Ruegg, Maria. "Metaphor and Metonymy: The Logic of Structuralist Rhetoric," Glyph  6 (1979): 141-157.

(excerpted by Clifford Stetner)

CHAPTER SEVEN

METAPHOR AND METONYMY: THE LOGIC OF STRUCTURALIST RHETORIC Maria Ruegg

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One of the curious by-products of French structuralism has been a revival of interest in classical rhetoric: curious, because whatever success the structuralist movement enjoyed was due, in large part, to the fact that it represented a "theoretical revolution" devoted, in particular, to overthrowing the very assumptions about language upon which classical rhetoric, no less than classical metaphysics, was based. Despite their repeated insistence that the new theoretical age - inaugurated by Saussurian linguistics, Freudian analysis, Nietzschean "symptomology" and Mallarmean poetics - constituted a "radical epistemological rupture" with the "pre-scientific" past,[1] a large number of structuralists were, at the same time, strangely attracted to the antiquated, elaborately constructed systems of tropes and figures offered by classical manuals of rhetoric, from Quintillian to Fontanier.

And what is even more surprising, they not only admired such works, but freely adopted, within their own "revolutionary" discourse, a good many terms directly, and uncritically, derived from the most traditional of rhetorical texts.[2]  Of the many tropes and figures thus resurrected in the name of the "science of language," none proved so popular as the pair, "metaphor" and "metonymy." Introduced by Jakobson, in his article, "Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of

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Aphasic Disturbances" (which appeared in French translation, along with "Linguistics and Poetics" and other essays, in an extremely influential volume entitled Essais Linguistiques, published in 1963)[3] "metaphor" and "metonymy" - terms which Jakobson used to denote the "two fundamental poles of language" - quickly became key terms in the structuralist lexicon. Of the numerous articles which soon followed, based on Jakobson's distinction, the most significant was no doubt Lacan's "L'instance de la lettre dans l'inconscient" (published in Ecrits, 1966; translated “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious" in Ecrits: A Selection, 1977), which applied the Jakobsonian distinction to the context of psychoanalysis: metaphor and metonymy became the master figures of a "rhetoric of the unconscious," which it was the goal of the "Freudian science" to decipher.

The use of the terms "metaphor" and "metonymy" by both Jakobson and Lacan is of particular interest: first of all, because it illustrates a number of characteristic structuralist tendencies - the tendency to reduce complex givens to the terms of a simple binary opposition; the tendency to make universal generalizations on the basis of purely hypothetical and unverifiable "structures"; the tendency to ignore logical inconsistencies within the binary oppositions themselves. And secondly, the use of "metaphor" and "metonymy" is of interest because it reveals the extent to which structuralism, despite its pretense of radical novelty, remained firmly entrenched in the most traditional of metaphysical idealisms; for it was the use of such terms - terms which have always depended on classical theories of language, the very theories structuralists so categorically rejected - that permitted structuralism to dismiss the Western metaphysical tradition, while at the same time reaffirming it.

Jakobson's text is relatively simple, but it is in the very simplicity of the schema he proposes - the bipolarization of language in general terms of a binary opposition between "metaphor" and "metonymy" - that one can best trace the complexity of the logical problems that arise in structuralist methods of analysis. And while Lacan's treatment of metaphor and metonymy is more subtle, more difficult, and more complex, it is there that the very simple - and very conservative - metaphysical monism underlying structuralism's radical rhetoric reveals itself most clearly.

Jakobson derives his distinction between metaphor and metonymy from a fundamental differentiation of two linguistic faculties (a difference which he in turn derives from his empirical observation of certain speech disorders): the faculty of selecting and substituting one word for another, characterized as a "metaphoric" process; the faculty of combining words with one another, of putting words "in context," characterized

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as a "metonymic" process. The distinction between metaphoric "similarity" and metonymic "contiguity" appears, according to Jakobson, at all levels of language (morphological, lexical, syntactic, phraseological) in either of the two aspects common to both: positional (predicative) or semantic (substitutive).

This doubling of metaphor and metonymy (or, contiguity and similarity) along a positional/semantic axis is illustrated in Jakobson's text by a "well known psychological test," in which children were asked to respond to the stimulus of a signifier, "hut."[4] The responses were qualified as either "substitutive" or "predicative," according to whether the child "substituted" another signifier for the given signifier, or whether he "complemented" the given signifier with a chain of signifiers. To this horizontal, syntactic, positional axis, Jakobson superimposes a vertical semantic axis. The results can perhaps be best visualized with the help of the accompanying table.

