Jacques Lacan
In his
discussion of the absolute division between the unconscious and the
consciousness (or between id and ego), Freud introduces the idea of the human
self, or subject, as radically split, divided between these two realms of
conscious and unconscious. On the one hand, our usual (Western humanist) ideas
of self or personhood are defined by operations of consciousness, including
rationality, free will, and self-reflection. For Freud and for psychoanalysis
in general, however, actions, thought, belief, and the concepts of
"self" are all determined or shaped by the unconscious, and its
drives and desires.
Jacques
Lacan is a French psychoanalyst. He was originally trained as a psychiatrist,
and in the 1930s and 40s worked with psychotic patients; he began in the 1950s
to develop his own version of psychoanalysis, based on the ideas articulated in
structuralist linguistics and anthropology. You might think of Lacan as Freud +
Saussure, with a dash of Levi-Strauss, and even some seasoning of Derrida. But
his main influence/precursor is Freud. Lacan reinterprets Freud in light of
structuralist and post-structuralist theories, turning psychoanalysis from an
essentially humanist philosophy or theory into a post-structuralist one.
One of
the basic premises of humanism, as you recall, is that there is such a thing as
a stable self, that has all those nice things like free will and
self-determination. Freud's notion of the unconscious was one of the ideas that
began to question, or to destabilize, that humanist ideal of the self; he was
one of the precursors of post-structuralism in that regard. But Freud hoped
that, by bringing the contents of the unconscious into consciousness, he could
minimize repression and neurosis--he makes a famous declaration about the
relation between the unconscious and conscious, saying that "Wo Es war,
soll Ich werden": Where It was, shall I be." In other words, the
"it," or "id" (unconscious) will be replaced by the
"I", by consciousness and self-identity. Freud's goal was to
strengthen the ego, the "I" self, the conscious/rational identity, so
it would be more powerful than the unconscious.
For
Lacan, this project is impossible. The ego can never take the place of the
unconscious, or empty it out, or control it, because, for Lacan, the ego or
"I" self is only an illusion, a product of the unconscious itself. In
Lacanian psychoanalysis, the unconscious is the ground of all being.
Where
Freud is interested in investigating how the polymorphously perverse child
forms an unconscious and a superego and becomes a civilized and productive (as
well as correctly heterosexual) adult, Lacan is interested in how the infant
gets this illusion we call a "self." His essay on the Mirror Stage
describes that process, showing how the infant forms an illusion of an ego, of
a unified conscious self identified by the word "I."
Central
to the conception of the human, in Lacan, is the notion that the unconscious,
which governs all factors of human existence, is structured like a language. He
bases this on Freud's account of the two main mechanisms of unconscious
processes, condensation and displacement. Both are essentially linguistic
phenomena, where meaning is either condensed (in metaphor) or displaced (in
metonymy). Lacan notes that Freud's dream analyses, and most of his analyses of
the unconscious symbolism used by his patients, depend on word-play--on puns, associations,
etc. that are chiefly verbal. Lacan says that the
contents of the unconscious are acutely aware of language, and particularly of
the structure of language.
And here
he follows ideas laid out by Saussure, but modifies them a bit. Where Saussure
talked about the relations between signifier and signified, which form a sign,
and insisted that the structure of language is the negative relation among
signs (one sign is what it is because it is not another sign), Lacan focuses on
relations between signifiers alone. The elements in the unconscious--wishes,
desires, images--all form signifiers (and they're usually expressed in verbal
terms), and these signifiers form a "signifying chain"--one signifier
has meaning only because it is not some other signifier. For Lacan, there are
no signifieds; there is nothing that a signifier ultimately refers to. If there
were, then the meaning of any particular signifier would be relatively
stable--there would be (in Saussure's terms) a relation of signification between
signifier and signified, and that relation would create or guarantee some kind
of meaning. Lacan says those relations of signification don't exist (in the
unconscious, at least); rather, there are only the negative relations,
relations of value, where one signifier is what it is because it's not
something else.
Because
of this lack of signifieds, Lacan says, the chain of
signifiers--x=y=z=b=q=0=%=|=s (etc.)--is constantly sliding and shifting and
circulating. There is no anchor, nothing that ultimately gives meaning or
stability to the whole system. The chain of signifiers is constantly in play
(in Derrida's sense); there's no way to stop sliding down the chain--no way to
say "oh, x means this," and have it be definitive. Rather, one
signifier only leads to another signifier, and never to a signified. It's kind
of like a dictionary--one word only leads you to more words, but never to the
things the words supposedly represent.
