Guest Post on Lacan

"Indeed, the matrix of language, the Symbolic, makes us who we are. Without it, we are nothing."

First of all, thanks to Ashley for her helpful guest post. It was very very informative!

I am really interested in the idea of language making us who we are. It is funny to think about something that we created is actually really creating us. It reminds me of technology taking over in the Matrix: man-made things are controlling the world we live in, just like language.

"For Lacan, DESIRE and LANGUAGE are synonymous."

This quote really struck me. There is a void in language which we cannot fill, but have this innate desire to fill. But this is interesting, because man was created before language was, so why is this void in language giving subjects a void? Was this void still present before language? I'm not sure if this is making sense, but I am interested in this relationship between language and desire probably for the reason that it is a little confusing.

One final thing I found interesting was the idea of identity and the mirror stage:
"One only ever “asymptotically” approaches having an identity, moving towards but never quite reaching it."

This struck me because we always hear things like "struggling to find one's identity" or "i can identify with this" - when identity is something we can never really achieve. It also made me think of the ways in which we try to create an identity, for example, through Facebook. We list off our favorite movies, music, books, etc. in order to create a certain personal identity for others to see. These movies, books, and music are all things produced by someone else. They can't give us individuality or identity because they aren't ours. We cannot reach a certain identity through these things, but we always strive to do so, unable to reach it whether on Facebook, or in real life.

Mantissa & The Mirror Stage

One thing I noticed when I first began reading Mantissa, was the connection to The Mirror Stage we have talked about in class.



When Miles Green first wakes up, he is referring to himself as "it": "it was conscious of a lumious and infinite haze, as if it were floating, godlike, alpha and omega, over a sea of vapor and looking down...(3). He has no idea who he is or even what he is at this point. It seems as though he is an outsider looking down on a body he cannot identify as his own.

However, once his wife comes into the picture and begins talking to him, he begins to develop a sense of "self": "Obscurely reproached by the closer and more requiring face, it made another unwilling deduction: for some reason it was a center of attention, an I of sorts" (4). I feel as though it is here that we are getting an example of Lacan's Mirror Stage. Green begins to develop this sense of self and moves away from the somewhat "outer body experience" of referring to himself as "it". He then goes on to say: "with another painfully swift and reducing intuition it realized it was not just an I, but a male I" (4). It is at this point that Green realizes that he is a being that is separate from the rest of the world, much like the child who sees his reflection in the mirror.