Slippage

Slippage (glissement) is Lacan's term for the constitutively unstable, fluid relationship between signifier and signified that characterizes the signifying chain as such. Against Saussure's model of the linguistic sign as a stable coupling of two faces, Lacan insists that the bar separating S (signifier) from s (signified) in his rewritten algorithm is not a neutral boundary but an active structural resistance—a permanent impediment to any final or transparent anchoring of word to meaning. Signification never arrives at a stable resting point; instead, every signified slides into another signifier, and meaning is endlessly deferred along the chain. Slippage names this very motion: the ceaseless drift of the signified beneath the signifier, a drift that is not an accident or failure of language but its constitutive condition.

The only interruptions to slippage are the points de capiton—quilting points that retroactively pin a provisional signified to the chain, creating the temporary illusion of stable meaning. These arrests are, however, always local and temporary; they do not abolish slippage but merely suspend it long enough for communication and subject-formation to proceed. The theoretical move Evans records makes clear that the absence of such quilting points—the failure to install even a minimal set of anchors—does not produce more slippage but something structurally different: psychosis, in which the signifying chain undergoes what Lacan called a "mass seizure," and the sliding of signification becomes ungovernable rather than merely fluid.

Within evans-dylan-an-introductory-dictionary-of-lacanian-psychoanalysis-taylor-francis, slippage functions as the descriptive label for the dynamic that the other three cross-referenced concepts collectively presuppose. It is the baseline condition that signification (the process of meaning-production) must always manage but can never eliminate: signification is retroactive and self-referential precisely because slippage makes any direct, simultaneous coupling of signifier and signified impossible. The signifier—purely differential, acquiring identity only through its distinction from all other signifiers—cannot, by its very structure, be nailed to a determinate signified; slippage is the name for that structural incapacity rendered as an ongoing movement.

Slippage therefore stands in a constitutive relationship to the point de capiton: the quilting point is meaningful only against the background of slippage it temporarily arrests. Without presupposing slippage, the quilting point would have nothing to do—it would be redundant in a system where signifier and signified already corresponded naturally. Conversely, slippage stands in a boundary relationship to psychosis: whereas ordinary discourse is characterized by slippage interrupted by quilting points, psychosis marks the structural limit at which quilting points are absent and slippage loses the rhythmic arrest that makes it livable. Slippage is thus neither the normal state of language nor a pathological one; it is the permanent substratum whose regulation (through capitonnage) produces neurotic normalcy and whose dysregulation produces psychosis.

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian PsychoanalysisDylan Evans · 1996 (page unknown)

Lacan uses the verb 'slip' (and its corresponding noun, 'slippage') to describe the unstable relationship between the signifier and the signified.

The quote's theoretical weight lies in its explicit lexical move: by nominating a verb ("slip") and then substantivizing it into a noun ("slippage"), Evans signals that Lacan is not merely describing a property of signs but installing a technical concept that names the constitutive instability of the signifier–signified relationship as an ongoing structural process rather than a contingent failure.