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SEXUATED TOPOLOGY AND THE
SUSPENSION OF MEANING

A NON-HERMENEUTICAL PHENOMENOLOGICAL
APPROACH TO TEXTUAL ANALYSIS

WILLIAM J. URBAN

5.3 Lacanian Psychoanalysis

The official call made by Lacan to return to Freud is easily marked from his first seminar of 1953–54, a seminar he was to give yearly until his death in 1981. As the content of this seminar changed dramatically over the years to develop into its own unique set of psychoanalytic concepts, just as with Freud there are multiple levels with which to read Lacan. Add to this his difficult écrits, whose authoring also spans as many years, the obstacles encountered in concisely discussing Lacan are considerable. With the discussion of Freud this has been managed by condensing these levels into three, and the present discussion continues to mobilize these same three levels. This is in part done in order to concur with the underlying thesis of this chapter, viz., that psychoanalysis as here discussed should be viewed as encompassing the entire trajectory leading up to it. Thus, as was seen with Freud, many concerns regarding meaning raised in the first two chapters are equally raised in the hermeneutical (and phenomenological) aspects of psychoanalysis; moreover, certain psychoanalytical techniques and the modeling of the structural dynamics of the psyche – entirely meaningless in and of themselves – utilize similar notions developed by (post)structuralism as discussed in the third chapter; while Freud's prospect of a nonsensical 'navel' begins to bring the conclusion drawn in the fourth chapter by some recent aesthetic theorists more fully to its notion. Of course actual chronology frustrates a naïve conception of this thesis. For the discussions above on aesthetic theory, (post)structuralism and hermeneutical phenomenology concern developments in these fields which historically take place well after Freud's actual writings. So in truth the entire historical trajectory of Part I was presented retroactively from a much later perspective, and that perspective is the work of early 1970s Lacan. Effectively the claim made in Part I is not only that the radical work undertaken by Lacan in his final decade allows us to discern his own career as a trajectory – one in which he eventually leaves both hermeneutical and structuralist concerns behind to ultimately embrace a more radical dimension – but to additionally see a similar trajectory entirely embodied in the work of Freud and Lacan specifically and in the field of psychoanalysis generally. While Part II employs a novel psychoanalytic approach to, among other things, further articulate how this radical third dimension is ever present in the other two, the remainder of this chapter undertakes a discussion of Lacan by examining texts from each of the three distinct periods of his career. First an écrit representative of his hermeneutical phenomenological period (roughly 1933–mid 1950s) is discussed; then three écrits representing different aspects of his 'structuralist' period (mid 1950s–1960s) are considered; finally, two seminars are taken up which delimit Lacan's final non-hermeneutical phenomenological period (1960s–1981), one which first deals with the real object qua trauma and then with the real object qua impossible. Generally speaking these three periods correspond to his famous registers of Imaginary–Symbolic–Real respectively. This sampling of Lacan's texts is then supplemented with texts authored by a few Lacanian psychoanalysts who largely place the accent with late-Lacan and accordingly engage in efforts to expose the real dimension in his work by endeavoring to read it with all three levels simultaneously in mind.

The first period of Lacan's career culminates in his paper "The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis" (1953),497 popularly known as his 'Rome Discourse.' While using his name only twice, this text nevertheless bears the distinctive mark of Heidegger, as it generally links together the subject, language and speech on the basis of a reading of psychoanalysis that is undeniably hermeneutical phenomenological. As he writes, '[i]f psychoanalysis can become a science (for it is not yet one) and if it is not to degenerate in its technique (and perhaps this has already happened), we must discover the meaning of its experience.'498 Like Heidegger's problematic of unveiling truth, the very psychoanalytic notion of the unconscious calls for a similar need for exegesis to reestablish the censored chapters of the subject's history. This is analogous to the hermeneutical task of clarifying obscure texts and just as for hermeneuts from the medieval period onward this task is linked to truth. But in the present case this is seen as taking place phenomenologically, through 'the Word realized in discourse that darts from mouth to mouth, conferring on the act of the subject who receives its message the meaning that makes this act an act of history and gives it its truth.'499 But simply because Lacan stresses language and speech throughout this paper, one should not conclude that he can be considered a structuralist. In 1953 his use of the phrase 'symbolic order' still refers to the substantial matter and imponderable meaning of symbolic objects and not to the mechanics of signifiers. Thus the claim that the Freudian 'discovery was that of the field of the effects, in man's nature, of his relations to the symbolic order and the fact that their meaning goes all the way back to the most radical instances of symbolization in being' is a reading of psychoanalysis that wholly places the symbolic order qua system of signifiers behind a primary concern for a being grasped through meaning.500 For Lacan the subject is thus alienated from its most primordial and meaningful being, and psychoanalysis endeavors to reestablish a link to it or else tries to compensate for its loss with a renarrativization of the subject's history. As noted above, the French use of the futur antérieur problematizes simple conceptions of meaning-conferment by adding a complex temporal dimension. This in large part accounts for Lacan's opposition to determinist lines of thinking which consider events in the subject's past as simple facts. On the contrary, for Lacan such events are always already historicized so that what is important is how the subject today perceives them to have been experienced. Here is where the psychoanalyst can 'help him complete the current historicization of the facts.'501 This implies that any event takes on its full meaning only at a future date; its present status is thus what it 'will have meant' to the subject. In terms of meaning the past is in a sense more flexible than the future. Given this understanding Lacan maintains that the psychoanalyst's most formidable technique is to 'punctuate' the speech of the patient. Utilizing terminology from an earlier paper on logical time, Lacan maintains that by so punctuating the text of the subject the psychoanalyst 'annuls the times for understanding in favor of the moments of concluding which precipitate the subject's meditation toward deciding the meaning to be attached to the early event.'502 As Lacan moves into his structuralist period, the hermeneutical phenomenological shell of these insights is removed in order to expose and rearticulate their underlying logic into the pure language of signifiers.

However, Lacan's move away from hermeneutical phenomenology does not imply he regresses to explaining meaning through the determining forces of signifiers, at least not in terms of a naïve conception of meaning as factory-produced, like a finished product which emerges at the end of an assembly line of signifying chains. Readers of Lacan's work from his relatively brief second period might be tempted to conclude otherwise, since it is clear he has a strong interest in delimiting the causal forces at work in the very midst of the field of meaning. In his defense one must stress that while he finds himself in the company of those men who, like the (post)structuralists examined in Chapter 3 above, investigate the meaningless structural aspects of language as delimiting the field of meaning, he does depart from their company in his insistence that first, there is a cause of meaning; second, the cause of meaning is decentered; and third, this decentered cause is the very signifying structure itself. Such an understanding, to be explored in the following three texts, better accounts for that 'general truth of structuralism' identified above, which speaks of experiencing meaning-effects only when turning away from strict structural work. For Lacan, at the level of formal structural mechanisms stands a sense and performing structural analysis accesses that sense but not its meaning. This potential meaning is actualized only in a future moment which comes by releasing the signifiers from their analysis to allow their free and incessant sliding so as to produce the imaginary meaning-effect. At this point in Lacan's career sense and meaning are related roughly as cause and effect, articulated with respect to the symbolic qua formal mechanism of the signifying structure itself. In Lacan's third period meaning is still seen as an effect of sense, but the status of this cause is conceived as real rather than as symbolic. While issues raised in the next three texts from his structuralist period are more fully understood by taking into account the work from his third period, an adequate sense of Lacan's project at this time can nevertheless be had by endeavoring to strictly keep the discussion oriented towards its structural components.

