Page 148 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes radical alterity with language and the law, and hence the big Other is inscribed in the order of
the symbolic. Indeed, the big Other is the symbolic insofar as it is particularized for each
subject. The Other is thus both another subject, in his radical alterity and unassimilable
uniqueness, and also the symbolic order which mediates the relationship with that other subject."
"The Other must first of all be considered a locus," Lacan writes, "the locus in which speech is
constituted". We can speak of the Other as a subject in a secondary sense only when a subject
occupies this position and thereby embodies the Other for another subject.
In arguing that speech originates not in the Ego nor in the subject but rather in the Other, Lacan
stresses that speech and language are beyond the subject's conscious control. They come from
another place, outside of consciousness-"the unconscious is the discourse of the Other." When
conceiving the Other as a place, Lacan refers to Freud's concept of psychical locality, in which the
unconscious is described as "the other scene".
"It is the mother who first occupies the position of the big Other for the child," Dylan Evans
explains, "it is she who receives the child's primitive cries and retroactively sanctions them as a
particular message". The castration complex is formed when the child discovers that this Other is
not complete because there is a "Lack (manque)" in the Other. This means that there is always a
signifier missing from the trove of signifiers constituted by the Other. Lacan illustrates this
incomplete Other graphically by striking a bar through the symbol A; hence another name for the
castrated, incomplete Other is the "barred Other."
Feminist thinkers have both utilised and criticised Lacan's concepts of castration and the Phallus.
Some feminists have argued that Lacan's phallocentric analysis provides a useful means of
understanding gender biases and imposed roles, while other feminist critics, most notably Luce
Irigaray, accuse Lacan of maintaining the sexist tradition in psychoanalysis. For Irigaray, the
Phallus does not define a single axis of gender by its presence/absence; instead, gender has two
positive poles. Like Irigaray, Jacques Derrida, in criticizing Lacan's concept of castration, discusses
the phallus in a chiasmus with the hymen, as both one and other. Other feminists, such as Judith
Butler, Jane Gallop, and Elizabeth Grosz, have interpreted Lacan's work as opening up new
possibilities for feminist theory.
13.3 The Three Orders

The Imaginary
The Imaginary is the field of images and imagination, and deception. The main illusions of this
order are synthesis, autonomy, duality, and similarity. Lacan thought that the relationship created
within the mirror stage between the Ego and the reflected image means that the Ego and the
Imaginary order itself are places of radical alienation: "alienation is constitutive of the Imaginary
order." This relationship is also narcissistic.
In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan argues that the Symbolic order
structures the visual field of the Imaginary, which means that it involves a linguistic dimension.
If the signifier is the foundation of the Symbolic, the signified and signification are part of the
Imaginary order. Language has Symbolic and Imaginary connotations-in its Imaginary aspect,
language is the "wall of language" that inverts and distorts the discourse of the Other. On the
other hand, the Imaginary is rooted in the subject's relationship with his or her own body (the
image of the body). In Fetishism: the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real, Lacan argues that in
the sexual plane the Imaginary appears as sexual display and courtship love.
Insofar as identification with the analyst is the objective of analysis, Lacan accused major
psychoanalytic schools of reducing the practice of psychoanalysis to the Imaginary order. Instead,
Lacan proposes the use of the Symbolic to dislodge the disabling fixations of the Imaginary-the
analyst transforms the images into words. "The use of the Symbolic," he argued, "is the only way
for the analytic process to cross the plane of identification."

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