'Lack' features prominently in Lacan's writing. He refers frequently to Plato's Symposium about the birth of desire, the concept that Zeus solved the problem of there being a third component of the human race, that had both male and female components by cutting them in half. This left each half yearning for each other and being rolled into one, thus dying. The second solution was to move the privates so that propagation became the result of love.
Lacan's first loss is at birth: the impossibility of being both male and female. To compensate we must fill our biological destiny - living out our maleness and femaleness, while acknowledging the coerciveness of those definitions.
Secondly, before the assimilation of symbolic order, there is the pre Oedipal territorialization of the subject's body. At a very young age, the child seeks to introject into itself those things that give it pleasure (the breast) and act as the missing complement. The concept of the missing complement is objet petit a.
The imaginery
The order of experience dominated by identification and duality - precedes but coexists with the symbolic order. The mirror phase is associated with the imaginery, as the child is aware of itself as the othe - assisted by seeing itself in the mirror. Adduces contrary emotions of loving the coherent identity yet hating it as it remains external. Characterisitc of the binary oppositions that feature prominenently in all stages. Visual images in the identification of imaginery order have been important in the study of film.
Signification
Less relevant to visual culture, signification is the meaning arising from a synchronic network; Lacan eschews the concept of meaning in an isloated unit.
Signifiers have no relation to real, and can be rituals, dress conventions, neuroses and many others as well as lanaguage. The subject is entirely contained within a network of signification - "they bring to his birth...the share of his destiny."
Lacan interprtets the boy throwing away toy from cot story as set out by Freud differently. He sees that the toy is identified with the subject, in the same binary way that it identifies with the mirror image.
Lacan sees 'desire' as impossible to achieve as recived from he symbolic. The desires are manufactured for the subject by cultural co-optation.
The symbolic
This part of the chapter is primarily involved with the penis and the phallus, and whether they are one and the same, and seemingly not relevant to this course.
More relevant is the idea that family is a set of symbolic relations transcending the actual persons. 'Mother' and 'father' are cultural positions that obtain meaning through relations to each other.
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