Jacques Lacan & Elizabeth Bishop
Displaced Identities and Love
Outline
Questions: about Identity
Three Stages of Psychic Development;
Questions: about gender and Lacan’s views
of language
Gender Difference, Desire, and Love
Questions: about Lacan’s views of love
E. Bishop’s Poetics of Displacement
Next week
Split Identity
1.
Identity is split; desire out of a lack.
(split: e.g. self and mirror image; self and
(m)other)
2. Against Cartesianism (rational
consciousness) and humanism (free will).
–
–
–
“Unconscious is the language of the Other.”
Language speaks us.
I think where I am not. (Ego alienated, not the
center of one’s identity. Ideal ego ego ideal)
Questions
1. Do you agree that our identity is
fragmentary and why? Which of the
following do you agree with? "I think,
therefore, I am," "Where I think, there I
am," or "I think where I am not,
therefore I am where I do not think."
2. What are the three phases of psychic
development according to Lacan?
3. What is mirror stage? Why is it an
important stage in child development?
The orders of human existence:
the Imaginary, the Symbolic & the Real
(chap 3: 156-58)
The Real – ‘pure plenitude’ (no subjectobject distinction); cannot be talked about.
The imaginary –(mis)recongnition of one’s
self through an external image; illusory
unity with the mother  split from her.
The Symbolic – entry into language 
split in the speaking self and spoken “I”
The orders of human existence:
the Imaginary, the Symbolic & the Real
The Real – oneness and jouissance
(undifferentiated unity of the mother,
objects of love, or objet a).
The imaginary (the mirror stage)
–two together and then separate (Baby
and the Mother)
The Symbolic – three: the Father, the
(M)other, and Self
The Mirror Stage
The baby (with its fragmentary sense of
self) identifies with an external image (of
the body in the mirror or through the
mother or primary caregiver)  have a
sense of self (ideal ego).
Split: 1) experiences fragmentation but
sees wholeness; 2) sees loss in the
mirror image
Mirror & Identity: Some examples
Vanity: In classical paintings & fairy tales
(actually it implies patriarchy’s repression of
female subjectivity)
e.g. Venus at
her Mirror
by VELÁZQUEZ, Diego Rodriguez
de Silva y (b. 1599, Sevilla, d. 1660,
Madrid)
Uses of Mirror: Some examples
The return of the repressed: Alter ego (or double) as
one’s mirror image (or ideal ego).
e.g. 19th century women in Jane Eyre and Wide
Sargasso Sea (textbook chap 4 166-69); The Piano
Uses of Mirror: Some examples
The French Lieutenant’s Woman: Sarah’s self-protrait
Mirror image & double: extensions
We—esp. women-- are always conscious of our mirror
images, or looking for screen images for selfidentification.
Looking at the mirror: changing one’s ideal ego or
discovering one’s selves. (Piano/French Lieutenant’s Woman)
What’s projected on the mirror: The Other, either ideal
ego or the repressed.
– e.g. Jane/Antoinette; movie stars
– The magical and the “uncanny”? “Mirror, Mirror on the wall”
 psychological roots: the strangest // the most
familiar (homely, unhomely)
The Oedipal Stage
Second-stage split desire for the mother
sublimated into desire for the unattainable
“Other”
Recognize the Name of the Father. (textbook
chap 3: 157; chap 4: 164)
The self, the other, the Other
(Lacan’s Schema L)
Id
(man in the realm of ‘the Real’)
2. Interactions
of different
forces in the
psyche
Ego
the other
(e.g. mother,mirror image)
1. From The
Mirror Stage to
Oedipal stage
and after
the Other (Father)
the Other
The Other is embodied in the figure of the
symbolic father. Its major signifier: the phallus
. . . stands for language and the conventions
of social life organized under the category of
the law. (source)
(different from “the [feminine] Other”—which
is the feminine space on the margin or
outside of the Symbolic– Cf. chap. 4.)
II. Questions
1. Why is gender definition slippery?
2. What is phallus to Lacan? Why
is it “transcendental signifier”?
Do you agree our desire centers
around “being” or “having”
phallus?
3. Why is the unconscious
structured like language?
Slippery Chain of Signification
Meaning of a sign is not in it; rather, it resides in its
difference from the other signs. (textbook chap 3: 157)
Sign = signifier (form) + signified (concept; usu. more
than one)
To determine its meaning, we need to look at its context
(its differences from and relation to the signs around it).
Transcendental signifier: absolute sign whose
meaning(s) does not change in its context. (chap 3:
158; chap 4: 174)
Gender Difference
Lacan’s analogy of the restroom signs: (chap 4:
171-72)
1.
2.
Arbitrary meaning structure determine gender difference
Slippery chain
3. It speaks man
Phallus vs. Woman as Other
(chap 4: 172-73)
In the Symbolic Order, phallus = wholeness and
power; wholeness  hole, in fact, nobody owns
the phallus/power.
Women as Lack, or ‘Other’ which can move
outside of language and be in “jouissance.”
the unconscious-- structured like
language
supported by F’s view of repression (ideas repressed
as codes)
evidence from Freud’s language of Dream
(condensation, displacement, symbolization);
S/s :
/ = the barrier between the conscious and the
unconscious, which resists being represented; / = the
phallus.
