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The Insistance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or, Reason Since Freud

Page history last edited by PBworks 17 years, 4 months ago

 

 

Jacques Lacan, "The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious, Reason Since Freud"

 

'Of Children in Swaddling Clothes

O cities of the sea, I bchold in you your citizcns, women

as well as men tightly bound with stout bonds around

their arms and legs by folk who will not understand

your language; and you will only be able to give

vent to your griefs and sense of loss of liberty

by making tearful complaints, and sighs, and

lamentations one to another; for those who

bind you will not understand your

language nor will you

understand them.'

LEONARDO DA VINCI

 

 

Although the nature of this contribution was deterrnined by the theme of the third volume of La Psychanalyse, I owe to what will be found there to insert it at a point somewhere between writing (l'écrit) and speech - it will be half-way between the two.

 

Writing is distingiushed by a prevalence of the text in the sense that this factor of discourse will assume in this essay a factor that makes possible the kind of tightening up that I like in order to leave the reader no other way out than the way in, which I prefer to be difficult. In that sense, then, this will not be writing.

 

Because I always try to provide my seminars each time with some. thing new, I have refrained so far from giving such a text, with one exception, which is not particularly outstanding in the context of the series, and which I refer to at all only for the general level of its argument.

 

For the urgency that I now take as a pretext for leaving aside such an aim only masks the difficulty that, in trying to maintain it at the level at which I ought to present my teaching here, I might push it too far from speech, whose very different techniques are essential to the formative effect I seek.

 

That is why I have taken the expedient offered me by the invitation to lecture to the philosophy group of the Fédération des étudiants ès lettres to produce an adaptation suitable to what I have to say: its necessary generality matches the exceptional character of the audience, but its sole object encounters the collusion of their common training, a literary one, to which my title pays homage. Indeed, how could we forget that to the end of his days Freud constantly maintained that such a training was the prime requisite in the formation of analysts, and that he designated the eternal universitas litterarum as the ideal place for its institution. Thus my recourse (in rewriting) to the movement of the (spoken) discourse, restored to its vitality, by showing whom I meant it for, marks even more clearly those for whom it is not intended. I mean that it is not intended for those who, for any reason whatever, in psychoanalysis, allow their discipline to avail itself of some false identity - a fault of habit, but its effect on the mind is such that the true identity may appear as simply one alibi among others, a sort of refined reduplication whose implications will not be lost on the most subtle minds.

 

So one observes with a certain curiosity the beginnings of a new direction concerning symbolization and language in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, with a great many sticky fingers leafing through the pages of Sapir and Jespersen. These exercises are still somewhat unpractised, but it is above all the tone that is lacking. A certain "seriousness" as one enters the domain of veracity cannot fail to raise a smile. And how could a psychoanalyst of today not realize that speech is the key to that truth, when his whole experience must find in speech alone its instrument, its context, its material, and even the background noise of its uncertainties.

 

I. The Meaning of the Letter

 

As my title suggests, beyond this “speech,” what the psychoanalytic experience discovers in the unconscious is the whole structure of language. Thus from the outset I have alerted informed minds to the extent to which the notion that the unconscious is merely the seat of the instincts will have to be rethought.

 

But how are we to take this “letter” here? Quite simply, literally1.

 

By “letter” I designate that material support that concrete discourse borrows from language.

 

This simple definition assumes that language is not to be confused with the various psychical and somatic functions that serve it in the speaking subject – primarily because 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.

 

Let us note then that aphasias, although caused by purely anatomical lesions in the cerebral apparatus that supplies the mental center for these functions, prove, on the whole, to distribute their deficits between the two sides of the signifying effect of what we call here “the letter” in the creation of signification. A point that will be clarified later.

 

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 movement in which his place is already inscribed at birth, if only by virtue of his proper name.

 

Reference to the experience of the community, or to the substance of this discourse, settles nothing. For this experience assumes its essential dimension in the tradition that this discourse itself establishes. This tradition, long before the drama of history is inscribed into it, lays down the elementary structure of culture. And of these very structures reveal an ordering of possible exchanges which, even if unconscious, is inconceivable outside the permutations authorized by language.

 

With the result that the ethnographic duality of nature and culture is giving way to a ternary conception of the human condition – nature, society, and culture – the last term of which could well be reduced to language, or that which essentially distinguishes human society from natural societies.

 

But I shall not make of this distinction either a point or a point of departure, leaving to its own obscurity the question of the original relations between the signifier and labour. I shall be content, for my little jab at the general function of praxis in the genesis of history, to point out that the very society that wished to restore, along with the privileges of the producer, the causal hierarchy of the relations between production and the ideological superstructure to their full political rights, as none the less failed to give birth to an esperanto in which the relations of language to socialist realities would have rendered any literary formalism radically impossible.

