From “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious”

(1290)  As my title suggests, beyond this “speech,” what the psychoanalytic experience discovers in the unconscious is the whole structure of language. Thus from the outset I have alerted informed minds to the extent to which the notion that the unconscious is merely the seat of the instincts will have to be rethought.

     But how are we to take this “letter’ here? Quite simply, literally.

     By “letter” I designate that material support that concrete discourse borrows from language.

     This simple definition assumes that language is not to be confused with the various psychical and somatic functions that serve it in the speaking subject—primarily because language and its structure exist prior to the moment at which each subject at a certain point in his mental development makes his entry into it.

     Let us note, then, that aphasias, although caused by purely anatomical lesions in the cerebral apparatus that supplies the mental centre for these functions, prove, on the whole, to distribute their deficits between the two sides of the signifying effect of what we call here “the letter” in the creation of signification. A point that will be clarified later.

     Thus the subject, too, if he can appear to be the slave of language is all the more so of a discourse in the universal movement in which his place is already inscribed at birth, if only by virtue of his proper name.

     Reference to the experience of the community, or to the substance of this discourse, settles nothing. For this experience assumes its essential dimension in the tradition that this discourse itself establishes. This tradition, long before the drama of history is inscribed in it, lays down the elementary structures of culture. And these very structures reveal on ordering of possible exchanges which, even if unconscious, is inconceivable outside the permutations authorized by language.

     With the result that the ethnographic duality of nature and culture is giving way to a ternary conception of the human condition—nature, society, and culture—the last term of which could well be reduced to language, or that which essentially distinguishes human society from natural societies.

But I shall not make of this distinction either a point or a point of departure, leaving to its own obscurity the question of the original relations between the signifier and labour. I shall be content, for my little jab at the general function of praxis (1291) (1291) in the genesis of history, to point out that the very society that wished to restore, along with the privileges of the producer, the causal hierarchy of the relations between production and the ideological superstructure to their full political rights, has none the less failed to give birth to an Esperanto in which the relations of language to socialist realities would have rendered any literary formalism radically impossible.

     For my part, I shall trust only those assumptions that have already proven their value by virtue of the fact that language through them has attained the status of an object of scientific investigation.

For it is by virtue of this fact that linguistics is seen to occupy the key position in this domain, and the reclassification of the sciences and a regrouping of them around it signals, as is usually the case, a revolution in knowledge; only the necessities of communication made me inscribe it at the head of this volume under the title “the sciences of man”—despite the confusion that is thereby covered over.

     The pinpoint the emergence of linguistic science we may say that, as in the case of all sciences in the modern sense, it is contained in the constitutive moment of an algorithm that is its foundation. This algorithm is the following:

which is read as: the signifier over the signified, “over” corresponding to the bar separating the two stages.

This sign should be attributed to Ferdinand de Saussure, although it is not found in exactly this form in any of the numerous schemas, which none the less express it, to be found in the printed version of this lectures of the years 1906-7, 1908-9, and 1910-11, which the piety of a group of his disciples caused to be published under the title, Course de linguistique generale, a work of prime importance for the transmission of a teaching worthy of the name, that is , that one can come to terms with only in its own terms.

That is why it is legitimate for us to give him credit for the formulation S/s by which, in spite of the differences among schools, the beginning of modern linguistics can be recognized.

The thematics of this science is henceforth suspended, in effect, at the primordial position of the signifier and the signified as being distinct orders separated initially by a barrier resisting signification. And that is what was to make possible an exact study of the connections proper to the signifier, and of the extent of their function in the genesis of the signified.

For this primordial distinction goes well beyond the discussion (1292) (1292)concerning the arbitrariness of the sign, as it has been elaborated since the earliest reflections of the ancients, and even beyond the impasse which, through the same period, has been encountered in every discussion of the bi-univocal correspondence between the word and the thing, if only in the mere act of naming. All this, of course, is quite contrary to the appearances suggested by the importance often imputed to the role of the index finger pointing to an object in the learning process of the infans subject learning his mother tongue, or the use in foreign language teaching of so-called “concrete” methods.

One cannot go further along this line of thought than to demonstrate that no signification can be sustained other than by reference to another signification: in its extreme form this amounts to the proposition that there is no language (langue) in existence for which there is any question of this inability to cover the whole field of the signified, it being an effect of its existence as a language (langue) that it necessarily answers all needs. If we try to grasp in language the constitution of the object, we cannot fail to notice that this constitution is to be found only at the level of concept, a very different thing from a simple nominative, and that the thing, when reduced to the noun, breaks up into the double, divergent beam of the “cause” (causa) in which it has taken shelter in the French word chose, and the nothing (rien) to which it has abandoned its Latin dress (rem).

