Subjectivity and Otherness A Philosophical Reading of Lacan

like the subject, it is also implicated in a dialectic situated on the phenomenal plane

of the reflection in relation to the little other.^57

I take these words to be unequivocal on a number of noteworthy issues. Lacan is

clearly stating that there are definitely two “privileged signifiers” which have dis-

tinct functions: on the one hand, there is “the paternal signifier,” the Name-of-the-

Father, which “authorizes the game of the signifiers” by working as the nonbarred

legal Other (A) ofthe linguistic (and thus differential by definition) Other of the

signifiers, the locus of speech (A barred). On the other hand, there is “another

privileged signifier,” the symbolic phallus Φ, that “institutes” in the Other as the

“locus of speech”—ultimately guaranteed by the Name-of-the-Father, and thus

turned into a nonbarred Other—something which “changes [the Other’s] na-

ture.” This can only mean that the phallus signifierizes the level on which the Other

is barred. The level on which the Other is barred—“like the subject” S —and sig-

nifierized as such by Φis the level on which the Other “is implicated” in the imag-

inary dialectic (“of reflection”) with the imaginary (“little”) other. The fact that Φ

and S (A barred) should here be regarded as strictly linked—and thus equally dis-

tinguished from the Name-of-the-Father—is confirmed on the same page of Sem-

inar V where Lacan states that “Φ, the phallus, is this signifier through which the

relationship [of the subject] with a,the small [imaginary] other, is introduced in

the Other as locus of speech.”^58 Φis therefore what makes possible the superim-

position of the imaginary relationship between the subject and the image of the

other with the subject’s relation to the symbolic Other: the imaginary relationship

must be introduced in the symbolic Other so that “something may be established

for the subject between the big Other qualocus of speech and the phenomenon of

[the subject’s] desire.”^59

The second quotation from Seminar V helps to confirm what I have just

inferred:

Besides speech and super-speech [sur-parole]—the law of the father, whichever way

one decides to denominate it—something else is necessary. It is for this reason that

the phallus, this elective signifier introduces itself.... This is what in my little for-

mulas I have named for you S (A barred), the signifier of A barred. This is all about

what I have just defined as being the function of the signifier phallus, that of mark-

ing what the Other desires insofar as [the Other] is marked by the signifier, that is,

is barred.^60

Here again, the Law of the father as metalanguage is clearly distinguished from Φ

as S (A barred). Interestingly enough, the function of the latter is on this occasion

primarily associated with the desire of the Other,not with that of the subject. The

fact that the Other is barred can only mean that insofar as the dimension of the

the subject of the real (other)