Lacan's impenetrable language, midterm post.

"…(T)he important point is that this form (“the Ideal-I”) situates the agency of the ego, before its social determination, in a fictional direction, which will always remain irreducible for the individual alone, or rather, which will only rejoin the coming-into-being of the subject asymptotically, whatever the success of the dialectical synthesis by which he must resolve as I his discordance with his own reality."

This passage, taken out of context, means close to nothing. I am sure that some will disagree with this view, but Lacan’s essay on The Mirror Stage is difficult to comprehend even with the entire text in front of the reader and unlimited resources to aid in understanding the constant references to other works of psychoanalytic theory. The ego is formed during the mirror stage; this at least is something I am able to gather in re-reading this piece. The child, when he first looks into the mirror, learns to relate his body and to the things around him by looking at them through the mirror. The Ideal-I is the “primordial form” of the I, “before it is objectified (…) in the dialectic identification with the other, and before language restores to it (…) its function as a subject.

I suppose that you could attempt to address this in an apocalyptic way not by content, because there really is no apocalyptic imagery contained in it. The passage does not offer ways to critique apocalypticism, (at least from my own view). It does address the mirror stage, which in of itself is not necessarily apocalyptic because it is not really bringing about the end of anything except for the non-existence of the ego or concept of self. The words themselves, and the form of the text contain a real apocalyptic element, the daunting task of trying to decode the significance of words so packed with meaning that the reader must almost look at each individual word, decode it, and then try to piece back together a coherent translation, as it were, of the text. The idea that a reader must do this for any and every text is apocalyptic in that it destroys the idea that a reader will ever entirely grasp what the author was trying to say. We can only know what we, as readers and decoders, can know in our own mind, and the idea that we can never understand what another person’s meaning to the fullest extent may be is earth shattering. The idea that people have been brought up with, the idea of language meaning a set thing and that it means the same thing for all other people versed in that language is incorrect, and that invalidates every conversation with anyone you have ever known. How does a person move on from a realization such as this? Do we pretend that it did not occur and move on with our lives, hoping to never think about it again? It seems that there is nothing we can do but that.