Pluth, Ed. Signifiers and Acts: freedom in Lacan’s theory of the subject, New York: SUNY Press, 2007. Print.
🙂 Lacan who not only subverts the subject but then he RETHOUGHT the subject but his critics are out there: Borch-Jacobson is saying that although Lacan’s subject is not EXTERNAL to language (that would be too Cartesian), so he says that Lacan’s subject is the same as language.
A persistent theme in Lacan’s discussions of the subject is the view that the subject is an effect of signifiers, and so B-J is right to wonder whether the subject is anything other than language. B-J does not consider, however, that thinking of the subject as an effect does not have to mean that the subject is somehow immanent in, rather than external to, language . I will be arguing that Lacan’s subject is an effect of language, but an effect that remains external to, and not reducible to, language. This is because the subject is not simply an effect of signifiers but an effect of signifiers themselves interacting with something nonlinguistic: sexuality (12).
The subject is in part “in” the Other but is also not in the Other: in other words, the subject has an important relation to language, but it is also external to language in some way. … the subject is not identitcal to language (14).
[T]he subject is portrayed [by Lacan] as something articulated between two poles. One of the poles is language, while the other pole remains a bit vague (15).
It will turn out that the subject is produced not only by an interaction of signifiers but by an interaction of signfiers with something nonlinguistic. Although the subject is not identical to either of the poles Lacan considers here, each pole designates something that is involved in the production of a subject — and language alone does not suffice (15-16).
[T]he production of the subject by signifiers needs to be complemented with an appreciation of a particular type of obstacle to signification. … it would be not erroneous to understand this second pole in terms of sexuality … (16).
One way to get at this second pole, nevertheless, is to consider the idea that there is something of the body that does not fit with the “socialized” body, the body that is overwritten with signifiers.
Saying that a body is overwritten with signifiers suggests that ther is something prior to signifiers on which the writing occurs, something that gets besieged by signfiers at some moment of its existence. This could be thought of as a body prior to the body that is linguistically and socially carved up, thus a body that is presymbolic and perhaps to be thought of in terms of what Lacan called the real (16-17).
Whatever term is settled upon, the category under which this organism or body is to be thought is the real, and not the symbolic (17).