LACAN AND MEANING
SEXUATION, DISCOURSE THEORY, AND TOPOLOGY IN THE AGE OF HERMENEUTICS
CHAPTER 3
LACAN ON MEANING
— page 67 —
our world of thought. It is at some point where this meshwork is particularly close that the dream-wish grows up, like a mushroom out of its mycelium.’37
All the elements of the dream can be accounted for by disentangling the meshwork of the latent dream-thoughts schematized by the dream-work. Yet an exceptional element nevertheless remains. Despite being disclosed by the dream-work, dream analysis cannot fully account for this most obscure and distorted element by tracing it back to a latent dream-thought. Here is why Freud expresses this element as a halting point to our knowledge of the dream. Its status is ontological, not epistemological. The objectivity it possesses comes precisely by paradoxically embodying the very dream-work which disclosed it. Without this object, analysis would be interminable and there would be no accounting for why latent dream-thoughts do not immediately collapse onto the manifest content of the dream. Using aesthetic terminology, Freud effectively uncovers the sublime object of dreams. If such an object were extracted, the entire dream and its meaningful content would unravel.
What remains parenthetical in Freudian dream analysis becomes a generally theorized object with Lacan. This may be approached by again raising the question of a cause of meaning. If Lacan’s second period establishes that the signifying structure operates as the decentered cause, the movement into his third and final period does not so much abandon this insight as ask a further question: does the signifying structure itself have a cause? By answering in the affirmative starting in the 1960s, Lacan for the remainder of his career effectively moves beyond both hermeneutics and structuralism. This new concern is seen in the second lecture of his The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1964), a lecture that day dedicated to the ‘function of cause’ in which he is recorded to have said: ‘Cause is to be distinguished from that which is determinate in a chain, in other words the law... In short, there is cause only in something that doesn’t work.’38 There are two points to note with this statement. Firstly, Lacan now holds there to be an indeterminate (capital ‘C’) Cause standing ‘outside’ the series of (little ‘c’) causes which make up the mechanistic movement of a chain of signifiers. This Cause is defined to be of the real, which implies that the notion of the real has been radically reworked from the previous decade. Schematically said, the real for Lacan in the 1950s was largely equated with ‘reality’ regarded as the sensory-laden background of the symbolic subject. But in the 1960s the real is elevated to a more dignified notion, as that which acts as the absent cause of the symbolic itself. The ultimate Cause of meaning is thus one further remove from his previous structuralist thinking.
Secondly, the Cause qua real never directly effectuates its causal power. Rather, it only ever registers itself through its disturbing effects on the symbolic
37 Ibid., 525.
38 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 21, 22.
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