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CHAPTER FOUR
I want to begin by saying something about the relationship between biology and language, on how the biological is always interpreted through language. Among Lacan's contemporaries both Sartre and Mer1eau-Ponty were concerned to refute the bio10gism and scientism of Freud's work, and both turned to the same sources as Lacan in order to support their critiques: the thought of Hegel and Heidegger. In Lacan's (phenomenological) view biological facts exist in psychoanalysis but only in so far as they are mediated through language and speech. Biological facts do not exist apart from the meaning that is given to them during the history of the
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46 Jacques Lacan
Traditionally, language has been conceived as an instrument for communication, mastered by subjects fully conscious of what they are doing when they speak. In contrast, the Lacanian view of language centres round the lack of mastery of the speaking subject (slips of the tongue, and so forth). In this view of language, the subject is formed in a process which turns the small animal into a human child. The subject is seen as constituted by language and it appropriates the world through language. In a Freudian perspective, says Lacan, man is nothing but the subject caught in, and
tortured by, language.2 ~ no
Lacan's emendation of Saussure
Lacan is against the idea that communication is a transferral of concepts from one mind to another, an exchange of tokens which already have their meaning clearly stamped upon them/}Ie rejects the view of language as a representation of pre-given objectSl Lacan believes that the (contractual nature of language) requires that, in order for two subjects to name the same object, they must recognise each other as recognising the same object, thereby transcending the struggle for possession. ~eech, argues Lacan, is always an inter-subjective pact~Lacan stresses that sp~ech is not simply a conveyor of infor~ation, but establishes a relation between speaker and hearer. ,In accordance with the dialectic of recognition the very being of the subject is dependent upon its recognition by other subjects.'
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of minor importance~ ~
I mention this because [1acan has sought to correlate Freud's concepts, condensation and displacement, with Roman Jakobson's analysis of the two poles of languag:.$ Jakobson argued that metaphor and metonymy are two poles, which are at work in language. It is important to remember that they are not entities. They are categories of distinction, not bags to put things in. Neither describes an isolable thing; they describe a relation.
Jakobson sees metaphor and metonymy as the characteristic modes mo no des of binarily opposed polarities which between them underpin the twofold process of selection and combination. An utterance or message is a combination of constituent parts selected from the repository of all possible constituent parts. Messages are constructed by a combination of a 'horizontal' movement, which combines words together, and a 'vertical' movement which selects the particular words from the available inventory of the language. The selective process manifests itself in similarity (one word or concept being 'like' another) and its mode is metaphoric. The combinative process manifests itself in contiguity (one word being placed next to anbther) and its mode is metonymic. In short, selection (the relation of similal'ity) and combination (the relation of contiguity) - the metaphoric and metonymic ways - are considered by Jakobson to be the two most fundamental linguistic operations.
