ABSTRACT
Common to post-Saussurean accounts of language is the assumption that where the signified once stood, the signifier now stands, and that furthermore it is signifiers all the way down. The systematic assumption that language operates in the absence of an available signified has tended to produce practices of reading for which a certain dematerialization and abstraction are the inevitable concomitants of language’s actual incapacity to refer. Yet it is arguable that where the absence of the referent is an easy assumption, too little concern may be shown for the residual vehemence with which signs attend to the world. To explore what may be in effect a turn towards reference by devious paths we must attend to opacities, since it is in moments when meanings fail that, as psychoanalysis has insisted, the painful origin of that failure may be intimated. Of particular relevance here is the work of Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok who have focused on language as a barrier or obstacle to understanding within which what is being obstructed is a situation “whose interpretation consists entirely in evaluating its resistance to meaning” (Rand 1986:lx). The words in which the event resides, if only as the pressure points left by its refusal of expression, are “defunct”, words “relieved of their communicative function” (Derrida 1986:xxxv-xxxvi), but not, paradoxically, of their force.
