You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Subjecthood begins with signification (“In the beginning was the word”), but what precedes subjecthood? Before the word exists a state of “pure presence,” in which the pre-linguistic infant experiences a timeless, disunified sense of self. In this state of formlessness, the infant merges with its environment and particularly with its mother, unable to distinguish between self and other. Scents, sounds, and fragments of bodies appear and disappear, constituting for the infant a kind of temporary identity, lived moment by moment. Lacan (1977) calls this the hic et nunc or the “here and now.” With the acquisition of language, this state of pure presence is all at once terminated. With signification comes intersubjectivity, and therefore subjectivity, in the construction of a series of discrete representations and identifications that bring the child into temporality, sociality, and the symbolic order.
In his seventh seminar, Lacan (1992) uses the metaphor of a vase to describe this process:
[The vase] creates the void and thereby introduces the possibility of filling it…. It is on the basis of this fabricated signifier, this vase, that emptiness and fullness as such enter the world …
Thus, language, form, and identity all arise from the opposite principle of void. Lacan (1992) calls this void at the center of language “das Ding,” the absent “thing” to which all signifiers refer. We imagine it as the core of desire, the place where, if we could only reach it, we would experience “pure,” unmediated satisfaction. Now that we exist as subjects within language, it is impossible for us to revert either to das Ding or to the primitive, undifferentiated environment of the prelinguistic hic et nunc, though the idea of doing so may contribute to our fantasies. Hiroshi Teshigahara's Woman in the Dunes (1964), a film about holes, illustrates these kinds of regressive fantasies by translating into visual representations a verbally unrepresentable subject. It depicts existence