Lacan
Tom Davis

Lacan Lecture 1:
Lacan and Deconstruction

1. Introduction

This lecture is difficult: it is hard because Lacan is hard, and because in order to understand him you have to open your minds a little. The concepts in it are not in themselves complicated, but what they do is, they deliberately defy common-sense. And so you reject them, and the easiest way to reject them is not to understand them.

It's a strange feeling: you think you've got it, it's clear, you understand it, you think of something else and then come back to what you though you had clearly in your mind and--it's gone.

If you persevere, however, there is a reward. Those who follow this way of reading literature, essentially the Lacanian way, have a powerful and entirely novel way of looking at literary texts; and, as an added bonus, they believe that what they are doing is very very important. You will see.

In order to make it easier for you I am going do two things. The first is, I'm going to spend much of this lecture not talking about Lacan, but about some of the basic concepts that he uses in order to build his theories. So this lecture is important, because it functions not just as an introduction to Lacan but also to the whole of French literary theory. But first, I want to give you a sense of Lacan, so you know what we're up against.

2. Lacan speaks

2.1 I, truth, will speak

Here is Lacan:

he is answering the question, What is Truth? With characteristic arrogance, he answers as if he, himself, were truth. If you can't follow this, don't feel bad.

Men, I am giving you the secret. I, truth, will speak. Whether you flee me in fraud, or think to entrap me in error, I will reach you in the misapprehension against which you have no refuge. In that place where the most caustic speech reveals a slight hesitation, it is lacking in perfidy--I am now publicly announcing the fact--and it would from then on be rather trickier to pretend that nothing had happened, in good, or for that matter, bad company...

In any case, is it not enough, to judge of your defeat, to see me escape first from the keep of the fortress in which you are so sure you have me secured by situating me, not in yourselves, but in being itself? I wander about in what you regard as being the least true in essence: in the dream, in the way the most Gongoresque conceit, the nonsense of the most grotesque pun defies sense, in chance, and not in its law but in its contingency, and I never do more to change the face of the world than when I give it the profile of Cleopatra's nose.

2.2 The unconscious is to be found in...

What does this mean? It means,

the unconscious is found in dreams and slips of the tongue.


2.3 Why read Lacan?

The first question is: if that's what he's saying, why doesn't he say so? If he's so perverse, so difficult, then what is the point of studying Lacan? I can tell you the answer to that quite quickly. For contemporary literary criticism, Lacan is more important than Freud, and Jung; in fact, he is one of the two or three most important influences on current literary criticism. I find him infuriating, incomprehensible, incredibly perverse, but also, in glimpses, very very illuminating. He is a trickster: a jester; a genius.

Lacan single-handedly placed psychoanalysis at the exact centre of French intellectual life. His influence is everywhere: you need to know about him.

3. Lacan's obscurity

3.1 The unbearable is hard to understand

So: why is it that Lacan is so difficult, so obscure?

Well, think back to Freud. The entire point of Freud's life work was that he was exposing to us the unbearable. What he had to tell us about was the unconscious, and the reason why unconscious material is unconscious is because we can't face it, and so repress it: the unconscious contains the unbearable. If not that, then nothing.

So the question should be, in fact, why is Freud so easy to understand? Why don't we reject it? Why don't we react to what he says with horror and incomprehension? If Freud is true, then the unbearable ought to be hard to understand.

What, in Lacan's case, is this unbearable topic? For Freud, you remember, the unbearable is the sexual. In my experience, students don't on the whole find that particularly convincing. On the whole, students seem to find the sexual interesting, even quite possibly entertaining. Well, Lacan deals with the sexual, yes, but that is not for him the deepest level. What he does is this: he attacks the solidity of all that we can see, and, worse than that, all that we think we are. For Lacan

· Language is what we use to construct the world

· Language is what we use to construct ourselves

· Language is completely inadequate for both those tasks

This is the bad news. Nothing is real. Nothing is solid. You are not real. This, he would say, is unbearable: and therefore we reject and repress it: we can't afford to understand it.

3.2 The discourse of the unconscious

Moreover in order to express the unconscious it is necessary, Lacan would say, to be incomprehensible. In fact, it's inevitable. When the unconscious speaks, it does not make sense, by definition: its language is not that of the everyday world of common sense. The unconscious speaks nonsense.

It must, if you think about it. It is unconscious: it is utterly different. It is the voice of the other, frightening, mysterious, awe-inspiring, shattering, strange: all of those things. Not, repeat not, rational, commonsensical, easy to follow.

Dreams are nonsense. Psychotics talk nonsense. The suffering of neurotics does not make sense. So in order to let the unconscious speak Lacan felt he needed to speak with the voice of the unconscious: to talk a kind of signifying nonsense. Lacan, you have to understand, was a kind of standup comedian, an artist, a juggler, a showman; because he was French he could unite those roles with being, at the same time, an intellectual. He tried to make himself, at the same time, both clear and unclear, so that at the edge of meaning, in puns, allusions, jokes, logical contradictions, language games, glimpses of the truth can come through.

3.3 Lecturing on Lacan

This creates a problem for anyone whose job it is to explain Lacan. How can I make Lacan speak to you without betraying everything he stands for? How can I clarify and elucidate this stuff, try to make it comprehensible, without by that very act destroying it? Well, the answer is, I can't. All I can hope to do is give you a basis from which to approach the man himself. To turn to Lacan, to leave this lecture behind.

Now: the influences of Lacan.

4. Lacan = Freud + Saussure + Dada

You can say that Lacan has three influences: Freud, Saussure, and Dada. Freud, I have covered. Saussure was a Swiss linguist who, in a series of lectures published in 1915, laid down the foundations of modern linguistics. Dada was a movement, also Swiss in origin, founded, oddly enough, at just the same time, in 1916; it consisted of some remarkably crazy and irresponsible people, and it gave birth to the artistic movement known as surrealism. Many of Lacan's friends were surrealists.

