Mythology of Significance

The "mythology of significance" [mythologie significative] is Lacan's polemical name for the theoretical error of treating meaning as the ground of the signifier — of explaining how language works by appeal to a primary, pre-existing content or sense that words then carry or transfer. The mythology consists in the belief that signification is constituted by an inner semantic substance, a reservoir of meaning that the sign faithfully conveys from mind to mind or from world to word. Against this, Lacan insists in Seminar III (p. 239) that the efficacy of both metaphor and metonymy derives not from the transference of meaning but from the positional structure of the signifier itself. It is the signifier's location in a differential chain — its relation to what is before and after it, what it replaces, what it displaces — that generates signified effects, not the other way around. To invoke "significance" as an originary explanatory category is to fall into "verbalism": one names the phenomenon one wishes to explain (meaning) and treats the name as an explanation.

The deeper theoretical stakes concern the priority of metonymy over metaphor. Lacan's argument is that metonymy — the combinatory, positional sliding of one signifier alongside another — is the primitive function that makes the substitutive spark of metaphor possible in the first place. Metaphor presupposes a chain that can be occupied and displaced; that chain is metonymic. The mythology of significance inverts this order by presupposing that words already mean, and then asking how metaphor "adds" or "transfers" meaning. In doing so it obscures the structural condition — the positional function of language — that is the real engine of signification.

This concept appears in jacques-lacan-seminar-3 (p. 239) and belongs to the stretch of Seminar III where Lacan is systematically grounding his structural-linguistic account of the unconscious. It functions as a critical foil: by naming and dismissing the mythology of significance, Lacan clears the ground for his account of the positional function of language — the claim that the signifier operates through differential position, not semantic content. This places the concept in direct dialogue with the cross-referenced pair of Metaphor and Metonymy, and with the broader concept of Language as constitutive structure. The mythology is precisely what one subscribes to if one takes metaphor as primary and treats metonymy as a derived or decorative variant, since that move implicitly assumes that words already possess significance before their positional relations are established.

The concept also resonates with the cross-referenced notions of Condensation and Displacement. Lacan's structural equation — condensation = metaphor, displacement = metonymy — depends on granting metonymy (displacement, the sliding positional chain) its primitive status. The mythology of significance is the view that would subordinate this structural account to a content-based one, explaining condensation by the "richness" of meaning rather than by the overdetermination of signifier positions. Similarly, the Point de capiton, which retrospectively pins meaning to the signifying chain, only becomes intelligible once one has abandoned the mythology: meaning is not already there, waiting to be expressed, but is produced retroactively by the anchoring operation of the quilting point. The mythology of significance is thus an anti-concept — a negative landmark that, by being named and rejected, defines the coordinates of Lacan's positive structural theory of signification.

Seminar III · The PsychosesJacques Lacan · 1955 (p.239)

one always falls into verbalism by further adhering to what I call the mythology of significance [mythologie significative].

The phrase is theoretically loaded because Lacan pairs "verbalism" — the empty repetition of a word as if the word were itself an explanation — with "mythology of significance," thereby indicting any theory that treats significance as self-grounding: to say that a metaphor works because of its "significance" is to explain nothing, only to redescribe the explanandum. The bracketed French "mythologie significative" also encodes a reflexive irony — the term "significative" is itself an instance of the verbalism it names, pointing to the structural, not semantic, nature of the critique.