Lacan’s style

In a web article on the “Cult of Lacan,” Richard Webster analyzes a paragraph from one of Lacan’s early works.

Referring to his “mirror” theory of childhood development (which, Webster shows, Lacan borrowed without much attribution from one Henri Wallon), Lacan writes, “This jubilant assumption of his specular image by the child at the infans stage, still sunk in his motor incapacity and nursing dependence, would seem to exhibit in an exemplary situation the symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in a primordial form, before it is objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as a subject.”

Webster explains how the rhetoric works:

“The passage, regarded by many Lacanians as a crucial formulation, is an interesting example of Lacan’s expository style. The dominant register is a scientific one; we are told that the ‘I’ is ‘precipitated’ as though what is being described is a chemical experiment. ‘Primordial form’ is a phrase with a similar scientific resonance although this time the field evoked is that of geology or evolutionary biology. In both cases something called the ‘I’ is referred to as though it were a solid object with physical properties which can be both transformed and described. ‘Symbolic matrix’ is another technical-sounding term which appears to refer to a particular semantic process or entity, though no clue is provided as to what this process or entity might be. When Lacan goes on to refer to the stage ‘before the “I” is objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other’ and to the power of language to restore to the I ‘its function as a subject’ he writes as if he were referring to a theory of human development which is widely understood and commonly held to be true. Yet, apart from the Hegelian or Marxist resonance of the word ‘dialectic,’ no information is offered as to what this theory might be or where any exposition of it might be found. The seeming confidence and omniscience of Lacan’s formulations is likely to lead those who read them for the first time to assume that he is referring to a coherent body of knowledge with which they should be familiar, or that keys which unlock his formulations will be found elsewhere in his writings. In an effort to find such keys they may well find themselves plunging into a deep study of Lacan’s writings.”