Literally Speaking, Or, The Literal Sense From Augustine To Lacan

Literally Speaking, or, the Literal Sense from Augustine to Lacan
Author(s): BRIAN CUMMINGS

Source: Paragraph, Vol. 21, No. 2, THE LITERAL (July 1998), pp. 200-226
Published by: Edinburgh University Press
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Literally Speaking, or, the Literal
Sense from Augustine to Lacan
I am, literally, speaking.' Yet am I at the same time speaking literally,

literally speaking? My question is not purely rhetorical. After all, I
wrote these words before speaking them, and after speaking them they
will be read. How could I, anyway, speak literally at all? I can speak in
many ways, unprofessorially, ineffably, even unutterably, but certainly
not literally (at least only illiterally literally). The literal is always
written, literally. In that sense, the phrase 'literally speaking' is, at best,
an oxymoron. So I must crave the forgiveness of both my auditors and
my readers for beginning so improperly. I will restate myself, this time
non-literally, to make myself clearer. (Clearer, you understand, in the
figurative sense.) Figuratively speaking, and restricting myself in future
entirely to dead metaphors, I am, literally, speaking, so to speak. Or so
I say.
What am I talking about? That is easily answered. This should be the
shortest paper ever: I may be able to finish it without saying anything
at all. My subject is the literal sense. The literal sense of the literal sense.
Perhaps, more properly, the literal sense of the literal sense of the literal
sense. There, I've said it. What do I mean? I mean that (what?) that,
that's what, that is, what I have already said. What am I talking about!
Let me begin again. Do I have to repeat myself? Have I said enough?
You have had enough. I am not getting very far. I have hardly started.
Let me put this in other words.
To promise to speak literally is to invite disaster. It is to set oneself
up for the easiest of jokes. The word is the most beguiling of enemies,
the most treacherous of friends. On the one hand, it is to offer
something which should already have been given. Why did I not speak
literally the first time, what was my business in speaking at all if not
literally? I did not mean what I meant, or I did not say what I said, so
I will say it again. Only in different words. Or the same words only
this time louder, so as to be more precise. In this way, a literal
explanation is either a redundancy (repeating what has already been
said) or else a lie: since as soon as I say something in different words I
am saying something else, not the literal sense at all, but a new sense.
T.S. Eliot was not joking, therefore, but utterly serious, when in reply
Literally Speaking, or, the Literal Sense from Augustine to Lacan 201
to the question, 'What do you mean by the line, "Lady, three white
leopards sat under a juniper-tree" ' he answered: 'I mean, "Lady, three
white leopards sat under a juniper-tree" '2
On the other hand, the promise of the literal promises something
even more than meaning, or the meaning of meaning, it promises the
thing itself. This is the ultimate ludic banality of the literal: 'Sammy
Cahn literally put the words into Frank Sinatra's mouth'; or 'The
Labour Party survey says that dentists have literally been kicked in the
teeth'; or (Trevor Bailey) 'This is the sort of pitch which literally
castrates a bowler'.3 The error here appears to be in not accepting the
figurative as a figure. The other side of the literal coin is a not-bad
metaphor. It is the claim to literalism which cuts the feet from under
the metaphor (if you'll pardon the metaphor). 'Literally' literally claims
the metaphor as real, and in the process gives the game of language
away. The metaphor wishes to retain its metaphoricity intact, and has
no desire to make its own way in a world beyond words. Paradoxically,
it is only if there is some element of doubt about the figure that the
word 'literally' properly (properly?) comes into play; as if to say that
the metaphor is not, for once, metaphorical, but is really real. However,
is this the proper sense of 'literal' at all? Not according to the Oxford
English Dictionary: 'LITERALLY 3b. Now often improperly used to indicate
that some conventional metaphorical or hyperbolical phrase is to be taken in
the strongest admissable sense'.
A The Literal by way of Metaphor
The problem of the literal may be the most fundamental problem in

the theory of interpretation. Indeed without it there might be said
to be no problem of interpretation to make a theory about. None-
theless, in recent theory, particularly in Anglo-American
philosophical writing since the war, the problem of the literal has
largely disappeared, or more properly has been displaced, into the
problem of the metaphorical.4 Emblematic of this transference was
the celebrated Chicago symposium on 'Metaphor: The Conceptual
Leap' in 1978, published in a special issue of Critical Inquiry and
reprinted since, which brought together a brilliant array of contribu-
tors, both philosophical and literary (including Donald Davidson,
Paul de Man, Wayne Booth, Paul Ricoeur, not to mention W. V. Quine
and Max Black among the published 'Afterthoughts') and announced
the movement (or leap) of metaphor 'from a place on the ornamental
202 Paragraph
fringes of discourse to a central position in the understanding of

human understanding itself'.5 This apparently innocuous academic
advertisement already makes what becomes a characteristic turn on
the metaphor by which metaphor ordinarily (properly?) defines itself.
Metaphor (literally (from the Greek, |i.Età <popé(o), 'to carry over')
is what is off centre, a deviation from meaning, but here is reclaimed
from its own eccentricity as a deviation from deviation, a return to
the centre.
The self-consciousness of this gesture is a reaction to a long-standing
critique of metaphor in the English-speaking philosophical tradition,
a critique which goes back to Hobbes and finds its central statement
in Locke.6 Locke notoriously denounced metaphor in the following
terms:
all the artificial and figurative application of Words Eloquence hath invented, a
for nothing else but to insinuate wrong Ideas, move the Passions, and there
mislead the Judgment; and so indeed are perfect cheat.7
Orators and poets may use metaphors at their peril and perha
sometimes to their praise, but in philosophical discourse, in 'all dis
courses that pretend to inform or instruct', such figures are 'wholly
be avoided'. Locke promises in short to stick to the literal, or in h
preferred term, the 'proper'. Locke's caveat is a ground-bass to t
Chicago symposium, cited in three of the first four contributions.8
is subjected to its most radical reversal in Paul de Man's dazzling essa
'The Epistemology of Metaphor'.9 Eschewing no available trope
oratory or poetry, but adopting the manner of the most rigorous
philosophers, de Man artfully substitutes the terms of the metaphor
and the literal in each other's practised position. Locke's theory
language, he quips, 'turns out to be in fact a theory of tropes' (p. 1
In the process of propounding it, Locke's own text can be shown t
be shot through with metaphors.
The figures which are 'wholly to be avoided' are avoided least
all in those passages where Locke attempts to fence off, shore up,
batten down, the boundary between the figurai and the literal. 'Th
Names of simple ideas are not capable of any definitions', Locke sa
but his 'simple ideas' turn out to be neither so simple nor so ve
non-figurative: 'motion', for instance, or 'light'.10 The confusion i
not a simple one, de Man is careful to explain. The proper mean
of 'light' according to Locke is not an affect of any sensory percepti
but an ' idea '. De Man glosses Locke as saying, 'To understand light
idea is to understand light properly' (p. 15-6), then proceeds to

unravel Locke's sentence from its own figurations:
But the word 'idea' ( eide ) , of course, itself means light, and to say that to understand
light is to perceive the idea of light is to say that understanding is to see the light
of light and is therefore itself light. (16)
De Man pauses to congratulate himself on making Locke sound like

