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Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics

Inventing Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Linguistics and Tropology in "The Agency of the Letter"
Author(s): James M. Mellard
Source: Poetics Today, Vol. 19, No. 4 (Winter, 1998), pp. 499-530
Published by: Duke University Press
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InventingLacanianPsychoanalysis:
Linguisticsand Tropologyin
"TheAgency of the Letter"
James M. Mellard
English,NorthernIllinois

Abstract While Lacan always insisted that he was a Freudianand thereforeworked


within "the Freudian Field," his approach to analysis nonetheless differs from
Freud's.A primary difference relates to questions of poetics and discourse.Whereas
some scholars contend that Freud constructshis discourse of psychoanalysisaround
archaeology used as a trope, Lacan adverts in his rereading of Freud not to archae-
ology, but to linguistics. Though linguistic terms are everywhere visible in Lacan
and though many Lacanians address language and linguistics in his work, Lacan's
use of linguistics is itself somewhat misconstrued. While much commentary sur-
rounds his focus on language and linguistics, not much of it actually discusses his
rhetoric or his troping or even admits that he uses tropes, rather than merely dis-
cussing them, when talking about psychoanalysis. Because scholars both pro and
con take it as if Lacan were really doinglinguistics, they have not fully recognized
that linguistics is the constitutive trope in Lacan's rethinking of Freudiandiscourse.
Between "The Mirror Stage" of 1936 and the beginning of the famed seminar in
late 1953, Lacan seems to have been only randomly rereading Freud until he seized
upon the explanatory power of linguistics as a trope for invention. Lacan offers
his linguistic manifesto in "The Function and Field of Speech and Language in
Psychoanalysis"(1953)and makes more evident his use of Saussurein "The Freudian
Thing" (1955),but in "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since
Freud"(1957)he goes beyond manifesto of change to his most systematic extrapola-
tion of the new trope to constitute his discursivefield. If "The Agency" is "the locus
classicusof Lacanian linguistics,"it is also the site of Lacan's tropological reinvention

PoeticsToday19:4 (Winter 1998). Copyright ? 1998 by The Porter Institute for Poetics and
Semiotics.

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500 PoeticsToday19:4

of psychoanalysis through linguistics. As a discourse, the Lacanian is constituted in


ways accessible through tropological analysis of the sort theorized by Hayden V.
White. "The Agency of the Letter"exhibits the rhetorical phases White calls mime-
sis, diegesis, and diataxis. Moreover, it exhibits these three phases operating in close
conjunction with an ordered series of tropes-metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche,
and irony-forming the center of the tropological analysis White extrapolates from
GiambattistaVico and Kenneth Burke.While the parodic term linguisterie that Lacan
introduced in seminar twenty (1972-73) suggests an ironic awareness of linguistics
as indeed a figure of speech, he does not express such an ironic detachment in "The
Agency" itself.

1. Introduction
1.1 Freud'sArchaeology
Even if, as Freud joked, he brought the "plague" into the world with his
psychoanalytic theory, he certainly brought a method of interpretation
that has powerful implications for all hermeneutic activity, all decipher-
ing or making of meaning from any sort of text. In literary study, however,
the Lacanian reading threatens these days to supplant the Freudian as the
most frequently practiced mode of psychoanalytic literary hermeneusis.
While Jacques Lacan always insisted that he was a Freudian and there-
fore worked within "the Freudian Field"-indeed he called his teaching
forum, begun in 1964, "l'ecolefreudienne"-his approach to analysis differs
from Freud's, sometimes in subtle, sometimes in radical, ways. I contend
that a primary difference relates to questions of poetics. Lacan differs from
Freud because he constitutes his field of discourse in a different way. It
is well known that Freud constructed his discursive field through a meta-
phor of archaeology (see Moller 1991; Gay 1988: 170-73). As early as "The
Aetiology of Hysteria" (1896), we find Freud drawing an analogy between
the ways archaeologists and psychoanalysts work to uncover buried histo-
ries. Imagine, Freud (ibid.: 192) says, "that an explorer in a little-known
region ... may have brought picks, shovels and spades with him, and he
may set the inhabitants to work with these implements." He goes on to
speak of a buried site and archaeological activities. "Together with them
he may start upon the ruins, clear away the rubbish, and, beginning from
the visible remains, uncover what is buried." He ends with the triumphs
of the discipline. "If his work is crowned with success," he says, "the dis-
coveries are self-explanatory: the ruined walls are part of the ramparts of
a palace or a treasure-house; the fragments of columns can be filled out
into a temple; the numerous inscriptions, which, by good luck, may be bi-
lingual, reveal an alphabet and a language, and, when they have been de-
ciphered and translated, yield undreamed-of-information about the events

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Mellard* InventingLacanianPsychoanalysis 501

of the remote past, to commemorate which the monuments were built."


While archaeology is not Freud's only constitutive metaphor (the mecha-
nistic or thermodynamic one of energy and forces is important to the
second topography-id, ego, and superego), one sees easily enough why
archaeology's work of uncovering a hidden history would not only be so
important in the invention of the discourse of the unconscious, but would
fascinate Freud throughout his career. Archaeology, as Moller (1991)has
shown, was as central to Freud's "Constructions in Analysis" (1937) as it
was to "The Aetiology of Hysteria."

1.2. Lacan'sLinguistics
Equally well known is that in a historically apt "structuralistturn" Lacan
adverted in his rereading of Freudian discourse not to archaeology, but to
a discipline -linguistics - already faintly visible in Freud's imagery above
of inscriptions, alphabet, and language. Lacan is known to be particularly
indebted for his "linguistics"to Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakob-
son. But having referred to Claude Levi-Strauss's "The Effectiveness of
Symbols" (1949) in "The Function and Field of Speech and Language in
Psychoanalysis" (1977b [1953]), Lacan also seems, in the words of Dylan
Evans, to have been "inspired by" the anthropologist, "who in the 1940s,
had begun to apply the methods of structural linguistics to nonlinguistic
cultural data (myth, kinship relations, etc.), thus giving birth to 'structural
anthropology"' (1996: lo1). Though linguistic terms are everywhere visible
in Lacan (much more, indeed, than archaeological references are visible in
Freud) and though many Lacanians address language and linguistic issues
in Lacan, Lacan's use of linguistics itself is somewhat misconstrued. A
voluminous body of commentaries -of which the most fruitful recent one
is Moller's (1991)-envelops Freud's troping as he speaks of psychoanaly-
sis. For that reason, one might as readily examine the commentary on
Freud as Freud'sprimary documents themselves. That is not the case with
Lacan. While an enormous volume of commentary also surrounds Lacan
and his focus on language and linguistics, not much of it actually focuses
on his rhetoric or his troping or even admits that he usestropes, rather than
merely discussing them, when talking about psychoanalysis.
The work of David Macey (1988) notwithstanding, Lacanian studies
seem, for the most part, still at the level of the literal. At this stage, scholars
take the metaphors and other tropological moves as natural or ordinary
or merely factual in some unproblematic, referential way. Then they tend
either to support or to debunk Lacan's linguistics. Although Macey comes
closer than others to my tropological orientation (and, indeed, I return to
him in my conclusion), it is Macey (ibid.: 123)who reminds us how the "lin-

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502 PoeticsToday19:4

guistic model ... dominate[s] many of the classic presentations of Lacan."


Macey refers, for instance, to Louis Althusser and Anika Lemaire and to
other presentations found in the journals Screenand TelQuel.Though the
main interest of Althusser (1971[1964]: 188) is Marxism and dialectical ma-
terialism, he says, for instance, "Lacan would be the first to admit that his
attempted theorization would have been impossible but for the emergence
of a new science: Linguistics." Likewise, Lemaire (1977[1970]: 187)says not
only that the "progress made by the Lacanian school of psychoanalysis has
allowed us to come to grips with the profound nature of the unconscious
which had, until then, remained unknown," but also that "contemporary
developments in linguistics were needed to make such a profound advance
in the knowledge of man, and Freud did not have sufficiently advanced
studies at his disposal for him to make these discoveries."
While the supportersgenerally held sway, there were nonetheless strong
critics of Lacan's linguistics almost from the start. While some simply re-
jected it, others displaced it toward some other discipline they found more
important. Among the former, for instance, Macey (1988: 123) insists, "It
is ... difficult to take Lacan at all seriously as a linguist as opposed to a
psychoanalyst who is fascinated by language." Indeed, calling Lacan's lin-
guistics charlatanism, Macey says that "it is [as] dangerous to mistake a
fascination with language for linguistics ... [as it is to take] exploration for
cartography."But long before Macey, the first important North American
commentator on Lacan, Anthony Wilden (1968), though otherwise sympa-
thetic, attacked Lacan's linguistic ideas on the grounds of their inconsis-
tency and imprecision. Moreover, focusing particularly on Lacan's use of
Saussure and his notion of the signifier, French linguists such as Georges
Mounin (1969) and even Lacan's friend Emile Benveniste (1971 [1966])
strongly critiqued the legitimacy of Lacan's wedding of Freudiantheory to
linguistic theory. Sometimes denying the validity of linguistics, sometimes
displacing linguistics toward some other discursive field, the critiques have
only intensified over the years. On the side of denial, joining Macey's "Lin-
(1988: 121-76) as among the most radical critiques,
guistics or Linguisterie?"
is Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen's "Linguisteries"(1991:169-96). On the side of
displacement, Juliet Flower MacCannell and Stephen Michelman shift
discussion of linguistics toward other disciplines. Whereas MacCannell
(1986: 14) says literature "is the proper model for figuring Lacan," Michel-
man (1996) both offers one of the most useful recent overviews of the vari-
ous objections to Lacan's linguistics and argues that sociological theory is
more important than linguistics to the constitution of Lacan's discourse.

