ABSTRACT
Key concepts: writing, speech, and language; reading the signifiers we hear, finding a repressed ‘x’ signifier, finding an unknowable ‘X’.
This chapter focuses on the difference between the written and speech. How meaning functions in each case depends on the relationship between the signifier and the signified. In this, he says, “if there is something that can introduce us to the dimension of the written as such, it is the realization that the signified has nothing to do with the ears, but only with reading – the reading of the signifiers we hear”. So, in what we hear, there may be something more than the signifier, meaning that the signified could be a sound and not necessarily another letter or another word. The signifier produces an effect of meaning at the level of the hearing. We may be listening to the signifiers, but we are not hearing the effect of meaning of the signifiers, and that’s where the effect of the unconscious is located.
Lacan also argues that with the mathematical symbol, the meaning is concrete, whereas with written language, the space between the signified and the signifier is always going to be there. If you have an ‘x’ as an indeterminate variable, but because of the formula, you are going to achieve a concrete number for the ‘x’. Before you reach that concrete number, the ‘x’ is simply a placeholder for something that could be different things until you use the letters in such a way that the formula produces a result based on arithmetical functions. In a way, it is like trying to find the ‘x’ of the repressed unconscious. Since we do not know, we are using this formula to try to get to what may be the repressed signifier – the ‘x’ for this person as it relates to their relationships and their symptoms, and so on and so forth. Then there is the ‘x’ that just represents the difference between the indeterminate and the undetermined. The undetermined is a different kind of X that stands for unknowable that holds the structure in place.
