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T H E S U B J E C T D‘I'L E M M A

E A
R C
R A
I N
COMMUNICATING DIFFERENCE D
A

By
Paul Houlihan

A paper for Literary Theory

Submitted to:
David Watson
Department of English
University of Uppsala
Nov 24 2010

For last year's words belong to last year's language,


And next year's words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning. 1

“Irrespective of what one might assume, in the life of a science, problems do


not arise by themselves. It is precisely this that marks out a problem as being of the
true scientific spirit: all knowledge is in response to a question. If there were no
question, there would be no knowledge. Nothing proceeds from itself. Nothing is
given. All is constructed” 2

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Jacques Derrida commences his paper ‘Signature Event Context’ by enquiring into the
nature of the word “communication”. Here and through much of his work as a whole
Derrida draws attention to the necessary problems we encounter when trying to
analyse or determine meaning and its limits. Why is this? According to Derrida the
word “communication” gets its significance from the way it is used. 3 In order to
communicate “communication” in speech one already has to predetermine or attempt
to propose an identifiable meaning for the verb ‘to communicate’, to function as a
vehicle or medium of transmitting meaning. Yet the word itself can be used in a “non-
semantic” sense. So this opening aporia which initially appears to be rhetorical has
significance, albeit in a paradoxical sense and is indicative of the dilemmas posed
when using language to fix the content or meaning of its own linguistic elements. 4

“Communication” appears at first glance to be homogenous, whose common-sense


‘shared’ meaning in everyday usage appears relatively identifiable. Yet if we pursue it
further what does “communication” signify? What do we do in communicating itself?
One can point to a tree but not to communication. The word is self-reflexive and yet
its meanings point to a myriad of different activities, ‘events’ and usage. As a speech
act there is a multitude of ways by which we can use it, yet it “opens a semantic field
which precisely is not limited to semantics, semiotics, and even less to linguistics”.5

What Derrida shows is that on closer inspection what we find is the indeterminacy of
language. At a definitional level then, there is uncertainty about what constitutes a
word’s meaning. In using language to enquire into propositions and our “concepts”,
this particularly apt example shows the impossibility of ever definitively fixing a fully
“determined content, an identifiable meaning, a describable value” 6 due to the
polysemous nature of signifiers and the inherent plurality of meanings which can be
disentangled through any act of interpretation whose only appeal is to words.

Perhaps we can start in this manner to see how much of Derrida’s writings are
engaged in a deep reflective questioning of how any communication whether that be
through speech, writing or gesture is possible and how these communicative acts can
come to have significance through the dynamics of interpretation. In this way it is
possible to see how Derrida necessarily shares, sometimes “mirrors” and at other
times sharply contrasts with similar concerns outlined by Lacan after his “linguistic

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turn” or rather “return to Freud”, which as Žižek points out was by way of
“Saussurean linguistics, speech acts theory and the Hegelian dialectics of
recognition”, 7 involving as it did a systematic re-thinking of how language
communicates and how a subject represents to us their unconscious “meaning”
through these very acts of signification.

Both writers exhibit many commonalities which of course is not to negate their
respective and sometimes conflicting and competing methods and claims; both were
deeply engaged with a re-working of the principles of Saussurean linguistics as they
inherited it, employing its terms or “lexicon” in an effort to “de-limit” its more radical
implications; both were greatly influenced by canonical figures like Freud but also
Husserl, Hegel and Heidegger who exerted a particularly strong allure in post-war
France; both produced an inimitable writing style which they hoped would ‘perform’
the message; and both in a final analysis left as a legacy to those who follow, a
bewilderingly dense schematic interpretative approach to reading based on not only
their key concepts but also their respective strategies of reading.

