Thinking With One’s Feet:
Lacanian Theories of Textual Engagement
WILLIAM J. URBAN
The Imaginary Lacan: Signification of Texts
Theorizing ways of reading texts certainly was not Lacan’s primary concern, but the possibility of using his work for such purposes is not entirely absent from his thought. On the contrary as he explicitly tells us in Seminar I: ‘Commenting on a text is like doing an analysis.’3 This seems reasonable when we recall that Lacan is the great reader and ‘translator’ of Freud into French and stressed early in his career of the absolute necessity to return to the writings of the founding father of psychoanalysis. Indeed, he devotes his first two seminars on Freud’s texts, as their titles suggest.4 Perhaps more importantly, as a clinician Lacan was daily confronted with the spoken texts of his analysands who verbally confided in him their intimate desires and recounted their nightly dreams in hopes of a cure through a learned interpretation. This intellectual emersion in Freud’s psychoanalytic texts coupled with an intense clinical praxis forms the crucial context for Lacan’s first critical theoretical break: a reformulation of the ego. We will initially examine his ‘mirror stage theory’ as it appears in its 1949 Écrits version.5
The opening sentence makes reference to the fact that Lacan introduced this paper thirteen years previously when he attended his first International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) conference held in 1936. In a later écrit Lacan gives us in bitter detail his experience at this conference: apparently ten minutes into delivering his mirror stage paper, Ernest Jones cut him short in mid-sentence and did not allow him to continue. (Lacan 2006: 184) The fact that Lacan makes mention of this episode numerous times throughout the rest of his career might lead us to suspect that the Master’s ego was rather fragile, almost as if he did not quite learn the lesson of the very paper he was delivering which – as one can see from its full title: ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience’ – is all about a radically new theory on how the ego is formed. Whereas previously the thinking was that man adapts himself to reality, Lacan’s thesis essentially reverses things and in a gesture strictly homologous to Kant’s transcendental idealist revolution in metaphysics, he proclaims that it is man who adapts reality to himself. More specifically, the ego creates a new adaptation to ‘reality’ and the subject then tries to maintain cohesion with this double. It is Lacan’s emphasis on the nature of this double as an image or ‘imago’ that permits us to characterize the Lacan of the 1930s the Imaginary Lacan, for he is quite literally concerned with the imaginary identification aspect of ego-formation. Lacan further refers to the appearance of these doubles and object-projections as hallucinatory and dream-like in order to underscore the role that the mirror plays in presenting a whole yet fictional image for the fragmented child.6
We can readily understand this process by considering the image Lacan himself asks us to consider. The human child is born pre-mature and must be cared for and up to the age of eighteen months the child has immense difficulty with motor coordination and is outdone by the chimpanzee in intelligence. But while both are able to recognize their images in a mirror, it is only the child that remains fascinated with its specular image as the chimpanzee quickly loses interest. Here we have the elementary imaginary dyad: the fragmented child anticipates himself when looking into the mirror, but is ever uncertain, so he turns to his mother, who offers a confirmation. “Yes, that’s you!” she says and he is swept up in a wave of jubilation which attends to this phantasmatic experience of self-mastery. In this way, the child is compensated with a whole image of himself and this is an image that he will carry with him for the rest of his life. This image is what Lacan calls the Ideal-ego. (Lacan 2006: 93–5)
From this, we can make an analogy to psychoanalysis in general and from there to a strategy of textual engagement. As we noted above, in his clinical practice Lacan was daily confronted with raw, primordial texts. The texts were in the form of dreams and like Freud, Lacan accomplished the not so easy break with the appearance to which the dream-text is nothing but a meaningless confusion that has nothing whatsoever to do with signification. So the first critical step he took was to conceive dreams as meaningful phenomena that transmit repressed messages in need of an interpretive procedure. By accomplishing this step, Lacan entered his first stage, becoming what we might call a hermeneutical phenomenologist. The domain of psychoanalysis thus becomes the domain of meaning. Just as the goal of psychoanalytic treatment is to integrate traumatic symptoms into the patient’s life in a meaningful way, the goal of textual interpretation is likewise to integrate disturbing elements of the text into an overall, cohesive narrative. Here, the text is like the fragmented child and the goal is to provide an interpretation to accommodate the fragmented text into an imaginary wholeness much like what the child encounters in the mirror. Any gaps encountered in the text index interpretive failure and must be resolved. What the later Lacan might call the gaze of the text would be precisely the phenomenal experience by which such gaps peer out to the reader from the distortions of the text. Such disturbances are what the hermeneutical inter-subjective approach endeavors to neutralize at any price, since it impedes the text’s full integration into the hermeneutical universe of deep meaning.
To briefly illustrate this we might recall Roman Jakobson’s phatic function of language, the notion of which he introduces in a seminal paper. (Jakboson 1263) Confronted with the distortion this notion marks for the reader in as much as it is not readily understandable, one immediately sets to work to more fully integrate it into Jakobson’s overall theoretical universe since on a first approach such an element certainly sticks out of his text and calls for special attention. At a different level, the text of Lacan’s own life can be effectively read using his method of hermeneutical phenomenology. That is, we can interpret Lacan’s frequent allusions to his interruption by Jones at the 1936 IPA Congress as so many (failed) attempts to come to terms with the disturbance this episode wrought to the overall cohesive narrative of his life. Moreover, that Lacan may have been endeavoring to re-integrate this traumatic symptom back into his life in a meaningful way due to his initial interpretive failure to make sense of it at the time is indexed by the fact that Lacan continually reworked the mirror stage theory throughout the remainder of his career.7 We will examine one major reworking in the section immediately below. But let us note in passing how someone like Habermas in effect critiques Lacan’s first approach (laden as it is with hermeneutics), assuming as he does that distortions in texts have meaning as such. As Žižek notes, however, what Habermas overlooks is that meaning as such results from a certain distortion and that the very emergence of meaning is based on the disavowal of some primordially repressed element. (Žižek 1994: 27) We will examine the logic underlying this latter possibility in the two remaining sections.
Lacanian-themed puzzles