So first I will tell you a little about Dada and the surrealists, so that you can see how Lacan gets away with being as difficult and irresponsible as he is; then I will spend a quite a lot of time explaining Saussure, who is crucial not just to Lacan but to all of the French exponents of the new critical theory. Then I will take you in the direction beyond Saussure that Lacan himself took: towards the deconstruction of everyday reality, and of the ego itself. To do that I will look at the work of a colleague and on and off friend of Lacan's, Louis Althusser, whose theories, because he was not a surrealist, are easier to understand, and usefully parallel to Lacan's. All of this is essential preparation. Next week we will face the man himself: Lacan, and I will show you some ways of applying his theories to literature. But now, Dada.

5. Dada

Dada was a literary and artistic movement that began in Switzerland in 1916. It speedily moved to Paris, where it gave birth to Surrealism in the early 1920's and then died.

Dada believed that art told lies; it believed that the truth was in what art did not say. Surrealism believed that only in pure spontaneity would the truth arise, because the only truth was in the subconscious mind; therefore only by a process very like free association could the truth be found. If this sounds familiar, it should do: the father of Dada was Freud.

Realism, in art, is a lie. It does not show what is there, it creates it: realism is an illusion. The camera always lies. Here is one of the most famous surrealist pictures: the caption says 'This is not an apple'. But it looks like an apple: so why isn't it? First, obviously, because it's a painting; second, less obviously, because it wants to disturb your trust in apples. It asks the question: what is real? And so did Lacan, using the same kind of jokey, skilful, perverse method. As we shall see.

After Dada, Saussure.

6. Saussure

6.1 Saussure's radicalism

It is quite possible that Tristan Tzara, one of the founders of Dada, who was a fairly barbaric individual, and Saussure, the founder of modern linguistics, and by all accounts a rather civilised and scholarly person, could have run into each other in the street in Zurich. They would have had very little to say to each other, I imagine; nor could they have imagined that a union between the two of them could have given birth to Lacan. But it did. And it is probable that the more radical contribution came from Saussure.

What Saussure did was to deconstruct the sign. What is a sign?


6.2 What is a sign?

This is a sign.

When I say the word 'fish', immediately there comes into your mind a concept. What I am doing is making a noise, 'fish', and that's all, but there is an immediate, instant, intrinsic link in your mind and in my mind between the noise and the concept: we experience them to be the same thing. That marriage, that union, noise+concept, is the sign. A sign is a linguistic noise that evokes a concept. 'Fish'. Sign = noise + concept.

This is very simple, but also very important: it is basic to the way language works. What Saussure did was simple too: he took the sign apart. But this, though simple, had very very powerful consequences: from this deconstruction of the sign he arrived at the following famous proposition: 'language is a system of differences with no fixed terms'. What does that mean? Well, let us split the noise from the concept, and see.


6.3 The signifier

So, first the noise.

'Fish'. This he called the 'signifier': the sign-maker, the thing that initiates the sign-process. The signifier. Now, let us take that apart.

6.4 Phonemes

What is this signifier, 'fish'? Considered purely as a signifying noise, it consists of three elements: a 'f' noise, an 'i' noise, and a 'sh' noise. Those elements are called 'phonemes'. Now, if I change one of those elements, a different sign is initiated: wish, dish, fit, and so on. English has a little more than 60 phonemes. That's it. That's all you need to create all the words, or rather all the signifiers, 4 million or so signifying noises, that make up the English language.

6.5 A system of differences

What we can do with these phonemes is to put them together into a chart:

<<

wish, dish, fish, and so on. Obviously, what we've got here is a system. And the most important thing about the elements of the system is that they differ, said Saussure. When I say 'fish', in order for you to understand me all I have to get across is what I'm not saying. That I'm not saying 'dish', or 'wish', or 'fit'. The system, on the level of the signifier, on the noise level, is a system of differences.


6.6 The signified

Now, look at the other half of the sign: the concept half.

This is called the 'signified'.


6.7 The sliding of the signifiers

Here are two interesting things about the signified. One is, in order to talk about it, I have to use signifiers. In order to discuss language, you must use language. Obviously. But this means that you can't get outside the sign: language is a closed system.

To talk about a signified, I use a signifier, which has a signified, and to talk about that I have to use another signifier, words to explain words to explain words ... and so on, until I run out of language or loop back and start again. This is what Lacan calls 'the sliding of the signifiers'.

6.8 No fixed terms

The other interesting thing about the signified is that although the marriage between signifier and signified is so tight in our minds, the actual relationship has no basis. It is baseless.

There is no essential reason why the cold-blooded thing that swims should be evoked by that noise, 'fish', and no other. It's just an arbitrary arrangement we have because we are all members of the group known as English-speakers.

It needn't be like that. Look: supposing I said that from now on, I will refer to the cold-blooded thing that swims as a 'bok'.

This might take a little getting used to, but it wouldn't be hard, and soon we would all be using and understanding the word 'bok' without any trouble. And that would be a purely arbitrary arrangement we have because we are all members of the group known as people-who-went-to-the-Lacan-lecture. And if we were really proud, or defensive, about being in this group we might develop a whole arbitrary set of signifiers we could use together to announce and emphasise our membership of that group, and everyone else would feel mysteriously deprived. You can all think of sub-cultures that have their own private languages. Los Angeles street gangs. Rastafarians. Bibliographers. Lacanians.

But the point is that the relationship between the two halves of the signs of these languages is arbitrary. There is no essential relationship between the noise 'bok', or the noise 'fish', and the concept they express.

And look at the arbitrary bunch of creatures that we class under the term fish. A goldfish is a fish. A great white shark is a fish. The white meat in batter that you buy ready-cooked with chips is a fish. It goes on being a fish while you eat it, and then it stops being a fish. We class all these items as fish. And a whale is not a fish. A whale stopped being a fish in the eighteenth century.

