Lacan's Approach to Language

What must be understood above all about Lacan's approach to language is that it is conceived of as both a symbol, or sign, of human experience and as a mediating mechanism whereby human beings may indicate other symbols and construct signs that constitute social intercourse of any kind. For that idea to make sense, Lacan considers linguistic constructs and behavior as features of human development, which itself is conceptualized as a feature of individual social development and the cultural development that inheres in the consequences of individual behavior and/or interaction. In "The Mirror Image" Lacan describes a process whereby the developing human organism, from the moment of birth, is opaque to knowledge until he acquires consciousness of his own existence as a human being in the world. An infant, wholly dependent on the mother, has no sense of difference from the other. Lacan describes the self, or the "I," in a way that suggests how it recognizes its commonality with human existence on one hand, and how it will eventually recognize its uniqueness as a human being on the other. Lacan says that the developing infant is on the road to full self-consciousness (i.e., consciousness of self) when he "assumes an image," or has the sense of himself as a particular kind of being. That is in the background of Lacan's use of the term imago, which means likeness, in Latin. Lacan continues:

[The] I is precipitated in a primordial form, before it is objectified in the dialectic of

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hich the ego works out this split (or does not) determines the whole of personality development. Klein's characterization of the continual splitting and resplitting of the ego can be compared to Lacan's account of the evolving conditions of experience by way of dialectical differentiation. Initially, the dialectical engagement is as much a confrontation between the primordial self and the vaguely conscious self, but its character evolves as well, setting up dialectical encounters between the self and the other. This is the form that evolution of consciousness takes. Lacan does not explicitly say so, but of course there is not just one dialectical moment in the self's experience. The initial synthesis of consciousness will become the thesis of the next dialectic, and a chain of dialectical confrontations will produce an accretion of awareness. And so here we arrive, either continually splitting and resplitting (in Klein's formulation) or continually in dialectical engagement (in Lacan's), eventually assigning the self an identity worthy the name. As Lacan indicates, the self--by way of what must be an altogether higher-order dialectic--acquires language, or, as Lacan puts it, "makes his entry into it" ("Agency" 1293). Language a

Category: Philosophy - L