Semantic Indeterminacy

Semantic indeterminacy names the constitutive openness of every signifier — its irreducible surplus over whatever signified it momentarily anchors. On the account given in Boothby's text, this is not a deficiency of language but its most productive feature: because the signifier can never fully saturate meaning, every act of speech releases an excess that keeps the horizon of signification permanently ajar. This excess is what prevents the signifier from functioning as a simple, closed code, and it is precisely this gap — the non-coincidence of signifier and signified — that makes the symbolic order both a wall against the Real and a route back toward it.

The concept does double theoretical work in the passage from which it is drawn. On one side, the signifier operates defensively: through grammar, law, the paternal metaphor, and the big Other, it imposes structure and distance, holding the subject away from the annihilating proximity of das Ding. On the other side, semantic indeterminacy is what undoes that very closure. Because the signifier always exceeds its signified, it cannot fully domesticate what it names; the Thing — that excluded interior posited as the beyond-of-the-signified — remains virtually present as the uncancelable horizon of every utterance. Semantic indeterminacy is thus the formal mechanism by which the wound the signifier opens toward the Real is never entirely sealed.

The concept appears in diaeresis-richard-boothby-embracing-the-void-rethinking-the-origin-of-the-sacred (p. 65) and is best understood as a specification of the structural relationship between the signifier and das Ding. Das Ding is canonically defined as "the beyond-of-the-signified" — that kernel of the Real which resists assimilation into the symbolic chain. Semantic indeterminacy is the name Boothby gives to the formal property of the signifier that keeps that beyond structurally reachable: because no signifier exhausts its signified, das Ding is never fully buried beneath representation. The concept also intersects with Lack, since the excess of signifier over signified is precisely a form of the constitutive gap that Lacan locates within the symbolic order itself — a reminder that the Other is barred, that there is no final signified. In relation to the Name-of-the-Father and Metaphor, semantic indeterminacy marks what metaphoric substitution cannot complete: the paternal metaphor installs phallic signification, but the irreducible semantic excess means that every substitution leaves a residue oriented back toward the Thing. The concept is thus positioned as a bridge between the defensive and the transgressive dimensions of the signifier — an extension of the logic of das Ding into the internal texture of language itself, showing how the symbolic order harbors within its own structure the opening toward what it was meant to foreclose.

Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the SacredRichard Boothby · 2023 (p.65)

The most fertile contribution of the signifier consists in the way it opens a horizon of semantic indeterminacy. Every entry into speech unleashes an unavoidable excess of the signifier over the signified.

The phrase "unavoidable excess of the signifier over the signified" is theoretically loaded because it locates the bar between signifier and signified — the very bar whose crossing defines Lacanian metaphor — as permanently incomplete: the excess is not accidental but constitutive ("unavoidable"), and the "horizon" framing signals that this indeterminacy is not mere ambiguity but a structural orientation toward what lies beyond signification, i.e., das Ding as the beyond-of-the-signified.