Signifiance

Signifiance is Lacan's term — introduced in Seminar XX and deployed by Boothby to mark a crucial conceptual distinction — for the dimension of the signifier that exceeds any determinate, closed act of signification. Where signification names the retroactive, quilted production of a fixed meaning-effect, signifiance designates the open, volatile, tropistic pull of the signifier toward an indeterminate potentiality of meaning: not any particular meaning that language delivers, but the restless capacity-for-meaning that haunts every signifying act before and beneath its stabilisation. It names the signifier's resonance in excess of what any given signification can capture, a kind of overflow or surplus that prevents meaning from ever fully closing on itself.

In Boothby's deployment, signifiance is intimately tied to the operation of the signifier on das Ding. The signifier performs a primordial Aufhebung — simultaneously canceling and preserving the Thing — and in doing so generates an irreducible openness at the heart of the symbolic. This is the space of signifiance: the echoing, underdetermined register that the signifier opens up in its very act of distancing the subject from das Ding. Because this gap is structural and not contingent, signifiance is not a special or elevated mode of language but the ordinary condition of the speaking being. It collapses the distinction between pathological symptom-formation and normal linguistic operation: to speak at all is to be caught in this tropism, making human subjectivity symptomatic through and through.

In the source diaeresis-richard-boothby-embracing-the-void-rethinking-the-origin-of-the-sacred, signifiance occupies a precisely articulated position: it is explicitly contrasted with signification (index entry: "vs. signification, 59, 210n40") and linked to the Sabbath and to the void. This places it at the intersection of Boothby's two central concerns — the structural operation of the Lacanian symbolic and the question of the sacred. Relative to the canonical concepts it cross-references, signifiance is best understood as a specification of what the Signifier does beyond signification: it names the excess that the signifier generates over and above any quilted meaning-effect, the dimension that the concept of signification formally excludes. It is also the structural correlate of what das Ding leaves behind after the Aufhebung: because the Thing is never fully symbolised but only preserved-in-cancellation, the signifying system retains an opening — an "open potentiality of meaning" — that no particular signification exhausts.

Signifiance also bears directly on The big Other and the Symptom. Boothby tracks a shift in Lacan's use of the big Other from a term pointing toward genuine alterity and unconscious desire to one designating the defensive, meaning-policing function of the symbolic; signifiance names precisely what this defensive function attempts to contain — the volatile, indeterminate resonance that precedes and exceeds the Other's regulatory closure. And because this openness is the ordinary condition of language rather than a pathological exception, it confirms the claim that the Symptom is not aberrant but the general form of the subject's relation to the signifier. Signifiance thus functions in Boothby's argument as a hinge concept, connecting the theory of the signifier to ethics, the sacred, and the irreducibility of the Real dimension within the symbolic.

Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the SacredRichard Boothby · 2023 (p.69)

In his twentieth seminar, Lacan uses the term signifiance to refer to this tropism toward an open potentiality of meaning.

The word "tropism" is theoretically loaded: it figures signifiance not as a property passively possessed by language but as an active, directional tendency — an organic pull — toward open potentiality, implying that the signifier is structurally oriented away from closure and toward indeterminacy. Paired with "open potentiality of meaning," this formulation marks signifiance as irreducibly distinct from signification, which always terminates in a (retroactively fixed) meaning-effect, positioning signifiance as the excess that the signifying system cannot domesticate.