Metonymy
ELI5
Metonymy is what happens when you want something but, once you get it, you immediately want something else instead — desire keeps sliding from one object to the next because no single object can ever fully satisfy it, and Lacan says this endless sliding is the very structure of human desire.
Definition
Metonymy in Lacanian theory names one of the two fundamental operations of the signifying chain (alongside metaphor), corresponding to Freud's displacement (Verschiebung) in the dream-work and to the combinatory/syntagmatic axis of language. It operates through contiguity and word-to-word connection rather than substitution: one signifier moves laterally to the next through association, proximity, or shared substance rather than replacing it from a paradigmatic position. Crucially, Lacan distinguishes metonymy as the more primitive and foundational operation—it must exist first for metaphor to become possible, since there would be no substitution without a prior combinatory chain.
Metonymy is above all the structural form of desire. Desire does not pursue a fixed object but slides endlessly from signifier to signifier, from object to substitute object, driven by the constitutive lack-of-being (manque de l'être) that cannot be filled by any empirical object. This is why Lacan defines desire as "the metonymy of our being" and why the phallus is "the signifier of the metonymical nature of desire": the phallus marks not presence but the sliding itself, the impossibility of desire's fulfilment. The interval between signifiers—between what is said and what is wanted—is topologically named by metonymy in the formulas for separation: "In this interval intersecting the signifiers, which forms part of the very structure of the signifier, is the locus of what, in other registers of my exposition, I have called metonymy. It is there that what we call desire crawls, slips, escapes, like the ferret." Demand's articulation in signifiers always leaves a remainder that "runs under it"—an element necessarily lacking, unsatisfied, impossible—and this remainder is desire, produced metonymically beneath every demand.
Evolution
Lacan's elaboration of metonymy unfolds across at least three major phases. In the early structural-linguistic period, condensed in "The Instance of the Letter" (1957) and the parallel Seminar III on psychosis, metonymy is introduced through Jakobson's aphasia framework as the combinatory/contiguity axis of language, homologous to Freudian displacement. This period establishes metonymy as the foundational positional operation—more primitive than metaphor—upon which the signifying chain rests: "metonymy exists from the beginning and makes metaphor possible" (Seminar III, p. 240). Symptom, neurosis, and the unconscious are shown to operate through both rhetorical poles, with Freud's dream-work providing the explicit proof. Metonymy also receives its clinical elaboration in Seminar IV (object-relation) and Seminar V (formations of the unconscious), where it is theorised as the structural principle of the perverse object ("the constitution of the object is not metaphoric but metonymic"), as the basis of the "metonymic object" that psychoanalysis addresses, and as the back-side of the witticism's metaphorical creation.
In the middle period (Seminars X–XII, XIV), spanning the object-a and identification seminars, metonymy acquires its most precise ontological and clinical weight. Desire is explicitly defined as "the metonymy of our being" (Seminar VII, p. 302; Seminar VIII, p. 183; Seminar XI, p. 169). The relation between signifier and subject is formalised through the "metonymical object" (subsequently renamed objet petit a), and Miller's logic of suture (Seminar XII) shows how numerical succession—the passage from n to n'—enacts a "metonymical effect" homologous to the subject's constitutive exclusion from the chain. In Seminar XI, metonymy is given its topological address: it names the interval between signifiers in the Other's discourse where desire slips and the child first encounters the Other's desire. The formula for desire as "metonymic remainder" beneath demand becomes canonical here.
In the late period (Seminars XVII–XXIV, encore onwards), metonymy is repositioned relative to jouissance and the drive. Lacan increasingly argues that the real support of surplus-jouissance is itself metonymy ("the support of surplus enjoying is metonymy," Seminar XVIII, p. 49), while simultaneously insisting on a sharper distinction from post-structuralist/Derridean accounts: "the metonymic sliding always subverts every fixation of meaning" (Sublime Object of Ideology) is precisely what ideological critique cannot be reduced to, because beyond metonymy lies drive and enjoyment. In the late work, metonymy is contrasted with "para-being" (Seminar XX; Zupančič on Seminar on OR...); desire as metonymy of being gives way to the concept of para-being as the repetition of impossibility rather than its endless deferral. Across commentators (Zupančič, McGowan, Boothby, Fink, Copjec), metonymy consistently names the endless sliding structure of desire, though they diverge on whether this sliding is derivative of constitutive lack (psychoanalytic position) or primary as infinite dissemination (deconstructive position).
Key formulations
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) (p.229)
In this interval intersecting the signifiers, which forms part of the very structure of the signifier, is the locus of what, in other registers of my exposition, I have called metonymy. It is there that what we call desire crawls, slips, escapes, like the ferret.
Lacan's most precise topological definition of metonymy: it is not merely a rhetorical figure but the structural name for the gap between signifiers where desire is lodged; it grounds separation as the second fundamental operation of subject-constitution.
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) (p.169)
leaves a metonymic remainder that runs under it, an element that is not indeterminate, which is a condition both, absolute and unapprehensible, an element necessarily lacking, unsatisfied, impossible, misconstrued (méconnu), an element that is called desire.
The canonical formula grounding desire as metonymic remainder of demand: demand's signifying articulation structurally generates desire as what perpetually slips beneath and cannot be satisfied, positioning the Freudian cogito ('desidero') at the level of primary process.
Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (p.330)
desire is understood here, as we have defined it elsewhere, as the metonymy of our being... I explained this last time with the metonymy of 'eating the book'
Lacan's explicit identification of desire with the metonymy of being, extended to sublimation: the 'eating the book' example shows desire's metonymic structure at the extreme point where need meets the impossible Thing, grounding the ethics of psychoanalysis.
Seminar III · The Psychoses (p.240)
metonymy exists from the beginning and makes metaphor possible. But metaphor belongs to a different level than metonymy.
Inverts the rhetorical commonplace by establishing metonymy as the more primitive operation: the combinatory/positional axis is the precondition for substitutive/metaphorical operations, structurally prior in both language acquisition and the architecture of the unconscious.
Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (p.302)
the properly métonymie relation between one signifier and another that we call desire is not a new object or a previous object, but the change of object in itself.
Defines desire-as-metonymy at its most compressed: desire has no fixed object but is the structural movement of change-of-object, situating sublimation not as finding a new object but as redeploying this structural mobility itself.
Cited examples
Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941): Kane's collection of statues, paintings, exotic animals, and the sled 'Rosebud' (film)
Cited by Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets (p.47). The objects Kane accumulates 'reveal the metonymy of Kane's desire: He moves from object to object in search of one that might satisfy him, but none does.' Each collected object substitutes for the next along the chain of desire, while the sled functions as metaphor — standing for loss itself — rather than as one more metonymic substitute.
Capitalism's consumer commodity chain: buying new cars because the previous one failed to provide ultimate satisfaction (social_theory)
Cited by Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets (p.50). 'Capitalism leads the consumer from one commodity to the next according to the metonymy of desire.' The commodity chain structurally enacts metonymy: each purchase holds out the promise of final satisfaction while perpetuating the dissatisfaction that drives the next purchase.
Schreber's 'forced game of thought' — compulsive sound-based associations in the hallucinatory birds' messages (case_study)
Cited by Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' (p.190). 'The forced game of thought comes down to a continuous use of metonymy to compensate for the failure at the level of metaphor.' In foreclosure, the Name-of-the-Father (metaphoric anchoring) is absent, leaving the subject to substitute along the contiguous axis endlessly without the stabilising point of metaphorical substitution.
Little Hans's horse phobia — the signifier 'horse' arising from the grammatical weight of 'wegen dem Pferd' (case_study)
Cited by Seminar IV · The Object Relation (p.310). 'At the begetting of the phobia, at its very point of emergence, we find ourselves faced with the typical process of metonymy, that is to say, the passage from the weight of meaning from one point of the textual line, to the point that follows.' The horse is not a symbol but a metonymic pivot: 'something designed to be hitched' that carries the grammatical weight of coordination in Hans's signifying chain.
Valmont (Les Liaisons dangereuses) versus Don Juan as contrasted libidinal structures (literature)
Cited by Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan (p.148). 'His case is not that of the metonymy of desire, of the eternal elusiveness of the true object of desire.' Valmont represents desire's metonymic structure — slow approach, endless deferral of satisfaction — in explicit contrast to Don Juan's drive-logic where satisfaction is always already accomplished.
The giraffe fantasy in the Little Hans case — the large giraffe becoming 'a metonymy of the mother', then a crumpled piece of paper (case_study)
Cited by Seminar IV · The Object Relation (p.258). Lacan describes how 'the child was caught in the mother's phallic desire as a metonymy' and how 'He produces a metonymy of the mother' by reducing the imaginary giraffe to a symbolic ball of paper. This illustrates the passage from metonymic imaginary relation to symbolic substitution as part of the Oedipal trajectory.
Freud's forgetting of 'Signorelli' — the metonymic ruins 'Botticelli' and 'Boltraffio' (case_study)
Cited by Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious (p.39). 'Everything is centred on what we can call a metonymic approximation.' The substitute names arise from phonemic contiguity (Bo-/elli fragments) rather than semantic substitution, illustrating how the unconscious operates through the combinatory axis. The metonymic debris is the evidentiary trace that free association tracks.
Saint John eating the book (Revelation 10:9-10) as the 'most extreme of metonymies' (literature)
Cited by Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (p.330). Lacan invokes eating the book to illustrate how sublimation operates at the metonymic limit where need (hunger) is brought into contact with what cannot be consumed (the word/book), making visible desire's metonymic structure: the aim shifts from the object (food) to the movement of desiring itself.
Tensions
Within the corpus
Whether metonymy is foundational and prior to metaphor, or whether metaphor has priority over metonymy in the constitution of meaning and the subject
Lacan (Seminar III): metonymy is the more primitive, foundational operation — it 'exists from the beginning and makes metaphor possible' — grounding all signifying chains before metaphorical substitution can occur. — cite: jacques-lacan-seminar-3 p.240
Hook/Neill/Vanheule commentary on 'Instance of the Letter': 'The logic of the unconscious is mediated by metaphor and metonymy and the subject is a species of metaphor.' Lacan's own formulas prioritize metaphor (the paternal metaphor, symptom as metaphor) as the operation that produces meaning effects, with metonymy subordinated to enabling this emergence. — cite: derek-hook-calum-neill-stijn-vanheule-reading-lacan-s-ecrits-from-the-freudian-t p.146
This tension runs through Lacan's own work: the structuralist period grants metonymy foundational priority, while the clinical/ethical period privileges metaphor as the operation that instates lack and generates signification.
Whether metonymy is the primary logic of post-structuralism/deconstruction (privileged as infinite dissemination) or whether Lacanian psychoanalysis distinguishes itself precisely by grounding metonymy in a constitutive loss that metonymy itself obscures
Žižek (Sublime Object): 'In post-structuralism, metonymy obtains a clear logical predominance over metaphor. The metaphorical cut is conceived as an effort doomed to fail.' This positions deconstruction as privileging endless metonymic sliding over any anchoring substitution. — cite: slavoj-zizek-the-sublime-object-of-ideology-the-essential-zizek-verso-2009
McGowan (Capitalism and Desire endnotes): 'The metonymic movement from object to object obscures the loss that transpires during metaphoric substitution. Deconstruction, in contrast, views the movement within signification as primary.' Psychoanalysis insists that metonymy is downstream from a real, constitutive loss; the sliding is secondary to and conceals the founding cut. — cite: todd-mcgowan-capitalism-and-desire-the-psychic-cost-of-free-markets-columbia-uni
This is the key fault-line between Lacanian psychoanalysis and deconstruction as read through metonymy: is the sliding primary or secondary to loss?
Whether desire's metonymic structure should be understood as a defense against the drive (Žižek's position) or as a positive ethical resource that can appropriate jouissance (Ruti's position)
Žižek (Žižek Responds): 'desire as such already a certain yielding, a kind of compromise formation, a metonymic displacement, retreat, a defense against intractable drive.' On this reading, metonymic desire is the subject's way of avoiding the full force of jouissance — the drive is more ethically radical. — cite: todd-mcgowan-dominik-finkelde-eds-zizek-responds-bloomsbury-publishing-2022
Ruti (Žižek Responds): 'desire drifts in an endless metonymy of lack' as Žižek characterises it, but Ruti contests that this makes desire intrinsically normative or compromised — sublimation can elevate the metonymic object to the dignity of the Thing, making desire ethically operative. — cite: todd-mcgowan-dominik-finkelde-eds-zizek-responds-bloomsbury-publishing-2022
The desire/drive opposition maps onto a dispute about metonymy's ethical valence: is sliding displacement a retreat from jouissance or a liveable relation to it?
Across frameworks
vs Object Oriented Ontology
Lacanian: For Lacan, metonymy names the structural sliding of the signifier along a chain in which no object ever fully satisfies desire because desire is constitutively anchored to loss rather than to any positive object. The objet petit a is never an object-in-itself but the void or gap around which desire circulates; objects are metonymic stand-ins for an impossible Thing that was never present.
Object Oriented Ontology: Object-Oriented Ontology (Graham Harman) insists that objects have a deep, withdrawn reality that exceeds all relational or linguistic captures of them. Far from being metonymic substitutes for an absent Thing, real objects are genuine individual units whose 'volcanic' interiority is irreducible to their relations. OOO's flat ontology resists the Lacanian notion that objects are always-already enrolled in a signifying chain that displaces them.
Fault line: Where Lacan makes the object's desirability a function of its enrollment in the metonymic chain of the signifier (lack, sliding, substitution), OOO insists on the positive, irreducible being of objects prior to and independent of any subject's desire or any semiotic system.
vs Humanistic Self Actualization
Lacanian: Desire's metonymic structure means that the subject can never achieve a final, stable satisfaction — desire is constitutively the desire for something else, and any attempt to 'fulfil' desire simply displaces it. The goal of analysis is not the subject's self-actualization but a changed relation to the impossible kernel of desire and jouissance.
Humanistic Self Actualization: Humanistic self-actualization theories (Maslow, Rogers) posit a hierarchy of needs culminating in genuine fulfilment at the level of meaning, creativity, and self-transcendence. On this view, the sliding of desire from object to object is a symptom of unmet lower-order needs, and genuine self-actualization would arrest this metonymic restlessness through authentic growth.
Fault line: Lacan's metonymy of desire is constitutive and irresolvable — no amount of psychological growth dissolves it because the lack is ontological, not developmental. For humanistic theory, metonymic restlessness is contingent and remediable; for Lacan, it is the very structure of subjectivity.
vs Frankfurt School
Lacanian: Desire moves metonymically through commodity objects because the signifying chain appropriates and transforms need into desire — capitalism exploits the metonymic structure of desire without being its cause. The metonymic restlessness of the consumer is rooted in structural lack, not primarily in ideological manipulation.
Frankfurt School: The Frankfurt School (Adorno, Marcuse) analyzes consumer desire as a product of administered culture and the culture industry: subjects are manufactured into consumers through ideological manipulation that produces false needs. The restless movement from commodity to commodity reflects not constitutive lack but the frustrated real needs that late capitalism systematically blocks and redirects.
Fault line: For Lacan, metonymic displacement is the structural condition of all desire and cannot be attributed to capitalism's distortions (capitalism exploits what it does not produce). For the Frankfurt School, the ceaseless sliding of consumer desire is historically produced by capitalism and could in principle be overcome through emancipatory reason.
vs Cbt
Lacanian: The subject's metonymic sliding from object to object is not a cognitive distortion to be corrected but the fundamental mode in which desire exists — it cannot be resolved through reframing thoughts or achieving realistic goal-attainment, because the lack driving it is structural rather than cognitive.
Cbt: Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy treats repetitive patterns of dissatisfaction (e.g., serial disappointment with achieved goals) as cognitive distortions — irrational beliefs or schema-driven appraisals that can be identified, challenged, and replaced. CBT aims to interrupt the cycle by building realistic goal-setting and tolerance of achieved satisfaction.
Fault line: For Lacan, the 'irrationality' of metonymic desire (always wanting something else even when goals are met) is not a cognitive error but the structural truth of the subject's constitution through loss. CBT misreads a constitutive feature of subjectivity as a symptom amenable to correction.
All occurrences
Where it appears in the corpus (320)
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#01
Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.148
The Act and Evil in Literature > The case of Valmont > The case of Don Juan
Theoretical move: The passage establishes a structural distinction between desire and the drive by reading Valmont (desire) against Don Juan (drive): Valmont perpetually defers satisfaction to maintain the gap of desire, while Don Juan attains satisfaction in each object yet is propelled by the irreducible hole constitutive of the drive itself, which Zupančič links to the not-all and objet petit a.
His case is not that of the metonymy of desire, of the eternal elusiveness of the 'true' object (of desire).
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#02
Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.155
Between the Moral Law and the Superego
Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Kant's concept of 'respect' (Achtung) is structurally homologous to Lacan's concept of anxiety: both are 'objective' affects without a cause but with an object (objet petit a), both arise from a 'lack that comes to lack' (le manque vient à manquer), and both mark the subject's encounter with what exceeds the order of representation — thereby aligning Kantian drive theory with Lacanian drive theory avant la lettre.
While desire essentially belongs to the mode of representation (the metonymy of the signifier on the one hand; fantasy on the other)
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#03
Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.168
Between the Moral Law and the Superego > The sublime and the logic of the superego > The second passage is from the Critique of Judgement.
Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the Kantian sublime is structurally homologous to the Freudian superego: the subject's conversion of anxiety into elevated feeling relies on a "superego inflation" that displaces the ego's concerns while simultaneously functioning as a strategy to avoid direct encounter with das Ding and the death drive in its pure state. The sublime's narcissistic self-estimation, its link to moral feeling, and its metonymic evocation of an internal "devastating force" all reveal the superego as the hidden engine of the sublime.
The destructive power of natural phenomena is already familiar to the subject... the devastating force 'above me' easily evokes a devastating force 'within me'. The feeling of the sublime develops through this metonymy.
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#04
Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.247
Sygne, or the Enj oyment of the Remainder > The Real in ethics
Theoretical move: The passage argues that ethics is grounded in the encounter with the Real (or Badiou's 'event'), and that the central danger of Kantian ethics lies in misreading its descriptive ethical configuration as a 'user's guide' — thereby collapsing ethics into terror, masochism, or the obscure desire for catastrophe by treating the Real as a direct object of will rather than an irreducible by-product of subjective action.
we escape to the realm of infinite symbolic metonymy in order to avoid the encounter with the Real of enjoyment.
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#05
Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.257
Sygne, or the Enj oyment of the Remainder > From pure desire to the drive
Theoretical move: The passage argues that desire and drive are not opposed but sequentially related: pure desire is the limit-moment at which the subject's fantasy-support appears within its own frame and is sacrificed, marking a torsion from the register of desire into the register of the drive—a passage that constitutes the telos of analytic experience beyond the traversal of fundamental fantasy.
pure desire is the moment when desire, in its metonymy, comes across itself, encounters its cause among other objects.
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#06
Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.264
Sygne, or the Enj oyment of the Remainder > From pure desire to the drive > Notes
Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the "realization of desire" operates through an infinite measure (the logic of negative magnitude and endless metonymy) that can only be articulated from the point of view of a Last Judgement, and she uses the parallel between Kant's postulates and Lacan's ethics to show that the Act (as in Antigone) dissolves the divided subject by transposing it wholly to the side of the object—thereby distinguishing desire from jouissance and opening onto a "modern" ethics adequate to a symbolic order in which the Other's non-existence is itself known.
Essentially linked to this logic of subtraction which gives rise to a (possibly) endless metonymy, desire is nothing but that which introduces into the subject's universe an incommensurable or infinite measure.
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#07
Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.270
Sygne, or the Enj oyment of the Remainder > From pure desire to the drive > Notes
Theoretical move: Zupančič distinguishes two modes of "realizing desire" - Antigone's sublimation through which she becomes the phallic signifier of desire (the Φ), and Sygne de Coufontaine's drive-logic that short-circuits the infinite/finite opposition by sacrificing even the absolute condition itself, rendering the finite not-whole and making visible the Real of desire (the real residue of castration) rather than the Symbolic/Imaginary phallus.
This gesture puts an end to the metonymy of desire by realizing, in one go, the infinite potential of this metonymy.
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#08
Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.47
THE ALLUR E OF BU YIN G A BUN C H OF THIN GS
Theoretical move: The passage argues that capitalist accumulation operates by exploiting the subject's constitutive misrecognition of its own satisfaction: because satisfaction is located in the act of desiring (rooted in loss) rather than in the object obtained, the subject endlessly pursues objects via the fantasy of the Other's desire, and capitalism recruits this structural failure as its engine.
the objects that Kane collects—statues, paintings, exotic animals, and so on—reveal the metonymy of Kane's desire. He moves from object to object in search of one that might satisfy him
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#09
Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.50
THE ALLUR E OF BU YIN G A BUN C H OF THIN GS > BARRIER S WITHOU T B OUNDARIE S
Theoretical move: Capitalism sustains itself by exploiting the structure of desire: it converts the subject's constitutive loss into perpetual dissatisfaction, thereby capturing subjects within a fantasy of the lost object while simultaneously delivering (unacknowledged) satisfaction through repetition of failure; liberation requires recognizing this self-satisfaction and divesting from the logic of success.
Capitalism leads the consumer from one commodity to the next according to the metonymy of desire.
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#10
Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.78
RETRE ATIN G BEHIND THE GATE > THE P UBLIC OBSTAC LE TO PR I VAC Y
Theoretical move: The passage argues that psychoanalysis, by revealing that the subject's satisfaction is constituted by the obstacle (the public world) rather than by overcoming it, offers a structural counter-logic to capitalism, which systematically misrecognizes the obstacle as merely a barrier to private enjoyment rather than as the object-cause of desire itself.
Our desire moves metonymically from object to object without ever successfully obtaining satisfaction in the object that it seeks.
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#11
Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.263
. THE SUBJEC T OF DE SIR E AND THE SUBJEC T OF C APITALISM
Theoretical move: This endnotes passage performs several interlocking theoretical moves: it grounds capitalism's logic in the structure of desire and the signifier (gap, mediation, lack), distinguishes psychoanalytic castration from mere frustration, aligns Hegel's ontology of nothing with the foundational role of absence in signification, and positions psychoanalysis against object-relations, deconstruction, and Heideggerian authenticity in their respective treatments of loss and the Other.
Deconstruction, in contrast, views the movement within signifi cation as primary and the marking of a foundational loss as a secondary attempt to arrest this movement.
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#12
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.69
[Psychoanalysis and its Teaching](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-004) > A sign of alarm
Theoretical move: This passage contextualizes Lacan's 1957 essay "Psychoanalysis and its Teaching" within the institutional conflicts of French psychoanalysis, arguing that Lacan's theoretical insistence on humanistic, structuralist, and intersubjective foundations for analytic training was simultaneously a militant political intervention against the positivist-medical orthodoxy represented by the IPA and Nacht.
elaborated the structure of metaphor and metonymy as key to that of the symbolic order and therefore of the subject.
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#13
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.)
[Psychoanalysis and its Teaching](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-004) > Abstract
Theoretical move: Against the imaginary reduction of psychoanalysis to ego-psychology, this passage argues that the unconscious must be understood as the locus of the Other's speech, structured by signifiers via metaphor and metonymy, with the death drive as the key to repetitive speech—and that analytic training requires restoring the symbolic chain rather than reducing analysis to an imaginary dyad.
