Talk:Écrits

Until the publication of hisÉcrits (Writings), Jacques Lacan's only published book was his doctoral thesis in medicine, De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité (On paranoid psychosis in its relations with personality; 1932), written from a psychiatric, rather than psychoanalytic, perspective.

In the 1960s Lacan was asked by several of his students and by his friend François Wahl, of the publishing house Seuil, to collect his writings in a single volume. The considerable success of De...

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Lacan only published one book in his lifetime - Écrits (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966), and oversaw the editing of the first of his seminars - Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre XI: Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1973). The English translation, Écrits: A Selection by Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock Publications, 1977) contains key texts such as "The Mirror Stage", "The Rome Discourse," "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious," "The Meaning of the Phallus" and "The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire," but it still only consists of one-third of the French edition.

Lacan was 65 years old when he published Écrits and it is not an introductory text but the summation of a lifetime's teaching and clinical practice. Each paper contains a multiplicity of allusions and references that need to be unpacked, if we are to begin understanding Lacan's ideas.

"The Mirror Stage," for example, is only seven pages long, while "The Signification of the Phallus" is just nine, but each of these papers has generated volumes of explication, critique and applications.

==more==Reading as the production of meaning In this chapter I want to draw all the threads of the previous chapters together. I will do this by giving an exposition of some of the key themes contained in Lacan's Ecrits.! As this chapter contains many ideas already discussed in earlier sections of the book, it provides an opportunity for revision and a reconsideration of important topics such as: the significance of the mirror phase; the nature of the id and the ego; reasons for the rejection of egopsychology; the meaning of the terms signifier and signified, metaphor and metonymy; and Lacan's concept of desire. The first point to note about these writings is that they were almost all given as 'speeches', addresses to meetings of psychoanalysts. In them Lacan is trying to persuade the experts to listen to him. Lacan's seminars, on the other hand, although presented orally, aim at teaching students how to read the text of Freud.2 Second, it should be noted that Ecrits, a colle~tion of 'articles', is not theoretically o,r epistemologically homogeneous. Almost one thousand pages in the original French, the product of some thirty years of research, it has a monolithic reputation. The book is extraordinarily difficult to read for many reasons. It is said that these 'writings' are a rebus. A rebus, like a dream, is a sort of picture-puzzle which looks like nonsense but, when separated into elements and interpreted, makes sense. Lacan's writings are a rebus because his style mimics the subject matter. He not only' explicates the unconscious but strives to imitate it. The unconscious becomes not only the subject matter but, in the grammatical sense, the subject, the speaker of the discourse. Lacan believes that language speaks the subject, that the speaker is subjected to language rather than master of it. 80

! Lacan's Ecrits: A review 81 When I am reading Ecrits, Roland Barthes's distinction between the readerly (lisible) and the writerly (scriptible) text often comes to mind.3 Barthes makes a distinction between two sorts of writers. The lesser sort is the ecrivant, for whom language is the means to some extra-linguistic end. S/he is a transitive writer in that s/he has a direct object. The other sort of writer, the ecrivain, writes intransitively in so far as s/he devotes attention to the means, which is language, instead of the end. While the ecrivant produces a Work; the ecrivain produces a Text. Texts are scriptible because the reader, as it were, rewrites them as s/he reads. Works, on the other hand, are lisible or readable; we do not rewrite them but simply read them from start to finish. We proceed horizontally through a Work, but vertically, if that is possible, through a Text. In short, the readable (lisible) text is merchandise to be consumed; such a text moves inevitably and irreversibly to an end, to the disclosure of ~hat has been concealed. The writable (scriptible) text requires the production of meanings, the active participation of the reader. Barthes has said that the goal of literary work is to make the reader no longer a consumer but a producer of the text. It seems to me that when we are reading Ecrits we can no longer be passive consun"lers. We must contribute something; we must produce meaning. It could be argued that Lacan is to some extent working within a French literary tradition. His debt to the surrealist movement is particularly noticeable. Lacan's style, as I said earlier, owes much to Andre Breton, one of the leaders of surrealism. The style is further convoluted by the use of punning and, in the later work, there are many Joycean puns which are untranslatable. It has been said that his texts are so organised as to prevent skim-reading. There are' other difficulties. The architecture of Ecrits is such that it almost impossible to trace the development or history of the concepts deployed; chronology is in effect abolished. Ecrits contains an index raisonne compiled by Jacques-Alain Miller, in which the user is instructed to look, not for words, but for concepts, the implication being that they remain theoretically (and epistemologically) the same from 1936 to 1966. And so the concepts of the 1960s appear to exist in texts written before the Second World War. In other words, a fundamental assumption of unity and systematicity transforms Ecrits into a conceptually homogeneous text rather than a collection of papers written over a 82 Jacques Lacan considerable period of time, with all the shifts and modifications that implies.4 . Somebody once said the Ecrits seem to put the reader through an experience analogous to analysis: complete with passion, desire to know, transference. The Ecrits seem designed to force the reader into a perpetual struggle. An analysis terminates only when the patient realises it could go on for ever. Perhaps the reader of Lacan's work should be prepared for an unending struggle rather like the analytic patient's?