 [caveat: best guess cds]

According to Jakobson, it is by manipulating these two types of connection (similarity and contiguity) in their two aspects (positional and semantic), that an individual "reveals his personal style, his tastes and his verbal preferences" (77). And since, for Jakobson, the "two types of connections" and their "two aspects" are in fact doubles of the same distinction - the distinction between the "two cardinal poles" of metaphor and metonymy - the key to understanding all human discourse, and all human behavior (literature, painting, film, dreams, "every symbolic process, whether it be intrasubjective or social" [80]) lies in the simple, but "primordial" dichotomy between metaphor and metonymy.

It is only on the most superficial level, however, that such a distinction can function, and even then, the grossly oversimplified caricatures to which it gives rise are so general as to be virtually meaningless

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(thus, to use Jakobson's own examples, lyric poetry is "metaphoric," while epic is "metonymic"; romantics, symbolists and surrealists have a penchant for metaphor, realists have a penchant for metonymy [78]). But let us turn, for a moment, to the children's phrases cited by Jakobson: if we look at our little table, we can see that metaphoric "substitution" (Box IV) can become "contiguous" in the context of a predicative equivalence (or opposition or comparison or analogy) (Box II), and that metonymic "contiguity" (Box I) can become "substitutive" with the elimination of its syntactic context (III). If a simple phrase such as, "the den of poverty burned down'" defies simple analysis in terms of the semantic/positional, contiguity/similarity axes (it doesn't fit in anyone - or even two - of the boxes), then poetic discourse becomes a virtual nightmare for the modern rhetorician. Indeed, to reduce poetic language to two major "poles," the metaphoric (romantic, symbolist, surrealist) and the metonymic (realist), and to link this bipolarization onto the distinction between poetry and prose, can only generate a series of contradictory, "undecidable" interpretations.

Even in terms of the above schematization, the distinction between "metaphoric" and "metonymic" uses of language becomes clouded. A signifier becomes a metaphor only in certain syntactic contexts; thus "lair" or "palace" becomes a metaphor or an antinomy only with reference to, or in connection with another signifier - "hut." In Box II, the contiguous (syntactic) link between signifier and substitute is made explicit. and in the resulting paraphrase, tautology, antinomy, similitude, or metaphor, the predicate functions as a substitute for the subject, within and as part of a contiguous syntactic structure. Box IV is merely a truncated version of Box II, in that its terms have metaphoric meaning only in so far as they are contiguously linked (implicitly or explicitly) to the signifier "hut." In Box III, likewise, the terms (which are, syntactically, substitutes for the original signifier) are semantically metonymic only with reference to "hut"; when that contiguous link is made explicit (as in I), we once again have a predicate which functions as a kind of substitute for its subject (here indicating an "attribute" rather than postulating an equivalence or opposition) within, and as part of, a contiguous syntactic structure. The only opposition which remains is that between the narrative phrase, "burned down" or "shelters the old man" (which cannot be construed as metonymic) and the metaphoric/ metonymic group of syntactically contiguous, but semantically substitutive phrases.

It is only by artificially abstracting both metaphor and metonymy from their syntactic contexts (and considering them only along the "semantic axis") that a comparison between metaphoric and metonymic poles of language can be made; if, however, semantic "value" can only

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be derived from the syntactic position occupied by the signifier in relation to the whole chain of signifiers, in the complex interplay between all possible combinatory positions of a given linguistic code (as in Wittgenstein's "meaning is use"), then the separation between "syntax" and "paradigm," between "contiguity" and "similarity" and between metaphor and metonymy is at best unfruitful, and at worst, a misleading oversimplification of what language does.

Even on a purely abstract, semantic level, the distinction between metaphor and metonymy is difficult to maintain with any certainty. If the metonymically minded realist calls his car his "wheels" while the metaphorically inclined romantic prefers to call it his "prancing steed," the fact remains that both involve a kind of substitution (of one signifier for another) and both involve some degree of semantic contiguity which provides the necessary link between the two signifiers - the road without which the transfer cannot be made. That the link of contiguity is based, in the first case, on a relationship of part to whole, and in the second, on a comparative relationship of functions or of "common quality" (that of providing transportation), is certainly insufficient grounds for constructing a bipolarization of all language.

