ABSTRACT
Key concepts: the thing in itself, the visual image, the index pointing at the image, the signifier in four levels, the word, and the image, the signifier and the signified, the signified in the body of the Real points back to the thing in itself.
This chapter proposes that there are three levels in Peirce’s theory of semiotics that need to be organized under the influence of Lacanian theory in the following way. The first level corresponds to some vague idea or quality of feeling, a quale, otherwise known as the thing in itself. The second level is the icon or the visual representation. The third level is the index or the pointer where you use objects or fingers to point at images. The fourth level is the level of the signifier, which itself has four units: letter, phoneme, morpheme, and semanteme. Then the relationship between images and words is that between the signifier and the signified. Or the signifying relationship can be between words/signifiers. Finally, the signified for the signifier can also be in the Real of jouissance and the body. This level goes back to the first level where the experience of the body is some form of undefinable feeling defined as the thing in itself.
Meaning is arbitrary, in that meaning is internal to the structure of language. Then, language can be co-opted by the Imaginary: how ‘the master’ makes use of the language for purposes of political manipulation. So, there’s a ‘slipping’ because the meaning of the object ‘slips’ within language. When the slippage falls into ideology, then this constitutes an imaginary use of language. From then on, language as one of the determining aspects of the Symbolic “Goes at it alone”, meaning that language alone defines the objects of social reality. Language doesn’t need a reference to the external object.
The signified can be another word, but the signified can be a mathematical symbol more than a word (i.e., the square root of –1 or a signifier without a signified). Lacan says that jouissance is a form of thinking that is not determined by language.
Although Lacan incorporates philosophical discourse into psychoanalysis, in no way does he try to claim that psychoanalysis can explain everything. Psychoanalysis is not philosophy because it is tied to an experience and a practice. It follows that Lacan talks about Marxism because Marxism tried to define philosophy in terms of a practice instead of just simply a theory or a worldview.
The difference between religion (to temporally use this word) and philosophy, from a Marxist perspective, is that Marx stressed the ‘poverties of philosophy and religion’ that leave the world unchanged. Lacan here pokes fun at this perspective because analysts do not regard Marxism or psychoanalysis as a religion that can change the world.