Communication however, it will be noted, must be an interpersonal ‘event’ in that


there must be people involved in these moments or movements of inscription and
interpretation, which is to say the ‘I’ must be ‘in’ the act. For ‘structuralist’ thinkers in
the twentieth century however the self was only knowable, indeed could only think
itself or be thought of within language. It became the condition for all conditionality,
the structure or paradigm which made all other structures possible. This awareness is
the “rupture” or “event” that Derrida speaks of at the beginning of ‘Structure, Sign
and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences ’, 8 the historical moment at which
“language invaded the universal problematic”. (W&D 354)

With Lacan as with Derrida and following the footsteps of Nietzsche, Freud and
Heidegger, the self is decentred and the subject dispersed throughout language.
Theories of the subject became merged with structural theories of language (itself to
some extent a theory of tropes) yet as Derrida points out these shouldn’t be abstracted
from their instances of use. What this means is that the self becomes redefined as ‘a
subject’, that is, a set of linguistic positions which at any time are possible yet are

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necessarily governed by contexts and conventions. In Hegelian terms through
language the subject is viewed an “'I that is a We, and the We that is an I”.9

Any ontological claims of existence can only be made in a language which does not
have any correspondence with the objects it ‘picks out’; which is paradoxically
external, markedly arbitrary and tropically ambiguous, rendering problematic any
inference from linguistic properties to the objects they were supposed to correlate to
or describe. This, of course, was not to deny that there were real objects and people in
the world only that “all awareness is a linguistic affair”. 10 The ‘literal’ as it is
expressed in language is only what it is through what it is not, thereby taking to some
extent a metaphorical hue and leaving any statement of identity in brackets as it were
with no objective truth value. Ideology itself became viewed as ‘a linguistic affair’ as
did consciousness or rather any claim of one that existed in an unmediated non-
linguistic relationship with its own modes of ‘intellect’. Reflections into language
became self-reflexive through a process of theoretical refraction. 11

As Wittgenstein pointed out “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world”.
This gives rise to two interpretations and Derrida speaks of these as defining his
‘epoch’; one which following this logic views the subject as “a limit of the world”, 12
that is knowable or confinable within the structure of language itself and from which
we can infer general laws, and an opposing view-point which according to the
temporal as well as spatial aspects of language argued that it was forever in flux and
forever de-limiting itself.

These two modes or trends of thinking can be located in the figures of Derrida and
Lacan. Concerning the latter we find a procedure or position which still sought to
locate meaning and truth within the structure, issuing from a “centre”, by taking
phenomena as the products of an underlying governing and knowable system of
abstracted rules and conventions issuing from the structure, which “dreams of
deciphering, a truth or origin free from free-play”,(W&D 294) and on the other hand
Derrida’s approach affirms “free-play” and the “loss” of this centre, freeing
interpretation from rules which would seek to limit the act of conferring value and
meaning; “everything is to be disentangled nothing deciphered…there is nothing
beneath” 13, affirmative in that “the ‘I’ that approaches the text is itself already a

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plurality of other texts, of codes which are infinite or, more precisely, lost (whose
origin is lost)”14

Lacan’s linguistic theory as encapsulated and outlined in the “The Instance of the
letter in the Unconscious”, allows us to glimpse early on the asymptotic course which
was to mark his difference with Derrida’s treatment of similar subjects. He begins
with a prologue where we can immediately locate a major divergence in opinion
between the two thinkers. For Lacan the occasion for his paper concerned as it is with
symbolization and language in psychoanalysis allows him to reflect on a key aspect of
his methodological approach whereby “speech alone is the key to that truth” 15. At this
time Lacan was convinced of the need for “parole plein” or ‘full speech’ between
analysand and analyst where the unconscious could find ‘expression’ or be ‘heard’, so
that the psychoanalyst might “find in speech alone its instrument, its context, its
material and even the background noise of its uncertainties”. 16 For Derrida speech
and its primacy over writing was to be radically deconstructed as an unstable binary
pair indicative of a logocentric metaphysics which privileged what was ‘present’ over
that which was ‘representative’ or ‘secondary’, constituted as it was by ‘the loss or
‘absence’ of original intentionality .

