No Meta-Language

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Where it appears in the corpus (28)

1. #01

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.197

   A Lacanian Perspective

   Theoretical move: Fink argues that "insight" in psychoanalysis functions as a lure that can impede rather than advance analytic work, because it instates a meta-position of the ego as objectifying observer—a Cartesian cogito structure—while genuine analytic progress requires the continual reversal and inversion of any realized insight rather than its consolidation.

   the instating of a supposed meta-position: that of a self or ego that is hypothesized to be merely observing, not participating.

2. #02

   Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink

   <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Writing**

   Theoretical move: Writing, for Lacan, is not a metalanguage but is constitutively distinct from language (la langue/speech), and this distinction is what enables logic, the four discourses, and the formulas of sexuation—while also bearing an unexplained but significant relation to jouissance.

   It is in this respect that I stated that there is no such thing as a metalanguage. Writing itself, insofar as it is distinguished from language, is there to show us that, if language can be investigated through writing, it's precisely insofar as writing is not language

3. #03

   Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.94

   <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **The Title of the Seminar** > COMMENTARY

   Theoretical move: Fink argues that Seminar XVIII's title "On a discourse that would not be based on semblance" encodes a layered equivalence: semblance = signifier = speech = symbolic, against which Lacan posits the letter = writing = real, making the seminar's central theoretical move a privileging of the real over the symbolic as the ground of a non-deceptive discourse.

   we could gloss the title as: 'On a discourse that would not be based on the symbolic but rather on the real.'

4. #04

   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_117"></span>**mathematics**

   Theoretical move: Lacan's turn to mathematics as a formalising tool for psychoanalysis is not an attempt to produce a metalanguage or escape linguistic ambiguity, but rather to generate multiple effects of sense while foreclosing imaginary intuitive understanding, positioning mathematics as the ideal of scientific discourse complementary to—not replacing—the linguistic approach to the Symbolic.

   this use of mathematics is not an attempt to produce a METALANGUAGE, since 'no metalanguage can be spoken' (E, 311).

5. #05

   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_121"></span>**metalanguage**

   Theoretical move: Lacan's 'no metalanguage' thesis argues that language cannot step outside itself to anchor meaning, since any attempt to fix meaning must itself be done in language; this entails that the Real is a beyond of language that nonetheless cannot serve as a transcendental signified, and that there is no Other of the Other to guarantee the subject's discourse—with direct clinical consequences for the transference.

   no metalanguage can be spoken

6. #06

   An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

   <span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_ncx_9"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_page_0025"></span>***A*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_ncx_21"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_page_0037"></span>**art**

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's engagement with art is not literary criticism or psychobiography but a methodological demonstration: works of art serve as models for how the analyst should read the analysand's discourse as a text, foregrounding the signifier over the signified, and as illustrative metaphors for psychoanalytic concepts — making psychoanalysis irreducibly a clinical practice rather than a general hermeneutic metadiscourse.

   it is impossible to read Lacan as making any such claims. For Lacan, while psychoanalysis might be able to learn something about literature… it is doubtful whether literary criticism can learn anything from psychoanalysis.

7. #07

   An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

   <span id="9781134780112_Part30.xhtml_ncx_202"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part30.xhtml_page_0231"></span>***T*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part30.xhtml_ncx_208"></span> **transference**

   Theoretical move: The passage traces Lacan's evolving theorisation of transference from a Hegelian-dialectical and anthropological-symbolic account, through identification with the compulsion to repeat and the Agalma, to its mature formulation as the attribution of knowledge to the Other (Subject Supposed to Know), while also deploying Lacan's critique of ego-psychology's "adaptation to reality" model and its implicit collapse into suggestion and méconnaissance.

   the transference is interpreted on the basis of, and with the instrument of, the transference itself…there is no METALANGUAGE of the transference, no vantage point outside the transference from which the analyst could offer an interpretation

8. #08

   An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

   <span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_ncx_164"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_page_0186"></span>***R*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_ncx_171"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_page_0192"></span>**repression**

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that repression, understood through Lacan's reworking of Freud, is the structural operation that defines neurosis among the clinical structures; primal repression is recast not as a datable psychical act but as the structural incompleteness of language itself, while secondary repression is formalised as a metaphoric operation in which repression and the return of the repressed are identical.

   a structural feature of language itself—namely, its necessary incompleteness, the impossibility of ever saying 'the truth about truth'.

