The Regression of the Sign

 

Saussure’s description of the sign in its totality as “positive in its own class” belies the negativity — precisely not of “its own class” — which is the origin of this positivity. The positivity of the sign in its totality is exactly not of “its own class” — Why? This positivity is based on the fundmamental relationship to negativity. This paradoxical rapport defines the theory of value according to Saussure. This theory indicates that all attributions of ownership and possession are improper — what in Derrida’s words is a deviation from the economy of le propre. The deconstruction of the proper polices the borders of the improper. The Pervert does not believe that he transgresses the law in his immoral behavior because he recognizes a continuity of the law and desire — what Lacan describes as the “inverted ladder” of the law of desire. This continuity belies a discontinuity of each term — law and desire, prohibition and transgression — with itself. Zizek identifies this dissonance as the parallactic gap. It is the essence of the fetish in psychoanalysis. The vilification of the structure of perversion as a defense of the law — as obedience to rather than transgression of the name of the father — is only made from the perspective of the neurotic who opposes law to transgression and prohibition to desire. But perversely, none of these words is “in its own class” because the Pervert recognizes that the law (is) transgression and that the prohibition (is) desire — each exactly otherwise than themselves according to the Logic of Difference. The perverse relationship between law and transgression, and between prohibition and desire, is fundamentally unsymbolizable because Being is under erasure in the Pervert’s attitude toward ontology. But the equivalence (or such) which is drawn between opposites implies a relational plenitude and social fullness, even if such aesthetics are unwriteable and unspeakable. This indicates an inequivalence — gap and fissure — of each word with itself. This internal dissonance within identity and essence can be conceived as an individual lack or an isolated castration.

 

Neurotically, this series — equivalence (or any word) between and inequivalence (or any word) within — is quilted by the paternal metaphor. For the neurotic, the parallactic gap of each object from and within itself is distinct from the relational plenitude of the Sameness+ of each object and the other objects in the system. Perversely, none of these objects remains “in its own class” because of this simultaneous equivalence (or any word) and inequivalence (or any word) of each with the Other. The totality of the sign is positive because it is different from “itself” in its differential negativity. The parallactic gap in castration (is) the relational plenitude. The bond between castration and plenitude, and the relationship between capitalism and communism, are profoundly unrepresentable. The difference of each word from “itself” is the Sameness+ of each word with the other words in the system — Why? The parallactic gap is not “itself.” This disparity reveals truth as Aletheia. The parallactic gap reveals itself as otherwise than itself. The positive is outside of its “own” class because the le propre of the owned is inside of this class. In reverse, the positive is inside of its “own” class because the le propre of the owned is outside of this class. The negative is the class of the future because it unites the positives. The future is pure negativity — the death of all that is as such, by definition, il’y a, qua, and so on. The Pervert’s Manifesto gazes toward the afterlife of death. The future is the endless repetitions of the explosions and fragmentations of Thanatos.

 

Perversely, Saussure defends his theory of value in a gesture of renunciation. Saussure writes:

Two signs, each having a signified and signifier, are not different but only distinct. Between them there is only opposition. The entire mechanism of language, with which we shall be concerned later is based on oppositions of this kind and on the phonic and conceptual differences that they imply.

Saussure ascribes the economy of le propre (the proper, property, ownership, possession, mineness) to both the order of the sign, which is based on the opposition of objects which are distinct, and the logic of the signifier and the signified, which is based on the difference and negativity of objects which are displaceable and substitutable. He makes this regressive move toward the primacy of the sign in his description of two signs “each having a signified and signifier.” The order of the sign is capable of ownership (“having”), and the domain of the signified and the signifier is capable of being possessed. The theory of value upsets the economy of le propre that Saussure ascribes to the order of both the sign of opposition between the distinct and opposed, and the signifier and the signified of difference and negativity among the play of the text.

 

Saussure demonstrates a crucial component of the economy of le propre. The movement of ownership and possession is based on the constitution of identity. The lack within the sign enables the gesture of appropriation which seeks possession and ownership of the other signifiers in the system. Saussure’s description indicates that identification (“two signs,” “each”) is desire (“having”). This formulation of identification qua desire — yet unarticulable — deforms the division between identification (to be) and desire (to have). This distinction identification/desire and be/have is twisted in psychoanalytic theory, but the distinction and opposition is nonetheless central to the formation of the Subject of the Unconscious. The Pervert intuits identification as differential and negative to desire. Perversely, identification (is) desire. The rapport between being and having is under erasure. There is no decidable relationship between identification and desire. This discovery subverts any distinction between metaphor (having, identification) and metonymy (being, desire). A metaphor must always already (be) a metonymy because desire (is like — is like — is like — and so on) is endless. A metonymy must always already (be) a metaphor because identification (is like) structures a spatial and temporal relationship of desire between two objects, ego and ego-ideal.

 

Any object is itself in its parallactic plenitude insofar as any object is equivalent (or any word) with other objects. This Other supplements the mythical lack in the object itself. The object does not lack — but why? The object is unexpectedly full because it is a Sameness+ with every other object in the system. Identification returns to identity in the detours and delays of desire. But the caveat is that these interruptions are an endless series of metonymies which do not return to identity. This apparent economy of le propre is simultanesouly its subversion. Identification is an aneconomy of dispossession and nonownership. Saussure’s description of the sign as a “having” is precisely a not having — Why? The ownership which is involved in the relationships between signs is community property of dispossession and nonownership rather than individual possession of the economy of le propre. Simply put, having is not having, and capitalism is communism. Even stranger, the relationship between desire and its failure, and between capitalism and its Marxist Aufhebung unto communism, cannot be articulated. Revolution is under erasure. The property of the object and the commodity (is) the nonproperty of das Ding and the future.

 

The dispossession and nonownership that Saussure perversely describes with the sign and its “having” of desire also applies to the subject’s relationship to the system tout court. No one speaker owns the language system because everyone owns the language system. Saussure isolates this dispersal of le propre as the arbitrariness and conventionality of the sign. Saussure’s claim that “by himself the individual is incapable of fixing a single value” — because this value is arbitrary and conventional — indicates neither the supremacy of the society nor the subjugation of the individual. Rather, the individual (is) the society, and the speaker (is) the system. As Althusser would say, the system is a process without a subject. The individual may be “having” the society (and vice-versa), and the speaker may be “having” the system (and vice-versa). But neither does the individual possess the society nor the society own the individual. The individual and the society are not — because each of the objects is dissonant — split and ruptured — with itself. Neurotically, this internal gap and external suture are distinct and opposed — what Saussure describes as the Logic of Identity of the positive unity of the sign in its own class. Perversely, the internal lacunae and the external overlap — each “having” in identity and desire the other — are the same difference. The extimacy of the object in presence is the coordination of an external plenitude (lack) and an internal gap (fullness). This decenterment in the purported essence of the object is the parallax of the identity of the object.

