STRUCTURALISM
85
(It would not be improper, according to Levi-Strauss, to think of his
own work as "the myth of mythology.") They are important because
the subject, for Lacan, turns out to
be
a kind of
dedoublement,
a
matching of consciousness with the world, of speaker with hearer, of
the signifier with the signified. The latter terms are from the lin–
guistics of Saussure, and are of crucial significance to the structural–
ists. Whereas the civilized mind thinks itself capable of taking an
objective stance and judging the adequacy of language or symbol
(the signifier) to their meanings (the signified), the view of mind
which emerges from ethnology and psychoanalysis suggests that the
two realms are autonomous and that mind
is
precisely this adequacy,
so that such objectivity is impossible.
This point is made again and again, in different forms and
different occasions, in the writings of Lacan. The subject is an activity,
not a thing; the Cartesian
cogito
comes closer to representing it cor–
rectly than any view of the self as substance, but even the
cogito
gives
too strong a sense of continuity and permanence, so that it would
perhaps be better to say
«cogito ergo sum" ubi cogito
J
ibi sum.
The subject produces itself by reflecting on itself, but when it is
engaged on some other object it has no being apart from the activity
of being so engaged. The idea that it had objective being and could
be studied scientifically, according to Lacan, was a direct consequence
of the success of science in throwing light on the rest of the world.
The troubled Viennese came to Freud because he was a scientist and
had the prestige that went with that identification; but when Freud
looked for the subject in the light of science he found instead the
unconscious, the Other, as Lacan puts it. Freud's own subjectivity,
of course, was engaged on this quest, and its discovery by itself
would have been, again, a case of impossible self-division. Although
Lacan never quite puts it this way one could sum up the conclusion
of his argument against the possibility of a science of the subject by
saying:
the subject cannot be the object of science because it is its
subject.
When the analyst tries to get at "the subj ect which he calls,
significantly, the patient," what he finds is not the true subject at all,
but only something called into being by his questioning: "that is to
say, the fish is drowned by the operation of fishing...." The final
image of the subject, in the most recent writings, is the Moebius
strip, or as Lacan calls it "the interior eight," which from two
surfaces produces one, or from one two, depending on the starting-