In an article[5] entitled "Theorie de la Figure" Jean Cohen demonstrates the inseparability of paradigmatic (substitutive) and syntagmatic (contiguous) axes in the constitution of all rhetorical figures, and the consequent illegitimacy of all attempts to base a rhetoric on such a distinction (such as trope/non-trope, metaphor/ metonymy). The basis of all figurative language is what he calls "syntagmatic combinatory incompatibility," in which a "gap" is perceived between the given phrase and what we would normally expect in that syntagmatic context (given our linguistic "contract" or "code"). Whether the "gap" exists "in absentia" (as in the metaphor) or "in praesentia" (as in simile), we reduce the syntactic anomaly by making a paradigmatic substitution. The reading of any figure depends first of all on the perception of an anomaly (syntagmatic incompatibility) and then on its "correction," through recourse to paradigmatic substitution.

But to be able to substitute word for word, one must have some notion of how words relate to words - that is, one must have an idea of the possible combinatory positions a word is able to occupy in the syntactic structures of a given linguistic code: or, more simply, the word's possible functions. Paradigms of substitution are based on abstractions of a word's function within the syntactic structures of the code; the place and function of a given signifier is always determined by its context, which is comprised only of other signifiers, whether "in praesentia" (in the actual syntactic phrase in question) or "in absentia" (in the variety of possible syntactic positions it can occupy according to the linguistic rules of the code).

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"Similarity" is derived from a series of contiguities or signifying chains and the play of all rhetorical figures (including metaphor and metonymy) is an extension of the ambiguous game of language itself - in which the rules for semantic replacement are nothing but abstractions (metaphors) for the rules of syntactic displacement.

Cohen's argument effectively underlines the inadequacies of the metaphor/metonymy paradigm in attempting to account for traditional rhetorical phenomena; but if his own theory of rhetoric is more consistent, it nonetheless reveals the classical logical/ philosophical bias, in so far as it depends on the possibility of deciding whether a given message presents a "syntagmatic combinatory incompatibility" (and is hence "rhetorical") or not. In other words, it presupposes the possibility (and the necessity) of distinguishing between messages which are recognizably "rhetorical" and those which are "grammatical" - and the possibility of reducing rhetorical anomalies to grammatically "correct" syntagmas in so far as the meaning of the figure is concerned. What such a rhetoric fails to account for is what Jakobson himself later described as the "polysemic" nature of poetic discourse.

Referring to his earlier distinction between metaphor and metonymy, Jakobson - in "Linguistics and Poetics"[6] - attempts to modify his former position in an effort to make it include the play of multiple reference - the complexity, the "polysemic" nature - which characterizes poetic discourse. Thus, in poetry, "every metonymy is slightly metaphoric, and every metaphor has a metonymic tinge" (370). And this paradoxical admission of the failure of the metaphor/metonymy distinction to account for multiple reference is justified by the equally paradoxical explanation that the "essence" of poetry (its symbolic, polysemic nature) emerges from a projection of similarity onto contiguity (358).

First, as both communication theory and psychoanalysis have emphasized (and this, perhaps, is one of the most significant contributions of Freudian/Lacanian linguistic analysis), it is by no means the distinguishing characteristic of poetic discourse to be "polysemic" even if poetic discourse is, in de Man's words, the "most advanced and refined mode of deconstruction."[7] All forms of discourse consciously or unconsciously exploit the polysemic potential of language to transmit ambiguous, undecidable messages. And secondly, that "polysemic essence" does not arise from a "metaphorization" of metonymy or a "metonymization" of metaphor; it comes, rather, from the impossibility of separating the two imaginary axes of "similarity" and "contiguity" or rather, from the constant and inevitable mimetic play between a multiplicity of codes, texts, contexts: play which implicates all discourse in a complex, ambiguous, undecidable web.

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If poetry is the most "refined" mode of deconstructive discourse, it is because it systematically exploits that polysemic potential, while "ordinary language" attempts consciously, at least (or, at least, it pretends to attempt) to reduce that polysemic potential to an unambiguous single meaning.