 

Saussure’s description of the sign as “positive” and “having” is simultaneously the perverse expression of a system whose basal economy is the destructure of both the positive and the economy of le propre in its entirety. The expression of a system of negativity as at once the positive, and the description of the deconstruction of the economy of le propre as simultaneously “having” demonstrates that Hegel (is) Deleuze — the overlap of radical negativity with joyful positivity. Capitalism and communism are not only internal to each other. In addition, capitalism and communism are exactly the same system. The trick is to isolate the magic of this gesture — a showmanship which is the essence of the procedural chicanery of deconstruction. The future of the communism of the Pervert arrives within the extant system of capitalism. The castration of capitalism is eclipsed by the emergence of plenitude. It is not simply that Hegel’s Spirit is realized in Deleuze’s schizoid, or that capitalism is realized in communism (and vice-versa). Rather, the objects are strictly an unrepresentable Sameness+ (“Being,” “is” under erasure). The system is the proper name for the schizoid. Capitalism is the proper name for communism. But the caveat is that an otherness escapes this radical and paradoxical overlap. This excess is the gap between Being and its erasure. What is the under erasure? — what is the subject, verb, and object of difference and negativity? Is this under erasure a textual form, a pictorial figuration, a marked sound, an aesthetic sensibility, or a psychical structure? Saussure exposes the sign as positive and desirous, but this denotative definition of the sign is easily upset and reversed. How is this negative gesture performed other than by the brute truth of the Logic of Difference in the negative and differential aneconomy of the signifying chain?

 

Saussure’s claim that the “two signs” are “not different but only distinct” demonstrates the Logic of Difference of the signifier from within the words and phrases of distinction and opposition. Saussure illustrates the aneconomy of the signifier in a passage that otherwise purports to espouse the economy of distinction and opposition. The phrase “not different but only distinct” deploys the Logic of Difference in order to define the opposition between signs. The distinct is itself different from the different. The distinct (is) the different. The bond between the signifier and the sign is internal to the structure and function of the word, yet the internal components of the word can be determined as presence in relationship to the positive unity in its own class of the sign. The word is empty of its own constituent parts. The qualifier “only” indicates that Saussure intends to subvert his own deconstruction of the economy of le propre because neither the “different” nor the “opposite” can be “only” distinct in a system in which each word is unrepresentable to all of the other words. The distinct is exactly not the distinct, and the word is interrupted by itself. The qualifier “only” implies that the word is coincident with itself — self-same and self-identical — as the closure of the parallactic gap. This closure — in its own class — enables the sameness between the object and all of the other objects in the system. The parallactic gap is the proviso of the relational plenitude of the object with the other objects in the system. The internal lack is the source of relational plenitude. The parallactic gap (is) relational plenitude. The bond between the inside and the outside cannot be determined in Being. Nor can the relationship between the inside with itself, and the outside with itself, be isolated in presence. Unexpectedly, the parallactic gap refers to both Sameness+ and fullness because it is in fact Otherness+ and emptiness. The binary opposites overlap qua __________.

 

The correspondence that Saussure draws between “not difference” and “distinct” indicates that the opposite of difference is distinction. The negative of the signifier (is) the distinction of the sign. The difference of the signifier (is) the opposition of the sign. Neurotically, the “different” (autonomous materiality and isolated abstraction) and the “distinct” (combined word) are exactly distinct as signs because the “difference” and the “distinction” are each opposed words. The Pervert observes that the comparability of “difference” and “distinction” evinces that “difference” is distinct from “itself.” Strangely, the economy of the signifier is the Logic of Identity, and the system of the sign is the Logic of Difference. The continuity between the dissonant cannot be captured by Being because the copulatic “is” between Identity and Difference is decentered from itself. The word and the signifier, the sign and the signifier-signified, are singular objects which cannot be compared despite the precise overlap of the parallactic gap and relational plenitude. There is neither positive unit nor differential negativity in the relationship between sign and signifier. These twin logics are each beset by the extimacy between the simultaneous negative difference and positive unit of each economy. For the neurotic, the sign is the combinatory signified and the signifier because it is the sign. For the Pervert, the sign is the compound signifier and signified because it is not the sign. The word (is) the signifier, and the word (is) the signified. Ergo, the neurotic is the Pervert, and the psychical dimensions of neurosis and perversion are a sameness which is not identical. An indeterminate différance in space and time isolates the undecidable gap between the structure of the neurotic and the logic of the Pervert.

 

Saussure’s claim that “between them there is only opposition” illuminates the logic of the signifier and the signified which disrupts the self-same and self-identical identity of the logic of the sign. Saussure suggests that “between” the “two signs” is “only opposition.” The between is opposition. The point is that between “opposition” is the two signs whose between is opposition. The two signs are opposition — a demonstration of the identity of the two qua one. The two signs cannot approach each other because an irresolvable gap persists between the two. The reason that the two signs cannot approach each other is because the two signs are not in fact two signs. Two is not two. Two is one. The gap is the suture. The wound is the bandage. Between the two signs there is an “opposition” because the sign in its “totality” is split from “itself.” The sign is impossible in its “totality” because it is split from “itself” by the logic of the signifier and the signified. The parallactic gap — the distance of an entity from itself — animates the two signs which are two qua one. This internal split of the sign (what is the logic of the signifier and the signified) sutures the external gap between the sign and the other sign of the two signs. The parallactic gap is relational plenitude. Between the two signs qua one signifier is the opposition between “opposition” and “between” — the terms between which the two signs qua one signifier insist. The two signs are a single signifier. Between a single signifier and itself (which is a sign) is “opposition.” The signifier is the sign. The economy of the signifier is the economy of the sign. For the neurotic, between a single signifier is the “opposition” of two signs. For the Pervert, between two signs is a “difference.” The Pervert reads Saussure’s original account in its perversely transposed form. Strangely, two signs are one signifier.

