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6: The Extermination of the Name Of God, by Jean Baudrillard in Symbolic Exchange and Death.
[by] Jean Baudrillard. (Sage, London, England, 1993). pp [195]-242. [Bibliographic Details] [View Documents] |
The Anagram
The model of a symbolic exchange also exists within the field of language,
something like the core of a political anti-economy, a site of the extermination
of value and the law: poetic language. In the field of an antidiscourse,
a beyond of the political economy of language, Saussure's
Anagrams constitute the fundamental discovery. The same discovery that
will later lend its conceptual arms to linguistic science had previously, in his
Cahiers d'anagrammes, brought out the antagonistic character of a nonexpressive
language, beyond the laws, axioms and finalities assigned it by
linguistics, in the form of a symbolic operation of language, that is to say,
not a structural operation of representation by signs, but exactly the
opposite, the deconstruction of the sign and representation.
The principle of poetic functioning proclaimed by Saussure does not
claim to be revolutionary. Only the passion he puts into establishing this
principle as the recognised and conscious structure of remote, Vedic,
Germanic and saturnine texts, and establishing its proof, is proportionate
to the incredible scope of his hypothesis. He himself draws no radical or
critical consequences from it, he does not care for one moment to
generalise it on a speculative level, and when he failed to find this proof, he
abandoned this revolutionary intuition and went on to the edification of
linguistic science. It is perhaps only today, at the term of half a century of
uninterrupted development in this science, that we can draw out the
consequences of the hypothesis Saussure abandoned,
[113]
and investigate to
what extent it lays the advance foundations for a decentring of all
linguistics.
The rules of the poetic proclaimed by Saussure are the following.
[114]
The Law of the Coupling
1. `A vowel has no right to figure within the Saturnine unless it has its
counter-vowel in some other place in the verse (to ascertain the
identical vowel, without attention to quantity). The result of this is that
if the verse has an even number of syllables, the vowels couple up
exactly, and must always have a remainder of zero, with an even total
for each type of vowel.'
2. The law of consonants is identical, and no less strict: there is always an
even number of any consonant whatever.
3. He goes so far as to say that if there is an irreducible remainder either
of vowels (unpaired verse) or consonants, then, contrary to what we
might think, this does not escape condemnation even if it is a matter of
a simple `e': we will then see it reappear in the following verse, as a
new remainder corresponding to the overspill from the preceding one.
The Law of the Theme-word
In the composition of the verse, the poet sets the phonemic material
provided by the theme-word to work. One (or several) verse(s) contain(s)
anagrams of a single word (in general a proper name, of a god or a hero) by
being constrained to reproduce itself, especially in a vocal rendition, `on
hearing one or two Latin Saturnine verses, F. de Saussure heard the principal
phonemes of a proper name become clearer and clearer' (Starobinski,
Les mots, p. 28). Saussure writes:
In the hypogram, it is a matter of emphasising a name or a word, striving to
repeat its syllables and thus giving it a second, artificial way of being, added, so
to speak, to the original being of the word.
TAURASIA CISAUNA SAMNIO CEPIT (SCIPIO)
AASEN ARGALEON ANEMON AMEGARIOS AUTME (AGAMEMNON)
These simple rules are repeated untiringly in multiple variants. As regards
alliteration, the rule to which it used to be thought we were able to submit
all ancient poetry, Saussure says that it is only one aspect `of an otherwise
vast and important phenomenon', given that `all syllables alliterate, or
assonate, or are combined in some other phonemic harmony'. Phonemic
groups `become echoes',
entire verses to be anagrams of other preceding verses, however far off, in the
text. ... [P]olyphonies visually reproduce, when the occasion arises, the
syllables of an important word or name, whether they figure in the text or
present themselves naturally to the mind through the context. ... [P]oetry
analyses the phonemic substances of words, whether to turn them into accoustic
series or signifying [significative] series when one alludes to a certain name [the
anagrammatised word -- J.B.]. [In short,] everything is answered, in one way or
another, within the verse ...
whether the signifiers or the phonemes answer one another throughout the
verse, or the hidden signified, the theme-word, is echoed from one
polyphony to the other, `beneath' the `manifest' text. Moreover, both rules
can co-exist:
Sometimes conjointly with anaphony, sometimes beyond every word we imitate,
there is a correspondence of all the elements, translating into an exact `coupling',
that is to say, a repetition as a pair of even numbers.
Saussure will hesitate between the terms of `anagram', `antigram', `hypogram',
These two laws appear to say extremely little as regards what we could
say about the `essence' of the poetic. Furthermore, they take no account of
the poetic `effect', of the enjoyment [jouissance] proper to texts, or of their
aesthetic `value' Saussure has only considered the poet's `inspiration', not
the reader's ecstasy. Perhaps he would never even have claimed that there
was any relation whatsoever between the rules he clarifies (he thought he
observed them, and that's all there is to it) and the exceptional intensity it
has always been agreed that we find in poetry. By limiting his perspective
to a formal logic of the signifier, he seems to leave the concern with looking
for poetic enjoyment of the wealth of the signified and the profundity of
expression to others who, with one accord, have always done so (psychologists,
linguists and the poets themselves). Saussure, however, and
Saussure alone, tells us that the enjoyment derived from the poetic is
enjoyment in that it shatters `the fundamental laws of the human word'.
Linguists become refugees in the face of this subversion of their
discipline, in an untenable paradox. They acknowledge, with Roman
Jakobson, that
the poetic anagram cuts across the two laws of the human word as proclaimed by
Saussure, that of the codified bond between the signifier and its signified, and
that of the linearity of signifiers. ... (The means employed by poetic language
are such that they make us take leave of the linear order ...) [`F. de Saussure
sur les anagrammes', in Selected Writings, Vol. 7, Berlin: Mouton, 1985, p. 247]
(or, as Starobinski summarizes it, `we leave the consecutive temporality
proper to common language' [Les mots, p. 47]), and simultaneously affirm
that `Saussure's researches open up unprecedented perspectives in the
linguistic study of poetry' [Jakobson, Selected Writings, Vol. 7, p. 246].
An elegant manner to recuperate the poetic as a particular field of
discourse, on which linguistics retains the monopoly. What does it matter if
the poetic denies the laws of signification, since we will neutralise it by
giving it the keys to the city of linguistics, and by requiring it to obey the
same reality principle? But what is a signified or a signifier if it is no longer
governed by the code of equivalence? What is a signifier if it is no longer
governed by the law of linearity? And what is linguistics without all this?
Nothing (but we will see the contortions it goes through in order to make
amends for this violence).
Linguistics gets out of Saussure's first law (the coupling) by putting
forward the redundancy of the signifier, or indeed the frequency with
which a particular phoneme or polyphony occurs, which is greater than the
The law of the poem is in fact to make sure, following a rigorous
proceedure, that nothing remains of it. This is why it contrasts sharply with
the discourse of linguistics, which, for its part, is a process of the
accumulation, production and distribution of language as value. The poetic
is irreducible to the mode of signification, which is nothing other than the
mode of production of the values of language. This is why it is irreducible
to the linguistic, which is the science of this mode of production.
The poetic is the insurrection of language against its own laws. Saussure
himself never formulated this subversive consequence. Others, however,
have accurately assessed the danger inherent in the simple formulation of
another possible formulation of language. This is why they have all made
to conceal this in accordance with their code (calculating the signifier as a
term, and the signified as value).
The Poetic as the Extermination of Value
1. Saussure's first law, that of the coupling, is in no way, as he himself
insists, that of the unlimited expressive alliteration or redundancy of some
phoneme or other.
Pour qui sont ces serpents qui sifflent sur nos têtes?
These serpents are the rattlesnakes of a linguistics of the recurrence and
accumulation of the signified: s-s-s-s- `ÇA' [ID] also whistles in the
signifier, and the more `s's there are, the more ça whistles, the more
menacing it is and the better it `expresses'. Thus again:
... the faint fresh flame of the young year flushes
`In Swinburne's lines', says Ivan Fonagy, `we feel the breeze passing,
without the poem expressly mentioning it' (`Form and Function in Poetic
Language', Diogène, 51, 1965, p. 90). Saussure's coupling is a calculated,
conscious and rigorous duplication which refers to another status of
repetition, not as the accumulation of terms, as the accumulative or
Vowels always couple up exactly, AND MUST ALWAYS GIVE A REMAINDER
OF ZERO. (Saussure cited in Starobinski, Les mots, p. 21)
And in the emblematic citation that he gives this law -- NUMERO DEUS
PARI GAUDET (`God rejoices in even numbers') -- it is said that in one
way or another, enjoyment is inseparable not from amassing the Same,
reinforcing meaning by the addition of the Same, but quite the contrary,
from its cancellation by the double, by the cycle of the anti-vowel or the
anti-gram where the phonematic character comes to be cancelled as if in a
mirror.
2. Saussure's second law, which concerns the theme-word or the
`anathema' that runs through the text, must be analysed in the same way. It
must be seen that it is not at all a matter of repeating the original signifier
or reproducing its phonematic components throughout a text.
`Aasen argaleôn anemôn amegartos autmè' does not `reproduce' Agamemnon
even though Saussure is ambiguous on this point. He says:
In the hypogram, it is a question of emphasising a name, a word, striving to
repeat its syllables and thus giving it a second, artificial way of being added, so to
speak, to the original being of the word.
In fact, the theme-word is diffracted throughout the text. In a way, it is
`analysed' by the verse or the poem, reduced to its simple elements,
decomposed like the light spectrum, whose diffracted rays then sweep
across the text. In other words then, the original corpus is dispersed into
`partial objects'. It is therefore a matter not of another manner of being the
Same, of reiteration or paraphrase, of a clandestine avatar of the original
name of God, but rather of an explosion, a dispersion, a dismembering
where this name is annihilated. Not an `artificial double' (what use is this
unless it is in order to be reduced to the same thing?), but a dismembered
double, a body torn limb from limb like Osiris and Orpheus. Far from
reinforcing the signifier in its being, repeating it positively, this metamorphosis
of its scattered members is equivalent to its death as such, to its
annihilation. To sum it up, this is, on the level of the signifier, of the name it
incarnates, the equivalent of putting God or a hero to death in the sacrifice.
Following this, the animal totem, the god or the hero circulate, disarticulated,
disintegrated by its death in the sacrifice (eventually torn limb from
limb and eaten), as the symbolic material of the group's integration. The
name of God, torn limb from limb, dispersed into its phonemic elements as
the signifier, is put to death, haunts the poem and rearticulates it in the
rhythm of its fragments, without ever being reconstituted in it as such.
The symbolic act never consists in the reconstitution of the name of God
after a detour and analytic breakdown within the poem; the symbolic act
never consists of the resurrection of the signifier. Starobinski is wrong
when he says:
It will be a matter of reassembling the principal syllables, as Isis reunited
Orpheus' dismembered body.
Lacan gets his theory of symbolism wrong when he says:
If man finds himself open to desiring as many others within himself as his
members have names other than his, if he is to recognise as many disjointed
members, lost without ever having been a unity, as there are beings that are
metaphors of these members, we can also see that the question of ascertaining
the epistemological value of these symbols has been resolved, since these are the
very members that return to him after wandering through the world in an
alienated fashion. (La psychanalyse, Vol. V, 1960, p. 15)
The symbolic act is never in this `return', in this retotalisation that follows
alienation, in this resurrection of an identity; on the contrary, it is always in
the volatilisation of the name, the signifier, in the extermination of the term,
disappearance with no return. This is what makes possible the intense
circulation on the interior of the poem (also in the primitive group on the
occasion of feasting and sacrifice), this is what gives enjoyment a language,
and, again, one from which nothing results nor remains. The entire pack of
linguistic categories cannot do too much to efface the scandal of the loss
and death of the signifer in this feverish agitation of language which, as
Bataille says concerning life, `demands that death exert its ravages at its
expense'.
Here, of course, the limits Saussure imposes on himself explode. This
poetic principle is not only applicable to Vedic, Germanic or Latin poetry,
and it is pointless to seek, as he did, for a hypothetical generalisation of the
proof of this. It is obvious that modern poets have never made use of the
generative theme-word, if ever the ancient poets did. But this is not an
objection since it is clear that, for all languages and all epochs, the form
Saussure distinguished is sovereign. It is clear to all -- enjoyment bears
witness to this -- that a good poem is one where nothing is left over, where
all the phonemic material in use is consumed; and that, on the other hand,
a bad poem (or `not-poetry-at-all') is one where there is a remainder,
where not every significant phoneme, diphoneme, syllable or term has
been seized by its double, where not every term has been volatilised and
consumed in a rigorous reciprocity (or antagonism), as in primitive gift-exchange,
where we feel the weight of the remainder that has not found its
corresponding term, nor therefore its death and absolution, which has not
been successfully exchanged in the very operation of the text: it is in
proportion to this residue that we know that a poem is bad, that it is the
slag of discourse, something which has not exploded, which has been
neither lost nor consumed in the festival of reversible speech.
Value is residue. It is the discourse of signification, our language
governed by linguistics. The economy of signification and communication,
where we produce and exchange terms and meaning-values, under the law
of the code, rests on everything that has not been seized by the symbolic
operation of language, by symbolic extermination.
The economic process is inaugurated in the same way: what re-enters the
We can distinguish a third dimension of our mode of signification from
the notion of the remainder. We know that the poetic operation `shatters
the fundamental laws of language':
1. The signifier--signified equivalence.
2. The linearity of the signifier (Saussure: `In linguistics, we should not,
due to its being obvious, lightly disregard the truth that the elements of
a word follow each other, since, on the contrary, it provides in advance
the central principle of all useful reflection on words.')
3. The third dimension, never really taken into account, and strictly
interdependent with the two others, is that of the boundlessness, the
limitless production of signifying material. Just as equivalence defines a
dimension of the economic (that of unlimited productivity, the infinite
reproduction of value), so the signifier-signified equivalence defines an
unlimited field of discursivity.
We no longer even see this proliferation of our discursive customs, it
becomes so `natural' to us, but it is what distinguishes us from all other
cultures. We use and abuse words, phonemes and signifiers with no ritual,
religious or poetic restriction of any kind, in total `freedom', with no
responsibility as regards the immense `material' that we produce as we
please. Everyone is free to endlessly use and endlessly draw on phonemic
material in the name of what they want to `express' and with the sole
consideration of what they have to say. This `freedom' of discourse, the
possibility of taking it and using it without ever returning it, answering to it,
nor sacrificing even a share of one's goods to it, as the primitives used to in
order to ensure its symbolic reproduction; the idea of language as an all
purpose medium of an inexhaustible nature, like a place where the utopia
of political economy would be realised: `to each according to his needs';
this phantasm of an unprecedented stock, a raw material that would be
magically reproduced in exact proportion to its use (no need even for
primitive accumulation), and therefore the freedom of a fantastic wastage,
is the exact status of our discursive communication, a staggering availability
of signifying material. All this is thinkable only in a general
configuration where the same principles govern the reproduction of both
material goods and the species itself. A mutation runs simultaneously
through social formations where material goods, the number of individuals
and the proliferation of words are, in a more or less rigorous fashion,
distributed, limited and controlled inside a symbolic cycle, and our
`modern' social formations, which are distinguished by an infinite productivity,
as economic as it is linguistic and demographic. These societies are
caught in an endless escalation at every level: material accumulation,
linguistic expression, and the proliferation of the species.
[116]
This model of productivity (exponential growth, galloping demographics,
unlimited discursivity) must be simultaneously analysed everywhere.
