Sliding of Meaning

Sliding of meaning names the structural property of the signifying chain by which sense never comes to rest at a fixed, determinable point but perpetually moves along the chain from signifier to signifier. Lacan introduces the term in Seminar V to characterize metonymy as the primordial dimension of human language — not as the conveyance of a stable meaning (signification) but as the production of value through differential relation, analogous to Marx's analysis of general equivalence and the commodity-form. On this account, no sentence yields a single, graspable centre of gravity: the chain is always in motion, and any apparent fixing of meaning is merely local and provisional. The concept thus marks the irreducibility of metonymy to reference or denotation; language does not point to a thing but sets into play a sliding movement that constitutively escapes any final anchorage.

This sliding is not a contingent defect of imprecise language but the very condition of its operation. Because the signifier represents the subject for another signifier — never for a thing — meaning is always deferred along a chain whose logic is substitution and contiguity, never identity. The literary examples adduced in Seminar V (Maupassant, Feneon's micro-fictions) are deployed precisely because these texts make the sliding legible: their "rigour" paradoxically discloses the absence of a single centre of gravity rather than its presence. The sliding is thus the metonymic underside of every signifying act, the restless movement that desire itself inherits — desire being, in Lacan's canonical formulation, the metonymy of being along the chain of signifiers.

The concept appears in jacques-lacan-seminar-5 (p. 80), which marks the period in which Lacan is building the theoretical architecture that will culminate in the Graph of Desire. Sliding of meaning is most directly the elaboration of Metonymy as the dominant logic of the signifying chain, standing in explicit contrast to Metaphor, which produces a new signified through substitutive compression (condensation). Where metaphor crosses the bar and generates a spark of new meaning, metonymy slides along beneath the bar, perpetuating the maintenance of desire rather than producing the punctual effect of signification. The concept is therefore an extension and specification of the canonical metonymy/metaphor pair, underscoring that the chain's primary movement is one of endless displacement rather than creative substitution.

Sliding of meaning also articulates, from the side of language, the structural condition that alienation names from the side of the subject. If Alienation describes how the subject can only exist by taking up a place in a pre-existing signifying chain whose meaning is never fully its own, then sliding of meaning is the chain-level correlate of that same loss: because meaning slides and never anchors, the subject that is represented by a signifier for another signifier can never fully coincide with any fixed point of sense. The concept likewise underpins the lower circuit of the Graph of Desire — the point de capiton or quilting point is precisely the (temporary, retroactive) halting of the slide — and anticipates the later account of Language as a structure that "uses" the subject, equivocates, and cannot inscribe the sexual relationship. Finally, insofar as sliding is the movement that transforms Need into an endless metonymic desire — always displaced onto the next object — the concept connects to the broader Lacanian thesis that jouissance is constitutively missed rather than attained.

Seminar V · Formations of the UnconsciousJacques Lacan · 1957 (p.80)

It's because of what I've been calling the 'sliding of meaning' that we literally don't know where to stop, at what point, in these sentences which we encounter in their rigour, in order to locate their centre of gravity or point of equilibrium.

The phrase "centre of gravity or point of equilibrium" is theoretically loaded because it invokes the very thing that metonymy structurally refuses: a stable, anchoring signified. By saying we "don't know where to stop," Lacan names the absence of the quilting point as the default condition of the chain — foregrounding that the point de capiton is an intervention against the slide, not language's natural resting state.