 

Saussure’s summary of the “opposition” which inheres in language demonstrates that “opposition” cannot be coherently isolated from its own opposition in “difference.” The logic of the sign — Identity — is simultaneously the logic of the signifier — Difference. The conclusion that “opposition” (is) “difference” — each essence undefined as a construction — showcases both the logic of the sign in opposition and the logic of the signifier and the signified in difference. There is an unsymbolizable Real relationship within and between the two objects of “opposition” and “difference.” The “difference” illuminates “opposition,” and the “opposition” indicates “difference.” The truth as Aletheia of Saussure’s radical insight reveals itself in its own repressed words. This repression is simultaneously the return of this repressed. The negated and its return — opposites — are ultimately differential twists on the same object.

 

Langue is substantively structured by the (in)opposition between the architecture of the word and the architectonics of the signifier. Saussure writes: “The entire mechanism of language, with which we shall be concerned later, is based on oppositions of this kind and on the phonic and conceptual differences that they imply.” The first curiosity of this passage is the phrase “entire mechanism of language” because it implies a totality — what Saussure associates with the sign as opposed to the “purely differential” signifier and signified. This positive totality supplants a system of negativity which gestures beyond itself qua itself. The entire mechanism of language is a word in the positive unity of its own class. Language is a sign, and the signifier is repressed to the Outside of the “entire mechanism of language.” Saussure draws a correspondence between langue and its instruments and the “oppositions” upon which this system is based. This comparison between the mechanism and “opposition” — language is a system of opposition — is simultaneously a radical dissonance in its own claim because the langue entails “opposition” with itself. Language is not only an opposition, but it is opposed to itself in its present essence. Language cannot be an opposition because the system is opposed to itself. The system is not the system.

 

Any study of language must take an Other as the object of its scrutiny, and langue is not the object of the study of language. The neurotic understands the entire mechanism of language as a system of oppositions, but he overlooks that this structural opposition applies to the system itself. The Pervert intuits that the “entire mechanism” of language is a word which is opposed to itself. Saussure’s name for a sign divided against itself is a signifier. A properly defined word is exactly a signifier. For the neurotic, the signifier and the sign are separate objects whose distinction is articulated as an opposition of signifier/sign. For the Pervert, the signifier and the sign are the same difference — internally divided by negativity and relationally related by difference — such that the gap between materiality and its abstraction is illuminated as a difference of signifier-sign with the “-” as an unsymbolizable return of the Real whose foreclosure is the proviso of the neurotic’s interpretation of the sign. The word is the same as the signifier because the word is not the word. The signifier is the same as the word because the signifier is not the signifier. Neurotically, there is a strict boundary (“/”) between the signifier and the sign. Perversely, there is free exchange (“-” qua unsymbolizable) between the signifier and the sign. Materiality (is) abstraction (is) the word. There can be no isolation of the material from the abstraction, and so the word is outstripped by the signifier.

 

A Different Kind of Opposition

 

The second curiosity of the passage is the claim that language is based on oppositions and the phonic and conceptual differences that they “imply.” The logic of the word will “imply” the logic of the signifier. Oppositions “imply” differences. The positives “imply” negatives. The subtlety of the perversity of Saussure’s prose is explosive, and it requires a shrewd close reading in order to illuminate the fissures in the otherwise dry articulation of the theory of linguistic value. The index of “imply” is an equivalence or equality or comparability of Being and presence. The language system forbids an articulation of the differential negative overlap — gap and plenitude — between, first, “oppositions” between signs, and second, between “differences” between signifiers and signifieds. Saussure’s theory of value prohibits even the expression of his radical insight. Only a savvy interpretation of Saussure’s words makes intelligible the Real impossibility of symbolic representation.

 

Saussure’s unimaginable idea is based on the “opposition” and the “difference” between “opposition” and “difference.” The articulation of Saussure’s theory of value unveils itself in disguise. The concept emerges like the latent desire in the manifest form in Freud’s conception of the symptom. Saussure must say that oppositions “imply” differences. The manifest oppositions “imply” the latent differences. The architecture of the system “implies” the architectonics of langue. The animate and conscious principle of opposition between words is the marginal and unconscious truth of the difference among signifiers. The “entire mechanism” of language is oppositions and the logic of the sign, but this “entire mechanism” of oppositions is otherwise than itself. The opposite of opposition is the differed and deferred — undecidable gap — of opposition. This différance between opposition and “itself” is the differential and negative aneconomy of the signifier. The parallactic gap in each of the objects is simultaneously the relational plenitude between the objects.

 

Each object in the system “implies” every other object in the system. The “entire mechanism of language,” as Saussure puts it, is a series of implications (“imply”) which veils that the self-same and self-identical implications (“imply”) are split. The decenterment of implication indicates the overlap between the objects of the simultaneous parallactic gap and relational plenitude. Saussure’s description of language — the system qua a series of distinctions and oppositions — as a foundation (“based on”) suggests that Being can only reveal itself as the Nothingness of the foundation and implication of the Other. Saussure’s wildly perverse demonstration is the truth of the neurotic and his word. The basis (“based on”) and implication (“imply”) are the same. The neurotic’s apprehension articulates itself as perversity. The Pervert’s truth demonstrates itself as neurosis. The “entire mechanism of language” is neither neurotic nor perverse but the impossibility of the distinction and opposition between these two tendencies. The self-same and self-identical is Other, and the “mechanism” of language is the difference and deferral of any word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, and text of and to this Other. The challenge of The Pervert’s Manifesto is to inspire the neurotic to misrecognize himself as the Pervert, and to goad the Pervert into the disrecognition of the word.

 

Saussure embraces a variant of linguistic transcendentalism. This transcendentalism holds that language is the condition of possibility — proviso — of the constitution of the objects in the world. Saussure writes,

Psychologically our thought — apart from its expression in words — is only a shapeless and indistinct mass. Philosophers and linguists have always agreed in recognizing that without the help of signs we would be unable to make a clear-cut, consistent distinction between two ideas. Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula. There are no pre-existing ideas, and nothing is distinct before the appearance of language.

