JACQUES LACAN (1901 1982)

Lacan was a French poststructuralist who was quite difficult to understand. He deliberately wrote in a
style that was dense; in fact, Heidegger, himself no paragon of virtue or readability, remarked after
reading Lacans often dizzying magnum opus, Ecrits, that the psychiatrist needs a psychiatrist. Lacan
was a practicing psychoanalyst and reinterpreter of Freud. He came along at a time when Freuds
reputation in France was very low, because Existentialism was THE THING. He changed this practically
overnight; he started his own society and began offering seminars immediately. The core of his beliefs
about language were that

Language is what we use to construct the world

Language is what we use to construct ourselves
Language is completely inadequate for both those tasks

Therefore, nothing is real, nothing is solid. You are not real. This is unbearable, so we reject and repress
itwe cant afford to understand it. Since we cant satisfy this longing for apprehending reality, we
instead long for other things, such as sex and food and consumer objects.
Lacan had some really interesting ideas about language and the unconscious. He believed that, in order
to express the unconscious it is necessary to be incomprehensible. In fact, its inevitable. When the
unconscious speaks, it is by definition nonsense: it is the voice of the other, frightening, mysterious,
awe-inspiring, shattering, strangenot rational, commonsensical, or easy to follow.
Although Lacan was definitely an important French intellectual, he was a kind of standup comedian, an
artist, a juggler, and a showman. He tried to make himself clear and unclear at the same time, because he
believed that at the edge of meaning, in puns, allusions, jokes, logical contradictions, and language
games, glimpses of the truth come through.
Lacans influences
One writer said that Lacan = Freud + Saussure + Dada. Here is a brief summary of these influences:

Freud, you already know. See Matts summary for details.

Saussure: Saussure was a Swiss linguist who gave a series of lectures in 1915 that laid down the
foundations of modern linguistics. Saussure may be covered in the semiotics notes, but for this
summary Ill give you his relevance for Lacan. What Saussure did was to deconstruct the sign.
[note: sign means word + concept wedded together.] This means that he split apart the sound
(the word) and the concept for which the sound stands. In other words, the sounds f-i-s-h,
pronounced fish, stands for this category of cold-blooded animals that swim in water. But this is
just societally constructedit has no inherent referential meaning apart from our assignment.
So what? Well, if you spend some headache-inducing time thinking about it, it means that
language is in fact alienated from the actuality of the world. There is a huge gulf between the
sign and the concept, and in fact language can never ever adequately describe the world. When
we read a beautiful description of something in literature, we may believe that the beautiful
description has really captured somethinga sunset, or a lovers face, for instancebut what
has really happened is that the beauty was in the language itself, in the pattern of words.

Lacan was also concerned about the fact that we use words to talk about wordswords to
represent the concepts represented by other words. And in one final scandal, Lacan said that the
language we use constructs the reality we see, but we who do the perceiving are also constructed
by language..therefore, there is no such thing as a self. It is a linguistic construct.

Dada was a literary and artistic movement that started in Switzerland in 1916 and shifted to
Paris, where it gave birth to Surrealism in the early 1920s. Dada believed that art tells liesthat
the truth was in what art did not say. A famous Dada painting is of an apple, with the following
caption: This is not an apple. Of course, it looks like an apple, but (1) its a painting of an
apple, and (2) it wants to disturb your trust in apples by making you think its an apple.

So all these people and movements were concerned with one big philosophical question: What is real?
Experience = images + language
We cant experience the world directly. All we can really experience is a mental event. You may see the
table or couch in Jamies office, or see Jamie, and you think you are really experiencing the table, or
Jamie. But thats not true. You are seeing or feeling Jamie or the table, but what you experience is the
interpretation: Jamie. Table. You cannot experience reality unmediated by language. Your interpretations
are made up of two thingslanguage, and images that you have previously experienced. They are not
real, they are mental events.
If a cat were to walk into Jamies office while we were having class, the cat (or a Martian, or a tribal
man pulled from the Amazon) would not experience Jamies office during class. We recognize the
image because we have it in our database, and we have a dictionary of language to map onto the image.
Lacan believed that both language and images are false. What a scary world.