Heidegger ( das Licht des Lichtes lichten), but in doing so he is only
obeying his own sense of the proprieties of language. Nothing becomes
Locke more than his use of the word 'proper', which pervades his
discourse, along with its polite and political cognates, 'property' and
'propriety'. It is Locke's signature, nowhere more in evidence than
where its meaning is least evident, in the precise definition of what is
'proper' to it: 'The closer the description comes to that of metaphor,
the more dependent Locke becomes on the use of the word "prop-
erly" ' (16). Locke's favourite philosophical scapegoat is the child who
has not yet learned to tell the figurai apart from the proper, and yet, in
de Man's redescription, Locke, too, is an ingénu. If, as Locke demurs in
his denunciation of the powers of rhetoric, 'it is evident how much
Men love to deceive, and be deceived', then no one is better at
deceiving himself than Locke: he is the master professor."
De Man's great cause is the defence of the rhetor, and indeed of what
might be called successful self-deception. His aim consists not in
mocking Locke, but in retracing the deviations of Locke's language to
their own metaphorical sources. Philosophical discourse historically
has been embarrassed by the metaphorical power of language, and has
attempted either to keep it at bay or to rid itself of figuration entirely.
Finding this impossible, it has attempted the lesser task of creating a
philosophical metalanguage for metaphor, one that will delimit its
activity from the proper realm of philosophy in its true sense. Indeed
it is this mastery of metaphor which constitutes the status of philoso-
phy as the master discourse, controlling the whole field of language
and administering the boundaries within it. But de Man rejects what
he calls this totalizing gesture, by showing how metaphor continually
evades the limits set to it, and disrupts the philosophical language
empowered to order it. If this is true for Locke, he concludes, it is true
as much for Kant, or Fichte, or Hegel (p. 27-8) . Philosophy is therefore
forced to make further enquiries into its own metaphoricity. Such an
enquiry in no way implies a diminution in philosophical rigour,
however, since: 'are we so sure that we know how to read Fichte or
204 Paragraph
Hegel in the properly rhetorical manner?' (27). If philosophy is

condemned by its own figures to be literary, then literature by the same
token is compelled to be philosophical.
At the same time de Man has conducted what appears to be a reversal
in the order of discourse between the literal and the metaphorical.
What is the literal, the proper, de Man asks, if not itself a figure? A
figure which is in denial of itself, to be sure, and which attempts to
repress its figurative origins through further meta-philosophical tropes
such as the appeal to a world of 'ideas', 'truths' and 'concepts'. But in
de Man's terms all such repressions are futile, since: 'As soon as one is
willing to be made aware of their own epistemological implications,
concepts are tropes and tropes concepts' (21). The literal is, after all,
figurative. In this way, de Man's turn on the literal may be compared
with Paul Ricoeur's parallel statement concerning metaphor three
years earlier in La Métaphore vive, that 'it is impossible to talk about
metaphor non-metaphorically'.12 In the famous definition of meta-
phor in the Poetics, for instance, Aristotle had to make up a metaphor
to explain it: the metaphor of metaphor, a moving away, a borrowing
of something from somewhere else. He cannot define metaphor
literally, in other words. In the effort to control metaphor philosophi-
cally, Ricoeur concludes, philosophy metaphorises itself. Metaphor
'takes in . . . every philosophy that might wish to rid itself of metaphor
in favour of non-metaphorical concepts. There is no non-metaphorical
standpoint from which one could look upon metaphor' (18).
De Man moves from such an observation to conclude with 'the
recognition of language as trope' (21). However, is he not guilty here
of making the same totalising gesture that he identifies in the claim to
a philosophical language of pure transcendence? There is a difference
between his statement that 'concepts are tropes and tropes concepts'
and 'the recognition of language as trope'. It is one thing to show how
Locke's firm ground of the 'literal' gives way under his feet as he slips
into metaphor, and another to conclude that his language is thereby
somehow purely metaphorical. If everything is a trope, then a trope is
not a trope, and if everything is a metaphor, then a metaphor is not a
metaphor, since the means of opposition which made it something
different from the literal has disappeared. It should give us pause when
de Man declares that 'the word "idea" ( eide ), of course, itself means
light' (16) (what is the force of 'of course' here, or for that matter
'means'?) just as it does when he only half-ironically demands a
'properly rhetorical' reading of Hegel. In making the literal figurative,
is he (shall I say) speaking literally or figuratively? The question would
not seem to matter were it not for his insistence that he really
(properly) means the latter.
The problem comes with de Man's sense of a trope, which he takes
(if I may be forgiven) seemingly too literally. The trope, the 'turn' (Gr.
xpélKù = 'I turn') is his master trope, as the concept is Locke's master
concept. By this means the literal turns into the figurative, in a reversal
of meaning. But tropes have a habit of turning back on themselves,
they turn and turn again. Indeed this is clear in de Man's phrase,
'concepts are tropes and tropes concepts', where the reversal is reversed.
For a moment he offers a figure of interchangeability, before exchang-
ing this for a more simple figure of exchange. In the turn of the
figurative on the literal he reveals 'language as trope'. But at this very
point his argument becomes subject to the return of the literal.
The same could be said of the essay which follows de Man in the
Chicago symposium, Davidson's 'What Metaphors Mean'. This, too, is
a brilliant piece, although it could not appear to be more different from
de Man's. It has become a classic account of metaphor within an
analytical tradition and occupies the penultimate place in Davidson's
collection, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation .,3 Yet its affiliations are
much more complex than this would imply. It begins with a bravado
riposte to previous theorists of metaphor, in a list of straw men which
includes William Empson, I.A. Richards, George Lakoff, and also
Aristode, Freud, Plato. All have been guilty of 'a central mistake', which
is:
the idea that a metaphor has, in addition to its literal sense or meaning, another
sense or meaning. (30)
Davidson's list of targets subdy conceals the thrust of this counter-

intuitive statement, just as his style of bluff logicality hides an increasing
air of paradoxicality and ambiguity in the essay as a whole. For
Davidson's essay contains a double bluff. Its primary attack is on an
essay by Max Black, 'Metaphor', which had itself reinvented the topic
in post-war Anglo-American philosophy.'4 Black had spurned the
suspicion towards metaphor contained in the Lockean position by
asserting instead the cognitive value of metaphor. Metaphors are not
emotive aberrations but a specialised form of meaning. Davidson
directly contradicts this view, but in doing so he does not return to
the position of Locke; indeed, he carefully repudiates the association
of a denial of cognitive value with an assumption that metaphor is
therefore 'confusing, merely emotive, unsuited to serious, scientific, or
206 Paragraph
philosophic discourse' (30-31). Davidson attacks Black for the more

complex purpose of proving that metaphor does not have to be
cognitive to be philosophical; and it is in this respect that he turns out
to be not so unlike de Man after all.
Whereas Black formulates a special theory of meaning to account
for metaphor, and ascribes to this something like a separate truth value,
Davidson replies that:
It is no help in examining how words work in metaphor to posit metaphorical

or figurative meanings, or special kinds of poetic or metaphorical truth. These
ideas don't explain metaphor, metaphor explains them. (31)
Davidson identifies a circularity in Black's theory, in that he already

needs a theory of metaphor in order to explain what he means by
metaphorical meaning, and therefore cannot use metaphorical mean-
ing to explain what metaphors do. When Black has recourse to any
new 'new' or 'extended' sense involved in metaphor, he keeps returning
to the literal meaning. It is the same when metaphor is said to be a
compressed or elliptical version of simile: 'what words do with their
literal meaning in simile must be possible for them to do in metaphor'
(38).
In that sense Davidson's argument could be said to work in parallel
with de Man's, in that both declare that it is not possible to distinguish
between literal and figurative meaning. Whereas de Man turns every
literal sense back onto a figure, Davidson reduces every figurative
meaning to its literal kernel. But we could ask whether it is any more
reasonable to call a meaning purely literal than it is to call it purely
metaphorical, or vice versa. When Davidson insists that in metaphor
there is no 'difference in the words used or what they mean (in any
strict sense of meaning)' (41), the literal sense of 'strict' is becoming
hard to decipher. Similarly, when he denies that a metaphor is 'a vehicle
for conveying ideas' (30), it is hard to know whether 'vehicle' is a
metaphor. Would it be any more or less metaphorical to say 'conduit'
or 'means of transporting'? Or is it only metaphor when we say
'metaphor is the Rolls Royce of meaning'?
The more Davidson declares that he knows what a metaphor means,
the harder it is to know what he means. He returns again and again to
his one absolute assertion, made at the beginning of the essay:
metaphors mean what the words, in their most literal interpretation, mean, and
nothing more (30)
Literally Speaking, or, the Literal Sense front Augustine to Lacan 207
In other words, a metaphor 'doesn't say anything beyond its literal

