I am looking at Houston Baker, Jr.'s very interesting I Don't Hate the South (2007). And here it goes:
In a sense, language as the gateway of our identity is like a carnival hall of mirrors. There is, thus, always a gap, a lack, an unconquerable divide that the black writer Richard Wright captures in the title of one of his better known poems: "Between the World and Me."
When we fall into language (which Laçan [sic] defines as patriarchal, causing scholars like Gilles Deleuze, Felix [sic] Guattari, and Judith Butler to dissent from his thesis), we join the world. But we lose our whole(ness). We are always attempting, according to Laçan [sic], to fill the "hole in the self" that is our identity formation. (71)
The whole phrase between ( ) can be erased. And Lacan, Félix, rather. A little more attention, editors at Oxford UP!
But this image of language being "a carnival hall of mirrors" is so nice.
