OPEN LETTER

Fourteenth Series, No. 8, Spring 2012

Negotiating the Social Bond of Poetics
Guest-edited by Nancy Gillespie and Peter Jaeger
The Pivot of the Trope1

Adrian Price

In the nineteen-fifties, Jacques Lacan was crediting linguistics with having

displaced the centre of gravity of the sciences (Autres 167). Man had been
ousted from the seat he had claimed for himself at the centre of the world,
and was now shown to be gravitating around Einen anderen Schauplatz: the
Other as locus of speech (167). According to the Lacan of the fifties,
Freud anticipates Saussure in his formulas for the analysis of the uncon-
scious, just as linguistic theory subsumes the action of the signifier in a
specific structure, generating signification in the subject it seizes hold of,
marking him as signified (166). Psychoanalysis and linguistics would thus
be complementary, together wrong-footing the anthropocentrism of the
human sciences.
However, from 1969 onwards, Lacan demonstrates not only that this so-
called anticipation conceals the fact that the unconscious is the condition
of linguistics, but also that linguistics does not for all that have the
slightest grip on the unconscious (410).
What are the consequences for the analytic praxis? How does the analyst
position himself in relation to the rhetorical tropes of metaphor and
metonymy?
Position of the Analyst, Position of the Object
1969 affords Lacan two occasions to take stock of his teaching up to that
point: the publication of the pocket edition of his crits and a university
thesis on his work. Lacan penned a preface to both.
In the former, he looks again at the unconscious in terms of what was
met first of all in discourse (Autres 389). The unconscious is always to be
found in discourse, but this may well necessitate a prior articulation, says
Lacan. Prior in the sense that this articulation would precede the effect of
the structures of discourse. In the crits, Lacan found support for this
preliminary articulation in the Saussurian sign, slightly modified so that the
signifier takes precedence over the signified. Here at the end of 1969, he is
less taken with the idea of trusting in the laws of linguistics (390).
Lacan affirms that one must get used to handling schemas, scientifically
culled from an ethics (390). Previously, this scientifically would have
designated linguistics, but this is not so sure here. Rather, Lacan lays the
accent not on the scheme of the signifier and the signified, but on the scheme
of the signifier and the lektn.
 Price: The Pivot of the Trope 143

Lektn is a term that Lacan takes from Stoic ethics. Where we tend to
distinguish between, on the one hand, the sound, i.e. the signifier, as
Saussure spoke of an acoustic image, and on the other hand, the entity
manifested by the sound, the signified or the significante (signification,
which is not the thing itself, the reference), the Stoics add a further nuance
to this scheme: the lektn. Lektn does not translate very well, writes
Lacan (390). It is almost the signified, but not entirely. The signified is
more accessible and more cosy than the lektn (390).
Further down, Lacan speaks of the effect of the signifier which does
not correspond in the slightest to the signified circumscribed by linguistics
(390). This notion of effect takes up the effect of the structures of dis-
course. We are at the level of the preliminary articulation, the level of the
schema for the structure of the signifier, and therefore the effect of the
signifier and the effect of discourse are equivalent. Both are lektn
effects (390).
This step allows Lacan to slot the concept into his teaching, where it turns
out that its bed is already made: the quilting point. Lacan repeats this a few
months later: the lektn is the quilting point that makes a signified
readable (415). To employ the vocabulary that Lacan is developing in
parallel to this in his seventeenth Seminar in setting out his four discourses,
we are dealing with the place of the agent that orients the discourse and
determines the place of the other and the product of the articulation. Hence
there is a certain affinity between the quilting point and the master-signifier
(Other 189).
The preface to the pocket edition closes with a particular use of the
lektn. Lacan refers to the position of the analyst as the lektn of the
discourse of the unconscious. What is at stake here? The analyst as what
makes a signified readable? The analyst as the agent of the discourse?
As we know, in 1969 Lacan is pinpointing the analyst as holding the
position of the object a in the discourse that goes by this name. Thus, the
analyst as lektn in discourse raises the question of the place of the object
a in relation to the discourse of the unconscious. This is precisely how Lacan
broaches the object a in the other preface he pens in December 1969
(Preface xiv).
Lacan takes this opportunity to come back to the question of metonymy.
Where in the previous preface he called linguistics per se into question, here
it is specifically Jakobson who is summoned to mark the gap between their
respective conceptions of this rhetorical trope.
For Lacan, metonymy is what motivates displacement in the unconscious,
but this displacement turns around a pivot, the very pivot that in Position
of the Unconscious he terms the organ of what is incorporeal in the sexed
being (crits 720).2 This is a first foreshadowing of the object a. This
144 Open Letter 14:9

