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f. 3. Lacan{{Top}}langue]]'s Philosophy of Language', ''[[langage{{Bottom}}

Perhaps the component of Lacanian theory for which it is most famous, and which has most baffled its critics, =====Translation=====It is important to note that the emphasis Lacan laid on English word "[[language in his attempt ]]" corresponds to formalise psychoanalysis. From the 1950's, in complete opposition to any Jungian or romantic conceptions, Lacan instead described the unconscious as a kind of discoursetwo [[French]] [[words]]: the discourse of the Other. There are at least three interrelated concerns that inform the construction of what I am terming Lacan's 'philosophy of language':- The first is the central argument that the child's castration is the decisive point in its becoming a speaking subject - The second is his taking very seriously what might be termed the [[langue]]'interpretive paradigm' in Freud’s texts, according to which Freud repeatedly described symptoms, slips and dreams as symbolic phenomena capable of interpretation. - The third is Lacan's desire to try to understand the efficacy of psychoanalytic interpretation as a curative procedure that relies solely on what Freud called in The Question of Lay Analysis the 'magical[[langage]]'' power of the word.

Back These two words have quite different [[meanings]] in [[Lacan]]'s [[work]]: ''[[langue]]'' usually refers to Table a specific [[language]], such as French or [[English]], whereas ''[[langage]]'' refers to the [[system]] of Contents[[language]] in general, abstracting from all [[particular]] languages.

a=====Jacques Lacan=====It is fundamentally the general structure of [[language]] (''[[langage]]''), rather than the differences between particular languages ('''[[langue]]s'') that interests [[Lacan]]. Language and Law

In Part 1, When [[reading]] [[Lacan]] in recounting Lacan's view on the resolution of the Oedipal complex, one reason why Lacan allocated language such importance was touched upon. For Lacan, English it is only when the child accedes therefore essential to castration and the Law be aware of which term is used in the father, that s/he becomes fully competent as a language-speaker within his/her given social collective. By contrast, individuals suffering from psychosis, Lacan stresses (in line with a vast wealth of psychological research), are prone to characteristic linguistic dysfunctions and inabilities. Already from this, then, we can outline a first crucial feature original French; most of Lacan's 'philosophy of language'. Like the later Wittgenstein, Lacan’s position is that to learn a language is to learn a set of rules or laws for [[time]] the use and combination of words. Accordingly, for him too, French term will be 'learning is based on believing' [Wittgenstein[langage]]. Particularly, Lacan asserts a lasting link between the capacity of a subject to perceive the world as a set of discrete identifiable objects, and his/her acceptance of the unconditional authority of a body of convention. I will return to this below''.

Back =====Psychoanalytic Experience=====Between 1936 and 1949 references to Table [[language]] are sparse, but they are significant; already in 1936, for example, [[Lacan]] emphasizes that [[language]] is constitutive of Contentsthe [[psychoanalytic]] [[experience]],<ref>{{Ec}} p.82</ref> and in 1946 he argues that it is [[impossible]] to [[understand]] [[madness]] without addressing the problem of [[language]].<ref>{{Ec}} p. 166</ref>

b[[Lacan]]'s comments on [[language]] at this time do not contain any references to a specific [[linguistics|linguistic theory]], and instead are dominated by [[philosophy|philosophical allusions]], mainly in [[terms]] derived from [[Hegel]]. Psychoanalysis as Interpretation: the Unconscious Structured Like a Language

