Talk:Graph of desire

The Graph of Desire is a schema, or model, that Jacques Lacan began developing in his seminar on The Formations of the Unconscious (1957-58). It achieved its definitive form in his essay "Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious" (1960/2004). Its four successive stages represent the constitution of the human subject and his desire. Nevertheless, Lacan never intended it to describe the genetic stages of a biological development. Rather, it represents the "logical moments" of the birth of a speaking subject.

Lacan starts with what he calls the "quilting point" (where an upholsterer attaches a button to a sofa or mattress to prevent the batting from moving around) a kind of looping by which the signifying chain of the parental Other's "discourse"—not to be understood here as merely verbal, of course—intersects with the baby's expressions of need (See Figure 1).

This pressure of need is represented by a retrograde trajectory beginning at delta (d). In the course of its reverse looping, this line intersects at two successive points the vector S → S′, which represents the chain of the Other's discourse. Because they travel in opposite directions, the two trajectories carry out this double intersection in a retroactive manner that calls to mind Freud's concept of "deferred action." For Lacan, the point of intersection on the right, A, represents the "treasure trove of signifiers" (p. 292), which is Lacan's definition of the Other as the "locus" of the signifying battery on which the subject depends. On the left, the other point, s(A), represents the moment at which a meaning is produced in the heart of the Other, which henceforth makes it a sign for the infant.

This first stage of the graph forms a "circuit" of vectors that first follows the chain of the Other's discourse, from s(A) to A, and then returns, from A to s(A), along the path of the baby's biological impulses. In this circularity, everything comes back to the signifying structure of the Other's discourse. The demand of the newborn must conform the Other's "code" in order to be understood.

In spite of this apparently closed circularity, Lacan also situates the constitution of the ego ideal at this level. By grasping upon an insignia of the Other's parental power, s(A), the child anticipates its own future access to any power whatsoever. From then on, the ego ideal, I(A), is inscribed at the endpoint of trajectory delta, as an anticipated function that the child can attain in relation to the parent.

The process where the ego is constituted makes up the second stage of the graph. A right-to-left vector goes from the specular image, i(a), to the constitution of the ego, m (Figure 2). This vector is essentially imaginary, which means that it belongs to the register of spatial-corporeal representation, and it is grafted as a short circuit onto the delta trajectory, which represents the pressure of need.

From then on, a second circuit can be taken by returning along the signifying chain, S → S′. This return circuit, by which the constitution of the ego is implicated in the discourse of the Other, might constitute in itself an impasse, from which no subject could extricate himself. And this is where Lacan made one of his specific contributions to psychoanalysis by emphasizing the intrinsic doubling of the Other's discourse.

We have seen that effects of meaning are manifested in the Other, s(A), where they are interposed between the needs of the baby and certain signals and statements coming from the mother. The baby comes to feel capable of provoking these maternal manifestations, and at the same time develops a paranoid tendency to interpret their intentionality when they appear.

Lacan developed an account of this essential phenomenon on the basis of certain linguistic facts that led him to distinguish, beyond the subject of the statement evident in the parental discourse, a more or less obscured subject of the enunciation. This implied that quite another dimension of unconsciousness was possible (Figure 3).

The intentionality that is assumed to exist in the manifestations of the Other causes the child to ask—What does he want from me? This question forms the basis of the first experience of anxiety (Hilflosigkeit). Given the fundamental mirroring nature of the imaginary relation that gives the ego substance, this paranoid question—What does he want from me?—returns in the form of a question addressed to the nascent subject—What do you want? (or "Chè vuoi?" as Lacan puts it). This form of address, characteristic of the superego leads to the upper stage of the graph, which it takes the form of a question mark rooted in A, the place of the Other. But the Other at this stage is still not in any way the "barred" by the symbolization of its possible absence and not yet marked by the incompleteness of its sexual identity. At this point the Other is still the all-embracing expression of the two parents merged into a single non-castrated parent figure. It is the perception of the mother's lack of a penis that now plays the crucial role of representing the incompleteness of the maternal Other.

