LACAN AND MEANING
SEXUATION, DISCOURSE THEORY, AND TOPOLOGY IN THE AGE OF HERMENEUTICS
CHAPTER 3
LACAN ON MEANING
— page 71 —
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 the retroactive product of its own effects. For the möbius strip subverts the normal way of representing space. It seems to have two sides. But this is deceptive as it really has only one side (and one edge). Each ‘inside’ point appears to have a corresponding ‘outside’ point ‘beyond’ it. However, traversing the length of the strip (say, by tracing it with one’s finger) reveals that the two points are not discrete but are, in fact, contiguous. In an homologous fashion, that substantive ‘beyond’ the subject so often wagers on as the Cause for disturbances in its world turns out to be a mere effect of its own disturbing effects. It only becomes traumatic in retrospect, from the perspective of a later symbolic horizon. The classic example is the small child who witnesses the copulation of his parents. There is nothing particularly traumatic about the scene to the child at the time. That possibility is reserved for a later date when his first sexual theories are formulated which do not permit the remembered scene to be symbolized and thus fully integrated into his newly narrativized life-world. This notion of the retroactive constitution of trauma firmly establishes Lacan’s break from certain lines of structuralist thought which proceed linearly from cause to effect.
Yet in no way does Lacan break toward the hermeneutical field. Consider how the logic of the möbius strip cannot be grasped with a single glance. A single glance can only confirm what the subject already knows and imbue it with meaningful understanding – a temptation to be resisted at all costs. This is the topological backdrop to the admonition Lacan voiced on the penultimate day of Seminar XI during a discussion of interpretation:
‘I have already tried to embody certain consequences of the very particular vel that constitutes alienation – the placing in suspense of the subject, its vacillation, the collapse of meaning – in such familiar forms as your money or your life, or freedom or death which are reproduced from a being or meaning – terms that I do not propose without some reluctance. I would ask you not to be too hasty in overloading them with meanings, for if you do you will only succeed in sinking them. So I feel that it is incumbent upon me to warn you of this at the onset.’48
In effect, the subject must permit itself to get caught up in the signifying 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 meanings collapses into a nonsensical point, suspending its desire to meaningfully appropriate its loss of being in the signifying field of the Other.
While these conclusions do find textual support, in 1964 alienation and separation are expressed more with signifiers than with objet a. But as Lacan
48 Ibid., 246.
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