🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

Let us take up our aim again: ‘1’1. Namely, what I announced to you last time, that I intended to pivot our problem around the notion of the ‘1’, our problem, that of identification. It having already been announced that identification is not simply ‘making one’. I think this will not be difficult for you to admit.

We begin, as is proper concerning identification, from the most common mode of access of subjective experience, the one expressed by what appears as essentially communicable evidence in the formula which, at first glance, does not seem to raise any objection: that A be A. I said ‘at first glance’, because it is clear that, whatever the belief-value this formula carries, I am not the first to raise objections against it.

You need only open the slightest treatise on logic to encounter what difficulties the distinction of this formula, apparently the simplest, raises by itself. You may even see that the greatest part of the difficulties to be resolved in many domains—but it is particularly striking that this be so in logic more than elsewhere—fall under all the possible confusions that can arise from this formula which eminently lends itself to confusion.

If, for example, you have some difficulty, even some fatigue, in reading a text as passionate as Plato’s Parmenides: it is insofar as, on this point of ‘A is A’, let us say that you are a little lacking in reflection, and insofar precisely that, if I said a moment ago that ‘A is A’ is a belief, this must indeed be understood as I said it: it is a belief that has not always surely reigned over our species, insofar as after all A did indeed begin somewhere—I am speaking of A: the letter A—and that it must not have been so easy to gain access to that kernel of apparent certainty there is in ‘A is A’, when man did not have A at his disposal.

I will say in a moment along what path this reflection may lead us: it is nevertheless fitting to realize what arrives as new with A. For the moment let us be content with this, which our language here allows us to articulate well: that ‘A is A’ looks as if it wants to mean something, it produces signifiedness.

I posit—very sure of encountering no opposition on this point from anyone…
and on this theme from a position of competence whose test I have made through attested testimonies of what can be read on the matter, by questioning this or that mathematician, sufficiently familiar with his science to know where we currently stand for example, and then many others in all domains
…I will encounter no opposition in advancing, under certain conditions of explanation which are precisely those to which I am going to submit myself before you, that: ‘A is A’ means nothing.

It is precisely this ‘nothing’ that is at issue, for it is this ‘nothing’ that has positive value for saying what it means. We have in our experience, even in our analytic folklore, something, an image never sufficiently deepened, exploited, namely the game of the little child, so skillfully identified by Freud, glimpsed so perspicaciously in the ‘Fort-Da’.

Let us take it up for our own account since, from an object to be taken and rejected—it is a question in this child of his grandson—Freud knew how to glimpse the inaugural gesture in the game. Let us redo this gesture, let us take this small object, a ping-pong ball: I take it, I hide it, I show it to him again. The ‘ping-pong ball’ is ‘the ping-pong ball’, but it is not a signifier, it is an object. It is an approach to saying: ‘this little(a) is a little(a) ’.

Between these two moments—which I unquestionably identify in a legitimate way—there is the disappearance of the ball. Without that there is no way for me to show anything, there is nothing that forms on the plane of the image. So the ball is always there and I can fall into catalepsy from looking at it too much.

What relation is there between the ‘is’ that unites the two appearances of the ball and this intermediate disappearance?
On the imaginary plane, you grasp that at least the question arises of the relation of this ‘is’ with what indeed seems to cause it, namely disappearance, and there you are close to one of the secrets of identification, which is the one to which I tried to have you refer in the folklore of identification: this spontaneous assumption by the subject of the identity of two appearances that are nevertheless quite different.

Remember the story of the dead owner of the farm whom his servant rediscovers in the body of the mouse:
the relation of this ‘that is him’ with the ‘that is still him’, that is what gives us the simplest experience of identification, the model and the register. ‘Him’ then ‘still him’: there is the aiming at being, in the ‘still him’, it is the same being that appears. As for the other, all in all, that can go like that, it goes. For my dog, whom I took the other day as a term of reference, as I just told you: it goes, this reference to being is sufficiently, it seems, supported by her sense of smell. In the imaginary field the support of being is quickly conceivable. What is at stake is knowing whether it is effectively this simple relation that is in question in our experience of identification.