 

For it is by virtue of this fact that linguistics is seen to occupy the key position in this domain, and the reclassification of the sciences and a regrouping of them around it signals, as is usually the case, a revolution in knowledge; only the necessities of communication made me inscribe it at the head of this volume under the title 'the sciences of man' - despite the confusion that is thereby covered over.

 

To pinpoint the emergence of linguistic science we may say that, as in the case of all sciences in the modern sense, it is contained in the constitutive moment of an algorithm that is its foundation. This algorithm is the following: S/s

 

which is read as: the signifier over the signified, “over” corresponding to the bar separating the two stages.

 

This sign should be attributed to Ferdinand de Saussure although it is not found in exactly this form in any of the numerous schemas, which none the less express it, to be found in the printed version of his lectures of the years I906-7, I908?9, and I9I0-11, which the piety of a group of his disciples caused to be published under the title, Cours de linguistique génerale, a work of prime importance for the transmission of a teaching worthy of the name, that is, that one can come to terms with only in its own terms.

 

That is why it is legitimate for us to give him credit for the formulation S/s by which, in spite of the differences among schools, the beginning of modern linguistics can be recognized.

 

The thematics of this science is henceforth suspended, in effect, at the primordial position of the signifier and the signified as being distinct order separated initially by a barrier resisting signification. And that is what was to make possible an exact study of the connections proper to the signifier, and of the extent of their function in the genesis of the signified.

 

For this primordial distinction goes well beyond the discussion concerning the arbitrariness of the sign, as it has been elaborated since the earliest reflections of the ancients, and even beyond the impasse which, through the same period, has been encountered in every discussion of the bi-universal correspondence between the word and the thing, if only in the mere act of naming. All this, of course, is quite contrary to the appearances suggested by the importance often imputed to the role of the index finger pointing to an object in the learning process of the infans subject learning his mother tongue, of the use in foreign language teaching of so-called “concrete” methods.

 

One cannot go further along this line of thought than to demonstrate that no signification can be sustained other than by reference to another signification: in its extreme form this amounts to the proposition that there is no language (langue) in existence for which there is any question of its inability to cover the whole field of the signified, it being an effect of its existence as a language (langue) that it necessarily answers all needs. If we try to grasp in language the constitution of the object, we cannot fail to notice that this constitution is to be found only at the level of concept, a very different thing from a simple nominative, and that this thing, when reduced to the noun, breaks up into the double, divergent beam of the “cause” (causa) in which it has taken shelter in the French word chose, and the nothing (rien) to which it has abandoned its Latin dress (rem).

 

These considerations, important as their existence is for the philosopher, turn us awy from the locus in which language questions us as to its very nature. And we will 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.

 

For even reduced to this latter formulation, the heresy is the same – the heresy that leads logical positivism in search of the “meaning of meaning,” as its objective is called in the language of the devotees. As a result, we can observe that even a text highly charged with meaning can be reduced, through this sort of analysis, to insignificant bagatelles, all that survives being mathematical algorithms that are, of course, without any meaning.

 

To return to our formula S/s: if we could infer nothing from it but the notion of the parallelism of its upper and lower terms, each one taken in its globality, it would remain the enigmatic sign of a total mystery. Which of course is not the case.

 

In order to grasp its function I shall begin by reproducing the classic yet faulty illustration … by which its usage is normally introduced, and one can see how it opens the way to the kind of error referred to above.

 

 

In my lecture, I replaced this illustration with another, which has no greater claim to correctness than that it has been transplanted into that incongruous dimension that the psychoanalyst has not yet altogether renounced because of his quite justified feeling that his conformism takes its value entirely from it. Here is the other diagram:

 

 

where we see that, without greatly extending the scope of the signifier concerned in the experiment, that is, by doubling a noun through the mere juxtaposition of two terms whose complementary meanings ought apparently to reinforce each other, a surprise is produced by an unexpected precipitation of an unexpected meaning: the image of twin doors symbolizing, through the solitary confinement offered Western Man for the satisfaction of his natural needs away from home, the imperative that he seems to share with the great majority of primitive communities by which his public life is subjected to the laws of urinary segregation.

It is not only with the idea of silencing the nominalist debate with a low blow that I use this example, but, rather to show how in fact the signifier enters the signified, namely, in a form which, not being immaterial, raises the question of its place in reality. For the blinking gaze of a short-sighted person might be justified in wondering whether this was indeed the signifier as he peered closely at the little enamel signs that bore it, a signifier whose signified would in this call receive its final honors from that double and solemn procession from the upper nave.

 

But no contrived example can be as telling as the actual experience of truth. So I am happy to have invented the above, since it awoke in the person whose word I most trust a memory of childhood, which having thus happily come to my attention is best placed here.

 

A train arrives at a station. A little boy and a little girl, brother and sister, are seated in a compartment face to face next to the window through which the buildings along the station platform can be seen passing as the train pulls to a stop. “Look,” says the brother, “we’re at Ladies!”; “Idiot!” replies his sister, “Can’t you see we’re at Gentlemen.”