The ‘Instance’ of Lacan’s title loses some of its ‘significance’ when translated as
“agency”. While this term certainly conveys the causal active nature Lacan had in
mind, the French term “l’instance” points not only to the “presence” of a present
‘instant’ that is implied by that word but also towards the judicial use of the ‘law-
giving’ function of the ‘letter’. In this respect it is noteworthy to contrast “instance”
with Derrida’s use of the term “solicit” in the essay “Differance” which he uses in its
entomological sense (i.e. in to shake or disturb the whole) within his discussion of
Freud’s “questioning of the authority of consciousness”. 17

Lacan’s starting point and main thesis is that we can understand the unconscious as
being structured like a language. It is as such capable of communicating, of signifying
and as a result we can come to an understanding not only of its “topography” but also
interpret its language as it makes itself known, as it is “manifest in conscious
psychical effects”, and not just in dreams. As Lacan contends “the unconscious leaves
none of our actions outside its field”. (Ecrits 428)

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Its ‘trace’ then is present in our actions and behaviour, but of central importance to
Lacan was how it manifested itself through language. Words generate meanings
beyond the conscious understanding or intentions of those who use them and came to
be seen by Lacan as organising the symbolic sphere in which we live as social beings.
Words are ‘symptoms’, symptomatic of inner anxieties or desires, repressed ‘truths’
and hidden significances but by giving a linguistic capability to the unconscious
Lacan simultaneously grants it the throne “of verification and truth” as Spivak argues
in her introduction to ‘Of Grammatology’ 18

Language then, is something external to man. Its structure, as Lacan reminds us,
exists “prior to the moment at which each subject at a certain point in his mental
development makes his entry into it”. (Ecrits 414) Saussure had outlined how
language is paradigmatic and how our uses or ‘parole’ are syntagmatic occasions of
use. Lacan likewise from a scientific point of view is careful to differentiate this
system from “the various psychical and somatic functions that serve it in the speaking
subject”, (Ecrits 413) that is, it is not reducible for Lacan to brain states. It has not
been brought into being but is already existent as a sort of pre-determined program or
deep-structured Chomskyan Universal grammar which we enter into. As Heidegger
had argued language is the house that “material support” in which man abides. 19
Instead of a classical view which saw language as a communicative tool with which
man could share his inner thoughts however, structuralists were able to reverse a
Hegelian binary-double and argue that the subject entering into the language game is
more the “slave” of this language. Thought is only possible by this line of reasoning
through language, through the manipulation of signifiers.

This is a move necessary in order to attack a Cartesian consciousness predicated on a


central thinking ‘I’, a rational reflective consciousness that is above and beyond the
means of its own expression. Lacan had in a famous ‘move’, earlier outlined how he
viewed this “consciousness” as being akin to the Ego outlined earlier by Freud,
determined by the misrecognition of itself in ‘The Mirror-Stage’, the site of
identification’ which was to govern all further ‘mes-recognitions’. 20

In this essay however Lacan was interested in delineating a further stage in the
development of the self, i.e. the formation and governing of the ‘subject’ in and

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through language. In this, he turns to Saussure and re-works the earlier analysis of the
Swiss linguists’ theories into a model that reconfigures its central terms. 21 If Freud
was to give the general laws of the dream-work, Lacan was to go a step further
arguing how “the unconscious leaves none of our actions outside its field”. (Ecrits
428) For this to be plausible Lacan was to replace the processes involved in the
production of the dream work with corresponding linguistic terms determining all
language production, “signifying mechanisms” whose effects are analysable in the
sense of being quantifiable and qualifiable.

Lacan places the signifier (word-sound) in a hierarchical relationship over what is


signified (the concept-thought) and capitalises it to indicate its predominance in the
formula. What separates them is a bar. The two are separate elements divided by a
barrier which impedes signification and yet Lacan attempts to illustrate how we can
think that the signifier enters the signified, that is, the subject is determined and
somewhat controlled through “the law-governing function” of the signifier in
“generating the signified”. (Ecrits 415)

We can see Derrida’s opinion of Lacan’s reformulation in a note from ‘Of


Grammatology’ worth quoting at this stage;

“This does not, by simple inversion, mean that the signifier is fundamental or primary.
The “primacy” or “priority” of the signifier would be an expression untenable and
absurd to formulate….The signifier will never by rights precede the signified, in
which case it would no longer be a signifier and the “signifying” signifier would no
longer have a possible signified….The thought that is announced in this impossible
formula without being successfully contained therein should therefore be stated in
another way”. 22

