June 20, 2010
“That there are in the
unconscious signifying chains which subsist as such, and which from there
structure, act on the organism, influence what appears from the outside as a
symptom, this is the whole basis of analytic experience” (Seminar V, 21.05.58.,
p.7).
In this post I wanted to look
at several passages from Lacan’s work that I think are particularly useful in
getting to grips with the notion of the signifier. This is a crucial concept
for Lacanian psychoanalysis, as the quote from Lacan above attests, but one
which he borrows from linguistics and injects into psychoanalytic discourse.
Perhaps for this reason, the signifier is an alien concept for people who are
interested in psychoanalysis but are more familiar with Freud’s work. Freud
does not use the concept of the signifier – indeed, there are no references to
‘signifier’ in the indexes of the Standard Edition – but Lacan all the same
attempts to tease it out of Freud’s text to justify its introduction at the
heart of his own approach to analysis.
I have chosen several passages
from Lacan’s Seminar, both published and unpublished, and provided commentary
below. I hope this article both clarifies what the signifier means for Lacan
and distinguishes it from related concepts, specifically, the sign, the trace,
the signified and the subject.
What can Robinson Crusoe tell
us about the signifier?
The first three quotations we
will look at come from Seminars III, V and VI respectively. The little story he
relates from Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is one that we find repeated in
several places in his work from this time, the so-called ‘Return to Freud’ period.
“Let’s begin with the
biological sign. In the very structure, in the morphology, of animals there is
something that has this captivating value due to which its receiver, who sees
the red of the robin redbreast for instance, and who is made for receiving it,
undertakes a series of actions or henceforth unitary behaviour that links the
bearer of this sign to its perceiver. Here you have what gives us a precise
idea of what may be called natural meaning. Without otherwise seeking how this
might take place in man, it is clear that by means of a series of transitions
we can manage to purify, neurtralise, the natural sign.
Then there is the trace, the
footprint in the sand, the sign about which Robinson Crusoe makes no mistake.
Here sign and object separate. The trace, in its negative aspect, draws the
natural sign to a limit at which it becomes evanescent. The distinction between
sign and object is quite clear here, since the trace is precisely what the
object leaves behind once it has gone off somewhere else. Objectively there is
no need for any subject to recognise a sign for it to be there – a trace exists
even if there is nobody to look at it.
When have we passed over into
the order of the signifier? The signifier may extend over many of the elements
within the domain of the sign. But the signifier is a sign that doesn’t refer
to any object, not even to one in the form of a trace, even though the trace
nevertheless heralds the signifier’s essential feature. It, too, is the sign of
an absence. But insofar as it forms part of language, the signifier is a sign
which refers to another sign, which is as such structured to signify the
absence of another sign, in other words, to be opposed to it in a couple”
(Seminar III, p.167).
In this passage Lacan wants to
make clear the difference between a sign, a trace and a signifier. Let’s
summarise what he says about each:
The sign is the equivalent to
the code in the animal kingdom. It is a complete equivalence of thing and
meaning that allows for no ambiguity. Waving a red rag in front of a bull, for
example, is like a code for it to attack – the red has a fixed meaning and the
bull does not interpret it in any other, more ‘poetic’ way.
The trace is the mark of an
absence, a missing object like the foot in the sand of Man Friday.
The signifier is a sign
without any referent. It does not refer to anything, although it shares with
the trace absence as its fundamental feature.
Signifier and trace are the
same in that there is both an absence, but in the case of the signifier that
absence is not the absence of the foot. The foot does not need to have once
been there for the footprint in the sand to operate as a signifier because a
signifier does not refer to something that is lost, but simply to other
signifiers. In saying at the end of this passage that, as part of language, the
signifier is a sign which refers to another sign’s absence Lacan is referring
to how a signifier denotes opposition. Light becomes the opposite of dark, for
instance; we only know light as the absence of dark. Perhaps an even simpler
example of this would be the oppositions of zeros and ones in binary code.
There is a relationship of mutual opposition in the way signifiers work in a
language system.
