The other Side of Desire: Lacan's Theory of the Registers

4. Lacanian Epistemology

Lacanian psychoanalysis emphasizes language as the medium of subjectivity ; consequently, Lacan honors Saussure’s observation that “the mechanism of a language turns entirely on identities and differences” (107). Lacan’s unique insight is that he sees identity and difference as two distinct processes, each of which functions as a “register” unto itself. The logic of the image and of the imaginary register is fusional. The logic of the signifier and of the symbolic register is differential. These processes and their related registers remain distinct in Lacan’s writings, even though each register has points of structural analogy to the other. While duality is foundational in the symbolic register, duality in the imaginary defines the face-to-face immediacy of mirroring interaction whose ultimate goal is to achieve likeness—whether through fusion and synthesis or through Hegelian conquest and domination. Triplicity with its orthodox psychoanalytic incarnation in the Oedipal triangle defines symbolic identity, but at the moment the subject becomes self-interpreting, the self talks to itself about itself in a characteristically imaginary way. Formally, one register echoes the other. As a result, the registers describe identity and difference as complex processes, each of which can vary within itself while remaining distinct from the other. When Lacan foregrounds desire and its interpretation in his later Seminars, the registers remain as a rich background resource for analytic reading. The registers define the forms, levels, and requirements of interpretability ; desire provides the occasion. Before we explore the hermeneutics of desire—for interpretability is desire’s raison d’être in 71 4 Lacanian Epistemology Lacanian theory—we will return to the questions left dangling in the Symposium, the undecided questions of the binary, of identification, and of code. These questions lie within the domain of the Lacanian registers as desire’s other side because they pose issues concerning the relation of structure to process. The registers inform a Lacanian epistemology the more so because the function of truth positions itself within the registers. Lacan is not content to have a theory of markers alone—whether signifiers or images. Nor is he content to stop with the process of identification . Lacan pushes the structural system, shot through with gaps, overlaps , and incongruities as it is, to the point where the system’s disjunctions themselves determine interpretation. Lacan’s epistemology of the registers seeks to position truth vis-à-vis the meaning-making process. At the beginning of his Seminars on the registers, Lacan claims that Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams “reintroduced ” meaning to an age of science in a time obsessed with certainty . In interpreting a dream, “one is always up to one’s neck in meaning ” (Sem I 1). Meaning leads to a sort of metasubjectivity in which the subjectivity of the subject rather than the subject itself is at issue. In the process of meaning-making, the subject shows itself as a subject. The gap between the subject and its center of accrued, habitual, ego-invested understandings allows for a meaning that comes from beyond imaginary mastery. “What is the meaning of meaning? Meaning is the fact that the human being isn’t master of this primordial, primitive language. He has been thrown into it, committed, caught up in its gears” (Sem II 307). Sounding at least as Heideggerian as Freudian at this moment, Lacan reveals the poststructuralism implicit in even his most structural moments. The subject does not make meaning; the subject is surprised by the meanings it has made. Because Lacan’s structure is both many layered and differentiated, it embraces positions that in and of themselves appear contradictory. Lacan is foundational and antifoundational, essential and constructionist by turns—but never ambiguously so. For Lacan, there are no binary answers to tertiary questions, no foundational answers to complex questions . Identification is not a substitute for interpretation—though in everyday life, and especially in neurosis, this is precisely the case. In fact, taking things personally (the everyday form of substituting identification for interpretation) is such a commonplace that this loss of interpretive distance is familiar to us all. Similarly, the reductive move from symbolic to imaginary is common: when subjects cease to respect the Law’s posiThe other Side of Desire 72 tional definitions, they regress to Hegelian power struggles. Likewise, the loss of truth is commonplace since to refuse the leap into Truth’s contingencies is to fall into imaginary reiteration of received constructions , constructions in which the ego...