There is perhaps no better work by Lacan which demonstrates his thesis of the existing parallel between the workings of the symbolic order and the functioning of the unconscious than his "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter'" (1956).503 This paper must have held a special importance for Lacan himself as he placed it at the very beginning of his Écrits, whose compiled papers are otherwise generally presented in chronological order. Such importance is indirectly confirmed by the attention it has received by literary criticism; the brilliant structural analysis of Poe's short story has easily made this the most popular of all of Lacan's papers for English departments across higher academia. Its main themes are well-known, like how the repetition of scenes in Poe's text proceeds according to which character possesses the feminizing letter (which in turn makes them possessed by its meaning),504 a letter whose very possession further determines the spatial disposition of all the characters and dictates how much insight they can draw from each scene. Less known are the how and the why of these structural movements. To address the underlying mechanism which accounts for them, one must turn to the latter half of his paper. There Lacan supplements his English department-friendly literary analysis with a scientific exposition complete with strange diagrams and figures all inscribed in notational shorthand which, commented on in his usual confusingly laconic style, is sure to give initial pause to even those well-versed in mathematics and logic. What Lacan attempts to illustrate is how there is a certain autonomy to the workings of the symbolic order and thus to unconscious processes. This autonomy stems from the various degrees of ciphering involved in these workings, a ciphering which dictates in many respects the general direction a signifying system can proceed.505 These exercises involving overlapping or overdetermined symbols are designed to mimic how natural language assigns more than a single meaning to any word or phrase such that a surplus of words is most often required to adequately represent one's intention. So one should seriously heed Lacan's warning against taking up his work here simply for its 'recreational character.'506 The painstaking process of slowly working through these pages with paper and pencil in hand may or may not appeal to one's sensibilities. But only through such analytic work (properly speaking a deciphering) can one truly be convinced that if the unconscious does exist and that its processes are so ciphered, then these processes indeed have nothing to do with meaning. The realm of meaning is under the sole purview of conscious thought and can be safely set aside when discussing (the truth of) unconscious formations and productions. More strongly said, meaning must be set aside as it covers over unconscious processes. Lacanian interpretation does not so much aim to uncover meaning as rather seek to reduce the matter at hand to the meaningless movement of overdetermined signifiers.

But it is a year later that Lacan first works out a full theory of signifiers, as demonstrated in his paper "The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud" (1957).507 It is in this text that Lacan famously inverts the order of Saussure's linguistic sign, placing instead the signifier on top and the signified on bottom with an intervening bar which quite literally bars any intimate relation between the two. In his algebraic shorthand,508 it is represented as the Lacanian sign, ratio of signifier capital S over signified lower-case s. Generally speaking, the signified is another term for (the smallest unit of) meaning, so what Lacan now calls an algorithm still seems to retain the Saussurean notion that to every signifier stands a meaning. Yet Lacan breaks from Saussure by claiming how these algorithms should be considered as 'devoid of meaning.'509 Indeed we can view this entire paper as an effort to set aside meaning for signifying structure, which here amounts to substituting for every signified a chain of signifiers.510 A couple of illustrations are thus presented to help prepare us for his claim made a page later that 'the signifier in fact enters the signified.' Signifiers always problematize the signified from within, and upon close examination the signified reveals itself as nothing but a series of signifiers. It is thus the signifier that has logical priority, '[f]or the signifier, by its very nature, always anticipates meaning by deploying its dimension in some sense before it.' Interrupted phrases like 'I'll never...' and 'The fact remains...' which are missing their significant terms anticipate their meaning yet nevertheless make sense and one that 'is all the more oppressive in that it is content to make us wait for it.' In a sentence which nicely captures the problematic relation of meaning to the signifier whereby the former incessantly slides under the later, Lacan writes 'that it is in the chain of the signifier that meaning insists, but that none of the chain's elements consists in the signification it can provide at that very moment.' 511 Certainly the meaning of the sentence 'George Washington was the first president of the United States' insists in this series of signifiers, yet one would be hard pressed to localize exactly where it consists in that series. Nevertheless it is obvious that the potential sliding of meaning is (at least temporarily) stopped, and to explain this phenomenon Lacan uses the analogy of 'button ties' [points de capiton]. Literally designating upholstery buttons which prevent a shapeless mass of stuffing from freely moving about, the idea is that such anchoring points exist where the signifier and signified are knotted together. Initiated towards the end of sentences, this involves a retroactivity which should be seen as complementing the anticipatory nature of meaning noted above. Consider the interrupted sentence 'It was light...'. Here the sliding of meaning manifests itself in the uncertainty which arises in the mind of the reader as to the exact signification of the term light. At best this term anticipates a limited array of possible meanings. But it is only by actually completing the sentence with one of these possible meanings, say with '...outside,' '...so he could carry it' or even '...reading' that the meaning is buttoned-down. The anticipatory nature of signifiers at the start of sentences thus overlaps with the retroactive nature of those at the end to result in a tying down of meaning. However, a further aspect of the analogy should be clear: just as button ties are not permanent anchors, the meaning of sentences are not so fixed that they cannot later be called into question with future sentences.512

Another way to manage with what 'elusive ambiguity the ring of meaning flees from our grasp along the verbal string' is to recognize the 'fact that access to meaning is granted only to the double elbow of metaphor,... namely, the fact that the S and s of the Saussurian algorithm are not in the same plane, and man was deluding himself in believing he was situated in their common axis, which is nowhere.'513 The actual arrangement of the algebraic ratio the Lacanian sign, ratio of signifier capital S over signified lower-case s should provide a visual prop to help one recognize how the signifier S (e.g., light) can come to mark the place of s (a series of signifiers, e.g., It was light so he could carry it) such that the latter disappears while its meaning is in some sense preserved in the former. While this accounts for metaphor's poetic effect, whereby two or more meanings exist in one signifier, one should further recognize that since Lacan demotes meaning to the secondary structuring effects of signifiers alone he is driven to make a further distinction within the realm of the signifier. Thus his distinction between the signifier and the letter. When Lacan defines the letter as 'the localized structure of the signifier,'514 this definitely makes it not of the realm of meaning but rather of sense, and one which provides direction to the movement of signifiers as they subvert the very place of meaning itself. In this way, by straddling the very instance of this letter in the unconscious with a signifier substituting a series of signifiers, we begin to see how Lacan can claim that the 'metaphor is situated at the precise point at which meaning is produced in nonmeaning.'515 It should also be noted how Lacan's consideration of metaphor and metonymy (as well as an assortment of other obscure figures of speech and tropes, such as periphrasis, hyperbaton, catachresis, litotes, antonomasia and hypotyposis) as unconscious mechanisms distinguishes him from a linguist. In contrast to the traditional structuralist who eschews notions of subjectivity, Lacan is a psychoanalyst whose interest in subverting meaning at the textual level is calculated so as to discourage any further alienation of the subject in the field of meaning, which amounts to frustrating the subject's constitution of an imaginary and meaningful sense of self or ego.516 Commenting on these 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?' So Lacan would agree with the common structuralist truth of how 'language speaks the subject.' But he would go 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.'517 As seen more clearly in his third period, Lacan's subject actually emerges from a thoroughly meaningless structure whose being can thus be set in opposition to its meaning; in no way is Lacanian subjectivity a transcendent something which stands over-against this structure. But at this time Lacan's main message is clearly to turn our analytic gaze to the operations of signifiers, for signifiers so assembled into various linguistic structures hold the causal key to questions concerning meaning. 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. As he writes in the opening lines of this paper in a statement equally applicable to the entire Écrits, this text should be considered as 'situating... 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.'518 Papers such as these 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, the difficulty of these texts merely signals the enormously flexible thought contained therein.