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CHAPTER SIX Lacan'5 Ecrits: A review Reading as the production of meaning In this chapter I want to draw all the threads of the previous chapters together. I will do this by giving an exposition of some of the key themes contained in Lacan's Ecrits.! As this chapter contains many ideas already discussed in earlier sections of the book, it provides an opportunity for revision and a reconsideration of important topics such as: the significance of the mirror phase; the nature of the id and the ego; reasons for the rejection of egopsychology; the meaning of the terms signifier and signified, metaphor and metonymy; and Lacan's concept of desire. The first point to note about these writings is that they were almost all given as 'speeches', addresses to meetings of psychoanalysts. In them Lacan is trying to persuade the experts to listen to him. Lacan's seminars, on the other hand, although presented orally, aim at teaching students how to read the text of Freud.2 Second, it should be noted that Ecrits, a colle~tion of 'articles', is not theoretically o,r epistemologically homogeneous. Almost one thousand pages in the original French, the product of some thirty years of research, it has a monolithic reputation. The book is extraordinarily difficult to read for many reasons. It is said that these 'writings' are a rebus. A rebus, like a dream, is a sort of picture-puzzle which looks like nonsense but, when separated into elements and interpreted, makes sense. Lacan's writings are a rebus because his style mimics the subject matter. He not only' explicates the unconscious but strives to imitate it. The unconscious becomes not only the subject matter but, in the grammatical sense, the subject, the speaker of the discourse. Lacan believes that language speaks the subject, that the speaker is subjected to language rather than master of it. 80

! Lacan's Ecrits: A review 81 When I am reading Ecrits, Roland Barthes's distinction between the readerly (lisible) and the writerly (scriptible) text often comes to mind.3 Barthes makes a distinction between two sorts of writers. The lesser sort is the ecrivant, for whom language is the means to some extra-linguistic end. S/he is a transitive writer in that s/he has a direct object. The other sort of writer, the ecrivain, writes intransitively in so far as s/he devotes attention to the means, which is language, instead of the end. While the ecrivant produces a Work; the ecrivain produces a Text. Texts are scriptible because the reader, as it were, rewrites them as s/he reads. Works, on the other hand, are lisible or readable; we do not rewrite them but simply read them from start to finish. We proceed horizontally through a Work, but vertically, if that is possible, through a Text. In short, the readable (lisible) text is merchandise to be consumed; such a text moves inevitably and irreversibly to an end, to the disclosure of ~hat has been concealed. The writable (scriptible) text requires the production of meanings, the active participation of the reader. Barthes has said that the goal of literary work is to make the reader no longer a consumer but a producer of the text. It seems to me that when we are reading Ecrits we can no longer be passive consun"lers. We must contribute something; we must produce meaning. It could be argued that Lacan is to some extent working within a French literary tradition. His debt to the surrealist movement is particularly noticeable. Lacan's style, as I said earlier, owes much to Andre Breton, one of the leaders of surrealism. The style is further convoluted by the use of punning and, in the later work, there are many Joycean puns which are untranslatable. It has been said that his texts are so organised as to prevent skim-reading. There are' other difficulties. The architecture of Ecrits is such that it almost impossible to trace the development or history of the concepts deployed; chronology is in effect abolished. Ecrits contains an index raisonne compiled by Jacques-Alain Miller, in which the user is instructed to look, not for words, but for concepts, the implication being that they remain theoretically (and epistemologically) the same from 1936 to 1966. And so the concepts of the 1960s appear to exist in texts written before the Second World War. In other words, a fundamental assumption of unity and systematicity transforms Ecrits into a conceptually homogeneous text rather than a collection of papers written over a 82 Jacques Lacan considerable period of time, with all the shifts and modifications that implies.4 . Somebody once said the Ecrits seem to put the reader through an experience analogous to analysis: complete with passion, desire to know, transference. The Ecrits seem designed to force the reader into a perpetual struggle. An analysis terminates only when the patient realises it could go on for ever. Perhaps the reader of Lacan's work should be prepared for an unending struggle rather like the analytic patient's? The mirror phase (1936) The first text in the English edition of Ecrits is called 'The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as rev;ealed in psychoanalytic experience'. The essay is about the formation of identity, the moment of constitution of the self. Lacan begins his account - as it has been discussed in Chapter 5 I will be concise - with the first months of the infant's life. The infant is relatively unco-ordinated, helpless and dependent. Between the age of six and eighteen months the infant becomes aware, through seeing its image in the 'mirror, of its own body as a totality. The human infant seems to go through an initial stage of confusing the image with reality, and may try to grasp hold of the image behind the mirror, or seize hold of the supporting adult. Then comes the discovery of the existence of an image with its own properties. Finally, there is the realisation ~hat the image is its own - when it moves, its image moves, and so on. The mirror image is held together, it can come and go with a slight change of the infant's position, and the infant's mastery of the image fills it with triumph and joy. The, mirror image anticipates the mastery of its body that the infant has not yet objectively achieved. In other words, the infant's imaginary mastery of its body anticipates its biological mastery. Lacan believes that the formation. of the ego commences at the point of alienation and fascination with one's own image. The image is the first organised form in which the individual identifies him- or herself, so the ego takes its form from, and is formed by, the organising and constitutive qualities of this image. I want to stress the point that the ego is formed on the basis of

