In Seminar 3, Lacan distinguishes the signifier as “[making note] of the sign as such”: A ship captain writes in the ship’s log about an event that he has witnessed. What is written down becomes a signifier, it is no longer a sign.

Recall Hegel’s discussion of sense-certainty in The Phenomenology of Spirit: We see that Now is Night and “We write down this truth”; but then the sun rises and Now becomes Day. So a discrepancy emerges between the mediation of the signifier “Now” and the immediacy of the alternating signs “Day” and “Night”. This is why Hegel calls the signifier the “negative in general”.

By relating Lacan’s example to Hegel’s discussion, we can say that the sense-certainty of the sign consists of an imaginary mirror-relation between ‘I’ and ‘This’. For Hegel this “immediately appears as the richest kind of knowledge” because of its boundless appearance and it “appears to be the truest knowledge”; but in the end it “proves itself to be the most abstract and poorest truth” in comparison to the determinacy that the signifier affords [1]. The symbolic mediation of the signifier is distinguished as the “negative in general” by writing down the imaginary sense-certainty of the sign.

Now we can review Boothby’s claim in “Lacan’s Thing With Hegel” that the pointing finger is a signifier [2]. Boothby rightly points out that the pointing finger is a combination of the image of the finger with the real of the pointed Thing. But he then neglects the necessity of the symbolic dimension for it to be a signifier. Since the pointing finger is still immersed in the immediacy of the mirror-relation between ‘I’ and ‘This’, it should be associated with the imaginary sense-certainty of the sign. The signifier, in contrast, would “take note of the sign” by introducing a negative symbolic mediation.

Moreover, since consciousness is always immersed in the duality between ‘I’ and ‘This’ whereas the unconscious “is structured like a language”, what distinguishes the signifier from the sign, namely the “negative in general”, also distinguishes the unconscious from consciousness.

This determination has great consequences: Unknowing is always stronger than knowledge. This is probably the reason why humans have a strong passion for ignorance (repression), while they have no pure desire to know about stuff [3]. One must dismiss the commonsensical derogatory connotation of “ignorance”: Learned-trained ignorance (as opposed to crass ignorance) is an important virtue for Lacan [4]. I call this virtue Görce [5]. Unknowing has a very strong influence on knowledge because it is the negative mediation of unknowing that opens the field of truth in the horizon of knowledge. In practice, this influence is sensed as the meaningless signification of the true truth [6].

(Turkish)

Işık Barış Fidaner is a computer scientist with a PhD from Boğaziçi University, İstanbul. Admin of Yersiz Şeyler, Editor of Žižekian Analysis, Curator of Görce Writings. Twitter: @BarisFidaner

Notes:

[1] This is imaginary alienation as posturing wholeness: “Imaginary Alienation (Posturing Wholeness) and Symbolic Alienation (Posturing Allness)”

[2] See “The pointing finger is a sign” which also includes the full quotation from Lacan.

[3] Jacques-Alain Miller: “Lacan said ‘there is no desire to know, there is no drive to know.’ And he added: ‘the only thing I have ever discovered in a patient, and in myself, is the drive not to know.'” / Jacques Lacan, 21st Seminar: “well I hope you remember, not only did I emphasize this, that there is no desire to know [désir de savoir], but that I even talked about something like … that I actually articulated this horror of knowing [l’horreur de savoir]. There you go!”. See also “Curiosity and the Passion of Ignorance”

[4] See “Ignorance’a Cehalet Değil Bilmezlik Denmelidir”

[5] See “Görce Writings”

[6] See “The meaningless signification of the true truth”