When we speak of our experience of being, it is not for nothing that the whole effort of a thought that is ours, contemporary, goes on to formulate something of which I never move the bulky piece of furniture except with a certain smile: this Dasein, this fundamental mode of our experience of which it seems that the furniture giving all access, to this term of being, the primary reference, must be designated.

It is precisely there that something else forces us to question ourselves on this: that the scansion wherein this presence to the world manifests itself is not simply imaginary, namely that already it is not to the other that here we refer, but to that more intimate part of ourselves from which we try to make the anchoring, the root, the foundation of what we are as subject. For if we can articulate, as we have done on the imaginary plane, that my dog recognizes me as the same, we have on the other hand no indication of the way in which she identifies herself.

In whatever way we may be able to re-engage her into herself, we do not know, we have no proof, no testimony of the mode under which, this identification, she hooks onto it. It is here that the function, the value of the signifier itself as such appears, and it is insofar precisely as it is a question of the subject that we have to question ourselves on the relation of this identification of the subject with what is a different dimension from everything that is of the order of appearance and disappearance, namely the status of the signifier.

That our experience shows us that the different modes, the different angles under which we are led to identify ourselves as subjects, at least for a part of them, presuppose the signifier in order to articulate it, even under the form most often ambiguous, improper, unwieldy and subject to all sorts of reservations and distinctions, which is ‘A is A’, that is where I want to bring your attention. And first of all I want to say without further dawdling, to show you that if we have the chance to take one more step in this direction, it is by trying to articulate this status of the signifier as such. I indicate it at once, the signifier is not the sign. It is in giving this distinction its precise formula that we are going to apply ourselves. I mean that it is by showing where this difference lies that we will be able to see emerge this fact already given by our experience, that it is from the effect of the signifier that the subject as such emerges.

Metonymic effect? Metaphorical effect? We do not yet know, and perhaps there is something articulable already before these effects, which allows us to see dawn, to form in a relation, in a connection, the dependence of the subject as such with respect to the signifier. That is what we are going to see put to the test.

To anticipate what I am trying here to make you grasp, to anticipate it in a short image, to which it is only a matter of giving still only a sort of value of support, of apologue, measure the difference between this, which will at first perhaps seem to you a play on words, but precisely it is one: there is ‘the trace of a step’—I have already led you onto this track, strongly tinged with mythicism, correlated precisely with the time when the function of the subject as such begins to be articulated in thought: ROBINSON before ‘the trace of a step’ that shows him that on the island he is not alone—
the distance that separates this ‘step’ [pas], from what ‘pas’ has become phonetically as the instrument of negation [same word in French: pas = step / not].

These are exactly the two extremes of the chain that here I ask you to hold before showing you effectively what constitutes it and that it is between the two ends of the chain that the subject can emerge and nowhere else.
By grasping it, we will arrive at relativizing something in such a way that you may consider this formula ‘A is A’, itself as a sort of stigma, I mean in its character as belief, as the affirmation of what I will call an ἐποχή [époché]: epoch, moment, parenthesis, historical term after all, whose field we can, you will see, glimpse as limited. What I called the other day an indication—which will still remain only an indication—of the identity of this false consistency of ‘A is A’ with what I called ‘a theological era’, will, I believe, allow me to take a step in what is at issue concerning the problem of identification, insofar as analysis requires that it be posed in relation to a certain access to the identical, as transcending it.

