Causation and Destitution of a Pre-ontological Non-entity

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Even at this primary level, the effects are quite dramatic: when being makes itsappearance on the level of language, it must disappear under that language, itloses the reality of its being. For Lacan, this is a matter of choice, albeit a veryspecial choice, for whatever decision is made, one element is lost forever. Hecompares this choice to the classical 'Your money or your life!'. Whatever youchoose, you will lose your money anyway. The element lost in the process ofbecoming a human being is being itself, the pure being, the real, the thing withouta name, leaving us with a basic lack as a condition for our becoming, whichLacan calls manque à être (want-to-be, or lack of being). 63 Thus, right from thestart, the subject is divided between the necessary loss of its being on the onehand and the ever alienating meaning in the Other on the other hand. Thesubject chooses the (m)Other in order to regain the lost paradise of the primaryexperience of satisfaction, and the net result will be an ever more cleardelineation of this loss. 64The second level concerns the chain of signifiers, the automaton, in which thesubject continuously appears and disappears in an ever repeated division by thesignifiers: '[A] signifier is that which represents the subject for another signifier.' 65Here again, the subject can 'choose' its signifiers in the field of the Other, but thischoice reminds one of that mentioned by Ferdinand de Saussure in his Course inGeneral Linguistics. There he demonstrated the arbitrary relationship betweensignifier and signified, and the consequences of this for the freedom of choice.Basically, you can pick your own signifiers, but of course the choice has alreadybeen made for you and before you, hence his expression: la carte forcée de lalangue, meaning that language is a 'set-up.' 66 12
When comparing this Lacanian operation to the Freudian ones, it becomesobvious that alienation comprises both identification and repression. This can bedemonstrated with Lacan's definition of metaphor, as 'the substitution of signifierfor signifier.' 67 The subject 'chooses' a signifier, which appears on top of anothersignifier. The latter becomes repressed, whereas the former entails a newidentification for the ego and the subject remains divided between the two ofthem. In Freudian terms, the ego is nothing but a concatenation of identifications,as a result of the successive object losses. In this line of reasoning, the first levelof alienation corresponds to the primal repression (Urverdrängung) and theprimary identification. Indeed, the primal repression constitutes the kernel of theunconscious as something that is forever lost and can never be verbalised,namely the real of the drive. 68 The primary identification is for Freud always the i-dentification with the father, and this identification provides the platform fromwhich development, in the form of the Oedipus complex, takes off. 69 For Lacan,this implies the installation of the S 1 , the master signifier.The second level of alienation corresponds to the Freudian eigentlicheVerdrängung (repression proper) or Nachdrängen (after-pressure), which can beinterpreted as a secondary repression and which takes place completely withinthe chain of signifiers. 70 Unconscious processes or formations, which are madeup from signifying material, take place at the border of the unconscious, as isdemonstrated by a slip of the tongue, the forgetting of a proper name, etc. TheSignorelli example in Freud's The Psychopathology of Everyday Lifedemonstrates both levels in a perfect way. The lost signifiers, due to thesecondary repression, can be retrieved by means of free association, but thebasic lack cannot be verbalised and is merely hinted at by Freud in his mentionof 'death and sexuality' and 'repressed thoughts' at the bottom of his schema. 7113
Page 1: This paper should be referred to as
Page 4 and 5: formulating the link between the or
Page 6 and 7: The crucial thing concerning these
Page 8 and 9: the sense of what cannot be assimil
Page 10 and 11: number of other things will follow.
Page 14 and 15: In Lacan's theory of the four disco
Page 16 and 17: Before Seminar XI, the idea of alie
Page 18 and 19: subject separates himself off, ceas
Page 20 and 21: 1. S. Žižek, The Sublime Object o
Page 22 and 23: 34. Ibid., pp. 29-30.35. Ibid., p.
Page 24 and 25: 62. S. Freud, Moses and Monotheism

Causation and Destitution of a Pre-ontological Non-entity

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