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

How then does one begin to read Lacan in this way? Gallop has given us various areas of focus: Notes
"odd marginal moments, slips of the tongue, unintended disclosures." Already we are at a
disadvantage; reading Lacan's notoriously difficult texts "straight" proves almost an impossibility
as it is, much less to turn one's attention to that which is not explicit in the text. One could go so
far as to argue that everything of importance in Lacan's texts is latent in some sense; and whether
or not it is even possible to skirt around this to get to an "unintended disclosure" could be strongly
contested. But perhaps this gives us a clue: it would stand to reason (albeit superficially) that if
Lacan's significant content is very often latent, hidden, and submerged in his texts, then perhaps
what we are looking for as a marginal moment is that which seems, on some level, obvious or so
self-apparently intended as to go more or less unnoticed by the complex reader.
So let us begin with the "obvious." In the essay "The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious,"
Lacan reverses Saussure's concept of the sign, which was represented by the ideogram of signified
over sign. He criticized this formulation for its privileging of the signified over the signifier as
well as the indication (which Saussure illustrates with arrows going up and down) that there is a
reciprocity between the two, a crossable relationship. Saussure presumes a unity between language
and concept which ultimately leads into a regression of a representational (referential) theory of
language - that is to say, to the unity of signifier and signified, which in Saussure is then capable
of referring to the thing. Lacan's reformulation is signifier over signified, and in addition he
emphasizes the bar between them, as "a formula of separateness rather than reciprocity of signifier
and signified". Lacan "cuts" into the Saussurian sign, upsetting its unity and recasting the signified
as an effect of the signifier. This radically undermines any unity of language and concept, and
indeed denies the possibility of accessing the concept as such. We are left with the available
signifier and its laws.
Moreover, Lacan ascribes to Jakobson's differential structure of language, in which each signifier
is reducible to phonemes, or differential elements, and these, operating in a signifying chain, form
the basis of meaning. Lacan makes a passage from these phonemes to the letter, which is, as he
defines it, "the essentially localized structure of the signifier."
According to Lacan, "the subject is what is represented by the signifier, and the signifier can only
represent something for another signifier". Therefore, "the signifier anchors itself to the subject,
marking its place with a letter, and whether or not the subject knows, reads or denies it, the subject
will function like a signified and will always slide under the signifier. Thus the subject is constituted
as secondary in relation to the signifier, while signification has a life of its own". Lacan maintains
that the subject, who uses language, is born into and constituted by it, and more specifically is
constituted in and through the signifier.
Language or speech does not mask what we believe to be true, but rather the truth speaks through
and is produced by language. The subject produces truth about which he does not know by
speaking, which is why within the psychoanalytic context the analyst must pay the most attention
to the subject's "mistakes," or unintended statements. Lacan then goes on to differentiate and
describe the two linguistic forms of metaphor and metonymy:
Metaphor, which is conceived as vertical (after Jakobson) is the substitution of one word for
another. Metaphor is the action of poetry, and is characterized by creativity, symbolism, and
liberation - liberation from the oppression of the bar between the signified and the signifier.
Metaphor "crosses" this bar, as represented in Lacan's mathematical formulation with what looks
like a plus sign.
Metonymy, on the other hand, is horizontal, a relation of word to word. It is characterized by lack,
and is associated with realism and servitude, that is, the servitude to the burden of the bar, which
in its mathematical formulation is represented without a vertical line, therefore giving the
appearance, not merely coincidentally, of a minus sign.
But while it would appear that Lacan casts metaphor in strong, positive terms and metonymy in
weak, negative ones, he nonetheless asserts that metonymy provides the possibility of metaphor.
He refers often to the "insufficiency" of the metaphor, and criticizes the tendency of linguists to
privilege metaphor over metonymy. In Gallop's reading of the relationship between the two,

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