Lacan Key Terms, Basic Concepts

8/3/2019 Lacan Key Terms, Basic Concepts

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/lacan-key-terms-basic-concepts 1/10

( '. y /)

LACAN: Key Terms, basic concepts .

. . h a way as to reveal the constructed nature

"Lacan rewrites Freud's pro~ect Ins~c oststructuralists Lacan attac~s what heof a certain historical self. like mo~ p sed to know, the subject of .

enerally cans the subject, t~e subject s~ppo f science etc. Often this reads as If~ertainty, the Cartesia~ subject, the ~UbJ:~!~I, but this is not so. All these ~efertohe is attacking the notion of the self Ing t ti n In order to reveal the baSically

a historically institutio~al~ze~ s~lf-r~pre~n '~-il~~ge, Lacan has to show that al.1unhealthy nature of this tnStltut~onaIZ~ se the immediate self-presence that It .

subjectivity is con~tructed an9 ISnot%'r:'PZust show how it is constructed, th~t IS,naturally thinks of Itself as being. An ~. k' d of presence. Their presence ISa

out of signs: ~igr:'Sof coufrsear~ a P~~~:~~r~~ce' in fact their presence iskind of precipitanon ou~0 a sys em tl' a being that is constitutedessentially bound up with absence ~onsequ~n y. This kind of revelation,through signs has the same kind of essence as sign,s. b' t m st reject at allLacan and others would hold, is just what the Cartesian ~u ~ec u. .costs because if it is true, then this self cannot be what It thinks of .'tself a~:etng.

And ~ince a whole host of actions in the world derive fro~ the.self-,,:nage, en awhole host of actions can suddenly not be what they had obviously been

before." (Tony Jackson, PHIL-LIt Discussio~ ~is.t,23 May 199~) 1: Language1.1. Lacan questions the symmetry and equilibrtum between ~lg~lfier and

signified in Saussure; he reverses the relationship signifierl signified to SIs,Signifier over signified. The bar separating the two stresses the cleavage .,

between them. The signified slips beneath the signifier, resists attempts to pm Itdown. Signifiers refer not to objects but to the chain of language, that is, to other

signifiers -- Lacan uses the metaphor of the signifying chain, the chain of speechcomprising the rings of a necklace that is a ring in another necklace made of

rings. The characteristic sense of being a person or having a personality comesfrom the self-perpetuating imperative that propels the signifying chain. Lacan

posits, then, the primacy to the signifier -- an active, colonizing power over the

signified.

1.2. the signifier is paradigmatic -- selected from and having value in relation to

other signifiers, and, hence, commutable (able to be replaced by another

signifier); the signified is sytagmatic, or contextual, having meaning in relation to

other signifieds (as in, 'meaning is only cultural')

1.3. the signifier represents a conceptualized reality, not reality itself ;1.4.

essentially, anything that means in a subject's world -- or to put it another way,

any thing that for the subject is the world -- is a signifier (a signifier is not just

language) however all of our signifiers are mediated by language. [KS, approx.]

TJ has this lengthier explanation: For the most part we "naturally" tend to assume

that signifiers ultimately refer to a signified that is itself and only itself, apart from

signs. The signified seems naturally the real thing, and the signifier simply stands

in for that real thing which in itself seems to need no sign in order to exist. But in

fact the real thing is just what you cannot have once you have signs. Once you

have signs, you can have, for human consciousness, "only" re-presentation. No

self-identical presence apart from signs can be discovered once you have signs



at all, because as Saussure argued (and the Saussurean turn to difference is

indispensable for all this), meaning is a function of a systematized difference

between signs. The real thing is constantty deferred, constantly getting away

precisely as we turn our (inevitably linguistic) attention to it. Think again of what itmeans that we should ever need signs. Try to imagine something existing for a

human consciousness apart from meaning which is always a function of signs.

1.5. we can have agreement on what words mean because there are points de

capiton, upholstery studs, that keep the signifier from shifting completely out of

our control.

