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formation of the human subject through the dialectic of drives (Triebe is more
often, and incorrectly, translated as ‘instincts’) and social constraints. This is not
to posit a pre-given ‘instinctual’ being since, according to Freud, everything
occurs across social formations. It is a conception, then, which posits a human
subject formed by what is refused entry into consciousness; that is, through the
formation of the unconscious. A brief exposition of this theory of the
construction of the subject will now follow, which can do no more than situate
certain features of it.
The human child is not born with a predetermined sexual identity, according to
Freud. The child is composed of many diverse drives which could join each
other, ‘never reach their goal, find another goal, dry up, overflow and so get
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attached to something quite different’. This alteration of drives to form the normal
‘sexed’ infant takes place, according to Lacan, through the dialectic of need,
demand and desire. The subject has to find the constituting structure of his desire
in the structure of signifiers (language), which are already established in the
other person to whom the infant’s demand is addressed. In other words desire is
formed through the subject’s relation to language. Both Lacan and Kristeva take
account of the development of modern linguistics, particularly from Saussure,
which establishes language as a series of difference. They posit the ‘endless
tautology’ of language, with meaning only established retrospectively: that is,
deep structures such as the logical, semantic or intercommunicational are
articulated only in so far as language is used by a subject who intends meaning.
Meaning occurs only through the function of a subject, not through the fixed
position of a sign.
This formulation is not to be interpreted as some form of idealist subjectivism:
it proposes the necessary positionality of the subject to enable communication.
This is close to some of Vološinov’s formulations. The mechanism by which this
positionality occurs is the refusal of entry into signifying positions of certain
signifiers. This is one of the fundamental mechanisms of the unconscious as
identified by Freud: metaphor. Lacan recognized that this notion of the
‘metaphoric’ construction of meaning in language is exactly the same model as
that of repression. Primal repression, for Freud, exists at the level of the
constitution of the unconscious. By this certain signifiers are barred entry into
consciousness, and the subject has to recognize himself in the organizing
structures of the signifier. The unconscious is seen to be constructed in the same
process as that by which the individual acquires language: it results from the
capture in the web of signifiers of the structuring of need, demand and desire. In
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Lacanian theory (too complex to be done justice in this space) certain key
signifiers organize the structure of the unconscious. These are, for example, what
Lacan calls ‘the name of the father’ (that is, the organization of desire according
to patriarchal social formations in which the phallus is a central term). These
signifiers ensure the positions for the reproduction of the species through the
establishment of sexual difference. It is not only in these moments that
consciousness is constructed out of unconscious formations; the logical