Subjectivity and Otherness A Philosophical Reading of Lacan

self-consciousness. If, on the contrary, one defends the logical priority of the un-

conscious over the letter, one inevitably falls back into proto-Jungian positions

for which the “other scene” has as such some imaginary signification.

In Seminar III, Lacan provides us with a key definition of the letter by stating

that “every real signifier is, as such, a signifier that signifies nothing.”^78 This state-

ment can be read in two complementary ways:

( 1 ) As we have already noted, a signifier differs from a (natural) sign in that it is

signifying and not significant. Only significant (Gestaltic/imaginary) signs signify

something per se—a red feather signifies ejaculation—whereas onesignifier, a real

letter, does not signify anything: it has no effects of signification since there is no

bi-univocal relation between the signifier and the signified. A signifier is signify-

ing and produces an effect of signification only when considered in a differential/

oppositional relation with all other signifiers: this is what a symbol is for Lacan.

( 2 ) Even if taken as a set, signifiers are,per se, just letters that do not signify any-

thing as long as they are considered separately from the effect of signification

they generate. In other words, symbolic signifying chains—the association of

unconscious signifiers by metaphor and metonymy—may properly be so named

only from the perspective of the signified they produce in the Imaginary. In

themselves, they are a mere association of meaningless letters as material sup-

port of signifiers.

To clarify this difficult point, Lacan perpetuates Freud’s passion for hieroglyphics.

Lacan believes that hieroglyphics provide perfect evidence of the level of the Real-

of-language. As he puts it, the signifying chain as letter “is found to survive in an

alterity in relation to the subject [the individual subject’s self-consciousness] as

radical as that of as yet undecipherable hieroglyphics in the solitude of the des-

ert.”^79 Here Lacan is implicitly suggesting that one should consider the role of hier-

oglyphics before they were deciphered as that of a paradoxical signifying chain without

signification.^80 Western archaeologists attempted to decipher hieroglyphics because

they supposed them to signify something for another civilization, but they did

not signify anything for the archaeologists themselves. This proves that the letter,

the Real-of-language, underlies the dimension of the signifier as symbol. It would

be wrong, however, to assume that when the symbol (the hieroglyphic) is deci-

phered, the letter simply disappears: on the contrary, it remains there as a neces-

sary material support of the signifier/symbol; it is also in this sense that the letter

is said to “insist.” The same point can also be demonstrated per negativum: what if the

hieroglyphics had turned out to be a fake, and only seemedto signify something? In

the unconscious structured like a language