 

The system of words conditions the manifestation of clear and distinct ideas. The sign precedes the signifier and the signified. The language system forges links between ideas (signifieds) and sounds (signifiers) that only will have been (futur antèrieur) signifiers and signifieds in the future event of this bond of the word. The sign precedes the signifier and the signified because the latter are the retroactive constructions of the former. The signifier and the signified preexist their own existence. The origin qua the sign is the destination — suture of signifier and signified. The origin (is) the destination, and any temporality of chronology and succession is incoherent. Langue is the timeless space of the unconscious, and the synchrony of the system overwrites any diachrony which demands the reduction of temporal suspension. The posteriority of the sign is simultaneously the anteriority of the sign. There is no temporality in the system.

 

The signified is the sign, as is any word and any other word — with the hitch that the copulatic Being (“is”) cannot be determined in any presence.  Being cannot be symbolized as either “equivalence” or “equality” or “coincidence” — which would reduce the objects to comparable and contrastable units under general equivalence. The word is pure singularity, even as it is interchangeable with every other word in the system. The signified emerges as a retroactive construction of itself qua sign. The signified is both signified and sign. The signified is the transcendental condition of possibility of itself qua another. The sign is the proviso of the signified because the sign (is) the signified; the sign (signified) is its own condition. The sign (signified) is a creationist ex nihilo that Lacan describes as the delayed origin of all active sublimation. The sign is both itself and not itself. The “shapeless and indistinct mass” of inchoate signifiers and signifieds is the cosmic ether out of which the signified qua sign emerges.

 

Lacan identifies the function of the mythical phallus — a conceptual prop which substitutes for an irresolvable philosophical problem — as the operation which marks these joints between signifiers and signifieds. The phallic joint enables the emergence of the sign. The signified births itself — ex nihilo — to itself qua another. This creationist sublimation of the signified is simultaneously the sublimation of the Other — why? The Other precedes the division between the subject and the alter-ego, and between the aneconomy of the signifier and the Logic of Identity of the sign. The subject is the Other, but this metaphorical bond is unrepresentable by langue. The aneconomy of the signifier is the economy of the sign, the Logic of Difference is the Logic of Identity, and the Other is the subject. But the Being (“is”) of these relationships is under erasure. The signified qua sign showcases — makes present — truth as Aletheia.

 

The signified is the sign, and it emerges retroactively from the sign. The total precedes its components. The signified manifests — ex nihilo — from the unexplained joint between thought and sound qua the sign. There is no difference among signified, signifier, and sign — none at all — because of the structure of the so-called “totality” of the sign. The signified and the signifier reveal themselves in the disguise of the sign. The three elements of the system are coincident with each other because they are different from themselves. The word unveils itself as the signifier. The signified, signifier, and the sign are all signifiers — what Saussure identifies precisely as the sign. The word is the word because the word is not the word. Most simply, this open differential and negative totality summarizes the zany and uncanny structure of the systems of signification in speaking and writing. Écriture is a system of the Sameness+ of repression and its return. The truth of this extraordinary structure of the word is the Pervert’s disavowal. The Pervert’s Manifesto is a presentation and performance of the simultaneity of negation and its return, and of the overlap of all oppositions within the system.

 

Psychoanalysis and Semiotics

 

Saussure’s claim that “psychologically our thought — apart from its expression in words — is only a shapeless and indistinct mass” indicates that psychology is not in fact a psychology. There is no possibility of thought and the signified “apart” from the sound-image and the signifier. The material signifier can only be detached from the signified in theory. Otherwise, the sign in its conceptual incoherence rules the system of practice. (Derrida criticizes the detachment of conceptuality from materiality — in theory, as Saussure says — in the history of philosophy as “logocentrism.”) The peculiarity of the passage is that the abstraction (signified) of psychology emerges as the study of the “shapeless and indistinct mass” qua “its expression in words” — presumably located in “consciousness” or “mind” or “brain.” The thought “apart from its expression in words” is both thought and not thought. To be “apart” from its expression in words is to be part of its expression in words. This (a)part system — isolated and grouped, segregated and unified, and separated and attached — is the upshot of the practical indivisibility of the signifier and the signified. Thought is “itself” only qua a “shapeless and indistinct mass.” Thought is shapeless and indistinct. Thought presents itself as a formal chaos. Thought is not thought. Thought is a variant of prethought. The conscious of the ego is the unconscious. Thought is “apart” from thought. The signified idea is split from itself. There is no unity to “consciousness” or “mind” or “brain.”

 

This also demonstrates the split within the signified. The signified is composed of a sign (called the “signifier”) and a sign (called the “signified”). Thought expressed in words is a shapeless and indistinct mass. Language is thought expressed as a shapeless and indistinct mass. Thought can only express itself as shapeless and indistinct. This is the opposite of Saussure’s description — and Descartes’s — of clear and distinct ideas as the elemental scaffold of metaphysics. Language is a shapeless and indistinct mass. There is order — le propre — in language. Rather than a symbolic order of opposed combinatory pairs, Saussure indicates that language is inchoate and incoherent. Language is prelinguistic. The ego is the id. Saussure’s unexpected reference to “psychology” is an allusion to linguistics itself. Saussure’s claim that “psychologically our thought — apart from its expression in words — is only a shapeless and indistinct mass” is an appeal to psychology qua linguistics. Psychology is a form of linguistics itself. Psychology (psychoanalysis) is a semiology.

 

Thought which is expressed apart from words is thought expressed with words. Expression without and with words is exactly the same difference. The separated is the sutured. The apart is the together. Neurotically, the gap between the signifier and the signified is separate from the so-called “totality” of the sign. The neurotic callowly views this separation as a sign of the unity of the signifier and the signified. The Pervert intuits the separation of the signifier and the signified as a demonstration that the signifier and the signified are each themselves signs. These signs are signifiers. But the signifier is also a signifier. It is no wonder that Saussure appeals to “psychology” for help with the project of “general linguistics.” The slippage among signifier, signified, and sign renders the expression of words a “shapeless and indistinct mass” — whether as innocent speech or conceptual theory.

