logocentric – Page 92

pluth difference between lacan and levinas

Pluth, Ed. Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. Albany: SUNY Press, 2007. Print.

Many commentators on Lévinas, as well as Lévinas himself, have tried to ground the subject in an address from the Other. This makes the subject fundamentally ethical, fundamentally indebted to the Other …

… what is called the subject in Lacan’s threory begins when the Other no longer addresses you. According to Lévinas, what is traumatic is the encroachment of the Other on my own psychic space. According to Lacan, what is traumatic is finding out that the Other’s desire concerns something that leaves you out of the picture. Being “touched” by the other is traumatic too, but not being touched at all is at least as bad, and in this absence of a touch can be found the core of Lacan’s theory of the subject (73).

This encounter with the Other’s desire motivates a quest for a signified and an eventual identification with that signified. The Other’s desire plays a role diferent from that played by the image in the mirror stage.

In the imaginary and symbolic identifications, a meaning or an identity is produced, and an individual is presented with a place that is already his or hers. In the encounter with the Other’s desire, I am not given any place at all, and my very being is put into question. The Other’s desire is a mirror that does not return my reflection. (74).

Because of this, the subject in Lacan’s work is not just something determined. It is also a position with respect to a determination, an affirmation or a rejection of it. The subject is some kind of negation of determination. But this negation actually originates from the resistance to signification that is found in the Other’s desire. The Other’s desire is opaque and abyssal. For this reason, it makes any determination appealing, because it is something I can always fall back on (74).

pluth other’s desire mirror stage

Pluth, Ed. Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. Albany: SUNY Press, 2007. Print.

In the mirror stage, I am presented with an image (or a signifier, a unary trait, in Lacan’s later revision of the mirror stage), and I get identified with it. Lacan’s article on the mirror stage does not offer a very satisfactory account of how this identification happens. It just seems to happen.

In Lacan’s later discussion of the mirror stage, we do get an account of why mirror-stage identification occurs. It occurs because the Other identifies me with the image. This is my motivation to identify with the image. It is as if my identity is already “out there,” affirmed by the Other as “me” before I have anything to do with it (72).

A subject is not consciousness

nor is it a “vital immanence.” We have already seen that Lacan rejects these ideas.

When the idea of the Other’s desire is added to this account of identity, the subject can finally be conceived as something that is neither consciousness nor an ineffable lived experience. In other words, the Other’s desire makes it possible to account for how a subject is something other than its identity or its ego. In the encounter with the Other’s desire I am given neither an image nor a signifier for what I am, and I am not encouraged by the other to identify with anything. The Other’s desire is in this way different from the Other’s affirmation of a place for me in identification. With respect to the Other’s desire, I am without a place. I am not even really addressed by the Other. … The Other’s desire is not at all directed toward me (73).

pluth genital stage subject

Pluth, Ed. Signifers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. Albany: SUNY Press, 2007.

The genital stage allows for the creation of a space between the nascent subject and the Other, although again it does not at all resolve the fundamental discord between the two. What is different about this stage is that in it instead of being confronted with the Other’s demand the child is confronted with the Other’s desire — an enigma that appears between the lines of the Other’s demands.

Once the Other’s desire is introduced we can speak about the production of a subject. The earlier stages fail to bring about this production. It is only with the radical lack of a place for the child, a lack that the Other’s desire implies, that a subject can get produced. The oral and anal stages offer a place for the child in the Other, but the production of a subject occurs only when the Other offers no place at all (68).

Without this trigger, there would only be a strictly determined subject-as-meaning, a fate determined by a signifying chain. Without this interruption, the subject would be nothing but a series of signifers working like sheet music in a player piano, and attempts to separate from those signifiers would always be frustrated (69).

