterised its infantile years have been supplemented
by an identification of an entirely different order: what Lacan calls
a symbolic identification with an 'ego ideal'. This is precisely
identification with and within something that cannot be seen, touched,
devoured, or mastered: namely, the words, norms and directives of its
given cultural collective. Symbolic identification is always
idenification with a normatively circumscribed way of organising the
social-intersubjective space within which the subject can take on its
most lasting imaginary identifications: (For example, the
hysterical-vulnerable female identifies at the symbolic level with the
patriarchal way of structuring social relations between sexes, outside
of which her imaginary identification would be meaningless).
e. Summary
So, to repeat and summarise: Lacan's philosophical anthropology (his
answer to the question: what is it to be human?) involves several
important reformulations of Freudian tenets. By drawing on Hegel, game
theory, and contemporary observations of infant behaviour, he lays
greater systematic emphasis than Freud had on the intersubjective
constitution of human desire. In this feature at least, his
philosophical anthropology is united with that of philosophers such as
Levinas, Honneth and Habermas. Equally, since for Lacan human desire
is 'the desire of the other', what he contends is at stake in the
child's socialisation is its aspiration to be the fully satisfying
object for the mother, a function which is finally (or at least
norm-ally) fulfilled by the Law-bearing words of the father.
Human-being, for Lacan, is thus (as decentred) vitally a speaking
animal (what he calls a parle-etre); one whose desire comes to be
'inmixed' with the imperatives of, and stipulated within, the natural
language of its society. [see Part 2] Particularly, Lacan picks up on
certain cues within Freud's texts (and those of Saint Paul) to
emphasise the dialectical structuration of human desire in relation to
the prohibitions of Law. If the Law of the father denies immediate
access to what the child takes to be the fully satisfying object (as
expounded above), from this point on, Lacan argues, (at least
neurotic) desire is necessarily articulated in the interstices of what
is permitted by the big Other. And it is characterised by an innate
and 'fatal' attraction to what it prohibits as such, which is why he
placed such central emphasis throughout his career on the enigmatic
Freudian notion of a death drive.
f. Lacan's Diagnostic Categories
Finally, it should be noted that, because of Lacan's reformulations of
several of Freud's key notions, Lacan's diagnostic heuristic differs
markedly from Freud's. For Lacan, what is decisive in understanding
mental illness is not the conflict between the embattled ego and its
two more 'irrational' psychic bedfellows, the superego and the id. It
is how the subject bears up vis-à-vis the condition of being a
castrated animal forced to pursue its desire on 'the inverted ladder
of the signifier', within the phallic order of its society's big
Other. The question to be asked, for Lacan, is: how fully has the
subject acceded to its symbolic castration?, and- as such- how fully
has it overcome the transitivity and aggressivity characteristic of
the earlier infantile stages of its development?
As in Freud, Lacan stipulates three major classes of mental illness,
all of which are situated by him vis-à-vis the terms of this question,
and which (as such) are elevated by him to something like three
existential bearings towards the condition of being a decentred
socialised animal. According to the Lacanian conceptualisation, the
neurotic is someone who has submitted to castration, but not without
remainder. His/her symptoms stand testimony to a lasting refusal of,
and resentment towards, the castrating agency of the big Other. The
pervert is someone who has only partially acceded to castration. For
him/her, the Law does not function wholly to repress or render
inaccessible what s/he deeply desires (the maternal body). Because of
this, this Law comes itself (either in its prosecution, or in its
sufferance) to function as the object of her/his desire. Finally, the
psychotic is someone who has never acceded (or been drawn to accede)
to the symbolic order of social interchange bound by the name of the
father. For him/her, this order of the big Other, in which people
follow the Law 'because it is the Law' can thus only ever appear to be
a semblance. As is most clear in the delusions of paranoiacs, s/he
will thus permanently be prey to the delusion that there must be some
'Other of the big Other' (eg: aliens, the CIA, God) behind the scenes,
pulling the strings of the social charade.
3. Lacan's Philosophy of Language
Perhaps the component of Lacanian theory for which it is most famous,
and which has most baffled its critics, is the emphasis Lacan laid on
language in his attempt to formalise psychoanalysis. From the 1950's,
in complete opposition to any Jungian or romantic conceptions, Lacan
instead described the unconscious as a kind of discourse: the
discourse of the Other. There are at least three interrelated concerns
that inform the construction of what I am terming Lacan's 'philosophy
of language':
- The first is the central argument that the child's castration is the
decisive point in its becoming a speaking subject – The second is his
taking very seriously what might be termed the 'interpretive paradigm'
in Freud's texts, according to which Freud repeatedly described
symptoms, slips and dreams as symbolic phenomena capable of
interpretation. – The third is Lacan's desire to try to understand the
efficacy of psychoanalytic interpretation as a curative procedure that
relies solely on what Freud called in The Question of Lay Analysis the
'magical' power of the word.
a. Language and Law
In Part 1, in recounting Lacan's view on the resolution of the Oedipal
complex, one reason why Lacan allocated language such importance was
touched upon. For Lacan, it is only when the child accedes to
castration and the Law of the father, that s/he becomes fully
competent as a language-speaker within his/her given social
collective. By contrast, individuals suffering from psychosis, Lacan
stresses (in line with a vast wealth of psychological research), are
prone to characteristic linguistic dysfunctions and inabilities.
