Autonomy, heteronomy: remark on the relation between body and structure in Jacques Lacan's work

Abstract

The years of 1954 and 1955 correspond to a moment of Lacan's work which can be indicated as the summit of the reference to a structure that, conformed by signifiers, answers for the total determination of the subject. The "subject effect", according to its own definition, comes explicitly to dispense associations with the human being in the sense of what this expression could bear of an indication, whatsoever, of a vital support. With the construction of the graph of desire (1957), the problem begins to receive a new configuration. Since then, we see an insistent retrieval of a role to be assigned to the body in the constitution of desire that arises from the way we think of its relation to necessity and to demand. This paper approaches the terms of this reinsertion and tries to indicate in which sense it begins to circumscribe one of the vectors of the surpassing of the structuralist rationality.