In the oral stage, the Other’s demand was a response to the child’s demand, and the child could see himself as the object of this demand, satisfying the Other to his own chagrin. In the anal stage, the Other’s demand to the child, which was first, was also readily answered, again to the child’s chagrin. The genital stage involves a demand from the Other that the child simply cannot answer. This “absolute” demand is in fact what Lacan calls the Other’s desire. This is not a desire for anything specific, and it is not necessarily a desire directed toward the child … It presents the child with an enigma, and as a result it puts the child’s relation to the Other, and the child’s very being, into question. Without this, there would be no possible space apart from the Other (69).

pluth subject signifiers

Pluth, Ed. Signifers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. Albany: SUNY Press, 2007.

Is the unconscious an eternally existing, deep nether-region that contains the true intentions and meanings of the subject? Lacan is vehemently opposed to such an interpretation of the unconscious, such that, according to his view, the unconscious cannot even be said to express itself. It does NOT consist of a region of intentions that can only achieve expression between the lines, as it were, of a conscious, spoken discourse. The unconscious “consists” of nothing but interruptions, bursts, and gaps in signifying practices: “Discontinuity, then, is the essential form in which the unconscious first appears to us as a phenomenon — discontinuity, in which something is manifested as a vacillation” (XI, 34/25). If this is the case for the unconscious, then what must we think about the subject of the unconscious?

I have been saying that the subject is a product of signifiers. This still needs to be explained. For now, it should be noted that if it is a product of signifiers, then we have no reason to suppose that this subject has any intentions whatsoever, or that it is a subject that uses signifiers in an attempt to communicate something (44).

If a subject is something like a signified effect, then this means that it never has a hard and fast place in a signifying chain and is not reducible to any point, any signifier, of a signifying chain. But a subject is also represented nonetheless, and there are certain signifiers to which a subject gets fixated. Certain signifiers are more important for the subject than others, and these are the signifiers involved in the identity of the subject (45-6)

The subject in Lacan’s theory is a function of signifiers. In order to gain clarity on what this means, the structures involved in using signifiers have to be studied. What structures are involved in using signifiers? …

The subject is indeed represented by a signifier. But it is not its intentions that are represented. Rather, its mere existence as a desired subject is what gets represented. So representation and identity are closely related (46).

What does it mean to say that subjects are produced by signifiers? According to Lacan’s theory, a flesh-and-blood individual is not the same as a subject. Certainly a subject is not possible without flesh and blood. But, curiously, there can be an individual without this individual being a subject. This a least is one consequence of Lacan’s theory of the subject. The subject is a particular kind of effect of signifiers on a real individual.

I am saying that a subject is a particular kind of effect of signifiers on a real individual because it is possible for signifiers to have effects on an individual that do not bring about a subject. According to Lacan, psychosis is an example of such a phenomenon. One of the limitations for my study is that what is being said about the subject does not hold for the psychoses, and probably not for perversions either. This study is restricted to neuroses (Note 1, 168).

pluth subject and signifiers

Pluth, Ed. Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. New York: SUNY Press, 2007.

Signifiers are not a medium the subject uses to communicate

Rather, just as meaning rigorously speaking, never occurs as a hard and fast relation between a signifier and signified, although there is a meaning effect or signified effect, there is also a subject effect that occurs due to the interaction of signifiers (40).

“You ask me who this person in the dream can be. It’s not my mother”

The “not” is an attempt to efface the signifier “mother” and to lead the analyst to believe that the analysand’s true thoughts are elsewhere, that the dream had nothing to do with his or her mother. This battle against a signifier in signifiers allows us to see how the conscious subject, the ego, is at odds with another tendency, a tendency that the signifier “mother” manages to represent (42).

Signifiers, despite our conscious use of them, despite our illusory control over their emergence and our illusory belief in our control over how they are to be taken and read, reveal that there is a subject in a place other than the conscious speaking subject’s place. This is the kind of subject Lacan theorizes.

Signifiers … are indifferent to the conscious subject’s (the ego’s) intentions. Where the analysand wishes to deceive the analyst is where there is truth: this is the very structure of the “false false” and is in fact the strucuture of the basic functions of the unconscious — puns, parapraxes, dreams, and slips of the tongue. The unconscious produces signifiers that can be embellished by negations, but which are in fact true (42).