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Lacan's Ecrits: A review 83 an imaginary relationship of the subject with his or her own body. The ego has the illusion of autonomy, but it is only an illusion, and the subject moves from fragmentation and insufficiency to illusory unity. Even though the infant is its own rival before being a rival of another, it is captured from very early on by the human form and conditioned by the other's look, for example, by the face and gaze of the mother. The mirror phase inaugurates an indentification with other' human images and with the world the subject shares with them. In the mirror phase one can see evidence of transitivism: the child who strikes another says that he or she has been struck; when one child is punished the other also cries. In both cases, the identity of the one remains indistinct from, confused with, the other. Transitivism occurs when the borders separating them are affirmed and simultaneously confused. Like Melanie Klei~, Lacan considers that the roots of primordial aggressivity can be seen in the earliest months of life. Aggressivity and narcissism appear to be tightly bound to one another. Lacan argues, in short, that the ego is not present from birth; it is something that develops. He believes that Freud put too much stress on the ego's ,adaptive functions, and that there was not enough emphasis on the ego's refusal to acknowledge thoughts and feelings from the unconsclOUS. Let me summarise the main points. The mirror phase is a moment of self-delusion, of captivation by an illusory image. Both future and past are thus rooted in an illusion. The mirror phase is the founding moment of the imaginary mode. It represents the first instance of what, according to Lacan, is the basic function of the ego: misrecognition (meconnaissance). The ego's function then is purely imaginary, and through its function the subject tends to become alienated. The ego 'neglects, scotomises, misconstrues'.5 It is an agency that constantly misreads the truth that comes to the subject from the unconscious. In Lacan's view, the ego's mastery of the environment is always an illusory mastery as a result of the way it is formed at the mirror ph,ase. Human subjects continue throughout life to look for an imaginary 'wholeness' and 'unity'. These quests, controlled by the ego, are quite futile.6 The mistake that many people make is that they confuse the human subject with the ego. The ego might give a feeling of permanence and stability to the subject, but this is an "

84 Jacques Lacan . illusion. And we must remember that the subject is neither unified nor stable. Lacan is, therefore, fundamentally opposed to any idea that one should help the analysand to strengthen his or her ego, or to help him or her adjust to society in any way. He is hostile to those who say that the aim of psychoanalysis is to produce healthy, welladjusted individuals who know what 'reality' is. Lacan stresses the workings of the unconscious and the role of unconscious impulses. In his view there is a basic 'lack of being' at the heart of the human subject. The subject comes to feel an illusory unity at the time of the mirror phase, but with the introduction of language, s/he has the possibility of at least representing his or her thoughts and feelings. The function and field of speech and language in psychoanalysis (1953) This paper, often called the 'Rome Report' or the 'Rome Discourse', marked Lacan's break with the analytic establishment and the formation of his own school of psychoanalytic thought. The paper, the founding statement of Lac ani an theory, defines psychoanalysis as a practice of speech and a theory of the speaking subject.7 It is in this text, written in 1953, that Lacan begins to talk like Lacan. Psychoanalysis, he asserts, is distinguished from other disciplines in that the analyst works on the subject's speech. He points out that Freud often referred to language, particularly when he was focusing on the unconscious. After all, language is the 'talking cure'. The theory of the three interacting orders, the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real, first appears in detail in this paper. I will briefly explain these concepts here, but will leave a fuller discussion of them till the next chapter. These orders can be conceived as different planes of existence which: though interconnected, are independent realities, each order being concerned with different functions. At any moment each may be implicated in the redefinition of the others. The Imaginary order includes the field of phantasies and images. It evolves out of the mirror phase, but extends into the adult

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Lacan's Ecrits: A review 85 subject's relationships with others. The prototype of the typical imaginary relationship is the infant before the mirror, fascinated with its image. The Imaginary order also seems to include preverbal structures, for example, the various 'primitive' phantasies of children, psychotic and perverse patients. The Symbolic order is concerned with the function of symbols and symbolic systems. Language belongs to the Symbolic order and, in Lacan's view, it is,through language that the subject can repfCsent desires and feelings. It is through the Symbolic order that the subject is constituted. The Real order is the most elusive of these categories, and is linked to the dimensions of sexuality and death. It seems to be a domain outside the subject. The Real is the domain of the inexpressible, of what cannot be spoken about, for it does not belong to language. It is the order where the subject meets with inexpressible enjoyment and death. ' In the 'Rome Discourse' Lacan's main emphasis is on the function and independence of the Symbolic order. Lacan illustrates the early insertion into the Symbolic order by the story Freud tells of his eighteen-month-old grandson playing the 'fort-da' game. (The child had a cotton reel on a piece of string which he alternatively threw away and pulled back.) Freud said that the game was related to the disappearance and appearance of the mother.s He suggested that by the repetition of this game of presence and absence the child seemed to cope with his mother's comings and goings, and tried to 'wean' himself from her. Freud noted that the child had turned a passive experience into an active one. Lacan stresses the point that speech is the dimension by which' the subject's desires are expressed and articulated. It is only when ardculated and named before the other (for example, the analyst) that desires are recognised. It is also only with speech that subjects can fully recognise their histories. With the introduction of the language system, individuals can put themselves and their pasts in question. Subjects can restructure events after they have occurred. Indeed, it is well known that all of us are constantly rearranging our memories, histories and identities. Let us examine'the relationship between the imaginary and the symbolic. The imaginary is made up of imagos. An imago is an unconscious image or cliche which orients the way in which the subject apprehends other people. In the imaginary mode (or 86 Jacques Lacan register), one's understanding of other people is shaped by one's own imagos. The perceived other is actually, at least in part, a projection. Psychoanalysis is an attempt to recognise the subject's imagos in order to ascertain the deforming effect upon the subject's understanding of his or her relationships. The point is not to give up the imagos, which is an impossible task, nor to create better ones. In the symbolic register, the subject understands these imagos as structuring projections. Lacan condemns ego-psychology as hopelessly mired in the imaginary because it promotes an identification between the analysand's ego and the analyst's. The ego, for Lacan, is an imago. The enterprise of ego-psychology reshapes the analysand's imagos into ones that better correspond to 'reality' - that is, the, analyst's imagos. Ecrits is full of attacks on ego-psychology; because he regards it as a betrayal of psychoanalysis, a repression of the unconscious, and a manipulation of patients. One of his main criticisms is that it never gets beyond 'the language of the ego'. Lacan describes two types of speech: on the one hand the speech which takes its orders from the ego (empty speech) and is addressed to the other (with a little 0), the imaginary counterpart, through whom the subject is alienated. On the other hand, there is full speech, addressed to the Other, which is beyond the language ordered by the ego. The subject of this speech is the subject of the unconscious. Thus, Lacan can say: the unconscious is the discourse of the Other. For Lacan, the subject's truth is not to be found in the ego. Instead it is to be found in another place, which Lacan called the place or 'locus' of the Other (with a capital 0) at another level. Even if the patient lies, or is silent, or remembers nothing, what s/he cannot say or remember can be rediscovered elsewhere, in another locality. This was, after all, Freud's basic discovery: the subject speaks most truthfully, or the truth anyway slips out, when the ego's censorship is reduced, for example through dreams, " jokes, slips of the tongue or pen .. In contrast with the practice of ego-psychologists, Lacan suggests that the analyst should be a mirror (but not a mirror stage). S/he can serve as a screen for the analysand's personality or values or knowledge. It is not the analyst's ego but his or her neutrality that should mirror the analysand. And obviously, the analyst should be able to distinguish the two registers in the patient's