These considerations, important as their existence is for the philosopher, turn us away from the locus in which language questions us as to its very nature. And we will fail to pursue the question further as long as we cling to the illusion that the signifier answers to the function of representing the signified, or better, that the signifier has to answer for its existence in the name of any signification whatever.

For even reduced to this latter formulation, the heresy is the same—the heresy that leads logical positivism in search of the “meaning of meaning,” as its objective is called in the language of its devotees. As a result, we can observe that even a text highly charged with meaning can be reduced, through this sort of analysis, to insignificant bagatelles, all that survives being mathematical algorithms that are, of course, without any meaning.

To return to our formula S/s: if we could infer nothing form it but the notion of the parallelism of its upper and lower terms, each one taken in its globality, it would remain the enigmatic sign of a total mystery. Which of course is not the case.

In order to grasp its function I shall begin by reproducing the classic, yet faulty illustration (see below) by which its usage is normally introduced, and one can see how it opens the way to the kind of error referred to above. (1293)

(1294) In my lecture, I replaced this illustration with another, which has no greater claim to correctness than that it has been transplanted into that incongruous dimension that the psychoanalyst has not yet altogether renounced because of his quite justified feeling that his conformism takes its value entirely from it. Here is the other diagram:

where we see that, without greatly extending the scope of the signifier concerned in the experiment, that is, by doubling a noun through the mere juxtaposition of two terms whose complementary meanings ought apparently to reinforce each other, a surprise is produced by an unexpected precipitation of an unexpected meaning: the image of twin doors symbolizing, through the solitary confinement offered Western Man for the satisfaction of this natural needs away from home, the imperative that he seems to share with the great majority of primitive communities by which his public life is subjected to the laws of urinary segregation.

It is not only with the idea of silencing the nominalist debate with a low blow that I use this example, but rather to show how in fact the signifier enters the signified, namely, in a form which, not being immaterial, raises the question of its place in reality. For the blinking gaze of a short sighted person might be justified in wondering whether this was indeed the signifier as he peered closely at he little enamel signs that bore it, a signifier whose signified would in this call receive its final honours form the double and solemn procession form the upper nave.

     But no contrived example can be as telling as the actual experience of truth. So I am happy to have invented the above, since it awoke in the person whose word I most trust a memory of childhood, which having thus happily come to my attention is best placed here.

     A train arrives at a station. A little boy and a little girl, brother and sister, are seated in a compartment face to face next to the window through which the buildings along the station platform can be seen passing as the train pulls to a stop. “Look,” says the brother, “we’re at Ladies!;” “Idiot!” replies his sister, “Can’t you see we’re at Gentlemen.”

     Besides the fact that the trails in this story materialize the bar in the Saussurian algorithm (and in a form designed to suggest that its resistance may be other than dialectical), we should add that only someone who didn’t have his eyes in front of the holes (it’s the appropriate image here) could possibly confuse the place of the signifier and the signified in this story, or not se form what radiating centre the signifier sends forth its light into the shadow of incomplete significations. (1295)

(1295)  For this signifier will now carry a purely animal Dissension, destined for the usual oblivion of natural mists, to the unbridled power of ideological warfare, relentless for families, a torment to the Gods. For these children, Ladies and Gentlemen will be henceforth two countries towards which each of their souls will strive on divergent wings, and between which a truce will be the more impossible since they are actually the same country and neither can compromise on its own superiority without detracting form the glory of the other.

     But enough. It is beginning to sound like the history of France. Which it is more human, as it ought to be, to evoke here than that of England, destined to tumble form the Large to the Small End of Dean Swift’s egg.

     It remains to be conceived what steps, what corridor, the S of the signifier, visible here in the plurals in which it focuses its welcome beyond the window, must take in order to rest its elbows on the ventilators through which, like warm and cold air, indignation and scorn come hissing out below.

    One thing is certain: if the algorithm S/s with its bar is appropriate, access from one to the other cannot in any case have a signification. For in so far as it is itself only pure function of the signifier, the algorithm can reveal only the structure of a signifier in this transfer.

Now the structure of the signifier is, as it is commonly said of language itself, that it should be articulated.

