Jacques Lacan’s Liminal Subject: Semiotic and Anti-semiotic Thrusts of a Psychoanalytic Theory of the Subjectivity

Jacques Lacan is considered one of the most influential thinkers and intellectuals of the second half of the last century. He was a French psychoanalyst who offered an innovative understanding of the human psyche and the unconscious in order to develop new elements at the service of psychoanalytic clinics. His influence goes far beyond the psychoanalytic domain and touches all areas of culture, philosophy, literature, art, politics, and human sciences. The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the status of the subject within the Lacanian theory and clinics starting from the recognition of double semiotic matrices attributable to both Ferdinand de Saussure’s structuralist paradigm and Charles Sanders Peirce’s pragmatic paradigm. Although these two perspectives are often placed in opposition to each other, in the development of Lacanian thought they are both present and interacting. This double movement makes it possible to highlight on the one hand how human subjectivity is constituted within a structure of symbolic signs that preexists the subject and which determines the elements of constraint and possibility and on the other hand how there is a continuous slipping of signifiers, which it endows subjectivity with an evanescent and never fully circumscribable and definable status. Furthermore, in the course of the development of Lacanian theory and its clinical implications, a semiotic tension becomes more and more evident, which produces signification for the subjective experience and at the same time a radical, unstoppable push toward the impossibility of signifying. Through the presentation of Lacan’s three registers of human experience (the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real), the tension between the desire and the jouissance is argued: the former as an emergency movement of the subject through the lack of experience and their capacity to make relations and the latter as an absolute movement toward indistinction, dissolution, and fusion.