Prof: Well,
I'd really better start.
I can infer,
I think, from looking around
the room that there is either
post-paper depression at work or
that having written the paper,
you scarcely had time to read a
fifteen-page labyrinthine essay
by Lacan.
That's unfortunate,
and I hope you're able to make
up for it soon.
 
Those of you who are here today
can take such notes as you can
figure out how to take and then
go back to the text of Lacan and
try to make use of them.
 
It is a pity that not
everyone's here,
but we'll fare forward
nevertheless.
Now there is an obvious link
between the work of Peter Brooks
that you had last time and this
particular essay of Lacan which,
of course, I'd like to begin by
underlining.
It has to do with the part of
the argument of Lacan which
probably is most accessible to
you after your tour through
structuralism and related
"-isms"
and which,
in a way, I think really can be
used to anchor a certain
understanding of Lacan.
It's something I am going to
want to spend a lot of time with
in the long run today.
 
In any case,
Brooks understood the fictional
text and the completed fictional
narrative as a sustaining of
desire through a series of
détours,
detours, inadequate and
improper endpoints overcome,
resulting in a continuation of
desire,
resulting in a proper
ending--that is to say,
something corresponding to what
Freud understood as the desire
of the organism to die in its
own way and not according to the
modification or pressure of
something from without.
This sequence of
détour in the
elaboration of a narrative plot
Brooks called metonymy,
in a way that by this time we
ought to recognize as what
happens in the putting together
of signs along the axis of
combination as it's described by
Jakobson.
But Brooks remarks also that at
the same time,
there is a binding of
this sequence of signs--
of events in the case of a
plot--there is an effect of
unity,
a feeling that the experience
one has in reading a fictional
plot is an experience of unity.
This effect he calls
"metaphor":
that is to say,
our sense of the unity of a
fictional plot we understand as
metaphoric.
Some kind of identity,
self-identity,
or close correspondence in the
meaning of the variety of events
that we have encountered results
in a unity that can be
understood in metaphorical
terms.
In other words,
something like what Jakobson
calls the "poetic
function"
has been superimposed on the
metonymic axis of combination in
such a way that the feeling of
unity,
the sense of the recurrence of
identity in the signs used,
is something that we can come
away with.
This, Brooks argues,
accounts for our sense of the
unity of the plot even as we
understand it to be a perpetual
form of the delay of desire.
 
I speak of the delay of desire:
That's most obvious,
of course, in a marriage plot,
the marriage plot being the
heart of fiction,
perhaps, and most immediately
intelligible--
but of course desire takes many
forms.
 
There are many sorts of plot,
and they always do in one form
or another have to do,
in Brooks' sense,
with desire.
 
Now I pause in this way over
Brooks because I think you can
see--
whatever frustration you may
also be feeling in encountering
Lacan--
I think you can see that the
same basic movement is at work
in Lacan's understanding of the
unconscious.
The discourse of desire for
Lacan, the perpetual deferral of
bringing into consciousness,
into being, into presence,
the object of desire--
Lacan, too, harkens back to
Freud as Brooks does,
harkens back to the connection
made in Freudian thought and
picked up by Jakobson between
condensation in the dream work
and metaphor in the dream work,
and displacement in the dream
work and metonymy in the dream
work--
this is central as well to
Lacan's argument.
 
The deferral of desire,
and for Lacan the impossibility
of ever realizing one's desire
for a certain kind of
"other"
that I'm going to be trying to
identify during the course of
the lecture,
is understood as metonymy,
just as Brooks understands the
movement of metonymy as not a
perpetual but as a
plot-sustaining
détour or deferral
of the end.
 
So this, too,
one finds in desire in Lacan.
Metaphor, on the other hand,
he understands to be what he
calls at one interesting point
"the quilting"
of the metonymic chain,
the point de capiton or
"quilting button"
that suddenly holds together a
sequence of disparate signifiers
in such a way that a kind of
substitution of signs,
as opposed to a displacement of
signs,
can be accomplished.
We'll come back to this later
on in attempting to understand
what Lacan has to say about that
line from Victor Hugo's poem,
"Boaz Asleep,"
the line: "His sheaves
were not miserly nor
spiteful."
We'll come back to that.
 