Lacan expands on the
difference between the trace and the signifier with reference to Robinson
Crusoe again, this time in Seminar VI a few years later:
“I spoke to you about Robinson Crusoe and about the footstep, the trace of Friday’s footprint, and we dwelt a little while on the following: is this already the signifier, and I told you that the signifier begins, not with the trace, but with whatever effaces the trace, and it is not the effaced trace which constitutes the signifer, it is something which poses itself as being able to be effaced, which inaugurates the signifier. In other words, Robinson Crusoe effaces the trace of Friday’s footprint, but what does he put in its place? If he wants to preserve the place of Friday’s footprint, he needs at least a cross, namely a bar and another bar across it. This is the specific signifier. The specific signifier is something which presents itself as being itself able to be effaced and which subsists precisely in this operation of effacing as such. I mean that the effaced signifier already presents itself as such with the properties proper to the unsaid. In so far as I cancel the signifier with the bar, I perpetuate it as such indefinitely, I inaugurate the dimension of the signifier as such. Making a cross is properly speaking something that does not exist in any form of locating that is permitted in any way. You must not think that non-speaking beings, the animals, do not locate things, but they do not do it intentionally with something said, but with traces of traces…. What man leaves behind him is a signifier, it is a cross, it is a bar, qua barred, qua overlaid by another bar which indicates on the one hand that as such it has been effaced” (Seminar VI, 10.12.58., p.3).
Again, we see Lacan describing
the footprint in the sand as a trace of the object that is missing – the foot.
But it differs from the signifier in that the trace, by contrast, still has an
actual referent – Man Friday. If Robinson Crusoe comes along and erases the
footprint-trace, but in the place where it once was puts a completely arbitrary
marker – a cross, for instance – this constitutes a signifier. What makes this
a signifier rather than a trace is that any object can stand in the place of
the trace. It does not need to be a footprint because it does not need to have
any real-world connection to the thing represented. It can be substituted for
any other object because it does not matter as an object but only
insofar as it takes its place in the structure with reference to other objects
which also function as signifiers. If we think of a game of chess – it is not
necessary to have little miniature kings, queens and rooks to play – you can
use any objects in place of those pieces as long as they obey the same rules as
the ones they were substituted for. What matters is the rules of the game,
which corresponds to the structure and rules of language, rather than the
pieces you play with, which are totally substitutable. What makes humans who
use language different from animals is that we do not need the trace of the
missing object to be able to signify something.
A year previously, whilst
delivering Seminar V, Lacan again makes the point that the trace is not a
signifier, but here he does accept that the signifier can take as its material
the trace, or even that the signifier requires something of the trace to be a
signifier proper:
“If we notice what is specific
in the fact, not of a trace, because a trace is an imprint, it is not a
signifier, one senses however that there could be a connection, and that in
truth what one calls the material of the signifier always participates a little
bit in the fleeting character of the trace. This seems to be one of the
conditions for the existence of this signifying material. This however is not a
signifier, even the footprint of Friday which Robinson Crusoe discovers during
his walk around the island, is not a signifier, but on the contrary, if we
suppose that he, Robinson, for whatever reason, effaces this trace, there we
clearly introduce the dimension of signifier” (Seminar V, 23.04.58, p.8).
Effacing – the hallmark of the
signifier.
But why the focus on the
effacing of a trace? Why is it this act of erasing that constitutes something
as a signifier? To answer this we have to look at the place of the signifier in
a network of other signifiers. Lacan goes on:
“… In fact there again what we
rediscover, is that just as after it is effaced, what remains, if there is a
text, namely if this signifier is inscribed among other signifiers, what
remains, is the place where it has been effaced, and it is indeed this place
also which sustains the transmission, which is this essential thing thanks to
which that which succeeds it in the passage takes on the consistency of
something that can be trusted” (Seminar V, 23.04.58, p.8-10).
What Lacan is saying here is
that we recognise a signifier by reference to its place among other signifiers.
For example, if we take a signifying system such as the Dewey decimal system in
a library, I know that a book should be at a certain place on a shelf even if
that place is empty and the book is not there. What Lacan calls here “the place
where it has been effaced” remains even if the book itself is missing. If it is
simply a trace, like the footprints of Friday in the sand, these can be erased
and you will never know Friday has been there. But a signifier in a language
system like the Dewey system means that I know the book has a place on the
shelf even if when I go there I find no trace of it.
Lacan links this to another
form of erasing- the notion of Aufhebung, which he takes from Hegel:
“There has been a lot of talk,
ever since there are philosophers who think, about the Aufhebung, and they
have learned to make use of it in a more or less cunning way. This word means
both cancellation, and essentially this is what it means: for example I cancel
my subscription to a newspaper, or my reservation somewhere; it also means,
thanks to an ambiguity of meaning which makes it precious in the German
language, to raise to a higher power or situation. It does not seem to me that
sufficient attention is paid to the following, that to be able properly
speaking to talk about being cancelled, there is only properly speaking only
one kind of thing, I would say roughly speaking, which can be, that is a
signifier, because to tell the truth, when we cancel anything else, whether it is
imaginary or real, it is simply because strictly speaking in doing so, and by
that very fact, we not only cancel what is in question, we raise it by a grade,
to the qualification of signifier (Seminar V, 23.04.58, p.8-10).
