Jacques Lacan

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Jacques Lacan Elizabeth Bishop

• Displaced Identities and Love

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Outline

• Summary Key Ideas
• General Questions
• Three Stages of Psychic Development
• Mirror Stage ,Questions and Examples
• Oedipal Stage
• Gender Difference Language
• Questions
• Gender Difference
• Insatiable Desire
• Questions about Lacans views of love
• E. Bishops Poetics of Displacement
• Next week

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Summary of Key Ideas

• Chap 3 pp. 61- chap 4 161- (The Unconscious as
  language and Sexual development)
• The unconscious is
• structured like a language.
• a constantly moving chain of signifiers (sliding
  of signifying chain.
• The three-part personality (order) The Real,
  the Imaginary and the Symbolic, in which we have
  needs, make demands, and Desire.
• Development and splitting of self mirror stage,
  self-Other and subject position, fragmented body.
• Gendering process (chap 4) and phallus and love
  The Name of the Father,

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General Questions

• Your questions? Your Examples?
• Do you agree that the Fathers authority is
  associated with language and interdiction(??)?
• Do you agree that our learning of language is a
  process of castration and fragmentation
  (splitting)? And that our desire is drifting
  from one object to the next, and that ultimately
  we desire a kind of pre-Oedipal unity?
• Why are there only signifiers(?? roz) but not
  signified (??the concept of rose) in the
  unconscious?

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The orders of human existence the Imaginary,
the Symbolic the Real

• (chap 3 62-63 chap 4 164-65)
• The Real pre-linguistic pure plenitude (no
  subject-object distinction) beyond the Symbolic
  order (cannot be talked about).
• The imaginary (centering around the Mother) from
  bits and pieces to a sense of unity
  (mis)recongnition of ones self through an
  external image illusory unity with the mother ?
  split from her fragmentary sense of self
• The Symbolic (intervention of the Name of the
  Father) entry into language (a world of
  difference) ? a loss of wholeness, a split in the
  speaking I and spoken I

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The orders of human existence the Imaginary,
the Symbolic the Real

• The Real oneness and jouissance
  (undifferentiated unity of the mother, objects of
  love, or objet a).
• The imaginary (the mirror stage) two together
  and then separate (Baby and the Mother)
• The Symbolic three the Father, the (M)other,
  and Self

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The Mirror Stage

• (chap 4 165)
• The baby (with its fragmentary sense of self)
  identifies with an external image (of the body in
  the mirror or through the mother or primary
  caregiver) ? have a sense of self (ideal ego).
• Split
• 1) In the self experiences fragmentation but
  sees wholeness
• 2) From the self sees loss in the mirror image

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Split Identity in Language

• Against Cartesianism (rational consciousness) and
  humanism (free will).
• Unconscious is the language of the Other.
• Language speaks us.
• I think where I am not . . .(Ego alienated, not
  the center of ones identity.
• Ideal ego (mirror image) ego ideal (role
  model)

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Review Questions

1. Do you agree that our identity is fragmentary and
   why?  Which of the following do you agree with? 
   "I think, therefore, I am," "Where I think, there
   I am," or "I think where I am not, therefore I am
   where I do not think." 
2. What are the three phases of psychic development
   according to Lacan?
3. What is mirror stage? Why is it an important
   stage in child development?

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Mirror Identity Some examples

• Vanity In classical paintings fairy tales
  (actually it implies patriarchys repression of
  female subjectivity)
• e.g. Venus at
• her Mirror
• by VELÁZQUEZ, Diego Rodriguez
• de Silva y (b. 1599, Sevilla, d. 1660,
• Madrid)

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Uses of Mirror Some examples

• The return/assertion of the repressed
• Alter ego (or double)
• Mirror image as deeper levels of self, or ideal
  ego.
• e.g. 1. 19th century women in Jane Eyre and Wide
  Sargasso Sea (textbook chap 4 166-69) alter ego
• e.g. 2. chap 4 (176-77)The Awakening The Yellow
  Wallpaper

