Those of you consulting my ‘Critical Dictionary’ will find the following definition of ‘Symbolic Authority’:
‘The king, the judge, the president, and so on, can be personally dishonest, rotten, but when they adopt the insignia of authority, they experience a kind of mystic transubstantiation.’
The distinction, very simply, is between the empirical individual and the structural and Symbolic position they occupy. From this structural position, from this Symbolic title they borrow authority. Those who genefluct to them are in fact signalling their deference to this Symbolic Position. When a student respectfully addresses a Professor on the first day of classes, they address his symbolic position as opposed to him/ her as an empirical individual. They address the Other, of which he is the bearer.
The empirical individual can experience and relate to this Symbolic title in different ways. He may identify with it utterly, as though the authority and respect appropriate to his structual symbolic position is a direct emanation of his self. (Lacan’s famous assertion that a beggar who thinks he is a king is no more or less mad than a king who thinks he is a king.)
Alternatively, the individual may experience his symbolic title as a kind of foreign body, an unwelcome burden, a constant imperative. The father who feels not quite up to the mandate of ‘father’, as if the title doesn’t fit him, as if has invaded him from the outside, clamped itself upon his substance. When someone says, by contrast, you’ve been 'such a good father', it means – ‘you have utterly met, lived up to, your symbolic mandate.’
The Symbolic mandate – king, father or whatever – is, nonetheless, whether embraced or refused, always a kind of eccentric imperative, which colonises the subject, demanding the commitment of and preying on his life substance. And this status of the Symbolic as a kind of parasite is beautifully expressed in Shakespeare’s Henry iv, part ii.
The history plays as a whole arguably concern the way in which people are interpellated by their symbolic titles, assume or fail to assume their symbolic titles, are transformed by those titles. Towards the end of part ii, Prince Hal, soon to be Henry v, first thinks his father dead, seeing the crown (the very material embodiment of his title) lying beside him on the pillow. On realising that his weary and ill father is in fact still alive, Hal comments -
Coming to look on you, thinking you dead,
And dead almost, my liege, to think you were,
I spake unto this crown as having sense,
And thus upbraided it: ‘The care on thee depending
Hath fed upon the body of my father;
Therefore thou best of gold art worse than gold.
The Symbolic leaches life out of the real body, the Symbolic title is like a parasite feeding on the living body.
Falstaff, by contrast, is the life substance itself, negligent of Symbolic ‘honours’. Ultimately Falstaff has to be disowned by Hal when he assumes his symbolic title of Henry V.