This fecundity, this sort of determination that is suspended from this signified of ‘A is A’ could not rest on its truth since it is not true, this affirmation. What is at stake in reaching, in what I strive before you to formulate, is that this fecundity rests precisely on the objective fact…
I use ‘objective’ there in the sense it has for example in the text of Descartes: when one goes a little further, one sees the distinction emerge, concerning ideas, of their ‘actual reality’ and their ‘objective reality’.
And naturally the professors produce for us very learned volumes, such as a scholastico-Cartesian index to tell us
—which seems to us there, to us, since God knows we are clever, a little muddled—
that it is a heritage of scholasticism, whereby one believes one has explained everything, I mean that one has freed oneself
from what is at stake, namely: why Descartes—the anti-scholastic—was led to reuse these old accessories.
It does not seem that it comes so easily to mind, even to the best historians, that the only interesting thing is what necessitates his pulling them out again. It is quite clear that it is not in order to make Saint Anselm’s argument all over again that he drags all that back onto the front of the stage.
…the objective fact that A cannot be A, that is what I would first like to make evident for you, precisely to make you understand that it is of something that has a relation with this objective fact that it is a question, and right down into this false effect of signified which is only shadow and consequence and which leaves us attached to this sort of spontaneity there is in ‘A is A’.

That the signifier is fecund in being unable in any case to be identical to itself, understand well what I mean there: it is perfectly clear that I am not in the process—though it is worth the trouble in passing in order to distinguish it from this—of making you notice that there is no tautology in saying that ‘war is war’. Everyone knows that. When one says ‘war is war’, one says something, one does not know exactly what besides, but one can look for it, one can find it and one finds it very easily, within arm’s reach.

That means—which begins from a certain moment—one is in a state of war. That involves conditions of things a little bit different; it is what Péguy called ‘that the little pegs no longer went into the little holes’.
That is a Péguyan definition, that is to say, it is anything but certain. One could maintain the contrary, namely: that it is precisely in order to put the little pegs back into their true little holes that war begins,
or on the contrary that it is to make new little holes for old little pegs, and so on.

This, moreover, has strictly no interest for us, except that this pursuit, whatever it may be, is accomplished with remarkable effectiveness through the intermediary of the deepest imbecility, which must also make us reflect on the function of the subject in relation to the effects of the signifier. But let us take something simple, and be done with it quickly.
If I say: ‘My grandfather is my grandfather’, you must nevertheless clearly grasp that there is no tautology there,
that ‘my grandfather’, first term, is an indexical use of the second term ‘my grandfather’, which is sensibly not different from his proper name, for example Émile Lacan, nor any more from the ‘c’ of ‘c’est’ when I designate him when he enters a room: ‘that’s my grandfather’.

Which does not mean that his proper name is the same thing as this ‘c’ of ‘this is my grandfather’.
One is astonished that a logician like Russell could have believed he could say that the proper name is of the same category,
of the same signifying class as the this, that or it, on the pretext that they are susceptible of the same functional use in certain cases. This is a parenthesis, but like all my parentheses, a parenthesis intended to be found again later concerning the status of the proper name, of which we will not speak today.

Be that as it may, what is at stake in ‘My grandfather is my grandfather’ means this: that this execrable little bourgeois that the said fellow was, this horrible person thanks to whom I gained at an early age access to that fundamental function which is to curse God, this person is exactly the same one who is entered in the civil registry as being shown by the bonds of marriage to be the father of my father, insofar as it is precisely the birth of the latter that is at issue in the act in question. You therefore see to what extent ‘my grandfather is my grandfather’ is not a tautology[sic].

This applies to all tautologies, and this does not provide a univocal formula for them, for here it is a question of a relation
of the real to the symbolic. In other cases there will be a relation of the imaginary to the symbolic, and carry through the whole series of permutations, just to see which ones will be valid. I cannot commit myself to this path because if I am speaking to you of this, which is in some way a mode of setting aside false tautologies that are simply the current, permanent use of language, it is to tell you that that is not what I mean.

If I posit that no tautology is possible, it is not insofar as first A and second A mean different things that I say there is no tautology: it is in the very status of A that it is inscribed that A cannot be A. And it is on this that I ended my discourse last time by indicating to you in Saussure the point where it is said that A as signifier can in no way be defined, except as not being what the other signifiers are. On this fact: that it can be defined only by this precisely, by not being all the other signifiers, on this depends that dimension in which it is also true that it cannot be itself.