Mother and Daugher in The Piano
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Uses of Mirror Some examples

• 3. Looking at the mirror changing ones ideal
  ego or discovering ones selves. (Piano/French
  Lieutenants Woman)

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Mirror Image Double extensions

• Weesp. women-- are always conscious of our
  mirror images, or looking for screen images for
  self-identification.
• Whats projected on the mirror The Other, either
  ideal ego or the repressed.
• e.g. Jane/Antoinette movie stars as the phallic
  symbol
• The magical and the uncanny? Mirror, Mirror
  on the wall
• ? psychological roots the strangest //
  the most familiar (homely, unhomely)

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The Oedipal Stage and the Symbolic Order

• Second-stage split? desire for the mother
  sublimated into desire for the unattainable
  Other
• Recognize the Name of the Father. (textbook chap
  3 63 chap 4 164)
• Language as a system of difference (with no
  essential or unchanged meanings) (chap 4 p.
  171-73 e.g. woman femininity, fertility,
  lady, etc.all signifiers)
• the signified get repressed beyond recognition

S-ier ------ S-ied
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The self, the other, the Other(Lacans Schema L
revision of Fs triangle)

Id (man in the realm of the Real) the other (e.g. mother,mirror image)
Ego the Other (Father)
2. Interactions of different forces in the psyche
1. From The Mirror Stage to Oedipal stage and
after
Imaginary relation
The unconscious
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the Other

• The Other is embodied in the figure of the
  symbolic father. Its major signifier the phallus
• . . . stands for language and the conventions of
  social life organized under the category of the
  law. (source)
• (different from the feminine Otherwhich is
  the feminine space on the margin or outside of
  the Symbolic Cf. chap. 4.)

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II. Questions

1. Why is gender definition slippery?
2. What is phallus to Lacan? Why is it
   transcendental signifier? Do you agree our
   desire centers around being or having
   phallus?
3. Why is the unconscious structured like language?

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Causes of Gender Fluidity and Unstable Self
Slippery Chain of Signification

• Meaning of a sign is not in it rather, it
  resides in its difference from the other signs.
  (textbook chap 3 62 chap 4 169)
• Sign signifier (form) signified (concept
  usu. more than one)
• To determine its meaning(??, we need to look at
  its context (its differences from and relation to
  the signs around it ????????).
• Transcendental signifier absolute sign whose
  meaning(s) does not change in its context who
  fixes the chain of signification. (chap 4 173)

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Gender Difference

• Lacans analogy of the restroom signs (chap 4
  171-72)
• Arbitrary meaning structure determine gender
  difference
• Slippery chain
• 3. It speaks man?

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Phallus vs. Woman as Other

• (chap 4 172-73)
• In the Symbolic Order, phallus wholeness and
  power wholeness ? hole, in fact, nobody owns the
  phallus/power.
• Women as Lack, or Other which can move outside
  of language and be in jouissance (transgressive
  pleasure)

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the unconscious-- structured like language

• supported by Fs view of repression (ideas
  repressed as codes)
• evidence from Freuds language of Dream
  (condensation, displacement, symbolization)
• S/s / the barrier between the conscious
  and the unconscious, which resists being
  represented / the phallus.
• We are conditioned by the Symbolic order. ?
  movement of our desire like metonymy. (Cf. chap
  
  
  
  4 172)

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Insatiable Desire Need, Demand, and Desire (1)

• (chap 3 62)
• A child develops from need to demand and
  desire.// its movement from the Real, to the
  Imaginary and Symbolic.
• Need requirements for brutal survival.
• (e.g. biological need for milk) ? absence of the
  mother ? the babys social, imaginary and
  linguistic functions evolve.

the Real the Imaginary The Symbolic
need demand desire
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Effects of the three orders Need, Demand, and
Desire (2)

