The Phallic Mother: Platonic Metaphysics of Lacan’s Imaginary

Abstract

Jacques Lacan has been a major force in the post-modernist attempt to dismantle the metaphysical foundation of Western thought. Working within the lineage of thinkers such as Nietzsche and Heidegger who have also attacked Platonic idealism, Lacan, like his contemporary, Jacques Derrida, locates the basis of metaphysical thought in the concept of presence articulated in Plato’s definition of Being. In Marges de la philosophie, Derrida has shown how, according to Plato, Truth is capable of adequate reflection in the eternal presence of the Sun, the origin of knowledge expressed through the origin of vision. Yet, as Derrida goes on to demonstrate, the Sun, as a metaphoric expression, represses the truth about Truth, the fact that, as Nietzsche had understood, Truth is inexpressible, non-representable.² Lacan shares with Derrida this notion that it is metaphor itself which effects repression.

Just as in Plato? The “receptacle” receives the mark of everything, understands everything, except itself—without its relationship to the intelligible ever being established, in truth….And its function in relation to language, in relation to the signifier in general, would be inaccessible to it from the fact that it would have to be its support (sensible once again).¹