Aufhebung, sometimes translated
into English as ‘sublation’, implies cancellation, and Lacan says here that to
sublate something is to “raise it by a grade, to the qualification of
signifier”. The key property of the signifier is that it is erasable, that
is can be cancelled out. Perhaps it is because it is substitutable – that only
its place among other signifiers matters – that Lacan claims that “one of the
fundamental dimensions of the signifier, is to be able to cancel itself out”.
This cancelling or effacing is
operant at the level of the signifying chain because we see it happening in the
movement from one signifier to another:
“One sees in effect that if
here the signifier is a melting pot in so far as it bears witness to a presence
that is past, and that inversely in what is signifying, there is always in the
fully developed signifier which the word is, there is always a passage, namely
something which is beyond each one of the elements which are articulated, and
which are of their nature fleeting, vanishing, that is the passage from one to
the other which constitutes the essential of what we call the signifying chain,
and that this passage qua vanishing, is this very thing which can be
trusted” (Seminar V, 23.04.58, p.8-10).
The “passage” that Lacan
refers to here is quite simply the signifying chain. Because it refers to
nothing but other signifiers, the signifying chain makes the signifier only
ever fleeting. No signifier can exist by itself, it always has to refer to another,
and this is what he says “constitutes the essential of what we call the
signifying chain”.
We will return to look more
closely at the dynamics of this chain of signifiers later on. If for now
however we think of all signifiers as connected (one signifier always refers to
another, something adequately demonstrated when we look up a word in a
dictionary), with the process of effacement of each successive signifier
animating that chain and leading from one signifier to another, we get a sense
of the similarity which might explain why Lacan aligns human desire to the
displacement of the signifier:
“… I am not playing with words
to amuse myself. I simply mean by this use of words, to indicate for you a
direction along which we get closer to this link between the signifying
manipulation of our object which is that of desire, and its opposition between
consideration and désideration marked by the bar of the signifier,
being here of course only destined to indicate a direction, a beginning…
There is a link between the
signifier and desire in that both have this property of constantly referring to
something else – desire is not something that can be satisfied, as my earlier post on the nature of desire in Lacan pointed out;
and likewise the signifier never refers to anything other than other
signifiers.
… It is only from the moment
that it can be barred, that any signifier whatsoever has its proper status, namely
that it enters into this dimension which ensures that in principle every
signifier, to distinguish here what I mean, comes from the cancelling which is
so essential” (Seminar V, 23.04.58, p.8-10).
The Signified
So what is the status of the
signified, then?
“Let me pause here for a
moment so you can appreciate how necessary are the categories of the linguistic
theory that last year I was trying to make you feel comfortable with. You
recall that in linguistics there is the signifier and the signified and that the
signifier is to be taken in the sense of the material of language. The trap,
the hole one must not fall into, is the belief that signifieds are objects,
things. The signified is something quite different – it’s the meaning, and I
explained to you by means of Saint Augustine, who is as much of a linguist as
Monsieur Benveniste, that it always refers to meaning, that is, to another
meaning. The system of language, at whatever point you take hold of it, never
results in an index finger directly indicating a point of reality; it’s the
whole of reality that is covered by the entire network of language. You can
never say that this is what is being designated, for even were you to succeed
you would never know what I am designating in this table – for example, the
colour, the thickness, the table as object, or whatever else it might be”
(Seminar III, p.32).
Lacan here gives us the
definition of the signified. The signified is not the thing or object in
reality to which the signifier refers but instead the meaning. But in what
sense does he mean ‘meaning’? When Lacan says that the signified slides
underneath the signifier he is referring to the fact that it is only through
the production of more signifiers that you can designate meaning, and thereby
produce the signified. It is only through signifiers that the generation of any
meaning, or any signified, is possible. This is why the signifier is primary
according to Lacan. For example, when you look up a word in a dictionary you do
not find the object itself but other signifiers that you use to ascertain its
meaning. These words, or signifiers, in every case refer to more signifiers,
which in turn refer to still more, and onwards forever. The meaning is never
fixed and localised as if your finger were to point at something. To follow the
example that Lacan gives in this passage, if we look up the word ‘table’ in a
dictionary we do not find the object itself because the signifier ‘table’ can
refer to many different things. It can be a noun that designates an object you
put things on; it can be a table that holds information in rows and columns; or
it can be a verb, ‘to table’, referring to putting something forward, like an
amendment.
