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Psychoanalysis at the gates
(Returning to Freud through Joyce)

Pietro Bianchi and Samo Tomšic



Summary:

The paper discusses the theoretical and practical shift in Lacan’s teaching of psychoanalysis, which took place in the early seventies and lead to a complete reinvention of psychoanalysis. Lacan’s reference to James Joyce can be understood not only as an abolishment, but also and above all as a rearticulation of the structuralist doctrine, and as an attempt of a second return to Freud in psychoanalysis. The case of Joyce pushes Lacan to orientate his teaching in direction of the “real unconscious”, that is of the unconscious as it manifests itself on the level of lalangue. This shift in his teaching is contemporary to the discursive shift in Western capitalist societies, which introduces new modes of relation between the subject and jouissance. Lacan’s reinvention of psychoanalysis under the Joycean inspiration is therefore also an attempt to reaffirm the contemporaneity and political relevance of Freudian invention in the condition of globalized capitalism.

Keywords: Symptom – Jouissance – Language – Lacan - Joyce


The place of psychoanalysis

Where and in which way should we celebrate the entrance of psychoanalysis in the 21st Century? Where is nowadays the place of psychoanalysis? Maybe in the studio of an old analyst in Paris where an upper-class obsessional neurotic still continues his analysis started in the heyday of the late Sixties? Or in the meeting of a small psychoanalytic school where due to ambitiousness of the two leading analysts another scission is decided? Or in decreasing demand for “traditional” analysis expressed by a marginal group of urban and educated people in order to self-represent a certain kind of enlightened aristocracy of the unconscious? Let’s imagine for a moment that those are not the places where psychoanalysis will have its home in the 21st Century. Let’s imagine for a moment that psychoanalysis will concern a 15 year-old kid from the Paris suburbs who destroys his father's car during riots; or a bulimic teenager who is vomiting in the toilet during a high school class; or an impotent middle-aged man who is not able to have sex with his wife but instead sees a prostitute three times a week; or a 26 year old psychology majored student who is doing an internship for free in a psychiatric hospital and for the first time faces the enigma of psychosis. What psychoanalysis would we find in those places?

Paraphrasing Lacan’s famous statement about the political nature of the structure one could say: psychoanalysis should walk the streets. Especially because there, in the streets, it has always found its proper place. Faced with the capitalist discourse which increasingly enables contemporary subjects to bypass castration through various forms of ready-made enjoyment (what Lacan called proliferation of gadget-objects), psychoanalysis should therefore confront the increasing decline of demands for analysis not as a symptom of its decay, but rather as an opportunity to reinvent itself. Rather than a questioning subject, the metaphor of contemporary capitalism is an enjoying subject: a subject that does not address a question to the Other, but rather enacts a solution through a certain practice of enjoyment. What does it therefore mean, at the gates of the 21st Century, to say that we should return to the discipline invented over a century ago in Vienna by Dr. Freud? Which kind of psychoanalysis do we need in the context of contemporary capitalism and hypermodernity?

Freudian psychoanalysis started with a specific and heroic historical figure: the hysteric woman. The hysteric was in fact the true inventor of psychoanalysis. Her mistrust towards the medical discourse and her unbeatable will to push the extremes in knowing the truth opened up a gap in the discourse of the Master and created the space for a new discourse to emerge. The discourse of hysteria acted subversively as castration agency aiming at the Master in order to reveal the lack of His knowledge. While medicine acts as universal discourse (it is filled/stuffed with knowledge, with no voided space – it is based on the fantasy that every item and object of the world has a specific and achievable knowledge –), the discourse of hysteria, on the contrary, is based on doubt. On doubt that this very knowledge which at first seems totalized, in fact contains blank spots and inconsistency. Hysteric therefore raises questions concerning precisely these blank spots, holes in knowledge, in which desire can “ground” itself. Transference – and therefore psychoanalysis – is made possible precisely on the basis of this non-totalized knowledge: a knowledge which is no longer stuffed, self-enclosed and completed. In transference – because of this defective knowledge – we suppose that we do not posses this knowledge, even though it concerns us, but is rather possessed by someone else: the subject supposed to know: the analyst. Transference is therefore a procedure of decentralization of knowledge: the subject supposes his knowledge in the Other, a gesture which ends up being detached from a concrete carrier, just like the subject and the Other are de-individualized and de-psychologized. In this sense the practice of psychoanalysis always already implies a dimension of Aufklärung (but also of meaning production) which was, among others, made possible by its connection to linguistics. It was language, its misunderstanding (speech as split between the enunciated content and the place of enunciation) and its suspension of negation which gave the potentiality to open up a gap in the conscious speech in order to reveal the dimension of the speaking truth and decentralized knowledge.

