Colloquium: Lacan: NTUT 2008b

Background: Western Idealism

Western Idealism from Descartes through Hegel is the search for an Absolute Idealism, that is, the identification of being and thought, being and knowledge. Absolute Idealism would mean that that which is (being) is inasmuch as it is thought. This epoch in philosophy (which Lacan knew very well largely through the famous lectures of Alexandre Kojève) began with Descartes’ Cogito ergo sum.



Descartes wished to establish a truth beyond all doubt. What can resist doubt? What if all that is and all the contents of my thinking are merely a dream created by an evil genius, an evil god? What if 2+2=4 is merely an apparition placed in my mind by this demon? What if every thought I have does not represent any reality? What if every thought is only a chimera? Well, even if that is the case it is still certain that I am thinking. The contents of my thinking may be false but that I am thinking cannot be falsified. My thoughts may not correspond to any reality but it is certain that I am really thinking. I think, therefore I am. (But it is not really a deduction as the ‘therefore’ indicates. There are no steps as in an argument. It is an immediate, present, certainty: I think, I am: cogito sum.)

In this way, being is reduced to thought. Thought reveals being. Truth, for Descartes, is certainty and the only indubitable certainty is the equation I think, I am. It is not the presence of an object before (in front of, outside) thought. It is simpler: if there is thinking, I am: hence I am subject. The ego is inasmuch as it is thinking. The ego is its own foundation, its own ground. Thinking-ego is subjectum (Latin, meaning foundation or that which is ‘thrown under’, sub-jectum). Being is reduced to thought (not its being thought as if it were an object of thought).

It does not matter anymore if thought represents some object or something objectively true. The criterion of truth is to be beyond any doubt and only the ego-cogito achieves this status. All else is dubious. Subject is that which thinks, Ego is subject. Truth is subjective. This is not merely a subjective point of view. More radically, there is no point anymore in even asking if thought represents something outside of thought. Reality is my thinking—my representing—my idea. This does not mean that René Descartes is certain of his actual existence, his body, e.g. What he means by Ego is, can only be, a thinking-thing, res cogitans. The ego is a transcendental ego. It (i.e. “I”) is thought thinking itself.

Every reality but this is henceforth negated, suspended, doubted. What remains is the identity of subject and object. That which is is insofar as, and for as long as, there is thinking (some “I”, some thinker). I am insofar as I think. For-iteself=in-itself. The For-itself (the thinker, the subject) is the In-itself (that which is thought, the object of thought). Being is precisely as it appears insofar as we now agree that the only certain being is the res cogitans.

Is the Cartesian subject an absolute subject? Yes and No. Yes, insofar as Subject=Object, insofar as being is as it appears. (If it seems to me I am thinking then I am thinking.) There is no point anymore in distinguishing the two. But, on the other hand, the ego-cogito is a merely subjective certainty. The fact that Descartes appeals to God to guarantee “everything else” shows that he still separates his reality from an objective reality. So, there isn’t, really, an absolute identity between thought and reality, between being and appearing (the phenomenon). This is the problem Kant inherited.

(Cartesian certitude is bought at the price of hyperbolic doubt and as only the res cogitans can be made certain, all else (presuming, of course, that there is more to the whole of reality than a thinking-thing) is uncertain. I can perceive what seems to be the chair and I immediately reflect that it is indeed I (or, the res cogitans) that is perceiving, but I can reflect nothing more than this with certainty. Hence Descartes must appeal to a benign god that would not fundamentally deceive me. In the modern world the appeal is to science: there must be some discoverable reality even if this or that theory is proven false. It is a short step from here to Lacan’s global assertions about ‘paranoid knowledge’. For Descartes, as for much modern thought, ‘to think’ is always primarily ‘to think myself’. Every cogito is, as Heidegger has said, is a cogito me cogitare: thought thinks me. The ego is undecideable between being a thinker a function of thought. The certainty of the self is threatened by a sea of uncertainity surrounds it. It is thus a short step from here to paranoia.)