Already from this, then, we can outline a first crucial feature of
Lacan's 'philosophy of language'. Like the later Wittgenstein, Lacan's
position is that to learn a language is to learn a set of rules or
laws for the use and combination of words. Accordingly, for him too,
'learning is based on believing' [Wittgenstein]. Particularly, Lacan
asserts a lasting link between the capacity of a subject to perceive
the world as a set of discrete identifiable objects, and his/her
acceptance of the unconditional authority of a body of convention. I
will return to this below.
b. Psychoanalysis as Interpretation: the Unconscious Structured Like a Language
Lacan's contention concerning human-being as a parle-etre, put most
broadly, is that when the subject learns its mother tongue, everything
from its sense of how the world is, to the way it experiences its
biological body, are over-determined by its accession to this order of
language. This is the clearest register of the debt that Lacan owes to
phenomenology. From Heidegger, he accepts the notion that to be a
subject is to experience the world as a meaningful totality, and that
language is crucial to this capability. Aligning Freud with the
theories of Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, Lacan developed a psychoanalytic
conception of how the body is caught in the play of meaning-formation
between subjects, and expressive of the subjectivity that 'lives'
through it, as well as being an objectificable tool for the
performance of instrumental activities. For Lacan, that is, 'the
unconscious' does not name only some other part of the mental
apparatus than consciousness. It names all that about a subject,
including bodily manifestations and identifications with others and
'external' objects that insist beyond his/her conscious control.
Freud had already commented in the Introductory Lectures to
Psychoanalysis that the unconscious can be compared to a language
without a grammar. Lacan, using structuralist linguistics, attempted
to systematise this contention, arguing that the unconscious is
structured like a language, and that 'it speaks'/ ca parle. A symptom,
Lacan (for example) claimed, is to be read as a kind of embodied
corporeal metaphor. As Freud had argued, he takes it that what is at
stake within a symptom is a repressed desire abhorrent to the
consciously accepted self-conception and values of the subject. This
desire, if it is to gain satisfaction at all, accordingly needs to be
expressed indirectly. For example, a residual infantile desire to
masturbate may find satisfaction indirectly in a compulsive ritual the
subject feels compelled to repeat. Just as one might metaphorically
describe one's love as a rose, Lacan argues, here we have a repressed
desire being metaphorically expressed in some apparently dissimilar
bodily activity. Equally, drawing on certain moments within Freud's
papers "On the Psychology of Love", Lacan argues that desire is
structured as a metonymy. In metonymy, one designates a whole object
(eg: a car) by naming one part of it (eg: 'a set of wheels'). Lacan's
argument is that, equally, since castration denies subjects full
access to their first love object (the mother), their choice of
subsequent love objects is the choice of a series of objects that each
resemble in part the lost object (perhaps they have the same hair, or
look at him/her the same way the mother did …). According to Lacan,
the unconscious uses the multivalent resources of the natural language
into which the subject has been inducted (what he calls 'the battery
of the signifier') to give indirect vent to the desires that the
subject cannot consciously avow. Lacan's Freudian argument is that a
directly comparable process occurs in formations of the unconscious as
in jokes. As Freud detailed in Jokes and Their Relation to the
Unconscious, the 'punch line' of jokes pack their punch by condensing
in one statement, or even one word, two chains of meaning. The first
of these is what the previous words and cues of the joke, and our
shared norms for interpretation, lead us to expect. The second is a
wholly different chain of associations, whose clash with what we had
expected produces our sense of amusement. In the same way, Lacan
observed that, for example, when an analysand makes a 'slip of the
tongue', what has taken place is that the unconscious has employed
such means as homonymy, the merging of two words, the forgetting or
mispronunciation of certain words, or a slippage of pronoun or tense,
etc., to intimate a whole chain of associations which the subject did
not intend, but through which his unconscious desire is given indirect
expression. Lacan argues that what the consideration of jokes,
symptoms and slips thus shows are a number of features of how it is
that human beings form sense in language. The first thing is that the
sentence is the absolutely basal unit of meaning. Before a sentence
ends, Lacan notes, the sense of each individual word or signifier is
uncertain. It is only when the sentence is completed that their sense
is fixed, or- as Lacan variously put it- 'quilted'. Before this time,
they are what he calls floating signifiers, like to the leading
premises of a joke. The sense of this position can be easily
demonstrated. One need only begin a sentence by proferring a subject,
but then cease speaking before a verb and/or predicate is assigned to
this in accordance with linguistic convention. For example, if I say:
'when I was young I…' or 'it's not like …', my interlocutor will be
understandably want to know what it is that I mean. At the end of the
sentence, by contrast, the sense of the beginning words becomes clear,
as when I finish the first of the above utterances by saying 'when I
was young I ran a lot', or whatever. This understanding of sentences
as the basic unit of sense, and of how it is that signifiers 'float'
until any given sentence is finished, is what informs Lacan's emphasis
on the future anterior tense. Sense, he argues, is always something
that 'will have been'. It is anticipated but not confirmed, when we
hear uttered the beginning of a sentence (see transference below). Or
else, at sentence's end, it is something that we now see with the
benefit of 'twenty twenty hindsight' to have been intended all along.
