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April 1998, Week 3

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Subject:
From:
Louis Schwartz <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Film and TV Studies Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Mon, 20 Apr 1998 23:56:55 -0700
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Richard J. Leskosky asks:
I assume there must be an obvious answer to the following question since
the question itself seems so obvious to me, so I apologize in advance if
I'm being obtuse.  Since mirrors were not a part of human experience for
most of the course of human evolution, and since even today most infants in
the world do not have a chance to see themselves much or at all in mirrors,
what is the basis for  hypothesizing a "mirror stage" in infants?
 
Lacan's point isn't that an actual mirror is needed in the process of ego
formation, but that the sense of being, and the sense of being a unity,
comes to the infant from the outside .  In other words,  he condends that
the unity of the ego is first seen in a place where it (the ego) is not.
 
Which brings us to Petra Hanakovawho wrote:
To put it differently , Lacan refuses the Carthesian notion of the
subject, described by the infamous phrase "Cogito, ergo sum". Lacan would
probably shift it into "I'm being thought about by the other", or,
 rather "I'm being spoken by somebody else". Because subjectivity
does not exist in its own discourse, but in the discourses of the others.
 
Yes, Lacan  says that the I who thinks is not the I who is. See FOUR
FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS pp.  35-37 and especially pp.
203-230.
 
Louis Schwartz
 
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