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longer be arrested, how sure
can I be of my reading of the
Danish flag, not to mention
its Danish context? The signifier
is removed from within
me, slips away, and I am left
with the thing-not-itself.
The barred subject aiming
for the Real
Still, I go out and buy my
own flag, seeming to believe
that, unlike the American
flag, my peace flag will not
only represent my opinions
adequately, but remain stable
and thus read clearly to others.
In light of my inability to
decode the American flag,
even disapproving of the
waving of it, what drives me
to do this? Lacan would
answer that I, like all the
other flag wavers in the U.S.,
Entry into the Imaginary
Although the human
being is subjected to all
these three orders from
before birth, its insertion
into them happens at different
stages and constitutes
the gradual formation
of subjectivity. Lacan
seems to say that until the
age of six months, the child
resides in the Real in the
sense that it is without language
and unable to distinguish
itself from the mother
and its surroundings,
thus being “one” with the
world. Although the child
therefore has no sense of
difference, it is not outside
of language (which would
constitute an originary
moment), since language
predates it and has already
constituted it as an object
before its birth. At the age
of six months, however, the
child becomes aware that it
is separate from its mother
and the world by recognizing
its own image in the
mirror for the first time.
Lacan describes this
moment in his famous
essay “The Mirror Stage as
Formative of the Function
of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic
Experience”
(1949) as the child’s entry
into the Imaginary(15).
What is crucial about this
moment is that it introduces
a duality or split in
the child, which forms the
structure for the child’s
future identifications. For
there is a discrepancy
between the corporeal
unity and mastery of the
Gestalt that the child sees
in the mirror and the
child’s own experience of
bodily incapability. This
discrepancy produces a
In relation to the subject-notitself,
the drive to return to a
lost moment of self-presence
that the signifier bars the
subject from could thus be
said to be an aiming for the
Real as the residue outside
language, the lost world of
wholeness. The drive is thus
operating in the gap between
the me “lost” and the
simultaneous state of
attraction and repulsion,
identification and alienation
in the child. By identifying
with the Gestalt,
the child anticipates its
“maturing to a future point
of corporeal unity,”(16) but
at the same time, this
Gestalt is located outside of
the child, which alienates
the child from its own
body. The central concept
in Lacan’s account of the
mirror stage is thus that the
child produces a sense of
self during this phase, but
that this self is an imaginary
construct, another
self, an alienated moi. In
that sense, Lacan’s “moi corresponds
to the internalization
of the other through
identification,”(17) which
becomes the source of all its
future identifications. The
dialectic between me
“here” in front of the mirror
and me “there” in the
mirror is internalized and
creates a desire for unification.
This wish to go “there”
to oneself in the mirror is
projected onto others by
the child, who searches for
this other self in them. During
the mirror stage,
Lacan’s self is thus activated
from the outside and the
child realizes that it is being
seen by the world, thus
being given a position in it.
Apart from breaking with
the classical notion of the
subject as unified, Lacan’s
account of the self-alienation
occurring in the mirror
stage also explains how
the child can appropriate
language from the other
and enter the Symbolic
order, where it gains subjec-
me replaced by the signifier,
that is, between the me
“here” and the mebarred
from being “there.” The
prospect of this return to a
lost moment of union creates
a certain jouissance. If we go
back, then, to the three
scenes, what kind of selfpresence
are the wavers of
the Danish and American
am aiming for the Real(13).
For Lacan, the Real is one of
three cognitive dimensions
or orders, which co-exist and
intersect in the mature
human being to constitute
consciousness. The other two
orders are the Symbolic,
which I have previously
mentioned, and the Imaginary,
which refers to the
dimension of images. The
tivity. This entry is marked
by the child’s organization
of reality through words
and the appropriation of
personal pronouns for itself
and others(18). What happens
when the child is
named through the signifier
“I” is that the sense of
alienation and lack-of-beingthere-in-the-mirror
is intensified.
The signifier “I” comes
to stand-in and substitute for
the child, who is barred from
being “there” by it and thus
alienated from the Real. To
illustrate this process, Lacan
applies his algorithm
as a metaphor for the subject,
the signifier representing
the conscious and the
signified representing the
unconscious. The sliding of
the signifier results in the
subject becoming absent as
the subject-not-itself and forever
barred from signification
and the unconscious.
This leads Lacan to replace
Descartes’ famous words “I
think, therefore I am” with
“I think where I am not,
therefore I am where I do
not think.”(19)
From this process of being
represented by a signifier, a
drive is produced to return
to a lost moment of selfpresence,
which the signifier
has barred the subject
from. Marie-Hélène Brousse
defines Lacan’s notion of
the drive as “the result of
the functioning of the signifier,
that is, of demand:
the Other’s demand”(20) on
need, which is barred by
the other’s demand
through language. From
the beginning, the child
has nothing but need. The
mother will attempt to ful-
flags respectively aiming for?