     This means that no matter where one starts to designate their reciprocal encroachments and increasing inclusions, these units are subjected to the double condition of being reducible to ultimate differential elements and of combining them according to the laws of a closed order.

     These elements, one of the decisive discoveries of linguistics, are phonemes; but we must not expect to find any phonetic constancy in the modulatory variability to which this term applies, but rather the synchronic system of differential couplings necessary for the discernment of sounds in a given language. Through this, one sees that an essential element of the spoken word itself was predestined to flow into the mobile characters which, in a jumble of lower-0case Didots or Garamonds, render validly present what we call the “letter,” namely, the essentially localized structure of the signifier.

     With the second property of the signifier, that of combining according to the laws of a closed order, is affirmed the necessity of the topological substratum of which the term I ordinarily use, namely, the signifying chain, gives an approximate idea: rings of a necklace that is a ring in another necklace made of rings.

     Such are the structural conditions that define grammar as the order of constitutive encroachments of the signifier up to the level of the unit (1296) (1296)immediately superior to the sentence, and lexicology as the order of constitutive inclusions of the signifier to the level of the verbal locution.

     In examining the limits by which these two exercises in the understanding of linguistic usage are determined, it is easy to see that only the correlations between signifier and signifier provide that standard for all research into signification, as is indicated by the notion of “usage” of a taxeme or semanteme, which in fact refers to the context just above that of the unites concerned.

     But the phenomenon is no different which by the mere recoil of a “but” brings to the light, comely as the Shulamite, honest as the dew, the negress adorned for the wedding and the poor woman ready for the auction-block.

     From which we can say that it is in the chain of the signifier that the meaning “insists” but that none of its elements “consists” in the signification of which it is at the moment capable.

     We are forced, then, to accept the notion of an incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier—which Ferdinand de Saussure illustrates with an image resembling the wavy lines of the upper and lower Waters in miniatures from manuscripts of Genesis; a double flux marked by fine streaks of rain, vertical dotted lines supposedly confining segments of correspondence.

     All our experience runs counter to this linearity, which made me speak once, in one of my seminars on psychosis, of something more like “anchoring points’ (“points de caption”) as a schema for taking into account the dominance of the letter in the dramatic transformation that dialogue can effect in the subject.

     The linearity that Saussure holds to be constitutive of the chain of discourse, in conformity with its emission by a single voice and with its horizontal position in our writing—if this linearity is necessary, in fact, it is not sufficient. It applies to the chain of discourse only in the direction in which it is orientated in time, being taken as a signifying factor in all languages in which “Peter his Paul” reverses its time when the terms are inverted.

     But one has only to listen to poetry, which Saussure was no doubt in the habit of doing, for a polyphony to be heard, for it to become clear that all discourse is aligned along the several staves of a score.

     There is in effect no signifying chain that does not have, as if attached to the punctuation of each of its units, a whole articulation of relevant contexts suspended “vertically,” as it were, from that point.

     Let us take our word “tree” again, this time not as an isolated noun, but at the point of one of the these punctuations, and see how it crosses the bar of the Saussurian algorithm. (The anagram of “arbre” and “barre” should be noted.)

For even broken down into the double spectre of its vowels and (1297) (1297)consonants, it can still call up with the robur and the plane tree the significations it takes on, in the context of our flora, of strength and majesty. Drawing on all the symbolic contexts suggested in the Hebrew of the Bible, it erects on a barren hill the shadow of the cross. Then reduces to the capital Y, the sign of dichotomy which, except for the illustration used by heraldry, would owe nothing to the tree however genealogical we may think it. Circulatory tree, tree of life of the cerebellum, tree of Saturn, tree of Diana, crystals formed in a tree struck by lightning, is it your figure that traces our destiny for us in the tortoise-shell cracked by the fire, or your lightning that causes that slow shift in the axis of being to surge up from an unnamable night into the “Evravta of language:

No! says the Tree, it says No! in the shower of sparks Of its superb head

Lines that require the harmonics of the tree just as much as their continuation:

Which the storm treats as universally As it does a blade of grass.

     For this modern verse is ordered according to the same law of the parallelism of the signifier that creates the harmony governing the primitive Slavic epic or the most refined Chinese poetry.

     As is seen in the fact that the tree and the blade of grass are chosen from the same mode of the existent in order for the signs of contradiction—saying “No! and “treat as”—to affect them, and also so as to bring about, through the categorical contrast of the particularity of “superb” with the “universally” that reduces it, in the condensation of the “head” (tete) and the “storm” (tempete), the indiscernible shower of sparks of the eternal instant.

