Page 166 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes 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.

What do you mean by S/s?

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

160 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY