(1-12) How can we talk about Lacan and not fall prey to psychologistic analyses that reduce social to individual? Freud wrote a good deal using that combined a psychoanalytic framework with a social analysis Civilization and Its Discontents, Jokes etc. and Lacan even more so, develops a socio-political conception of subjectivity that is “not reduced to individuality, a subjectivity opening a new road to understanding of the ‘objective’. 4
The million dollar question is what the hell does Stavrakakis mean here? He quotes Laclau here to buttress the point about the impossibility of the construction of any identity.
Mirror Stage
Captivated by its image in the mirror. “But this captivation, the anticipation of synthesis, can never eliminate the real uncoordination of the body of the infant, it can never erase the external and alienating character of its own foundation. This ambiguity is never resolved” (18).
🙂 Stavrakakis here argues that the mirror image of the child is alienating, even though it is this image the infant recognizes, reaches out to as a basis of her identity, but it nevertheless remains fundamentally alienating, meaning, that there exists a gap, the infant is still uncoordinated yet his image gives him the appearance of a totality, of a wholeness that is complete and unified. Remember the imaginary is already caught up within the symbolic. “If the ego emerges in the imaginary the subject emerges in the symbolic (19).
If the imaginary, the field of specular images, of spatial unities and totalised representations, is always built on an illusion which is ultimately alienating for the child, his or her only recourse is to turn to the symbolic level, seeking in language a means to acquire a stable identity. By submitting to the laws of language, the child becomes a subject in language, it inhabits language, and hopes to gain an adequate representation through the world of words … ‘the subject is the subject of the signifier — determined by it” (Citing Lacan) (20).
Lack
But instead of transgressing alienation in the direction of acquiring a solid identity, the subject of the signifier, the subject constituted on the basis of the acceptance of the laws of language, is uncovered as the subject of lack par excellence. (20)
This lack can only be thought as a trace of the ineliminable ACT OF POWER at the root of the formation of subjectivity, as the trace of an ex nihilo decision entailing the loss of certain possibilities or psychic states (the imaginary relation with the mother, for example) and the formation of new ones (20). …
Already this is indicative of the political relevance of the Lacanian category of the lacking subject. This lack can only be thought as a trace of the ineliminable act of power at the root of the formation of subjectivity, as the trace of an ex nihilo decision entailing the loss of certain possibilities or psychic states (the imaginary relation with the mother, for example) and the formation of new ones.
The subject can only exist on the condition that it accepts the laws of the symbolic.
It becomes an effect of the signifier. In that sense it is a certain subordination, an exercise of POWER, that constitutes the condition of possibility for the constitution of subjectivity.
Judith Butler is right when, in her recent book The Psychic Life of Power, she argues that there is no formation of subjectivity without subordination, the passionate attachment to those by whom she or he (the subject in question) is subordinated (Butler, 1997:7).
[However Butler] remains within the limits of a somewhat traditional conceptualisation of power when she is personalising her account (those to whom we are subordinated are presumably our parents, especially during our early formative years).
In Lacan, it is the signifier that is revealed as the locus of this power forming the subject: ‘power is coterminous with the logic of the signifier’ (Dyrberg, 1997:130).
This POWER of the signifier cannot be reduced to the physical presence or the behaviour of the biological parents. It is the NAME-OF-THE-FATHER, the symbolic and not the real father, who is the agent of this POWER, the agent of symbolic Law (20).
Signifier and Signified
Meaning is produced by signifiers; it springs from the signifier to the signified and not vice versa … 25
What happens then to the signified in the Lacanian schema? Lacan understands the signified as an effect of transference. If we speak about the signified it is only because we like to believe in its existence.
[T]he signified disappears because it is no longer associated with the concept, as in Saussure, but is conceived as belonging to the order of the real; that’s why the bar dividing signifier and signified, … is understood as a barrier resisting signification, as a limit marking the intersection of the symbolic with the real (citing Boothby 1991). 26
Loss of the Signified
In Lacan, … the signified disappears as such, that is to say as the epicentre of signification, exactly because in its real dimension it is situated beyond the level of the symbolic.
What is retained is the locus of the signified which is now designated by a constitutive lack. What is also retained is the promise or the aspiration of attaining the lost/impossible signified, to fill in the vacuum in the locus of the absent signified.
Signification is articulated around the illusion of attaining the signified; but this illusion itself is a result of the signifying play. The signified, as we have pointed out, is an effect created by the signifier in the process of signification. 26-27
… if there is a signified it can only be a signifier to which we attribute a transferential signified function.
