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Lacan's subject: The imaginary, language, the real and philosophy

Article in South African Journal of Philosophy · December 2005

DOI: 10.4314/sajpem.v23i1.31381

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Bert Olivier
Extraordinary Professor of Philosophy
University of the Free State
South Africa
OlivierG1@ufs.ac.za
bertzaza@yahoo.co.uk

This paper was first published in the South African Journal of Philosophy (SAJP), Vol. 23 (1),
January 2004, pp. 1-19.

Lacan’s subject: the imaginary, language, the real and philosophy.

Abstract: The thought of the psychoanalytical thinker, Jacques Lacan, is examined in this paper with a view
to ascertaining the place and function in it of the so-called imaginary , the symbolic as well as the ‘real’.
The extent to which the imaginary or realm of images is construed by Lacan as being the order of
identification and a (spurious) sense of unity of the ego or self, is contrasted with the symbolic (or
linguistic) order as that of the subject and of desire, in fact, of the subject of desire. The place and meaning
of the enigmatic third register in Lacan’s thought, namely the ‘real’ is also addressed in relation to the
question of desire. Furthermore, the question is raised, where philosophy in its traditional sense belongs - to
the Lacanian register of the imaginary or to that of the symbolic.

The poststructuralist, psychoanalytical theorist, Jacques Lacan, poses interesting

problems for philosophy in the traditional sense, and at the same time enables one to overcome
some of the most invidious problems that it has faced.1 The reasons for this have to do with both
of the adjectives used, above, to describe Lacan - ‘poststructuralist’ and ‘psychoanalytical’. The
first of these is an indication that he occupies a position beyond structuralism - that is, beyond
the theoretical commitment (as it is encountered in the work of Saussure or Lévi-Strauss, for
example) to the exhaustive description of ‘human reality’ - social, cultural, linguistic - in terms
of universal, underlying structures. Like other poststructuralists (including Derrida, Lyotard,
Deleuze and Foucault), he avails himself of the heuristic efficacy of uncovering and working
with structures and structural dynamics of subjectivity, but at the same time, especially in his
later work, adduces evidence that these structures are irredeemably unstable, or rather - to put it
more accurately - that they are stable and unstable, reliable and unreliable, at the same time. This
is probably the feature of poststructuralist thinking that disturbs ‘traditional’ philosophers most,
because it seems to go against the grain of the straighforward ‘search for truth’, and, moreover,
appears to violate the cherished logical rule of the ‘excluded middle’. Interestingly, one of the
ways to grasp what is truly new about poststructuralism, is precisely to understand it as a novel
way of coming to terms with the unmitigated complexity of social, cultural, epistemic,
anthropological, ethical and other issues – a novelty of approach which could broadly be termed
an alternative ‘logic’ that eschews the older ‘either/or’ structure in favour of a thinking practice
of ‘both/and’.2
The second of the adjectives used above, ‘psychoanalytical’, alerts one to something just
as destabilizing as the peculiar ‘both/and’ logic of the poststructuralists. One would probably
find a lot of evidence that many poststructuralist strategies owe much to psychoanalytical ways
of thinking, if one had to look for it.3 After all, Freudian psychoanalysis is older than
poststructuralism, and, together with Saussure’s structural linguistics, provided the impetus for
Lacan’s rethinking of Freud’s cardinal discoveries along the lines suggested by what is broadly
known as the linguistic turn. In Lyotard’s version of poststructuralism, too, psychoanalysis plays
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a major role (cf. his Heidegger and ‘the jews’, 1990, for example). The destabilizing moment
inherent to psychoanalysis is, first and foremost, the notion of the unconscious as that aspect of
the human mind that, as a different ‘place’, not only escapes the possibility of direct conscious
access, but also continually threatens to destabilize or infiltrate conscious, ‘rational’ intentions
and volitions when one expects it least. In Lacan’s theory this has led to his important distinction
between the ‘subject’ and the ‘self’, the relationship between which may be expressed as
follows: subject ($) = self (ego)/(over) unconscious. In what follows, I hope to throw some light
on this by examining some of the cardinal features of Lacan’s complex thinking - mainly the
implications for philosophy (and for the ‘subject’ of philosophy) of what he terms ‘the
imaginary’ and ‘the symbolic’, although I shall refer to the so-called ‘real’ as well. In doing so, I
shall concentrate mainly, although not exclusively, on some of his early texts, especially ‘The
mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience’
(1977b), and ‘The function and field of speech and language in psychoanalysis’ (1977a).

The imaginary.

What is the imaginary in Lacan? It is one of the three registers, or ‘orders’ in terms of
which he understands the human subject, the other two being the symbolic and the ‘real’. The
imaginary represents the sphere of images, which is also, for Lacan, the sphere of identification,
a psychical process that he initially regarded as fundamental (Sheridan in Lacan 1981: 279).
While one may justly perceive Lacan’s ‘imaginary’ as being his radically anti-humanist
interpretation of the traditional philosophical concept of the imagination (Kearney 1988: 256-
261), what is new in his work is the specific developmental sense with which he endows it.
Moreover, as will become apparent in what follows, while Descartes (‘father’ of modern
philosophy), disregarding the implications for intersubjectivity of the language that comprised
his medium, laboured under the illusion that the human subject has its genesis in isolation as
solitary thinking substance, Freud and Lacan were wiser.4 They locate the emergence of the
subject in a structural relation differently conceived by each: for the later Freud the subject as
ego emerges in the complex triangular Oedipal situation (where the boy-child distances himself
from the mother and identifies with the father, for example); for Lacan, its provenance is to be
thought more fundamentally (and paradigmatically) in the narcissistic identification with and
simultaneous alienation from its own specular, iconic double (Bowie 1991: 30-33). How does
this come about, according to Lacan?
In ‘The mirror stage’ (1977b: 1-7) Lacan describes the entry of the subject into the sphere
of the imaginary by providing a succinct description of the manner in which the young child’s
perception or experience of its own mirror image, between the ages of 6 and 18 months, lays the
foundation for its constitution in this register. It is from here that the subject’s further
development takes its course. He stresses at the outset that this experience, consisting in the
spurious ‘recognition’ of oneself, or one’s own image, in the mirror, provides ample reason to
oppose a philosophy based on the (Cartesian) Cogito 5 – it is, after all, a misrecognition, for
various reasons that should become clearer in due course. As I shall show, for Lacan it also gives
one a clue regarding the ontological structure of the human world. In a crucial passage he
formulates as follows what is at stake (1977b: 2):

This jubilant assumption of his specular image by the child at the infans stage,
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still sunk in his motor incapacity and nursling dependence, would seem to exhibit in an
exemplary situation the symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in a primordial
form, before it is objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before
language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject….the important point is
that this form situates the agency of the ego, before its social determination, in a fictional
direction, which will always remain irreducible for the individual alone, or rather, which
will only rejoin the coming-into-being…of the subject asymptotically…this
Gestalt…symbolizes the mental permanence of the I, at the same time as it prefigures its
alienating destination…

