ABSTRACT
Herein lays the first of a series of differentiations founded upon a duality—animal/human—which the prohibition of incest installs. Thus far the prohibition of incest has been situated as Symbolic, affording the possibility of symbolically committing incest through a signifying substitution which allows us to construct the irony of familiarity. The horror of incest, therefore, is associated with a collapsing of borders and blurring of identities; a collapse of the familiar way in which difference is thought and identity ascribed in such a way as to maintain a duality within the sexual domain. The closed circuit maintains language and the sexual on a bedrock of duality, taking difference at the Symbolic level of mutual exclusion and contradiction and consigning truth to the operation of the dialectic. The difference between Lacan and his dog is that she never takes him for another.
