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1 on failed unicity Rhetoric and Structuralist Poetics The universe is a flower of rhetoric. —Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality,the Limits of Love and Knowledge:Encore. in a statement destined to become his theoretical calling card,in 1956 Jacques Lacan declared that “the unconscious . . . is structured like a language.”1 nearly seventeen years later Lacan proffered his most explicit reflection on this claim: “the universe is a flower of rhetoric . . . that is what i am saying when i say that the unconscious is structured like a language.”2 Two accounts of rhetoric’s flowering form the bookends of Lacan’s career: the socalled Rome Discourse and one of Lacan’s last published pieces, a section of his antepenultimate seminar Time to Conclude. The Rome Discourse,or “The function and field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” was delivered to the Rome Congress of Romance Language Psychoanalysts in 1953. This lecture represents a pivotal moment in Lacan’s career, both because it became the founding document for the Société française de Psychoanalytique and because it comprised the first introduction of Lacan’s thought to circles outside the psychoanalytic academy.3 The Rome Discourse was revolutionary because of the role it afforded rhetoric:in it, Lacan heralds an analytic practice organized around “speech” and attention to the “ancient arts of rhetoric” as an antidote to the “arid scientism” of the theoretical humanities .4 A quarter of a century later, in the closing days of his twenty-fifth seminar,Time to Conclude, Lacan declared that “the psychoanalyst is a rhetor.” in the quarter of a century between these two statements Lacan composed a systematic theory of rhetoric grounded in public speech in the broadest sense of the terms:as a theory of how subjects are formed by, take on, and engage in discourse in the presence of others. The claim that Lacan’s psychoanalysis relies on a quintessentially rhetorical understanding of public speech upsets a commonly accepted vision of Lacan’s work as a “structuralist poetics.”5 in locating rhetoric at the core of Lacan’s thought, i argue that the metaphor of structuralist poetics that has prefigured the reception of his work ought to give way to a rhetorically tinctured account of discourse as an economy that constitutes subjects, speech, 2 / Chapter 1 and the social world.To do so,i would like to argue for a rhetorical social ontology that figures the social as a crucially impactful but, nevertheless, epiphenomenal extension of tropological processes.for Lacan,the crucial questions for understanding the subject and its discourses lie at the intersection of a rhetorical social ontology and an ontology of rhetoric. Ernesto Laclau has characterized Lacan’s contribution to the poststructuralist moment as an articulation of an ontology of rhetoric and a rhetorical social ontology under the banner of “failed unicity.” for Laclau,“failed unicity ” means that there is no coherent totality underwriting the subject, sign, and the act of communication or of discourse that unites speaker, speech, and speech act in a coherent transhistorical whole.6 What Laclau renders in the vernacular of poststructuralism, Lacan derived from everyday life. Even though subjects often act as if there is a “unifying unity” to human life, experience reveals no such thing: “it is always the unifying unity which is in the foreground.i have never understood this ...life is something which goes, as we say in french, à la dérive. Life goes down the river, from time to time touching a bank, staying for a while here and there, without understanding anything—and it is the principle of analysis that nobody understands anything of what happens.The idea of the unifying unity of the human condition has always had on me the effect of a scandalous lie.”7 failed unicity starts with the presumption—one now common in the theoretical humanities— that the nature of the subject, the social world, and discourse are not given in advance nor derivable from nature;instead, the subject, social world, and discourse are products of accident and contingency. Despite a failure in unicity, subjects think, speak, and act as if they inhabit a condition of unicity all the time. Life goes “down the river,” foregrounding fantasies of a “unifying unity” that often contradict experience. Even though the illusion of unicity is a “scandalous lie,” it effectively organizes the social world. Paradoxically, these two facets of human life are intensely complementary .The failure of unicity necessitates imagined unicity to purchase the coherence of a subject...

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