signifiers. Human body language—for example, shaking one’s head, nodding,
waving, and so on—insofar as it is equivocal, can also work as a signifier.
( 2 ) A sign is, strictly speaking, something that overlaps with the notion of code or
“biological sign,” with the Gestaltic/imaginary—bi-univocal—relation between
an index and a referent. This is the domain of animal communication. ( Think, for
example, of the way in which the appearance of a certain color in an animal can
automatically trigger a certain sexual response in its partner.)^56 Animal communi-
cation is thus “significant,” while human communication is “signifying,” which
means never bi-univocal, as the ineradicable possibility of lying—the quintes-
sence of the symbolic dimension—concretely attests.
( 3 ) “There’s no other scientific definition of subjectivity than one that proceeds
from the possibility of handling the signifier for purely signifying, not significant
ends, that is, expressing no direct relation to the order of appetite.”^57 This defini-
tion already provides the basis for Lacan’s well-known formula of the early 196 0s
according to which a subject is that which is represented by a signifier for another
signifier.^58 The subject cannot be reduced to the signified—indeed, the subject
of the signified corresponds to the ego; on the other hand, he cannot even be
identified with a signifier, given that it is the very action of signifiers that splits him
between statement and enunciation. No signifier fully signifies the subject, even
though there are “privileged” signifiers.Having surveyed the notion of signifier, we should now move on to analyze the
way signifying chains are formed in the unconscious and, above all, according to
which linguistic laws they produce conscious signification. In other words, what
does “The unconscious is structuredlike a language” really mean?
Lacan derives from Jakobson’s linguistics^59 the idea according to which lan-
guage is divided into two main axes (horizontal or diachronic, and vertical or
synchronic), each of which is ruled by a specific linguistic law (metonymy for the
horizontal axis, metaphor for the vertical axis). Furthermore, following Jakobson’s
suggestion, Lacan believes that Freud’s description of the dream-work as depen-
dent on the principles of displacement and condensation anticipates the formula-
tion of the linguistic laws of metonymy and metaphor. As in the case of Freud’s
Verschiebung(displacement), metonymy indicates the combination of one signifier
with another. On the other hand, echoing the idea of Verdichtung(condensation),
metaphor is constituted by a process whereby one signifier is substituted for an-
other. Substitution produces signification.
First of all, let us briefly summarize Jakobson’s notions of metaphor and me-
tonymy.^60 Jakobson believes that speech presupposes two basic procedures: selec-the unconscious structured like a language