• Demand need formulated in language (with
  meanings e.g. need for breast as good or bad).
• -- Demand has two objects one spoken, the other
  unspoken.
• -- verbalization of imaginary subject-object,
  self-other relations. 66 (Grosz pp. 59 - 67)
• Desire primally repressed wishes for unity with
  the Mother or for self-confirmation reappear in
  and as unconscious desire.
• -- insatiable characterized by lack. (Grosz
  pp. 59 - 67)

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Desire expressed as

• Demand of Different Objects (e.g. pacifier,
  receiving blanket, the mothers handkerchief,
  etc.)
• The conflict or gap between ones demand and
  need.
• The connection of the desired object and the
  demanded metonymic connection whole and parts,
  or continguity (??).

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Questions III

• Lacan thinks that both our desire and demand (for
  love) are insatiable, because there is always an
  otherness to it which cannot be represented in
  language, or because we ultimately desire an
  impossible unity with the lover/Mother.
• Do you agree?

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Lacans Views of Love (1) a Mirage to Hide the
Impossible

• Why is there love? Because there is no sexual
  relationship.
• Love is the mirage that fills out the void of the
  impossibility of the relationship between the two
  sexes.
• Why impossible? Unity with the other and in
  ones self.
• Demand a demand for the unity of the self and
  the other Love consists in a series of demands
  for the proof of the others commitment. The
  proofs sought from the other are impossible,
  imaginary tests of love. (G 132)
• The obstacles of love is actually internal, a
  fact which courtly or romantic lovers cannot
  face.

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Lacans Views of Love (1) the Impossible

• Examples Woman conflict between being a sexual
  object and a subject demanding recognition.
• As a sexual object, she paints/shaves/dyes/diets/
  exercises her body, and clearly derives pleasure
  from compliments about her looks. Her whole body
  becomes a phallus to compensate for a genital
  deficiency. (G 133)
• As subject, she demands the man, his attention,
  affections, and his capacity to give her identity

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Lacans Views of Love (1) the Impossible

• Examples Man conflict between desire and
  affection.
• When desiring a woman, he explores, conquers and
  appreciates her enigma as a phallus, which, once
  unveiled, is a lack and confronts the man with
  his own castration.
• After a period of familiarity, the mystery is
  gone and the sexual partner becomes more an
  object of affection than of desire. The man then
  turns to another woman for her recognition of his
  having a phallus.
• Note Having phallus and being phallus, places in
  the circuit of exchange.

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Lacans Views of Love (2) paradoxical
fulfillment

• For Lacan, loves sublime moment occurs when the
  beloved enacts the metaphor of love, when he
  substitutes his position of the lover for that of
  the beloved object and starts to act in the same
  way the lover has so far acted. . . .it occurs
  when the beloved returns love by giving what he
  does not have.
• Beloved, realizing the real object-cause of the
  others love does not reside in me ? beloved
  object (metonymy what he does not have lack) ?
  can only return love (Bozovic 69 77)

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Elizabeth Bishop

• A victim of her loss displacement,
• Or one who is able to turn it into art?

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Elizabeth Bishop A Life of Displacement

• Displacement in Life
• born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1911
• her father was dead when she was 8 months old,
  and her mother institutionalized when she was
  five.
• Spent her childhood in Nova Scotia with her
  grandparents (clip 1340)
• Forced to move to Boston, MA to live with her
  paternal grandparents. Later rescued by her
  aunt.
• Bishop traveled extensively in Europe and lived
  in New York, Key West, Florida, and, for sixteen
  years, in Brazil
• Ref. http//www.youtube.com/watch?v_SJEylT-4GI
  250 524

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In the Village the scream

• A scream, the echo of a scream, hangs over that
  Nova Scotian village. No one hears it it hangs
  there forever, a slight stain in those pure blue
  skies, skies that travelers compare to those of
  Switzerland, too dark, too blue, so that they
  seem to keep on darkening a little more around
  the horizon-or is it around the rims of the
  eyes?-the color of the cloud of bloom on the elm
  trees, the violet on the fields of oats
  something darkening over the woods and waters as
  well as the sky. The scream hangs like that,
  unheard, in memory-in the past, in the present,
  and those years between. It was not even loud to
  begin with, perhaps. It just came there to live,
  forever-not loud, just alive forever. Its pitch
  would be the pitch of my village. Flick the
  lightening rod on top of the church steeple, with
  your fingernail and you will hear it.

