Binary Signifier

The Binary Signifier, as deployed in McGowan's argument in enjoying-what-we-don-t-have-th-todd-mcgowan, names the hypothetical — and structurally absent — signifier that would function as the supplement or counterpart to the Master Signifier: a second term that would explain, justify, or ground the Master Signifier's demand, thereby closing the signifying chain into a self-sufficient totality. The term draws on the logic of the signifying couple (S1/S2) in Lacanian discourse theory, where S1 (the Master Signifier) always requires S2 (knowledge, the chain of other signifiers) to produce meaning — yet S2 never fully delivers, because no signifier can ultimately ground what the Master Signifier commands. The "binary" in Binary Signifier thus refers to the dyadic structure of signification: every signifier requires a second one to produce meaning, yet no second signifier can serve as an ultimate foundation. The absence of such a signifier is not a contingent gap to be repaired but a structural necessity.

This absence is precisely what creates an opening in the signifying order — a gap that cannot be sutured by any ideological or theological supplement. Religion, in McGowan's reading, is the cultural apparatus that fills this gap by positing God as the Binary Signifier: the term that would explain the Master Signifier's demand and thus make the symbolic order whole and legitimate. The psychoanalytic-atheist counter-move is not to deny God's existence but to insist that "God is unconscious" — that the gap holds no hidden knowledge, no founding justification — and thereby to keep the opening open as the very ground of emancipatory subjectivity. The Binary Signifier is thus the name for an impossibility that ideology refuses to acknowledge and that psychoanalysis insists upon recognizing.

Within enjoying-what-we-don-t-have-th-todd-mcgowan, the concept of the Binary Signifier sits at the intersection of McGowan's accounts of the Master Signifier, the Gap, and Lack. It is a specification — almost a negative image — of the Master Signifier: where the Master Signifier (S1) designates the anchoring, quilting term that organizes a signifying chain (the Point de capiton), the Binary Signifier would be the term that in turn grounds or justifies S1 itself. Because no such grounding term exists, the gap between S1 and the rest of the signifying chain (S2, knowledge) remains irreducibly open. This aligns structurally with what the cross-referenced canonical concepts articulate as Lack — specifically the Lacanian formula that lack is an effect of signification, that "nothing in the real is missing" until the symbolic order introduces a void — and with the Gap, understood as the constitutive opening within the Other (S(Ø)) that no signifier can close.

The Binary Signifier also directly implicates the cross-referenced concepts of Knowledge and Desire. If the Binary Signifier existed, it would function as the ultimate S2 — the knowledge that could answer the Master Signifier's demand and complete the circuit of signification. Its absence means that knowledge (savoir) remains irreducibly incomplete, which is precisely the Lacanian thesis that the unconscious is "a corpus of knowledge that must in no way be conceived as knowledge to be completed, to be closed." Desire, in turn, is sustained by this very incompleteness: desire "resides in the interval between two signifiers," and the Binary Signifier's structural non-existence guarantees that this interval — and therefore desire itself — cannot be abolished. McGowan's move is to politicize this structural gap: rather than mourning the missing Binary Signifier (the religious move) or pretending it has been found (the ideological move), emancipatory politics begins from its acknowledged absence.

Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of PsychoanalysisTodd McGowan · 2013 (p.264)

The absence of a binary signifier, a signifier that would explain or justify the demand of the master signifier, creates an opening within the structure of signification.

The phrase "explain or justify the demand of the master signifier" is theoretically loaded because it specifies precisely what the Binary Signifier would have to accomplish — not merely mean something, but ground the Master Signifier's authority — while "creates an opening" reframes the absence not as a deficiency but as a productive structural gap, aligning it with the Lacanian principle that lack is constitutive rather than merely negative.