Page 175 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Unit 15: The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconcious—Jacques Lacan: Critical Appreciation

halfway" between speech and writing. By doing so, he foreshadows both the essay's notorious Notes
opacity and its theme: the relationship between speech and language and the place of the subject
in relation to both. The paper represents a key moment in 'his resolutely structuralist notion of the
structure of the subject ', as well as in his gradual 'incorporation of the findings of linguistics and
anthropology...in the rise of structuralism'.
The Letter in the Unconscious
Lacan uses his concept of the letter to distance himself from the Jungian approach to symbols and
the unconscious. Whereas Jung believes that there is a collective unconscious which works with
symbolic archetypes, Lacan insists that we must read the productions of the unconscious à la lettre
- in other words, literally to the letter (or, more specifically, the concept of the letter which Lacan's
essay seeks to introduce).
In Freud's theory of dreams, the individual's unconscious takes advantage of the weakened ego
during sleep in order to produce thoughts which have been censored during the individual's
wakened life. Using Lacan's concept of the letter, we should be able to see how, in Fink's example,
the unconscious cleverly produces the censored thought associated with the word "algorithm". (Of
course, this does not actually tell us why this particular hypothetical analysand has consciously
censored a thought associated with the word "algorithm".)
The Signifier and the Signified
Because Lacan's use of the concept "the letter" requires a concept of materiality different from
anything previously found in linguistics, Lacan argues that the signifier and signified are separated
by a bar: 'the signifier over the signified, "over" corresponding to the bar separating the two
stages'. The signifiers can slide over the top of this bar, with the signified elements beneath. This
means that there is never an easy correlation between signifier and signified and, as a result, all
language and communication is actually produced by the failure to fully communicate.
The asymmetrical relationship between signifier and signified is further complicated by the fact
that the bar between them cannot itself be signified: 'the S and the s of the Saussurian algorithm
are not on the same level, and man only deludes himself when he believes his true place is at their
axis'.
Phallus
Such a formulation enabled Lacan subsequently to assert that 'the phallus is a signifier...not a
phantasy...[and] even less the organ, penis or clitoris, that it symbolizes'. Theorists such as
Slavoj •i•ek have frequently pointed out this fact in order to defend Lacan against his feminist
critics.
Metonymy and Desire, Metaphor and the Subject

Lacan aligns desire with metonymy and the slide of signifiers above the bar, 'indicating that it is
the connection between signifier and signifier that permits the lesion in which the signifier installs
the lack-of-being in the object relation...in order to invest it with the desire aimed at the very lack
it supports'. This produces a situation in which desire is never satisfied, 'being caught in the rails
- eternally stretching forth towards the desire for something else - of metonymy' Partly for this
reason, one's desires can never be identified in a statement along the lines of: 'I desire x, y and z'.
Instead, desire is slippery and metonymical.
Lacanian theorists often note that capitalist consumerism is predicated upon this fact about desire:
because desire is never satisfied and yet, always sliding from one signifier to the other, the capitalist
subject finds him or herself making an endless series of purchases in order to satisfy their desire.
The way out of this metonymical chain of unsatisfied desire, for Lacan, is a "crossing of the bar" by
a signifier: Lacan emphasises 'the constitutive value of this crossing for the emergence of
signification'. Lacan aligns this operation with metaphor rather than metonymy. When a signifier
crosses the bar, from above it to under it, it becomes a signified. But this leaves a space or gap
above the bar which, according to Lacan, is the subject. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the subject

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