The relation Lacan finds between structure and the subject is further considered in "The Signification of the Phallus" (1958).519 While Lacan will continually rework the underlying logic of this relation into his final decade, for the present review there are two key points to note in this paper. The first has to do with the distinction Lacan draws between the meaning (signification) of the phallus and the phallus qua signifier, which are nevertheless two aspects of the phallus that are paradoxically related.520 The former concerns a subjective experience and thus notably adds a phenomenological dimension to Lacan's structuralist work. On the one hand this experience has to do with virility, the pleasurable feeling of potentially grasping all the signifiers (and thus all the meanings) in a structure, but on the other hand this experience is coupled with utter impotence, a painful realization that such an all (and the total meaning it potentially conveys) forever eludes the grasp of the subject. The overall experience is thus one of jouissance, the pleasured pain of a pulsation between everything and nothing, as when a friend unacquainted with one's area of expertise suddenly inquires after its meaning. Such an auspicious occasion is often simultaneously met with a feeling of helplessness or in psychoanalytic terms, an experience of symbolic castration.521 But what should not be overlooked is how this experience of the impossible fullness of meaning is itself marked by a signifier and one that is entirely devoid of a signified. To explain this, consider how for any network of signifiers to operate as a differential system (i.e., as a system of differences), it must contain a lack which cannot be filled so as to 'complete' the system. One could also conceptualize this as a system which sets in motion its signifiers in an endeavor to find the missing signifier. Either way the result is the same: its total completion and thus all of its meaning-effects are impossible to achieve. Yet this very notion of a lacking signifier is further marked by a signifier: a signifier of the lack of a signifier. However, this is not yet the phallic signifier. All one needs to do to grasp this signifier is reflect on the 'place' in which the lack of the signifier converts into the signifier of the lack. The signifier which marks this place is the phallus qua signifier, a paradoxical signifier-without-signified that 'sticks out' from the series of ordinary signifiers. It is an element in the symbolic order in which excess and lack coincide. This provides for a much deeper understanding of the 'general truth of structuralism' spoken of numerous times above. For we see how the phallus qua signified and phallus qua signifier, while intimately related, are nevertheless distinct, such that the lack of possessing this signifier is the price to be paid for any meaningful experience. This leads to the second key point of this paper, the contention that

'one can indicate the structures that govern the relations between the sexes by referring simply to the phallus' function. These relations revolve around a being and a having which, since they refer to a signifier, the phallus, have contradictory effects: they give the subject reality in this signifier, on the one hand, but render unreal the relations to be signified, on the other. This is brought about by the intervention of a seeming [paraître] that replaces the having in order to protect it, in one case, and to mask the lack thereof, in the other.'522

Concisely said, man is defined as 'having' the phallus while woman is defined as 'being' the phallus. Here lies the origin of Lacan's earlier attempt to formulize sexual difference and as can be seen, it is one which is strictly conceived as internal to phallic economy. The sexual categorization of the subject simply proceeds according to which of the two possible relations it takes with respect to the phallus. It is a resounding truth that much of the criticism leveled at Lacan's notion of sexual difference is leveled at this particular conceptualization. What is thereby overlooked is how Lacan himself eventually recognized the deficiencies of conceiving sexual difference as a symbolic reality, to turn instead in the early 1970s to consider its real basis. Inscribed from that point on into what he calls the 'formulae of sexuation,' commentary in the literature on his final conception of sexual difference has only slowly been growing in recent years. The formulae of sexuation are extensively discussed and enlarged upon throughout Part II below.

If Lacan's second period establishes that the signifying structure operates as the decentered cause of meaning, 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 this question in the affirmative starting in the 1960s, Lacan for the remainder of his career effectively moves beyond both hermeneutics and structuralism. One sees this new concern 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.'523 There are two notable aspects to these words. The first concerns how 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. The ultimate Cause of meaning is thus one further remove from his previous structuralist thinking so that a real, and not a symbolic, suspension point must be sought. However, this does not imply an abandonment of concerns for the symbolic order, for the real is only discernible through its effects on that order. This leads to the second notable aspect of the above citation, how the Cause qua real can never directly effectuate its causal power but can only register itself as a disturbance in the symbolic order. Such disturbances were seen above when the inconsistency inherent to the network of signifiers was discussed. What Lacan's new approach adds is an understanding that this structuralist deficiency (i.e., the network's failure to complete itself due to an ever missing signifier) is the way the real manifests itself at the symbolic level, for it is precisely the non-symbolizable real that throws the symbolic order's potentially smooth signifying operations off course. At first Lacan considers these real effects in their traumatic impact on the subject. But then in the 1970s the real is seen as impossible, and such a conception is most strikingly evident in Lacan's declaration of the impossibility of the sexual relationship. Below two seminars from Lacan's non-hermeneutical phenomenological period are briefly discussed. Seminar XI is primarily taken up for its potential to radically suspend Heidegger's question of the meaning of being, while Lacan's novel discourse theory as articulated in Seminar XVII (a seminar given just prior to the introduction of the formulae of sexuation), is likewise considered for its theorizing of an end point to the interminable slide of meaning.

For present purposes the most pertinent section of Seminar XI is its last section which includes two Venn diagrams, reproduced in Figure 5.3 with slight modifications.524

Figure 5.3, Lacan's Vel of Alienation diagram depicting 2 Venn diagrams with the words money and life in one, being and meaning in the other, with accompanying mathemes $, S1 and S2

The diagram to the left is readily understandable, and Lacan uses it to explain the one to the right. Suppose you are walking down an alley and a robber jumps out, sticks a gun in your belly and offers you the following choice, a vel (Latin for 'or'): 'Your money or your life!' It is immediately evident that if you choose to keep your money the robber pulls the trigger, ending your life as well as relieving you of your money. The only way of retaining one of these options is to choose life, which is of course a life now diminished by a specific dollar amount. The choice of life is thus rather forced upon you525 and Lacan's point is that so is meaning, for the subject faces a similar choice with respect to its being and its meaning. While Heidegger is not expressly named in these pages, one cannot but recognize that where hermeneutical phenomenology holds meaning and being together in a single question that proves decisive for its very project (i.e., the question of the meaning of being), Lacan's non-hermeneutical phenomenology posits a gap between the two, for 'the being of the subject [is] that which is there beneath the meaning.' He continues, summarizing the vel of alienation:

'If we choose being, the subject disappears, it eludes us, it falls into non-meaning. If we choose meaning, the meaning survives only deprived of that part of the non-meaning that is, strictly speaking, that which constitutes in the realization of the subject, the unconscious. In other words, it is of the nature of this meaning, as it emerges in the field of the Other, to be in a large part of its field, eclipsed by the disappearance of being, induced by the very function of the signifier... One of the consequences is that interpretation is not limited to providing us with the significations [meanings] of the way taken by the psyche that we have before us. This implication is no more than a prelude. Interpretation is directed not so much at the meaning as towards the non-meaning of the signifiers, so that we may rediscover the determinants of the subject's entire behaviour.'526

The subject, which Lacan algebraically represents by $, cannot but find itself immersed in the Other, the chain of signifiers represented here by S2, which make up the language it speaks and within whose system of differences meaning stands. However, it was seen how there is a missing signifier in this chain, here represented by S1, which if found would complete the system and allow the subject full access to the final Meaning (of its being). Yet this lack of a signifier is a condition for the differential signifying system itself and thus cannot be found. This is why Lacan characterizes this vel as alienation, as it condemns the subject to the field of the Other which provides meaning to the loss of its being.527 But unlike Heidegger who calls for a deeper hermeneutic to reestablish a connection to this being, Lacan paradoxically calls for a further separation of the subject from this entire scenario, as in Figure 5.4.

