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Semiology: from structuralism to post-structuralism

POST-STRUCTURALISM: LACAN, DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

Jacques Lacan
We referred to Lacan in the previous chapter’s discussion of
Zizek. Like Barthes and Foucault, Lacan too had a structuralist
past: influenced, in turn, by Lévi-Strauss, Saussure and Jakobson,
he had used structural linguistics to recover what he saw as the
essential kernel of Freudian psychoanalysis. Hence his insistence
that ‘the unconscious is structured like a language’ (Lacan, 1977,
p. 20). Unlike Freud, Lacan came to see the unconscious not as a
key to understanding and thus curing the aberrations of the
conscious ego, but as an end in itself, the centre of our being.
Expelled from the International Psychoanalytic Association as a
result, he founded the École Freudienne in Paris, in 1964, and
from there presented the two series of lectures, subsequently
published as Écrits and The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-
Analysis, which formed the basis of his thinking. Lacan reversed
the Freudian conception of the subject’s trajectory: instead of a
pre-Oedipal subject self-present to its own unity and only later
‘split’ by socialisation, he saw the subject as wholly constructed
through the child’s contact with the external world of people and
language. There is therefore no core of self or subjectivity prior
to the child’s insertion into the social. Moreover, Lacan saw
language itself as providing the key to understanding how
human subjectivity is constructed. Interestingly, he claimed that
this was already implied in Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams
(Lacan, 1977a, p. 159).
As we noted in chapter 3, Lacan developed a tripartite model
of the pyscho-social world, comprising the Imaginary, the Real
and the Symbolic. During the infant stage, the child inhabits a
pre-linguistic, pre-Oedipal ‘Imaginary’ characterised by speech-
less identity between child, mother and world. During the
‘mirror stage’, between the ages of six and eighteen months,
primordial symbolisation in the fort-da games of presence and
absence develops a sense of subjectivity in the infant and hence
also awareness of its being and of existence in general. The
subject is formed, therefore, by the insertion of the child’s awak-
ening consciousness into the symbolic system of language

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