ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the early stages of the development of Lacan’s graph of desire in Seminar V. The definitive and canonical version of the graph of desire that appears in Lacan’s “Subversion of the Subject”—a talk given in 1960 but revised for the Écrits (1966)—differs in many ways from the versions of the graph that were incremental steps in its development. The chapter argues that Lacan’s graphs were pedagogical tools, not just for Lacan’s students, but for Lacan himself. The graphs, and especially his big graph, allowed him to make discoveries as he explored them, and this is why studying their development is so important. The early versions of the graph—and Lacan’s commentary on them—featured many elements that were dropped or obscured in the final version. Most notably, Lacan’s emphasis on the connection between the metonymic object and the place of the code in the developmental versions of the graph are crucial for understanding what he has to say about formations of the unconscious, even though this connection doesn’t appear in the final version of the diagram. This connection prevents the graph from being merely a linguistic model of communication. In fact, this link between the metonymic object and the code goes a long way towards explaining how language means. This chapter looks at the incremental stages of the graph’s development and sees what they have to teach us.
