Signification
| French: signification |
Jacques Lacan
Early Work
In Lacan’s writings prior to the early 1950s, the term "signification" is employed in a relatively broad and pre-theoretical manner. It designates both the fact of meaningfulness and the affective or existential importance of a phenomenon within human experience.[1] At this stage, Lacan has not yet fully articulated his structuralist turn, and his use of the term remains close to ordinary language and phenomenological discourse rather than to a rigorous linguistic concept.
Example
In a 1946 text, for instance, Lacan criticizes organicist psychiatry for neglecting "the significance of madness."[2] Here, signification refers less to a relation between linguistic elements than to the failure of psychiatry to grasp the human, subjective, and symbolic dimensions of psychosis. Madness is said to have a significance insofar as it expresses something meaningful about the subject’s relation to self and world, even if this meaning is not yet theorized in structural terms.
Later Work
Symbolic Order
Between approximately 1953 and 1957, during the period marked by Lacan’s return to Freud “through the letter,” the term "signification" becomes increasingly tied to language and the symbolic order.[3] Influenced by structural linguistics and the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, Lacan situates signification within the symbolic network that precedes and structures the subject. Nevertheless, during this transitional phase, the concept still retains some ambiguity, oscillating between meaning as semantic content and signification as an effect of linguistic structure.
Latest Work
Imaginary Order
From 1957 onward, Lacan’s use of the term undergoes a decisive transformation. Signification now explicitly refers to the Saussurean concept and is increasingly located in the imaginary order. This shift reflects Lacan’s growing insistence that signification produces an illusion of meaning and unity—an imaginary effect—rather than access to truth as such. Signification comes to be associated with images, coherence, and the subject’s misrecognition of itself in language, in contrast to the symbolic dimension of structure and law.
Ferdinand de Saussure
Relation between Signifier and Signified
For Saussure, the term "signification" designates the relation between the signifier and the signified. Each sound-image is said to “signify” a concept, and this relation constitutes the basic unit of language, the linguistic sign.[4]
Signification is, for Saussure, an unbreakable bond: the signifier and the signified are inseparable, like the two sides of a sheet of paper. While the relation is arbitrary, it is nonetheless stable within the synchronic structure of language, allowing for relatively fixed meanings within a given linguistic system.
Jacques Lacan
Relation between Signifier and Signified
Lacan radically reinterprets this relation. He argues that the bar separating the signifier and signified in the Saussurean algorithm should not be understood as a simple line of union but as a mark of rupture—a "resistance" to signification.[5] Meaning does not flow smoothly from signifier to signified; rather, the bar indicates a structural impossibility that prevents full coincidence between the two.
Primacy of the Signifier
First, Lacan asserts the logical primacy of the signifier. The signified does not ground the signifier; instead, it is produced as an effect of the differential relations among signifiers within the signifying chain. Signification is therefore secondary and derivative, never original or self-sufficient.
Slippage
Second, even when signifieds are produced, they are inherently unstable. They constantly slip and slide beneath the signifier. Temporary stabilizations of meaning occur only through the intervention of points de capiton (quilting points), which momentarily pin a signifier to a signified, creating the illusion of a stable meaning. These points do not eliminate slippage but merely arrest it provisionally.
Metaphor and Metonymy
For Lacan, signification is not a fixed relation but a process—the process through which the play of signifiers generates the illusion of a signified. This process operates through the two fundamental rhetorical tropes identified by Roman Jakobson and reworked by Lacan: metonymy and metaphor.
Metonymy
Signification is metonymic insofar as "signification always refers to another signification."[6] Meaning is endlessly deferred along the signifying chain. No single signifier contains meaning in itself; meaning emerges only through the differential movement from one signifier to another.
"It is in the chain of the signifier that the meaning insists, but none of its elements consists in the signification of which it is at the moment capable."[7]
Metaphor
Signification is metaphoric insofar as it involves the crossing of the bar—the substitution of one signifier for another and the resulting production of a new signified. Lacan describes this as the “passage of the signifier into the signified.”[8]
The fundamental metaphor underpinning all signification is the paternal metaphor, through which the desire of the mother is symbolically replaced and regulated. Consequently, all signification is structurally phallic, insofar as it depends on this primordial substitution.
Lacanian Algebra
In Lacanian algebra, signification is designated by the symbol s, notably in expressions such as s(A), which names a key node in the graph of desire. The same symbol s is also used for the signified, indicating an overlap between the process of signification and its effect. This reflects Lacan’s insistence that the signified has no independent existence outside the process that produces it.
Signification and Meaning
In the late 1950s, Lacan introduces a distinction between signification and meaning (sense). While the two are often conflated in translation, Lacan opposes them structurally: signification belongs to the imaginary production of coherence, whereas meaning is tied to the symbolic articulation of truth and lack.
Speech
Signification pertains to empty speech, which circulates images, identifications, and illusory meanings. Meaning pertains to full speech, in which the subject confronts the symbolic consequences of what is said.
Psychoanalytic Interpretation
Psychoanalytic interpretation aims not to reinforce signification but to work against it, targeting meaning and its correlate, non-meaning (non-sens). Interpretation seeks to disrupt imaginary coherence and expose the symbolic structure of desire.
Production of Jouissance
Although opposed, both signification and meaning are linked to the production of jouissance. Lacan signals this complex relation through the neologisms signifiance and jouis-sense, emphasizing that enjoyment emerges at the limits of meaning and its breakdown.
See Also
References
- ↑ Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. Paris: Seuil, 1966. p. 81
- ↑ Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. Paris: Seuil, 1966. p. 167, 153–4
- ↑ Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire. Livre IV. La relation d'objet, 19566-57. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil, 1991. p. 121
- ↑ Saussure, Ferdinand de. (1916) Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, trans. Wade Baskin, Glasgow: Collins Fontana, p. 114.
- ↑ Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Tavistock Publications, 1977. p. 164
- ↑ Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar. Book III. The Psychoses, 1955-56. Trans. Russell Grigg. London: Routledge, 1993. p. 33
- ↑ Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Tavistock Publications, 1977. p. 153
- ↑ Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Tavistock Publications, 1977. p. 164