Re-reading The Purloined Letter - Alternation Journal

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Re-reading The Purloined Letter
(and a linguistic order) which he has not created, and which imposes on him
the laws of the social order—he is, then, subject to a system he cannot
control, and so his developing subjectivity comes into being through an
experience of power (of the Other in its various forms) and lack (of control,
of his own narcissistic self-unity which the social order does not recognize).
Lacan (1977:05) writes in his famous essay The Mirror Stage that the end of
this moment ushers the child into the socially- governed system of the
Symbolic:
This moment in which the mirror-stage comes to an end inaugurates,
by the identification with the imago of the counterpart and the drama
of primordial jealousy …, the dialectic that will henceforth link the I
to socially elaborated situations.
It is here, when the ‘I’ is linked to socially elaborated situations that desire
which is predicated on lack becomes possible, and also here that entry into
language begins uneasily to take place, at the same time as an equally
difficult move towards gender identification. This, then, is the beginning of
subjectivity, since it is only through language as a system of difference that
subjective identity can be stated, thought, articulated—it is also the moment
at which the unconscious is born, since here repression takes place. Sexual
difference and language are thus both effects of entry into the Symbolic
Order. Entry into language is differently negotiated by girls and boys.
However, girls do not view the mother, castration, or the threat of the father
in the same way, in Freud’s final model (from the early 1930’s essays on
femininity onwards), or in Lacan’s work. They do not feel the loss of the
mother’s body as boys do, and so the work of Symbolic substitution (and
consequently their entry into the Symbolic) does not, for Lacan, come as
easily. As Ragland-Sullivan (1992:421) puts it:
Language itself serves as the signified that tells the particular story
of the knotting (or not) of the three orders (Imaginary, Symbolic,
Real) in an individual’s life in terms of acquisition of gender as an
identity.