McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. 2013.
The subject as such emerges through the experience of loss.
It is the loss of a part of the subject – an initial act of sacrifice – that creates both subject and object, the object emerging through this act as what the subject has lost of itself. The subject takes an interest in the object world because it forms this world around its lost object. 26
When the subject submits to the imperatives of language, it enters into an indirect relation with the object world. … This means that the indirectness or mediation introduced by language deprives the subject of a direct relation to the object world that it never had.
… Prior to its immersion in the mediation of language, the subject had no object at all – not a privileged relation to objects but a complete absence of relationality as such due to its autoeroticism. In this sense, the subject’s willingness to accede to its alienation in language is the first creative act, a sacrifice that produces the objects that the subject cannot directly access. 27
🙂 Rothenberg makes a similar point with her garage analogy
Language is important not for its own sake but because it is the site of our founding sacrifice . We know that the subject has performed this act of sacrifice when we witness the subject functioning as a being of language, but the sacrifice is not an act that the subject takes up on its own.