In the meantime,
the point of Lacan and what
makes Lacan's reading of desire
different from Brooks's,
and indeed what makes his
reading of desire different from
that of anyone who thinks of
these structuralist issues in
psychoanalytic terms,
is that Lacan really doesn't
believe that we can ever have
what we desire.
He has no doubt that we can
have what we need.
He makes the fundamental
distinction between having what
we desire and having what we
need.
The distinction is often
put--and when you read Slavoj
Å―iÅūek next week--
who makes a much more central
point of this,
it's often put as the
distinction between the
"big other"--
>
 
and later on we'll talk about
why it's big--
the "big other,"
which one can never appropriate
as an object of desire because
it is perpetually and always
elusive,
and the "objet petit
ā,"
the little object of desire,
which is not really an object
of desire at all but is
available to satisfy need.
 
Sociobiologically,
you can get what you need.
Psychoanalytically,
you cannot get what you desire.
Now the obvious gloss here,
I think, is the Rolling Stones.
If Lacan were the Rolling
Stones, he'd have slightly
rewritten the famous refrain by
saying,
"You can't ever 'git' what
you want,"
right: "but sometimes if
you try"--
and you got to try.
 
Even for what you need,
you got to--
>
 
right?
 
>
 
You can't just sit
there--"Sometimes if you
try you 'git' what you
need."
I'm sure that Mick Jagger had
many sticky fingers in the pages
of Lacan in order to be able to
make that important distinction,
but I think it's one that
perhaps you might want to salt
away the next time you feel
confused about the distinction
between desire and need.
 
Now obviously,
it'd be great if we could just
stop there,
but we do have to get a little
closer to the text and try to
figure out why in these terms
given to us by Lacan,
terms both structuralist and
psychoanalytic--
we have to figure out why this
distinction prevails and what it
amounts to,
so we soldier on.
 
First of all,
let me just say a couple of
things in passing.
 
There is for humanistic studies
more than one Jacques Lacan.
There is the Lacan for literary
studies who,
I think, is very well
represented by the text we have
before us,
even though some of his most
important ideas are only hinted
at in this text.
For example,
we hear nothing in this text
about his famous triadic
distinction among the real,
the imaginary and the symbolic.
 
This is something we can't
really explore with only this
text before us.
 
There is only the slightest
hint at the very end of the
essay on the last page of the
distinction I have just made
between the "big
other" and the
"objet petit
ā."
We'll have lots of time to
think about that because it's
central to the essay of Å―iÅūek
that you'll read next week,
but for literary studies
focusing on the structuralist
legacy for Lacan,
this is an exemplary selection.
But there's also the Lacan,
perhaps a more current Lacan--
one better known,
perhaps, even to some of you in
film studies:
the Lacan of "the
gaze," the complicated
dialectic of "the
gaze" which does very much
involve negotiating the
distinctions among the real,
the imaginary and the symbolic.
As I say, this Lacan we're
obliged largely to leave aside
if only because of the
selectivity of what I've given
you to read,
but as I say these are Lacans
with quite different emphases
overlapping only to a certain
degree.
 
Now the other thing I want to
say in passing explains some of
the rather strange tone of this
essay.
You notice that Lacan is just
sort of bristling with hostility
>
 
and, of course,
as well, condescension.
Of all the big egos in our
syllabus, this is by far the
biggest.
 
It's just something we have to
live with and come to terms
with, but the condescension
isn't just toward the natural
stupidity of all the rest of us.
 
It's toward,
in particular,
what he takes to be the
distortion of the legacy of
Freud by most of his
psychoanalytic contemporaries,
particularly the International
Psychoanalytic Association,
many members of whom were the
so-called American "ego
psychologists."
 
Now what is an ego psychologist?
 
It's somebody who begins as
Lacan does--
and this is something we'll
want to come back to--
somebody who begins with
Freud's famous proposition,
"Wo es war soll ich
sein": "Where it was,
there I should be."
 