9. #09

   Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.62

   **3**

   Theoretical move: The passage traces Lacan's successive redeployments of the aphorism "Moi la vérité, je parle" across several seminars, arguing that this formula encapsulates a Hegelian-inflected thesis that unconscious truth is irrepressibly self-manifesting, strictly immanent, and structurally equivalent to language—while simultaneously being tied to three interrelated negations (no meta-language, no Other of the Other, no truth about the truth) that foreclose any depth-hermeneutical or transcendent grounding.

   'There is no meta-language' (Il n'y a pas de métalangage), 'There is no Other of the Other' (Il n'y a pas d'Autre de l'Autre), and 'There is no truth about the truth' (Il n'y a pas de vrai sur le vrai)

10. #10

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.213

    Presentation on Psychical Causality > On the Subject who Is Finally in Question

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the subject is constituted at the joint between language and the desire for knowledge, and that castration—as the key to the subject's symptomatic evasion—remains an irreducible enigma even within training analysis, which must be understood as structurally identical to the teaching of psychoanalysis in its scientific openness.

    constituting a science by itself which is raised to the second power [au second degré].

11. #11

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.468

    The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956 > On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis > /. *Toward Freud*

    Theoretical move: By analyzing Schreber's hallucinatory phenomena as structured by the signifier—autonymous messages, interrupted sentences cut at the point of the shifter, and a code constituted by messages about the code—Lacan demonstrates that psychosis exhibits a topology of signification irreducible to neurological localization, while also showing that the notion of metalanguage is improper if meant to designate elements differentiated within language itself.

    This is the system's relation to its own constitution as signifier, which should be filed under the question of metalanguage and which, in my opinion, demonstrates the impropriety of this notion if it is intended to define elements differentiated within language.

12. #12

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.706

    The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious > GRAPH 2

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that desire is constitutively structured through the Other's desire and the margin opened by demand's excess over need, while critiquing Hegel's Master/Slave dialectic for repressing jouissance and showing that the symbolic order (including the Name-of-the-Father and the law of no metalanguage) always already dominates the imaginary register of ego-formation.

    I formulate this by saying that there is no metalanguage that can be spoken, or, more aphoristically, that there is no Other of the Other.

13. #13

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.708

    The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious > GRAPH 3

    Theoretical move: The passage completes Lacan's Graph of Desire by articulating the upper chain's key mathemes—S(Ⓐ), ($◇a), ($◇D)—showing how the drive, fantasy, and the castration complex jointly structure the barred subject's relation to jouissance and the lack in the Other, while insisting that the very prohibition of jouissance by the Law is what constitutes the subject as barred rather than merely absent from it.

    This algorithm and the analogs of it used in the graph in no way contradict what I said earlier about the impossibility of a metalanguage. They are not transcendent signifiers; they are indices of an absolute signification

14. #14

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.776

    Appendix II: Metaphor of the Subject¹

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that metaphor cannot be reduced to analogy (contra Perelman) because its logic is that of signifier-substitution—three terms against one, crossing the bar between signifier and signified—thereby grounding rhetoric in the structural logic of the unconscious and showing that enunciation can never be reduced to what is enunciated.

    the discourse of science, insofar as it commends itself by its objectivity, neutrality, and dreariness... is just as dishonest and ill-intentioned as any other rhetoric.