meaning' (30). Metaphor 'depends entirely', that is, 'on the ordinary
meanings of . . . words and hence . . . the ordinary meanings of the
sentences they comprise' (31). In the plainest possible sense, but only
in the plainest possible sense (let us be strict about this), it is clear what
Davidson means here. The metaphors mean what they say. Literally.
Nothing more or nothing less. And there is nothing in the least
metaphorical about the phrase 'nothing more', either, or about the
phrase 'beyond its literal meaning': for 'beyond', too, is not meant
metaphorically, indeed it could not be, any more (or any less, let us not
forget the less, for it is not in the least inconsiderable) than any other
word, for all words mean what they literally do mean.
Such turns on the metaphorical will be familiar to readers of
Derrida's classic essay, 'La mythologie blanche' ('White Mythology'),
with its contentious subtide, 'Metaphor in the text of philosophy'.
Derrida's essay at least appears to be an attack on the very idea of 'un
discours qui se donne pour non métaphorique, ce qu'on appelle ici le
système philosophique' ('a discourse that presents itself as nonmeta-
phorical, which here is called the philosophical system').15 'La my-
thologie blanche' is an unravelling or undressing of the tropes by which
the metaphorical is removed from discourse. One of the most common
of these, of course, is the very distinction between the literal and the
figurative, a distinction which at the end of his essay Derrida offers to
'faire sauter', or in the less playful and more self-congratulatory English
translation, 'to explode':
Et par conséquent de faire sauter l'opposition rassurante du métaphorique et du

propre dans laquelle l'un et l'autre ne faisaient jamais que se réfléchir et se renvoyer
leur rayonnement (323)
(And consequendy to explode the reassuring opposition of the metaphoric and

the proper, the opposition in which the one and the other have never done
anything but reflect and refer to each other in their radiance: 270-71)
As if in parody of these self-reflexive and self-referential procedures

Derrida renames the literal, the propre, the meta-metaphorical, a
renaming which is intrinsically no more improper than the quite
common philosophical protocol of naming the metaphorical the
non-literal.
It has become common, at least among some of Derrida's readers
within an English perspective, to assume that he is here making a move
208 Paragraph
similar to de Man's. But is the triumph of the metaphorical a proper

reading of Derrida? It would imply that Derrida, like de Man, sees
metaphor as the literal in reverse. This does less than justice to the
constant turns, the inversions and conversions, of the words métaphore
and propre in his own text. The literal emerges from this as more
troubling, more disturbing to literary and philosophical categories. In
fact it could be said that as 'La mythologie blanche' proceeds, Derrida's
readings become more and more literal. This is true especially of
Derrida's own (for want of a better word) metaphors. A famous
example is 'la mise en abyme' (313). Appropriately and charac-
teristically, it is used by Derrida to characterise Nietzsche's attempt to
figure the metaphor icity of the concept, the metaphor of the metaphor.
The English translation by Alan Bass is forced into a tortuously
circumlocutory footnote at this point, in its attempt to reconfigure the
metaphor of the French 'mise en abyme':
Mettre en abyme (to put into abyme) is a heraldic term for the placement of a small
escutcheon in the middle of a larger one. Derrida is playing on this old sense of
abyme, with its connotation ofinfinite reflection, and the modern senses of abîmer,
to ruin, and of abîme - abyss, chasm, depths, chaos, interval, difference, division,
etc. (262, n. 73)
What is Bass doing here if not looking for the literal sense, in fact twice
over? He cannot explain Derrida's metaphorics without being literal-
minded, doubly-literal, one might say pedantically so. If it is a
metaphorical analysis it is doing a pretty good job at pretending to be
literal. Bass uses all the tropes of the literal interpretation so comically
rehearsed and enjoyed by Derrida, of spurious paths of derivation, of
the desperate revivification of dead metaphors, or of the equally
desperate mixing of live ones with dead ones. So is the mise en abyme
literally metaphorical? or metaphorically literal? Or does Derrida
imply (less simply simple) the literally literal?
B The Historical Sense of the Literal
It is time to look for the literal. Where should I begin? Immediately, I

am turned back onto the customary techniques of the literal, searching
for an etymology (literally (from the Greek, ETüjxoXoyía), 'the true
meaning', or perhaps more literally, ò 8TU110Ç X.óyoç, 'the true word')
of the literal. The 'literal', literally, is a literal translation, the most literal
of translations, not only word for word but letter for letter, from the
Latin, litteralis. The litteralis sensus was the founding term of medieval
literary theory. It was not, properly speaking, a classical usage, which
might have said proprie dicitur. To trace the history of the litteralis sensus
would take several volumes. Its origins lie in the idea of the quadriga,
a four-fold layering of interpretation of the Bible, an idea often
associated with Augustine and Gregory the Great but whose origins
have been traced back further to Origen and even to Clement of
Alexandria, writing about 200 A.D.16 The idea of the quadriga has
become very well known, too well known, one might say, to be
properly understood. It was by no means a monolithic system of
interpretation, and fluctuated widely in different periods and even in
the same author. Rather than a uniform division into four senses,
sometimes only two were classified, and sometimes three, as indeed in
a classic formulation of Gregory.17 Even when four senses were
identified, the terminology was not constant. Different words were
used at different times to designate differences between senses: the first
sense might be called sensus litteralis, or grammaticalis, or historicus ; the
second, allegoricus or spiritualis or mysticus; the third (although it was
sometimes called the fourth) tropologicus or moralis ; the last (or some-
times penultimate) anagogicus or eschatologicus. There were often
sub-divisions among the four.18
One point which emerges from this is that it is only comparatively
recently, perhaps only in post-enlightenment philosophy, that the literal
has become routinely categorised in contradistinction to the figurative
alone. Such a supposition is confirmed in English usage by the citations
in the OED for 'literal', where the literal and the figurative become
paired only in the eighteenth century.19 It is about the same time in
English that the literal sense of 'literal' as connected with the letter, with
letters, or with literature in general, is lost, and is replaced by a figurative
sense of the literal as the 'non-figurative'. In medieval usage the 'literal'
is a much more variable term, differentiated in different ways against a
number of other categories. Ricoeur has made a similar point about the
sense of the literal in classical Greece. Aristotle, he argues, did not make
a rigid distinction between proper meaning and figurative meaning; it
was only in Hellenistic rhetoric that this step was taken.20 Such a division
was known in the middle ages, partly because of Augustine's saturation
in rhetorical traditions. However, the literal was also commonly inter-
preted in a number of other ways. This suggests that it is a mistake to
assume, as much of twentieth-century linguistic philosophy does, that
there is some prior division of meaning into 'literal' and 'figurative'
spheres, which philosophy then aspires to rediscover and to articulate.
210 Paragraph
The literal occupies a more openly ambiguous and enigmatic space

in medieval theory, surrounded by a penumbra of connotative terms
for the spectra of meaning. All meaning beyond the letter was in some
sense a form of allegoria (literally (from the Greek, akX oç áyopEÓú)),
'to say other'). Allegoria was a late classical word, defined in a not
unparadoxical formula by a grammarian quoted by Cicero as 'saying
one thing to make someone think of something else'.2' It was conse-
crated for Christian usage by St Paul in the letter to the Galatians,
where he said that the words of Genesis meant something else
entirely.22 Allegory was necessary in the first place in order to read the
Jewish scriptures without accepting the Jewish interpretation of those
scriptures. Allegoria was taken to be symptomatic of the Bible because
of the complex relation between the Old and New Testaments. The
sense of the words was therefore always in some sense a mystérium. The
words of scripture are to be understood secundam mysticam formam (in
Origen 's phrase).23 In turn, in a particularly resonant collocation, the
mystérium of scripture is said to be a sacramentum. Augustine calls the
Bible mysteriorum scriptura and its books divinorum sacramentorum libri.24
The terms mystérium and sacramentum are used so interchangeably that
Henri de Lubac calls their relationship pleonastic.25
This whole range of terms is summed up in the word spiritus, which
of all words forms the most equal counterpoise to littera. De littera et
spiritu is the tide of one of Augustine's most famous works, and could
be taken as an apt epigraph for the whole of medieval literary theory.26
"Vet once again the formulation has nothing of the tightness of
distinction associated with the parallel pairing of 'the literal and the
figurative'. The sensus spiritualis was always plural, polyvalent. It came
to encompass all the possible dehiscences of meaning, as in Bonaven-
ture's term triplex sensus spiritualis, or in the late scholastic definition
in Nicholas of Lyra's Prologue to the Glossa ordinaria, where the sensus
mysticus, seu spiritualis, envelops all other senses within itself.27
Yet all these sacramenta of meaning are referred back ultimately to
the corpus of the littera. For there can never be sacrament without a
body, and similarly there can be no spiritus without littera. This opens
out a conflict at the heart of medieval theory of interpretation. The
sacramentum, as sacred, is reserved from view. The sacramenta of meaning
are, in St Hilary's words, absconsa (literally, 'hidden away') or occulta Dei
mystéria ( occulta , literally, 'covered over').28 And yet Christian exegesis
wished to avoid association with the tendency in pagan and oriental
religions to emphasise language as an arcane mystery available only to
initiates.
The relationship between littera and spiritus is therefore contentious