In other words,
out of the raw materials of the
id--
it, es--in the
unconscious, the ego--
that is to say,
the capacity of the human
organism to develop into its
maturity--
should arise.
In other words,
the relationship between
instinctual drives and the
proper inhibitions of human or
adult consciousness should be a
progressive one,
and the purpose of
psychoanalysis,
the purpose of bringing people
beyond their entrapment in the
various infantile stages or
beyond their entrapment in some
form or another of neurosis,
the idea of progress or
development in psychoanalysis--
it has to do with the emergence
and reinforcement of the ego.
 
Lacan hates this idea,
and the reason he hates it is
because that idea of the
emergence of a stable and mature
ego is presupposed by the idea
that there is such a thing as
stable human subjectivity:
in other words,
that there is such a thing as
consciousness from which our
communicative and linguistic and
other sorts of systems derive.
Lacan takes a completely
different view of consciousness.
This, of course,
is something to which we will
turn in a moment,
but the basic disagreement and
the source of his most intense
hostility throughout this essay
concerns the question whether or
not there is for each of us a
stable and by implication unique
subjectivity.
We are not each other.
 
We suppose ourselves--indeed,
we complain when we think about
ethics,
about our isolation from each
other--
we suppose ourselves to be
altogether
>
individual whereas for Lacan,
there is a kind of
continuousness in consciousness,
the reason for which I'll
explain, which is not absolute.
 
In the long run,
in this essay you will find--
and I hope to be able to
understand this as a kind of
turn in his argument--
you will find that Lacan does
actually hold out a limited
sense of individual
subjectivity,
not really as autonomous
subjectivity,
not something that can
authorize a sense of free will
or power of agency,
but a way in which,
owing simply to the complexity
of the unconscious,
each of us, as it were,
inhabits a slightly different
form of that complexity.
Lacan goes that far in the
direction of the subject,
or of subjectivity,
but refuses the idea that the
subject is something that can
emerge from analysis or--
in the case of,
I suppose, most of us--
simply through maturation as a
stable,
coherent, well-organized sense
of self and identity.
All right.
 
Let's start,
then, with the one piece of
really solid clinical work that
Lacan ever did.
Lacan's psychoanalytic
philosophy is,
as he would be the first to
admit and even sort of
cheerfully to endorse,
largely speculative.
That is to say,
he works in depth with
philosophical and literary
materials.
He is not glued to the
analyst's chair.
He is notoriously impatient
with his analysands and is very
interested in matters of
analysis either in,
on the one hand,
shortcuts or,
on the other hand--
championing Freud's late essay,
"Analysis Terminable or
Interminable"--
taking the side that analysis
is, just obviously,
such is the complexity of the
thing,
interminable.
 
But the one really solid piece
of clinical research that Lacan
did and that is accepted as part
of the psychoanalytic lore is
the work that he did in the
1930s on the mirror stage.
That work actually does
generate the system of ideas
that Lacan has to offer.
 
So what is the mirror stage?
 
A baby in the anal phase--that
is to say,
no longer identifying with the
breast of the mother,
but aware of a sense of
difference between whatever it
might be and that otherness
which is out there--
a baby views itself in the
mirror, and maybe it views
itself like this [turns towards
board with hands up].
Right?
 
It can only crawl.
 
It can barely touch its nose.
 
It can't feed itself,
and the actual nature of its
body is still fragmented and
disorganized.
It lacks coordination.
 
In fact, it lacks,
in any ordinary sense of the
term, "uprightness."
 
But let's say it's looking at
itself in the mirror like this
[turns towards board with hands
up],
and so what it sees is
something like this [gestures
towards diagram on board].
 
In other words,
it sees something which is
coherent, coordinated,
and really rather handsome.
"Oh,"
>
it says, "Wow,
you know, I'm
>
 
okay."
 
>
 
It acknowledges itself to be,
it recognizes itself to
be--it's the object of the
mother's desire.
Right?
 
That is the moment in which it
no longer identifies with the
breast but thinks of itself as
the object of the desire of
another because it's so pleased
with itself.
"Somebody's got to desire
me.
It's probably Mom."
 
So >
 
there it is,
and this is the moment of the
mirror stage.
 