If Jakobson's attempt to analyze language in terms of a simple binary rhetoric leads to logical inconsistencies, it is, first of all, because he treats what are in fact the very subtle, and often undecidable differences between metaphor and metonymy in terms of an absolute opposition which imposes an either/or choice at all levels of the analysis. And secondly, it is because he attempts to maintain a strict dualism between the two poles, even though he is forced to admit that the language of analysis (the "metalanguage") is itself essentially a "metaphoric" process, which naturally tends to privilege metaphor over metonymy.[8]

Lacan resolves these difficulties, as we shall see, first by transforming Jakobson's bipolarization of metaphor and metonymy along a single axis, into an opposition between two superimposed axes - one horizontal (metonymic), the other vertical (metaphoric) - in such a way that the two forms of discourse are no longer mutually exclusive, but on the contrary, always coexistent. And secondly, he makes no pretense of maintaining a symmetrically balanced, dualistic relationship between metaphor and metonymy: the Lacanian system is militantly monistic, and rigidly hierarchical.

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Lacan's rhetoric, like Jakobson's, would include, in its analytic grasp, not merely what traditionally passes for "figurative" discourse, but all forms of discourse. In many ways, however, Lacan's treatment of rhetoric is more interesting than Jakobson's and more coherent as well - despite the relative obscurity of the Lacanian text. Not only does Lacan manage to avoid most of the logical problems that arise from the Jakobsonian dichotomization of language, but he offers a paradigm for the interpretation of rhetorical figures. While the question of meaning (or its "lack") is virtually ignored (or simply taken for granted) in Jakobson's text, Lacan provides a model which permits the analyst to account for the "true meaning" of all rhetorical discourse in terms of a limited number of key psychoanalytical concepts (castration, phallus, Other, Father, Law, etc.).

But the possibility of interpretation, in the Lacanian text, is made to rest on the subordination of rhetoric to a metaphysical order - The Symbolic - which is at once the "source" and the "truth" of rhetorical figures.

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And despite all the scientific clap-trap Lacan employs to prove its legitimacy - the algorithms, the knots, the Moebius strips, the Markov chains - "The Symbolic" remains as "scientific" and as "verifiable" as the Platonic realm of Ideas. The nature of rhetoric, in the Lacanian text, cannot be understood without reference to this "symbolic order"; but in order to understand the relationship between the two - and in particular, in order to understand the differentiation of the metaphoric and metonymic functions - some general remarks are first necessary.

Despite the elusive, enigmatic "style" of the Ecrits, one can hardly imagine a less "poetic" text - in de Man's sense of the word; for in fabricating its elaborate labyrinthian structure, filled with secret passages and hidden chambers accessible only to the initiated, it represents one of the most "refined modes" of what Derrida has aptly termed "phallogocentric" construction. The "play" of signification in which the text continually indulges itself - like the child's "game" of making objects appear and disappear - is no laughing matter; indeed, it is meant to reveal the impossibility of any play which is not determined by and which cannot be reduced to the Symbolic Order: illusory play, then, which is incessantly, with unrelieved monotony, referred, brought back, to the "inevitable" Truth which the text would have us stoically accept: the eternal, necessary lack of the object of desire.

If language plays such a central role in the Lacanian text. it is because language determines the "place" of the "subject" And if, in terms of the Saussurian distinction, the signifier is given absolute priority over the signified ("there is no master but the signifier"),[9] it is because the "signified" represents the concepts of a Cartesian rational consciousness which is based on an imaginary autonomy of the subject. Since, in a classical sign theory, the "signifier" corresponds to a "signified" (a conscious thought) which in turn corresponds to a reality, the signifier "je," for example (and the example is by no means randomly chosen), will correspond to the conscious concept "je" which will in turn correspond to the actual "being" of "je" (which exists, then, prior to both thought and language). Lacan sums up this hierarchical order of derivation, from real entity to thought to word, in the quasi-Cartesian formula "ubi cogito, ibi sum"; he then reverses that order with his own formula, "I think where I am not, therefore, I am where I do not think" (or, in its expanded form, "I am not wherever I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am where I do not think to think").[10]

The signifier, then, determines not only the imaginary concept (the signified) in terms of which our own, imaginary reality is constituted, but it also determines the true place of the subject (ou il est), in revealing the true subject and the true object of all discourse.

