 In this video we will look at Lacan, language and subjectivity. There are endless ways in which to think about subjectivity, or self-hood. Authors, philosophers, psychologists and theorists have approached the topic in complex and often overlapping ways. In this video we are going to look briefly at Jacques Lacan, a French psychoanalyst following the Freudian tradition. Lacan's ultimate and most famous statement is, the unconscious is structured like a language. For Jacques Lacan, language was not just a medium of exchange, rather he posited that language created the very nature of our psyche and therefore our world. As Nick Manfield writes, Lacan challenged the common sense idea that language exists in order to communicate. Instead Lacan wanted to show that language is the very material of subjectivity. What this means is that words are not just empty vessels with which each individual uses to exchange personal meaning. Actually as Nick Manfield points out, language existed before any of us were born and we must locate ourselves in the field of language in order to take up a place in the human world. However, Lacan's ideas about language emerged from previous groundbreaking theoretical work, namely from a third name de Saussure and Jacques Derrida. Saussure's work illustrated the arbitrariness of language, pointing out that language is a system of signs and only makes sense because of the rules that govern what those signs mean. Manfield explains that, for Saussure, each sign connects a material form, the signifier, with an abstract concept. It's signified. This last is not a material thing in the world as much as the idea of the thing as it forms in the mind of the language user. So, really, this makes all language only metaphor. This means that signs are not directly anchored in reality but in the conceptualization of reality in the human mind. The relationship of each signifier is thus not with the object in the outside world with which it is supposed to connect, but with other signifiers as they form a systematic world view. Therefore, language is a system of always already political and loaded meaning which presupposes what things are, what things mean, who has power and who does not. When you're born, you enter into this pre-existing system and your subjectivity has had to emerge in a world in which language is always already established. A subject, a person, can only exist within the parameters that this language world has prescribed for that subject to exist within. Thank you for watching. The resource we have used today is called Subjectivity Theories of the Self from Freud to Haraway by Nick Mansfield.