However in response to this, one may point out that a signified is merely comprised of
a chain of signifiers and in this sense Lacan is right to concentrate on the ‘priority’
and the effects that the signifier can produce, on “their function in the genesis of the
signified”. On the other hand, and crucially for many deconstructionists, Lacan leaves
himself open to the accusation that he is merely following in the path of a logocentric
philosophical tradition reducing a plurality of different entities to a unifying substance

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in this case the signifier, that “material support” from which all meaning derives. In
effect what Lacan achieves is a reduction of plurality and alterity to sameness. The
unconscious is no longer the other, but substituted as a ‘transcendental signifier’, the
centre to which everything refers. Lacan’s triadic distinctions between the Real,
Imaginary and the Symbolic on close analysis with the latter two dissolving into a
world of illusions and appearances strongly resembles a form of Platonism where in
Derrida’s words the analyst becomes the “translator of a full speech that was fully
present…..interpreter of an originary speech itself shielded from interpretation”. (OG
p 8)

What Lacan however hoped to show was that the ‘agency’ of the signifier, its function
as a law-giving ‘letter’ was beyond the control of a speaker. In yielding an indefinite
number of signified it is not a subject who controls signifiers but rather is controlled
by them. Lacan’s formula aims to highlight how a subject’s discourse represents a
chain of signifiers yielding possible signified concepts “where meaning insists”
(Ecrits 419) transferred during communication. The elements in the unconscious
whether anxieties, repressions or desires are seen to be like ‘letters’ or signifiers.
However as the signifier works by a dual process – by either metonymy or
metaphorically - the signifier is never really itself but relates to another signifier in the
chain of significations, that is a word is only what it is by what it is not so that
signifiers relate only to other signifiers and of which it is the duty of the
psychoanalyst to locate or ‘disentangle’.

Towards the end of “’Structure, Sign and Play” Derrida characterises this as the
tendency or “thematic of broken immediateness”, which attempts to determine a
“genetic indetermination”, that is the freeplay of the structure. (W&D 292) In other
words Lacanian analysis while free from a 'subjectivity' that is centred in and through
the consciousness is tied to the materiality or objectivity of language and is thereby
trapped in a hermeneutics that searches for a lost cause in which it can locate a
presence. As can be seen from Lacan’s witty wordplay between ‘arbre’, ‘barre’ and
“arbitraire”, the links are truly arbitrary, not conforming to general semiotic laws but
in which an “arbitre”(referee) decides through this process of ‘subjective’ analysis to
confer signification – one which is totally in the act of phenomenological
interpretation which Derrida might see as an impulse towards totalitarianism. It is also

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open to the charge that what the psychoanalyst finds there is already known and is
based on the assumptions and projections of the one doing the interpreting, i.e.
Lacan’s method is a vicious circle. Instead of letting the other speak for itself in its
alterity, Lacan from this perspective is guilty of speaking for it.

Though Lacan at many points in the essay acknowledges the differential aspects of
signs, and alters the linearity of Saussure’s structure of ‘the chain of discourse’ to
reflect Jakobson’s notion of the musical-score, there is still a presupposition of
‘knowing’ the “whole articulation of relevant contexts suspended vertically, as it were
from that point” and this is a further point of disagreement with Derrida. For Derrida,
there can never be a rigid structural ‘non-saturable’ context. The transmission of
meaning opens itself to the polysemous nature of words. Though ‘context’ allows us
to put a frame around meaning to a certain undeniable extent (otherwise we would
slip into the problem of ‘private languages) the problem is that context can never be
‘saturated’ for Derrida appropriating that term from Husserl. As a result there can
never be “full speech” where context is fully determinable “however much one might
wish to restore it by means or without benefit of psychoanalysis”.