It is not enough to advance it thus in this opaque way precisely because it surprises, because it overturns this belief suspended from the fact that this is the true support of identity, one must make you feel it. What is a signifier?
If everyone, and not only logicians, speaks of A when it is a question of ‘A is A’, that is still not by chance, it is because, to support what one designates, one needs a ‘letter’.

You grant me that, I think, but likewise I do not hold this leap to be decisive, except insofar as my discourse cuts across it, demonstrates it in a sufficiently superabundant way for you to be convinced of it, and you will be all the better convinced of it because I am going to try to show you in the ‘letter’ precisely this essence of the signifier
through which it is distinguished from the sign.

I did something for you last Saturday at my country house where I have—hanging on my wall—
what is called a ‘Chinese calligraphy’. If it were not Chinese, I would not have hung it on my wall
for the reason that it is only in China that calligraphy has taken on the value of an art object. It is the same thing as having
a painting, it has the same price. There are the same differences, and perhaps even more, from one writing to another
in our culture as in Chinese culture, but we do not attach the same value to it.

Moreover I will have occasion to show you what can—for us—mask the value of the ‘letter’, what, because of
the particular status of the Chinese character, is particularly well brought out in this character. What I am therefore going to show you takes its full and most exact situation only from a certain reflection on what the Chinese character is.

I have already, all the same, often enough alluded to the Chinese character and to its status for you to know that,
calling it ideographic is not at all sufficient. I will perhaps show it to you in more detail.

That is moreover what it has in common with everything that has been called ideographic: there is properly speaking nothing that deserves this term in the sense in which it is usually imagined, I would almost say expressly in the sense in which Saussure’s little diagram, with arbor and the tree drawn underneath, still supports it by a kind of imprudence, which is what misunderstandings and confusions cling to.

What I want to show you there, I made in two copies.

I had been given at the same time a new little instrument of which certain painters make much, a sort of thick brush where the fluid comes from the inside, which allows one to draw strokes with an interesting thickness, a consistency. The result was that I copied much more easily than I normally would have the form the characters had on my calligraphy. In the left column, there is the calligraphy of this sentence, which means: ‘the shadow of my hat dances and trembles on the flowers of the Hai-tang’.

On the other side, you see the same sentence written in ordinary characters, those that are the most licit,
those that the droning student makes when he correctly writes his characters:

帽
影
时
移
乱
海
棠

帽影时移乱海棠
màoyǐngshíyíluànhǎitáng

These two series are perfectly identifiable, and at the same time they do not resemble each other at all. Do you notice that it is in the clearest way insofar as they do not resemble each other at all, that they are indeed obviously, from top to bottom, on the right and on the left, the same seven characters, even for someone who has no idea, not only of Chinese characters, but no idea up to then that there were things called Chinese characters. If someone discovers this for the first time drawn somewhere in a desert, he will see that on the right and on the left there are characters, and the same succession of characters on the right and on the left.

This is to introduce you to what constitutes the essence of the signifier and of which it is not for nothing that I will best illustrate it by its simplest form, which is what we have for some time designated as the einziger Zug.
The einziger Zug that I am aiming at here is what gives this function its value, its act and its spring.

It is this which requires, to dispel what might here remain of confusion, that I introduce in order to translate this term best and most closely, which is not a neologism, which is used in so-called set theory, the word ‘unary’ instead of the word ‘unique’. At the very least it is useful that I use it today, in order to make you clearly feel the nerve at stake in the distinction of the status of the signifier.

The unary stroke then…
– whether it be as here: │, vertical, we call that making sticks,
– or whether it be, as the Chinese do it: ─ horizontal
…it may seem that its exemplary function is linked to the extreme reduction, in relation to it precisely, of all occasions for qualitative difference. I mean that from the moment I simply have to make a stroke, there are, it seems, not many varieties nor possible variations, and that this is what will make its privileged value for us.