The truth appears despite our attempts to falsify it, or rather, the truth appears because of our attempts to falsify it. One always says more than one intends. So the signifier is in excess of the intention of the conscious subject. It is in this signifying excess, in saying more than we meant to, that the subject effect is to be situated, and not in consciousness, where we struggle to use signifiers to get a meaning across (42).

pluth first thesis chap 2 metonymy metaphor signified effect

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).

pluth signified effect

Pluth, Ed. Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s theory of the subject New York: SUNY Press, 2007.

Certainly meanings can be quite clear at times. By saying “pass me the salt,” my intention is probably clear … But the idea of a meaning or signified effect recalls to us that there is always more evoked by words than what one wants them to mean, and it is not always possible to reduce evocation down to the kind of fixed meaning possessed by signs. The point here is that even when I say “pass me the salt,” there is still more said than what we might normally take the phrase to mean. … Maybe I am quoting someone … or maybe [it’s] an idiomatic expression from my part of the country meaning “how great!” or something entirely different. .. But I am simply trying to illustrate that what is being spoken of here as the signified — always really just a signified effect — is something other than what we might take the more or less easily determinable meaning of a signifier or phrase to be

This “easily determinable meaning” never completely does away with the aura of ambiguity surrounding every signifier and every signifying chain. This aura of ambiguity is just what Lacan’s idea of a signified effect is trying to account for (32).

Signified effect: the evocativeness produced by an interaction of signifiers
Signified: what one ends up with when on attempts to reduce this evocativeness. In this case we have an apparently stable meaning and the appearance of a one-to-one correspondence of a signifier and a meaning. … Of course, such an idea is mythical, but it does nevertheless play an important role in our lived experience of language. But this fixed meaning is in fact always just another signifier, evoking others, generating yet another signified effect. (33)

pluth signifiers signs signfieds chapter 2

Pluth, Ed. Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s theory of the subject New York: SUNY Press, 2007.

Traces … were self-sufficient. Signs implied the ruin of this self-sufficiency by subordinating traces to objects. Signifers go even farther: signifiers are not dependent upon merely one object but upon every other signifier. For this reason, it is not entirely appropriate to speak of a signifier “referring” to other signifiers: it does not refer to them as a sign refers to an object. Rather, all other signifiers absorb it, and its particularity is always vanishing because of this absorption.

What is being described in this movement from traces to signs to signifiers is a movement from the self-sufficiency of the trace to the referential structure of the sign to the radical difference constitutive of the signifier. Of course, this radical difference could just as well be called a “hyper referentiality” … A signifier’s reference is not to a specific object or to a specific sign but to all other signifiers, or to the mere fact that signifiers exist (26).

The signifier then is a purely meaningless and purely differential unity, and unlike the trace, it is not self-sufficient but hyper-referential (29).

Although there may never be a strict union of signifier and signified, signifiers, according to Lacan, give the impression that there is meaning somewhere, however elusive it may be. In fact, this is precisely what signifiers do: they give an impression of meaning (30).

… signifiers are not signs. They originate in a destruction of the one-to-one reference that is constitutive of signs. Also signifiers are constituted by difference, and their uniqueness consists of their difference from other signifiers … A signifier is moreover, meaningless. … So whatever meaning is, it is not reducible to or identifiable with a particular signifier. According to Lacan, signifiers generate a signified effect or meaning effect that cannot itself be situated within the order of signfiiers (30).

This unfixed meaning effect or signified effect is produced by an interaction of signifiers with each other in what Lacan calls … a signifying chain (30).

A signifiying chain is nothing other than a succession of signifiers.

pluth ego ideal

Pluth, Ed. Signifers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007.

