拉康的理论

. 黄华，权利，身体与自我一福科与女性主义文学批评「M]北京:北京大学出版社，2005必须注意的是,自我的建构是在一种时间的辩证法中实现的。

对拉康来说,镜子阶段远不仅是幼儿的一个自然发展阶段,而且是主体发展中一个体现了时间辩证法的、先行和回溯相互交织的决定性的时刻。

“这一发展是作为时间的辩证法而经历的,它把个体的形成决定性地投射进历史之中:镜子阶段是一出戏,其内在压力迅猛地从不足冲向先行(anticipation)——对于受空间认同诱惑的主体而言,这出戏生产了从身体的破碎形象到我所说的关于身体整体性的外科整形形式的种种幻想——直到最终穿戴起异化身份的盔甲。

这副盔甲以其僵硬的结构标识出主体的精神发展。

”[2](p6)拉康认为,镜子有一个整体的功能,构建统一的自我，自我形成于镜像阶段。

来源于作者与自我分裂6Lacan and His Fundamental Concepts of Theory of Subject Jacques Lacan(1901-80)is undoubtedly the central figure of psychoanalysis in the second half of the 20th century.He has not only revolutionized the psychoanalytic practice but also exerted a global reinterpretation of the entire psychoanalytic theoretical edifice by employing the achievements of structural linguistics and semiotics.The reinterpretation has changed the entire field of the scientific debate.Some of his formulas such as“[T]he unconscious is structured like a language”;“[D]esire is thedesire of the Other”(Ecrites:A Selection 121,123),etc.acquire an almost iconic statuslike Einstein’s E=mc2.The least one can say about Lacan is that nobody was undisturbed and unaffected by his work:even those whopassionately oppose him have to take stance from his theory. For Lacan, psychoanalysis totally changes the way we should understand the fundamental notions like “subject’,“cause”,and“reality”,which clearly indicates that the Freudian unconscious as primordial and irrational drives is ridiculous; on the contrary, the unconscious is in a specific way fully rational, discursive, “structured likea language”(Ecrites:A Selection 121),which entails that Lacan reduces all psychic lifeto a symbolic interplay. He proposes the triangle of Imaginary-Symbolic-Real as the three basic phases of forming the subject,the elementary matrix of the human experience.The term Imaginary is obviously similar with fiction but in Lacanian sense it is notsimply synonymous with the fictional or unreal;on the contrary,imaginary identifications can have very real effects. There is of course an air of unreality to the Imaginary: it traps the subject into alienating identifications that prevent the truth from emerging. In the Mirror Stage that is a key step to the formation of the subject,when the baby at the age from six to eighteen months glimpses its own image in a mirror or some equivalent to a mirror, it greets the image in the mirror with great jubilation and thus identifies with it which is unreal by definition and shows somethingyet to become: an integrated unity. It is this identification that forms its unconscious, but its initial self-identification is inevitably based on the Other; so identification with this image in the mirror means alienation of the subject. Therefore, from the beginning, the site of the subject is occupied by the other; the subject is in fact deteriorated into emptiness in essence. The unconscious which is the soul of the subject becomes accordingly the other’s unconscious, while the desire of the subject is the desire of the other. In this sense, the unconscious is not a latent being since it is not an entity; on the contrary, it is rather a negativity, a lack of being, and a hole in chains of signifiers. Lacan calls it pre-ontological. Strictly speaking, the unconscious cannot be defined in the sense of being delimited.The Symbolic is a register that exists prior to the individual subject, into which the subject must be inserted if he/she is to be able to speak and desire. The Symbolic is often exhibited as languages, cultures, persons and surroundings around. Insertion into the Symbolic is a negative or privative process which implies recognition on the part of the child that it is not in possession of the phallus which is the object of the mother’s desire. It is also an object with which the child attempts to identify (desire always beinga desire of and for the Other).The agency that imposes the law and deprives the child of the phallus in an act of symbolic castration isthe name of father. It is in the name of father that we recognize the symbolic function which has identified the person with the figure of the law. In other words, the name of father is the sign of law. Insertion into the Symbolic thus implies renunciation of the illusion of omnipotence associated with identification with the phallus, and it also introduces a split into the subject. The subject, as used by Lacan, is a deliberately ambiguous term; it refers to both the subject of a sentence and the subject of the impersonal laws of language. The subject is always divided or decentered, not simply because of the presence of the unconscious, but because of the structures of language itself. “Existence is a product of language”(Xie Qun:24). For a subject,to be given a signifier or named is of vital importance.Thesymbolic/language decides the existence of being.The things that enter the Symbolicand are represented by language become existent. The things unnamed by language will not exist into being.By analogy,a subject that is represented is recognized as a being.A child has to allow itself to be represented by language/signifier in order to be a subject. Losing the mark of a signifier,one becomes non-being.Although the Symbolic differentiates dimensions that are confused in the Imaginary, it does not replace or transcend the Imaginary.Though every subject must be inserted into or inscribed in the Symbolic,no subject lives in the Symbolic alone, just as speech does not replace imagery. The two orders co-exist with a third: the Real. It is not synonymous with external reality but equal to the left dimension that constantly resists symbolism and signification. The two conceptions the Real and the reality are mutually exclusive. What we experience as “reality”―the daily life-world in which we feel athome—can only stabilize itself through the exclusion or primordial repression of the traumatic Real, while the Real is often in the guise of fantastic apparitions which forever haunt the subject. It is the threatening element that invades the subject when rifts appear in the Symbolic, and the failure to recognize or submit to the name of the father opens up such rifts. The implication of Lacan’s theory may be two-fold in analyzing Joseph Conrad’s works. First, the mirror stage marks the child’s initial attempt to construct an identity as an independent entity from the Other and to locate a position in the society. Since its self-identification is based on an idealized unitary image, fragmentation and loss underline its experience as a subject once it steps into the register of Symbolic .The characters in the works are haunted by severe loss and inner split when they experience what differentiates its prior existential conditions.Second,the implication of Lacan’s theory is found in its explanation of the causes and destination of human desires and how they are related to become a subject. Lacan emphasizes that man’s desire is the mother’s desire, and the desire aims at the phallus, in accessible to the subject, and ushers the subject into an endless desire chain. To be a subject means to fill in an ontological lack that can never actually be fulfilled. Lacan’s revelation of the psychic structure of the self and its way of function offers us a tool to interpret the cause of the frustration and disintegration experienced by Conrad’s characters in his fictional works.。