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Mellard* InventingLacanianPsychoanalysis 503

2. Linguistics-as-Trope

2.1. New Trope,New Poetics


It is neither literature nor sociology but linguistics that offers Lacan a new
way to think about psychoanalysis.Yet none of the commentators-pro or
con--seems to recognize that, as Lacan uses linguistics in the poetics and
rhetoric of his revision of psychoanalysis, linguistics is a trope, a figure of
speech or, for all practical purposes, a myth, a structure, as Levi-Strauss
says, with which one thinks. Because critics both pro and con take it as
if Lacan were really doing linguistics,' they have not recognized that lin-
guistics is the constitutive trope in Lacan's rethinking Freudian discourse.
Between Lacan's 1936 lecture on the mirror phase and the beginning of
the famed seminar in late 1953, Lacan seems to have been only randomly
rereading Freuduntil he seized upon the role of language and the explana-
tory power of linguistics as a discipline and an integrating trope. "While
Lacan's interest in language," says Dylan Evans (1996: lo1), "can be traced
back to the early 1930S, when he analysed the writings of a psychotic
woman in his doctoral dissertation ..., it is only in the early 1950Sthat he
begins to articulate his views on language in terms derived from a specific
linguistic theory, and not until 1957 that he begins to engage with linguis-
tics in any detail." Specifically, as Macey (1988: 130) suggests, he offers his
linguistic manifesto in "The Function and Field of Speech and Language
in Psychoanalysis"(1977b1953)and makes more evident his use of Saussure
in "The Freudian Thing" (1977c [1955]), but it is "The Agency of the Let-
ter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud"(1977d[1957])that goes be-
yond manifesto of change to Lacan's most systematic extrapolation of the
new linguistic trope to constitute his discursivefield. If it is, as Macey (1988:
139) suggests, "the locusclassicusof Lacanian linguistics," it is also the site
of Lacan's tropological reinvention of psychoanalysis through linguistics.

2.2. Reading"TheAgency of the Letter"


To uncover Lacan's new trope and new poetics, I shall focus on "The
Agency of the Letter" (1977c [1957]). Both because it is indeed the most

i. Some commentatorson Lacansuggestthat he beganhis linguisticrereadingof Freudas


earlyas the 1930s.Manysubscribeto whatMacey(1988:1-25)calls "The Final State"and
Michelman(1996:25) calls "the timelesssystem,"for they assumethat Lacan's"system"
was in place fromthe beginning.Lemaire(1977[19701)may havebeen the most influential
earlysuchcommentator.She focusesdirectlyon Lacan'suse of linguistics,butforher,as for
manyothersboth beforeand afterher, linguisticsseemsalwaysalreadypresent.She gives
no indication,for instance,that Lacan'slinguisticsemergesin the 1950Sand changesover
time or that the momentin whichLacaninventedhis linguisticrereadingof Freudoccurs
in "TheAgencyof the Letter."

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504 PoeticsToday19:4

systematic of Lacan's essays "about" language and linguistics and, no


doubt, because it was among the nine essays of the nearly forty in the
original Ecrits(Lacan 1966) Lacan saw fit to include in the English trans-
lation, Ecrits:A Selection(Lacan 1977a), many other Anglophone scholars
have analyzed it as well. Among the earliest and most influential readings
was that of John P. Muller and William J. Richardson in the very funda-
mental, almost literal, line-by-line reading found in LacanandLanguage: A
Reader'sGuideto "Ecrits"(1982). More tendentiously, with corrosive wit and
sometimes disarming charm, Jane Gallop (1985) has read the essay in a
combination of deconstructive and feminist terms. More like Muller and
Richardson, Bice Benvenuto and Roger Kennedy (1986) do a reading that
many early enthusiasts for Lacan found helpful because of its attention to
Lacan's relation to Saussure. Perhaps because Lacan himself referred to
it, the most famous-as well as extensive-reading of "The Agency" is
Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's The Titleof the Letter:A
Readingof Lacan, published in 1973 and recommended the same year by
Lacan to the participants in his seminar twenty, "Encore"(1972-73). More
recently, in an analysis almost as extensive as that in The 7itle of the Let-
ter,Gilbert D. Chaitin (1996) analyzes Lacan's aesthetic and philosophical
uses of the concepts of metaphor and metonymy as exhibited mainly in
"The Agency," but Chaitin's approach, while extremely cogent and illu-
minating, is largely rhetorical.
But none of these analyses takes an approach similar to mine. Nancy
and Lacoue-Labarthe might well have, but, though their approach is valu-
able, I would classify them as among the displacers of linguistics, for they
are generally philosophical and specifically deconstructive. Nor is their
reading even particularlyin the registers of the linguistic or the psychoana-
lytic. In their translators'preface to the book, Francois Raffoul and David
Pettigrew say that Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe "demonstrate that the sci-
ence of the letter articulates itself onto another register, that of the philo-
sophical" (Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe 1992: ix). In the most important
"stage" of the book, say the translators, the authors "abandon their com-
mentary per se and reveal a system in Lacan's text which is determined
by, and reinscribes, a number of classical philosophical presuppositions:
the certainty of subjectivity, systematicity, and the positing of a ground"
(ibid.). Although in the first two stages of The Titleof theLetterNancy and
Lacoue-Labarthe argue that Lacan first uses linguistics to challenge "the
traditional theoretical order" and then argues for a "paradoxical recon-
struction of that very theoretical order" (ibid.: viii), ultimately they do not
suggest how "The Agency of the Letter" offers a Lacanian poetics, a key to

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Mellard* InventingLacanianPsychoanalysis 505

how Lacan uses linguistics to invent his particular version of the Freudian
discursive field.

2.3. A TropologicalMethod
Examining Lacan's rhetoric and poetics, I shall analyze the constitution
of Lacanian discourse in "The Agency of the Letter" through a rhetorical
method called "tropology."For illustrations of this approach see Mellard
(1987), Rice and Schofer (1983), and White (1973, 1978, 1987). Because of
his interest in tropes, tropology meshes very well with-even reflects-
Lacan's poetics. Indeed, Benvenuto and Kennedy (1986: 120), without re-
course to my tropological method, say that "Lacan's whole teaching is
metaphorical." Like any other discursive field, Lacanian discourse is in-
vented or constituted precisely in ways accessible through tropological
analysis. Perhaps today's leading international tropological theorist, Hay-
den V. White, demonstrates that as a discourse moves back and forth from
the unknown to the known, it functions through predictable phases and
operations open to analysis. "A discourse," says White in his introduction
to Tropicsof Discourse(1978: 4), "moves 'to and fro' between received en-
codations of experience and the clutter of phenomena which refuses incor-
poration into conventionalized notions of 'reality,''truth,' or'possibility.'"
That is, discourse mediates between what he calls the interpretive and
the preinterpretive. While this mediative process may be called dialecti-
cal, White prefers to call it diatactical in order to distinguish it from the
processes of logic. Discourse, White (ibid.) suggests, crosses all the rules
of comprehension, "throws all 'tactical' rules into doubt, including those
originally governing its own formation." But it nonetheless offers a struc-
ture of levels or phases that allow us to analyze it. White calls these phases
mimesis, diegesis, and diataxis. But, further, he suggests that these three
phases operate in close conjunction with a series of tropes-the four tropes
(metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony) that form the center of the
tropology White extrapolates from GiambattistaVico and Kenneth Burke.
In typical practice, this mediative process is entirely unconscious at first
and is only later rationalized as a naturalized structure. It begins in the
figuring of an unknown in the terms of some known that seems like it.
A simple instance of the principle sometimes occurs in naming, as when
Spanish explorers in the American Southwest encountered vertical up-
croppings of rock with a flat top and named them mesas,a Spanish word
for tables.In this instance, the metaphor of tablegoes nowhere, for it does
not lead to a system of objects in the landscape named after pieces of fur-
niture. More typical of complex analytical or constructive thought is the

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506 PoeticsToday19:4

process exemplified by Freud's enfiguring psychoanalysis as archaeology.