Lacan's Ecrits: A review 87 speech. The analyst is addressed both as the other through whom the patient's desire is alienated, and as the Other, to whom the analysand's true speech is addressed. The Freudian thing (1955) 'The Freudian thing' was a commemorative oration delivered at the Viennese neuro-psychiatric clinic in 1955, and in it Lacan repeatedly taunts his clinical audience with a contrast between Freud's intellectual heroism and the alleged pusillanimity of most clinicians. The lecture could have been entitled: the unconscious, language and the tasks of the analyst. Many of the themes discussed so far in the book are to be found in this lecture. Lacan begins by referring to Freud's revolution in knowledge: the discovery t!hat the centre of the human being was no longer at the place assigned to it by the humanist tradition. He states that the meaning of a return to Freud is a return to the meaning of Freud. Truth, he says, belongs to the unconscious - it is found in dreams, jokes, nonsense, word play. In what could the unconscious be better recognised, in fact, than in the defences that are set up in the subject against it? The most innocent intention is disconcerted at being unable to conceal the fact that one's unsuccessful acts are the most successful and that one's failure fulfils one's most secret wish. Lacan then links the topic of the unconscious with language. It is language that distinguishes human society from animal society; language is constituted by laws. If you want to know more, he says, read Saussure, the founder of modern linguistics. Lacan launches an attack dn ego-psychology and its connections with 'the American way of life'. He is antagonistic to ego-psychology with its reference to 'the healthy part of the subject's ego', its stress on 'adaptation to reality', and its belief that the purpose of analysis is achieved through 'identification with the analyst's ego'. In his view it is the ego-psychologists who support the translation of Freud's phrase' Wo Es war, soli Ich werden' as 'Where the id was, there the ego shall be.' Lacan argues that this is false, a mistranslation. He believes that there is a fundamental distinction between the true subject of the unconscious and the ego as constituted in its nucleus by a series of alienating identifications. The 88 Jacques Laean correct translation of the German emphasises not the ego but the unconscious: 'Where the subject was, there ought I to become.' Or, alternatively, 'There where it was, it is my duty that I should come into being.' The third theme of the lecture is the task of the analyst. It is important, Lacan says, that the analyst should know why s/he intervenes, at what moment the opportunity presents itself and how to seize it. For this to occur the analyst must fully understand the difference between the Other to which his or her speech must be addressed, and that second other who is the individual he sees before him or her. The Other (capital 0) is the locus in which is constituted the I who speaks to him/her who hears .. " Lacan believes that in the analytical situation there are not only two subjects present but two subjects each provided with.two objects, the ego and the other (autre), the unconscious. This then is a game for four players. It is in this paper that Lacan discusses two important phenomena in psychoanalysis - the return of the repressed and transference - in the context of recognition. Both these phenomena are forms of repetition, types of return. We know, for example, that the victims of traumas return to the traumatic scene in their dreams, and the infant repeats the painful scene of its mother's departure. Lacan believes that a desire must insistently repeat itself until it be recognised. Repetition is the effect not so much of the frustration of a desire but of the lack of recognition of a desire. Indeed, Lacan sees the psychoanalytic situation as a context conducive to the subject's recognition of his or her desires. But how do subjects come to recognise their desires? What the analyst must do is to reply to what s/he hears. That reply sends back to the subject in inverted form what s/he was saying that s/he could never hear if s/he did not hear it returning from the analyst. Thus is accomplished the recognition that is the goal of analysis, the recognition by the subject. The subject must come to recognise his or her own drives, which a~ insisting, unbeknownst to him or her, in his or her discourse and actions. That recognition is reached through the mediation of the analyst. The analyst returns to the subject what the subject was saying so that the subject can recognise it and stop saying it. Although the analyst is the one who is 'supposed to know' the truth, s/he really has to give up the power associated with his or