Kant: Is our thought an accurate representation of reality? In fact, what we call reality is always already informed by thought, conditioned by thought. (To try to go beyond this is to enter into the antimonies.) For Kant, we only ever encounter the phenomenon—that which our thinking always structures in advance and makes available for thought by way of the Kantian categories beginning with space and time. Thought is limited/structured. (I can only imagine a thing in some space and at some time; I cannot imagine myself not existing; e.g.) For Kant, that is real which is thinkable. For Kant, that which we only ever have access to is the real only insofar as, and in the way that, it presents itself to thought, not the real as it is In-itself. Hence, for Kant, all thought is ob-jective: that which is thrown before (in front of, is in the presence of) the categorized-categorizing thinker. Whereas, for God (who creates all things), all that is is e-jective (since it all comes from out of Him and consequently no object ever appears before God. God knows nothing of objective knowledge. Science would be absolutely foreign to Him, etc.). In Kant, for Absolute Being (God) things appear as they are and only in infinite mind does being=thought. But we are finite, limited to phenomena. The Absolute is beyond us. (The recalcitrant Kant is not so important to the structuralist enterprise.)



Fichte, Schelling, Hegel: These attempted to achieve a true Absolute Idealism. I am only familiar with Hegel (who has been the greater influence on the thinking that has followed in France). Hegel preserves the same structure as Descartes: the ego-cogito is not only the experience of a finite subject but is also the experience of an Absolute Subject. Descartes abandoned his insight too quickly. Descartes, in the end, separated his subjective certainty from reality as a whole in his appeal to God. For Hegel, the ego-cogito is a part of reality as a whole insofar as reality is the thought of God (Spirit, Infinite Being). Hegel projects the Cartesian subject onto Being in its Totality. Being-in-its-Totality is insofar as it knows itself, and reflects itself, and pro-jects itself. In Descartes, I am insofar as I immediately reflect myself in thinking. In Hegel, this immediacy must come to take itself as its own object, the immediate subjective certainty Descartes achieves sacrifices the mediation that would allow subjective certainty to equal objective certainty. For Hegel, Absolute Subject (which Descartes experiences but then recoils from) must separate itself from itself and know itself. The Cartesian subject is a thinking-being (res cogitans) that cannot know itself as such but can only experience itself thinking itself. It does not absolutely know itself and hence is not Absolute Subject (even if it experiences Absolute Subjectivity). For the Absolute Subject to know itself it must have self-knowledge and this requires time, history. The identity of Absolute Subject requires difference. It must come to be For-Itself what it already is In-Itself. The Absolute knows itself only in finding itself outside itself. It requires a mirror.

The Hegelian Absolute is not content with being—it must know that it is as it is; that is to say, it must become conscious (of itself). So, it alienates itself from itself, divides itself, departs from itself—understand this anyway you like—this alienation is the motor of history. Step one is alienation: Absolute Subject must first negate itself as Absolute, must negate what it is in-itself in order to know itself in that other, in that object, so that, in the end (at the end of history), it can come to know itself. I see (I alienate myself) in the mirror—that is, I recognize myself in that other, in the mirror. In order to know myself as I am in-myself I must see myself outside myself. Truth, subjective certainty, requires the ordeal of alienation, the dialect, history. [The motif here is that of the New Testament.]

In Hegelian Logic for example: A concept is an essence, an identity. The concept of tree gives us what all trees have in common, it is their identity. Hegel shows that that which all trees have in common, their identity, is unthinkable without difference. Sheer identity, A=A, is unthinkable (“the night when all cows are black,” he says derisively). Therefore, logic must become a dialectic. The identity A=A will be a result of its own negation and then a negation of that negation. Take a concept, the thing-in-itself. What is its other? The thing in its actual existence in nature. So, nature is the becoming-other of the concept, the alienation of the concept. But the thing as it is in nature is only as it is insofar as it is thinkable. Nature is the truth of the concept but nature is only “nature” insofar as it is thought as such and hence a new Concrete identity must overcome the impasse. (This is not so strange. ecological debates are hung up on this point. What is nature? That which is virgin, untouched, not cultivated, not thought. But if we do not think of nature (define it, conceptualize it) then how can we “save it” and why should we? Hence nature, like it or not, is always contaminated by its “other”: that which we think of it, its concept. And the concept, unless it is realized in nature, remains a mere abstraction. Note: what might, for Levi-Straus, remain at the level of unresoveable binary opposition for Hegel must be resolved in the famous aufhebung.)

