Step-of-Sense

The "step-of-sense" (pas-de-sens) is Lacan's term — deliberately equivocal, exploiting the French pas as both "step" and "not" — for the surplus of meaning introduced by metaphoric substitution within the signifying chain. Where metonymy produces a "bit-of-sense" (peu-de-sens), a sliding, levelling, and partial displacement along the signifying chain that keeps meaning in perpetual deferral, the step-of-sense names the sudden qualitative leap that metaphor accomplishes: one signifier is substituted for another, and from that substitution a new, irreducible meaning-effect erupts. In the context of the joke (Witz), this is the operation behind the punchline — a retroactive resemanticization that cannot be predicted from the chain's linear movement and that is irreducible to mere wordplay or poetic ambiguity.

Crucially, the step-of-sense is not self-sufficient: it requires the big Other as a structural third term to authenticate it. The subject presents a "bit-of-sense" to the Other, who, by receiving it within the symbolic order, transforms it into a step-of-sense — adding the dimension of recognition that completes the joke's circuit. This triangular social structure distinguishes wit (esprit) from the merely comic or funny. Because the pas-de-sens condenses both "a step" and "not sense" (non-sens), it signals that the surplus of meaning is also a fracture in sense — the point where the signifier introduces its constitutive heterogeneity, displaces any simple transparency of meaning, and grounds the subject's desire in an irreducible remainder that can never be fully domesticated by the signifying chain.

The concept appears exclusively in jacques-lacan-seminar-5, Lacan's seminar on "The Formations of the Unconscious" (1957–58), and is part of his sustained reading of Freud's Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. It sits at the intersection of three canonical concepts: the Signifier, the big Other, and the Unconscious. The step-of-sense is best understood as a specification of the Signifier's metaphoric function: just as the canonical definition of the signifier stresses that the signifier "polarizes meaning, structures it, and brings it into existence" while producing a constitutive bar, the step-of-sense names the precise moment of that productive bar in the joke-work — the point where substitution generates a surplus-meaning that exceeds the sum of its parts. It extends the theory of metonymy/metaphor (Demand's sliding along the chain versus the sudden substitutive leap) into the concrete site of the Witz.

The step-of-sense equally specifies the role of the big Other: the Other is not merely an intersubjective addressee but the structural locus where the bit-of-sense (peu-de-sens, the metonymic residue) is transformed into the step-of-sense. This maps directly onto the canonical account of the Other as the site where the signifying chain is deposited and where truth is constituted — here that constitutive function is made visible in the social act of the joke. The concept also bears on the Unconscious insofar as the retroactive, retrograde path of the step-of-sense — meaning that "snaps into place" after the fact — is structurally homologous to the unconscious's own logic of après-coup: a signifier-in-action that thinks in the subject according to its own laws, without the subject's deliberate control, and whose effects are legible only from a position that has already crossed to the other side of the metaphoric substitution.

Seminar V · Formations of the UnconsciousJacques Lacan · 1957 (p.100)

the Other, having received what is presented as a bit-of-sense, transforms it into what I have called, in an equivocal and ambiguous manner, the 'step-of-sense'.

This quote is theoretically loaded because it makes the big Other the active transformer — not a passive receiver but the structural agent that converts the merely metonymic "bit-of-sense" into the metaphoric "step-of-sense" — and because Lacan's own flagging of the term as "equivocal and ambiguous" signals that the pas-de-sens is itself an enactment of what it names: a signifier that steps beyond, and simultaneously negates, straightforward sense.