Obviously, what puts things into the class 'fish' is convention, common agreement amongst users of the same language, whether the language group is as enormous as all users of English, or as small as those-who-went-to-the-Lacan-lecture; it's a cultural convention. There might be another culture that thinks that the dead thing with the chips on your plate has stopped being a fish, and become something else, just as we think that the dead sheep on your plate that you are about to eat is not a sheep at all, it's stopped being that entirely, it's become mutton. Arbitrarily, at least as far as language is concerned.

And that's what the second half of Saussure's saying means: language is a system of differences without fixed terms.

6.9 Literature is a beautiful trick

You might say, so what? So what is important about that? Well, let's try another signifier. Think of a cat. Any cat, but a particular cat. A cat you know, or have known.

Now, think of the word "cat". That noise. "Cat". Now try and imagine the distance, the incredible gulf, between that noise "cat" and the cat you know. It's immense, isn't it? The one hardly captures a particle of the actuality of the other. If you can hold that distinction, between the actual cat and the empty word, in your minds, you are prising the sign apart, and are getting a glimpse of how completely language is in fact alienated from the actuality of the world. The fact is that language cannot adequately describe the world. Not even a small fraction of it. There is a gulf between the world and language, between the animal and the word, and we are not aware of this gulf until we prise the sign apart.

But if words can't capture the world, what about literature? Because that is literature's main claim for our attention, that it delivers to us the world seen anew, that it is the prime agent for us of the actuality of the world.

This claim is false. When we read a description, however brilliant, say in a poem, say about a cat, the brilliance that makes us catch our breath and wonder is a brilliance in language: a pattern of words. The actuality it points us towards is always already outside language, beyond language, not to be captured. It is a trick of words, an illusion. Literature is a beautiful trick. Like a surrealist painting.

So that's quite an uncomfortable realisation. But what makes it worse is that we rely on language, this imperfect instrument, to construct the world for us: we can't do without it, we do almost everything with it.

7. We see the world through language

7.1 The world deconstructed

When the two halves of the sign have been sprung apart, we enter a strange world. Or rather, we stay in exactly the same world, we inhabit the same reality, but it becomes strange, unfixed, sliding. In order to see that, to really see it, we have to travel, so that we can come back and see where we live as if we didn't live there.

7.2 Love

A good way of seeing something of how words dominate and deceive us is to look at the word love. You could put up a good case for the idea that this word, 'love', these three phonemes, is the most important word in the English language. So let us look at how another culture, another language, deals with it.

The Tibetans have a language that is extremely well adapted for the description of psychological states. Since much of the adult population in traditional Tibet lived in monasteries and spent most of their time examining the nature of mind, it was necessary for them to develop this language; and it allowed them to perceive and recognise things that are obscure or not meaningful to us.

Tibetans are very interested in the concept of Love. They have 14 words for it. I am just going to deal with 2 of those. Thugs rTse Ba, and 'Tsal Ba. The first of these is classically defined as follows:

To love: to entirely wish for the happiness of another being or beings.

The second, 'Tsal Ba', means:

To love: to wish to possess, to desire, to be attached to.

What's interesting about these is that they are opposites: the two words have meanings that are precisely 180 degrees apart.

Now, from that Tibetan perspective, if we look back at our own word, love, it can be seen in a new way. Those two words for love, roughly altruistic love and selfish love, are collapsed together in the English word. In English you can say 'I love you' meaning 'I wish for your happiness', or you can say 'I love you' meaning 'I want something from you'. The latter is a very common use of the word, in my experience.

In fact what usually happens is that the word carries both meanings. The two quite distinct senses of the word are collapsed together, the self-seeking sense gains authority from the unselfish sense: you must give me what I want, because I love you, and love is good, isn't it? Hence the immediate feeling of guilt, surely known to us all, when someone says "I love you", and you don't say "I love you" back.

This ambiguity runs through the whole of the culture: did Othello, for instance, love Desdemona? Yes, he must have done, that's why he murdered her. And so on. I expect you can think up examples for yourselves. And none of this is a problem for the Tibetans, simply because they have some extra words in the language.

7.3 Words fail me

Let me give you another, very simple, example of how words describe, and dominate, and fail us. I will just read you a short poem. It's called 'Words fail me'.

Dear Sirs · man to man · manpower · craftsman working men · the thinking man · the man in the street · fellow countrymen · the history of mankind · one-man show · man in his wisdom statesman · forefathers · masterful · masterpiece old masters · the brotherhood of man · Liberty Equality · Fraternity · sons of free men · faith of our fathers · god the father · god the son · yours fraternally · amen · words fail me

8. Language creates us

8.1 The ego is no longer master in its own house

I hope I have shown you how the language that we use constructs the reality that we see, and how in doing so it can deceive, dominate, oppress us. There remains one final Lacanian scandal: that the we who do the perceiving are also constructed by language: there is no self; it is a linguistic construct.

It was Freud who said this first: he was conscious of being, in fact he felt honoured to be, in a line of iconoclasts, whose work was to dethrone us, the human beings, from our feeling of being at the centre of the universe: the paragon of animals, the centre of creation. So Copernicus and Galileo showed that the earth went round the sun, and not the other way around. Darwin showed that we are not the lords of creation, but simply a rather specialised form of ape. And Freud showed, he said, that the ego is no longer the master of his own house: that there is another mind, inside our own, that we are unaware of, and which dictates a great deal of what we do and think. The ego is no longer the master of his own house.

Lacan goes further than this: goes as far as it is possible to go. He dethrones the subject entirely. In order to follow him into this inner sanctum, it seems to me that the easiest thing to go to Paris: to work with the theory of a colleague and (on and off) friend of Lacan's named Althusser.

