The Material Manifested: Lacanian Reading of Dissent in Folktales

Abstract

Abstract

In “Freud and Lacan”, Althusser enunciates that the Symbolic and the Imaginary “are dominated, governed and marked by a single law, the Law of the symbolic. . . . even the Imaginary . . . is marked and substituted in its dialectic by the dialectic of the Symbolic order itself, i.e. by the dialectic of human order, of the human norm . . . in the order of the signifier itself” (143-144). Lacan's Symbolic does not comprise a law in the positive sense; it bears all the differentiating features of social existence; a law that generates the feasibility of “acceptance, rejection, yes or no,” (Althusser “Freud” 143). The pliable desire is channelized through linguistic substitutions to maintain the basic instinct in to the developed stages of life. The Oedipal prohibition converts into more localized rules and laws - the “Law of Human Order” (Althusser Writings 28). The personation of the desire coheres with the established norms.