incorporeal nevertheless clings to the body (Autres 409). Lacan asks

where this object a is to be situated: In the unconscious, or elsewhere?
Lets take these two questions as our compass the position of the analyst
as lektn and the position of the object in relation to the position of the
unconscious and move into Radiophonie where they undergo a deeper
development.
Linguistic, Literary and Psychoanalytic Tropes
In his reply to the second question put to him by the radio journalist, as to a
possible common field between psychoanalysis, linguistics and ethnology,
Lacan sets out three points of conflict between linguistics and psychoanaly-
sis.
The first concerns a text by Benveniste that Lacan, then editor-in-chief of
the journal La Psychanalyse, had included in its inaugural issue (Benveniste
3-16). The text deals with Freuds 1910 article on The Antithetical Meaning
of Primal Words and the research of the Egyptologist Carl Abel on
enantiosemy in Indo-European and Semitic languages. This little known
article once again shows the unconscious demonstrating itself as the
condition of linguistics, this time the absence of the law of non-contradiction
anticipating Nicolas Marrs law of opposites.3
Benveniste holds that the signified requires a signifier that would not be
enantiosemantic, i.e. that does not carry two antithetic significations. By and
large, he refutes both Freud and Abel, finding the absence of the law of non-
contradiction to be contradictory. But there is no need to speculate about
extinct languages, the abundance of addds in Arabic refutes in turn the
refutation, and Lacan does not deprive himself of this reference.
Why does Benveniste make this move? He wants the signifier to be what
comes down on one side or the other, and not the object, because for him the
object has no consequence on language, language knowing nothing of what
is external to it (Milner 98).
As for Lacan, he states the exact opposite: the object makes for the
effect, (Autres 410) and this is demonstrated above all in the analytic
praxis. This time it is not simply the object as a pivot in metonymy, but the
operative object as what is at stake in the analytic act. Although linguistics
delivers the material of analysis, it leaves this object blank (410).
Lacan pursues with a second remark, going from Benveniste to his
predecessor, Saussure. This time he takes issue with the notion of the
arbitrary connexion between signifier and signified, treating it as a lapsus
on the part of Saussure.
This is a thorny issue. Two decades later, in 1992, J.H. Prynne likewise
called into question the scope and pertinence of the concept of arbitrariness
in his two lectures delivered under the title Stars, Tigers and the Shape of
Words. Noting that it was Locke who first described the imposition whereby
such a Word is made arbitrarily the Mark of such an Idea 4 (Prynne 4-5) a
 Price: The Pivot of the Trope 145

full two centuries before Saussure, Prynne pits this notion against Popes
assertion that, in art, The Sound must seem an Eccho to the Sense (3-6,
passim) This latter usage, though it is a properly literary one where words
are managed so as to give innumerable motivated echoes of non-arbitrary
confirmation to the sense or idea (6), has necessary repercussions on the
function and field of speech and language at large. Prynne refers to Saus-
sures notion of phonic harmonies in his anagram hypothesis, a radical
challenge to his scientific work, (20-21) effectively positing a counter-
current to the arbitrariness hypothesis that mirrors Popes artistic exception
to Lockes linguistic rule. Prynne concludes that Saussures classic linguistic
theory is elaborated in conceptual space and not in historical time, so that
its origin is not directly written into its form (34). Thus, we may if we
wish leave arbitrariness in more or less full control of the central citadel of
linguistic theory, but out in the larger semantic fields and forests its writ
does not successfully prohibit a wider and more hybrid repertory of
contrarious procedures (35).
Lacan also alludes to Saussures work on anagrams, making the point that
they effectively do away with university literature (Autres 406). For
Lacan, the only arbitrariness at issue is that of the discourse of the master;
an arbitrary power that is no less present in the university discourse where
the master-signifier finds its hiding place. This discourse divides the subject
without supposing any consensus from him (411). If that was where
Saussures linguistics ran aground, Lacan puts an end to any idea of a
common ground between linguistics and psychoanalysis by insisting on the
quarter turn that steers us from the university discourse to the analytic
discourse. There, the subject is manifested as other with the key to his
division in his hands (411).
Thus, psychoanalysis also resides outside of the citadel of linguistic
theory, drawing on contrarious procedures that call for a different conceptu-
alization of language. This foreshadows Lacans development of lalangue
and linguistrie in the years to come.
Lacans third remark on linguistics is to be found in his reply to the third
question, where he comes back to Jakobsons contribution. He begins by
repeating his last comment in the Preface to a Thesis: what Jakobson
designates as metaphor and metonymy do not give the same results as
Freudian condensation and displacement. In sum, Jakobsons conception
does not furnish anything of the lektn. Lacan treats this point in some
detail, using examples drawn from his Seminar.5
Metaphor and metonymy give the principle of the dynamism of the
unconscious. Language is the condition of the unconscious, and above all it
is the bar that encapsulates this condition. T his bar produces a real edge
(Autres 416).
146 Open Letter 14:9