1.6. like Heidegger Lacan believes it is impossible to step outside of language; in

a revision of Heidegger's empty and full speech, Lacan sees speech that carries

the illusion of the intact ego as empty, in the Imaginary register: the subject does

not speak but is spoken. Full speech follows the acceptance of the self as

existing in the domain of inter-subjectivity: one ceases to speak of oneself as an

object. [MS}1.7. analysts listen to what is not in the speech of the analysand, what s/he is not

saying -. listen to the patient's Other. [MS1

1.8. all speech is an effect; there is a difference between what a speaker meansand what the speakers words mean. (they mean more, Other, what is lacking,

etc.) [MS]

1.9. speech is the dimension by which the subject's desires are expressed and

articulated [MS]

1.10. however, language is of the Other, its meanings can never be fully

controlled, its prefabricated structures are inadequate to the expression of one's

desire [MSk]

1.11. the law that the father introduces is in particular the law of the languagesystem. [MS]

1.12. a reservation: that Lacan in locating the self and reality only in language,

thus effectively writing out visual and physical experience; this appears to

deracinate us from biology, history. [MSk] Lacan and other theorists (beginning

with Pierce) might reply that however 'real' biology and history (as existence in a

concrete universe) are, they are only experienced as real though our signifying

systems.

2. Metaphor and metonymy

2.1. following Jakobson; the function of selection, based on similarity, is seen as

metaphoric; Lacan as associates this with Freud's conception of condensation (in

The Interpretation of Dreams); the combinative function, based on contiguity, isseen as metonymic; Lacan associates this with displacement. (each has a tint of

the other). The metaphoric is associated with the concept of symptom, the

metonymic with the Origin of de sire. l.acan's preference is for metaphor -- the

ability of language to signify something other than what it says. All words are

metaphoric, mean much more than they mean -- are extensions in various ways:

see "The Insistence of the Letter ...". Metaphor is a system of implying and

imputing value. Metaphor implies choice, choice implies value judgment. [MS}

3. Language and absence

3.1. a signifier is always not its signified; language assures/creates the absence



of the object;

3.2. the subject as constituted in language is not itself -- the enunciating 'I' and

the enunciated T are different; the illusion of unity as all that is given -- as

language creates the illusion of the unity and stability of objects and the world.

3.3. "Language is empty because it is just an endless process of difference and

absence: instead of being able to possess anything in its fullness, the child will

now simply move from one signifier to another, along a linguistic chain which is

potentially infinite. Along this metonymic chain of signifiers, meanings, or

signifies, will be produced; but not object or person can ever be fully present in

this chain, because as we have seen with Derrida its effect is to divide and

differentiate all identities." [E]

3.4. "This potentially endless movement from one signifier to another is what

Lacan means by desire. All desire springs from a lack, which it strives continually

to fill. Human language works by such a lack: the absence of the real objects

which signs designate, the fact that words have meaning only be virtue of theabsence and exclusion of others." To enter language, then, is to become a prey

to desire: language, Lacan remarks, is what hollows being into desire. [E]

4. Unary and binary signifiers

4.1. The unary signifier is as it were the initial signifying break, the trace of

repression suffered by the drives -- as the mark of the subject's rupture with its

being. The drives have represented the last, already partially mediated contact of

the subject with its being; the unary signifier attests to the permanent

disappearance of that being ....The unconsciousness is the area where these se/f-

losses as well as future ones are inscribed. [KS]

4.2. The lack of referent or order opens up a world of play, of differences, in

which the binary signifiers make their structures: the non-meaning of the unarysignifier initiates the process of endless displacements and substitutions which

comprise Signification within the Lacanian scheme. [KS]

4.3. At the same time, by deracinating the subject from contact with itself, and

opening it up to the structure of binary signifiers, the unary signifier deprives the

subject of any autonomy, is henceforth wholly subordinated to the field of social

meaning and desire. [KS1

4.4. the binary signifier is the construction of signification in terms of difference

and relation, and this forms a closed signifying system -- e.g. father and mother

form each the meaning of the other, neither is complete without the other. This is

the creation of paradigmatic and syntagmatic relationships.

4.5. Lacan attributes to the binary signifier a number of momentous and closelyconnected events: the creation of meaning; the exclusion of the drives; the

formation of the unconscious; the emergence of the subject into the symbolic

order, otherwise known as the field of the Other; and the inauguration of desire.5.

the Mirror Stage

5.1. At the mirror stage the infant is able to imagine itself as a coherent and self-

governing entity; there is a sense of difference from the Other - the burden of

identity is to be not whole; the Other warrants the existence of the child; this is an

armor of alienating identity, the child moves from insufficiency to anticipation.

[MS]



5.2. identity does not equal identification; the subject will never be truly himself or

herself; when the fragmented body gives way to the armor of the subject, the

ego is formed.

