ing down the existence of a subject of the signifier. Safouan correctly observes that
“Lacan’s reflection on the signifier is in constant interreaction with his reflection
on the subject.... The gap which can never be filled between signifier and signi-
fied causes the fact that the subject is not only a subject of the signified, but also
and above all, a subject of the signifier.”^51 The subject is split because of the action
of the signifier or, more precisely, because the signified continuously slips be-
neath the bar of the signifier as an effect of the concatenation of signifiers. In a
sense, Lacan complicates the distinction between (conscious) subject of the state-
ment and (unconscious) subject of the enunciation by proposing the following
proportion: (subject of the) signified : (subject of the) statement =(subject of the)
signifier : (subject of the) enunciation. As he writes in Seminar IV, there is “a sort
of superimposition between the course of the signifier... and the course of the
signified”; thanks to the signified, “the continuity of lived experience, the flux of
the tendencies in a subject and between subjects is given.”^52 This is to say that if,
on the one hand, the signified sides with the conscious “continuity of lived ex-
perience,” on the other, the signifier sides with the unconscious. What is more,
these two courses are “superimposed”: each word the subject utters resonates and
is inscribed in two different “scenes,” the ego and the unconscious. I propose that,
for the time being, the dictum “The unconscious is structured like a language”
should simply be interpreted as “The unconscious is made of signifiers” or, rather,
as “Signifiers form the unconscious”: this is essentially due to the fact that sig-
nifiers transcend the conscious dimension of the signified. Signifiers are linked
in many synchronicunconscious signifying chains, which ultimately arethe un-
conscious. These chains are created according to the laws of metaphor and me-
tonymy, and are responsible for generating signification at the conscious level. In
parallel, self-consciousness corresponds to nothing but onecontinuous, uninter-
rupted chain, formed both by the signified that results from my speech and by
that which I associate with the speech of other subjects:^53 this single chain may
be equated with the diachronic“lived experience” of the individual subject from his
birth to his death.^54
Following this subversion of the Saussurian sign, Lacan is able to offer three new
interlinked definitions of the notions of signifier, sign, and subject:
( 1 ) “The signifier is a sign that doesn’t refer to any object.” It “is a sign which refers
to another sign, which is as such structured to signify the absence of another sign,
in other words, to be opposed to it in a couple.”^55 What is more, the signifier does
not necessarily correspond to a word (in a sentence): oppositional units at all hier-
archical levels of language, from the phoneme to the sentence, can function as