Is Truth in itself or in the object? Is it for-itself or in-itself? Neither. For Hegel, truth is the identity of both. Therefore, Human knowledge must pass through all possible combinations of subject-object. Hegelian philosophy is active. There is no point in merely being free, for example. Freedom must be an act. To enact freedom is to desire to know freedom as it is in itself (in its concrete reality). Animal life finds itself in its confrontation with death. Human thought’s only reality is in what it does, its work, its concrete realization in an object: in nature transformed by mind. Etc. Etc. Alienation is not to be dreaded; on the contrary, it is necessary. (Lacan takes over the thinking if Descartes and Hegel and modifes both in important ways prior to his ‘conversion’ to Saussure and structuralism (which he also modifies in important ways).)



Lacan b. 1901 d.1981 Son of a Parisian sales rep. Brilliant student, developed early love of Spinoza. (Spinoza, by the way, is highly important to the structuralists (Althussier and Lacan especially) but also to Deleuze and Foucault. Anglo-American thought tends to ignore him focusing instead on Hobbes.) Met Joyce at 17 and was at Shakespeare & Co, for the legendary reading of Ulysses. Became a physician specializing in psychiatry. Was close friends with surrealists. (Members of his Ecole Freudienne would always be required to study literature and philosophy as well as medicine and psychiatric case studies.)



The early Lacan through the “Mirror Stage” essay is primarily Hegelian. Later, beginning in the 1950’s he is influenced by Levi-Strauss and adapts Saussurean linguistics into a more complex understanding of the unconscious [hereafter ucs.]. But, from the early work to the later both language and the imaginary are crucial.

The young (now practicing psychoanalyst) Lacan notes in a paper that language is the fist given: a sign addressed to someone. (This will later become his parole.) The patient speaks and is content to speak. This speech does not conform to any reality. The patient is content to speak of anything at all to the analyst. The patient, Lacan notes, is not so much interested in correctly representing some reality as he is in simply speaking to someone; he offers signs to the analyst to be deciphered. Language, before it signifies some reality, signifies for someone else. What matters is not what the patient says but the fact of saying something for the analyst. The analyst knows that there is ‘meaning’ in the speech and this meaning is the subject him/herself. No matter how nonsensical, the speech is the manifestation of some subject. In speaking the patient manifests himself for the analyst. This is the essence of language: to manifest a subject for some other. The patient expresses himself for the benefit of the other. In fact, for Lacan, language itself is the subject and the subject is that speech which manifests him. Analytic speech is not a matter of some exterior reality, nor of memory. Recalling past events is of little importance. Analysis is not a matter of adjusting the speech of the patient to conform to some social reality. Analytic speech has only to do with certitude: detached from objective reality. Same structure as Cartesian cogito sum but with an important difference: here, certitude is spoken: dico sum. The same epochal suspension of reality however. Analytic speech is pure subjective auto-manifestation. All speaking, before it refers to any exterior reality, says the same thing: I am. Lacan re-discovers the Cartesian cogito in speech. Certitude is spoken. (Lacan says that this is something Descartes “forgot”.)

If the subject [hereafter s.] must speak himself in order to be himself, in order to manifest himself, then speech is a demand and, moreover, a demand made to some other. In speech the s. speaks himself to some other hence exteriorizes himself the better to know himself. Speech for-the-other is the mediation by which the s. will be able to grasp himself. This auto-exteriorization is the opening up of what is primordial psychic space. As the speech of the patient manifests the s. prior to any reality, the speech is primordially imaginary. Already in the early Lacan there is an emphasis on exteriorization and the imaginary. Already, primordial psychic space is the space of the image. The speech of the patient is an image of speech before it represents any possible reality. In both analytic speech as in the mirror phase, space is primarily imaginary-psychic, not categorical as in Kant.



In the 1930s the Americans commissioned a strange study of birds. Thousands of birds were captured and dissected to reveal the contents of their stomachs. It was found that the birds ate equal numbers of insects that camouflage themselves and those that don’t. This seemed to disprove the common sense idea that insects, and by extension other creatures, disguise themselves and blend into the environment for practical purpose of self-preservation. With this empirical study in mind, Lacan began to ask then why the mimetic faculty exists at all. He began to develop the idea that creatures are in some way ‘captured’ by their environment. (This was also the view of ethnologists at the time.) This capture then becomes a trigger or motor necessary for maturation. He began to study the mimetic faculty in children and as early as 1936 was speaking of a mirror stage. But the philosophical background had already been prepared through his understand of Hegel’s massive critique of Descartes.

