Discourse, Figure

Desire in Discourse

277 Desire in Discourse Knowledge and Truth Now I would like to turn to the presence of the figural in discourse.The field of inquiry is restricted to the work of poetry.The latter can be defined, hastily, as constituted by a text worked over by the figure.Here,then,is a paradox: how can a figural discourse—invested by the forms of desire, offering the illusion of fulfillment—perform the function of truth? The properties of a text taken as such have, as it were, their destiny mapped out and their model imposed by the very properties of the linguistic signifier. Just as these properties inform a system of oppositions that free discourse completely from both the subject of the utterance and the object it designates, discourse’s signified similarly tends to constitute itself into a system of terms bound by specific transformations. The properties of this system are internal: consistency vis-à-vis negation and independence of the axioms, as well as saturation and decidability of the system .The property of completeness or incompleteness that defines the relation of the system to the area of interpretation subjected to it adds nothing to the “syntactic” properties.1 Knowledge constitutes itself by building its “object”— building here means the establishing of a system of relations between terms, and this establishing occurs through variations enacted upon terms.Instead of the field in which the object first appeared,a system of concepts will now take over. Clearly, what is considered ideal for any system of knowledge, at least in its relation to the two other spaces that interest us, is the system of language [langue].With the designated—that is, the object first presented in its field— we witness the same break taking shape as referential (arbitrary) distance in language and as epistemological split in knowledge. As for the figural, for the presence of a form within discourse,we encounter the same ambition to specify all internal relations as a system and thus to impose discontinuity as rule of intelligibility: in the use of relevance at the lowest degree of communication 278 desire in discourse (phonology),and in the use of the independence of axioms at the highest level of knowledge (formalization). The text’s mission as such is to free itself from the figure, be it designation or expression, and to sever the adhesions and continuities by which the movement of the mind that performs the variations runs the risk of being hindered, and the significations that it simultaneously produces of being unilateral. Knowledge’s vocation is to hold true at all times and in all places, without consideration for the meanings that might remain active and silent in discourse.It would seem,therefore,that the poetic text has no right to any claim to truth, because it is riddled with figures.The figural is to the textual what illusion is to knowledge. Still, here is my hypothesis: that this alternative—between deceptive figural space and a textual space where knowledge is produced—can be avoided. On this side of this alternative one can discern another function, absent from the alternative itself, that would, as a matter of principle, turn on figural space: a truth function. Against what is implied in revelation, I would argue that this truth is not the sign of the Word uttered by the Other, which would be scrambled merely by effects of reverberation, omissions, and condensations that would make it into a symbol given to us as food for thought. Figural opacity is not that which belongs to a second discourse in discourse. A discourse occupies a position in front of us so that we may understand and read it. One can read a discourse on lips; short of lips, the paper or support of scripted discourse is turned toward us like a face, showing its front to us. A second discourse is merely a second front in the first. God would be only this kind of transcendence, of an invisible, possibly inaudible vis-à-vis, but gripping us by the presence of its absence. I have no intention of leaving the ideology of knowledge behind only to return to that of revelation. What Freud appreciated in art is that it does not allow something to pass as what it is not, nor the unconscious to be mistaken for the sky. The truth that signals to us in artworks comes from below, fathered by desire. This truth teaches us nothing , is not edifying, does not look at or...