But there is another side of this hysterical heroism and its connection to truth, which was already very clear to Freud himself at least since the 1920’s when he started to develop the concept of death drive. A neurotic is also someone who enjoys the very impossibility and non-satisfaction of his/her desire. In his early text on Familiar Complex Lacan clearly mentions two pathological sides of neurotic's desire: impotence and utopia. Impotence is based on the impossible realization of one’s own desire for the lack of sufficient force, inadequacy, lacking of phallic potency; utopia on the other hand is an impossible realization of desire which is sustained by the ideal of “beautiful soul” and the refusal to face the reality of castration. In both cases we are dealing with defensive structure against desire – but especially in utopia (which is related to hysteria) we deal with impossibility to be satisfied by any social link. In this case we find on the side of hysteria not only the doubt which opens up a new dimension of truth and castrates the Master, but also a much more obscure and bizarre satisfaction of the impossible satisfaction itself: enjoyment in non-satisfaction. While the neurotic question, when worked through in analysis, can open up a new dimension of temporality connected to change, the very enjoyment of the question itself is connected to a fixed temporality, self-enclosed and unable to open up anything that its not its own fulfillment. Enjoyment can therefore be seen as an eclipse of progressive temporality.

If from hysteria we pass to the most “infamous” phenomena of contemporary clinic we can see how this structure of impossibility pushes toward its dimension of enjoyment, rather than the dimension of heroism (castration of the Master). The clinic of eating disorders, drug-addiction or compulsive sexuality addiction seems to be revolving around a practice of enjoyment which does not imply any doubt – rather, all these cases seem to enact solutions. Precisely for this reason Lacan in 1960's (already after the seminar on Transference) abandoned the paradigm of enjoyment based on heroic transgression (figures like Bataille, Antigone or Sygne de Coûfontaine) in order to embrace a much more obscure and normalizing idea of enjoyment: an enjoyment which can be cut into little slides of jouissance, fragmented and dispersed in the myriad gadget-objects of contemporary capitalism. Jouissance comes in form of “detached pieces” (Miller 2006).

We have here a dimension of language which no longer constitutes a door through which we can open up a space of truth, but a language which is directly inscribed in a bodily practice of enjoyment. Language acts on the body through a talking cure, it is the enjoying body itself. How is it then possible to create this very gap which opens up the possibility of “castrating” a knowledge when language is not external to the body, but is analogous to the enjoying body as such?


Over the truth

What we would like to stress here, and what we find crucial in order to address contemporary debates in psychoanalysis, is that Lacan in his final teaching took this deadlock not as a limit of the “talking cure” (as it was the case with Freud in his discussion of “interminable” analysis, where the “male protest” and “penis envy” represented the insurmountable deadlock of the cure) but rather as a means for its reinvention. A means which can actually redefine and renew the psychoanalytic practice in its scope of facing the new dimension of society in which enjoyment is not only the cornerstone of a myriad of different subjective practices, but also the biggest force managed and organized by contemporary capitalism in order to perpetuate itself.

Lacan's crucial shift in 1970's concerns precisely the nature of language, as it was articulated through the link between psychoanalysis and structuralism. Here, Lacan will substitute his classical reference to linguistics with reference to literature. Saussure the Scientist, this subject supposed to possess the knowledge of language, is substituted by Joyce the Scribbler, the symptom which operates with practical rather than theoretical knowledge: savoir-faire instead of savoir. And in this shift from science of language to writing skill the question of meaning and its metonymy, in short the question of desire, is substituted by the already mentioned problematic of enjoyment. From that starting point Lacan will re-articulate psychoanalytic conception of the symptom and of the unconscious. In seminar Le Sinthome Lacan will continuously stress the side of the symptom which is no longer related to the dimension of transitivity of truth: that transitivity which enables to open up a dimension of interpretation of the symptom which can lead to the production of new unconscious material and which is driven precisely by the production of meaning. The other, rather intransitive side of the symptom would be the one where – as it has already been pointed out by Lacan and systematically developed by Jacques-Alain Miller – the symptom is no longer a formation of the unconscious. The symptom is no longer included in the production of meaning, but rather functions as the emerging point of different morphing figures of jouissance itself.