9. Althusser: ideology and language

9.1 the State apparatuses

Althusser (in 1968) asked this question: what is it that maintains the stability of a given society? What is it that keeps people under control? He gave two answers. In some societies, repressive societies, people are kept under control by the obvious force of the state: he called this the Repressive State Apparatus. This has to be obvious so that people can be afraid of it, and so stay in line. The army. The Police. The Secret Police.

But in Western affluent societies this degree of control is much less obvious. There is, of course, an element of direct repression against those who get out of line, but those cases, where the police or the army are seen in an obvious way to be repressive, are rare, and get into the newspapers. On the whole. So what is it that keeps us in line?

He decided that there was another kind of state apparatus for control and he called it the Ideological State Apparatus. This has the effect of making us want to stay in line; we enjoy and willingly co-operate with our conformity. Why? Because it is common sense to do so; because it is the way things are; because we believe ideology to be true. Ideology, said Althusser, is not true: ideology is a false set of ideas operating in a given society in order to keep the people in line and serve the interests of the ruling class in that society. This sounds like propaganda, but there is a crucial difference. Propaganda is obvious; it is felt to be a lie; ideology is felt, at a deep level to be true. To be common sense. To be the way things are. It is invisible.

So how does ideology get to be propagated? Said Althusser, through the Ideological State Apparatuses. What are they? They are language devices: discourses. Such as? The Church. The schools. The Newspapers. The TV. The Theatre. The novels. The bill-boards. The Department of English at the University of Birmingham. Here we are, Althusser would say, in this lecture room, in the very heart of the ideology industry.

So how does ideology work? He would say, ideology is like the air we breathe. It is everywhere, so that we can't see it. It is buried deep in language and felt, at the deepest level to be true. Ideology tells us who we are: it names us into our very existence. How does this happen? He expressed it by a pun in French.

9.2 Ideology names us

In French when you call yourself something, appeler, je m'appelle Tom, you do two things: you name yourself, and you call out to yourself: it's the same word, appeler. So when someone calls out to me in the corridor, Tom, in French they are simultaneously calling me, appeler, and naming me, appeler; and it has an electric effect. You're walking down the corridor, you hear your name called out, you jump to attention. Althusser would say, at that instant you become yourself: I become "Tom." Now ideology works like but at a much deeper level: it names us invisibly, internally, at a level so deep that we can't see it or feel it or hear it, but nonetheless it is there, everywhere: it is our truth. It is the truth of us: it names us into existence and tells us, not just who we are, but that we are. Not appeler, but interpeller. Naming within. Outside that false interpellation, we have no existence. There is no 'I'. Said Althusser. And said Lacan.

10 Ways round language

10.1 Religion

This is all very bleak; however, it is not the end of the story. There are ways of dealing with this problem. One of them, which I will not discuss here, is religion. Many religions have somewhere in them the perception that language deceives us about the world, that the ego is an inadequate construct. There is in these religions a rich repertoire of ways of subverting the lies of commonsense experience, the oppressions of normality: in Sufism, in Buddhism, in parts of Hinduism, in Taoism--just to name a few. I mention this in order to make clear that this problem is not a new one: it was not invented by fashionable Frenchmen in the late 60's, but is as old as the oldest written records.

More directly relevant to us in the English Department and to this lecture are three methods: psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and, surprisingly, the study of literature.

10.2 Psychoanalysis

For Lacan, psychoanalysis was the way to deal with this problem. He thought that neurosis was a result of a disruption, a deception, in Language, and that language could be turned against itself, in order to heal. I will say more about this in the next lecture.

10.3 Deconstruction

This use of language in psychoanalysis we would call deconstructive. And deconstruction is not only a psychoanalytic tool.

Here is the good news: there is a peculiarity in language which allows us to escape from its complete domination by it. The peculiarity is this: although Language is almost all we have to think with, it so happens that we can turn it upon itself: it is possible to catch it in the act of deception. To interrogate it. It's not easy, because you have to find some way of getting outside what you normally take for granted, of escaping from common sense.

One way of getting outside language is to look at the way different cultures operate in language. Sometimes we can use this insight to look back on our own with new eyes: to see the tricks in action. And having seen the trick operating, we can ask why? Where did this come from? As I tried to show with the word "love."

You can take this further: if, for instance, we ask why English has this ambiguity about the word love, the answer is very interesting. It has a history. I think it probably derives from Plato, and came into English via Christianity. There's a good book about it: Arthur Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being; a classic work of literary theory. That would be a good place to start. And from this start you could go very deeply into the nature of our culture, the way we are made, the way we see things: the history of our preconceptions. Deconstruction is like opening a door into ourselves: behind that door, another door, and another, leading us deeper into knowledge.

Deconstruction is a method of interpretation: it looks beneath the surface, as does psychoanalysis; it refuses to be deceived. It takes the symptom and looks for the truth behind it, the truth that may be unconscious. It refuses to be tricked. It will not let language get away with fooling us. It looks profoundly into the way the world works in language, to clear away illusion, to come to a truth. It seeks to make us free.

10.4 Literature

But as well as looking into other languages and cultures, there is a more convenient area where we can look, one much closer at hand. We can look at literature. Literature, which is made up of language, embodies the peculiarity that language has, that it can be turned against itself in order to show it in action. We can use deconstruction to examine, you might say, the unconscious of literature.

Literature is made up of language, and therefore a trick; but it is also characteristic of literature that it pushes at the barriers of language to free itself from them, restlessly, constantly, always feeling and testing the constraints of words. You could say that Literature tries to deconstruct itself.