Do not be mistaken! No more than earlier was it a question, in order to track down what is at issue in the formula: ‘there is no tautology’, of pursuing tautology precisely where it is not, no more is it a question here of discerning what I called the perfectly graspable character of the status of the signifier, whatever it may be, ‘A’ or another, in the fact that something in its structure would eliminate these differences—I call them qualitative because it is this term that logicians use when it is a matter of defining identity—of the elimination of qualitative differences, of their reduction, as one would say, to a simplified schema: that would be where the spring of this recognition characteristic of our apprehension of what is the support of the signifier, the ‘letter’, would lie.

It is nothing of the sort. That is not what is at stake. For if I make a line of sticks, it is perfectly clear that, whatever my care, there will not be a single one of them alike, and I will say more, they are all the more convincing as a line of sticks precisely insofar as I will not have taken such pains to make them rigorously alike. Since I have been trying to formulate for you what I am in the process of formulating at this moment, I have—with the means at hand,
that is to say those given to everyone—questioned myself on this after all, which is not immediately obvious:
at what moment does one see a line of sticks appear?

I went to a truly extraordinary place where perhaps after all by my remarks I am going to cause the desert to come alive,
I mean that some of you are going to rush there, I mean the Saint-Germain Museum.
It is fascinating, it is enthralling, and it will be all the more so if you nevertheless try to find someone
who has already been there before you because there is no catalogue, no plan and it is completely impossible to know
where and what is what, and to find one’s way in the sequence of these rooms.

There is a room called the PIETTE room, after the justice of the peace who was a genius, and who made the most prodigious discoveries of prehistory, I mean of some small objects, generally very small in size,
which are what one can see that is most fascinating. And to hold in one’s hand a little woman’s head that certainly
is around thirty thousand years old still has its value, besides the fact that this head is full of questions [the ‘Lady of Brassempouy’].

But through a display case you will be able to see, it is very easy to see, for thanks to the testamentary arrangements of that remarkable man one is absolutely forced to leave everything in the greatest disorder with the completely outdated labels that were put on the objects, they nevertheless managed to put on a bit of plastic something that makes it possible to distinguish the value of certain of these objects, how can I tell you of the emotion that seized me when, bent over one of these display cases, I saw on a thin rib, manifestly a rib of a mammal, I do not know very well which one, and I do not know whether anyone will know better than I do, some kind of roe deer, cervid, a series of little strokes:
first two, then a small interval, and then five, and then it starts again.

Incised ideograms on bone. Magdalenian. Le Placard

There, I said to myself—addressing myself by my secret or public name—there, in sum, is why
Jacques LACAN your daughter is not mute. Your daughter is your daughter, for if we were mute, she would not be your daughter.
Obviously this has considerable advantage, even that of living in a world quite comparable to that of a universal madhouse, a no less certain consequence of the existence of signifiers, as you are going to see.

These strokes, which appear only much later, several thousand years later, after men knew how to make objects of realistic exactitude, after in the Aurignacian they had made bison after which, from the point of view
of the painter’s art, we can still run. But more than that, at the same period they made in bone, very small,
a reproduction of something, of which it would seem they would not have needed to tire themselves out since it is
a reproduction of another thing in bone, but much larger: a horse’s skull.

Why remake in bone, very small, when one truly imagines that at that period they had other things to do,
this inimitable reproduction? I mean that, in the CUVIER that I have in my country house,
I have exceedingly remarkable engravings of fossil skeletons made by consummate artists,
it is no better than this little reduction of a horse’s skull sculpted in bone, which is of such anatomical exactitude
that it is not only convincing, it is rigorous.

Well then, it is only much later that we find the trace of something that is, unambiguously, a signifier, and this signifier stands alone, for I do not dream of giving, for lack of information, a special meaning to that little increase of interval there is somewhere in this line of strokes. It is possible, but I can say nothing about it. What I do mean, by contrast, is that here we see something emerge of which I am not saying that it is the first appearance, but in any case a certain appearance of something of which you see that this is quite distinct from what can be designated as qualitative difference.