According to Lacan, therefore, the mirror stage represents an ‘identification’ in the sense
of a transformation in the subject on its ‘assumption’ of an image that seems or promises to
impart to it wholeness and unity, but in fact has the effect on it of alienation (Lacan 1977b: 2-4).
It is noteworthy that, at the same time (as intimated earlier), Lacan lets the concept of
‘narcissism’ fuse with that of identification.6 Bowie (1991: 34) captures this succinctly:

Lacan’s search for the inaugural and the irreducible in the mental life leads him to
construct a single explosive moment and a single knot of interconnected theoretical
motifs: ‘narcissistic suicidal aggression’…The original act of identification is the original
narcissistic declaration too; into the very constitution of the ego its destruction is already
woven…

Significantly, Lacan (1977b: 2) observes that the specular image determines the
functioning of the ego, prior to its social development, in fictional terms which are ‘irreducible’
for the individual. This implies that it – the ego or self modelled on the mirror-image – possesses
an inimitable specificity, and will therefore never coincide completely with the subject in its
genesis via entry into the (universal) linguistic order. Moreover, this Gestalt, which both
symbolises the ‘mental permanence’ of the ‘I’ and adumbrates its destined ‘alienation’ (p.2),
must be seen as constituent (rather than as constituted by something else). What does this mean?
Simply that there is nothing in the development of the subject that is more fundamental for its
sense of self than the imago or mirror-image which first imparts to it a sense, however
misleading, of coherence and unity. It should be remembered that this need not literally be a
mirror-image – a reflection of one’s face and figure on the surface of a lake or in a window
fulfills the same purpose, as does a parent’s gaze or remark reflecting something about one’s
body, for instance: ‘Look at Jack’s (or Jill’s) strong little body!’, or: ‘With those legs you will
run like the wind!’
This assumed image, then, functions exemplarily as a ‘symbolic matrix’ 7 for the subject
or ‘I’ in primordial form – in the form of what Lacan calls the moi, that is, the self or ego - before
identification with others can take place in the social sphere, and before the ‘I’ acquires its full
significance and function as subject via the universal moment or dimension of language (the
universality of the concept) in the symbolic order (Lacan 1977b: 2; quoted above).
One may wonder why it should be the case that the subject only attains ‘full’ subjectivity
by means of the ‘universal’ aspect of language – wouldn’t that clash with his contention, that the
mirror stage, which lays the basis for the subject eventually acquiring language, teaches one to
oppose any universalistic philosophy based on the Cogito, that is, any philosophy which claims
unity and transparency for the subject? The reason is to be sought in the signifying function of
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language or the symbolic order which enables the subject to be a subject, that is, to surpass the
muteness and inertia of what Lacan terms the ‘real’ – for instance the body in its pure
(‘unintelligible’, ‘unsymbolizable’) organic state.8 In Bowie’s words (1991: 87): ‘On the one
hand, the Symbolic relentlessly pre-ordains and organizes human experience, but on the other
hand it cancels experience. It creates meaning, yet also withdraws it. It vivifies, yet also
mortifies.’ This has to do with the structure of language as signifying medium, that is, as
comprising a system of signs, themselves exhibiting, in Saussurean terms, the dyadic structure of
signifier and signified. The former may be any signifying unit, for example a spoken or written
word, and the latter (signified) the concept or conceptual meaning of the signifier. It should be
obvious that both of these aspects of the sign leave out the organic as such - as Silverman (1983:
174) observes apropos of Lacan’s theory, once the subject has entered the symbolic order of
language, he or she has left the mute order of the organic, its ‘being’ or the ‘real’, behind forever
(cf. endnote 20, below). Commenting on the child’s acquisition of language according to Lacan,
Jonathan Lee (1991: 20) clarifies what is at stake here:

Here the moi becomes a je: the essentially individual identity constructed through the
child’s image-constituted relations to others is transcended by a universal identity created
by and sustained within that broad range of cultural forces that goes by the name of
language. The imaginary product of a particular history of visual identifications becomes
a genuine human subject, able to use the first person pronoun and to identify herself as
the child of a particular family: ‘I am Joanna Smith.’

To be able to articulate one’s name in speech or parole means, in terms of structuralist

linguistics (one of the major sources of influence on Lacan), to be able to draw on the (largely
unconscious,9 assimilated) social value- and grammatical rule-system labelled langue by
Saussure. To the extent that langue embodies the ‘social bond’ – something also implicit in
Freud’s concept of the Oedipus complex that the child has to negotiate to find a place in the
social order of kinship relations – it is therefore understandable that, prior to acquiring the use of
language, one can hardly be called a subject in the sense of being able to position oneself 10 in
the social and cultural world (represented by the symbolic order) through language in spoken or
written form. In an important sense, one ‘becomes subject to the laws of society’ by entering the
symbolic order of language (see endnote 8 in this regard). The inescapable tension between the
particular, imaginary ‘identity’ of the subject, and her position within the universalizing medium
of language is also apparent in Lee’s observation.
Such symbolization ‘partly’ overcomes the constraints of the imaginary as (taken by
itself) the register of identification (and potentially of alienating imprisonment), but because the
imaginary overlaps the symbolic register (think of the operation of metaphor or metonymy in
language), such ‘liberation’ is never complete – which is why Lacan states, in the passage quoted
above, that the image is the form that ‘…situates the agency of the ego, before its social
determination, in a fictional direction, which will always remain irreducible for the individual
alone, or rather, which will only rejoin the coming-into-being…of the subject asymptotically’. In
other words, the subject as ego (or what Lacan terms the moi), which has its provenance in the
register of the imaginary as instantiated by the mirror phase, and the subject as ‘I’ (or what Lacan
calls the je), which emerges in the register of the symbolic (language), never coincide. No matter
how hard one tries, the ego will always approach the emergent subject ‘asymptotically’ (and vice
versa), that is, the two aspects of the subject will always approximate each other without actually
 5

coinciding – the ‘healthy’ subject is a ‘lacking’ subject (while, in the case of the psychotic, there
is ‘lack of lack’ – that is, there is no mitigation, via the salutary play of signifier and signified, of
the plenum instantiated by identification with an ostensibly unitary image).
In the ‘mirror stage’ we have an instance in Lacan of a genuine ‘quasi-transcendental’,
that is, of a mode of poststructuralist thinking that marks a development of the tradition of
(Kantian) transcendental philosophy. As is well-known, something functions ‘transcendentally’
when, like Kant’s categories of the understanding, it is the condition of the possibility of
something else - in the case of the categories, conceptual meaning regarding spatiotemporal
phenomena. When something performs a ‘quasi-transcendental’ function, however, an important
shift has taken place in the understanding of ‘transcendental’ thinking: instead of merely being
the ‘condition of the possibility’ of something else, it may then be said to be simultaneously the
‘condition of the possibility and the impossibility’ of something else. So, for example, Jacques
Derrida’s notion of (the ‘process’ of) différance 11 is at one and the same time the condition of
the possibility and impossibility of meaning; which is a somewhat confusing way of saying that
it makes both meaning and non-meaning, sense and nonsense, possible. Similarly, the mirror-
image in the life of every subject performs a quasi-transcendental function: it is the very
‘fictional’ (and indispensable) condition for having a sense of ‘self’ or of a series of variations
(‘selves’)12 on the intitial Gestalt, but simultaneously also the condition for being alienated from
this genuine capacity of fictionalization or fantasy in so far as the subject tends to construct a
kind of (no less fictional) straitjacket or carapace to ‘contain’ or limit its generation of images of
the self.13 Lacan puts it as follows (1977b: 4):

The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to
anticipation – and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial
identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to
a form of its totality that I shall call orthopaedic – and, lastly, to the assumption of the
armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject’s
entire mental development.

