2.1 Introduction: From the Small to the Big Other
“From the small to the big Other”: this is how Jacques-Alain Miller—editor of the
Seminars—entitled a fundamental series of lessons that Lacan gave during the first
semester of 1955. Such a motto deserves special consideration, since it effectively
captures a much more general turning point in Lacanian thought. Beginning with
Seminar II (195 4– 1955 ), Lacan capitalizes the Other, and proceeds to elaborate an
innovative theory of the subject. In brief, the big Other may be equated with: (a)
languageas a structure (as in structural linguistics); (b) the symbolic orderas the legal
fabric of human culture (in accordance with Lévi-Strauss’s anthropology); (c) the
Freudian unconsciousas reformulated by Lacan in his widely promoted return to its
original, subversive signification. Despite their mutual superimpositions, it would
be misleading to immediately assume that these three notions perfectly overlap.
The subject of the Other can appropriately be grasped only by clearly defining these
three vertices. This is the main aim of the present chapter and the one that follows.
With particular reference to the notion of subjectivity, Lacan’s new interest in
the big Other corresponds to a shift in emphasis from the formula “The ego is an
other” to the formula “I is an Other.”^1 Having almost exclusively concentrated on
what the subject was not(the ego), Lacan’s theory becomes more constructive: first
and foremost, the subject is now positively identified with the subject of the Other.
On the basis of my initial claim, the latter should be understood equally as: (a) the
subject of language; (b) the subject of the Symbolic; and (c) the subject of the un-
conscious. If, on the one hand, it is relatively easy to see, even at this early stage,
how the first two relate to each other (how could the symbolic Law that founds
human society not be related to human language as something uniquely distinct
from a mere animal code?),^2 on the other, the link between language (along with
the Symbolic) and the unconscious is not so immediately apparent.
Let me attempt to provide a preliminary, partial explanation of this relation
here. The subject of the unconscious is, for Lacan, both the unconscioussubject, a
psychic agency that is opposed to the agency of consciousness (or, better, self-
consciousness), and the subject ofthe unconscious, the subject subjected tothe un-
conscious. The fact that the conscious subject is subjected to the unconscious can
initially be explained by answering the following naïve question: why does psy-
choanalysis take the trouble to think about the unconscious in the first place? The
answer is to say that an unconscioustoposseparated from consciousness must
exist because something which is not conscious tangibly manifests itself within
consciousness. What is more, these manifestations, the so-called “formations of
the unconscious,” are far from “irrational”: they can be seen to follow certain reg-
ular patterns, which Freud had already considered to be fundamentally linguistic.^3