Lacan, non-self, and other personal musings

I recently pulled my first all-nighter of the semester. As I see it, I'm doing pretty well. Almost halfway through the semester and only one night of no sleep. I have an upcoming phil paper (Descartes) and a presentation on Foucault's "History of Sexuality", but I think I can get through those without any painful sleepless nights.

Lit theory was interesting yesterday. We discussed Lacan's mirror stage article. I don't know what the title of the English translation is, but in French it's "Le stade du miroir comme formateur de la fonction du Je" (roughly: The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function"). Though Lacan touches on other things, the heart of this article is his analysis of subjectivity. In Lacan's view, at some early point along the line, one comes to recognize oneself as a coherent whole through the experience of seing oneself reflected in, for example, a mirror. The problem with what I have just written are the words 'one' and 'oneself'. In the sentence above, 'one' implies a pre-existing subject that can recognize 'oneself' in the mirror, and 'oneself' implies an existing subject. Please do not be confused by these implications. 'One' does not exist as SUBJECT (this is an important word choice) until one has subjectivity, that is, until one has recognized 'onself'. However 'oneself' does not exist. It is a conceptual ideal, a notion that we construct, but not something we can ever obtain. Be careful, words like 'we' in the last sentence suffer similar problems as those already mentioned for 'one'. So what is subjectivity? For Lacan, subjectivity is simply the desire for coherence, which can also be called wholeness.

This all got me to thinking that it would be interesting to look at different theories of non-self. It's something I might one day write a book on, if I ever do such a thing. Thus far in my life, I have become acquainted with the following:

Ferdinand de Saussure: As far as I'm aware the first person (in the west) to propose that meaning is differentially established. There are probably some who proposed this before him, but his concept of the sign really does a nice job of describing a world in which there is no inherent, pre-existing meaning, or if you will, 'thingness', or you might say 'suchness'

Jacques Derrida: I've read some of his writing, including his exlanation of différance. I'm not going to hasard an attempt to say anything about it at this point. I'll just say that I plan to go back and reread some of his writing as, at least some of it is clear and lucid, despite that much of it is, well, difficult.

Jaques Lacan: as described above

Buddhist Philosophy: In particular, notions of shunyata, or emptiness, that might more accurately by tranlated as 'empty of suchness'.

Contempoary theories of Conciousness as an emergent property: I know little about this. Jedd and I went to hear a philosopher speak at UBC who spoke very briefly about his work on conciousness and his views of it as an emergent property. I remember being struck by the similarities to some of buddhist theory/philosophy. Near the end of his presentation, he read some of the negative reactions that other philosophers have had to his work. They were strikingly similar to the common (and sane/reasonable) response of an indignant 'wtf' when people are told in an intro buddhist studies class that the self does not exist.

Any one have any ideas of any others?