Impossibility of Metalanguage

The Impossibility of Metalanguage names the structural condition, drawn from Lacan's linguistic axiom that there is no metalanguage (il n'y a pas de métalangage), whereby no discourse can step fully outside itself to achieve a total, self-grounding description of the social whole. In Copjec's deployment of the concept in Read My Desire, this impossibility is not a merely epistemological limitation (a regrettable incompleteness of our maps) but a constitutive, ontological feature of any social regime: because language cannot be supplemented by a meta-level that would anchor its own terms from the outside, the "generative principle" of a social formation can never be made fully visible from within the positive content of that formation's relations. The impossibility is therefore productive — it is precisely what prevents a social space from ever being identical with itself, ensuring that no diagram, panopticon-map, or genealogical inventory can ever display the whole of society "once and for all."

Copjec mobilizes this principle directly against Foucault's archaeological and genealogical methods. Foucault's rejection of the linguistic model and his preference for the diagram (notably the panopticon) as a figure of power-knowledge implicitly proceeds as if a metalinguistic standpoint were available — as if power relations could be surveyed in their totality from an analytic outside. Lacan's insistence that structures are real — that the instituting principle of a regime is irreducible to, and negates, its positive relations — is what Copjec claims Foucault lacks. The ban on metalanguage is thus the flip side of the claim that structure (the symbolic order, the Law) carries a real negativity that no empirical or historicist reading of surface relations can dissolve or circumvent.

This concept appears once, in the opening theoretical framework of Copjec's Read My Desire (radical-thinkers-joan-copjec-read-my-desire-lacan-against-the-historicists-verso, p.8), and functions as one of the pivotal anti-Foucauldian moves of that text. It is positioned as the Lacanian answer to what is missing in Foucault's account of power: a theorization of the Generative Principle of Society — a principle that, because it negates and exceeds positive social relations, cannot be read off from any empirical or genealogical inventory. The impossibility of metalanguage is thus the linguistic-structural ground on which the concept of Lack operates socially: society is never whole precisely because the symbolic order that constitutes it introduces an irreducible gap, a bar that no accumulation of positive knowledge (S2 in the Four Discourses schema) can close. This aligns the concept with the Four Discourses insofar as every discourse harbors an impossible relation on its upper line and an impotent one on its lower — no discourse can fold back on itself to achieve total self-transparency.

The concept also resonates with Fetishistic Disavowal and Ideology in the corpus: one ideological response to the impossibility of metalanguage is to act as if a complete picture were available — as if the diagram did display society "once and for all." Copjec's point is that Foucauldian historicism, by refusing the linguistic model's internal ban on a view from nowhere, inadvertently installs precisely such a fiction of completion, thereby foreclosing the conceptual space needed to think Historicism's own limits, as well as the possibility of resistance and institution-formation in social space. The concept thus serves as a hinge between Lacanian structural theory and a critique of post-structuralist historical method.

Read My Desire: Lacan Against the HistoricistsJoan Copjec · 2015 (p.8)

an acknowledgment of metalanguage's impossibility compels us to realize that the whole of society will never reveal itself in an analytical moment; no diagram will ever be able to display it fully, once and for all.

The phrase "no diagram will ever be able to display it fully, once and for all" is theoretically charged because "diagram" is Foucault's privileged analytic figure (the panopticon as diagram of disciplinary power), so its explicit disqualification marks the exact point where Copjec's Lacanian argument breaks from Foucauldian method; "the whole of society will never reveal itself in an analytical moment" simultaneously invokes the structural incompleteness entailed by the ban on metalanguage — society, like the subject, is constitutively barred from self-totalization.