On the plane of language, which is alone in question here, it is clear
that the unrestrained freedom to use phonemes in unlimited number for
purposes of expression, without the reverse processes of cancellation,
expiation, reabsorption or destruction (it does not matter which term), is
radically opposed by the simple law announced by Saussure, that in poetry
a vowel, a consonant or a syllable cannot be uttered without being
doubled, that is to say, somehow exorcised, without fulfilling itself in the
repetition that cancels it.
From that point on, there is no question of unlimited use. The poetic,
like symbolic exchange, brings into play a strictly limited and distributed
corpus, but it undertakes to reach the end of it, whereas our economy of
discourse implements an unlimited corpus that cares nothing for resolution.
What becomes of words and phonemes in our discursive system? We
should not think that they graciously disappear as soon as they have served
their purpose, nor that they return somewhere, like the characters on a
Linotype matrix, and wait until the next time they are used. Again, this is
part of our idealist conception of language. Every term or phoneme not
taken back, not returned, not volatilised by poetic doubling, not exterminated
as a term and as a value (in its equivalence to what it `meant' or
`wanted to say'), remains. It is a residue. It will return to a fantastic
sedimentation of waste, of opaque discursive material. (We begin to
perceive that the essential problem of a productive civilisation may be that
of its waste, which is nothing other than the problem of its own death: giving
way under its own remains. Industrial leftovers are nothing, however, in
relation to the remains of language.) Such as it is, our culture is haunted
and jammed by this gigantic, petrified, residual instance: by means of an
escalation of language it attempts to reduce a tendential decline in the rate
of `communication'. Nothing happens. Just as every commodity, that is to
say, everything produced under the sign of the law of value and equivalence,
is an irreducible residue that comes to bar social relations, so every
word, every term and every phoneme produced and not symbolically
destroyed accumulates like the repressed, weighs down on us with all the
abstraction of dead language.
An economy of profusion and wastage rules over our language: the
affluent utopia. But although `affluence' and wastage are recent characteristics
of the material economy, an historical trait, they appear to be a
natural dimension, always already given, of spoken or written language.
There is and will always be, at every instant, a utopia, insofar as we will
want it for the whole world -- the utopia of an unlimited capital of language
as use-- and exchange-value. In order to signify, everyone proceeds by the
accumulation and cumulative exchange of signifiers whose truth lies
elsewhere, in the equivalence to what they want to say (one can say it in
fewer words: concision is a moral virtue, but this is only ever an economy
Linguistics seized the stage of the waste product [déchet], the stage of a
functional language that it universalises as the natural state of all language.
It imagines no other:
Just as the Romans and the Etruscans divided the sky by rigid mathematical
lines, and in this way delimited space as a templum and conjured up a God, so
every people has above them such a sky divided up by mathematical concepts
and, under the demand for truth, it intends that from now on every conceptual
God should be sought nowhere other than within this sphere. (Nietzsche, The
Philosopher's Book)
This is what linguistics does: it forces language into an autonomous
sphere in its own image, and feigns to have found it there `objectively',
when, from start to finish, it invented and rationalised it. It is incapable of
imagining a state of language other than that of the combinatory abstraction
of the code [langue] accompanied with an infinite manipulation of
speech [parole]; in other words, speculation (in the double sense of the
term) on the basis of general equivalence and free circulation; everyone
using words as they please and exchanging them in accordance with the law
of the code.
But let's suppose a stage where the signs of language were deliberately
distributed (like money is for the Are-Are): restricted distribution, no
formal `freedom' of production, circulation or use. Or rather a double
circuit:
-- the circuit of `liberated' words, gratuitously useable, circulating as
exchange-value; a zone of meaning `commerce', analogous to the sphere
of the gimwali in economic exchange;
-- the controlled circuit of a non-`liberated' zone, of a material restricted to
symbolic use where words have neither use-- nor exchange-value, and
where they cannot be gratuitously multiplied nor uttered, analogous to
the sphere of the kula for `precious' goods.
The general principle of equivalence does not operate in this sphere, nor
therefore does the logical and rational articulation of the sign with which
semio-linguistic `science' is preoccupied.
The poetic recreates the situation of primitive societies in linguistic
material: a restricted corpus of objects whose uninterrupted circulation in
the gift-exchange creates an inexhaustible wealth, a feast of exchange.
Assessed by their volume or their value, primitive goods end up in an
almost absolute penury. Tirelessly consumed in feasting and exchange,
they recount, through their `minimal volume and number', the `maximal
Words here have the same status as objects or goods: they are not freely
available to everybody, language has no `affluence'. In these magical and
ritual formulations there reigns a restriction which alone preserves the
symbolic efficacity of signs. The shaman and the prophet (Vates) act on
considered, coded and limited phonemes or formulae, exhausting them in
a maximal configuration of meaning. So the formula is pronounced, in its
literal and rhythmic exactitude, so it binds the future, but not because it
signifies.
[117]
The same goes for the poetic, which is defined by the fact of operating on
a restricted corpus of the signifier, and by aiming to resolve it completely.
And it is precisely because the poetic (or the primitive ritual of language)
aims not at the production of signifieds, but at the exact consumption and
cyclical resolution of a signifying material, that it takes on a limited corpus.
Limitation is neither restrictive nor penurious in this context: it is the
fundamental rule of the symbolic. Conversely, the inexhaustible character
of our discourse is bound to the rule of equivalence and linearity, just as
the infinite character of our material production is inseparable from the
change to equivalence in exchange-value (it is this linear infinity which
simultaneously breeds, at every moment of capital, the fact of poverty and
the phantasm of a final wealth).
The signifier, doubling up and returning to cancel itself out, follows the
same movement as the gift and the counter-gift, giving and returning; it is a
reciprocity where the use-value and the exchange-value of an object cancel
each other out, and the same complete cycle results in the nothingness of
value, on which the intensity of the social relation or the enjoyment of the
poem acts.
This is a question of revolution. What the poetic accomplishes with the
phoneme-value at a microscopic level, every social revolution accomplishes
over the entire flanks of the code of value -- use-value, exchange-value,
rules of equivalence, axioms, value-systems, coded discourses,
rational finalities, etc. -- when the death drive is linked to it in order to
volatilise them. This same process of completion does not stop short of the
analytic operation: in contrast to science as a process of accumulation, the
real analytic operation eliminates its object, which comes to an end in it.
The term of the analysis -- not its `constructive' finality, but its real end -- is
this volatilisation of the object and its own concepts; or again, these are the
processes of the subject who, far from attempting to master its object,
accepts being analysed by it in turn, in which movement the respective
positions of each are irremediably dismantled. It is only from this point
that the subject and the object are exchanged, whereas in their respective
positivity (in science for example) they merely draw themselves erect and
face each other off for an indefinite period. Science is bound to the
construction of its object and to its repetition as a phantasm (as much as to
The poetic is the restitution of symbolic exchange in the very heart of
words. Where words, in the discourse of signification, finalised by meaning,
do not respond to each other, do not speak to each other (and neither,
within words themselves, do consonants, vowels and syllables), in the
poetic, on the contrary, once the authority of meaning has been broken, all
the constitutive elements enter into exchange with, and start to respond to,
each other. They are not `liberated', nor is any deep or `unconscious'
content `set free' through them: they are simply returned to exchange, and
this very process is enjoyment. It is futile to look for the secret in an
energetics, a libidinal economy or a fluid dynamics: enjoyment is not
bound up with the effectuation of a force, but with the actualisation of an
exchange -- an exchange without traces, where no force casts a shadow,
since every force, and the law behind it, has been resolved. For it is the
operation of the symbolic to be its own definitive end.
The mere possibility of this is a revolution in relation to an order where
nothing and no-one, neither words, men, their bodies nor their gazes, are
given access to direct communication, but instead pass in transit as values
through the models that engender or reproduce them in total `estrangement'
to each other ... The revolution is everywhere where an exchange
crops up -- be it the infinitesimal exchange of phonemes or syllables in a
poetic text, or of millions of men speaking to each other in an insurgent city
-- that shatters the finality of the models, the mediation of the code and the
consecutive cycle of value. For the secret of a social parole, of a revolution,
is also the anagrammatic dispersal of the instance of power, the rigorous
volatilisation of every transcendent social instance. The fragmented body
of power is then exchanged as social parole in the poetry of rebellion.
Nothing remains of this parole, nor is any of it accumulated anywhere.
Power is reborn from what is not consumed in it, for power is the residue of
parole. In social rebellion the same anagrammatical dispersal is at work as
that of the body in eroticism, as that of knowledge and its object in the
analytic operation: the revolution is symbolic or it is not a revolution at all.
The End of the Anathema
The whole science of linguistics can be analysed as resistance to the
operation of dissemination and literal resolution. Everywhere there is the
same attempt to reduce the poetic to a meaning, a `wanting-to-say'
[vouloir-dire], to bring it back under the shadow of a meaning, to shatter
the utopia of language and to bring it back to the topic of discourse.
Linguistics opposes the discursive order (equivalence and accumulation) to
the literal order (reversibility and dissemination). We can see this counter-offensive
unfolding in the interpretations of the poetic given here and there
These, then, are the principles of linguistics and psychoanalysis that will
be at stake as regards Saussure's anagrammatic hypothesis. Although he
made this hypothesis in connection with a precise point and subject to
assessment, there is nothing to prevent us developing it and drawing out its
ultimate consequences. In any case, the radicalisation of hypotheses is the
only possible method -- theoretical violence being the equivalent, in the
analytic order, of the `poetic violence which replaces the order of all the
atoms of a phrase' of which Nietzsche speaks.
We will begin with Starobinski's commentary on Saussure [Les mots,
pp. 33ff.]. Two aspects of his commentary are especially in question here:
the theme-word (whether or not it exists); and the specificity of the poetic
(and thus Saussure's discovery).
Saussure's whole argument seems to draw its support from the real
existence of the key-word, the latent signifier, the `matrix' and the `corpus
princeps':
This versification seems to be dominated by a phonemic preoccupation, sometimes
internal and free (the mutual correspondence of elements by couplets or
rhymes), sometimes external, that is to say, drawing inspiration for phonemic
composition from a name like Scipio, Jovei, etc.
And we know that after having had this intuition, all his efforts were
brought to bear on establishing its proof. Here, it is true, Saussure falls into
the trap of scientific validation, into the superstition of the fact. Fortunately,
he fails to establish this proof (of knowing whether the practices of the
ancient poets were governed scientifically by the anagram of the theme-
word), and this failure preserves the scope of his hypothesis, which would
in fact, once delimited by a proof, be restricted to a certain type of ancient
poetry and, more seriously, it would have restrained the poetic act to the
formal gymnastics of the cryptogram, a game of hide-and-seek with the
key-word, playing for the reconstitution of a term that had been voluntarily
buried and dislocated. This is how Starobinski interprets it:
Poetic discourse will therefore only ever be the second manner of being of a
name: an elaborate variation that would allow the perspicacious reader to see the
obvious but dispersed presence of the principal phonemes ... The hypogram
slides from a simple name into the complex spread of the syllables in a line; it will
be a question of recognising and reassembling of the principal syllables, as Isis
reunites the dismembered body of Osiris.
From the outset, Starobinski eliminates both the emanationist or mystical
theory (the germinal diffusion of the theme-word through the line) and the
productive theory (the theme-word used by the poet as a framework for
the labour of composition). The theme-word is neither an original cell, nor
The latent theme-word differs only from the manifest line by its compression. It
is a word like the many words deployed in the line: they differ only therefore in
the way that the one differs from the multiple. Developed before the total text,
hidden behind the text, or rather in it, the theme-word shows no qualitative
difference: it is neither of a superior essence, nor of a more humble nature. It
offers its substance to an inventive interpretation, causing it to survive in an
extended echo.
But, if it is a word like other words, why is it necessary that it is hidden or
latent? On the other hand, the `manifest' text is something other than the
`development, multiplication, prolongation' and `echo' of the theme-word
(in itself, the echo is not poetic): this something else is dissemination,
dismemberment and deconstruction. Starobinski overlooks this aspect of
the operation until his most nuanced interpretation:
The diction of the theme-word seemed to be dislocated, subjected to a rhythm
other than that of the vocables through which the manifest discourse unfolds; the
theme-word becomes looser, in the manner in which the subject of a fugue is
stated, when it is treated as imitation by augmentation. There can be no question
of recognising it, the theme-word never having been the object of an exposition;
it must be divined in a reading attentive to the possible links between disparate
phonemes. This reading is developed according to another tempo (and in
another tense): ultimately, we leave the time of the `continuity' proper to
customary language.
This interpretation, more subtle in that it is allied to the analytic process
(floating attention to a free discourse), also seems however to fall into the
trap of presupposing a generative formula, whose scattered presence in the
poem would in some sense be merely a secondary state, whose identity it
would nevertheless always be possible (it is even the necessary condition of
reading) to locate. Simultaneous double presence at two levels: Osiris
dismembered is the same in another form, his finality is to become Osiris
again following the phase of dispersion. The identity remains latent, and
the process of reading is a process of identification.
This is the trap, this is the linguistic defence: as complex as they are,
these interpretations only ever turn the poetic into a supplementary
operation, a detour in a process of recognition (of a word, a term, a
subject). It is always the same that is given to read. But then why this
laborious reduction; and what makes all this `poetic'? If it is in order to
repeat the same term, if the line is only the phonemic dissimulation of the
This is what societies' games do, and this is all they do. This is what bad
poetry, allegory and figurative music do, when they refer in too facile a
fashion to what they `signify', or endlessly metaphorise into other terms.
These are charades, riddles and spoonerisms, in which, with the discovery
of the key-word, everything is complete. And of course there is pleasure in
this detour, as there is removing the mask from what is hidden, and whose
secret presence attracts you. But this pleasure has nothing to do with poetic
enjoyment, which is radical in another way, and not perverse: nothing is
discovered in it, nothing expressed in it, and nothing shows through it. No
riddles or `divinations', no secret terms, no abutment of meaning. The
poetic destroys every cleared path towards a final term, every key, it
resolves the anathema, the law weighing down upon language.
We could offer the hypothesis that enjoyment is a direct function of the
resolution of every positive reference. It is at its minimum where the
signified is immediately produced as value: in `normal' communicative
discourse -- linear and steady speech, exhausted in decoding. Beyond this
discourse -- the zero degree of enjoyment -- all sorts of combinations are
possible where a game of hide-and-seek is set up with the signified, a
deciphering, and no longer a pure and simple decoding. This latter is the
traditional anagram or the text with keys, the `Yamamoto Kakpoté' or the
texts from the Fliegende Blätter (interpreted by Freud and analysed by
Lyotard in `The Dreamwork Does Not Think', Oxford Literary Review, 6
(1) 1983), where, behind a coherent or incoherent manifest text, there lies
a latent text to be found. In both cases, there is a disengagement, a
distantiation of the signified, of the last word of history, a detour by way of
the signifier, différance as Derrida says. But in any case, it is possible, by
whatever developments, to seize hold of the last word, the formula that
controls the text. This formula may be subconscious (in the joke, the mot
d'esprit, to which we shall return) or unconscious (in the dream), but it is
always coherent and discursive. With the dawning of this formula, the cycle
of meaning is exhausted. And enjoyment, in every case, is proportionate to
the detour, the delay, the loss of the statement, to the time lost in
rediscovering it. It is therefore extremely restrained in society's games,
more intense in the mot d'esprit, where the decoding is suspended and
where we laugh in proportion to the destruction of meaning. In the poetic
text, it is infinite, because no code whatsoever can be found there, nO
`Aboli bibelot d'inanité sonore': a perfect line where the anagrammatic
form is taken up again. `ABOLI' is the generative theme-word running
throughout the line, and referring to nothing. The anagrammatic form and
its content seal an extraordinary union here.
