Subjectivity and Otherness A Philosophical Reading of Lacan

an articulation amounts to the promulgation of the phallic Law (of sexuation
+/−), the founding of the fact that the Other is lawful. Moreover, the dimension
of the Name-of-the-Father must then be “embodied in those people [the real
fathers] who support its authority”:^182 the Law of the +/−is embodied in a spe-
cific +, the paternal symbolic phallus Φ. On the basis of Lacan’s schema, one could
perhaps picture the relation between the Name-of-the-Father, the phallus, and the
signified as in Schema 3. 6 :

We can also break this schema down into its two components:

One should not underestimate what structurally distinguishes the signifying
function of the Name-of-the-Father from that of the phallus. The latter is, as sig-
nifier of the signified as such, the most important oppositional signifying couple
+/−; on the contrary, the former is, as signifier ofsignifiers, definitely not a signi-
fying couple: the Name-of-the-Father as the imposition of the Lawof the +/−functions
bi-univocallyin relation to the Desire-of-the-Mother which it replaces. In this sense,
one could argue that the phallus is a privileged signifier to be understood as the
fundamental signifying couple that is introduced by the signifier Name-of-the-
Father as the “natural” sign or indexof the Law; again, the Name-of-the-Father, through
the production of phallic signification, retroactively “legalizes” or groups the sig-
nifying oppositional couples that the child had already confusedly experienced in
the protosymbolic relation with the Desire-of-the-m-Other. More precisely, the
Name-of-the-Father should be understood as a shifter,a signifier which also works

93

Schema 3.6

Schema 3.7

Name-of-the-Father

φ signified

Φ

(a) (b)

Name-of-the-Father

Phallus

signified