Intersubjective Structure

Intersubjective Structure, as Lacan deploys it in Seminar II, designates the configuration of relations among subjects that is constituted and governed not by psychological intentions, mutual recognitions, or ego-to-ego dyadic bonds, but by the structural position of the signifier (the letter) within the symbolic chain. The concept names the fact that what appears to be a relation between persons is in reality a relation between positions in a symbolic order—positions that the signifier occupies and that subjects merely fill. Lacan's analysis of Poe's "The Purloined Letter" is the demonstration: each character (the Minister, the Queen, Dupin, the Prefect) does not act from individual psychology but from the structural slot the letter occupies relative to them. Their behavior, desire, and blindness are entirely determined by where the letter is, not who they are. The term "inmixing of subjects" (l'emboîtement des sujets) captures this: subjects are not independent atoms who subsequently enter into relations, but are already folded into one another by virtue of being positions within the same symbolic circuit.

This structure is irreducibly intersubjective rather than merely social or communicative: it concerns the way that subjectivity itself is constituted through relations to other subjects-as-positions. Crucially, however, those positions are not imaginary identifications (rivalries, mirror-relations, ego comparisons) but symbolic slots determined by the letter's movement. The symbolic chain runs ahead of, and independently of, any individual subject's intentions—an operation Lacan elsewhere names the automaton. Intersubjective Structure is therefore the social face of that automatism: the specific configuration of determinations that links multiple subjects together as effects of a single signifying circuit.

In jacques-lacan-seminar-2, the concept of Intersubjective Structure belongs to Lacan's extended argument that the symbolic order constitutes the subject rather than being constituted by it. It sits at the intersection of several canonical concepts provided here. It is most directly an application of the logic of the Letter: the letter (la lettre) as material support travels through the symbolic circuit and distributes subject-positions along its path, confirming the Letter's non-psychological, structural efficacy. Intersubjective Structure is what the Letter produces at the level of relations among subjects. It also articulates with Automaton: if the automaton is the mechanical insistence of the symbolic chain, Intersubjective Structure is the relational topology that automaton-repetition maps out across multiple subjects simultaneously — it is the automaton seen from the angle of "several subjects at once." The concept thereby specifies how repetition (automaton) is not merely an individual compulsion but a shared structural fate.

The concept further engages Logical Time: the "inmixing of subjects" presupposes the inferential, anticipatory temporality Lacan formalizes in Logical Time — each subject's position is determined partly by inferring what the other subject knows and does. Intersubjective Structure is, in a sense, the spatial complement to Logical Time's temporal account of subject-constitution: where Logical Time describes the non-chronological sequence through which a single subject concludes its position, Intersubjective Structure describes the simultaneous determination of multiple subject-positions by a single circulating signifier. The concept is positioned in tension with the Imaginary: Lacan's point is precisely that the structure of intersubjective relations is not imaginary (not a hall of mirrors between egos) but symbolic. And it has an oblique relation to Objet petit a: the letter as object-that-circulates is a forerunner of the later, more refined notion of a as the cause of desire that organizes the field of the Other — Intersubjective Structure at this early stage in the corpus is what will later be more precisely articulated through the object a's positioning within the mathemes of discourse.

Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of PsychoanalysisJacques Lacan · 1954 (p.202)

what is immediately clear is what I have called the inmixing of subjects. I will illustrate it for you, since chance has offered it to us, with the story of The Purloined Letter.

The phrase "inmixing of subjects" (l'emboîtement des sujets) is theoretically loaded because it replaces any model of intersubjectivity as voluntary encounter or mutual recognition with a structural one: subjects are "mixed into" one another by a mechanism that precedes and governs them. The parenthetical "since chance has offered it to us" is also significant — it performs the very point being made, attributing the illustrative occasion not to authorial intention but to the autonomous working of the symbolic chain (chance = automaton).