Three stages structure
the constitution of the subject. First, the paternal metaphor acts
intrinsically on account of the primacy given to the phallus by culture. Then, the father intervenes
as the one who deprives the mother: to her he addresses the message "You will not reintegrate
your product" - the child as phallic object. The child receives "a message on the message,"
in
the form of "You will not sleep with your mother" that liberates and deprives him of the object
of his desire. From the alternative "To be or not to be the phallus," he can move to the
alternative "To have it or not to have it." The third moment - the exit out of the Oedipus
complex - requires the intervention of the permissive and generous father who, preferred over
the mother, gives birth to the idea of the ego. It is in this context that the problems of becoming
boy or girl - of the inverted Oedipus complex are raised.
Lacan plays with the term "insistence"
in order to recall repetition, the characteristic of the
signifying chain in the unconscious. "The unconscious is neither primordial nor instinctual; what
it
knows about the elementary is but the elements of the signifier." In a previous writing, "The
Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud," he defines the unconscious as
a memory that can be compared to that of modern thinking-machines where the chain that
insists on reproducing itself in the transference can be found, and which is the chain of dead
desire.
In "The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,"
written in 1960, Lacan states that "it is not the law that bars the subject's access to jouissance
but pleasure." In 1966 he will add a final sentence: "Castration means that jouissance
must be
refused, so that it can be reached on the inverted ladder (échelle inversée) of the
Law of
desire."
1. Foundations
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