ABSTRACT
I had stopped at the emergence of the signifier DM (desire of the mother) from the paternal metaphor. We are here at the little explored chapter of the production of signifiers. In the seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis Lacan had given a definition of the Thing, das Ding : it is “the real inasmuch as it suffers from the signifier [ pâtit du signifiant ]”. This was his classic thesis on the operating signifier, which can be found right up until his hypothesis in the seminar Encore . But he had produced another formula playing on the word: “It’s the real inasmuch as it builds the signifier [ bâtit du signifiant ].” I commented on this in 1975 in Lacan’s presence. You will not find it in the Seuil edition, it was not included. Perhaps because at the time, the person who transcribed the seminar himself emphasised the antecedence of the symbolic. But this was all the same a very bad reason, because the expression already indicated another side of Lacan’s thought, one that culminates around 1975 at the moment of the Borromean knot, at a moment where he talks of the hole of the symbolic. To a question he was asked regarding the place that he would give to the Thing, das Ding , in the Borromean knot, he responded that it is the hole of the symbolic. And about this hole he says: a hole coughs things up, and what does it cough up? Names of the father. This is not the same thing as building the signifier. I will come back to this, but the common point is that the Thing, this hole in the real, far from being inert, is productive in the field of language. In our commentaries on Lacan, we are used to the idea that the signifier is already there, in the Other, the place where the signifiers are “to be gotten”. Yes, but this does not say that the Other is the cause of signifiers – it is their storehouse [ lieu de dépôt ]. The Other is the place where “speech is deposited” he says in Encore , and Lacan specifies: watch out for resonances. Indeed, from the storehouse [ dépôt ] to the dump [ dépotoir ], it’s not very far. Letter, litter. Signifiers come from the Thing that speaks, and very early on he wrote: the approach of the unsayable produces the word [ l’approche de l’indicible fait mot ]. In Encore , he speaks of the real moving towards the symbolic with the image of the spider weaving its web. Incidentally this is why languages are in constant evolution. And so, I insist, to whom can we impute the emergence of this first signifier DM, a name
of the Thing in some respects? We cannot impute it to the Other, the locus, even if in the locus, the speech of the parental others – without which there would not be any locus of the Other – is deposited. Is it necessary to convoke “the unsoundable decision of being” (Lacan, [1946] 2006, p. 145)? 1 Most likely, because without it we would only be marionettes of the Other, who would be the sufficient cause of our symptoms of psychosis, neurosis, or perversion.