One answer could be a fantasmatic
notion of national
unity or unity as a nation, a
moment “before” difference,
absence, and sliding. My
peace flag waving is no different.
I too aim for the Real
in my attempt to represent
my dissent as presence in the
flag. But this, of course, only
S s
Real should not be confused
with external reality, but is to
be understood rather as that
which is real for the subject(14).
It is a kind of residue;
all that which is outside the
dimensions of images and language.
Hence, it is unrepresentable.
Present in the unconscious,
however, the real makes
itself felt in dreams, symptoms,
and hallucinations.
fill this need with objects,
but she will be speaking at
the same time, just as she
will be giving the child
these objects in a specific
way. Her use of language
thus has consequences for
the feeding of need; it constitutes
a demand on the
child, which becomes the
object of this demand.
Hence, in order to get satisfied,
the child will have to
take into account the
demand of the mother: its
satisfaction depends on the
use it makes of the other’s
demand, which it will have
to construct in order to
become satisfied(21). It is
this conjunction between
the other’s demand in
speech and need that produces
the drive. As Brousse
explains, need and demand,
however, will never
completely correspond:
“Something escapes the
correlation between need
and demand which is central
for understanding the
drive. It is desire,” as she
continues(22). Since no object
can lower the impetus
of the drive because “it is
not the food that satisfies
[the mouth], it is, as one
says, the pleasure of the
mouth,”(23) Lacan states
that the drive is constant
and impossible to satisfy.
Thus, any object can be
adopted as the drive object,
but it will never be able to
satisfy the aim of the drive.
The drive will move
around the object and trick
the object, making the subject
think that it is that
object, but the object can
never be retrieved, it is lost
in representation(24).
creates a short moment of
pleasure because I am still
barred and my drive can
never be satisfied. Hence, my
desire to put two more flags
on my car.
Now, I only wonder how far
my antenna pulls out...
Tone O. Nielsen
1) Lacan, op. cit., p. 150.
2) Anthony Wilden, “Lacan and the Discourse
of the Other,” in Anthony
Wilden, The Language of the Self: The Function
of Language in Psychoanalysis, Baltimore,
Maryland: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1968, p. 191.
3) This is not to say that Ferdinand de
Saussure claimed that reality precedes
language. Since he was only interested in
the synchronic approach to language, that
is, the state of language at any one
moment, he does not deal with the
diachrony of language, that is, its historical
evolution and the moment of the subject’s
insertion into it. He is, however,
very specific about language not being a
function of the subject. Rather, it is the
subject, who is inscribed in language and
thus a function of it. See Ferdinand de
Saussure, “Course in General Linguistics,”
(extract) in Mark Taylor (ed.), Deconstruction
in Context, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1986.
4) Saussure, op. cit., p. 149.
5) Lacan, op. cit., p. 149.
6) Saussure, op. cit., p. 160.
7) Quoted from Wilden, op. cit., p. 239.
8) Lacan, op. cit., p. 150.
9) See foreword to Jacques Derrida’s “Différance,”
(extract) published in Peggy
Kamuf (ed.), A Derrida Reader: Between the
Blinds, New York: Columbia University
Press, 1991, p. 59.
10) Ibid., pp. 63-64.
11) Ibid., p. 64 & Jacques Derrida, “Of
Grammatology,” (extract) published in
Peggy Kamuf (ed.), A Derrida Reader:
Between the Blinds, New York: Columbia
University Press, 1991, pp. 42-43.
12) Jacques Derrida, “Signature, Event,
Re/aktion
Context,” in Peggy Kamuf (ed.), A Derrida
Reader: Between the Blinds, New York:
Columbia University Press, 1991, pp. 177-
78.
13) I owe thanks to Juli Carson for pointing
this out to me when researching this
paper.
14) Wilden, op. cit., p. 161.
15) Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as
Formative of the Function of the I as
Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,”
in Écrits: A Selection, New York: W.W. Norton
& Company, 1977. The essay is based
on a paper delivered at the 16th International
Congress of Psychoanalysis in
Zürich, 1949.
16) Wilden, op. cit., p. 160.
17) Ibid.
18) Wilden, op. cit., p. 161.
19) Lacan, “The Agency of the Letter,” p.
166.
20) Marie Hélène Brousse, “The Drive (I),”
in Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink & Maire
Jaanus (ed.), Reading Seminar XI: Lacan’s
Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis,
Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1995, p. 106 & Marie Hélène Brousse,
“The Drive (II),” in Richard Feldstein,
Bruce Fink & Maire Jaanus (ed.), Reading
Seminar XI: Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts
of Psychoanalysis, Albany: State University
of New York Press, 1995, p. 109.
21) Brousse, “The Drive (II),” p. 115.
22) Brousse, “The Drive (I),” p. 106.
23) Jacques Lacan, “The Deconstruction of
the Drive,” published in Jacques-Alain
Miller (ed.), The Seminar of Jacques Lacan.
Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psychoanalysis, New York: W.W. Norton &
Company, 1981, p. 167.
24) Ibid., p. 168.
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