The leap from signifier to signified, introducing the signifier in the signified,
what we call metaphor, gives a meaning effect. But Lacan draws a distinction
here between this operation and Freudian condensation which sets off from
repression. More to the point, the latter uses metaphor to bring about the return
of the impossible, to be considered as the limit point at which the category of
the real is established by the symbolic (417). Therefore, metaphor in poetic art
gives a meaning effect whilst metaphor in the dream gives language
effects; in poetics, the signifier outside meaning bursts into the field of
meaning and produces an effect of sense; in condensation, the real (qua
impossible) bursts into the symbolic and produces an effect of non-sense (it
makes a splash, but with no ripples of meaning).
Lacan qualifies these language effects as reasons: the reason of the
subject who is not yet endowed with significance (417). In some sense we are
at the level of the preliminary articulation we saw earlier: the effects of
language presentify the significance of the subject who has not yet set about
playing with the representative (417). In other words, the trope is in absentia,
there is no anchoring by means of discourse. This intransitive movement, in
the sense that as yet there is no transition between S 1 and S 2, draws back the
veil on the unconscious as the deposit, the alluvium of language (417).
Now we pass on to metonymy. For Lacan, metonymy is not a matter of
meaning, but of jouissance. This jouissance has a paradoxical status because
it has to do with the satisfaction of a body, but a body that is a fact of the
signifier (like the organ of what is incorporeal). This body is both a cut
and a lining, it is a corps ravi, a body that is at once ravished and robbed.
Ultimately, metonymy lists as a value the portion of jouissance that can
be transferred. A credit operation, a cashing-in of jouissance, Lacan
employs a host of terms to indicate that metonymy makes jouissance pass
over onto the account books (419-20). Thus, in place of the translation
displacement for Enstellung, Lacan substitutes the French word virement.
Virement is both an expulsion and a credit transfer: a virement in the
unconscious, into the locus of the Other.
Is it not as an object that the analyst displaces himself along with the
displacement of the real in the symbolic? This operation gives us a specifically
psychoanalytic metonymy. And is it not as a lektn that the analyst condenses
himself to lend weight to [his] symbols in the real? Thus, object and lektn,
the two pivot points of metonymy and metaphor, describe two aspects of the
position of the analyst hot on the trail of the unconscious (420).
Envoi on the Stellar and the Mineral
Brother Hesperus and brother Phosphorus, der Abendstern and der
Morgenstern, intensionally distinct in Venusian Sinn, extensionally
equivalent in Cytherian Bedeutung, how I wonder what you are!
 Price: The Pivot of the Trope 147

