ABSTRACT
Throughout this book, I have described how the trope of the mirror may offer a useful way of reading the representation of other cultures because the activity of forging cultural identities seems to take place in relation to the dialogic construction of Otherness. Psychoanalysis has provided the terms of the debate; between the mirror and the signifying chain, we have an indication of how desire, identification and fantasy are set in motion. For in entering the Symbolic, the order of language and culture, the subject ‘forfeits’ the possibility of wholeness. All subsequent relations and activities will be directed at filling this gap. Fantasy is the psychic formation for filling this lack. Fantasy provides the subject with a desiring position and a narrative to dramatise desire. Nowhere is fantasy more potent than in the dynamics of identification; as Silverman argues, ‘the mise-en-scène of desire can only be staged’, in other words, by ‘drawing upon the images through which the self is constituted’ (Silverman, 1992:5). Identification is not only grounded in vision and visual images but is also activated discursively, in so far as it is based on a point of address.