The signified, what is supposed to be, through its links to external reality, the source of signification, indeed belongs to the real. But this is a real that resists symbolisation — this is the definition of the real in Lacan; the real is what cannot be symbolised, the impossible. Surely, if this real is always absent from the level of signification it cannot be in itself and by itself the source of this same signification. Its absence however, the constitutive lack of the signified as real can. This lack constitutes something absolutely crucial for signification.
This absence has to be compensated if signification is to acquire any coherence. It is the absence of the signified in its real dimension which causes the emergence of the transference of the signified. What emerges is the signified in its imaginary dimension.
There is, however, one more dimension to this signifying play. This transference of the signfiied, the emergence of the imaginary signified can only be the result of the play between signifiers. This is how the third dimension, the dimension of the symbolic, determines signification. It is the predominance of the signifier that produces the imaginary signified in order to cover over the absence of the real signified or rather of the signified as real. 27
Here we need to introduce lack.
[I]rreducible lack is inscribed within the symbolic structure, a lack due to the priority of the signifier and the nature of the symbolic order; the subject becomes identical to this lack … by being born with the signifier, the subject is born divided. 28
The fact that we speak itself divides the subject: the gap between the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the statement can never be bridged.
From Identity to Identification
The fullness of identity that the subject is seeking is impossible both in the imaginary and in the symbolic level. The subject is doomed to symbolise in order to constitute her- or himself as such, but this symbolisation cannot capture the totality and singularity of the real body, the close-circuit of the drives.
Symbolisation, that is to say the pursuit of identity itself, introduces lack and makes identity ultimately impossible. For even the idea of identity to become possible its ultimate impossibility has to be instituted. Identity is possible only as a failed identity; it remains desireable exactly because it is essentially impossible. It is this constitutive impossibility that, by making full identity impossible, makes identification possible, if not necessary. Thus, it is rather misleading to speak of identities within a Lacanian framework. 29
What we have is only attempts to construct a stable identity, either on the imaginary or the symbolic level, through the image or the signifier. The subject of lack emerges due to the failure of all these attempts. What we have then, if we want to be precise and accurate, is not identities but identifications, a series of failed identifications or rather a play between identification and its failure, a deeply political play. 29
The concept of identification becomes crucial then for any understanding of the Lacanian conception of subjectivity, … The ontic horizon of identification is that of ultimate failure; its ontological horizon that of impossibility. Yet this is not, strictly speaking, a failure of identification, but a failure of identity, that is to say a failure to achieve identity through identification.
It is, however, this same impossibility to achieve identity (substance) that that makes identification (process) constitutive. This is not only true for the life of the child but for the life of the adult as well, something which reveals the relevance of the concept of identification for social and political analysis.
Since the objects of identification in adult life include political ideologies and other socially constructed objects, the process of identification is revealed as constitutive of socio-political life. It is not identity which is constitutive but identification as such; instead of identity politics we should speak of identification politics.
Name-of-the-Father introduces a certain lack, the Name-of-the-Father is a signifier that disrupts the imaginary relation between mother and child by erecting the prohibition of incest, the Paternal Function isntitutes a new order, an order structurally different from the natural order, an order instituting human society, a certain community of meaning (32).
… in order to gain the signifer we have to sacrifice the signified
Symbolic identification is an identification structured around the acceptance of this constitutive lack.
But the objective sphere is also lacking, how?
40 In a section entitled The objective is also lacking. Stav insists that even though Lacan made innovative theoretical strides on subjective side, the importance of Lacan for political theory comes through with his work on the ‘objective’ side. Roughly the social.
These two levels are not, of course identical but in any case they are not antithetical; there is something linking the individual to the collective, … it is the subject, symbolic lack itself, which splits the essentialist conceptions of individuality; it is the same subject as lack that introduces division into human collectivity. 40
How does the subject ‘introduce division into human collectivity”?
Laclau is quoted by Stav, “‘Objectivism’ and ‘subjectivism’ are symmetrical expressions of the desire for a fullness that is ultimately impossible.” HSS 13
Lack in the Other
It is the Lacanian subject of the signifier, the lacking subject, that provides the first link between psychoanalysis, society and politics, and this precisely because it highlights its dependence on the socio-symbolic order: …
By locating, at the place previously assigned to an essence of the individual psyche, a constitutive lack, Lacanian theory avoids the essentialist reductionism of the social to the individual level and opens the way to the confluence of psychoanalysis and socio-political analysis, since this lack can only be filled by socio-political objects of identification. 37
If I need to identify with something it is not only because I don’t have a full identity in the first place, but also because all my attempts to acquire it by identifying with a supposedly full Other are failing.