The sinthome is what is left after going through the enigma of the unconscious formation and its repetitive and never-ending production of a meaning. To put it otherwise, the symptom always relies on the supposition of meaning: the analysand interrogates its meaning addressing it to the subject supposed to know, or like Lacan will put it, he believes that the symptom has something to say, that there is communication taking place on the level of the symptom. This presupposition can be understood as one of the moments which trigger the demand for analysis. In this sense the symptom is a phenomenon of transferential, that is Freudian unconscious, whereas the sinthome is a consistency detached from the production of meaning; or better, on the level of the sinthome the demand for meaning no longer relies on a subject supposed to know, but on a certain consistency of enjoyment. Lacan will later claim that Joyce managed to unsubscribe himself to the unconscious – meaning that he detached his symptom from the transferential unconscious, by inventing a skill or a technique of its manipulation. This detachment of the symptom from transference (and therefore from the Freudian unconscious) can be understood as a limit of psychoanalysis – a limit of Freud. But its gesture does not place Joyce outside the unconscious. It rather reveals a different dimension of the Freudian concept – its real dimension. It is therefore not surprising that Lacan will end up identifying unconscious with the real itself and even introduce the term “real unconscious”.1

In Le Sinthome Lacan claims that the Joyce's symptom “does not concern you at all, given that there is no possibility that it will attach something of your own unconscious”. This symptom is unsubscribed to the unconscious in the sense that it rejects any analytical interpretation based on the production of meaning. Even if the transference is not operative in Joyce, that does not prevent him to enjoy and therefore to be able to do something with his symptom. The very passage from the symptom to the sinthome (homologous to the passage from language to lalangue) is the passage from the symptom as opened up to the possibility of analytical interpretation and the sinthome as a certain consistency of enjoyment which can nevertheless be subjected to manipulation. Therefore it constitutes the passage from psychoanalysis as related to a certain problem of truth, interpretation and meaning (where we still have a certain reference to a possible universality of understanding) to psychoanalysis as pragmatic, technique of irreducible singularity of enjoyment. While the figure of the symptom is articulation, where we have the relaunching of signifier to another signifier, or the intertwined relation between knowledge and truth, in the singular dimension of sinthome we have the radical consistency of the absolute (ab-solutus, literally loosed by any relation – detachment) enjoyment.

Lacan's final teaching can therefore be seen not only as an internal subversion of his previous, structuralist orientation, but also as a redefinition of his return to Freud. And as said, this second return to Freud is undertaken under the flag of Joycean literature.

The body of linguistic

Lacan's second return to Freud can be traced back to his seminar Encore, where Joyce is introduced in a very specific context – namely, regarding the relation between the signifier and the signified. This crucial passage, in which Lacan radically subverts the link between psychoanalysis and linguistics, between the praxis of the unconscious and the doctrine of the signifier, goes as follows:

I can agree that Joyce's work is not readable (...). What happens in Joyce's work? The signifier stuffs (vient truffer) the signified. It is because the signifiers fit together, combine, and concertina - read Finnegans wake - that something is produced as signified (comme signifié) that may seem enigmatic, but is clearly what is closest to what we analysts, thanks to analytic discourse, have to read - slips of the tongue (lapsus). It is as slips that they signify something, in other words, that they can be read in an infinite number of different ways. But it is precisely for that reason that they are difficult to read, are read awry, or not read at all. But doesn't this dimension of "being read" (se lire) suffice to show that we are in the register of analytic discourse?2

Lacan's choice of words clearly demonstrates, in which sense the linguistic discourse reveals itself to be incapable of handling this horror linguae, this Joycean condensation of enjoyment in the production of detached signifiers – namely detached precisely from their link with the production of meaning and communication. The Joycean signifier does not communicate, but rather enjoys – and it is precisely in this sense that this detached signifier reveals a certain dimension of the unconscious which turned out to be left out of the picture, when psychoanalysis was referred merely to the Saussurean, that is, structuralist foundation of the science of language. What this passage communicates is therefore a certain abandoning of structuralism, its exceeding. And what is at stake in this abandoning is precisely the shift from impotence – of linguistics – to impossibility – of psychoanalysis; a shift, which could enable psychoanalysis to prolong Freud beyond linguistic limits – for what is at stake here is precisely the status of the unconscious in its relation to the real.