The importance of Lacan’s claim (quoted earlier), that the mirror-image marks the
‘fictional’ provenance of the subject’s (alienating) ‘identity’ cannot be overestimated. It explains
his opposition to both traditional, Cartesian conceptions of the subject as autonomous and self-
transparent14, and Anglo-American ego-psychology, which was predicated on the assumption
that the ego or self was that ‘part’ of the psyche responsible for establishing a healthy
relationship with ‘reality’. In fact, as Lee (1990: 24) reminds one, Lacan here challenges Freud’s
own claims about the ego as first arising from the psyche’s conscious ‘contact’ with reality – if
the ego or moi is the result of ‘misrecognizing’ the mirror-image as one’s self, it is the product of
fantasy and as such is quite divorced from ‘reality’. Moreover, the extent to which the early
Lacan here radicalizes the Freudian subversion of the traditional philosophical conception of the
subject as rational, self-transparent and autonomous, should be emphasized once more. It is well
known that Freud’s challenge to this notion of the subject lay in the far-reaching implications of
his concept of the unconscious, theorized by the early Freud in terms of a distinctive system
dubbed the ‘primary process’ (operating by means of images in an effort to achieve pleasure or
the removal of unpleasure - in dreams, for instance), removed from deliberate, conscious
intervention by the ‘secondary process’ of thought, language and motor movement (Freud 1977:
757-761; Olivier 2000). Lacan’s depiction of what Bowie (1991: 25) calls the ‘inalienable
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alienation of the human species’ does not put a more optimistic complexion on things; on the
contrary. Bowie (p. 25) provides the following summary of this unenviable state of affairs, the
contours of which exacerbate the already disempowering self-division of the subject as
uncovered by Freud:

The mirror-image is a mirage of the ‘I’ and promises that the individual’s latent powers
of coordination will eventually be realized; indeed it has a role in triggering the
development of these. So far so good. But the ‘alienating destination’ of the ‘I’ is such
that the individual is permanently in discord with himself: the ‘I’ is tirelessly intent upon
freezing a subjective process that cannot be frozen, introducing stagnation into the mobile
field of human desire.

Joan Copjec (1990: 52) highlights this paradox at the heart of the human subject’s
provenance in the specular realm of the imaginary where she points out that, contrary to
essentialist anthropological models characterized by a ‘will to power’, ‘…Lacan insists on the
constitution of a “desire not to know”; and thus of a subject at odds with itself’.
But there is more to shake the confidence of those who continue to believe smugly that
‘rational’ human beings are, in principle, always ‘in control’, epistemically speaking - even if
they may sometimes err a little, they can always move closer to ‘zero defect’ in knowledge, as in
technology. One of the most interesting and disconcerting implications of Lacan’s theory of the
ego or moi is that the structure of human knowledge is ‘paranoiac’ (Lacan 1977b: 3). If one
considers the etymological meaning of ‘paranoia’, namely (treating something as if it is) ‘beside,
beyond mind’, as well as his remark, that in its ‘most general structure’ human knowledge
endows ‘the ego and its objects with attributes of permanence, identity, [and] substantiality’
(1977d: 17), he seems to mean that there is a contrast, conflict, or at least a tension, between the
fluctuating field of human experience and humanity’s ‘delusional’ tendency to substantialize this
‘punctuated flow’15 into things, entities or objects marked by an independent and enduring
being16 rather than by becoming.17 This same tendency is responsible for the ‘alienating’
identification with various imaginary constructs on the part of subjects. (In this regard, for
example, Kaja Silverman (1992: 15-16) has referred to patriarchy - or patriarchal identification -
in Lacanian vein as ‘the dominant fiction’.) Commenting on Lacan’s notion of knowledge as
being inherently paranoiac, Bowie (1991: 40) remarks:

…Lacan…talks about an immanent structure of the human world. Human knowledge

begins from an illusion – a misapprehension, a deceit, a seduction, an inveiglement – and
constructs an inescapable autonomous system in its wake…(p.42): …the structure of the
ego and the structure of knowledge are both typified by a will to alienation, a sought-after
madness, that seems on the face of it unanswerable and untreatable.

It should be noted, however, that an important implication of Lacan’s work on the

‘inscription’ of human identity in the register of the ‘imaginary’ via ‘misrecognition’ or
identification with the mirror image by the subject, is a denial of any adequate conceptualization
of the subject exclusively in terms of flux or becoming, or, for that matter, completely in terms of
being in the sense of undifferentiated permanence.18 The subject’s being is forever caught in the
tension-field between what Lacan (1977c: 298) calls the je (the ‘I’, the subject of the saying or
the enunciation, that is, of language) and the moi (the ‘me’, ‘imaginary’ self, ego or subject of
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the statement, the ‘said’ or the enunciated).19 While the latter or ego provides the admittedly
alienating, but nevertheless indispensable moment of relative or intermittent stability, the former
always, inescapably, transcends the strictures and constraints of the ego or moi, so that one can
speak, following Joan Copjec (1996: xvi), of an ‘excessive subject’ – one that is never reducible
to any set of imaginary or, for that matter, historical indicators (see endnote 17 for a formulation
of this in terms of Lacan’s theory of the ‘four discourses’). After all, one of the implications of
Lacan’s insistence (1977b: 2), discussed above, on language’s capacity to ‘restore’ to the ‘I’,
‘…in the universal, its function as subject’, is precisely that language, as the sphere of (abstract)
concepts, enables the subject to exceed or transcend not only the mute domain of the ‘real’ (for
example of the body in its pure, ineffable organic state20), but also the ‘rigid armour’ of
potentially imprisoning imaginary identification. It is through language that revision and renewal
of the subject is possible via different self-descriptions, and it is the enduring ‘dialectical’
relationship between the imaginary and the symbolic which ensures that the fecundity of the
imaginary, in reciprocity with the universalizing function of language, can give rise to new,
particularizing variations on a theme of universal import. So, for instance, instead of being
imprisoned in the straitjacket of identifying with a film icon in a certain role (say, of a medical
doctor, or of an undercover policeman, or of a ballerina) or with a world-famous politician,
language provides the means for articulating a variation on these imaginary embodiments of
fantasized perfection: whatever one does in life, a particularizing variation on a universal theme,
or a universalizing interpretation of a mesmerizing particularization is always available to the
subject. (As will be shown below, in his later work Lacan enriched the meaning of his distinction
between the imaginary and the symbolic, or between the moi and the je.)
As far as philosophy is concerned, it seems to me that Lacan’s work on the inscription of
human identity in the imaginary order via the mirror stage provides a caveat regarding all those
philosophies that are predicated on the (illusory) attainment of unity and wholeness, regardless of
the ontological or epistemological register in which such ‘wholeness’ is articulated. Although
philosophy’s medium is concept-permeated language, the imaginary order (which overlaps it, as
indicated earlier), constantly exercises its seductions or temptations, inviting one to ‘fill in’ the
unavoidable ‘gaps’ in one’s self- and world-descriptions or -conceptions through recourse to all
manner of imaginary fullness. Needless to say, not only would such philosophizing be deluded,
but it would also suffer from the illusory promise of power that marks all ideology. 21 As will be
seen in what follows, what Lacan calls ‘full speech’ or what one may term, by analogy, the
practice of ‘full’ philosophy, is only possible precisely where such a belief in fullness (of
knowledge or rationality, e.g.) no longer holds sway – where a commitment to unity and
wholeness exists, one encounters, ironically, only ‘empty speech’, or alternatively, ‘empty’
philosophy.