 

Besides the fact that the rails in this story materialize the bar in the Saussurian algorithm (and in a form designed to suggest that its resistance may be other than dialectical), we should add that only someone who didn’t have his eyes in front of the holes (it’s the appropriate image here) could possibly confuse the place of the signifier and the signified in this story, or not see from what radiating center the signifier sends forth its light into the shadows of incomplete significations.

 

For this signifier will now carry a purely animal Dissension, destined for the usual oblivion of natural mists, to the unbridled power of ideological warfare, relentless for families, a torment to the Gods. For these children, Ladies and Gentlemen will be henceforth two countries towards which each of their souls will strive on divergent wings, and between which a truce will be the more impossible since they are actually the same country and neither can compromise on its own superiority without detracting from the glory of the other.

 

But enough. It is beginning to sound like the history of France. Which it is more human, as it ought to be, to evoke here than that of England, destined to tumble from the Large to the Small End of Dean Swift's egg.

 

It remains to be conceived what steps, what corridor, the S of the signifier, visible here in the plurals in which it focuses its welcome beyond the window, must take in order to rest its elbows on the ventilators through which, like warm and cold air, indignation and scorn come hissing out below.

 

One thing is certain: if the algorithm S/s with its bar is appropriate, access from one to the other cannot in any case have a signification. For in so far as it is itself only pure function of the signifier, the algorithm can reveal only the structure of a signifier in this transfer.

 

Now the structure of the signifier is, as it is commonly said of language itself, that it should be articulated.

 

This means that no matter where one starts to designate their reciprocal encroachments and increasing inclusions, these units are subjected to the double condition of being reducible to ultimate differential elements and of combining them according to the laws of a closed order.

 

The elements, one of the decisive discoveries of linguistics, are phenomes; but we must not expect to find any phonetic consistency in the modulatory variability to which this term applies, but rather the synchronic system of differential couplings necessary for the discernment of sounds in a given language. Through this, one sees that an essential element of the spoken word itself was predestined to flow into the mobile characters which, in a jumble of lower-case Didots or Garamonds, render validly present what we call the “letter,” namely, the essentially localized structure of the signifier.

 

With the second property of the signifier, that of combining according to the laws of a closed order, is affirmed the necessity of the topological substratum of which the term I ordinarily use, namely, the signifying chain, gives an approximate idea: rings of a necklace that is a ring in another necklace made of rings.

 

Such are the structural conditions that define grammar as the order of constitutive encroachments of the signifier up to the level of the unit immediately superior to the sentence, and lexicology as the order of institutive inclusions of the signifier to the level of the verbal locution.

 

In examining the limits by which these two exercises in the understanding of linguistic usage are determined, it is easy to see that only the correlations between signifier and signified provide the standard for all research into signification, as is indicated by the notion of “usage” of a taxeme or semanteme which in fact refers to the context just above that of the unit concerned.

 

But it is not because the undertakings of grammar and lexicology are exhausted within certain limits that we must think that beyond those limits signification reigns supreme. That would be an error.

 

For the signifier, by its very nature, always anticipates meaning by unfolding its dimension before it. As is seen at the level of the sentence when it is interrupted before the significant term: “I shall never…,” “All the same it is…,” “And yet there may be….” Such sentences are not without meaning, a meaning all the more oppressive in that it is content to make us wait for it 2.

 

But the phenomenon is no different which by the mere recoil of a “but” brings it to the light, comely as the Shulamite, honest as the dew, the negress adorned for the wedding and poor woman ready for the auction-block.

 

From which we can say that it is in the chain of the signifier that the meaning “insists” but that none of its elements “consists” in the signification of which it is at the moment capable.

 

We are forced, then, to accept the notion of an incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier – which Ferdinand de Saussure illustrates with an image resembling the wavy lines of the upper and lower Waters in miniatures from manuscripts of Genesis; a double flux marked by fine streaks of rain, vertical dotted lines supposedly confining segments of correspondence.

 

All our experience runs counter to this linearity, which made me speak once, in one of my seminars on psychosis, of something more like “anchoring points” (“points de caption”) as a schema for taking into account the dominance of the letter in the dramatic transformation that dialogue can effect in the subject 3.

 

The linearity that Saussure holds to be constitutive of the chain of discourse, in conformity with its emission by a single voice and with its horizontal position in our writing – if this linearity is necessary, in fact, it is not sufficient. It applies to the chain of discourse only in the direction in which it is oriented in time, being taken as a signifying factor in all languages in which “Peter hits Paul” reverses its time when the terms are inverted.

 

But one has only to listen to poetry, which Saussure was no doubt in the habit of doing4, for a polyphony to be heard, for it to become clear that all discourse is aligned along the several staves of a score.