Figure 5.4, Lacanian Separation diagram depicting 1 Venn diagram with the word nonesense and with accompanying mathemes $, a, S1 and S2

Separation occurs not when the subject realizes how there is a missing signifier which prevents grasping the full meaning of being; such an insight is readily known in structuralism. Rather, separation is the further phenomenological experience of how the missing S1 is primordially lost, how there is a lack which precedes that secondary lack manifesting itself at the structural level to which one may or may not hold out hope of filling in with a final signifier. Graphically this movement away from vacillating between the hope of finding the missing signifier and the recognition of the impossibility of doing so amounts to shifting S1 entirely over to the field of the Other so that all that is left is the empty place S1 previously occupied at the intersection of the subject and the Other. This place was seen above as marked by the phallus qua signifier. But what is important to recognize here is how Lacan now conceives the place of the intersection as the overlap of two lacks, a point which coincides with the lack in the subject and the lack in the other. Lacan thus breaks away from set theory, which treats elements of intersections as belonging to both circles; rather, Lacan considers it a negative intersection so that the nonsensical object a which embodies it belongs to neither the subject nor the Other. This quintessential Lacanian object is what was identified above as the sublime object, a paradoxical object offered up from Section 4.2 onward as a suspension point to meaning, and Lacan effectively theorizes the same when he says that '[t]hrough the function of the objet a, the subject separates himself off [and] ceases to be linked to the vacillation of being, in the sense that it forms the essence of alienation.'528 At the phenomenological level, the alienated subject cannot but meaningfully vacillate with its being, while the separated subject gains an 'empty' distance towards this meaningful existence precisely by identifying with an object which embodies the jouissance that supports this experience of alienation. At the theoretical level, this is 'the object that cannot be swallowed, as it were, which remains stuck in the gullet of the signifier.'529 And in terms of interpretation, Lacan contends that the proper strategy is to aim for this object, for 'the effect of interpretation is to isolate in the subject a kernel, a kern, to use Freud's own term, of non-sense'530 which for all that does not make this type of interpretation itself nonsensical.

This objet a, also called the 'object-cause,' thus accounts for the real Cause which disturbs the signifiers of the symbolic order. Moreover, Lacan considers this object the objectal correlate to a subject that only exists in the differential signifying system as a pure difference, as per his often repeated tautological definition of the signifier as 'that which represents a subject for another signifier.'531 What Lacan now adds to this structuralist understanding is the further insight that the subject can only recognize this truth insofar as 'the subject sees himself caused as a lack by a.'532 Thus what makes the object-cause characteristically traumatic to the subject is the discovery that the Cause of meaning has something to do with his own subjectivity. Correlative to his belief that one attains the agility needed for the interpretation of logico-mathematical unconscious thought processes by working through ciphered matrices, Lacan increasingly recommends examining topological figures to gain similar insights into the logic of the real. In the present seminar a favored figure is often invoked – the möbius strip533 – which illustrates the existence of a structure whose limit separating its inside from its outside coincides with its internal limit. Such a model is precisely what is needed to explain how the Cause qua real disturbing the signifying system from 'outside' the structure is in fact the retroactive product of its own effects. That is, trying to grasp the entire logic of the structure and its relation to the real cannot be done with a single glance;534 rather, the subject must permit itself to get caught up in the structure with its attending illusion of a substantive Cause of meaning in order to discover how that Cause is nothing more than the subject's own path towards it. It is as if the entire path the subject forges through chains of signifiers and their meanings collapses into a nonsensical singular point suspending the need for further attempts to meaningfully appropriate a loss of being in the signifying field of the Other.

While these conclusions do find textual support in Seminar XI, it is true that Lacan articulates alienation and separation not so much in terms of objet a as rather with reference to the primordially repressed binary signifier mentioned during the discussion of Derrida in Section 3.2 above. But as Lacan continues to clarify the subject's relation to the system of signifiers throughout the second half of the 1960s, he will increasingly recognize the need to specifically address the question of how the signifier and jouissance are related. This eventually becomes a question of establishing a link between objet a (or surplus-jouissance) and the chain of signifiers, and this is first articulated in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis (1969–70).535 This seminar is well-known for having presented Lacan's Theory of the Four Discourses (of the Master, Hysteric, Analyst and University), which is extensively utilized in Chapter 7 below. For present purposes only a minimal grasp of this theory is required in order to recognize its applicability to the issue of meaning. Fortunately much of this theory can be introduced and applied by building on the preceding discussion. Recall how for Lacan meaning is retroactively 'buttoned-down' as the signifying chain proceeds from left to right, from an earlier signifier (S1) to later signifiers (S2). This is visually captured in Figure 5.6.

Figure 5.6, Retroactive Trajectory of Meaning depicting the horizontal signifying chain of S1 and S2, pierced by a curved arrow labeled meaning production

Now, the four discourses are based on the original definition of the signifier (S1) as that which represents a subject ($) for another signifier (S2). What Lacan does is identify each of these three places, as well as the hitherto unidentified fourth place, as in Figure 5.7.

Figure 5.7, Definition of a Signifier and the Places of Discourse depicting ratios using S1, S2 and $; other ratios using agent, truth, other and product/loss

By superimposing the schema of Figure 5.6 onto the definition of a signifier in Figure 5.7, we can visualize Lacan's idea that the subject emerges from the meaningless symbolic chain. Lacan tells us as much in the very first session of Seminar XVII, for 'it is at the very instant at which S1 intervenes in the already constituted field of the other signifiers, insofar as they are already articulated with one another as such, that, by intervening in another system, this $, which I have called the subject as divided, emerges. Its entire status, in the strongest sense of this term, is to be reconsidered this year.'536 One aspect of this reconsidered subject can be seen through the distinction between what might be called the 'subjectivization' of the subject and the pure subject. The former is the emergence of the subject into the field of meaning, a subject imbued with meaningful content (visually confirmed with the $ emerging at the tail end of the retroactive trajectory of meaning production); the latter is the empty lack between signifiers, a subject of the signifier devoid of any substantive meaning.537 Lacan's effort here can productively be viewed as understanding the subject in its move from the alienation of subjectivization to the subject proper. How? Immediately following the citation above is Lacan's reminder of how he has 'always stressed that something defined as a loss emerges from this trajectory. This is what the letter to be read as object a designates.' As mentioned above, it is through the subject's identification with this lost object that the subject sees itself as a lack. In terms of discourse theory, we now have the final element that occupies the fourth place of product/loss in the elemental discourse which Lacan calls the Master's discourse (Md). This is seen in Figure 5.8.

Figure 5.8, Master's and Analyst's Disourse depicting Md and Ad ratios using mathemes S1, S2, a, $

Recall how Lacan in the 1970s re-conceptualizes the status of the real, no longer considering it primarily in its traumatic aspect. This is a direct result of his new theory of discourses, 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.'538 This element of impossibility is the objet a which Lacan articulates from the perspective of the Master's discourse in various ways including how that discourse uncovers the fact that there is no sexual relation as well as the 'futile search for meaning' that is involved in seeking the origins of language.539 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 5.8, 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.' The two are at opposite poles of each other but connected nevertheless. As Lacan reminds us,

'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.'540

Certainly cryptic, but if one understands that for Lacan the analyst is to embody objet a, his words are readily understandable. The rejected stone is objet a in the place of loss in the Md which becomes a cornerstone by assuming the place of agency in the Ad. As rejected, it is that which falls out of the signifying chain as it proceeds from S1 to S2, retroactively producing meaning for 'we feeble beings... [who] will keep on discovering for ourselves at every turning point... [how] we need meaning.'541 But this interminable slide of signifiers and meaning has its limits. In fact it is the objet a that embodies this very limit and when it becomes the agent of its own discourse it can radically change the subject's coordinates. The Ad is thus a truly subversive practice, placing at its cornerstone a nonsensical object which embodies its own disappearance and in this way is a discourse harboring the capacity to collapse the entire edifice of the subject, i.e., his life-world and all the meaning it entails. The Md is the essential discourse retroactively producing meaning without restraint and the Ad reverses this process, putting an end to meaning production through identification with a nonsensical object.542 For the Md simultaneously also produces the object of its own demise such that if appropriated can suspend the subject's need to further inquire upon the meaning of phenomena.