Laean's Ecrits: A review 89 her position in order to encourage the encounter with the Other. The analyst, according to Lacan, should not identify with the Other, but only encourage the analysand to encounter his or her own Other. Lacan mentions the fact that Freud regarded the study of literature, art, languages and institutions as necessary to an understanding of (the text of) our experience. In Lacan's view there should be an initiation into the methods of the linguist, the historian and the mathematician. Psychoanalysis can be sustained only by constant communication with other disciplines that form the 'sciences of inter-subjectivity' or the 'conjectural sciences'. In the concluding section of 'The Freudian thing' there is a moving reference to the Actaeon myth: 'Actaeon, too guilty to hunt the goddess, the prey in which is caught, a huntsman, the shadow that you become, let the pack pass by without hastening your step, Dian~ will recognise the hounds for what they are ... ' (Eerits, p. 145). Actaeon was guilty of having surprised the chaste goddess Diana in her bath. Taken aback, the goddess transformed him into a stag, and then his own dogs hunted and devoured him. This Ovidian parable can be interpreted in many ways. We know that Lacan stressed the insistent power of repression and that the discovery of the unconscious isitself subject to repression. Freud's discovery was a terrifying one, even to Freud himself. We also know that Freud's thoughts have become codified; egopsychologists and others have domesticated and/or repressed the unconscious. Is Freud a new Actaeon turned upon and savaged by his own thoughts for having unveiled the goddess of the unconscious? Or is, perhaps, Actaeon Lacan himself? The agency of the letter: Reason since Freud (1957) Lacan is always telling us that we should listen to what the unconscious says. The subtitle of the essay, 'Reason since Freud', is a reference to a debate about knowledge. Lacan argues that we have to abandon the idea of reason as belonging to the positive sciences; nor does it belong to conscious logical or philo~ophical reason, but to the unconscious. Reason is the insistence of a meaning, the 90 Jacques Lacan primacy or authority of a letter which insists on being expressed or heard. He reminds us that the subject is implicated in language, even before his or her birth; that is to say there is a place assigned to him or her by a discourse which pre-existed his or her birth. During the 1950s Lacan began to make use of Saussure's concepts but, as I said in O1apter 4 on language, he adapted them in important ways. For Saussure the linguistic sign is a unification of a sound-image (the signifier) with a concept (the signified). The signifier and the signified are like two sides of a sheet of paper. While Saussure put the signifier and the signified in an ellipse which indicates the structural unity of the sign, Lacan removed it. Lacan wanted to emphasise that the signifier and signified are two distinct and separate orders. He therefore introduced what he called a 'cut' (coupure) into the Saussurean sign with the introduction of a new emphasis on the bar, as a formula of separateness rather than recipro<;:ity of signifier and signified. This move calls iP-tb question any theory of correspondence between words and ~things. Lacan writes that the algorithm that is the foundation of modern linguistics is SI s. While Saussure formulated the signified on top, Lacan puts the signifier on top - to give it pre-eminence.9 He argued that signifiers are combined in a signifying chain. Meaning does not arise in the individual signifier but in the connection between signifiers. Saussure had admitted that there can occur a shift or sliding (glissement) in the relationship between the signifier and signified. In contrast, Lacan argues not only that the two realms of signifier and signified are never united, but that there is an incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier. This does not mean that there are no moments of stability at all. Lacan suggests that there are 'anchoring points' (points de capiton); these are certain 'nodal points' which stop the sliding signifiers and fix their meaning. (Sometimes, it is said that 'the floating signifiers' are 'quilted'.)10 After every quilting of the signifying chain, which retroactively fixes its meaning, there always remains the persistence of a gap between utterance and its enunciation: you're saying this, but what are you really telling me? One' of the most important functions of speech is that a subject uses it to signify something quite other than what slhe says. The meaning is always veering off, or being displaced. One must not

Lacan's Ecrits: A review 91 think that speech masks one's thoughts. The subject produces through his or her speech a truth which slhe does not know about. Truth resides, as it were, in the spaces between one signifier and another, in the holes of the chain. The linguistic concepts of metaphor and metonymy occupy an important place in Lacanian theory. I will make only one basic point here as I discussed these concepts in Chapter 4, 'The functions of language'. To put it simply, a metaphor is based on a proposed similarity, or analogy; Lacan defines it as 'one word for another'. He defines metonymy as the relation 'word by word'.l1is the relation between two signifiers along the line of any concrete discourse. This is linear because only one word is pronounced or written at-atrm-e.-Inthe-ffieronymic dimension, the signifier can receive>its-c<Li!ipJet~-signification only by deferred action. -The-maIn point is this: Lacan inserts Saussurean linguistics into Freud's notion of condensation and displacement and links it with Jakobson's analysis of the two poles of language: metaphor and metonymy. Lacan connects metaphor with condensation and metonymy with displacement. (I should remind readers that Freud argued that condensation and displacement were the two processes basically responsible for the form assumed by dreams. I I He believed that they were the basic unconscious mechanisms at work in, for instance, symptom formation and the production of jokes and slips of the tongue.) Lacan describes condensation as the 'superimposition of signifiers' and compares it to his notion of metaphor, where one word is substituted by another. He considered that in displacement one could see a 'veering off of sig- J nification' which is similar to his notion of metonymy. It seems to me that Lacan has a preference for metaphor and tends to privilege it. In metaphor a signifier substitutes for another signifier only in order to articulate what cannot be said, that is the signified. It is in metaphor that desire finds a pathway for expression. The significance of the phallus (1958) It is in this paper that Lacan uses the term 'masquerade'. The term is not in Freud but it appears in a famous paper by Joan Riviere, 'Womanliness as a masquerade' (1929).12 Her paper is important because of the debate around the construction and representation 92 Jacques Lacan of sexual identity. Riviere's paper is concerned with 'women who wish for masculinity' and who may then put on 'a mask of womanliness' as a defence, to avert anxiety and retribution feared from men. The particular case Riviere discusses involves a successful intellectu<d woman who seeks reassurance from men after her public engagements. Analysis of her behaviour after her performances showed that she was attempting to obtain sexual advances from the particular type of men by means of flirting and coquetting with them in a more or less veiled manner. % extraordinary incongruity of this attitude with her ha~tYimpersonal and objective attitude during her intellectual performance, which it succeeded so rapidly, was a problem. 13 Riviere suggests that the problem can be solved by reference to Oedipal rivalry: in her successful professional career the woman rivals and takes the place of the father; in her acknowledgement nevertheless of womanliness, the flirting and coquetting, she placates him: ' ... it was an unconscious attempt to ward off the anxiety which would ensue on account of the reprisals she anticipated from the father-figures after her intellectual performance'.14 A woman identifies as a man - takes on masculine identity - and then identifies herself after all as a wom'an - takes up a feminine identity. Masquerade, 'the mask of womanliness' seems quite simple but there are some puzzling questions: where does Riviere draw the line between genuine womanliness and 'masquerade'? If there is a mask, then there is a behind-the-mask - and we need to know what is behind. In Stephen Heath's view, by collapsing genuine womanliness and the masquerade together, Riviere undermines the integrity of the former with the artifice of the latter. IS What is the Lacanian interpretation of the patient described in Riviere's paper? In 'The signification of the phallus' Lacan writes: Paradoxical as this formulation may seem, I would say that it is in order to be the phallus, that is to say the signifier of the desire of the Other, that the woman will reject an essential part of her femininity, notably all its attributes through masquerade. It is for what she is not that she expects to be desired as well as loved.16