as much as complementary. An ability to interpret allegorically was
said by Origen to be what characterised Christian as against Jewish
reading of scripture: 'If anyone wants to hear and understand these
things strictly literally, he ought to address himself to the Jews rather
than to Christians'.29 In fact the sensus litteralis was often referred to,
disparagingly, as the sensus judaicus. Christian exegesis was therefore to
some extent self-consciously anti-literal. Yet the slur against literalism
was combined with an antipathy towards any recidivist gnostic ten-
dency to idolatrise the letter as an indecipherable arcanum. The mys-
térium of allegory was therefore constantly called back to the letter of
its meaning. The literal was at the same time as a consequence in some
sense at contradiction with itself.
Locating the literal in relation to the other senses was a source of
controversy at intermittent points throughout the middle ages. In this
as in other matters Augustine was the master. However, Augustine
proved a complex model since he was also in controversy with himself.
Meaning must always ultimately be spiritual because it is a reflection
of God.30 Yet Augustine also fiercely propounded the literal sense.
Augustine believes in the literal most of all as the historical sense, and
God means his history to be taken literally.
Just as the soul of a rational man is found only in the body, so the
spirit of sense is revealed in the body of the letter. Differentiating
between literal and spiritual senses in this complex metaphor of
meaning is itself a difficult matter. The most extended discussion in
Augustine comes in the De doctrina Christiana, where he formulated a
comprehensive philosophy of exegesis. In this seminal discussion of
signs, Augustine returned to rhetorical theory in distinguishing signs
into two kinds. In modern English translations these terms are usually
rendered 'literal or figurative', but Augustine's own terms are rather
different, propria uel translata :
Sunt autem signa uel propria uel translata. Propria dicuntur, cum his rebus
significandis adhibentur, propter quas sunt institūta, sicut dicimus bouem, cum
intelligimus pecus, quod omnes nobiscum latinae linguae homines hoc nomine
uocant.31
(They are called literal when they are used to designate those things on account
of which they were instituted: thus we say bos [ox] when we mean an animal of
a herd because all men using the Latin language call it by that name just as we
do.)32
212 Paragraph
The literal is what is propria to something, the name which belongs to

it, just as bos belongs to a bos. But what is a bos ? The best answer seems
to be bos. For explanation, Augustine offers what is commonly offered
here, what is called the common sense, that is, what we commonly call
by the name of (what else?) bos. Augustine has another go, a pecus, or
'an animal of a herd, a kind of cattle'; but which animal from which
herd? Well, bos. We might be tempted to say that kind of cattle which
is peculiar to the word bos, except that in English we should be wary:
the 'peculiar' is that which is one's own property, literally, 'one's cattle'.
The signum translatum, on the other hand, seems easier: it is
something else entirely:
Translata sunt, cum et ipsae res, quas propriis uerbis significamus, ad aliquid aliud
signifìcandum usurpantur, sicut dicimus bouem et per has duas syllabas intel-
ligimus pecus, quod isto nomine appelari solet, sed rursus per illud pecus
intelligimus euangelistam, quern significant scriptura interpretante apostolo
dicens: bouem triturantem non infrenabis.
(Figurative signs occur when that which we designate by a literal sign is used to
signify something else; thus we say bos and by that syllable understand the animal
which is ordinarily designated by that word, but again by that animal we
understand an evangelist, as is signified in the Scripture, according to the
interpretation of the Apostle, when it says: "Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that
treadeth out the corn".)
The figurative, then, is a transference of the literal from sign to sign. But
from what? and to what? If bos (properly) signifies bos, the transferred
sense signifies not just bos, but 'something else' as well; but not what?
Not bos, at any rate. Yet what is this to say except that the non-literal is
not literal? And the literal? Well, it's not non-literal, at least.
Something odd is going on here, something quite peculiar. The
signum translatum translates, transfers, defers, dilates, the meaning itself
from itself. But as for this literal meaning, this has been lost in the
translation. Augustine is reduced either to repeating the term endlessly,
bos for bos, or else translating it into something else, a bos into a pecus.
The signum proprium is after all a signum translatum.The only difference,
so he claims, is in a name, one name or another. But what is the
difference? Bos is (literally) a translation from the Greek, ßoo«;, whereas
for pecus, the dictionary helpfully tells us (I am afraid to say), the origins
are obscure.
What is noticeable here is that although Augustine characterises
the signum translatum as a deviation from the literal - following
Aristotle's classic definition of metaphor as 'giving the thing a name

that belongs to something else' (here, ad aliquid aliud significandum
usurpantur), it is the thing itself that he finds most difficult to
explain.33 He can only identify it by translating it, in a transference
back from a transferred sense. This could be said to be the charac-
teristic trope of the literal. Yet it is not, as de Man sees it, a turning
of the literal into a trope. The literal is a double turn. What is
interesting is that this seems to be true of the history of the
hermeneutics of the literal. Conventionally, the history of interpre-
tation is characterised as an attempt to take account of systems of
meaning which deviate from the literal, the plain, proper sense. But
paradoxically, the literal is a term discovered or invented only in the
delineation of deviations. It is the deviations which seem describable,
whereas the literal seems more and more evanescent, ever further off.
It may be no exaggeration to say that the literal is historically
posterior to the other senses, however much it is represented as
logically anterior.
The literal is habitually presented as the pre-existent meaning to
which other meanings are added in layers. Yet it is rather arrived at as
a reaction to the so-called outer and successive senses. In medieval
theory the literal repeatedly appears as a rearguard action. A prime
example is the school of biblical exegesis which built up at the Abbey
of St Victor on the left bank of the Seine in Paris in the twelfth century,
centred in the work of Hugh of St Victor and his pupils Richard and
Andrew.34 Hugh self-consciously promoted his work as a revival of the
principles of Augustine's De doctrina Christiana and as a correction to
the excesses of the Gregorian exegesis. In this project allegoria was
subordinated to the literal which in turn was reinstated as the prima
signification 5 All other senses proceed from the literal, from which they
are a translatio, a movement away.
The notion that the literal is first and last, the first of the biblical
senses, was of course habitual to medieval theory, and indeed a different
metaphor of tangentiality was used to express the relation of each of
the higher senses to the first and basic sense. Allegoria was a movement
sideways, anagogia was a movement upwards, whereas tropologia, more
radically and more enigmatically, was conceived as a 'bending' away of
signification.36 Yet in turning attention back towards the centre of
meaning Hugh constructed a much more elaborate metaphor of his
own.37 The words and phrases of the Bible fit together like rough-hewn
rocks with many cracks and unevennesses between them. For the
spiritus of meaning to be even and flawless it must be fitted, like a wall,
214 Paragraph
onto foundation stones which have been cut to form a level surface
below, in the interstices between the rocks. The literal sense is this
foundation. This architectural image was much prized and quoted by
later commentators who saw in it a confirmation of the unity and
interdependence of the different senses. But it is just as much an
indication of the metaphoricity of the notion of centre, fundament,
foundation which is so fundamental in figurations of the literal.
Hugh's reordering of the senses redoubles on itself in complex and
subtle ways. In a brilliant reworking of the Augustinián argument, he
says:
The mystical sense is only gathered from what the letter says, in the first place. I
wonder how people have the face to boast themselves teachers of allegory, when
they do not know the primary meaning of the letter. 'We read the scriptures',
they say, 'but we don't read the letter. The letter does not interest us. We teach
allegory.' How do you read Scripture, then, if you don't read the letter? Subtract
the letter and what is left?38
As a deconstruction of the pretentions of the allegorists (from Gregory

