Not Thinking and Speaking: A Study of Lacan's Subject Theory

Author: Huang Zuo
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-12-01
Features: Jaques Lacan is one of the most important philosophers in France since Descartes and one of the most creative and influential thinkers in Europe since Nietzsche and Freud. When examining the formation of the subject, Lacan proposed the famous "mirror stage" theory. Lacan believed that children between six and eighteen months use their reflections in the mirror to confirm their own image. This gradually helps them move away from a "fragmented body" and achieve a basic unity of identity. Before the mirror stage, children merely see their bodies as a pile of fragmented objects, and they even fear this incomplete body. At this stage, children cannot recognize the completeness of their body through self-perception—such as a sense of time, space, movement, and so on—only an external mirror can provide the subject with a structural wholeness. Of course, in many cases, the mirror Lacan refers to is merely a symbol—a symbol that is external to the subject but also gives it a sense of positioning. This book includes topics such as the emergence of the subject, the theory of emergence versus construction, the illusion of imagination, the capture of the symbolic, and the meaning of failing to encounter the real.