Subjective identification in an encounter with ‘The Little Prince’ by Antoine de Saint Exupéry. Exploration of the conception of subjectivity in reconstructed narratives - Lacanian discourse analysis (original) (raw)
Related papers
Identification, language, and subjectivity: Reading Freire through/against Lacan
Curriculum Inquiry, 2017
This paper aims to interrogate Freirean critical pedagogy via the work of Jacques Lacan in order to shed new light on psychoanalytic issues that arise when engaging in critical pedagogical work. First, through a close reading of Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the author delineates Freire's conception of the human subject, the mechanisms that function to oppress subjects and prevent full humanization, and the process by which subjects can begin to imagine new possibilities outside of the oppressor/oppressed relationship. Next, careful consideration is given to Lacan's formulation of the function of the imaginary in the emergence of the subject, which was most clearly articulated in his seminal work The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience. This engagement with these two thinkers emphasizes what Lacan can teach us about the complex relationship between identity construction, subjectivity, and the role of intersubjective relations in theorizing and creating a more just world.
2023
Subjectivity in the early works of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan is centred primarily on the imaginary order with misrecognition as its essence. With reference to texts from the 1930s to the early 1950s, I try to trace out the historical and philosophical trajectory of this idea. I show that Lacan’s borrowings from an eclectic range of fields including Freudianism, structuralism, existentialism, gestalt psychology, ethology, etc. animate the deepest quarters of his conception of subjectivity. In early Lacan we find more of an apophatic conception of the subject. The ego, the cornerstone of imaginary subjectivity, resembles the Cartesian cogito in its hubristic claim to self-mastery and self-knowledge. It is experienced as intimately alienated owing to the narcissism-aggressivism dialectical complex that serves as its bedrock. The primordial imagos and family complexes play a role in this regard. The mirror stage, marking the transition between two of the earliest complexes, acts as a watershed moment in the development of self-identity. For Lacan, identity consists in identification with a reflected/refracted image. The Lacanian subject is not a matter of developmental psychology since it keeps casting its lasting shadow throughout the life-journey of the individual. Nor is it reducible to forces in biology, since, despite being made of physical matter, the subject’s preeminence is a cultural-linguistic consequence. Its becoming owes its debt to the complexes more than the instincts. Governed by a dialectical logic of retroactive and anticipatory temporality with roots in the quagmire of neonatal helplessness, the subject, we learn, is never a point of full presence, but a fundamental absence, a negativity.
Subjectivity, desire and theory: Reading Lacan
Subjectivity in cultural studies is believed to be culturally constructed. Unlike humanists cultural theory marks subject as cultural construction rather than fixed and timeless entity. Formation of subjectivity reflects the social process that constitutes us as subjects. A Subject is not born but is transformed into one from a concrete being by his immersion into culture. Subjectivity is precisely the condition of our being which enables us to recognize ourselves as subjects or persons. Subjectivity is something in us by which we understand the world around us. The present paper is a reading of Lacan with some help from some other thinkers to understand how a subject is formed. It further outlines role of desire in formation subject and finally there is an attempt to relate the nature and dimensions of the subjectivity with what theory has to aim and subsequently aims to achieve. Significance of culture for the development of human mind is now being widely recognized in intellectual circles. Culture is the medium through which we understand the world. Determinacy of culture for our brain is such, as noted by Merlin Donald (1991), that it cannot realize its design potential
Lacan's subject: the imaginary, language, the real and philosophy.
The thought of the psychoanalytical thinker, Jacques Lacan, is examined in this paper with a view to ascertaining the place and function in it of the so-called imaginary , the symbolic as well as the 'real'. The extent to which the imaginary or realm of images is construed by Lacan as being the order of identification and a (spurious) sense of unity of the ego or self, is contrasted with the symbolic (or linguistic) order as that of the subject and of desire, in fact, of the subject of desire. The place and meaning of the enigmatic third register in Lacan's thought, namely the 'real' is also addressed in relation to the question of desire. Furthermore, the question is raised, where philosophy in its traditional sense belongs-to the Lacanian register of the imaginary or to that of the symbolic.
Living with Textual Surplus: Jacques Lacan’s Method/ Stuti Khare
One problem that the interpreters of texts have always faced is the problem of surplus signification that the texts generate. Since the beginning of hermeneutical practices, various thinkers have suggested a range of methods to resolve this complex issue. In this paper, I attempt to bring out the conceptual frameworks that Jacues Lacan has created to deal with the issue of surplus signification. I discuss the concepts of language, signifier, lalangue, epos, jouissance, sinthome, and lamella in Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to explicate the nature of the text, its constitutive elements, and its relationship with the author and the reader. By implication, the nature of signification is subjected to exhaustive scrutiny in order to arrive at an understanding of the complex issues of language and text.
Lacanian Theory in Literary Criticism
2017
The foremost Post-Freudian Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) has established a significant practice of psychoanalysis on the basis of unconscious and language. This model of Psychoanalysis on the basis of structural linguistics has been utilized by Lacan himself in criticizing a work of literature as well as formulating a theory of unconscious through literary expressions. In this model of Lacanian psychoanalysis where the theory of unconscious and the theory of literature defining each other establishes a Post-Freudian model of psychoanalytic criticism. This model which further interrogates into the literary text through the language in order to examine the unconscious of both the writer and the reader is made possible. The present essay considers outlining the Lacanian model of literary criticism
" Desire Pronounced and/Punctuated": Lacan and the Fate of the Poetic Subject
American Imago, 1995
Throughout the 1980s, as future histories of the academy will no doubt recall, the concept of the self was in big trouble. Theoretically, that is. Outside the academy it was a different story; indeed, in popular culture, forms of self-exploration and expression proliferated alongside fragmented and fragmenting media technologies. Next to this complex narrative, theself in the academy enacts a fairly consistent retreat. Attacked by intellectuals in every corner of the human sciences, the self was nowhere less secure than in the very discipline often accused of giving it ultimate priority: psychoanalysis, symbolized especially by the figure of Jacques Lacan. In the eyes of some historians at least, Lacan singlehandedly loosed analysis from its traditional moorings; as Anthony Elliot (1994) recently phrased it, Lacanian theory "has completely transformed cultural debates about the development of the individual subject in social and historical terms" (91-92). Yet at the height of this transformation, the Lacanian theoretical vocabulary of desire was being picked up and employed by several young American poets toward very different ends. As poststructuralist theory grew more important to the academy, Lacanian terms became important to poets who struggled over the fate of traditional poetic notions of agency, selfhood, individuality, and authorship. What resulted from this heady mixture of lyric and Lacan by no means reaffirmed the centrality of the subject in either poetry or cultural theory; it did, however, implicate the collapse of traditional discourses of the self in the reproduction of contemporary poetic value.