Week 8 Lacan #2

Illusion of the Imaginary Delusion of the Symbolic Unrepresentability of the Real

Ferdinand de Saussure Course in General Linguistics (1915) A signSignifier A set of speech sounds, or of marks on a page Signified The concept, or idea, which is the meaning of the sign

The Mirror Stage The Imaginary has to do with the mechanisms of identification that the subject sets up, identifications with objects outside ourselves, whether these be material objects, other people, or our own image in the mirror. Parkin-Gounelas 94

The Mirror Stage Illusion of the Imaginary The “ego”, in Lacan’s terms, is an imaginary illusion, a false impression of wholeness. It is through entry into the Symbolic order of language that the infant learns to face up to the inevitability of its incompleteness. Parkin-Gounelas 94

The Fort/Da Game Language structured around the loss of a prior satisfaction (mother).

The Fort/Da Game Delusion of the Symbolic: The subject seeks to repair loss through the process of repetition. Soon repetitions became an end in themselves, a comforting suggestion of the (only) possibility of fulfillment. Parkin-Gounelas 100

Difference → Language In gaining access to language, the small child unconsciously learns that a sign has meaning only by virtue of its difference from other signs, and learns also that a sign presupposes the absence of the object it signifies. (Eagleton 166)

Desire All desire springs from a lack, which it strives continually to fill. Human language works by such lack: the absence of the real objects which signs designate. To enter language is to become a prey to desire. (Eagleton 168)

Desire Man desires to be desired by the Other. Objet a: the Other’s desire the mOther’s desire = the (missing) phallus Fink 59

Desire Objet a: the remainder produced when that hypothetical mother-child unity breaks down, as a last trace of that unity, a last reminder thereof. (Fink 59)

Desire By cleaving to that rem(a)ider, the split subject... can sustain the illusion of wholeness.... That is precisely what Lacan means by fantasy. (Fink 59)

Desire Desire is “the desire of the Other.” The Other, strictly speaking, is the Oedipus complex. (Parkin-Counelas 84)

Hamlet Freudian Reading Hamlet’s treatment of Ophelia → Hamlet’s aggression toward his mother → his thwarted passion for her; his overwhelming grievance of his mother’s misdirected sexuality (Parkin-Counelas 84)

Hamlet Freudian Reading Hamlet can’t kill Claudius for doing what Hamlet himself unconsciously wishes to do: kill his father and appropriate his mother.

Hamlet Unlike Jones’s (Freud’s) Oedipal of the Oedipal child who knows what he wants but is forbidden to have it, Lacan’s Oedipal subject does not know what it desires.

Hamlet Lacanian Reading It isn’t Hamlet’s desire for his mother, it’s the desire of his mother that drives the plot of the play. Hamlet cannot act because he cannot come to terms with Gertrude’s desire.

Hamlet Lacanian Reading The mOther’s desire: → the phallus → Claudius In desiring Gertrude’s desire, Hamlet cannot fulfill the mandate to kill Claudius; the revenge demanded by the ghost encounters the obstacle of the mOther’s desire.

Hamlet Lacanian Reading Mourning is the central preoccupation of the play. Hamlet suffers from “insufficient mourning.” (Parkin-Counelas 89)

Hamlet Lacanian Reading His inability to avenge his father’s death results from his reluctance to strike at himself in the form of the phallus, represented by Claudius, both his replacement and the ultimate signifier of power. “To be or not to be” the phallus (Parkin-Counelas 84)

Cause of Desire objet petit a: the imaginary position of the mother, or the lost/missing phallus That which constitute loss or trauma “the Real thing”: that which makes its presence felt in the gaps or holes in the Symbolic Parkin-Counelas 99

“The unconscious is structured like a language.” (Jacques Lacan)

His procedure is to recast Freud’s key concepts and mechanisms into the linguistic mode, viewing the human mind not as pre-existent to, but as constituted by the language we use. (Abrams 252)

The Unconscious The unconscious is just a continual movement and activity of signifiers, whose signified are often inaccessible to us because they are repressed.

Freud’s views of the mental workings of dreams → Lacan’s play of signifiers (Abrams 252)

The Unconscious Lacan makes us recognize that the unconscious is not some kind of seething, tumultuous, private region “inside” us, but an effect of our relations with one another. (Eagleton 173)

The Unconscious The unconscious 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. (Eagleton 173)

The Split Subject S: The divided subject, the barred subject The subject is split between ego and unconscious, between conscious and unconscious, between an ineluctably false sense of self and the automatic functioning of language (the signifying chain) in the unconscious. Fink 45

The Split Subject The subject is nothing but a split between the between two forms of otherness—the ego as other and the unconscious as the Other’s discourse. The subject is nothing but this very split. Fink 46

A River Runs Through It 1. Whose subjectivity will you focus on in your analysis? Norm’s or Paul’s? 2. Where do you perceive the Oedipus Complex at work? 3. Identify realms of the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real in the movie. 4. In what ways are Norm and Paul split subjects?

The End