What was the characteristic of Lacan's famous return to Freud in the 1950's and 1960's? It consisted in a bet that Freudian invention of the unconscious and Saussurean invention of linguistic structure are mutually compatible, two sides of the same coin. Contrary to the governing discourse, which reduced the unconscious to its imaginary dimension – a common point of ego-psychology and Jungian “deep psychology” – the return to Freud re-affirmed the unconscious as symbolic, structured as a language. Linking psychoanalysis and structuralism meant to affirm that Freud unknowingly anticipated Saussure's research – and therefore that psychoanalysis was always already inscribed in the same epistemological break as structural linguistics. Saussurean linguistics was thus practically declared to be the “condition” of psychoanalysis – if one wants to insist on the path opened up by Freud and refuse the Jungian imaginarization of the unconscious. Opposite to the Jungian idea of sub-consciousness – whereby the term itself already indicates that we are dealing with a “depth”, hence with a completely different topology of the unconscious to the one discovered by Freud – Freudian unconscious is not an ontological substance, but rather something “pre-ontological” and “ethical”, as Lacan will claim in his ground breaking seminar on the Four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis. What does that imply? Precisely that the unconscious is not an element of world view – rather, it introduces a dimension going against the world-view producing discourse (that is, the discourse of philosophy – the discourse of the master, which consists precisely in producing imaginary totalities). It goes against it in the sense that it does not give ground for ontology to be built on it – it is precisely why its status is pre-ontological: it faces ontology, it stands outside it, it opens up a space that ontology always already subordinated to the production of meaning – to the centralizing effect of the discourse of the master, also pointed out by Lacan in seminar Encore. Unconscious, and it is here that the linguistic reference of psychoanalysis became fully efficient, is equivalent to the surface of language. Whit this gesture the notion of the unconscious got progressively detached from meaning and started shifting from imaginary to the real.

Lacan will thus inaugurate his teaching with the claim that unconscious is structured as a language, re-affirming its symbolic (or transferential) dimension. But this classical Lacanian axiom puts forward a small but important detail in the link between language and unconscious. Namely, unconscious is not structured as the language, but as a language. It is not equivalent to Language as such, that is, with language as constituted and self-enclosed totality. It is not structured as language marked by “univocity of being”, to use the famous Deleuzian term. And it can not be linked to Heideggerian “language of being”. One could say that Lacan puts forward psychoanalytic separation between “being” and “thinking”, the equivalence of which is affirmed by western thinkers since the very origins of philosophy. Unconscious means precisely that the subject thinks where it is not – decentralization of thinking in relation to being. Which also implies that the invention of the unconscious introduces an idea of language which operates beyond the idea of communication – hence, beyond centralization.

The structure of the unconscious overlaps with what one might call, following Lacan's own suggestion, “the life of language”. Which gives a different image of language to the one fabricated by scientific discourse. One has to recall here the famous Saussurean demand, that linguistic should (we are dealing with an imperative) treat language as if not spoken by any living subject. Hence, it has to detach language from any dimension of life, as a frozen constellation of grammatical rules. And it is precisely here that we encounter the limits of psychoanalytical alliance with structural linguistics, Freud and Saussure. Psychoanalysis is interested precisely in the encounters between language and living body – it investigates the consequences of these encounters, which manifest themselves in the form of symptoms. And it is precisely this encounter of language with the living body that Lacan will later call enjoyment – jouissance. Enjoyment, which is always experienced on the level of the concrete speaking body, in concrete speech acts, and which is therefore also always already taking place in language itself, so that one could finally say that language enjoys. Lacan in fact did say precisely this, when he introduced the notions of “Other enjoyment” and “enjoyment of the barred Other”: both terms designate enjoyment of language manifesting itself in particular living bodies – enjoyment beyond castration and beyond phallic centralization (or phallicization). In this sense, jouissance could simply be defined as the real effect of language in the living body.

It therefore becomes clear that the limits of the link between psychoanalysis and linguistics were indicated by the very axiom of the “unconscious structured as a language”, rather than “the language”. Whereby the language would be equivalent to what Lacan in Encore mockingly calls elucubration du savoir, ponding of knowledge: a construction produced by scientific discourse – in this case, linguistics as the science of language – in order to regulate the effects of what Lacan calls lalangue, this conceptual expression for the life of language.