The symbolic.

I have already referred to the Lacanian register of the ‘symbolic’ quite extensively in the
discussion of the ‘mirror stage’, above. This is not sufficient to grasp the role of language or the
symbolic in Lacan’s ‘mature’ theory, however, especially because – as Bowie (1991: 47-60),
among others, has indicated - this is what sets him conclusively apart from Freud, whose
distinction between ‘thing-presentations’ (which belong to the unconscious) and ‘word-
presentations’ (belonging to consciousness) does not allow him to think of the unconscious, as
Lacan famously does, as being ‘structured like a language’. Besides, for Freud a symbolic
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relationship existed between, for example, a dream-symbol and its ‘universal’ meaning(s), and
he does not seem to have had any use for generalizing ‘the symbolic’ into an encompassing
system of more than merely ‘linguistic’ import in the narrow sense of the term, as Lacan
eventually does. ‘Lacan’s difference from Freud’, remarks Bowie (1991: 57-58),

…is nowhere more evident than in his talk of ‘the Symbolic’. This category was
important to Lacan precisely because it was versatile and inclusive and referred in a
single gesture to an entire range of separate signifying practices. It linked, in what
promised to be a coherent and durable fashion, the world of unconscious mental process
to that of speech, and both of them to the larger worlds of social and kinship structure.
‘The Symbolic’, for Lacan in the mid-fifties, is a supra-personal structural order…

How did Lacan arrive at this position, which leans heavily on the sense that the
anthropologist Lévi-Strauss gave to the symbolic as a cultural system (Bowie 1991: 58-59)? To
answer this question, one has to turn, once more, to the relation between the subject (of the
imaginary order) as ego or moi, and the subject (of language) as je or ‘I’. As intimated above,
there is a sense in which the subject always has the capacity to overcome the alienation that
occurs through the mirror-image, one that concerns the imbrication of the imaginary and the
symbolic. To understand better what is at stake here, one has to take careful note of Lacan’s
emphasis on speech and language in the important paper, ‘The function and field of speech and
language in psychoanalysis’. (Lacan 1977a).
Addressing ego-psychologists and object-relations theorists (Lee 1990: 32-34), Lacan
claims that analysts have only the speech of the analysand to work with, and insists on the
bipolar structure of subjectivity, instantiated in the analytical situation by the fact that the
analysand has, at the very least, an auditor in the person of the analyst. He then proceeds to
show, via an analysis of the phenomenon of the ‘free-associating’ analysand’s frustration22 in the
face of the silently listening analyst, that the subject (as analysand) is led to the disconcerting
discovery that his or her ‘identity’ is an illusion, that is, that it is the result of (the previously
theorized) ‘misrecognition’ (Lacan 1977a: 41-42). In fact, the subject comes to grasp that what
had always been experienced as his or her ‘desire’, really belongs to an imaginary construct (p.
42), and that his or her speech had therefore been ‘empty’ – in Lee’s (1990: 40) formulation,
‘…it has been emptied of the subject by being filled with his alienating moi identity’.
It should therefore be apparent that Lacan, far from indulging the subject as analysand’s
need for some measure of (spurious) security supposedly attainable by strengthening the ego or
moi, recommends – in the spirit of the Socratic goal of bringing about a ‘wholesome unrest’ in
the soul of the philosophical interlocutor - the cultivation of uncertainty on the subject’s part by
‘suspending’ her or his ‘certainties until their last mirages have been consumed’ (Lacan 1977a:
42). If one wonders what he hopes to achieve along this trajectory of demolishing the subject’s
imaginary identifications at the level of (psychoanalytical) discourse, the answer is firstly to be
sought in the significance of the discontinuity or gap between the latter or the moi and the subject
as je (from the ‘perspective’ of which any discourse ‘about’ the moi is conducted), in so far as
this gap represents the function of repression (Lee 1990: 40-41). This would help explain
Lacan’s puzzling reversal of Descartes’s paradigmatically ‘modern’ dictum, ‘Cogito ergo sum’
(‘I think, therefore I am’), namely ‘I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think’,
or – in amplified form – ‘I am not wherever I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what I
am where I do not think to think’ (Lacan 1977: 166). The subject as je or ‘I’ is located where it
 9

exceeds the domain of conscious deliberation and control, that is, at the level of the unconscious
– it is not the same as the rational ego or moi of the Cartesian tradition, with its (illusory)
attributes of autonomy and self-transparency. It also clarifies Lacan’s (1981: 34) contention that
the status of the unconscious is ethical, which is another way of saying that it is the locus of the
subject’s desire in an ethical sense – what we ‘truly’ want, is hidden from us via repression23.
That this is by no means an arbitrary ‘desire’ on the subject’s part, should be apparent when one
considers that Lacan (1977a: 55) thinks of the unconscious as being ‘structured like a language’,
and as the ‘discourse of the Other’, with the corollary that the latter discourse represents the
social system in its entirety, including the values and norms that structure social life.
But secondly, by highlighting the indispensable role of language as discourse here, Lacan
(1977a: 46) is suggesting a way of transforming the ‘empty’ speech of the subject as moi into the
‘full’ speech of the ‘psychoanalytically realized subject’. As hinted at earlier, one cannot avoid
noticing the irony, that ‘empty’ speech corresponds with the (spurious) ‘fullness’ of the ego,
while ‘full’ speech corresponds with the ‘lack’ or mercurial mobility of the subject as je or ‘I’. In
other words, one has to achieve a ‘symbolic interpretation’ of what occurs in the course of ‘free
association’, a process that enables the subject to reconstruct an ‘intelligible narrative’ or life
story (Lee 1990: 41-42). It is important here, to keep in mind that the ‘narrative’ of the
analysand, as it emerges in the course of the dialogue between her or him and the psychoanalyst
(however minimal the latter’s participation in it), is a product of this dialogue, where the
analyst’s art consists in timely (and well-timed) interventions in the speech of the subject with
the purpose of utilizing the gaps, hesitations, signs of aggression, and so forth, to give the
associative discourse a specific interpretation, direction, punctuation or emphasis. And if one
gets the impression that there seems to be far too much ‘coherence’ here (as one is inclined to,
given Lacan’s conception of the subject as ‘interrupted’ or ‘split’ – the so-called ‘barred’ subject
$) – so much so that it bears a resemblance to the approach which Lacan explicitly eschews,
namely ego-psychology, his contention that there is a ‘third term’ (the unconscious) at work in
the analytical situation, quickly negates this impression (Lacan 1977a: 49):

The unconscious is that part of the concrete discourse, in so far as it is transindividual,

that is not at the disposal of the subject in re-establishing the continuity of his
conscious discourse.