15. #15

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan

    Classified Index of the Major Concepts > C. THE STRUCTURE OF THE SUBJECT

    Theoretical move: This classified index passage organizes Lacan's key theoretical concepts around the structure of the subject and intersubjective communication, mapping page references across the Écrits to show how concepts such as splitting of the subject, topology, the Other, and the unconscious-as-Other's-discourse form an articulated theoretical architecture.

    b. Metalanguage: 271, 351, 353, 498, 813, 867-68.

16. #16

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.375

    The Freudian Thing > *The Thing's Order* > *Analytic Action*

    Theoretical move: Lacan formalizes the analytic situation as a four-term dialectical structure (S, A, ego, little-other) and derives from it the analyst's technical rule: to "play dead" by distinguishing his two positions—as big Other (silence) and as little other (canceling resistance)—while grounding all speech in the Other's constitutive role as the true addressee of any discourse.

    no word [discours]—whatever inertia it may be based on or whatever passion it may appeal to—is ever addressed to anyone except the wise to whom it is sufficient… What is called logic or law is never anything more than a body of rules that were laboriously worked out at a moment of history

17. #17

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.381

    The Freudian Thing > *The Training of Analysts to Come*

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that genuine transmission of psychoanalysis requires grounding analysts in linguistics, history, and mathematics rather than social-psychological objectification, because the Freudian experience is structured by language and truth—truth that is irreducibly foreign to reality and constitutively elusive of the subject; the abstract of the companion talk then maps how narcissism separates the imaginary from the symbolic, situates unconscious truth in metonymic/metaphoric interplay, and diagnoses contemporary analysts' retreat to ego-psychology and environmentalism as a betrayal of Freud's insights.

    the truth of the unconscious must be situated between the lines, since a broader metonymy encompasses their metaphors

18. #18

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.754

    On Freud's "Trieb" and the Psychoanalyst's Desire > Science and Truth

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the absence of metalanguage—grounded in the self-referential speech of truth—is co-extensive with Urverdrängung, and uses this to differentiate how magic, religion, and science each relate "truth as cause," showing that only psychoanalysis, via the subject of science, can rigorously articulate this relation without disavowal or deferral.

    there is no such thing as a metalanguage (an assertion made so as to situate all of logical positivism), no language being able to say the truth about truth, since truth is grounded in the fact that truth speaks

19. #19

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.863

    Appendix II: Metaphor of the Subject¹ > NOTES TO IN MEMORY OF ERNEST JONES: O N HIS THEORY OF SYMBOLISM" > NOTE S T O "GUIDIN G REMARK S FO R A CONVENTIO N O N FEMAL E SEXUALITY " > NOTES TO SCIENCE AND TRUT H

    Theoretical move: This passage is a set of scholarly translator's/editor's notes to Lacan's "Science and Truth" (and adjacent Écrits essays), clarifying word choices, tracing intertextual references, and glossing key Lacanian and Freudian technical terms without advancing an independent theoretical argument.

    Toutes les chutes que constitue le metalangage en ce qu'il a de faux-semblant, et de logique (all the traps metalanguage, as sham and logic, falls into)

20. #20

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.94

    **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar** 7: **Wednesday 24 January 1968**

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the act from the doing in order to locate the analyst's position as a specific structural function: psychoanalytic practice, as a doing of pure speech, approaches the act through the 'signifier in act', and the analyst must occupy this corner of the barred subject supposed to know precisely by absenting himself from the doing—a structural self-effacement that risks collapsing into a 'hypochondriacal jouissance' if theorised away as mere equidistance from all schools.

    there is no meta-language. You can well imagine that it worries me also if perhaps there is one. In any case, let us start from the idea that there is not.