If one takes Lacan's written and spoken word as the authoritative discourse of a master, as his adherents no doubt do, a striking example of elevating what that discourse produced to a new universal conception is to be had with Miller's paper entitled "Suture (elements of the logic of the signifier)" (1966).543 For Miller there takes 'a casual word that occurs once in Lacan'544 and uses it to unite many of the points made above under a single concept. Indeed this is consistent with the general thesis of the paper itself, one that raises awareness of how a singular point exists in any signifying system which is directly linked to that system's aspirations for universality (i.e. , the relative autonomy of the symbolic order). In order to understand this, Miller's project to develop 'the logic of the signifier' as that which unpins psychoanalysis can in no way be taken as a structuralist project. Given the preceding discussions one can immediately recognize from his very definition of suture, as that which 'names the subject to the chain of its discourse... [and which] figures there as the element which is lacking, in the form of a stand-in,' that at every turn Miller has his eye on the real.545 In fact, many of the arguments made above regarding Lacan's notion of overdetermined structure fall under the purview of suture. For instance the overlap in a structure between its external difference and its internal one, which was brought to bear using the mӧbius strip, can be expressed as the sutured point. The overlapping of two lacks, the lack of the subject and the lack of the other, that is objet a is another way to express the suture. As well, Miller makes use of Lacan's distinction between the signifier and the letter, for '[i]n order to grasp suture we must cut across what a discourse makes explicit of itself, and distinguish from its meaning, its letter. This paper is concerned with the letter – a dead letter. It should come as no surprise if the meaning then dies.'546 In general, what suture designates is in no way an operation which covers its own tracks to produce an illusory self-enclosed totality (of meaning) since such an operation always leaves its trace 'in the form of a stand-in.' The suture is thus phallic, registering an excessive element which sticks out from the ordinary series of signifiers precisely as an exception. It has a sublime quality, an element of the formal schema found amongst the disclosed content yet marking the part of that content that is excluded from explicit and meaningful understanding. However one expresses it, suture designates a nonsensical element where excess and lack coincide. Recognizing how suture directly links the universal aspect of a signifying system with its exception is to see how the singularity of suture allows one to bypass the middle term of particularity in the classic philosophical triad of universal–particular–singular. Thus as long as one acknowledges how the relation between the universal and the particular is the philosophical version of the classical hermeneutical circle of whole and part, this permits yet another way to conceive the undermining of this circle which acts as the condition of understanding in hermeneutical phenomenology. For the logic of suture dictates that the whole signifying field must paradoxically disclose a singular element amongst its particulars which simultaneously embodies the very circle itself, thus suspending the hermeneutical framework of meaning.

A leading representative of the great reception Lacan has received in South America, Harari focuses on the phenomenological experience of anxiety which arises from drawing too close to the paradoxical object a in his Lacan's Seminar on "Anxiety:" An Introduction (1987).547 By utilizing Lacan's readings of Kris' article (discussed in Section 5.1 above),548 of Plato and of other works, Harari expounds on Lacan's tenth seminar, which was dedicated to the phenomenon of anxiety. For instance, Harari explains that the analyst should not isolate the manifest demands of the patient, for this simply encourages imaginary healing. This is still the mistaken aim of psychotherapy today. In contrast, 'psychoanalysis seeks to arrive at the central question of lack and not to apply makeup to it or cover it up with various meanings. This kind of demand is directed toward plugging lack; what the analysand [patient] is asking for neurotically is an imaginary cover for constitutive lack.'549 Providing meaning is thus seen as that which simply plugs lack and stifles desire, since lack and desire are coextensive. Can one not recognize in this the elemental disposition of hermeneutics whose very abhorrence of any lack encountered in the text has driven it to devise better and better strategies over the centuries to signify that lack? Recalling the discussion of Ingarden and Iser in Section 2.3 above, epistemological phenomenology fares no better on this score since it quite explicitly speaks of structural 'holes,' 'gaps' and 'blanks' to be addressed and thus also moves too quickly to cover over the desire of the text. Yet the Lacanian approach has its own perils. As Harari recognizes, at the very moment desire is about to be smothered anxiety arises in the subject. Anxiety thus has an indicative function. Its experience registers a phenomenological encounter with objet a which, as seen above, is the very embodiment of the 'lack of the lack,' the situation in which the lack defining the subject itself lacks. So in contrast to the deceptions of imaginary meaning and of symbolic signifying chains, the claim that 'anxiety cannot deceive' places this phenomenon squarely with the register of the real.550 This raises the possibility that when anxiety is experienced with a text, the reader has encountered a point of nonsense which suspends the ability of the text to supply meaning and effectively ends the interpretive gesture. The broader lesson is that one runs the risk of overlooking this place of truth by ignoring one's own subjective engagement with the text. It should be repeated how this truth is a place and not a long sought after, finally re-found object. In terms which bring to mind hermeneutical phenomenology and the forgetting of being, Harari writes of the psychoanalytical school of the Kleinians and of their 'belief that, in the first place, there is an object and second, the object departs, which is how Kleinianism nourishes itself. For Kleinians, first there is co-presence of subject and object with which a relation is maintained, and then the problem arises, when the object is lost.' But in contrast, 'Lacan maintains the inverse of this: the outline of the object can only be delineated and obtain quiddity at the moment of the loss,' or in other words, 'the object is constituted specifically at the moment at which it is lost; that is, when it is cut off as fallen, separated.'551 The anxious encounter with this object – the object a – marks the moment when the direct pursuit of meaning by the hermeneutical phenomenologist, or the more measured efforts to delimit meaning by the (post)structuralist, reaches its limit.

Representative of Lacanian psychoanalysis in the German-speaking world, which strongly emphasizes the real and Lacan's philosophical roots in Kant, Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger, David-Ménard in her paper "The Act of Interpretation: Its Conditions and its Consequences" (1988)552 further considers questions surrounding clinical interpretation. Indeed from its opening lines David-Ménard takes her distance from the dispositions of both (post)structuralism and hermeneutical phenomenology by stressing how 'interpretation is an act because it is never merely a matter of listening to the signifiers of desire or to the meaning of the discourse, but rather a more or less profound transformation of the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious.'553 As a listening, interpretation is thus never passive but active. This is certainly the case for Heideggerian phenomenology as well. But Lacanian interpretation goes further since it is to be conceived as actively intervening in the world of the patient in order to effect radical change. This amounts to the opening move of the paper, which goes on to consider the conditions the analyst must meet as well as the consequences she must tolerate if she aims for a real interpretation qua act. The very title of this paper thus functions as a sort of map to its overall structure which can even further be condensed by making use of the matheme for the analyst's discourse, Lacan's symbols for the Analyst's Discourse, one ratio of a over S2, with arrow pointing to another ratio of $ over S1. The top terms have already been identified: the a is the analyst in her successful act of interpretation which profoundly transforms the $, the analysand. Now, through presenting three or four partial case histories David-Ménard demonstrates how 'interpretation remains abstract, ineffective, as long as what the analyst says or emphasizes in the analysand's assertions, that is, something insisting on expression, is not immediately linked to the relation between the signifier of desire and precise transferential elements.'554 The prerequisite for successful interpretation is that it must make reference to the transference, which can be thought of as the space within which the signifying structure of the analysand's history constitutes itself. This space is marked by a unique (phallic) signifier which 'sticks out' from all these other signifiers (i.e., this signifier represents the subject for all other signifiers) and in terms of discourse theory this is S1 which in the Ad occupies the place of product/loss. A successful interpretation references this S1, producing the world of the analysand as a waste and thus thoroughly suspending its meaning-effects. As might be expected such an act carries a strong element of contingency, for the analyst never knows exactly how the analysand will react to the interpretation. This implies that the analyst must accept 'the fact that an interpretation which takes effect as act always means for the analyst a relative loss of control over the transferential effect of his or her words.'555 David-Ménard thus acknowledges a truth of analytic discourse whereby the analyst is barred from making full use of psychoanalytic knowledge, visually confirmed by the fact that a is barred from S2 which occupies the place of truth in Ad: Lacan's symbols for the Analyst's Discourse, one ratio of a over S2, with arrow pointing to another ratio of $ over S1.556 Adapting clinical for textual interpretation, this might serve to remind the reader to allow for a transference to take place so that her interpretation can transform the relation of the conscious and unconscious elements of the text. Whether this takes the form of a transference with the author or in some other way is relatively unimportant, so long as there is identification with an element which marks the very space within which the interpretative discourse operates. Such an approach rules out the customary liberal-academic attitude of striking a cynical distance towards the text, as this overlooks the necessity of 'buying into' the text before it can be subverted and moreover, absolves the interpreter of personally taking responsibility for the consequential loss of control over the effects of her interpretation. The implicit lesson of David-Ménard's paper is a reminder of how the clinical interpreter can never relieve herself of taking responsibility for the unintended consequences of her interpretation and the meaning-effects (or lack thereof) it bestows upon her analysand. Likewise with textual interpretation, one cannot scapegoat the text for one's reading of it.557

