Subjectivity and Otherness A Philosophical Reading of Lacan

the “signifier of signifiers,”^174 as “the Other of the Other”:^175 this means that sig-

nifiers are somehow signified by the Name-of-the-Father. The phallus as a privileged

signifier, signifier of the signified as such, is obviously no exception. In other

words, if the Name-of-the-Father is the signifier of signifiers and the (embodied)

symbolic phallus (Φ) is the signifier of the signified as such, then the Name-of-

the-Father will also be the signifier of the symbolic phallus (Φ) understood as the

imaginary phallus (φ) which emerges as the signified of the paternal metaphor.

To use Lacan’s formulas: ( 1 ) “The phallus is in the signified that which results

from the existence of the signifier”:^176 the imaginary phallus φis the signified

which results from the mere fact that the signifier Name-of-the-Father signi-

fies signifiers, and thus makes them exist; ( 2 ) The symbolic phallus Φis “the last/

ultimate [privileged] signifier in the relation between signifier and signified”;^177

this is why Φcan never fully unveil that which, as signifier, it signifies: the latter is

in fact nothing but φitself, the universal object. The fact that the phallus is the sig-

nifier of the signified as such ultimately means that Φis the signifier of itself quaφ

(the signified as such).

The distinction between the Name-of-the-Father and the phallus can more eas-

ily be grasped if we refer to another of Lacan’s schemas in Seminar V:^178

He comments on this by saying that “the [name-of-the-] father [the upper S]

is, in the Other, the signifier that representsthe existence of the place of the signify-

ing chain [S/s] as law.”^179 Here Lacan is advocating the absolute transcendenceof the

signifier Name-of-the-Father with respect to the Other quasignifying chain (S/s);

as he unequivocally maintains: “The Other itself has beyonditself an Other which is

able to found the law.”^180 In order properly to exercise its function as Other, the

Other as the “deposit” or “treasury of signifiers” has to be anchored in the “signi-

fier of the Other quaOther.”^181 The Name-of-the-Father articulates the order of the

signifier, it groups the signifying oppositional couples that the child had already

experienced in the protosymbolic relation with the Desire-of-the-m-Other: such

oedipus as a metaphor

S

S S S S S S S S

s s s s s s s s s s

Schema 3.5