Subjectivity and Otherness A Philosophical Reading of Lacan

this case, archaeologists would have been mistaken in inferring the existence of a
signification where there was only a randomly marked stone or papyrus, the purely
material dimension of the alleged signifying chain—which normally remains
concealed in everyday discourse. In the end, what is at stake in the notion of letter
is a dimension of meaninglessness that is constitutive of the process of significa-
tion as such, a lack of signification that is structurally linked to signification and
does not merely amount to non-signification. Lacan will see the radical conse-
quences of this conclusion—the end of the autonomy of the symbolic order—
only in the late 195 0s, after the notion of the Real had come to occupy the center
of his theoretical interests.

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