The psychoanalyst Verhaeghe writes in summary fashion at the end of his book Does the Woman Exist? From Freud's Hysteric to Lacan's Feminine (1996) that 'The Woman, the becoming of a woman, is a meaningful process which is based on metaphor. Hysteria, on the contrary, is a fixation which refuses meaning, based on metonymy.'558 Setting aside his notion of Woman, his remaining claim regarding hysteria provides an opportunity to introduce a third discourse, the Hysteric's discourse (Hd). This is seen in Figure 5.9.

Figure 5.9, Hysterics and University Disourse depicting Hd and Ud ratios using S1, S2, a, $

Verhaeghe's claim is easily confirmed by recognizing how $, the subject qua hysteric, stands in metonymic relation to the meaning-effects of S2, the chain of signifiers: subject in metonymic relation to meaning: ratios using $, S2. But he further implies that this is an imaginary solution and thus one to be avoided. We might surmise that a simple refusal of meaning, however consistently undertaken, is still too meaningful a project for the subject; accordingly, psychoanalysis should aim to suspend such a subjective stance. In the preface and introduction to this book it is noted that by following the path of hysterical desire Freud discovered psychoanalysis. But not to be overlooked is how such a path begins by duplicity of which Freud was certainly the first victim. To understand this, consider how knowledge (S2) is produced in the hysteric's discourse. Historically, it was the demand of the hysteric which put Freud to work, and his texts bear witness to the construction of numerous theories which, at least initially, he was all too willing to explain to his patients. Armed with this academic knowledge, his initial move was thus to assume the place of agency in a final discourse to be introduced, the University discourse (Ud) which, as can be seen in Figure 5.9, does nothing but further maintain the patient in his hysterical mode (i.e., what is produced in the Ud is $). But addressing the demands of the patient in this fashion satisfies only his request for meaning. It never fully patches over the underlying desire and ultimately results in antagonizing the lack constitutive of the patient. At best it can offer the patient a temporary relief. This is why Verhaeghe says the analyst must listen to the underlying causality, the a in the place of truth in the Hd, which he even elevates to a duty. As he writes, 'the discourse of the analyst... [is] supported by an ethical imperative: to open the unconscious, which is always closing, at the point of cause and effect: a → $. Interpretation is not limited to an ever shifting desire; full attention must be paid to that around which desire circles in the fundamental fantasy: object a.'559 It should be clear that this a → $ is the top half of the Lacan's symbols for the Analyst's Discourse, one ratio of a over S2, with arrow pointing to another ratio of $ over S1 and thus nicely supplements the discussion above of David-Ménard. Verhaeghe feels that Freud accomplishes this shift in focus (from Ud to Ad) starting after 1914, which roughly corresponds to Lacan's own shift into his third period of the real beginning in the 1960s. In either case, the result is the same: once positioned as the object-cause of the patient's desire, the analyst can potentially stop the incessant slide of meaning which covers over that constitutive lack in subjectivity. The task is thus the 'impossible' one of positioning oneself at that real point which was previously seen by Lacan only in its 'traumatic' aspect and one of the strengths of Verhaeghe's great focus on discourse theory – indeed he even organizes his book into parts according to the various discourses – is that he highlights pertinent facets of this theory. He thus reminds us that in terms of discourse theory, the real qua impossible is how Lacan characterizes the relation between the agent and the other in any of the four discourses. Moreover, this is effectively equivalent to his famous claim of 'Il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel' [There is no such thing as a sexual relation].560 These claims are explored in more detail in Part II below, but for now a further point should be made as to how Lacan's discourse theory radically undermines Heideggerian-styled dialogue with its three elements (viz., a subject facing-off with another subject or object-text in the medium of language) through the addition of a nonsensical fourth element, the objet a.561 Through this addition of objet a, hermeneutical phenomenology effectively transforms into a non-hermeneutical phenomenology.

As the translator of the first complete English edition of Écrits as well as one of the seminars, Fink is well positioned to cast judgment on the public reception of Lacan's textual legacy. But while conceding that Lacan often deserves his notorious reputation for being an obscure writer, it is also true 'that he comes right out and says what he means in many cases.'562 This is the wager of Fink's book Lacan to the Letter: Reading Écrits Closely (2004) which, true to its title, endeavors to read Lacan literally, à la lettre, in order to demonstrate that his writings are not as absurd as so often claimed. To this end Fink undertakes an intensive exegesis of a few texts by Lacan,563 inclusive of chapters devoted to "The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious," the phallus and the critique of Kris' ego psychology. As Fink's own writing is didactic, what results is highly instructional commentary.564 But this may initially strike one as suspicious, for the question arises as to whether Fink's concerted effort to clearly explain Lacan does not move too quickly to fill in with meaning certain elements which would better be served as preserved in their nonsensical dimension.565 Yet then again he does occasionally offer his own interpretation which borders on the nonsensical, as when he slowly develops the thesis that 'on my reading... the phallus is the very "relationship" between the signifier and the signified' to conclude that 'Lacan equates the phallus with the bar between the signifier and signified ( the Lacanian sign, ratio of signifier capital S over signified lower-case s ).'566 Lacan nowhere literally says this, but Fink's reading quite effectively frustrates assigning an easy meaning to the phallus. Another instance of preserving the nonsensical domain comes about rather inadvertently. At the end of his book Fink struggles to make sense of certain aspects of Lacan's notion of sexual difference to conclude in a footnote how '[w]e need not assume there is some sort of complete consistency to Lacan's work in this regard... [It] seems to remain something of a work in progress.'567 This effectively amounts to confessing a lack of understanding of sexuation and thus 'negatively' preserves the nonsensical domain sexuation delimits. These reservations aside, Fink's intense focus on the 'literality' of Lacan's texts reminds us to look there for manifestations of the real, for this impossible dimension is unveiled not through a deep hermeneutic but is rather found much closer to the surface than one might first suspect.

