ABSTRACT
Human forms of organisation, from kinship to prestige hierarchies, require a mode of selection. Hegel knew this, as did Rousseau before him: metaphor is the first human form. The metaphoric mode dominates culture, repressing the metonymic. As the extension and elaboration of the signifier, metaphor is the systematic form of classifying and imputing value, or significance. Lacan followed closely his friend Jakobson's classic modern definition of this trope: it is the trope of selection and substitution. Certainly the accession to the paternal function through metaphor, the substitutions of others for the original objects of desire, not only civilises, it normalises. The masculine gender derives from its identification, by means of symbolic substitution or metaphorisation, with the 'god' that subtends the economy. Dependence on the signifier as the form of form is therefore, unwittingly, a dependence on metaphor and its negative ideology. Metaphor powers as well as empowers.
