Reach Beyond Reach: Literature’s Uncanny Tickling of the Real Alexander Sallas, PhD candidate (Western University) As a witty poet so rightly remarks, the mirror would do well to reflect a little more before sending us back our image. —Jacques Lacan, Écrits The uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar. —Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny” Introduction In the Poetics, Aristotle suggests writers should imitate portrait-painters: "In rendering the individual form… paint people as they are, but make them better-looking" (1996). The mirror stage, posited by Jacques Lacan, suggests a similar, innate process in psychoanalysis. It theorizes that a lifelong quest to materialize a stable, whole, autonomous self begins the moment an infant recognizes their reflection. But the endeavour is fruitless; it situates the subject “in a fictional direction, which will always remain irreducible for the individual alone” (Lacan 2018).i Indeed, it marks the subject’s passage into an unyielding stade (stadium) of subjectivity in which they are “permanently caught and captivated” by their own imago (2018). Moreover, it includes several concomitant effects. The mirror stage triggers the subject’s irreducible removal from the Real, the first dimension in the Lacanian triad, into which they are born; it crystallizes the Imaginary and the Symbolic, the triad’s second and third dimensions; it transfixes the ego by contrasting the imago’s fictional totality with the infant’s fragmented body, manifesting their “Ideal-I,” which is composed of an “ideal ego” and “ego-ideal”;ii and it produces artificial jubilation in the subject who perceives they have assumed the imago as their own image.iii It even moulds conscious and unconscious thought; Lacan articulates this with a play on Descartes’s cogito ergo sum: “I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think.” To that end, he calls the mirror stage an “identification.” When you consider “yourself,” he suggests, you are really considering a construct as such. There is no alignment between the self and objective reality; rather, the mirror stage establishes “a relation between the organism and its reality” (2018; emphasis added).
Gnosis | 19.1 (2021)
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