So literature presents us with language and its deceptions, captured and laid out for us to test and question, conveniently packaged in book form; but also it leads us itself towards a way out. Yes, literature is a trick; but the very trickiness of literature is what, you could say, does the trick. We as critics can deconstruct language through literature because that deconstruction is what literature itself does: by puns, jokes, tricks and distortions of language: all those literary devices. Metaphor, for instance, the essential device of literature, is exactly a way of tricking language into saying that which cannot be said.

This view suddenly transforms the study of literature. No longer a harmless activity, saying nice things about nice books: but central, combative, subversive, fascinating, and, above all, important. Very, very important.

Lacan Lecture 2:

1. Overview

Briefly, what I'm going to do in this lecture is this.

Lacan is known as the French Freud. This summarises rather well what he did, which is to translate Freud into French. It's a very very free translation.

At the centre of Freud are two things: eros, sexuality, and the story of Oedipus. So first I will remind you of Freud's story of eros and Oedipus, to set the scene; then I will show how Lacan radically reread this Freudian story, all the time vehemently asserting his complete fidelity to Freud. No wonder he got kicked out of the Pyschoanalytic Association.

Next I will then explain two main ways of using Lacan for reading literature, with recommended examples of the theory in action. Then I will show you a Lacanian analysis of the Ode to a Nightingale. I will then come back to the subject of deconstruction, and finally do a Lacanian analysis of a poem about a blackbird.

2. Oedipus

In order to begin with Lacan, we must begin with Freud. I will remind you of Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex, and this time go into it a little more deeply. Then I will give you Lacan's version of Freud's theory.

The Greek story of Oedipus is a tragedy: a man without knowing it kills his father and marries his mother. He is punished terribly for this double sin. Freud's theory is, you will remember, that what Oedipus did to his father and to his mother is what we all secretly desire to do.

Here is an image of Oedipus, who has just killed his father but not yet fallen in love with his mother, facing a monster with the head of a beautiful woman and the body of a lion. The monster asks him a riddle, and will kill him if he gets the wrong answer. This is for Freud and for Lacan the essential metaphor for psychoanalysis.

So. Here is Freud's view of Eros and Oedipus.

3. Freud

3.1 Freud and Eros

The child is borne into desire. For Freud, you remember, sexual desire is primary: eros is the motivating factor that makes the whole psychic machinery work. At the beginning of life, in the oral stage, the child is in a state of sexual bliss: at the mother's breast, receiving nourishment, in a sexual relationship not only with his mother but, he thinks, with the whole world. There is a primary at-one-ness with the universe, it's sometimes called the oceanic feeling, that is connected with nourishment and connected with sex.

3.2 Freud and Oedipus

As he grows older, he is weaned away from that bliss. Eventually he enters into what Freud calls the genital stage: he becomes aware of his own penis. He becomes aware too, perhaps in the bath with his sister, that little girls don't have penises. He concludes, unlikely as it may seem, that she has been castrated. By Daddy. This is because, in his secret heart, what he wants to do is to get back into that primal blissful state with the mother, that sexual union. But he can't because by now he has noticed that he has a father, who prevents him: who is already in a sexual relationship with the mother, who stands in between him and his desire, threateningly. The father, for Freud, is one who says 'no': this 'no' enters deeply into the mind of the child and becomes his super-ego: roughly, his conscience.

The 'no' is like a knife, cutting him off from his mother; and he fears that if ever his guilty desires become known, a real knife will castrate him. So he wishes to sleep with his mother, but can't, and because he can't he wishes to kill his father. This is his deepest, most guilty wish, the wish that cannot be expressed. This guilty wish is repressed deep inside us, and since it is repressed, it governs our actions, surfacing in displaced or symbolic forms throughout our lives. This is the Oedipus complex. 'Complex', incidentally, simply means 'pattern'. A recurrent pattern of behaviour.

Now, you'll notice that the child is male. There is a very obvious gap in this story: the gap is female. Don't ask me what female version of Oedipus little girls are supposed to go through: I don't know. Freud (who was maybe the clearest, the most brilliantly lucid, of all the great theorists) is not clear about this.

So many people find two problems with this story. One is that it is sexist: male centred. The other is that it is sexual: as if the secret centre of all we are is our sexuality, and only that. In rereading Freud's Oedipus story, Lacan addresses, and, many would say, solves those two problems.

4. Lacan and Desire

OK: now for Lacan. First, his version of Eros: desire. In French, désir.

For Lacan as for Freud, the child is born into desire. Desire, désir, is what makes the psychic machine work. But for Lacan this desire is more than sexual, though it is also sexual. To explain that I need to explain one of Lacan's key concepts: the real, la réelle.

4.1 We cannot experience the world directly.

The crucial point is this: we cannot experience the world directly. All we can experience is a mental event. I touch the table, or see a friend, and think I am experiencing the table or the friend directly. This is not true. I see or feel some phenomena, and interpret them, and what I experience is the interpretation: friend, table. That is the only way I can know the world. I can't get behind the interpretation to experience the world direct, raw, unmediated.

The interpretations, that are all I can know of the world, are made up of two things: language, and images that I have previously experienced: previous interpretations. They are not real. They are mental events.

Here I am in a lecture room, and I am perceiving a lecture room, but that's an interpretation. My cat would not perceive a lecture room, if she were here now. Neither would a Martian or a tribal man plucked from the Amazon rainforest. I know it's a lecture room because I recognise it, and I do this by comparing it with a database of images inside my head. The second step is to define it, and I can do this because I have a collection of definitions, in fact a kind of dictionary, also inside my head. This dictionary is called language. These two things, images and language, make up all of my experience of everything. Experience = images + language.

4.2 Experience = images + language.

I experience language as being more or less controlled and precise, and the images as being rather dreamy: undefined. I experience language as somehow secondary, artificial, and the images as somehow primary, or basic.