This is why, in Seminar I, Lacan even quips that the meaning of
symptoms do not come from the past, but from the future. Before the
work of interpretation, a symptom is a floating signifier, whose
meaning is unclear to the analysand, and also to the analyst. As the
analytic work proceeds, however, an interpretation is achieved at some
later time that casts the whole behaviour into relief in a wholly
different light, and makes its sense clear.
c. The Curative Efficacy of the 'Talking Cure'
Lacan's emphasis on language is also over-determined by an elementary
recollection that, if Freud's intervention promised anything, it is
that speaking with another person in strictly controlled circumstances
can be a curative experience for people suffering from forms of mental
illness. The analysand comes to the analyst with his troubling
symptoms, and the analyst, at certain decisive points, offers
interpretations of these behaviours that retrospectively make their
meaning clear. And this is not simply an intellectual exercise. As
Freud stressed, there is knowledge of the unconscious, and then there
is knowledge that has effects upon it. A successful psychoanalytic
interpretation is one that has effects even upon the biological
reality of the body, changing the subject's bearing towards the world,
and dissolving his/her symptoms.
The need to explain this power of words and language is a clear and
lasting motive behind Lacan's understanding of language. His central
and basal hypothesis concerning it can be stated in the following way.
In a symptom, as we saw above, an unconscious desire seeks to make
itself manifest. The symptom is recounted to the analyst, or else
repeated in the way the subject responds to the analyst in the
sessions. Then an interpretation is offered by the analyst, which
recognises or symbolises the force of the desire at work in the
symptom, and the symptom disappears. So here the recognition of a
desire at the same time satisfies the desire. What this can
accordingly only mean is that the unconscious desire given voice in
the symptom is itself, from the start, at least in part a desire for
recognition. This is an absolutely central Lacanian insight, wherein
he again shows the influence of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit upon
his most central concepts. It synchronises exactly with the
philosophical anthropology recounted above, and Lacan's stricture
concerning how human desire is always caught up in the dialectics of
individuals' exchanges with others. But, for Lacan, it also shows
something vital about the language in or as which the subjects'
repressed desires are trying to find a vent. This is that language is
above all a social pact. As Lacan wrote in the Ecrits: "As a rule
everyone knows that others will remain, like himself, inaccessible to
the constraints of reason, outside an acceptance in principle of a
rule of debate that does not come into force without an explicit or
implicit agreement as to what is called its basis, which is almost
always tantamount to an anticipated agreement to what is at stake… I
shall expect nothing therefore of these rules except the good faith of
the Other, and, as a last resort, will make use of them, if I think
fit or if I am forced to, only to amuse bad faith…" [Lacan, 2001:
154-155] Lacan's idea is that to speak is to presuppose a body a
conventions that ensue that, even if my immediate auditor doesn't 'get
it', the true meaning of what I wish to convey always will emerge, and
be registered in some 'Other' place. (Note that here is another
meaning of the big Other touched upon in Part 1. The big Other is the
place, tribunal, collective or single person which we presuppose will
register the truth of what we say, whenever we speak). This is why
Lacan's philosophy of language is to be read in strong opposition to
any philosophical account (whether Lockean, descriptivist or
phenomenological) which argues that meaning is formed prior to the
communicative act. Lacan defines speech as a process in which the
subjects get their meanings back from the Other in an inverted form.
Think once more of what is involved in psychoanalytic interpretation.
Here the meaning of a symptom is rendered by the analyst. What this
means, for Lacan, is that the symptom not only bears upon the
subject's past relations to others. If it can be dissolved by an
Other's interpretation, this is because it is formed with an eye to
this interpretation from the start. To quote Slavoj Zizek on this
Lacanian notion of how the symptom is from the start addressed to an
Other supposed to know its truth: "The symptom arises where the world
failed, where the circuit of symbolic communication was broken: it is
a kind of 'prolongation of communication by other means': the failed,
repressed word articulates itself in a coded, ciphered form. The
implication of this is that the symptom can not only be interpreted
but is, so to speak, formed with an eye to its interpretation … in the
psychoanalytic cure the symptom is always addressed to the analyst, it
is an appeal to him to deliver its hidden message … This … is the
basic point: in its very constitution, the symptom implies the field
of the big Other as consistent, complete, because its very formation
is an appeal to the Other which contains its meaning …" [Zizek, 1989:
73] Even the key meaning of transference, for Lacan, is this
supposition that there is an Other supposed to know the truth of my
communicative acts, even down to the most apparently meaningless
'slips' and symptomatic behaviours. In terms of the previous section,
transference is the condition of possibility for the quilting of the
meaning of floating signifiers that occurs even in the most basic
sentences, as we saw. What occurs in a psychoanalytic interpretation
is simply one more consequential version of this process. The subject,
by speaking, addresses himself to some Other supposed to know her/his
truth, and at the end of this process, the signifiers he offers to the
Other are quilted, and return to him 'in an inverted form'. What has
occurred at this point, on Lacan's reckoning, is that the previously
unquilted signifiers finding voice in the manifestations of his
unconscious are integrated into the subject's symbolic universe: the
way s/he understands the world, in the terms of his/her community's
natural language. They have been subjectivised; which means that now
s/he can recognise them as not wholly alien intrusions into his/her
identity, but an integral part of this identity. Lacan's stress is
thus always, when he talks of psychoanalytic interpretation, that this
interpretation does not add new content to the subject's
self-understanding, so much as affect the form of this understanding.