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For the subject of "that which speaks" (the subject of the "enonciation") is not the Cartesian "je" of "that which is spoken" (subject of the "enonce"), but rather the "id": "Ca parle" (and not "je") - the unconscious id, and not the conscious ego. And it is because of this "splitting" of the subject that the signifier is defined as "that which represents the subject for another signifier," for the signifier "je" (of the enonce) has the function of re-presenting the subject for (in place of, as a substitution for) another signifier: the subject of the enunciation, the "ca" of the unconscious, the "true" subject of discourse. In the corollary to this formula, the subject is defined as "that which the signifier represents for another signifier": subject caught ("split") between the "je" of imaginary desire and the "ca" which truly speaks.[11]

The object of "its" discourse - that about which, from which, according to which ("de qua") the subject speaks - is l'Autre, the Other: the objects of desire which, since they exist only in the symbolic order (phallus, father, etc.) can never be replaced or possessed. "La vraie parole," true discourse, is then the discourse of the unconscious subject derived from, determined by and concerning the non-existent Object of its desire: "the unconscious of the subject is the discourse of the other."[12]

Freud's "Copernican Revolution," according to Lacan, consists precisely in this displacement of the subject, away from the center of the linguistic universe in which the Cartesian "cogito" had imagined its "sum" to be. But, if the "sum" of the now ex-centric subject is never where its "cogito" thinks it is, its "place" can nonetheless be determined by observing its trajectory as it revolves about the (center) - the Other - which constitutes the object of its necessarily heliotropic desire. The Lacanian revelation that the "sun" does not, in fact, exist (that it has no real, material existence) by no means implies that the system is not "solar": for even if the center is not "really" a center, but rather a hole, an absence, a lack; and even if the Other exists "only" Symbolically - that in no way changes the fact that the subject revolves about and is determined by the "absence" which functions "as if" it were a "presence," lodged in a "center."

The Lacanian text offers the subject only the necessity of reconciliation (Versohnung) with his own excentricity, and the necessity of accepting the Revelation of Absence, of Eternal Lack. Whence his insistence on the Freudian dictum, "Wo Es war, soll Ich werden" which, in Lacan's reading (which is indeed consistent with Freud), does not mean that the "ich" should replace the "es" (the ego should "overcome" the id), but rather that the "je" should "come to be" there where the "ca" already (is):[13] that the conscious subject should accept its determination by the Symbolic Other.

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The revelation of the Truth - of that Symbolic Order which "constitutes the subject" - is brought about by means of a rhetorico-linguistic analysis aimed at uncovering the laws of reference (or representation) which govern the seemingly chaotic displacements of signifiers. As we have just seen, the "I" - the conscious subject of the Cartesian cogito - is but an illusory figment of a narcissistic imagination, incapable of grasping the true meaning of the signifying chains "it" utters; for the meaning is never what the "I" - the conscious ego thinks it is. For the "I" imagines that it is speaking a non-figurative, straight-forward language (in which signifier refers to a consciously "signified" concept), when in fact - from the true perspective of the ex-centric, unconscious subject - its discourse is purely rhetorical, and has meaning only in so far as its rhetoric can be reduced to the "true" language underlying it.

The rhetoric which ultimately permits the Revelation of the Truth is divided, in "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious," into two branches, corresponding to the double function of the signifier: on the one hand, its function of combining with other signifiers in a horizontal, linear, syntactic chain (relationship of "mot a mot"); on the other. Its function of replacing, of substituting itself for, of "re-presenting" another signifier, according to a vertical "semantic" axis (relationship of "mot pour mot"). Following Jakobson's model, the signifier, in its first "role" - horizontal, syntagmatic, contiguous, syntactic, associational - functions as "metonymy"; and in its second role - paradigmatic, substitutive, semantic, symptomal - it functions as a "metaphor."

But the Lacanian articulation of these "metaphoric" and "metonymic" signifying functions differs radically from that of Jakobson and not simply in their correspondence to the "Verschiebung" (displacement) and "Verdichtung" (condensation) of the Freudian dreamwork (for Jakobson, elsewhere, makes the same association; association which - in the Traumdeutzung itself - carries little of the hierarchical implications that it does in Lacan's text). It is, rather, in the association of "metonymy" with the Hegelian notion of desire for recognition by the Other (the dialectic of master and slave in the Phenomenology) and in the association of "metaphor" with the Heideggerean notions of Being and Truth (alletheia), that Lacan traces the fundamental qualitative difference between the two. For the metonymy is the "signifier of desire"; desire for the Other, which in Hegelian terms is at once a desire to possess - to own, to appropriate, to "subject" - the other, a desire to be recognized by the other, and a desire to replace, to substitute oneself for the other. But the Other can never be "replaced" or "possessed" by the desiring subject, for it symbolizes precisely that which is always beyond, that which exceeds the accomplishment of any particular desire. If one desire always leads to another, in an infinite self-perpetuating "metonymic" chain, it is because there can be no "real" satisfaction of desire, for there is no Object that can put an end to desire itself.