The human infant is born prematurely. Has little motor control. Can’t feed itself. Etc. In the mirror phase the infant can assume itself and anticipate itself in the image. The image appears to be whole, one, unified, in short, a self while the reality of the infant is fragmentation, a body out of control, weakness, etc. Lacan very early observed infants and wondered how an infant’s mood can shift so abruptly from happiness to hate to inconsoleability to joy and so on. He theorized that infant is being captured by an imago: an image of some other. The ego is thus born through identification with some other whether an image in a real mirror or some alter-ego (a second child for example). The child identifies with either a real mirror image of himself or just an image of some other child: the other child cries, I cry. Whether it is my “own” image or a counter-part (an alter ego) makes no difference. (The mother shows the infant a mirror and says: look, you have your father’s eyes! Even in the mirror the image of myself is some other.) The important point is that from the start, the ego is imaginary. It is always outside. The ego is an image; it is in space; it is specular. This is the orginary alienation of the ego. The ego is born alienated. The ego-image “robs” the infant of itself at the same time as it grants the infant a self. The ego is essentially imaginary, not accidentally. The ego is essentially a mis-understanding (méconnaissance): I see myself there, in the image and hence miss myself here, in myself. It is thus only on the condition of missing itself that the ego can know itself. Years later, when the patient speaks to the analyst, he speaks still to an alter-ego, an image, an incarnation of his own ego insofar as his own ego is always outside him.

This imaginary dimension allowed Lacan to understand the mystery of transference, the problem of a patient becoming irrationally emotional during a session. In transference the patient exteriorizes an ego ‘imprinted’ in his person and triggered by some speech, maybe a single word. What the analyst wishes to offer the patient, at this stage of Lacan’s career, is a pure mirror. What the patient suffers from is mimesis. The analyst remains silent, seated out of view of the patient who speaks endlessly of troubles and pain and failures and so on. What the analyst wants is to be for the patient a simple mirror. In this way the patient, in transference, enacts the painful and destructive imago for the other (the analyst) who does not respond and thus it is hoped that the patient will see himself as in a mirror, that is, see this other, persecuting ego-imago that has captured him and made him ill. And in so doing, become cured as he will see and understand that his illness was all imaginary. (Bertrand Russell once uncovered his father’s diaries in which he wrote in detail of the courtship of Russell’s mother. Russell was spellbound to read that he himself had followed the same steps in his own courtship. The mimetic function is ucs.) Unlike American ego-psychology which sought to repress these demonic and possessive imagoes, Lacan wanted them to display themselves in all their vigor in the session and thus the mimetic illness would be cured by mimesis itself. (As in Aristotle’s Poetics possibly?)

But there was a problem. The cure didn’t work. The patient only became more and more frustrated. The attempt to de-alienate the patient by way of mimesis (by way of alienation itself) failed. Here, Lacan began to draw a finer distinction between the ego and the s. The ego is always an image, always outside, always an object. What then is inside, what is in-itself? The answer is: nothing. That is, nothing but desire. Specifically, the desire to be a s: “The ego can never become one with the assumption of the subject’s desire.” The problem is that the ego is the very locus of resistance to cure. The patient resists cure with his own ego. “Underneath” the imaginary imagoes is not a primordial ego waiting to be united with subjectivity. Unfortunately, underneath all the imagoes who persecute the patient there is nothing, no one: just the desire to be a subject. The position of the analyst in the analytic situation is a graver problem than Lacan had early realized because the analyst is for the patient an incarnation of subjectivity. The analysist is the s. the patient desires to be. Desire is the ucs. s. In remaining silent, in attempting to be a pure mirror the analyst had inadvertently presented the patient with something more disturbing: nothing. In saying nothing, in remaining impassive and unimpressed by the patient’s most violent and aggressive outbursts as well as his declarations of passionate love, the mirror became a hole in reality, a lack-of-being, the very provocation of desire: the desire to be.





Review: The ego is essentially and originally alienating based on the infant’s premature birth, his discoördination, fragmentation, incompletion. The infant is not unified and the image is that false completion wherein the infant can anticipate his adult, fully formed self. This is altogether a disturbing situation which human being inherits: a fragmented body and a false, alienated self. The ego is made up of pieces of mimed imagoes unconsciously assimilated in its environment. But what is it in the environment that altogether, on a day-to-day basis, most thoroughly impregnates human beings? Language. Lacan, beginning in he 1950s turned more and more to speech as the key to understanding the human psyche.