Though “language bears within itself the necessity of its own critique” there can be no
final appeal to method, context or convention that can arrest the disseminating free
play and multiplicity of meanings of a discourse. Language is bound by “division or
dissociation” where origins cannot be located and its ‘end’ is constantly deferred. As
such Derrida argues words cannot be reduced or confined whether by intention or by
the vague structure of context and that the wish to “simplify” neglects the necessarily
amorphous quality of language. Like Austin and Searle, Lacan’s analysis can be
viewed as an attempt to centre meaning in ‘speech acts’. It is noticeable how swift
Lacan dismisses how language can conceal as much as reveal; the “function of speech
is more worth pointing out than that ‘of disguising the thought’ (more often than not
indefinable) of the subject”. This is a crucial statement in Lacan’s argument, one
which though unremarked I believe, irrevocably trips up the argument as a whole; for
if this aspect of speech is ‘indefinable’, can’t all attempts be thought of as indefinable
as Derrida would argue.

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Derrida’s reading of Saussure is more to the letter (a la lettre) in that it is more
faithful and involves rather, the development or extension of some key aspects which
Saussure himself did not realise especially as it concerned the conception of language
being based on ‘differences’. However the results of this reading led to a method of
analysis which systematically undermined the presumption of guiding interpretative
contexts to which anyone could appeal to for a determination of meaning thus
bringing this method into conflict with Lacan attempts to locate interpretation within
the signifying chain. What cannot be reconciled is the element of ‘play’ which for
Derrida is the determining characteristic of all language. While Derrida agrees with
many aspects of Lacan’s analysis most notably the importance of the chain of
significations there is a crucial difference residing in his notion of play which negates
any final agreement as Derrida outlines in the essay ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the
Human Sciences’;

“There are thus two interpretations of interpretation, of structure, of sign, of freeplay.


The one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering, a truth or an origin which is free
from freeplay and from the order of the sign, and lives like an exile the necessity of
interpretation. The other, which is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms
freeplay, and tries to pass beyond man and humanism” (W&D 293)

This essay presents two different ways accruing from the thinking about the
“structurality of structure”, one epitomised by Levi-Strauss but also valid I think for
Lacan in Derrida’s view, and the other proposed by Derrida which treats with
suspicion the claims of any science or would be science such as psychoanalysis which
retain an “ethic of nostalgia for origins….of a purity of presence and self-presence in
speech”.

Derrida’s essay ‘Difference’ is best viewed in context with Lacan’s treatment of the
structure of semiotics as it deals with an extended reading not only of Saussure but
also Freud. In his essay ‘On the Interpretation of Dreams’ Freud drew a distinction
between the traditional “hitherto” practice of taking dreams to be a “presentation”, in
a form reminiscent of a “pictorial composition”, rather than as being representative of
a different signifier – of something that "speaks” behind what is "conscious”, of
something that "produces” these collection of disparate signifiers, i.e. the “dream-

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work”. So for Freud “a dream is a picture-puzzle”, where the elements are not
identical to that which they represent.

It is a similar preoccupation with which Derrida opens his famous essay ‘Difference’.
Here Derrida indicates how a sign’s meaning is never ‘present’. All language is
metaphorical in the sense that it “signifies non-identity”, being arbitrary and
descriptive in nature. This for Derrida challenges some of the most foundational laws
in philosophy and metaphysics – the law of identity, of non-identity and excluded
middle. His essay introduces the “concept of play”, the “tracing out of difference “
which no longer follows “the line of logico-philosophical speech’ as it pertains to the
construction of systematic truths through propositions. As such it compliments much
of what Freud had earlier shown and Derrida highlights how both the “different
meanings of differance are tied together in Freudian theory”, a theory “of ciphers or
traces and an energetics” through which the process of signification is discernable.

What is present in the dream-work for Freud is merely the “manifest content” – from
which people had drawn evaluations rather than beginning an interpretative process
that sought to “disentangle” meaning, seeing the signs present as a symbolical
synthesis of other signs produced from a hidden dialectics, a “diaphoristics”. In this
sense Freud deconstructs the binary opposition of presence/absence - taking the
“rebus” to stand as the effects of absent signs in a process not seen – that of the
“work” or “energetics” that defers and dissociates, condenses, displaces and distorts
through a series of detours “that suspends the accomplishment or fulfillment of
‘desire’ or ‘will’, or carries desire or will out in a way that annuls or tempers their
effect”. (Margins 8)

For Lacan the dominance of the signifier over the signified is seen by Freud’s analysis
of the function of signs in dreams; “Freud shows us in every possible way that the
value of the image as signifier has nothing to do with its signification”. The meaning
of dreams is in the signifying chain itself which “allows us to spell out the ‘proverb’
presented by the rebus of the dream”. (Ecrits 424) Central to this process are the
functions of metaphor and metonymy linguistic tropes which are linked to the
processes of condensation and displacement in the dream-work. Lacan argues that all
acts of signification whether conscious or unconscious at some level operate and are

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expressed in either metonymic or metaphoric terms. Lacan speaks of the impossibility
of realising an object of desire due to the metonymic structure desire follows in the
symbolic realm. Desire is linked to the desire of the signifier to cross the bar of
signification.

