Butler recognises the importance of language to the formation of the subject, but tends to emphasise the subject's social embeddedness and dependence on social norms. Jacques Lacan, in contrast, focuses on the relationship between thought and language to insist on the fundamental importance of the symbolic realm – meaning primarily though not exclusively the differential relations that generate meaning – for the formation and continuation of the subject. This is not to say, however, that he ignores or downplays the social dimension. For Lacan, the symbolic is inherently social because it is defined by relationality and so is dependent upon the Other.

This is combined with two additional points: first, Lacan holds that the subject is distinct from the ego; and, second, whereas the ego is associated with consciousness, he links the subject to the unconscious. By moving the terms of the debate away from the conscious foundational ego towards the unconscious differential symbolic relations that generate meaning, Lacan continues the poststructuralist rejection of the Cartesian cogito and rethinking of the subject. Schematically, his analysis fulfils at least three functions in so far as it 1) criticises any privileging of the ego, 2) undermines the notion that the subject is foundational, and 3) focuses our attention on the ways in which diachronic symbolic relations and, by extension, the Other structure and underpin the subject.

It is, then, not surprising that Lacan's theory of the subject has attracted much attention: Dany Nobus, for example, calls the subject the ‘conceptual cornerstone’ of Lacan's psychoanalytic edifice, while Bruce Fink relies on the fallacy that poststructuralist thought fails to offer a positive conception of the subject to claim that Lacan not only corrects this lacuna but, in so doing, also ‘presents us with a radically new theory of subjectivity’. Lorenzo Chiesa agrees with this assessment by maintaining that ‘Lacan outlines a revolutionary theory of the subject’, while Yannis Stavrakakis insists that ‘this subject … is generally considered as Lacan's major contribution to contemporary theory and political analysis’.