Both language and images, says Lacan, are false. All these mental events that I perceive are approximations, makeshifts. Remember how inadequate language is for describing the world? If you compare the words 'lecture room' -- hear them, just the words, 'lecture room' -- with what seems to be going on here, the difference is pathetic. And the database of images that I have with which I compare this image-experience with others feels very shadowy and shifting. Both, says Lacan, are not real. They are false.

4.3 the real

We cannot perceive raw reality. Whatever raw reality is like, and I cannot possibly imagine what it might be like, I know it doesn't have lecture rooms in it. Lacan calls this raw reality 'la réelle': the real.

Now, Lacan says that though we cannot know the real, la réelle, in any way whatsoever, we have an obscure sense of it, of its plenitude, its incredible fullness and richness. We want it.

Desire, for Lacan, comes out of the imbalance between what we perceive, language and images, and what actually is: la réelle. This enormous discrepancy is the primary fact of our mental life, like a constant imbalance or vertigo. This, not eros, not sexual desire, is the main thing that motivates everything, for Lacan.

It is impossible to satisfy this desire, because we cannot know what we want. The real is utterly unknowable. Everything gets in the way: all the mental events that make up our false view of the world. We can't even really long for what we long for; we are fundamentally confused.

So this longing is displaced: we long for everything else instead. Sex and food and consumer objects, trying to fill the void of desire. But we are not satisfied by any of these things, because as soon as the desire is fulfilled it vanishes, becomes, strangely, unsatisfactory: no, I think, that's not it, that's not what I wanted. Soon another desire arises: maybe that's it, maybe, maybe, and so I long for that instead. Until it too is satiated and falls away. And so on for ever.

Of course if we could somehow actually encounter the real, without any conceptualisation coming in between, it might be blissful, or it might be actually terrifying. It would be like meeting God, face to face.

So this is how Lacan translates Freud into French: the sexual eros becomes the more abstract désir.

How then does he translate Oedipus? In Freud, it's a conflict, located in sexuality, between mother and father. In Lacan, it is a conflict, located in désir, between the two things that we use to make up the world: images (associated with the mother) and language (associated with the father). And the cause of the conflict is the fact that we are born too soon.

5. Lacan and Oedipus: the child.

5.1 we are born too soon

It is generally admitted that human beings come into the world too early. Some say it's because of our big brains. Big brains need big heads, and if we stayed in the womb any longer these big heads would, like Alice, grow too big, and wouldn't be able to get down the birth canal. We are all prematurely born: most animals emerge from the womb with considerable functionality, able to feed, to walk, to be independent to some degree of their mothers. Humans emerge helpless, completely dependent on their mothers: as if, for months after birth, they are still in the womb, still part of the mother's body.

5.2 the child has no categories

In the beginning, the child (of either sex: note this) has no language, and no images, and so knows no concepts or distinctions. There is no difference felt between child and environment, and in particular between the child and the source of nourishment, the bottle or the breast. The world has no categories for the young child: it is not divided. It is as if the baby is still in the womb. The sense of self in the child is absolutely synonymous with and completely identified with his or her universe.

We adults are not like that: we all have a very clear and constantly maintained distinction between the sense of "I" and the rest of the world. The world begins immediately at the outside of our skin, and goes on for ever, containing millions upon millions of separate things, that are none of them us. Cats and cows and chairs and cheese and all those other myriad things the world is so full of. For the child, the world is full of only one thing; there is no boundary at the skin. The self and the others are one.

This experience, for the child, resembles the richness of the real. It is not the same, but it is like it, and therefore satisfying.

But simultaneously there are phenomena that keep happening that contradict this, because the child isn't in fact in the womb: it is aware of unpleasure, and pleasure: of pain and hunger and the food not being there. Strange objects move independently, noises, faces, but we can't yet call them faces, or objects, or noises, because we have no language, and we can't identify them, because we have no images to compare them with: so none of this can be felt as separate from the self. (Lacan was not aware of the work on inherited images that I talked about in the Dreams lectures). To make this separation, the first thing that we have to do is to make a distinction between the self and the world: to aquire a self-image. Lacan summarises the process in a symbolic event: the mirror phase, le stade du miroir.

6. Lacan and Oedipus: the mother

6.1 The mirror phase / le stade du miroir

If you show a baby a mirror--the baby has to be about six months old--it will usually do two things, both strange. No other animal does either of these things. One is, it will recognise that the image presented is an image of itself. It will not, like a cat does, think there is another animal there: it will know that the mirror shows the self. Secondly, it will laugh. There is pleasure in this realisation, this revelation of the self.

Lacan says that when the child sees him or herself in the mirror, that's me, the child thinks; that is this. So 'me' is at once here, safely inside the skin, as always, and also there, outside the skin, in the glass reflection. And there 'me' is seen as others see it: is objectified. With this comes the realisation that there is an inside and outside, that 'I' exist objectively to others; 'I' am now only another being, and no longer everything.

6.2 je est un autre

With that comes another realisation: that is what I'm like. I now have a way of imagining myself, an image to live by: an image of me. This is the primary image, against which I can compare all other images I see, that are either me nor not me. I am about to build up my image stock, my kit for making sense of the world. I am entering into the world of images. Lacan calls this the imaginary world: the imaginaire.

6.3 the imaginary / l'imaginaire

The most important images are those that I use to make up my self-image. This self-image is false. It is made up of things that are not me. An image, not a reality. This self-image builds in the child's mind, seems more and more real, as the child sees more and more images: it sees other children, pictures, adults, glimpses of parts of its own body (now identified as 'mine', part of 'me'), and so it builds up a self-image out of these broken fragments. These alien entities.

It makes a sort of 'me' out of that which is not me. Frankenstein, who made a badly made monster out of the parts of corpses, who in trying to create a human created precisely the opposite, did what the child does. Lacan, always a sucker for puns, calls this new being, that the child thinks is self, an hommelette: a little man, made out of broken eggs.