 

There is in effect no signifying chain that does not have, as if attached to the punctuation of each of its units, a whole articulation of relevant contexts suspended “vertically,” as it were, from that point.

 

Let us take our word “tree” again, this time not as an isolated noun but at the point of one of these punctuations, and see how it crosses the bar of the Saussurian algorithm. (The anagram of “arbre” and “barre” should be noted.)

 

For even broken down into the double specter of its vowels and consonants, it can still call up with the robur and the plane tree the significations it takes on, in the context of our flora, of strength and majesty. Drawing on all the symbolic contexts suggested in the Hebrew of the Bible, it erects on a barren hill the shadow of the cross. Then reduces to the capital Y, the sign of dichotomy which, except for the illustration used by heraldry, would owe nothing to the tree however genealogical we may think it. Circulatory tree, tree of life of the cerebellum, tree of Saturn, tree of Diana, crystals formed in a tree struck by lightning, is it your figure that traces our destiny for us in the tortoise-shell cracked by the fire, or your lightning that causes the slow shift in the axis of being to surge up from an unnameable night into the Enpanta of language:

 

No! says the Tree, it says No! in the shower of sparks

Of its superb head

 

 

lines that require the harmonics of the tree just as much as their continuation:

 

 

Which the storm treats as universally

As it does a blade of grass5.

 

 

For this modern verse is ordered according to the same law of parallelism of the signifier that creates the harmony governing the primitive Slavic epic or the most refined Chinese poetry.

 

As is seen in the fact that the tree and the blade of grass are chosen from the same mode of the existent in order for the signs of contradiction – saying “No!” and “treat as” – to affect them, and also so as to bring about, through the categorical contrast of the particularity of “superb” with the “universally” that reduces it, in the condensation of the “head” (tete) and the “storm” (tempete), the indiscernible shower of sparks of the eternal instant.

 

But this whole signifier can only operate, it may be said, if it is present in the subject. It is this objection that I answer by supposing that it has pass over to the level of the signified.

 

For what is important is not that the subject knows anything whatsoever. (If Ladies and Gentlemen were written in a language unknown to the little boy and girl, their quarrel would simply be the more exclusively a quarrel over words, but no less ready to take on signification.)

 

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 this subject in the search for the true.

 

I have only to plant my tree in a location; climb the tree, even project on to it the cunning illumination a descriptive context gives to a word; raise it (arborer) so as not to let myself be imprisoned in some sort of communiqué of the facts, however official, and if I know the truth, make it heard, in spite of all the between-the-lines censures by the only signifier my acrobatics through the branches of the tree can constitute, provocative to the point of burlesque, or perceptible only to the practiced eye, according to whether I wish to be heard by the mob or by the few.

 

The properly signifying function thus depicted in language has a name. we learned this name in some grammar of our childhood, on the last page, where the shade of Quintillian, relegated to some phantom chapter concerning “final consideration on style,” seemed suddenly to speed up his voice in an attempt to get in all he had to say before the end.

 

It is among the figures of style, or tropes – from which the verb “to find” (trouver) comes to us – that this name is found. This name is metonymy.

 

I shall refer only to the example given there: “thirty sails.” For the disquietude I felt over the fact that the word “ship,” concealed in this expression, seemed, by taking on its figurative sense, through the endless repetition of the same old example, only to increase its presence, obscured (voilait) not so much those illustrious sails (voiles) as the definition they were supposed to illustrate.

 

The part taken for the whole, we said to ourselves, and if the thing is to be taken seriously, we are left with very little idea of the importance of this fleet, which “thirty sails” is precisely supposed to give us: for each ship to have just one said is in fact the least likely possibility.

 

By which we see that the connexion between ship and sail is nowhere but in the signifier, and that it is in the word-to-word connexion that metonymy is based6.

 

I shall designate as metonymy, then, the one side (versant) of the effective field constituted by the signifier, so that meaning can emerge there.

 

The other side is metaphor. Let us immediately find an illustration: Quillet’s dictionary seemed an appropriate place to find a sample that would not seem to be chosen for my own purposes, and I didn’t have to go any further than the well-known line of Victor Hugo:

 

 

His sheaf was neither miserly nor spiteful7

 

 

under which aspect I presented metaphor in my seminar on the psychoses.

 

It should be said that modern poetry and especially the Surrealist school have taken us a long way in this direction by showing that any conjunction of two signifiers would be equally sufficient to constitute a metaphor, except for the additional requirement of the greatest possible disparity of the images signified, needed for the production of the poetic spark, or in other words for metaphoric creation to take place.

 

It is true this radical position is based on the experiment known as automatic writing, which would not have been attempted if its pioneers had not been reassured by the Freudian discovery. But it remains a confused position because the doctrine behind it is false.

