Weeks 7 Lacan 1 The unconscious is structured

Weeks 7 Lacan #1

• “The unconscious is structured like a language. ” (Jacques Lacan)

• His procedure is to recast Freud’s key concepts and mechanisms into the linguistic mode, viewing the human mind not as pre-existent to, but as constituted by the language we use. (Abrams 252)

Ferdinand de Saussure • Course in General Linguistics (1915) A sign Signifier Signified A set of speech sounds, or of marks on a page The concept, or idea, which is the meaning of the sign

Child Self --fragmented Reflection in the mirror Subject Object Self-image --unified, integrated --narcissistic --an ideal ego --is not Signified Signifier Self Identity (fictive)

The Mirror Stage • The moment when the infant learns to identify with his or her image in a mirror, and so begins to develop a sense of a separate self. (Abrams 252)

The Mirror Stage • For Lacan, the ego is just this narcissistic process whereby we bolster up a fictive sense of unitary selfhood by finding something in the world with which we can identify. (Eagleton 165)

The Father • = the Law (e. g. the social taboo on incest. ) • A wider familial and social network. • The first appearance of the Law and the opening up of unconscious desire occur at the same time. (Eagleton 165)

The Phallus • Signifies the father, and thus sexual difference. • The presence of the father, symbolized by the phallus, teaches the child that it must take up a place in the family which is defined by sexual difference, by exclusion (it cannot be its parent’s lover) and by absence (it must relinquish its earlier bonds to the mother’s body). (Eagleton 167)

The Symbolic Order • The big Other; the Name-of-the-Father • The child’s identity as a subject, it comes to perceive, is constituted by its relations of difference and similarity to the other subjects around it. • The pre-given structure of social and sexual roles and relations which make up the family and society. (Eagleton 167)

Difference → Language • In gaining access to language, the small child unconsciously learns that a sign has meaning only by virtue of its difference from other signs, and learns also that a sign presupposes the absence of the object it signifies. (Eagleton 166)

The imaginary -Pre-linguistic, pre-Oedipal stage -No clear distinction between the subject and an object, or between itself and the external world. The mirror stage The moment when the infant learns to identify with his or her image in a mirror, and so begins a sense of a separate self. The symbolic -After the acquisition of language, “the law of the father” -the infant subject assimilates the inherited system of linguistic differences (male/female, father/son, mother/daughter).

Desire • All desire springs from a lack, which it strives continually to fill. • Human language works by such lack: the absence of the real objects which signs designate. • To enter language is to become a prey to desire. (Eagleton 168)

Desire • All processes of linguistic expression and interpretation, driven by “desire” for a lost and unachievable object, move incessantly along a chain or unstable signifiers, without any possibility of coming to rest on a fixed signified, or presence. (Abrams 252)

The Real • The inaccessible realm which is always beyond the reach of signification, always outside the symbolic order. • In particular, we are severed from the mother’s body. (Eagleton 168)

Object of desire • We have to made do instead with substitute objects, what Lacan calls the “objet petit a, ’ with which we try to plug the gap at the centre of our being. (Eagleton 168)

Object of desire • To come too close to our object of desire threatens to uncover the lack that is, in fact, necessary for our desire to persist, so that, ultimately, desire is most interested not in fully attaining the object of desire but in keeping our distance, thus allowing desire to persist. (Felluga)

Desire = the Road Runner

The Unconscious • The unconscious is just a continual movement and activity of signifiers, whose signified are often inaccessible to us because they are repressed.

• Freud’s views of the mental workings of dreams → Lacan’s play of signifiers (Abrams 252)

The Unconscious • Lacan makes us recognize that the unconscious is not some kind of seething, tumultuous, private region “inside” us, but an effect of our relations with one another. (Eagleton 173)

The Unconscious • The unconscious is elusive not so much because it is buried deep within our minds, but because it is a kind of vast, tangled network which surrounds us and weaves itself through us, and which can therefore never be pinned down. (Eagleton 173)

Lacan’s Poststructualism • (1) the inalienable split, or “difference, ” that inhabits the self • (2) the endless chain of displacements in the quest of meaning

Lacan vs. Freud • Freud works within an empirical, humanist tradition that still believes in a stable self’s ability to access the “truth. ” • Lacan questions any simple notion of either “self” or “truth, ” exploring instead how knowledge is constructed by ways of linguistic and ideological structures that organize not only our conscious but also our unconscious lives. (Felluga)

Psychoanalytical Reading • We could construct a “sub-text” for the work—a text which runs within it, visible at certain ‘symptomatic’ points of ambiguity, evasion or overemphasis. • All literary works contain one or more such sub-texts, and they might be spoken as the ‘unconscious’ of the work itself. (Eagleton 178)

Psychoanalytical Reading • The work’s insights, as with all writing, are deeply related to its blindnesses: what it does not say, and how it does not say it, may be as important as what it articulates; what seems absent, marginal or ambivalent about it may provide a central clue to its meanings. (Eagleton 178)

The Other • it is the place of language where subjectivity is constituted • it is the place of primal speech linked to the Father • The Other makes the subject without him knowing it.

References • Abrams, M. H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 7 th ed. Harcourt Brace, 1999. • Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory. U of Minnesota, 1983. • Felluga, Dino. http: //www. purdue. edu/guidetotheory/psychoanalysis

• The End