When Freud needed a figure to explain how psychoanalysis explores the
unconscious, he used its metaphorical likeness to archaeology. That bit of
metaphorical naming (psychoanalysis is archaeology) allowed him then to
move to other aspects of psychoanalysis-to the parts or pieces or elements
that associate around the named object (archaeology). Thus, in the phase
of diegesis and through the trope of association-metonymy-he moves
beyond exploratory digging to the acts of interpretation and the narra-
tives that interpretation constructs to make sense of the objects uncovered
(these moves are clearly visible in both Freud 1896 and Freud 1937).
In my analysis of Lacan's "The Agency of the Letter,"I intend to show-
in considerable detail and paying close attention to the text-how Lacan
follows the process mentioned above in inventing a new psychoanalytic
poetics. Mimesis and metaphor characterize the first tropological moves
Lacan makes; diegesis and metonymy, the second; and diataxis and synec-
doche, the third. First, where metaphor performs the naming operation,
mimesis involves "the description . . . of the 'data' found in the field of
inquiry being invested or marked out for analysis" (White 1978: 4). Next,
where metonymy performs the operations of dividing into parts and clas-
sifying, diegesis involves the argument or narrative "running alongside of
or interspersed with the descriptive materials" (ibid.). Finally, where syn-
ecdoche performs the operation of integrating parts into a whole founded
upon the originating metaphor, diataxis involves "the combination of these
previous two levels" (ibid.). Since the diatactical level is actually the whole
of a complete or successful discourse, it represents what we must regard as
our sense of the integrity and consistency of the argument the discourse
represents. "The archetypal plot of discursive formations," says White
(ibid.) in summation, "appears to require that the narrative 'I' of the dis-
course move from an original metaphorical characterization of a domain
of experience, through metonymic deconstructions of its elements, to syn-
ecdochic representations of the relations between its superficial attributes
and its presumed essence, to, finally, [an ironic] representation of what-
ever contrasts or oppositions can legitimately be discerned in the totalities
identified in the third phase of discursive representation."Using these ana-
lytic tools (the three phases and the four tropes), I will examine how in
"The Agency of the Letter" Lacan invents a post-Freudian psychoanalysis
through his linguistic turn or troping upon Freud.

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Mellard* InventingLacanianPsychoanalysis 507

3. Analyzing"TheAgency of the Letter"

3.1. Phase One: Mimesis and Metaphor


When a creative thinker creates a new object of thought, he or she oper-
ates in the rhetorical phase White calls mimesis by using for the invention
a metaphor based on some presumed likeness. Metaphor, White suggests,
is the naming operation. As Freud uses archaeology in his tropological in-
vention and exploration of his field of discourse, so Lacan uses linguistics
as his creative metaphor to name the object he will later extend through
the rhetoric of diegesis and the operations of metonymy and will yet later
integrate at a higher level through the rhetoric of diataxis and the opera-
tions of synecdoche. Linguistics gives Lacan a known to which he can
attach the many parts of an unknown psychoanalysis that will appear as
he redefines it.2Although Lacan could not have known of tropology in my
terms, he certainly understood its conceptual operations and the way it af-
fected his discipline. Because Lacan acknowledges the power of metaphor
in reorienting ways of thinking, he also knows that his turn to linguistics
will have the same effect on his epoch as Freud'sturn had on his era. As he
shows in the conclusion to "The Agency of the Letter,"Lacan is well aware
that his recourse to linguistic science will irrevocably change the Freudian
field. Lacan finds his science in Saussure,Jakobson, and, I contend, Ben-
veniste (Mellard 1991; see also Borch-Jacobsen 1991: 142), and he also finds
it validated, as Macey demonstrates, in the work of structural anthro-
pologists such as his inspiration, Levi-Strauss. Lacan necessarily reinvents
psychoanalysis as a discourse through his own constitution of another dis-
course. That is, as he works his way through "The Agency of the Letter,"
Lacan's procedure, though not always orderly, instantiates all the tropo-
logical moves a well-formed discourse will make.3In linguistics he finds his

2. One shouldnote, again, that Freud,just as other creativethinkers,used other tropes


at other times to constructrevisionsof his system.He very effectivelyused the thermo-
dynamictropeto enfigurethe relationsamongid, ego, and superego,but thattropeneither
destroyednor displacedthe originatingtrope.Likewise,Lacanalso usedothertropes.Late
in his career,he turnedto the tropeof knots--especiallyBorromeanknots- to enfigurethe
relationsamongthe Real, Imaginary,and Symbolicas registers(a linguisticterm,it should
be noted).But while the theoryof knotsmay have displacedlinguisticsfromthe centerof
Lacan'sfocus,it couldneverdiminishthe importanceof linguisticsforthe veryconstitution
of Lacanianpsychoanalyticdiscourse.As I suggestin my conclusion,however,linguistics
mayhavelost someof its lusterforLacan.But,as I show,Lacan'slateperspective-with the
multiplelevelsof ironyit suggests-also playsa rolein the stagesof tropologicalanalysis.
3. Thereis no questionthatif Lacanhad followedthe proceduresof tropologicalconstruc-
tion in an orderlyfashion,we wouldunderstandmuchmore readilythe way in whichlin-
guisticsservesits constitutivepurposeas a trope.While"TheAgencyof the Letter"shows
moremarksof writtendiscoursethan some of Lacan'swritings(ecrits), it nonethelessbegan

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508 PoeticsToday19:4

metaphor to name his reinvention; in the parts his linguistics gives him, he
finds the metonymical extensions by which he explores the newly defined
field; and in a further trope-the letter-cum-Other-he discovers a syn-
ecdoche within which he can reintegrate the many parts uncovered in the
exposition of his essay's middle. Taken together, the tropological moves fit
into the rhetorical phases and, as rhetoric tends to do, serve both offensive
and defensive purposes, that is, to invent and to protect one's invention.
I shall first examine the rhetoric of defense. Serving the same rhetorical
purpose found in Freud'suse of the trope of archaeology (see Moller 1991),
linguistics allows Lacan to protect his field from assaults on its veracity
or truth value. If for Freud archaeology is a field already legitimate as a
science, then psychoanalysis becomes legitimate by being likened to it. In
the same way, if linguistics is legitimate as a science, then a psychoanalysis
likened to or constructed upon linguistics automatically (or so one pre-
sumes) becomes legitimate as well. While rhetorically, for Lacan, this step
may be the most important of all, in Lacan as in others it is the one that
takes up the least space. Lacan handles it rather briefly in two ways, one
direct, the other indirect. On one hand, just ahead of his extended (met-
onymic) discussion of the interrelations of linguistics and psychoanalysis,
he indirectly implies a link between his project and truth, and, on the
other hand, he makes direct claims about the scientific credentials of lin-
guistics. As to the first, the indirect implications come in his ironic use of
the phrase "domain of veracity" and the statement (which we may take as
a veritable thesis for the entire essay) that concludes his introductory pas-
sage: "And how could a psychoanalyst of today not realize that speech is
the key to that truth, when his whole experience must find in speech alone
its instrument, its content, its material, and even the background noise
of its uncertainties" (Lacan 1977d [1957]: 147).This is to say that because,
in the relation of analyst to analysand, analysis is founded totally on lan-
guage, psychoanalysis must be in need of linguistics and its analytic tools.
As to the second, the direct claims for the scientific credentials of lin-
guistics occur a few pages further.While aware that nonscientific versions
of linguistics exist, Lacan (ibid.: 148) writes that he will "trust only those
assumptions that have already proven their value by virtue of the fact
that language through them has attained the status of an object of scien-
tific investigation." But these credentials alone do not explain why Lacan
turns to linguistics. "While Lacan was at first excited by the prospect of

life as a speech and perhaps was not as rigorously revised to fit the standards of written
discourse as one would expect from anyone but Lacan. In contrast, Freud certainly would
never have published anything so highly inflected by the marks of speech.

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Mellard* InventingLacanianPsychoanalysis 509

founding psychoanalysis as a science on bases similar to those of linguis-


tics and structural anthropology,"writes Bruce Fink (1995: 139), "he later
distinguished psychoanalysis from the latter two disciplines in that they do
not take truthinto account: the cause,and thus the subject that will have
resulted from that cause." But in "Agency,"his early infatuation with lin-
guistic science persists. He claims not only that linguistics occupies "the
key position" in the realm of scientific investigation, but also that even the
sciences are being regrouped and reclassified around linguistics. Such a re-
orientation of the sciences, writes Lacan (1977d[1957]: 149), "signals, as is
usually the case, a revolution in knowledge." Thus, clearly, the reorienta-
tion of psychoanalysis within the field of linguistics merely participates in
the reorientations going on elsewhere in the sciences generally and, espe-
cially, in the sciences of man, those disciplines we in the United States
usually call the social sciences. Hereafter, Lacan's defense of the veracity
or what we might call the scientificity of psychoanalysis becomes a con-
stant, a given, a background screen against which the analysis of psycho-
analysis with the tools of linguistics can take place.
Let me now turn to the "offensive"aspect, the rhetoric of invention that
grows from Lacan's new poetics. The analysis of psychoanalysis within the
terms of his understanding of linguistics takes up the bulk of "The Agency
of the Letter."His first constitutive move, which occurs in the essay's first
part ("The Meaning of the Letter"), is to name linguistics his grounding
trope and to extend its reach wide enough to embrace psychoanalysis as if
it existed apart from Freud. His second move, occurring in the second part
("The Letter in the Unconscious"), is again to connect psychoanalysis to
linguistics by rereading Freud to show that, however unaware, he too oper-
ated along lines defined by linguistics. His third move is toward Logos or
Language-as-Langage,toward "the Word"or language in its broadest con-
ceptual sense. Because the first two are related moves, I will handle them
simultaneously where possible and so will draw on passages from both
parts when they augment each other.
The unconscious, Lacan will say, is structured like a language, but the
word likesignals that, for his constitution of Lacanian discourse, linguistics
is a figure of speech, not a discipline to be taken literally. On this figure,
Fink (1995: 8-9) comments: "Lacan did not assert that the unconscious is
structured in exactly the same way as English, say, or some other ancient
or modern language, but rather that language, as it operates at the uncon-
scious level, obeys a kind of grammar, that is, a set of rules that governs
the transformation and slippage that goes on therein. The unconscious, for
example, has a tendency to break words down into their smallest units-
phonemes and letters-and recombine them as it sees fit." Still, by assert-