An interpretation, that is, realigns the way the s/he sees her past,
reordering the signifiers in which his/her self-understanding has come
to be ordered. A crucial Lacanian category in theorising this process
is that of the 'master signifier'. Master signifiers are those
signifiers to which a subject's identity are most intimately bound.
Standard examples are words like 'Australian', 'democrat', 'decency',
'genuineness'. They are words which will typically be proffered by
subjects as naming something like what Kant would have called ends in
themselves. They designate values and ideals that the subject will be
unwilling and unable to question without pulling the semantic carpet
from beneath their own feet. Lacan's understanding of how these
'master signifiers' function is a multi-layered one, as I shall expand
in Part 3.. It is certainly true to say, though, that the importance
of these signifiers comes from how a subject's identification with
them commits them to certain orderings of all the rest of the
signifiers. For example, if someone identifies himself as a
'communist', the meanings of a whole array of other signifiers are
ordered in quite different ways than for someone who thinks of himself
as a 'liberal'. 'Freedom' for him comes to mean 'freedom from the
exploitative practices enshrined in capitalism and hidden beneath
liberal ideological rhetoric'. 'Democracy' comes to mean 'the
dictatorship of the proletariat'. 'Equality' comes to mean something
like 'what ensues once the sham of the capitalist "equal right to
trade" is unmasked'. What Lacan argues is involved in the
psychoanalytic process, then, is the elevation of new 'master
signifiers' which enable the subject to reorder their sense of
themselves and of their relations to others. Previously, for example,
a person may have identified with a conception of 'decency' that has
led him to repress aspects of his own libidinal makeup, which then
return in neurotic symptoms. What analysis will properly lead him to
do is identify himself with a different set of 'master signifiers',
which re-signify the signifiers he had unconsciously been addressing
to the Other in his symptoms, reducing their traumatic charge by
integrating them into his symbolic (self-)understanding.
4. Lacanian Psychoanalysis and The Philosophy of Ethics
Whereas Freud never systematically spoke on the ethics of
psychoanalysis, Lacan devoted his pivotal seventh seminar (in
1959-1960) to precisely this topic. Seminar VII: The Ethics of
Psychoanalysis goes to some lengths to stress that the position on
ethics Lacan is concerned to develop is concerned solely with the
clinical practice of psychoanalysis. Its central topic, in line with
what we examined in Part 1 concerning the intersubjective
structuration of subjective desire and identity, is the desire of the
analyst as that Other addressed by the patient and implicated in the
way s/he structures his/her desire through the transference.
Nevertheless, it remains that Lacan develops his position through
explicit engagement with Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics, as well as
Kant's practical writings, and the texts of Marquis de Sade. Moreover,
Lacan's ethics accord with his metapsychological premises, examined in
Part 1, and his theorisation of language, examined in Part 2. In this
Part 3, accordingly, I want to present Lacan's understanding of ethics
as a sophisticated position that, disavowals notwithstanding, can be
read as a consistent post-Kantian philosophy of ethics. Part 3 is
divided into three sections. The first two sections develop further
Lacan's metapsychological and philosophical tenets. Section i.
involves a further elaboration of the Lacanian conception of the
'master signifiers'. Section ii. involves an exposition of Lacan's
notion of the 'fundamental fantasy'. Section iii. then examines
Lacan's later notion of 'traversing the fantasy' as the basis of his
ethical position.
a. Master Signifiers, and the Decentred Nature of Belief
As I stated at the end of Part 2, Lacan assigns great importance in
his theorisation of the psychoanalytic process to what he calls
'master signifiers'. These are those signifiers that the subject most
deeply identifies with, and which accordingly have a key role in the
way s/he gives meaning to the world. As was stressed, Lacan's idea
about these signifiers is that their primary importance is less any
positive content that they add to the subject's field of symbolic
sense. It is rather the efficacy they have in reorienting the subject
vis-à-vis all of the other signifiers which structure his/her sense of
herself and the world. It is precisely this primarily structural or
formal function that underlies the crucial Lacanian claim that master
signifiers are actually 'empty signifiers' or 'signifiers without a
signified'.
As with all of Lacan's key formulations, the notion that the master
signifiers are 'signifiers without signified' is a complex one. Even
the key idea is the following. The concept and /or referent signified
by any 'master signifier' will always be something impossible for any
one individual to fully comprehend. For example, 'Australian-ness'
would seem to be what is aimed at when someone proffers the
self-identification: 'I am an Australian'. The Lacanian question here
is: what is 'Australian' being used by the subject to designate here?
