Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology, New York: Routledge 2004.
The predication of the subject in language constitutes is as divided, radically split between the conscious and unconscious, and as ‘ex-centric‘, radically other to its conscious self of identity. É: 189 33
S/s Lacan’s algorithm emphasizes not the unity of the sign but the rupture between signifier and signified.
I read the formulae of the four discourses as a dynamic representation of the discursive social link; as devices that formalize and elucidate fundamental forms of intersubjectivity. 53
S1 represents the master signifier, the symbolic element that represents the subject for another signifier. The master signifier marks the subject’s position within the signifying chain and hence within the discursive social tie. 50
S2 designates the symbolic field, teh chain or network of signifiers that form the subject. For this reason, S2 represents the knowledge of the subject. It describes both the form of the subject’s knowledge, for example, academic, psychoanalytic and so on, and the form of knowledge of the subject, such as the differing conceptions of the subject within the unversity and psychoanalysis. 50
a represents the ‘left-over’ or remainder of discourse. That remainder is the jouissance produced by, and surrendered to, language in the taking up of a a speaking position by the subject. The a is an unassimilable excess to the discourse. There is no signifier of the a, as it is not possible to represent it in the signifying economy of the discourse. The subject attempts to structure its relationship to this unassimilable remainder by rendering it as an imaginary object — the objet petit a. The a thus both functions in the imaginary register, in which it appears as an imaginary object filled with phantasmatic content, and in the symbolic register, in which it marks the excluded term of discourse, the gap in or void of its symbolic structure. For this reason, the a ‘stands simultaneously for the imaginary fantasmic lure/screen and for that which this lure is obfuscating, for the void behind the lure’ (Žižek 1998 4 Disourses Cogito and the Unconscious).
$ designates the barred subject, in which the S of the conscious subject is struck through because of its division by the unconscious.
In the Discourse of the Master, S1 stands in the place of the agent, S2 in the place of the other, $ in the place of truth, and a in the place of the product of the disourse. In the operation of the Master’s Discourse, the master signifier is the cause of the subject. The subject addresses its speech to the Other of the Symbolic order, S2, the network of signifiers which form the subject. The truth of the discourse is $, the unconscious of the divided subject. The product of its discourse is the a, that remant of jouissance which is forbidden to the subject. Lacan nominates teh Discourse of the Master as the fundamental relation because it represents the structure to another signifier, and hence produces it as a subject in the signifying chain, the cause of the discourse is also the ’cause’ of the speaking subject (Seminar 17: 19-20). In this way, the S1 of the Discourse of the Master represents the ‘origin’ of discourse as such, because it is the condition of the production of discourse as enunciation. For this reason, Lacan describes the foundational discourse as that of the Master. 51