The Ethical Subject of The God of Small Things

Lacan's well-known aphoristic formulations that “desire is the desire of the Other” and “the unconscious is the discourse of the Other” necessarily entail that the human subject is a social subject. Coming to life inevitably among language users, the subject is constructed in an identification with the signifiers of language—with letters, sounds, detached words and phrases—which become the elements of the unconscious, organized in a syntax of metaphor and metonymy. The child addresses demands to the mother or caretaker in signifiers and is addressed through signifiers which henceforth mark and determine desire. Entering into social exchange through language, desire pursues an object beyond whatever would fulfill the subject's immediate needs, its satisfaction never adequate to the love it wants. The unconscious is the discourse of the Other, because signifiers motivate and carry the subject's desire, forming associative networks and chains that remain the material of an unknown, that is, repressed, memory.

Language takes form by excluding the Thing, the lacking substance of complete enjoyment, or jouissance, whose absence is occupied by the mother as Other and covered over by the object of drive, the objet a, that is detached from the body. The subject identifies with the lacking object and thereby tries to attain an impossible jouissance. Desire is the desire of the Other, because the subject wants to be what the lacking Other desires; its desire is an answer to the question of the Other's desire. It is as a prohibition of that Other, the mother whose desire the subject questions and wants to answer to, that the Name of the Father is introduced, propelling the subject into language by forbidding the ultimate jouissance of incest. In the process of castration, the subject gives up the project of filling the Other's lack and takes on a sexual position as masculine or feminine, its jouissance reduced to limited pleasures. In the nuclear family of modern, Western cultur