21. #21

    Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.77

    *[A porter appears]*

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Wittgenstein's *Tractatus* to push the question of truth and meta-language to its limit: because any assertion is already self-announcing as true, adding a truth-predicate is superfluous, yet this very superfluity reveals that there is no meta-language — only the desire of the Other, from which all 'blackguardism' (wanting to be the big Other for someone) is deduced.

    there is no meta-language. There is no other meta-language than every form of blackguardism (canaillerie)

22. #22

    Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.4

    Seminar 1: Wednesday 8 December 1971

    Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the title "...Ou pire" as a vehicle for the claim that "there is no sexual relationship" — a truth that can only be half-said, such that any attempt to escape it produces something worse — and grounds this in a logical analysis of the empty place in language, the impossibility of metalanguage, and the introduction of the "not-all" as what exceeds Aristotelian quantification, thereby linking the structure of language to castration and sexuation.

    there is no metalanguage. What does that mean? It might seem that in saying this I am only formulating a paradox... There is no metalanguage denies that this division is tenable.

23. #23

    A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.107

    The voice and the drive > The voice of reason

    Theoretical move: Dolar argues that the voice operates as the operator enabling a transition from the ethics of desire to the ethics of the drive, and that Heidegger's phenomenology of the call of conscience—a pure, aphonic voice that convokes Dasein to Being—illuminates the structural function of voice as extimate alterity, while simultaneously exposing the metaphysical illusion of positing voice as a pure, prelinguistic origin.

    speech is 'always-already' a response, a response to this voice, and always bears the responsibility in relation to the voice of Being.

24. #24

    Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.43

    Lack and Excess > Living with Contradiction

    Theoretical move: Russell's paradox is not merely a logical curiosity but the structural condition of comedy itself: because the signifying order necessarily harbours an irresolvable contradiction (lack), it generates an excess of compensatory signifiers, and it is precisely this coincidence of lack and excess that produces comic effects.

    All attempts to render it sensible have failed (or have resorted to prohibitions on universalizing to bypass it and thereby produce the gap that it bespeaks in a different form).

25. #25

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek

    Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Toward a New Science of Appearances

    Theoretical move: By reading Rashomon's four witness accounts as a Lévi-Straussian mythic matrix, Žižek argues that the film's real stakes are not epistemological (no ultimate reality behind narratives) but socio-ethical: the disintegration of the big Other's symbolic pact is traced to feminine desire as the traumatic kernel around which the other versions function as defense-formations.

    the point is not that it tells us what 'really happened' but that, within the immanent structure that links the four versions, it functions as the traumatic point

26. #26

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.320

    Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Do We Still Live in a World?

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that global capitalism is uniquely "worldless" — it dissolves every stable representational frame rather than founding one — and this creates a fundamental aporia for Badiouian emancipatory politics (which traditionally intervenes from within a world's symptomal excess), forcing a parallax reading of the economy/politics non-relation as the key structural problem for any leftist project today.

    no 'meta-language' enabling us to grasp the two levels from the same neutral standpoint, although—or, rather, because—these two levels are inextricably intertwined.

27. #27

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.298

    Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > The Biopolitical Parallax

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that late capitalism's shift from desire to demand (and from Oedipal to post-Oedipal subjectivity) converges with biopolitical control as two faces of the University Discourse; the correct psychoanalytic response is not conservative re-Oedipalization but a full assumption of the Other's nonexistence, enabling a demand no longer addressed to the Other — a mode that coincides with the drive.

    there is no meta-language that enables us to translate the logic of domination back into the capitalist reproduction-through-excess, or vice versa

28. #28

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.221

    Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > The False Opacity

    Theoretical move: Žižek uses Metzinger's neurophenomenological account of selfhood (the "cave," "red arrow," and "total flight simulator" metaphors) to sharpen the Lacanian distinction between the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the enunciated, arguing that Metzinger's two imprecisions—failing to distinguish those two subjects, and failing to distinguish generative opacity from the inherent symbolic opacity of phenomenal experience—are structurally linked: the second, properly symbolic opacity is the opacity of the subject of the enunciation itself.

    there is, however, a vicious cycle in this version of the Cave argument... while the cave can simulate the substantial identity/content of the observer, it cannot simulate the function of the observer, since in this case we would have a fiction observing itself