Pluth, Ed. Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. New York: State University of New York Press, 2007.
What they don’t understand is that we’re bringing them the plague.
Metonymy creates an absent or a withdrawn signified effect.
Metaphor creates a verbal incarnation of a signified effect in a signifier by conflating a signifier with this effect, making the signifier act as a signified
Metaphor does not only create a signified effect that exceeds any particular signifier, it also achieves an incarnation of this effect in a particular signifier, which then acts as the “signified” of the metaphor. … The elusiveness that characterizes the kind of signified effect produced by metonymy is, in metaphor, incarnated in one signifier (36).
Even though metaphor, in contrast to metonymy, achieves a “verbal incarnation” of meaning, a signified is still not fully , or simply, present in it (38).
In metaphor, a particular signifier stands in for the more diffuse signified effect, marking the presence of that effect in the signifying chain. Metonymy marks rather the perpetual absence of the signified while at the same time succeeding in creating a signified effect (45).
In metonymy, the signified slides away from signifiers and is always absent from signifiers, even though it is always suggested by them. Metaphor presupposes this arrangement but produces a “verbal incarnation” of the signified effect by making one signifier pose as the signified: the “plague” IS “psychoanalysis.” 39
What I wish to avoid with this reading is the idea that a signified effect can actually be reduced to a signifier, which Lacan’s formulas (particularly the one for metaphor) may lead some to believe. … the signified effect of a metaphor is not one of the signifiers involved in its production, be it “plague” or the “repressed” signfier “psychoanalysis.” So the repressed signifier is not equivalent to the signified effect, and what functions as a signified effect does not remain in the signifying chain as a signifier. “Psychoanalysis” is not the signified effect of the metaphor [see the above title heading] … The signified effect can perhaps be characterized as a new resonance that gets incarnated by the “signified” “psychoanalysis.” 39
The mobius strip could be taken as the signifying chain, and the void that the strip surrounds would be where the signified effect should be placed. … The maintenance of a bar between signifier and signified amounts to the creation of something beyond the signifying chain, which can be said to lack therein despite attempts to incarnate it (in metaphor). Thus unlike in the Saussurean model, where the signified is available on the other side of the sheet of paper, in Lacan’s theory what is on the other side is always another signifier just posing as the meaning or signified (a Mobius strip is, after all, a one-sided surface), and one keeps going around the signified effect without actually getting to it (40).
The main point is that the order of signifiers produces the effect that there is an order of final signifieds beyond signifiers. In imagining the space of this signified effect, we must not be misled into thinking the “beyond” of the Mobius strip os signifiers as something that exists prior to signifiers, or as something that the chain of signifiers is attached to as a sign is supposed to be attached to its referent. In fact, the signifying chain itself forges the signified effect’s space (40).