3 - A Being of Significance

Summary

La poésie est création d'un sujet assumant un nouvel ordre de relation symbolique au monde.

Lacan, Les psychoses

But something other dearer still than life

The darkness hides and mist encompasses:

We are proved luckless lovers of this thing

That glitters in the underworld: no man

Can tell us of the stuff of it, expounding

What is, and what is not: we know nothing of it.

Euripides, Hippolytus

The foregoing exposition of Lacan's theory of metaphor and metonymy would seem to put to rest the notion that ‘metaphor dominates, founds and precedes metonymy’. On the contrary, the account of the relation between the two tropes given in the seminar on the psychoses and reprised in ‘Agency’ leaves no doubt that, and how, metonymy ‘is there from the start’, forming the basis of the ‘double-triggered mechanism’ of metaphor. Lacan's assertion that it is language which creates the presupposition of something before and something beyond itself would seem to sweep the ground from under the claim that the ‘hole’ or the ‘bar’ forms the centre around which Lacan's system revolves. The idea that the place of the centre is created by the system rather than being defined in advance as its origin, ground and truth apparently eliminates any remaining metaphysical or essentialist connotations.

Yet it also seems doubtful that so many careful and intelligent readers of Lacan would simply have misread his conception of the relation between the two tropes and that between language and reference.