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→Is Lacan a Structuralist?
((Try writing a small ad. What you write is different from you. It may represent you, but in being represented, you have to confront the fact that words are not there to help you. ''They have no been designed for you'', and yet you have to find your way around in the world of language in order to survive. (Words represent me, but are not for me...))) There is thus a new theory of [[alienation]] in [[Lacan]]. The early work referred to [[alienation]] in the [[register]] of the [[image]], and now ''[[alienation]] is situated in the [[register]] of [[language]]''. If [[speech]] was first seen as giving the [[subject]] some sort of [[identity]], now ''[[language]] has the role of blocking identity''. This is the difference between [[Lacan]]'s conception of [[language]] in 1953 and that of 1958: the [[subject]] is no longer recognized but abolished.
=====Loss and Language=====
From early [[childhood]], you have to use [[speech]] to express your [[needs]]. But the minute you use words to express something, you are in another [[register]]. (If you need water, asking for it changes things. The water matters less than whether my mother gives it to me. In other words, how the mother manifests her love.) The [[object]] of [[need]] becomes pulverized by the dimension of [[language]]: what matters now is not the [[object]] (the water) but the [[sign]] of [[love]]. ''Speaking thus introduces a particular form of [[loss]] into the world''. To speak is to make the object vanish, since one is speaking to someone else. The [[object]] of [[need]] becomes eclipsed in the [[demand]].
=====Desire=====
[[Demand]] is ultimately a [[demand]] for [[love]], and, for this reason, [[unsatiable]]. If someone asks you if you lvoe them and you say yes, that will not step them from asking you again and again and again. The impossibility of really proving one's love once and for all is well known. Hence [[demand]] is a continuing spiral. But Lacan adds something more. To [[need]] and [[demand]], he adds the [[register]] of [[desire]]. ''[[Desire]] take sup what has been eclipsed at the level of [[need]]'' (the dimension represented by the mythical water) and introduces an absolute condition in opposition to the absolutely unconditional nature of demand. (We can see this in cases where human desire literally has an absolute condition, in fetishism. I cna only reach sexual enjoyment when a particular object or trait is present in my partner, like a ribbon or a certain pair of boots.) ''[[Enjoyment]] is determined strictly by the [[present]] of this element''.
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