Hey it's me....or is it?

I freely admit the I may have missed much of what Lacan was trying to say in this weeks readings, but I was continually frustrated by his lack of assertion. He seemed very rarely to be claiming anything about the psyche, or the role of the mirror stage or language in its development. There was of course quite a bit of deconstruction theory which clearly demonstrates his influence on Derrida, but I missed the punch line. He opens “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious” with the assertions that the unconscious is equated with the form of language and that at birth the child is inscribed by language even before their entry into language. What I seem to have missed, given the subsequent discussions of sign and signifier, and of metaphor and metonymy, is what does this mean for consciousness.   There was perhaps a suggestion in this passage “the function of speech is…indicating the place of the subject in the search for the true.” But what exactly does that mean? Are we, in the act of language, establishing our position philosophically, or does this imply that development is somehow equated with the search for the true and speech is a  marker of how far along we are in the process? In either case doesn’t his examination of the sliding chain of signifiers and the figurative nature of discourse undermine speech as any sort of definitive place holder? How can a language without absolute value be any sort of placeholder?
     After finishing the text, I wrote a restatement based on my overall impression of the work. Speech is the subject positing itself; signified expressing itself as a signifier but the relationship is imperfect and inaccurate. The speaking subject is always already removed from itself in speech because their subconscious and conscious mind are inscribed and operate based on the laws of language which in the end is difference. Thus the speech act is always subject to play in the same ratio that governs signifier to signified. That means also that our conscious reckoning of ourselves is also subject to play and by extension mistake. We are not what we say we are, and more we are not what we think we are.
     

     Searching through the text  though, I cannot find anything but tangential inferences to this impression. Again I am frustrated by Lacan’s unwillingness to say anything definite about the correlations he appears to be drawing. That would however tend to undermine his points about the referentiality of language so I suppose it should not be a surprise.