Page 159 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Unit 14: The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious—Jacques Lacan: Detailed Study

bi-universal correspondence between the word and the thing, if only in the mere act of naming. Notes
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 infants 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 (lingua) 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
(lingua) 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 away 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.
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.
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

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