What is Called Subject?: A Note on Lacan’s “Linguistery”

What is Called Subject? A Note on Lacan’s “Linguistery” Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen T HE REQUEST THAT MOTIVATES this note on Lacan and lan­ guage, while apparently modest, is really quite outrageous.1For the question of language in Lacan is no small one: it is the ques­ tion, the central and obsessive question of his famous “ return to Freud,” which, as is well known, was almost entirely concerned with reformulat­ ing Freudian theory in terms of speech and language. Hence, any analy­ sis of this question would involve examining Lacan’s proverbially pro­ lific and complex text in all its aspects and implications. I will not venture that here. I propose rather, more modestly, to sketch a demonstration of the internal logic that I see governing the development of Lacan’s thought on language from his first meditations about speech to the imposition of the “ logic of the signifier” in his late period. More pre­ cisely, I would like to question why the Lacanian theory of language is conjoined to the point of being identical, with a theory of the subject. Why, indeed, is the subject defined exclusively as the subject of speech, of language, or of the signifier? And conversely, why is the signifier—in Lacan’s canonical (and enigmatic) formula—“ that which represents the subject for another signifier” ? In attempting a response to these questions, I will start with what is most familiar (if not best understood): Lacan’s extensive reference to Saussure and structural linguistics. When Lacan writes that “ the uncon­ scious is structured like a language [langage],” or again, that “ language is the condition of the unconscious” (1970, 58),2he is really thinking of “langue” in Saussure’s sense.3Similarly, when he proposes to assimilate the Freudian mechanisms of condensation and displacement to metaphor and metonymy, he is thinking much less of classical rhetorical tropes than of the particular linguistic interpretation proposed by Jakobson in his famous article on aphasia.4 No matter how much Lacan may later have distanced himself from linguistics (to which he opposed his own “ linguistery” [1975b, 20]), it is clear that the major, if negative, model of reference for his theory of language is that of linguistic science in its Saussurian version: langue as a closed system of regulated oppositions that organizes, independently of the reality it designates, a homogeneous Vol. XXIX, N o. 1 83 L ’E s pr it C réa te u r multiplicity of signifying unities. I do not mean to imply that other influ­ ences—notably philosophic ones—do not subtend the Lacanian utiliza­ tion of the linguistic model. On the contrary, I will return to them in a moment. But we should begin by examining this model so as to better understand how it links up with these other more subterranean ref­ erences. Now, from this point of view, it is noteworthy that Lacan, while retaining the Saussurian model, simultaneously brings several important modifications to it, the most remarkable being the dissociation of sig­ nifier and signified and the bold extension of the mechanisms regulating langue to the domain of discourse.5Does this mean that Lacan was un­ faithful to Saussure’s lesson or that he simply didn’t understand it, as certain professional linguists have indignantly claimed? It seems to me, rather, that Lacan’s modification;; tend, on the whole, towards a very rigorous radicalization of the Sausiurian model, even if, in the end, they extract from it (or rather apply t3 it) a philosophy incompatible with Saussure’s teaching. This is especially evident if one examines the apparently heretical treatment to which Lacan submits the Saussurian sign. For, in Saussure himself, the theory of the sign is far from univocal. Quite the opposite, in the Course in General Linguistics, it seems as if this theory were torn between two rival hypotheses. The first, which Saussure inherits from a long philosophical tradition, is that of the “ arbitrariness” of the sign: “ the linguistic sign unites, not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound-image” (p. 66), that is, a “ signified” and a “ signifier.” And that union, in principal, is just as arbitrary as it is, in fact, necessary and indissoluble...