Subjectivity and Otherness A Philosophical Reading of Lacan

obliged to conceptualize a full speech which is never actually full.... A rather

senseless question would then follow: when does empty speech stop being empty

and become partially full? What does “as fully as possible” mean? I believe Lacan

will confront the deadlock generated by the notion of full speech, and will conse-

quently discuss the importance of primal repression, only in later years, having

reassessed the Otherqua language through the linguistic notions of signifier and

signified.^38

2.4 Signifier, Signified, Letter

In an apparently trivial passage of Seminar III, Lacan summarizes in rapid succes-

sion what he believes to be three fundamentally divergent notions of language. Ac-

cording to the first, which Lacan defines as “naïve,” “there is a superimposition,

like a tracing, of the order of things onto the order of words.” As for the second,

“it’s thought that a great step forward has been made by saying that the signified

only ever reaches its goal via another signified, through referring to another sig-

nification [signification].” This notion of language is implicitly made to correspond

with Saussure’s. The third notion of language is Lacan’s own: “This [the second no-

tion] is only the first step, and one fails to see that [another] is needed. It has to be

realized that without structuring by the signifier no... meaning [sens] would be

possible.”^39 Lacan thus both recognizes his debt to Saussure and marks his distance

from the linguist. Saussure is correct in claiming the mutual dependency of signi-

fieds, the differential structure of language, but he is incorrect insofar as he fails to

emphasize the supremacy of the signifier over the signified.

In this section, I shall begin by explaining the Saussurian notions of signifier

and signified, and the way in which Lacan reformulates them. I shall then proceed

to clarify the way in which the link between signifiers and signifieds is, for Lacan,

organized by the (Jakobsonian) laws of metaphor and metonymy. Finally, and most

importantly, I shall attempt to clarify what the dictum “The unconscious is struc-

tured like a language” means if one assumes that the unconscious consists of sig-

nifiers. Here, I shall primarily be interested in analyzing the way in which the

unconscious “structured like a language” functions.In Chapter 3 —focused on

Lacan’s rereading of the Oedipus complex as the subject’s active entry into the big

Otherqua symbolic order of Law and culture—I shall explore how the unconscious

is formedin the individual subject.

The second part of Seminar III—and, above all, the article “The Agency of the

Letter”—suggests that by 195 6Lacan’s return to the Freudian discovery of the un-

conscious no longer revolved primarily around the pseudo-Hegelian dialectical

function of speech, but instead became increasingly dependent on the structural-

the unconscious structured like a language