Lacan
says this is what the unconscious looks like--a continually circulating chain
(or multiple chains) of signifiers, with no anchor--or, to use Derrida's terms,
no center. This is Lacan's linguistic translation of Freud's picture of the
unconscious as this chaotic realm of constantly shifting drives and desires.
Freud is interested in how to bring those chaotic drives and desires into
consciousness, so that they can have some order and sense and meaning, so they
can be understood and made manageable. Lacan, on the other hand, says that the
process of becoming an adult, a "self," is the process of trying to
fix, to stabilize, to stop the chain of signifiers so that stable
meaning--including the meaning of "I"--becomes possible. Though of
course Lacan says that this possibility is only an illusion, an image created
by a misperception of the relation between body and self.
But I'm
getting too far ahead of where we're going.
Freud
talks about the 3 stages of polymorphous perversity in infants: the oral, the
anal, and the phallic; it's the Oedipus complex and Castration complex that end
polymorphous perversity and create "adult" beings. Lacan creates
different categories to explain a similar trajectory, from infant to
"adult." He talks about 3 concepts--need, demand, and desire--that
roughly correspond to 3 phases of development, or 3 fields in which humans
develop--the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic. The Symbolic realm, which
is marked by the concept of desire (I'll explain this in more detail later) is
the equivalent of adulthood; or, more specifically for Lacan, the Symbolic realm
is the structure of language itself, which we have to enter into in order to
become speaking subjects, in order to say "I" and have "I"
designate something which appears to be stable.
Like
Freud, Lacan's infant starts out as something inseparable from its mother;
there's no distinction between self and other, between baby and mother (at
least, from the baby's perspective). In fact, the baby (for both Freud and
Lacan) is a kind of blob, with no sense of self or individuated identity, and
no sense even of its body as a coherent unified whole. This baby-blob is driven
by NEED; it needs food, it needs comfort/safety, it needs to be changed, etc.
These needs are satisfiable, and can be satisfied by an object. When the baby
needs food, it gets a breast (or a bottle); when it needs safety, it gets
hugged. The baby, in this state of NEED, doesn't recognize any distinction
between itself and the objects that meet its needs; it doesn't recognize that
an object (like a breast) is part of another whole person (because it doesn't
have any concept yet of "whole person"). There's no distinction
between it and anyone or anything else; there are only needs and things that
satisfy those needs.
This is
the state of "nature," which has to be broken up in order for culture
to be formed. This is true in both Freud's psychoanalysis and in Lacan's: the
infant must separate from its mother, form a separate identity, in order to
enter into civilization. That separation entails some kind of LOSS; when the
child knows the difference between itself and its mother, and starts to become
an individuated being, it loses that primal sense of unity (and
safety/security) that it originally had. This is the element of the tragic
built into psychoanalytic theory (whether Freudian or Lacanian): to become a
civilized "adult" always entails the profound loss of an original
unity, a non-differentiation, a merging with others (particularly the mother).
The baby
who has not yet made this separation, who has only needs which are satisfiable,
and which makes no distinction between itself and the objects that satisfy its
needs, exists in the realm of the REAL, according to Lacan. The Real is a place
(a psychic place, not a physical place) where there is this original unity.
Because of that, there is no absence or loss or lack; the Real is all fullness
and completeness, where there's no need that can't be satisfied. And because
there is no absence or loss or lack, there is no language in the Real.
Let me
back up a bit to explain that. Lacan here follows an argument Freud made about
the idea of loss. In a case study which appears in Freud's Beyond the
Pleasure Principle, Freud talks about his nephew,
aged about 18 months, who is playing a game with a spool tied with yarn. The
kid throws the spool away, and says "Fort," which is German for
"gone." He pulls the spool back in, and says "Da," which is
German for "here." Freud says that this game was symbolic for the
kid, a way of working out his anxiety about his mother's absence. When he threw
the spool and said "Fort," he replayed the experience of the loss of
a beloved object; when he reeled it in and said "Da," he got pleasure
from the restoration of the object.
Lacan
takes this case and focuses, of course, on the aspect of language it displays.
Lacan says that the fort/da game, which Freud said happened when his nephew was
about 18 months old, is about the child's entry into the Symbolic, or into the
structure of language itself. Lacan says that language is always about loss or
absence; you only need words when the object you want is gone. If your world
was all fullness, with no absence, then you wouldn't need language. (Jonathan
Swift, in Gulliver's Travels, has a version of this:
a culture where there is no language, and people carry all the objects they need
to refer to on their backs).