This connection between the death instinct and metonymy makes sense since Freud, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, attributes the compulsion to repeat to the death drive.
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#14
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.80
[Psychoanalysis and its Teaching](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-004) > The symbolic unconscious
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the symbolic order—structured by the sliding of signifiers over signifieds—is constitutive of the subject, and that both Jungian symbolism and ego-psychological adaptation represent reactionary misreadings of Freud that replace the truth-seeking function of psychoanalysis with domination and narcissistic identification.
Signifiers slide along, metonymy gets away from real objects, language lives on its own terms, existing in dimensions far removed from its signifieds.
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#15
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.)
[Psychoanalysis and its Teaching](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-004) > Subjection to the laws of language
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the symbolic order structurally precedes and subjugates the individual subject, such that the signifier — carried by language across generations, dreams, jokes, and symptoms — is irreducible and indestructible even as individual speakers are not; Lacan's theses on the symbolic thus serve as a "key" to Freud's three major works on the unconscious, with condensation/metaphor and displacement/metonymy as the structural parallels.
the relationship between metaphor and condensation, and metonymy and displacement, for example
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#16
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.95
[Psychoanalysis and its Teaching](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-004) > Approaching neurosis in the imaginary vs. the symbolic
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the IPA's ego-strengthening approach to neurosis deepens alienation by keeping the subject in the imaginary register, and that only orienting analysis through the symbolic Other—rather than the imaginary other of identification—can treat neurosis as a genuine question rather than a lure; this critique extends to all empiricist, biologistic, and behaviorist appropriations of psychoanalysis that destroy its symbolic foundation.
he theorizes a behavioral functional analysis of speech—using such concepts as metaphor and metonymy!
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#17
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.113
[The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-005) > Mirages and other narcissistic extravagances
Theoretical move: Lacan's satirical critique of mid-century psychoanalytic institutionalism — its narcissistic 'good object' ideology, fetishization of technique, and anal-stage ritualism — is shown to ultimately serve his core theoretical claim that the unconscious is structured like a language, grounding rhetorical tropes as defenses and linking style to the Real beyond meaning.
He asserts that these tropes constitute defenses, and include: accismus (feigned refusal), metonymy (substitution), antiphrasis (humorous statement antithetical to accepted meaning)
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#18
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.132
[The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-006) > Context
Theoretical move: This contextual introduction argues that "The Instance of the Letter" must be read as a multi-front intervention — into structural linguistics, continental philosophy (Heidegger, Hegel via Kojève), the politics of psychoanalytic institutions, and the art of rhetoric — in order to grasp the full theoretical stakes of Lacan's reinvention of the Freudian unconscious through the concepts of metaphor, metonymy, and the letter.
his third seminar ('The Psychoses') where the concepts of metonymy and metaphor in Lacanian usage are explored at length
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#19
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.143
[The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-006) > The letter in the unconscious
Theoretical move: Lacan's alignment of metaphor/metonymy with condensation/displacement establishes the signifier's logic as constitutive of both the unconscious and the subject itself: the subject is not the ego-cogito but the effect of signifying operations, and symptoms/desire are the two modes in which the letter insists through these operations.
the signifier-to-signifier connection that allows for the elision by which the signifier instates lack of being [le manque de l'être] in the object-relation
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#20
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.146
[The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-006) > The letter in the unconscious
Theoretical move: Lacan's deployment of rhetorical trope (via Quintilian) over mere figure reframes metaphor and metonymy as active, structural operations of the unconscious that work independently of conscious intention—thereby establishing the primacy of the signifier and positioning psychoanalysis as necessarily interdisciplinary, in explicit opposition to ego psychology's "autonomous ego."
The logic of the unconscious is mediated by metaphor and metonymy and the subject is a species of metaphor.
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#21
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.151
[The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-006) > The letter, being, and the other
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the ego is a symptomatic compromise-formation that covers over the radical heteronomy of the subject, while the unconscious, understood as the Other's discourse, is the true object of psychoanalysis; the letter's insistence through metaphor and metonymy links being to desire and repetition, grounding Lacan's claim that subjects are spoken by signifiers rather than speaking them.
These objects of desire have a metonymic relationship to each other, as signifiers do in a signifying chain. Failing to achieve the full (impossible) satisfaction of desire, we nonetheless repeat our efforts to do so.
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#22
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.153
[The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-006) > The letter, being, and the other
Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's account of the letter (metaphor/metonymy) constitutes an implicit but sustained response to Heidegger: where Heidegger sees language as the "house of being," Lacan insists that language captures, mutilates, and tortures the subject, making the unconscious the condition of any question of being and symptom/desire the structural correlates of metaphor/metonymy respectively.
Lacan's explanation of metonymy and the lack in 'Instance of the Letter' helps to explain how repetition functions not as a deeply buried internal dynamic of individual subject … but as a relationship between grammar and rhetoric.
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#23
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.158
[The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-006) > Conclusion
Theoretical move: The passage argues that in Lacan's thought, metaphor and metonymy operate on two registers simultaneously—as a grammar of the unconscious (structural/linguistic) and as genuinely rhetorical figures in the concrete discourse of analysands—and that attentiveness to rhetoric as an art is therefore indispensable for clinical psychoanalytic practice.
what Freud calls displacement is metonymy. The structuration, the lexical existence of the entire signifying apparatus, is determinant for the phenomena present in neurosis
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#24
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.165
[On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-007) > Context
Theoretical move: This passage provides a contextual and structural overview of Lacan's 'On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis,' arguing that the text marks a pivotal shift in Lacan's theorization of psychosis as a unitary clinical structure grounded in the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father, situated within a four-period developmental arc in Lacan's broader work on psychosis.
It was particularly around the mid-nineteen fifties that Lacan began to focus on concepts like the signifier and signified, symbolic structure, metaphor and metonymy and the shifter.
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#25
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.173
[On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-007) > I. Toward Freud
Theoretical move: The passage argues that psychotic hallucinations—both 'code phenomena' (autonomous neologisms) and 'message phenomena' (disrupted signifying chains)—are not symptomatic of an underlying illness but ARE the structure itself, revealing the subject's relationship to the signifier as mapped by the Graph of Desire; the subject is constituted as an effect of signifier-to-signifier reference, not of any neurological or imaginary substrate.
interruptions in the metonymic concatenation of signifiers go against the creation of a message. Thus, they confront the subject with a black hole at the level of meaning
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#26
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.183
[On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-007) > III. With Freud
Theoretical move: The passage demonstrates how Lacan's formula of metaphor, applied to the Oedipus complex as the paternal metaphor, structures subjective identity through the substitution of the Name-of-the-Father for the Mother's Desire, while the R-schema (reconceived as a Möbius strip) situates the objet petit a as the virtual support of reality in neurosis versus its chaotic real manifestation in psychosis.
a signifier S replaces another signifier that was not uttered but was metonymically anticipated in the signifying chain, expressed by the barred S′. The x from the formula symbolizes metonymic anticipation of signification.
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#27
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.190
[On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-007) > IV. Schreber’s way
Theoretical move: The passage argues that Schreber's psychosis is structurally determined by the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father, which produces a cascade of effects—absence of phallic signification, invasion of the Real by hallucinatory voices and gazes (object a), and compensatory metonymic 'forced thought'—all of which Lacan formalizes through the R-schema and the I-schema as an alternative symbolic architecture to neurotic repression.
The 'forced game of thought' comes down to a continuous use of metonymy to compensate for the failure at the level of metaphor.
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#28
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.209
[The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-008) > Context
Theoretical move: The passage contextualizes Lacan's 'The Direction of the Treatment' as a theoretical turning point that pivots from an intersubjective/symbolic model of analysis toward a structural account of desire as the metonymy of lack-of-being, in direct opposition to ego psychology and object relations approaches that centre adaptation and the analyst's ego as goals of treatment.
Desire, thus, is the metonymy of this lack of being (often translated in English as 'want-to-be').
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#29
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.217
[The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-008) > II. What is the place of interpretation?
Theoretical move: Lacan's account of interpretation displaces ego-psychological and Gestaltian frameworks by grounding interpretation exclusively in the function of the signifier and the place of the Other, arguing that subjective transmutation occurs through the signifier rather than through ego-adaptive understanding, and that analytic direction must begin from subjective rectification rather than adaptation to reality.
there is no stable bound between signifier and signified, but rather a process in which the illusion of the signified is produced via metonymy and methaphor
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#30
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.)
[The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-008) > II. What is the place of interpretation?
Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Rat Man and Ernst Kris cases to demonstrate that correct analytic interpretation operates through the Symbolic frame (the signifier, the Other, the paternal function) rather than through ego-level defense analysis; the ego-analysts' surface-to-depth model systematically misses desire by subordinating it to drives and defenses, requiring instead a topology that locates desire at the level of speech and the signifier.
Lacan regards this shift as a metonymy (of desire), which emerges at the point where the signifier 'plagiarist' does not represent the lack of meaning (peu de sens) anymore
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#31
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.234
[The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-008) > V. Desire must be taken literally
Theoretical move: By reading Freud's Interpretation of Dreams through the butcher's wife dream, Lacan argues that desire operates through the linguistic mechanisms of metonymy (desire as sliding lack-of-being) and metaphor (surplus of meaning), and that analytic treatment must preserve the literal, signifier-structured dimension of desire rather than reducing it to ego-psychological normalization.
desire is the metonymy of the 'want-to-be'… Desire, which Lacan relates to lack-of-being, is a form of metonymy because it shifts from one object to another. It is "eternally extending toward the 'desire for something else'"
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#32
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.241
[The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-008) > V. Desire must be taken literally
Theoretical move: Through close reading of the 'witty hysteric' dream, Lacan articulates that desire is structurally constituted as the interval between need and demand, that man's desire is the Other's desire, and that the phallus is the privileged signifier of the metonymical lack that sustains this structure — a conclusion illustrated both by hysterical identification and an obsessional clinical case.
The phallus as such is thus nothing more than the signifier of the metonymical nature of desire.
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#33
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.)
[The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-008) > V. Desire must be taken literally
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the direction of treatment must preserve a place for desire by refusing to respond at the level of demand; the phallus as signifier of lack structures the subject's desire metonymically, and analysis must lead the subject to confront the lack in the Other rather than offering new identifications that only deepen alienation.
Lacan focusses here rather on the metonymy of desire. Desire finds its basis in the lack in the symbolic order, the ever vanishing desire being the metonymy of this lack of being.
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#34
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.270
[Remarks on Daniel Lagache’s Presentation: “Psychoanalysis and Personality Structure”](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-009) > II. Where is id?
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that negation (Verneinung/Bejahung) is not a logical operation but a structural one grounded in the signifying chain: the "failed negation" of the French 'ne' exemplifies how repression and the return of the repressed are identical, and how the subject of desire emerges precisely from the space carved out between the statement and enunciation by this structural capacity for one signifier to replace another — making lack, not fusion or adaptation, the founding condition of both subject and objective reality.
the 'ne' is placed before it... rather than simply negating or disappearing 'vienne'... just as the repressed is never entirely eliminated by a symptom or a dream, but returns and continues to be expressed.
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#35
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.)
<span id="ch18.xhtml_page_289"></span>[Index](#ch05.xhtml_tocindex-001)
Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index section (letters L–O) from a book on Lacan's Écrits, listing terms and their page references without advancing any theoretical argument.
metonymy [69]–[70], [80], [83], [94], [113], [132], [134], [139], [141]–[145]...
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#36
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.141
[The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-006) > The meaning of the letter
Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's concept of the 'letter' — the insistence of a structural element of language within concrete speech — reformulates the Saussurean sign by elevating the signifier over the signified and exposing the bar as a resistance to signification, such that the operations of metonymy and metaphor reveal how the unconscious is structured like a language, producing truth-effects that exceed the speaking subject's intent.
Metonymy is not the 'whole for the part' in the sense of what is signified, but rather is a word-to-word connection. It is defined by proximity or shared substance.
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#37
Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.27
Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > Worshipful Obsession, Obsessional Worship > Lacanian Heresy
Theoretical move: By introducing the three Lacanian registers (Real, Symbolic, Imaginary) through a rereading of the Rat Man case, the passage argues that the RSI triad constitutes a comprehensive rewriting of psychoanalytic theory: the Imaginary grounds ego-formation and alienation, the Symbolic structures the unconscious through signifying excess, and the Real names the traumatic, impossible kernel that ordinary reality functions to ward off.
Lacan refers to this margin of excess as a 'slippage of the signified beneath the signifier.' The consequence is that we always say more than we intend. It is in the space of the unsaid and unintended that unconscious effects unfold.
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#38
Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.72
Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > The Disappearing Thing > The Signifying Matrix > It Speaks
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the signifier operates on two irreducible dimensions—a semantic pole anchoring definite meaning and a "mantic" pole opening toward das Ding as pure lack—and that this bifold matrix grounds both the psychoanalytic method (free association, the slip of the tongue) and the quasi-religious capacity to create ex nihilo, illustrated by Heidegger's vase as the originary signifier of signifying itself.
Lacan is intensely interested in such an allusive penumbra of meaning, particularly in his analyses of metaphor and metonymy.
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#39
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part22.xhtml_ncx_104"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part22.xhtml_page_0122"></span>***L*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part22.xhtml_ncx_105"></span>**lack**
Theoretical move: Lacan's concept of 'lack' undergoes three successive theoretical articulations across his teaching: from lack of being (tied to desire and paralleling Sartre), to lack of object (distinguished into three forms, with castration as central), to lack of a signifier in the Other (constitutive of the subject), showing how the concept evolves while remaining fundamentally anchored to desire.
desire is the metonymy of the lack of being (manque à être; translated by Sheridan as 'want-to-be' and by Schneiderman as 'want of being')
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#40
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_ncx_113"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_page_0132"></span>***M*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_ncx_122"></span>**metaphor**
Theoretical move: Lacan's concept of metaphor, derived from Jakobson's linguistic theory, redefines metaphor as the substitution of one signifier for another that produces signification by crossing the bar of the Saussurean algorithm, and deploys this structure across the Oedipus complex, repression, condensation, identification, and love.
metonymy to displacement (see Jakobson, 1956: 258). Lacan then argues that just as displacement is logically prior to condensation, so metonymy is the condition for metaphor.
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#41
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_142"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_page_0161"></span>***P*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_147"></span>**paternal metaphor**
Theoretical move: The paternal metaphor is established as the founding metaphoric substitution (Name-of-the-Father for the desire of the mother) that structures the Oedipus Complex, grounds all signification as phallic, and whose foreclosure in psychosis abolishes phallic signification entirely.
Lacan first begins to discuss the tropes of METAPHOR and metonymy in detail
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#42
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part06.xhtml_ncx_5"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part06.xhtml_page_0010"></span>***Preface***
Theoretical move: This preface to an introductory dictionary of Lacanian psychoanalysis establishes its methodological framework: Lacan's discourse constitutes a unique, topologically structured language whose terms are mutually defining, and the dictionary form—itself a synchronic, self-referential, metonymic system—is the appropriate vehicle for exploring it, while the preface also theorises the dangers of ignoring the diachronic evolution of Lacan's concepts.
it is a closed, self-referential structure in which meaning is nowhere fully present but always delayed in continual metonymy
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#43
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part22.xhtml_ncx_104"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part22.xhtml_page_0122"></span>***L*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part22.xhtml_ncx_110"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part22.xhtml_page_0128"></span>**linguistics**
Theoretical move: Lacan's engagement with linguistics is neither a straightforward application nor a faithful borrowing: he selectively imports Saussurean and Jakobsonian concepts (signifier, metaphor/metonymy, enunciation/statement) and deliberately modifies them for psychoanalytic ends—coining 'linguistérie' to mark this irreducible difference between linguistics and psychoanalysis.
Lacan borrows the concepts of METAPHOR and METONYMY as the two axes (synchronic and diachronic) along which all linguistic phenomena are aligned, using these terms to understand Freud's concepts of condensation and displacement
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#44
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_173"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0195"></span>***S*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_188"></span>**signifying chain**
Theoretical move: The signifying chain is theorized as simultaneously linear/syntagmatic/metonymic and circular/associative/metaphoric, with the two dimensions cross-cutting each other — a move that integrates Saussure's two axes of linguistic relationship while displacing the unit from sign to signifier, and grounds the metonymic structure of desire in the chain's irreducible incompleteness.
desire is metonymic. The chain is also metonymic in the production of meaning; signification is not present at any one point in the chain, but rather meaning 'insists' in the movement from one signifier to another
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#45
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_173"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0195"></span>***S*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_185"></span>**Signification**
Theoretical move: Lacan's concept of 'signification' undergoes a trajectory from a vague association with meaningfulness to a precise, imaginary-order process in which the play of signifiers produces the illusion of the signified through metonymy and metaphor, with the bar in the Saussurean algorithm marking not a bond but a rupture—a theoretical move that radically inverts Saussure's stable sign relation.
Signification is metonymic because 'signification always refers to another signification' (S3, 33). In other words, meaning is not found in any one signifier, but in the play between signifiers along the signifying chain.
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#46
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_ncx_113"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_page_0132"></span>***M*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_ncx_123"></span>**metonymy**
Theoretical move: Lacan's concept of metonymy, derived from Jakobson, defines the diachronic, combinatorial relation between signifiers along the signifying chain as the structural condition for signification and the very logic of desire; the formula for metonymy shows that the bar between signifier and signified is maintained (no new signified produced), and metonymy is identified with displacement and posited as the condition of possibility for metaphor.
Lacan defines metonymy as the diachronic relation between one signifier and another in the SIGNIFYING CHAIN.
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#47
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_43"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_page_0056"></span>***D*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_51"></span>**development**
Theoretical move: Lacan's critique of developmental psychology (geneticism) turns on replacing a linear, chronological model of psychosexual maturation with a structural, retroactive account: the so-called stages of development are timeless symbolic structures ordered *nachträglich* by the Oedipus complex, and entry into the Symbolic is always a creation ex nihilo rather than gradual evolution.
the subject is irremediably split, and the metonymy of desire is unstoppable.
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#48
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part22.xhtml_ncx_104"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part22.xhtml_page_0122"></span>***L*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part22.xhtml_ncx_111"></span>**love**
Theoretical move: Love is constituted as an imaginary, narcissistic, and fundamentally deceptive phenomenon whose relationship to transference, desire, and demand reveals both its structural opposition to and its entanglement with desire — love as metaphor versus desire as metonymy — while simultaneously functioning as an illusory substitute for the absent sexual relation.
Love is a metaphor (S8, 53), whereas desire is metonymy.
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#49
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part16.xhtml_ncx_66"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part16.xhtml_page_0084"></span>***F*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part16.xhtml_ncx_72"></span>**formation**
Theoretical move: The passage maps the concept of "formation" across three Lacanian registers—unconscious, analytic training, and ego—showing how Freud's laws of condensation and displacement are recast by Lacan as metaphor and metonymy, constituting the structural grammar of the unconscious.
condensation and displacement, which Lacan redefines as metaphor and metonymy
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#50
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_43"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_page_0056"></span>***D*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_49"></span>**desire**
Theoretical move: This passage establishes Desire as the central concept of Lacanian theory by distinguishing it rigorously from Need and Demand, grounding it in the Hegelian-Kojèvian framework of mutual recognition, and defining it structurally as a relation to Lack caused by Objet petit a rather than a relation to any satisfiable object.
Desire is always 'the desire for something else' (E, 167), since it is impossible to desire what one already has. The object of desire is continually deferred, which is why desire is a METONYMY (E, 175).
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#51
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_173"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0195"></span>***S*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_187"></span>**Signifier**
Theoretical move: The passage establishes Lacan's transformation of the Saussurean signifier: by asserting the primacy and autonomy of the signifier over the signified, grounding it in differential structure, and defining it as "that which represents a subject for another signifier," Lacan reconstitutes language as the field of the Other and the unconscious as an effect of the signifier's operation on the subject.
By the phrase 'combining according to the laws of a closed order', Lacan asserts that signifiers are combined in signifying chains according to the laws of metonymy.
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#52
Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.347
**xx** > **FROM THE** *a* **TO THE NAMES-OF-THE-FATHER**
Theoretical move: Lacan concludes Seminar X by distinguishing mourning, melancholia, and mania through the functional difference between objet a and i(a), and then pivots to announce the Names-of-the-Father as the next seminar's project, arguing that the father is not a causa sui but a subject who has integrated his desire back into the irreducible a — the only passage through which desire can be authentically realised in the field of the Other.
this delivers him, in a way without any possibility of freedom, to the sheer infinite and ludic metonymy of the signifying chain
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#53
Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.35
BookX Anxiety > **ANXIETY, SIGN OF DESIRE**
Theoretical move: Lacan marks a decisive 'leap' beyond Hegel on the function of desire: whereas Hegel's desire is desire of/for another *consciousness* (leading necessarily to the struggle to the death), Lacanian desire is desire of the Other qua *unconscious lack*, mediated by the fantasy as image-support — a distinction formalised through four formulae and the division-remainder algebra that produces the barred subject and objet a as co-residues on the side of the Other.
This false infinity is linked to the kind of metonymy that, concerning the definition of the whole number, is called recursion.
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#54
Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.155
**x** > **ON A LACK THAT IS IRREDUCIBLE TO THE SIGNIFIER**
Theoretical move: The decisive therapeutic factor in analysis is not the content of interpretation but the introduction of the "function of the cut" — the analyst's intervention that allows the subject to grasp herself as a lack, which is irreducible to signification and constitutive of desire and anxiety.
An ongoing and varied reflection on the diverse metonymic forms that the focal points of this lack assume in the clinic will make up the next part of our disquisition.
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#55
Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.261
**x** > **THE VOICE OF YAHWEH**
Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the Voice as a new form of objet petit a — separated, not reducible to phonemic opposition — by way of the shofar, which he deploys to distinguish the vocal dimension from the scopic, and to show that while the mirror-stage/eye level produces a closed image with no remainder, the voice opens the question of the big Other's memory (and thus repetition) in a dimension irreducible to space and the specular.
a system of oppositions, along with what that introduces by way of possibilities of substitution and displacement, metaphors and metonymies
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#56
Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.327
**xx** > **ON A CIRCLE THAT IS IRREDUCIBLE TO A POINT**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the anal object (objet a) functions as the *cause* of desire rather than its goal, and that inhibition is the structural locus where desire operates; this grounds a theory of the obsessional's recursive desire as a defence against genital/castration anxiety, whereby the excremental *a* acts as a "stopper" substituting for the impossible phallic object.
the subject is essentially constituted as metonymy
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#57
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.191
THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the partial drives constitute the irreducible middle term between repression/symptom (structured as signifiers) and interpretation/desire, and that sexuality participates in psychical life precisely through the gap-like structure of the unconscious—a structure that cannot be reduced to neutral psychical energy.
interpretation is directed towards desire, with which, in a certain sense, it is identical. Desire, in fact, is interpretation itself
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#58
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.229
THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: ALIENATION > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER
Theoretical move: Lacan introduces Separation as a second operation distinct from Alienation, grounding it etymologically in the Latin 'separare/se parere' (to engender oneself) and showing how the subject responds to the lack perceived in the Other's discourse by offering its own disappearance as the first object — thereby locating desire in the interval between signifiers and founding the dialectic of the subject's self-engendering through the Other's lack.