For Lacan (1977a: 50), the unconscious is that ‘chapter’ of the subject’s history which
has been ‘censored’ – it is a ‘marked by a blank’, but can be ‘rediscovered’ through the
interpretive ‘cooperation’ between the analyst and the free-associative discourse of the subject,
despite resistance on her or his part. The ‘language’ of the unconscious manifests itself in the
subject’s bodily symptoms, the memories of her or his childhood and in the very specific,
‘idiosyncratic’ diction or verbal expressions he or she uses (Lacan 1977a: 50; Lee 1990: 44).
This makes the emergence of ‘full speech’ possible. It is along this trajectory that Lacan arrives
at his startling insight, made possible by reading Freud through (among others) the lenses of
structural linguistics, that ‘…the unconscious is structured in the most radical way like a
language…’ (Lacan 1977e: 234; Lee 1990: 46). This seems more intelligible if one reflects on
his assertion that the subject’s unconscious ‘…is the discourse of the other…’ – this insight
follows from the (for Lacan clinically demonstrable claim), that the subject’s ‘full speech’
(remember the irony referred to earlier) emerges from the interaction between the subject’s
discourse, analyst’s discourse, and the ‘third term’ or ‘discourse’ of the unconscious as
 10

manifested in memories, parapraxes or slips of the tongue, and so on. Why is the unconscious the
discourse of the other/Other? Because language, with all the societal values, behavioural norms
and taboos embedded in it, pre-exists the individual subject’s entry into it (Lacan 1977: 148; Lee
1990: 46; see endnote 8 in this regard). As pointed out earlier, this implies that one becomes
‘subject to’ the laws of society (and of the moral law in the Kantian sense) through this entry into
the symbolic realm.
It is important to remember that the narrative which the subject is able to construct from
the perspective of the je or subject of the symbolic register, working through her or his free-
associating discourse with the analyst,24 is not synonymous with what ego-psychologists or
phenomenologists would regard as ‘subjective experience’ of the ego or moi. For Lacan (1977a:
55) the notion of the ‘subject’ goes well beyond what can thus be ‘subjectively’ experienced, as
one may expect from the insight concerning the transindividual status of the unconscious as the
‘discourse of the Other’. Hence, the life story of the psychoanalytically actualised subject is
equally to be understood as being transindividual, in so far as the ‘third term’ or unconscious, as
manifested in all the telling ‘signs’ with which his or her discourse is peppered, enable the
analyst to fill in the ‘gaps’, in this way facilitating a ‘coherent’ narrative. Lee (1990: 47) makes
the following noteworthy observation:

Once again, just as he had in ‘The Mirror Stage’, Lacan is standing up to any view of the
human subject based on the Cartesian cogito. The difference in ‘Function and Field’ is
that Lacan has now enriched the je/moi distinction, understanding the je in terms of
symbolic narrative and the moi in terms of imaginary identification. That the human
subject is essentially a place of conflict between the je and the moi, between the symbolic
and the imaginary, will remain one of Lacan’s central theses throughout his career.

It is especially Lee’s last remark concerning the conflictual character of the subject which
is important for the analysis of literature, artworks, or of philosophy as the critical-reflective
understanding of human beings and their place in the world, given the differences between
manifestations of je- as opposed to moi-positions in art, literature or philosophy – where moi-
positions would signify moments of imaginary (and therefore of ideological) identification or
unity, and je-positions would indicate where gaps or divisions are introduced into the subject as
moi or imaginary construct. Moreover, as Lacan indicates in the following excerpt where he
explains his resistance to any conception of (moi-) totality in the subject - in Cartesian
philosophy or in related ego-psychologies - this is not only true of the individual subject, but of
the ‘collective subject’ (e.g. a cultural community as supposed ‘totality’) as well (Lacan 1977a:
80; Lee 1990: 74):

…this is what leads me to object to any reference to totality in the individual [i.e. the ego
or moi], since it is the subject who introduces division into the individual, as well as into
the collectivity that is his equivalent. Psychoanalysis is properly that which reveals both
the one and the other to be no more than mirages.

Lacan here opens the way for a social theory aimed at unmasking ideological blindnesses
at work behind different kinds of illusory claims to coherence, whether it is in philosophy in the
form of the Cartesian or Sartrean ‘self-transparent’ subject, in film as overt or covert justification
 11

of, for example, patriotic unity – Shayamalan’s recent Signs springs readily to mind – in music or
in literature.25
For Lacan the symbolic, then, in contrast to the imaginary is, in Bowie’s words (1991:
92):

…the realm of movement rather than fixity, and of heterogeneity rather than similarity. It
is the realm of language, the unconscious and an otherness that remains other. This is the
order in which the subject as distinct from the ego comes into being, and into a manner of
being that is always disjoined and intermittent.

The real.

But for Lacan this is not all there is to be said about the subject. As Bowie (1991: 94)
reminds one, he postulates a ‘third order’ that is not reducible to either the imaginary or the
symbolic, one which functions ‘…as a permanent agent of disharmony between them’. We
therefore cannot understand the human subject exhaustively by means of the tension between the
subject as moi at the level of the imaginary and as je at the level of the symbolic – there is
another register (probably the most decisive of them all as a kind of primus inter pares), namely,
the ‘real’, which has to be invoked to grasp how the human subject is precariously ‘stretched’
among the imaginary, the symbolic and the ‘real’ in a manner that disallows any assimilation to
either of them26 (a reduction of which the varieties of ego-psychology are guilty in different
ways). For my present purposes it is not necessary (and impossible in a mere paper, anyway) to
give an exhaustive account of what is at stake here for Lacan, so a mere sketch will have to
suffice. Lee articulates it well (1990: 82):

The Lacanian subject is the uneasy coexistence of three distinct moments. There is, first
of all, the real ‘presence that is speaking to you’, the speaking body [reminiscent of
Kant’s ‘thing that thinks’], the subject of the actual act of enunciation. Secondly, there is
the symbolic subject indicated by the je of the speaking body’s discourse, the subject of
the statement actually uttered. The third moment of the subject, distinct from both the
speaking body and the je, is the imaginary moi constructed…early in childhood to give
the subject an identity that it really lacks.