Lacan's contention concerning human-being as a parle-etre, put most broadly, is that when the subject learns its mother tongue, everything from its sense of how the world is, to the way it experiences its biological body, are over-determined by its accession to this order of Thus [[language. This ]] is the clearest register of the debt that Lacan owes to phenomenology. From Heidegger, he accepts the notion that to be a subject is to experience the world seen primarily as a meaningful totality, and that language is crucial to this capability. Aligning Freud with the theories of Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, Lacan developed a psychoanalytic conception of how the body is caught in the play of meaning-formation between subjects, and expressive of the subjectivity that 'lives' through it, as well as being an objectificable tool for the performance of instrumental activities. For Lacan, that is, 'the unconscious' does not name only some other part of the mental apparatus than consciousness. It names all that about a subject, including bodily manifestations and identifications with others and 'external' objects that insist beyond his/her conscious control.Freud had already commented in the Introductory Lectures to Psychoanalysis that the unconscious can be compared to a language without a grammar. Lacan, using structuralist linguistics, attempted to systematise this contention, arguing that the unconscious is structured like a language, and that 'it speaks'/ ca parle. A symptom, Lacan (for example) claimed, is to be read as a kind of embodied corporeal metaphor. As Freud had argued, he takes it that what is at stake within a symptom is a repressed desire abhorrent to the consciously accepted self-conception and values of the subject. This desire, if it is to gain satisfaction at all, accordingly needs to be expressed indirectly. For example, a residual infantile desire to masturbate may find satisfaction indirectly in a compulsive ritual the subject feels compelled to repeat. Just as one might metaphorically describe one's love as a rose, Lacan argues, here we have a repressed desire being metaphorically expressed in some apparently dissimilar bodily activity. Equally, drawing on certain moments within Freud's papers "On the Psychology of Love", Lacan argues that desire is structured as a metonymy. In metonymy, one designates a whole object (eg: a car) by naming one part of it (eg: 'a set of wheels'). Lacan’s argument is that, equally, since castration denies subjects full access to their first love object (the mother), their choice of subsequent love objects is the choice of a series of objects that each resemble in part the lost object (perhaps they have the same hair, or look at him/her the same way the mother did …). According to Lacan, the unconscious uses the multivalent resources of the natural language into mediating element which permits the [[subject has been inducted (what he calls 'the battery of the signifier') to give indirect vent ]] to attain [[recognition]] from the desires that the subject cannot consciously avow. Lacan's Freudian argument is that a directly comparable process occurs in formations of the unconscious as in jokes. As Freud detailed in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, the 'punch line’ of jokes pack their punch by condensing in one statement, or even one word, two chains of meaning. The first of these is what the previous words and cues of the joke, and our shared norms for interpretation, lead us to expect. The second is a wholly different chain of associations, whose clash with what we had expected produces our sense of amusement. In the same way, Lacan observed that, for example, when an analysand makes a 'slip of the tongue', what has taken place is that the unconscious has employed such means as homonymy, the merging of two words, the forgetting or mispronunciation of certain words, or a slippage of pronoun or tense, etc., to intimate a whole chain of associations which the subject did not intend, but through which his unconscious desire is given indirect expression. Lacan argues that what the consideration of jokes, symptoms and slips thus shows are a number of features of how it is that human beings form sense in language. The first thing is that the sentence is the absolutely basal unit of meaning. Before a sentence ends, Lacan notes, the sense of each individual word or signifier is uncertain. It is only when the sentence is completed that their sense is fixed, or- as Lacan variously put it- 'quilted'. Before this time, they are what he calls floating signifiers, like to the leading premises of a jokeother. The sense of this position can be easily demonstrated<ref>{{E}} p. One need only begin a sentence by proferring a subject, but then cease speaking before a verb and9</or predicate is assigned to this in accordance with linguistic convention. For example, if I say: 'when I was young I…' or ‘it’s not like …’, my interlocutor will be understandably want to know what it is that I mean. At the end of the sentence, by contrast, the sense of the beginning words becomes clear, as when I finish the first of the above utterances by saying 'when I was young I ran a lot', or whatever. This understanding of sentences as the basic unit of sense, and of how it is that signifiers 'float' until any given sentence is finished, is what informs Lacan's emphasis on the future anterior tense. Sense, he argues, is always something that 'will have been'. It is anticipated but not confirmed, when we hear uttered the beginning of a sentence (see transference below). Or else, at sentence's end, it is something that we now see with the benefit of ’twenty twenty hindsight’ to have been intended all along. This is why, in Seminar I, Lacan even quips that the meaning of symptoms do not come from the past, but from the future. Before the work of interpretation, a symptom is a floating signifier, whose meaning is unclear to the analysand, and also to the analyst. As the analytic work proceeds, however, an interpretation is achieved at some later time that casts the whole behaviour into relief in a wholly different light, and makes its sense clear.ref>

Back Above and beyond its use for conveying information, [[language]] is first and foremost an appeal to Table of Contentsan interlocutor; in [[Jakobson]]'s terms, [[Lacan]] stresses the connative function above the referential.

cThus he insists that [[langage]] is not a nomenclature. The Curative Efficacy of the 'Talking Cure'<ref>{{Ec}} p. 166</ref>

