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.
Development
1957
introduced by Jacques Lacan
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.
In Écrits (1966)
Relations
- 1957 introduced by Jacques Lacan
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.
- 1957 derives from Displacement
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.
- 1957 opposed by Metaphor
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.
Works
- 1966
Lacan's collected papers, published by Éditions du Seuil in 1966: a volume of some nine hundred pages gathering articles and essays written over three decades, from 1936 to 1966. It includes the text on the mirror stage given at Zurich in 1949; the Rome discourse of 1953, 'The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis', which has been called the founding manifesto of Lacanianism; 'The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious' (1957); and the 1958 essay on the treatment of psychosis. Across these papers Lacan pursues his return to Freud by way of structural linguistics, reading the unconscious as structured like a language, and turns against the ego psychology of Hartmann, Kris and Loewenstein. The book became a bestseller in France and made Lacan known as 'the French Freud', while also fixing his reputation for difficulty. Its first complete English translation, by Bruce Fink with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg, was published by W. W. Norton in 2006.
See also
People
References
- Écrits1966Evidence for a relation