To the subject of the imaginary or the moi, and the subject of the symbolic or the je, has
to be added, it seems to me, the subject of the ‘real’ as (speaking) body, to be able to understand
the Lacanian subject as a subject who (implicitly) asks the question: ‘Who or what am I?’ (Lee
1990: 78). Crucially, and related to this, what is at stake for the subject to assume her or his role
as a responsible, ethical human being, is her or his ‘desire’ in the peculiarly Lacanian sense
(reminiscent of Kant’s use of the concept in the second Critique and also of Hegel’s in the
Phenomenology of Spirit). ‘Desire’ here does not mean what is usually meant by it in the
vernacular, which denotes something conscious. The subject’s ‘desire’ in the psychoanalytical
sense is hidden from him or her in so far as it has always been repressed, and only manifests
itself in those discursive-linguistic peculiarities such as certain intonations, mumblings, gaps,
slips,27 and so on, that provide the analyst (or another kind of interlocutor) with the means to fill
in these gaps and allow a ‘coherent’ (note the scare quotes) narrative to emerge. But more than
that: in so far as speech, discourse or language enables the subject to articulate her or his desire –
 12

a desire that is particular or unique to the subject, although it has to be expressed in the
‘universal’ medium of (conceptual) language – an unavoidable gap or chasm becomes apparent
between the subject’s ‘need’ and the linguistic form that it ineluctably assumes as a ‘demand’.
What one witnesses here is Lacan’s account of the dynamics of desire, in which the subject’s
immersion (through her or his embodiment) in the ‘real’ is of paramount importance. He
formulates the place of desire as follows (Lacan 1977e: 263):

Desire is that which is manifested in the interval that demand hollows within itself, in as
much as the subject, in articulating the signifying chain, brings to light the want-to-be
[manque á être], together with the appeal to receive the complement from the Other, if
the Other, the locus of speech, is also the locus of this want, or lack…It is also what is
evoked by any demand beyond the need that is articulated in it, and it is certainly that of
which the subject remains all the more deprived to the extent that the need articulated in
the demand is satisfied.

In other words, the Other (or the unconscious as discourse of the Other) as locus of the
subject’s lack, from which the subject draws when he or she speaks, cannot ever fill the void
signified by demand in so far as it represents the subject’s repeated, but always futile, attempt to
articulate its desire (Lacan 1977e: 263):

That which is thus given to the Other to fill, and which is strictly that which it does not
have, since it, too, lacks being, is what is called love, but it is also hate and ignorance.

Why can’t desire be expressed, embodied, in language? If I understand Lacan correctly

here, it is because language, or the unconscious structured like a language, the ‘discourse of the
Other’, lacks being in the same sense that the subject, as soon as he or she enters language, lacks
being. For the subject to acquire language is tantamount to losing the fullness of its being as
(ineffable, ‘organic’ body), which is why Lacan refers to this entry into the symbolic as ‘fading’
or aphanisis (Lee 1990: 82). Language, as symbolic – as making fleetingly present in speech
(string of signifiers) an absence in abstract, conceptual form (chain of signifieds), is removed
from the ‘real’ of the mute body or from ‘nature’ – language is self-referential. But for that very
reason the subject’s particular desire as an embodied being in space and time cannot be
adequately captured in her best attempts to articulate it in the form of a demand: ‘Love me,
recognize me as someone unique!’ – there is always a gap between need and demand, and this
gap constitutes desire. This is also why Lacan is in the final analysis not a structuralist (despite
many claims that he cannot escape it), but a poststructuralist. If he finally claimed that we
were/are exhaustively determined or ‘spoken’ by discourse or language, he would not escape a
linguistic structuralism, but because desire marks for him the locus of an unbridgeable chasm
between ‘need’ (for example thirst or hunger, or the craving of another person’s bodily warmth
and the enigmatic comfort it brings), located at the level of the ‘real’, and the expression of this
need in symbolic form as ‘demand’, his position is a poststructuralist one - in the sense of
providing the philosophical means to theorize the subject in an illuminating manner, but resisting
the temptation of claiming, through these, that the subject can be adequately, that is,
conclusively, ‘totally’ theorized or understood, explained, in this way.
Small wonder then, that he (Lacan 1977e: 259) describes desire as metonymy (the
substitution of one word for another in the signifying chain), specifically as ‘the metonymy of
 13

the want-to-be’, that is, the ‘connection’ in a ‘word-to-word’ fashion (Lee 1990: 55), of the
subject’s essential lack of being – no word adequately captures this lack because of its being
removed, as symbol, from the fullness craved by the subject; as indicated earlier, the subject
loses whatever fullness of being it may have had as soon as it enters the symbolic realm. Lee
reminds one (1990: 59; Lacan 1977e: 274) that the moi may thus be understood as ‘the
metonymy of desire’. Is it at all difficult, therefore, to see in the never-ending series of alienating
(and ideological, given their false promises of fulfilment) identifications with media-figures (on
the part of individuals living in the contemporary era) in the order of the imaginary the endless
substitution of one image for and by another, of which it is a metonymic ‘part’? As such it
represents the ‘metonymy of desire’ of the moi in so far as the ego comes into being at the
moment of identification, which is metonymically actualised regardless of the question, which of
the images available to the subject in today’s media-saturated world one identifies with – by
metonymic implication, they are all equivalent. (Neil LaBute’s recent film, Nurse Betty [2000],
is a striking thematization of precisely this tendency in contemporary culture.)
But it is not only at the level of media-images that one runs the risk of imaginary
identifications; it could all too easily happen in the most ‘rational’ of domains, namely
philosophy, as well, as soon as one yields to the temptation of believing in the attainability of
any kind of (metaphysical) ‘closure’, fulfillment, unity and the like, especially when such
attainment seems to be guaranteed by failsafe ‘methods’ or criteria of reasoning. Philosophers
should learn to resist the temptation to ‘fill in’ the gaps in their self- and world-experience by
imaginary means, something they could do by reminding themselves of Lacan’s insight, that
desire is the ‘gap’ separating need and (linguistically articulated) demand. And that gap can
never be finally filled in.
In this paper I could do no more than to sketch a brief overview of the very complex field
of Lacan’s poststructuralist psychoanalytical thought and the counter-intuitive model of the
human subject that it provides. To do more than this would require several more papers – indeed,
a book-length study would hardly do justice to the manner in which some of the concepts
touched upon here were developed by Lacan in the course of his teaching and writing, especially
in the public teaching seminar that he conducted for more than twenty years on a weekly or bi-
weekly basis. I believe that the fecundity of his thought and the far-reaching implications it has
for self-understanding on the part of reflective human beings, has only recently begun to become
apparent, largely through the work of dedicated Lacan scholars like Jonathan Lee, Malcolm
Bowie, Slavoj Zizek, Kaja Silverman, Bruce Fink and Joan Copjec. It is fitting to conclude this
brief excursion into Lacanian terrain with a remark by Joan Copjec in her most recent (Lacanian)
book, Imagine there’s no woman – Ethics and sublimation (2002: 10):

To approach the question of ethics from the perspective of psychoanalysis may strike
some as a narrowing of the issue and a needless confinement of the debate to the terms of
a special language. My arguments here are premised on the belief that psychoanalysis is
the mother tongue of our modernity and that the important issues of our time are scarcely
articulable outside the concepts it has forged. While some blasé souls argue that we are
already beyond psychoanalysis, the truth is that we have not yet caught up with its most
revolutionary insights.
 14

