as a bi-univocal index/sign. The Name-of-the-Father as signifiersignifies “the Other
quaOther,” the existence of the differential signifying chain as such; for the same
reason, it is precisely, as name (of the Other), a “rigid designator,” it always desig-
nates the same thing, that is, φquaobject of the Desire-of-the-m-Other. For Lacan,
this bi-univocal relation is typical of indexes/natural signs and not of signifiers
which are never bi-univocally related to one given signified. In other words, by
signifying always one and the same signified (φ, the Other quaOther) the Name-
of-the-Father is actually meaningless: it is both that which allows the emergence
of (phallic) signification as such in the signifying chain—by anchoring it—and,
per se,meaningless. On the contrary, as we know, all signifiers in the signifying chain
both signify in various—non-bi-univocal—ways, and do not signify anything
specific; this is of course valid, first and foremost, for the privileged relation sig-
nifier over signified given by Φover φ.Having described the relationship between signifier and signified in the signifying
chain as non-bi-univocal, Lacan faces the problem of explaining how, despite the
incessant slippage of the signified under the signifier, the chain actually holds to-
gether, how and where “the signified and the signifier are knotted together.”^183 In
Seminar III, he names these places “quilting points” (points de capiton). Where the di-
achronic horizontal dimension of language is concerned, the notion of quilting
point can easily be explained through the idea of retroactive punctuation: “It is
only when the sentence is completed that the sense of the first words is determined
retroactively.”^184 In simple terms, punctuation corresponds to the overall effec-
tiveness of grammar in a given language: for instance, if one does not know the
grammar of a foreign language well enough, one cannot appropriately punctuate
a given sentence, and the signifying chain simply falls apart; in this case, signi-
fiers cease to have meaning—or signify too many things at the same time—even
if we actually know the “meaning” of a given signifier (hence we ask questions
such as “what does that word mean in thiscontext?”). On the other hand, where
the synchronic vertical—unconscious—dimension of language is concerned,
Lacan thinks that quilting points should be identified with metaphors.^185 In Semi-
nar III, before the explicit formulation of the paternal metaphor, he indicates that
“the notion of father... gives the most palpable element in experience of what
I’ve called the [vertical] quilting point between the signifier and the signified,”^186
hence, implicitly, how the (Name-of-the-)Father, by linking a signifier and a sig-
nified in a bi-univocal way, functions as a sign.In other words, as we have seen, the
(Name-of-the-)Father knots together the paternal imago as signified with the
phallic symbolic Law as signifier.^187 Two years later, in a brief passage from Semi-
nar V, Lacan—strangely—seems to contradict the equation between metaphor
and quilting point: he considers the latter to be a “mythical matter, since nobodythe subject of the symbolic (other)