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The Fall of the Primordial Signifier and the ROBINSON William This work began with an investigation of Lacan's paper on the Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious (3). The creation of the letter in the unconscious brings with it the location of the signifier. Lacan, in Seminar III (3), speaks of what is essentially the "given", the pre-existence of "...a primitive stage in which the world of signifiers as such appears" and "...this is something that already implies language" (p. 149). He speaks (p. 150) of "... an original within, which is not a bodily within but that of an initial body of signifiers". "It's inside this primordial body that Freud posits the constitution of the world of reality." Lacan makes an interesting comment (p. 180) on "This constitution of reality ... registered on the basis of an original bipartition, one that curiously coincides with certain primitive myths that evoke something primordially crippled that has been introduced into the subject's access to human reality". This primordially crippled element, which is the key to the fall of this primordial signifier seems to be in the same line of thought developed regarding negation, the negative, negativity. The fundamental power of the negative, is thoroughly developed in Hegel, Schelling (in Zizek's papers [8/9]), Ver Eeke (6) and Freud (1). Lacan, in Seminar III (3) speaks of negation in the process of the primordial signifier entering discourse "...in the field of the phenomenon of Verneinung (negation) phenomena occur that must originate as a fall in the level, in the passage from one register to another ... a characteristic of the negated and disowned _ it's as if they are not existent". Commenting on the Wolf-Man, Lacan, again in Seminar III (p. 156) says "The signifier is thus primitively given but it remains nothing as long as the subject doesn't cause it to enter his history". My thesis then, for this paper would be that the essence of this mythical turning point called the "fall of the primordial signifier", which I would now say is "entering the patient's history", must in fact be accepting the presence and effectiveness of the Name-of-the-Father. This feature is most thoroughly elaborated by Wilfred Ver Eeke in "Saying No" (6). What this transition accomplishes is the replacement of the loss of concrete reality by a metaphor. Herein lies the new possibility of speech to mean "something quite other than what it says" (3). The "fall of the primordial signifier" is a crucial reference
to the beginning of the human possibility of tolerating ambiguity and
uncertainty. The philosophical foundation of this is the necessity of
negation, of negativity as a fundamental expression of a positive fact. To quote Quentin Lauer (5) discussing Hegel, "What has to be overcome is the negative relationship of individuals which is only destructive; and in its place must stand the relationship which is at once negative and constructive (we see both kinds in the relationship of parent to child, teacher to student, psychiatrist to patient, etc.). This is `the negation of consciousness which cancels out (aufhebt) in such a way that it retains and preserves what has been cancelled, and, thus, survives its cancellation' (ref. 1, p. 145)". Retaining and preserving what has been cancelled in a psychoanalytic frame means a shift from a false sense of certainty (The Imaginary) to the acceptance of loss and uncertainty in the establishment of the Word. What is cancelled and preserved in the relationship to the mother. The word can never live up to its promise (i.e. to represent the thing) and a permanent gap is created, which, one might say, becomes the domain of psychoanalysis. Within that gap forever resides the "Indivisible Remainder" (9) (i.e. what is left over from the real, the objet à, the disturbance that won't go away) and the possibility of symbolization, which must include the phallic signifier (i.e. of nothing) and the new attachment of that to the "No" of the Paternal Metaphor. To quote Wright (8): "Zizek, (discussing Schelling and the position of German Idealism in the emergence of the subject), reads this as the Lacanian moment of symbolic castration, a `primordial dissonance', in which the phallus is a `something' standing for `nothing', as the master-signifier that shows what is the case with all words, that in designating a presence they refer to an absence. With this crux the subject is faced with the `forced choice': on the side of the drive it cannot speak; on the side of the word, it cannot be. In coming into being as subjects, we exchange the antagonism of the expansions and contradictions of the drive for the contradictions of language; ..." "...the castration enforced by language bestows identity at the price of leaving an inexpressible remainder: the drive is condemned to circle endlessly around the objet à, the fantasy of the restoration of the subject's loss". Thus with the "fall of the primordial signifier", the inexpressible fantasies of the encounter with the world of reality (which for the child must also be the Real in the Lacanian sense) gain time in the unconscious in the, (unconscious) encounter with the Paternal Metaphor. Clinically, of course, what we engage with in an endless battle are the failures of that "fall". Such failures extend all the way from the foreclosure of the Paternal Metaphor (psychosis) to gross partial failures such as Zizek describes as the result of the presence of an "obscene father" to the every day neurotic world of symptoms as the failure of repression. In all of these failures, the clinical issue is one of a relative inability to replace an actual person with a symbolic representative (which can only be gained through an accession to absence), initiated by the "fall of the primordial signifier". Would this fall, this disappearance, the creation of holes and gaps and absences, so unthinkable before "the fall" now become the very definition of the "subject", the subject as undecided and indistinct, of shifting and change and disguise. In fact, the subject as "an effect of the signifier" is in fact a subject with flexibility and a potential for change. This is the subject of repression, of the unconscious, where the "letter" (itself a meaningless substance) can hide and reattach itself to the signifiers in a process of exchange.
2. Hegel, G.W.F., (1807), Phenomenology of Spirit, Trans. A.V. Miller, (1976), Oxford University Press. 3. Lacan, J., (1977) Ecrits, Trans. Alan Sheridan, Norton. 4. Lacoue-Labarthe, P., and Nancy, J.L., (1973), The Title of the Letter, A Reading of Lacan, Trans. Raffoul and Pettigrew, State of University of New York Press, (1992). 5. Lauer, Q., (1976), A Reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, Fordham, University Press. 6. Ver Eeke, W., (1984), Saying "No", Duquesne University Press. 7. Weber, S., (1991), Return to Freud, Jacques Lacan's Dislocation of Psychoanalysis, Cambridge University Press. 8. Wright, E., and Wright, E., (1999), The Zizek Reader, Blackwell Press. 9. Zizek, S., (1996), The Indivisible Remainder, Verso Press. 10. Zizek, S., (1992), Enjoy Your Symptom, Routledge Publishers. |