The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience (1949)

p1 “…formation of the I” [the I is formed. It is not given. It is not a category.] “…that leads us to oppose any philosophy directly issuing from the Cogito.” [The I, the ego, is not a certainty as in Descartes. It is not immediately given, immediately revealed. It comes to be. Lacan had already reformulated the ego cogito as dico cogito which is quite different since the latter requires an other, demands an other. In the mirror phase he will unveil a formation, a building-appropriating of the ego as a function, not of immediate certainty, but alienation, as I have already outlined above.]



“Aha-Erlebnis” [The aha! experience. I don’t know who Köhler is.]



“This act, far from exhausting itself…around him.” [The monkey finds out that the image of a banana can’t be eaten, that the image of the monkey is unreal and so loses interest, but the infant retains a fascination with the image. My cats for a moment thought that the tennis balls on TV might be real; once they realized there was no ball here they never again gazed at the TV with longing.]



p2 “…as well as an ontological structure of the human world that accords with my reflections on paranoiac knowledge…” [a grandiose statement I will leave aside for now.] .”…libidinal dynamism…” [indeed it is an ecstasy, an upsurge, with which the infant—who, mind you, does not have a self to look out from through his/her eyes—appears to begin to grasp unities, wholes, selves. All of them upright and in apparent control of themselves.] “We have only to understand the mirror stage as an identification…” [what this means is that it is in the image that the infant begins to schematize a rough outline for a self. (A rough outline: this is why Lacan uses the archaic word imago. His imago is not at all the same as Jung’s. In the latter the imago is a primordial archetype, for Lacan it is a mere schema.) To identify here means simultaneously to incorporate and to exteriorize. In short, it is clear here that the self, the ego, the infant will one day be is, from the outset an image of an image. From the outset, ego is outside. Immediate experience is not even properly speaking experienced by the infant as there is no unified self to experience and as there is no unity of any kind yet. The infant is disorganized. It is this state that child must emerge from and primarily through the imaginary space as it is opened in the mirror phase. The child’s ego is out there, outside, is an object among objects. He draws here on the work of Henri Wallon who observed the phenomenon long before Lacan and also drew the conclusion that, for example, our first experience of our bodies is—has to be—visual, imaginary because, very simply, the infant sees others before it sees itself. It learns to see itself as it sees others—as others are seen outside, so the infant sees its own body as outside.) “…jubilant assumption…before it is objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject” [a dense passage that basically outlines our deluded infant’s entire psychic history through jealousy and the Oedipal stage to his or her assumption of a place in the Symbolic order via language, all of which is highly complex and problematic. Eventually, some years after this essay, Lacan will, very importantly, separate the ego from the s. I hope we will get to that in the colloquium next time.] “…Gestalt…imago…imago of one’s own body…” etc. [what is presented is as I say a rough outline, a schema, not some definitive image. The young infant does not form the thought “I am Queen Elizabeth!” (not yet anyway, later maybe…) In fact the infant gaze is being educated. Here, Lacan draws on the female pigeon and the locust to show empirically that the visual image has actual formative “powers” foreign to causality. In human being this homeomorphic education is not limited to the body. “This form [imago] would have to be called the Ideal-I…source of secondary identifications…libidinal normalization. But the important point is that this form situates the agency of the ego, before its social determination, in a fictional direction, which will always remain irreducible…” Somewhat unclear. Later, Lacan will make a distinction between the Ideal-I and the Ego-Ideal. Here, I believe that Lacan is saying that it is not any one particular image that the infant identifies with but rather with an imaginary process, libidinally invested, that is enduring and not merely a phase passed into and then out of. Lacan also uses the German word Gestalt which performs basically the same function as the word imago. The infant will identify and then develop and learn to identify with certain people, certain images: this is the normalization (boys should not play with dolls in imitation of their mothers, e.g.) The important point is that the human being has no natural relation to any object for any reason—there is first identification. If I want that toy there is because some other child wants that toy. If I am crying and you can’t find a reason it is because I am suddenly seized by some imago who is not even present. But there is more: if I identify with this or that imago it is because some other also identifies with this or that imago. This specular identification is “irreducible”: there is no way out. (Maybe, better, there is no way into the infant for who the infant is is always outside: in an identification. The infant carries “in” him/herself various ‘outsides”, various others.)