For the nascent subject, this is a transformational moment that leads to a recognition that the Other is desiring/lacking. From that moment on, the Other will be "barred," S(A̷), and submitted to the symbolic system of exchange that is instituted in the aftermath of the of the superego's question (Chè vuoi?). It is from this point that we can conceive of the emergence of a subject in its own right. Lacan designates it with a barred S because of its fundamental dependence on a relation of at least two signifiers, one of which is necessarily the signifier of the lack in the Other—without which, Lacan said, no signifier would ever be able to represent a "person."

This is what can be formalized in a fourth imaginary stage wherein the subject that is detached at the point of symbolization by the Other finds a way to represent itself as having a relation with the object of desire through an unconscious fantasy, as shown in the formula S̷ ◇ a. The operation by which the Other is recognized as lacking is inscribed in a symbolic system of exchange that nevertheless includes a real "remainder" made up of objects that are detachable from the mother. These are the Freudian partial objects, which Lacan designates with a small a, that become part of the fantasy. Any persistent difficulty in symbolically marking the mother's lack interferes with the constitution of the fantasy and leads to a failure in the process of subjectivation (Figure 4).

At the upper level of the graph, along the imaginary vector (d → S̷ ◇ a), desire and fantasy maintain a relation similar to the one that at the lower level governed the constitution of the ego in relation to the image of the small other, i(a). However, Lacan noted that these two imaginary stages are not in any way analogous to each other, since unconscious desire tends to present itself regularly to the ego as precisely what the ego does not want. The subject of the unconscious fantasy, in contrast to the ego, represents for Lacan "the 'stuff' of the I that is primally repressed" (p. 302). In treatment, this subject would be the analyst's true interlocutor.

The two levels of the graph are modeled on a split that is structural in the human being (in Lacan's terms parlêtre, or "speaking-being"). The first level, that of the statement and of specular relations of the ego, is prior to castration. It manifests a phallic-narcissistic logic where the nascent ego remains trapped in the circle of the Other's all-importance. The upper level, on the other hand, has as its keystone the signifier of the lack in the Other, S(S̷), the guarantor of a discourse submitted to what Freud called the "reality of castration."

BERNARD PENOT Bibliography

   * Lacan, Jacques. (2004). The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire in the freudian unconcsious. In Écrits: A selection. (Bruce Fink, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton. (Original work published 1960)

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Pictured above is Graph II in the series of four graphs that make up Lacan’s topology of desire (taken from Zizek The Sublime Object of Ideology 103). Before laying out how the graph depicts the movement of desire, I will first take a moment to define the symbols it uses. On the far left of the graph is the term "Signifier," designating the starting point of the act of signification and proceeding to the "Voice," which is the final outcome of the process of signification. At the bottom left hand corner of the graph is the symbol I(O), indicating the ego-ideal, the imaginary version of itself with which the ego would like to be identified. Further up on the left hand side is "e," designating the ego itself, caught halfway between the signifying chain ("Signifier" to "Voice") and the ego-ideal. On the bottom right hand side of the graph is "S/" (S with a bar through it), designating the barred subject, the subject split by his or her entry into the symbolic and finally never coincident with its own signification. Immediately above the barred S is a delta which feeds directly into the parabolic line which ends at I(O). This delta is the Lacanian algebra for "the prelinguistic mythical subject of pure need" which must "pass through the defiles of the signifier" in the course of producing the barred subject (Evans 76). That is, the delta designates the embryonic subject prior to the intervention of the paternal interdiction ("the defiles of the signifier"), after which time it simply denotes desire, the urge to return to the time and place preceding that rude awakening. Midway up the right hand side of the graph is the symbol "i(o)," designating the specular image which the ego encounters in the mirror stage and throughout life; it is non-coincident with either the ego or the ego-ideal, though it is more accurate than the ego-ideal. Everything in the lower half of the graph, below the signifying chain, is located firmly in the imaginary order. The two circles at the points where the trajectory of S/<-> I(O) are points de capiton, points at which the signifying chain is anchored to the imaginary by the crossing trajectories of desire and signification. Within the left point de capiton is the symbol "s(O)," the signification of the other, the temporally prior point in the act of signification that bears the meaning of the Other (language) but does not yet articulate it. Inside the right point de capiton is the symbol "O," indicating the Other itself, language in its ever-expanding entirety. The appearance of the Other at this point retroactively punctuates the temporally precedent s(O), allowing it to bring forth its meaning as a particular portion of the "‘treasure of the signifier’" (Bowie 190) which it guards. As the points de capiton, these two intersections represent the arbitrary but stable points in the signifying chain at which meaning appears to dangle vertically from the process of signification as well as inhering in its syntactic or horizontal movement.