Is 'Australian-ness' something that inheres in everyone who is born in
Australia? Or is it a characteristic that is passed on through the
medium of culture primarily? Does it, perhaps, name most deeply some
virtues or qualities of character all Australians supposedly have?
However, even if we take it that all 'Australians' share some basic
virtues, which are these? Can a closed list everyone would agree upon
be feasibly drawn up? Is it not easy to think of other peoples who
share in valuing each individual trait we standardly call 'Australian'
(eg: courage, disrespect for pomposity)? And, since 'Australian' would
seem to have to aim at a singular entity, not a collection, or else
some grounding quality of character that could perhaps unite all of
the others, which is this? And is this 'essential' quality- again-
simply biological, perhaps genetic, or is it metaphysical, or what?
What Lacan's account of 'master signifiers' thus emphasizes is the gap
between two things. The first is our initial certainty about the
nature of such an apparently obvious thing as 'Australian-ness'. (We
may even get vexed when asked by someone). The second thing is the
difficulty that we have of putting this certainty into words, or
naming something that would correspond to the 'essence' of
'Australian-ness', beneath all the different appearances. What Lacan
indeed argues, in line with his emphasis on the decentred self, is
that our ongoing and usually unquestioning use of these words
represents another clear case of how the construction of sense depends
on the transferential supposition of 'Others supposed to know'. Though
we ourselves can never simply state what 'Australian-ness', etc. is,
that is, Lacan argues that what is nevertheless efficient in
generating our belief in (and identification with) this elusive
'thing' is a conviction that nevertheless other people certainly know
its nature, or seem to. Just as we desire through the Other, for this
reason Lacanian theory also maintains that belief is always belief
through an Other (for example, in the Christian religion, priests
would be the designated Others supposed to know the meaning of the
Christian mystery vouchsafing believers' faith). At this point, it is
appropriate to recall from Part 1 Lacan's thesis that castration marks
the point wherein the child is made to renounce its aspiration to be
the phallic Thing for the mother. A subject's castration amounts at
base, for Lacan, to the acceptance that it is the injunctions of the
father- and through his name the conventions of the big Other of
society- that govern the desire of the mother. The 'master signifiers'
are also what Lacan calls phallic signifiers. The reason is exactly
that- despite the difficulty of locating any simple referent for them-
they nevertheless are the words that seem to intimate to subjects what
'really matters' about human existence. While no Christian believer
may know what 'God' is, nevertheless s/he will be in no doubt of the
transcendent importance of whatever It is that this word names. Lacan
thus is drawing together his philosophical anthropology and his
theorization of language when he defends the position that it is the
consequence of 'castration' that subjects are debarred from immediate
knowledge of what it is that the 'phallic signifiers' signify. He is
also arguing, in the psychoanalytic field, a position profoundly akin
to the Kantian postulation that finite human subjects are debarred
from immediate access to things in themselves. Lacan's argument is
that it is this lost 'signified', which would as it were be 'more
real' than the other things that the subject can readily signify, that
is what is primordially repressed when the subject accedes to becoming
a speaking subject at castration. When the subject accedes to the
symbolic, he repeats, the Real of aspired-to incestuous union, and the
sexualized transgressive enjoyment or jouissance it would afford, is
necessarily debarred.
b. Lacan's Conception of Fantasy
If the neurotic subject does not to forego the Oedipal supposition
that there is some Thing that would fully satisfy the desire of the
mother, it is because s/he constructs fantasies about the nature of
this lost Thing, and how s/he stands towards it. The primary means
s/he deploys in this process is what I recounted above, when I noted
how the difficulty in knowing the referent of the phallic master
signifiers obliges subjects to construct their beliefs concerning it
in a 'decentred' manner, through the Others. While the subject accepts
that the Real phallic Thing is lost to him/her, that is, in his/her
fantasmatic life s/he yet supposes that there are Others who do know
what it is that phallic signifiers refer to, and have more direct
access to the Real of jousissance. In line with this, Lacan's further
argument is indeed that the deepest fantasmatic postulation of
subjects is always that the Real Phallic Thing that s/he has been
debarred from must be held in reserve by the 'big Other' whose law it
is that discernibly structures the mother's desire.
What follows from this is the position that the manifestations of the
unconscious represent small unconscious rebellions of the subject
against the loss that s/he takes him/herself to have endured when s/he
acceded to socialization. They are all under-girded by the more basic
fantasmatic structuration of identity as constituted by the loss
endured at castration. This is why Lacan talks of a fundamental
fantasy, and argues that it is above all this fundamental fantasy that
is at stake in psychoanalysis. Lacan strived to formalize the
invariant structure of this 'fundamental fantasy' in the matheme: $ a.
This matheme indicates that: '$', the 'barred' subject which is
divided by castration between attraction to and repulsion from the
Object of its unconscious desire, is correlative to (") the fantasised
lost object. This object, designated in the matheme as 'a', is called
by Lacan the 'object petit a', or else the object cause of desire.