the Great to de Man) it could hardly be bettered. Yet where does it
leave the letter? The literal has once again folded back on itself to
include the non-literal. The metaphors and similes of the Bible, Hugh
says, are literal too. The literal, in fact, is already spiritual.
To solve their problems with the literal, the twelfth-century Vic-
torines turned increasingly to Jewish commentary. Hugh quotes from
several Jewish sources, including Rashi, and may have gained some of
his references directly from members of the rabbinic schools working
in northern France.39 His pupil, Andrew of St Victor, took this further,
learning some Hebrew and also gaining a far more intimate acquain-
tance with Jewish traditions of exegesis through extensive conversa-
tions with the rabbis, presumably in French, with the rabbis translating
from Hebrew and Andrew into Latin.40 He shows knowledge not only
of a variety of traditional Talmudic interpretations, but also of oral
midrashim. Not surprisingly, even members of his own abbey accused
him of a judaizing tendency. Andrew, however, was quite open in his
justification. The Jewish writers gave him direct access to the literal
sense. Unlike their Christian counterparts, they had no embarrassment
with the literal meaning of the Hebrew scriptures and had no need
for allegory to circumvent it.
For Andrew the literal sense is the Jewish interpretation. He refers
to it repeatedly as an alternative to the mystical explanation offered in
his Christian sources. Although he rejects the accusation, he worries

about the Jewish insinuation that Christian exegetes are 'perverters and
violent distorters of Holy Writ'. Borrowing from Jewish commentary
is for Andrew a way of returning to the straight and narrow of the
letter, of untwisting the distortions. He takes it for granted that the
rabbis have no need for, and so know, no other sense than the purely,
plainly, strictly literal. For him the Jews are the letter.
Without theorising in the manner of his master Hugh, Andrew
suggests a division between Christian and Jewish, between allegorical
and literal modes of exposition, which has large implications for the
history and theory of meaning. Yet however beguiling, in this he was
making a radical distortion of the history of Jewish exegesis. As Beryl
Smalley explains, Andrew encountered rabbinic scholarship at a
peculiar moment:
Had he gone a hundred years earlier, he would have found no connection

between 'literalism' and Jewish exegesis. He would have found that the Jews were
just as devoted to allegory and fancy as the Christians were. Then perhaps he
might have realised that there was a mistake somewhere. He might have been
forced to reconsider his premises and analyse that misleading word 'literal' (171)
Even among the riches of Smalley's scholarship, this is a startlingly

illuminating comment. Only the briefest account can be offered here
of Jewish exegesis.41 Interpretation was known by the term derash. Its
practice was enjoined by the letter of scripture, in Deuteronomy 13.
Beyond the written Torah of scripture extended the explanations of
the rabbis, eventually codified in the written Talmud. This ceaseless
flow of interpretation poured over into the Midrash literature. Within
the panoply of exposition there is no singular law of the literal, but a
constant play between poles of meaning. Among the distinctions made
in the creation of the Midrashim is that between the halakhic, the
authoritative exposition from the Torah of the 'rule of life' (the halakha),
and the aggadic, a freer, more homiletic tradition of commentary, full
of moral doctrine and edifying tales. The two approaches stand side by
side.
Between Talmud and Midrash, between the halakhic and the aggadic,
Jewish commentary is never the exclusive home of the literal. The term
for the literal, peshat, can once again be seen to have developed
controversially rather than to exist in some prior world of signification
before the glossators and the deconstructors got going. Peshat as a term
only makes sense (as it were) in relation to its sister term derash, just as
216 Paragraph
littera in relation to spiritus, or the literal and the metaphorical. As with

the letter in medieval Christianity, peshat in medieval Judaism ebbed
and flowed amidst the controversies of theory. The distinction between
derash and peshat grew sharper in time. In tenth-century Spain, Saadya
Gaon founded a methodology of the literal with new efforts in
grammatical and lexicographical study. But Saadya also defined a
system for departure from the literal, particularly in opposition to
Islamic philosophers. In northern France in the eleventh century,
Rashi also developed a new attention to peshat. Yet whereas Hugh and
Andrew of St Victor assumed that Rashi was typical of the Jewish
tradition, Rashi was an innovator.42 Nor was he a rigid literalist, and
he made plentiful use of the aggadic method. As a champion of the
literal he was outdone by Joseph Kara, the exact contemporary of
Hugh of St Victor. Kara made a full-frontal attack on midrashic
interpretation:
whosoever is ignorant of the literal meaning of scripture and inclines after the
Midrash of the verse is like a drowning man who clutches at a straw to save
himself. Were he to set his mind to the word of the Lord, he would search out
the true meaning of the verse and its literal purpose.43
Whatever else, Kara is obviously not afraid of metaphors, nor is his

definition of the literal so literal. His own commentary in any case
delved deep in midrashim. Regardless, he was considered dangerously
sectarian in his attachment to the literal by mainstream Judaism.44
The literal does not appear to be a pre-existent given in Jewish
exegesis any more than it does in the Christian tradition which was
formed so much in relation to it. Besides, the influence was two-way:
Jewish interpretation developed in conscious opposition to Christian,
just as it did in another direction against the Islamic. Peshat was a
method among methods. In a similar way, Christian exegesis developed
a faction for the literal which periodically asserted itself against the
other senses. The literal was a creation of contention, both for and
against. St Bernard took umbrage against the efforts of the literalists.
Thomas Aquinas took up the cause of the Victorines and gave it
theological substance. It was not until the fifteenth century that any
formal ecclesiastical discussion took place on the status of the literal.
Jean Gerson's De sensu litterali sacrae Scripturae of 1414 then decreed,
momentously but inevitably, that it was a political matter. The Church
alone had the power to determine the literal sense. With audacious
circularity, he derived this authority from the New Testament. The
literal sense of the New Testament empowers the Church tö determine