Now what happens after
that--and by the way,
the rather wonderful epigraph
from Leonardo da Vinci which
begins your essay is all about
this--
what happens after that is
rather tragic.
The baby falls into
language,
and in the moment--and I'm
going to come back in a minute
to the whole question of why it
is language that does this--
in the moment at which it falls
into language,
it no longer sees itself as the
ideal I--
"das
Ideal-Ich"
in Freud's language.
 
It comes into the recognition
that it doesn't even have its
own name, let alone an identity.
 
It has "the name of the
father,"
but it doesn't have the phallus
of the father,
and it begins to recognize
competition in desire.
It begins to recognize that
what it itself desires is not
accessible in a kind of
mutuality of desire and that it
has no choice but to admire--
while at the same time envying
and indeed forming as an object
of desire because that's what it
lacks--
the father.
That's the sense in which--but
it's the father only in a
phantasmagoric sense.
 
In Lacan the object of desire
can be just absolutely
anything depending on the
course of the unraveling of the
metonymic sequence that desire
follows;
but this is what Lacan
associates with the Oedipal
phase;
that's why I say,
in passing, "the
father."
It does have something to do
with Lacan's revision of Freud
in saying that the object of
lack that perpetually motivates
desire,
the desire for what one lacks,
is not at all physical.
 
If you make that mistake,
you're right back in sort of
mindless Freudianism.
 
You know, it's not the
penis!
It is, on the contrary,
something which is by nature
symbolic,
something which is an ego ideal
but no longer oneself--
that is to say,
no longer what one has
but what,
through the gap opened up by
language,
one recognizes that one
lacks.
So it takes a variety of,
let's just say,
phallogocentric forms.
 
In film criticism,
some of you may know the essay,
the Lacanian essay of Laura
Mulvey in which the female
object of the spectator's desire
or gaze,
dressed in a sheath dress,
is actually just like the baby,
just like anything else that's
upright,
it is this [points to
the vertical axis on the board].
In other words,
it is, despite being obviously
an incredibly different kind of
thing, nevertheless.
in symbolic terms, the phallus.
 
All right.
 
Now the question then is:
why is it that it's
language that does this?
 
Lacan speaks of the
impossibility of realizing an
object of desire,
because the metonymic structure
of desire follows what he calls
"an asymptotic
course,"
"asymptotic"
meaning the line which curves
toward the line it wants to meet
but never reaches it.
 
There's a kind of an underlying
punning sense in that word of
the metonymic course of desire
not revealing the symptom.
It's asymptotic in that sense
as well.
The only thing that can reveal
the symptom is those moments of
quilting,
the moments at the point de
capiton when metaphor,
as Lacan says on two different
occasions in the essay,
reveals the symptom.
So this is what happens when
you can't "git"
ever--when you can't ever
"git"
what you want.
 
But don't worry,
because you can always have
what you need as long as you
try.
So the question is:
why does language do this?
What is it about language that
introduces this problematic
beyond repair?
 
Lacan begins the essay with a
claim about the Freudian
unconscious,
a claim which he takes,
he says, from The
Interpretation of Dreams
where Freud speaks of the
relationship between
condensation and displacement in
the dream work.
Lacan says, "The
unconscious is structured like a
language."
 
That's perhaps the single
expression that people take away
from Lacan,
and rightly so,
because it is,
again,
foundational for what we need
to understand if we're to get
along with him:
"the unconscious is
structured like a
language."
Now what does this mean?
 
He doesn't say,
"The unconscious is
a language,"
by the way,
and he doesn't say that he
means the unconscious is
structured exclusively like
human language.
He means that the unconscious
is structured like a semiotic
system.
 
In fact, he draws from Freud's
Interpretation of Dreams
the idea that the way the
dream work works and the way
everyday life,
in Freud's sense of the
psychopathology of everyday
life,
works is like a
rebus--in other words,
one of those puzzles in which
you can find an underlying
sentence if you figure out how
to put together drawings,
numbers, and syllables:
in other words,
a sequence of signs taken from
different semiotic systems that
can put themselves together into
a meaning.
That's how Lacan understands
the dream work and the movements
of consciousness to unfold.
 
The unconscious then is
structured like a language,
which is not the same thing as
to say it is a language.
Okay.
 
Structured like a language.
 