In this interval intersecting the signifiers, which forms part of the very structure of the signifier, is the locus of what, in other registers of my exposition, I have called metonymy.
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#59
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.61
OF THE NETWORK OF SIGNIFIERS > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION
Theoretical move: Lacan retroactively reads Freud's Wahrnehmungszeichen as signifiers, establishing that the unconscious is structured by the interplay of signifying synchrony and constituent diachrony (metaphor/metonymy), and grounds psychoanalysis in the Cartesian subject rather than any pre-modern notion of the soul, thereby distinguishing analytic 'recollection' from Platonic reminiscence.
what is involved in this synchrony is not only a network formed by random and contiguous associations
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#60
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.43
THE FREUDIAN UNCONSCIOUS AND OURS > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION
Theoretical move: The unconscious is theorized as the locus of a splitting in the subject from which desire emerges via metonymy, while Freud's own unresolved relation to feminine desire (hysteria) is used to illustrate the structural limits of the speaking subject's self-knowledge.
a desire that we will temporarily situate in the denuded metonymy of the discourse in question
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#61
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.169
SEXUALITY IN THE DEFILES OF THE SIGNIFIER > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that desire, as the metonymic remainder left by demand's articulation in signifiers, constitutes the nodal point linking the pulsation of the unconscious to sexual reality, and that this 'Freudian cogito' (desidero) is the essential locus of the primary process—a claim grounded in the irreducible split between the subject of the statement and the subject of the enunciation.
leaves a metonymic remainder that runs under it, an element that is not indeterminate, which is a condition both, absolute and unapprehensible, an element necessarily lacking
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#62
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.203
FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the subject is constituted through division in the field of the Other, such that only partial drives (never a unified sexual drive) are apprehensible, while love and genitality belong to the Other's field and are structured by the Oedipus complex — meaning the ganze Sexualstrebung is nowhere present in the subject but diffused across culture.
He will simply find his desire ever more divided, pulverized, in the circumscribable metonymy of speech.
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#63
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.43
THE FREUDIAN UNCONSCIOUS AND OURS > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION
Theoretical move: The passage situates the unconscious as the site of a split in the subject from which desire emerges via metonymy, and uses Freud's unresolved question about feminine desire ('What does a woman want?') as an illustration of how the encounter with the hysteric oriented Freud's theoretical trajectory despite his personal idealism.
a desire that we will temporarily situate in the denuded metonymy of the discourse in question, where the subject surprises himself in some unexpected way
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#64
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.169
SEXUALITY IN THE DEFILES OF THE SIGNIFIER > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that desire is the nodal point linking the pulsation of the unconscious to sexual reality: it is the metonymic remainder left by demand's articulation in signifiers, and as such constitutes the Freudian cogito ('Desidero') — the essential site where the primary process is established.
leaves a metonymic remainder that runs under it, an element that is not indeterminate, which is a condition both, absolute and unapprehensible
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#65
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.191
THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE
Theoretical move: Sexuality enters psychical life exclusively through partial drives whose gap-like structure mirrors that of the unconscious; it occupies the interval between the primal repressed (a signifier, homogeneous with the symptom) and interpretation (which is directed toward desire and is, in a certain sense, identical with it), and this interval cannot be reduced to a neutral energetics.
interpretation is directed towards desire, with which, in a certain sense, it is identical. Desire, in fact, is interpretation itself
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#66
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.203
FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the totality of the sexual drive (ganze Sexualstrebung) is nowhere apprehensible in the subject — only partial drives appear through the pulsation of the unconscious — while genital sexuality finds its form not in the drive itself but in the field of the Other (Oedipus complex, kinship structures), thereby structurally separating drive from love and from any unified sexuality.
He will simply find his desire ever more divided, pulverized, in the circumscribable metonymy of speech.
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#67
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.229
THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: ALIENATION > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER
Theoretical move: Lacan theorises Separation as the subject's response to the lack encountered in the Other's discourse: by superimposing its own lack (disappearance/loss) onto the gap perceived in the Other's desire, the subject both procures itself and grounds fantasy, with metonymy naming the structural interval in which desire slips.
In this interval intersecting the signifiers, which forms part of the very structure of the signifier, is the locus of what, in other registers of my exposition, I have called metonymy.
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#68
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.185
**Presentation by Monsieur Valabrega**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the successful termination of analysis consists in the analysand's "conquest of the name" — the separation from identificatory names (father's name, analyst's name) and the founding of a singular subjective identity — with transference liquidation as the structural hinge between alienated and autonomous subjectivity.
it is an enlarged language where metaphor and metonymy appear as seen in a microscope.
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#69
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.121
**Seminar 9: Wednesday 24 February 1965** > **Presentation by Jacques-Alain Miller**
Theoretical move: Miller's presentation of Frege's logic of number demonstrates that the subject's relation to the field of the Other is structurally isomorphic to the relation of zero to the field of truth: the subject, like zero, is an excess that cannot be subsumed under any concept, yet must be counted as one (represented by a unary trait) in a movement that simultaneously excludes it from the field it grounds — this is the operation of suture, which ties logical discourse to the logic of the signifier and founds the definition of the signifier as that which represents the subject for another signifier.
the difference between n and n' which you have already recognised as a metonymical effect... The function of metonymy as an effect of zero.
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#70
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.158
**Seminar 12: Wednesday 17 March 1965**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that analytic experience centred on demand cannot be grounded in a biologistic or anaclitic conception of the mother-child relation; instead, the o-object (objet petit a) must be understood as what arises in the gap created by demand at the junction of subject and Other, with the demand always referring to the big Other as a third term irreducible to any concrete or fusional origin.
this symbolic, metabolisable, metonymical, translatable character, and this very early on this is the interest of the Kleinian experience, its appearance very early on...in the disguised, entstellt, displaced form of the phallus
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#71
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.67
**Seminar 5: Wednesday 13 January 1965** > (10) [Various noises] You see that we are in a police state!
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Freudian slip (parapraxis) operates not through any diffuse or motor stumbling but through a phonematic substitution at the level of the proper name, where the Name-of-the-Father functions as the structural pivot linking desire (including the desire to kill the father and Oedipal desire) to signification — and proposes that the desire of the analyst, topologically defined in relation to identification, must be the axis of analytic treatment.
not of one or other desire which is only the concealment, the metonomy, the metabolism indeed the defence, of which it is the most common figure
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#72
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.211
**Seminar 14: Wednesday 31 March 1965**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Foucault's *The Birth of the Clinic* independently converges with his own theory of the gaze and the o-object, using this convergence as structural confirmation that both inquiries touch the same real of vision — and he frames the passage through the lens of fantasy, metonymy-becoming-metaphor, and the genesis of the partial object in sensoriality.
this metonymical association becoming metaphorical by its effects could not correspond to some kind of phantasy
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#73
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.188
**Presentation by Monsieur Valabrega** > **Presentation by Melle Markovitz (not in French typscript)**
Theoretical move: The passage deploys the analysis of Philip's proper name and fundamental fantasy (Poord'jeli) to articulate the interweaving of transference, the unconscious, drive, repetition, and the incestuous encounter as the conditions under which a desiring subject emerges from the analytic situation—turning the phonematic transcription of the fantasy into a site where metaphor, metonymy, castration, and the analyst's desire converge.
He has illustrated for us the fundamental mechanisms of the unconscious metaphorical substitution and metonymical displacement.
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#74
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.125
**Seminar 9: Wednesday 24 February 1965** > **Presentation by Jacques-Alain Miller**
Theoretical move: Miller's presentation argues that the subject's emergence as representation in the signifying chain is necessarily correlative to its vanishing—a circular temporal structure in which the subject is simultaneously the origin of the signifier and excluded by it—and uses this logic to critique Aulagnier's notion of 'insertion' as neglecting the dimension of aphanisis, while grounding desire's pseudo-infinity and alienation in the metonymic function of the objet petit a.
the infinity of desire is a pseudo-infinity, namely, that it is an infinity that can be numbered in so far as it is only a metonymy as it appears in the form of recurrence in the theory of the whole number
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#75
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.203
**Seminar 14: Wednesday 31 March 1965**
Theoretical move: The passage performs two theoretical moves: first, it shows how the proper name functions as a signifier that splits the subject between objectification ("I am so-and-so") and self-identity ("I am me"), and second, through a clinical case and Leclaire's contribution, it argues that the phonematic decomposition of proper names enacts the primary mechanisms of metaphor and metonymy, while the signifier itself is defined as a pure connotation of antinomy constitutive of the subject — with objet petit a precisely as what escapes this antinomy.
the pure possibility of the phonematic decomposition and recomposition, namely of metonymy and metaphor reduced to phonemes with their amputations
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#76
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.277
**Seminar 20: Wednesday 26 May 1965**
Theoretical move: The passage uses the mythological figure of Palamedes to articulate the structural relationship between the enunciating subject and the subject of the enunciation, linking this to Plato's Sophist (the noun/verb distinction and the 'sliding of sense') and to the problem of the numbering unit within arithmetic, ultimately positioning linguistics and arithmetic as parallel domains within a broader theory of the subject.
what happens in this sliding of sense through which the potential noun is actualised in the verb
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#77
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.282
**PRESENTATION BY JACQUES-ALAIN MILLER**
Theoretical move: Miller defends his concept of suture as a general structural category—not reducible to the analyst's clinical non-suturing practice—by arguing that a sutured discourse is constituted by an apparent chain and a dissimulated chain whose occultation is the condition of discourse, while the signifier is identical to itself precisely insofar as it is constituted at its root by the non-identical to itself (the barred subject/lack).
The analysed subject sutures his lack of being, the metonymical effect of desire, the metaphorical cause.
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#78
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.282
**PRESENTATION BY JACQUES-ALAIN MILLER**
Theoretical move: Miller defends his concept of suture as a structural (not merely psychoanalytic) category that describes how a subject is produced in discourse through the articulation of an apparent chain and a dissimulated chain, arguing against Leclaire's reduction of his theoretical discourse to the position of an analysand's speech, and insisting that the signifier's identity is constituted at its root by the non-identical-to-itself, i.e., by lack.
The analysed subject sutures his lack of being, the metonymical effect of desire, the metaphorical cause.
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#79
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.211
**Seminar 14: Wednesday 31 March 1965**
Theoretical move: Lacan draws a structural homology between his own theory of the o-object and the gaze, and Foucault's account of the birth of the clinic, arguing that autonomous intellectual developments at distinct levels can converge on identical theoretical coordinates — and uses this convergence to orient his seminar participants toward Foucault's work as a key supplement to his teaching on vision, the gaze, and the genesis of the objet petit a at the level of sensorality.
this metonymical association becoming metaphorical by its effects could not correspond to some kind of phantasy
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#80
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.188
**Presentation by Monsieur Valabrega** > **Presentation by Melle Markovitz (not in French typscript)**
Theoretical move: The passage advances the argument that the fundamental fantasy (Poord'jeli) is legible as the intersection of the proper name, the unconscious signifying chain, transference, and the drive—showing that the analytic encounter is constitutively structured as an "incestuous adventure" in which the analyst's desire and the subject's becoming are articulated through phonematic and metonymic condensation, culminating in the subject's constitution as desiring through the analyst's name.
He has illustrated for us the fundamental mechanisms of the unconscious metaphorical substitution and metonymical displacement.
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#81
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.184
**Presentation by Monsieur Valabrega**
Theoretical move: The passage advances, through clinical presentations and commentary, that the signifying chain—animated by the proper name, desire's arrow, the Name-of-the-Father, and displacement—constitutes the very medium in which anxiety is covered over, condensed, and potentially traversed; the failure of the paternal metaphor to operate leaves the subject in a marsh of endless metonymic substitution, with the death drive "gaping" beneath.
The psychic life of Philip has remained like a marsh where one nenuphar displaces another nenuphar indefinitely.
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#82
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.126
**Seminar 9: Wednesday 24 February 1965** > **Presentation by Jacques-Alain Miller**
Theoretical move: Miller's presentation argues that the subject's insertion into the signifying chain is necessarily correlative to its vanishing — a circular, non-linear temporal logic — and that alienation is properly grounded in the division of the subject (not in consciousness), while the o-object, functioning as metonymy and as the logic of number (zero/one), structures the pseudo-infinity of desire.
the function of the o, as an effect of metonymy, which abolishes the subject by blocking off its place, because the subject finds himself identified to it.
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#83
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.9
http://www.lacaninireland.com
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the signifier's essential function is to represent the subject for another signifier, not to produce meaning through a signifier/signified relation alone; and that "non-sense" (the face sense presents on the side of the signifier) is the operative barrier that psychoanalytic experience explores, distinguishing this from any philosophical or developmental-psychological recuperation of loss through meaning.
the relation of the signifier is essentially to the signifier, that the signifier as such, in so far as it is distinguished from the sign, only signifies for another signifier and never signifies anything other than the subject
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#84
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.19
All men are mortal Socrates is a man Therefore Socrates is mortal
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the proper name cannot be reduced to a merely designatory function but opens onto the question of the signifier's relation to death (via the syllogism and the Death Drive), and further that language—as the primary, grammatically structured maternal tongue—is prior to and not reducible to logic or conceptual thought, as demonstrated through Dante, Vygotsky vs. Piaget, and Darwin's child-language example in which the signifier's mobility (from cry to monetary unit) reveals the two poles structuring language: the cry and money.
this quack... he is going to transfer from the duck to the water in which it splashes about, from the water to everything which splashes about in it... it ends up by designating what? ...a monetary unit
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#85
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.277
**Seminar 20: Wednesday 26 May 1965**
Theoretical move: The passage performs a theoretical pivot through the figure of Palamedes: writing confiscates the enunciating subject, and the gap between enunciation and the subject of the statement (traced via Plato's Sophist, the noun/verb relation, and the 'sliding of sense') is articulated as structurally linked to problems of arithmetic (the numbering unit within number) and linguistics - pointing toward the dyad and Sophistic discourse as a shared problematic.
this sliding of sense through which the potential noun is actualised in the verb
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#86
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.67
**Seminar 5: Wednesday 13 January 1965** > (10) [Various noises] You see that we are in a police state!
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Freudian slip (parapraxis) is not merely a motor accident but a phonematic substitution that traces desire back to the Name-of-the-Father as the structural axis of both repression and identification, and that analysis must topologically define the desire of the analyst in relation to this pass through identification.
not of one or other desire which is only the concealment, the metonomy, the metabolism indeed the defence, of which it is the most common figure
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#87
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.121
**Seminar 9: Wednesday 24 February 1965** > **Presentation by Jacques-Alain Miller**
Theoretical move: Miller's presentation argues that Frege's logical generation of zero and the natural numbers provides the formal matrix for Lacan's theory of the subject: the subject is structurally homologous to zero—excluded from the field of the Other yet represented within it as one (the unary trait)—and this 'suture' of logical discourse is also the suture of the subject in the signifying chain, replacing any reference to consciousness with the logic of the signifier.
to produce the difference between n and n' which you have already recognised as a metonymical effect.
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#88
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.185
**Presentation by Monsieur Valabrega**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analytic process culminates in the subject's "conquest of the proper name" — a symbolic achievement of identity through the liquidation of transference, separation from parental figures, and the re-knotting of the signifying chain, with literature positioned as a magnified analogue of this process via metaphor and metonymy.
it is an enlarged language where metaphor and metonymy appear as seen in a microscope.
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#89
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.203
**Seminar 14: Wednesday 31 March 1965**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the proper name functions as a signifier that simultaneously marks, objectivises, and alienates the subject, while Leclaire's contribution extends this by proposing that the signifier is constitutively an antinomy—a pure connotation of opposition—whose bodily materialisation (the cupped hands gesture) reveals obsessional mastery as an attempt to hold together the irreducible split that is constitutive of the subject, with Objet petit a defined as precisely that which escapes this signifying antinomy.
the pure possibility of the phonematic decomposition and recomposition, namely of metonymy and metaphor reduced to phonemes with their amputations, the forbidden contacts, the terrible confusions
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#90
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.158
**Seminar 12: Wednesday 17 March 1965**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analytic experience of demand cannot be grounded in a "living" or anaclitic dependency on the mother, but must be rethought through the articulation of the o-object (objet petit a) as what arises in the gap created by demand at the junction of subject and the big Other — thus correcting post-Freudian reductions of demand to developmental/biological origins.
this symbolic, metabolisable, metonymical, translatable character... the disguised, entstellt, displaced form of the phallus
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#91
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.161
**Seminar 14: Wednesday 20 April 1966**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Voice as an object has yet to be properly established as a category in clinical thought, then pivots to show why neither Socrates nor Freud produced social critique: in the ancient world, jouissance was 'resolved' by being delegated to slaves, and it was precisely this reserved park of jouissance—not any theoretical lack—that prevented the emergence of science and of the subject; this historical-economic argument positions the problem of jouissance as the hidden thread connecting ancient Greek knowledge-practice to Freudian psychoanalysis.
in the end it is false all the same because it is not a metaphor, it is a metonymy
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#92
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.184
**Seminar 16: Wednesday 4 May 1966**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that topology—specifically projective geometry—provides the non-metaphorical, combinatorial foundation for the subject's relation to extension and signification, displacing the classical unifying subject (grounded in Cartesian homogeneous space) in favour of a structural account where the screen, the signifier, and the combinatorial replace imaginary unity and representational resemblance.
in every art, it is fundamentally metonymical, namely, designating something other than what it presents to us
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#93
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.39
B - The problem of the differential distribution of the mode of representation
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Objet petit a cannot be reduced to perception but must be understood as a structural "representative of representation" — a trajectory of the subject through registers — that grounds desire through aphanisis, negative hallucination, and the mourning of the primordial object, while also proposing a systematic mapping of the object across synchronic and diachronic axes of Freudian theory.
These mutations have as object the accentuation of non-identity to itself not alone in the resurgence of the signifier but in its metonymical metamorphoses.
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#94
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.33
II -THE SUTURING OF THE SIGNIFIER, ITS REPRESENTATION AND THE o-OBJECT
Theoretical move: By reading Frege through Miller's logic of the signifier, Lacan argues that the structure of numerical concatenation (zero as both excluded object and naming integer) mirrors the subject's constitutive exclusion from the signifying chain, and that the objet petit a is precisely what "subsists" from this nullifying operation, linking suture and cut to the subject–signifier relation.
if the succession of numbers, metonymy of zero begins by its metaphor
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#95
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan
E - The (o) object of lack, cause of desire
Theoretical move: The passage theorises the objet petit a as the cause of desire by articulating its double register: it marks both the lack in the Other and the loss inscribed in the process of meaning, while its non-specularisable nature forces the barred subject to mis-identify with knowledge in order to cover over that constitutive loss.
there appears with a particular force the metonymical and metaphorical structure of the o-object in the mapping out that Lacan gives in Plato's text about the particular position of the agalmata
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#96
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.34
A - The problem of the suture
Theoretical move: The passage argues that suture—the logical operation linking lack to the chain of signifiers—is not merely a formal linguistic procedure but requires the bodily, psychoanalytic dimension of the object (objet petit a / partial objects) as mediator between thing and cause; it advances a ternary (triangular) logic over binary structuralist opposition to account for the cutting-up of both signifier and signified, with the phallus as the vanishing term that holds the system together.
can one not consider that the cutting up of the signified in this metonymical series of different partial objects is represented by the phallus precisely in so far as it has appeared in the form of (-phi)
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#97
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.11
**Seminar 2: Wednesday 8 December 1965**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that both the scientific object and the psychoanalytic object (objet petit a) are structurally constituted as lack/hole, and that the subject of science is defined by a cut homologous to Dedekind's cut; the antinomy between "saving truth" (science) and "enjoying truth" (epistemological drive/jouissance) is structured by the same alienation schema as "your money or your life," such that the objet petit a is always the excluded intersection-term of this forced choice.
The scientific object is passage, (23) response, metabolism (metonymy if you wish, but be careful) of the object as lack.
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#98
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.42
IV - IDENTITY AND NON-IDENTITYTO ONESELF: THE DEATH DRIVE
Theoretical move: The passage, presented by André Green as a commentary on Lacan's o-object, argues that the psychoanalytic subject is constituted through the effacing of the trace—a logic linking the Death Drive, the Name of the Father, castration, and metonymy—and that this logic of effacement (cutting/suturing) is what structuralism (Lévi-Strauss) fails to capture, reducing symbolic difference to mere homology rather than recognizing the barred lack as the cause of desire.
The metonymy is highlighted by Freud in the representation of the substitutive body for the lack of one of its parts, the genitals.
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#99
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan
E - The (o) object of lack, cause of desire
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the objet petit a functions as the cause of desire precisely through its status as objective lack: it operates in a double register — revealing the lack of the Other and the loss internal to signification — and its non-specularisable nature forces the barred subject to misidentify with knowledge in order to cover over the irreducible remainder left by castration.
there appears with a particular force the metonymical and metaphorical structure of the o-object in the mapping out that Lacan gives in Plato's text about the particular position of the agalmata
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#100
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.39
B - The problem of the differential distribution of the mode of representation
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the objet petit a is not a perceived object but a structure of transformation — the trajectory/circuit of the subject across registers — grounded in the differential distribution of representations, where aphanisis, negative hallucination, and the mourning of the primordial object together constitute the inaugural narcissistic identification and the condition for desire as desire of the Other.
These mutations have as object the accentuation of non-identity to itself not alone in the resurgence of the signifier but in its metonymical metamorphoses. The metaphor is infiltrated even into the metonymical enchaining.
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#101
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.42
IV - IDENTITY AND NON-IDENTITYTO ONESELF: THE DEATH DRIVE
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Death Drive operates through the effacement of the trace—a logic linking the signifier's self-cancellation to castration, paternity, and the cause of desire—and that this logic (not structuralist homology) is what distinguishes psychoanalysis from Lévi-Strauss's anthropology, while also grounding a structural technique built on the non-identity of the signifier to itself.
The metonymy is highlighted by Freud in the representation of the substitutive body for the lack of one of its parts, the genitals.
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#102
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.161
**Seminar 14: Wednesday 20 April 1966**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the status of the Voice as a psychoanalytic object is still to be established against naive empiricism, and links this problem to the Socratic/modern science distinction: the absence of ancient science (and thus of the unconscious) is explained by the slave's function as the reserved site of jouissance, whose structural resolution was the precondition for modern subjectivity and psychoanalysis.
it is not a metaphor, it is a metonymy
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#103
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.33
II -THE SUTURING OF THE SIGNIFIER, ITS REPRESENTATION AND THE o-OBJECT
Theoretical move: By reading Frege through Miller's logic of the signifier, Lacan articulates the structure of suture: the subject is constituted by the same operation of evocation-and-exclusion that generates the number zero, such that the subject is repeatedly expelled from the signifying chain it produces, with the objet petit a as the trace-remainder (the 'having') that subsists under the chain.
If the succession of numbers, metonymy of zero begins by its metaphor
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#104
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.11
**Seminar 2: Wednesday 8 December 1965**
Theoretical move: Lacan establishes a structural homology between the scientific object (defined as lack/hole, measurable only through the cut) and the objet petit a in psychoanalysis, showing that both the subject of science and the o-object are constituted through alienation—a forced choice in which something is always lost, either truth-as-jouissance or science-as-knowledge.