5.3. the ego is the enemy, constituted by alienating identifications [MS]5.4. human subjects continue through life to look for an imaginary wholeness and

unity [MS15.5. the subject is comprised of lack, the lack of being that results from the

subject's dependence on the Other. The Other is the place where the subject is

born. [MS]

5.6. the narcissistic process whereby by identifying with images we bolster up a

fictive sense of unitary selfhood. [E]

5.7. "The mirror event in Lacan's terms is the opening, so to speak, of the ego.

The child must go through some initial form of recognizing itself as a separate

object in the world. In order to identify itself as a self, it must see itself as a self

among selves. But this if you think about it is an odd moment. How can youidentify yourself unless you are some how apart from yourself precisely in order

to recognize yourself? This is true implicitly in the very notion of self-

identification. You must be a split self in order to think of yourself as a self at all,

and in fact in order to be a self as we take that word. The concept of self-

identification requires both sameness and difference to make sense, though

typically the difference is misrecognized by the infant." (TJ Jun. 1/95»)

6. the subject

6.1. the subject and the self are socially produced [MS]; the subject is constituted

by the symbolic, by the intersubjective system of language and culture into which

the subject is born [MSk]

6.2. the subject is not a person but a position, an 'I' dehinged relationally, by hisor her difference from the 'you' he or she addresses [MSk]

7. the Imaginary

7.1. a condition in which we lack any defined center of self, in which what self we

have seems to pass into objects and objects into it, in a ceaseless closed

exchange [E J

7.2. the Imaginary surely drives from the experience of the image -- and of the

imago --and we are meant to retain its spatial and visual connotations. [J]

7.3. The Imaginary may thus be described as a peculiar spatial configuration,

whose bodies primarily entertain relationships of inside/outside with one another,

which is them traversed and reorganized by that primordial rivalry and

transitivistic substitution of imagoes, that indistinction of primary narcissism andaggressivity, from which our conceptions of good and evil derive.[J]

7.4. "That order of the subject's experience which is dominated by identification

and duality ... not only precedes the symbolic order, which introduces the subject

to language and Oedipal triangulation, but continues to coexist with it afterward.

The two registers complement each other, the symbolic establishing the

differences which are such and essential part of cultural existence, and the

imaginary making it possible to discover correspondences and homologies. The

imaginary order is most classically exemplified by the mirror stage." [KS]

8. The Real: history itself [J] ; That which is in the world but beyond signification.

4



9. The Ego

9.1. identity does not equal identification; the subject will never be truly himself or

herself; when the fragmented body gives way to the armor of the subject the ego

is formed.9.2. the ego is the enemy, constituted by alienating identifications [MS]

9.3. human subjects continue through life to look for an imaginary wholeness and

unity [MS]

9.4. the subject is comprised of lack, the lack of being that results from the

subject's dependence on the Other. The Other is the place where the subject is

born. [MS]

9.5. the ego is a function or effect of a subject which is always dispersed, never

identical with itself, strung out along a the chains of the discourses which

constitute it. [E)

9.6. the imaginary unity of the enunciated and enunciating I [E]

9.7. the pronoun I stands in for the ever-elusive subject, which will always slipthrough the nets of any particular piece of language; and this is equivalent to

saying that I cannot mean and-be simultaneously. I am not which I think, I think

where I am not, wrote Lacan. [E]

9.8 "To be ever so brief, the ego, to Lacan, is what is formed as the human

organism is absorbed into signs or symbols and in the process squeezed out of

what Lacan calls the real. Now while there is always an ego, the nature of any

particular ego can vary depending first on both the sign systems through which it

is constituted and its particular processing through those signs. So though an

analyst always confronts a personal history and an individual voice, he also

confronts generic voices that are speaking the person, so to speak." (Tony

Jackson Phil-Lit post April 95)9.9 'When Lacan speaks of the unconscious as being structured like a language

he means that its nature and interpretation are analogous to language as

described by Saussure and those who have come after him. Confronted with the

self, we have the speaking voice, the "conscious" self, the one who is called into

a kind of presence through a name. But this self, like any piece of language

cannot occur in a vacuum. Its total meaning/being cannot be present just in it

self, as total meaning/being is fundamentally not present in language. A given

piece of language takes on meaning because of its structured difference from

other pieces of language. What we have before us is the one piece of language,

but when we search out its meanings, we turn to systematically related pieces of

language that are at once indispensably "present" and entirely absent, that isunconscious. In a sense unspoken rules of discourse operate to repress, to filter