Thus in
the realm of the Real, according to Lacan, there is no language because there
is no loss, no lack, no absence; there is only complete fullness, needs and the
satisfaction of needs. Hence the Real is always beyond language,
unrepresentable in language (and therefore irretrievably lost when one enters
into language).
The
Real, and the phase of need, last from birth till somewhere between 6 and 18
months, when the baby blob starts to be able to distinguish between its body
and everything else in the world. At this point, the baby shifts from having
needs to having DEMANDS. Demands are not satisfiable with objects; a demand is
always a demand for recognition from another, for love from another. The
process works like this: the baby starts to become aware that it is separate
from the mother, and that there exist things that are not part of it; thus the
idea of "other" is created. (Note, however, that as yet the binary
opposition of "self/other" doesn't yet exist, because the baby still
doesn't have a coherent sense of "self"). That awareness of
separation, or the fact of otherness, creates an anxiety, a sense of loss. The
baby then demands a reunion, a return to that original sense of fullness and
non-separation that it had in the Real. But that is impossible, once the baby
knows (and this knowing, remember, is all happening on an unconscious level)
that the idea of an "other" exists. The baby demands to be filled by
the other, to return to the sense of original unity; the baby wants the idea of
"other" to disappear. Demand is thus the demand for the fullness, the
completeness, of the other that will stop up the lack the baby is experiencing.
But of course this is impossible, because that lack, or absence, the sense of
"other"ness, is the condition for the baby becoming a self/subject, a
functioning cultural being.
Because
the demand is for recognition from the other, it can't really be satisfied, if
only because the 6-to-18 month infant can't SAY what it wants. The baby cries,
and the mother gives it a bottle, or a breast, or a pacifier, or something, but
no object can satisfy the demand--the demand is for a response on a different
level. The baby can't recognize the ways the mother does respond to it, and
recognize it, because it doesn't yet have a conception of itself as a thing--it
only knows that this idea of "other" exists, and that it is separate
from the "other", but it doesn't yet have an idea of what its
"self" is.
This is
where Lacan's MIRROR STAGE happens. At this age--between 6 and 18 months--the
baby or child hasn't yet mastered its own body; it doesn't have control over
its own movements, and it doesn't have a sense of its body as a whole. Rather,
the baby experiences its body as fragmented, or in pieces--whatever part is
within its field of vision is there as long as the baby can see it, but gone
when the baby can't see it. It may see its own hand, but it doesn't know that
that hand belongs to it--the hand could belong to anyone, or no one. However,
the child in this stage can imagine itself as whole--because it has seen other
people, and perceived them as whole beings.
Lacan
says that at some point in this period, the baby will see itself in a mirror.
It will look at its reflection, then look back at a real person--its mother, or
some other person--then look again at the mirror image. The child moves
"from insufficiency to anticipation" in this action; the mirror, and
the moving back and forth from mirror image to other people, gives it a sense
that it, too, is an integrated being, a whole person. The child, still unable
to be whole, and hence separate from others (though it has this notion of
separation), in the mirror stage begins to anticipate being whole. It moves
from a "fragmented body" to an "orthopedic vision of its
totality", to a vision of itself as whole and integrated, which is
"orthopedic" because it serves as a crutch, a corrective instrument,
an aid to help the child achieve the status of wholeness.
What the
child anticipates is a sense of self as a unified separate whole; the child
sees that it looks like what "others" look like. Eventually, this
entity the child sees in the mirror, this whole being, will be a
"self," the entity designated by the word "I." What is really
happening, however, is an identification that is a MISRECOGNITION. The child
sees an image in the mirror; it thinks, that image is "ME". But it's
NOT the child; it's only an image. But another person (usually the mother) is
there to reinforce the misrecognition. The baby looks in the mirror, and looks
back at mother, and the mother says, "Yes, it's you!" She guarantees
the "reality" of the connection between the child and its image, and
the idea of the integrated whole body the child is seeing and identifying with.
The
child takes that image in the mirror as the summation of its entire being, its
"self." This process, of misrecognizing one's self in the image in
the mirror, creates the EGO, the thing that says "I." In Lacan's
terms, this misrecognition creates the "armor" of the subject, an
illusion or misperception of wholeness, integration, and totality that
surrounds and protects the fragmented body. To Lacan, ego, or self, or
"I"dentity, is always on some level a FANTASY, an identification with
an external image, and not an internal sense of separate whole identity.
