主体的隐喻

The starting point of the dialectical process is not the plenitude of a self-sufficient substance, identical with itself, but the absolute contradiction: the pure difference is always-already the impossible “predicate” of identity-with-itself – or, to put it in Lacanian terms, the identity of a signifier’s mark (S) always-already represents the subject (Image). This absolute contradiction is “resolved” by way of excluding from the substantial set an element charged with representing the void, the lack of determination that pertains to a tautology; by way of excluding from a series of signifier’s marks “at least One” which thereby remarks the void of their very space of inscription. The subject is this void, this lack in the series of the predicates of the universal Substance: it is the “nothing” implied in the Substance’s tautological self-relationship – the mediating fourth term which vanishes in the final Result, in the accomplished Triad. 主体逻辑，不是这个，不是这个，不是这个…… 我只不过是一个路人，辩证过程的起点，你是谁？这个是个开端，不是一个自足的实体，无实体的主体性，它是与你所有的规定性，实体所有可以讨论的东西反过来的，但是它又把自己变成开端。在绝对反冲中，主题逻辑，客体逻辑。所以一个能指，符号的认同，当你与它同一的时候，你必须以敞开的，必须以一种不同的，才能与它同一

The “metaphor of the subject”

These paradoxes of the “logic of the signifier” enable us to locate properly Lacan’s thesis on the “metaphor of the subject”, his assertion that the very status of the subject is linked to a metaphor, to a metaphoric substitution. In a first approach, there are two complementary readings of this thesis:

• the first would be simply to conceive the subject as the last, ever-elusive Signified of the signifying chain: there is no “proper” signifier to the subject, every signifier can serve only as its metaphor; in it, the subject is always (mis)represented, simultaneously disclosed and concealed, given and withdrawn, indicated, hinted at between the lines …

• the opposite reading would insist that a signifying chain is “subjectivized” precisely by way of its metaphoricity: what we call “subject” is not the unfathomable X, the ultimate reference point of its meaning, but rather a name for the very gap that prevents human language from becoming a neutral tool for designation of some objective state of things, a name for the different ways the described state of things is always-already presented from some partial, biased position of enunciation. In other words, our speech is “subjectivized” precisely in so far as it never “says directly what it wants to say” – instead of “vagina”, one can say “blossom of femininity”, where the second expression, repulsively exuberant as it may be, is no less “objective” than the first.39

The interesting point about these two readings is that, although opposed, they both possess a kind of “primary”, “common-sense” self-evidence: we somehow “feel” that no words can adequately represent our innermost subjectivity, that its proper content can only be alluded to; yet simultaneously we “feel” that a speech which functions as pure, transparent medium of designation is in a way “subjectless”; that one can detect the presence of a subject through the elements of style, metaphoric devices, and so on-in short: through all the elements which, from the viewpoint of transmitting information, present a superfluous “noise”. How do we account for this opposition? The key to it is contained precisely in the paradoxical logic of the Exception, of the “reflective” term in the form of which the universal genus comes across itself within its species. To recall again the Marxian logic of royalism: republicanism in which royalism encounters itself in the form of its opposite is a metaphoric substitution for royalism:

– that is, republicanism taking over the place of royalism-in-general. Yet, as we have just seen, this Exception (the “pure” signifier) is a Janus-like entity with two faces:

• on the one hand, it entertains a metonymic relationship towards the universal genus: in it, a part functions as a metonymic substitute for the Whole, as in the Marxian example of production, where production as a term in the tetrad production–distribution–exchange–consumption simultaneously stands for the Whole;

• on the other hand, it entertains a metaphoric relationship towards the void, the lack in the substantial Universal: the Exception fills out the void in the midst of the Substance.

This duality is precisely what Lacan means when he speaks of the signifier as the “metonymy of the object” and the “metaphor of the subject”: the Exception entertains a metonymic relationship towards the substantial Object and a metaphoric relationship towards the substanceless void which is the subject. The metaphor, in its most radical dimension, is this latter substitution of One for Zero, this act by means of which the One (the signifier’s feature) “stands for” the Zero, the void which “is” the subject – in short, the act by means of which Zero is counted as One. This would be the most elementary Lacanian definition of the subject: a Nothing which is not pure nothingness but already “counted as One”, remarked by the Exception, the plus-One in the series of marks – in other words: a Nothing which appears in (is represented by) the form of its opposite, of One. The “original metaphor” is not a substitution of “something for something-else” but a substitution of something for nothing: the act by means of which “there is something instead of nothing” – which is why metonymy is a species of metaphor: the metonymic sliding from one (partial) object to another is set in motion by the metaphoric substitution constitutive of the subject: the “one for another” presupposes the “one for nothing”.

From here we can return to the two ways to read the formula of the “metaphor of the subject”: it is clear, now, that in the first reading (the subject as the last, ever-elusive point of reference) the subject is still conceived as substance, as a transcendent substantial entity, whereas the second reading (the subject as the gap preventing our speech from becoming a neutral medium of designation) indicates the proper dimension of the subject. In other words, these two readings express, on the level of commonsensical intuition, the very duality of Substance and Subject.