Seductions in Narrative: Subjectivity and Desire in the Works of ...

In more cryptic and extravagant style, Lacan makes a similar point about misrecognition in language when he claims that “I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it like an object” (Four 86). Becoming a subject, therefore, is a process based on the paradoxical premise of losing oneself like an object (of language) whilst assuming that the author of the utterance is in control of meaning, that he/she is “Master,” to use Humpty Dumpty’s terminology.

In the process of losing itself in language like an object, the little human organism loses something else: that which is organic in its component, something which, being outside signification cannot be articulated within language for it has no name within this new formulation. Lacan comes to the rescue and labels this organic loss “the real.” Although forlorn, the real never ceases to be present in existence and it:

The gap which the loss of the real brings about, the dissatisfaction of the organism which is suddenly propelled into a world of signifiers which are alien to it, is what leads to the birth of desire: “[i]t is the assumption of castration [in the sense of loss] that creates the lack upon which desire is instituted” (Lacan, Écrits 852). Desire, therefore, is related to a loss which creates a lack that cannot be signified and, as such, it cannot be articulated in the symbolic order, the place which is symbolic in so far as it is ruled by (linguistic) symbols.⁴