Lacan's Ecrits: A review 93 In other words, the game being played is that of being the phallus. With the mother as initial object, the child seeks to be the phallus she wants. Now, according to Lacan, no one has the phallus, it is a signifier, the initial signifier of the lack-in-being that determines the subject's relation to the signifier. The subject is constituted in lack and the woman represents lack. Lacan credits Riviere with pinpointing in the masquerade 'the feminine sexual attitude'. The masquerade serves to show what she does not have, a penis, by showing - the adornment, the putting on - something else, the phallus she becomes, as woman to man, sustaining his identity and an order of exchange of which she is the object. Lacan remarks: 'Such is the woman concealed behind her veil: it is the absence of the penis that turns her into the phallus, object of desire.'17 Adornment is the woman, she exists veiled; only thus can she represent lack, be what is wanted: lack is never presented other than as a reflection on a veil. I think I should mention that at the time Lacan gave his paper on the meaning of the phallus (1958), he wanted to emphasise the place of the Symbolic order in the determination of human subjectivity. (He argued that the contemporary science oflinguistics was unavailable to Freud.) In the paper Lacan returns to some of the debates of the 1920s and 1930s and criticises what he sees as a reduction of the phallus to an object of primitive oral aggression, belonging in the realm of the instinct. Instead he places the phallus within the Symbolic order and argues that it can be understood as a signifier only in the linguistic sense of the term. Lacan has often been accused of phallocentrism. And it is true that he, has asserted that 'the phallus is the privileged signifier'. The meaning of the term phallus, however, has often been misunderstood. The term phallus must be distinguished from the term penis. The penis is an organ of the body; the phallus is signifier, function or metaphor. Lacan says explicitly that the phallus is not a fantasy, not an object, but least of all an organ, a penis. The phallus symbolises the penis and the clitoris. It is a signifier. In short, Lacan's distinction between the penis and the phallus enables Freud's biologistic account of male superiority and women's penis-envy to be explained in linguistic and symbolic, and thus historical terms. Lacan's paper contains a discussion about desire and the difficulties of the sexual relation, especially for the woman, whose \

94 Jacques Lacan relationship to the phallic term is described in terms of masquerI ade. Let me recapitulate some of the key points: the drama of the subject in language is the experience of its lack in being, and that experience is a movement of desire. Desire is a relation of being to lack. Nothing can make up division, no object can satisfy desire what is wanting is always wanting, division is the condition of subjectivity. The phallus, with its status as potentially absent, comes to stand in for the necessarily missing object of desire at the level of sexual division. That no one has the phallus is an expression of its reality as signifier of lack: if division cannot be made up, desire satisfied, then the phallus is not an end, not some final truth but, paradoxically, the su~me signifier of an impossible identity. Pre-Oedjpally, both sexes have a masculine relation to the mother seeking to be the phallus she wants. The prohibition of the mother under the law of the father, the recognition of castration, inaugurates the Oedipus complex for the girl, she now shifting her object love to the father who seems to have the phallus and identifying with the mother who, to her fury, does not: henceforth the girl will desire to have the phallus. The phallus is the signifier of lack marking castration. It signifies what men (think they) have and what women (are considered to) lack. The woman does not have the phallus, the object of desire for another. The phallus is the signifier of signifiers, the representative of signification and language. The phallus is the crucial signifier in the distribution of authority and power. It also designates the object of desire. Lacan writes about the castration complex in the masculine unconscious and penisneid in the woman's unconscious. Man is threatened with loss, woman is deprived. Because she feels deprived, her (structural) attitude is one of envy. In an interesting paragraph, Lacan does not use the more usual word deprivation or envy, he uses the word nostalgia.18 The dictionary definitions of 'nostalgie' - homesickness and regret. for something past - are useful in understanding Lacan's text. But there is a third definition which is also helpful in understanding Lacanian theory: unsatisfied desire. The Lacanian subject is castrated, that is to say, deprived of the phallus, and therefore can never satisfy desire. Now, one might say that desire does not know its object, has no (conscious) idea of its object, because of repression. Of course, the