The signified is the name for
discourse as a whole, rather than the thing you are designating or the object
in its raw reality. Signification can never be fixed and final – it is never
possible for a signifier to refer to an object in reality, as later in Seminar
III he goes on to point out:
“Now, in no way can we
consider that the fundamental endpoint is to point to a thing. There is an
absolute non-equivalence between discourse and pointing. Whatever you take the
ultimate element of discourse to be reduced to, you will never be able to
replace it with your index finger – recall the quite correct remark by Saint
Augustine. If I designate something by pointing to it, no one will ever know
whether my finger is designating the object’s colour or its matter, or whether
it’s designating a stain or crack, etc. You need words, discourse, to discern
this. Discourse has an original property in comparison with pointing. But
that’s not where we shall find the fundamental reference of discourse. Are we
looking for where it stops? Well then, it’s always at the level of this
problematical term called being” (Seminar III, p.137).
Rather than pointing to a
thing, Lacan’s idea is that the signified is determined by the signifier:
“… The signifier (and you can
note that I never properly articulated it as such) is not simply what supports
what is not there. The fort-da in so far as it refers to maternal
presence or absence, is not, here, the exhaustive articulation of the coming
into play of the signifier. The signifier does not designate what is not there,
it engenders it” (Seminar XIV, 16.11.66., p.8).
Again we can see, from a
different angle, how the signifier is different from a trace, in that “The
signifier… is not simply what supports what is not there”. If the fort-da game
Freud describes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle is invented by the
child to represent the appearance and disappearance of the mother this is not
the same as the function of the signifier, which goes beyond this marking of an
absence. So in saying here that the signifier does not designate what is not
there but rather engenders it he is referring to the fact that it is the
signifier that determines the signified.
Let’s analyse a passage in
the Ecrits where the difference between the signifier and signified
for Lacan is made manifest, and from there look closer at the notion of a
‘chain’ of signifiers:
The Chain of Signifiers
“A psychoanalyst should find
it easy to grasp the fundamental distinction between signifier and signified,
and to begin to familiarise himself with the two networks of nonoverlapping
relations they organise.
The first network, that of the
signifier, is the synchronic structure of the material of language insofar as
each element takes on its precise usage therein by being different from the
others; this is the principle of distribution that alone regulates the function
of the elements of language [langue] at its different levels, from the phonemic
pair of oppositions to compound expressions, the task of the most modern research
being to isolate the stable forms of the latter.
The second network, that of
the signified, is the diachronic set of concretely pronounced discourses, which
historically affects the first network, just as the structure of the first
governs the pathways of the second. What dominates here is the unity of
signification, which turns out to never come down to a pure indication of
reality [réel] , but always refers to another signification. In other words,
signfication comes about only on the basis of taking things as a whole [d’ensemble].
Its mainspring cannot be
grasped at the level at which signification usually secures its characteristic
redundancy, for it always proves to exceed the things it leaves indeterminate
within it.
The signifier alone guarantees
the theoretical coherence of the whole as a whole. Its ability to do so is
confirmed by the latest development in science, just as, upon reflection, we
find it to be implicit in early linguistic experience.
These are the foundations that
distinguish language from signs. Dialectic derives new strength from them” (Ecrits,
414-145).
If the signified refers to
meaning, practically it “always refers to another signification”, that is, to
more signifiers and their potential signifieds as the latter slide underneath
the former. If Lacan says that the signified is meaning (in the passage from
Seminar III quoted above) then the signified is simply the discourse in which
all signifiers are collectively bound up. This is why Lacan says that the
“network” of the signified does not refer to a thing in reality but instead
“always refers to another signification”, another fleeting and transitory
pairing of signifier with signified. The process of signification is therefore
constantly in flux with what we might call meaning or sense created when the
signified aligns with the signifier above it, until we move on to using another
signifier. The signified is thereby an effect of the signifier for precisely
the reason that meaning cannot be determined without employing more and more
signifiers. Thus we get the appearance of a chain of signifiers. This is how
Lacan describes it in Seminar III:
“Let me sum this up. The sense
is always moving towards something, towards another meaning, towards the
closure of meaning. It always refers to something that is out ahead or that
turns back upon itself, but there is a direction. Does this mean that we have
no endpoint? I’m sure that this point still remains uncertain in your mind
given the insistence with which I state that meaning always refers to meaning”
(Seminar III, p.137).
