Being of Signifierness

The "being of signifierness" is Lacan's counter-ontological formulation for what it means to exist as a speaking being (parlêtre). Rather than grounding "being" in a substantial metaphysical substrate—whether idealist (pure mind or concept) or naively materialist (brute matter)—Lacan locates it in the fact that the body is always-already marked by the signifier. "Signifierness" (the quality or effect of being traversed by the signifying order) is not a secondary accident added to a pre-given body; it is the very condition of the body's being as such. Being is therefore neither a natural given nor a logical abstraction, but the residue of the encounter between the living organism and language. This encounter is precisely what castration formalises: the signifier's impact on the body institutes a constitutive loss of jouissance, and it is in this loss—in the jouissance that remains, that clings to the body as its now-marked substance—that being is said to reside.

The "reason" or ground for this being is identified as jouissance of the body. This move is decisive: Lacan refuses to separate ontology from libidinal economy. The body does not first exist and then enjoy or suffer; rather, it is in its jouissance—the enjoyment/suffering that the signifier both organises and disrupts—that it achieves whatever "being" can be attributed to it. This makes the concept a direct intervention in the debate between idealism (being as idea or meaning) and materialism (being as inert matter), refusing both poles in favour of a third term: the real of the body as it is knotted, scarred, and activated by the signifying order.

The concept appears on p. 81 of jacques-lacan-seminar-20-bruce-fink, squarely within Seminar XX's elaboration of the sexuation formulas and supplementary jouissance. It functions as the ontological underside of those formulas: if the feminine "not-all" (pas-toute) points to a jouissance beyond the phallic function, and if that jouissance cannot be symbolised but is nonetheless real, then some account of "being" is required that is neither symbolic (idealist) nor pre-symbolic (vulgar materialist). The "being of signifierness" supplies that account by tying being to the jouissance of a body already worked over by the signifier — a body that is barred (divided, never self-coincident) yet not dissolved into pure linguistic structure.

In relation to the cross-referenced canonicals: it extends Castration by specifying what the structural loss of jouissance leaves behind — not nothing, but a marked body whose remnant enjoyment constitutes its being. It specifies the stakes of the Barred subject: the bar is not mere negation but the very inscription that produces "signifierness" as an ontological quality. It situates Jouissance as the ground rather than the effect of being, inverting the usual ontological hierarchy. And it provides the material (non-idealist) basis for Feminine Sexuality and the Not-all: the supplementary jouissance that escapes the phallic function is not free-floating — it is anchored in the jouissance of a body whose being is constituted by signifierness. The concept thus operates as a hinge between Lacan's formal-logical apparatus (mathemes, sexuation) and his anti-philosophical insistence on the Real of the body.

Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and KnowledgeJacques Lacan · 1972 (p.81)

the being that I oppose to that... is the being of signifierness. And I fail to see in what sense I am stooping to the ideals of materialism... when I identify the reason for the being of signifierness in jouissance, jouissance of the body.

The phrase "reason for the being of signifierness" is theoretically loaded because it places jouissance in the position of ground or cause (reason) for an ontological category (being), while the term "signifierness" insists that this being is constitutively linguistic — not brute bodily matter but body-as-marked-by-the-signifier; the double refusal (neither idealism nor materialism) compressed into a single sentence enacts the precise logical space Lacan is carving out for the parlêtre.