Linguistics created a separation, a barrier between the signifier and the signified. This enabled to scientific discourse to normalize the living situation of language, isolating structure as the system of signifying differences, determining the relation between the signifier and the signified as arbitrarity and linking meaning to its metonymical dimension. But what Lacan claims in his reference to Joyce is that he reveals the back side of this scientific normalization – or rather, formalization of lalangue. He claims that Joyce reveals the fact that the signifier “stuffs” the signified. What does that mean? Precisely that the hypothesis of the relation between the signifier and the signified is abolished and that the barrier between the two is abandoned. The signifier repeats itself on the other side of the barrier, thus producing and enigmatic effect of the signified, which is in fact merely a linguistic construction. Instead of signification and meaning we are dealing with enjoyment of detached signifier which functions outside the signifying chain. Joyce dissolves the signifying link, substituting it with enjoyment of and in writing, where the signifier becomes the cause of enjoyment and not the carrier of meaning.

Lacan already underlined this shift from the signifier as a support of relation to the signifier as non-relation in the very first lecture of Encore, by claiming that the signifier should be defined in topological terms, namely as something that has the effect of the signified. As we are dealing with topological definition, the expression “effect” should be understood as equivalent of the effect of the back side on the surface of the Möbius' strip, or the effect of the interior in Klein's bottle. So the signifier is defined precisely as aspheric, curved surface, producing the effect of the signified, simulating signification, while in fact it introduces a non-relation in the very flesh of the body “inhabiting” language. This is also clearly stated in the claim that the signifier is capable of causing enjoyment. But the link between the signifier and this causality is possible only on the background of the detachment of the signifier from the purely signifying link and thus from the linguistic field. Both remarks, the one concerning the causing of enjoyment and the one related to topology of the signifier, have to be read together.

So the signifier is a curved surface, something that is invented in order to introduce relation between the imaginary and the real, but instead causes enjoyment in the speaking body and produces a mirage of signification. Signifier does not function, it is a broken gadget, malfunctioning constitutes the very core of its function. Lacan will formalize this line of thought at the very end of his teaching, in 1980, when he will claim that the speaking being is marked and even traumatized by misunderstanding. A good definition of the signifier – but also of the unconscious. And again, when interacting with the living body the signifier produces something which did not exist before – precisely enjoyment. The latter is its real effect. And this causality of the signifier denaturalizes the anatomical body. It produces the libidinal body – the speaking body – which is in non-relation with anatomy. One can therefore entirely understand the contemporary struggle between psychoanalysis and neurosciences – it is completely logical. And it consists in the question of whether libidinal body can be in fact reduced to neuronal processes. Or to put it otherwise, to the question of whether language is capable of producing effects in the real, without being therefore reduced to scientific vision of neuronal real. But we do not want to enter this problem here.

The limit of linguistics is therefore placed in the signifier itself – in the signifier as far as it is not merely supporting fantasmatic relation to the signified, but is also capable to produce effects of enjoyment in the living body. The symptom, this formation of the unconscious par excellence, will thus be completely redefined. Lacan will abandon its equivalence with linguistic metaphor and define it as the “knot of signifiers” (see i.e. Television). Here, the symptom is no longer the carrier of sense, but rather codification of joui-sens, enjoyed-meaning. And it is precisely Joyce, his art of writing, that embodies this modification of the symptom.

The symptom re-defined as the “knot of signifiers” evokes the reference to the Borromean knot, the curious topological object that fascinated Lacan throughout his final teaching. And one could argue that it is precisely this object which substitutes the notion of the signifier in these final years of Lacan's re-invention of psychoanalysis. Which, of course, has its consequences for the psychoanalytic theory of the subject. Lacan's final teaching elaborates a much more complex image of subjectivity, opposed to the barred subject which initially made him famous.

$ was the subject of the signifier – precisely of Saussurean signifier. So the barred subject, subjective split between two signifiers, as the subject of Freudian unconscious was simultaneously the subject matching the already mentioned Saussurean claim that linguistics as strict science should treat language as detached from the living body. Lacanian subject as barred $ is precisely the mortified, dead subject: mortified by language, by the signifier, by linguistic (ponding) knowledge. The barred subject is the de-psychologized remainder. And it is the subject that occupied Lacan throughout the 50's and 60's.

