Concept
Metonymy
In Lacan's teaching, the linking of signifier to signifier along the signifying chain, word to word, which carries meaning forward and keeps deferring it without ever crossing over to a signified. Lacan took the term from Jakobson's 1956 contrast between the metonymic pole of language, built on combination and contiguity, and the metaphoric pole, built on selection and substitution. In 'The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious' (1957) he made metonymy the structure of Freud's displacement, the means the unconscious uses to get round censorship. He also declared that desire is a metonymy, as the symptom is a metaphor: desire is always aimed at something else, so it slides along the chain and never comes to rest on an object.
Read more- Introduced by
- Jacques Lacan
- Key works
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introduced by
- Jacques Lacan 1957 In "The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious" (1957, collected in Écrits), Lacan turns Jakobson's metonymic pole into a psychoanalytic concept. Metonymy becomes the word-to-word connection along the signifying chain, and he sets it beside metaphor: the symptom is a metaphor and desire is a metonymy.
derives from
- Displacement 1957 Lacan reads Freud's displacement (Verschiebung) in the dream-work as metonymy: the shift of significance from one element to the next along the chain, which the unconscious uses to evade censorship. Condensation he reads in the same way as metaphor.
opposed by
- Metaphor 1957 Following Jakobson, Lacan makes metaphor and metonymy the two opposite poles of the signifier's action. Metaphor substitutes one signifier for another and crosses the bar into signification; metonymy connects signifier to signifier and keeps the bar in place. He maps the pair onto condensation and displacement, and onto the symptom and desire.