Chapter 2 The Unconscious Structured Like a
Language
1. “The [symbolic] Iis distinct from the [imaginary] ego” (The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book II,
The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955[New York: Norton,
1991 ], p. 8 ). “The subject is decentred in relation to the individual. That is what I is an
[O]thermeans” (ibid., p. 9 ).
2. “The law of man has been the law of language since the first words of recognition
presided over the first gifts” (J. Lacan, Écrits: A Selection[London: Tavistock, 1977 ], p. 61 ).
3. See especially S. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams,SE, IV–V; The Psychopathology of Everyday Life,
SE, VI; and Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious,SE, VIII.
4. See Écrits: A Selection,pp.14 8, 68.
5. J. Lacan, The Seminar. Book III. The Psychoses, 1955–56(London: Routledge, 1993 ), p. 167.
6. J. Lacan, Le séminaire livre V. Les formations de l’inconscient, 1957–1958(Paris: Seuil, 1998 ), p.10 4.
“Lacan’s perseverance toward retaining the concept of the subject certainly ran against
the grain of the time, especially in the days of a budding and flowering structuralism
that seemed to have done away with the subject” (M. Dolar, “Cogito as the Subject of
the Unconscious,” in Cogito and the Unconscious,ed. S. Zˇizˇek [Durham: Duke University
Press, 1998 ], pp. 12 – 13 ).
7. The Seminar. Book III,p. 241.
8. Ibid.
9. See especially Écrits: A Selection,p. 81.
10. At this stage, discourse can therefore be defined as an act of speech between (at least)
two subjects. “Whenever Lacan uses the term ‘discourse’ (rather than, say, ‘speech’) it
is in order to stress... the fact that speech always implies another subject, an interlocu-
tor” (D. Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis[London: Routledge, 199 6],
p. 44 ).
11. “Language entirely operates within ambiguity, and most of the time you know absolutely
nothing about what you are saying” (The Seminar. Book III,p. 115 ).
12 .Le séminaire livre V,p. 105.
13. B. Fink, The Lacanian Subject(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995 ), p. 38. However,
Fink does not specify that the “I” understood as the “subject of the statement” is here ex-
clusively the subject of the consciousstatement. He fails to clarify the ambiguous and of-
ten misleading distinction between the “I” of the imaginary (the linguistic pendentof the
ego) and the “I” of the unconscious.
14. This allows Lacan to affirm that there is a “paradox of the relation of language to speech”
for which “the subject loses his meaning in the objectifications of discourse” (Écrits: A
Selection,p. 70 )
15. Ibid., p. 269.
16. Ibid., p.16 6.notes to pages 35–44