Let the biographers wrangle, flitting between Isabella Jones and Fanny
Brawne, the poet knows that the bright star of his Being is neither, but the
still steadfast, still unchangeable, incorporeal object that clings to the body.
As Prynne reminds us, star is not a name for an object in the sky, it is a
word marking the category-boundaries which separate its sense from that of
words like planet or comet or cloud (Prynne 16), even when, in the context
of the 1835 Twinkle, twinkle for example, where it hangs like a dia-
mond, a more extravagant operation is invited, the simile reaching for an
hypothetical apex of value which invests for a spectacular terminal bonus
(10). Prynne shows how a nursery rhyme such as this derives its power from
an ostensive dialectical functioning of historical deletion and recovery
ostensive because the lost object is listed on the account books from the
start. The effect of the rhyme is derived from a pattern where sound reads
by invitation to sense: pointing it up while scaling it down. The object is
raised to the dignity of The Thing, but one that here fits into the scale of the
friendly and protective charm of little things (10).
The pivot is not the referent but, we shall say it again, what subsists as
incorporeal. The definite article appended to this twinkling star lends weight
to the symbol in the real, while the diamond simile displaces the real in
the symbolic.
Lacan in 1969-70, Prynne in 1992, demonstrate how the notion of an
arbitrary stamp of signifier on signified at the schematic level of language
per se obfuscates the pragmatic history (Prynne 32) of formations at the
level of lalangue. One tongue among others writes Lacan in 1972, is no
more than the complete set of equivocations its history has let persist
(Autres 490). Like the alluvium of the unconscious, this accumulation is
deposited in a seam, and that is where lalangues diamond is formed.
That is where Keats finds his bright star, not a simile this time, but the
limit of the real itself upon which he is pillowed.6
And that is where the couched analysand meets the true substance of his
hypothetical apex of value, stripping what is logical of the grammatical
gangue that envelops it (Lacan Lesson 28 Feb 1968 n.p.).

Notes
1. A first version of this text was delivered at the PULSE Seminar, Barnard College,
Columbia University, on 2 October 2011 as the opening lecture to the sequence
Psychoanalysis and Science: The Real is Lawless.
2. The reference is Lacans own.
3. For a deeper examination of Marrs contribution, see (Velmezova 343-361).
4. Cf. Lockes 1690 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book III, Chapter
II. See too however the 1662 Logique de Port-Royal: il y a une grande equivoque
dans ce mot darbitraire, quand on dit que la ignification des mots et arbitraire.
148 Open Letter 14:9

Car il et vray que cet une choe purement arbitraire, que de joindre une telle
ide un tel on pltot qu un autre (Arnauld 33).
5. For the quilting point, see Lacans commentary on Racines Athaliah (The
Seminar, Book III 262-70); for metaphor, see Lacans commentary on Hugos Booz
endormi (crits, 421-3); for metonymy, see Lacans commentary on Maupassants
Bel-Ami (Le sminaire livre V 76-8).
6. Keatss Bright Star, probably written in 1819, may be likened in this respect to
Baudelaires La Gante from the 1857 Fleurs de Mal, especially in ric Laurents
reading (Laurent 51-59).

Works Cited
Arnauld, Antoine, & Nicole, Pierre. La Logiqve ov lart de penser. Paris:
Guignart/Savreux/Lavnay, 1662.
Benveniste, mile, Remarques sur la fonction du langage dans la dcouverte
freudienne. La Psychanalyse, No. 1, 1956, pp. 3-16.
Laurent, ric. A Fundamental Point of Departure. Hurly-Burly, Issue 2, November
2009, pp. 51-9.
Lacan, Jacques. Autres crits. Paris: Seuil, 2001. (Passages cited in my translation).
____. crits, The First Complete Edition in English. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York:
Norton, 2006.
____. Lesson of 28 February 1968. Le sminaire XV, Lacte analytique.
Unpublished.
____. Le sminaire livre V, Les formations de linconscient. Paris: Seuil, 1998.
____. Preface by Jacques Lacan. Lemaire, Anika. Jacques Lacan. Trans. David
Macey. London/Boston: Routledge & Paul Kegan, 1977.
____. The Seminar, Book III, The Psychoses. Trans. Russell Grigg. London:
Routledge, 1993.
____. The Seminar, Book XVII, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Russell
Grigg. New York: Norton, 2007.
Milner, Jean-Claude. Le priple structural. Paris: Verdier, 2008.
Prynne, J.H. Stars, Tigers and the Shape of Words. Birkbeck Collection, 1993.
Velmezova, Ekaterina. Les lois du sens diffus chez Marr. Cahiers de lILSL, No.
20, 2005: 343-61.