6.4 the hommelette

So the hommelette is made out of fragmentary images, of bits and pieces. But there is another essential ingredient of the hommelette: the motivating force, désir.

Remember, the world we are born into is full of desire, of unsatisfiable desire. When we are born we are surrounded by this desire, which was always already there. People expect things of us, want things of us, try to make us what we are not. Surrounded by this desire, we make ourselves out of the expectations of others. Out of what others want us to be.

Which others? Well, at this stage, the mother. She, like all beings, is full of desire, but her desire is misplaced from its real object, like all desire, and finds expression in longing for this and that, and this and that. So a major component of the landscape into which we are born is the mother's desire, le désir de la mere. But the child cannot satisfy that desire, because nothing can satisfy it. And we desire from her: we desire the oneness that the child had at the breast, in the womb; but this too is not it, not the real, and so cannot be satisfied.

This botched concept of self, this monster, the hommelette, made of illusion and desire, surrounds the child like a hard skin: it is me, the child feels: it protects me, it keeps me safe. But actually it is not me at all, but a constriction of me, a hard awkward clumsy approximation, made up of what my mother wants of me, of tangled half-understood images and suppositions. It prevents me from being free and happy.

So for Lacan the primary environment of the child, as it enters into the imaginaire, the world of images, is the mother's desire: le désir de la mère.

6.5 the desire of/for the mother / le désir de la mère

This seems a long way from Freud. But what Lacan does, remember, is to translate Freud into French. In French le désir de la mère is ambiguous: it means both the mother's desire, and the desire for the mother. And, as in English, desire can mean sexual desire, or a more general want.

So Freud's sexual desire by the child for the mother, a desire to return to the bliss at the breast, which for Freud is a sexual act as literal as the incestuous love of Oedipus for his mother/wife, is located by Lacan in a more general landscape of loss and desire. The mother's unfulfillable desire for the child, and the child's unfulfillable desire for the mother. All loosely located in the dreamy unreliable landscape of the imaginaire. There they are, the child and the mother, in union, joined at the breast, negotiating desire, dreaming together.

7. Lacan and Oedipus: the father

7.1 the symbolic

This mutual desire is disrupted, as in Freud, by the father. As in Freud, there is a castration. But in French. Le désir de la mère is suppressed by what Lacan calls le nom du père, the name of the father, and the new landscape is not the imaginary, but the symbolic: la symbolique. The child enters into language. I will explain.

It is language, remember, that names the world into existence, that creates all the categories by which we separate the world into manageable chunks: cats and cows and chairs and cheese and so on and on. When we enter this hard masculine world of language the dreamy world of the mother, l'imaginaire, is suppressed. So you can say there are three layers: at the bottom, deeply and unutterably suppressed, is desire itself: desire for the real. On top of that is l'imaginaire, and le désir de la mère. And on top of that, suppressing it, is language, the voice of the father: la symbolique.

Once the child has acquired language and realised the multiplicity of things then the original sense of oneness with the mother, and the even deeper desire for the real, is lost. No, not exactly lost: they become unconscious, because they are outside language. Once we begin to think in language, it's hard to imagine what it is not to have it: it is unspeakable. It is unconscious. So we have not only lost something wonderful, something important, but also we don't know, we can't possibly know, what it is that we have lost, because we can't express it in language, because it is not in language: it is, exactly that which language is not. L'imaginaire can surface in dreams and fictions, but desire itself, desire for the real, is deeply deeply hidden.

7.2 le nom du père

So this is how Oedipus gets translated into French. Lacan imagines that language comes with the child's increasing awareness of the father, which cuts him or her off from dreamy bliss. Specifically it is the voice of the father, who becomes the conscience: who says 'no'. For Lacan the entry into language, the entry into separateness, that splits up the world and deprives us forever, is a castration, a cut that separates, and it is associated with the father. He says this in a pun: it is le nom du père.

This is twice a pun. Once, blasphemously, on the end of the Lord's prayer (in the name of the father); twice, in that the word 'nom' in French, meaning name, is identical in sound with the word 'non', meaning 'no'. So in le nom du père you have all those meanings: the god-like father names the world by saying no. it is the non du père that suppresses the désir de la mere, puts it into the unconscious: we are cut off from it, for ever.

With language we enter into a new world: the left brain, organised, articulated world of language: the symbolique. We as it were turn towards the father. This says Lacan, is a perversion, a père-version.

And here, for Lacan, is the root of suffering. In each of us there is an absence that we cannot, by definition, think about, because we cannot name it. At the moment of the creation of the ego, the self, an absence is created. It is an absence as big as everything, because it is caused by the removal of a sense of unity with everything. But that removal created 'me', gave birth to my sense of self, so 'I' can't get back to it, because to do so 'I' would cease to exist. And so what I want, I can't have. What I do is to try and fill this gap up with things, with all of the things that I might think I am hungry for, like food and toys and books and cars and houses and computers, and all the other goods, that seem so good, in anticipation, but, when attained, seem to do no good at all, because the absence is not filled.

8. Truth and consequences

So let me now point out some consequences of this Lacanian map of the world, so oddly similar to Freud, and yet so competely different.

First, sex is decentered from the centre of all things. It is a deeper desire, which includes all desire, that drives us on.

Second, the hero of the Oedipus story is no longer a little boy. It is not a gendered story.

Thirdly, more than this, one of the ways you can read Lacan's reading of Oedipus is to say that it is a critique of patriarchy. Lacan was deeply suspicious of repressive masculine authority, of any way of using language to tie down knowledge, to repress freedom. He called it père-version, remember. He also called it le discours de l'université.

Men traditionally in this culture see women as illogical, dreamy; women see men as excessively rational, oppressive. Lacan says that both these ways of being, the symbolique and the imaginaire, are there in all of us; and he appears to value the imaginaire over the symbolique.