 

The creative spark of the metaphor does not spring from the presentation of two images, that is, of two signifiers equally actualized, it flashes between two signifiers one of which has taken the place of the other in the signifying chain, the occulted signifier remaining present through its (metonymic) connexion with the rest of the chain.

 

One word for another: that is the formula of the metaphor and if you are a poet you will produce for your own delight a continuous stream, a dazzling tissue of metaphors. If the result is the sort of intoxication of the dialogue that Jean Tardieu wrote under this title, that is only because he was giving us a demonstration of the radical superfluousness of all signification in a perfectly convincing representation of a bourgeois comedy.

 

It is obvious that in the line of Hugo cited above, not the slightest spark of light springs from the proposition that the sheaf was neither miserly nor spiteful, for the reason that there is no question of the sheaf’s having either the merit or demerit of these attributes, since the attributes, like the sheaf, belong to the Booz, who exercises the former in disposing of the latter and without informing the latter of his sentiments in the case.

 

If, however, his sheaf does refer us to Booz, and this is indeed the case, it is because it has replaced him in the signifying chain at the very place where he was to be exalted by the sweeping away of greed and spite. But now Booz himself has been swept away by the sheaf, and hurled into the outer darkness where greed and spite harbor him in the hollow of their negation.

 

But once his sheaf has thus usurped his place, Booz can no longer return there; the slender thread of the little word his that binds him to it is only one more obstacle to his return in that it links him to the notion of possession that retains him at the heart of greed and spite. So his generosity, affirmed in the passage, is yet reduced to less than nothing by the munificence of the sheaf which, coming from nature, knows neither our reserve nor our rejections, and even in its accumulation remains prodigal by our standards.

 

But if in this profusion the giver has disappeared along with his gift, it is only in order to rise again in what surrounds the figure of speech is what he was annihilated. For it is the figure of the burgeoning of fecundity, and it is this that announces the surprise that the poem celebrates, namely, the promise that the old man will receive in the sacred context of his accession to paternity.

 

So it is between the signifier in the form of the proper name of a man and the signifier that metaphorically abolishes him that the poetic spark is produced, and it is in this case all the more effective in realizing the signification of paternity in that it reproduces the mythical event in terms of which Freud reconstructed the progress, in the unconscious of all men, of the paternal mystery.

 

Modern metaphor has the same structure. So the line Love is a pebble laughing in the sunlight, recreates love in a dimension that seems to me most tenable in the face of its imminent lapse into the mirage of narcissistic altruism.

 

We see, then, that metaphor occurs at the precise point at which sense emerges from non-sense, that is, at the frontier which, as Freud discovered, when crossed the other way produces the word that in French is the word par excellence, the word that is simply the signifier “esprit”8; it is at this frontier that we realize that man defies his very destiny when he derides the signifier.

 

But to come back to our subject, what does man find in metonymy if not the power to circumvent the obstacles of social censure? Does not this form, which gives its field to truth in its very oppression, manifest a certain servitude inherent in its presentation?

 

One may read with profit a book by Leo Strauss, from the land that traditionally offers asylum to those who choose ^freedom, in which the author reflects on the relation between the art of writing and persecution. By pushing to its limits the sort of connaturality that links this art to that condition, he lets us glimpse a certain something which in this matter imposes its form, in the eflfect of truth on desire.

 

But haven't we felt for some time now that, having followed the ways of the letter in search of Freudian truth, we are getting very warm indeed, that it is burning all about us?

 

Of course, as it is said, the letter killth 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 pretensions 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.

 

The Letter in the Unconscious

 

In the complete words of Freud, one out of every three pages is devoted to philological references, one out of every two pages to logical inferences, everywhere a dialectical apprehension of experience, the proportion of analysis of language increasing to the extent that the unconscious is directly concerned.

 

Thus in “The Interpretation of Dreams” every page deals with what I call the letter of the discourse, in its texture, its usage, its immanence in the matter in question. For it is with this work that the work of Freud begins to open the royal road to the unconscious. And Freud gave us notice of this; his confidence at the time of launching this book in the early days of this century only confirms what he continued to proclaim to the end: that he had staked the whole of his discovery on this essential expression of his message.

 

The first sentence of the opening chapter announces what for the sake of exposition could not be postponed: that the dream is a rebus. And Freud goes on to stipulate what I have said from the start, that it must be understood quite literally. This derives from the agency in the dream of that same literal (or phonematic) structure in which the signifier is articulated and analyzed in discourse. So the unnatural image of the boat on the roof, or the man with a comma for a head, which are specifically mentioned by Freud, are examples of dream-images that are to be taken only for their value as signifiers, that is to say, in so far as they allow us to spell out the “proverb” presented by the rebus of the dream. The linguistic structure that enables us to read dreams is the very principle of the “significance of the dream,” the Traumdeutung.