The enjoyment of parlêtre

Because the second return to Freud subverts the psychoanalytic reference to linguistics, it also subverts Lacan's theory of the subject. The barred subject will not be rejected as impertinent, on the contrary – Lacan will keep referring to it, but in order to underline its difference to what he would start calling parlêtre. Parlêtre, of course, is a word-play, evoking both speech and being and finally speaking being. But it also evokes parlotte, babbling, senseless speech, soaked with enjoyment, detachment of speech from meaning and communication. It evokes therefore the dissolution of the subjective link with the Other. And this dissolution was precisely Joyce's problem – if we follow Lacan's reading in Le sinthome. But parlêtre not only introduces the dimension of language as detached from the discourse of the Other – it also introduces the bodily dimension of subjectivity. While the barred subject was without a body, pure difference, metonymically shifting along the signifying chain, parlêtre is something, which is inseparable from its bodily dimension. It is a speaking body, the subject of the effects of language on the living body, denaturalized body.

The necessity of linking psychoanalytic reflections on language to the bodily dimension is already strongly underlined in Encore. The question of sexual difference in the end demands bodily dimension – which, of course, does not mean biological dimension, but rather two logical modes of how enjoyment gets inscribed in the living body. Lacan will constantly underline the bodily dimension of the subject-parlêtre by referring to the fact that body introduces the dimension of having, rather than the “question of being”. The latter was articulated in relation to the subject of the signifier, that is, the Freudian and Saussurean subject of language/subject of transferential unconscious. The parlêtre is not a body, it rather has it: meaning that the relationship with it cannot but be marked by a non-rapport, a split that cannot be brought together by any experience of meaning. Jouissance is in fact a principle of radical disagreement and the problem of psychoanalysis will be therefore the modalities through which a certain practice of “living-with” the enjoying body can be invented and experienced in a contingent and singular way.

With Joycean literature the question of the limits of Freudian psychoanalysis is being raised, for Joyce abandons the unconscious, and hence the laws of structural linguistics. Lacan formulates it very clearly, when he says that Joyce “unsubscribed himself from the unconscious” – precisely from the unconscious structured as a language, from transferential unconscious. With Joyce Lacan makes another step further in his return to Freud, re-inventing and re-defining the very conditions of possibility of this return. Joycean image of psychotic symbolic universe is recognized as the limit of psychoanalysis, a point on which psychoanalysis has to repeat the gesture of invention made by Freud in his encounter with hysteric patients. But while hysteria revealed the (Freudian) truth: Ça parle (“Id speaks”) – psychosis puts forward the moment of the (Lacanian) real: Ça juit (“Id enjoys”). And to conclude with Lacan's own speculative and anti-philosophical synthesis of the two moments (again, the quote is to be found in Encore): Là où ça parle, ça jouit, et ça sait rien (“Where Id speaks Id enjoys, and Id knows nothing”). A phrase that would deserve a much more exhaustive comment, but which should be left here in its con-density, adding only that the alliance between Freud and Joyce can after all be revealed in the “joke” that the accurate English translation of Freud's proper name would be precisely: Joyce – and vice versa. Joyce – the masked Freud for the 21st century?

Bibliography

Lacan, J.:

  • (1996) Seminar XX, Encore, translated by Bruce Fink (London: W. W. Norton & Company)

  • (2001) “Préface à l'édition anglaise du Séminaire XI”, in: Autres écrits (Paris: Seuil)

Miller, J.-A. (2006) “Detached Pieces”, in: Lacanian Ink 23, Autumn 2006.

Soler, C. (2009) Lacan, l'inconscient réinventé (Paris: PUF).


Notes:

1 Lacan (2001, p. 571). The notion of the “real unconscious” has been in recent years widely commented by Jacques-Alain Miller in his seminar Orientation lacanienne. Another systematic discussion of the term can be found in Soler (2009).

2 Lacan (1996, p. 37). Translation modified. In B. Fink's version “comme signifié” is translated as: “by ways of meaning”, which is actually incorrect. Lacan does not say that the enigmatic effect is produced through (or by ways of) meaning, but precisely through detachment of the signifier from any production of meaning. The signifier produces an effect of the signified – by stuffing it, that is, by abolishing the classical structuralist (Saussurean) schema of the signifier-signified division. The signifier intervenes in the signified, thus repeating itself on the other side of the barrier, which separates the two fields. Hence, the signified becomes an effect of the signifier, which is itself detached from the signifying chain and its metonymical back side – which is precisely the metonymy of meaning, or desire.



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