Signification is an operation
that is in constant fluidity. There is always a ‘moving towards’ a closure of
meaning, as Lacan describes it here. This is why, for example, a string of
signifiers only makes sense in retrospect once you indicate you have reached
the end by punctuating it.
The Sign
So what then is a sign, and
how is a sign made?
“I want to end by showing in
what respect the sign can be distinguished from the signfier.
The signifier, as I have said,
is characterised by the fact that it represents a subject to another signifier.
What is involved in the sign? The cosmic theory of knowledge or world view has
always made a big deal of the famous example of smoke that cannot exist without
fire. So why shouldn’t I put forward what I think about it? Smoke can just as
easily be the sign of a smoker. And, in essence, it always is. There is no
smoke that is not a sign of a smoker. Everyone knows that, if you see smoke
when you approach a deserted island, you immediately say to yourself that there
is a good chance there is someone there who knows how to make fire. Until
things change considerably, it will be another man. Thus, a sign is not the
sign of something, but of an effect that is what is presumed as such by a
functioning of the signifier” (Seminar XX, p.49).
What is the difference between
a sign and a signifier? If “The signifier, as I have said, is characterised by
the fact that it represents a subject to another signifier”, as Lacan says in
this passage then the sign, by distinction, “is not the sign of something, but
of an effect that is what is presumed as such by a functioning of the
signifier”. So is smoke a sign of fire, for Lacan? If we are approaching a
desert island and see smoke is it not the sign of fire? For Lacan, to be
precise, smoke is the effect of a smoker rather than an effect of the fire
itself. Smoke is not a sign (of fire) but a signifier of the fact that there is
someone there who knows how to make a fire, and it is for this reason that
Lacan says the smoke is a signifier rather than a sign. What Lacan is trying to
do here is to split the concept of signifier from that of the sign. What we
might at first take to be an obvious ‘sign’ of fire actually reveals the
signifier’s place as primary, with the sign an effect of the functioning of the
signifier. The danger to be avoided is to take the sign too literally. The great
lesson of the toilet doors analogy in The Agency of the Letter (Lacan’s
replacement for the Saussurean algorithm of a tree) was that we cannot take the
little pictures of men and women on the front of toilet doors too seriously,
because behind the doors are simply two identical toilets. The difference
between the two toilets, ‘Ladies’ and ‘Gentlemen’ is created by the signifier
on the doors themselves – either ‘Ladies’ or ‘Gentlemen’ – rather than what is
actually behind them.
A little apologue Lacan gives
his audience in Seminar III might serve to make this distinction between the
signifier and the sign more clear:
I’m at sea, the captain of a
small ship. I see things moving about in the night, in a way that gives me
cause to think that there may be a sign there. How shall I react? If I’m not
yet a human being, I shall react with all sorts of displays, as they say –
modeled, motor, and emotional. I satisfy the description of psychologists, I
understand something, in fact I do everything I’m telling you that you must
know how not to do. If on the other hand I am a human being, I write in my log
book – ‘At such and such a time, at such and such a degree of latitude and
longitude, we noticed this and that.
This is what is fundamental. I
shelter my responsibility. What distinguishes the signifier is here. I make a
note of the sign as such. It’s the acknowledgement of receipt
[l’accusé de réception] that is essential to communication insofar as it is
not significant, but signifying. If you don’t articulate this distinction
clearly, you will keep falling back upon meaning that can only mask from you
the original mainspring of the signifier insofar as it carries out its true
function” (Seminar III, p.188).
What we can take from this is
that it is not the referent of the sign or the signal that matters – what
constitutes a signifier is the registering that something is detected, an
inscription marking that something has been noted or acknowledged. It is
important to note that what Lacan’s apologue implies is that nothing is being
communicated by the signifier as such – it is just being registered.
The Primacy of the Signifier
The primacy of the signifier
is not an idea found in Saussure’s work, from which Lacan imports contributions
from linguistic theory into psychoanalysis. In the following passage Lacan
explains why he chooses to deviate from the Saussurean model:
“The unconscious is
fundamentally structured, woven, chained, meshed, by language. And not only
does the signifier play as big a role there as the signified does, but it plays
the fundamental role. In fact, what characterises language is the system of
signifiers as such. The complex play between signifier and signified raises questions
that we are skirting since we aren’t doing a course in linguistics here, but
you have a good enough idea of it now to know that the relationship between
signifier and signified is far from being, as they say in set theory,
one-to-one.
