Page 156 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes 14.2 Lacan’s Main Ideas

We stated earlier in the unit that Lacan offered a re-reading of Freud’s theories in the light of
linguistics. In the 1950s and 1960s he developed a structuralist theory of psychoanalysis based
largelyon the work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. The important thing to note in
this connection in that Lacan did not import a stable linguistic theory into psychoanalysis. His
goal, rather, was that the encounter between Freud and Saussure should lead to a re-thinking of
the work of both thinkers in the light of the other person’s work.
One of Lacan’s famous uttarance is that the unconscious is structured like a language. By this he
means that the unconscious used linguistic means of self-expression and that the unconscious is
an orderly network, as complex as the structure of language. What the psychoanalytic experience
discovers in the unconscious is the whole structure of language. ‘The subject’ is seen by Lacan as
an effect of language in that its ‘position’ and identity’ is constituted by language. Language
mostly names that which is not present and substitutes a linguistic sign for it when the child starts
entering the language system.

Three ‘orders’ (or congnitive dimensions) are central to Lacan’s thought. These
are distinctions developed by Lacan to describe the phases in the constitution of
the psychic subject.

The first, ‘the Imaginary’, is the dimension in which there is no clear distinction between subject
and object, no central self exists to set the object apart from the subject. The ‘Symbolic’ order is the
realm of language. It sets off the subject on a quest for the unobtainable lost object. The ‘Real’ is
beyond language and abstractly defined in Lacan as a realm or the impossible. All that cannot be
represented in the imaginary and the Symbolic belongs here.
In Lacan’s scheme of things, our being is founded not on unity but on rupture, the initial experience
of being ripped out of a fullness of being and being separated from the object (the mother) that
provided us with it. With the initiation of the Symbolic order, the original desire for the mother is
repressed. It is like the signified being made absent by he signifier. That is because the signified as
Lacan sees it, ‘slides’ beneath a signifier which ‘floats’. Words and meanings have a life of their
own and constantly obscure and override the supposed clarity and ‘simplicity’ of external reality.
Language, as an intractable material in its own right, creates by its materiality a barrier between
the signifier (the words) and the signified (their referent).
According to Lacan, that which introduces “lack” and “gap” into the operations of the subject is
“the other”. The subject can only be the unstable effect of meaning, never its master. In its ‘otherness’,
in its exclusion from the imaginary, it is the cause of the lack which initiates desire. ‘The other’
guarantees the indestructibility of desire by helpling to keep the goals of desire in perpetual flight.
‘Desire’ is that which begins to take shape in the margin in which ‘demand’ becomes separated
from ‘need’. In Lacan ‘need’ is that which can be satisfied by the acquisition of a specific object,
and “demand” is that which is addressed to another and seeks reciprocity. Desire involves both
‘need’ and ‘demand’ but is not reducible to either. It is directed towards the fantasy constructions
that govern the endless search for a satisfactory object in the world, a search that begins with the
‘castration complex’. Another thing to note in this context is that ‘the phallus’, for Lacan, is a
signifier of ‘lack’—not an actual organ. It stands for ‘the law of the father’ and the fear of castration.
It is experienced as separation and loss in relation to the maternal body.
As Lacan sees the symbolic order, the power of law is above all the power to establish relationship
through speech and through the act of naming. The dominant figure of the father is conceived of
not as a particular individual, but rather as an abstraction of the paternal role, which is characterized
by its privileged possession of the mother and its function as the enforcer of the law. When the
male child himself identifies with the father’s role, his position is that having been forced to give

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