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ing immediately in "Agency"that "what the psychoanalytic experience dis-


covers in the unconscious is the whole structureof language," Lacan (1977d
[1957]:147)argues for the near-identity of unconscious and language or, we
might say, the human capacity for language. Indeed, as if to suggest that
he is simply bringing out a fact known to everyone, he claims Freud him-
self must have known as much. Not only does Freud devote one-third of
all his pages to philological references and one-half to logical inferences,
but Lacan insists that he also devotes everything to what Lacan calls a lin-
guistically oriented "dialectical apprehension of experience" (ibid.: 159).
Wherever the unconscious is concerned, says Lacan (ibid.), Freudalways
increases the proportion of space devoted to analysis of language. "Thus in
'The Interpretation of Dreams,' every page deals with what I call the let-
ter of the discourse, in its texture, its usage, its immanence in the matter in
question. For it is with this work that the work of Freud begins to open the
royal road to the unconscious." The road to the unconscious runs through
the dream, and dreams are "read" quite literally as a rebus because of
an "agency in the dream of that same literal (or phonematic) structure in
which the signifier is articulated and analysed in discourse"(ibid.). We are,
Lacan writes, to take as signifiers only such images from the dreams Freud
discusses as a boat on a roof or a man with a comma in place of a head.
From these images-as-signifiers, Lacan (ibid.) argues, we are to "spell out
the 'proverb' presented by the rebus of the dream." But, he suggests, we
are not to regard these images-as-signifiers as merely aberrant or unnatu-
ral occurrences. They are founded, he insists that Freud insists, on the
-
"very principle"-the presence of a linguistic structure that gives us "the
'significance of the dream,' the Traumdeutung" (ibid.). In short, as if to say,
"Freud made me do it," Lacan here argues that linguistic science is nec-
essary because Freud already uses a form of linguistic theory. In the first
part of "The Agency of the Letter,"Lacan interprets such claims as these
to mean that the unconscious is something other than the place of a priori
forces such as the instincts. "Informed minds" must now realize they must
rethink "the notion that the unconscious is merely the seat of the instincts"
(ibid.: 147). In the second part he says much the same thing. "The un-
conscious is neither primordial nor instinctual, what it knows about the
elementary is no more than the elements of the signifier"(ibid.: 170).
Thus in part 1 Lacan will begin the necessary rethinking by examining
the elements of the signifier. He begins with what we may conceive to be
the smallest particle of linguistic science: the letter he mentions in his sub-
title. "By 'letter,'" he writes, "I designate that material [phonematic] sup-
port that concrete discourse borrows from language" (ibid.: 147). Further-

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Mellard* InventingLacanianPsychoanalysis 511

more, he intends to use the notions of "letter" and "material support" in


ways that avoid any direct connection to the experience of specific human
subjects. For Lacan (ibid.: 148), importantly, "language and its structure
exist prior to the moment at which each subject at a certain point in his
mental development makes his entry into it"-however much language
becomes implicated in specific somatic and mental phenomena such as
aphasia and determinations effected by culture in its broadest sense, a
sense, in fact, that Lacan says may itself be "reduced to language." The
reason Lacan uses this specific, "objective"notion of language and the let-
ter becomes clear in his choice to "trust only those assumptions that have
already proven their value by virtue of the fact that language through
them has attained the status of an object of scientific investigation"(ibid.).
Needing the validation of linguistics by science, Lacan (ibid.: 176n. 8) thus
defines in a note attached to the very next sentence what he means: "By
'linguistics' I mean the study of existing languages (langues) in their struc-
ture and in the laws revealed therein; this excludes any theory of abstract
codes sometimes included under the heading of communication theory,
as well as theory, originating in the physical sciences, called information
theory, or any semiology more or less hypothetically generalized."

3.2. Phase Two: From Mimesis to Diegesis and Metonymy


In the rhetorical phase that White calls diegesis, which works primarily
through the functions of metonymy, a creative thinker begins to unfold
what we might call the micro-units of the object named in the founding
metaphor. It is on this phase that Lacan embarksnext, turning to the parts
of linguistic science and connecting them to related phenomena in the new
object, his version of psychoanalysis. In order and building from the small
to the large, these parts are the sign and its algorithm, the phoneme and
the word, and the tropes of metaphor and metonymy.To begin working out
in part 1 the implications of linguistics-as-trope, Lacan invokes Saussure.
He dates the beginning of modern linguistics as a science to Saussure'sem-
phasis on the concept of the sign as composed of a signifier and a signified.
Because Lacan's understanding of Saussure is always in question, I need
to establish several points here. First, it is generally understood that Saus-
sure founds his reinvention of linguistics on several premises: that language
operates by contrast and combination, that signification is systematic, that
elements in signification are relational, and that signs are arbitrary (see
Schleifer 1987). Second, in Saussure's Coursein GeneralLinguisticsthere is
no diagram that looks exactly like what Lacan calls the "algorithm."The
closest to it (Saussure 1959 [1916]: 66) is an ellipse (see Figure 1) on either

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512 PoeticsToday19:4

A
Signified

Signifier

Figure1

Concept

Sound-
image V

Figure2

side of which is an arrow pointing either up (the one on the left) or down
(the one on the right); the ellipse is divided by a line above which is the
word Conceptand below which is the word Sound-image.
Immediately after the diagram (ibid.: 67), Saussure translates Concept
into Signifiedand Sound-image into Signifierand later (ibid.: 114)redraws his
diagram accordingly (see Figure 2).
Third, when Lacan creates his algorithm (S/s; read as "Signifier over
signified")by modifying Saussure'sdiagram from page 114,he reverses the
terms so that one-Signifier-gains dominance both by appearing above
the bar and by beginning with an uppercase letter. Fourth, whereas Saus-
sure gave no priority to either Concept/Signified and
or Sound-image/Signifier
conceived of them as two sides of a sheet of paper (ibid.: 113),Lacan en-
figures the two elements of the sign not only as having different levels of
importance, but also as being entirely separate from each other.
Thus, it seems from the outset that while Lacan has a defective under-
standing of Saussure, his misunderstanding-of the sort, perhaps, that he
himself might have called meconnaissance-makesno difference to the con-
stitutive value of linguistics as his trope. Within the rhetoric of diegesis
through which Lacan expands upon the concept of the sign, his argument
makes the algorithm he constructs the most important figure. "To pinpoint
the emergence of linguistic science we may say that, as in the case of all
sciences in the modern sense, it is contained in the constitutive moment of
an algorithm that is its foundation" (Lacan 1977d [1957]: 149). Whereas I
identify the constitutive moment of Lacan's invention of his psychoanaly-
sis in linguistics as such, Lacan locates the emergence of linguistics itself

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Mellard* InventingLacanianPsychoanalysis 513

as a science in the algorithm because it gives the appearance, if not the


actuality, of mathematical precision and because it suggests the objective
arbitrarinessof language as an object of study. Lacan thus recognizes that
linguistics cannot become a science as long as words or significations, in
their primordial being, belong to subjects or subjectivity,for in subjects the
formations, if not the transformations, of words and significations would
be unavailable to the objective mapping of mathematics or other arbitrary
codes or systems.
Lacan's major diegetic premise, ostensibly founded on Saussure, is that
linguistics, like theory in science, operates in the domain of signifiers, not
that of the signified. Such operation means that, within the domain of sig-
nifiers, signification has nothing to do with any presumed natural reality,
for it operates only within the humanly constructed systems of significa-
tion, founded on difference that the mechanisms of language constitute.
Whereas Saussure tends to imagine a close articulation (albeit, he insists,
arbitrarybetween a Signifier (Sound-image) and a Signified (Concept) en-
figured as the recto and verso of a sheet of paper, Lacan regards the ele-
ments as irrevocably separate from each other and, in the arbitrarysystem
of language, separate from reality as well. Meaning or signification, then,
occurs not in reference to some outside reality, but in references within a
system of signs and signification. "One cannot go further along this line
of thought," says Lacan (ibid.), "than to demonstrate that no signification
can be sustained other than by reference to another signification."Lacan's
point being that the field of the signified is subordinate to that of the sig-
nifier, he supports that premise by pointing out a fact of linguistics: "that
there is no language (langue) in existence for which there is any question of
its inability to cover the whole field of the signified,"for it is a condition of
the existence of a language "that it necessarily answers all needs" of a cul-
ture (ibid.: 150). Language can so answer because, to repeat, it depends on
no domain of a putative reality, but only on the system of signifiers within
which understanding of this domain is itself constituted. Lacan illustrates
this theme by his famous story of the boy and girl on a train who see
signs reading "Ladies"and "Gentlemen" and infer that they have stopped
at a town called, the boy says, "Ladies," or, the girl says, "Gentlemen."
The example suggests both the arbitrarinessof nomination (as seen in the
nominalist fallacy, expressed in the joke that elephants are called elephants
because they are so big) and the independence of one level from the other,
the signifier from the signified. Insisting, then, on the arbitraryrelation of
signifier and any presumed reality where a signified may be found, Lacan
(ibid.: 150) claims it is merely an "illusion that the signifier answers to the