Each of these marks is not at all identical to the one next to it, but it is not because they are different that they function as different, but because signifying difference is distinct from everything that pertains to qualitative difference, as I have just shown you with the little things I have just passed around before you. Qualitative difference may even, on occasion, underscore signifying sameness. This sameness is constituted precisely by this: that the signifier as such serves to connote difference in the pure state, and the proof is that at its first appearance the 1 manifestly designates multiplicity as such. In other words: I am a hunter—since here we are brought to the level of Magdalenian IV—God knows catching a beast was not much simpler at that time than it is nowadays for those called Bushmen, and it was quite an adventure!

It does indeed seem that after having hit the beast one had to track it for a long time to see it succumb to what was the effect of the poison:
– I killed one, that is an adventure.
– I kill another, that is a second adventure, which I can distinguish by certain traits from the first, but which resembles it essentially in being marked by the same general line.
– By the fourth, there may be confusion: what distinguishes it from the second, for example?
– By the twentieth, how will I find my way in it, or even, will I know that I have had twenty?

The Marquis de SADE, in the Rue Paradis in Marseille, shut in with his little valet, proceeded in the same way for the blows, though diversely varied, that he dealt in the company of this partner, even if with a few accomplices themselves diversely varied. This exemplary man, whose relations to desire surely had to be marked by some uncommon ardor—whatever one thinks—marked at the bedside of his bed, they say, with little strokes each of the ‘blows’—to call them by their name—which he was led to carry through to their accomplishment in that sort of singular probationary retreat.

Assuredly, one must oneself be quite engaged in the adventure of desire, at least according to all that the common run
of things teaches us from the most ordinary experience of mortals, to have such a need to get one’s bearings in
the succession of one’s sexual accomplishments. It is nonetheless not unthinkable that at certain favored periods
of life, something may become blurry as to the exact point one is at in the field of decimal numeration.

What is at issue in ‘the notch’, in ‘the notched stroke’, is something of which we cannot fail to see that here something new emerges with respect to what one may call the immanence of any essential action whatsoever. This being, whom we can still imagine deprived of this mode of marker, what will he do after a fairly short time and limited by intuition, so that he may not feel himself simply bound to a present always easily renewed in which nothing any longer allows him to discern what exists as difference in the real?

It is not enough to say: ‘it is already quite obvious that this difference is in the subject’s lived experience, for what resembles a cycle more than the return of needs and the satisfactions that attach to them?’. Just as it is not enough to say: ‘But still,
So-and-so is not me!’. It is not simply because LAPLANCHE has his hair like this and I have mine like that, and because he has eyes in a certain way, and because he does not quite have the same smile as I do, that he is different.
You will say: ‘Laplanche is Laplanche, and Lacan is Lacan’. But that is precisely where the whole question lies,
since precisely in analysis the question arises whether LAPLANCHE is not the thought of LACAN,
and whether LACAN is not the being of LAPLANCHE or vice versa.

The question is not sufficiently resolved in the real. It is the signifier that decides. It is it that introduces
difference as such into the real, and precisely insofar as what is at issue is not qualitative differences. But then if this signifier, in its function of difference, is something that presents itself thus under the mode of the paradox of being precisely different from this difference that would be founded on—or not—resemblance, of being something else distinct and of which, I repeat, we can very well suppose—because we have them within reach—
that there are beings who live and sustain themselves very well while completely ignoring this sort of difference which certainly, for example, is not at all accessible to my dog.

And I am not showing you at once—for I will show it to you in more detail and in a more articulated way—
that it is indeed for that reason that apparently the only thing she does not know is that she herself is. And that she herself be, we must seek under what mode this is hung upon this sort of distinction particularly manifest
in the unary stroke insofar as what distinguishes it is not an identity of likeness, it is something else.
What is this other thing? It is this: the signifier is not a sign.

