Reading Lacan

Reading Lacan summary: Gallop psychoanalytically close-reads seminars from Lacan's Ecrits, symptomatically accounting for the effects of her own transference occasioned by a feminist reading of these fragments situated between writing and speech.

Passage for close-reading: “The infant is thrown forward from 'insufficiency' to 'anticipation.' The image of the body in bits and pieces is fabricated retroactively from the mirror stage. It is only the anticipated 'orthopedic' form of its totality that can define—retroactively—the body as insufficient. Thus the impetus of the drama turns out to be so radically accelerated that the second term precedes the first—a precipitousness comparable to the speed of light” (86).

Here, Gallop is herself engaged in a close-reading of a passage from Lacan's seminar on the mirror stage. The quotation marks around “insufficiency,” “anticipation,” and “orthopedic” thereby serve the practical purpose of grounding her close-reading in specific evidence from the passage in question. Yet other words in Gallop's reading, notably “bits and pieces” and “drama” are not quoted although taken directly from Lacan's passage. This quotation mingled with transferential co-optation functions in opposition to the structure of the dashes. Each of the pairs of dashes sets off an appositive phrase, the first one an adverb modifying the verb defines, the second a dependent noun phrase. The first would be grammatically and semantically accurate if it were to precede the verb, but setting it off in dashes gives an insouciant, casual tone, as demonstrated in larger scale during the Prefastory section. If part of her project is to make apparent the ways her argument is structured as spoken from a subject who purposely leaves uncovered her inefficiencies to put pressure against patriarchal lingual practices, then the dashes open a space for allowing personal voice to structure argument, as opposed to the more formal and didactic adverb placement before the verb. The dashes before the final noun phrase serve the same purpose of the circuitous, personally invested writing pattern, and also makes the phrase stand out so that the end of the sentence becomes the most valuable and weighted segment, both thematically and rhythmically, especially with the prosody of the “speed of light” an elegant and fantastic image serving to both pull away from and universalize the image of the child gazing at themselves in the mirror.

Although the path of reader and response through this segment, from Gallop to Lacan to Freud eventually reaches back to Sophocles, here the plot and content of the play seems to slide under the form. Specifically, the mirror stage as Lacan writes it engages with the Greek play's temporal directionality, fated telos, and the presence of a protagonist whose fateful struggle is narrated or clarified (or sometimes obscured) by the everyman Chorus. The temporality of this childhood moment is then both unified and dispersed, in relation to the temporality of Greek plays. The actual moment of discovery, the mirror stage itself, is so instantaneous as to be retrogressive.

The light-speed rush of this drama's temporality is embedded in miniature in the word “precipitousness,”which denotes a sense of rush or unneccessary speed, but is related etymologically to “precipice” from the classical Latin praecipitium, to fall or jump from a great height. In the potential horror embedded in the vertical crash of the Latin, the word includes a suggestion of the Sublime, in the fear and awe that would be instantiated either when one approaches the edge of a yawning precipice, or, figuratively, in the child who embarks on his fabrication of the self towards the orthopedic totality if the mirror stage. The verticality and stationary nature of a precipice (which one approaches rather than the reverse, but which is terrifying in its very immobility, permanence, and perennial promise of potential demise) is opposed to the horizontality and set pace of light traveling. The complexity of the figure of light traveling ties together the extremes of verticality and horizontality along the register of compacted, explosive time, embedding both possibilities together within the vertical layering of the word's connotative etymology.

The figurative images in this passage serve this dualistic purpose of both uniting Gallop's voice with Lacan's, and pulling her argument away from his into the wider implications of her close-reading. In the first of these, the image of the body in bits and pieces seems to contradict the verb “fabricated.” Fabricated here is the language of quilting as well as text, purposefully related to Lacan's image of the button-tie that eventually fixes the sliding of signified under signifier without anchoring it to anything external, in the same way a quilting stitch fixes the filling of a quilt. Likewise, a text can also be fabricated, perhaps as fragments of writings held together, as in a biography reconstructed from letter fragments, or Lacan's own Ecrits reconstructed from seminars. Yet the verb also has connotations of falsity: a fabricated text might be a plagiarized one, or one that forces evidence to signify outcomes to which it isn't fixed.

In the second figuration, which Gallop shares with Lacan, the phrase “orthopedic form of its totality,” can refer to structural straightening, to a repair job, done from the outside in, on a body that is at least functionally in bits and pieces. The “ped” suffix embodies a homonymical split between the meanings “child” and “foot,” derived respectively from the Latin -paedo and -ped or -pedo. In this way, the adjective inextricably contains both referents, connecting along the notion that children learning to engage and command their bodies, as they learn to walk, wear orthopedic shoes. The use of the word “orthopedic,” then suggests that the child, perhaps because of their complex relationship to time (say more) requires the outside shaping influence of orthopedic devices to maintain the totality of their bodies, which is always already an anticipation and a nostalgia.

The suffix of the word “orthopedic” also contains a polysemy, in this case between grammatical and geometrical or architectural senses, meaning correct or right in the first sense, and straight, upright, or perpendicular in the second. By using a word that contains two divided roots to describe a pre-linguistic stage in child development embeds the notion of writing as both primary to and imbricated within speech. In this way, the orthopedic nature of the mirror stage's construction of an anticipatable self serve as a form of writing, constructing the text of the proper, correct self into which the child must project themselves in a sort of dramatic transference of identity. The child gazing at herself in the mirror, then, fits into her own narrative drama as an observer identifying with an external character, while also occupying the place of the protagonist, and thereby conflating the temporalities of writing and reading.