ABSTRACT
George Herbert is a Lacanian poet – or should I say that Lacan is a religious psychoanalyst? The conception of délire expounded in the last chapter treated man as a shop of linguistic rules, whose every parcel underwrites a syntactic law. Sometimes the pack comes untrussed: délire is both a symptom of this dereliction and a defence against it. We might call this a structural conception of délire, where délire is a linguistic activity dominated by the law – a displaced use of the rules of normal language (with serious consequences, the main one being the exclusion of the delirious speaker). So, on the one hand, there are no metaphors in delirious speech, and, on the other, délire as a whole is an instance of the metaphoric process: everything in delirious utterances can and must be interpreted. The law which governs délire is semiotic; it gives délire its distinctive structure (the dialectic of excess and lack) and produces a mirror-effect: the paranoiac’s delirium is faithfully reflected in the délire of the interpreting analyst. Délire is both close to theory and distant from it; this relation is mediated by their common opposition to a third type of discourse – poetry.