Identification only becomes thinkable as a result of the lack within the structure, the structure of the social Other. The objective as a closed totality is a semblance; the objective Other is lacking. 41
This then takes Stav into a discussion of the nature of this lack, and hence the introduction of jouissance and desire. Lack is a lack of jouissance, “lack of a pre-symbolic real enjoyment which is always posited as something lost, as a lost fullness, the part of ourselves that is sacrificed/castrated when we enter the symbolic system of language and social relations” 42
As soon as we enter the symbolic, the pre-symbolic – that which is impossible to integrate in the symbolic – is posited as an external prohibited object. “The universality of language cannot capture the singular real of the pre-symbolic mythical subject. The most intimate part of our being is experienced as something lost.” 42
The emergence of desire cannot be conceived independently of the family drama of the subject. The Name-of-the-Father demands the sacrifice of jouissance. … This loss … the prohibition of jouissance, is exactly what permits the emergence of desire, a desire that is structured around the unending quest for the lost/impossible jouissance. The paradox here is that what is prohibited is by definition impossible. 42
The trick of the Law is that it creates desire as a result of the lack imposed by the prohibition of incest. … it is the prohibition itself, the performative institution of symbolic Law, that makes possible the desire to ‘recapture’ this impossible jouissance. 43
This is the nodal point of the Oedipus complex … The Law makes us believe that what is impossible really exists and it is possible for us to encounter it again … What is revealed here is a dialectic between desire and the Law. The prohibition of an impossible jouissance creates the desire for its attainment …
It means that it is lack that introduces the idea of fullness and not vice-versa. It means that it is an act of power, an act of exclusion, that retroactively produces the fullness we attribute to what was excluded, to that unknown impossibility. 43
“It is … lack that introduces the idea of fullness and not vice-versa” 43
The individual’s entry into symbolic means a loss of jouissance (pre-symbolic real). Is thus always seeking identification, and thus this is what is behind the emergence of the subject and yet “if full identity is proven ultimately impossible, what makes us identify again and again? … What stimulates our desire for new identification acts? ” 45
It is this repetition of failure that sustains desire as a promise to attain the mythical jouissance; if the realisation, the full satisfaction of desire is impossible, then the promise of this realisation becomes necessary; without it no desire can be sustained. But what is the exact nature of this promise? … the name for this promise is fantasy. 45
Fantasy veils the lack in the Other
Fantasy is a scenario that veils the lack in the Other effected by castration. If the human condition is marked by a quest for a lost/impossible enjoyment, fantasy offers the promise of an encounter with this precious jouissance, an encounter that is fantasised as covering over the lack in the Other and, consequently, as filling the lack in the subject. 46
… fantasy emerges as a support exactly in the place where the lack in the Other becomes evident; it functions as a support for the lacking Other of the symbolic. … In short, it attempts to take the place of the lacking Other of the Other, of the missing signification that would, this is our mythology, represent our sacrificed enjoyment. It is because reality is articulated at the symbolic level and the symbolic is lacking, that reality can only acquire a certain coherence and become desirable as an object of identification, by resorting to fantasy; the illusory nature of fantasy functions as a support for the desire to identify. 46
What has to be stressed … is that the domain of fantasy does not belong to the individual level; fantasy is a construction that attempts, first of all, to cover over the lack in the Other. As such it belongs initially to the social world; it is located on the objective side, the side of the Other, the lacking Other. 51
Fantasy sustains our sense of reality. Our social construction of reality acquires its ontological consistency due to its dependence on a certain fantasy frame. When this frame disintegrates, the illusion – the promise – of capturing the real that sustains reality, the illusion that closes the gap between the real and our symbolisations of it, between signifier and signified, is dislocated 51-52
How can we preserve within our symbolisations a space for the recognition of the impossibility of their closure? 93
The Lacanian system is perhaps the closest we can get to a discourse opening itself up to what exceeds its limits. 93
The elimination of lack through a definite symbolisation of the real is impossible. Yet this is the condition of possibility of our freedom because it means that no order, no matter how repressive it might be, can acquire a stable character … 95