The scientific object is passage, response, metabolism (metonymy if you wish, but be careful) of the object as lack.
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#105
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.184
**Seminar 16: Wednesday 4 May 1966**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that topology — specifically projective geometry — provides a non-metaphorical, combinatorial foundation for situating the subject, replacing the classical unified-point subject (grounded in Cartesian extension/thought dualism) with a structural account in which the screen, signification, and the subject's relation to extension are all rigorously formalised without appeal to intuitive or metrical geometry.
it is fundamentally metonymical, namely, designating something other than what it presents to us
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#106
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.34
A - The problem of the suture
Theoretical move: The passage argues that suture is not a mere logical operation but is grounded in the body's structure: castration enacts the rupture of signifying concatenation, the phallus (-phi) functions as the vanishing third term in a ternary (rather than binary) structure, and the object mediates the passage from thing to cause — thereby both accomplishing and exposing the suture within signification.
the cutting up of the signified in this metonymical series of different partial objects is represented by the phallus precisely in so far as it has appeared in the form of (-phi)
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#107
Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.15
the smallest whole number which is not written on this board
Theoretical move: Lacan advances the axiom that "no signifier can signify itself" as the founding structural principle of the Universe of discourse, and demonstrates—through a self-referential paradox of writing—that this axiom introduces a constitutive gap or exclusion within that very Universe, raising the question of whether what the axiom specifies can itself be said.
in its essence, it signifies this sliding which comes from the fact that no signifier belongs properly to any meaning.
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#108
Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.192
the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 17: Wednesday 19 April 1967**
Theoretical move: Lacan formalizes the objet petit a through the golden number equation (1 + o = 1/o), arguing that this mathematical structure captures the objet a's incommensurability with sex, and deploys the unary stroke as the necessary precondition for measurement of the objet a within the locus of the Other, linking metaphor's substitutive logic to the emergence of the sexual subject.
you have here a rather good image of what I called in the signifying chain the metonymical effect that for a long time I already illustrated by the sliding in this chain of the small o figure.
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#109
Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.166
the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 16: Wednesday 12 April 1967**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that structure—the fact that the subject is an effect of language—must be the founding premise of psychoanalysis, just as Marx had to expose the latent structural difference within the equation of value before political economy could become rigorous; and he culminates this argument with the provocative thesis that "there is no sexual act," positioning the unconscious as speaking *about* sexuality through metaphor and metonymy rather than expressing a libidinal drive-force like Eros.
it is by being in a relation of metaphor and metonymy to sexuality that these objects are established
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#110
Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.271
the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 24: Wednesday 21 June 1967**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that desire is structurally constituted by its displacement from demand through language, making it inherently the desire of the Other and necessarily unsatisfied; fantasy is reframed not as a content to be interpreted but as a truth-meaning axiom within the neurotic's unconscious discourse, supplying for the lack of desire.
there is something displaced, which makes the object of the demand unsuitable for satisfying desire
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#111
Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.15
the smallest whole number which is not written on this board
Theoretical move: Lacan deploys the paradox of self-reference (the smallest whole number not written on the board) to establish a foundational axiom for his theory of the signifier: that no signifier can signify itself. This axiom, when introduced into the Universe of discourse, generates a structural gap — a specification that simultaneously belongs to and threatens to exceed the totality of what can be said — linking the logic of writing, the Graph of Desire, and the structure of the unconscious as language.
in so far as on the other hand, in its essence, it signifies this sliding which comes from the fact that no signifier belongs properly to any meaning
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#112
Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.192
the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 17: Wednesday 19 April 1967**
Theoretical move: Lacan deploys the golden ratio formula (1 + o = 1/o) as a matheme for the Objet petit a's incommensurability to sex, arguing that the iterative algebraic unfolding of this relation enacts both metonymy (the sliding chain) and metaphor (the substitution of the One for the enigma of sex), while grounding the operation of measurement in the unary stroke as the condition for the Other's locus.
you have here a rather good image of what I called in the signifying chain the metonymical effect that for a long time I already illustrated by the sliding in this chain of the **small o** figure.
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#113
Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.192
the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 17: Wednesday 19 April 1967**
Theoretical move: Lacan deploys the golden ratio formula (1 + o = 1/o) as a matheme for the Objet petit a's incommensurability to sex, arguing that the iterative algebraic unfolding of this relation enacts both metonymy (the sliding chain) and metaphor (the substitution of the One for the enigma of sex), while grounding the operation of measurement in the unary stroke as the condition for the Other's locus.
the metonymical effect that for a long time I already illustrated by the sliding in this chain of the **small o** figure.
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#114
Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.256
the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 23: Wednesday 14 June 1967**
Theoretical move: Lacan deploys the golden-ratio schema of objet petit a to articulate how perversion attempts to reconnect the body and jouissance that the signifying intervention (the subject-function) necessarily disjoins — with the sadist as the exemplary figure who, in Verleugnung, becomes the instrument of jouissance rather than its master, ultimately revealing that jouissance can only be located in the 'outside-the-body' part that is the o-object.
a jouissance dependent on the body of the other… the jouissance of the other, as I told you, remains adrift.
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#115
Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.166
the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 16: Wednesday 12 April 1967**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the subject is a structural effect of language — not a psychological substance — and that the unconscious, far from "speaking sexuality" in the manner of a life-instinct, speaks *about* sexuality by producing partial objects in relations of metaphor and metonymy to it; the climactic theoretical move is the assertion that "there is no sexual act," grounding the entire argument in the constitutive impossibility of the sexual relation.
it is by being in a relation of metaphor and metonymy to sexuality that these objects are established.
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#116
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.167
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > **Seminar 13: Wednesday 13 March 1968** > **Seminar 15: Wednesday 27 March 1968**
Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the dream as a phenomenon with multiple dimensions from the unconscious proper (of which the dream is merely the "royal road"), defends the thesis that the unconscious is structured like a language against conflation with dream-work distortions, and pivots to the problem of the subject in logic and linguistics: the universal quantifier always covertly implies the "stating subject" (sujet de l'énonciation), and no formal system has succeeded in fully eliminating this enunciating subject from its statements.
this mechanism that I identified to metaphor and to metonymy because it forces itself on us, it is precisely in the measure that the dream is the royal road to the unconscious
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#117
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.167
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > **Seminar 13: Wednesday 13 March 1968** > **Seminar 15: Wednesday 27 March 1968**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that language cannot be reduced to an act of the subject, and pivots to the logic of quantification to show how the universal proposition always secretly harbours an irreducible "stating subject" that cannot be elided — which is precisely what makes quantificational logic (and psychoanalysis) interesting beyond formal demonstration.
this mechanism that I identified to metaphor and to metonymy because it forces itself on us, it is precisely in the measure that the dream is the royal road to the unconscious.
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#118
Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.189
Seminar 12: Wednesday 26 February 1969
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Freudian unconscious apparatus — grounded in the pleasure principle, repetition, and homeostatic return to perceptual identity — is not a neurophysiological mechanism but a minimal logical structure of signifying articulation (difference and repetition), such that the dream functions as a 'wild interpretation' whose analysis reveals desire precisely at the point where the reconstituted sentence fails as a sentence, not as meaning.
what fixes is a reference to the signifying pinpointing, is destined to slide from this pinpointing itself. Here is the fundamental function of displacement.
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#119
Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.87
**Seminar 6: Wednesday 8 January 1969**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the minimal requirement for renewing psychoanalytic questioning is restoring the subject's dependency on the signifier, and that this project must move beyond phonology/linguistics toward a 'logical practice' (mathematical logic) as a discipline that maps an isomorphism—possibly an identity of material—between the structure of the subject and formal discourse; he also insists on the distinction between form and formalism as a structural, not specular/imagistic, operation.
avoids him having to judge whether yes or no the use that I made of the functions of metaphor and of metonymy is relevant
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#120
Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.37
Am I making myself understood?
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the objet petit a is not a theoretical artifice but an effect of analytic discourse itself—homologous to Marx's discovery of surplus value—and uses this claim to introduce the Graph of Desire's earliest construction (1957-58) as the formal ground for understanding how a signifier represents the subject for another signifier, with meaning constituted retroactively.
the o-object was only designated in the function of the metonymical object
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#121
Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.39
Am I making myself understood?
Theoretical move: Lacan revisits the two-tier structure of the Graph of Desire—signifying chain vs. circle of discourse—to show how the Witz (joke/wit) demonstrates the subject's triple register and its entanglement in the big Other, culminating in the claim that the subject is defined as what a signifier represents for another signifier, and that primal repression (Urverdrängung) is the originary fading of the subject into opaque knowledge.
it remains permeable to the effects of metaphor and metonymy, the formation of the word 'famillionairely'.
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#122
Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.14
**Seminar 1: Wednesday 13 November 1968**
Theoretical move: Lacan uses the structure of surplus-jouissance (plus-de-jouir) to ground the constitution of fantasy as the point where subject and object (objet a) achieve a non-reducible consistency, arguing that truth has no guarantee in the Other but only its correlate in the fabricated o-object, while perversion names the site where surplus-jouissance is unveiled in naked form.
the other signifiers can, by linking up, articulating and at the same time here, freezing in the effect of meaning, introduce this effect of metonymy which means that this subject, whatever he may be
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#123
Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.50
Am I making myself understood?
Theoretical move: By mapping Russell's paradox onto the relation of the subject (S) to the big Other (O), Lacan demonstrates that the Other cannot be totalized as a closed code or complete set of discourse, and that this structural impossibility — topologically figured by the cross-cap and Klein bottle — is precisely what produces the split subject and positions the objet petit a as the hole in the Other.
They will all leave it indefinitely given the essence of what is essentially metonymical in the continuity of the signifying chain. Namely, that every signifying element is extracted from any conceivable totality.
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#124
Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.174
Seminar 10: Wednesday 8 April 1970
Theoretical move: Lacan uses the 'no smoke without fire' sign-logic to argue that the signifier (smoke/sign) does not point to a supreme subject-guarantor behind appearances, but rather to the materialist productivity of surplus-jouissance; he then defends his independent deployment of metaphor and metonymy against claims of mere Jakobsonian borrowing, insisting he was saying something categorically different.
there has been enough nonsense talked about whether or not I borrowed metaphor and metonymy from Jakobson... I was saying something completely different
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#125
Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.119
*[A porter appears]* > Seminar 7: Wednesday 18 February 1970
Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Dora case to argue that Freud's substitution of the Oedipus complex for the truths offered by hysterical experience was a defensive idealization that masked the fundamental truth — audible in the hysteric's discourse — that the father/master is castrated from the start; this leads to a critique of the Oedipus myth as an unworkable, quasi-religious fiction that displaces the proper analytic relation between knowledge and truth.
a metonymical sliding, where people try to maintain a constant object
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#126
Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.164
Seminar 10: Wednesday 8 April 1970
Theoretical move: Lacan inverts the usual claim about the Freud-Saussure relationship by arguing that the unconscious is the condition of linguistics (not the reverse), and that language is the condition of the unconscious — positioning the Lacanian reading of Freud as what makes modern structural linguistics possible rather than derivative of it.
what Freud anticipated, specifically the Lacanian metaphor and metonymy, the locus where Saussure generated Jakobson?
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#127
Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.170
Seminar 10: Wednesday 8 April 1970
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that structure is the effect of language already operative in reality—not a representational function of any subject—and uses this to demarcate psychoanalysis from linguistics and ethnology: neither can master the unconscious because psychoanalysis operates within a particular tongue where there is no metalanguage, the signifier represents a subject (not another signifier), and sexual non-relation is the irreducible structural remainder that myth and linguistics cannot formulate.
The myth does not operate either from metaphor nor even from any metonymy... It does not displace, it dwells
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#128
Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.184
**Seminar 8: Wednesday 19 May 1971** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 16 June 1971**
Theoretical move: Lacan advances the argument that all language functions through metaphor and metonymy with the phallus as the sole Bedeutung (denotation) that language gestures toward but never reaches, and uses Frege's Sinn/Bedeutung distinction to reframe the paternal metaphor: the Name of the Father is efficacious not as a signifier producing sense alone, but as a name that summons someone to speak — revealing the Father as ultimately a numeral (a position in a series) rather than a presence, and castration as the reduction to number.
nothing of what language allows us to do is ever anything but metaphor, or indeed metonymy. That the something that every word, whatever it may be, claims to name for an instant can only ever refer back to a connotation.
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#129
Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.49
**Seminar 3: Wednesday 10 February 1971**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that language is irreducibly metaphorical—the referent is always "real" precisely because it is ungraspable—and uses this to ground both surplus-jouissance (whose support is metonymy) and psychoanalysis's relationship to linguistics: psychoanalysis does not borrow from linguistics but rather moves within the same constitutive metaphoricity, with surplus-jouissance functioning as the sliding metonymic object that keeps discourse in motion.
when I realise that the support of surplus enjoying is metonymy...this surplus enjoying is essentially a sliding object. Impossible to stop this slide at any point of the sentence.
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#130
Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.159
**Seminar 8: Wednesday 19 May 1971** > - We can't hear you!
Theoretical move: Language has only one Bedeutung — the phallus — because it is constituted from the impossibility of symbolising the sexual relationship; writing provides the "bone" that jouissance lacks, and the semblance that structures discourse is irreducibly phallic, meaning sexual enjoyment forever remains barred from the field of truth.
for metonymy, from which they take the x little bit of reality that remains to them, under the form of surplus
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#131
Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.122
**Seminar 6: Wednesday 17 March 1971** > *Lituraterre*
Theoretical move: Lacan introduces "lituraterre" as a neologism to theorise the letter not as a frontier between knowledge and jouissance but as a *littoral* — the edge of the hole in knowledge — thereby distinguishing the letter from the signifier and from psychobiographical reduction, while implicitly critiquing the Discourse of the University for conflating letter and signifier.
one word taken for another, indeed the word taken by another, in other words metaphor and metonymy, as an effect of the sentence.
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#132
Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.152
accommodate yourselves.
Theoretical move: Lacan deploys the quantifying logic of "not-all" to correct the Oedipal myth of the primal father, then pivots to argue that the sexual non-relationship is what generates desire as a language-effect, before closing with a meditation on the analyst's intolerable position as objet petit a (semblance) in the analytic discourse—a position only made liveable through logic.
We have displacement, we have condensation, it is very exactly the path along which in effect one can create... unier.
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#133
Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.62
The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the phallus is the singular meaning (Bedeutung) through which language signifies, that this phallic function structurally prevents any harmonious sexual relation, and that the objet petit a — as metonymical cause of desire — is what determines the speaking being as a divided subject within discourse, with the semblance-pole (analyst's position) and enjoyment-pole standing as the two irreducible terms of the quadripode.
It is again the one that I called, as you know, the metonymical object, the one that runs along what is unfolded as discourse
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#134
Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.41
The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge
Theoretical move: Lacan uses a Klein bottle topology and a playful six-verse poem to demonstrate that the relation between man and woman passes through love, then substitutes the world for the sexual partner, and terminates at a wall that is not a cut but the locus of castration — the point where truth and knowledge are held apart. This topological demonstration grounds the claim that the discourse of capitalism forecloses castration, and that it is only the analytic discourse (emerging from logic, the four discourses, and language) that re-introduces castration as the hinge between truth and knowledge.
it has noticed that all metonymies emerge from it
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#135
Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.109
**VII** > A love letter *(une lettre d'amour)* > **Knowledge and truth**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that knowledge is grounded in the Other as a locus of the signifier, and that its true nature lies in the identity between the jouissance of its acquisition and its exercise — not in exchange value but in use — while the analyst, by placing objet petit a in the place of semblance, is uniquely positioned to investigate truth as knowledge; this culminates in a meditation on the not-all, the Other's not-knowing, and the link between jealouissance, the gaze, and das Ding as the kernel of the neighbor.
the desire evoked on the basis of a metonymy that is inscribed on the basis of a presumed demand, addressed to the Other
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#136
Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.136
**<sup>107</sup>x** > Rings of string
Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of Borromean knots and rings of string to ground a theory of desire, the subject, and the Other: object a is the void presupposed by demand, the subject's division is structurally equivalent to the 'bending' of a ring, and the Other is not additive to the One but is the 'One-missing' — a difference internal to the One rather than supplementary to it.
it is only by situating demand via metonymy, that is, by the pure continuity assured from the beginning to the end of a sentence, that we can imagine a desire that is based on no being
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#137
Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.27
**Seminar 2: Wednesday 12 December 1972**
Theoretical move: Recanati's presentation, guided by Lacan, develops the concept of "sectioning of the predicate" as the structural impossibility at the heart of predication — the cut that divides yet cannot find the indivisible — linking it through ordinal number theory, Platonic myth (Aristophanes' sexion/cut, Diotima's intermediary/interpretant), and the logic of nomination to show that the 'encore' names the infinite index that escapes any system of covering-over, while the 'non' names the radical initial negation that infinitises all nomination.
one says a little more and that this more that one says it is necessary for it to be not so much resorbed as to be identified, to be given a name and, starting from there, we are dealing with an infinite displacement
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#138
Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.37
**Seminar 2: Wednesday 12 December 1972**
Theoretical move: Recanati uses Cantorian set-theoretic ordinals to formalise the logic of repetition: each ordinal both records and reproduces the gap (hole) it cannot close, so that the limit insists as an absolute, unreachable frontier — a structure Recanati explicitly maps onto the psychoanalytic dynamics of desire, interpretation, and the entrance into analysis.
the emergence of another that permits, through this confrontation… to understand that one has to deal with elements of a different set, with the elements of a larger set.
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#139
Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.251
(3) Naturally since I made a small mistake
Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Borromean knot as a topological demonstration that the One (ring of string enclosing nothing but a hole) grounds both the structure of desire—where the objet petit a is not a being but a void supposed by demand, sustained only by metonymy—and the logic of mathematical language, where removing a single element disperses all the rest simultaneously.
it is only by defining it as situated by metonymy, namely by the pure continuity assured from the beginning or the start of the sentence, that we can imagine what can be involved in a desire that no being supports.
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#140
Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.188
**Seminar 9: Wednesday 20 March 1973**
Theoretical move: Lacan links the objet petit a as a semblance of being to a primordial scene of jealous enjoyment (jalouissance) drawn from Augustine, positioning it as the first substitutive enjoyment that founds desire through metonymy and demand addressed to the Other, and closes on the question of whether having the object a is the same as being it — a question he refers to "The Meaning of the Phallus."
The desire evoked from a metonymy that is inscribed from a demand that is presumed to be addressed to the Other
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#141
Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.58
**Introduction** > **Seminar 4: Tuesday 21 January 1975**
Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Borromean knot's topological properties to argue that the three consistencies—Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real—are irreducibly linked and that this triadic structure grounds both representation and the subject's condition, while the objet petit a (small o), as cause of desire rather than its object, marks an irrational, non-conjunctive gap between the One of the signifier and the One of meaning.
the being to be removed from this metonymy, by which *I* support desire, as forever impossible to say as such.
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#142
Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.36
**Seminar 2: Wednesday 9 December 1975** > QUESTIONS
Theoretical move: Lacan uses a seminar Q&A to clarify the topological function of the Borromean knot as the fourth term (symptom) that holds RSI together, argues that the Real operates as a third pole mediating between body and language rather than being reducible to either, and distinguishes the knot from a 'model' on the grounds that it resists imagination while topology itself remains insufficient to prove its four-fold Borromean realisation.
One always reduces the import of the metaphor as such, is that not so. Namely, one reduces it to a metonymy, is that not so.
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#143
Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.116
**Seminar 9: Wednesday 15 March 1977** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 19 April 1977**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that analytic interpretation must abandon the register of beautiful, logical sense in favour of a poetic-equivocal resonance grounded in the witticism: it is the capacity to extinguish a symptom—not logical articulation or aesthetic beauty—that validates an interpretation as true, pointing toward a practice founded on economy rather than value.
Metaphor, and metonymy, have an import for interpretation only insofar as they are capable of functioning as something else.
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#144
Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.58
So then what is this lack? > **Seminar 5: Wednesday 18 January 1977**
Theoretical move: Lacan refuses the framing of art (painting, music) as "preverbal" and instead insists it is "hyper-verbal" — saturated by the symbol and the signifier — while simultaneously distinguishing art as a form of know-how (savoir-faire) that goes beyond symbolism and carries more truth than discursive elaboration. The theoretical pivot is that the Real/Imaginary continuity invoked by the interlocutor does not bypass the Symbolic but is, in Lacan's formulation, "verbal to the power of two."
there is always this slippage and this interplay of signifiers as in the Seminar on the Purloined Letter
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#145
Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.78
So then what is this lack? > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 8 February 1977**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Passe cannot be transmitted by a speaking subject alone (the *passant*) because the locus of enunciating from which S(Ø) is emitted cannot itself be said; only a topological writing—a graphical arrangement that articulates the subject of the enunciated and the subject of enunciating in a transmissible way—can function as the true Passer, which is why Lacan's seminars and graphs perpetually recreate the conditions of division.
falls itself as a simple metonymical remainder and loses its value of metaphorical message
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#146
Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.240
**XVIII** > **1**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the efficacy of metaphor — and of signification generally — rests not on the transference of meaning but on the positional structure of the signifier itself; metonymy, as the primitive positional function, is what makes metaphor possible, not the other way around.
metonymy exists from the beginning and makes metaphor possible. But metaphor belongs to a different level than metonymy.
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#147
Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.251
**XVIII** > **An address: Freud in the century** > **1**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freud's fundamental discovery is the primacy of the signifier — the structure of language — as the organizing principle of the unconscious, dreams, symptoms, and the ego, and that the compulsion to repeat is grounded in the insistence of speech; this is what post-Freudian ego psychology has systematically obscured.
He answers, Trafoi and Boltraffio, which he makes the intermediary of the metonymy, the intermediary of the slide between Herzegovina and Bosnia.
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#148
Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan
**XVIII** > **Metaphor and metonymy (II): Signifying articulation and transference of the signified**
Theoretical move: Lacan uses the aphasia distinction (similarity vs. contiguity disorders) to positively ground the metaphor/metonymy opposition, while insisting that the signifier/signified split cannot be collapsed into the traditional "words for thought" dualism.
What I retain from the two levels of disorder that have been distinguished in aphasia is that there is the same opposition between them as the one that appears, no longer in a negative but in a positive way, in metaphor and metonymy.
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#149
Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.241
**XVIII** > **1**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that metonymy (contiguous, signifier-to-signifier coordination) is the foundational operation of language acquisition and psychic organization, upon which metaphor (transference of the signified) can only subsequently operate—and that psychotic phenomena like Schreber's delusional assonances expose this hidden signifying substructure by promoting the signifier as such.
children begin with such and such an element of the verbal stock rather than by some other... they're not yet up to metaphor, but only metonymy.
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#150
Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.233
**XVII** > **1**
Theoretical move: Lacan grounds the Freudian mechanisms of condensation and displacement in the rhetorical distinction between metaphor and metonymy, arguing that the signifier's structural priority over the signified is the very starting-point of the Freudian discovery, and that psychosis results from a specific pathological relationship between the subject and the signifier/Other rather than from a merely aphasic mechanism.
what he calls displacement is metonymy… One thing is named by another that is its container, or its part, or that is connected to it.