 

The interval between “our thought” and “shapeless and indistinct mass” is “apart from its expression in words.” Between “our thought” and “shapeless and indistinct mass” is the lack and castration (“apart”) of the masculine libidinal economy. The stark artistry of the syntax and semantics of the passage is that lack and castration (“apart”) is the force of connection and attachment. The gap between “Being” (“our thought”) and “Nothingness” (“shapeless and indistinct mass”) — itself a reversible interval — is the condition of “general linguistics” qua “psychology.” Neurotically, this gap (“apart”) between thought and its Other in chaos is a lack because apart is “itself” apart. The Pervert views this gap (“apart”) as plenitude because apart is not “itself” apart. Oddly, apart is part of a whole. This metaphorical substitution — fetish — is simultaneously a metonymyic contiguity — beyond the fetish. Lack (is) plenitude. Linguistics (is) psychology. Lacan (is) Saussure. The relationship of Being cannot be determined as presence such that the deconstructed oppositions insist in the signifying chain in variable spatial and temporal proximities.

 

Saussure’s declaration that “philosophers and linguists have always agreed in recognizing that without the help of signs we would be unable to make a clear-cut, consistent distinction between two ideas” claims that the “help” of signs is fundamentally helplessness. Language is useless, and it may be dangerous. The first perplexity of the passage is that philosophers and linguists agree that they need “help.” Indeed, that is probably quite true, and it also applies to all of the speakers of language. The agreement between the philosophers and the linguists is precisely a disagreement about the Real. The “help of signs” supplements the work of the philosophers and the linguists whose agreement requires the disagreement of signs. The disagreement of signs agrees to “help” the agreement of the philosophers and the linguists. The “help” is exactly helpless because Saussure’s theory of value makes any “clear-cut, consistent distinction between two ideas” a laughable dumb show. Clear and distinct ideas — at all — are impossible within the system of language.

 

The passage indicates that between the two ideas — the stipulation of the distinction between the two ideas — is a failure. Saussure mentions this, “we would be unable to make a clear-cut, consistent distinction between two ideas.” This failure (“we would be unable to make”) illuminates the two collapsed ideas which finally preexist their own failure. The two ideas precede the two ideas themselves. Precession precedes precession. The present is endlessly deferred forward to (backward from) any point of arche. The two ideas retroactively manifest from and as the failure of their origination ex nihilo. The two ideas are not themselves the two ideas. The distinction heralds the distinction in the simultaneous overlap of temporal past and present and spatial location and dislocation. The economy of the sign and the Logic of Identity retroactively presences from the signifier and the signified. The distinction is not the distinction. The two ideas are the “shapeless and indistinct mass.” Thought is a mess. The distinction is the two ideas. Thought is a division. The two ideas precede the sign which retroactively produces the two ideas as failures. The two ideas mime the creationist sublimation ex nihilo of the signifier. The two ideas are the signifier. The two ideas are language qua chaos. The only thought in langue is madness. The distinction is the unity of the two ideas which this distinction makes possible.

 

Neurotically, the failure of the two ideas is its condition of impossibility. The neurotic understands the veiled failure in Saussure’s passage as an indication of malfunction. The isolation of a chink in the system implies an origin and a cause for a system which does not work. This is the reason that the neurotic searches for the “origin” of language. The massive dysfunction is also the reason that science and religion search for the “origin” of man. If language worked, the neurotic would not seek the universal grammar of the system. If man worked, Darwinists and Christians would not seek the evolution or creation of man. There is a problem with language, and the linguist hunts for the arche of this difficulty. The neurotic reads Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (1917), and he concludes that language does not work — but with the caveat that an originary moment of enunciation — spoken and written — is in presence in the history of language. Writing and speech generally imply presence or origin with the foundation of “consciousness” or “mind” or “brain” as the arche of the text. Perversely, the failure of the two ideas — messy chaos — is the joy of écriture. The Pervert interprets the obscured failure in Saussure’s passage as a sign of wild success. The Pervert reads Saussure’s text as a demonstration of the triumph of language. Langue is a victory for the utter failure of the sign. The sign loses, and language wins.

 

The difference between the neurotic and the Pervert is that whereas the former notices a sad loss between the two ideas, the Pervert envisions a fabulous presence between the two ideas. For the neurotic, the two ideas are two ideas. For the Pervert, the two ideas are one idea. No distinction or opposition separates the one from the other. No distinction or opposition — of the sign — operates in the universe of the Pervert. The phallic function — a metaphorical prop for a philosophical conundrum — does not rule the world of the Pervert. Neurotically, the interval between the neurotic and the Pervert is cheerless failure — what psychoanalysis names as lack and castration. Perversely, the interval between the neurotic and the Pervert is happy success — what the Pervert intuits as presence and plenitude. For the obsessive linguists and hysterical philosophers, the signs “help” because they translate the “shapeless and indistinct mass” into expression in words. For the Pervert and his Manifesto, language is “helpless” — but droll — because it can only draw distinctions and oppositions that immediately dissolve under the mischievous eye of the Pervert. Language “helps” the neurotic see his own “helplessness.” The system reveals itself to the neurotic as a fabulous failure. The Pervert observes that the neurotic is itself the subjective figuration of language. The neurotic is the cause and effect of the madness of langue. The neurotic cannot free itself from the sign — what Lacan describes as the torture of man by the word. The difference between the neurotic and the Pervert is that the former understands himself as the cut of the Real in the symbolic, and the latter interprets himself as the suture of the symbolic in the Real. The neurotic is the failure in the symbolic qua Real. The Pervert is the success of the Real qua symbolic. Perversely, these two modalities are the same. The neurotic is the Real qua the symbolic, and the Pervert is the symbolic qua the Real. The Symbolic (is) the Real. Is (is) is, and is (is not) is. The qua is not the qua.

 

What is Language?

 

Saussure’s claim that “without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula” is a neurotic interpretation of the relationship between, on the one hand, thought and the signified and, on the other hand, the system of langue. The first oddity is the assumption of a time and space which is the Outside of the symbolic order — what Lacan identifies as the Real which resists symbolization absolutely. In the absence of language, thought is a “shapeless and indistinct mass,” even if the only function of language is such chaotic thought. The absence of language is the presence of the amorphous throng, and the loss of the word in the Real is the presence of the inchoate mass of signifiers and signifieds without the punctuation of the point de capiton. The absence of the symbolic is the presence of the Real. Ergo, absence (is) presence, and the symbolic (is) the Real. The relationship between absence and presence, and between the symbolic and the Real, is imaginable as a parallactic overlap but indescribable in the signification of the word.