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function of representing the signified, or better, that the signifier has to


answer for its existence in the name of any signification whatever."
As Lacan embarks at this point on multiple ways of explaining Saus-
surean principles, his rhetoric of diegesis takes several turns to become
more complex. In a first turn, Lacan operates in the register of science.
Here, his style shifts from the anecdotal and allusive to the difficult pre-
cision of scientific discourse (a style that in itself also provides for psycho-
analysis a rhetoric of protection and defense). Saying that, like language in
general, the signifier must be articulated in some way, Lacan explains the
modalities of its articulation. Signifiers, he suggests, "are subjected to [a]
double condition." On one hand, they are "reducible to ultimate differen-
tial elements," and, on the other, they combine "according to the laws of
a closed order" (ibid.: 152).The first, differential elements are phonemes
that enter "the synchronic system of differential couplings necessary for the
discernment of sounds in a given language" (ibid.: 153).Whereas a struc-
tural linguist might say phonemes combine to form morphemes or words,
Lacan (ibid.) suggests they constitute the "mobile characters"that "render
validly present what we call the 'letter,' namely, the essentially localized
structure of the signifier."If the first property of language (its phonemic
elements) operates on the axis Jakobson calls the selectional or paradig-
matic ("synchronic"),the second operates on the axis Jakobson calls com-
binatory or syntagmatic ("diachronic")4and introduces what Lacan calls
the signifying chain (which he enfigures as a necklace whose rings may be
rings in another necklace made of rings, a figure that elsewhere in Lacan
becomes the Mobius strip).
Within linguistic science, these two conditions of the signifier are orga-
nized on a higher plane by lexicology (words existing synchronically) and
by grammar (words organized into diachronic strings according to laws or
rules). But Lacan is quick to point out that meaning is not pinned down in
either the synchronic or diachronic dimension, that of the word or that of
the string of words. The signifier, writes Lacan (ibid.), "by its very nature,
always anticipates meaning by unfolding its dimension before it. As is
seen at the level of the sentence when it is interrupted before the signifi-

4. On these axes, Jakobson differs from Saussure. The differences have caused some confu-
sion among those who study Lacan. Saussure 1959 [1916]: 80 provides a diagram in which
"the axis of simultaneities" is the horizontal and "the axis of successions" is the vertical.
Jakobson and structural linguists after him have typically reversed these: in schematic dia-
grams, they make the vertical the axis of the differing concepts of the simultaneous and
the paradigmatic, and they make the horizontal the axis of concepts of succession and the
syntagmatic. The vertical in Jakobson is the axis of selection; the horizontal, the axis of
combination. In conceptualizing these axes diagrammatically, Lacan follows Jakobson in
assigning metaphor to the vertical axis; metonymy, to the horizontal.

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Mellard* InventingLacanianPsychoanalysis 515

cant term." That is, in popular sports parlance, Lacan believes not that
"it's over when it's over," but that it's never over. In this principle echo-
ing Saussure's notion of the limitlessness of semiosis, Lacan believes that
some meaning always lies before or beyond (anticipated by) the signifier.
Thus while Lacan (ibid.) concludes that "meaning 'insists"' in the chain
of the signifier, he emphasizes that "none of its elements 'consists' in the
signification of which it is at the moment capable." A philosopher might
say, then, though Lacan does not, that while meaning always subsistsin the
chain of signifiers, it is never present at any one point in the chain except
as a moment pinned down by what Lacan calls pointsde capiton,anchoring
points that only momentarily hold meaning within a system of relations, a
phenomenon Derrida (1967)names differance to suggest the constant defer-
ral of meaning and its difference from itself in time.
In a second move in the rhetoric of diegesis, Lacan turns to a new figure
in explanation of Saussureanprinciples and a linguistic unit larger than the
phoneme. In the diegetic expansion of his originating linguistic metaphor,
Lacan moves beyond the point, or smallest unit of language represented
by the phoneme, to a field, represented by multiple chains of significations
contained in a larger discourse. For Lacan, the analogical figure for such
a field of discourse is the musical score. For him the musical score not
only illustrates the perpetual sliding of meaning, but also its polyphony or,
we must say, polysemy.All discourse, says Lacan (1977d[1957]: 154), oper-
ates as if through alignment "along the several staves of a score."Whereas
in the previous move he had talked of science, he talks of poetry when
he illustrates the sliding of meaning or signification. In one of the most
poetic passages in his work, he meditates lyrically on tree(or arbre,which
for him evokes anagramatically the concept of the barre,the gap he--not
Saussure-envisions between signifier and signified). Here, Lacan (ibid.)
suggests concretely how on a two-dimensional diagram the horizontal sig-
nifying chain contains, "as if attached to the punctuation of each of its
units, a whole articulation of relevant contexts suspended 'vertically."'
In its concreteness, the passage helps to elucidate how polysemous lan-
guage can be when significations multiply from within a single word or
point in a syntagmatic string. He needs to emphasize language's polysemy
in order, diegetically, to construct the next level of his linguistic invention
of psychoanalysis. Playing off Saussure's use of tree(arbre)to illustrate the
terms Conceptand Signified(Signifie),Lacan offers, as it were, a jazz riff on
trees that works as much through metonymy as through metaphor. "Let
us take our word 'tree' again," Lacan begins, "this time not as an isolated
noun, but at the point of one of these punctuations, and see how it crosses
the bar of the [nonexistent] Saussurian algorithm." Moving associatively,

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516 PoeticsToday19:4

he "calls up" specific species of tree and "meanings" (strength, majesty)


they carry."Foreven broken down into the double spectre of its vowels and
consonants, it can still call up with the robur and the plane tree the signi-
fications it takes on, in the context of our flora, of strength and majesty."
Shifting from the botanical, Lacan moves to the scriptural and invokes
other associations. "Drawing on all the symbolic contexts suggested in the
Hebrew of the Bible, it erects on a barren hill the shadow of the cross.
Then reduces to the capital Y, the sign of dichotomy which, except for the
illustration used by heraldry, would owe nothing to the tree however gene-
alogical we may think it" (ibid.: 154). Finally, in a prayerfulinvocation, he
soars through a series of other images and conceptualizations evoked by
treeand trees."Circulatory tree, tree of life of the cerebellum, tree of Sat-
urn, tree of Diana, crystals formed in a tree struck by lightning, is it your
figure that traces our destiny for us in the tortoise-shell cracked by the fire,
or your lightning that causes that slow shift in the axis of being to surge up
from an unnameable night into the [one and all] of language" (ibid.: 154-
55). In the language of today's computers, it is as if clicking on the word
treeopens up a virtually unlimited world of trees and significations.
In the rhetoric of diegesis, Lacan turns toward a linguistic unit yet larger
than the word. However poetic his own divagations on the theme of tree,
they all depend from some point within the word itself. But there is within
the field of discourse a unit larger than the word. Besides sentences and
those clusters of sentences that writing (but not linguistics) defines as para-
graphs, reason tells us that there is of course the whole of any discourse
(an essay, for instance, or a book or a whole oeuvre such as Freud's) or
even a discipline such as psychoanalysis as a whole (on the concept of dis-
course, see Ducrot and Todorov 1972 [1979]). But Lacan does not attempt
to deal with that whole. Nor need he. Rather, he implicates the structure
of the whole in the structureof the part. That is, he makes the structure of
the sign, S/s, into the model for any unit of discourse of any size we might
analyze. This turn of his basic figure back upon itself Lacan illustrates by
recourse to lines of verse. Ending his riff on the theme of tree,Lacan turns
to a quotation from Paul Valery's "AuPlatane,"from Les Charmes("To the
Plane Tree," from Charms).
No! saysthe Tree,it saysNo! in the showerof sparks
Of its superbhead
Whichthe stormtreatsas universally
As it does a bladeof grass...

Taking these lines as what he calls a "whole signifier,"on the model of


the sign itself as seen in the algorithm, Lacan once again argues that lan-

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Mellard* InventingLacanianPsychoanalysis 517

guage, as it is observed by linguistics, operates not through subjects, but


through objects. As a whole signifier structuredS/s, the lines, writes Lacan
(1977d[1957]: 155), have "passed over to the level of the signified" and so,
though having begun as a signifier, have dropped from that level. As a
signified now, they have become an object made of language that is ap-
proachable throughlanguage. "What this structure of the signifying chain
discloses,"Lacan (ibid.) argues, is that it is possible "to use it in order to sig-
nify something quiteotherthan what it says."This something other, he insists,
is not merely a "disguise"of the thought of the subject, for that thought is
rather "indefinable."Rather, "it is no less than the function of indicating
the place of this subject in the search for the true" (ibid.). That place, the
subject's place, Lacan insists, is not inside, in the locus of the signifier, but
outside, in the locus of the signified. If one knows the truth, Lacan claims,
one can make it heard in a signifier that will become in turn a signified.
Thus the truth will not need a subject to make itself understood. In Lacan,
that truth, we may say, lies "out there," in the domain of language, much
as reality lies out there, within its own domain, independent of us, inde-
pendent of any subject.