So you could say that Lacan's translation of Freud into French has the effect of answering the two main criticisms of Freud: his sexualism, and his sexism.

9 Two ways to use Lacan

So: having negotiated all that, how on earth can we apply it to literary criticism?

As I see it, there are two ways. You can try to imitate Lacan, or you can try to use Lacan. The first of these, I will call the method of free association; the second, I will call the method of hidden history.

9.1 Free association

"Take a leaf out of my book: don't imitate me"

If you want to take the first course, you should read this article, by Maud Ellmann, on Chaucer's The Book of the Duchess, entitled "Blanche". This completely subverts the discourse of the University, which is relegated to ironic footnotes: it is a poem, an elegant, somewhat imaginary, mediation on woman. The main point of her essay, as I read it, is the beauty of its own writing: it is literary criticism, not as interpretation, but as another work of art: it is playful, artful, beautiful. It is a game.

It's very difficult to do that game in this lecture, because I am very much speaking with the discourse of rationalism (the discourse of the university) here. If you want to see what it's like, read the article.

The other method, the method of hidden history, is more amenable to the tone of voice I'm using now. It is a way of using literature to find out about ourselves.

9.2 hidden history

When the patient comes to see the analyst, in order to help his or her suffering the analyst takes nothing said for granted. Everything is read against the grain, in opposition to the voice of the conscious mind. That is because the conscious mind is concealing the truth that causes the suffering.

Similarly no historian or economist or political scientist will take the word of the ruling class in any society, the official propaganda that disguises the truth: they will attempt to read beneath that, to get at the concealed truth. In its most general form, this method of hidden history is like that: you read the text to get at the secret behind it, its unconscious contents, revealed in gaps or absences or slips or, as it were, the dreams of the text. To find out what the text doesn't want you to know. This method, which I began to describe to you in the last lecture, is called deconstruction.

Now, you can do this in more specifically psychoanalytic terms: you can look in the text for a history of the way we see the world. One of the main exponents of this method is Catherine Belsey, and if you wish to learn it, a good place to start, in my view, is in her article, "The romantic construction of the unconscious".

In it she says this: that what Lacan tells us is that the self is a construct: it is, you might say, part of ideology. It is not natural or outside history or culture.

She says that since this 'self' is cultural, it can be studied, and the best place to study it is in literature: if it has a history, then that history is textual, because literary texts are, as Freud knew, in a powerful way like the dreams of the culture: they can be read, and interpreted. So in this article she offers a reading of some of the most dreamlike works of literature, the poems of the romantic poets. Her reading of these is Lacanian, in that she sees them as a dialogue between the imaginaire and the symbolique. How? Well, it is better that you should read the article and find out; but what I will do is to attempt a reading of The Ode to a Nightingale using the same kind of analysis that Kate Belsey uses, to show you how it can be done.

10 The nightingale: desire and dissolution

Let us look at Keats's poem.

10. 1 the poem

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk.
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot
But being too happy in thy happiness
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless
Singest of summer with full-throated ease.

Darkling I listen; and for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Called him soft names in many a musèd rhyme
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain-
To thy high requiem become a sod

.10.2 the interpretation

This poem, as FR Leavis was the first to point out in a famous essay, has two movements. One is towards a fantastic world, of mythology, sensory pleasure, music, sensation, ecstasy. The geography of this world is hard to catch, because it is not of this world; the nightingale has no physical location and doesn't behave much like a bird because the whole of this part of the poem has exactly that categorylessness, that feeling of outside language, that we now know to associate with the Lacanian imaginaire; longed for, not describable, inexact, infinitely seductive, with the enormous power of something remembered and yet not remembered: something repressed. It is the unconscious.

Beneath this longing there is a deeper longing, a climactic desire, but one that loses itself instantly in paradox. Now more than ever seems it rich to ... die. This deeper longing has a catch: the 'I' that wants it, remember, cannot possibly get back to it, because it can only exist when 'I' do not, since it is beyond categories, and 'I' is a category. This would be a death, but so seductive, to cease, no more longing, no pain, a pouring forth of self into plenitude just like the nightingale's pouring forth of self into song. But at the end of the last stanza quoted the paradox hits, and so does realism: it is impossible, death is death.

That is a Lacanian reading of the Ode to a Nightingale.

This method of reading, as I said, is most commonly known as deconstruction.

11 deconstruction again

What I have just shown you is Lacanian deconstruction; there are others, and there is no time to go into all of that here. I hope you have got from this a beginning, so that if you see the word deconstruction in some literary criticism you will know what it means and have some idea how to do it.

It means to look behind the text, and against the grain of the text. You can use Althusser, or Lacan, as in the above examples; if you look at my Lacan reading list you will find many more ways of doing it.

If you follow this path, there is a benefit. One of the things that it does, is that it gives great meaning to being in an English Department. I will explain.

Most students choose to study literature because they like it, and this is very nice. I like it too. But they find that they are asked to read long difficult books that they may not like. George Eliot, for instance. If their only motivation is in liking literature, and they are asked to read something they don't like, then that feeling of vertigo, of contradiction, sets in. It saps their motivation, and they waste this precious three years, and regret it, very very much, after the three years is over. Whereas this way of reading has this to say for it is this: it makes the reading of English in the English Department a very important activity; it restores to it some of the centrality that it had in the golden days of the founding fathers of literary studies: Eliot, Leavis, IA Richards, William Empson.

What it does is to put the full meaning of the word 'criticism' back into literary criticism. If those founding fathers knew that the main method of teaching of literary studies in schools and often in Universities is to teach students to appreciate texts selected as good by their elders and betters, they would rotate in their honoured graves: they did not name the subject literary appreciation, they called it literary criticism, and they meant what they said.

Of course, deconstruction isn't easy. It is often very difficult. A saying from George Eliot comes to mind: love does not make things easy: it makes you ch