Language, the unconscious, the parents, the symbolic order: these terms in Lacan are not exactly synonymous, but they are intimately allied. They are sometimes spoken of by him as the __ther_ _ as that which like language is always anterior to us and will always escape us, that which brought us into being as subjects in the first place but which always outruns our grasp. We have seen that for Lacan our unconscious desire is directed towards this Other, in the shape of some ultimately gratifying reality which we can never have; but it is also true for Lacan that our desire is in some way always received from the Other too. We desire what others _ our parents, for instance _ unconsciously desire for us; and desire can only happen because we are caught up in linguistic, sexual and social relations _ the whole field of the __ther_ _ which generate it.

Certain American uses of deconstruction, Derrida has observed, work to ensure __n institutional closure_ which serves the dominant political and economic interests of American society. Derrida is clearly out to do more than develop new techniques of reading: deconstruction is for him an ultimately political practice, an attempt to dismantle the logic by which a particular system of thought, and behind that a whole system of political structures and social institutions, maintains its force. He is not seeking, absurdly, to deny the existence of relatively determinate truths, meanings, identities, intentions, historical continuities; he is seeking rather to see such things as the effects of a wider and deeper history of language, of the unconscious, of social institutions and practices.

In conscious life, we achieve some sense of ourselves as reasonably unified, coherent selves, and without this action would be impossible. But all this is merely at the __maginary_ level of the ego, which is no more than the tip of the iceberg of the human subject known to psychoanalysis. The ego is function or effect of a subject which is always dispersed, never identical with itself, strung out along the chains of the discourses which constitute it. There is a radical split between these two levels of being _ a gap most dramatically exemplified by the act of referring to myself in a sentence. When I say __omorrow I will mow the lawn,_ the ___ which I pronounce is an immediately intelligible, fairly stable point of reference which belies the murky depths of the ___ which does the pronouncing. The former ___ is known to linguistic theory as the __ubject of the enunciation_, the topic designated by my sentence; the latter ___, the one who speaks the sentence, is the __ubject of the enunciating_, the subject of the actual act of speaking. In the process of speaking and writing, these two _____ seem to achieve a rough sort of unity; but this unity is of an imaginary kind. The __ubject of the enunciating_, the actual speaking, writing human person, can never represent himself or herself fully in what is said: there is no sign which will, so to speak, sum up my entire being. I can only designate myself in language by a convenient pronoun. The pronoun ___ stands in for the ever-elusive subject, which will always slip through the nets of any particular piece of language; and this is equivalent to saying that I cannot __ean_ and __e_ simultaneously. To make this point, Lacan boldly rewrites Descartes__ __ think, therefore I am_ as: __ am not where I think, and I think where I am not.

If this constant sliding and hiding of meaning were true of conscious life, then we would of course never be able to speak coherently at all. If the whole of language were present to me when I spoke, then I would not be able to articulate anything at all. The ego, or consciousness, can therefore only work by repressing this turbulent activity, provisionally nailing down words on to meanings. Every now and then a word from the unconscious which I do not want insinuates itself into my discourse, and this is the famous Freudian slip of the tongue or parapraxis. But for Lacan all our discourse is in a sense a slip of the tongue: if the process of language is as slippery and ambiguous as he suggests, we can never mean precisely what we say and never say precisely what we mean. Meaning is always in some sense an approximation, a near-miss, a part-failure, mixing non-sense and non-communication into sense and dialogue.

What Althusser does_ is to rethink the concept of ideology in terms of Lacan__ __maginary_. For the relation of an individual subject to society as a whole in Althusser__ theory is rather like the relation of the small child to his or her mirror-image in Lacan__. In both cases, the human subject is supplied with a satisfyingly unified image of selfhood by identifying with an object which reflects this image back to it in a closed, narcissistic circle. In both cases, too, this image involves a misrecognition, since it idealizes the subject__ real situation. The child is not actually as integrated as its image in the mirror suggests; I am not actually the coherent, autonomous, self generating subject I know myself to be in the ideological sphere, but the __ecentred_ function of several social determinants. Duly enthralled by the image of myself I receive, I subject myself to it; and it is through this __ubjection_ that I become a subject.

What we have witnessed in our own time is the death of universities as centres of critique. Since Margaret Thatcher, the role of academia has been to service the status quo, not challenge it in the name of justice, tradition, imagination, human welfare, the free play of the mind or alternative visions of the future. We will not change this simply by increasing state funding of the humanities as opposed to slashing it to nothing. We will change it by insisting that a critical reflection on human values and principles should be central to everything that goes on in universities, not just to the study of Rembrandt or Rimbaud.