 

Saussure isolates the time and space which is the Outside of the symbolic — the “without language” that Derrida details as the il n’y a pas de hors texte. Saussure also identifies the Inside of the symbolic — with language that Saussure names as a “vague, uncharted nebula.” The absence of language is coincident with the presence of language. Presence and absence are each different from themselves but continuous with each other in a system which is based on the Logic of the Future. The simultaneity of this difference and continuity — otherness and overlap, dissonance and equality, and decenterment and inlay — is the parallactic gap and suture of the one and the same object in its difference and negativity in relationship to “itself.” There is no proper word for the subject and process — substance — of this parallactic gap. The “is” between difference and continuity, otherness and overlap, dissonance and equality, and decenterment and inlay is the resistant void whose effect is the interplay of Eros and Thanatos in the implosion and explosion of the word. Language is not language. A thought — philosophy as such — is only possible within the system and its series of semantic and syntactical arrangements. Thought inscribes itself with the “help” of signs. But this series of words also demonstrates the opposite of its intention. The “vague, uncharted nebula” is the ultimate thought — chaotic and inchoate — of language. The “vague, uncharted nebula” is precisely not langue.

 

After reading Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (1917), it is reasonable to wonder: what is language? The proper response is enunciated in Lacan’s description of perversion in the Seminar on Freud’s theory and technique of the analysis of the ego (1954-1955): “It is something else in its very structure.” Language reveals itself as otherwise than itself. Language is its own Outside. The same holds for the sign, the signifier, and the signified. They are each not themselves. The sign is the Outside of the word; the signifier is the Outside of materiality; and the signified is the Outside of abstraction. This is the reason — the Real — that Saussure staggers in the effort to define the terms as themselves. These signifiers unveil themselves as otherwise than themselves; the manifest level of the system obscures its latent truth; the symptom is a dissimulation. The system resists qua Real its revelation as a “vague, uncharted nebula.” The system is an amorphous mass of inchoate thoughts and sounds. It is a throng of unorganized signifieds and signifiers. The symbolic is Real, and the “is” of Being which couples and unbinds symbolic and Real is the abyss of the parallactic overlap between the two (one) dimension(s). The system unveils itself as a symbolic order of organized binary oppositions. But this arrangement is a silly theatrical production of artifice. The system is a a put-on of simulation. Otherwise, the system is fundamentally disorganized and destructured as the Logic of Difference. The absence of language posits an expected but elided presence of language. The system is this nebulous assemblage of jostled signs. It is a confusion without anchor in any foundation or ground. Philosophy is the mise-en-scène of madness, and thought is the excess of chaos.

 

The time and space without language is simultaneously the time and space with language. They are — Inside and Outside — the same time and space. There is no Outside and Inside to the system. The sans is the avec. The time before language is the time after language. The system of langue  is an eternal and timeless unconscious of the suspension of temporality in the expanses of space. There is no arche of language because the system dissolves — differs and defers in différance — any origin in the fiery whirlwind of an undeveloped swarm of wordy ether. What is the “origin” of language? The neurotic cheerlessly regrets the absence and loss at the arche, and the Pervert delightfully embraces the presence and bounty at the — trace. The reason that the neurotic spots castration at the “origin” is that he insists that the “origin” is coincident with and identical to itself. The “origin” is lack and absence because the origin is considered itself in its delay and interruption. The reason that the Pervert discovers plenitude and fullness at the “origin” is that he observes that the arche is not itself. The play of différance and its suspended point de capiton disrupts arche. The difference between the function of the phallus in the psychotic against the Pervert is that whereas the former cannot symbolize because the quilting point is absent as a trauma, the latter can symbolize because of the peculiar mechanism of disavowal which enables him to pin significance even as the letter passes to another destination in the endless metonymy of desire. The “origin” is otherwise than itself but parallactically sutured to the other supplements in the series of metonymical and metaphorical extensions in space.

 

The disappeared arche of language is a neurotic symptom. The origin qua symptom is quilted by the point de capiton, and the proper “origin” of language is the slipperiness of the perverse value of the signifier rather than the neurotic signification of the word. Outside of perversion, langue is a “vague, uncharted nebula.” Inside of perversion, langue is a playground of the ecstasies of the feminine jouissance which is the messianic arrival of the Other after the death of man and the end of patriarchy and its support in the phallocentric (penis/not-penis) system of representation. The “origin” of the perversity of language is itself neurotic. A neurosis is the arche of perversion, and the symptom of neurosis is the schizophrenia of langue. But the “origin” of the neurosis of language is also perversion. Neurosis manifests from a primary perversity which invariably disavows the system of binary opposition. This disavowal is the both/and acknowledgement and denial of the system. Language is both the anxious labor of repression and the Spirited playground of disavowal.

 

The Pervert disavows the division between anxiety and Spirit — labor and play, and latent and manifest. The Pervert embarks on the adventure of a giddy dance of enjoyment as the condition of the world — a violently Nietzschean trope. Saussure can only reveal language qua nebulous mass of madness — the symbolic qua the Real — with the extant language — word and signification — at his disposal. Language avec language is language sans language. Saussure approaches an articulation of the Real Symbolic — the play land of perversity — in the contention that “without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula.” These words index the parallactic coincidence and continuity — unsymbolizable Sameness+ of the Real — of absence, lack, and Nothingness (“without language”) with presence, plenitude, and Being (“thought is”). This parallactic overlap is simultaneously a lacunae because the thought of a “vague, uncharted nebula” is not properly a thought of language (“without language”). The without language is the system itself. The system of langue is absent of itself. Nothingness (is) Being, and the essence of language is a constitution of Becoming in the absence of a constituted Being. Language — philosophy and thought, and speech and writing — is a vague, uncharted nebula of mad incoherence. This is the essence of the word. Philosophy cannot do without the “help” of language. It is a necessary crutch. It is a dangerous auxiliary. It is also of no “help.”

 

These perverse pyrotechnics demonstrate Lacan’s lalangue — the primary chaotic substrate of polysemy at the base of the symbolic order. (Kristeva refers to this as the semiotic chora.) This lalangue inspires a jouissance of the Other of the body of the material signifier. This jouissance of the Other is the enjoyment of a subject which exceeds the borders of Being. Lacan names the feminine pleasure the jouissance of the Other because this pleasure arises at the moment of the dissolution of the separation between the subject and the Other. It is the emergence of the free exchange between the inside and the outside which awaits beyond the reign of phallic intervention. Femininely, the jouissance is the Other’s jouissance because the Other’s jouissance is the subject’s own jouissance. The désir of the subject is the désir of the Other, and the jouissance of the self is the subject of the jouissance of the Other. What is the difference between feminine and masculine, and between Other and subject? This Other jouissance upsets the boundaries between the subject and the Other. The analytic shift from ego and alter-ego of the imaginary register to the Subject of the Unconscious which is situated between the symbolic and the Real substitutes feminine jouissance for masculine jouissance. This is a free exchange because the man’s pleasure and the woman’s ecstasy are a Sameness+ or Otherness+ which cannot be reduced to the economy of general equivalence and the comparison and contrast of identity and difference.