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#151
Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.129
**VIII**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Freudian unconscious is nothing other than the continuous circulation of the symbolic sentence (the "discourse of the Other"), from which the ego functions precisely to shield consciousness; psychosis makes this structure visible by exposing the internal monologue as an articulated, interrupted, and grammatically structured discourse — as Schreber's voices demonstrate — thereby grounding both the theory of the unconscious and the theory of psychosis in the same structural account of language.
The state of a language can be characterized as much by what is absent as by what is present.
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#152
Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.68
**IV** > **"I've just been to the butcher's"**
Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes synchronic from diachronic dimensions of the signifier, using Schreber's psychosis to show how isolated signifiers become "erotized" (charged with unassimilable meaning), and frames the structural analysis of delusion around the differentiation of the big Other (symbolic), the imaginary ego, and the real person—arguing that this tripartite structure is what the unconscious means.
This meaning, like all meaning worthy of the name, refers to another meaning. It is indeed what here characterizes the allusion. In saying, I've just been to the butcher's, the patient points out to us that it refers to another meaning.
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#153
Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.347
**XXV** > **INDE X**
Theoretical move: This is the index section of Seminar III, a non-substantive reference apparatus listing key concepts, proper names, and page references for the seminar's theoretical content on psychosis, language, and related Lacanian concepts.
metonymy, 218-21, 222-230, 239
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#154
Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.232
**XVII** > **1**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that in psychosis (particularly Schreber's hallucinations), the signifier's dimension of contiguity dominates over the dimension of similarity/metaphor, and that misrecognising the primordial mediating role of the signifier — reducing analysis to the signified — renders psychosis unintelligible; the hallucinatory phenomenon is precisely the grammatical-syntactic part of language imposed as an external reality, marking a failure of the metaphoric function.
the relations of similarity, or substitution, or choice... and on the other hand the relations of contiguity, alignment, signifying articulation, syntactic coordination.
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#155
Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.273
**XXI** > **1**
Theoretical move: Lacan uses Schreber's psychotic experience and Saussure's two-flow schema to argue that the signifier is never isolable but always retroactively determines meaning through the completion of a signifying chain — a structural property illustrated through Racine's Athalie — and that this structuring priority of the signifier over the signified is the necessary foundation for understanding psychoanalytic (especially psychotic) experience.
the elementary meanings we call desire, or feeling, or affectivity, these fluctuations, these shadows, these resonances even, have certain dynamics that can be explained only at the level of the signifier insofar as it is structuring
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#156
Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.227
**XVII**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the dimension of truth enters human life through the paternal symbol, and that this symbol—understood as pure signifier—coincides with the death drive at the origin of the human symbolic order; this convergence grounds the return to the study of psychosis.
Metaphor and metonymy (I)
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#157
Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.292
HOW MYTH IS ANALYSED > THE SIGNIFIER AND DER WITZ
Theoretical move: Lacan uses the structure of Witz (naivety, the third-person ternarity, and the combinatorial logic of signifiers) to argue that Little Hans's symptom is best understood as a mythical-signifying system whose diachronic development is circular: the impasse at the origin is found again—inverted but structurally identical—at the point of arrival, and this movement is governed by the symbolic register, not by instinctual meaning.
all these linkages of variously fantasmatic signifier-elements revolving around the theme of movement... the term of modification, acceleration, there is specifically the word Bewegung, motion
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#158
Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.268
HOW MYTH IS ANALYSED
Theoretical move: By reading Little Hans's case through Lévi-Strauss's structural method for myth analysis, Lacan argues that the signifying elements of Hans's fantasies cannot be fixed to univocal meanings but function as transforming bundles whose traversal moves from the eruption of the real penis to its symbolic accommodation, with the imaginary father (occupied by Freud himself) remaining distinct from both the real and symbolic father—and this structural incompleteness explains both the cure and its limits.
what I called the metonymy of the mother, to become a piece of paper, to become a crumpled giraffe that the child sits on
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#159
Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.142
Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > DORA AND THE YOUNG HOMOSEXUAL WOMAN
Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the structures of neurosis and perversion by mapping Dora's hysteria as a perpetual metaphorical self-positioning under shifting signifiers (Frau K. as her metaphor), while the young homosexual woman's perversion operates metonymically—pointing along the signifying chain to what lies beyond, namely the refused paternal phallus—and uses Lévi-Strauss's exchange theory to ground why woman is structurally reduced to object within the Law of symbolic exchange.
You will find here what I once called, in the widest sense, metonymy, which consists in getting something across by speaking about something utterly different.
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#160
Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.298
XVIII CIRCUITS
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the horse in little Hans's phobia functions primarily as a "polarising" signifier — not because of its symbolic content but because of its formal structural role: introduced at a critical moment, it reorganises the field of the signified, constitutes limits and transgressions simultaneously, and operates as a signal that restructures Hans's world. The analysis pivots on the priority of the signifier over the signified, against any object-relations or content-based reading.
the horse extends far beyond what appears as something of a supervalent figure, a heraldic figure, which focuses the entire field and is laden with all sorts of implications, and above all signifying implications.
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#161
Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.404
FAREWELL > FROM HANS-THE-FETISH TO LEONARDO-IN-THE-MIRROR
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that little Hans's case resolves not through a properly symbolised castration complex and superego formation, but through identification with the maternal phallus as Ego Ideal — a structurally atypical Oedipal outcome that positions Hans as a fetish-like object, leaving him on the margins of full phallic symbolisation and masculinity.
you will see what is perhaps a tighter justification for the ordering of some of these formulae, notably those for metaphor and metonymy.
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#162
Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.152
THE FETISH OBJECT > THE FUNCTION OF THE VEIL
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the fetish is constituted not through metaphor but through metonymy: it is the point in the symbolic-historical chain where the subject's history is arrested, functioning as a screen-memory that marks the onset of repression and veils the beyond-zone where the phallus-as-presence-absence should appear, while the subject's erotic life oscillates between imaginary identifications due to insufficient symbolization of the ternary (Oedipal) relationship.
the constitution of the object is not metaphoric but metonymic. The latter is a point in the chain of history at which history has come to a halt.
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#163
Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.258
WHAT MYTH IS FOR
Theoretical move: The passage traces Hans's progressive symbolisation of the phallus—through metonymy, the imaginary-to-symbolic passage, and the introduction of the "screw thread" as a mythical logical instrument—arguing that the resolution of the Oedipus complex requires the child to construct a myth that integrates the phallus into symbolic circulation as a detachable, mediating element.
the child was caught in the mother's phallic desire as a metonymy. The child is the phallus in his totality... He produces a metonymy of the mother
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#164
Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.128
Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > DORA AND THE YOUNG HOMOSEXUAL WOMAN
Theoretical move: By distinguishing symbolic insistence (Wiederholungszwang) from imaginary deception in the transference, Lacan argues that the young homosexual woman's "ruse dreams" are in fact the return of an unconscious symbolic message ("You will bear my child") from the Oedipus complex—and that Freud's error was failing to locate transference at the level of symbolic articulation rather than preconscious intentionality; this is then set against the Dora case as its structural mirror (perversion as negative of neurosis).
Perverse metonymy, neurotic metaphor
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#165
Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.312
XVIII CIRCUITS > PERMUTATIONS
Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Little Hans case to argue that the Oedipus complex requires a tripling of the paternal function—real father, symbolic father (Freud as supra-father), and the Name-of-the-Father—wherein the child's phobia emerges from the mother's constitutive privation and is resolved through symbolic identification with the father, not mere genital maturation; simultaneously, Lacan critiques the psychoanalytic emphasis on 'frustration' as missing the deeper logic of the object as something that must be re-found through symbolic distancing.
the context in which this manifest metonymy appears. It is in correlation with the story of Fritzl's fall when they are playing horsey in Gmunden.
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#166
Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.370
XVIII CIRCUITS > AN ESSAY IN RUBBER¬ SHEET LOGIC
Theoretical move: Lacan formalises the paternal metaphor through the Hugo poem on Boaz and Ruth, showing that the father's function is constitutively metaphorical (substitution + castration complex), and applies this formula to the case of Little Hans to explain how the horse-phobia acts as a substitute metaphorical mediator when the paternal metaphor is absent, while also distinguishing phobic and fetishistic objects as "milestones" of desire in the real that are nonetheless only accessible through signifying formalisation.
Metaphor is the function… which unfolds not in its connective dimension in which any metonymic usage of the signifying chain is installed but in its dimension of substitution.
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#167
Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.343
XVIII CIRCUITS > TRANSFORMATIONS > <sup>I</sup> (o P°)
Theoretical move: Lacan identifies the "axial moment" in the Little Hans case as a fantasy of mastery over the mother, whereby Hans reworks the castration threat through a series of signifying transformations (objects substituting for one another) culminating in his symbolic reversal: turning the mother's castrating knife into an instrument he controls, making the hole himself.
the cart becomes a bathtub, and then a box, and so on and so forth, each nestling into the others
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#168
Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.237
ON THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX > THE SIGNIFIER IN THE REAL
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the child's position in relation to the mother is structurally determined by the mother's lack (the phallus), such that the child functions not as the metaphor of her love but as the metonymy of her desire—a distinction that explains the genesis of anxiety and its transformation into phobia in the case of Little Hans.
Can't you see that in this case the child is the metonymy of the phallus for the mother?
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#169
Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.310
XVIII CIRCUITS
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Little Hans's phobia originates in a paradigmatic metonymic operation: the grammatical weight of 'wegen' (because of) slides onto 'Pferd' (horse), making the horse signifier the nodal term around which Hans's entire symptomatic system is reorganized; this grounds the horse not as an imaginary symbol but as a structural, 'amboceptor' signifier whose defining feature is its function of hitching/coordination within the signifying chain.
at the begetting of the phobia, at its very point of emergence, we find ourselves faced with the typical process of metonymy, that is to say, the passage from the weight of meaning… from one point of the textual line, to the point that follows.
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#170
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.124
*UNE FEMME DE NON-RECEVOIR,* **OR: A FLAT REFUSAL**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the comic (as distinct from the witticism) is constituted at the level of the Imaginary—specifically through the ego's narcissistic dependency on the image of the semblable—while naïve jokes achieve their effect entirely "at the level of the Other" without requiring the standard dialectical work, and that Desire's fundamental disappointment is what the subject masks through ready-made metonymic satisfactions in language.
he rediscovers his disappointment in a top hat in the guise of a baby's stuffed bunny that he thinks is the living rabbit of the valid explanation... He finds that his disappointment is sufficiently explained by a locution that he thinks is an accepted locution, a ready-made metonymy for such occasions.
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#171
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.16
THE FREUDIAN STRUCTURES OF WIT > **THE F AMILLIONAIRE**
Theoretical move: Lacan recapitulates the theoretical trajectory of Seminars I–IV to frame the new topic of "formations of the unconscious," establishing that the signifier's primacy grounds both the symbolic determination of meaning and the structural distinction between metonymy (desire's object) and metaphor (emergence of meaning), while introducing the quilting-point schema and the retroactive (*nachträglich*) action of the signifier as the key apparatus for the year's investigation.
the only object is a metonymic object, the object of desire being the object of the Other's desire, and desire always being desire for some Other thing, very precisely for what is lacking
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#172
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.457
**THE SIGNIFICATION OF THE PHALLUS IN** THE TREATMENT > **EXITING VIA THE SYMPTOM**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that neurosis is a fully structured linguistic phenomenon—"speech pronounced by the barred subject"—and that the opacity of the unconscious derives specifically from the Other's desire, which sits between the Other as locus of speech and the Other as embodied being; regression is thereby recast not as a temporal return but as the reappearance in discourse of earlier signifying forms linked to demand.
A certain lag always exists between signifier and signification, and it's what makes all signification... an essentially metonymic factor related to what binds the signifying chain together and constitutes it as such.
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#173
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.25
THE FREUDIAN STRUCTURES OF WIT > **THE F AMILLIONAIRE**
Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's analysis of the 'famillionaire' witticism to argue that wit operates through a formal technique of the signifier (condensation of two signifying chains), that it requires the Other as a third party to codify the incongruous message, and that the essence of wit lies not in truth but in truth's alibi — a dimension always glimpsed only by looking obliquely, as with the unconscious itself.
the chain is reflected by the metonymic object at W, 'my millionaire'. In effect, what is involved for Hirsch-Hyacinth is the schematized, metonymic object that belongs to him.
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#174
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.129
*UNE FEMME DE NON-RECEVOIR,* **OR: A FLAT REFUSAL**
Theoretical move: The passage advances the argument that love is the fundamental human solution to the structural unsatisfiability of demand—having "an Other of one's own"—and uses this thesis to trace comedy's history from Aristophanic id-irruption through New Comedy's metonymic love-object, culminating in Molière's *The School for Wives* as the paradigm case in which full speech, metonymy, and the comedic treatment of desire are displayed with Euclidean clarity.
The metonymy that it contains, the passage from the Other to this unique object that is constituted by the statement, nevertheless requires that the metonymy be received
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#175
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.85
**A BIT-OF-SENSE AND THE STEP-OF-SENSE**
Theoretical move: By tracing Freud's analysis of wit, Lacan argues that the pleasure of witticisms is not reducible to infantile verbal play but is grounded in the structural homology between the laws of the signifier (metaphor/metonymy) and the unconscious, and that this structural primacy of the signifier fundamentally perverts the relationship between need, demand, and desire.
which we've tried to formulate more precisely by using the terms 'metaphor' and 'metonymy'. These forms are the same for all language use and also for the structuring by language we encounter in the unconscious.
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#176
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.45
THE FREUDIAN STRUCTURES OF WIT > **THE** *FAT-MILLIONAIRE*
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the witticism 'famillionaire' operates on two irreducible axes—metaphorical signifying creation and metonymic proliferation of meaning—but that the true centre of the phenomenon is the conjunction of signifiers confirmed by the Other, which is precisely what distinguishes a witticism from a symptom and grounds its status as a formation of the unconscious.
there is the metonymic thing, with all the scraps of meaning, sparks and splatters that are produced around the creation of the word 'famillionaire', and which constitute its influence, its weight
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#177
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.260
**THE GIRL AND THE PHALLUS**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the phallus functions as the master signifier of desire for both sexes — not as a biological organ but as the structural marker of the gap between need and desire introduced by the signifying order — and that the Kleinian error lies in reducing the primordial dialectic to a specular, dyadic mother-child relation, thereby foreclosing the constitutive third term (the father) and the Other's desire.
the structures of metaphor and metonymy, condensation and displacement
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#178
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.119
*UNE FEMME DE NON-RECEVOIR,* **OR: A FLAT REFUSAL**
Theoretical move: By duplicating the Graph of Desire to incorporate the Other as a parallel subject-system, Lacan formalizes the conditions under which a Witz succeeds: the Other must share the same signifying chain (be "of like mind"), and the comic/naive works by evoking a primal lack of inhibition that mirrors the metonymic captivation structuring the joke's mechanism.
in the opposite sense to the metonymy of my discourse, it's a matter of bringing about a kind of fixation of the Other as discoursing on a particular metonymic object.
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#179
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.97
**A BIT-OF-SENSE AND THE STEP-OF-SENSE**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the witticism (Witz) operates by traversing the tension between two structural poles: the 'bit-of-sense' (peu-de-sens), the levelling effect of metonymic displacement, and the 'step-of-sense' (pas-de-sens), the surplus introduced by metaphoric substitution. The joke's completion requires the big Other to authenticate the step-of-sense, revealing that desire is structurally conditioned by the signifier's ambiguity and that subjectivity is only constituted through this triangular social process.
There is an effacement or reduction of meaning, but this isn't to say that it's nonsense... this might be called, using a neologism that is also ambiguous, the de-sense [de-sens]. Today, let's simply call it 'the bit-of-sense'
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#180
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.521
**EXPLANATION OF THESCHEMAS** > **Chapter xxvm You Are the One You Hate**
Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index section of Seminar V, listing concepts, proper names, and page references in alphabetical order (L–N). No original theoretical argument is advanced here.
metonymy 7-8, 12, 17, 23, 60-4, 76, 83, 116 ... signifying chain 56, 65, 67 ... the Other and 120-1
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#181
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.62
THE FREUDIAN STRUCTURES OF WIT > **THE** *MIGLIONAIRE*
Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's Signorelli forgetting to articulate the structural distinction between metaphor and metonymy as the two axes of signifying creation, arguing that the forgotten name marks not mere absence but a positively constituted lack (an X) where new metaphorical meaning should have been produced, and extends this to a distinction between the 'speaking present' (the enunciating subject) and the 'present speaking' (discourse itself), grounding wit in the play of signifiers at both metaphoric and metonymic levels.
The metonymic dimension, insofar as it makes a contribution to witticisms, plays upon contexts and usage. It operates by associating elements already preserved in the treasure trove of metonymies.
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#182
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.222
FROM IMAGE TO **SIGNIFIER - IN PLEASURE AND IN REALITY**
Theoretical move: Lacan reframes perversion not as a category of instinct or tendency but as a signifying structure, arguing that the object in perversion is a "metonymic object" — produced by the sliding of signification beneath the signifying chain — and that the phallus names the imaginary pole that anchors the subject's radical identification with this always-fleeing object.
I call this object a metonymic object.
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#183
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.40
THE FREUDIAN STRUCTURES OF WIT > **THE** *FAT-MILLIONAIRE*
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Freudian forgetting of "Signorelli" and the Witz "famillionaire" share the same signifying topology — both operate through the intersection of metonymic decomposition (the combinatory axis) and metaphorical substitution (the substitutive axis) — and uses this structural homology to distinguish carefully between substitution and metaphor, and between *Unterdrückung* and *Verdrängung* as two different modes of repression.
What do we have before us? Nothing but a pure and simple combination of signifiers. They are the metonymic ruins of the object in question.
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#184
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.73
THE FREUDIAN STRUCTURES OF WIT > **THE GOLDEN CALF**
Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's analysis of witticisms to establish metonymy as the foundational structure of the signifying chain — the "transfer of signification along the chain" — on which metaphor (substitution) depends, while also linking the metonymic function to the sliding of meaning, fetishistic displacement of desire, and the irreducibility of linguistic ambiguity (the impossibility of metalanguage).
metonymy is the fundamental structure within which something new and creative, which is metaphor, can be produced. Even if something of metonymic origin is placed in the position of substitution, as in the case of 'thirty sails', it's different from a metaphor. In short, there would be no metaphor if there were no metonymy.
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#185
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.490
**EXPLANATION OF THESCHEMAS** > 2 This year's schema
Theoretical move: The passage explicates the Graph of Desire schema by showing how the retroactive action of the signifying chain on the signified produces meaning, and how desire serves as the middle term that inserts discourse into the speaking subject, distinguishing the human level (with desire and the Other) from the animal level (specular imaginary confrontation).
Whatever form we give this term 'signifying chain', as soon as there is a signifying chain, there is a sentence.
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#186
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.69
THE FREUDIAN STRUCTURES OF WIT > **THE GOLDEN CALF**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that metonymy is irreducible to metaphor by using Heine's "Golden Calf" witticism to show that the wit resides not in metaphorical substitution but in a metonymic displacement that subverts the metaphor; this is grounded in a structural distinction between desire and need, where need is always refracted through the laws of the signifier before it can appear as demand.
Today, then, I'll introduce the metonymic phase.
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#187
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.53
THE FREUDIAN STRUCTURES OF WIT > **THE** *MIGLIONAIRE*
Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's examples of 'famillionaire' and the forgetting of 'Signorelli' to argue that metaphorical creation necessarily produces a repressed residue (a 'signifying scrap') — the word that is displaced but not forgotten — demonstrating that the unconscious is structured as a combination of signifiers, not as a repository of meanings or objects.
we should find metonymic correspondences to these paradoxical formations no less than those corresponding to the conjuring-away or disappearance of 'Signor' when it comes to the forgetting of a name.
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#188
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.100
**A BIT-OF-SENSE AND THE STEP-OF-SENSE** > **WHOAH, NEDDY!**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Other is not merely an intersubjective correlate but the structural locus where the "bit-of-sense" is transformed into the "step-of-sense" through a signifying chain that introduces an irreducible remainder (heterogeneity), thereby displacing the Cartesian cogito and grounding the unconscious as the signifier-in-action that thinks in the subject according to its own laws.
Everything that is language proceeds via a series of steps like those of Achilles who never catches up to the tortoise - it aims at re-creating a full sense which, however, it never achieves, which is always somewhere else.
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#189
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.52
THE FREUDIAN STRUCTURES OF WIT > **THE** *MIGLIONAIRE*
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the unconscious structure revealed by Freud in dreams, symptoms, and witticisms coincides entirely with the laws of signifying combination (metaphor/metonymy) identified by linguistics, and uses the 'famillionaire' witticism and Gide's 'Miglionaire' to demonstrate how signifying neo-formations produce meaning through condensation and displacement, while insisting that the subject of the unconscious cannot be equated with the synthesizing ego.
As I showed you last time, even though our attention isn't drawn to this aspect of the thing, we can find in it all the debris or scraps typical of reflecting on an object used in any metaphorical creation. This is the underside of the signifiers... the debris of the metonymic object.
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#190
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.524
**EXPLANATION OF THESCHEMAS** > **Chapter xxvm You Are the One You Hate**
Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index chunk from Seminar V, listing page references for key Lacanian and psychoanalytic concepts without advancing a theoretical argument.
metonymy and 120-1
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#191
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.518
**EXPLANATION OF THESCHEMAS** > **Chapter xxvm You Are the One You Hate**
Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index section listing key terms, page references, and cross-references for Seminar V concepts; it contains no independent theoretical argument.
metonymy 7-8
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#192
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.113
**A BIT-OF-SENSE AND THE STEP-OF-SENSE** > **WHOAH, NEDDY!**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the joke's mechanism reveals the Other as a dual structure: both a real, living subject (whose needs give meaning direction) and a purely symbolic locus — an anonymous, abstract "treasure trove" of signifiers — and that it is precisely this function of the Other, as the empty Grail or form, that the joke invokes and must awaken, thereby showing that the unconscious is the plane on which the joke's surprise arrives.
It is these images, which have become more or less everyday signifying elements, more or less ratified in what I have called the metonymic treasure trove, that are at play in jokes... I necessarily speak in the double register of metonymy and metaphor.
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#193
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.116
**A BIT-OF-SENSE AND THE STEP-OF-SENSE** > **WHOAH, NEDDY!**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that jokes operate through a shared symbolic field (the "parish"/paroisse) constituted by metonymic stock common to speaker and Other, and that the joke's mechanism works by using the Other-as-censor as a "reflecting concavity" to make the unconscious resonate — the obstacle to meaning becomes the very vehicle for transmitting what cannot ordinarily be heard.
more profoundly linked to the stock of metonyms without which, in this order, I am absolutely unable to communicate anything to the Other
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#194
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.343
**THE DREAM BY THE BUTCHER'S BEAUTIFUL WIFE**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that desire must be distinguished from demand by showing how the subject's desire is fundamentally constituted through its encounter with the Other's desire, illustrated by Freud's analysis of the butcher's beautiful wife's dream, which serves as a paradigm case for the structure of unsatisfied/barred desire and the alienation of desire in the Other's speech.
nothing shows better the two levels on which a dream unfolds, the properly signifying level which is the level of speech, and the imaginary level where in some way the metonymic object is embodied.
