We may first read Lacan's assessment of Freud's project (1956):
>"Psychoanalysis should be the science of language inhabited by the subject. From the Freudian point of view man is the subject captured and tortured by language."<Jacques Lacan, Seminar 3, Ch. 19, Sct. 3This "torture" we can see structurally, by the separation of the signifier from the signified, and further, of the signifier's internal separation from itself, as we may read from chapter 14, from seminar 3:
<The signifier, as such, signifies nothing […] Experience proves it - the more the signifier signifies nothing, the more indestructible it is […] There's no other scientific definition of subjectivity than one that proceeds from the possibility of handling the signifier for purely signifying, not significant ends, that is, expressing no direct relation of the order of appetite […] the signifier, which is that it signifies nothing and is therefore always capable of yielding various meanings.I take this to mean that the signifier "as such" (S) is separated by its formality from what is "signified" (s), and so, the appeal to the signifier (S) is an end in-itself, not a means to an end. An example is in religion, where the signifier "God" only refers to itself, and so is internally contentless. as an example, we may read hegel (1816):
<This proposition in its positive expression A = A is, in the first instance, nothing more than the expression of an empty tautology. It has therefore been rightly remarked that this law of thought has no content and leads no further.https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hl/hl409.htmThus, the signifier cannot signify anything other than itself (A is A), yet the internal content of A is also empty, so A is not-A. Hegel works this out by applying negativity to give identity totality, but Lacan resists totality, speaking of "set" (Ch. 14, Sct. 1):
<I said a set, I didn't say a totality. As a matter of fact, the notion of structure is analytic […] I think that you're well enough oriented to understand that the notion of structure is by itself already a manifestation of the signifier.So then, in t
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