Sean Homer, Critical Thinkers : Jacques Lacan, New York: Routledge, 2004. p 44.
The unconscious is a process of signification that is beyond our control; it is the language that speaks through us rather than the language we speak. In this sense, Lacan defines the unconscious as the discourse of the Other. The big Other is language, the symbolic order; this Other can never be fully assimilated to the subject; it is a radical otherness which, nevertheless, forms the core of our unconscious. We will see how this works in the following chapter, but first let us look at Lacan’s conception of the subject and how it is determined by the signifier. Lacan conceived of the symbolic order as a totalizing concept in the sense that it marks the limit of the human universe. We are born into language – the language through which the desires of others are articulated and through which we are forced to articulate our own desire. We are locked within what Lacan calls a circuit of discourse …
The ego is an ‘imaginary function’ formed primarily through the subject’s relationship to their own body. The subject, on the other hand, is constituted in the symbolic order and is determined by language. There is always a disjunction, according to Lacan, between the subject of enunciation and the subject of the utterance; in other words, the subject who speaks and the subject who is spoken. Following the linguist Emile Benveniste’s (1902– 76) conception of ‘I’ as a shifter – as having no specific referent but in the act of speech designating the person who says ‘I’ – Lacan argued that the ‘I’ in speech does not refer to anything stable in language at all.
To become a subject one must take a position in relation to the desire of the Other. The infant must differentiate itself from the desire of the Other. 74.
What is there beyond language and the symbolic that makes the subject more than the subject of the signifier?