[Wenzel Hablik's Sunset, Mont Blanc] In the second book of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche has life confide to Zarathustra: Behold, [. . .] I am that which must always overcome itself. Indeed, you call it a will to procreate or a drive to an end, to something higher, farther, more manifold: but all this…
Tag Archives: Ferdinand de Saussure
[An example of a signifier that différance slides] [Presented in François Raffoul’s class on Contemporary French Philosophy at LSU in the fall of 2008; contains his additions and corrections] Jacques Derrida begins the essay “Différance” (perhaps the most systematic articulation of the non-concept that, according to Derrida, he “ha[s] been able to utilize” in previous…
This is the second and final written part of my MA exam. In this part, I was asked to evaluate the relevance of Lacanian psychoanalysis to the study of the humanities. Issues that came up during the oral defense include the materiality of language in Lacan (as cited in an article where Lacan interprets that…
[A demagogue; Image from Teaching American History] What is a regime of signs? A semiotic machine, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari state in A Thousand Plateaus. In “On Several Regimes of Signs,” they call Ferdinand de Saussure’s structuralist linguistic of the sign—the linguistic system that privileges the signifier and its signifying function—semiology—but one regime of…
In delineating the unconscious as the (no longer merely psychic, as in Freud, but Symbolic (social?)) repository, as it were, of repressed elements, Jacques Lacan stresses that the rules (the Law) these elements are subject to (that determine the shape, as it were, of the unconscious, what it looks like, what’s in there, what happens…
[A schema of (Real) being and the (Symbolic) Other from lacan.com] In a previous post I suggested that in contrast to Alexandre Leupin‘s ontological presentation of Jacques Lacan’s three orders, Bruce Fink in The Lacanian Subject offers a durational model, i.e. a model that portrays the relationship between the orders as historical configurations, i.e. as…
Bruce Fink presents a more nuanced explication of Jacques Lacan’s (overly?) complex ontology in The Lacanian Subject compared to the more simple (although by no means easy) schematic of parallelisms that Alexandre Leupin establishes between Freud and Lacan in Lacan Today. Leupin’s explication, I think, (and not just because his explication is my first sustained…
Parallel to Freud’s three agencies (it, I, Over-I; or the id, the ego, and the superego), Lacan develops the three orders that structure the human subject. There are significant nuances between the two. Freud’s agencies have the implication that they are internal, that they reside somehow inside (or is formed within) the human subject (like aspects of a personality, dimensions of being). Lacan’s orders, on the other hand, while pertaining to the agencies, are analogous to mathematical sets, like realms or worlds, i.e. aspects or dimensions of the world or life itself (the way we live), whose structure has a corresponding effect on the human subject (hence forming the three agencies). Lacan himself, while staying true to the injunction, “Return to Freud!” point out this difference. He says in the Écrits, “My three orders are not Freud’s.”
Rather than a nomenclature (i.e. language as the naming of things/ideas), for Saussure, language is a sign system. Linguistics (Saussurian linguistics = semiotics?) is thus but a part of the study of signs (their nature, the laws governing them) in general, semiology. A linguistic sign, Saussure claims, is a link between the signifier and the signified. The signifier refers to the sound pattern, “not actually a sound [. . . but] the hearer’s psychological impression of a sound, as given to him by the evidence of his senses.” It is the word itself, or, more precisely, the sound one hears, or the sound image that registers in one’s brain, when a word (such as tree) is uttered. The signified, on the other hand, refers to the concept or the idea linked to (not just conveyed by and not that which causes) the sound pattern, i.e. the idea of the tree one forms in his/her head. (These two are different from the referent, i.e. the actual thing linked to the signifier and/or the signified, e.g. the actual tree we can see, touch . . .) The signifier and the signified together make up the sign.