3.3. Phase Three:FromDiegesis to Diataxisand Synecdoche


In the rhetoric of diegesis, as he progresses from smaller to larger units,
Lacan next moves tropologically beyond phonemes and words to the level
of figures of speech and, eventually, to the whole associated with the rheto-
ric of diataxis. The means by which subjects construct and make their
meanings heard are the rhetorical ones of discourse. Tropes are the heart
of discourse. On that Freud is as clear as any tropologist. In part 2 of "The
Agency," to talk about tropes, Lacan goes directly to Freud'sdiscussion of
the modalities of dream and dream analysis and connects them to tropo-
logical moves such as those found in language and studied by rhetoric and
linguistics. For instance, Lacan describes Freud'sEntstellung-distortion or
transposition-in terms Lacan (ibid.: 160) calls "the sliding of the signified
under the signifier."This sliding is the process described by Saussure (1959
[1916]: 66-67) that enables Lacan to "discover"a structure (S/s) that does
two things for him. First, it founds the algorithm formulating the sign;
second, it represents the "general precondition for the functioning of the
dream" itself. The distortion or transposition of a message into another
key or modality, in some sense, is the formation of the dream-language. As
such a language, it thus may be represented in the algorithm and will also
exhibit, Lacan (1977d[1957]: 160) suggests, "the two 'sides' of the effect of
the signifier on the signified."
These two sides of signification, Lacan insists, are found in the tropes

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metaphor and metonymy. While Lacan uses a two-trope tropology he finds


in the linguistics of Jakobson, he clearly forces matters to maintain that
dualistic system. Since it is generally understood that Freud works with
four tropes (see Todorov 1982 [1977] and White 1978), Lacan has to either
eliminate two or reduce the four to two. His strategy is the latter. In con-
structing his discourse, Lacan names metonymy as the trope that, in his
schematic diagramming, operates on the plane Jakobson calls the horizon-
tal (along the axis of syntagmatic combination). He names metaphor as the
trope that operates on the plane Jakobson calls vertical (along the axis of
paradigmatic selection). He then discusses Victor Hugo's "Booz Endormi"
to illustrate the functions of the two tropes, particularlythose of metaphor.
Apparently perceiving his term consistent with Saussure's(1959 [1916]:8o)
"axis of successions,"Lacan says metonymy operates by "word-to-word con-
nexion" and above the bar separating signifier and signified. In the struc-
ture of the purely imaginary Saussurean algorithm, metonymy is situated
on the side of the signifier."I shall designate as metonymy,"he writes, "the
one side (versant)of the effective field constituted by the signifier, so that
meaning can emerge there" (Lacan 1977d[1957]:156). On the other (lower)
side, where original meaning is constructed, lies metaphor. For Lacan,
-
metaphor operates within the terms Saussure-but not White or Burke
calls the associative relation as it follows the principle of simultaneities or
that which in my tropology I call a principle of similarity. "Onewordfor
another," writes Lacan (ibid.: 157),"that is the formula for the metaphor."
Whereas Lacan claims that in metonymy both signifiers (in traditional
examples, crownfor king or sails for ships) are equally present, he states
that in metaphor one signifier is obscured. While this discussion repeats
a common-enough confusion about absence and presence, Lacan seems
to be thinking of Saussure's discussion of the relations he calls syntag-
matic and associative. Referring to relations Lacan later identifies with
metonymy, Saussure (1959 [1916]: 123) says that the "syntagmatic relation
is in praesentia.It is based on two or more terms that occur in an effective
series." Referring to relations Lacan later identifies with metaphor, Saus-
sure says, "Againstthis, the associative relation unites terms in absentiain a
potential mnemonic series."To illustrate presence, Saussure speaks of how
a part of a building will relate to another part in a syntagmatic (and, Lacan
would say, metonymic) relation. To illustrate absence, Saussure speaks of
how, say, a Doric column has an associative (or, Lacan would say, meta-
phoric) relation to styles such as Ionic and Corinthian. In my tropological
terms, the latter clearly suggests a relation of similarity. But Lacan adds
a further dimension to metaphor. Whereas metonymy (he claims) works

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Mellard * Inventing Lacanian Psychoanalysis 519

within a single, horizontal signifying string, metaphor makes a vertical


leap, jumping from one signifying string to another. The second string is
the one below the bar and, for Lacan, thinking he echoes Saussure, absent,
in the way that the concept of style is absent in the relation of the three
types of Greek columns. To illustrate Lacan's notion of metaphor, we may
say that it implies a complex two-part syllogism involving three terms, one
of which is unnamed. To speak of a warrior as brave, we may say, "Charles
is a lion." Implied is the double articulation of "Ais to B as B is to some X"
(Charles is to lion as lion is to ... something, presumably bravery). Or, as
one referee of this article has suggested, the metaphor works here as "A is
like B with respect to C (Charles is like the lion with respect to bravery)."
If the aim is to make Lacan consistent with Saussure, this formulation is
better, for, clearly, it fits the example: Doric is like Ionic and Corinthian
with respect to style. But however we illustrate it, for Lacan the crucial
feature of any formulation of metaphor is that while A and B are present,
C and X are not. Thus, Lacan insists, for the mind to make sense of the
metaphor, it must jump from the known items to the unknown (thereby,of
course, leaving itself open to misunderstanding and the potentially infinite
regress of further new meanings).
As Lacan elaborates on metaphor, he makes the figure serve several pur-
poses, for not only does he intend to contrast metaphor to metonymy, but
he also means to suggest how the structureof metaphor plays a larger role
in psychoanalysis because it repeats the structureof the Oedipus complex.
To begin, he offers his own complex illustration of metaphor's double ar-
ticulation. He eventually attaches the manifold significance of metaphor to
a discussion of Hugo's "Booz Endormi" and the phallic sheaf that stands
for Booz himself. In speaking of Booz, if that sheaf were instead a phallus,
the poet would be employing metonymy, not metaphor, for, presumably,
a man might well be identified by his phallus (or, Lacan would insist, his
penis; the recent American film BoogieNights,about a porn-movie star with
a gigantic penis, tragicomically illustrates such an identification). Oper-
ating through the trope of metaphor, however, Hugo's poem enfigures
a sheaf as a phallus, but because the phallus, in Lacan's and Saussure's
terms, is not present, the lines therefore invoke another, hidden, signifying
string. "The creative spark of the metaphor," Lacan (1977d[1957]: 157)in-
sists, "does not spring from the presentation of two images, that is, of two
signifiers equally actualized. It flashes between two signifiers one of which
has taken the place of the other in the signifying chain, the occulted signi-
fier remaining present through its (metonymic) connexion with the rest of
the chain." Using the second formulation of metaphor suggested earlier (A

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520 Poetics Today 19:4

is like B with respect to C), we may translate Lacan'Scomments as "Booz


is like the sheaf with respect to .. ." what? Let's say power, the power of
sustenance and regeneration.
In the absence of a clearly mandated third term, Lacan suggests, meta-
phor has yet another powerful dimension, for in that process by which one
image or signifier obscures or represses another, it enfigures the very basis
of the Freudian constitution of human subjectivity. In enfiguring, that is,
the Oedipal structure, the sheaf's repression of the phallus is for Lacan
itself a metaphor suggesting how the figure of the father represses (de-
nies) the desire of the child, forcing desire into the unconscious (or, as one
referee for this essay has suggested, into the preconscious since it is acces-
sible). By a further metaphorical leap of his own, Lacan suggests that in
a primal repression of desire the father-signifier thereby creates the un-
conscious itself. "So, it is between the signifier in the form of the proper
name of a man [Booz] and the signifier that metaphorically abolishes him
[the sheaves] that the poetic spark is produced, and it is in this case all
the more effective in realizing the signification of paternity [the phallus]
in that it reproduces the mythical event [the Oedipus conflict] in terms
of which Freud reconstructed the progress, in the unconscious of all men,
of the paternal mystery" (ibid.: 158). It is not that Booz/sheaf invoke the
Oedipus complex, but that the structure of their relation reminds one of
it. Indeed, in its hiding, obscuring, or repressing an earlier signifier, says
Lacan (ibid.), "Modern metaphor has the same structure" (my emphasis) as
the Oedipus resolution itself.
It may be because Lacan relies for his "tropics" on Jakobson that he
privileges just two tropes-metaphor and metonymy-and finds himself
eliminating two of Freud's four. But within the terms of my tropological
analysis it is clear that Lacan needs a more differentiated tropology such
as Freud's in his figurative explanation of how his own discourse (which,
metaphorically, I have called a jazz riff) on the theme of treeworks. Lacan
actually distinguishes not two, but three discursive moves that represent
different tropological functions. Invoking Jakobson's notion of the two
axes of language and their principles of contrast and combination, the
three moves include one we may call vertical, one we may call horizon-
tal, and a third we may call transformative or integrative. If one found a
parallel to this third principle in Saussure, it might well be what he calls
"the domain of articulations" (1959 [1916]: 112), though, to be fair, this
is how Saussure describes language itself. The point is, though, that like
tropologists such as White, Lacan recognizes at least implicitly that any
description of linguistic processes requires the function of transformation
or articulation, the move from some part to some putative whole. In my