Lacan's Ecrits: A review 95 repressed was once conscious and so the desire is £Or a return to an object whose knowledge is only contingently unavailable to the subject. But what if the object of desire was an indefinable something, the result of primary repression? The primary repressed was never present to consciousness; it is primordially and structurally excluded. There is no past state that was once present to which one could return, even in phantasy. The returned cannot be imagined because one does not know the object. (Saint-Exupery defines nostalgia as the desire for what cannot be defined.) What Lacan calls desire is precisely the result of this primary repression and yields up a nostalgia beyond the drive to return, a desire constitutively unsatisfied and unsatisfiable because its 'object' simply cannot ev~r be defined. In short, primary repression is that part of needs which is left out in the articulation of a demand, and which we experience as desire. The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire in the Freudian unconscious (1960) Lacan's work, like psychoanalysis generally, draws heavily on literature. Gradually, however, his writings seem to move in the direction of science: first, linguistics, and later, mathematics. This paper is full of algorithms and graphs and exemplifies the drive towards 'science'. The paper examines the way in which Freud's notion of the unconsciou,s has overturned the traditional concept of the subject. Lacan claims that because of the dominating role of the signifier (language) in the constitution of the human subject, one can no longer think of the subject in terms of positivist scientific thought. The subject cannot be conceived as an objectively knowable thing (a signified). Instead, Lacan argues, one has to think in terms of a different kind of knowledge, for the subject arises in relation to desire which is unknown to him or her. Lacan's concept of truth can be related to his view of psychoanalytic knowledge. In his view truth is essentially disturbing and, as Freud demonstrated, expresses itself in the unconscious. The apparently unknown knowledge in the unconscious speaks. It says

\ ( 96 Jacques Lacan what it knows, while the subject does not know it. For Lacan, the unconscious is the language, or form, through which this knowledge about truth is always and exclusively represented. Lacan made an interesting distinction between linguistics, the science concerned with the formalisation of knowledge, and La Linguisterie, concerned with the side of language that linguistics had left unformalised. La Linguisterie is the language with which the unconscious is concerned, and which psychoanalysis can decipher at the moments when the ordinary language structure is interrupted, or breaks down as in jokes, dreams and parapraxes. La Linguisterie speaks about what cannot be consciously known. Unconscious truth often appears unacceptable, stupid, marginal or unacceptable. I Lacan placed, the function and structure of language in the forefront of his theory. The 10gic:6f the unconscious appears, for example, in the analytic relationship when the analyst finds her- or himself listening to different orders in a discourse. Suppose an analysand says 'I think I do not exist.' What is happening here? The first'!' indicates the subject of the enunciation (enonciation, the act of uttering the words) but does not signify the subject's existence, which is considered in the'!, of the statement (enonce, the actual words uttered), 'I do not exist.' One is faced here with what Lacan called a cut (coupure) between different orders of discourse - where, on the one hand, the subject enunciates his or her symbolic existence as the 'I' who speaks and thinks, but then denies this existence at the level of the statement, 'I do not exist.' It should be emphasised that the Lacanian view of the unconscious revolves around the question of lack, the lack of being that results from the subject's dependence on the Other. One can see certain similarities between the Lacanian concept of lack of being and the Freudian theory of the death drive (which aims to bring the living being back to the inorganic state). Lacan illustrated the relationship between the subject and his death with a dream referred to by Freud. Freud argued that ~ dreams do not differentiate between what is wished and what is l-e~or instance, a man who had nursed his father during his last illness a~ been deeply grieved by his death, had the following dream: 'His fathe~as again alive and he was talking to him as of old. But as he did so~e felt it exceedingly painful that his father was nevertheless dead, Qnly did not know it.'19

Lacan's Ecrits: A review 97 Freud wrote that, at bottom, dreams are nothing other than a particular form of thinking, made possible by the conditions of the state of sleep. We must not focus on the 'hidden meaning', the latent content, but centre our attention on the form itself, on the dream-work. We must ask: why does this content assume this particular form? We should remember that there are always three elements at work: the manifest dream-text, the latent dreamcontent or thought, and the unconscious desire. This desire attaches itself to the dream, it intercalates itself in the interspace between the latent thought and the manifest text. According to Freud, dreams function to the pleasure principle, that is, according to the dreamer's wish. The pleasure principle is the reign of wishes, unbridled by reality. The father was dead, only did not know that the dreamer wished it. Freud remarks: 'It is thus a matter of the familiar case of self-reproaches after the loss of a loved person, and in this case the reproach goes back to the infantile significance of the death-wish against the father.' In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud explained that the repetition of painful experiences in dreams and children's play is an attempt to master an exceedingly painful event by taking over the position of author of this event. The dream, described above, is an illustration of the repetition compulsion and the death drive that are beyond the pleasure principle. In Lacan's view, the dead father dream expresses not only the Oedipal desire for the father's death but also a more radical death drive or 'death desire'.2o The Oedipal wish is not only a wish for the father's death, but also and as centrally a wish to be in the father's place. If one tries to think at one and the same time the desire to be in the' father's place, one risks facing the desire for one's own death. I In considering the dream, Lacan focuses on the topic of knowledge and he makes a distinction between savoir and connaissance, which runs through the first part of this paper. The two words can both be translated as 'knowledge'. Lacan distinguishes between a biological i,nstinct which is a connaissance without savoir, and what we find in Freud, which is a savoir without connaissance.21 Connaissance in this paper is associated with psychology and its perception of the person as a unified whole with natural developmental states. Savoir is associated wit~ Hegel, language, unconscious knowledge and desire. Underlying Lacan's theory of desire is the concept of