=====Anthropology and Phenomenology=====From 1950 to 1954 [[language]] begins to occupy the central [[position]] that it will hold in [[Lacan]]'s work thereafter. In this period, [[Lacan]]'s emphasis on [[discussion]] of [[language ]] is also over-determined dominated by an elementary recollection thatreferences to [[Heideggerian]] [[phenomenology]] and, if Freud’s intervention promised anythingmore importantly, it is that speaking with another person in strictly controlled circumstances can be a curative experience for people suffering from forms of mental illness. The analysand comes to the analyst with his troubling symptoms, and the analyst, at certain decisive points, offers interpretations [[anthropology]] of these behaviours that retrospectively make their meaning clear. And this is not simply an intellectual exercise. As Freud stressed[[language]] ([[Anthropology|Maus, there is knowledge of the unconsciousMalinowski, and then there is knowledge that has effects upon itLévi-Strauss]]. A successful psychoanalytic interpretation  [[Language]] is one that has effects even upon thus seen as [[structure|structuring]] the biological reality [[law|social laws of the bodyexchange]], as a symbolic pact, changing the subject's bearing towards the worldetc. There are also occasional references to [[rhetoric]], and dissolving hisbut these are not elaborated.<ref>{{E}} p. 169</her symptoms.ref> The need There are a few allusions to explain this power of words [[Saussure]],<ref>{{S1}} p. 248</ref> but in his famous "[[Rome Discourse]]" [[Lacan]] establishes an opposition between ''[[parole]]'' and ''[[language is a clear |langage]]'' (and not, as [[Saussure]] does, between ''[[parole]]'' and lasting motive behind Lacan's understanding of '[[language|langue]]''.<ref>{{L}}. "''[[Fonction]] et [[champ]] de la parole et du langage en [[psychanalyse]]. His central and basal hypothesis concerning it can be stated in the following way''" 1953a. In a symptom, as we saw above, an unconscious desire seeks to make itself manifest{{E}} p. 237-322. ("[[The symptom is recounted to the analyst, or else repeated function and field of speech and language in the way the subject responds to the analyst in the sessionspsychoanalysis]]. Then an interpretation is offered by the analyst, which recognises or symbolises the force of the desire at work in the symptom, and the symptom disappears") In {{E}}. So here the recognition of a desire at the same time satisfies the desirep. What this can accordingly only mean 30-113</ref> ====="The Unconscious is Structured like a Language"=====Between 1955 and 1970 [[language]] takes center [[stage]] and [[Lacan]] develops his classic [[thesis]] that "the unconscious desire given voice in the symptom is itself, from the start, at least in part [[structured]] like a desire for recognitionlanguage."<ref>{{S11}} p. This 20</ref> It is an absolutely central Lacanian insight, wherein he again shows in this period that the names [[Ferdinand de Saussure]] and [[Roman Jakobson]] come to the influence of Hegelfore in [[Lacan]]'s Phenomenology [[Works of Spirit upon his most central conceptsJacques Lacan|work]]. It synchronises exactly with the philosophical anthropology recounted above, and  =====Structural Linguistics=====[[Lacan]] takes up [[Saussure]]'s stricture concerning how human desire [[theory]] that [[language]] is always caught up in the dialectics a [[structure]] composed of differential elements, but whereas [[Saussure]] had stated this of ''[[language|langue]]'', [[Lacan]] states it of individuals’ exchanges with others''[[language|langage]]''. But ''[[language|Langage]]'' becomes, for [[Lacan]], it also shows something vital about the single paradigm of all [[structures]]. [[Lacan]] then proceeds to criticize the [[Saussure]]an [[concept]] of [[language in or as which ]], arguing that the subjects' repressed desires are trying to find a vent. This is that basic unit of [[language ]] is above all a social pactnot the [[sign]] but the [[signifier]]. As  [[Lacan wrote in ]] then argues that the Ecrits: "As a rule everyone knows that others will remain[[unconscious]] is, like himself[[language]], inaccessible to the constraints of reason, outside an acceptance in principle of a rule [[structure]] of debate that does not come into force without an explicit or implicit agreement as to what is called its basis[[signifiers]], which is almost always tantamount also allows [[Lacan]] to an anticipated agreement to what is at stake... I shall expect nothing therefore of these rules except formulate the good faith [[category]] of the Other, and, as a last resort, will make use of them, if I think fit or if I am forced to, only to amuse bad faith[[symbolic]] with greater precision..."  