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LACAN AND MEANING

SEXUATION, DISCOURSE THEORY, AND TOPOLOGY IN THE AGE OF HERMENEUTICS

CHAPTER 3

LACAN ON MEANING

— page 74 —

Seminar XVII thus marks a re-conception of the status of the real. The real is no longer to be strictly considered in its traumatic effects on the subject. For ‘in supposing the formalization of discourse and in granting oneself some rules within this formalization that are destined to put it to the test, we encounter an element of impossibility. This is what is at the base, the root, of an effect of structure.’51 Lacan articulates the impossible objet a from the perspective of the Master’s discourse in various ways, including how raising the question of the origins of language is ‘a futile search for meaning.’52 Yet despite uncovering it, the Master’s discourse cannot grasp this impossibility. Only the Analyst’s discourse (Ad) can do so. As can be seen in Figure 3.5, the order of elements (S1, S2, a, $) is constant from Md to Ad, having been but rotated (counter)clockwise half a turn to fall into new places which do not themselves rotate. So S1 in the place of agency in the Md is now in the place of product/loss in the Ad. These two discourses are inversions of each other and it is in this sense that the Md is the ‘other side of psychoanalysis.’ In his usual cryptic style, Lacan explains their unique link:

‘I am a little analyst, a rejected stone initially, even if in my analyses I become the cornerstone. As soon as I get up off my chair I have the right to go for a walk. That is reversed, the rejected stone which becomes a cornerstone. It may also be, inversely, that the cornerstone goes for a walk. It’s even like that that I will perhaps have some chance that things will change. If the cornerstone left, the entire edifice would collapse. There are some who are tempted by this.’53


better as it seeks out ‘a subjectivity without objectivity.’ But without objet a, he cannot quite bring his pure consciousness to its full notion. The lesson here is how phenomenologists more in line with Husserl (and less with Heidegger) forge the straighter path toward late-Lacan.
51 Ibid., 45. More simply, ‘the impossible is the real’ (165) and ‘[i]f the real is defined as the impossible the real is placed at the stage at which the register of a symbolic articulation was found to be defined as the impossible to demonstrate to be true’ (172–3) – a truth to be experienced, not proved.
52 Ibid., 19. Lacan effectively argues how structure trumps a concern for meaning. Hermeneutics may be correct to seek out historical contexts within which to appropriate the meaning of particular phenomena. But the very framework of subsuming particulars under universals belies its claim that meaning precedes structure. Moreover, when it comes to the question of the origins of the signifying system itself, no recourse can be made to any historical conception of its advent. There is a retroactive logic in play here, at the ‘meta-level.’ That is, the signifying system as such coordinates its own birth, retroactively positing its own origins. So structuralism trumps hermeneutical phenomenology, but in a radical way: structure ontologically precedes its historical advent. In this sense the standard argument that Freud failed to place the psychoanalytic framework into historical context becomes thoroughly innocuous.
53 Ibid., 109.

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