This finds a parallel in Derrida’s analysis of “substitution” and the notion of the
“supplement”. Our desires (whether conscious or unconscious) aim to fulfil an
inherent or "original lack”. They aim to make ‘present’ or immediate what is
presently absent as with the case of memories and fantasies. It can only do this
through signs which themselves are never fully ‘present’ outside the system of
differences of what Derrida has termed ‘differance’. On one hand the sign is only the
supplement of the object itself. It represents what is not present and as the term
“supplement” indicates, it is incomplete. Hence the metonymic desire to make whole
what is lacking. However there is no possibility of an absolute presence in and for
itself, a self-sufficiency which can’t be added to. As with Lacan desire can never be
fulfilled. It is a wish of the incomplete to be made complete, a structural condition of
the historical ‘present’, in the presence of an inevitable absence. Thought in time
through signs that can only be ‘presented’ through representations point outside to a
past that is absent or a future which is forever deferred (in terms that are
interminable), which is why, Derrida notes, the supplement “produces no relief” 23

Though Derrida is ultimately concerned with langue – that is the way the system
operates rather than parole – those instances of individual language use which
psychoanalysis will be interested in, his account allows one to see how parole is
possible. Saussure had outlined a conception of the structure of language as being a
system marked by differences “without positive qualities”, but what did this mean?
Derrida interrogates the meaning of the verb “to differ” delineating its double-sided
meaning, which on one hand “indicates difference as distinction, inequality or
discernability”, i.e. as spatial differences between non-identical things, but also and
crucially as that which “expresses the interposition of delay…that puts off until later
what is presently denied”. The structure cannot be thought of as solely synchronic if
this is inherently true as it shows that there is a temporal aspect to the ‘differences’ of
language .

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Derrida’s conceptualization of ‘difference’ then accounts for “differing both as
spacing/temporalising and as the movement that structures every dissociation” which
impedes the clarity of signification through the dispersal and endless deferral of
meaning through signs which bear within themselves ‘retentions’ as well as
protensions’, that is, the traces of other signs issuing from the past as well as
projecting forwards to other signs along the chain of significations; “each so-called
present element…is related to something other than itself, thereby keeping within
itself the mark of the past element and already letting itself be vitiated by the mark of
its relation to the future element.

While sharing many aspects of Lacan’s analysis of language this is a radical re-
imagining of the “structural conditions that define grammar”, (L) conditions most
evinced by the conditions of writing and which is significantly different from Lacan’s
notion of “the order of constitutive encroachments of the signifier”. Derrida’s play
allows for meaning to be disseminated and dispersed so that the “diverted presentation
continues to be somehow definitively and irreducibly withheld”.

Words are objectively the same and yet dissimilar in that they are interpreted in
different ways at different times by different subjects with different linguistic
capabilities as such they are capable of change, of ‘grafting’ onto new contexts and
giving birth to new meanings which is why I think Derrida gives his term for this a
biological name and talks of “the seminal adventure of the trace”. So while on one
hand Derrida might agree with Lacan that words can be often governed by their
conventional use (as shown in Lacan’s examples of ‘FemmeS HommeS’), they are
not totally tied by conventional use and the ‘law-giving’ function of the signifier and
Derrida throughout his work questions the right of philosophical attempts to
determine the centre which is to say the locus of meaning for words in any number of
contexts. So even if one grants that ‘the unconscious is structured like a language’ this
does not mean anyone can faithfully transcribe what it says especially if it works
through the processes of metonymy and metaphor whereby any attempt at epistemic
statements such as x = y can be easily ‘deconstructed’, as ‘truth-value’ is necessarily
suspended. X can as easily be = F or C and this leads to an indefinite over-
determination of meaning.

