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

In this lecture, he theorises the entry of the subject into the symbolic of language, laws, and social processes through a metaphor which has become both popular and controversial within Psychoanalysis: the stade du miroir . The Mirror Stage, Lacan claims, inaugurates a process at the end of which the little human organism will acquire his/her place in the symbolic order of culture. It occurs around the age of six to eighteen months, when the child who, up to this moment conceived of no separation between its body and its surroundings, recognises its own image when placed in front of a mirror. For Lacan, this apparently trivial event places the subject in a “fictional direction,” in so far as “the total form of the body by which the subject anticipates in a mirage the maturation of his power is given him only as Gestalt , that is to say, in an exteriority in which this form is certainly more constituent than constituted” (Four 2–3). This Gestalt “symbolizes the mental permanence of the I , at the same time it prefigures its alienating destination” (Lacan, Four 3, italics in original). The use of the German term Gestalt —figure—is accurate, in so far as, Lacan claims, the image that the child recognises in the mirror is an anticipation “in a mirage” of “the maturation of his power” (Four 2–3). This ‘figure’ grants the child its identity, but is no more than that: an image which is seductive in so far as it is a unified projection of coherence. This is how the subject adopts “the armour of an alienating identity” (Lacan, Four 4), through the identification with the seductive image of its physical form which is constituent of a “mental permanence” (Lacan, Four 33), at once itself and not really itself.

Through this apparently easy process, a split is effected upon the subject, a split which prefigures a difference between the I who is watching and the I who is being watched (into the mirror). The subsequent entry into the symbolic through the acquisition of language entails another, metaphorical split between the I who speaks and the I who is represented in speech. “Just as the infant of the mirror phase misrecognizes itself as unified and in physical control of itself,” Chris Weedon states, “so the speaking subject in the symbolic order misrecognizes itself and its utterance as one and assumes that it is the author of meaning” (52).