We are conditioned by the Symbolic order. 
movement of our desire –like metonymy. (Cf. chap
4: 172)
Insatiable Desire:
Need, Demand, and Desire (1)
(chap 3: 158)
A child develops from need to demand and desire.// its
movement from the Real, to the Imaginary and
Symbolic.
the Real
the Imaginary
The Symbolic
need
demand
desire
Need – requirements for brutal survival.
(biological need)  absence of the mother  the baby’s
social, imaginary and linguistic functions evolve.
Effects of the three orders:
Need, Demand, and Desire (2)
Demand: need formulated in language.
-- Demand has two objects: one spoken, the other
unspoken.
-- verbalization of imaginary subject-object, self-other
relations. 66 (Grosz pp. 59 - 67)
Desire: primally repressed wishes [for the Mother]
reappear in and as unconscious desire.
-- insatiable; characterized by lack (of object). (Grosz
pp. 59 - 67)
Desire: expressed as
Demand of Different Objects
The connection of the desired object and the
demanded: metonymic connection = whole and
parts, or continguity (鄰近).
(-) : maintenance of the bar
Questions III
1. Do you agree with Lacan that both
our desire and demand (for love) are
insatiable? That there is always an
otherness to it which cannot be
represented in language?
Lacan’s Views of Love (1)
Why is there love? Because there is no sexual
relationship.
Love is the mirage that fills out the void of the
impossibility of the relationship between the two sexes.
Beyond the fascination with the image of its object, love
aims at the kernel of the real, at what is in the object
more than the object itself, at objet petit a.
Lacan’s Views of Love (2)
For Lacan, love’s sublime moment occurs when the
beloved enacts the metaphor of love, when he
substitutes his position of the lover for that of the
beloved object and starts to act in the same way the
lover has so far acted. . . .it occurs when the beloved
returns love by giving what he does not have.
Beloved, realizing the real object-cause of the other’s
love does not reside in me  beloved object
(metonymy; what he does not have; lack)  can only
return “love” (Bozovic 69; 77)
Elizabeth Bishop
Displacement in Life:
born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1911;
Spent her childhood in Nova Scotia with her
grandparents, after her father was dead, and her
mother hospitalized;
Attended two boarding schools in MA; graduated from
Vassar College in NY in 1934 (where she met Marianne
Moore)
Bishop traveled extensively in Europe and lived in New
York, Key West, Florida, and, for sixteen years, in Brazil
Elizabeth Bishop: Style
Highly crafted
Displacement as a major theme.
e.g. “One Art” and “Sestina” objectifying her losses
and turn them into recognizable aesthetic forms
(repetition, sestina, metaphor and metonymy). 
aestheticization or distanciation as a way of
displacement. This displacement is actively done, but
not permanent.
e.g. the scream “Flick the lighting on top of the church
steeple with your fingernail and you will hear it.”
Cf. textbook (pp. 85 - )
Sestina
Sestina: six elements changing
positions—house, grandmother,
child, stove, almanac, tears.
Metaphoric/metonymic chains
grandma’s: tears  equinoctial tears
 almanac  tea as dark brown
tears; [moons fall like tears] 
sings to the stove
Child’s: teakettle’s small tears  rigid
house, a man with buttons like tears
 [moons fall like tears] 
inscrutable house
Red Stove and Flowers
The inscription: May the Future's Happy
Hours /Bring you Beans & Rice &
Flowers / April 27th, 1955 / Elizabeth.
“In the Waiting Room”
What kind of identity is constructed by this a six-yearold girl?
How does she establish her identity?
What do the images of volcano and African natives,
as well as all the other images on National
Geographic mean to her?
How about the adults around her? And her aunt?
What is the “big black wave” she is sliding beneath?
“In the Waiting Room”
1.
2.
Thesis: the poem records the speaker’s uncertain entry into society
(and its symbolic order) as a one marginalized because of her
gender and her insecurity.
Not sure about her self; (too shy to stop; dare not look at herself,
cannot look higher); simultaneous self-identification and selfquestioning
Three-stage identification:
1.
2.
3.
internalize the aunt’s pains;
Unable to identify with “the phallus” or symbols of power—boots,
trousers, hands.
Objects of identification—her aunt and hanging breasts
“In the Waiting Room”
The self-construction is uncertain and retains traces of the
maternal Other
–
moving from the exterior to the interior, pushed back to the
exterior only to get back in;
Moving between social order and the black wave
Social order represented by
–
–
•
•
•
•
–
Clear demarcation of place and time;
clothing and boots,
Lamps and magazines;
Social hierarchy implied in the magazine;
The black wave
•
•
Unnamed;
Close to the darkness and coldness outside
“In the Waiting Room”
traces of the maternal Other displaced by the social and
historical world.
– Signs of the maternal:
• The aunt in the clinic; her voice heard (scream)—a
•
voice that could have got louder and worse
Family voice  black wave
– vs. what’s seen by Elizabeth and the date of the
first World War
Martin & Osa Johnson
movies of Africa, Borneo, and the South
Seas
Reference
Elizabeth Grosz Jacque Lacan: A Feminist
Introduction
The Other (with a big O)
http://www.mii.kurumeu.ac.jp/~leuers/Lacother.htm
Lacan and Love New Formations 23 (1994).
Next Week
"Tell-Tale Heart" and "Ligeia" by Edgar
Allan Poe
Re-read chaps 3 & 4 for an in-class quiz.