In terms of its movement, this graph displays the oscillating movement between I(O) and S/ as the fundamental movement of desire from the initial imaginary encounter with the specular image to the formation of the ideal-ego and on to the foundation of the barred subject. Crossing that trajectory from left to right is the signifying chain, from Signifier to Voice as an instance of the speech which makes of the subject a "parlêtre." This movement is only provisionally unidirectional, however; between the points de capiton there is a retrogressive movement by which the punctuation of the Other fixes the meaning of the signification of the other in the particular utterance. This fixation is also a deflection, however, as it interferes with the direct path between the subject and the ideal-ego. Furthermore, the placement of the arc of this deflection above the signifying chain reveals that it is an unconscious process, since though we may be aware of the temporal construction of meaning in the linear development of grammar, its effect on our psyche is one of an always-already established meaning. Finally, the two smaller cells contained in the lower half of the graph play on the analogy between the imaginary identification between the specular image (i(o)) and the ego (e) and the way in which the signification of the Other (s(O)) is never quite coincident with the Other itself (O); both are imaginary relations. The first short-circuits the symbolic order by refusing to articulate its processes of identification, while the second represents the imaginary aspect of the signifying chain, the realm of the signified as the arbitrary sound-images which lend some semblance of coherence to the symbolic order. As a final addition to this graph, we might position the objet a at the center of it all as the absent still point around which the machinery of desire, signification, and identification turns in the psychic life of the subject.

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The graph of desire is a conceptual tool from the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan.

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The "graph of desire" (Fr. graphe du désir) is a topographical representation of the structure of desire.

Jacques Lacan

Lacan first develops the graph of desire in the seminar of 1957-8 in order to illustrate the psychoanalytic theory of jokes.

The graph reappears in some of the following seminars, but then all but disappears from Lacan's work.

The graph appears in various forms, although the most well known form of it appears in "The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire in the Freudian unconscious."

Four Stages

In this paper, Lacan builds up the graph of desire in four stages.

Elementary Cell

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Elementary Cell

The first of these stages in the "elementary cell" of the graph.

The horizontal line represents the diachronic signifying chain; the horseshow-shaped line represents the vector of the subject's intentionality.

The double intersection of these two lines illustrates the nature of retroaction: the message, at the point marked s(A) in the elementary cell, is the point de capiton determined retroactively by the particular punctuation given to it by the Other, A.

The prelinguistic mythical subject of pure need, indicated by the triangle, must pass through the defiles of the signifier which produces the divided subject, $.

Intermediate Stages

The intermediate stages of the graph of desire are not meant to show any evolution or temporal development, since the graph always exists as a whole; they are simply pedagogical devices used by Lacan in order to illustrate the structure of the complete graph.

Complete Graph

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Complete Graph

In the complete graph there are not one but two signifying chains.

The lower chain (from the signifier to the voice) is the conscious signifying chain]], the level of the statement.

The upper chain (from jouissance to castration) is the signifying chain in the unconscious, the level of the enunciation.

The structure is thus duplicated: the upper part of the graph is structured exactly like the lower part.