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Deeply Lacanian joke incoming!

Posted by Jeff Allred (he/him/his) on

While riding to work this morning, I thought about how Lacan’s reading of the “mirror stage” is hilariously conjured up by a joke the narrator relates in Alexandr Hemon’s marvelous novel, The Lazarus Project:

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This is a classic instance of what Lacan calls “meconnaissance” (misrecognition), whereby the subject identifies with the idealized figure in the mirror (here, the “brawny, suntanned” man with the hot wife and scads of money) to substitute for the unbearable fact of his own frustrated, discontinuous, dislocated self (Mujo, like the narrator himself, is an immigrant who, Lazarus-like, is permanently alive and dead, between two worlds, already over and beginning again).

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Lacan’s “four orders”

Posted by Jeff Allred (he/him/his) on

To help us contextualize the “mirror stage” essay, which narrates the formation of the ego and the advent of the “imaginary” in psychological life, check out this diagram:

This “knot” helps us see a few important things at once:

  • there are three zones that constitute the subject:
    • the Real is roughly equivalent to the Freudian “id”: it is “unsayable” and not representable in any direct way; the infant is all “Real,” in what appears to fully-developed subjects as a chaotic space, one that Kristeva describes for us as the “chora” and which Williams James once described as a “booming, buzzing confusion”
    • the Imaginary is dominated by preverbal signs, images that are tightly bound to the figure of the mother and the desires that attach to her
    • the Symbolic is the familiar world of Saussurean “structure”: we enter the symbolic by acquiring language, and we acquire language because the “father” forbids untrammeled access to the mother to meet all our needs. For “father” we can substitute widely: God, ideology, language, morality, all the “centers” in Derrida’s sense that govern the structures we live in. We speak language with some agency, but we don’t choose the “langue”: to speak is to be a “subject” in Althusser’s sense of the linguistic order. A subject, in order to meet their desires/needs, must channel them through this structure, with all the limitations and frustrations and repressions this entails.
  • These zones are only separate in theory: we don’t leave the Imaginary and Real behind when we enter the Symbolic as we acquire language. Thus the overlapping areas, which I won’t get into in any detail. But when we identify with the protagonist in a movie or respond to the seductive voice of a singer or fly into a rage at a partner’s odd habits for reasons we don’t understand, these reactions stem from these overlapping spaces. So, a Freudian slip overlaps symbolic/Real; weeping in the movies overlaps the Imaginary/Symbolic; a “symptom” in which the body is “speaking” through us (let’s say a compulsion to count to seven every time we cross train tracks) represents the crossroads of all three zones “talking at once.”
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