ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces some of the basic principles of the Lacanian symbolic register in order to account for the visual's irreducibility to the logic of specularity, and outlines some preliminary remarks regarding the relationship between the visual and the structural. The entanglement of the Imaginary and the Symbolic is a delicate point in the development of Jacques Lacan's teaching, considerably complex and multi-faceted, and given our concern with the visual dimension it can only be partially addressed in the present work. The operator of the one of the Imaginary in the field of speech works in the following way: a series of signifiers are uttered and directed towards an other. Lacan approaches the problem of the foundation of the structure in many different ways over the years and he calls it by different names: phallus, self-referential signifier, unary trait, and master-signifier.
