Law

In Lacan’s theory of childhood development, the traumatic moment of entry into the symbolic is not simply a spontaneous act on the part of the infant. It is also the originary advent of the law as an effect of the father’s interdiction. In the infant’s experience of his mother’s body as a site of enjoyment (producing warmth, food, comfort, etc.), he or she perceives this enjoyment as an integral part of the order of things as they are ambiguously organised through imaginary identifications. At some point, however, the infant becomes aware of the fact that the father has some degree of precedence over the infant’s right to enjoy the mother. Classically termed the Oedipus complex, this moment is part and parcel of the infant’s entry into the symbolic order, as this apprehension of the father’s precedence is conveyed as an originary verbal prohibition of access to the mother’s body which forces the infant to devise a compensatory presence, the symbol of the absent mother (the "da!" of the Freudian fort/da binary). This inaugural paternal interdiction is thus essential to the symbolic order and makes of it the very fibre of the law itself:

This law, then, is revealed clearly enough as identical with an order of language. For without kinship nominations, no power is capable of instituting the order of preferences and taboos that bind and weave the yarn of lineage through succeeding generations. And it is indeed the confusion of generations which, in the Bible as in all traditional laws, is accused as being the abomination of the Word (verbe) and the desolation of the sinner. (Ecrits 66)

"This legal-linguistic structure is in fact no more and no less than the symbolic order itself" (Evans 99). Clearly drawing on structural anthropology and, more obscurely, on speech act theory, Lacan positions the law in its broadest sense as "the set of universal principles which make social existence possible, the structures that govern all forms of social exchange, whether gift-giving, kinship relations or the formation of pacts. Since the most basic form of exchange is communication itself, the law is fundamentally a linguistic entity – it is the law of the signifier" (Evans 98). Growing out of the paternal interdiction that puts an end to the infant’s unproblematic imaginary identification with the mother and inaugurates the rivalry between infant and father that grounds the Oedipus complex, the law is coextensive with the symbolic order to such an extent that neither is conceivable without the other.

Insofar as the law is essentially a process for regulating social relations, the symbolic order must henceforth be conceived of as a profoundly intersubjective structure. Just as there can be no need for, or effectiveness of, the law in the absence of something to regulate, so there can be no signification in the absence of someone to whom to signify. That is, the law actually invents that which it regulates, creating a lack by masking the impossibility of the imaginary relation behind the symbolic prohibition: "the law creates desire in the first place by creating interdiction. Desire is essentially the desire to transgress, and for there to be transgression it is first necessary for there to be prohibition […] desire is born out of the process of regulation" (Evans 99). By the same process, the symbolic order actually invents the subject as an effect of itself, generating the subject position of the speaking individual at the same moment as that individual seeks to signify the absence of someone or something to which it has suddenly been barred access (or the impossibility of access to which he or she has suddenly been made aware). In this regard, the entry into the symbolic makes of all signification an intersubjective situation as the speaking subject necessarily orients itself in relation to that which it symbolises; to do so, it must hold a position within that symbolic network – it must in essence be a signifier.

The infant’s entry into the symbolic is thus a traumatic event in which the original sense of integrity, wholeness, presence, and identification (associated with the primary narcissism of the imaginary order) is lost forever. Even the imaginary compensations of ego formation now recede from consciousness as the irremediable gap between the individual and that which it desires (the ideal-ego, the mother’s body, plenitude) comes to the fore as the organising principle of the totalising force of the symbolic order. The repetitive automatism of the signifying chain is thus a compensatory gesture, an obsessive attempt by the symbolic order (and the subjects who live in and by it) to cover over the lack/absence which organises it. The signifying chain must always remain in motion, doubling back on itself and deferring any presence of meaning as content, in order to forestall the terrifying confrontation with this originary and constitutive absence. In effect, the symbolic order achieves a sustained deferral of this confrontation, proffering alternative signifiers as provisional substitutive compensations for the irremediable lack created in its radical reorganisation of the world.

An analogous and consistent way of conceiving this compensatory response to the trauma of entering the symbolic is to consider the occurrence of repetition compulsion in victims of trauma. By repeating an action that is an effect of a traumatic episode, the obsessive neurotic effectively symbolises the traumatic kernel that organises his or her symptoms without ever approaching the truth of the motivating traumatic episode. The repetitive actions of the trauma victim are comparable to the repetition compulsion built into the incessant play of signifiers in the signifying chain. Just as the trauma victim’s actions constitute a series of symptoms that represent effects of the traumatic episode without symbolising it, so the series of signifiers in the signifying chain represent the traumatic loss or absence around which the symbolic order is organised without ever being able to signify it directly.