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Derrida while analyzing the line of thought he terms ‘characteristic of our epoch’
notes how the subject is seen to be inscribed within the linguistic system, a “function
of the language”, which leads to the argument that consciousness must be thought of
as something like a ‘determination’ or ‘an effect’. However if this is so, then through
Derrida’s new re-conceptualization of the ‘system’ the unconscious must be thought
as the other qua other which is to say as an irreducible alterity, constituted as a system
that even if structured like a language is no longer that of presence but that as
“differance”.

The problem with attempts at foundational principles (what Derrida somewhat


sweepingly constitutes as the whole enterprise and history of “logocentric” thinking)
is to deny the difference that constitutes its very possibility, “Univocity” Derrida tells
us is the essence, or better, the telos” of their attempts to limit language, (Margins
247) yet language it is implied tends towards the mythos rather than the telos.. Even as
Lacan attempts to make his theory a materialistic one centered on the ‘letter’, he is
unable to do so outside of “the cratylic delusions” 24 of a tradition which centers
presence and truth in a traditional binary pair against the false consciousness where
the subject is absent. To destroy this tradition would be to move beyond the “dream of
full-presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and end of the game”. (W&D 293)

Lacan has paradoxically ‘subjected’ the alterity Freud originally ascribed to the
unconscious and conferred it with the ontological truth of being-in-and-for itself. It is
now “classed as a thing” (Margins 16) and not just anything but a ‘res cogitans’ –
given shape and coordinates as the place where “I think of what I am”. In other words,
Lacan is only able to criticize a Cartesian consciousness while paradoxically retaining
essentially its whole structure with consciousness, truth, value, presence, ect, now
shifted one step back into the added element of the unconscious, a “masked
consciousness” (which remains the centre of this universe), whose effects can be
traced through linguistic-analysis; “it is not man that speaks, but in and through man it
(es) speaks, and man’s nature becomes interwoven with effects which exhibit the
structure of language, of which he becomes the substance.’(Ecrits 689)

These are epistemological claims conflicting with Derrida’s own pragmatic reading of
Freud; “with the alterity of the unconscious we have to deal not with the horizons of

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modified presents … but with a “past” that has never been nor will ever be present”.
(Margins 21) For deconstructionists it might be significant how Lacan appeals to
words such as ‘truth’ and ‘fact’ throughout the final few passages of his essay. If on
one hand Lacan appeals to philosophy his theory falls foul of Occam’s razor (amongst
others), if to science the possibility of falsifiability (as well as countless others), while
any position that starts with such a radically skeptical view of signified meaning has
an impossible task in convincing one of the “truth” of signifiers.

In conclusion text is inter-textual and the event of language though repeatable is also
singular. A theory of language through which we can know anything of a subject is
itself to some extent a theory of tropes. Yet who is to say they can be abstracted from
their actual instances of use as Derrida argues. We can think of many instances where
for example the imperative ‘pass me the butter’ is taken in its literal sense, but this is
of course not to say that it can’t be imagined in another context where it is totally
metaphoric. Such is the legacy of Dada and Surrealism. 25 Communication is intra-
personal but who is to say that a signifier has been ‘revealed’ and not arbitrarily
‘produced’ in the very act of interpretation by an ‘analyst’ from their own horizons of
expectation. If by Lacan’s argument an analysand has no claim to controlling their
‘speech’ then on what ground can anyone else claim privilege and validity especially
as there is always a possibility of partial misunderstanding or even a complete loss of
meaning? As Derrida points out by the allusion to pyramids there are signs which
confront us in silence, tombs “that cannot be made to resonate” which is not to deny
that we can’t speculate. Signifiers which are present, though carrying “pretensions”
and “retentions”, can point beyond themselves to a past that never was and a future
that is endlessly deferred.