This means--and this is where
there is this enormous gulf
between Lacan and most other
practitioners of
psychoanalysis--
the unconscious is not,
in that case,
to be understood as the seat of
the instincts.
 
It's not to be understood as
something prior,
in other words,
to those forms of derivative
articulation,
those forms of articulation
emerging through maturity that
we're accustomed to call
"language."
 
If the unconscious is
structured like a language,
then it--the id,
es--itself is precisely
the signifier,
the signifier that emerges as
language: not that it is
foundational to language,
because Lacan's point,
like the point of many other
people in our syllabus,
is not that language expresses
thought.
 
It's not at all that language
expresses thought,
but that language constitutes
thought,
that language brings thought,
consciousness,
or a sense of things into
being, and that this is
articulated through language.
 
Now this, of course,
brings us immediately to
certain issues of conflict that
Lacan has not just with other
forms of psychoanalysis but with
a whole philosophical tradition.
If you are a materialist--in
other words,
if you believe that things come
first and consciousness comes
second: that is to say,
if you're a Marxist,
if you believe that
consciousness,
ideology, or call it what you
will,
is determined by existing
material circumstances--
as one says--you can't very
well think that existing
material circumstances are
produced by language.
Whoa.
 
If by the same token you're a
positivist,
if you believe that the meaning
of things is something that is
expressed by language,
something that language is
brought into being to express:
then also you are giving
priority to things,
to that which is behind
language, to that which gives
rise to language--
rather than,
as Lacan does,
giving priority to language.
 
He actually attacks both the
Marxist tradition and the
positivist tradition at various
points in your text.
The sideways blow at Marxism is
on page 1130,
the right-hand column.
 
The sideways blow at positivism
is on page 1132,
the right-hand column.
 
I don't want to pause to quote
them but you can go to them in
your text.
 
So what is it,
id, or es?
What is that which is normally
called "the instinctual
drives,"
the id, the unmediated wish for
something?
 
Well, Lacan says it is nothing
other than the signifier.
He says, "What do I mean
by literalism?
How else can I mean it except
literally?
It is the letter."
 
That is to say,
consciousness begins with the
letter.
 
Remember Levi-Strauss saying in
the text quoted by Derrida that
language doesn't come into being
just a little bit at a time.
One day there is no language,
and the next day there is
language: which is to say,
suddenly there is a way of
conferring meaning on things,
and that way of conferring
meaning on things is
differential.
That is to say,
it introduces the arbitrary
nature of the sign and the
differential relations among
signs which are featured in the
work of Saussure.
So it is for Lacan.
 
The letter is not that which is
brought into being to express
things,
not that which is brought into
being in the service of the ego
to discipline and civilize the
id,
but rather is "it"
itself.
 
That is to say,
it is the beginning.
"In the beginning was the
word."
In the beginning was the
letter, which disseminates
consciousness through the
signifying system that it makes
available.
 
Now actually I'm hoping that in
saying these things you find me
merely and rather dully
repeating myself,
saying things that I've said
before,
because it seems to me that
this is the part of Lacan which
is accessible and which is
central to the sorts of things
that we've been talking about,
which I rather imagine you must
be getting used to by this time.
 
Lacan shares a structuralist
understanding of how the
unconscious discourses.
 
He accepts Jakobson's
distinction between metaphor and
metonymy and he sees the
cooperative building-up
relationship of metaphor and
metonymy in the discourse of the
unconscious and of the
psychopathology of everyday life
in much the same way that
Jakobson does.
Remember Jakobson associates
metaphor and metonymy not just
with poetry and prose,
not just with certain kinds of
style,
but actually with pathologies.
In its extreme forms,
metaphor and metonymy as
manifest in linguistic practice
take the form of aphasias,
as Lacan points out;
and so Jakobson,
too, is concerned with
something sort of built-in,
hard-wired in the way in which
language works in and as the
unconscious that,
in its extreme forms,
is aphasic and always expresses
itself in tendencies either
metonymic or metaphoric.
 
Now, of course,
he also draws on Saussure but--
as your editor rightly points
out in a footnote--
the way in which he reads
Saussure [draws on chalkboard],
the signifier,
the big signifier over
the little,
rather insignificant
signified--because after all,
what does the signified matter?
You can never cross the
bar--right?--to get to it.
You are barred from it.
 
