Lacan in Literature and Film : Closer Look at Formation of Subjectivity in Lacanian Epistemology

This study aims to apply Lacanian ideas to literary texts and film. Why is such an endeavour necessary? One might give different responses to this question: due to Lacan s emphasis on the Symbolic in the constitution of the subject, as he takes the human as a linguistic being, his ideas concerning unconscious might be used in analysing the unconscious of the text or the characters themselves, his ideas on the constitution of the subject might be applicable to the character creation in the texts, etc. The empirical fact is, everybody has a different reason to go to Lacan and in each case co-existence of literature and Lacan leads into different and interesting readings of the texts. This study is one of those attempts which hopes to offer a few of those happy encounters between Lacan and literature.

Among the writers discussed are Harold Pinter,Angela Carter, D.H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster and Graham Greene

Lacan in Literature and Film :A Closer Look at Formation of Subjectivity in Lacanian Epistemology might help to justify why Lacan is applicable in literary studies. Lacanian subject problematizes the post-Cartesian and the pragmatic ego as the perceiving subject of consciousness which is stable, self-knowing and which implies totality and wholeness. Lacan shatters the previous myth of autonomy since he bases his understanding of the human subject on reinterpretation of Freud s Ichspaltung or a splitting of the subject (Seminaire II 3-12); and since he locates this split at the source of human I dentity formation by taking narcissism as the central imaginary relation of interhuman relationships (Seminaire III 92). Lacan s subject is formed by his conscious and unconscious parts, and finds its source in the Other (A) which infers familial prehistory, as well as the social order of language, myths, and conventions (Ragland-Sullivan 16). The Other (A) exists both inside and outside consciousness as a concept of continuity between consciousness and unconscious; and leaves no human action outside its domain participating in the functions of ideation, and even of thought (The Language of the Self 20). It is fundamentally discordant with being as it governs personality in reference to a savoir that, paradoxically, determines and transcends the human subject as being (Ragland-Sullivan 3). In a Lacanian context unconscious is the discourse of the Other (A) and emerges from its discourse as an object of Other (A) Desire (Ragland-Sullivan 16).

Unconscious, as a closed system of a network of signifying representations, is structured like a language but these representations as pure signifiers operate on their own specific logic. There is an unbridgeable gap or split between conscious and unconscious meaning; [t]o the extent that what is spoken rarely coincides with what the ego intends to communicate (Schneiderman 3). Unconscious, which is a barred S for Lacan, due to this unbridgeable difference in their logic, is elusive and alien to the conscious subject as it is untranslatable into linguistic logic. Accordingly, it does not hear itself speaking in the conscious discourse.