 

The reason that lalangue precedes the dissolution of the transferential ego and alter-ego relationship is that puns and plays (and jokes and dreams, as Freud demonstrates) destablize the strict codes of the symbolic order. Puns reveal the truth of the symbolic order as the Real. Puns are not the truth. This is precisely the reason that truth can only express itself in puns. The pun is the veil and concealment that Heidegger defines as truth. Truth or Aletheia unveils itself as otherwise than itself. Neurotically, the pun is a nuisance which interrupts the rationality of language. The neurotic reads the pun as an annoyance — just as the symptom is interpreted as a dysfunction — which obscures truth. But perversely, the pun is a delight which reveals the irrationality of language. The Pervert interprets the pun as an exhilaration in lalangue which reveals truth. The Pervert of feminine jouissance recognizes that annoyance is exhilaration, and that nuisance is delight. The same difference between the two perspectives unites and divides each other — like Eros and Thanatos — within and as each other.

 

The Other’s jouissance is both ecstatic and painful — orgasmic death — because the Other’s jouissance of the subject is precisely the Other’s jouissance — it is not for the subject to determine as either ecstatic or painful. The pleasure and hurt of the system is elsewhere from the subject. Strictly, the subject’s affect is exteriorized from any vacant Nothingness in the place of the subject. The polysemy of lalangue at the center of the symbolic order is the inspiration for the puns which reveal the symbolic qua the Real. Thought qua vague, uncharted nebula qua the Real is the jouissance of the Other. The symbolic order is its own enjoyment in the Real. Enjoyment is a broken chaos which intends to destroy the distinction and opposition of the sign. But the only mode of demonstration of this limit-thought of the Real Symbolic is the system of signs. The system of langue enables the amorphous throng to be otherwise than itself — without language. The Pervert symbolizes that he does not need the system of signs in order to enjoy himself. The only absence in the system is the maniacal laughter of the Other’s jouissance — what can be described as the absent presence of the Being of Nothingness of the self. The Other cackles in present absence because the subject guffaws in absent presence. But what is the difference between presence and absence? Why is this distinction crucial to the (dys)function of the masculine libidinal economy?

 

Other Jouissance

 

The Other’s jouissance is accessible to the Pervert, who relishes its symbolization, and the psychotic, who suffers its torture. The schizoid is unable to symbolize this pleasure, and he experiences the feminine jouissance as a return of the foreclosed in the Real as the symbolic itself in the phenomena of delusions and hallucinations. The psychotic fails to symbolize the Real and for this reason his experience is unarticulable in the symbolic; the schizoid is himself because he makes no sense to the symbolic order. The reason for the schizoid’s bungled symbolization is the foreclosure of the paternal metaphor — what Lacan defines as the substitution of the name of the father (the symbolic) for the desire of the mother (the Real). The failure of this substitution of the father’s law for the mother’s desire — metaphor — conditions the emergence of psychosis. The foreclosure of the name of the father in schizophrenia obstructs the symbolization of the Real. Rather than foreclose the paternal metaphor, the Pervert disavows the name of the father. This disavowal both accepts and denies the reality of the castration threat. The reason that the Pervert disavows — accepts and denies — the reality of the castration threat is that the desire of the mother and the law of the father present themselves as the same difference. For the Pervert, the mother’s desire is the father’s law. Law and desire are flip-sides of the same difference; desire follows duty. The mother’s desire presents itself as equivalent to the father’s law. The schizoid forecloses the name of the father because it contradicts the desire of the mother; the psychotic is trapped in what Lacan calls “mommy-gator,” the ferocious annihilation of the separation of the child from the mother. The psychotic makes a choice in favor of the mother at the expense of the father, and this choice costs him coherent access to the symbolic order. The schizoid fails the paternity test of the Oedipus complex. In contrast, the Pervert refuses both the mother and the father because he accepts both choices, such as both libido and law. There is no choice for the Pervert because the mother’s desire and the father’s law are coincident because they are not themselves. The Pervert’s choice is both — “yes, yes,” as Derrida puts it. The only decision for the Pervert is to follow his own jouissance — the Other’s jouissance — and disavow the name of the father, the rule of law that separates entities (in Saussure: the signifier, the signified, and the sign) from each other. The disavowal of the name of the father is the avowal of the name of the father. For this reason, the Pervert is precisely not the Pervert; his identity is internally — and externally — split. Both the neurotic and the psychotic tarry with the Oedipus complex. There is no Oedipus complex for the Pervert because there is no “opposition,” in Saussure’s terminology, between the mother’s desire and the father’s law. For the Pervert, the Oedipus complex is not the Oedipus complex. Rather, desire (is) law. The “inverted ladder,” as Lacan puts it, of the law of desire describes the disavowal of the paternal metaphor. The “inverted ladder” is not a metaphor because the Pervert fundamentally disavows metaphor — a process of substitution which depends on distinction for its operation.

 

Saussure’s claim that “there are no pre-existing ideas, and nothing is distinct before the appearance of language” demonstrates the aporetics involved in the expression of the relationship between the symbolic and the Real. The passage indicates that “nothing” precedes language. The indication is not simply a linguistic transcendentalism which holds that language is the condition of possibility of the constitution of the categories in the mind and the objects in the world. Rather, the point is that Saussure must rely on the Being of Nothingness (“nothing is distinct”) in order to articulate his conception of language. The phrase “nothing is distinct” indicates that “nothing” is torn between Being and Nothingness. The equivalence that Saussure draws between Nothingness and distinction indicates that Nothingness is the proper name for language itself — of creation ex nihilo of a system without origin. Language is nothing whatsoever. The nothing qua the distinct is neither Being nor Nothingness but the condition of possibility of the difference between the two terms of Nothingness and distinction. The phrase “nothing is distinct” identifies Nothingness as the ontological Being qua transcendental condition of possibility of the ontic beings (Nothingness and distinction) in the world. Saussure’s passage confuses the levels of the ontological and the ontic in the same way that Heidegger’s vaunted “ontico-ontological” difference collapses upon realization that “Being” (Sein) is simply another “being” (Seinde) in the world. The trick in both Heidegger’s work and the excerpt from Saussure is that they confuse the transcendental level — “Being” for Heidegger, “Nothingness” for Saussure — with the conditioned term — “being” for Heidegger, “nothing” and distinction for Saussure.