Several other things can be advanced concerning the theme-word, even
within the limits of Saussure's hypothesis. The hypogram, being a god's or
a hero's name, is not just any `signified', and not even a signified at all. We
know that the literal invocation of God is dangerous because of the forces
it unleashes. For this reason, the anagram is necessary to veil the
incantation by rigorously, but obliquely, spelling out the name of God.
This allusive mode differs radically from the mode of signification, for the
signifier stands for the absence, dispersal and putting to death of the
signified. The name of God appeared in the eclipse of its own destruction,
in the sacrificial mode, exterminated in the literal sense of the term.
From this point, it is clear that the make or break question Saussure puts
to himself, and on which Starobinski's objection entirely rests, concerning
the positive existence of the theme-word, is beside the point, since the
name of God exists only in order to be annihilated.
We endlessly create the identity of the name of God, with which no kind
of enjoyment is associated, since enjoyment proceeds from the death of
God and his name, and more generally from the fact that where something
used to be -- a name, a signifier, an agency -- nothing remains. In this there
is an agonising overhaul of our anthropological conceptions. It is said that
poetry was always the exaltation, the positive celebration of a god or a hero
(or a great many other things since), but we must see, on the contrary, that
it is only beautiful and intense because it returns the god to death, because
poetry is the site of its volatilisation and his sacrifice, because in it all the
`cruelty' (in Artaud's sense) and ambivalence of the relation to the gods is
played out in a precise manner. You must be as naïve as a Westerner to
think that the `savages' prostrated themselves before their gods as we do
before ours. On the contrary, in their rites they have always been able to
actualise their ambivalence towards the gods, perhaps they only ever roused
them in order to put them to death. This is still alive in the poetic. In the
poetic, God is not invoked in any other form, the poem does not keep
trotting out His name `in extension' (once again, what interest would there
be in this? A prayer wheel is quite enough to repeat his name), he is
In the poem, God is not even the hidden subject of the utterance, nor is
the poet the subject of enunciation. Language itself adopts speech so as to
disappear in it. And the name of God is equally the name of the Father: the
law (of repression, of the signifier, of castration) that it brings to bear on
the subject and, at the same time, language is exterminated in the
anagram. The poetic text is the example, realised at last, of reabsorption
without residue, without trace, without the merest atom of a signifier (the
name of God) and, through this, of the agency of language itself and,
through this reabsorption, the resolution of the law.
The poem is the fatal declension of the name of God. For us, who no
longer have a god, but for whom language has become God (the full and
phallic value of the name of God is diffused for us throughout the extent of
discourse), the poetic is the site of our ambivalence as regards language, of
our death drive as regards language, of the force proper to the extermination
of the code.
The Nine Billion Names of God
In a science-fiction story (Arthur C. Clarke, `The nine billion names of
God' [in Of Time and Stars, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981, pp. 15-32] ),
a brotherhood of lamas, lost in the foothills of Tibet, devote their whole
lives to the recitation of the names of God. There are a great many of these
names -- nine billion. When they have all been stated and declined, the
world will come to an end, an entire cycle of the world. Bringing the world
to an end, step by step, word by word, by exhausting the total corpus of the
signifiers of God: this is their religious delirium -- or the truth of their death
drive.
But the lamas read slowly, their difficult task lasting many centuries.
They then hear talk of mysterious Western machines that can record and
decode at an incredible speed. One of them sets about ordering a powerful
computer from IBM to hasten their task. The American technicians arrive
in the Tibetan mountains to set up and programme the machine. According
to them it will take only three months to get to the last of the nine
billion names.
[120]
They themselves do not believe a word of the prophesied
consequences of this enumeration, and, shortly before the expiry of the
operation, afraid that the monks might turn against them when faced with
the failure of their prophecy, they flee the monastery. Then, climbing
down into the civilised world, they see the stars go out one by one ...
The poem, too, is the total resolution of the world, as soon as the
scattered phonemes of the name of God are consumed in it. When
the anagram has been completely declined, nothing remains, the world has
turned once again, and the intense enjoyment running through it has
nowhere else to come from.
The second point on which Starobinski's commentary bears is the
specificity of the poetic. Basically, he says, the rules Saussure evokes and
imputes to a deliberate and calculated act may be reduced to the basic
givens of all language. On the first rule (of the coupling):
The total phonemic opportunities language offers at every instant to whoever
wants to make use of them ... are sufficiently numerous not to demand a
laborious combination, requiring instead an attentive combination.
Ultimately no more chance: pure probability is sufficient. Again:
The facts of phonemic symmetry [the term `symmetry' is already a reductive
term, that sees a specular redundancy in the doubling of phonemes -- J. B.] noted
here are striking: but are they the effect of an observed rule (of which no
testimony has survived)? Could we not invoke, to justify the multiplicity of
internal correspondences, an only barely conscious and half instinctive taste for
the echo?
`An instinctive taste for the echo': the poet would be basically nothing
other than a linguistic particle accelerator who merely increases the rate of
the redundancy of customary language. That's what `inspiration' is, and
there is no need to calculate for it: a little `attention' and `instinct' is all we
need:
Must the Ancients' poetic practices resemble the obsessional ritual more than
the surge of inspired speech?
Of course we can acknowledge formal constraints:
It is true that traditional scansion subjects the vates' diction to a regularity that
we must indeed qualify as obsessional. Nothing prevents us from imagining,
since the facts go along with this, an increasing formal requirement that would
oblige the poet to use every phonetic element twice in the same line.
But whether the poet is an inspired resonator or a calculating obsessional,
it is always the same type of interpretation: the coupling and the anagram
are the effects of a resonance, a redundancy, an `imitation by augmentation',
etc. -- in short, the poetic is a play of combinations, and since all
language is combinatory, the poetic becomes once more a particular case
of language:
Why do we not turn our attention to an aspect of the process of speech in the
anagram, a process which is neither fortuitous, nor fully conscious? Why should
there not exist an iteration, a generative and involuntary repetition that would
double and project the materials of a primary speech within discourse, unpronounced
and at the same time non-evanescent? Due to the lack of a conscious
rule, the anagram can nevertheless be considered as a regularity (or a law) where
the arbitrary theme-word submits to the necessity of a process.
The hypothesis of the theme-word, and its rigorous dispersal
uncovers the extremely simple truth that language is an unending resource, and
that dissimulated behind every phrase is the increasing clamour of the multitude
from which it was taken in order to be isolated in front of us in its originality.
But what then did Saussure uncover? Nothing. Was this a `staggering
Every discourse is a set that facilitates the subtraction of a subset ... moreover,
every text is itself the subset of another text ... every text incorporates and is
incorporated. Every text is a productive product.
Onwards to the Russian dolls, to the `abyssal' [en abyme] textuality dear
to Tel Quel.
Starobinski's whole argument amounts to saying either the poet is just an
obsessive formalist (if we follow Saussure's hypothesis), or his operation is
exactly the same as that of all language, and so it is Saussure who is the
obsessive: everything he believed he had discovered is nothing but the
researcher's retrospective illusion, since:
Every complex structure provides the observer with sufficient elements for him
to select a subset apparently endowed with meaning, which nothing prevents us
according an a priori logical or chronological antecedence.
Poor Saussure, who saw the anagram everywhere, and attributed his
phantoms to the poets!
Starobinski and the linguists do not dream: by verifying Saussure's
hypothesis ad infinitum, they reduce it to zero. To do this it was enough to
stick to its content (the inference of the theme-word, its positive role, its
metamorphoses) instead of judging it on its form. The stakes of the poetic
are not the production of, nor even the combinatory variations on, a
theme, nor an identifiable `subset'. In this case, in fact, it is clearly part of a
universal mode of discourse (except we cannot then see the necessity of the
poetic, its different status, nor the enjoyment proper to this mode as
opposed to that of discourse). Its stake is, precisely through the labour of
the anagram, the point of no return in whatever term or theme. At this
point, whether the theme-word's existence is recognised or not is a false
problem. This is not because, according to Starobinski, every language is,
at bottom, articulated on a sort of code or formula -- but because, in any
case, it is the annihilation of this code that is the form of the poetic. As
Saussure describes it, this form holds for all poetry, the most modern and
the most ancient. The principle of the annihilation of the code retains all its
intelligibility even if the existence of this formula cannot be verified.
[121]
The
only thing is that this code, which in ancient poetry could have taken the
form of a word-theme, might, in modern poetry, be no more than
The Linguistic Imaginary
We must now leave Saussure and look at how the linguists dealt with the
poetic and the questions it brought to bear on their `science'. All things
considered, the defence they put up in the face of this danger is the same as
that mounted by the adherents of political economy (and its Marxist critics)
in the face of the symbolic alternative in previous societies and in our own.
All of them chose to differentiate and modulate their categories while not
changing their principle of rationality in any way, that is, without changing
the arbitrariness and the imaginary that made them hypostatise the order
of discourse and the order of production as universals. As scientists, they
have good reason to believe in this order, since they are agents of order.
Thus the linguists concede that the arbitrary character of the sign is a bit
shaken by the poetic; but certainly not the signifier/signified distinction,
nor therefore the law of equivalence and the function of representation.
Indeed, in a certain way, the signifier in this instance represents the
signified far better, since it `expresses' it directly following a necessary
correlation between each element of the substance of the signifier and what
it is supposed to express, instead of referring to it arbitrarily, as in
discourse. The signifier's autonomy is conceded:
The conceptual messages transmitted through the intermediary of sound necessarily
differ from the pre-conceptual contents in the sound sequences and
rhythms themselves. They either happen to converge or diverge. (I. Fonagy,
Diogène, 51)
However, this is basically so that the signifier better embodies, not
merely by convention, but in its materiality and its flesh, what it has to say:
`In Swinburne's lines, we feel the breeze passing ...'. Instead of it being,
as in conceptual language, the unit of primary articulation, the phoneme,
the unit of secondary articulation. becomes representative, while, however,
the form of the representation has not itself changed. It is always a
question of referring, no longer to the concept by means of the terms of the
langue nor syntax, but by means of vowels and syllables, the atoms of
language, and their combination in rhythm, to an elementary presence, to
an original instance of things (the `breeze' as primary process!). Between
In this way, muted vowels would stand for the dark and obscure, etc.,
and there would no longer be an arbitrary conceptual equivalence in this
case, but a necessary phonemic equivalence. Thus Rimbaud's vowelsonnet,
and Fonagy's entire exposition of the `symbolism' of linguistic
sounds (Diogène, 51, p. 78): everyone would agree to recognise that `i' is
lighter, faster and thinner than `u'; that `k' and `r' are harder than `l', etc.
The feeling of thinness associated with the vowel `i' may be the result of a
subconscious kinaesthetic perception of the position of the tongue in the
emission of this sound. The `r' appears masculine [!] by reason of the greater
muscular effort required to emit it in comparison with the alveolar `l' or the labial
`m'.
A real metaphysics of an original langue, a desperate attempt to rediscover
a natural deposit of the poetic, an expressive genius of language, that would
only have to be captured and transcribed.
In fact, all this is coded, and it is just as arbitrary to correlate the
repetition of the phoneme `f' with the passing breeze as it is to correlate
the word `table' with the concept of table. There is nothing more in
common between them than there is between a piece of music and what it
`evokes' (landscape or passion), other than cultural convention, or a code.
That this code claims to be anthropological (`naturally' soft vowels) takes
nothing away from its arbitrary character. Conversely moreover, we can
clearly maintain, with Benveniste, that the very strong cultural convention
that binds the word `table' to the concept of `table' imposes genuine
necessity, and that at bottom the sign is never arbitrary. This is correct: the
fundamental arbitrariness lies not in the internal organisation of the sign,
but in the imposition of the sign as value, that is to say, in the
presupposition of two instances and their equivalence in accordance with
the law: the sign acting as a stand-in, as emanating from a reality that
makes signs to you. Such is linguistics' metaphysics, and such is its
imaginary. Its interpretation of the poetic is still haunted by this presupposition.
By contrast, when Harpo Marx waves a real sturgeon instead of
pronouncing the password `sturgeon', then indeed, by substituting the
referent of the term and by abolishing their separation, he really explodes
the arbitrariness at the same time as the system of representation, in a
poetic act par excellence: putting the signifier `sturgeon' to death by its own
referent.
Whether conceptual or pre-conceptual, it is always the `message' and the
`aim of the message as such', by which Jakobson defines the poetic
function, which by autonomising the operation of the signifying material
merely refers it to a supplementary effect of signification. Something other
The `self-presence' [présence à lui-même] of the signifier is analysed in
terms of redundancy, as an internal echo, as resonance, phonetic recurrence,
etc. (Hopkins: `The verse is a discourse that repeats, either wholly
or partially, the same phonemic figure'). Or again:
It is acknowledged that poets worthy of the name possess a delicate and
penetrating sensibility as regards the impressive value of the words and sounds
with which they compose; to communicate this value to their readers, they are
often moved to represent, around the principal word, the phonemes that
characterise it, in such a way that, in short, this word becomes the generator of
the entire line in which it appears. (M. Grammont, Traité de phonétique [Paris:
Delagrave], 1933)
In all this, the `labour' of the signifier always appears as a positive
assemblage, concurrent with that of the signified, which sometimes
coincide, and sometimes diverge, to cite Fonagy again, but in any case the
outcome is merely `a subjacent current of signification' -- no question of
escaping the being of discourse. And it could not be otherwise from a
perspective that conceives the poetic as the autonomisation of one of the
functional categories of the order of discourse.
The other Jakobsonian formula maintains this illusion: the poetic
function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection to
the axis of combination. Equivalence is promoted to the rank of the
constitutive process of the sequence.
In poetry, one syllable is equalized with any other syllable of the same sequence;
word stress is assumed to equal word stress, as unstress equals unstress, long is
matched with long, short is matched with short ... [Jakobson, `Linguistics and
Poetics' in Language in Literature, ed. K. Pomorska and
S. Rudy, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard, 1987, p. 71]
Of course, articulation is no longer that of customary syntax, it is always
rather a question of a constructive architecture; that anything other than a
scansion of equivalence could start to play a role in prosody is never
envisaged. Jakobson is content to substitute the ambiguity of the signified
for the ambivalence of the signifier.
Ambiguity is what characterises the poetic and distinguishes it from the
discursive: `Ambiguity is an intrinsic, inalienable character of any selffocussed
message briefly, a corollary feature of poetry' (Jakobson,
`Linguistics and Poetics', p. 85). `The machinations of ambiguity are
among the very roots of poetry' (Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity
[London: Chatto & Windus, 1963] ). Jakobson again:
The supremacy of the poetic function over the referential function does not
obliterate the reference but makes it ambiguous. The double-sensed message
finds correspondence in a split addresser, a split addressee, as well as in a split
reference. [`Linguistics and Poetics', p. 85]
In this way, all the categories of discursive communication `work loose'
in the poetic (all, curiously, except the code, of which Jakobson does not
speak: what does the code become? Does it too become ambiguous? But it
would then be the end of langue and linguistics). Ambiguity is not
dangerous in itself. It does not change the principles of identity and
equivalence in the slightest, nor does it change the principle of meaning as
value; it merely produces floating values, renders identities diffuse, and
makes the rules of the referential game more complex, without abolishing
anything. Thus, for Jakobson, the ambiguous sender and addressee merely
signifies the uncoupling of the I/YOU relation, internal to the message,
from the author/reader relation: the positions of the respective subjects
have not been lost, in some sense they expand indefinitely -- subjects
become unsettled in their subject-positions. Thus the message becomes
unsettled, ambiguous, in its definition; all categories (sender, addressee,
message, referent) move, work loose in their respective positions, but the
structural grid of discourse remains the same.
