8. Psychoanalysis, Post-structuralism and Feminism- Jacques Lacan-"The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious"

Question 1

“The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious”

Answer 1

• Lacan’s rhetoric is very often as elusive – or poetic – as Derrida’s.
• “… what the psychoanalytic experience discovers in the unconscious is the whole structure of language” (447) – this refers to the psyche being structured as both the signifier/signified dyad, as well as the metaphor/metonymy one.
• “We are forced, then, to accept the notion of an incessant gliding of the signified under the signifier” (451)

– this is actually, how the psyche works in negotiating between the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary.

• Our desires, being first metaphorically transferred from the mother to an other object, then are part of a chain of metonymic replacements of desire which – as they are only placeholders (signifiers) of an unattainable object (signified or referent), can never be fulfilled.
• Interestingly, what Lacan refers to in his example, is not metonymy but, more precisely, synecdoche, part for whole.

Question 2

Dreams

Answer 2

• “Entstellung, translated as “distortion” or “transposition,” is what Freud shows to be the general precondition for the functioning of the dream, and it is what I designated above
• … as the sliding of the signified under the signifier, which is always active in discourse (its action, let us note, is unconscious).
• But what we call the two “sides” of the effect of the signifier on the signified are also found there. Verdichtung, or “condensation,” is the structure of the superimposition of the signified which metaphor takes as its field, and whose name, condensing in itself the word Dichtung, shows how the mechanism is connatural with poetry to the point that it envelops the traditional function proper to poetry.
• In the case of Verschiebung, “displacement,” the German term is closer to the idea of that veering off of signification that we see in metonymy and which from its first appearance is represented as the most appropriate means used by the unconscious to foil censorship” (455/6).

Question 3

Signifier/Signified

Answer 3

-The algorithm
S
-
s

 thus designates the problematic relationship between what I and how I designate myself, with the problem that the metonymic and metaphorical slippage of the signified (unconscious) under what can be known and talked about (the symbolic order and the chain of signifiers) defies knowledge about my unconscious, and thus also the unity of both in a unified, whole I.

-“It is not a question of knowing whether I speak of myself in a way that conforms to what I am, but rather of knowing whether I am the same as that of which I speak” (456).

Question 4

Metaphor and analysis

Answer 4

“The double-triggered mechanism of metaphor is the very mechanism by which the symptom, in the analytic sense, is determined. Between the enigmatic signifier of the sexual trauma and the term that is substituted for it in an actual signifying chain there passes the spark that fixes in a symptom the signification inaccessible to the conscious subject in which that symptom may be resolved – a symptom being a metaphor in which flesh or function is taken as a signifying element” (457).

Question 5

(Phal)logocentrism

Answer 5

-Although highly problematic from a feminist point of view [since it is saturated with a patriarchic point of view, as the significance of the phallus and concepts deduced from it, such as castration anxiety and penis envy, make clear (“Woman doesn’t exist”)] Lacanian psychoanalysis has served as a starting point for the attempt to designate the “feminine” or female.

-The question that has mainly haunted the entire debate whether one should think of the masculine and the feminine as essences – which the central opposition between man and woman suggests – or whether such thinking in oppositions itself constitutes the problem.
In other words: Is what is required a de- or even re-hierarchization of the opposites (while leaving the opposition itself intact), or do we have to deconstruct the poles (and dichotomic thinking) in general, as they are a result of phallogocentric thinking.

-What is more: Can we even speak of problems of gender – and, from a feminist point of view, even of women or woman – without evoking or assuming such essentialisms?