out all but a particular set of meanings, though as literary types know especially

well, the filter can be ever so changeable. The manifest self, similarly, must arise

from a systematic and unconscious repression of the difference by which it is

constituted. We are getting structured, so to speak, by and as signs in the most

fundamental way before we can think or reflect upon meaning, value etc. We

have as adults a given sense of self, but that given or manifest self is inhabited or

constituted by a system of signs that are not readily available to consciousness

precisely because the consciousness in question is given its nature by the



system of signs and much of the specificity of that system was set in place before

all but the most rudimentary thinking was possible. An observer can, however,

from studying the actual signsllanguage of the self in question, the way the self

speaks, make inferences about the constitutive signification (unconscious) of thatself." (TJ 31 Mar 1995)

10. Unconscious

10.1. for Lacan what is important about Freud's ideas of the unconscious is not

that the unconscious exists but that it has a structure [MS]

10.2. the rhetoric of the unconscious is its deep structures which create meaning

through certain patterns of repetition and exchange.

10.3. the subject [the self] is comprised of lack, the lack of being that results from

the subject s dependence on the Other. The Other is the place where the subject

is born. [MS]

10.4. the unconscious comes to being only in language [MSk]

10.5. the unconscious is Other -- the human subject is divided; the unconscious

has a linguistic structure; the subject is inhabited by the Other; [MS]

10.6. the unconscious always attains its goal, even if by deferral. the

unconscious is the discourse of the Other because the Subject does not know

that he desires what the Other desires. That Other is, in Lacan, the Oedipal

drama (the father is the real Other) [parents are Object grande A ); but it is also

that part of the self which the Subject always fails to recognize (or misrecognizes,

as Lacan says) because he does not know it is a part of himself; his ownunconscious. [FM]

10.7. the separation from the mother under the pressure of the law -- the desire

for the mother is driven underground; it is only when the child acknowledges the

taboo or prohibition which the father symbolizes that it represses its guilty desire,

and that desire just is what is called the unconscious [E]10.8. the unconscious is just a continual movement and activity of signifiers,

whose signifieds are often inaccessible to us because they are repressed. [E]

10.9. The unconsciousness is the area where the self-losses of Signification, of

the unary signifier cutting the subject off from its last vestige of contact with itself,

the already partially-mediated drives, are inscribed. [KS]

10.10. the unconscious is the discourse of the Other because the Subject does

not know that he desires what the Other desires. That Other is in Lacan the

Oedipal drama (the father of the real Other); but it is also that part of himself

which the Subject always fails to recognize (or misrecognizes, as Lacan says)

because he does not know it is a part of himself; his own unconscious. [FM]

10.11. the unconscious is not some seething, tumultuous, private region insideus, but an effect of our relations with one another. The unconscious is, so to

speak, outside rather than within us -- or rather it exists between us , as our

relationships do. I t 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. [E]

11. The Law of the Father

11.1. refers in the first place to the social taboo on incest, but in a sense more

importantly, it is a recognition of the larger familial and social structure of which-6



the self is (only a) part in a role which is already there for it, laid down for it bythe pra9!£§ of the soc~ty into which it h~isbeen born. -_ --.,,-------

11.2. tne law that the father introduces in particular is the I~w of the language

system.11.3. the appearance of the Father drives the child from its mother's body and in

doing so drives the desire for union underground into the unconscious (creates-- ... -~the unconscious). The Law and the unconscious appear at the same moment.

11.4. The mirror stage initiates a process which CUlminates in the Oedipus

process or-paternal metaphor. The child submits to the Law of the Father. The

paternal figure serves to !i~arate the child rromanalf-encompassing relation

with the mother. The Father represents the Law, embodies the power of the~ . - - - - - - - -~ --~-."--'------~nd the threat of castration. Accepting his authority and phallic status is

the precondition of the child s ha\7lngaQlace within the socio-~y_,!!!!olJ.c~Q_rd~r,

name and a speaking position .... The Phallus subjects_Roth sexest() !be

Symbolic.] ------- --------- -~1'1.5.the separation oJfrom the mother under the p~essure of the law -- thedesire for tlieillOTher ISdriven underground; it is only when the child

acknowledges the taboo or prphibition which the father symbolizes that it

represses its gUiltyoestre, and1hafaesire just is what is called th_e_J!!1cQ!}~cious------~'-.-~=~.-.~-.~ --, .._-

11.6. the IJn£~s is the discourse of the Other because the Subject does not

know that he desires what theOtherdesires. That Other is in Lacan the Q~diR~

dr(i_~!lJthe father of the real Other); but it is also ~~a~rt o ! _ ~ J ! ! : 1 ~ ~ l fwhich theSubject always fails to recognize (or misrecognizes, as Lacan says) because he

does not know it is-a-part of hImself; his own unconscious.