`The machinations of ambiguity' do not therefore make a great deal of
difference to the form of discourse. Jakobson has this bold formula:
Poetry does not consist in adding rhetorical ornament to discourse: it involves a
total revaluation of discourse and all its components, whatever they may be.
Bold and ambiguous, since the components (sender/addressee, message/code,
etc.) maintain their separate existences, they are simply `revalued'.
The general economy remains the same -- the political economy of
discourse. At no point does this thought advance to the point of the
abolition of separate functions: the abolition of the subject of communication
(and therefore the sender/addressee distinction); the abolition of the
message as such (and therefore of all the code's structural autonomy). All
this work, in which the radical character of the poetic act consists, is
swamped by `ambiguity' and by a certain hesitation as regards linguistic
categories. A `discourse within a discourse', a `message centred on itself':
all this merely defines a rhetoric of ambiguity. But the ambiguous
discourse, squinting at itself (a strabismus of signs), remains the discourse
of positivity, the discourse of the sign as value.
In the poetic, by contrast, language turns back on itself to be abolished.
It is not `centred' on itself, it decentres itself. It undoes the entire process of
the constructive logic of the sign, resolving all the internal specularity that
makes a sign a sign: something full, reflected, centred on itself, and, as
such, effectively ambiguous. The poetic is the loss of the spectacular
closure of the sign and the message.
At bottom, this is the same metaphysics that has governed the theory of
artistic form since romanticism: the bourgeois metaphysics of totality. Art
All this is attained by means of an identification between signifier and signified
... the aesthetic sign ... is not confined to a given denotatum, but rather
expands every time the structure within which it is inevitably embodied, is duly
appreciated -- a sign whose signified, resounding relentlessly against its signifier,
keeps acquiring new echoes. (ibid., p. 36)
This, then, is a schema of a first (denotative) phase of reference, followed
by a second phase of `harmonic' reference, where a `theoretically unlimited'
chain reaction is operative -- hence the evocation of the cosmic.
This theory serves as the basic ideology of everything we have been able
to say about the poetic (nor does psychoanalysis escape this) -- ambiguity,
polysemia, polyvalence, polyphony of meaning: it is always a matter of the
radiation of the signified, of a simultaneity of significations.
The linear character of discourse hides an harmonious concert of different
messages. (Fonagy, Diogène, 51, p. 104)
The semantic density of language, the wealth of information, etc.: the poet
`liberates' all sorts of virtualities (with, as a corollary, a differential
hermeneutics of the role played by the reader: every interpretation
`enriches' the text with that reader's personal harmonies). This whole myth
plays on a `savage' pre-conceptual anteriority and a `virginity' of meaning:
The poet rejects the usual and appropriate term for the concept, which is a
skeletal reduction of all previous experiences, when he finds himself in front of
an untamed, virginal, reality ... The word must be recreated each time from an
intense personal experience; the skeleton of the thing in itself must be attired in
living flesh so as to give it the concrete reality the thing has for me. (ibid., p. 97)
We are no longer sure whether to undress the concept or dress it up in
order to rediscover the virginity of the poetic! In any case, it is a question
of uncovering `the secret correspondences that might exist between things'.
This romantic theory, with its conception of `genius', paradoxically turns
out to be rewritten today in terms of information theory. This polyphonic
`wealth' can be put in terms of `additional information'. At the level of the
signified: Petrarch's poetry constitutes a `large capital of information' on
love (Eco, The Open Work, p. 54). At the level of the signifier a certain
type of disorder, rupture and negation of the customary and predictable
linguistic order increases the rate of information of the message. There
would be a `dialectical tension' between the elements of order and disorder
that can serve as a base-rate within the poetic. Whereas the most probable
use of the linguistic system would yield nothing, the unexpectedness of the
Thus the semiological imaginary easily reconciles romantic polyphony
and quantitative description:
The structure of poetry can most rigorously be described and interpreted in
terms of a chain of possibilities. ... A superior accumulation at mid-range
frequencies of a certain class of phonemes, or the contrasting assemblage of two
opposed classes in the phonemic texture of a line, a strophe, or a poem, plays the
role of a `subjacent current of signification'. (Fonagy, Diogène, 51)
`In language, form has a manifestly granular structure, which is open to a
quantitative description' (Jakobson). With this we can confront Kristeva:
Words are not non-decomposable entities held together by their meaning, but
assemblages of signifying, phonemic and scriptural atoms leaping from word to
word, thus creating unsuspected and unconscious relations between the elements
of the discourse: this putting into relation of signifying elements constitutes a
signifying infrastructure of the langue. (Julia Kristeva, `Poésie et négativité', in
Séméiotikè [Paris: Seuil, 1969], p. 185)
All these formulas converge on the idea of a `Brownian' stage of
language, an emulsional stage of the signifier, homologous to the molecular
stage of physical matter, that liberates `harmonies' of meaning just as
fission or fusion liberate new molecular affinities. The whole conceived as
an `infrastructure', a `subjacent current', that is to say, as a logically prior,
or structurally more elementary, stage of discourse, just like matter. This is
a scientistic, `materialist' view of discourse, where the atom and the
molecule are properly assimilated to the secondary articulation of language,
as the molecular stage -- an original stage, prior to the differentiating
organisation of meaning -- is to the poetic, Besides, Kristeva is not
afraid of her own metaphor: she says that modern science has broken the
body down into simple elements in the same way as (poetic) linguistics has
disarticulated signification into signifying atoms.
There, concurrently with the metaphysics of primary articulation (the
metaphysics of signifieds, bound to the play of signifying units), what we
might call the metaphysics of secondary articulation takes shape, in which
the effect of infrastructural signification is bound up with the play of
distinct units, the minimal entities of discourse, where they are once again
taken as positive valencies (just as atoms and molecules have an elementary
valency), as phonemic materiality whose assemblage takes place in
terms of linkages and probabilities.
But the poetic is no more based on the autonomous articulation of the
phonemic levy than on that of words or syntax. It does not play secondary
articulation off against the primary.
[122]
It is the abolition of the analytic
distinction of the articulations on which language's capacity for discourse
and its operational autonomy rests, as the means of expression (and as the
object of linguistics). In any case, why should the phonemic level be more
`materialist' than that of the lexical concept or the sentence? As soon as we
Tel Quel have taken the deconstruction of the sign furthest, up to the
total `liberation' of the signifier. End of the mortgage of the signified and
the message, there is no `polysemia', it is the signifier that is plural. No
more `ambiguity' of the message, just the intertextuality of the signifier,
which is linked with and is produced by its pure `material' logic. The
endless text of the paragram, significance is the real level of the productivity
of language, a productivity beyond value, opposed to the signification
of the sign-product.
Julia Kristeva, in `Poésie et négativité' (pp. 185ff.) comes closest to
acknowledging a poetic form, even if the superstition of a `materialist
production' of meaning leads her nevertheless, by returning the poetic to
the semiotic order, to censoriously describe it as a radical alternative.
She posits the ambivalence of the poetic signified (and not its mere
ambiguity): it is concrete and general at the same time, it includes both
(logical) affirmation and negation, it announces the simultaneity of the
possible and the impossible; far from postulating the `concrete versus the
general', it explodes this conceptual break: bivalent logic (0/1) is abolished
by ambivalent logic. Hence the very particular negativity of the poetic. The
bivalent logic of discourse rests on the negation internal to the judgement,
it founds the concept and its self-equivalence (the signified is what it is).
The negativity of the poetic is a radical negativity bearing on the logic of
judgement itself. Something `is' and is not what it is: a utopia (in the literal
sense) of the signified. The thing's self-equivalence (and, of course, the
subject's) is volatilised. Thus the poetic signified is the space where `Non-Being
intertwines with Being in a thoroughly disconcerting manner'. But
there is a danger (which can be seen in outline in Kristeva's work) of taking
this `space' as a topic again, and taking the `intertwining' as, once again,
the dialectic. There is a danger of filling this space up with every figure of
substitution: `Metaphor, metonymy, and all the tropes are inscribed in
space surrounded by this double semantic structure.' The danger of the
metaphor, of an economy of metaphor that remains positive. In Kristeva's
chosen example, Baudelaire's meubles voluptueux (`voluptuous furniture'),
the poetic effect does not stem from an added erotic value, a play of
additional phantasms nor from a metaphorical or metonymic `value'. It
Metaphor is simply the transfer of value from one field to the other, to the
point of the `absorption of a multiplicity of texts (meanings) in the
message' (Kristeva, `Poésie et négativité', p. 194). The poetic implies the
reversibility of one field onto the other, and thus the annulment of their
respective values. Whereas values are combined, implicated and intertextualised
in the metaphor according to a play of `harmonies' (the `secret
accord of language'), in poetic enjoyment they are annulled: radical
ambivalence is non-valence.
Kristeva, then, reduces the radical theory of ambivalence to a theory of
intertextuality and the `plurality of codes'. The poetic can no longer be
distinguished from discourse save by `the infinite nature of its code'; it is a
plural discourse, the other only being the limit case of a monological
discourse, a discourse with only one code. There is therefore a place for
both types of discourse in a general semiotics: `The semiotic practice of
speech [discourse] is only one possible semiotic practice' (ibid., p. 215).
Semanalysis has a duty to take them all into account, without exclusion,
that is to say, without neglecting the irreducibility of the poetic, but equally
without reducing it to the logic of the sign. Semanalysis has a duty to
constitute a `non-reductive typology of the plurality of semiotic practices'.
There is an increasing intricacy of the different logics of meaning:
The functioning of speech [la parole] is impregnated with paragrammatism, just
as the functioning of poetic language is circumscribed by the laws of speech.
(ibid., p. 214)
Once again Starobinski's doubts about Saussure come to the surface: the
latter's tolerance of both the poetic and the discursive in the name of
universal rules of language (here in the name of a `genuinely materialist'
science called semiotics). In fact, this is a reductive and repressive position.
For from the poetic to the discursive there is no difference in their
respective articulation of meaning, there is a radical antagonism. Neither
of them is an `infrastructure of signification' (would the logical discourse on
it be its `superstructure'?). Further, discourse, logos, is not a particular
case in the infinity of codes: it is the code that puts an end to infinity, it is
the discourse of closure that puts an end to the poetic, to the para-- and the
The semiotic project is only a more subtle way of neutralising the
radicality of the poetic and saving the hegemony of linguistics (re-baptised
`semiotics'), no longer by pure and simple annexation, but under cover of
the ideology of `plurality'.
The subversion of linguistics by the poetic does not stop here: it leads
one to wonder whether the rules of language even hold good for the field of
language over which they prevail, that is to say, in the dominant sphere of
communication (similarly, the failure of political economy to give an
account of anterior societies leads one, as an after-effect, to wonder if
these principles have any value for us). Now it is true that the immediate
practice of language is somewhat resistant to the rational abstraction of
linguistics. O. Mannoni puts this well in `The ellipsis and the bar':
Linguistics originates from the bar it has installed between the signifier and the
signified, and their reunion spells its death -- which brings us back to conversation
in everyday life. (`L'ellipse et la barre', in Clefs pour l'imaginaire, p. 35)
The Saussurian bar has facilitated the renewal of linguistic theory from
top to bottom. In the same way, Marxism, by means of the concept of a
material infrastructure opposed to the `superstructure', has established
something like an `objective' and revolutionary analysis of society. Science
is based on rupture. In exactly the same way, a `science', a rationalist
practice (organisation), originates from the distinction between theory and
practice. Every science and every rationality lasts as long as this rupture
lasts. Dialectics makes endless formal adjustments to this rupture, it never
resolves it. To dialecticise the infra-- and the superstructure, theory and
practice, or even signifier and signified, langue and parole, is merely a vain
effort at totalisation. Science lives and dies with the rupture.
This is indeed why current non-scientific practice, both linguistic and
social, is revolutionary in some way, because it does not make these kinds of
distinctions. Just as it has never made a distinction between mind and body,
whereas every dominant religion and philosophy survives only on the basis
of this distinction, so our, everybody's, immediate and `savage' social
practices do not make a distinction between theory and practice, infra-- and
superstructure: of itself and without debating the issue, it is transversal,
beyond rationality, whether bourgeois or Marxist. Theory, `good' Marxist
theory, never analyses real social practice, it analyses the object that it
produces for itself through separating this practice into an infra-- and a
In the same way, the immediate, everyday linguistic practice of speech
and the `speaking subject' pays no attention to the distinction between the
sign and the world (nor that between signifier and signified, the arbitrary
character of the sign, etc.). Benveniste says and acknowledges this, but
only as regards memory, since this is precisely the stage that science
overcomes it and leaves it far behind: it interests only the linguistic subject,
the subject of the langue, which is at the same time the subject of
knowledge: Benveniste himself. Somewhere, however, the other is right,
speaking in advance [en deçà] of the distinction between sign and world, in
total `superstition' -- the other (along with ourselves and even Benveniste)
knows more, it is true, about the essentials than Benveniste the linguist.
For the methodology of the separation of signifier and signified holds no
better than the methodology of the separation of the mind and the body.
The same imaginary in both cases. In the one case, psychoanalysis
[123]
came
to say what this was, as, in the other, did poetics. But there has basically
never been any need for psychoanalysis nor for poetics: no-one has ever
believed in them apart from the scholars and linguists themselves (just as,
in the final analysis, no-one has ever believed in economic determinism
other than economic scientists and their Marxist critics).
Virtually, and literally, speaking, there has never been a linguistic subject;
it is not even true of we who speak that we purely and simply reflect the
code of linguistics. Likewise, there has never been an economic subject, a
homo oeconomicus -- this fiction has never been inscribed anywhere other
than in a code -- there has never been a subject of consciousness, and there
has never been a subject of the unconscious. In the simplest practice, there
is always something that cuts across these simulation models, which are all
rational models; there has always been a radicality absent from every code,
every `objective' rationalisation, that has basically only ever given rise to a
single great subject: the subject of knowledge, whose form is shattered from
today, from now, by undivided speech.
[124]
Basically we have all known this
for much longer than Descartes, Saussure, Marx and Freud.
The Witz, or The Phantasm of the Economic in Freud
Is there an affinity between the poetic and the psychoanalytic? If it is clear
that poetic form (dissemination, reversibility, strict delimitation of the
corpus) cannot be reconciled with linguistic form (the signifier-signified
equivalence, linearity of the signifier, undefined corpus), it seems, on the
contrary, that it intersects with psychoanalytic form (primary processes:
The poetic and the psychoanalytic do not mix. The symbolic mode is not
that of the labour of the unconscious. To question the poetic as Freud does
is therefore to question psychoanalysis from the standpoint of the symbolic:
the analysis in reverse is always the only one that, by means of this
very reversal, allows us to escape theory, which is purely and simply the
exercise of power.
Freud's analysis of the joke, the mot d'esprit, can serve as our guiding
thread, for otherwise there is no theorised difference in Freud between the
properly symptomatic field and that of the work of art and `artistic
creation' (the concept of `sublimation', as we know, suffers from a lack of
rigour and an hereditary idealism). This is a point of considerable
importance: if the poem is neither a lapsus nor a mot d'esprit, there is
nothing to account for it in the theory of the unconscious.