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#195
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.191
**THE THREE MOMENTS OF THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX (II)**
Theoretical move: Lacan elaborates the three logical moments of the Oedipus complex as a structural sequence centred on the metonymic circulation of the phallus as the object of the mother's desire, showing how the paternal prohibition interrupts the child's identification as the mother's metonymic object and thereby opens the path to the third, identificatory moment — grounding castration in the paternal metaphor rather than in any social teleology.
If we simply place our trust in our customary little schema, the phallus is located here, and it is a metonymic object.
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#196
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.64
THE FREUDIAN STRUCTURES OF WIT > **THE** *MIGLIONAIRE*
Theoretical move: The passage argues that human intelligence is not a brute capacity but is constituted by the prior introduction of signifying formulations; the signifying chain, as the principle of combination and locus of metonymy, is what makes metaphorical substitution possible and what transforms mere discourse into knowledge.
The basis for this is the signifying chain as the principle of combination and locus of metonymy.
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#197
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.81
THE FREUDIAN STRUCTURES OF WIT > **THE GOLDEN CALF**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that metonymy, through the perpetual sliding of meaning along the signifying chain, constitutes the primordial dimension of human language not as meaning but as value — a claim grounded in readings of Maupassant, Feneon's micro-fictions, and Marx's theory of general equivalence, all of which demonstrate that discourse can only grasp reality by introducing a decentring, disorganizing movement irreducible to reference.
metonymy is, strictly speaking, the locus where we must situate the dimension that is primordial in and essential to human language and that lies at the opposite end of the dimension of meaning - namely, the dimension of value.
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#198
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.18
THE FREUDIAN STRUCTURES OF WIT > **THE F AMILLIONAIRE**
Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the Graph of Desire's two-line schema to distinguish the signifying chain (permeable to metaphor/metonymy) from the line of rational discourse, showing how their two intersections (code and message) generate meaning; he then opens the inquiry into Witz as the privileged Freudian site where the interplay between code and message—and thereby the structural relation between wit and the unconscious—becomes legible.
the signifying chain insofar as it remains completely permeable to the properly signifying effects of metaphor and metonymy, which implies the possible actualization of signifying effects at all levels
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#199
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.450
**THE SIGNIFICATION OF THE PHALLUS IN** THE TREATMENT > **THE CIRCUITS OF DESIRE**
Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the obsessional's circuit of desire from the hysteric's by showing that the obsessional uses the signifying articulation of demand to annul the Other's desire through verbal destruction, yet paradoxically this same destructive signifying act sustains the Other's dimension — a structure illustrated by the French formula 'Tu es celui qui me tues', and contrasted with the illusory analytic 'solution' of imaginary identification.
blasphemy diminishes a pre-eminent signifier... Blasphemy diminishes this signifier to the rank of object. In a way, it identifies the Logos with its metonymic effect and brings it down a notch.
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#200
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.39
THE FREUDIAN STRUCTURES OF WIT > **THE** *FAT-MILLIONAIRE*
Theoretical move: The passage argues that metaphor and condensation operate not through injection of meaning but through signifier-to-signifier relations (homonymy, equivocation), and that this same mechanism — whereby the original signifier gets "repressed" once meaning is established — underlies all formations of the unconscious, unifying wit, slips, and forgetting under a single economy of the signifier.
Everything is centred on what we can call a metonymic approximation. Why? Because what re-emerges first are replacement names - 'Botticelli', 'Boltraffio'.
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#201
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.32
THE FREUDIAN STRUCTURES OF WIT > **THE** *FAT-MILLIONAIRE*
Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's analysis of the joke-word 'famillionaire' to argue that the structural mechanisms of the unconscious (condensation, displacement) are irreducibly linguistic phenomena — specifically special cases of the signifier's two fundamental functions, metaphor (substitution) and metonymy (combination/contiguity) — thereby insisting that psychoanalytic technique must be grounded in a rigorous theory of the signifier.
the metaphorical and metonymic functions of language can be very simply expressed in the register of signifiers... the connections or links between signifiers involve two dimensions, one that can be called the combination, continuity or concatenation of the chain, and one of substitution
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#202
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.134
*UNE FEMME DE NON-RECEVOIR,* **OR: A FLAT REFUSAL**
Theoretical move: Through a reading of Molière's *L'École des femmes*, Lacan argues that desire is structurally metonymic and always exceeds any attempt to capture it in language or in the Other: the subject's desire lies "beyond" whatever object or discourse is imposed, and the Other functions not as the unique object of desire but as the necessary correspondent/medium through which desire must pass while always slipping past it.
insofar as something lies beyond this metonymic actuality that Arnolphe is attempting to impose on her - she slips away
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#203
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.91
**A BIT-OF-SENSE AND THE STEP-OF-SENSE**
Theoretical move: By tracing demand through a three-moment schema, Lacan argues that the introduction of signifiers necessarily transforms raw need into desire, and that this minimal metaphorical transformation—instating the Other and the message simultaneously—is the mythical-structural foundation for all subsequent operations of the unconscious, including wit, surprise, and the metonymic circuit of the subject's desire in the Other.
New meaning emerges through the action of a metaphor when, taking original circuits, it enters the everyday, banal and accepted circuit of metonymy.
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#204
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.285
**THE GIRL AND THE PHALLUS** > **INSIGNIAS OF THE IDEAL**
Theoretical move: Lacan formalizes a minimal three-term schema for secondary identification: a libidinal object is transformed into a signifier that anchors the ego-ideal, while desire undergoes substitution via a third term (the rival/father), with the phallus functioning as the universal "lowest common denominator" — the metonymic pivot through which desire must pass in any signifying economy, regardless of sex.
in opposition to the common metonymic factor, the phallus, which is found everywhere.
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#205
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.323
**SIGNIFIER, BAR** AND PHALLUS
Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes desire from demand by insisting on desire's eccentricity to satisfaction and its irreducibility to any graspable meaning produced by signification, while simultaneously grounding the signifier's distinctive status in its capacity for self-substitution within the topological space of the big Other — a structure animals lack, since they possess no law organizing signifiers into a concatenated discourse.
desire is a by-product, as it were, of the act of signification... desire's eccentricity in relation to all forms of satisfaction
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#206
Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.151
THE LITTLE COUGH AS A MESSAGE
Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Graph of Desire to articulate the structural distinction between statement (énoncé) and enunciation (énonciation) in dream-reporting, arguing that the subject's asides, doubts, and stresses are not incidental but are inscribed at the level of enunciation and connect directly to the latent dream-thoughts — thereby giving the formula E(e) as the general structure of the enigma.
for each of the elements of a sentence - no matter how minutely we break it down... something can intervene that makes one of its signifiers disappear and puts another signifier in its place.
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#207
Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.374
THE FUNDAMENTAL FANTASY
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the "Freudian thing" is desire, and that desire is constitutively incompatible with any harmonistic or adaptive account of human development; against ego-psychological attempts (Glover, Hartmann) to reduce desire to a preparatory stage of reality-adaptation, Lacan proposes to re-situate desire within the synchronic structure of the signifier rather than the diachronic unfolding of the unconscious.
in other words, metonymies and metaphors
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#208
Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.118
INTRODUCING THE OBJECT OF DESIRE
Theoretical move: Lacan critiques Jones's concept of aphanisis as a failed equalization of male and female desire, then rehabilitates it as a structural question about the subject's existence beyond desire, showing that when the subject encounters objet petit a, the subject vanishes ($), and that displacement/metonymy functions as the mechanism by which desire is preserved precisely through the thwarting of satisfaction.
it is still, as it were, a way of metonymically symbolizing satisfaction.
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#209
Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.35
CONSTRUCTING THE GRAPH
Theoretical move: The passage argues that metaphor produces a new signified by substituting an unexpected signifier, and that this metaphorical operation always veils/unveils death — the constitutive absence at the heart of language — through the structural function of the phallus as the missing signifier subtracted from the chain of speech, making desire the metonymy of being and castration the inevitable consequence of the subject's capture in speech.
the presence of his speech being a pure metonymic effect, I mean his speech qua speech in the continuity of speech
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#210
Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.472
THE FUNCTION OF SPLITTING\* IN PERVERSION
Theoretical move: The passage pivots on the distinction between neurotic and perverse desire by deploying the fantasy matheme ($◇a) to show that fantasy constitutes the subject at the point where unconscious discourse escapes him; masochistic jouissance is reread as the subject's relation to the Other's discourse rather than the death drive, schizophrenic foreclosure is located at the identification with the cut, and neurotic desire is defined as structurally dependent on the paternal metaphor that masks a metonymy of castration.
The metonymy in question is based, in the final analysis, on the fact that there is never just one phallus in the game.
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#211
Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.412
CUT AND FANTASY
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the "cut" (coupure) is the fundamental structural characteristic of the symbolic order and the locus of the subject's relation to being, and that works of art—exemplified by Hamlet—do not sublimate or imitate reality but structurally instantiate this cut, thereby making accessible, via fantasy, the subject's real as an unconscious speaking subject.
I defined the function fulfilled by fantasy as a metonymy of being, and identified desire itself at this level.
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#212
Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.179
THE FANTASY ABOUT THE BARKING DOG > Crossing and exchange
Theoretical move: Lacan demonstrates how the fantasy formula ($◇a) operates clinically by tracking a patient's chain of associations through the Graph of Desire, showing that the subject's fantasy structure requires the absence of the big Other as witness, and that the oscillation between the imaginary other (little a) and the symbolic Other is the pivotal hinge around which the subject's desire and shame are organized.
the fact remains that we observe once again that what is at stake is far more marked and shot through and through with the signifying element than it is associated with the contiguity of perception.
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#213
Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.99
THE DREAM ABOUT THE DEAD FATHER: "AS HE WISHED"
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the object of desire is not the correlate of need but what props the subject up at the moment of his disappearance behind the signifier; deploying the Graph of Desire, Lacan situates 'desire' between the alienating appeal to the Other and the dimension of the unsaid, using Freud's 'dead father' dream to show how statement and enunciation articulate desire's structural role in the subject's existence.
why bring joy to all? Why if not in fantasy and in order to demonstrate to what degree the object of fantasy is metonymic? Joy therefore circulates here like a metonymy.
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#214
Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.188
THE IMAGE OF THE INSIDE-OUT GLOVE
Theoretical move: The passage uses the Graph of Desire to theorize the structural asymmetry between fantasy and dream: in fantasy the subject (barred, announcing itself as other) is foregrounded while the object remains enigmatic, whereas in the dream the object is foregrounded and the subject remains unknown — thereby elaborating the formula ($◇a) as a mobile, two-sided structure where desire arises in the gap between need and demand.
He goes successively through something that reflects his desire and then incarnates his fantasy. The circle closes on itself there.
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#215
Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.465
THE EITHER/OR CONCERNING THE OBJECT
Theoretical move: The passage articulates the structural logic of the phallus as signifier through the "either/or" formulation — one either *is* the phallus or *has* it — and deploys this to distinguish feminine desire from neurotic desire, where the neurotic regresses to a metonymic substitution in which "not having" disguises an unconscious identification with being the phallus, while the ego usurps the place of the barred subject in the dialectic of desire.
How is the neurotic characterized? He of course makes use of this alternative [either/or]... he makes use of it in a way that I will call metonymic. I would even say that this metonymy is regressive.
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#216
Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.59
THE DREAM ABOUT THE DEAD FATHER: "HE DID NOT KNOW HE WAS DEAD"
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the structure of associationism (contiguity and similarity) maps directly onto metonymy and metaphor in the signifying chain, thereby subordinating psychological atomism and its Gestalt critique to a single linguistically-grounded theory; the dream's wish-satisfaction operates at the level of "being" as verbal appearance rather than substance, and desire—irreducible to demand—is located at the enigmatic point opened by the subject's relation to the signifier.
this continuity is nothing but the discursive combination on which the effect that I call metonymy is based.
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#217
Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.110
INTRODUCING THE OBJECT OF DESIRE
Theoretical move: By testing the algorithm (S◇a) against the phenomenology of desire—through dream interpretation, clinical vignette, and Jones's concept of aphanisis—Lacan argues that desire is structurally alienated in a sign and thereby constitutively linked to lack, such that castration functions as the "final temperament" of the metonymic vanishing of desire's object.
the fundamental structure that turns the object of any desire into the prop of an essential metonymy
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#218
Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.29
CONSTRUCTING THE GRAPH
Theoretical move: Lacan constructs the second and third stages of the Graph of Desire by showing how the encounter with the Other's desire (Che vuoi?) introduces the principles of substitution (metaphor) and similarity (metonymy), situating desire in the gap between demand and being, and how fantasy ($ ◇ a) emerges as the subject's imaginary defense against Hilflosigkeit — the structural response to the opacity of the Other's desire.
A second new principle can also be seen: the principle of similarity. A certain dimension, the metonymic dimension, begins to operate as a function of the fact that, within the signifying chain, one signifying term may resemble another.
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#219
Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.450
THE DIALECTIC OF DESIRE IN NEUROSIS
Theoretical move: By re-reading Freud's "A Child is Being Beaten" through the lens of metaphor and alienation, Lacan argues that the obsessive fantasy stages the neurotic's structural relation to desire: the subject sustains desire precisely by perpetuating its precariousness, finding jouissance not in satisfaction but in the symptomatic metonymy of 'être pour' (being-for) that defers 'pour être' (being as such).
The ambiguity of the neurotic's position lies precisely in this metonymy, which is such that it is in this être pour that all of his pour être [in order to be] lies.
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#220
Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.403
IN THE FORM OF A CUT > A few tangential remarks are in order here.
Theoretical move: Lacan develops the voice as the third form of objet petit a — specifically as a pure cut or gap — by contrasting it with ordinary vocal function and analysing the hallucinatory voice in psychotic delusion, where the interrupted sentence (Schreber's Sie sollen werden…) produces a call to signification that swallows the subject; he then frames this alongside the mirror-stage, narcissism, and the phallus to insist that fantasy's "dimension of being" cannot be collapsed into any reality-adaptation model of analytic technique.
The subject is, strictly speaking, the metonymy of the being who expresses himself in the unconscious chain.
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#221
Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.478
THE FUNCTION OF SPLITTING\* IN PERVERSION
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the structural difference between neurotic and perverse desire turns on how each subject bears the "cut" or split: the neurotic indefinitely defers his desire in metonymic evasion, while the pervert directly identifies with the split/cut as constitutive of fantasy—a distinction Lacan develops by critiquing Gillespie's anatomical reduction of ego-splitting and by reading Gide's fantasies as evidence that perverse identification with the phallus operates differently from neurotic castration anxiety.
In the neurotic's metonymy, the subject is, as I have said, the phallus… only insofar as he does not have it.
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#222
Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.176
**XI** > **XIII**
Theoretical move: The passage makes two interlocking theoretical moves: (1) it critiques Sperber's sexual-origin theory of language by insisting that the metaphorical spread of sexual signifiers proves not a reduction of meaning to sexual roots but rather that an "emptiness" or gap — the form of the female organ — is the privileged pole around which metaphorical play of the signifier is organised; (2) it pivots to Freud's treatment of the paternal function in religious experience, arguing that religious knowledge (Moses, the Name of the Father) belongs within the analytic field of inquiry precisely because all knowledge emerges against a background of ignorance.
the creation of signification through the métonymie and metaphoric use of signifiers
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#223
Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.41
**II**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freud's apparatus of the pleasure/reality principles is not a psychology but an ethics, and that the structural necessity of language (the cry as sign) to render unconscious processes conscious demonstrates that the unconscious has no other structure than the structure of language — a claim grounded in a close reading of the Entwurf's distinction between identity of perception and identity of thought.
the theories of relations of contiguity and continuity illustrate admirably the signifying structure as such, insofar as it is involved in any linguistic operation.
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#224
Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.70
**V**
Theoretical move: Lacan reconstructs Freud's *Entwurf* around *das Ding* as the original lost object that structures the entire movement of *Vorstellungen* under the pleasure principle, while establishing that the unconscious is organized according to the laws of condensation/displacement (metaphor/metonymy), and that access to thought processes requires their mediation through word-representations (*Wort-Vorstellungen*) in preconsciousness — thereby grounding the ethics of psychoanalysis in the constitutive distance from *das Ding*.
the laws of condensation and displacement, those that I call the laws of metaphor and metonymy.
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#225
Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.302
**XIV** > **XXII**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analyst's ethical task is inseparable from the question of desire's realization—which can only be posed from the standpoint of a "Last Judgment"—and that sublimation, properly understood via the metonymic structure of the drive and the signifier, is not a new object but the change of object as such, grounding the subject's access to its own relationship with death.
the properly métonymie relation between one signifier and another that we call desire is not a new object or a previous object, but the change of object in itself.
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#226
Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.330
**XXIII** > **XXIV**
Theoretical move: Lacan concludes Seminar VII by consolidating the ethics of psychoanalysis around the injunction not to give ground relative to one's desire, articulating the relationship between jouissance, sublimation, and the 'service of goods' through the figures of the hero, the saint, and tragic catharsis, and ends by locating modern science as the unconscious refuge of human desire.
desire is understood here, as we have defined it elsewhere, as the metonymy of our being... I explained this last time with the metonymy of 'eating the book'
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#227
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.141
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **FROM** *E P IS T É M E* **TO** *M Y T H O U S* > <span id="page-136-0"></span>**EXIT FROM THE ULTRA-W ORLD**
Theoretical move: Lacan reads Diotima's speech in the Symposium as staging a fundamental slippage between two functions of beauty—beauty as a veil over the desire for death (between-two-deaths) and beauty as the metonymic object of desire—arguing that this movement illustrates the metonymic structure of desire itself, while also pointing toward what is missed when Plato is read as reducing Eros to narcissistic self-perfection (identification with the ideal ego).
the dialectical definition of love, as it is developed by Diotima, intersects with what I have tried to define as the metonymic function in desire.
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#228
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.260
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **D E M A N D A N D DESIRE IN THE ORAL A N D A N A L STAGES** > **THE SYMBOL Φ**
Theoretical move: The passage theorises the structural difference between hysterical and obsessional fantasy through their respective relations to the phallic signifier Φ: the hysteric sacrifices her own desire to keep the Other in possession of the key to her mystery, while the obsessive attacks the imaginary phallus in the Other (what Lacan calls "phallophany") to manage the unbearable real presence of desire — revealing that handling the symbolic function of Φ, not working through imaginary castration, is the genuine analytic task.
the obsessive's relation to the object - to an object that is always metonymic, because for him the object is essentially interchangeable
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#229
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.109
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *AGATH ON*
Theoretical move: Lacan grounds the topology of desire in the death drive and the "between-two-deaths," arguing that Freud's discovery of the unconscious is not reducible to the content of the Oedipus myth but to its structural form—"he did not know"—which inscribes the subject's desire in a signifying chain beyond consciousness, beyond adaptation, and in permanent tension with individual life.
desire is caught up in a dialectic because it hinges - I have already said how it hinges, in the form of metonymy - on a signifying chain.
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#230
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.159
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *ÂGALMA*
Theoretical move: Lacan defines the psychoanalytic object as *àgalma* — the partial object of desire that is incommensurable with ordinary objects of equivalence — and argues that this object, not identificatory or metaphysical constructs, is the true pivot of love, desire, and analytic practice, requiring a strict topology of subject, little other, and big Other to be properly situated.
This privileged object of desire culminates for each of us at the border or liminal point I have taught you to view as the metonymy of unconscious discourse.
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#231
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.220
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **D E M A N D A N D DESIRE IN THE ORAL A N D A N A L STAGES**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the oral and anal stages must be understood through the structural distinction between need, demand, and desire—where desire emerges as a gap or negation irreducible to need's satisfaction—and uses the anal stage to demolish the myth of "oblativity," revealing that anal desire is constituted by the subject's identification with the excremental object (objet a) and its symbolic evacuation, which grounds the obsessional's fundamental fantasy.
'Ricolice' collided with 'règle' [rule or ruler], regula, and that led to rygalisse... the encounter between 'licorice' and 'règle' is superb.
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#232
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.400
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE RELATIONSHIP BETW EEN ANXIETY A N D DESIRE** > **M O U R N IN G THE LOSS OF THE ANALYST**
Theoretical move: The passage articulates the structural function of objet petit a as the remainder that animates desire: the partial object is constituted by the elision of the phallus from the narcissistic image, such that libidinal cathexis (Besetzung) circulates around a central blank, and the object of desire is precisely what is 'saved from the waves' of narcissistic love — establishing the dialectic between being and having through the oral, anal, and phallic stages of demand.
The latter lends itself to the same equivocations in grammar. There, too, you can hear that metonymy is 'the part taken for the whole,' a definition that allows for everything - both truth and error.
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#233
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.183
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE OBJECT OF DESIRE A N D THE DIALECTIC OF CASTRATION** > <span id="page-179-0"></span>**TRANSFERENCE IN THE PRESENT**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Symposium's final scene between Alcibiades and Socrates reveals the fundamental structure of desire: the subject, through the metonymic sliding of the signifier, finds an object (objet petit a / agalma) that arrests that sliding and paradoxically restores subjective dignity, while the subject simultaneously undergoes a "deposing" before the Other—establishing that transference is not reducible to repetition but must be approached via this dialectic of love and desire.
desire presents itself in a position that can only be conceptualized on the basis of the metonymy determined by the existence of the signifying chain... which is nothing other than the possibility of the infinite sliding of signifiers owing to the continuity of the signifying chain.
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#234
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.267
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **D E M A N D A N D DESIRE IN THE ORAL A N D A N A L STAGES** > **REAL PRESENCE**
Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes Φ (the phallus as symbolic/unconscious function operative for all speaking subjects) from φ (the imaginary phallic unit of measurement that organises the obsessive's erotic object-equivalences), arguing that in obsessive neurosis the phallic function is not repressed but emerges consciously and avowedly at the level of symptom, which is precisely what must be explained against both Bouvet's theory of imaginary introjection and a naïve psychologism.
the rat follows its path in a multiform manner in the whole economy of the peculiar exchanges, substitutions, and permanent metonymy of which the obsessive's symptomatology is the living example.
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#235
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.128
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **FROM** *E P IS T É M E* **TO** *M Y T H O U S*
Theoretical move: Lacan reads the Symposium's shift from Agathon to Diotima not as Socrates' tact toward a humiliated interlocutor, but as a structural necessity: once the function of lack is installed as constitutive of desire/love, Socrates cannot continue in his own name because the substitution of *epithumei* (desire) for *era* (love) is a move that exceeds what Socratic dialectical knowledge can formally authorize.
The function of lack, to which he gave its own efficacy, is quite patently a return to the desiring function of love: the substitution of επιθυμεί (epithumei), he desires, for έρα (era), he loves.
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#236
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.222
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **D E M A N D A N D DESIRE IN THE ORAL A N D A N A L STAGES**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analyst must preserve the gap between demand and desire by resisting premature interpretation: the "margin of incomprehension" is precisely the margin of desire, and collapsing it—whether by satisfying the obsessive's demand, offering phallic communion, or nourishing the subject with metaphor—forecloses desire in favour of symptom, while the object of desire is shown to pre-exist the subject who seeks it.
what the subject truly needs is to signify metonymically, and this is situated at no point in such nourishing speech.
