The Ethical Subject of The God of Small Things

Lacan's well-known aphoristic formulations that "desire is the desire of the Other" and "the unconscious is the discourse of the Other" necessarily entail that the human subject is a social subject. Coming to life inevitably among language users, the subject is constructed in an identification with the signifiers of language—with letters, sounds, detached words and phrases—which become the elements of the unconscious, organized in a syntax of metaphor and metonymy. The child addresses demands to the mother or caretaker in signifiers and is addressed through signifiers which henceforth mark and determine desire. Entering into social exchange through language, desire pursues an object beyond whatever would fulfill the subject's immediate needs, its satisfaction never adequate to the love it wants. The unconscious is the discourse of the Other, because signifiers motivate and carry the subject's desire, forming associative networks and chains that remain the material of an unknown, that is, repressed, memory.

Language takes form by excluding the Thing, the lacking substance of complete enjoyment, or jouissance, whose absence is occupied by the mother as Other and covered over by the object of drive, the objet a, that is detached from the body. The subject identifies with the lacking object and thereby tries to attain an impossible jouissance. Desire is the desire of the Other, because the subject wants to be what the lacking Other desires; its desire is an answer to the question of the Other's desire. It is as a prohibition of that Other, the mother whose desire the subject questions and wants to answer to, that the Name of the Father is introduced, propelling the subject into language by forbidding the ultimate jouissance of incest. In the process of castration, the subject gives up the project of filling the Other's lack and takes on a sexual position as masculine or feminine, its jouissance reduced to limited pleasures. In the nuclear family of modern, Western cultures, castration operates through the Oedipus complex, and it will take different forms in different kinship systems, but castration or the incest prohibition must function in subject formation as the Law that is the prerequisite for any social being ruled by particular social laws.

The Freudian myth of the primal father makes legible the necessity of the incest prohibition at the origin of social organization, as does Lacan's assertion that the ten commandments derive from the incest prohibition and that the moral law is the law of language. Moustapha Safouan likewise argues that the law of language—in other words, the incest prohibition—is the basis for social relation. The regulation of reciprocity in marriage, made possible by the incest prohibition, is the law of exchange that governs speech. But the law that allows for social being cannot in itself determine what would be a more or less just society, nor can it predict what specific forms reciprocity will take in any given society, just that there be reciprocal exchange. So the language of any given culture, even while it derives from the universal prohibition, will carry the weight of its accumulated experience, customs, and forms of domination, marking its specificity in master signifiers that will consequently mark the desire and hence the unconscious material of the culture's subjects.

In an increasingly global economy, the master signifiers of the dominating international regime increasingly infiltrate local cultures and economies, introducing new ideals for identification and new forms of coercion and reinforcing established forms of injustice. The global master discourse, because it has the power to determine forms of social exchange universally, enters into unconscious processes of subjects everywhere to construct desire. It is the radical project of The God of Small Things, the 1997 novel of Arundhati Roy, to undermine the laws of social exchange, what the narrator in a repeated refrain calls "the Love Laws. . . . That lay down who should be loved...