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The primary psychic construct produced by the individual’s traumatic accession to the symbolic is the Lacanian subject. Just as the real is the realm of undifferentiated consciousness and the imaginary is the realm of the ego (pre-symbolic identity formation), so the symbolic is coeval with and constitutive of the subject (Evans 195). The ego, produced by the process of differentiation first experienced in the mirror stage, is superseded by the subject as the primary psychic structure by which the individual relates to the surrounding world. In a radical departure from both traditional humanist conceptions of the self and the Freudian construct of the ego as the privileged mode of human existence, Lacan designates the subject as a function of the signifying chain, a linguistic phenomenon produced by the symbolic order which the infant enters in the originary moment of articulating the mother’s absence. As such, and given the hollowness of signifiers in the Lacanian signifying chain, the subject is reduced to the status of being merely a signifier for another signifier. It exists not independently of the perpetual flux of signification, but only as one in an endless series of events in that flux:
the distinguishing marks of subjectivity are to be found not in the forces, faculties, aptitudes and dispositions that individuals in varying combinations possess, but in the signifying processes of which they are part. [Lacan’s] philosophy of the human subject is self-consciously thin, empty and weightless. He invents a subject without subject-matter. […] ‘The subject’ is no longer a substance endowed with qualities, or a fixed shape possessing dimensions, or a container awaiting the multifarious contents that experience provides: it is a series of events within language, a procession of turns, tropes and inflections. (Bowie 75-76)
Lacan’s subject is without "subject-matter" because it is a bona fide signifier whose "matter" is the irretrievable loss of a sense of wholeness. "Represented by a signifier for another signifier, […] the subject is an effect of language" (Evans 196) which is unsignifiable: "no signifier can signify the subject" (Evans 187); it can be represented as an effect of the signifying chain, but never tied down to any stable content. As such, the subject is a necessary epistemological category made available to humans by virtue of the sophistication of our thought processes. This sophistication allows us to conceive of presence and absence not only as existential conditions, but also as temporally-bound conditions of a given entity. More importantly, this sophistication of consciousness prompts us to articulate this knowledge through a system of signification whose first principle is the absence of that about which we speak.
Though I have laid this relationship out as a diachronic process in which conception precedes articulation, fidelity to the Lacanian model of the symbolic order prompts me to point out that such diachrony is impossible. Rather, the conception of presence and absence as variable attributes of the same object is part and parcel of the accession to the symbolic order; the oscillation between presence and absence is inconceivable outside the symbolic order and the symbolic order is inconceivable without the dialectic of presence and absence. The irony of this situation is that the naming of an object is necessarily also a process of negating it, of insisting on its irremediable inadequacy even in the face of its actuality: "the symbol manifests itself first of all as the murder of the thing" (Ecrits 104). In adherence to a strictly Hegelian conception of the dialectic, Lacan maintains that the very act of predication (i.e. any symbolisation whatever) is necessarily an act of negation. The process of saying what something is is simultaneously the process of saying what it is not: "P is Q" deprives P of its essentiality as it becomes something other than P; it is negated in favor of one of its accidents. Further, no accumulation of the accidents of P (say, an infinite number of Q’s) can ever amount to an exhaustive definition (and hence a full representation) of P. In entering the symbolic, then, the human infant unwittingly abandons the immediate world of objects and re-situates himself or herself in a position of always-already mediated epistemology any retreat from which is impossible.
An inevitable result of the status of the subject in the symbolic order is that it is fundamentally split; it is an effect of signification whose truth is the absence signification seeks to mask: "because the subject is essentially a speaking being (parlêtre), he is inescapably divided, castrated, split" (Evans 196). As a speaking being, the subject is not only a parlêtre but an entity par lettre, one created only by the divisiveness endemic to the process of signification. And as a result of the play of signifiers in the signifying chain, the subject is therefore at base and irreducibly an absence, a lack whose place is determined and whose truth is deferred, delayed, and decoyed by the signifier. That is to say, the subject is no more a present reality, a manipulable object or entity in the world, than is any other signifier. Originating in this discovery that the shadow of absence falls across all presence, the subject is the pre-eminent fiction by which the signifying chain covers up the void which both structures the symbolic and which it strives to preclude. As such, the subject is all the more closely aligned with this organising originary absence, not merely as one signifier among many, but as their truth as well.
This truth is perpetually covered over by the flux of signification, however, enforcing the subject’s mobility in the symbolic order, a mobility that thoroughly temporalises the subject and sets the stage for the introduction of the driving force behind its evasive and fleeting existence: "the subject comes into being at the point of intersection between an irrecoverable past and an unattainable future; its structure is that of a ceaseless cross-stitching, in language, between what-is-no-longer-the-case and what-is-not-yet-the-case" (Bowie 184). A version of being in its past and future tenses, the subject is not only always-already elsewhere, but also always-already elsewhen. This temporality is both inextricable from existence in the signifying chain and necessary to its perpetuation; it is what allows the subject to organise his or her experiences in the world in such a way as to retain a sense of order, logic, and meaning. Further, it reveals both how the subject compulsively participates in the signifying chain and how it understands its own need to be forever on the move.
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subject (sujet)