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Mellard* InventingLacanianPsychoanalysis 521

tropological terms, the three moves in Lacan I describe must be named


metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche.5As is so often the case in Lacan-
ian discourse, Lacan "performs"his meanings before he explains them in
a more orderly, discursive way. In his performative language, Lacan not
only uses the three tropological moves of metaphor, metonymy, and synec-
doche, but he also exhibits the levels of discourse called mimesis, diegesis,
and diataxis. Metaphorically, he argues, "I have only to plant my tree in
a locution," by which locution we must understand the metaphoric func-
tion and the level of mimesis. Then, suggesting the metonymic extensions
of diegesis, Lacan says he may "climb the tree, even project on to it the
cunning illumination a descriptive context gives to a word." Finally, en-
figuring the synecdochic move of the level of diataxis (that is, the level of
the whole), he claims he may "raise it (arborer [punning on arbre])so as not
to let myself be imprisoned in some sort of communique of the [mere] facts,
however official, and if I know the truth, make it heard, in spite of all the
between-the-linescensures by the only signifier my acrobatics through the
branches of the tree can constitute" (Lacan 1977d [1957]: 155-56).
But what zshis synecdoche? Complicating matters, there is not one but
several, for Lacan moves metaphorically from one to another and another
as he moves from the letter to the unconscious to the Other and finally to
Language, the Word, and Logos.
TheLetter. While Lacan's overt argument in "The Agency of the Let-
ter" focuses on the binary pair of metaphor and metonymy, that third
tropological move I identify as synecdoche is everywhere implicit in how
Lacan thinks because he thinks integratively through complex articula-
tions. While the descriptions of metaphor and metonymy in Lacan's ac-
count seem confused according to the semiotics of our time, Lacan means
for them to be traditional enough. Thus what remains immanent in his
own discourse is that other level, the level of integration or articulation
or transformation, the turn of synecdoche within which meanings become
subsumed in something either larger or more primal in structure. Perhaps
not surprisingly, since his habit has been to work articulations on a single
model, that of the algorithm S/s, Lacan turns for his larger theme back to
the presumably smallest, most primal, unit of linguistic science-the ele-
ment he calls "the letter."But now he blows the letter into a more inclusive
significance than before, for he makes it connote the two most impor-

5. Contrary to the definitions I employ in my tropological analysis, typical dictionary defi-


nitions virtually conflate metonymy and synecdoche and some barely distinguish between
synecdoche and metaphor. See Burke 1969 for discussion of some of the issues surrounding
tropes. In contrast to Jakobson's (1956) two-trope tropology and White's (1973, 1978, 1987)
four-trope system, Bloom (1975)offers a tropology composed of seven tropes.

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522 PoeticsToday19:4

tant integrative, articulatory, synecdochic constructs in the Freudian field:


(1) the subject and (2) the unconscious itself. In part 1 of "The Agency of
the Letter," Lacan spends little time on the first, the subject. He is con-
tent to stress that language-as-language does not depend on the human
subject, nor does linguistics as a science. Yet without a subject, there is no
psychoanalysis. So Lacan cannot simply ignore the subject throughout his
discourse. He thus turns to it in part 2 of "Agency."He does so following a
long, scientific-looking disquisition on metaphor and metonymy, the pas-
sage (ibid.: 164) in which he offers formulas for the two tropes.
Once again, Lacan begins with the algorithm S/s and suggests that
the subject, particularly its desire and symptoms, is implicated in the two
tropes. His transformation of the algorithm is to be read as "the function
of the subject (S) is as an I over or divided by an s."What Lacan offers here
is a quasi-mathematical representation of the divided subject, the subject
always divided from itself, the subject subjected not only to the displace-
ments of desire as represented in metonymy, but also in the expression of
unconscious messages in symptoms as represented in metaphor. Thus, it
turns out in Lacan's many turns that the subject is structuredlike the algo-
rithm, and its dominant expressions-desire and symptoms-are repre-
sented, as in a language, in the tropes of metaphor and metonymy. But as
meaning in language always exists elsewhere in the sign or strings of signs,
so the subject's being (in the place of the signified) and its meaning (in the
place of the signifier and taken as its I or ego or self) is always elsewhere.
Lacan reminds us of this failure of identity by pointing out that "the S
[upper case] and the s [lower case] of the [imagined] Saussurian algorithm
are not on the same level." What is more, since that axis "is nowhere"
(ibid.: 166), "man only deludes himself when he believes his true place is
at their axis." He makes the same point in another way when he suggests,
"I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think." Words,
he suggests, may "render sensible to an ear properly attuned" the "elusive
ambiguity" of "the ring of meaning," but that meaning, he insists, "flees
from our grasp along the verbal thread."To this Lacan (ibid.) adds, "What
one ought to say is: I am not wherever I am the plaything of my thought; I
think of what I am where I do not think to think."The fact is, Lacan insists,
the subject is forever displaced by the lures of metonymic desire, where for-
ward to a desired object is always back to a remembered one. Moreover,
he says, the equal fact is that the desire luring one forward is expressed
only in the metaphoric symptom (in Lacan the symptom is always thought
metaphoric, not metonymic). The symptom is a signifier of the subject's
desire. In Lacan's (ibid.: 167)words, "It is the truth of what this desire has
been in his history that the patient cries out through his symptom." In

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Mellard* InventingLacanianPsychoanalysis 523

the symptom, then, through a flash of insight, the analyst may discover
the object of the patient's desire, for that desire lies beneath the symp-
tom as the signified lies beneath the signifier: the symptom is to desire as
the signifier is to the signified. But because desire, as a signifier, stands for
something missing and, ultimately, unrecoverable to it, it also participates
in metonymic strings, in which one object of desire is always replaced by
another, prompting Lacan (ibid.: 175)to say, "Desire is a metonymy."
The Unconscious. Talk of symptoms and subjects leads Lacan to an-
other synecdochic construct. The second integrative concept Lacan must
somehow explain in terms of his linguistic trope--of linguistics as his
trope-is the unconscious. Lacan addresses the unconscious at the end of
both the first and the second sections of "The Agency of the Letter" and
makes it the dominant focus of the final section, "The Letter, Being, and
the Other." In his way, Lacan invokes the new concept within the context
of the algorithm S/s and the two tropes that function within signification.
Both metaphor and metonymy provide access to the unconscious. Meta-
phor, Lacan argues, occurs at the point where sense emerges from non-
sense, "at that frontier which, as Freud discovered, . . . produces"wit or, in
Lacan's word, produces esprit, a word that signals both witticism and spirit
and, in the latter, connotes a domain that may be thought to underpin
the letter. Likewise, metonymy is also a means of creating wit or humor,
because it has "the power to circumvent the obstacles of social censure"
and therefore to evoke a truth the subject ordinarily represses. These two
ways of the letter-metaphor and metonymy-begin finally, says Lacan,
to bring us to the verge of the "Freudian truth" of the unconscious itself.
"Haven't we felt," he asks, "for some time now that, having followed the
ways of the letter in search of Freudian truth, we are getting very warm
indeed, that it is burning all about us?"(ibid.: 158).That truth, however, is
not to be mistaken for the spirit that in Western thought so often accom-
panies the letter. As language operates without a subject, independent of
human consciousness, and thus is an object in its own right, so the letter
connoting the unconscious likewise operates independently of the spirit.
Lacan (ibid.) adverts to the saying, "The letter killeth while the spirit giveth
life." Though he feels he must agree to some extent with its claim, he also
asks "how the spirit could live without the letter." But because of Freud's
discovery of the unconscious, the letter has punctured the pretenses of the
spirit, for, Lacan (ibid.) argues, Freud has "shown us that [the letter] pro-
duces all the effects of truth in man without involving the spirit at all."Just
as the letter operates independently of the spirit, the unconscious operates
independently of the subject. The unconscious is a subject itself.
Of Freud'sdiscoveries, the unconscious is the one, Lacan says, that most

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524 PoeticsToday19:4

changed the direction of human history. The most revolutionary feature


of the unconscious was not its focus on sexuality, but its very objectivity,
its ability to operate independently of the conscious subject. "It is the
abyss opened up at the thought," writes Lacan (ibid.: 170),"that a thought
should make itself heard in the abyss that provoked resistance to psycho-
analysis from the outset." Because modern psychoanalysis attempts largely
to construe the subject as an autonomous ego (ibid.: 171),Freud's notion
of the unconscious as a subject that dominates the ego or self is particu-
larly disconcerting. "Is what thinks in my place, then, another I?" asks
Lacan. "Does Freud'sdiscovery represent the confirmation, on the level of
psychological experience, of Manicheism?" If it involves such a dualistic
principle, does it posit every subject as a "split personality"?Lacan's inevi-
table answer is yes. The human subject, as Lacan outlines it, is always split.
Since his model of subjectivity remains language as itself modeled by lin-
guistics (well, Lacan'slinguistics), the splits in subjectivity can be described
in a series of transformations of the basic algorithm. On the analogy of
S/s, one split occurs between being and meaning, another between I and
other, and yet a third between ego and Other. These antithetical pairs,
Lacan suggests, exhibit variations on the primal split in language, the gap
between the signifier and the signified, concepts whose functions exist,
Lacan stresses, not merely on different levels, but on levels barred from
one another. For Lacan, such pairs continually reinforce his claim that
the human subject, however rhetorically integrative the concept of sub-
jectivity, is not one but two. The subject is not an entity concentric with
itself, but one that, in Lacan's terms, is "ex-centric"-outside the center
or the circle. Indeed, that this split subject is outside or beyond itself is
the essential Freudian discovery. "The self's radical ex-centricity to itself
with which man is confronted [is] the truth discovered by Freud" (ibid.).
If we ignore that truth, "we shall falsify both the order and methods of
psychoanalytic mediation" (ibid.). Moreover, says Lacan (ibid.: 172),"The
radical heteronomy that Freud's discovery shows gaping within man can
never again be covered over without whatever is used to hide it being pro-
foundly dishonest."
TheOther,Language,the Word,and Logos. However split, however cut
off from that other who "speaks" one, the subject nonetheless may ask
how this other is constituted, how it comes to be. "Who, then," asks Lacan
(ibid.), "is this other to whom I am more attached than to myself, since, at
the heart of my assent to my own identity, it is still he who agitates me?"
Lacan's answer, as we must anticipate, is bound up in the topoiof linguis-
tics. Lacan explains the Other of the Unconscious in terms of language.
Personifying this Other, Lacan connects "him"to the function of language