Blog post originally published on May 15, 2009 at 9:56

The ego ideal is the symbolic or linguistic foundation of identification. It plays, in the symbolic order, roughly the same role that the mirror image plays in the imaginary order —it is something the ego strives to be but is not. 52

Driving around in a sports car to “piss daddy off.” What is at stake here is the signifier “father.” That is, even though they set themselves up in a defiant relation to the ego ideal, the ego ideal is still for them the point of view from which they have a place and are “seen” by the Other, and this is still, whether they are seen by the Other as good or bad, narcissistically satisfying. Defiant or not, the common factor here is that in these examples they remain seen by the Other, and their actions occur entirely within the Other’s scope. Indeed, their actions are for the Other, even when they appear to be against the Other (53).

What is important here is the notion that the ego ideal is a signifier in the Other from whose “point of view” the individual is given meaning and a place. … In Lacan’s revision of the mirror stage, the child is compelled or encourged to identify its mirror image (ideal ego) as itself by a parent (or someone else) saying something like “That’s you Jimmy! Yes it is!”

The child finds that it has a place ein this symbolic Other by means of the Other’s affirmation of a place for the child. The child is told by the Other what he or she is (54).

pluth unary trait

Unary trait: a signifier that represents a subject to another signifier. (54)

Blog post originally published May 15, 2009. at 10:11

Proper Name as unary trait: When there is a subject that is constituted as the bearer of this trait, there is a subject-as-meaning, despite the fact that the name itself is meaningless. My name precedes me, and to this extent my place in the linguistic and social Other is given before my birth. This is all my name does —it gives me a place. This meaningless signifer, however, is also the bearer of a string of meanings provided that other signifiers enter into the picture, bringing about an operation similar to what happens in metaphor. Here again, the other signifier at work would be the place in the Other from which I am looked at and possibly desired, for example, the Other’s affirmation of the signifier that gives me a place. So to the extent that I am talked about and desired (or not) by means of this meaningless “trait” existing in most cases before I am born, a discursive place is already carved out for me in this Other. My name functions as the representative point of this “talk,” this knot of signifiers whose consistency makes up the stuff of the subject-as-meaning. Once again, we see that the construction of the subject-as-meaning may thus precede the actual birth of the individual.

pluth signifiers generate a signified effect

Pluth, Ed. Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s theory of the subject New York: SUNY Press, 2007.

Certainly, unlike a sign, a signifier is not fixed to a particular object, but in its inclusion withn a system of other signifiers there is still an extreme form of reference at work. A signifier’s reference is not to a specific object or to a specific sign but to all other signifiers, or to the mere fact that signifiers exist (26).

According to Lacan’s view, there are nothing but signifiers and signified effects in language (29).

The signifier then is a purely meaningless and purely differential unity, and … not self-sufficient but hyper-referential. As such, it is also distinguished from the sign, whose reference is more or less fixed.

Although Lacan rejects the Saussurean notion of the sign — a union of signifier and signified — this does not prevent him from granting that some sort of signified effect is an important aspect of language. Although there may never be a strict union of signifer and signified, signifiers, according to Lacan, give the impression that there is meaning somewhere, however elusive it may be. In fact, this is precisely what signifiers do: they give an impression of meaning. (30)

A signifier is, moreover, meaningless. Since Lacan rejects the notion that a signifier and signified (meaning) are united in a single unit, meaning is never ultimately pinned to a signifier. So whatever meaning is, it is not reducible to or identifiable with a particular signifier (30).

According to Lacan, signifiers generate a signified effect or meaning effect that cannot itself be situated within the order of signifiers.

pluth the real

Pluth, Ed. Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s theory of the subject New York: SUNY Press, 2007.

Does the real always mean the presymbolic?

2 versions of the real in Lacan’s work:

real1, prior to the acquisition of language, which is “progressively symbolized” in the course of the child’s life
second order real (real2) which is an effect of the symbolic order itself

Real2 is not outside the symbolic, as real1 seems to be. This second-order real is characterized by impasses and impossibilities that occur in the symbolic order itself.

The real can only be inscribed on the basis of an impasse of formalization (Seminar XX)

Instead of being a field of referents that language aims at, this version of the real is a stumbling block in the field of signification itself (17).