The signified is that from
which you are forever excluded,
and we'll go into Lacan's
examples of this in a minute.
This is actually quite
different from Saussure's [draws
on chalkboard]
"signified over the
signifier,"
anchored by a kind of mutuality
whereby it's never a question
what generates what,
but rather a question which has
in common,
I think, with Lacan's so-called
algorithm only in fact
the bar itself;
the fact that the relationship
between signifier and signified,
or signified and signifier,
is an arbitrary one that can't
be crossed by evoking anything
natural in the nature of the
signified that calls forth the
signifier.
 
There they agree,
but as to what produces what:
Saussure is agnostic about it
and Lacan insists that the big
S is that which generates
the signified--
that from which any possibility
of grasping a signified arises
and derives.
 
So Lacan's algorithm is,
in fact, rather different from
Saussure's diagram.
 
Okay.
 
Let's exemplify this by going
back to what I said about the
red light [gestures to the board
repeatedly throughout this
paragraph]--
right?--because here,
too, I think we'll have
continuity.
The red light over a door is a
signifier which has a great deal
to do with desire,
right?
This we take for granted.
 
The red light in other contexts
has nothing to do with desire,
but the signifier,
"red light over a
door," suggests desire--
but desire for what?
Well, we think we know
"desire for what,"
but look at the signifier.
 
"Desire for the
door," right?
What is the relationship
between the signifier and what
would seem to be the signified?
 
That's not what you desire.
 
You don't desire the door,
and it's the same with
hommes et femmes,
right?
What is this hommes et
femmes?
Well, okay.
 
The little girl says,
"We've arrived at
Gentlemen,"
and the little boy says,
"We've arrived at
Ladies."
Well, that seems to be quite
healthy, right?
We're on our way to something
like hetero-normative
desire--great,
terrific.
But wait a minute.
 
This hommes here:
what is hommes?
What does that have to do with
the price of--the only thing you
can do even behind this door is
restore your personal comfort.
It has nothing to do with
hommes,
right, or anything else for
that matter.
If the visible signified is in
question, well,
in what sense can we call this
door hommes?
Right?
 
It's the same with
femmes.
There is, in any case,
in Lacan's anecdote the
wonderful existence of the
railroad tracks,
which for him constitutes the
bar: that is to say,
that owing to the nature of
language,
owing to the arbitrary relation
of the signifier to the
signified,
the little boy and little
girl--who are wonderful
characters right out of
Nabokov's Ada--
I don't know if any of you know
that novel,
but the little boy is sort of a
little genius,
obviously Lacan,
but his sister is even smarter
than he is.
"Idiot," she says,
just like a character in
Nabokov, but both this little
boy and little girl are barred
from desire--
from their desire--because they
are already putting up with a
substitute precisely insofar as
they seem to be on track toward
something like the
hetero-normative expression of
desire.
It's not an expression of
desire at all.
It's an expression of need
because they are not able to
bring into being,
consciousness,
or before themselves the object
of desire indicated by the
signifier.
 
The signifier is always
displaced from the object of
desire in precisely the ways
that are borne out
diagrammatically in these
formulas.
All right.
 
So what then is desire?
 
Well, perhaps we've covered it:
it is the endless deferral of
that which cannot be signified
in the metonymic movement of
discourse,
of dreaming,
or of the way in which the
unconscious functions.
Lacan is very ingenious in,
I think,
convincingly showing us how it
is that we get from one
signifier to another:
in other words,
how what he calls the chain of
the signifier works.
You have a series of concentric
rings [gestures to the board],
but each concentric ring is
made up of a lot of little
concentric rings which hook on
to associated surrounding
signifiers in ways that could be
variable.
This, I think,
very nicely re-diagrams
Saussure's sense of the
associative structure of the
vertical axis:
that is to say,
of the synchronic moment of
language,
the way in which some
signifiers naturally cluster
with other signifiers,
and not just with one group of
signifiers but a variety of
groups of signifiers.
But they don't at all naturally
cluster with just any or all
signifiers,
so that you get associative
clusters in the axis of
selection,
and they are indicated by this
[gestures to board].
As the chain of signifiers
unfolds,
the one or another of these
possible associations links on--
and remember all of these
signifiers are made up,
in turn, of a chain of
concentric circles.
So I think this is a rather
good way of understanding the
unfolding of metonymy.
 