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#237
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.308
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE OEDIPAL MYTH TODAY** > **TU R E L U R E 'S ABJECTION**
Theoretical move: Lacan uses Claudel's trilogy to argue that castration is constitutive of the desiring subject—not as frustration of need but as the structural elevation of the phallus to a signifying function—and locates the composition of desire across three generational stages: the mark of the signifier, the undesired object, and finally the constitution of desire proper, while critiquing ego-psychology's reduction of desire to need and the concurrent eclipse of the father function.
just as it is altogether convincing to see Freud already enunciate the laws of metaphor and metonymy in The Interpretation of Dreams.
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#238
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.115
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *AGATH ON*
Theoretical move: Lacan reads Socrates' desire as an atopia — an unclassifiable, unsituable place of pure desire for discourse — which he locates topologically in the space between-two-deaths, and uses this to frame the question of the analyst's desire as something that must be articulated beyond the vague notion of training catharsis.
this indefatigable questioner... generates before our eyes and develops throughout his life what I will call a formidable metonymy. Its result... is a desire that is embodied in an assertion of immortality
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#239
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.226
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **D E M A N D A N D DESIRE IN THE ORAL A N D A N A L STAGES** > <span id="page-221-0"></span>**ORAL, ANAL, A N D GENITAL**
Theoretical move: Lacan uses the figure of the praying mantis to sharply distinguish animal (instinctual/synchronic) jouissance from human desire, arguing that human desire is not grounded in natural instinct but is structurally constituted in the margins of demand—a beyond and a shy-of—and is always already articulated around a partial object whose erotic value is retroactively (Nachträglich) installed by demand and its beyond of love.
it is less the part that is preferred to the whole - in the most horrible way, and in a way that would already allow us to short-circuit the function of metonymy - than the whole that is preferred to the part.
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#240
Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.91
*Seminar 9*: *Wednesday 24 January 1962*
Theoretical move: Lacan uses Russell's paradox—the set of all sets that do not include themselves—as a structural homology for the analytic subject's self-exclusion, arguing that the letter's signifying function (not logical intuition) is what generates the paradox, and then pivots to show how the metonymical object of desire (objet petit a) undergoes metaphorical substitution for the faded subject in demand, yielding the master signifier of the "good object."
the metonymical object of desire, the one which in every object represents this elective little o, in which the subject loses himself
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#241
Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.133
*Seminar 13*: *Wednesday 14 March 1962*
Theoretical move: Lacan advances the structural derivation of desire through three ordered moments—real privation, imaginary frustration, and their articulation in the symbolic via the Other—arguing that the torus topology formalises how the subject's uncounted circuit (−1) grounds universal affirmation, and that the neurotic impasse is constitutively the collapse of desire into demand.
This dimension of loss essential to metonymy, the loss of the thing in the object, is the true sense of this thematic of the object qua lost and never refound
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#242
Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.111
*Seminar 10*: *Wednesday 21 February 1962* > *Seminar 11*: *Wednesday 28 February 1962*
Theoretical move: Lacan pivots from the unary trait's role in constituting the subject to the logic of privation, arguing that the "minus one" (the subject's non-identity with the unary trait) is the structural condition for lack in the Real, and that this founds the connection between the signifier, narcissism of small differences, and the sexual drive's privileged function in subjectivity.
as many jumps as there are metonymies produced
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#243
Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.245
*Seminar 21*: *Wednesday 23 May 1962* > *Seminar 22*: *Wednesday 30 May 1962*
Theoretical move: By mapping the torus topologically, Lacan formalises the structural inversion between the subject's demand/object and the Other's demand/object, deriving from this the differential structure of obsessional and hysterical neurosis, and showing that the neurotic's impasse consists in pursuing objet a through the specular image i(o) rather than acceding to it directly.
The advent constituted by repetition, the metonymical advent, the one which slides, is evoked by the very sliding of the repetition of demand
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#244
Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.94
*Seminar 10*: *Wednesday 21 February 1962*
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the privileged function of the phallus in identification is grounded in the signifier's logic of non-identity (Russell's paradox), and proposes a decisive reversal: in place of Kantian Einheit (synthetic unity as norm), psychoanalytic logic requires Einzigkeit (unary trait as exception/singularity), thereby replacing transcendental logic with a logic of the signifier.
This thematic starting from the object qua metonymical was questioning itself about what we are doing when we make this metonymical object appear as a common factor of this line.
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#245
Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.230
*Seminar 21*: *Wednesday 23 May 1962*
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that classical logic's universality (the Eulerian circle, *dictum de omni et nullo*) is grounded in nullifiability, and that what logic truly circles around is not extensional inclusion but the object of desire — the "whirlwind" or hole at the centre of the concept (*Begriff*). The cut (la coupure), as a closed and nullifiable line, is the structural origin of signification, and the death drive names the condition under which life perpetually twists around a void rather than simply opposing the inanimate.
I have to say that in this case I believe I began to push forward metaphor and metonymy in our theory sometime around the discourse of Rome
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#246
Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.135
*Seminar 13*: *Wednesday 14 March 1962*
Theoretical move: By mapping desire and demand onto two interlocking tori, Lacan demonstrates that the subject's inside and outside spaces are topologically identical, and that the object of desire emerges precisely from the Other's structural inability to respond to demand — the Other is "not without" power, and this negation grounds the absolute conditionality of desire.
comes here to materialise the metonymical object beneath all these demands... of which the subject is only the metonymy
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#247
Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.37
*Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1961* > *Seminar 4*: *Wednesday 6 December 1961* > What then is a signifier?
Theoretical move: The passage pivots on distinguishing the signifier from the sign: whereas a sign represents something for someone, a signifier represents the subject for another signifier. This distinction is grounded in the concept of the unary trait (pure difference, the "1" of set theory), which Lacan then links to repetition, metonymy, and the emergence of the subject through the signifying chain.
to remind you of the formulae under which I noted for you for example the function of metonymy, the big S function in so far as it is in a chain which is continued by S', S'', S'''… f (S, S', S'...) = S(-)s
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#248
Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.150
*Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 15*: *Wednesday 28 March 1962*
Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of the torus (and introduces the cross-cap) to formalise the dialectical relationship between Demand and desire in the subject, showing how the torus's privileged circle—encompassing both the generating circle (Demand) and the inner circle (metonymical desire)—allows him to locate objet petit a and the phallus as structural measures of the subject's relation to desire, while insisting that identification is strictly a dimension of the subject and not of drive or image.
metonymy finds in a way its most tangible application as being manifested by desire in so far as desire is what we articulate as presupposed in the succession of all the demands in so far as they are repetitive.
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#249
Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.53
*Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1961* > *Seminar 6*: *Wednesday 20 December 1961* > Where is the subject in all of that?
Theoretical move: Lacan advances the thesis that the proper name cannot be adequately defined by Russell's nominalist reduction to "word for particular" nor by Gardiner's psychological accent on sonant material, and that a rigorous definition requires grounding the proper name in the subject's relationship to the letter — thereby linking proper-name function to the unary trait and the unconscious structured by the letter.
I gave by means of metaphors and metonymies a more precise accent to it.
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#250
Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.181
*Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 16*: *Wednesday 4 April 1962*
Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of the torus—its two irreducible circles, their symmetric difference without intersection, and a privileged composite circle that both encircles and passes through the hole—to provide an intuitive topological model for the structural relationship between demand and desire, where the "self-difference" of the objet petit a and the void of desire are formalised through non-intersecting, non-unifiable fields.
comparing these circles which make the circuit of the hole of the torus to something which, I told you, is related to the metonymical object, to the object of desire as such.
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#251
Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.123
*Seminar 12*: *Wednesday 7 March 1962*
Theoretical move: Lacan deploys the topology of the torus to argue that the subject's structure is characterised by irreducible loops—unlike the sphere or plane where any loop can be collapsed to a point—and that the interplay between 'full circles' (demand) and 'empty circles' (desire/the object) on the torus structurally accounts for the constitutive 'minus one' of the unconscious, the detour through the Other, and the impossibility of a purely tautological (fully analytic) subjectivity.
there must be something which is related to the little object of metonymy in so far as it is this object
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#252
Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.153
*Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 15*: *Wednesday 28 March 1962*
Theoretical move: The passage traces how the subject constitutes itself through the unary trait and the non-response of the Other, rewriting Freud's "Wo Es war, soll Ich werden" as a formula of the One's advent, and then uses Sade to demonstrate that the object of desire is structurally dependent on the Other's silence—culminating in the Sadian drive toward annihilating signifying power as the logical extreme of this dialectic.
at once metaphorical and metonymical, of the first signifying game because every time that we analysts have to deal with this relationship of the subject to the nothing
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#253
Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.30
*Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1961* > *Seminar 4*: *Wednesday 6 December 1961*
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the formula "A is A" is not a logical truth but a historically contingent belief whose apparent self-evidence conceals the real condition of subject-formation: the subject emerges only from the non-self-identity of the signifier, demonstrated through the Fort-Da game and the distinction between sign and signifier, between indexical and nominal uses of language.
Metonymical effect, metaphorical effect, we do not yet know and perhaps there is something already articulatable before these effects which allows us to see dawning, being formed in a relationship, in a link, the dependence of the subject as such with respect to the signifier.
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#254
Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.115
*Seminar 12*: *Wednesday 7 March 1962*
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that error is constitutively tied to the subject's function of counting, and that this "error in the count" precedes any explicit numerical knowledge — grounding the subject's structure in the unary trait and repetition rather than in empirical acquisition, thereby positioning error not as accident but as constitutive of subjectivity itself.
with our way of interrogating the facts of language in terms of the effects of the signifier... to ask our pupil to recognise in every signification of number an effect of metonymy which has arisen virtually from nothing more and, as its elective point, from the succession of an equal number of signifiers.
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#255
The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.52
II. Can Psychoanalysis Constitute the Kind of Ethics Necessitated by our Times?
Theoretical move: Lacan critiques the ego-psychological reduction of desire to libidinal object-relations (oral/anal/genital stages), arguing instead that desire has no proper object but only the Thing as its impossible horizon, and that the commandment to love one's neighbour exposes the irreducible ambivalence (love/hatred) that makes any ethics of psychoanalysis inseparable from sublimation, the death drive, and the laws of speech that encircle das Ding.
This third object, the phallus, detached from the Osirian dispersion to which I alluded earlier, serves the most secret metonymic function depending on whether it intervenes in or is reabsorbed by desire's fantasy.
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#256
The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.20
I. Regarding Ethics, Freud Has What it Takes
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freudian desire—properly understood as the "true intention" of an unconscious discourse structured like a signifying chain—poses genuinely new problems for moral philosophy, positioning psychoanalysis as a more adequate ethics than either Ego Psychology's adaptive finalism or traditional philosophy of good intentions.
any [new] signification this set acquires draws on the significations to which it has already been linked... This is the dimension that I call metonymy, which makes poetry of all realism.
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#257
A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.150
A month later: > Lalangue
Theoretical move: Dolar argues that lalangue names the internal divergence between the signifier's differential logic and the voice's logic of sonic resemblance/contamination, displacing the early Lacanian formula "the unconscious is structured like a language" with one in which enjoyment (jouissance) is not proscribed beyond speech but operates as the inner torsion of speech itself—the Möbius-strip surface on which signifier and voice are the same yet irreducibly split.
Sound contaminations can be produced metonymically, on the axis that Saussure called in praesentia, by the sounds which are present in the current signifying chain
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#258
A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.175
Silence
Theoretical move: The analyst's silence does not simply oppose lalangue but is its structural flip side: by creating a void in which the analysand's speech resonates through the loop of the Other, silence dispossesses the voice, returning the message of desire as the voice of the drive, and this trajectory—from subject-supposed-to-know through fantasy to the object voice—is the path of analysis itself, culminating in la passe.
it is always deferred from one instance to another, from one office to the next, because it is nothing but this movement of deferral, it coincides with this perpetual motion of evasion… this metonymical movement, which can be seen as coinciding with the movement of desire.
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#259
Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.71
Orthopsycbism > The Mirror as Screen > Achilles and the Tortoise
Theoretical move: Copjec argues that Lacanian theory inverts the Derridean logic of deconstruction: rather than totality being an illusion masking infinite difference, it is the closed totality (the limit) that is the very condition of possibility for infinite difference and the production of meaning—the subject is finite, and it is this finitude that causes the infinity of desire.
One thing comes to be substituted for another in an endless chain only because the subject is cut off from that essential thing that would complete it.
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#260
How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins
HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *Inhabiting the God-shaped hole* > *Religion and the absence of God*
Theoretical move: Rollins deploys a Derridean law/justice analogy to argue that Christianity is structurally self-deconstructing: just as the law testifies to but can never embody justice, religious tradition testifies to but can never make present a God who is Wholly Other, thereby affirming religion's necessity while simultaneously announcing its redundancy.
We have arrived too late for the first coming of justice and too early for the second coming.
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#261
Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda · p.161
Freud against the Illusion of Psychical Freedom > Anatomy Is Destiny I: The Fate of the Genitals
Theoretical move: Ruda argues that Freud's "Anatomy is destiny" is not biological determinism but a retroactive logic: it is culture and repression that transform the meaningless anatomical placement of the genitals into an inescapable fate, such that repression and the return of the repressed coincide, making cultural progress itself the source of irreducible conflict.
the utter meaninglessness of their location becomes somehow the metaphor of man's excremental nature (born between urine and feces) and the metonymy for human repression.
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#262
The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.85
3. *The Ethics of the Act* > *Getting Satisfaction*
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the ethical act (not ceding on one's desire) is the logical point where desire converges with the drive, specifically the death drive, because pursuing desire to its limit necessarily catches up with the drive's proximity to the Thing; this convergence explains why subjective destitution is the radical but not the only expression of Lacanian ethics, and why desire—as the metonymy of being—must be honored to avoid self-betrayal and the contempt that follows from backing away toward the pleasure principle's endless deferral.
because desire is 'the metonymy of our being'
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#263
The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.91
3. *The Ethics of the Act* > *The Fraying of Social Ideals*
Theoretical move: The passage argues that social trauma and oppression fray the symbolic anchoring points (points de capiton) that suture the subject to collective ideals, and that the Lacanian act—by temporarily demolishing these quilting points—can break the repetition compulsion imposed by oppressive signifiers, opening a space for singular desire and counterhegemonic possibility beyond the normative symbolic order.
the metonymic chain of discourse enabling participation in the intersubjective exchanges of ordinary life
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#264
The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.130
5. *The Jouissance of the Signifi er* > *Epiphanies That Transmit the Real*
Theoretical move: Joyce's writing is theorized as a privileged site where the Real irrupts into the Symbolic not to destroy but to radicalize language: by remaining at the level of metonymic residue rather than metaphor, Joyce's epiphanies transmit scraps of the Real and enact an eroticization of language that brushes against the sinthome without collapsing into psychosis.
what Joyce does is in no way metaphorical. One could speak, rather, of metonymic residues, the remnants of an ecstatic experience, dislocated fragments that are displaced into writing
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#265
Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.61
**Cutting Up** > **Achilles and the Tortoise**
Theoretical move: Against Derridean deconstruction's commitment to infinite deferral, Copjec argues—via Lacan and Zeno's paradox—that it is precisely a closed totality (a limit) that makes infinite difference possible; the psychoanalytic subject is finite, and it is this finitude that causes the infinity of desire, not the other way around.
One thing comes to be substituted for another in an endless chain only because the subject is cut off from that essential thing that would complete it.
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#266
Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.129
<span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 2 </span><span id="ch2.xhtml_p71" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 71. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Between the Image and the Word > The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles
Theoretical move: Boothby articulates a general theory of metaphor and metonymy by mapping Lacan's structural distinction onto an original framework of "positionality" vs. "dispositional field," arguing that metaphor operates through positional substitution that releases latent dispositional meaning, while metonymy operates through lateral slippage across the dispositional field — and that this dynamic is more fundamental than the image/sign dichotomy itself.
Metonymy, by contrast, is effected by one or another mode of slippage across the dispositional field. The metonymic link is made not by insertion of a new content into the positional locus but by a kind of lateral movement
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#267
Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.132
<span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 2 </span><span id="ch2.xhtml_p71" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 71. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Between the Image and the Word > The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles
Theoretical move: By mapping Jakobson's two aphasic types (similarity disorder / contiguity disorder) onto the metaphoric and metonymic poles — and correlating these with psychological field dependence/independence — the passage grounds Lacan's expansion of Freud's condensation/displacement distinction in a clinical linguistics of positional and dispositional functioning.
Jakobson, who likened the metaphoric and metonymic poles to the processes of condensation and displacement identified by Freud in the dream-work—a comparison taken up and greatly expanded upon by Lacan.
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#268
Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.157
<span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 3 </span><span id="ch3.xhtml_p133" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 133. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>The Freudian Dialectic > The Agency of Death in the Signifier
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Lacanian death drive has two complementary faces—the pressure of the Real against the Imaginary and the agency of the Symbolic—and that both operate by dissolving the alienating coherence of the imaginary ego, thereby opening the subject to jouissance either through violence or through symbolically mediated exchange.
the 'incessant sliding of the signifier,' binds the functions of speech to the experience of death.
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#269
Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.227
<span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 4 </span><span id="ch4.xhtml_p191" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 191. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>The Freudian Thing > Freud avec Jakobson
Theoretical move: By reading Freud's concept of das Ding through Jakobson's linguistics, the passage argues that the phoneme—as a signifier that signifies nothing—provides the structural condition for an open, indeterminate horizon of meaning, thereby grounding the relation between language and the Thing at the level of pure differential structure rather than binary semantic necessity.
the functions of combination and selection that Jakobson associates with the full realization of speech
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#270
Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.29
<span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter One </span><span id="ch1.xhtml_p17" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 17. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Toward the Unthought Ground of Thought > The Class of 1890: James, Bergson, and Nietzsche > James
Theoretical move: The passage deploys William James's concept of the "psychical fringe" as a pre-Lacanian theorisation of the contextual, relational, and temporal dimensions of consciousness, arguing that this dispositional, horizon-like structure of thought anticipates a field-theoretical account of language, meaning, and the stream of consciousness that resonates with Lacanian concerns about signification and the sliding of meaning.
In our feeling of each word there chimes an echo or foretaste of every other.
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#271
Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.283
<span id="ch6.xhtml_p281" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 281. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Conclusion
Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's "return to Freud" is not a Oedipal critique but a structural recovery that reveals the inner coherence of Freudian metapsychology, and that the Freudian-Lacanian subject is constituted by an irremediable gap and a double ground of representation (imaginary/symbolic) that situates psychoanalysis at the intersection of phenomenology and structuralism.
it is precisely because desire is articulated that it is not articulable
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#272
Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.76
<span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 2 </span><span id="ch2.xhtml_p71" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 71. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Between the Image and the Word > <span id="ch2.xhtml_p72" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 72. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>In the Shadow of the Image
Theoretical move: Boothby argues that Freud's neurological mechanism of "side-cathexis" (from the Project for a Scientific Psychology) and the psychoanalytic phenomena of resistance, screen memories, and fetishism all operate through the same structural logic: a gestalt shift in which a peripheral perceptual element metonymically substitutes for and occludes the threatening focal content, a logic that Lacan explicitly links to the imaginary ego's function of méconnaissance.
Freud notes with some surprise that this process is not metaphorical, that a substitute for the absent phallus is not chosen from among typical symbols of the phallus. Rather, the process of substitution is metonymical.
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#273
Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.147
<span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 3 </span><span id="ch3.xhtml_p133" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 133. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>The Freudian Dialectic > <span id="ch3.xhtml_p141" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 141. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Imaginary Alienation
Theoretical move: Boothby argues that Lacan's concept of the Real functions as a rigorous reformulation of Freud's energetic metaphor (libido/drive), positing the Real as a primitively excluded remainder of imaginary partitioning that can only be encountered obliquely—through anxiety and the disintegration of imaginary coherence—and that the lamelle concretizes this excluded real as the undifferentiated life-drive that haunts the subject after ego-formation.
The energetic metaphor allows psychoanalytic theory to postulate the transmission of psychical value between very different representations and to conceptualize a surplus of excitation forever excluded from the system of representations.
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#274
The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins
<span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > The betrayal of Judas, take 1
Theoretical move: The passage introduces Judas as the paradigmatic figure of betrayal within Christian tradition, surveying the scriptural and traditional condemnations of his act as a prelude to a theoretical reframing of what 'betrayal' can mean theologically.
If there is any name that acts as a metonymy for betrayal then it is likely to be none other than that of Judas.
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#275
The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.239
The Writing on the Wall > **No Matter** > **Otto's Dirty Syringe**
Theoretical move: The passage performs a close reading of Freud's Irma dream to show how the dream-work's mechanisms of displacement and metonymy allow Freud to redirect reproach and anxiety outward onto colleagues, while the concept of Nachträglichkeit (retroactive re-signification) reveals how the dream retrospectively crystalizes an earlier "obscure impression" into a legible accusation—ultimately functioning as wish-fulfillment that acquits Freud and vindicates his professional identity.
the accusation of 'thoughtlessness' allowed Freud to resume and legitimate his earlier annoyance with Otto, providing him with a metonymic justification for his 'disagreeable impression' of the previous day.
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#276
The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.283
A Play of Props > **"An Other Scene"**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that analytic repetition operates as a dialectic between phantasmatic imagery and traumatic-real experience: the fort-da game is deployed as the paradigm case showing how symbolic mastery of the real through repetition can become the condition of possibility for remembering, and this logic is then applied to Freud's Irma dream, where metonymic displacement (empty speech) functions as a fort-da structure that simultaneously evades and summons the traumatic kernel lurking in "an other scene."
That their senseless examination of Irma quickly shifts from her mouth to her torso to her shoulder, interspersed with images of Dr. M.'s poor health, is in strict keeping with this rhetorical purpose. With each of these metonymic shifts, Freud's egomorphic peers exclaim 'fort'
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#277
The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.285
A Play of Props > **From** *Tuché* **to** *Automaton*
Theoretical move: The passage argues that Freud's Irma dream stages a movement from tuché (the traumatic-real encounter) through a fort-da guessing game (metonymic escape via empty speech and symbolic abstraction) to automaton (the insistent return of signs governed by the pleasure principle), such that the symbolic structure of trimethylamine's chemical formula completes the repressive desublimation of the traumatic real — revealing the dream's "secret reality" as the quest for signification as such, not the recovery of traumatic truth.
the *fort* of his colleagues' empty speech allows for a repetitive, metonymic escape from his traumatic encounters with the real
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#278
The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.248
The Writing on the Wall > **Mixing Subjects**
Theoretical move: Through the concept of *l'immixtion des sujets* (inmixing of subjects), Lacan distinguishes two structural moments in Freud's Irma dream: first, the imaginary decomposition of the ego into identificatory fragments (a polycephalic crowd), and second, the emergence of an acephalic, unconscious speaking subject ("Nemo") at the symbolic level, whose voice exceeds the ego and culminates in the purely signifying, graphic inscription of the trimethylamine formula — thereby grounding the unconscious as a phenomenon of the Symbolic Order that is irreducible to egocentric interpretation.
no longer subordinate to Freud's account of his mind's metonymic drift from the 'fusel oil' stench of Otto's gift, to 'the chemistry of sexual processes' according to Fliess, to 'the three curly structures in Irma's throat'
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#279
The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.235
The Writing on the Wall > **No Matter**
Theoretical move: The passage uses Freud's dream of Irma's injection to argue that the nonsensical speech of Dr. M. ("no matter" / *macht nichts*) functions as an instance of Heideggerian everyday discourse (*alltägliche Rede*) that simultaneously voices and covers over anxiety about being-towards-death, thereby protecting Freud's professional identity while gesturing toward a constitutive void or *Nichts*.
the metonymic shift from daughter-Mathilde to deceased-Mathilde transformed into a vengeful circuit of pain
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#280
The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.19
Abbreviations in Text Citations > **A Usable Past**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that Kierkegaard's concept of "chatter" inaugurates an intellectual tradition—continued by Heidegger and Lacan—that identifies everyday talk as a self-perpetuating "means without end," structurally analogous to machine automatism, thereby providing a usable conceptual genealogy for diagnosing digital-age communication pathologies.
