Subjectivity and Otherness A Philosophical Reading of Lacan

seek it in another signifier,which could not appear outside this locus in any way.Which is what

I mean when I say that no metalanguage can be spoken, or, more aphoristically, that

there is no Other of the Other.”^52 By contrast, in Seminar IV, Lacan clearly main-

tained that “the symbolic father [the paternal Law/Name-of-the-Father] is a ne-

cessity of the symbolic construction which we can only locate in a beyond,I would

dare to say a transcendence.”^53 I am firmly convinced that even a superficial compari-

son of passages like these leaves little room for doubt that, in the late 195 0s, Lacan’s

conceptualization of the symbolic order underwent a fundamental change.

More specifically, according to “Subversion of the Subject,” the Name-of-the-

Father is still what renders the subject’s entrance into the proper functioning of the

Symbolic possible. Nevertheless, it can be said to work only as an “organizer”

which is now, so to speak, “internal” to the Other of the signifiers. It still exer-

cises a fundamental role, and is still a “privileged” signifier, but can no longer be

accounted for as the “signifier of signifiers” in a strictly structural sense. Conse-

quently, the necessarily differential signifying structure which the Name-of-the-

Father was itself sustaining, by way of “enclosing” it, becomes an open structure,

which is directly exposed to the Real; in the case of nonpsychotics, the paternal

metaphor can suture this structure only in a time which is—at least from a logical

standpoint—secondary and contingent (see graph 4. 5 ).

The same is obviously valid with regard to the universal basic Law (the univer-

sal Name-of-the-Father): the symbolic structure is by now open and in contact

with the Real on both the particular and the universal level. To be more precise, the

fact that there is no Other of the Other also necessarily entails the impossibility

of distinguishing between these two levels of the structure. When there is an Other

of the Other, the individual subject’s Symbolic is a particular “part” of the univer-

sal symbolic structure by which it is ultimately sustained and contained; when

there is no Other of the Other, the Symbolic of individual subjects itself sustains

the universal structure in a particular (phallic) way. Adopting the terms Lacan used

there is no other of the other

Graph 4. 5

S S R

R Real as

object a

Symbolic

N.O.F., Φ, S1

TIME 1 TIME 2