Contrary to Saussure, who is not concerned with poetic pleasure nor
even with any cause or finality whatever of what he describes, Freud's
analysis is functional, it is a theory of enjoyment [jouissance] in which work
on the signifier is always related to the fulfilment of a desire. Moreover,
this is an economic theory of enjoyment. The Witz, the mot d'esprit or joke
moves more rapidly, by way of short-cuts and short-circuits, towards what
it means to say, and it says things, it `liberates' significations that would
never have existed without it, other than at the cost of considerable
conscious intellectual effort. It is this ellipsis of psychical distance that is
the source of enjoyment. In other words, the joke lifts the censorship, and
the subversion this bring about `liberates' the energies bound to the super
ego and the process of repression. The `liberation' of affects: the disinvestment
of unconscious or preconscious representations; the disinvestment of
the repressing psychical agency. In any case, enjoyment emerges from a
residue, an excess or a differential quantum of energy made available by
the operation of the Witz.
In this sense, concision, or the multiple use of the same material in
different modalities, is a fundamental characteristic of the mot d'esprit.
Always economising on effort: a single signifier may signify at multiple
levels; we draw a maximum of (sometimes contradictory) significations
from a minimum of signifiers. It is futile to insist on analogies with the
poetic mode: the multiple use of the same material evokes Saussure's
anagram, coupling the necessary delimitation of the corpus and the
`maximal energy in signs' of which Nietzsche speaks. Freud too says of the
poet that `polyphonic orchestration allows him to emit messages on the
threefold levels of clear consciousness, the subconscious and the unconscious'.
This energetic calculus has something of the whiff of capital about it, the
capital of a saving of energy (Freud continually employs this term) where
enjoyment never comes about save by the subtraction, by default, of a
residue or a surplus from an investment (but never an excess) -- or even
from nothing at all: from an inverse process of expenditure, the abolition
of energies and finalities. We are not speaking primarily about `labour', or
even the `signifier', because this level is never primary for Freud. His
libidinal economy is based on the existence of unconscious contents (affects
and representations), of a repression and a pro-duction of the repressed, a
calculated investment that steers this production towards an equilibrium
(the resolution of tension) of bound and unbound energies. Freudian
enjoyment takes place and is spoken of in terms of forces and quanta of
energy. In the Witz or the dream, the play of signifiers is never in itself the
articulation of enjoyment: it only opens roads to phantasmatic or repressed
contents. The unconscious is a `medium' which is never a `message' in
itself, since something like desire -- strictly understood in terms of the
topological or the economic theory -- is necessary in order that it, the `Id'
that speaks, speaks in its own voice. The play of the signifier is only ever
the tracery of desire. Here, around the unconscious `mode of production'
(and its mode of representation), is where the entire problem of libidinal
economy and the critique of libidinal economy is posed, in the perspective
of an enjoyment that never had anything to do with the economic.
In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud says of the slip of the
tongue, the lapsus:
The reader's preparedness alters the text and reads into it something which he is
expecting or with which he is occupied. The only contribution towards a
misreading which the text itself need make is that of affording some resemblance
in the verbal image, which the reader can alter in the sense he requires.
(Standard Edition, Vol. 6, 1960, pp. 112-13)
It is of course a matter of a latent, repressed content, waiting to leap up
and `profit' from the fantasies, the interstices and the weak points of logical
discourse in order to cause an explosion. This, at the level of discourse, is
what happens to the body in the concept of anaclisis: desire `profits' from
the satisfaction of a physiological need in order to invest libidinally in a
particular zone of the body, diverting the pure and simple function
(organic logic) towards the fulfilment of desire. While this is true, it is not
entirely true, since the articulation of the need and the desire has never
been clarified. Between the two terms, so thoughtlessly formulated, on the
It is certain, however, that psychoanalysis has given the signifier-signified
relation an almost poetic slant. The signifier, instead of manifesting
the signified in its presence, is in an inverse relation with it: it signifies
the signified in its absence and its repression, in accordance with a
negativity that never used to appear in linguistic economy. The signifier is
in a necessary (not an arbitrary) relation with the signified, but only as the
presence of something is with its absence. It signifies the lost object and
takes the place of this loss.
The concept of representation could hardly, in psychoanalysis, be situated
between an objective reality on the one hand and its signifying figuration on the
other, but rather between an hallucinated reality, a mnemic image of a lost
object of satisfaction, on the one hand, and a substitute-object on the other,
whether it is a formula-object like that constituted by the phantasm, or an
instrumental contraption such as the fetish may be. (S. Leclaire, Psychanalyser
[Paris: Seuil, 1968], p. 65)
Linguistic equivalence is lost, since the signifier is instead of and in the
place of something else which no longer is, nor has it ever been. It is always
therefore what it no longer is. The fetish-object, in its vacillating identity,
is the endless metaphoric series of what is permanently denied: the absence
of the phallus in the mother, sexual difference.
The removal of identifying marks from psychoanalytic signification in
relation to linguistics is well formulated by Mannoni:
By introducting the signifier, we make meaning lose its balance. This is not
because the signifier brings with it a collection of signifieds of the sort that a
semantics of the traditional type might locate them, but because we interpret
Saussure's ellipsis as if it kept the place of the signified empty, a place which can
only become full again in the different discourses in which a single signifier is
then the common element ... If we also uncouple the signifier from the weight
A remarkable passage. But what is this `blank' signified that successive
discourses will fill? What is a signifier `liberated' so as to be given over to
another order? Can we take this `play' from the linguistic categories of the
signifier and the signified without shattering the bar which separates them?
The bar is the strategic element which establishes both the principle of
non-contradiction in the sign, and its components, as values. This is a
coherent structure, so we cannot inject just anything into it (such as
ambivalence, contradiction, or the primary process). Benveniste puts
things clearly into focus in his critique of Freud's Gegensinn der Urworte
(`On the antithetical meaning of primal words', 1910, Standard Edition,
Vol. 11, 1957, pp. 155ff.):
It is thus improbable a priori that ... languages, however archaic they are
assumed to be, escape the `principle of contradiction'. Let us suppose that a
language exists in which `large' and `small' are expressed identically, then the
distinction between `large' and `small' literally has no meaning. For it is indeed
contradictoriness to impute to a language both a knowledge of two notions as
opposite while, at the same time, the expression of these notions as identical. (E.
Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics [tr. Mary Elizabeth Meek, Miami:
University of Miami Press, 1971], p. 71)
And this is correct: ambivalence is never part of linguistic signification.
`It being proper to language to express only what it is possible to express',
it is as absurd to imagine a meaning that would not be conveyed by some
distinction, as it is on the other hand, to imagine a signifier that would
mean everything:
To imagine a state of language ... in which a certain object would be
denominated as being itself and, at the same time, something else, and in which
the relation expressed would be a relation of permanent contradiction, in which
everything would be itself and something else, and hence neither self nor the
other, is to imagine a pure chimera. (ibid., pp. 71-2)
Benveniste knows what he is talking about, since all linguistic rationalisation
is there in order to prevent precisely this. There is no risk of the
ambivalence of the repressed rising to the surface of linguistic science,
since the latter is in its entirety a part of the repressing agency. But within
its own order, linguistic science is right: nothing will ever participate in
language that does not obey the principles of non-contradiction, identity
and equivalence.
It is not a matter of saving linguistics, it is a matter of seeing that
Benveniste is clear-sighted concerning the choice to be made here
(moreover, he is only clear-sighted here because it is a matter of protecting
his field from incursions from other fields -- he tolerates the existence of a
`symbolic area' somewhere else, but this area `is discourse, not language' --
If therefore we are, with the psychoanalytic signifier, beyond all logical
equivalence, we are not, for all that, outside nor beyond value. For in its
`hesitation' [trébuchement], it always designates what it represents as value
in absentia, under the sign of repression. Value is no longer logically
conveyed by the signifier, it haunts it phantasmatically. The bar separating
them has changed its meaning, but it remains nevertheless: there indeed
remains a potential signified (a repressed signifier with an unresolved value
content) on the one hand, and a signifier, itself an instance established as
such by repression, on the other.
In fact, there is no longer any equivalence, but equally, there is no more
ambivalence, that is, dissolution of value. Here lies the difference with the
poetic, where the loss of value is radical. There is no more value in the
poetic, not even absent or repressed, to nourish a residual signifier in the
form of a symptom, a phantasm, or a fetish. The fetish-object is not poetic,
precisely because it is opaque, more saturated with value than any other,
because the signifier is not disintegrated in it but, on the contrary, is fixed,
crystallised by a value that is for ever buried and for ever hallucinated as a
lost reality. There is no longer a means of unblocking the system, forever
caught fast in the obsession with meaning, in the fulfilment of a perverse
desire that comes to fill the empty form of the object with meaning. In the
poetic (the symbolic) the signifier disintegrates absolutely, whereas in
psychoanalysis it endlessly shifts under the effect of the primary processes
and is distorted following the folds of repressed values. Whether distorted,
transversal or in `points de capiton' (as Lacan says), the psychoanalytic
signifier remains a surface indexed on the turbulent reality of the
unconscious, whereas in the poetic it diffracts and radiates in the anagrammatic
process; it no longer falls under the blows of the law that erects it,
nor under the blows of the repressed which binds it, it no longer has
anything to designate, not even the ambivalence of a repressed signified. It
is nothing more than the dissemination and the absolution of value,
experienced, however, without the shadow of anxiety, in total enjoyment.
The illumination of the work of art or the symbolic act comes from the
point of the non-repressed, the point of no return, where the repression
and the incessant repetition of meaning in the phantasm or the fetish, the
incessant repetition of the prohibition and value, are lifted, where death
and the dissolution of meaning play without hindrance.
`Grasp in what has been written a symptom of what has been silenced'
(Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil [tr. R. J. Hollingdale, Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1990]). A psychoanalytic proposition par excellence: everything
that `means' something (particularly scientific discourse in its `transparency')
has the function of silencing. And what it silences comes back to
haunt it in an easy-going but irreversible subversion of its discourse. This is
the place of the psychoanalytic, in the non-place relative to every logical
discourse.
The poetic, however, silences nothing, and does not come back to haunt
it. For it is always death that is repressed and silenced. It is actualised here
in the sacrifice of meaning. The nothing, death, absence, is overtly stated
and resolved: death is manifest at last, and is at last symbolised, whereas it
is only symptomatic in all other formations of discourse. This, of course,
signals the decline of all linguistics, which thrives on the bar of equivalence
between what is said and what is meant, but it is also the end of psychoanalysis
which, for its part, lives off the bar of repression between what is
said and what is silenced, repressed, denied, phantasmatic and infinitely
repeated in the mode of denial or de-negation: death. When, in a social
formation or a formation of discourse, death speaks, is spoken and exchanged
in a symbolic apparatus, psychonalysis no longer has anything more
to say. When Rimbaud says, of his Saison en enfer, `it is true literally, and
in every sense', this also means that there is no hidden, latent, meaning,
that nothing is repressed, that there is nothing behind it, that there is
nothing for psychoanalysis. It is at this price that every meaning is possible.
Linguistics originates from the bar it has installed between the signifier and the
signified, and their reunion spells its death. (Mannoni, `L'ellipse et la barre',
p. 35)
Psychoanalysis too, originates from the bar it has installed, under the law
of castration and repression, between what is said and what is silenced (or
`between an hallucinated reality ... and a substitute-object' -- Leclaire,
Psychanalyser, p. 65), and for it, too, their reunion spells death.
That there is no residue signifies that there is no longer a signifier and a
signified, no signified behind the signifier, no structural bar distributing
them on either side; it also signifies that there is no longer a repressed
agency beneath a repressing agency (as there is in psychoanalysis), no
longer a latent beneath a manifest, nor the primary processes playing hide-and-seek
with the secondary processes. There is no signified, of whatever
sort, produced by the poem, no more there is a `dream thought' behind the
poetic text, nor a signifying formula (Leclaire), nor any kind of libido or
potential energy which somehow threads its way through the primary
processes and would still testify to a productive economy of the unconscious.
There is no more a libidinal than there is a political economy, nor of
course than there is a linguistic economy, that is to say, a political economy
of language. Because the economic, wherever it is, is based on the
remainder (only the remainder permits production and reproduction),
[125]
Market value, signified value and unconscious/repressed value are all
produced from what remains, from the residual precipitate of the symbolic
operation. It is always this remainder that is accumulated and that fuels the
diverse economies that govern our lives. To pass beyond economics (and if
`to change life' has any meaning, it can only be this) is to exterminate this
remainder in all domains. The poetic is the model of this, since it operates
without equivalence, accumulation, or residue.
To come back to the Witz: can we not assume that enjoyment is the
effect of `economising', of gaining potential due to the `ellipsis of psychical
distance', or the irruption of the primary process into the order of
discourse, the irruption of a meaning beneath a meaning, or the deeper
reality imposed by the presumed duality of the psychical agencies? Can we
not assume that the finality of the `other scene' to come is produced by
twisting this latter around, the finality of the return of the repressed as the
psychical value of the very separation of the agencies (topographical
hypothesis), and the corollary of a binding and an unbinding of energies
from which, at a given moment, there would result the libidinal surplus
value called enjoyment (economic hypothesis)?
Can we not assume that enjoyment happens on the contrary at the end of
the separation of the separate fields, that it arises out of the very
discrimination of the agencies, and therefore from the differential play of
investments, and therefore from within the logical order of psychoanalysis?
Is this the effect of the conflagration, the short-circuit (Kurzschluss)
telescoping between separate fields (phonemes, words, roles, institutions)
that until then had meaning only due to their separation, and that lose their
meaning in this brutal reconciliation that causes them to be exchanged? Is
this not the Witz, the effect of enjoyment where the separated subject is
also lost, not only in the reflexive distance of consciousness, but also as
regards the agency of the unconscious? The abolition of the super-ego at
this moment, of the effort to maintain the discipline of the reality principle
and the rationality of meaning, does not merely signify the effacement of
the repressing agency to the advantage of the repressed agency, it signifies
the simultaneous effacement of both. This is where we find something of
the poetic in the Witz and the comical, something beyond the compulsive
resurrection of the phantasm and the fulfilment of desire.
Freud cites Kant saying `Das Komische ist eine in nichts zergangene
The example of Lichtenberg is not an exceptional case. If we take a good
look at them, all the examples of absurd logic (which is the limit of the
Witz, and the point at which enjoyment is at its most acute) chosen by
Freud -- the cauldron, the cake, the salmon mayonnaise, cats that have two
holes cut in their skin precisely at the place where their eyes are, the child
that, as soon as it comes into the world, is fortunate to find a mother to
take care of it -- all these examples can be analysed in the same way, as the
reduplication of an identity or a rationality that turns back on itself in order
to disintegrate and be eliminated, as the reabsorption of a signifier into
itself without a trace of meaning.
`Eifersucht ist eine Leidenschaft, die mit Eifer sucht, was Leiden schafft'
(an untranslatable Witz: `jealousy is a passion that with eagerness seeks
what causes pain'). Multiple use of the same material, thus pleasure from
the deduction of energy? But Freud himself admits that the multiple use of
the same material is also the most difficult to accomplish -- the simplest still
being saying two different things with the aid of different signifiers. What
changes is that the two things are said simultaneously. But the essential
thing then is the abolition of the time the signifier takes to unfold, its
successivity: pleasure derives not from the addition of signifieds under the
same signifier (economistic interpretation), but from the elimination of
the logical time of enunciation, which amounts to the cancellation of the
signifier itself (anti-economistic interpretation). Moreover, the `Eifersucht'
Witz constitutes a proper Saussurian coupling: it realises, at the level of a
phrase and its `anti-phrase', what Saussure said of every vowel and its
Freud often speaks of `joke-technique', which he distinguishes from the
basic process in this way:
[The joke-technique consists in] the use of the same name twice, once as a whole
and again divided up into separate syllables ... in the manner of a riddle.
