"Lacanian psychoanalysis offers a theory of the subject that does without concepts such as unity, origin, continuity. It goes from the assumption of a fundamentally split subject and thus comes up with a model of subjectivity that grounds itself on a constitutive lack rather than wholeness. Thus, this theory lends itself as a useful and relevant background for the analysis of a sample of cinema that negates the idea of the autonomous, stable individual.
"According to Lacan, the human being is entangled in three registers, which Lacan calls the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real. Whereas the imaginary constitutes the (perceptual) realm of the ego, the register that accounts for a (however illusive) notion of wholeness and autonomy, the symbolic is the field of mediation that works according to a differential logic. Whereas the imaginary constantly tries to 'heal' the lack-of-being of the subject, the symbolic accepts castration. The human subject is thus doubly split: on the imaginary level between the ego and its mirror image, while on the symbolic level it is language and the inscription into a specific socio-cultural reality and its rules that bars the subject from any unity. Thus, this forever lost unity belongs to the third register: the real, which is simply that which eludes any representation, imaginary or symbolic. Because of this lack, the subject, which, according to Lacan, is an effect of the signifier, aims at recreating that lost unity. The 'strategy' of desire emerges as a result of the subject's separation from the real and the 'means' by which the subject tries to catch up with this real, lost unity again. It is thus desire that accounts for the subject's trajectory through the human world, which according to Lacan "isn't a world of things, it isn't a world of being, it is a world of desire as such." (From Jacques Lacan. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book II: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954-55. Trans. S. Tomaselli. Cambridge, 1988, 222.)"
[originally found here]
[k]
"According to Lacan, the human being is entangled in three registers, which Lacan calls the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real. Whereas the imaginary constitutes the (perceptual) realm of the ego, the register that accounts for a (however illusive) notion of wholeness and autonomy, the symbolic is the field of mediation that works according to a differential logic. Whereas the imaginary constantly tries to 'heal' the lack-of-being of the subject, the symbolic accepts castration. The human subject is thus doubly split: on the imaginary level between the ego and its mirror image, while on the symbolic level it is language and the inscription into a specific socio-cultural reality and its rules that bars the subject from any unity. Thus, this forever lost unity belongs to the third register: the real, which is simply that which eludes any representation, imaginary or symbolic. Because of this lack, the subject, which, according to Lacan, is an effect of the signifier, aims at recreating that lost unity. The 'strategy' of desire emerges as a result of the subject's separation from the real and the 'means' by which the subject tries to catch up with this real, lost unity again. It is thus desire that accounts for the subject's trajectory through the human world, which according to Lacan "isn't a world of things, it isn't a world of being, it is a world of desire as such." (From Jacques Lacan. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book II: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954-55. Trans. S. Tomaselli. Cambridge, 1988, 222.)"
[originally found here]
[k]
sniggitysnags:
What the hell are you talking about? 