" 98 Jacques Lacan drive. His notion of drive implies the 'drifting' movement of desire. There is a sense in which the subject does not know where the current is going and so does not have what is called connaissance. Lacan then focuses on the nature of the subject's being. He argues that the subject has a basic dependence on the Other. In a way, the Other is the real witness and guarantor of the subject's existence. The subject's basic dependence on the Other is clear when we think of the mother's role in relation to the infant. She looks after the infant, calls it by a name and tells it who it is. She is the M-Other who created it. The Other is the 'place' fhere the subject is born. The Other was there before the subject) birth, but the-mother is also a subject, itself based on a lack of being. The mother's love cannot be absolute as she cannot fulfil this absolute demand for love made by the infant. No matter how much she gives it and how much its needs are satisfied, the mother can never fill the void she shares with her child. The demand for love goes beyond the objects that satisfy need. As Lacan says, Desire takes shape in the margin in which demand is torn apart from need.22 But what is the object which unchains desire? The object a, objet (a)utre, is the object of desire permeated and mobilised by lack. The objet a represents the lacking or lost object. It is the object of desire on its way to becoming the cause and condition of desire as well. It always escapes the subject. The objet a may be an orifice, a breast; it has something to do with an edge or cut: 'The lips, the enclosure formed by the teeth, the rim of the anus, the tip of the penis, the vagina, the slit formed by the eyelids .. .' To this list Lacan adds the phoneme, the gaze, the voice.23 Perhaps it would be best to describe objet a as the cause of desire. In a sense it is the phallus which the child wishes to be in order to complete its mother, the symbolic complement of its own lack. It is the object of the radical lack lived by the child who is separated at birtlyfrom its mother. It is the first image to fill in the crack of separaliion. In short, the objet a (sometimes calledYhe objet-petit-a) is the signifier of desire. I mentioned j st now the lack of being of the mother. T . s is represented, accor, ing to Lacan, by the signifier of the allus, which she does not I:l: ve and which she desires. The' ant identifies with the phallus, as e object lacking to, a esired by, the mother; and hence how s/he . ks her- 0 . mself to her lack of being through the phallus. But however strong the dual imaginary

Lacan's Ecrits: A review 99 mother-child relationship is, a third term intervenes - the Other, the father. The father brings back the mother to her own lack of a phallus, that is to say, to her castration. The mother looks for what she does not have, by receiving the phallus from the father, or by identifying it with her child. The child identifies with the phallus in order to satisfy its mother's desire. The phallus also signifies the law of symbolic castration for it belongs to the father, the Other who forbids the enjoyment of the mother-child 'symbiosis'. The phallus signifies sexual difference. It is what splits human beings into what Lacan called 'sexed partial beings'. In Aristophanes's famous myth, described in Plato's Symposium, each sexual half is looking desperately for the other complementary half; Lacan believes that the subject's search for his or her sexual complement is replaced by the search for that part of her- or himself that is lost for ever, owing to the fact that he or she is a sexed partial being. One effect of Lacan's concern with desire is the displacement of the concept libido (the word Freud used to describe the force of the 'sexual desire'). Lacan always uses the term libido sparingly it is ousted by 'desire'. In later years, in Lacan's own writings, desire tends to be eclipsed gradually by jouissance. What is jouissance? The human subject is confronted by the unconscious which is striving to express what is really forbidden to the speaking subject - jouissance and death. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud said that 'there exists in the mind a strong tendency towards the pleasure principle, but that tendency is opposed - ~by certain other forces or circumstances'. Lacan makes an important distinction betweenplai~ir (pleasure) and jouissance, a term which signifies the ecstatic or orgasmic enjoyment - and exquisite pain - of something or someone. Jouissance goes beyond plaisir. In French, jouissance includes the enjoyment of rights and property, but also the slang verb, jouir, to come, and so is related to the pleasure of the sexual act. But it also refers to those moments when too much pleasure is pain. Jouissance, then, is not pleasure in pain - that is masochism. Jouissance is unconscious, it is unconscious pleasure which becomes pain. An example: while listening to music the other day I burst out crying without knowing, why. Jouissance begins where pleasure ends. When jouissance becomes conscious it is no longer jouissance, it is merely pleasure. Jouissance occurs when physical

100 Jacques Lacan pain becomes un physical pleasure. Now, plaisir is bound to desire as a defence against jouissance. Jouissance, like death, represents something whose limits cannot be overcome.

CHAPTER SEVEN The Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real Introduction: Lacan's changing concepts It may be helpful to think of Lacan's work as consisting of three main periods: in the first period, 1932-48 (the dates are llPproximate) the main idea is the domination of the human being by the image (the imago). In the second period, 1948-60, the function of the image is subordinated and the dominant field of knowledge in his thinking is linguistics. Lacan argues that this form of explanation (a theory of the signifier) was not available to Freud. In the third period, 1960-80, the key idea is that of the three 'orders' or 'registers': the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real. When Lacan moved from the psychiatric hospital to the university, in 1963, he began to concentrate on the formalisation of psychoanalysis by the use of logic and mathematics. These topics are the main themes of this chapter. The Imaginary One of the difficulties in understanding Lacan is that his concepts are in constant flux. Between the 1950s and the 1970s there were many changes in his conceptualisation of the Imaginary, Symbolic, and the Real. Some Lacanians refer to the three orders as RSI (which, amusingly, sounds like the word 'heresy'). But this is not the sequence in which the concepts were developed. At the beginning of his teaching Lacan focused on the Imaginary. The Imaginary grows from the infant's experience of its 'specular ego'. It arises with the mirror phase but 'extends far into the - adult individual's experience of others and of the external world,l Wherever a false identification is to be found - within the subject, 101