(Standard Edition, Vol. 8, 1960, p. 31)
But this is nothing but `technique'. The same goes for the multiple use of
the same material: all these techniques can be summarised under a single
category, that is, condensation:
The multiple use of the same material is ... a special case of condensation; play
upon words is nothing other than a condensation without substitute-formation;
condensation remains the wider category. All these techniques are dominated by
a tendency to compression, or rather to saving. It all seems to be a question of
economy. In Hamlet's words: `Thrift, thrift, Horatio!' (ibid., p. 42)
What Freud neglects here is that the `techniques' of the Witz are by
themselves sources of pleasure. He affirms this, but only, however, in order
to add, as quickly as possible:
We now see that what we have described as the techniques of jokes ... are
rather the sources from which jokes provide pleasure ... The technique which is
characteristic of jokes and peculiar to them, however, consists in their procedure
for safeguarding the use of these methods for providing pleasure against the
objections raised by criticism, which would put an end to the pleasure ... Their
function consists from the first in lifting internal inhibitions and in making
sources of pleasure fertile which have been rendered inaccessible by those
inhibitions, (ibid., p. 130)
Thus everything that might have arisen from the procedure of the Witz
itself is referred back to an original `source' for which the Witz is no longer
anything other than a technical medium.
The same schema applies to the pleasure of recognising and remembering:
This rediscovery of what is familiar is pleasurable, and once more it is not
difficult for us to recognise this pleasure as a pleasure in economy and to relate it
to economy in psychical expenditure ... recognition is pleasurable in itself --
Again, these techniques, `which show so much similarity to that of
"multiple use" in the case of jokes' (ibid., p. 122), have no meaning in
themselves: they are subordinated to the resurgence of a mnemic content
(conscious or unconscious: amongst other things, it may be an originary or
childhood phantasm), of which these techniques are only the means of
expression.
[127]
Like the poetic, every interpretation of the Witz in terms of the
`liberation' of phantasms or psychical energy is false. When the signified
begins to erupt and circulate in every sense (the simultaneity of signifieds
from different levels of the psychical apparatus, the transversality of the
signifier under the pressure of the primary processes), we do not laugh and
we do not enjoy: there is only anguish, hallucination and madness.
Ambiguity and polysemia produce anguish, because the obsession with
meaning (the moral law of signification) remains in its entirety, whereas a
single, clear meaning no longer responds. Enjoyment, on the contrary,
comes from what every imperative, every reference to meaning (manifest
or latent) has swept aside, and this is only possible in an exact reversibility
of all meaning -- not in the proliferation, but in the meticulous reversal of
all meaning. The same goes for energy: neither its `explosive' liberation, its
unbinding, its solitary drift, nor its intensity is enjoyment. Reversibility is
the only source of enjoyment.
[128]
When we laugh or enjoy, it is because, in one way or another, a twisting
or distortion of the signifier or energy has managed to create a void. Thus
the story of someone who loses his key in a dark alley and is looking for it
under the street light, because this is the only chance he has of finding it.
The lost key can be given every hidden meaning (mother, death, phallus
castration, etc.), all undecidable for that matter, but this is unimportant:
the void of logical reason is reduplicated exactly in order to be destroyed,
and it is in the void thus created that the laugh and enjoyment burst out
(not, however, in order that this void `emerges from its subsoil and
establishes itself' -- Lyotard). Freud puts this extremely well: Entfesselung
des Unsinns -- the unleashing of nonsense. But nonsense is not the hidden
hell of meaning [sens], nor the emulsion of all the repressed and contradictory
meanings. It is the meticulous reversibility of every term --
subversion through reversal.
It is by means of the internal logic of the Witz that one of its `external'
characteristics must be interpreted: it shares itself out, it does not consume
itself alone, it is meaningful only in exchange. The flash of wit or the funny
story are like symbolic goods, like champagne, presents, rare goods, or
women in primitive societies. The Witz provokes laughter, or the reciprocity
of another funny story, or even a veritable potlach of stories in
succession. We know the symbolic network of complicity that bind certain
The Witz is necessarily inscribed in a symbolic exchange because it is
bound to a symbolic (rather than an economic) mode of enjoyment. If this
was a matter of `psychical saving', we fail to see why everyone does not
laugh alone, or is not the first to laugh with all this `liberated' psychical
energy. There must, therefore, have been something other than unconscious
economic mechanisms to compel reciprocity. This something else is
precisely the symbolic cancellation of value. It is because terms are
symbolically exchanged, that is to say become reversible and are cancelled
in their own operations, that the poetic and the Witz institute a social
relation of the same type. Only subjects dispossessed of their identity, like
words, are devoted to social reciprocity in laughter and enjoyment.
An Anti-Materialist Theory of Language
We see the outline, in the psychoanalytic interpretation of the dream, of
the Witz, of neuroses and, by extension, of poetry, of a `materialist' theory
of language. The work of the primary process is possible because the
unconscious treats words as things. The signifier, escaping the horizon and
the finality of the signified, becomes pure material once more, available for
another labour, an `elementary' material available for the foldings,
transports and telescopings of the primary process. The phonemic substance
of language takes on the immanence of the material thing, lapsing
back into (if these formulae have any meaning at all) primary articulation
(signifying units), perhaps even into secondary articulation (distinct units).
Sounds (or even letters) are then conceived as the atoms of a substance no
different from that of the body.
It may seem that there was an unsurpassable radicality of language here.
To treat words `as things' would be in principle the fundamental operation
of language, since it seems that we have the last word when we finally draw
out a `materialist' base. But the same goes for materialism as it does for
everything else. The philosophical destiny of this theory is to operate a
simple overturning of idealism, without surpassing endless speculation, by
simply alternating between the two. Hence the concepts of `thing' and of
`matter', negatively forged by idealism as its own hell, its negative
phantasm, have passed silently into a positively real phase, indeed into a
revolutionary explanatory principle, while losing none of the abstraction
that they inherit from their origins. Idealism has created, in repression, the
phantasm of a certain `matter' which, laden with all the stigmata of idealist
repression, re-emerges as materialism. Let's undertake a thorough examination
of the concept of the `thing' by means of which we would like to
delimit a beyond of representation. Having evacuated all transcendence,
there remains a crude, opaque and `objective' matter, a substantial entity,
To treat words `as things' ... in order to express THE thing -- the
Unconscious -- in order to materialise a latent energy. Expression always
falls into the trap, unless it is the repressed, the unsaid (perhaps the
unsayable that here becomes a positive reference), of assuming the force of
an authority, an agency, rather than a substance. Western thought cannot
bear, and has at bottom never been able to bear, a void of signification, a
non-place and a non-value. It requires a topography and an economics. The
radical reabsorption of the sign inaugurated in the poetic (and doubtless in
the Witz as well) has to become the decipherable sign of an unsaid, of
something that perhaps will never give up its code, but that thereby merely
augments its value. Of course, I understand that psychoanalysis is not a
`vulgar' hermeneutics: it is a more subtle hermeneutics in that something
else -- another world, another scene -- is always going on behind the
operation of the material signifier, whose twists and turns can always be
captured by a specialist discourse. Enjoyment is never purely and simply
consumption or consummation. The libido always becomes metabolic in
this operation, it always speaks from the depths of phantasm it always
releases affects. In short, linguistic material is already finalised by a
positive transformation (here a transcription), it always warrants an
interpretation, which envelops it as its analytic reason.
[130]
The `Thing' hides
itself and hides something else. To look for the force is to look for the
signifier.
A profound motivation of the sign-symptom, a consubstantiality of word
and thing, of the fate of language and the fate of the pulsion, the figure and
the force. A libidinal economy whose principle is always to metaphorise
(or metonymise) the unconscious, the body, the libido and the phantasm in
a linguistic disorder. In linguistic motivation, it is always the arbitrary
character of the sign that yields to the positive analogy of the signifier and
the thing signified. In psychoanalytic motivation, it is a reverse necessity
that binds the deconstructed signifier to a primary energetic potential.
Here motivation appears as the transgression of a form by an insurrectional
content. The blind surreality of the libido punctures language's reality
principle and its transparency. This is how, in the best cases, the poetic is
interpreted: Luciano Berio's organic sound, Artaud's theatre of cruelty,
groans, screams and gasps, the incantation and irruption of the body into
This is better than Swinburne's breeze, but it still has to do with
motivation and metaphor: a vitalist, energetic, corporealist metaphor of
the theatre of cruelty. Therefore, in the final analysis, it is a finalist
metaphor, even if it is a matter of a savage finality. The magic of a
`liberation' of an original force (we know Artaud's often shocking affinity
with magic and exorcism, and even, in Héliogabale, with orgiastic mysticism).
Metaphysics is always at the crossroads, as it is at the crossroads of
the economic-energetic view of the unconscious processes (put simply, that
is, the concept of the unconscious): the metaphysical temptation to make
the unconscious as substantial as a body, and thus the finality of its
liberation. The contemporary illusion of the repression that forms the
unconscious as a content, as a force. Form triumphs by circumscribing
what it denies as content, and delimiting it within a finality of the
expression of content or the resurrection of forces.
On this point, there is not so much difference between linguistics and
psychoanalysis, since in both there is always the same attempt to base the
poetic in the connaturality of the discourse and its object:
The distance from words to things is altered by the use made of the `thing' in the
word, by the mediation of its flesh and the echoes its flesh might make, in the
caverns of sensibility, of the rumbling created by the thing. (J.-F. Lyotard,
Discours, figure [Paris: Klincksieck, 1971], p. 77)
Thus the linguists try -- at best -- to preserve the `symbolic' value of sound
against the thesis of the arbitrary. Further on, Lyotard writes:
The thing is not `introduced into' language, but its linguisic arrangement spreads
it out over words, and between them, the rhythms consonant with those that the
thing discussed in the discourse sets up in our body. (ibid., pp. 77-8)
What miracle makes the `thing' consonant with the word through the
medium of the body? Not rhythm, but metaphor. In effect, this is a matter
of a positive economy of the metaphor: the idea of a reconciliation between
the `thing' and the word given back its materiality. But this is false. If it is
true that logical discourse denies the materiality of the word (the
Wortkörper), the poetic is not, by means of a simple inversion, the
resurrection of the word as thing. Far from making the thing appear, it
aims to destroy language itself as a thing. The poetic is precisely the mutual
volatilisation of the status of thing and discourse. That is to say that it aims
at the extermination of language as discourse, but also as materiality; not
by repressing it as discourse does, but by taking it to task to the point of
annihilating it.
This is how even Kristeva, following Heraclitus and Lucretius, states a
materialist theory of the signifier: words do not express the (movement of
the) real, they are it. Not by means of the mediation of ideas, but through
But to say that language makes fire, air, water and earth (or the work of
the unconscious) visible because it is itself an element, an elementary
substance in direct affinity with all the others, is at once more radical than
all the psycho-naturalists' `motivation', and also very far from the truth.
The whole thing needs to be reversed: it is on condition that we see that
fire, water, earth and air are neither values nor positive elements, that they
are metaphors of the continual dissolution of value, of the symbolic
exchange of the world -- on condition that we see that they are not
substances but anti-substances, anti-matter -- this is the sense in which
language may be said to reunite them, as soon as it has been torn from the
logic of the sign and value. This is what the ancient myths (and
the Heraclitean and Nietzschean myth of becoming) used to say about the
elements, and it is in this sense that they are poetic, and even superior to
every analytic interpretation that transposes this dissolution into the
hidden instance of the unsaid, `transpearing' in a no-saying or a sayingother.
There is no materialist reference in the symbolic operation, not even an
`unconscious' one; rather there is the operation of an `anti-matter'. We are
wary of science-fiction, but it is true that there is some analogy between a
particle and an anti-particle, whose encounter would result in their mutual
annihilation (along with, moreover, a fabulous energy), and the principle
of the vowel and its counter-vowel in Saussure, or, in more general terms,
between any given signifier and the anagrammatic double that eliminates
it: here again, nothing remains but a fabulous enjoyment. Kristeva writes:
In this other space, where logical laws of speech have been weakened, the
subject dissolves and, in place of the sign, the clash of signifiers eliminating each
other is instituted. An operation of generalised negativity, which has nothing to
do with the constitutive negativity of the judgement (Aufhebung), nor with the
negativity internal to the judgement (binary logic: 0-1), an annihilating negativity
(Sunyavada Buddhism). A zerological subject, a non-subject who comes to
assume the thought that cancels itself. (`Poésie et négativité', p. 212)
Beyond the Unconscious
The question is this: is there room to offer an hypothesis of the unconscious
-- this energy and affective potential which, in its repression and in its
labour, lies at the basis of the `expressive' disturbance and dislocation of
the order of discourse, and opposes its primary to its secondary processes --
an hypothesis in terms of the poetic process? Evidently everything hangs
together: if the unconscious is this irreversible agency, then the duality of
We must see that the symbolic processes (reversibility, anagrammatic
dispersal, reabsorption without residue) are not at all mixed up with the
primary processes (displacement, condensation, repression). They are
mutually opposed, even if together they are opposed to the logical
discourse of meaning. This singular difference (also as regards enjoyment)
means that a dream, a lapsus, or a joke is not a work of art or a poem. The
difference between the symbolic and the libidinal unconscious, today
largely effaced by the privilege of psychoanalysis, must be re-established to
prohibit psychoanalysis from encroaching where it has nothing to say.
Concerning the poetic (the work of art), the symbolic and (primitive)
anthropology neither Marx nor Freud has been able to say anything unless
either has reduced it to the mode of production on the one hand, and to
repression and castration on the other. Where psychoanalysis and Marxism
come to grief, we must not want to have them fall like angels (or like
beasts), they must be pitilessly analysed according to their failures and
omissions. Today, the limits of each are the strategic points of every
revolutionary analysis.
Marx believed that in economics and its dialectical procedure he
rediscovered the fundamental agency. In fact, he discovered, throughout
many economic convulsions, what systematically haunted it: the very
separation of economics as an agency. Running through the economic,
breeding conflict and making it the site of contradictions is the fantastic
autonomisation of the economy raised to the level of the reality principle,
which these contradictions, however violent, rationalise in their own way.
But this is also true of psychoanalysis: here too, in the term of the
unconscious and the labour of the unconscious, Freud gained possession of
what, in the form of the individual psychical apparatus, resulted from the
This analysis of Marx and Freud is critical. But neither are critical in
relation to the respective separation of their domains. They are not
conscious of the rupture that founds them. They are critical symptomatologies
that subtly turn their respective symptomatological fields into the
determining field. Primary processes, modes of production: `radical'
words, irreducible schemata of determination. It is as such that they
imperialistically export their concepts.
Today, Marxism and psychoanalysis try to mix and exchange their
concepts. Logically, in fact, if both fell within the province of `radical'
critique, they ought to be able to do this. This is not the case, as the failure
of the Freudo-Marxian phantasm in all its forms testifies. But the basic
reason for the incessant failure of this conceptual transfer, and why both
remain desperate metaphors, is precisely due to the fact that Marxism and
psychoanalysis retain their coherence only within their partial definitions
(in their ignorance), and cannot therefore be generalised as analytic
schemata.
A radical theory can be based neither on their `synthesis' nor on their
contamination, but only on their respective ex-termination. Marxism and
psychoanalysis are in crisis. Rather than supporting one another, their
respective crises must be telescoped and speeded up. They may yet do each
other great collateral damage. We must not be deprived of this spectacle:
they are only critical fields.
