At the risk of stating the obvious, it is important to insist on the fact that Lacan
adapts Jakobson’s laws of concrete consciouslanguage, the object of linguistics, to his
thesis of the unconsciousstructured like a (conscious) language, the object of psycho-
analysis. For Lacan, the unconscious is structured likea language, it follows the lin-
guistic laws that Jakobson attributed to conscious language. Strictly speaking,
however, the unconscious is nota language as we normally understand it, and as
Jakobson theorizes it. The signifiers of the unconscious possess a symbolic (oppo-
sitional/differential) meaningthat causes signification to emerge in consciousness,
but they do not possess, per se,any signification. Signification can only be conscious,
and the unconscious is, by definition, not conscious. In other words, as I have al-
ready observed, there is no archetypal unconscious signified for Lacan. Such a
specification is essential if we are not to misread Lacan’s appropriation of the no-
tions of metaphor and metonymy.
One could correctly object, as I myself did earlier, that from the standpoint of
the Symbolic, language as structure and the transindividual unconscious are iden-
tical: consequently, any attempt to distinguish them would be artificial. I accept
such an objection but, at the same time, wish to emphasize that for Lacan the Sym-
bolic is never, in practice,completely detached from the Imaginary.^64 Hence (con-
scious) language and the transindividual unconscious are not simply the same
thing. More importantly, this distinction should help us to avoid the confusion be-
tween two different applications of the notion of metonymy. According to Jakob-
son, the vertical axis of metaphor holds in absentia,its units are mutually exclusive
in concrete discourse, while metonymy holds in presentia,the combination of signi-
fiers is diachronic; on the other hand, for Lacan, metonymy holds both in presentia and in
absentia.Against those commentators who often use examples derived from posi-
tive language to illustrate the metonymic function of the unconscious, I argue that
Lacan implicitly distinguishes between:( 1 ) metonymy as combination in consciousspeech, that is, the grammatical/syntag-
matic rules of positive language as studied by Jakobsonian linguistics. Lacan fully
accepts them;
( 2 ) metonymy as combination in the unconscious.Lacan’s belief in the existence of
an unconscious level of metonymy is proved by the fact that the two formulas of
metaphor and metonymy are bothexplicitly presented as a “topography of the un-
conscious” in his seminal essay “The Agency of the Letter.”^65 Jakobson had already
admitted the existence of some metonymic combination within the vertical asso-
ciations, which, by definition, hold in absentia,synchronically. Lacan transforms the log-
ical necessity of the vertical axis (made of bothmetaphors and metonymy)—the existence
of a linguistic structurewhich, according to Saussure and Jakobson, concrete dis-the subject of the symbolic (other)