 

Freud shows us in every possible way that the value of the image as signifier has nothing whatever to do with its signification, giving us as an example Egyptian hieroglyphics in which it would be sheer buffoonery to pretend that in a given text the frequency of a vulture, which is an aleph, or of a chick, which is a vau, indicating a form of the verb “to be” or a plural, prove that the text has anything to do at all with these ornithological specimines. Freud finds in this writing certain uses of the signifier that are lost in ours, such as the use of determinatives, where a categorical figure is added to the literal figuration of a verbal term; but this is only to show us that even in this writing, the so-called “ideogram” is a letter.

 

But it does not require the current confusion on this last term for there to prevail in the minds of psychoanalysts lacking linguistic training the prejudice in favor of a symbolism deriving from natural analogy, or even of the image as appropriate to the instinct. And to such an extent that, outside the French school, which has been alerted, a distinction must be drawn between reading coffee grounds and reading hieroglyphics, by recalling to its own principles a technique that could not be justified were it not directed towards the unconscious.

 

It must be said that this is admitted only with difficulty and that the mental vice denounced above enjoys such favor that today’s psychoanalyst can be expected to say that he decodes before he will come around to taking the necessary tour with Freud (turn as the statue of Champollion, says the guide) that will make him understand that what he does is decipher; the distinction is that a cryptogram takes on its full dimension only when it is in a lost language.

 

Taking the tour is simply continuing in the Traumdeutung.

 

Entstellung, translated as “distortion” or “transposition,” is what Freud shows to be the general precondition for the functioning of the dream, and it is what I designated above, following Saussure, as the sliding of the signified under the signifier, which is always active in discourse (its action, let us note, is unconscious).

 

But what we call the two “sides” of the effect of the signifier on the signified are also found here.

 

Verdichtung, or “condensation,” is the structure of the superimposition of the signified which metaphor takes as its field, and whose name, condensing in itself the word Dichtung, shows how the mechanism is connatural with poetry to the point that it envelops the traditional function proper to poetry.

 

In the case of Verschiebung, “displacement,” the German term is closer to the idea of that veering off of signification that we see in metonymy and which from its first appearance in Freud is represented as the most appropriate means used by the unconscious to foil censorship.

 

What distinguishes these two mechanisms, which play such a privileged role in the dream-work (Traumarbeit), from their homologous function in discourse? Nothing, except a condition imposed upon the signifying material, called Rucksicht auf Darstellbarkeit, which must be translated by “consideration of the means of representation.” (The translation by “role of the possibility of figurative expression” being too approximative here.) But this condition constitutes a limitation operating within the system of writing: this is a long way form dissolving the system into a figurative semiology on a level with phenomena of natural expression. This fact could perhaps shed light on the problem involved in certain modes of pictography which, simply because they have been abandoned in writing as imperfect, are not therefore to be regarded as mere evolutionary stages. Let us say, then, that the dream is like the parlor-game in which one is supposed to get the spectators to guess some well-known saying or variant of it solely by dumb-show. That the dream uses speech makes no difference since for the unconscious it is only one among several elements of the representation. It is precisely he fact that both the game and the dream run up against a lack of taxematic material for the representation of such logical articulations as causality, contradiction, hypothesis, etc., that proves they are a form of writing rather than of mine. The subtle processes that the dream is seen to use to represent these logical articulations, in a much less artificial way than games usually employ, are the objects of a special study in Freud in which we see once more confirmed that the dream-work follows the laws of the signifier.

 

The rest of the dream-elaboration is designed as secondary by Freud, the nature of which indicates its value: they are phantasies or day-dreams (Tagtraum) to use the term Freud prefers in order to emphasize their function of wish-fulfillment (Wunsherfullung). Given the act that these phantasies may remain unconscious, their distinctive feature is in this case their signification. Now, concerning these phantasies, Freud tells us that [...........................................................................................................................................]

 

That is why any rectification of psychoanalysis must inevitably involve a return to the truth of that discovery, which, taken in its original moment, is impossible to obscure.

 

For in the analysis of dreams, Freud intends only to give us the laws of the unconscious in their most general extension. One of the reasons why dreams were most propitious for this demonstration is exactly, Freud tells us, that they reveal the same law whether in the normal person or in the neurotic.

 

But, in either case, the efficacy of the unconscious does not cease in the waking state. The psychoanalytic experience does nothing other than establish that the unconscious leaves none of our actions outside its field. …

 

It is a matter, therefore, of defining the topography of this unconscious. I say that it is the very topography defined by the algorithm: S/s

 

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 whether I am the same as that of which I speak. And it is not at all inappropriate to use the word “thought” here. For Freud uses the term to designate the elements involved in the unconscious, that it is the signifying mechanisms that we now recognize as being there.

 

It is nonetheless true that the philosophical cogito is at the center of the mirage that renders modern man so sure of being himself even in his uncertainties about himself, and even in the mistrust he has learned to practice against the traps of self-love.

