Occasionally two quotes lodged in one's head will unexpectedly join hands. For example, this sentence from a book on Lacan by Bruce Fink - "The subject [is a] spark that flies between two signifiers .. whereby that which is other is made one's own' at once recalled this -
"I live only here and there in a small word whose vowel ('thrust' for example) I use my useless ehad in for a moment. The first and last letter are the beginning and end of my fishlike emotion.' (Kafka)
Ok, they may not be saying exactly the same thing. Neverthless (or perhaps because of this difference), for me the one sheds light on the other. I take Fink to mean: language is something first of all foreign, Other, part of the Symbolic Order that pre-dates and pre-forms us. The signifiers of language are a foreign substance ingrained within us. Only between and across those foreign signifiers, in the way we join them up, jump between them, connect them etc is there a subject. The subject, then, in Lacanian parlance, is this relation to the preceding Symbolic Order, it is the peculiar 'twist' with which we jump between signifiers. Kafka's 'fishlike emotion' is precisely this spark, this flicker that passes through and between signs, like an electrical current between points..
[n.b. this post may be revised to make it more intelligble]