     But this whole signifier can only operate, it may be said, if it is present in the subject. It is this objection that I answer by supposing that it has passed over to the level of the signified.

     For what is important is not that the subject know anything whatsoever. (If LADIES and GENTLEMAN were written in a language unknown to the little boy and girl, their quarrel would simply be the more exclusively a quarrel over words, but no less ready to take on signification.)

     What this structure of the signifying chain discloses is the possibility I have, precisely in so far as I have this language in common with other subjects, that is to say, in so far as it exists as a language, to use it in order to signify something quite other than what it says. This function of speech is more worth pointing out than that of “disguising the thought” (more often than not indefinable ) of the subject; it is no less than the function of indicating the place of this subject in the search for the true. (1298)

(1298)  I have only to plant my tree in a locution; climb the tree, even project on to it the cunning illumination a descriptive context gives to a word; raise it (arborer) so as not to let myself be imprisoned in some sort of communiqué of the facts, however official, and if I know the truth, make it heard, in spite of all the between-the-lines censures by the only signifier my acrobatics through the branches of the tree can constitute, provocative to the point of burlesque, or perceptible only to the practiced eye, according to whether I wish to be heard by the mob or by the few.

     The properly signifying function thus depicted in language has a name. We learned this name in some grammar of our childhood, on the last page, where the shade of Quintilian, relegated to some phantom chapter concerning “final considerations on style,” seemed suddenly to speed up his voice in an attempt to get in all he had to say before the end.

     It is among the figures of style, or tropes—from which the verb “to find” (trouver) comes to us—that this name is found. This name is metonymy.

     I shall refer only to the example given there: “thirty sails.” For the disquietude I felt over the fact that the word “ship,” concealed in this expression, seemed, by taking on its figurative sense, through the endless repetition of the same old example, only to increase its presence, obscured (voilait) not so much those illustrious sails (voiles) as the definition they were supposed to illustrate.

The part taken for the whole, we said to ourselves, and if the thing is to be taken seriously, we are left with very little idea of the importance of this fleet, which “thirty sails” is precisely supposed to give us: for each ship to have just one sail is in fact the least likely possibility.

     By which we see that the connexion between ship and sail is nowhere but in the signifier, and that it is in the word-to-word connexion that metonymy is based.

     The other side is metaphor. Let us immediately find an illustration; Quilet’s dictionary seemed an appropriate place to find a sample that would not seem to be chosen for my own purposes, and I didn’t have to go any further than the well known line of Victor Hugo:

His sheaf was neither miserly nor spiteful…

under which aspect I presented metaphor in my seminar on the psychoses.

     It should be said that modern poetry and especially the Surrealist school have taken us a long way in this direction by showing that any conjunction of two signifiers would be equally sufficient to constitute a metaphor, except for the additional requirement of the greatest possible disparity f the images signified, needed for the production of the poetic spark, or in other words for metaphoric creation to take place.

(1299)

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(1299) For in the analysis of dreams, Freud intends only to give us the laws of the unconscious in the their most general extension. One of the reasons why dreams were most propitious for this demonstration is exactly, Freud tells us, that they reveal the same laws whether in the normal person or in the neurotic.

     But in either case, the efficacy of the unconscious does not cease in the waking state. The psychoanalytic experience does nothing other than establish that the unconscious leaves none of our actions outside its field. The presence of the unconscious in the psychological order, in other words in the relation-functions of the individual, should, however, be more precisely defined: it is not coextensive with that order, for we know that if unconscious motivation is manifest in conscious psychical effects, as well as in unconscious ones, conversely it is only elementary to recall to mind that a large number of psychical effects that are quite legitimately designated as unconscious, in the sense of excluding the characteristic of consciousness, are nonetheless without any relation whatever to the unconscious in the Freudian sense. So it is only by an abuse of the term that unconscious in that sense is confused with psychical, and hat one may thus designate as psychical what is the fact an effect of the unconscious, as on the somatic for instance.

     It is a matter, therefore, of defining the topography of this unconscious. I say that it is the very topography defined by the algorithm:

     What we have been able to develop concerning the effects of the signifier on the signified suggests its transformation into:

f(S)

We have shown the effects not only of the elements of the horizontal signifying chain, but also of its vertical dependencies in the signified, divided into two fundamental structures called metonymy and metaphor. We can symbolize them by, first:

f(S…S’)S S (-) s

that is to say, the metonymic structure, indicating that it is the connexion between signifier and signifier that permits the elision in which the signifier installs the lack-of-begin in the object relation, using the value of “reference back” possessed by signification in order to invest it with the desire aimed at the very lack it supports. The sign—placed between ( ) represents here the maintenance of the bar—which, in (1300) (1300) the original algorithm, marked the irreducibility in which, in the relations between signifier and signified, the resistance of signification is constituted.

