Page 163 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

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

One word for another: that is the formula of the metaphor and if you are a poet you will produce Notes
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"; 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.

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