Topics may range from anything to everything, but each is forfeited as soon as it is found, for there is always something new to discuss. All suffer the same fate because none is so alluring as the next.
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#281
The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.265
The Writing on the Wall > First and Final Words > **Tessellations of Empty Speech**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that "empty speech" operates as a tessellation — a mechanical, recursive, senseless patterning of discourse (mapped through Lacan's reading of Freud's Irma dream) — structurally analogous to herringbone designs and automata, thereby revealing the imaginary, ego-driven, and fundamentally alogos character of everyday talk.
With each turn in this highly figurative, metonymic conclusion, Lacan brings us one step closer to the basic communicative structure of empty speech.
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#282
The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.243
The Writing on the Wall > **No Matter** > *Mene¯, Mene¯, Teke¯ l, Upharsin*
Theoretical move: The passage traces Lacan's re-analysis of Freud's dream of Irma's injection as a structural pivot from imaginary ego-object dialogue to a traumatic encounter with the Real, using the biblical *Mene, Tekel, Peres* as an interpretive parallel to show how the dream stages the decentering of the subject in relation to the ego and the decomposition of imaginary identifications.
the metonymic shift from this Mathilde to his poisoned patient of the same name
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#283
The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.191
Ancient Figures of Speech > **"Opening One's Eyes"** > **The Babbler**
Theoretical move: Heidegger's reading of Plato's *adoleschos* and Theophrastus via his 1924–25 *Plato's Sophist* course establishes *Geschwätz* (babble/chatter) as a formal mode of discourse defined not by content but by style—its rambling, groundless, self-perpetuating character—positioning it as degraded relative to both the orator's *Rede* and the sophist's *Gerede*, and anticipating Lacan's later theorization of perpetually discontinuous speech.
conversation becomes 'a frivolous philandering among great diversities' in which one 'chatters about anything and everything and continues incessantly'
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#284
The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.92
Fuzzy Math > **P**⊋**{{***n*+**1},{Ø}}**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that "the public" (as theorized by Kierkegaard) is best formalized as the proper superset P⊋{{n+1},{Ø}}, where its "all" ({n+1}) and its "nothing" ({Ø}) are both subsets unified by the same bracing/forming-into-one operation — revealing that the public's counting procedure is not expansive but recursive, since it must exclude itself from its own result, making the operation of inclusion the void point that haunts the total aggregation.
With the addition of the empty set {Ø}, and its subsumption alongside {n+1} in the broader superset {{n+1},{Ø}}, this metonymic fog quickly clears
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#285
The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.273
A Play of Props
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the alliterative chain "propyl, propyls…propionic acid" in Freud's Irma dream is not mere phonetic noise but a quilting point that crystallizes the therapeutic passage from empty speech to full speech, and that the concept of repetition—as theorized by both Freud and Lacan—is the key to unlocking this bridge between their otherwise distinct analyses.
If the metonymic shift from propyl to propyls to propionic acid has a stuttering sonic shape— prop . . . prop . . . prop
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#286
The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.178
Conceptual Stakes of Repetition: Deleuze and Lacan
Theoretical move: By contrasting Deleuze's "realization of ontology through repetition" with Lacan's account of the symbolic cut as primary, Zupančič (drawing on Dolar) argues that tyche is the gap internal to automaton—i.e., the Real is not opposed to the Symbolic but is its constitutive impasse—and further that repetition and primary repression are co-extensive rather than causally related, so that alienation, the signifying dyad, and the forced choice together explain why repetition cannot be dissolved by successful interpretation.
since the subject emerges as pure difference in relation to her own being, she then strives to appropriate the latter by way of meaning constituted in the Other, and of its endless metonymy.
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#287
The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.205
(Essential) Appendix: The Phallus
Theoretical move: Zupančič redefines Lacanian castration not as mere lack/amputation but as the structural coincidence of lack and surplus (plus-de-jouir) that constitutes enjoyment's relative autonomy and detachability — and derives from this the comic form as the radicalization of the human norm, where comic characters are not subjects opposed to structure but "subjectivized points of the structure itself" running wild.
The latter is at the origin of all those further dislocations and metonymic displacements that are so striking in analysis (as symptoms), and are so often used as material for comedy.
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#288
The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.95
Physics of the Infinite against Metaphysics of the Finite > And a little further on:
Theoretical move: Comedy's theoretical structure is not simply the deconstruction of imaginary unity into multiplicity, but the production of an "impossible link" between constitutively exclusive elements—a short circuit that yields the properly comic object. The passage further argues that comedy knows more truth resides in the symbolic/exterior word than in sense-certainty, and that the comic character is defined by material sincerity (being caught in one's own appearance) and an unshakeable metonymic trust that opens the scene for demand and satisfaction to meet.
One of the essential characteristics of comic characters...is their unshakeable trust in what we might call their metonymic object, or in the other that carries this object.
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#289
The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.96
Physics of the Infinite against Metaphysics of the Finite > And a little further on:
Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that comic trust (and transference) operates not through knowledge but through a credit extended precisely at the point of the Other's lack, and that the comic suspension of the big Other (as in comedies of mistaken identity) produces a surplus object — "error incorporated" — as a little other that takes the Other's place, revealing that comedy proper pivots not on the Other's failure itself but on the surplus effects that failure generates.
The comic subject believes in his or her metonymic object, and this belief always contains an element of naivety.
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#290
Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.334
**Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Towards a <span id="scholium_35_towards_a_quantum_platonism.xhtml_IDX-1843"></span>Quantum Platonism
Theoretical move: The passage argues for a "Quantum Platonism" in which the Idea (eidos) is not an abstract universal but the virtual field of variations that subtends reality—itself always a partial, collapsed version of an impossible whole—and that this structure, visible in Kieslowski's eidetic film variations, Freud's reconstructed fantasy, Benjamin's translation theory, and Picasso's cubist distortion, is homologous to the Lacanian futur antérieur of the Unconscious and to Hegel's Understanding as the power of separation.
The movement described here by Benjamin is a kind of transposition of metaphor into metonymy: instead of conceiving translation as a metaphoric substitute of the original, as something that should render as faithfully as possible the meaning of the original, both original and its translation are posited as belonging to the same level, parts of the same field.
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#291
Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.457
**Sex and the Failed Absolute** > <span id="scholium_43_beckett_as_the_writer_of_abstraction.xhtml_IDX-162"></span>Beckett as the Writer of Abstraction
Theoretical move: Žižek reads Beckett's procedure of abstraction—the gap between the "material of experience" and the "material of expression"—as the formal operation by which the Real/Impossible interrupts any seamless passage to social totality, and argues that this same logic of the almost-closed circle (humanitarian charity reproduces what it opposes) can only be broken by a real-impossible act.
with regard to content, it slides metonymically from the terror of totalitarian interrogation to the terror exerted by theater directors on performers, and from there to the terror exerted by the benevolent humanitarian public
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#292
Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.454
**Sex and the Failed Absolute** > <span id="scholium_43_beckett_as_the_writer_of_abstraction.xhtml_IDX-162"></span>Beckett as the Writer of Abstraction
Theoretical move: The "empty" Cartesian subject ($) is not merely an agent of abstraction but is itself constituted through abstraction—its emptiness is ontologically primary, not derivative. This is demonstrated through Lacanian analysis (objet a as objectal correlate of the barred subject), Proust's voice episode, and Beckett's literary practice, all illustrating the concept of "concrete abstraction" as a violent re-totalization that yields deeper truth than direct concrete embeddedness.
they partially function as political metonymies: the political order to which they belong, sketched in the shadows and recesses of the texts, materialises precisely as they struggle through ruins, mud, deserted landscapes
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#293
The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek
INTRODUCTION
Theoretical move: Žižek traces three periods of Lacan's teaching on the death drive to show how, in the third period, das Ding as the 'extimate' traumatic kernel within the symbolic order redefines the death drive as the possibility of 'second death' — the radical annihilation of the symbolic universe itself — and links this to Benjamin's Theses as the unique point where Marxist historiography touches this non-historical kernel.
its 'primary process' of metonymic-metaphoric displacement, is governed by the pleasure principle
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#294
The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek
INTRODUCTION
Theoretical move: Žižek argues that ideology cannot be fully grasped through discourse analysis (interpellation/symbolic identification) alone; its ultimate support is a pre-ideological kernel of enjoyment structured in fantasy, and therefore ideology critique must be supplemented by a logic of enjoyment that 'traverses' social fantasy and identifies with the symptom — demonstrated through the case of anti-Semitism, where 'the Jew' functions as a fetish embodying the structural impossibility of 'Society'.
the fact that the metonymic sliding always subverts every fixation of meaning, every 'quilting' of the floating signifiers (as it would appear in a 'post-structuralist' perspective)
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#295
The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek
INTRODUCTION
Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Lacan's insistence on the primacy of metaphor over metonymy and on the phallic signifier as the signifier of castration radically distinguishes him from post-structuralism: where Derrida sees the localization of lack as taming dissemination, for Lacan the phallic signifier sustains the radical gap by embodying its own impossibility, thereby preventing (rather than securing) a metalanguage position.
In 'post-structuralism', metonymy obtains a clear logical predominance over metaphor. The metaphorical 'cut' is conceived as an effort doomed to fail; doomed to stabilize, canalize, or dominate the metonymical dissipation of the textual stream.
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#296
The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek
INTRODUCTION
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Point de capiton functions as a 'rigid designator' — a pure, meaningless signifier that retroactively constitutes the identity of ideological objects — and that 'ideological anamorphosis' names the error by which this structural lack is misperceived as supreme plenitude of Meaning; the Objet petit a emerges as the real-impossible surplus correlative of this operation.
the 'rigid designator', which totalizes an ideology by bringing to a halt the metonymic sliding of its signified
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#297
The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.41
<span id="page-32-0"></span>The Nature of Unconscious Thought, or How the Other Half "Thinks" > **The Unconscious Assembles**
Theoretical move: The unconscious operates as a formal, non-semantic ciphering system: it is structured not by meaning but by letter-assemblages functioning like set-theoretical inscriptions, so that psychoanalytic interpretation aims not at unveiling meaning but at reducing signifiers to their non-meaning in order to locate the determinants of the subject's behavior.
Freud refers to these links as 'verbal bridges' (SE X, p. 213); they have no meaning per se, deriving entirely from literal relations among words.
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#298
The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.28
<span id="page-21-0"></span>Language and Otherness > **The Unconscious**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the unconscious is constituted by the Other's discourse—a chain of signifiers obeying language-like rules—such that what appears as the subject's innermost desire is in fact the desire of the Other, rendering the very notion of a self-transparent, sovereign subject untenable.
the unconscious is nothing but a 'chain' of signifying elements, such as words, phonemes, and letters, which 'unfolds' in accordance with very precise rules
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#299
The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.110
<span id="page-101-0"></span>Object (a): Cause of Desire > *Real Objects, Encounters with the Real*
Theoretical move: Desire has no object in the conventional sense but only a cause — object (a) — which is real, unspecularizable, and resistant to symbolization; the passage argues that what elicits desire is the Other's desire as manifested in partial objects (gaze, voice), not the companion or the demand, and that the therapeutic challenge is to dialectize this real cause and disturb the fundamental fantasy organized around it.
cause → desire → metonymic slippage from one object to the next
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#300
The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.24
<span id="page-21-0"></span>Language and Otherness > A Slip of the Other's Tongue
Theoretical move: The passage argues that alienation in language is constitutive of the subject: the Other (as the pre-given totality of language) is not merely an external resource but an intrusive force that molds need into desire, installs an unconscious Other-discourse alongside ego-discourse, and thereby fundamentally alienates every speaking being from themselves.
Lacan pointed out the relationship between Freud's concepts of displacement and condensation typical of dream work and the linguistic notions of metonymy and metaphor.
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#301
The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.34
<span id="page-32-0"></span>The Nature of Unconscious Thought, or How the Other Half "Thinks"
Theoretical move: The passage argues that language operates autonomously as an Other that subjects are "used by" rather than merely using, and that unconscious thought processes — structured by condensation/metaphor and displacement/metonymy — constitute a parallel chain of discourse whose autonomous functioning Lacan sought to model through artificial/formal languages and combinatories.
between displacement and metonymy on the other, metaphor and metonymy being linguistic tropes
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#302
The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.235
<span id="page-231-0"></span>**Index**
Theoretical move: This is an index passage (pages 235-236) from Bruce Fink's "The Lacanian Subject," listing key concepts and page references. It is non-substantive as a theoretical argument but serves as a navigational guide to the book's conceptual architecture.
Metonymy, 5, 15
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#303
The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.96
Physics of the Infinite against Metaphysics of the Finite > And a little further on:
Theoretical move: The passage argues that comic naivety (trust in the Other's metonymic object despite its inconsistency) is not mere ignorance but a structural wager on the lack-in-the-Other, and that comedies of mistaken identity function by suspending the symbolic Other, generating a surplus comic object ('error incorporated') that displaces the emphasis from the Other's failure to the productive accidents that failure enables.
The comic subject believes in his or her metonymic object, and this belief always contains an element of naivety.
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#304
The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.178
Conceptual Stakes of Repetition: Deleuze and Lacan
Theoretical move: By triangulating Deleuze and Lacan on repetition, Župančič argues that the three Lacanian registers (Symbolic, Imaginary, Real) correspond to three modes of repetition, and that tyche is the gap internal to automaton rather than its opposite—a structure grounded in primary repression and alienation as co-constitutive rather than causally sequential moments of subjectivity.
when the subject comes to exist, she exists only in the Other, through the signifying chain, which is to say as metonymic meaning(s) of the originally missing signifier.
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#305
The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.205
(Essential) Appendix: The Phallus
Theoretical move: Župančič argues that Lacanian castration is not merely an operator of lack but the structural coincidence of lack and surplus (plus-de-jouir) that constitutes enjoyment as an "encrusted" appendix with relative autonomy — and that comedy, unlike tragedy, stages this constitutive dislocation of enjoyment at the level of structure itself rather than through individual existential destiny.
The Miser Harpagon's treasure chest (as the object through which and only through which the hero can find any satisfaction) is an emblematic example of such metonymic dislocation of enjoyment
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#306
The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.95
Physics of the Infinite against Metaphysics of the Finite > And a little further on:
Theoretical move: Comedy's proper theoretical object is not simply the deconstruction of imaginary unity into multiplicity, but the "impossible" short-circuit between two constitutively exclusive sides of reality — the moment when the split subject cannot fully separate from its other, and when words (the Symbolic) produce material effects of truth that exceed and yet cannot be reduced to sense-certainty.
One of the essential characteristics of comic characters... is their unshakeable trust in what we might call their metonymic object, or in the other that carries this object.
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#307
The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.65
The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Parallax of the Critique of Political Economy > ". . . ce seul objet dont le Néant s'honore"
Theoretical move: The passage argues that drive must be rigorously distinguished from desire: drive is not an infinite longing for the lost Thing that gets stuck on a partial object, but is itself the very fixation, the self-propelling loop of repetition that finds satisfaction in failure and endless circulation around the void. This distinction is then leveraged to reframe the debate between Lacan and Badiou on negativity and the Act, and to identify the curved structure of drive with Hegelian self-consciousness understood as a non-psychological, impersonal agency of registration — the big Other.
it is in desire that the positive object is a metonymic stand-in for the Void of the impossible Thing; it is in desire that the aspiration to fullness is transferred to partial objects—this is what Lacan called the metonymy of desire.
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#308
The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.195
**The Overlapping Worlds of Andrei Tarkovsky**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that Tarkovsky's "cinema of intersection" achieves its distinctive effect by dramatically separating the worlds of desire and fantasy only to reveal their fundamental identity—that the objet petit a remains constant across both registers—thereby exposing the traumatic proximity of the gaze and dissolving the illusion of difference that sustains ordinary desiring subjectivity. This move is theorized as simultaneously Hegelian (identity-in-difference) and Lacanian (the drive's monotony beneath desire's metonymy).
The metonymy of desire is but a mask for the monotony of the drive.
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#309
The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.18
The Shortest Shadow
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Nietzschean "declaration" is not caught in a lack of the Real but constitutes a specific duality in which declaration and event are co-immanent—the Real is not external to speech but structurally redoubled within it—and that this logic of the "Two" (rather than multiplicity) governs both Nietzsche's theory of the event and the temporal structure of truth and subjectivity.
Not only is it the case that 'two are enough,' but further multiplication or mirroring would clearly lead to an entirely different configuration—that of an endless metonymic illusion.
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#310
The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.152
<span id="page-33-0"></span>part i
Theoretical move: By reading the Zeno paradox of Achilles and the tortoise through Lacan's sexuation, Zupančič argues that masculine and feminine positions represent two structurally different relations to the Other and to Nothingness—metonymic pursuit versus immanent internal split—and then extends this to Nietzsche's "beyond good and evil," showing that Nothingness is not a transcendent void beyond the good/evil pair but its inner organizing structure, thereby redefining nihilism as capture between good and evil rather than their surpassing.
In short, he keeps pursuing the metonymic object of his desire.
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#311
The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.123
<span id="page-33-0"></span>part i
Theoretical move: The passage argues that truth in Lacan (and Nietzsche) is neither correspondence nor hidden essence but "the staging of the Real by means of the Symbolic" — a conception in which truth "aims at" the Real without being identical to it, illustrated through the play-within-the-play structure in Hamlet; simultaneously, the dialectics of desire/will always already presupposes a "willing nothingness" as its internal condition, with the objet petit a functioning as a stand-in for the void.
One could even say that it interrupts the metonymic play of gazes and reflections in the mode of which the major part of the play unfolds.
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#312
The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.181
<span id="page-33-0"></span>part i
Theoretical move: The passage argues that love, conceived as drive rather than desire, operates through a "time warp" logic in which the impossible Real happens rather than remaining structurally inaccessible; this enables love to "humanize jouissance" through a sublimation-as-desublimation that dislocates the sublime object from its source of enjoyment, thereby making jouissance itself an object of desire.
The object that the subject is pursuing accompanies her, moves with her, yet always remains separated from her... This accounts for the metonymy of desire.
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#313
The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.112
<span id="page-33-0"></span>part i
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the fundamental problem of knowledge and perspectivity is not the subject's partial point of view but the structural disjunction between the gaze (as object inscribed within the thing itself) and the viewpoint, such that the subject is constitutively 'ex-centered' — a part of the subject always already falls out onto the side of objects — and subjectivization is the possible (not necessary) consequence of encountering this expelled, fallen part.
The circular or metonymic structure of knowledge is attributable to the fact that, within the considered object, we never manage to find what we have put or 'deposited' there, namely, our gaze.
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#314
Theory Keywords · Various · p.55
**Neurosis** > **Oedipus Complex** > *objet a*
Theoretical move: The passage systematically theorizes the *objet petit a* as the object-cause of desire — constitutively absent, irreducible to signification, and functioning as the remainder/gap that both inaugurates subjectivity through loss and sustains desire by perpetually eluding satisfaction, thereby distinguishing it sharply from any empirical object of desire.
Our desire moves metonymically from object to object without ever successfully obtaining satisfaction in the object that it seeks.
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#315
Theory Keywords · Various · p.11
**Contradiction** > **Desire**
Theoretical move: Desire is constitutively tied to lack, structured as the desire of the Other, and operates as an endless metonymic movement through signifiers that can never arrive at a final object—making desire irreducibly different from need and rendering any fantasmatic 'solution' to desire a retreat from its fundamental logic.
it is the movement of interpretation, the passage from one signifier to another, the eternal production of new signifiers which, retroactively, give sense to the preceding chain.
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#316
Theory Keywords · Various · p.89
**Transference** > **Unconscious**
Theoretical move: The passage advances a multi-pronged account of the Lacanian unconscious: it is structured like a language (via the metaphor/metonymy–condensation/displacement homology), it is spatial and relational (between subject and Other), it operates independently of meaning/signification, and its logic can be extended to critique ideological systems like capitalism where surface avowals conceal the real engine (loss/sacrifice) driving the system.
Metonymy is a relation of contiguity, in that one term refers to another because it is associated with or adjacent to it, and therefore it corresponds to the syntagmatic axis, or the axis of combination.
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#317
Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.284
Žižek Responds! > [Response to Ruti](#contents.xhtml_ch11a)
Theoretical move: Žižek rejects Ruti's prioritization of desire over drive (and her reading of sublimation as 'taming' of the Thing into objet a), arguing instead that desire and drive are co-dependent parallax terms—neither more primordial—both being reactions to the same irreducible gap, while also insisting that 'desire of the Other' must be read at imaginary, symbolic, and real levels, and that lack is the lack in the Other itself, not merely the subject's own.
desire is metonymic, always sliding from one to another object, again and again experiencing that 'this is not that'
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#318
Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.)
Žižek Responds! > [When Desire Is Not the Desire of the Other](#contents.xhtml_ch11) > A Case for Sublimation
Theoretical move: Against Žižek's reading that desire is merely a compromise formation and a retreat from the drive, the passage argues that sublimation constitutes the "shared space" where desire can appropriate jouissance through the objet a — not in its mortifying/uncanny dimension but in its sublime dimension — thereby opening a more affirmative Lacanian ethics grounded in desire rather than the destructive act.
desire as such already a certain yielding, a kind of compromise formation, a metonymic displacement, retreat
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#319
Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.)
Žižek Responds! > [When Desire Is Not the Desire of the Other](#contents.xhtml_ch11)
Theoretical move: Mari Ruti challenges Žižek's categorical elevation of drive over desire by arguing that his distinction is too strongly drawn: desire is not intrinsically normative, and the ethical act requires an object of desire to arrest jouissance and motivate action—something a self-enclosed drive, by its circular structure, cannot supply alone.
desire drifts in an endless metonymy of lack
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#320
What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.143
Object-Disoriented Ontology > Being, Event, and Its Consequences: Lacan and Badiou
Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Lacan's "para-ontology" locates impossibility as internal to being itself (not external as in Badiou's Event), such that an Event is a disjunction of the necessary and the impossible rather than an interruption from elsewhere—and that love, as the paradigm case of the Event, produces a comic coincidence-of-split that generates a "new signifier" capable of sustaining contingency without forcing necessity.
'The being that would take flight' is what Lacan used to call 'metonymy of being'—the elusive being that slides, slips away in the *défilé* of the signifiers