Lacan's Relation To Tattoos

Introduction

outline chapter outline why – relation to tattoos

The Mirror Stage to The Optical Schema

Lacan's early work, most notably the Mirror Stage (1949/20??), placed the visual field center stage in the development of the subject. In his paper Lacan argued that when the infant is born it is in a 'fragmented state', a collection of bits and pieces, and only becomes a coherent unity when the infant recognises itself in the mirror as a whole entity. Lacan points out that this recognition is really a 'misrecognition'1, that is because the infant takes the image in the mirror itself as it's image. In more technical terms, the infant establishes their subjectivity through the fantasy image. This image allows for the creation of ideal others,

To relate this to our discussion on the gaze we could say that the uniform acts as a defence to the gaze, it offers an explanation of sorts to the che voui of the Other, 'I am that'. What makes the military, as a group of subjects, interesting is that people in the military are more likely to get a tattoo then the civilian population (ref - ?). This phenomena, which has been prevalent since WWII, relates to our discussion because it shows us that having an answer to the che voui is not always enough for the subject, i.e. they want something more/else, a mark of their particular

However, at different times and for different reasons, their prominance has varied within the many cultures that have utilised them in that time. One place where tattoos had profound importance in establishing hierarchy was in the prison system of communist Russia (USSR). Russia has a history of tattooing convicts, in the 1800s the authorities would mark out convicts by tattooing their faces with the letters K.A.T., which stood for 'konvict...'. The prisoners began to take this mark as their own and would refer to themselves as cats 'kats', and tattoo images of cats on their bodies (ref ?). When the communists took power in 1919 the prisoners began to tattoo their chests with images of Lenin, Marx and Engels to avoid being shot by the firing squad, because they believed their gaolers would never damage the images of their ideological