Lacan: “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious; or Reason Since Freud”

A contribution “half-way between” writing and speech. [What is this ‘between’?]Freud: ‘literary training’ is the prime prerequisite for training of analysts. Speech as the instrument of the “talking cure”.

I. The Meaning of the Letter

“Psychoanalysis discovers in the unconscious … the whole structure of language…” (p. 739). Thus, the unconscious is not just the ‘seat of instincts’.

The order of the ‘symbolic’:

“language and its structure exist prior to the moment at which each subject at a certain point in his mental development makes his entry into it.”

“Thus the subject, too, if he can appear to be the slave of language is all the more so of a discourse in the universal moment in which his place is already inscribed at birth, if only by virtue of his proper name.” (p. 739)

Linguistics as a science. Signifier over signified. What about the bar itself? “The thematics of this science is henceforth suspended, in effect, at the primordial position of the signifier and signified as being distinct orders separated initially by a barrier resisting signification.” (p. 740) Going beyond the doctrines of the arbitrariness of the sign or the correspondence of word and thing. Ostensive teaching. “No signification can be sustained other than by reference to another signification.” … “We fail to pursue the question further as long as we cling to the illusion that the signifier answers to the function of representing the signified, or better, that the signifier has to answer for its existence in the name of any signification whatever.” (p. 741)

Instead of assuming the correlation signifier/signified, we must pay attention to the reference of significations to one another.

Entry of signifier into signified. (Role of language/signification in the structure of material ‘reality’): an example: men’s and women’s restrooms.

Movement of language along the chain of signifiers. “We are forced … to accept the notion of an incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier …” (p. 743) This process does not depend on ‘presence’ of the “whole signifier” in the subject.

“What this structure of the signifying chain discloses is the possibility I have, precisely in so far as I have this language in common with other subjects, that is to say, in so far as it exists as a language, to use it in order to signify something quite other than what it says. This function of speech is more worth pointing out than that of ‘disguising the thought’ (more often than not indefinable) of the subject; it is no less than the function of indicating the place of the subject in search of the true.” (p. 744)

Sliding of signifier, in two modes: metonymy (word-word connection) and metaphor (one signifier takes the place of the other in the signifying chain).

“Of course, as it is said, the letter killeth while the spirit giveth life. We can’t help but agree, having had to pay homage elsewhere to a noble victim of the error of seeking the spirit in the letter; but we should also like to know how the spirit could live without the letter. Even so, the pretentions of the spirit would remain unassailable if the letter had not shown us that it produces all the effects of truth in man without involving the spirit at all. It is none other than Freud who had this revelation, and he called his discovery the unconscious.” (p. 746)

II. The Letter in the Unconscious

Freud: the dream as hieroglyphics and rebus. The value of signifier as image (having nothing to do with its signification).

Mechanisms of the dream-work:Distortion: sliding of signified under the signifierCondensation: superimposition of signifiers (cf. metaphor)Displacement: veering off of signification (cf. metonymy)

Liberating Freud’s insight from a limited conception of the “unconscious”.

Ubiquity of the unconscious. Even the bodily or somatic can be designated a an effect of the unconscious.

Symbolizing the place of the subject (“I”) in the signifying order and the metonymic structure. Aim of desire toward the very lack of signification.

Crossing of the bar as constitutive for the emergence of signification.

Cogito, ergo sum. “Is the place that I occupy as the subject of a signifier concentric or excentric, in relation to the place I occupy as subject of the signified? – that is the question…It is not a question of knowing whether I speak of myself in a way that conforms to what I am, but rather of knowing whether I am the same as that of which I speak.” (p. 750)

“I am what I am”. Am I (only) what I am? Do I become what I am?

“This signifying game between metonymy and metaphor, up to and including the active edge that splits my desire between a refusal of the signifier and a lack of being, and links my fate to the question of my destiny, this game, in all its inexorable subtlety, is played until the match is called, there where I am not, because I cannot situate myself there.” (p. 750).

Symptoms as metaphors. Memories and traces. “It is in a memory, comparable to what is called by that name in our modern thinking-machines (which are in turn based on an electronic realization of the composition of signification), it is in his sort of memory that is found the chain that insists on reproducing itself in the transference, and which is the chain of dead desire.It is the truth of what this desire has been in his history that the patient cries out through his symptom, as Christ said that the stones themselves would have cried out if the children of Israel had not lent them their voice.” (p. 751)

Neurosis: a question that “being poses for the subject ‘from where it was before the subject came into the world’”

III. The Letter, Being and the Other

Self’s radical ex-centricity to itself. Possibility of reconciliation with self? (with the “other I” that speaks in my place)? Only if this “other I” can be recognized as the “Other”:

“If I have said that the unconscious is the discourse of the Other (with a capital O), it is in order to indicate the beyond in which the recognition of desire is bound up with the desire for recognition. In other words this other is the Other that even my lie invokes as a guarantor of the truth in which it subsists. By which we can also see that it is with the appearance of language the dimension of truth emerges.”

The Other: the constitutive domain of truth. The effect of the symbolic.

History as history of shifts in relations between signifier and signified.

Heidegger. “Finally, if I am to rouse you to indignation over the fact that, after so many centuries of religious hypocrisy and philosophical bravado, nothing has yet been validly articulated as to what links metaphor to the question of being and metonymy to its lack, there must be an object there to answer to that indignation both as its instigator and its victim; that object is humanistic man and the credit, hopelessly affirmed, which he has drawn over his intentions.” (p. 756).