Zupancic, Alenka. “Psychoanalysis” Columbia Companion to Twentieth-Century Philosophies. Ed. Constantin V.Boundas, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. 457-468. Print
The central themes of structural linguistics are the arbitrariness of the sign and the emphasis on differentiality (signifiers only ‘make sense,’ or produce meaning, as parts of a differential network of places, binary oppositions and so on; the signifying chain is strictly separated from the signified), as well as on the fact that there are no positive entities in language. Lacan concluded that there was an important characteristic of every spoken language that was left out from this account, or was only considered on its margins, … It is not only according to the laws of differentiality that signifiers produce sense, but also according to the two already mentioned mechanisms: sonorous similarities or homonyms and associations that exist in the speaker’s memory. Here we are dealing with something like positive entities, with words functioning strangely similarly to objects. 459
In more general terms we could say that signifiers are not simply used to refer to reality, they are part of the same reality they refer to; hence ‘there is no such thing as a metalanguage’
Lacan transposed the bar separating the signifier from the signified (S/s) into the bar inherent to the register of the signifier itself. Signifiers are never pure signifiers. They are riddled, from within, by unexpected surpluses that tend to ruin the logic of their pure differentiality. On the one side … they are separated from the signified in the sense that there is no inherent connection leading from the signifier to its meaning. Yet, if this were all, the signifying field would be a consistent system and, as the structuralist motto goes, a structure without subject. Lacan subscribes to this view to the extent to which it convincingly does away with the notion of ‘psychological subject,’ of intentional subjectivity using the language for its purposes, mastering the field of speech or being its Cause and Source.
Yet he goes a step further. If we focus on the signifying chain, precisely in its independence and autonomy, we are bound to notice that it constantly produces, from itself, quite unexpected effects of meaning, a meaning which is strictly speaking, a surplus meaning that stains signifers from within. This surplus meaning is also a carrier of certain quotas of affect or enjoyment, ‘jouissance’ … It is precisely through this surplus meaning as enjoyment that signifiers are intrinsically bound to reality to which they refer. Incidentally, this is also the kernel of Lacan’s insistence on the truth being not-all: the effect of the signifier cannot be fully reduced back to the signifier as its cause. 460
The subject of the unconscious is not some deeply hidden subject that makes its presence known through, say, dreams or the slips of the tongue; it only exists with, and within, these very slips of the tongue. 460
What, precisely, it the unconscious? There is no such thing as a direct perception of the unconscious thoughts. dreams (and other formations of unconscious) are not the place where one can get an unobstructed view in the unconscious, beyond the censorship and repression that otherwise ‘hide’ them from consciousness. On the contrary, these formations are nothing but the censorship and distortions at work. … the unconscious is this very distortion, and not some untarnished content lying beyond these distortions, and contained in the coherent narrative of the latent thoughts reconstructed in the process of analysis.
Something is added to the latent thoughts and this surplus, constitutive of a dream, is the unconscious desire. In this perspective the unconscious desire is but this excess of form over content. The unconscious desire is not what is articulated in the latent thoughts, for instance — in the case of Freud’s own famous dream of ‘Irma’s injection’ — the wish to be absolved of the responsibility for a patient not getting better. The same applies to some other cases discussed by Freud, wishes related to professional ambitions or aggressive wishes towards our supposedly beloved ones, or ‘inappropriate’ sexual wishes. All these wishes are not all that unconscious; they are closer to the register of thoughts that we (more or less consciously) have, but wouldn’t admit to.