Hey! I'm trying towards bringing back alienation as a framework as used by Hegel and Marx through Deleuze and Butler and I'm a bit curious as to how Lacan uses it. Is it more colloquial or does he use it fairly consistently, and if so, do you know if it's more than the inevitable product of the relation between subject and object, as Hegel uses it? Sorry if this is a lot, I just cant stand Lacan personally and am a bit curious.
Heya! There's lot of interesting things to get into here. First up, Lacan uses alienation a ton, it's pretty fundamental to his philosophy. He does a lot of this discussion in Seminars III and XI and Ecrits, if you want to follow up on this. A lot of this is simplification, and it's been a while since I've actually dived into the texts.So, looking at the three orders, we have the imaginary (the image, the things we perceive and imagine), the symbolic (the symbol, how we categorize and divide the imaginary, includes language), and the real (the thing which is simplified and lost between the image and symbol). You can also think of it in terms of language, which is a subset of these things. The imaginary is your ability to recognize and your concept of an "apple," the symbolic is the word, category, and ability to express "apple," and the real is all the parts of apple, including those you don't think of in that definition, and the squishiness between boundaries of what really constitutes an "apple." Alienation is a part of that imaginary order, where the "I" (i.e., the Ego) separates itself as a category. It's our recognition of the self both distinct from the rest of reality and part of the rest of reality that enables us to have a self. We see not ourselves, but the image of ourselves in the mirror and identify with the image. But, we don't have language yet, so we don't yet think "That is me," but still recognize and identify with it (This is libidinal dynamism / the beginning of the mirror stage, see "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience").SO TO ANSWER YOUR QUESTION:
Basically, Lacan sees alienation as constitutive of the "I," but fundamentally distinct from the subject. He makes a distinction between the "ego" and the subject, both of which are "I"'s in English. In our developmental years, we don't yet have symbols to put the world into, so there's no divide between the imaginary and symbolic realms. Alienation is a major milestone where the ego forms and we can put ourselves into a distinct, but somewhat false, category.The subject, on the other hand, is formed with language development and is part of the symbolic and unconscious. The subject more forms in a relationship. A quote is kinda helpful here: "What do we call a subject? Quite precisely, what in the development of objectivation, is outside of the object." (Seminar I)SO TO REALLY REALLY ANSWER YOUR QUESTIONS:Alienation is kinda consistent, kinda not. The fact that it is used is certainly consistent, but Lacan's own ideas on the subject (haha) clearly developed through his work and there's not really a definitive landing point. It's definitely not the product of that relation, since for Lacan, this kinda happens before that. Again, that's using Subject and Object by his vocabulary, so you might be able to debate that a little bit. Lacan would say the Subject / Object doesn't exist at the formation of the Ego, aka Alienation, and Alienation is a process of image, concept, and identification.What Butler does with Lacan is expertly and soundly mash his idea of subject formation with Foucault's ideas of subject formation, along with Derrida's ideas of performance. The important part of what Lacan does in Butler is say that subject formation involves passing into the Law, culture's overriding control-grab of the symbolic order (think language. We're speaking English, and that determines our symbolic order). That overriding creates the identity, but also the unconscious mind, dividing and (different use) alienating the self from desire.Hope that helps, I may have gotten some things a little off here. Lacan can be very specific, but also a little technical and occasionally contradictory across his entire corpus. It may be that you're more interested the subject-formation and "Law" parts of Lacan more than what is generally referred to as "alienation," it occurs to me as I finish this long post here.