The signified is not the
things in their raw state, already there, given in an order open to meaning.
Meaning is human discourse insofar as it always refers to another meaning. M.
de Saussure thinks that what enables the signifier to be cut up is a certain
correlation between the signifier and the signified. Obviously, for it to be
possible to cut the two of them up together there must be a pause.
His diagram is questionable….
A system of signifiers, a language,
has certain characteristics that specify the syllables, the usage of words, the
locutions into which they are grouped, and this conditions what happens in the
unconscious, down to its most original fabric. If the unconscious is as Freud
depicts it, a pun can in itself be the linchpin that supports a symptom, a pun
that doesn’t exist in a related language. This is not to say that symptoms are
always based on puns, but that they are always based on the existence of
signifiers as such, on a complex relationship of totality, or more exactly of
entire system to entire system, of universe of signifiers to universe of
signifiers.
This is so clearly Freud’s
doctrine that there is no other meaning to give to his term overdetermination,
or to his necessary requirement that for a symptom to occur there must be at
least a duality, at least two conflicts at work, one current and one old.
Without this fundamental duality of signifier and signified no psychoanalytic
determinism is conceivable. The material linked to the old conflict is
preserved in the unconscious as a potential signifier, as a virtual signifier,
and then captured in the signified of the current conflict and used by it as
language, that is, as symptom” (Seminar III, p.119-120).
The question Lacan addresses
here is that of why he considers the signifier to be so important for
psychoanalysis. Is Lacan right however to apply these linguistic terms to
Freud’s work? If Freud does not use terms like ‘signifier’ and ‘signified’,
where is Lacan inferring them from? Let’s look at the Rat Man case for an
example of the repetition of a single signifier. Freud writes in the case
history:
“In this way rats came to have
the meaning of ‘money’. The patient gave an indication of this connection by
reacting to the word Ratten [‘rats’] with the association Raten [‘instalments’].
Little by little he translated into this language the whole complex of money
interests which centred round his father’s legacy to him; that is to say, all
his ideas connected with that subject were, by way of the verbal bridge Raten
– Ratten, carried over into his obsessional life and brought under the dominion
of his unconscious. Moreover, the captain’s request to him to pay back the
charges due upon the packet served to stengthen the money significance of rats,
by way of another verbal bridge Spielratte, which led back to his father’s
gambling debt…. Moreover, all of this material, and more besides, was woven
into the fabric of the rat discussion behind the screen-association heiraten [‘to
marry’]” (SE X, 214-215).
Although Freud sees these
‘verbal bridges’ as the means of the unconscious, Lacan sees it precisely as
what constitutes the unconscious itself. Nevertheless, it is from the text of
Freud’s work that Lacan claims legitimacy for his introduction of the concept
of the signifier into psychoanalytic theory. As is evident in the following
passage, Freud lacks the linguistic theory to express his findings in the way
Lacan later does. Freud writes:
“In a play upon words, in our
view, the word is also only a sound-image, to which one meaning or another is
attached. But here, too, linguistic usage makes no sharp distinctions; and if
it treats ‘puns’ with contempt and ‘play upon words’ with a certain respect,
these judgements of value seem to be determined by considerations other than
technical ones” (SE VIII, 46).
Lacan’s most radical inference
from the ‘discovery’ of the autonomy of the signifier in what would correspond
to Freudian ‘psychical life’ is that the subject itself is a product of the
displacement of the signifier:
“The subject is nothing other
than what slides in a chain of signfiers, whether he knows which signifier he
is the effect of or not. That effect – the subject – is the intermediary effect
between what characterises a signifier and another signifier, namely, the fact
that each of them, each of them is an element. We know of no other basis by
which the One may have been introduced into the world if not by the signifier
as such, that is, the signifier insofar as we learn to separate it from its
meaning effects” (Seminar XX, p.49-50).
The subject is an effect of
the signifier because the subject is what the signifier represents to another
signifier. In saying here that “The subject is nothing other than what slides
in a chain of signifiers” Lacan is putting the subject in the place of the
signified which, as he tells us in the Ecrits, slides underneath the
signifier (Ecrits, 502).
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