LACAN AND MEANING
SEXUATION, DISCOURSE THEORY, AND TOPOLOGY IN THE AGE OF HERMENEUTICS
CHAPTER 3
LACAN ON MEANING
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down of meaning. A further implication of the analogy should also 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. If this brings Ingarden and Iser to mind, this is because Lacanian structuralist thought is generally in accord with the phenomenology of reading.
Another way to recognize with what ‘elusive ambiguity the ring of meaning flees from our grasp along the verbal string’ is through 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.’27 The actual arrangement of the algebraic ratio 
provides a visual prop for how a signifier S (light) can come to mark the place of a series of signifiers s (It was light so he could carry it) such that the latter disappears while its meaning is in some sense preserved in the former. This accounts for metaphor’s poetic effect whereby two or more meanings exist in one signifier. But since meaning is demoted to the secondary structuring effects of signifiers, Lacan is driven to make a further distinction within the realm of the signifier. Hence his distinction between the signifier and the letter. Defined as ‘the localized structure of the signifier,’28 the letter is not of the realm of meaning but rather of sense. The letter is what provides direction to the movement of signifiers as they subvert the place of meaning itself. In this way, by straddling the very instance of this letter in the unconscious with a signifier substituting for a series of signifiers, Lacan can claim that the ‘metaphor is situated at the precise point at which meaning is produced in nonmeaning.’29
Other figures of speech and tropes are likewise defined as unconscious mechanisms. This generally distinguishes Lacan from the linguist. But he similarly departs from traditional structuralists who eschew notions of subjectivity. As a psychoanalyst, Lacan’s interest in subverting meaning at the textual level is calculated to discourage the subject’s alienating immersion in its field. This amounts to frustrating the constitution of an imaginary sense of self. Whereas reintegration into the field of meaning was once encouraged, Lacan now instructs analysts to separate the subject from this field. The gap between symbolic and imaginary identification is to be maintained, not primordially overcome. Expressed in terms of the mirror stage, the child must not remain transfixed by his Ideal-ego. He is to instead identify with the symbolic point from which that image appears to be a meaningfully good fit. Called the Ego-ideal, one such point is provided by mother’s reassurance. As a signifier, it marks off the very space in which mirroring occurs and accordingly takes logical priority over the Ideal-ego. In the end, signifiers are the determining factors in the subject’s
27 Ibid., 430–1.
28 Ibid., 418.
29 Ibid., 423.
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