Lacan holds that the subject always stabilizes its position vis-à-vis
the Real Thing by constructing a fantasy about how the debarred Thing
is held in the big Other, manifesting only in a series of metonymic or
partial objects (the gaze or voice of his/her love objects, a hair
style, or some other 'little piece of the Real') that can be enjoyed
as compensation for its primordial loss of the maternal Thing. Lacan's
argument is that the fundamental psychological 'gain' from the
fundamental fantasy is the following. The fundamental fantasy
represents what occurred at castration in the terms of a narrative of
possession and loss. This fantasm thus consoles the subject by
positing that s/he at one point did have the phallic Thing, but that
then, at castration, it was taken away from him/her by the Other. What
this of course means is that, since the Thing was taken away from the
subject, perhaps also It can be regained by him/her. It is this
promise, Lacan maintains, that usually structures neurotic human
desire. What the fantasy serves to hide from the subject, then, is the
possibility that a fully satisfying sexual relationship with the
mother, or any metonymic substitute for her, is not only prohibited,
but was never possible anyway. As I recounted in Part 1, the Lacanian
view, which is informed by observation of infantile behavior, is that
the mother-child relationship before castration is not Edenic, but
characterized by imaginary transitivity and aggressivity. This is why
Lacan quips in Seminar XX that 'there is no such thing as a sexual
relationship' and elsewhere that the 'Woman', with a capital 'W',
'does not exist'. Note then that the deepest logic of castration,
according to Lacan, is a profoundly paradoxical one. The 'no!' of the
father prohibits something that is impossible. Its very prohibition,
however, gives rise in the subject to the fantasmatic supposition that
the Thing in question is one that is attainable but only being
debarred. Lacan thus asserts that the fundamental fantasy is there to
veil from the subject the terminal nature of its loss at castration.
This is not simply a speculation, however. It is supported by telling
evidences that he adduces. The key point that supports Lacan's
position is the stipulation the objet petit is an anamorphotic object.
What this means can be seen by looking at even the most well-known
exemplar of the Lacanian objet petit a: the 'object gaze'. Contrary to
how it is sometimes read, the Lacanian 'gaze' is anything but the
intrusive and masterful male gaze on the world. For Lacan, gaze is
indeed a "blind spot" in the subject's perception of visible reality,
"disturbing its transparent visibility". [Zizek, 1999a: 79] What it
bears witness to is the subject's inability to fully frame the objects
that appear within his/her field of vision. The classic example of the
object-gaze from Lacan's Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis
is the floating skull at the feet of Holbein's Ambassadors. What is
singular about this 'thing' is that it can literally only be seen from
'awry', and at the cost that the rest of the picture appears at that
moment out of focus. From this point on the canvas, Lacan comments, it
is as if the painting regards us. What he means is that the skull
reminds us that we, and with us our desires and fantasies, are
implicated in how the scene appears. Here then is another meaning to $
a: the objet petit a, for Lacan, as something that can only operate
its fascination upon individuals who bear a partial perspective upon
it, is that object that 're-presents' the subject within the world of
objects that it takes itself to be a wholly 'external' perspective
upon. If a subject thus happens upon it too directly, it disappears,
or else- as in psychosis and the well-known filmic motif of what
happens when one encounter one's double- the cost is that one's usual
sense of how the rest of the world is must dissipate. What this
indicates is that the object petit a, or at least the fascinating
effect the object which bears it has upon the subject who is under its
thrall, has no 'objective' reality independently of this subject. The
logical consequence of this, though, as Lacan stipulates, is that this
supposedly 'lost' object can never really have been lost by the
subject, since s/he can never have possessed it in the first place.
This is why Lacan argues the apparently chimerical position that the
objet petit a is by definition an object that has come into being in
being lost.
c. The Lacanian Subjects, and Ethics
Lacan argues that the subject is 'the subject of the signifier'. One
meaning of this claim at least is that there is no subject proper that
is not a speaking subject, who has been subject to castration and the
law of the father. I shall return to this formulation below, though,
for its full meaning only becomes evident when another crucial claim
that Lacan makes concerning the subject is properly examined. This is
the apparently contradictory claim that the subject as such, at the
same time as being a linguistic subject, lacks a signifier. There is
no subject without language, Lacan wants to say, and yet the subject
constitutively lacks a place in language.