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Elizabeth Bishop Style

• Highly crafted
• Displacement as a major theme.
• e.g. One Art (clip 1150) and Sestina
  objectifying her losses and turn them into
  recognizable aesthetic forms (repetition,
  sestina, metaphor and metonymy). ?
  aestheticization or distanciation as a way of
  displacement. This displacement is actively
  done, but not permanent.
• e.g. the scream Flick the lighting on top of the
  church steeple with your fingernail and you will
  hear it.
• Cf. textbook (pp. 39 - )

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Elizabeth Bishop a Psychoanalytic Reading

• Cf. textbook (pp. 39 - )
• distance and absence ? disturbs the childs
  sense of boundaries between subjectivity
  interiority and objective exteriority, so that
  many of the childs observations are
  characterized by crossingsof perceptual and
  actual realms, of modes, of being, of metaphoric
  qualities
• Displacement works along a metonymic pathway
• From displacement to self-healing
• e.g. Sestina images of pain, human interactions
  and transformation of these images?

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Sestina

• Sestina six elements changing positionshouse,
  grandmother, child, stove, almanac, tears.
• Metaphoric/metonymic chains
• grandmas tears ? equinoctial(?????? ) tears ?
  almanac ? tea as dark brown tears? moons fall
  like tears ? sings to the stove (besides
  housekeeping)
• Childs teakettles small tears ? Marvel Stove?
  rigid house, a man with buttons like tears ?
  moons fall like tears ? inscrutable house

• Red Stove and Flowers
• The inscription May the Future's Happy Hours
  /Bring you Beans Rice Flowers / April 27th,
  1955 / Elizabeth.

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In the Waiting Room

• What kind of identity is constructed by this a
  six-year-old girl?
• How does she establish her identity?
• What do the images of volcano and African
  natives, as well as all the other images on
  National Geographic mean to her?
• How about the adults around her? And her aunt?
• What is the big black wave she is sliding
  beneath?

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In the Waiting Room

• Thesis the poem records the speakers uncertain
  entry into society (and its symbolic order) as a
  one marginalized because of her gender and her
  insecurity.
• Not sure about her self (too shy to stop dare
  not look at herself, cannot look higher)
  simultaneous self-identification and
  self-questioning
• Three-stage identification
• internalize the aunts pains
• Unable to identify with the phallus or symbols
  of powerboots, trousers, hands.
• Objects of identificationher aunt and hanging
  breasts

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In the Waiting Room

• The self-construction is uncertain and retains
  traces of the maternal Other
• moving from the exterior to the interior, pushed
  back to the exterior only to get back in
• Moving between social order and the black wave
• Social order represented by
• Clear demarcation of place and time
• clothing and boots,
• Lamps and magazines
• Social hierarchy implied in the magazine
• The black wave
• Unnamed
• Close to the darkness and coldness outside

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In the Waiting Room

• traces of the maternal Other displaced by the
  social and historical world.
• Signs of the maternal
• The aunt in the clinic her voice heard
  (scream)a voice that could have got louder and
  worse
• Family voice ? black wave
• vs. whats seen by Elizabeth and the date of the
  first World War

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Martin Osa Johnson

• movies of Africa, Borneo, and the South Seas

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Reference

• Elizabeth Grosz Jacque Lacan A Feminist
  Introduction
• The Other (with a big O) http//www.mii.kurume-u.a
  c.jp/leuers/Lacother.htm
• Lacan and Love New Formations 23 (1994).

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Next Week

• Wide Sargasso Sea (excerpt) by Jean Rhys
• Re-read chaps 3 4 for quiz 1 (due before
  class).