Page 169 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

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

limit.That this is the symptom and the prelude of a re examination of the situation of man in the Notes
existent such as has been assumed up to the present by all our postulates of knowledge—don't be
content, I beg of you, to write this off as another case of Heideggerianism, s even prefixed by a
neo- which adds nothing tothe trashcan style in which currently, by the use of his ready-made
mental jetsam, one excuses oneself from any real thought. When I speak of Heidegger, or rather
when I translate him, I at least make the effort to leave the word he proffers us its sovereign
significance. If I speak of being and the letter, if I distinguish the other and the Other, it is only
because Freud shows me that they are the terms to which must be referred the effects of resistance
and transfer against which, in the twenty years I have engaged in what we all call after him the
impossible practice of psychoanalysis, Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), German existentialist
philosopher. I have done unequal battle. And it is also because I must help others not to lose their
way there. It is to prevent the field of which they are the inheritors from becoming barren, and for
that reason to make it understood that if the symptom is a metaphor, it is not a metaphor to say
so, no more than to say that man's desireis a metonymy. For the symptom is a metaphor whether
one likes it or not, as desire
Is a metonymy for all that men mock the idea. Finally, if I am to rouse you to indignation that,
after so many centuries of religious hypocrisy and philosophical bravado, nothing valid has yet
been articulated on what links metaphor to the question of being and metonymy to its lack, there
must be an object there to answer to that indignation both as its provocator and its victim; it is
humanistic man and the credit, affirmed beyond reparation, which he has drawn on his intentions.
Self-Assessment

1. Choose the correct options:
(i) The instance of the letter in the unconscious published is ............... .
(a) 1966 (b) 1961
(c) 1960 (d) 1965
(ii) S/s indicates ............... .
(a) the signifier (b) the signified over signifier
(c) the signifier over the signified (d) none of these
(iii) Interpretation of dreams refers to the process of ............... .
(a) mental activity (b) physical activity
(c) spiritual activity (d) none of these
(iv) Lacan’s letter originally delivered as a ............... .
(a) speech (b) talk
(c) text (d) none of these

14.4 Summary

• Lacan's "The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud".
• Jacques Lacan was a French psychoanalyst in the Freudian school. Lacan specifically worked
to incorporate structuralism into Freudian psychoanalytic theory. In his 1957 essay, "The
Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud," Lacan argues that the
subconscious is structured like language, through chains of signification.
• Lacan begins his essay by stating that he uses the term "letter" quite literally and means by
it "that material support that concrete discourse borrows from language". He goes on to
remind us of the structure of language and lays out an algorithm which he says is at the
foundation of linguistics: "S/s which is read as: as the signifier over the signified". He claims
that this algorithm is appropriate because "in so far as it is itself only pure function of the

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