At the broadest level, in this claim Lacan is simply restating in the
language of structuralist linguistics a claim already made by Sartre,
and before him Kojeve and Hegel (and arguably Kant). This is the claim
that the subject is not an object capable of being adequately named
within a natural language, like other objects can be ('table',
'chair', or so on). It is no-thing. One of the clearest points of
influence of Kojeve's Heideggerian Hegelianism on Lacan is the
emphasis he places on the subject as correlative to a lack of being
(manqué-a-etre / want-to-be), especially in the 1950's. Lacan
articulates his position concerning the subject by way of a
fundamental distinction between the ego or 'moi' / 'me', and the
subject intimated by the shifter 'je' / 'I'. The subject is a split
subject, Lacan claims, not only insofar as- Freud dixit- it has
consciousness and an unconscious. When Lacan says the subject is
split, he means also that, as a subject of language, it will always
evince the following two levels. The first is the ego, or subject of
the enunciated. This is the self wherein the subject perceives /
anticipates its imaginary unity. Since the ego is an object, according
to Lacan, it is capable of being predicated about like any other
object. I can say of myself more or less truthfully that 'I am fat',
or 'honest', or anything else. What my enunciated sentence will speak
about in these cases, for Lacan, is my ego. But this is to be
distinguished from a second 'level' of subjectivity: the subject of
the enunciation. Here as elsewhere, Lacan's position turns around his
philosophy of language examined in detail in Part 2. The distinction
between the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the
enunciated follows from Lacan's understanding of what 'speech-act'
theorists like Austin or Searle would call the performative dimension
to language. Speech-act theorists emphasise that the words of given
speech-acts are never enunciated in a vacuum. They are always uttered
in a certain context, between language speakers. And through the
utterances, subjects effectively do things (hence Austin's title How
to Do Things With Words). This is particularly evident in cases like
commands or promises. When I make a promise (say: 'I promise I'll meet
you at 5:15) I do not primarily make a claim about an existing state
of affairs. It is what I have done that matters. What I have done is
make a pledge to meet you at some future time. Lacan's key argument,
alongside that of Austin here, is that all linguistic acts have two
important dimensions. The first is what Austin would call the
constative dimension. Lacan calls this the level of what is
enunciated. Words aim to express or represent factual states of
affairs in the world. The second is the performative dimension, that
Lacan calls the level of the enunciation. The subject of the
unconscious is the subject of the enunciation, Lacan insists. This is
one way he expresses the elementary Freudian hypothesis that, in
symptoms and parapraxes, the subject says more than s/he intended to
say. What s/he intended will usually be captured in the explicit
content of what s/he has enunciated. Nevertheless, in his/her body
language, or in a second chain of signification indicated by her/his
mispronunciation (etc.), something other than what s/he intended will
be conveyed to the analyst. This second chain of signification as it
were 'happens'- it is performed for the 'Other supposed to know'
before it can be explicitly and consciously enunciated by the speaking
individual. Lacan's distinction between the subject of the enunciated
and the subject of the enunciated can be exposed further through
examining his treatment of the liar's paradox. This is the paradox of
someone saying: 'I am a liar'. The paradox is that, if we suppose the
proposition true ('person x is a liar'), we at the same time then have
no reason to believe he is telling the truth when he says: 'I am a
liar'. As a liar, he can only be lying when he says this. But what
this means is that we must suppose that he is a sincere truth-telling
person. Lacan argues that this is a paradox only insofar as we have
wrongly collapsed the distinction between the subject enunciated in
the sentence, and the subject of the enunciation. A better
understanding of the meaning of this utterance can be garnered by
presenting the speech-act in both its two dimensions, as a case
wherein (to formalise): 'person x says: "I am a liar"' The point is
that the 'I' in the spoken sentence here is what Lacan calls the
subject of the enunciated. Of this ego, it may (or may not) be true
that s/he is a liar. Yet, this ego is in no way to be identified with
what I have called 'person x' in the above formalisation. 'Person x'
here is not the subject spoken about. S/he is the person speaking. And
Lacan's point is that it this subject of the enunciation that
addresses itself to the Other supposed to know in analysis, despite
whatever egoic plays and ploys the analysand might masquerade before
his/her analyst in what s/he enunciates. The hysteric, Lacan thus
says, is someone who tells the truth about his/her desire (at the
level of enunciation) in the guise of lying or at least being
indifferent to the factual truths of which she speaks (at the level of
the enunciated). The obsessional, by contrast, lies or dissembles the
truth of his/her involvement in what s/he speaks about (at the level
of enunciation) in the guise of always telling the truth (at the level
of what s/he enunciates). Lacan's position is that, when subjects wish
to speak about themselves, the subject of enunciation is always either
anticipated- at the beginning of the speech-act; or else missed- at
the end of the speech-act, whence it has come to be falsely identified
with the ego. In line with his prioritisation of the future anterior,
he comments that the subject always 'will have been'. In philosophical
terms, we can say that the Lacanian subject is a presupposition of any
speech-act (someone will always be speaking), yet impossible to fill
out with any substantial content. It is for this reason that Slavoj
Zizek has recently drawn a parallel between it and Kant's unity of
apperception in The Critique of Pure Reason. Lacan himself, in his
seminar on the logic of fantasy, strove to articulate his meaning by a
revision of Descartes' famous cogito ergo sum: 'I am not where I
think'. The key to this formulation is the opposition between thinking
and being. Lacan is saying that, at the point of my thought and speech
(the subject of enunciation), there I have no substantial being that
could be known. Equally, 'I am not where I think' draws out the
necessary misapprehension of the nature of the subject in what s/he
enunciates. If Lacan's subject thus seems a direct psychoanalytic
restatement of Sartre / Kojeve's position, however, it needs to be
read in conjunction with his doctrines concerning the 'master
signifier' and the 'fundamental fantasy'. Lacan says that master
signifiers 'represent the subject for other signifiers'. Given his
identification of the subject with a lack of being, a first register
of this remark becomes clear. The master signifiers, as examined
above, have no particular enunciated content or signified, according
to Lacan. But the Lacanian position is precisely that this lack of
enunciated content is correlative to the subject. In this way, his
theorisation of the subject depends not only on a phenomenological
analysis, as (for example) Sartre's does in Being and Nothingness. If
the subject is the subject 'of the lack of the signifier', Lacan means
not only that it cannot be objectified at the point of its thinking,
as I examined above. The subject is- directly- something that emerges
at the point of- and because of- a lack in the field of signification,
on his reckoning. This was already intimated above, in the section on
the 'logics of the fantasy', which recounted Lacan's position
concerning how it is that subjects develop regimes of fantasy
concerning what Others are supposed to know in order to ground their
own belief in, and identification with, the master signifiers. The
point to be emphasised now is that these master signifiers, if they
are to function, cannot do without this subjective investment of
fantasy. Lacan's famous claim there is no metalanguage is meant to
imply only this: that there is no field of sense that can be
'quilted', and attain to a semblance of consistency, unless subjects
have invested their partial, biased perspective upon that field. This
is even the final and most difficult register to what Lacan aimed to
express in the matheme: $ a. As I showed in Part 3, ii., the subject
is correlative to the fantasmatically posed lost object / referent of
the master signifiers. We can now state a further level of what Lacan
implied in this matheme, though. This is that in fantasy what subjects
misrecognise is not simply the non-existence of the
incestuous-maternal Thing. What subjects primordially repress is the
necessity of subjects' implication in the play of signification that
has over-determined the symbolic coordinates of their lives. The
archetypal neurotic subject-position, Lacan notes, is one of
victimisation. It is the Others who have sinned, and not the subject.
S/he has only suffered. What is of course occluded by these
considerations (which may be right or wrong from a moral or legal
perspective) is how the subject has invested him/herself in the events
of his/her life. Firstly, there is the fantasmatic investment of the
subject in the 'Others supposed to enjoy', who are supposed not to
have been made to undergo the castrating losses that s/he has
undergone. As Lacan reads Freud's later postulation of the superego,
this psychical agency is constructed around residual fantasies of the
Oedipal father supposed to have access to the sovereign jouissance of
the mother's body denied to the child. Secondly, what is occluded is
what Freud already theorised when he spoke of subjects' adaption to
and 'gain' from their illness, as a way of organising their access to
jouissance in defiance of the demands of the big Other. Even if the
subject has undergone the most frightful trauma, Lacan argues, what
matters is how this trauma has come to be signified subsequently and
retrospectively by the subject around the fundamental fantasy. S/he
must be made to avow that the subject-position they have taken up
towards their life is something that they have subjectified, and have
an ongoing stake in. This is why, in Seminar II, Lacan quips that the
injunction of psychoanalysis is mange ton dasein!- eat your existence!
He means that at the close of the analysis, the subject should come to
internalise and so surpass the way that it has so far organised your
life and relations to Others. It is this point, accordingly, that the
ethics of Lacanian psychoanalysis is announced. Lacan's name for what
occurs at the end of the cure is traversing the fantasy. But since
what the fantasy does, for Lacan, is veil from the subject his/her own
implication in and responsibility for how s/he experiences the world,
to traverse the fantasy is to reavow subjective responsibility. To
traverse the fantasy, Lacan theorises, is to cease positing that the
Other has taken the 'lost' object of desire. It is to accept that this
object is something posited by oneself as a means to compensate for
the experienced trauma of castration. One comes to accept that
castration is not an event with a winner (the father) and a loser (the
subject), but a structurally necessary factum for human-beings as
such, to which all speaking subjects have been subjected. What equally
follows is the giving up of the resentful and acquisitive project of
trying to reclaim the objet petit a from the Other, and 'settling the
scores'. This gives way to an identification with the place of this
object that is at once within the fabric of the world, and yet which
stands out from it. (Note that this is one Lacanian reading of 'where
It was, there I shall be'). The subject who has traversed the fantasy,
for Lacan, is the subject who has not ceded on its desire. This desire
is no longer fixed by the coordinates of the fundamental fantasy. S/he
is able to accept that the fully satisfying sexual object, that which
would fulfil the sovereign desire of the mother, does not exist. S/he
is thus equally open to accepting that the big Other, and/or any
concrete Other supposed by the subject to be its authoritive
representative(s), does not have what s/he has 'lost'. Lacan puts this
by saying that what the subject can now avow is that the Other does
not Exist: that it, too, lacks, and what it does and wants depends
upon the interventions of the subject. The subject is, finally, able
to thereby accept that what it took to be its place in the order of
the Other is not a finally fixed thing. It can now avow without
reserve that it is a lacking subject, or, as Lacan will also say, a
subject of desire, but that the metonymic sliding of this desire has
no final term. Rather than being ceaselessly caught in the lure of the
object-cause of desire, this desire is now free to circle around on
itself, as it were, and desire only itself, in what is a point of
strange final proximity between Lacan and the Nietzcheanism he
scarcely ever mentioned in his works.
5. Bibliography
Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 2001).
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I trans. John
Forrester. Edited by J.A. Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni. Press,
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