Endnotes
1
One of the reasons why Lacan is able to raise philosophically interesting issues has to do with his thorough
knowledge and appropriation of the philosophical tradition. In fact, the roots of some of his most crucial insights are
to be found in the thought of a variety of figures dating as far back as the ancient Greeks. He has appropriated from
Plato (in the latter’s Symposium) the concept of ‘lack’ (for Lacan the human subject is ‘essentially’ a ‘lacking’
subject); his concepts of the ‘imaginary’, the ‘symbolic’ and the ‘real’ may be understood as a (re-)configuration of
Kant’s interrelated concepts of the (productive and reproductive) imagination, the a priori forms of intuition and the
categories of the understanding, and the Kantian Ding an sich (or noumenal reality); and his concept of desire (in
relation to the desired desire of the Other) has distinct Hegelian overtones, in so far as, for Hegel, the dialectic
between self and other points beyond the stage of the master/slave relationship to the desire for recognition on the
part of the self (as being an autonomous ethical subject) by the other, to mention only some of these. The concept of
desire may of course, arguably, be seen as having its philosophical provenance in Plato’s account of love (in the
Symposium). Apart from these ‘positive’ influences, there are also numerous occasions in his work where Lacan
challenges and opposes certain philosophical claims or accounts, for instance in his ‘The mirror stage’ (1977b),
where he explicitly challenges and rejects Sartre’s existentialism, or in The four fundamental concepts of psycho-
analysis (1981), where he challenges some of his friend, the phenomenologist, Merleau-Ponty’s claims concerning
the perception of artworks. Some of these linkages with the philosophical tradition will be explored here, but
understandably only those which are pertinent to the theme of the present article.
2
There are many instances in the thought of the poststructuralists which could illustrate this claim. Two from
Derrida’s work are his demonstration that one ‘does not have to choose’ between two countervailing notions of
forgiveness, in other words that both are essential for the practice of forgiving (Derrida 2001); and his demonstration
that coming to terms with the complex, paralyzing richness of a work like Joyce’s Ulysses (Derrida 1991) has to
submit to and embrace, simultaneously, the ‘economy of debt’ to Joyce (who has always already anticipated what a
reader will make of the work), and the ‘economy of the gift’ (the freedom to respond to the work or text in a totally
unexpected manner). Foucault’s (1984) essay on the question of enlightenment, in turn, insists on the neglect, on the
part of Enlightenment thinkers, of the particular in favour of the universal, while they should be thought together. In
Lacan’s work this way of thinking is apparent in the early work on the ‘mirror phase’ (1977b), as well as in later
works (as will be demonstrated here). See also Cilliers (1998) on the relationship between complexity and
poststructuralism, among other things.
3
In her Introduction to Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1980), Spivak showed that Freud was one of Derrida’s
precursors, for instance.
4
In this respect it is not difficult to discern in Freud’s, and later Lacan’s location of the emergent subject within a
larger structural (social) context a continuation and modification of the Hegelian and Marxist tradition of thought, in
so far as this tradition (in contrast to the ‘atomistic’ Lockean tradition) conceives of the subject as being dialectically
mediated by its insertion in a broader social, economic and political context.
5
Small wonder that Lacan (1977: 166) modifies or reverses Descartes’s famous ‘Cogito ergo sum’ as follows: ‘I
think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think.’ Needless to say, this is a reference to the unconscious.
6
Malcolm Bowie (1991: 33-35) gives an informative account of the differences between Freud, who had kept these
concepts separate, and Lacan on ‘identification’ and ‘narcissism’, respectively.
7
This should not be confused with the symbolic register, or language, which overlaps, but is distinct from, the
imaginary.
8
It should be kept in mind, though, that it is language, through which the subject becomes a subject, which
simultaneously robs the individual of her or his inexpressible uniqueness and power as vested in the singular body.
By entering the symbolic realm of language, the repository of societal laws and values, the individual is ‘castrated’
in the sense of being ‘subjected’ to it. This is what it means to be a subject.
9
This goes a long way towards explaining Lacan’s (1977e: 234) dictum, that the unconscious is structured like a
language. For an insightful discussion of Lacan’s ‘turn toward structuralism’, see Lee (1990: 34-38). This is not to
say that Lacan remained attached to structuralist principles throughout his intellectual career. Already in his work on
the ‘mirror stage’ he displays distinct poststructuralist traits as I show, below, with reference to the ‘quasi-
transcendental’ logic of the mirror-image. In his late(r) work this poststructuralist bent becomes more conspicuous.
10
This ability to ‘position oneself’ within the symbolic order may be understood in a structuralist or in a
poststructuralist manner, depending on whether one means by this that the subject ‘is (exclusively) spoken’ by
 15

