Being of Significance

Being of Significance (être de signifiance) is the ontological category Lacan introduces in Seminar XX to name the mode of being proper to the speaking body — a being whose existence is grounded not in thinking (contra the Cartesian cogito) nor in enjoyment of being per se, but in the structural fact that jouissance is always already jouissance of a body, and that this bodily enjoyment is itself constituted through the mark of the signifier. The concept is explicitly posed as an alternative ontology: where classical metaphysics grounds being in thought (Descartes) or in a self-present enjoyment, Lacan proposes that being is "of significance" — that is, it is constituted by the play of signifiance (the movement of the signifier as such, distinct from meaning/signification). Signifiance here denotes the capacity of the signifier to produce effects independently of any fixed or stable meaning, and it is this ceaseless, never-fully-sutured operation of the signifier on the body that produces both the subject and the jouissance that attaches to corporeal substance.

The force of the formulation lies in the way it ties ontology to the condition of castration. On the side of masculine sexuation, castration is what makes enjoyment of the woman's body possible — but what the man enjoys is not "Woman" as such (since "The Woman" does not exist as a universal) but a being that is grounded in signifiance rather than in any positive essence. The being of significance is thus not a plenitude but a being constituted through the operation of lack: the signifier carves out jouissance from the body, and what remains — the remainder, the plus-de-jouir — is precisely what gives this being its consistency. This positions the concept at the intersection of the ontological and the libidinal, refusing any ontology of presence in favour of one structured by the constitutive gap of the signifying order.

The concept of Being of Significance appears in jacques-lacan-seminar-20-cormac-gallagher at p. 144, squarely within Lacan's late theoretical project of the formulas of sexuation. It functions as the ontological capstone to the arguments about Feminine Sexuality and the Not-all: if the feminine side of sexuation is constituted by the pas-toute — by not being wholly inscribed in the phallic function — then there can be no ontology of "Woman" grounded in a universal essence or a positive thinking-substance. The being of significance is Lacan's affirmative alternative: being as constituted by signifiance (the signifier's operation) and by the jouissance of the body. It thereby extends and radicalises the canonical account of Jouissance (which insists that "there is no jouissance except that of the body" and that the signifier is the cause of jouissance), giving it an explicitly ontological dimension: it is not merely that jouissance is bodily, but that being itself is structured through this bodily-signifying nexus.

The concept also directly presupposes Castration as its condition: Lacan's argument is that castration makes possible the (male) subject's enjoyment of the woman's body, and it is this castration-mediated jouissance that grounds the being of significance. This aligns with the Lacanian principle that castration is not only a deprivation but a structural condition of possibility for jouissance — the "structural coincidence of lack and surplus." The opposition to any ontology grounded in thinking or in enjoyment-of-being-as-such recalls the rejection of Cartesian and Hegelian frameworks: against the cogito and against any dialectic of self-present Geist, Lacan posits a being that is irreducibly split, marked, and enjoyment-laden in the mode of signifiance. The cross-reference to Objet petit a, Lack, and Das Ding (as the void around which signifying orbits are organised) underscores that this being is never full — it is a being constituted by the structural hole that the signifier produces in the real of the body.

Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and KnowledgeJacques Lacan · 1972 (p.144)

what I oppose as being, is...the being of significance (signifiance). And the being of significance...in recognising that the reason for this being of significance is enjoyment in so far as it is enjoyment of the body.

The quote is theoretically loaded because it performs a double move simultaneously: it names a new ontological category ("being of significance/signifiance") and immediately grounds it in a specific account of jouissance ("enjoyment in so far as it is enjoyment of the body"), collapsing the ontological and the libidinal-corporeal into a single formulation. The pivot on "signifiance" — not "signification" or "meaning" but the bare operation of the signifier — signals that this being is constituted not by semantic content but by the structural effect of the signifier on bodily substance, which is precisely the Lacanian definition of jouissance as cause and effect of the speaking body.