This is
why Lacan calls the phase of demand, and the mirror stage, the realm of the
IMAGINARY. The idea of a self is created through an Imaginary identification
with the image in the mirror. The realm of the Imaginary is where the alienated
relation of self to its own image is created and maintained. The Imaginary is a
realm of images, whether conscious or unconscious. It's prelinguistic, and
preoedipal, but very much based in visual perception, or what Lacan calls
specular imaging.
The
mirror image, the whole person the baby mistakes as itself, is known in
psychoanalytic terminology as an "ideal ego," a perfect whole self
who has no insufficiency. This "ideal ego" becomes internalized; we
build our sense of "self," our "I"dentity, by
(mis)identifying with this ideal ego. By doing this, according to Lacan, we
imagine a self that has no lack, no notion of absence or incompleteness. The
fiction of the stable, whole, unified self that we see in the mirror becomes a
compensation for having lost the original oneness with the mother's body. In
short, according to Lacan, we lose our unity with the mother's body, the state
of "nature," in order to enter culture, but we protect ourselves from
the knowledge of that loss by misperceiving ourselves as not lacking
anything--as being complete unto ourselves.
Lacan
says that the child's self-concept (its ego or "I"dentity) will never
match up to its own being. Its IMAGO in the mirror is both smaller and more
stable than the child, and is always "other" than the
child--something outside it. The child, for the rest of its life, will
misrecognize its self as "other, as the image in the mirror that provides
an illusion of self and of mastery.
The
Imaginary is the psychic place, or phase, where the child projects its ideas of
"self" onto the mirror image it sees. The mirror stage cements a
self/other dichotomy, where previously the child had known only
"other," but not "self." For Lacan, the identification of
"self" is always in terms of "other." This is not the same
as a binary opposition, where "self"= what is not "other,"
and "other" = what is not "self." Rather, "self"
IS "other", in Lacan's view; the idea of the self, that inner being
we designate by "I," is based on an image, an other. The concept of
self relies on one's misidentification with this image of an other.
Lacan
uses the term "other" in a number of ways, which make it even harder
to grasp. First, and perhaps the easiest, is in the sense of self/other, where
"other" is the "not-me;" but, as we have seen, the
"other" becomes "me" in the mirror stage. Lacan also uses
an idea of Other, with a capital "o", to distinguish between the
concept of the other and actual others. The image the child sees in the mirror
is an other, and it gives the child the idea of Other as a structural
possibility, one which makes possible the structural possibility of
"I" or self. In other words, the child encounters actual others--its
own image, other people--and understands the idea of "Otherness,"
things that are not itself. According to Lacan, the notion of Otherness,
encountered in the Imaginary phase (and associated with demand), comes before
the sense of "self," which is built on the idea of Otherness.
When the
child has formulated some idea of Otherness, and of a self identified with its
own "other," its own mirror image, then the child begins to enter the
Symbolic realm. The Symbolic and the Imaginary are overlapping, unlike Freud's
phases of development; there's no clear marker or division between the two, and
in some respects they always coexist. The Symbolic order is the structure of
language itself; we have to enter it in order to become speaking subjects, and
to designate ourselves by "I." The foundation for having a self lies
in the Imaginary projection of the self onto the specular image, the other in
the mirror, and having a self is expressed in saying "I," which can
only occur within the Symbolic, which is why the two coexist.
The
fort/da game that the nephew played, in Freud's account, is in Lacan's view a
marker of the entry into the Symbolic, because Hans is using language to
negotiate the idea of absence and the idea of Otherness as a category or
structural possibility. The spool, according to Lacan, serves as an "objet
petit a," or "objet petit autre"--an object which is a little
"other," a small-o other. In throwing it away, the child recognizes
that others can disappear; in pulling it back, the child recognizes that others
can return. Lacan emphasizes the former, insisting that Little Hans is
primarily concerned with the idea of lack or absence of the "objet petit
autre."
The
"little other" illustrates for the child the idea of lack, of loss,
of absence, showing the child that it isn't complete in and of itself. It is
also the gateway to the Symbolic order, to language, since language itself is
premised on the idea of lack or absence.
