The Question of the Subject: Lacan and Psychoanalysis

The subject as object: such is the impossible paradox, according to Michel Foucault,2 bequeathed to us by the late eighteenth century. Man, the self, rendered opaque, an object of study. Such is the paradox, too, which renders the human sciences at once conceivable as disciplines and impossible to complete satisfactorily. Unlike Descartes' cogito, the place of a universal logic of existence which sets the epistemic organization of classical thought, the cogito of the nineteenth century partakes of the stuff of existence in all its particularity. It is man the nineteenth-century subject to which Foucault refers when he speaks of the immanent disappearance of man, and it is indeed this very man the subject which is dissolved by the structuralist's analysis, an analysis which removes man from the center, which decenters the subject. The subject will no longer be an object, but neither will it be merely the place in which the universal logic of a world already ordered represents itself. The subject is a locus, the locus of a set of conditions, the place in which these conditions are knotted together and actualized. With the dissolution of the usually accepted unities of discourse—the subject, the object of study, the book, the life—and the rewriting of history as a discursive dispersion, the subject becomes merely an empty place in the discourse which may be indifferently adopted by a locutor. The subject, then, is not defined in empirical terms, either psychological, physiological, behavioral, or other, but rather is a requirement of the discourse, the place, as it were, left vacant by the discourse, a place which may be occupied by any being capable of saying I.

It is the linguist Emile Benveniste1 who has done the most provocative study of Indo-European pronouns. The terms I and you, he