12. The symbolic register12.1. Lacan mapped on to Freud's concept of the oedipal process -- crossing the

frontier out of the Imaginary, the dyadic world of mother and child, tothe Father's

name and his Law; this is the realm of th~§Y!!1bolic. Lacan followed Levi-Strauss

in idea that culture based on incest,-ondifference-and rules: Levi-Strauss use the

model of Linguistics, so too Lacan [a fundamental Structuralist move]. [MS]

12.2. The s...Y_r.!1_l?_~egister of culture and language introduces a mediating thirdterm to the idea of the subject and the missing complement (imaginary and mirror

stages'rapprox.), to strl!c~~_r~subjecti~~round a lack, thereby providing thesubject-access, not to pleasure, but tode~i.re ....A subject can desire only in terms

of the di§ion that occurs through thErsY..r.!l:bolicemre~_~Q!~!!gnf theg~~ired

~t?~ (the object 'a'), which in turn symbQli~~~_th.~_ITlQQ~~Jbi!~ty()L~.Y~[.~I!!.isfyi~gde~ir.~_<:;9_~plete!y-- -

12.3. The symbolic register provides the terms by which cuLtLJr~J~Ilse.ru1ers

subjectivity through its organizations ofunc()O~ciousdesires. As Lacan describes

therfClfiese lerms are quite s~~ill~to _tb~~_P_atr.tar.cltaL<i(p~rf modern western

culture (i.e. the symbolic register is culture~specinc) [CS]

12.4. As Oedipal complex: The Father triangulates the dual relationship of

Mother and Child. Representing the Law of th~..E~the~__(the_~!IJtura!J:~le~),s theprohibition of the Child s desire for the Mother, the phalluunot -- but with

difficulty not -- to be confused with the penis) the~~~!YJthrough symbols)

1



regulates desire throuqh the threat of castration. Male and Female are

constructed (in the SymooilC}ln·relatlorito the c~stratin_glack symbolized by the

phallus. Male: I have that lack; Female: I am that Lack. Male and Female are

symbolic positions; as such they are va.Iia.bJe.ran be taken up , etc.12.5 The subject o~es between the imaginaiYjlnd the.sympQlic .register --

she does not ;Ieave the imaginary behind when she enters the symbolic, but in

the works of MacCabe, ~:es, we are constantlyir:!1_C!9l!1ingurselves grantin~

some fullll2eanin9 to th~e sQe.aiUthe imaginary register], and constantly

being surprised to find them determined by relations outside our control [thesymbolic register]. ~'" . .------------ --~.

13. Lack, desire

13.1. lack is created by three main moves: the territorialization of the drives, the

mirror stage in which the self realizes distinctiveness and otherness -- limits to

the self -- and signification, at which point the self is inducted into the symbolic

order.13.2. The potentially endless movement from one signifier to another is what

Lacan means by desire. All desire springs from a lack, which it strives continually

to fill. Human language works by such a lack: the absence of the real objects

which signs designate, the fact that words have meaning only be virtue of the

absence and exclusion of others. To enter language, then, is to become a prey to

desire: language, Lacan remarks, is what hollows being into desire. [E]

13.3. Desire commences as soon as the drives are split off from the subject,

consigned forever to a state of non-representation and non-fulfillment. In short, it

begins with the subject's emergence into meaning. [KS]13.4. Desire has its origins not only in the alienation of the subject from its being,

but in the subject s perception of its distinctness from the objects with which itearlier identified. [KS]

13.5. severed from our mother's body, we have to make do instead with

substitute objects, what Lacan calls the 'object little a', with which we try vainly to

plug the gap at the center of our being. We move among substitutes for

substitutes, metaphors for metaphors, never able to recover the pure (if fictive)

self-identity and self-completion which we knew in the imaginary. [14. Analysis

14.1. what the analyst must do is reply to what he/she hears; that reply sends

back to the subject in inverted form what s/he is saying that s/he could never

hear, if s/he did not hear it coming from the analyst. Thus is accomplished the

recognition that is the goal of analysis, the recognition by the subject. The subjectmust come to know his or her own drives, which are insisting, unbeknownst to

him or her, in his or her discourse and actions. The analyst returns to the subject

what the subject was saying so the subject can recognize it and stop saying it.

