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

For the signifier, by its very nature, always anticipates meaning by unfolding its dimension before Notes
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.
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.
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 doing, 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 grass.
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.

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