ABSTRACT
Eric Kandel wanted to make psychoanalysis shift from its pre-scientific "context of discovery" to a higher scientific level by absorbing it into the new discipline of cognitive neuroscience. Kandel's neurological work concerns memory in general and its patterns of inscription in the nervous system. The essential component is plasticity: this observation has found experimental confirmation through recent progress in neurobiology, which demonstrates a plasticity of the neuronal network permitting the inscription of experience. Neuronal plasticity modifies neuronal networks; thus two stimuli, even though identical, could result in different responses depending on the state of the brain. Plasticity introduces a variability which removes any idea of an equal, univocal and determined response through a system which would be rigid and fixed in time. Meanwhile, elsewhere, linguists inspired by the neurosciences have also been seeking to form a conception of language and its metaphors as inscriptions. Biological discontinuity means that the subject fastens onto the signifier whose fastening to experience slips away.