Now every once in a while you
get metaphor--
whoa!--and it's a moment to be
celebrated in Lacan because
it's,
as he says, "poetic"
and it is also,
as he says, in a number of
places the manifestation,
the only possible
manifestation,
of the symptom.
What is the symptom?
 
It is the awareness of the lack
of an object of desire expressed
in a displaced manner--
that is to say,
expressed in a manner which is
not,
however, completely obfuscatory
of the lack of the object of
desire,
just sort of caught up in my
endless babbling;
but rather is that moment of
pause in which there is a
gathering together of signifiers
and,
ultimately, a substitution of
one signifier for another in
such a way that one says,
"Aha.
 
I see it.
 
I can't grasp it,
I can't have it,
but I see it.
 
I see the object of desire.
 
I see what has been displaced
by the very act of
signification."
 
That's what he calls
"metaphor,"
and he sees metaphor as
appearing at these points de
capiton.
 
Think of this as a quilt.
 
You know what I'm talking
about: quilting knots,
pins--no, not needles.
 
That's what you make a quilt
with.
* Those little
buttons, quilting buttons,
right?
 
That's what a quilt is like.
 
It's filled with something and
then the stuffing is held in
place by buttons.
 
Right?
 
So the stuffing of metonymic
signification is held in place
usefully for the analyst,
for the reader,
and for the interpreter by
these quilting buttons or
points de capiton.
 
So the example that Lacan gives
is--as I say,
he gives several examples.
 
There are wonderful,
dazzling readings,
both with four lines from
Valéry and of the one
line from Victor Hugo.
 
I focus on the Hugo because
it's a little easier,
just the one line.
 
He says, "There is
something that happens in this
line which is metaphoric,"
and I'm delighted that he uses
the word "sparks."
 
In other words,
the metaphoric,
the presence of the metaphor,
is a spark.
Remember I was talking about,
in Wolfgang Iser,
the need to gap a sparkplug:
in other words,
the need to have a certain
distance between two points in
order for the spark to happen.
 
If it's too close,
it doesn't happen;
you just short out.
 
If it's too distant,
it doesn't happen because the
distance is too great.
 
So the spark that Lacan is
talking about is the
relationship--
"his sheaves were neither
miserly nor spiteful"--
between Boaz and his sheaves;
because the sheaves themselves
which give of themselves--
just as certain other things we
could mention give of
themselves--
the sheaves themselves which
give of themselves,
and certainly are not miserly
or spiteful for that reason--
they're generous,
they're open,
they give,
they feed us,
etc., etc., etc.--are supposed,
in metonymy,
to indicate that Boaz is like
that.
 
Look at the munificence of
Boaz's crop.
It's neither miserly nor
spiteful, but as Lacan points
out,
the miserliness and
spitefulness comes back in an
unfortunate way precisely in
that word "his":
>
because if he is a possessor of
the sheaf,
he is--this involves the whole,
as it were,
structure of capitalist or
Darwinian competition and
involves,
at least in an underlying way,
all the elements of thrift,
if you will,
and competitive envy or spite,
if you will,
that seem to have been banished
from the sentence.
In other words,
metaphorically speaking,
Boaz returns in his absence.
 
He substitutes.
 
He is substituted for by the
expression "his
sheaves."
 
The possessive means that he is
not the things that he's said to
be,
metonymically speaking,
and the sheaves themselves are
precisely what he is in the
Oedipal phase:
that is to say,
precisely what he is if he is
objectified by a baby looking at
him;
but at the same time,
not at all what or where we
expected him to be.
In other words,
the point de capiton of
the sentence,
of the line,
is the substitution of Boaz for
his sheaves and his sheaves for
Boaz.
 
So the line has both a
metonymic reading and a
metaphoric reading.
 
