[lit-ideas] Re: Who Created the Symbolic Order?
- From: "Phil Enns" <phil.enns@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2006 19:48:47 -0500
Eric Yost wrote:
"Lacan't really say . . ."
Since Eric brings him up, here is bits of, to me, an interesting
'conversation', between Lacan and Derrida, regarding a symbolic meaning
that 'escapes' discourse. Lacan argues that there is a symbolic form of
communication that is not linguistic but gets deeper, to truth. Derrida
responds that the symbolic can never escape the linguistic, and in
particular linguistic usage. It was on this point that Derrida broke
with the Structuralists.
The fact that the message is thus retransmitted assures us of what may
by no means be taken for granted: that it belongs to the dimension of
language. Those who are here know our remarks on the subject,
specifically those illustrated by the countercase of the so-called
language of bees: in which a linguist can see only a simple signaling of
the location of objects, in other words: only an imaginary function more
differentiated than others. We emphasize that such a form of
communication is not absent in man, however evanescent a naturally given
object may be for him, split as it is in its submission to symbols.
Something equivalent may no doubt be grasped in the communion
established between two persons in their hatred of a common object:
except that the meeting is possible only over a single object, defined
by those traits in the individual each of the two resists. But such
communication is not transmissible in symbolic form. It may be
maintained only in the relation with the object. In such a manner it may
bring together an indefinite number of subjects in a common "ideal": the
communication of one subject with another within the crowd thus
constituted will nonetheless remain irreducibly mediated by an ineffable
relation. This digression is not only a recollection of principles
distantly addressed to those who impute to us a neglect of nonverbal
communication: in determining the scope of what speech repeats, it
prepares the question of what symptoms repeat. Thus the indirect
telling sifts out the linguistic dimension, and the general narrator, by
duplicating it, "hypothetically" adds nothing to it. But its role in the
second dialogue is entirely different. For the latter will be opposed
to the first like those poles we have distinguished elsewhere in
language and which are opposed like word to speech. Which is to say
that a transition is made here from the domain of exactitude to the
register of truth. Now that register?we dare think we needn't come back
to this?is situated entirely elsewhere, strictly speaking at the very
foundation of intersubjectivity. It is located there where the subject
can grasp nothing but the very subjectivity which constitutes an Other
as absolute.
(Lacan, _Seminar On the Purloined Letter_)
Baudelaire bluntly reminds us of this. The purloined letter is in the
text: not only as an object with its proper course described, contained
in the text, a signified that has become a theme or a signified of the
text, but also as the text producing framing effects. At the very
moment when Dupin and the Seminar find the letter, when they find its
proper place and course, when they believe the letter is at one place or
another as if on a map, a place on a map as if on the woman's body, they
no longer see the map itself: not the map described by the text at one
moment or another but the map that the text "is," that it describes,
"itself," like the four-way divergence with no promise of topos or
truth. The remaining structure of the letter, contrary to the final
words of the Seminar, is that a letter can always not arrive at its
destination.
(Derrida, _The Purveyor of Truth_)
Sincerely,
Phil Enns
Toronto, ON
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