the literal sense of the New Testament. To complete the circle, a century
later Martin Luther declared that there was nit ein buchstaben ('not a
letter') in scripture to warrant such a claim of the papacy over the
meaning of scripture.45 Against the arbitrary will of political power,
Luther staked his own interpretation of the literal sense. In a trium-
phant statement of the arbitrariness of the sign, he asserted simultane-
ously both buchstabe and geyst, what in Latin would be called littera and
spiritus, or as might be said signifiant and signifié.
C The Letter to the Letter
Le sens de la lettre - such is the heading for the first of the sections in
Lacan's seminal lecture on language and the unconscious at the
Sorbonne, just up the hill from the site of the Abbaye de St Victor, iņ
May 1957.46 To discuss 'L'instance de la lettre dans l'inconscient'
without reference to the unconscious, or to intersubjectivity, or even
to the subject, may seem a singular version of Hamlet without the
Prince. Yet my failure to attend to these matters should be taken as
utterly rigorous. My subject here is not the proper sense of Lacan's
paper but the place within it of the figure of the letter. For the famous
claim that 'the unconscious is structured like a language' - which
receives one ofits fullest elaborations in this paper - has often obscured
the part played within this claim by Lacan's analysis of the structures
of language, and the significance of his particular insistence on the
letter of the literal.47
In what sense does Lacan mean the letter? Lacan pre-empts the
question by asking it himself, and in both question and answer his tone
is precise, vatic, and perfectly impenetrable:
Mais cette lettre comment faut-il la prendre ici? Tout uniment, à la lettre. (1, 251)
The authorised English translation is not quite literal here: 'But how
are we to take this "letter" here? Quite simply, literally.'48 The English
implies merely a false rigour here, whereas the promise to take la lettre,
à la lettre, is not only one of the many bons mots with which Lacan
litters his text, it is also an exact imitation and rendition of the
self-involuting self-referentiality of the figure of the literal. 'Le sens de
la lettre' appears as soon as it is announced in Lacan's argument as an
impossibility. The carefully carefree witticism conceals this by noncha-
lantly proferring the literal sense of the literal sense, on a plate, 'tout
218 Paragraph
uniment'. Uniment is the mot juste, since he is giving us, uniquely and
only, a mere word for a word, a mere letter for a letter.
This is- not what we were asking for, for what we wanted was what
he promised, a sense for the letter. However, the literal sense is revealed,
when taken at its most literal, as an oxymoron, or else as the precise
opposite, should we take the dictionary definition of the proper
meaning of oxymoron: a rhetorical figure, 'in its superficial or literal
meaning self-contradictory or absurd, but involving a point'.49 The
literal sense appears as the most obvious of points but involves a
contradiction in terms. Littera and sensus come from different worlds.
The brute matter of the one cannot come into contact with the
abstract spirit of the other. At least in figurative terms.
For what is the figure of the letter? The letter, figuratively speaking,
is die Buchstabe, xó yp<X|iļia, the stroke of the pen, the mark on the
page. In fact, the origin of littera is all the more literally obscure; the
OED comments ruefully that 'the hypothesis that the word is con-
nected with tinere, "to smear", is now generally rejected'. We do not
know how the marks got there, they were there already perhaps, soiled
goods. The mark was smudged before it was smudged. Every mixed
metaphor, every bad pun, every false consciousness in the word 'literal'
comes back to this, to the letter. "Vet what could a letter, of or in itself,
foreclose, portend, imply? The letter on the page is a dead letter, a
cipher. Literally speaking, the literal is not 'literal', or at least the 'literal'
is not literal, because the metaphor underlying the literal- beneath its
literal meaning - has been, must be, lost. How can we realty say what
is contained within the letter, the mark itself?
Such is the enigma of the literal. It is a figure closed in on itself.
Before we can say what the letter literally represents in the world we
must be able to say what the mark of the letter really is. The materiality
of the signifier is a constant motif of Lacan's writing in this period, as
in the seminar on Poe's 'The Purloined Letter' a year earlier; a
materiality which is openly obscure, peculiar, odd:
Mais si c'est d'abord sur la matérialité du signifiant que nous avons insisté, cette
matérialité est singulière en bien des points dont le premier est de ne point
supporter la partition. Mettez une lettre en petits morceaux, elle reste la lettre
qu'elle est ( Ecrits , 1, 33)
(But if it is first of all on the materiality of the signifier that we have insisted, that
materiality is odd in many ways, the first of which is not to admit partition. Cut
a letter in small pieces, and it remains the letter it is.)50
The literalisatíon of the letter accompanies a literalisation of its parallel

term spiritus, in the form of the French word esprit. The self-referential
allusions and puns of Lacan's writing here (the 'pneumatic dispatch' of
the letter, the letter which kills versus the spirit which gives life, the
spirit which is 'living meaning') all point to the same paradox that is
contained within the obstruction of the letter, that letter and spirit are
at odds with each other, that the very presence of the letter is indicative
only of the absence contained within it:
C'est que le signifiant est unité d'être unique, n'étant de par sa nature symbole
que d'une absence. Et c'est ainsi qu'on ne peut dire de la lettre volée qu'il faille
qu'à l'instar des autres objets, elle soit ou ne soit pas quelque part, mais bien qu'à
leur difïérence, elle sera et ne sera pas là où elle est, où qu'elle aille. ( Ecrits , 1, 34)
(For the signifier is a unit in its very uniqueness, being by nature symbol only of
an absence. Which is why we cannot say of the purloined letter that, like any
other objects, it must be or not be in a particular place but that unlike them it
will be and will not be where it is, wherever it goès. (54))
The figure of the literal haunts Lacan's writing at this period like a
ghost at the feast. Yet in this figure, Lacan claims, the letter entombs
the enigma of language tout court. The letter is there to be plumbed in
all its depths. There is, after all, nowhere else to go. Simultaneously with
the insistence on the materiality of the signifier is a resistance to any
temptation to fetch back the sense of things by a spurious appeal to
the signified. If the letter of the letter is Lacan's strictest orthodoxy,
then the sense of the sense is, as he calls it, sheer hérésie. With a certain
sarcastic relish he identifies it as a particularly English heresy:
C'est elle qui conduit le logico-positivisme à la quête du sens du sens, du meaning

of meaning comme on en dénomme, dans la langue où ses fervents s'ébrouent,
l'objectif. (1,255)
(the heresy that leads logical positivism in search of the meaning of meaning, as
its objective is called in the language of its devotees. (150))
The meaning of meaning is the efflatus of a sect which believes in a

language of pure spirit. There is no such escape from the letter. For,
quoting from his Seminar on Augustine in 1954, Lacan repeats that 'il
, n'est aucune signification qui se soutienne sinon du renvoi à une autre
signification' (1, 254) ('no signification can be sustained other than by
reference to another signification' (150)).51 Augustine's chapter on the
signification of speech from De magistro, admired by Lacan for its
220 Paragraph
'sensational lucidity', lends to modern linguistic philosophy for a

moment the dense complicity in the litteralis sensus encountered in
medieval theory of interpretation.52
Augustine, of course, by way of Saussure. However, to quote Mal-
colm Bowie, it is far from 'a literal-minded reading of Saussure'.53 As
Bowie puts it, the two first principles of Saussure's analysis of the
relationship between signifiant and signifié - that they are symmetrical
and interdependent - are immediately disturbed by Lacan. In their
place Lacan substitutes, with a certain swagger, an algorithm: S/s.The
algorithm is to be read as follows: 'signifiant sur signifié, le sur
répondant à la barre qui en sépare les deux étapes' (1, 253) ('the signifier
over the signified, "over" corresponding to the bar separating the two
stages' (149)). This rereading of Saussure is necessary, however, Lacan
claims, because of an error created by the first printed edition of the
Cours de linguistique générale. Here, to illustrate the two sides of the
linguistic sign, there are three diagrams, in the third of which the Latin
word arbor is made to correspond to the signifiant, and a picture of a
tree to the signifié. This error is fundamental, according to Lacan. For
Saussure, having attacked at the outset of his General Principles the
traditiónal view that language is a nomenclature in which a list of signs
is taken to correspond to a list of things in the world which are their
referents, by using this diagram effectively lets referentiality in by the
back door. Saussure has given the perfect excuse to the logical positivist
heretics to revel in their illusionist trick of taking sensus from littera
like a rabbit from the suitcase, dissolving the density of the letter into
vapid sententiousness, reducing even the most charged of texts to
'insignifiantes bagatelles' (meaningless trivia) (1, 255).54
Lacan's critique has been made all the more pointed by the fact that
the authenticity of this third diagram has subsequently been ques-
tioned and has been identified as an editorial addition to Saussure's
posthumous text.55 Yet the dubiousness of the third diagram has
perhaps given all the more credence to the two that precede it in the
Cours, which remain unchallenged by Lacan. In these the duality of
the sign is mapped out as follows:
Concept «arbre»
image acoustique arbor
With the most minimal paraphernalia ofboxes, lines a