Secondly,

f()S S(+) s

the metaphoric structure indicating that it is in the substitution of signifier for signifier that an effect of signification is produced that is creative or poetic, in other words, which is the advent of the signification in question. The sign + between ( ) represents here the crossing of the bar—and the constitutive value of this crossing for the emergence of signification.

     This crossing expresses the condition of passage of the signifier into the signified that I pointed out above, although provisionally confusing it with the place of the subject.

     It is the function of the subject, thus introduced, that we must now turn to since it lies at the crucial point of our problem.

     “I think, therefore I am” (cogito ergo sum) is not merely the formula in which is constituted, with the historical high point of reflection on the conditions of science, the link between the transparency of the transcendental subject and his existential affirmation.

Perhaps I am only object and mechanism (and so nothing more than phenomenon), but assuredly in so far as I think so, I am—absolutely. No doubt philosophers have brought important corrections to this formulation, notably that in that which thinks (cogitans), I can never constitute myself as anything but object (cogitatum). Nonetheless it remains true that by way of this extreme purification of the transcendental subject, my existential link to its project seems irrefutable, at least in its present form, and that: “cogito ergo sum” ubi cogito, ibi sum, overcomes this objection.

     Of course, this limits me to being there in my being only in so far as I think that I am in my thought; just how far I actually think this concerns only myself and if I say it, interests no one.

     Yet to elude this problem on the pretext of its philosophical pretensions is simply to admit one’s inhibition. For the notion of subject is indispensable even to the operation of a science such as strategy (in the modern sense) whose calculations exclude all “subjectivism.”

It is also to deny oneself access to what might be called the Freudian universe—in the way that we speak of the Copernican universe. It was in fact (1301) (1301) the so-called Copernican revolution to which Freud himself compared his discovery, emphasizing that it was once again a question of the place man assigns to himself at the centre of a universe.

Is the place that I occupy as the subject of a signifier concentric or excentric, in relation to the place I occupy as subject of the signified?—that is the question.

     It is not a question of knowing whether I speak of myself in a way that conforms to what I am, but rather of knowing whether I am the same as that of which I speak. And it is not at all inappropriate to use the word “thought” here. For Freud uses the term to designate the elements involved in the unconscious, that is the signifying mechanisms that we now recognize as being there.

     It is nonetheless true that the philosophical cogito is at the centre of the mirage that renders modern man so sure of being himself even in his uncertainties about himself, and even in the mistrust he has learned to practice against the traps of self-love.

     Furthermore, if, turning the weapon of metonymy against the nostalgia that it serves, I refuse to seek any meaning beyond tautology, if in the name of “war is war” and “a penny’s a penny” I decide to be only what I am, how even here can I elude the obvious fact that I am in that very act?

     And it is no less true if I take myself to the other, metaphoric pole of the signifying quest, and if I dedicate myself to becoming what I am, to coming into being, I cannot doubt that even if I lose myself in the process, I am in that process.

     Now it is on these very points, where evidence will be subverted by the empirical, that the trick of the Freudian conversion lies.

This signifying game between metonymy and metaphor, up to and including the active edge tat splits my desire between a refusal of the signifier and a lack of being, and links my fate to the question to my destiny, this game, in all its inexorable subtlety, is played until the match is called, there where I am not, because I cannot situate myself there.

     That is to say, what is needed is more than these words with which, for a brief moment I disconcerted my audience: I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think. Words that render sensible to an ear properly attuned with what elusive ambiguity the ring of meaning flees from our grasp along the verbal thread.

     What one ought to say is: I am not wherever I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am where I do not think to think.

     This two-sided mystery is linked to the fact that the truth can be evoked only in that dimentsion of alibi in which all “realism” in creative works takes its virtue form metonymy; it is likewise linked to this other fact that we accede to meaning only through the double twist of metaphor when we have the one and only key: the (1302) (1302) S and the s of the Saussurian algorithm are not on is at their axis, which is nowhere.

     Was nowhere, that is, until Freud discovered it; for if what Freud discovered isn’t that, it isn’t anything.

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