The subject is a signifier for another signifier. Language
is itself the medium of intersubjectivity. When I said the
subject is subject to the identifications (perhaps I made a
confusing or confused choice of word?) of the other, I was
referring not to imaginary identification but to what
Althusser calls interpellation--in which the subject
answers to the name it receives from the symbolic--eg "You
are walking in the hall on a campus,a voice behind you
calls "Professor" and you turn around, thereby accepting a
symbolic determination: an extension of the second
splitting, when the subject enters the symbolic pinned
under le nom du pere.
On Wed, 25 Oct 2000 10:35:17 +0200 shirley sharon-zisser
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Dear Professor Grossman,
>
> I'd be interested to know how you think intersubjectivity and
> identification are related to one another. Is not identification a function
> of the ego and the imaginary, not the symbolic register of
> intersubjectivity (at once the locus of the unconscious, desire, and what
> the early moderns would call rhetoric)?
>
> thanks,
>
> Dr. Shirley Sharon-Zisser
>
> At 09:24 23/10/00 -0400, you wrote:
> >
> >I don't think metaphor is quite right. Rather, Lacan is
> >being hyperliteral (or literally literal). Lacan and
> >Benveniste, who was in Lacan's early seminars, argue that
> >(inter)subjectivity is a function of language. >As for the future anterior
> tense, I think the point is that
> >when one speaks, one submits to discourse. The "I" one
> >speaks is returned to him/her as "you" and this "you" never
> >quite coincides with what we thought we meant (even when we
> >talk to ourselves), so we discover our meaning, who we are,
> >discursively, by accepting or rejecting the identifications
> >of our interlocutors. We discover ourselves in terms of the
> >future "meaning" of our words (and deeds).
> >
>
>
>
----------------------
Marshall Grossman
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