In 1969 [[Lacan, 2001: 154-155] Lacan's idea is that to speak is to presuppose ] develops a body concept of [[discourse]] as a conventions that ensue that, even if my immediate auditor doesn’t 'get it'kind of [[discourse|social bond]]. =====Psychotic Language=====From 1971 on, the true meaning of what I wish shift from [[linguistics]] to convey always will emerge, and be registered in some ‘Other’ place. (Note that here is another meaning [[mathematics]] as the paradigm of the big Other touched upon in Part 1. The big Other [[science|scientificity]] is accompanied by a tendency to emphasize the place, tribunal, collective or single person which we presuppose will register the truth [[poetry]] and ambiguity of what we say[[language]], whenever we speak). This as is why evident in [[Lacan]]'s philosophy of language is to be read increasing interest in strong opposition to any philosophical account (whether Lockean, descriptivist or phenomenological) which argues that meaning is formed prior to the communicative act"[[psychotic]] [[language]]" of [[James Joyce]].<ref>{{L}}. Lacan defines speech as a process in which the subjects get their meanings back from the Other in an inverted form"[[Joyce]] le symptôme. Think once more of what is involved in psychoanalytic interpretation" 1975a. Here the meaning of a symptom is rendered by the analystIn Jacques Aubert (ed. What this means), for ''Joyce avec Lacan''. [[Paris]]: Navarin, is that the symptom not only bears upon the subject1987.</ref> [[Lacan]]'s past relations to others. If it can be dissolved by an Other’s interpretation, own style reflects this is because [[change]] as it is formed becomes ever more densely populated with an eye to this interpretation from the startpuns and neologisms. To quote Slavoj Zizek on this Lacanian notion of how  =====''Lalangue''=====[[Lacan]] coins the symptom is term ''[[language|lalangue]]'' (from the start addressed definite article ''la'' and the noun ''[[language|langue]]'') to an Other supposed refer to know its truth: "The symptom arises where the world failedthese non-communicative aspects of [[language]] which, by playing on ambiguity and homophony, where the circuit of symbolic communication was broken: it is give rise to a kind of 'prolongation of communication by other means': [[jouissance]]''.<ref>{{S20}} p. 126</ref> The term "[[language]]" now becomes opposed to ''[[language|lalangue]]''. ''[[language|Lalangue]]'' is like the failedprimary chaotic substrate of polysemy out of which [[language]] is constructed, repressed word articulates itself in a coded, ciphered form. The implication almost as if [[language]] is some ordered superstructure sitting on top of this substrate: <blockquote>"Language is that the symptom can not only be interpreted but without [[doubt]] made of ''[[lalangue]]''. It is, so to speak, formed with an eye to its interpretation … elucubration of [[knowledge]] (''[[knowledge|savoir]]'') [[about]] ''lalangue''.<ref>{{S20}} p. 127</ref></blockquote> =====Lacanian Psychoanalysis==========Language in the psychoanalytic cure the symptom Analytic Treatment=====It is always addressed to the analyst, it emphasis placed by [[Lacan]]ian [[psychoanalysis]] that is an appeal to him to deliver usually regarded as its hidden message … This … is most distinctive feature. [[Lacan]] criticizes the basic point: in its very constitutionway that other forms of [[psychoanalysis]], such as [[Kleinian psychoanalysis]] and [[object-relations theory]], tend to play down the symptom implies importance of [[language]] and emphasize the field "non-[[verbal]] communication" of the big Other as consistent[[analysand]] (his "[[body]] language, complete" etc.) at the expense of the [[analysand]]'s [[speech]]). This is a fundamental error, because its very formation is an appeal according to the Other which contains its meaning …" [Zizek, 1989: 73[Lacan]] Even the key meaning of transference, for Lacan[[three]] main reasons. :1. Firstly, all [[human]] [[communication]] is this supposition that there inscribed in a [[linguistic]] [[structure]]; even "body language," is an Other supposed to know , as the truth term implies, fundamentally a [[form]] of my communicative acts''[[language]]'', even down to with the most apparently meaningless 'slips' and symptomatic behaviourssame [[structure|structural features]]. :2. In terms Secondly, the [[whole]] aim of the previous section, transference [[psychoanalytic treatment]] is to articulate the condition [[truth]] of possibility for one's [[desire]] in [[speech]] rather than in any other medium; the quilting [[fundamental rule]] of [[psychoanalysis]] is based on the meaning of floating signifiers [[principle]] that occurs even in [[speech]] is the most basic sentences, as we sawonly way to this [[truth]]. What occurs in a psychoanalytic interpretation is simply one more consequential version of this process :3. The subjectAnd thirdly, by speaking, addresses himself to some Other supposed to know her/his truth, and at [[speech]] is the only tool which the end of this process[[analyst]] has; therefore, any [[analyst]] who does not understand the signifiers he offers to the Other are quilted, way [[speech]] and return to him 'in an inverted form'[[language]] work does not understand [[psychoanalysis]] itself.