Rothenberg, Molly Ann. The Excessive Subject. Malden M.A. : Polity Press, 2010.
the Non/Nom-du-Père has no content, much less normative content. the addition of the negation, the Non/Nom-du-Père, makes the subject a signifier, which means that the subject does not control what s/he means to others any more than s/he can know for certain what others mean. In effect, the “paternal metaphor” places a “minus sign,” so to speak, on the immediacy of the presence f the individual, raising the question as to the meaning of the individual, and in this way makes of the individual a signifier, bringing the individual into the realm of signification from the realm of the Real. That is, the Non/Nom-du-Père is a metaphor for the process by which anything, including the child, ceases to simply be and comes to mean, which is to say that it enters into the defiles of linguistic mediation and social appropriation. No object simply means what it is; every object becomes a site of excessive meaning. To be a signifier —and a subject— is to be stuck to an irreducible excess of meaning. In other words, … at its core is the social dimension of language, an unsymbolizable excess (not an unsymbolizable exclusion) produced by the conditions in which meaning arises as perpetually ungovernable (Rothenberg, 111).
