Jacques Lacan

“Thus the subject, too, if he can appear to be the slave of language, is all the more so of a discourse in the universal movement in which his place is already inscribed at birth, if only by virtue of his proper name.”

The term ‘liberty’ comes to mind as I read this. This implies that if language, or better yet of the ‘discourse in the universal movement,’ is our (humans) master, as we are a subject by virtue of our ‘proper name’ giving us our place in the community, then the concept of liberty is ever more empty. We tend to think, or at least this is the general conception of liberty in our day, that liberty is being able to do or think as I please. This is the most common way of conceptualizing ‘liberty’. When I think of this I always think of the example of me, or a subject, being in front of 30 different television sets, with different brands and sizes and other specifications, and thinking that that, my being able to choose from 30 different television sets, is an expression of my liberty. The problem here is that the option of not buying, just out right living without a television set, never crossed my mind. In this example there are obviously many other forces at work limiting the full scope of my understanding of liberty. The freedom of being able to do perhaps is easier to pinpoint: this can be seen as the removal of restrictions upon the body, matter, itself; not being confined unjustly, being able to move as I please. The other one, the cognitive element is much more difficult to grasp. Lacan goes on to say that language is what distinguishes human society from natural society. So language is what makes us human and it enslaves us. This tells me that liberty doesn’t exist. We may think we have the freedom of ‘thought’, but in that case what doesn’t cross our minds is that when we think a certain way, we are subjected to that discourse and that there was manipulation in getting us to join that discourse. Pinpointing how we are not at liberty to think what we want to think is something that must be rejected if one is within the parameters of the general concept of liberty that I mentioned above. Lacan (and Freud) talks about the unconscious mind. One of Lacan’s theses’ is that the unconscious mind is made up of language. Therefore, in my observation, we are slaves to our unconsciousness. I am inclined to think that a psychotic person, maybe really be free when language doesn’t make us human or our unconscious, language, is unlocked.