"Instance of the Letter" and "Subversion of the Subject"

“Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious” summary: Lacan diagrams the linguistically structured relations of transference and desire that obtain between the divided subject, the Other, and the subject's unconscious.

“The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud” summary: Lacan articulates the linguistic structure of the unconscious based on the literality of the letter.

Passage for close-reading:

“Freud himself compared his discovery to the so-called Copernican revolution, emphasizing that what was at stake was once again the place man assigns himself at the center of a universe. Is the place that I occupy as subject of the signifier concentric or eccentric in relation to the place I occupy as subject of the signified? That is the question” (430).

In the first sentence of this passage, Lacan ventriloquizes Freud in thinking of the latter's discovery of the interpretability of dreams as revolution akin to the Copernican one, specifically along the register of space. The reflexive pronoun modifying the subject of the sentence suggests that this position requires bolstering, as does the ironically minimizing “so-called.” Both these moves serve to grant power to the named thinker who precedes Lacan, although the nominal valuation granted by the proper adjective, the worldview that bears Copernicus's name is undermined by the disavowal of the hypenated adverb. The reflexive pronoun at the beginning serves rather to support Freud's eminence, in that even the great Freud himself, perhaps in an accession of humility, was aware of the world-altering potential of his own theories.

The use of the word “discovery” to describe Freud's thought, rather than perhaps “theory” or “practice” relates it to the supposedly harder science of the astronomy that Copernicus practiced, while granting primacy to the latter theory, as once again refining and replacing the position of man in his own worldview, much like Copernicus himself overturned the earlier Ptolemaic structuring systems. Yet the sarcastic tone granted by “so-called” can be partly accounted for by the fact that elsewhere in the seminar, Lacan reminds readers that Copernicus did not specifically and purposefully rearrange man's philosophy by subverting the inside-outside dialectic of a earth-centered solar system through an unadulterated zeal for mathematical accuracy. Rather, he retained the center-periphery model with a new central locus in the sun, simultaneously maintaining the centrality of certain sanctioned religious doctrines through a complex mathematical process of epicycles and spheres, effectively retaining the physically superfluous shell while upending its relation to the center.

In the second clause of the sentence, away from the imputations of the so-called, the words “revolution,” “place” and “center” further speak to this science of space and placement. Specifically, the word “revolution,” although used in a historical sense as repudiation of accepted thought or practice, retains its physical connotations by virtue of its close proximity to Copernicus’s name and thoughts of his epicycles. In conjunction with revolution's implied stately motion, regular, predictable and exact, “place” and “center” serve as stationary endpoints, two foci of an ellipse which includes Copernicus' doubtful revolution at one end, and the more promising psychoanalytic one, of which Freud himself recognized the transformative power, at the other.

The mathematical precision of this place is both undermined and expanded upon with the second reflexive of the sentence: “the place man assigns himself at the center of a universe.” This place, despite its seeming solidarity as a synonym for point or focus within the Copernican metaphor, is destabilized by Freud's demand that man place it for himself, situate it anew in light of Freud's revolution. Similarly, the unassuming article of “center of a universe” unsettles the mathematical and linguistic precepts on which an understanding of the universe is built, beginning with its singularity. If man's place in the center of the universe was in flux under Copernicus's revolution, with Freud's man's place within a universe, indefinite and amorphous, is at stake: a universe that, despite its mathematical structure, is always already capable of slippages between and among places.

The second half of the passage is composed of two sentences, the latter apparently a passive assertion of the other's value. The first, by its syntax, marks a shift from Lacan asserting the primacy of Freud's thought for both revealing the structure of the unconscious and unsettling the relation between this and conscious life and language. Returning to the notion of place, Lacan queries what shape this position possesses. As a question, the sentence seems to function as a pedagogical tool, but it is one that goes both ways. The speaker “I”, who is not the subject of the sentence but the object of a restrictive adverbial clause, can be seen to be clarifying their own position within this new Freudian science of position, a desire to solidify his own understanding of relationality in line with the quoted master. Yet this desire for knowledge is already a desire that cannot be fulfilled completely, because the place sought is, although structured, always already shifting, self-determined, and contingent.

Furthermore, by raising the question, the speaker asserts that these questions about the position of the subject in relation to the chain of signifiers, while undecidable, is the question to raise specifically due to this fundamental undecidability. After raising the question, Lacan neglects to begin to answer it, rather frustrating remarking that the question is the one to be pursued, like a teacher applauding a student's perspicacious remark while denying that same student the satisfaction of their curious desires. Furthermore, the form of the assertion, “That is the question” echoes Hamlet's most famous soliloquy which in turn, in its ambiguity between being and thinking, echoes Descartes cogito, which Lacan deconstructs and metaphorizes further down on this same page. Here, the slippage of signifiers is exemplified in the small, seemingly nerveless assertion of a question's prominence. Although Lacan frustrates our desire to settle the place of the subject as concentric or eccentric, the periphery and center structure remain intact, although fluid. The unconscious is structured like a language, the letters of which interact like those in mathematical equations as much as those in poetry. Whether that relation is concentric or eccentric is, perhaps, another question.