Note from page [195]:
1. But `forgotten' and covered over by all linguistics with especial care: it was only at this
cost that it could be established as a `science' and ensure its structural monopoly in all
directions.
Note from page [195]:
2. For what follows concerning the anagrammatic material we refer to Jean Starobinski,
Les mots sous les mots [Paris: Gallimard, 1971]. For the basic rules, see `Le souci de la
répétition', pp. 12ff.
Note from page 197:
3. The term `anathema' which can just as easily be an immolated victim as it can a
consecrated object, having drifted in the direction of an accursed object or person,
should retain all its importance for the rest of this analysis.
Note from page 201:
4. The same goes for our perception of space and time, which are unthinkable for us in any
other way than infinity -- a proliferation that corresponds both to their objectification as
value and, here too, to the phantasm of an inexhaustible extension or succession.
Note from page 204:
5. There is a critique to be made here of what Lévi-Strauss, in his Structural Anthropology
[2 vols, tr. M. Layton, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977-9], calls `symbolic efficacity'
since for him it remains bound (as is the vulgar representation of magic) to the operation
of a myth on the body (or on nature) by means of a `symbolic' exchange or
correspondence of signifieds. For example, the difficult birth: mythic speech remobilises
the blocked body along its signified, its content. Instead, the efficacity of the sign must
be understood as the resolution of a formula. It is by making the elements of a formula
exchange and resolve themselves within this exchange that you induce the same
resolution in the sick person's body: the elements of the body (or of nature) enter once
again into exchanges with each other. The impact of signs on the body (or on nature, as
in the legend of Orpheus), their operating force, derives precisely from not being
`value'. There is no rationalisation of the sign in primitive societies, that is to say, there is
no separation between its actual operation and a referential signified, no `reservoir of
meaning' where analogies would be conveyed. The symbolic operation is not analogical,
it resolves, it is revolutionary, and it concerns the materiality of the sign, which it
exterminates as value. There being no more value, the sign actualises the ambivalence,
therefore the total exchange and total reversibility of meaning. Hence its efficacity, since
conflicts, including disease, are only ever resolved in the exchange.
Note from page 205:
6. There again the residue of the analysis fuels the field of `knowledge', the constructive
Eros of `science', in exactly the same way as the residues of the poetic become enmeshed
in the field of communication. Science and discourse speculate on this residue in their
imaginary, where they produce their `surplus-value' and establish their power. What is
not analysed and radically resolved in the symbolic operation is what is frozen under the
death-mask of value -- the beginning of the culture of death and accumulation.
Note from page 209:
7. But the disappearence of every coherent signified is not sufficient to produce the poetic.
If this were the case, then a lexical madness would be sufficient, or an aleatory automatic
writing. It is also necessary that the signifier is eliminated in a rigorous, entirely non-aleatory,
operation, without which it remains `residual', and its mere absurdity will not
save it. In automatic writing, for example, the signified is indeed eliminated (`it means
nothing` -- ça ne veut rien dire) -- even though it lives entirely on the nostalgia for the
signified, and its pleasure consists in leaving every possible signified to chance -- in any
case, the signifier is produced here without any control, unresolved, instantaneous
waste: the third rule of customary discourse (see above), that of the signifier's absolute
availability, has been neither shattered nor overcome. But the poetic mode involves
both the liquidation of the signified, and the anagrammatic resolution of the signifier.
Note from page 210:
8. The humour in this story is so successful because, if there is one thing on which the
inscription of death has not taken, where the death drive is barred, it is cybernetic
systems.
Note from page 212:
9. The same goes, in a certain way, for Freud's hypothesis of the death drive -- its process
and its content remain, in accordance with his avowed wishes, ultimately unverifiable on
the clinical level, but its form, as the principle of mental functioning and the anti-logos,
is revolutionary.
Note from page 218:
10. This is the illusion of being able to separate the two articulations, and eventually
extract the one from the other. It is the illusion of being able to rediscover, by splitting
the primary, `significative' articulation, the equivalent of non-linguistic signs in language
(gestures, sounds, colours). This illusion leads J.-F. Lyotard, in Discours, figure [Paris:
Klincksieck, 1971] to grant the level of the visual or the cry an absolute privilege as
spontaneous transgression, always already beyond the discursive and closer to the
figural. This illusion remains trapped by the very concept of double articulation,
whereby the linguistic order again finds a means to establish itself in the interpretation of
what escapes it.
Note from page 222:
11. Careful here: this all holds for psychoanalysis itself, which also thrives on the rupture
between primary and secondary processes, and will die at the end of this separation.
And it is true that psychoanalysis is `revolutionary' and `scientific' when it explores the
entire field of channels from the standpoint of this rupture (in the unconscious). But
perhaps we will one day see that real, total and immediate practice does not obey this
postulate, or that analytic simulation model; that symbolic practice is from the very first
beyond the distinction between primary and secondary processes. To this day, the
unconscious and the subject of the unconscious, psychoanalysis and the subject of
(psychoanalytic) knowledge, has lived -- the analytic field will have disappeared as such
into the separation that it instituted itself -- for the benefit of the symbolic field. We can
already see many signs that this has already taken place.
Note from page 222:
12. This speech has nothing to do with linguistic sense of the word `parole', since the latter is
trapped with the langue--parole opposition and is subject to the langue. Undivided
(symbolic) speech itself denies the langue--parole distinction, just as undivided social
practice denies the theory--practice distinction. Only `linguistic' parole says only what it
says. But such speech has never existed, unless in the dialogue of the dead. Concrete,
actual speech says what it says, along with everything else at the same time. It does not
observe the law of the discrete sign and the separation of agencies, it speaks at every
level at the same time, or better, it undoes the level of the langue, and thus linguistics
itself. The latter, by contrast, seeks to impose a parole which would be nothing but the
execution of the langue, that is to say, the discourse of power.
Note from page 228:
13. Cf. Charles Malamoud, `Sur la notion de reste dans le brahmanisme', Wiener Zeitschrift
für die Kunde Südasiens, Vol. XVI, 1972.
Note from page 230:
14. [In Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud cites Kant in the following
manner: `the comic is "an expectation that has turned to nothing"' (Standard Edition,
ed. and tr. James Strachey, London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis,
Vol. 8, 1960, p. 199), which he takes from Kant's Critique of Judgement, tr. Werner
Pluhar, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987, p. 204, from which I have taken the quotation --
tr.]
Note from page 232:
15. It is on the reduction to and the primacy of the economy of the unconscious that the
impossiblity of ever really theorising the difference between the phantasm and the work
of art rests for Freud. He was able to say that the poets had had the intuition of
everything he analysed before him, or even (in Gradiva), that psychiatry has no privilege
over the poet and that the latter can very well express, `without taking anything away
from beauty and its works' (!) an unconscious problem in all its profundity. The poetic
act remains supplementary, sublime but supplementary. J.--F. Lyotard attempts to take
Freud up on this point, granting all importance to his distinction between the phantasm
and the work of art, while seeking to articulate them rigorously. He first denounces
every interpretation in terms of the `liberation' of the phantasm. To liberate the
phantasm is absurd, since the latter is a prohibition of desire, and is of the order of
repetition (this is in fact what is currently being produced with the `liberation' of the
unconscious: they liberate it insofar as it is repressed and forbidden, a liberation, that is
to say, under the sign of value, of an inverted surplus-value -- but perhaps this is the
`Revolution`?). Lyotard writes: `The artist ... struggles to free from the phantasm,
from the matrix of figures whose heir and whose locus he is, what really belongs to
primary process, and is not a repetition' (`Notes on the critical function of the work of
art', in Driftworks [New York: Semiotext(e), 1984], p. 74 [translation modified -- tr.]).
`For Freud, art must be situated by reference to the phantasm ... only the artist does
not hide his phantasms, he gives them the form of effectively real objects, and
furthermore [!] the presentation he makes of them is a source of aesthetic pleasure'
(Dérive à partir de Marx et Freud [Paris: UGE, 1973], p. 56). In Lyotard, this theory
takes on `inverted' ways: the artist's phantasm is not produced in reality as the play, the
reconciliation, or the fulfilment of desire, it is produced in reality as a counter-reality, it
intervenes only in the lack of reality, hollowing out this lack. `The function of art is not
to offer a real simulacrum of the fulfilment of desire, it is to show, by way of the play of
its figures, what deconstruction of the linguistic and perceptual order must be engaged
in, in order that a figure of the unconscious order allows itself to be discerned through its
very evasiveness (presentation of the primary process)' (ibid., pp. 57-8).
Note from page 232:
16. Pleasure, satisfaction and the fulfilment of desire belong to the economic order;
enjoyment belongs to the symbolic order. We must make a radical distinction between
the two. No doubt saving, recognition, psychical ellipsis and compulsive repetition are
sources of a certain (somehow entropic, involutive) pleasure, simultaneously heimlich
and unheimlich, familiar and disturbing, an endless source of anguish, since it is bound
to the repetition of the phantasm. The economic is always accumulative and repetitive.
The symbolic is the reversal, the resolution of accumulation and repetition; the
resolution of the phantasm.
Note from page 233:
17. Freud thinks, remaining within the logic of economic interpretation, that if one is not the
first to laugh, it is because the initiative for the Witz requires a certain psychical
expenditure, and is therefore, moreover, unavailable for pleasure. He himself admits
that this is not very satisfactory.
Note from page 234:
18. All matter is raw material. That is to say, that its concept only appears dependent on the
appearance of the order of production. All those who would like to be `materialists'
(scientific, semiotic, historical, dialectical, etc.) ought to remember this. Even the
sensationalist materialism of the eighteenth century is the first step towards a `liberation'
of the body in accordance with the pleasure-function, as raw material in the production of
pleasure.
6: The Extermination of the Name Of God
[p. 196]
[p. 197]
`paragram' and `paratext' to designate `the elaborate variation that
allows the perspicacious reader to perceive the evident but dispersed
presence of conducting phonemes' (Starobinski, Les mots, p. 33). We
could, as an extension of Saussure's work, propose the term `ANATHEMA',
which is originally the equivalent of an ex-voto, of a votive
offering: the divine name running beneath the text, and to whom the text is
consecrated, the name of he who consecrates and to whom it is consecrated.
[115]
[p. 198]
average in ordinary language, etc.; it gets out of the second (properly
anagrammatic) law by invoking the `latent' name (Agamemnon) as the
secondary signified of a text that inevitably `expresses' or `represents' it,
conjointly with the `manifest' signified (`one and the same signifier splits
into two signifieds', says Jakobson [Selected Writings, Vol. 7, p. 247]) -- a
desperate attempt to save, even if it was through a more complex
operation, the law of linguistic value and the essential categories of the
mode of signification (signifier, signified, expression, representation, equivalence).
The linguistic imaginary seeks to annex the poetic to itself and
even claims to enrich poetics' economy of the term and value. But against
it, and giving full scope to Saussure's discovery, it must be said that, on the
contrary, the poetic is a process of the extermination of value.
[For whom are these snakes whistling over our heads?]
from leaf to flower and flower to fruit ...
[p. 199]
alliterative (com)pulsion, but as the cyclical cancellation of terms, two by
two, the extermination of doubling by the cycle.
[p. 200]
[p. 201]
circuits of accumulation and value is what remains from sacrificial consumption,
what has not been exhausted in the incessant cycle of the gift
and the counter-gift. It is this remainder that we accumulate, we speculate
on the rest, and here the birth of the economic begins.
[p. 202]
[p. 203]
of means). This discursive `consumption', over which the spectre of penury
never hangs, this wasteful manipulation, sustained by the imaginary of
profusion, results in a prodigious inflation that leaves, in the image of our
societies of uncontrolled growth, an equally prodigious residue, a non-degradable
waste of consummated, but never entirely consumed, signifiers.
For used words are not volatilised, they accumulate like waste -- a
sign pollution as fantastic as, and contemporary with, industrial pollution.
[p. 204]
energy of signs' of which Nietzsche spoke, or the first and only genuine
affluent society of which Marshall Sahlins spoke (Les temps modernes, Oct.
1968).
[p. 205]
the phantasmatic reproduction of the subject of knowledge). A perverse
pleasure is attached to this phantasm, the pleasure of continually reconstructing
a faltering object, whereas it is proper to analysis, and to
enjoyment, to bring its object to an end.
[118]
[p. 206]
(Jakobson, Fonagy, Umberto Eco -- see `The Linguistic Imaginary',
below). Psychoanalytic interpretation, to which we will return, also arises
from this resistance. For the radicality of the symbolic is such that all the
sciences or disciplines that labour to neutralise it come to be analysed by it
in their turn, and returned to their ignorance [méconnaissance].
[p. 207]
a model: Saussure never tries to establish a relation of semantic privilege
between the two levels (nominal and anagrammatised) of the word.
Mannequin, sketch, miniature scene, theme or anathema: what status can
we give it? This is important, since the whole schema of signification, of
`making a sign', is at stake: it is certain at least that we cannot turn the
theme-word into the signified of the poem as signifier; and no less certain
that there exists, if not a reference, then at least a coherence between the
two. Starobinski seems to be sticking as close as possible to Saussure when
he proposes:
[p. 208]
key-word, then all this is futile complication and subtlety. And enjoyment
remains unexplained. Poetic intensity never consists in the repetition of an
identity, but in the destruction of an identity. It is ignorance [méconnaissance]
of this that produces the linguistic reduction, this is where it subtly
distorts the poetic in the direction of its own axioms: identity, equivalence,
refraction of the same, `imitation by augmentation', etc. It especially never
recognises the mad distortion, the perdition of the signifier and death in the
anagram, as the symbolic form of lanuage, remaining within the linguistic
game, where poetry is only a code, a `key', in the way we speak of a key to
dreams.
[p. 209]
deciphering is possible, and because there is never a signified to put an end
to the cycle. Here, the formula is not even unconscious (this is the limit of
all psychoanalytic interpretations), it does not exist. The key is definitively
lost. This is the difference between simple cryptogrammatic pleasure (the
entire category of the brainwave, where the operation always ends up with
a positive residue) and the symbolic radiation of the poem. In other words,
if the poem refers to something, it is always to NOTHING, to the term of
nothingness, to the signified zero. Poetic intensity consists in the vertigo of
this perfect resolution, which leaves the place of the signified or the
referent perfectly empty.
[119]
[p. 210]
resolved, dismembered and sacrificed in His name. We could say, following
Bataille, that the discontinuity (discursivity) of the name is abolished in
the radical continuity of the poem. The ecstasy of death.
[p. 211]
[p. 212]
error'? Worse: a platitude: Generalised in this way, his hypothesis is
annihilated. This is how, in all linguistic `good faith', the radical difference
of the poetic is denied. Saussure was at least seized by the intoxication of
the poetic -- the intoxication of the rigour with which he saw language turn
back on itself, operating on its own material, instead of unfolding in a
linear manner, idiotically following on from itself, as in customary
discourse. This is no longer the case with Starobinski: rigour has become
an `Obsession', a psychopathological category; total dispersion has become
a probabilistic occurrence/recurrence; anagrammatic dispersion has
become the `clamouring multitude of language', a harmonic contextuality
where a particular meaning is specified in turn:
[p. 213]
signifying constellation that can no longer be located as such, even a letter
or a formula of the Leclairian type, lost forever, or unconscious, or even
the `differential signifier' that Tel Quel talks about. What is essential,
whatever the formula is, is to consider the poetic not as the mode of the
formula's appearance, but as its mode of disappearance. In this sense, so
much the better that Saussure failed to find proof of the formula: by
verifying the content, he would have taken away the radicality of the form.
Saussure's failure and intoxication, since they at least maintain the urgency
of the poetic, are better than all the banalities that accept the poetic as a
fact of universal language.
