Entre cuir et chair: Jacques Lacan et la question de l'identité et de l'identification

Author(s)

Alexandre Starnino

• Document type: Master's Dissertation
• Press: Campinas, SP.
• Institution: Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas
• Defense date: 2018-08-31

Examining board members

Daniel Omar Perez; Vladimir Pinheiro Safatle; Lauro José Siqueira Baldini

• Advisor: Daniel Omar Perez

Abstract

This work in a broad sense examines and articulates the conception of identity and identification established by Jacques Lacan, as well as its implications. Our main theoretical reference is Seminar IX - The Identification. From the respective seminar, we circumscribe our problematic fundamentally in two central axes: (1) The way sustained by Lacan is an outlook on what refers to the very traditional concept of identity, correlative to conceptions identical to itself (A = A), idem itself. (2) Lacan will point out the Other as a rule in the consummation of what is meant by identity, pointing to the order of discourse, language - operations and significant productivity - as referential implied in what has traditionally been conceived as subject, identity, and subjectivity. "Identification is with the significant," Lacan tells us, and it is it - the identification - that "crystallizes into an identity." By these factors, we insist on the delimitation of the field of the Other; of the records of the statement and enunciation; as well as the difference between sign and signifier. For strictly methodological reasons, we divide the text into two parts: In the first part we present the assumptions of a possible conception of identity and identification in Lacan, forging the term enameling operation, which, in turn, is consumed in the relationship between the Lacanian notions of (1) off-centered and split-off subject, (2) significant and (3) affectivity. The main purpose of this first part was to systematically articulate the structural elements that make up the identity discourse, in order to substantiate what we call the enodamento operation. In the second part of the dissertation our reflection was centered on the formation and constitution of collective identities at their most elementary and structural level. We aim to point out the enameling operations that are established in the so-called collective identities in a sort of resumption of what we discussed in the first part. The laclaunian notions as chain of equivalence, void significant, radical investment, demand, naming, among others - concepts with intimate implication of the 'freudolacanian matrix¿ - formed the fundamental theoretical core for understanding the formation of collective identities. The specific cases discussed here and the formalizations presented in both the first and second parts gave us the basis for solidifying the theory presented. The interlocution with contemporaneous authors circumscribed to the 'freudolacanian field¿, very favored us in our wing in methodological terms. As a conclusion of the dissertation, we have established four expanded propositions about the identity process in modes of contingency and necessity that are summarized below: (1) the significant to be held as identification is contingent, but (2) the principles that determine the significant are necessary; (3) there is no subject without the necessary significant operation; (4) there are necessarily affective circuits, also contingent, that affirm and reconfigure themselves in the enameling of the discursive chain - in a true dialectic of mutual commitment - in modes of alienation and separation (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 15/26815-6 - From identity to signifier identification: a study on Jaques Lacan's seminar IX, the identification
• Grantee: Alexandre Augusto Garcia Starnino
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master