Lacan
says these ideas--of other and Other, of lack and absence, of the
(mis)identification of self with o/Other--are all worked out on an individual
level, with each child, but they form the basic structures of the Symbolic
order, of language, which the child must enter in order to become an adult
member of culture. Thus the otherness acted out in the fort/da game (as well as
by the distinctions made in the Mirror Phase between self and other, mother and
child) become categorical or structural ideas. So, in the Symbolic, there is a
structure (or structuring principle) of Otherness, and a structuring principle
of Lack.
The Other
(capital O) is a structural position in the Symbolic order. It is the place
that everyone is trying to get to, to merge with, in order to get rid of the
separation between "self" and "other." It is, in Derrida's
sense, the CENTER of the system, of the Symbolic and/or of language itself. As
such, the Other is the thing to which every element relates. But, as the
center, the Other (again, not a person but a position) can't be merged with.
Nothing can be in the center with the Other, even though everything in the
system (people, e.g.) want to be. So the position of the Other creates and
sustains a never-ending LACK, which Lacan calls DESIRE. Desire is the desire to
be the Other. By definition, desire can never be fulfilled: it's not desire for
some object (which would be need) or desire for love or another person's
recognition of oneself (which would be demand), but desire to be the center of
the system, the center of the Symbolic, the center of language itself.
The
center has a lot of names in Lacanian theory. It's the Other; it's also called
the PHALLUS. Here's where Lacan borrows again from Freud's original Oedipus
theory.
The
mirror stage is pre-oedipal. The self is constructed in relation to an other,
to the idea of Other, and the self wants to merge with the Other. As in Freud's
world, the most important other in the child's life is the mother; so the child
wants to merge with its mother. In Lacan's terms, this is the child's demand
that the self/other split be erased. The child decides that it can merge with
the mother if it becomes what the mother wants it to be--in Lacan's terms, the
child tries to fulfill the mother's desire. The mother's desire (formed by her
own entry into the Symbolic, because she is already an adult) is to not have
lack, or Lack (or to be the Other, the center, the place where nothing is
lacking). This fits with the Freudian version of the Oedipus complex, where the
child wants to merge with its mother by having sexual intercourse with her. In
Freud's model, the idea of lack is represented by the lack of a penis. The boy
who wants to sleep with his mother wants to complete her lack by filling her up
with his penis.
In
Freud's view, what breaks this oedipal desire up, for boys anyway, is the
father, who threatens castration. The father threatens to make the boy
experience lack, the absence of the penis, if he tries to use his penis to make
up for the mother's lack of a penis. In Lacan's terms, the threat of castration
is a metaphor for the whole idea of Lack as a structural concept. For Lacan, it
isn't the real father who threatens castration. Rather, because the idea of
lack, or Lack, is essential to the concept of language, because the concept of
Lack is part of the basic structuration of language, the father becomes a
function of the linguistic structure. The Father, rather than being a person,
becomes a structuring principle of the Symbolic order.
For
Lacan, Freud's angry father becomes the Name-of-the-Father, or the
Law-of-the-Father, or sometimes just the Law. Submission to the rules of
language itself--the Law of the Father--is required in order to enter into the
Symbolic order. To become a speaking subject, you have to be subjected to, you
have to obey, the laws and rules of language. Lacan designates the idea of the
structure of language, and its rules, as specifically paternal. He calls the
rules of language the Law-of-the-Father in order to link the entry into the
Symbolic, the structure of language, to Freud's notion of the oedipus and
castration complexes.
The
Law-of-the-Father, or Name-of-the-Father, is another term for the Other, for
the center of the system, the thing that governs the whole structure--its shape
and how all the elements in the system can move and form relationships. This
center is also called the PHALLUS, to underline even more the patriarchal
nature of the Symbolic order. The Phallus, as center, limits the play of
elements, and gives stability to the whole structure. The Phallus anchors the
chains of signifiers which, in the unconscious, are just floating and unfixed,
always sliding and shifting. The Phallus stops play, so that signifiers can
have some stable meaning. It is because the Phallus is the center of the
Symbolic order, of language, that the term "I" designates the idea of
the self (and, additionally, why any other word has stable meaning).
The
Phallus is not the same as the penis. Penises belong to individuals; the
Phallus belongs to the structure of language itself. No one has it, just like
no one governs language or rules language. Rather, the Phallus is the center.
It governs the whole structure, it's what everyone wants to be (or have), but
no one can get there (no element of the system can take the place of the
center). That's what Lacan calls DESIRE: the desire, which is never satisfied, because
it can never be satisfied, to be the center, to rule the system.