Fink's popularizing of Lacanian psychoanalysis in the English-speaking world is only overshadowed by Žižek who, from his very first book in English entitled The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), has done the most to elaborate the distance taken by late-Lacan from both hermeneutical phenomenology and (post)structuralism.568 Indeed the first half of its fifth chapter wraps up one of the threads running throughout this first book, which strongly argues against viewing Lacan as a (post)structuralist. Although Žižek will later write that this book was a failure in some important respects,569 embedded therein are undeniable successes which have earned it a favored status among his readers – no small feat given his many publications. Utilizing historical material and popular culture to explain many key psychoanalytic concepts, Žižek also leads his reader through some of Lacan's graphical analysis570 in a presentation which proves as equally instructional to the neophyte as Fink's own work, but with the addition of irreverent humor. However, a brief passage571 in which Žižek applies Hegel's logic of reflection to 'the eternal hermeneutical question of how to read a text' stands out for its originality. As per this logic, the proper reading of, say, Antigone occurs in three stages, the most naïve of which is 'positing reflection' which claims an immediate grasp of its true meaning. 'External reflection' solves the obvious dilemma of mutually exclusive readings by transposing the true meaning of Antigone into the inaccessible beyond. Whether this takes the form of the unapproachable question of why Sophocles wrote the play or more abstractly by viewing it as a transcendent Thing-in-self beyond considerations of authorial intention, the result is the same: the finite interpreter can at best only partially grasp its true meaning. With this external reflexive stance the interpreter must not only weigh the differing readings which exist at the present time, but must also contend with significant historical readings like those given by Hegel, Heidegger and Lacan, all of which can only approximate the essence of Antigone. However, 'determinate reflection' is said to resolve this impasse. Passing to this final stage requires an awareness of

'how this very externality of the external reflexive determinations of the "essence" (the series of distorted, partial reflections of the true meaning of the text) is already internal to this "essence" itself, how the internal 'essence' is already in itself "decentered"... [The Thing-in-itself] is constituted afterwards, though a certain structural delay. We achieve the "determinate reflection" when we become aware of the fact that this delay is immanent, internal to the "Thing-in-itself:" the Thing-in-itself is found in its Truth through the loss of its immediacy. In other words, what appears, to 'external reflection,' as an impediment is in fact a positive condition of our access to Truth: the Truth of a thing emerges because the thing is not accessible to us in its immediate self-identity.'

To gain some understanding of Žižek's speculative Hegelian formulation, one might recall here Lacan's insight into how meaning insists, but our search is in vain for that one element in which meaning consists. However, this does not imply we should heroically accept the failure to grasp final meanings. Doing so would be to take on an external reflexive stance which places such finality into a beyond (perhaps, in a hermeneutical phenomenological gesture, with a forgotten being). Instead, determinate reflection would have it that the truth of this endeavor is found precisely through the experience of the loss of meaning's immediacy. It is here that the subject recognizes that nonsensical surplus-jouissance which lends it support in its very search for meaning.

Žižek's second effort, a series of lectures compiled as For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (1991), is self-described as 'a more substantial achievement: it is a book of theoretical work' which elaborates its basic insight on how 'Hegelian dialectics and the Lacanian "logic of the signifier" are two versions of the same matrix.'572 Again such a statement regarding the affinity between Hegel and Lacan can be taken as expanding upon the thesis that Lacan should not be considered a (post)structuralist, since Žižek feels that Hegel's work at its most consequential also touches the real. This is seen above with determinate reflection and its logic is once again applied with respect to textual analysis. What is now stressed is the (impossible) experience of

'how, through our interpretations, the Text itself is in a way "in search of itself," reconstructs itself, acquires new dimensions. The "meaning of a Text" is not some hidden kernel, given in advance and waiting to be unearthed; it constitutes itself through the series of its historical "effectualities." To use ''deconstructivist" jargon: by means of our reading the Text, the Text itself reads and (re)writes itself.'573

Again, the very movement of reflecting on a text is what produces the retroactive illusion that there is an immediacy of meaning given in advance but forever lost. What is to be experienced is how loss precedes what is being lost, how presence is derivative of absence or in classical structuralist terms, how difference is prior to those signifiers between which it is a difference. Žižek expands on this by way of demonstrating the necessity of a notion like Lévi-Strauss' mana (described as a signifier which reflexively signifies meaning as such) to any differential signifying system. Now, if it is true that in every human language there is nothing that cannot be said despite being composed of a finite set of signifiers, then it is clear how this set must necessarily contain a signifier which signifies all future meanings to come. The crucial reflexive turn arrives when this marking of the empirical limitation of a system of signifiers (a limitation because such a finite set of signifiers falls short of the potential wealth of the universe to be signified) is also conceived as the transcendental condition of the system's capacity to provide meaning. That is, in order for a signifier to be nothing but a bundle of differences from other signifiers (as one learns from Saussure onward), a pure signifier must exist which stands for difference as such; analogously, 'in order for any given signifier to mean something, there has to be another signifier which reflexively signifies simply the fact of meaning as such. So the ultimate difference is not between (the opposed meaning of) two signifiers, but between the signifier which means something (determinate) and the "empty" signifier which means meaning as such.'574 In this way Žižek introduces the phallus, as this empty signifier is precisely the signifier of symbolic castration. Additional Lacanian concepts are introduced in equally novel ways, like with an analysis of Ludwig Wittgenstein, which suddenly dovetails into a discussion of the 'big Other' and the distance psychoanalysis takes from hermeneutics. For we are told how this big Other is effectively equated with the 'hermeneutical horizon of meaning,' since both are seen as 'always-already present as the inherent background of our operations – and, as such, constitutes the very place from which we speak and which therefore cannot be called into question in a consistent way;' however, 'the field of psychoanalysis is not confined to this dimension of the big Other – witness the crucial role the interpretation of slips of the tongue plays in it: they cannot be accounted for by the hermeneutical horizon.' So while Lacan in his first hermeneutical period may have confined the psychoanalytic field to the big Other, 'Lacan's late thesis [is] that "the big Other doesn't exist"... The consistency of our language, of our field of meaning, on which we rely in our everyday life, is always a precarious, contingent bricolage that can, at any given moment, explode into a lawless series of singularities.'575 Thus Žižek from his earliest texts takes the perspective of psychoanalysis offered from Lacan's third period, from which he assesses the successes and failures of other theories while also using those theories to instantiate that perspective. Below two additional texts by Žižek are briefly discussed, one which challenges hermeneutical phenomenology by way of a critique of Habermas and one which poses a challenge to Derrida's post-structuralism.

The essay whose title asks “Is There a Cause of the Subject?” (1994)576 is itself contextualized by a series of questions in its opening paragraph which effectively boil down to a choice: should one take psychoanalysis as a structuralism (since Freud recognized how we are the playthings of unconscious determinism) or a hermeneutics (since Freud's interpretations equally fall within the domain of meaning). But since '[w]e can no more conceive the notion of a causal determinism of the psyche as the paradigmatic case of objectivist "reification," of a positivist misrecognition of the proper subjective dialectic of meaning, than we can reduce the domain of meaning to an illusory self-experience regulated by hidden causal mechanisms,' the very opposition should be put into question.577 Žižek finds that the Frankfurt School has done just that and promptly turns to a lengthy discussion of Adorno's examination of Freudian psychoanalysis as a possible undermining of this opposition. But the deficiencies of Adorno's own theory ultimately cause him to overlook the radical dimension of Freud, which Lacan most fully articulated.578 Habermas, however, fares better, as he views psychoanalysis as a theory of self-reflection. In contrast to Adorno, who places truth on the side of psychoanalytic theory, Habermas instead places the crucial accent on its practice (i.e., on the phenomenological experience of its subject). As noted in Section 1.3 above, Habermas turns to Dilthey and Žižek reminds us that this is so because Freud's theory is deemed by Habermas to lag behind its practice. Habermas thus 'accomplishes his own "return to Freud" by reinterpreting Freud's entire theoretical framework from the perspective of language.'579 Recall how Habermas critiques Dilthey's model as only being applicable under the conditions of a non-repressive society. But since our society is repressed, there are distortions which manifest themselves in our communication with others and with ourselves. According to Žižek, psychoanalysis functions for Habermas as unearthing the true and meaningful link between the subject and his symptom (where a symptom is viewed here as a fragment of the public text which has been excluded from public communication). The reestablishment of this link amounts to full self-recognition in what were formerly censured chapters of self-expression. This allows the subject to narrate a new personal history. Hence self-reflection for Habermas amounts to a prioritizing of epistemology over ontology, for interpretation not only provides adequate knowledge of the unconscious causal chain which leads to the symptom but this knowledge simultaneously cancels its efficacy. With full self-knowledge the symptom dissolves and the subject is reconciled with himself. So while Habermas does not conceive psychoanalysis strictly as a hermeneutic or as a structuralist account of the unconscious causal chain determining our motivations, neither does he properly overcome their opposition. For he seems to opt for the best of both worlds without concern for their real common ground. Thus Žižek is quite right to critique Habermas for reducing the ontological weight of the historical real to a contingent force troubling the supposedly 'neutral' transcendental grid of language from the outside. For in truth this real is the beyond of these two options, constituting that 'traumatic kernel' resisting symbolization and inscription into the language of intersubjective communication. As seen above, Habermas' assertion that distortions have meaning as such cause him to ultimately resort to a 'depth hermeneutics' to unlock their mystery, to which Žižek counters by writing that 'what remains unthinkable for him is that meaning as such results from a certain distortion, that is, that the emergence of meaning is based on a disavowal of some "primordially repressed" traumatic kernel. This traumatic kernel, this remainder which resists subjectivization-symbolization, is stricto sensu the cause of the subject.'580 The answer to the essay's titular question is a resounding 'yes,' and here we clearly see how this same objet a which Lacan links to the subject also functions as the object-cause of meaning.

