Vel of Alienation
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#01
Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.731
The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious > Position of the Unconscious <sup>829</sup>
Theoretical move: The passage articulates the subject's constitution through two fundamental operations—alienation and the split produced by the signifier—demonstrating that the subject is an effect of language rather than its cause, while simultaneously theorising the topology of the unconscious (its closing/opening structure) and the temporal logic of retroaction (Nachträglichkeit) as the ground for psychoanalytic causality.
This structure is a vel, which shows its originality here for the first time... the vel of alienation, as I call it, imposes a choice between its terms only to eliminate one of them—always the same one regardless of one's choice.