ABSTRACT
It is not my intention to offer yet another theory of metaphor. At that hubristic thought, the mind, as Bertie Wooster might say, boggles. I feel no compulsion to out-Aristotle Aristotle, and I know how brief is the life expectancy of new-fangled conceptions in the field. But I intend to persist in my line of thought and follow up the consequences of my exploration of the remainder. My question, therefore, is not, What is metaphor? but, What can a theory of the remainder say about metaphor? And it must be confessed that such a theory has a fair amount to say on the subject. In the preceding chapters, we have already, on several occasions, come close to the question of metaphor - when I evoked the Lacanian concept of lalangue in Chapter 1, when I sampled a number of tropes from my rag-bag, or when I mentioned Jakobson’s all-encompassing theory of metaphor and metonymy as the two poles of language. From this series of partial insights, we may derive a few hints.