In Husserl’s ‘Ideas’ from 1913 there is recounted a moment when the author
remembers a visit to an art gallery in Dresden and encountering a picture which itself
represented a gallery of paintings, each of which represented further paintings in an
endless regress.25 Such is the fate of representation. The subject is trapped in a room
full of mirrors. In the words of Jimi Hendrix;
“I used to live in a room full of mirrors,
All I could see was me.
Well I take my spirit and I smash my mirrors,

15
Now the whole world is here for me to see.” 26

Notes
1. Eliot, T.S. ‘”Little Gidding” Four Quartets. London: Faber & Faber Ltd, 2001.
Web. 17 Nov. 2010. <http://www.tristan.icom43.net/quartets/gidding.html>

2. Bachelard, Gaston. The New Scientific Spirit Trans.Arthur Goldhammer.


Boston: Beacon Press, 1985. p 16.

3. In this instance through a ‘speech’ that is paradoxically ‘’directed’ by writing


immediately problematizing notions of ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ importance as well
as our conceptions of origins.

4. This question finds a precedent in the one Frege posed in 1892, “Is the concept of
a horse a concept?”
Gottlieb, Frege. On Concept and Object. Geach & Black 1952. pp. 42-55.

5. Derrida, Jacques. “Signature Event Context” Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan


Bass. University Of Chicago Press, January 1, 1985. pp 307 – 330.

6. Ibid p 307.

7. Zizek, Slavoj. How to Read Lacan. New york: W. W. Norton & Company 2007.
Web. 4 Nov. 2010. <http://www.lacan.com/zizhowto.html>

8. Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human
Sciences” Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass.
London: Routledge pp 278 – 294.

16
9. Hegel, Georg W.F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. J.B Bailie. Digireads, 2009. p
43.

10. Sellars, Willfred. Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes.


edited by Pedro Amaral. Ridgeview Publishing Co. 1993. p 160.
11. As in the original Greek meaning of that word ‘the ri ’

12. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. D.F. Pears.


London & New York: Routledge, 2001. p 56.

13. Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author”. Image-Music-Text.


London: Fontana, 1977. pp 142 – 148.

14. Barthes, Roland. S/Z. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974. p 10.

15. Lacan Jacques. Ecrits. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton & Company,
2007. p 172

16. “At this intersection of nature and culture…psychoanalysis alone recognizes this
knot of imaginary servitude which love must always undo again, or sever” .
Lacan, Jacques. “The Mirror-Stage”. Ecrits. Trans Bruce Fink. New York: W. W.
Norton & Company, 2007. p 80.

17. Derrida, Jacques. “Differance”. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass.


University of Chicago Press, 1982. pp 1 – 28.

18. Derrida, Jacques. Translator's Preface. Of Grammatology. by Gayatri


Chakravorty Spivak. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. p xiv.

19. Martin, Heidegger. “Letter on Humanism”. Basic Writings: From Being and Time
to The Task of Thinking. Trans. David Farrell Krell. London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul Ltd, 1964. pp 189 – 265.

20 Lacan Jacques. “The Mirror-Stage as formative of the Function of the I as


revealed in psychoanalytic experience”. Ecrits. Trans. Bruce Fink.
New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007. pp 75 – 82.

17
21. Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. Trans. Roy Harris. La
Salle, Illinois: Open Court Publishing, 1997.

22. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.


Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. p 324.

23. Interestingly Derrida’s reading of Rousseau allows one to see the close
correspondence between his deconstructive method and Lacan’s own
psychoanalytic method of reading texts. However Derrida is aware of how his is
just one way of reading at a particular point in time; “If we lend to the text below a
paradigmatic value, it is only provisional and does not prejudge what the discipline
of a future reading might rigorously determine”. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. p149.

24. Man, Paul de. “The Epistemology of Metaphor”. Critical Inquiry, Vol. 5, No. 1,
Autumn, 1978. pp. 13-30.

25. Mooney, Timothy. “Philosophical Roots and Bibliographical History”. Continental


Philosophy in the 20th Century. Ed. Richard Kearney. New York & London:
Routledge, 2003. pp. 449 – 467

26. Hendrix Jimi. “Room full of Mirrors” First Rays of the New Rising Sun.
Universal-Island Records Ltd. 1999.

18
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---. “Signature Event Context”. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass


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---. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago & London: Routledge, 1978.
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