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The discourse of the conscious "je" of the Cartesian cogito is thus nostalgically "caught in the rails - eternally stretching forth towards the desire for something else - of metonymy";[14] it can never "cross the bar" which separates signifier from signified, word from meaning, appearance from truth, for the "signified" to which it literally refers reveals only "le peu de sens," the lack of meaning it transmits. And to invest this fairly simple notion with the aura of scientific legitimacy, Lacan gives it the following "algorithmic" representation: f(S . . . S')S ::::: S( - )S.[15] (Formula which, thanks to Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe's excellent work on Lacan, Le Titre de la lettre, [Paris: Galilee, 1973] can be simply translated: the signifying function, f(. . . )S, of the syntactic combination of signifiers, (S . . . S'), is equivalent to, [] the maintenance of the bar, (-), which prevents the signifier, S, from grasping its signified, s. In this formula, it should be noted, the "signified" is used to symbolize the "true meaning," not the conscious concept.)

The metaphor, in contrast, is the "symptom" which provides access to "l’autre scene," the stage of the Unconscious, where lies the True Scenario hidden beneath the veil of the subject's metonymic displacements. And that is why its formula, based on the substitution of "mot pour mot," permits the "franchissement de la barre" permitting access to the realm of signification which had been denied the metonymy:

f (_)S = S (+) s. (In other words, the signifying function of the substitution of one signifier for another (_) is equivalent to a "crossing" of the bar which permits the revelation of meaning, the "grasping" of the "signified" -- S (-I) s.)

The real meaning of the signifier cannot be gleaned from its "literal," "mot a mot" syntactic displacements; it is only in substituting the "surface" signifier for another, in discovering what the conscious signifier is a substitute for (what repressed signifier it replaces - and, in replacing, attempts to hide) that the truth can be grasped. The strategy of the Lacanian metaphoric analysis is designed to break through the barrier separating language from meaning, the "I" from the "id," the rhetoric from the Logos; and the signifier provides access to the riches of this meaningful realm by showing us not only what is said (which is meaningless, the "peu de sens"), but more importantly by indicating what "it" does not say - the lack to which "it" points: "metaphor occurs (se place) at the precise point at which sense emerges from (se produit dans) non-sense."[16]

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For the real meaning of the signifier lies precisely in what it does not say, and in the absence "it" reveals: absence which points to a "being" and a "truth" which is present there, below the surface of conscious discourse, beyond the bar of resistance, in the Other Scene.

The function of the metaphor is then to reveal the "true discourse" of the unconscious: that is, the network of symbols which are, in fact, the origin of those metonymic displacements and those metaphoric veils - the rhetorical figures designed precisely to "cover up" (to repress, to resist the revelation of) their own (and the subject's) signification. The symbol - like the Platonic Idea and the Hegelian Concept (to which the Lacanian text refers us) is absolutely prior, autonomous, and determinant in relation to the "real" (physical reality) and the "imaginary" (conscious, rational thought). The symbolic order as Lacan repeatedly insists, "constitutes" man: ". . . (The) truth which emerges from (this) moment of Freudian thought is that it is the symbolic order which is, for the subject, constitutive"; "the order of the symbol can no longer be conceived as constituted by man, but as constituting him."[17]

What then is "the symbolic"? On the one hand, the symbolic functions, in the Lacanian text, as a purely abstract, structuring principle: reduced to its essence, it would be merely the structural alternative of "presence" and "absence," the scientifically objective, value-free mathematical sequence of "0" and "1." And as such, it would "constitute" man in so far as all desire, and hence all action, is desire for some thing, some object, some "presence," which must by definition be "absent" if it serves as an object of desire. An "absence" or a "lack" is, in that sense, always prior to and constitutive of man's desire for "presence"; but that desire is, of course, always illusory, since the moment we "possess" what we took to be the object of our desire - the moment the object becomes "present" to us - it is no longer, by definition, the object of our desire.