<ref>{{E}} p. What has occurred at this point, on 40</ref> One consequence of [[Lacan]]'s reckoning, emphasis on [[language]] is his recommendation that the previously unquilted signifiers finding voice in [[analyst]] must attend to the manifestations [[formal]] features of his unconscious are integrated into the subject[[analysand]]'s symbolic universe: [[speech]] (the way s/he understands the world[[signifiers]]), in the terms of his/her community's natural language. They have been subjectivised; which means that now s/he can recognise them as and not wholly alien intrusions be sidetracked into his/her identity, but an integral part empathic attitude baseed on an [[imaginary]] [[understanding]] of this identitythe [[content]] (the [[signified]]).  =====Symbolic and Imaginary Dimensions=====One common misconception of [[Lacan's stress ]] is that [[language]] is synonymous with the [[symbolic]] [[order]]. This is thus always, when he talks of psychoanalytic interpretationhowever, not correct; [[Lacan]] argues that this interpretation does not add new content to [[language]] has both a [[symbolic]] and an [[imaginary]] [[dimension]]. <blockquote>"There is something in [[the subject's self-understanding, so much as affect the form symbolic]] function of this understanding. An interpretationhuman discourse that cannot be eliminated, and that is, realigns the way [[role]] played in it by [[the simaginary]]."<ref>{{S2}} p.306</ref></he sees her past, reordering blockquote> The [[symbolic|symbolic dimension]] of [[language]] is that of the signifiers in which his/her self-understanding has come to be ordered[[signifier]] and [[speech|true speech]]. A crucial Lacanian category in theorising this process  The [[imaginary]] dimension of [[language]] is that of the 'master signifier'[[signified]], [[signification]], and [[speech|empty speech]]. Master signifiers are those signifiers to  [[Schema L]] represents these two dimensions of [[language]] by means of two axes which a subject's identity are most intimately boundintersect. Standard examples are words like  The axis 'Australian’, 'democrat', ‘decency’, ‘genuineness’. They are words which will typically be proffered by subjects as naming something like what Kant would have called ends in themselves. They designate values and ideals that the subject will be unwilling and unable to question without pulling the semantic carpet from beneath their own feet. LacanA-S''s understanding of how these 'master signifiers’ function is a multi-layered one, as I shall expand [[language]] in Part 3.. It is certainly true to say, thoughits [[symbolic|symbolic dimension]]], that the importance [[discourse]] of these signifiers comes from how a subject's identification with them commits them to certain orderings of all the rest of [[Other]], the signifiers[[unconscious]]. For example, if someone identifies himself as a  The [[imaginary]] axis 'communist', the meanings of a whole array of other signifiers are ordered in quite different ways than for someone who thinks of himself as a 'liberal'. ‘Freedom’ for him comes to mean ‘freedom from the exploitative practices enshrined in capitalism and hidden beneath liberal ideological rhetoric'. -'Democracy’ comes to mean ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat'. a'Equality’ comes to mean something like ‘what ensues once the sham of the capitalist "equal right to trade" is unmasked'. What Lacan argues is involved [[language]] in its [[imaginary|imaginary dimension]], the psychoanalytic processwall of [[language]] which interrupts, then, is distorts and [[inversion|invert]]s the elevation [[discourse]] of new the [[Other]]. In [[Lacan]]'master signifiers’ which enable s words, "language is as much there to be found in the subject Other as to reorder their sense of themselves drastically prevent us from understanding him.<ref>{{S2}} p. 244</ref> =====Languages and Codes=====[[Lacan]] distinguishes between [[language]]s and of their relations to others. Previously[[code]]s; unlike [[code]]s, for example, a person may have identified with a conception of 'decency' that has led him in [[language]] there is no [[stable]] one-to repress aspects of his own libidinal makeup-one correspondence between [[sign]] and [[sign|referent]], which then return in neurotic symptomsnor between [[signified]] and [[signifier]]. What analysis will properly lead him to do  It is identify himself with a different set this property of 'master signifiers', [[language]] which re-signify the signifiers he had unconsciously been addressing gives rise to the Other in his symptomsinherent ambiguity of all [[discourse]], reducing their traumatic charge which can only be [[interpreted]] by integrating them into his symbolic playing on the homophony and other forms of equivocation (self-''l'équivoque'')understanding. ==See Also=={{See}}* [[Analysand]]* [[Analyst]]||* [[Code]]* [[Discourse]]||* [[Linguistics]]* [[Other]]||* [[Sign]]* [[Signified]]||* [[Signifier]]* [[Speech]]||* [[Structure]]* [[Symbolic]]{{Also}} ==References==<div style="font-size:11px" class="references-small"><references/></div> {{OK}}[[Category:Linguistics]][[Category:Language]][[Category:Symbolic]] __NOTOC__