Lacan
says that boys can think they have a shot at being the Phallus, at occupying
the position of center, because they have penises. Girls have a harder time
misperceiving themselves as having a shot at the Phallus because they are (as
Freud says) constituted by and as lack, lacking a penis, and the Phallus is a
place where there is no lack. But, Lacan says, every subject in language is
constituted by/as lack, or Lack. The only reason we have language at all is
because of the loss, or lack, of the union with the maternal body. In fact, it
is the necessity to become part of "culture," to become subjects in
language, that forces that absence, loss, lack.
The
distinction between the sexes is significant in Lacan's theory, though not in
the same way it is in Freud's. This is what Lacan talks about in "The
Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious," on p. 741. He has two drawings
there. One is of the word "Tree" over a picture of a tree--the basic
Saussurean concept, of signifier (word) over signified (object). Then he has
another drawing, of two identical doors (the signifieds). But over each door is
a different word: one says "Ladies" and the other says "Gentlemen."
Lacan explains, on p. 742:
"A
train arrives at a station. A little boy and a little girl, brother and sister,
are seated in a compartment face to face next to the window through which the
buildings along the station platform can be seen passing as the train pulls to
a stop. 'Look,' says the brother, 'We're at Ladies!' 'Idiot!' replies his
sister, 'Can't you see we're at Gentlemen.'"
This
anecdote shows how boys and girls enter the Symbolic order, the structure of
language, differently. In Lacan's view, each child can only see the signifier
of the other gender; each child constructs its world view, its understanding of
the relation between sfr and sfd in naming locations, as the consequence of
seeing an "other." As Lacan puts it (742), "For these children,
Ladies and Gentlemen will be henceforth two countries toward which each of
their souls will strive on divergent wings..." Each child, each sex, has a
particular position within the Symbolic order; from that position, each sex can
only see (or signify) the otherness of the other sex. You might take Lacan's
drawing of the two doors literally: these are the doors, with their gender
distinctions, through which each child must pass in order to enter into the
Symbolic realm.
So, to
summarize. Lacan's theory starts with the idea of the Real; this is the union
with the mother's body, which is a state of nature, and must be broken up in
order to build culture. Once you move out of the Real, you can never get back,
but you always want to. This is the first idea of an irretrievable loss or lack.
Next
comes the Mirror stage, which constitutes the Imaginary. Here you grasp the
idea of others, and begin to understand Otherness as a concept or a structuring
principle, and thus begin to formulate a notion of "self". This
"self" (as seen in the mirror) is in fact an other, but you
misrecognize it as you, and call it "self." (Or, in non-theory
language, you look in the mirror and say "hey, that's me." But it's
not--it's just an image).
This
sense of self, and its relation to others and to Other, sets you up to take up
a position in the Symbolic order, in language. Such a position allows you to
say "I", to be a speaking subject. "I" (and all other
words) have a stable meaning because they are fixed, or anchored, by the
Other/Phallus/Name-of-the-Father/Law, which is the center of the Symbolic, the
center of language.
In
taking up a position in the Symbolic, you enter through a gender-marked
doorway; the position for girls is different than the position for boys. Boys
are closer to the Phallus than girls, but no one is or has the Phallus--it's
the center. Your position in the Symbolic, like the position of all other
signifying elements (signifiers) is fixed by the Phallus; unlike the
unconscious, the chains of signifiers in the Symbolic don't circulate and slide
endlessly because the Phallus limits play.
Paradoxically--as
if all this wasn't bad enough!--the Phallus and the Real are pretty similar.
Both are places where things are whole, complete, full, unified, where there's
no lack, or Lack. Both are places that are inaccessible to the human
subject-in-language. But they are also opposite: the Real is the maternal, the
ground from which we spring, the nature we have to separate from in order to
have culture; the Phallus is the idea of the Father, the patriarchal order of
culture, the ultimate idea of culture, the position which rules everything in
the world.
As you
might imagine, feminist critics, whom we'll start talking about on Wednesday,
have a lot to say about Lacan, as they do about Freud.
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Colorado, Boulder.
Last revision: October 8, 2001
ŇJacques LacanÓ, Professor Mary Klages.
Associate Professor of English, University of Colorado, Boulder. 04/11/2008 <http://www.colorado.edu/English/courses/ENGL2012Klages/1997lacan.html>
Academic
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BelŽn Garc’a Castiglioni
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