 

Furthermore, if, turning the weapon of metonymy against the nostalgia that it serves, I refuse to seek any meaning beyond tautology, if in the name of “war is war” and “a penny is a penny” I decide to be only what I am, how even here can I elude the obvious fact that I am in that very act?

 

And it is no less true if I take myself to the other, metaphoric pole of the signifying process, and if I dedicate myself to becoming what I am, to coming into being, I cannot doubt that even if I lose myself in the process I am in that process.

 

Now it is on these very points, where evidence will be subverted by the empirical, that the trick of the Freudian conversion lies.

 

The 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.

 

That is to say, what is needed is more than these words with which, for a brief moment I disconcerted my audience: I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think. Words that render sensible to an ear properly attuned with what elusive ambiguity the ring of meaning flees from our grasp along the verbal thread.

 

What one ought to say is: I am not wherever I am the plaything of my thought, I think of what I am where I do not think to think.

 

This two-sided mystery is linked to the fact that the truth can be evoked only in that dimension of alibi in which all “realism” in creative works takes its virtue from metonymy; it is likewise linked to this other fact that we acceded to meaning only through the double twist of metaphor when we have the one and only key: the S and the s of Saussurian algorithm are not only the same level, and man only deludes himself when he believes his true place is at their axis, which is nowhere.

 

Was nowhere, that is, until Freud discovered it; for if what Freud discovered isn’t that, it isn’t anything.

 

The contents of the unconscious with all their disappointing ambiguities give us no reality in the subject more consistent than the immediate; their virtue derives from the truth and in the dimension of being: Kern unseres Wesen are Freud’s own terms.

 

The double-triggered mechanism of metaphor is the very mechanism by which the symptom, in the analytic sense, is determined. Between the enigmatic signifier of the sexual trauma and the term that is substituted for it in an actual signifying chain there passes the spark that fixes in a symptom the signification inaccessible to the conscious subject in which that symptom may be resolved – a symptom being a metaphor in which flesh or function is taken as a signifying element.

 

And the enigmas that desire seems to pose for a “natural philosophy,” its frenzy mocking the abyss of the infinite, the secret collusion with which it envelops the pleasure of knowing and of dominating with jouissance sexual pleasure, these amount to no other derangement of instinct than that of being caught in the rails – eternally stretching forth towards the desire for something else – metonymy. Hence its “perverse” fixation at the very suspension-point of the signifying chain where the memory-screen is immobilized and the fascinating image of the fetish is petrified.

 

There is no other way of conceiving the indestructibility of unconscious desire – in the absence of a need which, when forbidden satisfaction, does not sicken and die, even if it means the destruction of the organism itself. 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 this 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. …

 

Thus, to speak of the precise point we are treating in my seminars on Freud, little Hans, left in the lurch at the age of five by his symbolic environment, and suddenly forced to face the enigma of his sex and his existence, developed, under the direction of Freud and of his father, Freud’s disciple, in the mythic form, around the signifying crystal of his phobia, all the permutations possible on a limited number of signifiers.

 

The operation shows that even on the individual level the solution of the impossible is brought within man’s reach by the exhaustion of all possible forms of the impossibilities encountered in solution by recourse to the signifying equation. It is a striking demonstration that illuminates the labyrinth of a case which so far has only been used as a source of demolished fragments. We should be struck too, by the fact that it is in the coextensivity of the development of the symptom and of its curative resolution that the nature of the neurosis is revealed: whether phobic, hysterical, or obsessive, the neurosis is a question that being poses for the subject “from where it was before the subject came into the world” (Freud’s phrase, which he used in explaining the Oedipal complex to little Hans).

 

The “being” referred to is that which appears in a lightning moment in the void of the verb “to be” and I sad that it poses its question for the subject. What does that mean? It does not pose it in front of the subject, since the subject cannot come to the place where it is posed, but it poses it in place of the subject, that is to say, in that place it poses the question with the subject, as one poses a problem with a pen, or as Aristotle’s man thought with his soul.

 

Thus Freud introduced the ego into his doctrine9, by defining it according to the resistances that are proper to it. What I have tried to convey is that these resistances are of an imaginary nature much in the same sense as those coaptative lures that the ethology of animal behavior shows us in display or combat, and that these lures are reduced in man to the narcissistic relation introduced by Freud, which I have elaborated in my essay on the mirror stage. I have tried to show that by situating in this ego the synthesis of the perceptual functions in which the sensori-motor selections are integrated, Freud seems to abound in that delegation that is traditionally supposed to represent reality for the ego, and that this reality is all the more included in the suspension of the ego.

 

For this ego, which is notable in the first instance for the imaginary inertias that it concentrates against the message of the unconscious, operates solely with a view to covering the displacement constituted by the subject with a resistance that is essential to the discourse as such.

