LACAN AND MEANING
SEXUATION, DISCOURSE THEORY, AND TOPOLOGY IN THE AGE OF HERMENEUTICS
CHAPTER 3
LACAN ON MEANING
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can be seen as an effort to set aside meaning for signifying structure, which here amounts to substituting for every signified a chain of signifiers.25 A couple of illustrations are then presented to prepare us for the claim on the following page, viz., 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 they 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 latter, 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.’26 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. It is as if its meaning suddenly emerges from nowhere since the whole of that meaning cannot be gotten by summing up the meaning of each individual part – well-known to anyone who has ever dabbled in translation and realized how word for word translations are often useless in rendering meaning from one language to another. This ‘nowhere’ from which meaning springs is the empty place occupied by the signifying structure itself.
Nevertheless, it is obvious that the potential sliding of meaning is (at least temporarily) stopped. 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 anchoring points exist to knot the signifier and signified together. Initiated towards the end of sentences, this involves a retroactivity which complements the anticipatory nature of signifiers 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 possibilities, 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
25 This is implied throughout but sometimes stated quite directly: ‘[I]t is easy to see that only signifier-to-signifier correlations provide the standard for any and every search for signification [meaning].’ Ibid., 418.
26 Ibid., 419.
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