Having previously been asked to clarify the complex relation between Lacanian psychoanalysis and Derridean deconstruction, Žižek responds with his essay “The Eclipse of Meaning: on Lacan and Deconstruction” (1995),581 in which he endeavors to precisely articulate their difference via Derrida's own oppositional couples. For instance, we are told how Derrida 'likes to indulge heavily' on deconstructing the 'center' by pointing out how the 'supplement' is an excessive element sticking out of the series it belongs to while simultaneously completing it, so that it cannot be said to be wholly inside or outside the system in question.582 Such an element should look familiar given the foregoing discussion in this section, but this in no way makes Derrida a Lacanian. As Žižek points out, the two aspects of this structural ambiguity are held apart by Derrida while Lacan unites them into the single notion of the (phallic) S1. But we do well to note how this equating of S1 with the supplement does not domesticate its tension with the center so much as expose the supplement as that which acts as both the condition of possibility and the condition of impossibility of the center. The tension which S1 marks ultimately testifies to that object which cannot be swallowed, stuck as it is in the gullet of this signifier. This nonsensical object is directly taken up in Žižek's subversion of Derrida's couple voice/writing, which is anything but a simple reversal of the thesis of the latter.583 As seen in Section 3.2 above, Derrida judges that Western metaphysics is logocentrist, founded on the illusion of the immediacy of the voice. But he argues that a transparent self-presence always fails to be delivered because writing always already taints voice by introducing a gap into it. In contrast to Derrida, once we know that voice for Lacan is a 'partial object' and thus an embodiment of objet a which, as was seen, is the nonsensical remainder of the signifying operation which buttons-down meaning in the Md: Lacan's symbols for the Master's Discourse, one ratio of S1 over $, with arrow pointing to another ratio of S2 over a , we can begin to understand Žižek's Lacanian claim that voice is that foreign body which most radically undermines the subject's self-presence. There is thus no need to posit writing as disrupting voice from without, for the uttering of the word by the voice itself provides its own internal disruption. This makes Derrida's tension between voice and writing secondary to the inner friction of the voice. As Žižek writes,

'voice is that which, in the signifier, resists meaning: it stands for the opaque inertia which cannot be recuperated by meaning. It is only the dimension of writing which accounts for the stability of meaning... As such, voice is neither dead nor alive: its status is, rather, that of a "living dead," of a spectral apparition which somehow survives its own death, i.e., the eclipse of meaning. In other words, it is true that the life of a voice can be opposed to the dead letter of a writing, but this life is the uncanny life of an "undead" monster, not a "healthy" living self-presence of Meaning.'584

On the printed page one finds 'objective' chains of written signs transparently designating their signified. Yet this meaning will remain merely the lifeless denotative meaning examined by the linguist until that moment the chain 'subjectivizes' itself through the addition of the nonsensical vocal object which thereby transforms it into expressive sense.585 At this point 'meaning slides into jouis-sense [enjoyment-in-meaning],' which is a self-consuming enjoyment no longer anchored in meaning. Žižek helpfully provides a concise equation to summarize this argument: 'Sense = meaning + nonsense.'586 In a certain way meaning never stands a chance: not yet fully constituted prior to objet a, it is thoroughly suspended after its addition.

Zupančič has also written on the relation of the Lacanian subject and meaning. At one point in the last chapter of her book The Odd One In: On Comedy (2008)587 the reader is taken back to the Lacanian idea of the forced choice of meaning. What this text can add to the explication of the vel of alienation undertaken above is an account of its emergence, which at the same time serves as an account of the very surfacing of the subject itself. For as Zupančič reminds us, alienation as constitutive of subjectivity does not imply it is the cause of the subject; rather, alienation is itself the effect of primary repression. She neatly explains the process of this emergence as taking place in three stages. First is the level of the prememorial signifier where there is as yet no subject and no signifying dyad. But contrary to what might seem the case, the dyad does not emerge by adding another signifier to the first; rather, it emerges at the place cleared by the repression of this first signifier, at which point the newly emerged dyad gives form to alienation constitutive of subjectivity. We might imagine this movement to the second stage as the expulsion or transformation of the antagonism inherent to the signifier into an external difference. Now, such differences are of course the defining feature of the signifying chain said to occupy the third level. But while this chain is already implied in one of the two terms of the dyad, it is

'activated only with the forced choice of this term. This is why, when the subject comes to exist, she exists only in the Other, through the signifying chain, which is to say as metonymic meaning(s) of the originally missing signifier. This is the level of interpretation (in analysis, as well as in general): since the subject emerges [as] pure difference in relation to her own being, she then strives to appropriate the latter by way of meaning constituted in the Other, and of its endless metonymy. Interpretation leads us to and through different forms/meanings developed around the subject's singular lack of being.'588

This explanation of the final stage should be readily comprehensible given the foregoing discussion in this section. But an additional contribution of Zupančič lies with her relating common experiences to illustrate this logic. For instance, she asks us to consider what makes a small child insist that the bedtime story she is being told must be told exactly as it was the night before. What makes her become a little officer of the law quick to catch the adult taking shortcuts, skipping pages and not reciting the story to the letter? Zupančič explains that '[t]extual, mechanical, stereotyped repetition is the mode in which the young subject, behind the scenes of the seemingly monotonous story, repeats the exciting story of a fundamental split or incongruity in her own being and meaning.'589 Each textual repetition repeats the emergence of the signifying dyad of alienation whereby the subject is forced to meaningfully make sense of the loss of her being. Yet nevertheless a separation does briefly occur here, for objet a is produced as a loss or in more poetic terms, 'as the subject's own shooting star in the Real, the object via which, for a moment, the subject sees herself on the outside.'590 In this case textual repetition is not dull but actually fulfills the child's expectation of a surprise. This notion of surprise is also the underlying rationale of comedy, the main topic of this book. For comedy also produces the nonsensical object which Zupančič cautions us not to take as a mere absence of sense. Rather, the encountering of nonsense occurs when a sense surprises us, as in the case of the comedic effect which she describes 'as a moment of disorientation, a momentary suspension in which the subject vacillates between his being and his meaning.'591 And just like the previous example, here too there is a deeper level at stake. For comic findings repetitively produce the schism of the subject and objet a at the very limit of their incongruence. In the concluding line of this book Zupančič asks us to recognize how this 'is not a reduction of ourselves (and all that we are) to a nonbeing, not the destruction of our being, but its emergence – its emergence outside meaning, yet inextricably from it.'592 Žižek aside, the fact that Lacanians are not renowned for their sense of humor is no excuse for overlooking the structural affinities between psychoanalysis and the comedic stance. The lesson here is that comedy affords ample opportunity for the subject to fully assume the suspension of meaning.

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