 

That is why an exhaustion of the mechanisms of defense, which Fenichel the practitioner shows us so well in his studies of analytic technique (while his whole reduction on the theoretical level of neuroses and psychoses to genetic anomalies in libidinal development is pure platitude), manifests itself, without Fenichel’s accounting for it or realizing it himself, as simply the reverse side of the mechanisms of the unconscious. Periphrasis, hyperbaton, ellipsis, suspension, anticipation, retraction, negation, digression, irony, these are the figures of style (Quintillian’s figurae sententiarum); as catchresis, litotes, antonomasia, hypotyposis are the tropes, whose terms suggest themselves as the most proper for the labeling of these mechanisms. Can one really see these as mere figures of speech when it is the figures themselves that are the active principle of the rhetoric of the discourse that the analysand in fact utters?

 

By persisting in describing the nature of resistance as a permanent emotional state, thus making it alien to the discourse, today’s psychoanalysts have simply shown that they have fallen under the blow of one of the fundamental truths that Freud rediscovered through psychoanalysis. One is never happy making way for a new truth, for it always means making our way into it: the truth is always disturbing. We cannot even manage to get used to it. We are used to the real. The truth we repress.

 

Now it is quite specially necessary to the scientist, to the seer, even to the quack, that he should be the only one to know. The idea that deep in the simplest (and even sickest) of souls there is something ready to blossom is bad enough! But if someone seems to know as much as they about what we ought to make of it … then the categories of primitive, prelogical, archaic, or even magic thought, so easy to impute to others, rush to our aid! It is not right that these nonentities keep us breathless with enigmas that prove to be only too unrealizable.

 

To interpret the unconscious as Freud did, one would have to be as he was, an encyclopedia of the arts and muses, as well as an assiduous reader of the Fliegende Blatter. And the task is made no easier by the fact that we are at the mercy of a thread woven with allusions, quotations, puns, equivocations. And is that our profession, to be antidotes to trifles?

 

Yet that is what we must resign ourselves to. The unconscious is neither primordial nor instinctual; what it knows about the elementary is no more than the elements of the signifier.

 

The three books that one might call canonical with regard to the unconscious – The Interpretation of Dreams, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, and Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious – are simply a web of examples whose development is inscribed in the formulas of connexion and substitution (though carried to the tenth degree by their particular complexity – diagrams of them are sometimes provided by Freud by way of illustration); these are the formulas we give to the signifier in its function that the term Ubertragung, or transference, is introduced, which later gives its name to the mainspring of the intersubjective link between analyst and analysand.

 

Such diagrams are not only constitutive of each of the symptoms in a neurosis, but they alone make possible the understanding of the thematic of its course and resolution. The great case-histories provided by Freud demonstrate this admirably.

 

To fall back on a more limited incident, let me cite the article on fetishism of 192710, and the case Freud reports there of a pianist who, to achieve sexual satisfaction, needed a certain shine on the nose (Glanz auf der Nase); analysis showed that his early, English-speaking years had seen the displacement of the burning curiosity that he felt for the phallus of his mother, that is to say, for the eminent manqué-a-etre, for that lack-of-being, whose privileged signifier Freud revealed for us, into a glance at the nose11 in the forgotten language of his childhood, rather than a shine on the nose12.

 

It is the abyss opened up at the thought that a thought should make itself heard in the abyss that provoked resistance to psychoanalysis from the outset. And not, as is commonly said, the emphasis on man’s sexuality. This latter has after all been the dominant object in literature throughout the ages. And in fact the more recent evolution of psychoanalysis has succeeded by a bit of comical legerdemain in turning it into a quite moral affair, the cradle and trysting-place of oblativity and attraction. The Platonic setting of the soul, blessed and illuminated, rises straight to paradise.

 

The intolerable scandal in the time before Freudian sexuality was sanctified was that it was so “intellectual.” It was precisely in that that it showed itself to be the worthy ally of all those terrorists whose plottings were going to ruin society.

 

At a time when psychoanalysts are busy remodeling psychoanalysis into a right-thinking movement whose crowning expression is the sociological poem of the autonomous ego, I would like to say, to all those who are listening to me, how they can recognize bad psychoanalysis; this is by the word they use to deprecate all technical or theoretical research that carried forward the Freudian experience along its authentic lines. That word is “intellectualization” – execrable to all those who, living in fear of being tried and found wanting by the wine of truth, spit on the bread of men, although their slaver can no longer have any effect other than that leavening. …

 

The end that Freud’s discovery proposes for man was defined by him at the apex of his thought in these moving terms: We es war, soll Ich warden. Es refers to the id or the unconscious, so this means “where the unconscious was, consciousness shall go.” I must come to the place where that was.

 

This is one of reintegration and harmony, I could even say of reconciliation (Versohnung).

 

But if we ignore the self’s radical excentricity to itself with which man is confronted, in other words, the truth discovered by Freud, we shall falsify both the order and methods of psychoanalytic mediation.

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