Here I think you can see
Lacan's sense of the relation
between metaphor or metonymy
hovering between that of
Jakobson or Brooks and that of
de Man,
because there seems to be an
underlying irreducible tension
between reading the line as
though it says that Boaz was
generous and free of spite,
and reading the line as though
it said that Boaz just
necessarily--
because he's one who possesses
something--
is a person who has the
characteristics of miserliness
and spitefulness.
 
The tension,
in other words,
seems to me to be in Lacan an
irreducible one so that,
at least in that regard,
we can place him closer to de
Man than we have to,
say, Brooks or Jakobson;
which isn't to say that
Jakobson is not the primary and
central influence on Lacan's way
of thinking about the axis of
combination.
 
The appearance of metaphor on
the axis of combination,
the way in which we can
identify these quilting buttons
on the axis of combination,
is nothing other than what
Jakobson said and meant when he
said that the poetic function is
the transference of the
principle of equivalence from
the axis of selection to the
axis of combination,
right?
 
I'm not saying--in speaking in
passing of the sort of
irreducible conflict one senses
between metonymy and metaphor
here--
I'm not saying that Jakobson is
not the primary influence behind
Lacan's thinking in this regard.
All right.
 
Now Lacan says language is a
rebus,
as I've said,
and he says the movement of the
signifier,
which is the movement of
desire, is the articulation of a
lack.
That is to say,
it is in the impossibility,
as certain kinds of language
philosophers would say,
of making the signifier hook on
to the signified or,
as we might say,
hook up with the signified--
in the impossibility of doing
that is precisely the
impossibility of realizing an
object of desire.
So all of this should I hope
now be clear.
So some of the consequences are
that language--
the most obvious consequence
is, and this isn't the first
time or last time that we will
have encountered this in various
vocabularies and contexts--
that "language thinks
me."
 
On page 1142,
the right-hand column,
for example:
"I think where I am not,
therefore I am where I do not
think."
That is to say,
that which brings my thinking
into being is not present to me.
 
It is it.
 
It is the letter.
 
It is the signified which
perpetually evades us and which
cannot possibly be present to
us.
I am not present to myself.
 
I cannot be present to myself
because what is present is the
way in which my self comes into
being in discourse which cannot
identify me.
 
It cannot identify me either as
subject,
or, in a phase of narcissism,
supposing I can somehow or
another re-imagine myself in the
mirror phase,
as an object of desire.
 
All right.
 
So I actually think that
without quite having meant to,
I have pretty much exhausted
what I have to say in outline
about Lacan.
 
I haven't said nearly enough
about the relationship between
desire and need as it plots
itself in our actual lives and
in fiction,
because the extraordinary thing
about it is it's not just a
slogan from the Rolling Stones
or from Lacan.
 
As we think about it,
it's not that we're not happy
with our relationship with the
things that we need:
obviously we are,
but the extraordinary thing
about it is that we recognize in
our lives,
in the magical world of
film--that is to say,
the world of illusion
deliberately promoted by film
and in fiction--
we recognize the absolutely
central significance of this
distinction.
That's what's so wonderful and
amazing about the essay by
Å―iÅūek you'll be reading for
next week called "Courtly
Love," which I love and
which headlines,
which features readings of a
series of films in which the
Lacanian distinction between the
impossibility ever of achieving
the Big Other--
by the way, there are times in
various kinds of fictional plots
in which you can actually have
the object of desire,
but what always happens in
plots like that is that the
unconscious,
the psyche, finds ways of
rejecting it.
I can't have that--it's my
brother;
or I can't have that--it is in
one form or another forbidden.
In other words,
in actuality,
in the way in which the psyche
works according to the structure
of the films Å―iÅūek undertakes
to analyze--
and he's so profuse in examples
that he really does leave us
feeling that there's a kind of
universality in what he's
saying--
yeah, there are all kinds of
object choices that can happen
and do happen and may even seem
satisfactory,
but those are all objects,
objets petit ā;
whereas the Big Other,
that which is the true object
of desire, is something that
will perpetually evade
possession.
Okay.
 
So next time we're actually
talking about the anxiety of
influence in Harold Bloom,
and then in the ensuing lecture
we'll return in a way to Lacan
when we take up Deleuze,
Guattari and Slavoj Å―iÅūek.
 
Thank you.
 
