LACAN AND MEANING
SEXUATION, DISCOURSE THEORY, AND TOPOLOGY IN THE AGE OF HERMENEUTICS
CHAPTER 3
LACAN ON MEANING
— page 63 —
overall sense of self. So in no way is Lacan’s structuralist turn to be viewed as registering a frustration with the incessant slide of meaning. Rather, it registers his faith that only signifiers can break the subject away from his Ideal-ego, which is nothing but a metonymic displacement of a desire for a full and meaningful being.
The separation between being and meaning is only brought to its full notion in Lacan’s third period. There it is seen how the subject actually emerges from the meaningless structure of language as a being opposed to its meaning. However, at this time Lacan directs our analytic gaze to the operations of signifiers, for signifiers assembled into linguistic structures are germane to investigations into the cause of meaning. After listing numerous obscure figures of speech, he asks: ‘Can one see here mere manners of speaking, when it is the figures themselves that are at work in the rhetoric of the discourse the analysand actually utters?’ Lacan would agree with the common structuralist truth of how ‘language speaks the subject.’ But he goes much further to argue that ‘we cannot confine ourselves to giving a new truth its rightful place, for the point is to take up our place in it.’30 His own writing style is consistent to these ends as it is notably more performative and prescriptive than demonstrative. While this attests to the inscription of his own subjectivity in his texts, it does make reading them difficult. But only if the reader stubbornly remains at the question of what Lacan means by this or that formulation and avoids the challenging demands of actually working through his texts. In the opening lines of “The Instance of the Letter” is a statement equally applicable to the entire Écrits. Lacan writes that his text should be situated ‘between writing and speech – it will be halfway between the two’ and is so crafted as to ‘leave the reader no other way out than the way in, which I prefer to be difficult. This, then, will not be a writing in my sense of the term.’ Lacan’s texts are only hindering and discouraging to those in search of readily appropriable meaning. But for the scholar willing to peek behind the imaginary veil to put the structures he finds there to productive and truthful ends, their difficulty merely signals the enormously flexible thought contained therein.
Lacan found Freud’s work to be just as flexible. In “The Signification of the Phallus” (1958), he argues that despite preceding Saussure historically, Freud nevertheless fully anticipated structuralism:
‘[T]he commentary on Freud’s work I have been pursuing for seven years...[has] led to certain results: first and foremost, to promote the notion of the signifier as necessary to any articulation of the analytic phenomenon, insofar as it is opposed to that of the signified in modern linguistic analysis. Freud could not have taken into account modern linguistics, which postdates him, but I would maintain that Freud’s discovery stands out precisely because, in setting out from a domain in which one could not have expected to
30 Ibid., 433.
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