“The Signification of the Phallus” reads Freud’s castration complex through the intersection of language and desire, of speech and jouissance, in order to position desire as the unfulfillable within the Other.
“The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis”, now known as “The Rome Discourse”, outlines Lacan’s decade-long plan for the discipline, and in so doing, delineates the subject from the I, speech from language, and the signifier from the symbolic.
In “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience”, Lacan tracks the stage of early development where the child recognizes its mirror image, shifting its conception of self from fragmented in the real to decentered and “whole” in the imaginary.
I found Lacan’s “Mirror Stage” essay to be the most readable of the works we’ve read so far. I think he’s making a grand effort at being transparent and clear here by clearly delineating, to the careful reader, the dual registers of time and space; see, for example, this passage where he elucidates the mirror stage through temporal and spatial metaphor:
This development is experienced as a temporal dialectic that decisively projects the individual’s formation into history: the mirror stage is a drama whose internal pressure pushes precipitously from insufficiency to anticipation—and, for the subject caught up in the lure of spatial identification, turns out fantasies that proceed from a fragmented image of the body to what I will call an “orthopedic” form of its totality—and to the finally donned armor of an alienating identity that will mark his entire mental development with its rigid structure. Thus, the shattering of the Innenwelt to Umwelt circle gives rise to an inexhaustible squaring of the ego’s audits. (97/78)
Note that Lacan is more interested in the process of “this development”—the mirror stage, as he so renames it after the colon—than the individual; in fact, Lacan places “this development” as the grammatical subject and buries “the individual” in an object, “the individual’s formation”, yoking the individual to the very process of formation with the possessive “’s”. We discover after the colon that “this development” is, metaphorically speaking, “a drama”, self-propelled so as to begin in “insufficiency”, work its way through “anticipation”, and conclude in “the finally donned armor”. The mirror stage is a playing out of self-formulated protective shields, the main act of which is “the shattering of the Innenwelt to Umwelt circle [which] gives rise to an inexhaustible squaring of the ego’s audits”. So the mirror stage is a play with characters, a plot, even a story arc. The climax is this shattering. There are stage directions, a costume descriptions, a plot synopsis, and inside the dashes, there’s a character sketch somewhat obscured by the exposition subsuming it: a “subject caught up in the lure of spatial identification” for whom the mirror stage (drama stage) “turns out fantasies that proceed from a fragmented image of the body to what I will call an ‘orthopedic’ form of its totality”. This development from the fragmented image of the body to the “orthopedic” form is the drama’s plot, the divided subject is its character(s), and the climax is the shattering of a circle which gives rise to inexhaustible squaring. I’m struck at this point by Lacan’s comment within the dashes reminding us that subjects are lured to spatial identification, so reading a sentence with the words “circle” and “squaring” so close together is a bit baffling. In one sense of the word “squaring,” the sentence could mean the inexhaustible efforts of the ego’s audits to make something into a square shape, as in “square the end of the table” (a spatial identification indeed); in another reading of that last sentence, “squaring” could mean the inexhaustible doubling, the inexhaustible multiplying of a thing by itself to infinity, as in “four squared equals sixteen.” I’m tempted toward the first because of the mention of its proximity to the phrase “rigid structure” with which Lacan ends the preceding sentence, but I’m drawn to the multiplication denotation of the word “squaring” because of Lacan’s movement earlier in the previous sentence from “insufficiency to anticipation”, or from poverty to surplus. In the original sentence, “the inexhaustible squaring of the ego’s audits” are a result of “the shattering of the Innenwelt to Umwelt circle”. If the movement of the sentence (and the plot of the drama) is from poverty to surplus, then the shattering, which is the impetus to the squaring, matches up temporally to the moment of insufficiency/poverty while the inexhaustible squaring aligns to anticipation/surplus. Therefore, I’m going to read Lacan’s use of the word “squaring” here within its temporal and not its spatial register. The inexhaustible squaring is a multiplying of the ego’s audits.
This last sentence-ling (for I cannot call it a sentence when compared to the behemoth that came before it) contains much intrigue for me. I’m intrigued first, as I’ve shown, by its spatial/temporal shiftiness, which, in using words like “circle” and “squaring”, slyly suggest a spatial relationship but which in fact align more along a temporal register (though it might just be a translation peculiarity -- do the respective French words also denote shapes?). I’m also compelled to include this short sentence in the close reading because Lacan chooses to begin this paragraph-long excerpt with “this development” and to use language of motility within the dialectic throughout the passage (think of “turns out fantasies that proceed”), only to end the passage with “the ego’s audits”. What audits? This is the first I’m hearing about any in this text, so it stunts my own development in/through/of the passage. The OED provides, of course, a few denotations to consider. An audit can be a searching examination, a periodic settling of accounts, or a statement of reckoning. It can also be the kind of audit that students do at school, when they attend a class without receiving credit for it. Audit can imply an examination of self or an examination from an outside source (like for taxes). Because this is the first time that I’m reading this word in this essay, I’m tempted to think back through the essay to another time when Lacan talks about self-assessment or self-consideration; on the pages before this word, he does remind the reader of his previous work on paranoiacs, both times in relation to a (libidinal) dynamic or a (social) dialectic. I’m tempted to read the word “audit” therefore as a self-audit that the individual, paranoid always of/for the Other and the Other’s desire, conducts on its self as it is seen in the mirror. In this way of reading the word, “audit” occupies space (it searches) and time (it occurs periodically) by taking on multiple denotations. The “audit” thus condenses much of the meaning stored away within the sentences which proceed “this development” through them. Is this the button-tie at work in space and time?
Even in an essay that is clear as “The Mirror Stage”, the clarity results not from simplicity of syntax or content but from being aware of the different registers Lacan’s describing in. It’s important to recognize throughout Lacan’s texts that he’s working out his theory of language and the unconscious by using metaphors of both spatiality and temporality. Tracking down which subject, which Other/other, or which register he’s talking about (or talking in or writing in) often means positioning the word in question within its rhetorical situation and reasoning out from there, using context and sentence/syntax clues to affix meaning (insofar as fixing meaning is possible). I know I have not even begun to probe the depths of this sentence, but I hope to have shown (myself as the future reader of my reading register) that understanding that Lacan uses space and time in ways that can seem to confound meaning but which actually opens meaning up should compel the close reader of Lacan to keep track of those registers while rereading him (and me).
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