Commentary: this mirror phase is decisive for Lacan but the term phase is misleading. The jubilation the infant feels is retained throughout its psychic life. The ego is a (or, an un-)finished pro-ject. It is always out there, outside. This is what project the Hegelian Absolute into history and what projects the Lacanian infant into the world, the Umwelt from out of the chaos of the Innenwelt. The egeo will henceforth be a constant pursuit for an illusory unity. Through its triumphant vision the infant is captured, fascinated by some image or counter-part who happens (the reasons why do not matter and are probably not discoverable anyway) to fascinate it. To be fascinated is both to be held in some stae by some other and to incorporate by way of the gaze. (Much film theory from the 1970s to today draws on this, by the way.) Imaginary here means fundamentally illusory and fundamentally visual. This is how Lacan understand Freudian narcissism. If the ego loves itself it is because it is not itself—it learns to love itself in its specular identifications who present it with an image of ‘itself’. Each of these will be a decoy, a false object, a trophy generated by that infantile jubilation described here by Lacan. A consequence of the pre-mature birth in human being is that we have no “natural” sexuality nor sexual appetite. Libidinal drive is, from the outset, the imaginary, ecstatic assumption of an image, hence, Lacan will repeat that the libidinal drive is centered in the imaginary function and human sexuality is eternally “baitable.” The infant’s first experience of anything unitary and autonomous is what/who it sees outside itself. In itself it, he/she (but who?) experiences (but this is too unified a term: experience requires a subjective unity, Kant had shown) nothing but the Hegelian “night when all cows are black.” (Where Lacan breaks with Hegel is to deny that there will ever be a reconciliation of the ego with its image or its imaginary nature in a new concrete reality.)

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p2-3 “The fact that the total form of the body…with the phantoms that dominate him, or with the automiton…” [Now, stop and think. The body will develop, grow. The infant will learn to hold itself upright, walk. At the same time it is ‘anticipating’ itself in its imaginary world of identifications. Thus its growth, new powers, will be attributed to this ‘other’ that has formed the self. I am, I can grow, (indeed I can be an I at all) only insofar as there is identification with some other, that is, only insofar as I am inhabited by some imago—who knows what one?—who is able, as if by magic, to organize and strengthen me. Its like magic. Without these imagos, I am nothing, I am helpless. {I think Bhabba has this situation in mind as he thinks through the colonization of India under British rule. No?} Years later, in the theraputic session, the patient will have to pass through every identification he/she has ever had in order to sort out his/her illness at the end of therapy. That’s why psychotherapy takes so long. (In the very same way that the Hegelian Absolute Subject must pass through every possible subject-object relation in order to realize itself concretely as the identity of subject and object at the end of history.)]

[“Underneath” all these identifications is something very disturbing: the fragmented, disorganized infantile body. Even, more, as the infant has no clear self and is therefore not distinguished from others, underneath all its identifications is both a body in pieces and madness: utter undifferentiation of self/other. That is why psychotherapy is so difficult for the patient will rather cling to his/her illness than have to be plunged into the chaos of the infantile Innenwelt. This is why all human knowledge is paranoid in structure and this is why the “ontological structure of the human world” is imaginary: it is the stubborn defense against an experience of reality—the world outside the imaginary: the mad, fragmented world of the infant. That mad, fractured world is the “little reality” Lacan mentions: Dali’s melting clocks, the mad paintings of Bosch.] p4 : Discord betrayed by signs of easiness and motor uncoordination…the view I have formulated as the fact of a real specific prematurity of birth in man.” “This fragmented body--…usually manifests itself in dreams…aggresive disintegration in the individual…disjointed limbs…” etc. etc.



p5 “Correlatively, the formation of the I is symbolized in dreams by a fortress, or a stadium--…surrounded by marshes..” [OK, that’s clear but] “…remote inner castle whose form…symbolizes the id in a quite startling way…” [That I don’t understand.]

