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

“Lacan’s subject,” Catherine Belsey writes, “is divided against itself; ‘other…than it is,’ dissatisfied—and desiring” (Poststructuralism 57). Within Lacanian theory, desire stands as the central presence/absence around which subjectivity is constructed. The truth of desire, its articulation within a cognitive level, remains untold because it is in the very nature of desire to elude answers and definition. Yet, desire is an integral part of the subject if we are to believe Lacan, so integral in fact, that our subjectivity is formed in relation to a lost object that we desire to go back to, to recover.

Lacan understands the human being as an organism-in-culture, a paradox which bears the crux of all our dissatisfactions. One is not born a subject, but one becomes one through the seemingly easy process of internalising culture. This takes place when the individual enters the symbolic order of language, a tool for which the individual is obviously equipped, but which is alien to us. Language is Other to the subject in so far as it belongs in the realm of culture and is therefore not organic. In other words, language pre-exists the subject, it is there before the subject makes its first appearance on the stage of culture, hence its strangeness to the organic beings that we subjects are. This alien product, nevertheless, is the only means by which we can clear up, however momentarily, the sudden gap which has been established between us and others while paradoxically making the gap even more obvious through the use of a product that is irremediably foreign:

The above account is desolate, but appropriate. Lacan’s description of the frail status of the ‘I’ was first assessed in a conference paper which he delivered in Zürich in 1949, entitled “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience.”