The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire in the Freudian unconscious
佛洛伊德的无意识:主体的颠覆及欲望的辩证
I must now develop much further for you the topology that I have elaborated in my teaching over the past five years , that is, introduce a certain diagram, which, I should warn you, also serves purposes other than the use that I am going to make of it here, having been constructed and completed quite openly in order to map in its arrangement the most broadly practical structure of the data of our experience. It will serve here to show where desire, in relation to a subject defined in his articulation by the signifier, is situation.
This is what might be said to be its elementary cell ( cf.Graph I). In it is articulated what I have called the ‘anchoring point’ ( point de capton), by which the signifier stops the otherwise endless movement ( glissement) of the signification. The signifying chain is regarded as being supported by the vector S.S’.—even without entering into the subtleties of the retrograde direction in which its double intersection with the vector occurs.
Only in this vector does one see the fish it hooks, a fish less suitable in its free movement to represent what it withholds from our grasp than the intention that tries to bury it in the mass of the pre-text, namely, the reality that is imagined in the ethological schema of the return of need.
The diachronic function of this anchoring point is to be found in its last term, each term being anticipated in the construction of the others, and, inversely, sealing their meaning by its retroactive effect.
But the synchronic structure is more hidden, and it is this structure that takes us to the source. It is metaphor in so far as the first attribution is constituted in it—the attribution that promulgates ‘ the dog goes miaw, the cat goes woof-woof, by which the child, by disconnecting the animal from its cry, suddenly raises the sign to the function of the signifier, and reality to the sophistics of signification, and by contempt for verisimilitude, opens up the diversity of objectications of the same thing that have to be verified.