divides out his image acoustique (soon identified as th
concept (the signifié), and draws them back together in the circle of the
sign. It is not much of a dowry with which to marry word to sense. Yet
in its simplicity it represents Saussure's wonder at the mystery by which
language signifies, or to use his pregnant phrase, 'cannot but signify'. The
opaque, smeary letters, the strange, unvocalised ululations make sense.
Saussure pays testimony to signification while respecting the way that
its processes are anything but transparent. He is a strict literalist first and
last.
And yet these diagrams tell any number of ironies (literally (from
the Greek, êipíõv 'one who says less than he thinks') 'dissimulations')
about the literal. Three of the four terms are italicised ( Concept , image
acoustique and arbor) while the fourth («arbre») is left in plain roman
but between edgy, defensive guillemets. Saussure cannot let the letters
speak for themselves. He fences them off with the non-literal devices
of punctuation and typography. He says the image acoustique in the Italic
style (in Latin, of course, arbor) but he thinks the concept in inverted
commas («arbre»). With the slightest gestures of discrimination he is
able to signify that some form (however minute) of transference has
taken place.
At the same time Saussure employs that most favoured of all tropes
of the literal sense, etymology. For arbor read arbre. He recuperates the
process of signification, the moment of sense, as an act of translation.
At the same time it is the most faithful of translations, the literal. The
litterae of littera recompose themselves in the sensus of another language,
only, by happy coincidence, it is after all the same language. By this
means meaning is kept in the family. Arbre really does mean arbor.
Endless are the resources of etymology. Searching for the lost traces
of ancient meaning, scratching around at the roots of words, kicking
life back into dead metaphors, these have been the habitual methods
of the great literalists from Augustine to Rashi to Derrida. Etymology
appears to reach back inside the word itself to find its own explication.
It conveys the word's own sense without any need for paraphrase or
metaphrase, without indeed any need for conveyance at all. The word
does not need to go anywhere else to explain itself. This is translation
without translation, reference without reference. No wonder Saussure
is beside himself, finding so convenient a form of transportation. He
has been searching for a way of distinguishing between signifiant and
signifié without making the one a referent for the other, without
making the word a nomenclature for the thing, or even for the idea of
the thing. He wants the word to name itself, not something else: and
here for a moment it does exactly that.
222 Paragraph
Except that it does not name itself, but only a family resemblance.
Perhaps a true linguist will always think in Latin. In making arbor and
not arbre the signifiant, Saussure makes an exchange and calls it a single
currency, pocketing the two letters as small change before the reader
notices the difference. What would be the alternative? It would be to
say that the signifiant is arbre and the signifié is arbre. Here the inverted
commas become all the more significant. Perhaps the signifiant is 'arbre'
and the signifié is ' "arbre" '. Or else the signifiant is ' "arbre" ' and the
signifié is ' " ' arbre' " '.
The literal reading, as it always does, recedes into tautology. The
literal reading of arbre is arbre. Etymology appears to offer Saussure a
route out of repetition, by making arbor appear similar to, but not quite
the same as, arbre. Similar, that is, in the sense of like but slightly
different; from the Latin similis , related (similar to) the Greek 01XOIOÇ,
and probably derived ultimately from the Sanskrit sama. Same, on the
other hand, meaning identical: from a variety of Teutonic words such
as samma, sama, same; related (similar to) the Greek ojioioç; probably
derived ultimately from the Sanskrit sama. What did sama mean in
Sanskrit? The dictionary tells us 'level, equal', or better, 'same'.
However, the problem with Saussure, Lacan implies, is not that he
is being too literal but that he is not literal enough. At the very moment
of trusting the letters he betrays them to the tyranny of sens. Lacan 's
algorithm, S/s, suggests something more precise and more mysterious.
The bar between signifiant and signifié - the mathematical line of
division - which in Saussure is treated as a form of translation or even
of correspondence - becomes in Lacan something more resistant to
interpretation. It is a barrier, a hindrance, an obstruction. It has itself
no signification ('cet accès en tout cas ne doit comporter aucune
signification' ('In no circumstances must this access display any mean-
ing') {I, 258). There is no 'meaning', as such, of the literal meaning.
Crossing the bar takes place only by not rendering a sens du sens. The
transfer ('ce transfert') reveals 'only the structure of the signifier'.
Lacan in this way gives new life to the letter. The superimposition
of signifiant on signifié is a return to the letter at the expense of spirit.
The literal always comes out on top. In place of Saussure 's symmetry
of signifiant and signifié, Lacan describes 'un glissement incessant du
signifié sous le signifiant' (1, 260) ('an incessant sliding of the signified
under the signifier' (154)). Such a metaphor, at such a moment, might
be said truly to deserve Locke's epithet, 'perfect cheat'. Except that
Lacan does not in any sense seem to oppose the literal to the
metaphorical. Instead, and much more radically, he seems to oppose
the literal to sense. For this he uses any number of metaphors: signifìers
are 'rings of a necklace that is a ring in another necklace made of rings'
(153); 'the signifier, by its very nature, always anticipates meaning by
unfolding its dimension before it' (ibid.).
In these metaphors he is as literal as he can be. This explains (if it
needed explaining) his attachment to puns, to etymologies. Bowie has
written well of Lacan's word-play:
We could say that in all these cases etymology is on Lacan's side, and that Latin
knew in advance about the connections he is seeking to make. But the problem
is that Lacan's puns run ahead of his arguments and make argument itself seem
slow-witted and prosaic. (36)
However, in Lacan's sense the letters tell it better than the sense ever
could. Etymology here works rather differently than in Saussure's
retreat of arbre into arbor. It is not a movement back into true, or truer,
meaning. It is a translation that acknowledges the part played by
translation in its own meaning.
Figures for the literal from time immemorial have been construed
as a process of turning back, of retrieving. But in Lacan the literal
always involves also a turning away. Nothing could illustrate this better
than what he does with Saussure's primary example of the signifiant.
For he uproots Saussure's arbre and replants it among Valéry 's plane
trees. Saussure's withering analysis gives way to an efflorescence, an
anthology, of interpretation. The tree is not reduced to a single
equivalence but is allowed to contain a multiplicity of ramifications.
In this way the etymology of the literal involves not only tautology,
repetition, the same (tó dutóç) again and again, but also translation, a
moving away, a carrying across, or in other words, metaphor:
Ce que cette structure de la chaîne signifiante découvre, c'est la possibilité que

j'ai, justement dans la mésure où sa langue m'est commune avec des autres sujets,
c'est-à-dire où cette langue existe, de m'en servir pour signifier tout autre chose
que ce qu'elle dit. (1, 262)
(What this structure of the signifying chain discloses is the possibility I have,
precisely in so far as I have this language in common with other subjects, that is
to say, in so far as it exists as a language, to use it in order to signify something quite
other than what it says. (155))
This is as exact as it is paradoxical. It attempts to give voice to a sense

that the letter of language is always both same and other, ëtepoç and
224 Paragraph
dl)TÓç or, if I may properly borrow from what is another context, what
Derrida calls 'son propre autre, le propre de son autre, un autre propre'
('its proper other, the proper of its other, an other proper').56 The literal
repeats itself, and at the same time returns its proper other.
BRIAN CUMMINGS
University of Sussex
NOTES
1 Spoken versions of this paper have been given at a Philosophy Co

at the Isle of Thorns and at the Centre for Modern French Though
University of Sussex. I am grateful to Paul Davies and Celine Surp
respectively for their kindness and insight in organising these session
reading a previous draft so carefully. All errors properly belong to m
2 Ash- Wednesday, II.
3 All of these examples are from the learned journal Colemanballs, 8
4 An obvious exception being, for instance, J.R. Searles 'Literal Mea
Expression and Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 197
5 The conference took place at the University of Chicago in Februa
and was published in Critical Inquiry , 5:1 (Autumn 1978). This quo
from the Foreword to the expanded edition, On Metaphor , ed. Sheldo
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1 979) . References here to pap
the symposium will be from On Metaphor , which also includes the 'A
thoughts' by W.V. Quine, Nelson Goodman, Max Black and others
were first printed in Critical Inquiry , 6 (1979).
6 Hobbes, Leviathan , 1, 4.
7 Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding , ed. Peter H. Nidditch
Clarendon Press, 1975), III, X, 34 (p.508).
8 By Ted Cohen, Paul de Man, and Wayne C. Booth. Locke's critiqu
the object of an extended critique by Geoffrey Bennington in The
cheat: Locke and empiricism's rhetoric', The Figurai and the Literal: P
of Language in the History of Science and Philosophy ; 1 630 - Í 800 , ed. A
Benjamin, Geoffrey N. Cantor and John R.R. Christie (Man
Manchester University Press, 1987), pp. 103-23.
9 Critical Inquiry , 5 (1978), 13-30; On Metaphor , pp. 11-28; also reprint
Man, Aesthetic Ideology , ed. A. Warminski, (Minneapolis: University of M
Press, 1996), pp.34-50. References here are from On Metaphor .
10 Essay Concerning Human Understanding , III, IV, 26.
11 Essay Concerning Human Understanding , III, X, 34 ('since Rheto
powerful instrument of Error and Deceit, has its established Prof
publickly taught, and has always been had in great Reputation: And,
not, but it will be thought great boldness, if not brutality in me, to h
thus much against it').
Literally Speaking , or, the Literal Sense from Augustine to Lacan 225
1 2 English translation, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation

of Meaning in Language (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), p.18.
13 On Metaphor , pp. 29-45. Originally published in Critical Inquiry , 5 (1978),
3 1-47; also in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, pp.245-64. References here
to On Metaphor .
14 Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society , 55 (1954-55), 273-94.
15 Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1972), p. 318; English
Translation by Alan Bass, Margins of Philosophy (Brighton: Harvester, 1982),
p.266.
16 Henri de Lubac, Exégèse médiévale : les quatre sens de V écriture , 4 vols (Lyon:
Aubier, 1959), I.i, chapter 3.
17 See Jean Leclerq, 'The Exposition and Exegesis of Scripture: from Gregory
the Great to St Bernard', The Cambridge History of the Bible, 3 vols (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP,), II, 196.
18 For examples of the varieties of terms used see de Lubac, Exégèse médiévale ,
I.ii, chs 8-10.
19 See for instance OED LITERAL, 3c and 3d. For a survey of the words in
this period, see The Figurai and the Literal : Problems of Language in the History
of Science and Philosophy, Î 630-1 800, ed. Benjamin, Cantor and Christie.
20 The Rule of Metaphor, p. 19.
21 Orator, 27; see de Lubac, Exégèse médiévale, I.ii, 373.
22 attiva eotiv aXX,īļyopoi)neva, Galatians, 4:21 .
23 Origen, Homiliae in Judicum, h. 6, n.l (Patrologia Graeca, 12, 974B).
24 De utilitate credendi, 17, 35 ( Patrologia Latina, 42, 91).
25 De Lubac, Exégèse médiévale, I.ii, 397.
26 For a discussion of the two words in Augustine's practice, see Brian Stock,
Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-Knowledge, and the Ethics of Interpretation
(Cambridge, Ms.: Harvard UP, 1996), esp. pp. 63-64.
27 Patrologia Latina, 113, 28CD.
28 In Ps. CXVIII (Patrologia Latina, 9, 514A).
29 Homiliae in Genesim, 6.1 ( Patrologia Graeca, 12, 195A).
30 Etienne Gilson, Introduction à V étude de Saint Augustin (Paris: Vrin, 1931), p.27.
31 De doctrina Christiana, II (10, 15); Corpus christianorum, series latina, 32, 41 . All
references from this edition.
32 On Christian Doctrine, translated by D.W. Robertson (Indianapolis: Bobbs
Merill), p. 43. 5
33 See Poetics, 1457b.
34 The work of this school has been richl
accessibly in The Study of the Bible i
Blackwell, 1952).
35 Didascalion, VI, iii ( Patrologia latina, 1
36 G.R. Evans, The Language and Logic
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984, p. 1
37 Didascalion, VI, iv ( Patrologia latina, 1
226 Paragraph
38 De scriptum, V ( Patrologia latina , 175, 13B), translated by Smalley, Study of the

Bible in the Middle Ages , p.93.
39 Smalley, Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages , pp. 103-4.
40 Andrew's contacts with contemporary Jews in France are analysed by Smalley,
pp. 155-57.
41 I follow Erwin Rosenthal's summary, 'The Study of the Bible in Medieval
Judaism', in The Cambridge History of the Bible , II, 252-79.
42 See L. Rabinowitz, The Sodai Life of the Jews of Northern France in the XII-XIV
Centuries as Reflected in the Rabbinical Literature of the Period (London, 1938).
43 Cited in Smalley, Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages , p. 151.
44 Rosenthal, The Cambridge History of the Bible , II, 255.
45 An den christlichen Adel deutscher Nation , in Luthers Werke , WA 6.41 1 .8.
46 First published as 'L'instance de la lettre dans l'inconscient ou la raison depuis
Freud', in Ecrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966), cited here from the Points Essais edition,
2 vols, I, pp.249-89.
47 The phrase occurs in this form in Séminaire , XI (Paris: Seuil, 1973), p.23; but
its genesis goes back at least as far as the Rome Discourse of 1953, 'Fonction
et champ de la parole et du langage', Ecrits I, p. 147 ('parce qu'il est lui-même
structuré comme un langage', although here the subject of the predicate is
'le symptôme').
48 English translation, 'The agency of the letter in the unconscious or reason
since Freud', in Ecrits: A Selection , translated by Alan Sheridan (London:
Tavistock/Routledge, 1977), p. 147.
49 OED OXYMORON: '(Now often erroneously used as if merely = a
contradiction in terms, an incongruous conjunction)'.
50 'Seminar on "The Purloined Letter" ', translated by Jeffrey Mehlman, Yale
French Studies , 48 (1972), 38-72; this citation p.53. Lacan comments here on
the untranslatability of Poe's English word 'odd'.
51 'De locutionis significatione' (23 June 1954), in Séminaire , I (Paris: Seuil,
1975).
52 English translation by Jacques-Alain Miller, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), I, p.249.
53 Lacan (London: Fontana Press, 1991), p.63.
54 Nonetheless, and somewhat ungratefully, Ogden and Richards begin The
Meaning of Meaning with an easy put-down of Saussure.
55 This argument was put forward by T. de Mauro in his Edition critique of the
Cours (Paris, 1972), p.441, n.132; see also Roy Harris, Reading Saussure
(London: Duckworth, 1987), p.59.
56 'Tympan', in Marges , op. cit., p.ii; English Translation, Margins , p.xi.

Literally Speaking, Or, The Literal Sense From Augustine To Lacan

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Literally Speaking, Or, The Literal Sense From Augustine To Lacan

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Literally Speaking, or, the Literal Sense from Augustine to Lacan

Author(s): BRIAN CUMMINGS

I am, literally, speaking.' Yet am I at the same time speaking literally,

A The Literal by way of Metaphor

The problem of the literal may be the most fundamental problem in

fringes of discourse to a central position in the understanding of

idea is to understand light properly' (p. 15-6), then proceeds to

De Man pauses to congratulate himself on making Locke sound like

Hegel in the properly rhetorical manner?' (27). If philosophy is

Davidson's list of targets subdy conceals the thrust of this counter-

philosophic discourse' (30-31). Davidson attacks Black for the more

It is no help in examining how words work in metaphor to posit metaphorical

Davidson identifies a circularity in Black's theory, in that he already

In other words, a metaphor 'doesn't say anything beyond its literal

Et par conséquent de faire sauter l'opposition rassurante du métaphorique et du

(And consequendy to explode the reassuring opposition of the metaphoric and

As if in parody of these self-reflexive and self-referential procedures

similar to de Man's. But is the triumph of the metaphorical a proper

B The Historical Sense of the Literal

It is time to look for the literal. Where should I begin? Immediately, I

The literal occupies a more openly ambiguous and enigmatic space

The relationship between littera and spiritus is therefore contentious

The literal is what is propria to something, the name which belongs to

Aristotle's classic definition of metaphor as 'giving the thing a name

As a deconstruction of the pretentions of the allegorists (from Gregory

his Christian sources. Although he rejects the accusation, he worries

Had he gone a hundred years earlier, he would have found no connection

Even among the riches of Smalley's scholarship, this is a startlingly

littera in relation to spiritus, or the literal and the metaphorical. As with

Whatever else, Kara is obviously not afraid of metaphors, nor is his

literal sense of the New Testament empowers the Church tö determine

C The Letter to the Letter

The literalisatíon of the letter accompanies a literalisation of its parallel

C'est elle qui conduit le logico-positivisme à la quête du sens du sens, du meaning

The meaning of meaning is the efflatus of a sect which believes in a

'sensational lucidity', lends to modern linguistic philosophy for a

image acoustique arbor

With the most minimal paraphernalia ofboxes, lines a

Ce que cette structure de la chaîne signifiante découvre, c'est la possibilité que

This is as exact as it is paradoxical. It attempts to give voice to a sense

1 Spoken versions of this paper have been given at a Philosophy Co

1 2 English translation, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation

38 De scriptum, V ( Patrologia latina , 175, 13B), translated by Smalley, Study of the

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