Critic speak is tough, but we've got you covered.
Quote :"Of Structure as an Inmixing of an Otherness Prerequisite to Any Subject Whatever"
I have never said that the unconscious was an assemblage of words, but that the unconscious is precisely structured. I don't think there is such an English word but it is necessary to have this term, as we are talking about structure and the unconscious is structured as a language….It is a thinking with words, with thoughts that escape your vigilance, your state of watchfulness.
Alright guys, we've all read Freud (is what Lacan's assuming) and therefore we know the score. Being human means having an unconscious, which means having all kinds of crazy thoughts and embarrassing dreams and weird verbal tricks that we don't understand and try really hard not to show in public. We've all been there, so it's cool.
But Lacan is trying to tell you something extra important here: if we really want to turn the psychoanalysis dial up to 11, we need to pay attention to how much Freud loved to talk about language. 'Cause folks, (Lacan is telling you), the unconscious is structured like a language. And that means that even when we're talking about our deep down inner selves, we can never be sure who's speaking. The system isn't just outside us—it's inside, too.
Lacan delivered this paper at the same symposium where Derrida presented "Structure, Sign, and Play," and it's easy to see why the two Jacques would later squabble about who came up with what ideas first. Lacan revolutionized psychoanalysis by combining Freud's theories with insights from structuralist linguists like Saussure and Roman Jakobson. Better than any other poststructuralist thinker, he laid out the blueprints that showed just how deeply our secret selves are shaped by the languages we live in.
Quote :"Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter'"
For the signifier is a unit in its very uniqueness, being by nature symbol only of an absence. Which is why we cannot say of the purloined letter that, like other objects, it must be or not be in a particular place but that unlike them it will be and not be where it is, wherever it goes.
Okay friends. Our pal Saussure taught us a long time ago that a signifier represents a kind of lack. A word points to a thing or a concept, but it isn't the actual thing or concept that it's pointing to. Whenever we use language to refer to something, we step into a system of differences—a network of gaps and lacks and ruptures where words and things never quite come together. So, this stolen letter in Poe's mystery story? It works just like that. Even when one of the characters has it, it's like it's both there and not there. Cool?
Lacan's "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter'" gives us what is (arguably) the first poststructuralist reading of a literary text. By pointing out the systematic movements and repetitive decisions that the story's three protagonists make, Lacan presents the story as a perfect illustration of how linguistic signification works.
On top of that, he also shows how it can be taken as a metaphor for psychoanalytic analysis. Not bad for a short story written in the mid-1800s!
Lacan delivered this seminar in 1955, but it wasn't until 1966 that it was published in his ginormous collection of essays and lectures, Ecrits. By then, Derrida's career was taking off, and deconstruction was picking up steam. For years, the two grumbled on and off about who had started to come up with their radical ideas about language first.