p5-6 “But if we were to build on these subjective givens alone…our theoretical attempts would remain exposed to the charge of projecting themselves into the unthinkable of an absolute subject…method of symbolic reduction…defenses of the ego…Miss Anna Freud…deflection of the specular I into the social I…this moment in which the mirror stage comes to an end…the dialectic that will henceforth link the I to socially elaborated situations…It is this moment that decisively tips the whole of human knowledge into mediatization through the desire of the other…turns the I into that apparatus for which every instinctual thrust constitutes a danger…the Oedipus complex.” [4 dense paragraphs in which Lacan refers to and approves of Anna Freud’s The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense in which A. Freud reveals a development of defense mechanisms that involve the other as a model of desire and knowledge on which the human ego comes to organize its defenses in ways that accord with others in society. The danger is that all these egos—all outside—will necessarily come into conflict and devolve into a Hobbsean war-of-all-against-all. The Oedipal conflict sorts this out and ‘structures’ defenses. It is a cultural mediator we all share (just as in Levi-Strauss the prohibition against incest, although arbitrary, is something we all ‘agree’ to in order that we may have culture.) The infant thus passes from the sheer jubilant, libidinal, joy of specular identifications through the cultural agony of having to identify with just this figure and not some other. Thus he becomes social and is defensive in socially recognizable and approved ways [he’s homophobic, he exchanges his mother’s love for some other woman, e.g.]



p6 “In light of this conception, the term primary narcissism…dynamic opposition between this libido and the sexual libido…invoke destructive and, indeed, death instincts, in order to explain the evident connection between the narcissistic libido and the alienating function of the I,…” [S. Freud could not explain the genealogy of narcissism; Lacan could. Freud had long warned against believing the patient when the patient spoke from his/her ego because patients are notorious liars. Lacan of course agrees since the ego is from the outset a méconnaissance, a lie, a fiction. But the patient loves the fiction, loves the false ego, the false image of unity. It is not a sexual love—this libidinal investment, already noted, will be re-directed, via the Oedipal complex, into its “proper” (culturally approved) sexual arena. The ego is an inauthentic agency. In Freud, the ego in narcissism takes itself as its love object and thus negates any interest in the world outside ultimately preferring death to any encounter that might break up this perfect love affair of the self with itself. In Freud, narcissism is a necessary phase since it is in self-love (which in Freud is still libidinal/sexual) that feelings are first organized into a unity, thence to be re-directed. Now, in Lacan, as we have seen, the ego is the outside in general and the aggressivity he notes is not a consequence of a death-drive but of a defense against an encounter with the uncanny fragmented body of the infant which recurs in dreams. Why is philanthropy a “form of aggression”? Because the philanthropist as it were spreads his/herself out as far as possible transforming the world outside into an appendage of the philanthropist’s self: in philanthropy the other is reduced to dependency, reduced to being an appendage of the philanthropist, exists solely for-the philanthropist’s kindness, etc.



p 6-7 “In fact, we are encountering that existential negativity…Hegelain murder.” In these paragraphs he takes the time to slam existentialism and, without naming him, Jean-Paul Sartre and, on the other hand, any philosophy (principally Anglo-American) that takes utilitarianism as foundational. For, each takes as its basic unit the self-sufficient subject. Opposed to this is, Lacan says in the next paragraph, the “function of méconnaissance” that is not self-sufficient, as we have seen. (Verneinung means “negation” and negation is part of the organization of defenses articulated by A. Freud in her book.)



p 7 “We can thus…real journey” Again, very dense passages. He is being somewhat prophetic sayaing that this discovery of his—of the imaginary dimension—must replace both an existential and a utilitarian conception of humanity. Out there in the world in general we are not autonomous agents involved in dialectical struggle with other autonomous agents (Sartre), nor are we autonomous agents who see to avoid pain and increase pleasure (Anglo-American), we are instead captives of an “imaginary servitude” that must be undone identification by identification by identification. The psychoanalyst is the one who can point sayaing Thou art that meaning you are that image, that imago, that real or imagined person from your past who has shaped you destiny.





Commentary: I can hardly understand every sentence in this amazingly dense and highly influential essay. I would emphasize only certain main aspects of the argument that are helpful in understanding Lacan at least a little. For Lacan, at bottom, the ego is not a unit but a peculiar capacity: namely, the ego is a mime. Having no personality of his own, the infant at the mirror stage exhibits his/her capacities. In the mirror and in counter-parts in the world the infant is alienated by an image/imago that “suggests” the infant him/herself. On the one hand, this allows the infant to have a self at all and moreover, to have one outside in space, apart from the murky and bewildering innerworld of bodily fragmentation, dependency, etc.. But on the other hand, the infant sacrifices all classically defined authenticity, preferring instead the imaginary, the fictive, the suggestive world outside. He/she can only ‘have’ him/herself at the price of losing him/herself. The price for the gradual organization the infant enjoys as it develops is perpetual alienation. The person we can sane, Levi-Strauss has written in response to Lacan, is the one who is capable of and masters this alienation.