The analyst encourages the analysand to encounter his or her own Other. [MS]

15. Suture

15.1 in representations of experience (film, narrative) the reader is constantly

faced with occupying subject positions called forth by the text, and hence is

created or at least is positioned by the text. This required insertion of the self into

the text is known as suture, particularly in cinematic versions of Lacanian theory.



16. Lacanian literary criticism

In general terms Lacanian theory applied to literature16.1 supports poststructural ideas of the fragmentation of the self and links these

ideas to the idea of intertextuality -- that all textuality is made up of meaningsconstituted by filiation and difference which are broadly cultural in scope, and

which force one to challenge the borders of the text. Insofar as a text has borders

these borders are then diagnostic (they tell us something about the meanings,

the implications, teh connections,of the text), and they link rather than separating.

16.2. has also pointed to the key functions of lack and desire in not only in the

constitution of various texts but in writing itself. It has opened language and

reference to a broad field of potential, and dynamic, meaning and has in creased

awareness of both the ambiguity and the complexity/density of structured

language use.

16.3. ties together the writer and culture, the text and the reader, at the level of

language, which level for Lacan is also both cultural, and an access to what islost, is desired, haunts and escapes us, which losses and desires form the

substance, such as there is one, of our selves.

16.4. draws attention to structures of the text -- repetitions and gaps and closures-- as essential and indeed key parts of the meaning of the text. In this it is dose

to much of what deconstruction does and looks at.

16.5. focuses often not on the text itself (if that could be considered an separate

object) but on the exchange mediated by (or, created or named by) the text; on

structures of the text, but as they are dynamically constituted or realized by the

reader

16.6. Both the author and the reader are positions, not individuals, just as the textis a process-field, not an object.

16.7. As textuality structures language, they both and together engage us in the

processes of desire and bring us closer to the other, and away from the illusory

narcissism of the individual self: we enter in a dynamic and concentrated way the

world of the unconscious which is also the world of the other: the world of

meaning and being which is culturally constructed and so connects us to the

meanings of our culture and to the presence and power of the drives which

create and sustain us of persons in a world of persons.

16.8. as we read, we are in effect analyzed by the text -- positioned, opened to

the nature and reality of our desires and our relations, brought closer to the

reality of our beings which is our unconscious; interpreters, instead of masteringthe text a re mastered by it. [MSk, in reference to Felman s work in particular}.

16.9 builds on Freud's by looking for the unconscious in the text's performative

aspects, in being suspicious of its rhetorical as well as representational strategies

-- as Freud's too often were not. It therefore emphasizes a new dimension of

reading.

16.10. MSk writes that "In an effort to counter reductive analogizing either to a

signified reality (the New Critic's heresy of paraphrase) or the psychology of a

unified author or reader (the intentional or affective fallacies), Lacanian criticism

is in danger of short-circuiting the particularity of this language." -- and goes on to



cite the dissolving of structure into psychic process and the expansion of

reference to a limitless field of reference chains. Her remark is in a sense a

typical anti-poststructural claim, in that she wants to reinstate the text as a

privileged, separate and internally-controlled object. A Lacanian might read this

desire for wholeness and retrievable identity with some suspicion.

16.11. because subjectivity and the unconscious are created by language and

work like language does, Lacan, in apparently erasing the boundaries between

literature and psychoanalysis, has in fact placed reading and literature in a

privileged position, because: ultimately in his understanding we are (as

meaningful beings, as human) readers whose reading takes us further and

further into the intricacies of the self and culture, and the (self-)deceits of those

who would assert and enforce a reality build on what is known and observable;

[sort of from MSk1

• we are beings who live in the presence of (or, what is the same thing, in

the manifest absence of) what they desire but cannot have, desiring a

completeness and a mastery which, through the very conditions of the

world, they can never have;

• are being is constituted through language, hence all is text, in a sense

different from Oerrida s there is nothing outside of the text.

10

Lacan Key Terms, Basic Concepts

Documents

Transcript of Lacan Key Terms, Basic Concepts