 

The Pervert recognizes that “Being” is another “being” in the world and understands that the “nothing” is another distinction in language. Unexpectedly for Heidegger, the collapse of the ontico-ontological difference enables the emergence of what the Greek name physis — the blossoming-forth out of itself of being — which is suppressed in a system that forces being to rely on Being for the light of truth. The physis that Heidegger seeks is only possible beyond a system which is based in the ontico-ontological difference, and beyond language as the purported house of Being. Being emerges only when it is reduced to Nothingness. Language (lalangue) surfaces only when it is reduced to a formless mob. Saussure’s claim that “nothing is distinct” suggests not only that Nothingness is Being but that Being and Nothingness are equivalent (“is”) terms. The equivalence (or any word) between Being and Nothingness destabilizes the equivalence itself. The Being of Nothingness — what Heidegger would term the Being (the what is) of beings (of what is) in the world — is not the Being of Nothingness. For this reason, Being (is) Nothingness. Saussure makes clear that Being (“nothing is distinct”) is divided in itself. Every signifier in the system — even Nothingness — is divided against itself —  the object of Zizek’s parallactic gap — but united with the signifiers that surround it — the object of what I refer to as relational plenitude. This is the reason that Heidegger cannot define Being, which presents itself as Nothingness in his work, but can unite the signifiers involved in being-in-the-world and being-with-others with extended hyphens (a peculiarity of the translated German).

 

The Being of each entity is Nothingness qua the parallactic gap — which is lack and castration for the neurotic and which is presence and fullness for the Pervert. The Being of each entity is Being or relational plenitude — which is lack and castration for the neurotic and which is presence and fullness for the Pervert. The time “before” language is the time of the suture of these two coincident lacks and plenitudes: the lack of the subject (parallactic gap) and the lack in the Other (relational plenitude). The time “before” language when “nothing is distinct” is the time “after” language when everything is indistinct. Language precedes language; in the beginning was the word. There is no arche of language. The source of langue is endless recursion within the system such a search seeks to found. This explains Lacan’s utter disinterest in developmental or psychosexual stages. The mirror stage text is a neurotic metaphor. For Lacan, language is a creationist sublimation — ex nihilo — and for this reason speaking, writing, reading, and listening are fundamentally ethical activities of sublimation.

 

The Other’s jouissance invites the subject into an economy beyond the rule of the symbolic which is based on the restriction of the barred Other — that there is no Other of the Other (and so on). The barred Other — Other — is equivalent to the assertion that il n’existe pas de tell chose comme le sujet. The Other of the Other is the subject which can be described as the outside of the subject. This Outside-Subject traumatically returns to itself. The subject is not the subject; as in the mirror stage text, the subject is split between anxious discord and anticipated image of totality. The reason that the subject is not the subject is that the subject is the Other; the subject, like the mole in the game of whack-a-mole, is elsewhere from “itself”; it is not in its proper (le propre) place. There is no such das Ding as the subject; it is a fictional and ideological invention of the Enlightenment, which is a tradition that both Derrida’s and Lacan’s efforts are intended to dismantle. The subject and the Other are the same difference; the split within each of these entities relates one to the other in an unequal equivalence. The point is that the unbarred subject — the Pervert — only unveils itself as the barred subject. The reason that Perverts do not go to ego-analysis is because the analyst produces the neurotic. The ego-analyst is a neurotic who produces the neurotic; the cure, as Derrida notes in his reading of Plato, is the source of the affliction.

 

Lacan stresses the “training analysis” because he trains his students to be Perverts — what can in shorthand be referred to as “the pass” — so that they in turn will produce Perverts. This succession of Perverts are wrongly identified as schizoids by ego-psychologists. Indeed, the Pervert presents as a psychotic to the neurotic; the psychical structure (neurotic, psychotic, perverse) determines the diagnosis of the subject; for this reason, each subject is simultaneously all three structures. The Pervert is only properly diagnosed as a Pervert by the analyst qua Pervert — the position that Lacan models for the analyst as the object-cause of the subject’s desire. The reason that the perverse analyst recognizes the analysand as perverse is because the analyst is also the analysand. The dissolution of the transference in the collapse of the ego and the alter-ego bond of narcissism and aggressivity invites the relationship between the Subject of the Unconscious and the Other qua the ego and the alter ego bond.

 

The end of analysis reveals the imaginary transference as otherwise than itself. The dissolution of the transference is the continuance of the transference. The transference persists, as Lacan suggests, because it ends. The post-transference (in)equivalence — the simultaneous parallactic gap of each term with itself and relational plenitude of each term with the other terms in the system — invites the feminine jouissance of the Other. This Outside pleasure enjoys the (in)equivalence between the subject and the Other. The Pervert’s Other jouissance laughs at the distinction between parallactic gap (lack) and relational plenitude (fullness). The Pervert lacks neither because he recognizes that the Other of the Other is the subject. The subject is the lack. The Pervert’s radical dispossession of himself entails that he has all that he needs; the Pervert is full and plentiful. The Pervert simply does not desire. Instead, the Pervert enjoys. Desire is for the neurotic whose masculine idiotic jouissance gets off on knowledge and mastery. The Pervert does not know, he need not know anything whatsoever. Instead, the Pervert plays. Knowledge is for the neurotic whose philosophy (like Kant’s) corresponds to reality — what Heidegger names the correspondence theory of truth. The Pervert does not philosophize. Enjoyment is desire. Play is knowledge. There is no such das Ding as the subject because there is no Other of the Other. Lacan veils — bars — his destruktion of the subject or reduction of the subject — to the parallactic gap of the Real in the symbolic — because the truth (as Aletheia) reveals itself as otherwise than itself. The subject is “something else entirely in its very structure.” The subject is Other than itself.