language (structuralist), or that the subject is alternatively both ‘spoken by’, and ‘speaks’ language or discourse
(poststructuralist). In his later work, Lacan maintains a poststructuralist position. See in this regard Olivier 2001 and
2003a, where I address this thorny issue (largely) in relation to the heuristic value of Foucault’s concept of
discourse.
11
See in this regard Derrida 1982: 11, Bennington 1993: 276-277, and Laclau 1997: 47-52. The latter provides a
number of examples of the operation of ‘quasi-transcendental logics’ (p. 48).
12
Jacques Derrida seems to me to be in substantial agreement with Lacan’s conviction, that it is inadvisable, if not
impossible, to prioritize the self or ego at the cost of the subject’s multiplicity, diversity or heterogeneity, where he
remarks in ‘Sauf le nom’ (1995:35) that ‘…it is always necessary to be more than one in order to speak, several
voices are necessary for that…’ Similarly, in Circumfession he insinuates that he lives in heterogeneity, observing
among other things (1993: 155) that ‘the constancy of God in my life is called by other names’, but simultaneously
that ‘I quite rightly pass for an atheist’. One could also point to Foucault, who claimed that, in order to discover
what one is, one has to ‘open’ oneself to all the multiplicities with which one is shot through from head to toe
(Miller 1994: 245). (It is probably no coincidence that Foucault regularly attended Lacan’s famous seminar in Paris.)
A final example, from literature: In Hermann Hesse’s (1963) novel, Steppenwolf, the main character, Harry Haller,
talks about his discovery that not only one, nor even only two different persona (as he thought at one stage
concerning human and wolf) live in a person’s psyche, but a variety of personalities or selves, which are usually
repressed by most people for the sake of the illusory ideal of unity as represented by the ego. However, from
Hesse’s narrative it is clear that, for the sake of a balance between stability and renewal, an individual can actualize
only one of these selves at a time.
13
I should also point out that Lacan’s insights remind one in some respects of the teachings of the Buddha,
Siddharta Gautama, from the 6th century BCE. Like Lacan, Siddharta regarded the self as a fantasm, that is, as the
result of fantasy, or of the need to experience the self as a unity. One does not encounter any of the Buddha’s
metaphysical doctrines such as the way in which asceticism can free one from the wheel of Karma on Lacan’s part,
however. See in this regard Leonard Shlain’s insightful discussion of the Buddha’s significance for contemporary
culture (1998: 168-178).
14
This also manifests itself in Lacan’s attack on Sartrean existentialism’s glorification of the subject’s putative
absolute freedom or autonomy, which Lacan (1977b: 6) regards as an illusion.
15
This reminds one of Schopenhauer’s (admittedly metaphysical) belief that what he called the irrational ‘world
will’ is best instantiated among all the arts by the fleeting forms of music as its immediate embodiment, and that the
human ability to ‘represent’ reality in terms of concepts or (in the other arts) as ideas, is essentially a falsification of
this reality (Olivier 1998). Bergson, too, regarded ‘true’ reality or élan vital as something that eludes the human
faculty of intellect with its tendency to substantialize, and as being accessible only by intuition.
16
Not in the Heideggerian sense, which construes being in an ‘active’ or processual sense. Cf. Heidegger 1978.
17
Interestingly, Lacan’s later theory of the ‘four discourses’ (Fink 1995: 129-137; Bracher 1994: 107-128) deviates
somewhat from his early stance concerning (scientific) knowledge. Here he provides a model with the aid of which
one can traverse complex configurations of cultural practices, including science, art and music. Succinctly put, he
distinguishes among the discourses of ‘the master’, of ‘the university’ (or of ‘knowledge’), of ‘the hysteric’ and of
‘the analyst’, and – contrary to what one might expect – shows that (authentic) science is an example, not of the
‘discourse of knowledge (the university)’, but of that of ‘the hysteric’, given the manner in which hysterics
constantly challenged Freud’s evolving theories by their behaviour. Similarly, true science is characterized by the
repeated challenging of every theoretical position that may be reached. Another way of putting this is to say that, for
Lacan, genuine science is marked by ‘structural indeterminacy’, as exemplified by the principle of indeterminacy in
quantum mechanics. Perhaps it is more accurate to say, then, that it is the discourse of ‘the hysteric’ and that of ‘the
analyst’ which, together, comprise the structural dynamic of science, where the discourse of ‘the analyst’ mediates
between the destabilizing discourse of the hysteric and the hyper-stabilizing or rigidifying function of those of the
‘university’ and (hidden behind it) of ‘the master’. It should be added that Lacan’s discourse-theory also enables one
to understand his model of the subject as being thoroughly poststructuralist (that is, as one that transcends the
either/or logic of traditional western thinking) in so far as the subject is theorized as occupying successive positions
within the discourse of the master, each of which is subverted by the subject intermittently positioning itself in the
discourse of the hysteric. This enables the subject to maintain a condition of relative stability coupled with a certain
dynamism. This is made possible by the discourse of the analyst, which mediates between the imaginary
identifications of the subject in the register of the master’s discourse, on the one hand, and the functioning of the
discourse of the hysteric (which erodes these imaginary identifications), on the other. Needless to say, of course, this
applies to a ‘healthy’ (note the scare quotes!) subject, as opposed to those subjects who ‘get stuck’ in a master’s
 16

discourse (e.g. patriarchy, religious fanaticism, etc.), or, on the other hand, become the mere playthings of the
unmitigated flux of the hysteric’s discourse. In both cases, the subject would tend towards psychosis, which is
recognizable by its ‘lack of lack’. In other words, the ‘lacking’ subject is a ‘healthy’ subject.
18
In the same way, knowledge is to be thought of in these ambivalent terms, too. Bowie (1991: 42), alluding to the
‘paranoiac’ structure of knowledge á la Lacan, puts it well: ‘…if you are not prepared to stagnate, at least a little,
you will not have access to the “symbolic polyphony” that is your rightful world of meaning.’ In other words,
knowledge cannot be conceived of adequately either exclusively in terms of being, or exclusively in terms of
becoming – it requires a bit of both as ‘necessary instruments of thought’ (Bowie 1991: 42).
19
Recall the formula provided earlier, namely: subject = self or ego / unconscious (as discourse of the Other).
20
Kaja Silverman (1983: 174-176) provides an illuminating example of Lacan’s claim that the subject leaves the
‘real’ behind forever as soon as he or she enters the symbolic realm of language with her discussion of Herzog’s
cinematic rendition of the story of the newly civilized ‘animal man’, Kaspar Hauser’s wistful but futile attempt to
regain the fullness (but muteness) of the ‘real’ by planting seeds (which eventually grow) in the shape of the letters
spelling his name.
21
John Thompson’s (1990: 7) conception of ideology, namely, ‘…meaning in the service of power’ is consonant
with the sense in which I am employing the term here.
22
Essentially, this means that the analysand discovers, by way of the inescapable experience of frustration, that
there is a chasm separating him or her from what was previously thought of as their ‘identity’, but is now uncovered
as something alienating. As Lacan puts it (1977a: 42; see also Lee 1990: 39):
…he [the analysand] ends up by recognizing that this being [of his] has never been anything more than his
construct in the imaginary and that this construct disappoints all his certainties…For in this labour which he
undertakes to reconstruct for another, he rediscovers the fundamental alienation that made him construct it
like another, and which has always destined it to be taken from him by another.
23
Zizek’s (1993: 206-208) discussion of the object a (or objet petit a) is helpful here in so far as he adduces a very
telling example from Freud’s clinical practice of how the so-called object a functions as the ‘knot’ or concentrated
point from the perspective of which one’s repressed, hidden desire becomes apparent.
24
It does not have to be an analyst who occupies this position, of course. It could be a friend or acquaintance who
listens to the subject and ‘punctuates’ her or his speech at apposite intervals, thus ‘filling in the gaps’ the way the
analyst does. It could also be the person who laughs at one’s jokes who plays this role (Lacan 1977a: 60).
25
All these vaunted types of ‘unity’ are related to what Kurt Vonnegut’s character, Bokonon, in Cat’s Cradle (1965:
61), calls the (illusory) unity of a ‘granfalloon’ - like a school, a family, a college, a nation - all of which are
putatively totalities that provide the individual subject with a context of identification where all alienation may be
overcome, but which, in fact, promote precisely such alienation through identification as characterized by Lacan.
26
Bowie (1991: 88-91) argues that one may detect a parallel between Freud’s triad of ego, superego and id, on the
one hand, and Lacan’s correspondingly triadic thinking in terms of the symbolic, the imaginary and the real.
27
A graphic demonstration of the revealing operation of such ‘parapraxes’ was provided by an ex-South African
actress, now living in London, when she was interviewed in South Africa on a return visit to act in one of the
principal roles in a production of Shakespeare’s MacBeth. After elaborating on the reasons for emigrating from
South Africa – mainly centred around family ties in Britain – the interviewer asked her what had persuaded her to
return for the production in question. The actress replied that she could not resist the opportunity to return for the
sake of playing the part of ‘Lady MacDeath’ – a slip that she promptly corrected, of course. What the lapse of the
tongue on her part revealed so starkly, was the true (but repressed) reason for her emigration, namely the ubiquitous,
violent crime in South Africa, concentrated in the word ‘MacDeath’. Bruce Fink (1995: 3) explains this
phenomenon of linguistic ‘blunders’ well in terms of the Other as one of the ‘places’ from which ‘different kinds of
talk’ come.

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