Page 165 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

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

What distinguishes these two mechanisms, which play such a privileged role in the dream-work Notes
(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 cogitate 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.

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