Thinking With One’s Feet:
Lacanian Theories of Textual Engagement
WILLIAM J. URBAN
NOTES
1 His translator notes how Lacan’s neologism is ‘a condensation of poubelle, garbage can (or dustbin), and publication, publication.’ (Lacan 1998:29) All references to Lacan’s work in this paper will be made to the marginal French pagination found in most translations.
2 Indeed for Lacan, understanding is a form of defense and when confronted with something new, he feels students endeavor to bring everything back to what they already know since ‘what they understand is a bit precipitate.’ (Lacan 1998: 65)
3 Cited in Fink (2004: 63).
4 Freud’s Papers on Technique and The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis
5 This is the earliest version available as the original 1936 paper was never handed in for publication. (Roudinesco 513)
6 Of course, an actual mirror need not be present. Another child or even adult can act as that other who lends its whole image to foster a sense of wholeness for the fragmented child.
7 See Roudinesco (113–4) for additional details on this 1936 episode and how it may have impacted Lacan.
8 ‘Seminar on “The Purloined Letter”’ (1955); ‘The Freudian Thing’ (1955); ‘The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious’ (1957); ‘On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis’ (1957); ‘The Signification of the Phallus’ (1958); ‘The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious’ (1960)
9 Increasingly for Lacan, Borromean topology is not a representation of structure, but rather is that structure.
10 See Miller’s index for additional references to the supremacy of the signifier over the signified. (Lacan 2006: 895)
11 ‘Remarks on Daniel Lagache’s Presentation: “Psychoanalysis and Personality Structure”’ (1958) (ibid: 647–84)
12 See Miller’s commentary on Lacan’s optical figures. (Lacan 2006: 905)
13 ‘This algorithm is the following: 
. It is read as follows: signifier over signified, “over” corresponding to the bar separating the two levels.’ (Lacan 2006: 497)
14 We thus have an early indication of what the later Lacan will understand as the subversive real element in any signifying dyad. As Fink suggests, Lacan’s 1950’s formulations of the difference between the letter and the signifier are best read retroactively from the standpoint of a statement made in 1971 from Seminar XVIII: ‘The letter is in the real and the signifier is in the symbolic.’ (Fink 75) The real of the letter is precisely what Lacan means by his famous ‘materiality of the signifier’ emphasized in his groundbreaking reading of Poe’s text ‘The Purloined Letter.’ (Lacan 2006: 24)
15 ‘[D]ream images are to be taken up only on the basis of their value as signifiers, that is, only insofar as they allow us to spell out the “proverb” presented by the oneiric rebus. The linguistic structure that enables us to read dreams is at the crux of the “signifierness of dreams.”’ (Lacan 2006: 510)
16 As with metonymy, Lacan provides a complex formula for metaphor, defined as the ‘place of the subject’ and then provides psychoanalytic strategies to deal with it since ‘symptom is a metaphor.’ (Lacan 2006: 516, 528)
17 This term is variously translated as the text’s signifierness or literality or literating structure throughout Lacan’s discussion of Freudian dream analysis in the section ‘The Letter in the Unconscious.’ (Lacan 2006: 509ff)
18 Thus, we note how the Real Lacan of the 1970s, especially with his sexuated logic, offers not one strategy of textual engagement in addition to his Imaginary and Symbolic offerings, but at least three others: not-All, All and their ‘impossible’ joint conception in the analyst’s discourse. These latter versions could be said to take precedence in that they reveal the topology of objet a which links all three registers together.
19 See, for instance, Žižek (1997: 277, 288; 2006: 89). Žižek most often uses this metaphor to imply a subversive link between the Lacanian subject and Hegel’s radical speculative identity of ‘Spirit is a Bone’ and interestingly points out one passage in which Lacan says much the same thing. (Žižek 2002: 94n28) The écrit in question is ‘The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire’ and the passage is as follows:
‘Certainly there is a bone(r) [os] here. Since it is precisely what I am claiming – namely, what structures the subject – it essentially constitutes in the subject the gap that all thought has avoided, skipped over, circumvented, or stopped up whenever thought apparently succeeds in sustaining itself circularly, whether the thought be dialectical or mathematical.’ (Lacan 2006: 820)
Lacanian-themed puzzles