A sign, we are told, is to represent something for someone. The someone is there as the support of the sign. The primary definition one can give of a someone is someone who is accessible to a sign. It is the most elementary form,
if one may express oneself thus, of subjectivity. There is as yet no object here. There is something else: the sign,
which represents that something for someone.

A signifier is distinguished from a sign first by this, which is what I have tried to make you feel, namely that signifiers first manifest only the presence of difference as such and nothing else. The first thing therefore that it implies is: that the relation of the sign to the thing be effaced. Those ‘1’s on the Magdalenian bone, a very clever person indeed could tell you what they were the sign of. And we are, thank God, far enough advanced since Magdalenian IV for you to perceive from this, which for you no doubt has the same sort of naive evidence—allow me to tell you—as ‘A is A’,
namely that—as you were taught at school—one cannot add dishcloths to napkins,
leeks to carrots and so on. That is entirely an error.

It only begins to become true starting from a definition of addition which presupposes, I assure you, a quantity of axioms already sufficient to cover this whole section of the board. At the level where things are taken nowadays in mathematical reflection, namely—to call it by its name—in set theory, there could in the most fundamental operations, such as, for example, a union or an intersection,
there could not at all be any question of positing such exorbitant conditions for the validity of operations.
You may very well add whatever you want at the level of a certain register for the simple reason that what is at issue in a set is, as one of the theoreticians speculating on one of the so-called ‘paradoxes’ expressed it very well: ‘it is neither object nor thing, it is 1’ very exactly, in what is called an ‘element’ of sets.

This is not sufficiently noticed in the text to which I am alluding for a famous reason, namely that precisely
this reflection on what a ‘1’ is, is not very elaborated, even by those who, in the most modern mathematical theory,
nevertheless make the clearest, most manifest use of it. This ‘1’ as such, insofar as it marks
pure difference, it is to it that we are going to refer in order to put to the test, at our next meeting,
the relations of the subject to the signifier. We must first distinguish the signifier from the sign, and show
in what sense the step that is crossed is that of the effaced thing.

The various ‘erasures’ [effaçons: neologism built from effacer, to erase]—if you will permit me to use this formula—from which the signifier comes to light,
will give us precisely the major modes of manifestation of the subject. Already now, to indicate to you,
to recall the formulas under which for you I noted for example the function of metonymy:
function capital S, insofar as it is in a chain that continues through (S′, S′′, S′′′,…) this is what must give us the effect that I called that of ‘little meaning’, insofar as the sign ‘minus’ designates, connotes, a certain mode of appearance
of the signified such as it results from the putting into function of S, the signifier, in a signifying chain.

f(S′, S′′, S′′′…) = S (-)s

We will put it to the test by a substitution into these S and S’ of ‘1’ insofar precisely as this operation is
entirely licit, and you know it better than anyone, you for whom repetition is the basis of your experience:
what makes the nerve of repetition, of repetition automatism for your experience: it is not that it is ‘always the same thing’ that is interesting, it is why it repeats, that of which precisely the subject, from the point of view of his biological comfort, has, you know, really strictly no need, as concerns the repetitions we are dealing with, that is to say the repetitions that cling the most, the most annoying, the most symptom-generating.

That is where your attention must be directed in order to detect there the incidence as such of the function of the signifier.
How can this typical relation to the subject constituted by the existence of the signifier as such come about, the only possible support of what is for us originally the experience of repetition? Shall I stop there, or shall I already now
indicate to you how one must modify the formula of the sign in order to grasp, to understand what is at issue
in the advent of the signifier?

The signifier, the reverse of the sign, is not what represents something for someone, it is what represents precisely
the subject for another signifier. My dog is in search of my signs and then she speaks, as you know.
Why is her speaking not a language? Because precisely I am for her something that can
give her signs, but that cannot give her a signifier. The distinction between speech, as it can exist
at the preverbal level, and language consists precisely in this emergence of the function of the signifier.