What is the barred subject?

Jacques Lacan, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

Jacques Lacan answers

The barred subject — $, written with that diagonal stroke through the S — is not a subject diminished or damaged. The bar marks something structural: the subject is constituted through the signifier, and this constitution is simultaneously a division.1 Consider the single stroke, the notch by which an animal killed is recorded. Once that mark exists, the subject has already separated himself from the sign by which he first constituted himself as subject.2

There are now two ones, not one — and it is at the level of this reckoning, this one-one, that the subject must situate himself. He is not the sign; he is what the sign marks off, which is already to say he is split from it.3 The bar in $ names that split. Now, what does this division cost? Jouissance, primarily. The operation that produces the barred subject leaves a remainder — the objet a — and it is this remainder that resists assimilation to any signifier.4

The a is what cannot be divided away cleanly; it is what the division fails to absorb. So the fantasy, written $◇a, holds together these two terms: the barred subject on one side, the irreducible remainder on the other, with the rhomb between them marking both conjunction and disjunction at once.5 From the side of language and the law, the same point arrives differently.

The subject is the phallus — it is the signifier with which language designates him — and yet he is not it, because language and the law of language take it away from him.6 Being and having do not arise at the same level; one cannot simultaneously be the phallus and have it, and the passage from one to the other is precisely what the bar in $ records.7

The subject is barred because he is a speaking subject, not a pure subject of knowledge, not the photoelectric cell that philosophy sometimes imagines when it says percipiens.8 What the bar refuses, then, is the ego-psychological fantasy of a complete subject — a subject who might, through analysis, be strengthened into coherent self-possession.

There is always a Spaltung, always two lines of constitution, and this is where all the problems of structure originate.9 To map the subject against reality rather than against the signifier is already to have abandoned the psychoanalytic experience for psychology — which has its domain of validity, but it is not ours.10

Sources

  1. I symbolize the subject by the barred S [$], in so far as it is constituted as secondary in relation to the signifier.
    Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, pp. 155–156
  2. Thus is marked the first split that makes the subject as such distinguish himself from the sign in relation to which, at first, he has been able to constitute himself as subject.
    Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, pp. 155–156
  3. It is at the level, not of the one, but of the one one, at the level of the reckoning, that the subject has to situate himself as such.
    Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, pp. 155–156
  4. the a is precisely what resists any assimilation to the function of a signifier and this indeed is why it symbolizes that which, in the sphere
    Seminar X, Anxiety, pp. 184–185
  5. The fantasy is $ standing in a certain relation of opposition to a, a relation whose polyvalence is sufficiently defined by the composite character of the rhomb, which represents disjunction, v, just as much as conjunction.
    Seminar X, Anxiety, pp. 184–185
  6. The subject both is and is not the phallus. He is it, because it is the signifier with which language designates him, and he is not it inasmuch as language and the law of language take it away from him.
    Seminar VI, Desire and Its Interpretation, pp. 223–224
  7. one cannot both be the phallus and have it. In order for the subject, under certain conditions, to come to have it, he must give up on being it.
    Seminar VI, Desire and Its Interpretation, pp. 223–224
  8. a complete human subject is never a pure and simple subject of knowledge, as all of philosophy constructs it, well and truly corresponding to the percipiens of this perceptum that is the world.
    Seminar V, Formations of the Unconscious, pp. 376–377
  9. we know that there is always a Spaltung, that is, there are always two lines along which he is constituted. This, moreover, is where all our problems of structure originate.
    Seminar V, Formations of the Unconscious, pp. 376–377
  10. mapping the subject in relation to reality, such as it is supposed to constitute us, and not in relation to the signifier, amounts to falling already into the degradation of the psychological constitution of the subject.
    Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, pp. 155–156