[p. 214]
the substance of language and the substance of the world (wind, water,
feelings, passions, the unconscious; everything `pre-conceptual', which is
in fact already conceptualised, without appearing to be, by a whole code of
perception), there is always a positive correlation at play, a play of
equivalence amongst values.
[p. 215]
than the concept comes through, but it is still some thing; another value is
realised through the very play of the signifier, but it remains a value; the
signifying material functions at another level, its own, but it continues to
function: moreover, Jakobson makes the poetic function supplementary
rather than alternative, just one linguistic function out of many -- a surplusvalue
of signification due to which the signifier itself is taken into account
as an autonomous value. The poetic gives you more!
[p. 216]
[p. 217]
should properly evoke `this quality of being a whole and of belonging to the
larger, all-inclusive, whole which is the universe in which we live' (John
Dewey, Art as Experience, pp. 194-5; quoted in Umberto Eco, The Open
Work [tr. Anna Cancogni, London: Hutchinson Radius, 1989], p. 26). Eco
appropriates this cosmology for himself, and retranscribes it in linguistic
terms. The totalisation of meaning takes place by means of a `chain
reaction' and the infinite subdivision of signifieds:
[p. 218]
poetic, its relative improbability, determines a minimum rate of information.
Here again, the poetic gives you more.
[p. 219]
turn the phonemic into minimal substances, the phoneme, like the atom,
becomes an idealist reference. With the physics of the atom, science
relentlessly entrenches its positivist rationality. It has not brought the
phonemic any closer to another mode, which would presuppose the
respective extermination of the object and subject of science. Perhaps
today it is reaching its borders, at the same time as materialism is in total
theoretical crisis, without meanwhile being able to step beyond its shadow:
there is no `dialectical' transition between science, even at the apogee of its
crisis, and something perhaps beyond it and irremediably separated from
it, since science is founded on the basis of the denegation (not dialectical
negation, but denegation) of dialectics. The most rigorous materialism will
never lead beyond the principle of the rationality of value.
[p. 220]
stems from the short-circuit of the two, the furniture being no longer
furniture and the voluptuous pleasure no longer being voluptuous pleasure
-- the furniture (meubles) becomes voluptuous, and the voluptuous pleasure
becomes mobile -- nothing remains of the two separated fields of value.
Neither of the two terms is poetic in itself, no more than their synthesis is:
they are poetic in that the one is volatilised in the other. There is no
relation between (poetic) enjoyment and the voluptuous pleasure as such.
In love, there is only voluptuous pleasure -- but it becomes enjoyment
when it is volatilised into furniture. And the furniture is cancelled by the
voluptuous pleasure in the same way: the same reversal sweeps away the
proper position of each term. It is in this sense that Rimbaud's formula
stands: `It is true literally, in every sense.'
[p. 221]
ana-grammatic. Conversely, it is on the basis of its dismantling, its
destruction, that language revives the possibility of `infinity'. In fact,
`infinity of codes' is a bad term, since it permits the amalgam of the one and
the `infinite' in the `mathematics' of the text, and their distribution along a
single chain. It must be said, in terms of radical incompatabilty and
antagonism, that it is on the basis of the destruction of the discourse of
value that language revives the possibility of ambivalence: this is the poetic
revolution in relation to discourse, where the one can only be the death of
the other.
[p. 222]
superstructure, or, in other words, it analyses the social field that it
produces for itself through the dissociation between theory and practice.
Theory will never lead back to `practice' since it only exists through having
vivisected it: fortunately this practice is beginning to return to and even
overcome it. But this brings with it the end of dialectical and historical
materialism.
[p. 223]
displacement, condensation, etc.). In the dream, the lapsus, the symptom,
and the joke, or mot d'esprit, everywhere the unconscious works, we can,
with Freud, read the distortions of the signifier--signified relation, the
linearity of the signifier, the discrete sign. This distortion of discourse,
excess and transgression of language, where the phantasm operates, marks
enjoyment. But what of desire and the unconsious in the poetic, and up to
what point does libidinal economy account for it?
[p. 224]
In every instance so much energy is `economised' in relation to the
ordinary system of distributing investments. In the polygon of forces that is
the psychical apparatus, enjoyment is like the result of a sort of short-cut,
or rather of the transversality of the Witz, which, cutting a diagonal across
the diverse layers of the psychical apparatus catches up with its objective
with less expenditure, even effortlessly attaining unforeseen objectives,
yielding a kind of energetic surplus value, the enjoyment `premium', the
`yield of pleasure'.
[p. 225]
one hand as the determinate completion of a function, and on the other as
the indeterminate fulfilment of a desire, the concept of anaclisis is only a
bridging concept that articulates nothing at all. Here libidinal economy
suffers from the same `layering' of the concept of need as does the
economy in general: between the subject and the object, there is `need';
between the need and the desire, there is `anacusis' (the same as in
linguistic economy: between the signifier and the signified, or between the
sign and the world, there is, or is not, a `motivation'). All these layerings
have the discrete charm of an insoluble science: if the articulation is
impossible, it is because the terms have been badly formulated, because
their very position is untenable. Somewhere, doubtless, the autonomisation
of desire in the face of need, of the signifier in the face of the signified,
and of the subject in the face of the object, is only an effect of science. But
the economies that follow from all this have a hard time, since they do not
want to renounce the regular oppositions by which they live: desire--need,
unconscious--conscious, primary--secondary process, and so on. Is the
pleasure principle itself anything other than the psychoanalytic reality
principle?
[p. 226]
of the signified, it is not in order to give it over to the laws which linguistics
discovers in every manifest discourse, but in order that it may be said to obey the
law of the primary process, by means of which it escapes, if only for a hesitant
moment, the apparent constraints of a discourse that always tends towards the
univocal, even though it exploits the equivocal. (`L'ellipse et la barre', p. 46)
[p. 227]
stay at home and language will be well protected!): we cannot be content to
`interpret' the Saussurian ellipsis and bar in order to return the sign to the
primary process, to bring it under analysis. The entire architecture of the
sign must be demolished, even its equation must be broken, and it is not
enough merely to multiply the unknown factors. Alternatively, then, we
must assume that psychoanalysis still makes room somewhere for a certain
mode of signification and representation, a certain mode of value and
expression: this is in fact precisely what Mannoni's `empty' signified stands
for -- the place of the signified remains marked as that of the mobile
contents of the unconscious.
[p. 228]
[p. 229]
whether this remainder is that which is symbolically non-distributed and
which re-enters commercial exchange and the circuit of commodity
equivalence; whether this remainder is what is not exhausted in the
anagrammatic circulation of the poem and enters the circuit of signification;
or whether this remainder is quite simply the phantasm, that is to say,
that which could not be resolved in the ambivalent exchange and death,
and which, for this reason, is resolved as the precipitate of unconscious
individual value, the repressed stock of scenes or representations which is
produced and reproduced in accordance with the incessant compulsion to
repeat.
[p. 230]
Erwartung' (`[The comic is] a tense expectation that suddenly vanished,
[transformed] into nothing').
[126]
In other words: where there used to be
something, now there is nothing -- not even the unconscious. Where there
used to be some kind of finality (albeit unconscious), or even a value
(albeit repressed), now there is nothing. Enjoyment is the haemorrhage of
value, the disintegration of the code, the repressive logos. In the comic, the
moral imperative of institutional codes (situations, roles, social characters)
is lifted; in the Witz, the moral imperative of the identity principle of words
themselves, and even the subject, is eliminated -- for nothing, and certainly
not in order to `express' the `unconscious'. Lichtenberg's definition of the
knife (or the non-knife: an inspired and radically poetic witticism) retraces
this explosion of meaning with no ulterior motive. A knife exists insofar as
a blade and a handle exist and can be named separately. If the separation
between the two is removed (and the blade and handle can only be
reunited in their disappearance, as in Lichtenberg's joke), then, strictly
speaking, there is no longer anything but enjoyment. The `expectation' of
the knife, Kant said, the practical expectation, as well as the phantasmatic
expectation (we know what the knife can `mean-to-say' [vouloir-dire]) is
resolved into nothing. And this is not a primary process (displacement,
condensation); there is no irruption of something from behind the blade
and the handle, there is nothing behind this nothing. End of separation,
end of the unconscious. Total resolution, total enjoyment.
[p. 231]
counter-vowel in a line. Here the rule operates at the level of an entire
syntagma, whereas in Saussure it operates only on non-signifying elements
(phonemes or diphones), but the spark of pleasure, the Witz or the poem,
always derives from the same rule of the signifier's revolution around itself.
Meaning, the `wealth' of meaning or of multiple meanings does not matter.
Quite the opposite: the signified often makes the pleasure of the Witz
relatively slight, and signifieds come to end the game to safeguard
meaning. Whereas, in the infinitesimal lapse of time as the signifier turns
back on itself, in the time of this cancellation, there is an infinity of
meaning, a virtuality of infinite substitution, a crazy and ultra-fast expenditure,
an instantaneous short-circuit of all messages, but always non-signified.
Meaning has not `taken': it remains in a state of centrifugal
circulation, `revolution'; incessantly given and returned like goods in
symbolic exchange, they never fall under the authority of value.
[p. 232]
i. e., through relieving psychical expenditure ... Rhymes, alliterations, refrains,
and other forms of repeating similar verbal sounds which occur in verse, make
use of the same source of pleasure -- the rediscovery of something familiar,
(ibid., pp. 121-2)
[p. 233]
stories or jokes, that go from one to the other as poetry used to. Here,
everything answers to the symbolic obligation. To keep a funny story to
oneself is absurd, not to laugh is offensive, but to laugh first at one's own
story also shatters the subtle laws of exchange in its own way.
[129]
[p. 234]
a molar or molecular base of rocks or of language. But do we not see that
idealism's last and most subtle resort is to have locked what it denied into
this irreducible substantiality, to legitimate it as an adverse referent, as an
alibi, and thus to disarm it as an `effect' of reality which becomes the best
support for idealist thought. The `thing', `substance', `infrastructure' and
`matter' have never had any other meaning. Even the `materialist' theory
of language falls into the same trap of idealist interdependence. It is not
true that words, when they cease to be representations and lose the sign's
rationale, become `things', thus incarnating a more fundamental status of
objectivity, a surplus reality, a rediscovered stage of final appeal. There is
no worse miscomprehension.
[p. 235]
the repressive interiorised space of language. The irruption of the partial
pulsions constitutes a partial surface under the seal of repression, simultaneously
transgressive and regressive, for this is precisely only the revolution
of a repressed content, marked as such by the hegemony of form.
[p. 236]
the consubstantiality (which is more than a `correspondence') between the
material thing and the phonemic substance of language. Homologous to
psychoanalysis: if language makes the unconscious visible, it is not because
it expresses it, but because it is of the same structure, and because it is
articulated and speaks in the same way. The same cut, the same scene, the
same `way', and the same work. Where the Ancients used to say `fire', we
say `language, the unconscious, the body'.
[p. 237]
the primary and the secondary processes is also irreducible, and the work
of meaning can only consist in the return of the repressed, in its
transpearance in the repressing agency of discourse. In this regard, there is
no difference between the poetic and the neurotic, between the poem and
the lapsus. We take note of psychoanalysis's radicalism: if the primary
processes `exist', they are at work everywhere, and are determinant
everywhere. Conversely, however, the mere hypothesis of a different
order, a symbolic order that provided the economy of the unconscious,
prohibition and repression and which basically resolved the distinction
between the primary and the secondary processes, is enough to relativise
the whole psychoanalytic perspective, and not only on those marginal
territories over which it imperialistically encroaches (anthropology,
poetics, politics, etc.), but on its own terrain, in the analysis of the psyche,
neurosis and the cure. To turn to Mannoni again, it cannot be ruled out
that psychoanalysis, which originates from the distinction between the
primary and the secondary processes, will one day die when this distinction
is abolished. The symbolic is already beyond the psychoanalytic unconscious,
beyond libidinal economy, just as it is beyond value and political
economy.
[p. 238]
fracture of the symbolic as a fundamental agency. The conflictual relation
of the conscious to the unconscious relentlessly translates the haunting of
this very separation of the psychical as such. Freudian topography
(unconscious, preconscious, conscious) merely formalises, and theorises as
an original given, what results from a destructuration.
[p. 242]
6: The Extermination of the Name Of God
[p. nts]
Actualising ambivalence, the primitive sign, the `effective' sign, has no unconscious. It
is clear, and equal to its manifest operation. It does not operate indirectly, or by
analogy, on the repressed or unconscious representation (Lévi-Strauss very clearly leans
in this direction, in his comparison with psychoanalysis -- `The sorcerer and his magic' --
as indeed does all psychoanalytic anthropology). It is its own operation, with no residue,
and this is how it operates on the world, this is why it is the direct operation of the world.
Being the prohibition of desire, however, how can the phantasm suddenly play this
subversive role? The same goes for the primary processes: `The work of art differs from
the dream and the symptom in that in it, the same operations of condensation,
displacement and figuration that, in the dream and the symptom, have the goal of
disguising desire because it is intolerable, are, in expression, used to push back the
bonne forme of secondary process and exhibit the "unform", the unconscious disorder'
(ibid., p. 58). How are we to understand that the primary processes can be reversed in
this way? Are they not themselves bound to repressed desire, or are they then the mode
of existence of a `pur et dur' unconscious, an unsurpassable, infrastructural unconscious?
So Lyotard, who correctly says that `one cannot write on the side of the primary
processes. Taking the side of the primary process is still an effect of the secondary
processes', would condemn himself.
But this is exactly what the artist does: `The [artist's] labour may be assimilated to that
of the dream and to the operations of the primary process in general, but the artist
repeats them and, in so doing, reverses them, because he applies them to the work
of this process itself, that is to say, to the figures that arise from the phantasm' (ibid.,
p. 65).
And, more radically still: `The artist is someone who, in the desire to see death, even
at the price of his own death, lends it the upper hand over the desire to produce.'
`Disease is not the irruption of the unconscious, it is this irruption and the furious
struggle against it. The genius advances as far as the same figure of depth as the sick, but
rather than defending himself against it, he desires it` (ibid., p. 60-1). But where does
this acquiesence to the `cruelty' of the unconscious come from, if not a reversal of the
`will' from an elusive `actual grace'? And where does the enjoyment that emanates from
this act come from, which must somehow, of course, stem from the form, and not from
the content. Form, for Lyotard, is not far removed from the mystics' void. The artist will
contrive `a deconstructed space', a void, a structure receptive to phantasmatic irruption:
`meaning comes about through the violation of discourse, it is a force or a gesture in the
field of significations, it remains silent. And in this hole the repressed word merges from
its subsoil and establishes itself'. This void, this silence -- the calming before the irruption
-- constitutes a dangerous analogy with mystical processes. But where, above all, do they
proceed from? What is the process of `deconstruction'? We soon see that it has nothing
to do with the primary process -- on which we here impose an incomprehensible double
role: it is both sides of the reversal. Would we not do better here, frankly, to leave
repression and repetition to one side, and to clear the poetic act of all psychoanalytic
counter-dependence?
Matter is only ever a force of production. But production itself is hardly `materialist' at
all -- nor, moreover, is it idealist. It is an order and a code, and that's all there is to it. The
same goes for science: it is an order and a code, no more or less `materialist' than magic
or anything else.
6: The Extermination of the Name Of God, by Jean Baudrillard in Symbolic Exchange and Death.
[by] Jean Baudrillard. (Sage, London, England, 1993). pp [195]-242. [Bibliographic Details] [View Documents]
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