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Mellard* InventingLacanianPsychoanalysis 525

as a mediation. "His presence can be understood only at a second de-


gree of otherness, which already places him in the position of mediating
between me and the double of myself, as it were with my counterpart"
(ibid.). Moreover, Lacan imbricates this Other in language as discourse.
"I have said that the unconscious is the discourse of the Other (with a
capital O)" (ibid.). But beyond-above, encompassing, transcending-this
conception of the Other as discourse lies the conception of the Other as
Logos, "the Other that even my lie invokes as a guarantor of the truth in
which [the lie] subsists"(ibid.), "the Other who is the guarantor of Good
Faith" (ibid.: 173). For Lacan, the Other may simply be language itself.
For him, language -parole-become-langage -is that which grounds every
aspect of being, meaning, and subjectivity.As the "locus of signifying con-
vention" (ibid.), language is the guarantor of truth and even our ability to
question our being. "It is with the appearance of language [that] the di-
mension of truth emerges," Lacan (ibid.: 172)writes. "Forthere even to be
a question ... there must be language" (ibid.).
Thus for Lacan the nucleus of our being-Kern unseresWesen-is not
something we can ever know fully, any more than we can fully know our
own or any other language. Rather, for Lacan the great Freudian truth of
the Unconscious, the Other that is the Unconscious, is not that it is know-
able as an object of our knowledge. The great truth is that we are the object
of its knowledge, even of its creation. What Freud "proposes for us to at-
tain is not that which can be the object of knowledge, but that ... which
creates our being and about which he teaches us that we bear witness to
it as much and more in our whims, our aberrations, our phobias and fe-
tishes, as in our more or less civilized personalities" (ibid.: 174).Because of
this Other that creates us beyond our knowledge, we as subjects are even
in our normality hardly to be distinguished from the mad. The wise man,
Lacan suggests, may find himself at home in his fear of madness because
"the supreme agent" creating that fear is "none other than . . . the very
Logos that he serves" (ibid.). We are both sane and insane because of the
language within which we are created. Finally, for Lacan, if language is
the Logos or Other that grounds our being, it remains a medium that both
signifies and reifies our alienation from ourselves and from others.

4. Conclusion

4.1. FinalPhase:Ironyand Lacan'sLinguisterie


It would seem never a pleasant moment for creative thinkers to discover
that their creations are wrong or merely a rhetorical edifice built on a

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526 PoeticsToday19:4

foundation of tropological illusion. But if one is Lacan, that may not be


the case, for his creation rests precisely on the premise that in Culture all is
an illusion created by language. In this case, the ironic perception simply
reifies the premise and may give one an ironic sense of triumph. Indeed, at
the end of his career that seems to have been the point to which Lacan had
arrived. In the late work, one finds not disillusionment, but a slyly amused
irony regarding his linguistic tropology. This irony begins to occur late in
the seminars, at the point particularly in seminar twenty where Lacan -as
David Macey notes insistently-begins to dub linguistics linguisterie, a word
Lacan made up that suggests a faux or derivative or degenerate linguistics.
In that seminar, Lacan (1975: 20) writes, "In order to leave Jakobson his
proper domain, we will have to coin some other word. I will call it linguis-
terie."By this term, Lacan means to suggest that language and our means of
studying it are less rational than linguistics presumes. In this view, as Ellie
Ragland-Sullivan (1991:79) writes, "Language is more like a Cartesian res
extensathan a res cogitans.But Lacan's connection of language to the un-
conscious is not a psycholinguistics. His linguisterie proposes that sensexists
beyond the grammatical sense that linguistics studies."Or, as Macey (1988:
127)suggests, "With the coinage of linguisterie psychoanalysis becomes, not
an extension of the field of linguistics, but a 'practice of chatter' which puts
speech on the same level as blather or sputtering. And as Lacan abandons
linguistics for linguisterie,a note of parody is introduced: Saussure's langue
becomes lalangueas the article is condensed with the noun to produce an
onomatopoeic effect and as linguistic scientificity gives way to splutters."
The note of parody or humor or ironic (feigned) dismissal here is impor-
tant to my tropological analysis of "The Agency of the Letter."Whatever
we call it, this note suggests Lacan has entered the ironic phase of the four-
fold tropology I have employed. Where linguistics is concerned, this phase
is new to him and forces us to see his career differently. Linguisterie was
not always already present for him. But just as scholars such as Lemaire
and Benvenuto and Kennedy frequently have misplaced Lacan's interest in
linguistics as beginning in the 1930s and therefore always already present
in his thought, so also have some scholars construed Lacan's linguisterie
as always already present. Benvenuto and Kennedy seem to take this view
as they speak of linguistics and linguisterie as if they arose at the outset as
a binary in Lacan's thought. He differed "from other thinkers," they say,
in "his approach to linguistics: he made a distinction between linguistics-
the science concerned with the linguistic formalization of knowledge--
and what he called La Linguisterie, which is concerned with the side of
language that linguistics has left unformalized. La Linguisterie is the lan-
guage with which the unconscious is concerned, and which psychoanalysis

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Mellard* InventingLacanianPsychoanalysis 527

grasps at the moments of failure of language itself; when meaning fails,


stumbles, or falls to pieces. La Linguisterie is, as it were, the science of the
word that fails, and thus Lacan was concerned with what one could call the
'margins' of ordinary language" (Benvenuto and Kennedy 1986: 17). De-
spite such claims, Lacan simply did not ironize linguistics into linguisterie
until late in his career. Although it is true enough (as Macey, Michelman,
Borch-Jacobsen, and others contend) that Lacan's grasp of linguistics was
always tenuous at best and totally defective at worst, it is equally true that
Lacan believed in his reinvention of psychoanalysis through linguistics at
least up to that point in about 1970 when he coined linguisterie. There-
after, though I assume he continued to believe in it, he had the luxury of
feigning-or metaphorizing-unbelief, the luxury of acting as if, like his
critics, he too no longer needed to accept its truth, whatever-he real-
ized-its truth might be within a post-Saussurean, postmodern world.
Although I do not believe Macey's account of Lacan's use of linguistics
as metaphor is sufficient, I do accept his narrative account of how Lacan
replaced an infatuation with linguistics with the ironic sense the term lin-
guisterie implies. Macey argues that while Lacan began only in the early
1950s to use linguistics as his touchstone for reinventing psychoanalysis, he
did in fact always have an interest in the strange uses of language found
in pathological subjects such as the Aimee of his doctoral thesis. Thus, the
advent of linguisterie is indeed "a return to Lacan's earliest concerns and
to a fascination with the stuff of pathological language rather than with the
theoretical object of Saussure's Coursde linguistique generale"(Macey 1988:
I
127). Quite rightly, believe, Macey associates Lacan's shift to linguisterie
with that other coinage, lalangue. In the "obvious condensation of the
article la and the noun langue,"writes Macey (ibid.: 173),"it constitutes [yet
another] ironic or humoristic reference to Saussure."Macey believes that
the coinages suggest Lacan is leaving linguistics as such and returning to
a sense of the playfulness and indeterminacy of language exemplified for
him in the discourse of psychotics and in the literary discourse of writers
such as James Joyce. But whether a return to earlier preoccupations or a
totally new direction, the notions suggested by either lalangue or linguis-
terie move Lacan away from linguistics, however understood, and toward
other tropes such as formulary mathemes and Borromean knots. "This,"
Macey (ibid.: 175)suggests, "may well be more exciting than the mechanics
of phonemics or the rather dismal science of philology, but it pertains to
linguisterie,not linguistics."
As to the use of linguistics as his creative trope in "The Agency of
the Letter," however, all that finally need be said is that linguisterie and
the modulations of irony have no place. Those would have to come later.

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528 Poetics Today 19:4

At the end of "The Agency," Lacan remains positive and unironic about
langue, about the access of psychoanalysis to it, and about linguistics as the
means by which analyst and analysand might reach it. While Lacan can be
very ironic about the divisions of the subject epitomized in the algorithm
schematizing the sign and symbolizing both subject and language, in the
concluding peroration of "The Agency" Lacan betrays no irony toward
linguistics or language or the project of psychoanalysis itself. Indeed, quite
the contrary: in his language, Lacan sounds like the missionary to the hea-
then preaching a sermon of conversion in which the integrating tropes--
the synecdoches of letter, unconscious, Other, Language, Word, and Logos
-beckon with promises of incorporation into a force or being far greater
than themselves. At this moment in his career, Lacan surely preaches
in "The Agency of the Letter" as if his conversion-the conversion of
Freudian into Lacanian psychoanalysis through the agency of linguistics-
has given him the redemptive, sacramental word he now gives his converts.

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