And it is in that sense, for Lacan, that man's life is symbolically structured by the "modulated couple" of presence and absence: "man literally devotes his time to deploying the structural alternative in which presence and absence each call the other forth" (ou la presence et l'absence prennent l’une de l'autre leur appel).[18] And it is in that sense that the game described by Freud - in which a child makes an object appear and disappear - can serve, for Lacan, as the model metaphor of man's determination by the symbolic: "This game wherein the child plays at making an object disappear from view, only to bring it back, and then to obliterate it once again, an object whose nature is moreover indifferent, while at the same time he modulates this alternance of distinctive syllables ("Fort! Da!") this game, we say, manifests in its

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radical traits the determination that the human animal receives from the symbolic order."[19] Man's life is nothing but a prolongation of that same game - game which, here, is regulated only by the abstract symbolic paradigm of a desire for presence in general, and the "truth" of an absence which is equally general.

But if Lacan's rhetoric consisted merely in reducing all language and all behavior to the simple, purely abstract structure of "presence" and "absence," it would be of as little use, of as little interest, and of as little effect as Jakobson's reduction of all linguistic phenomena to the abstract poles of "contiguity" and "similarity." What gives the Lacanian analysis its particular force is the fact that it specifies the nature of those symbolic "absences" that determine our desire; and in doing so, provides us with a code, a translation key, in terms of which all discourse can at last be truly understood.

The master symbol of that code - master symbol at once of absence and of desire - is the phallus. For Lacan, the phallus is the signifier of signifiers, "intended (destiné) to designate as a whole the effects of the signified."[20] Neither "real," nor "imaginary," the phallus represents the absence which makes it the ultimate object of desire: for the phallus in question is the phallus that Mother Never Had. And as such, it is the symbol that permits Lacan to articulate female desire in terms of penis-envy, and male desire in terms of the fear of castration:

Clinical experience has shown us that this test of the desire of the Other is decisive not in the sense that the subject learns by it whether or not he has a real phallus, but in the sense that he learns that the mother does not have it. This is the moment of the experience without which no symptomatic consequence (phobia) or structural consequence (Penisneid) relating to the castration complex can take effect. Here is signed the conjunction of desire, in that the phallic signifier is its mark, with the threat or nostalgia of reaching it. Of course, its future … the law introduced by the father into this sequence.[21]

If the object of desire - the symbolic phallus - is the same for both sexes, the social and cultural effects of that symbolic desire on the two sexes are radically different: for the actions of the one are determined by a "nostalgia" for what it "lacks," while the actions of the other are determined by the "menace" of losing what it "has" and in either case, it is the "law of the father" (who, in this case, is quite real) that will determine the future of both.

It is not by chance that Lacan compares the function of the phallus to the function of the Nous and the Logos in ancient philosophy.[22] For what the Lacanian text offers, far more than a "return to Freud," is a return to the comforting security of classical metaphysical idealism, and a return to the comforting security of the classical rhetorics which permitted readers to reduce all discourse to the terms of such a metaphysics.

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Despite the intentionally elusive games it constantly plays with the reader, there is no free play in the Lacanian text. And no way for the subject(s) to change the rules of the symbolically determined language game which determines his/her discourse and his/her desire.

The "revolutionary" theory of language upon which Lacan's "rhetoric of the unconscious" is based is, likewise, a reinscription of the most traditional, mimetic theories of language. If it is "the world of words" that engenders "the world of things" ("It is the world of words that creates the world of things"[23]), it is not by deriving the meaning of those words from any arbitrary metonymic displacements; for if things are constituted by words, words are in turn constituted and determined by symbols ("Man speaks, then, but it is because the symbol has made him man"[24]). For Lacan, "the word is already a presence made of absence";[25] that is, the word is a material "presence" (letter, body, appearance, veil) which represents an "absence" - a symbol which itself has no "material" reality, but which determines that reality. . . as its soul, essence, being, truth.

The Lacanian text offers at once the illusion of an open-ended poetic play, and the comforting reassurance that that "play" is, in fact rigidly controlled. The rhetoric of the text itself, like the crossword puzzles which Lacan would make part of the young analyst's training,[26] offers the vicarious thrill of solving problems to which the answers -  however difficult to find - have always been carefully pre-arranged. But the seductive power of the Lacanian text does not lie in the self-gratifying pleasure of deciphering its all too obviously calculated hermetic style. It lies rather, on the one hand, in the metaphysical security which the text provides in the guise of an objective, "clinically proven" scientific truth in its appeal, beyond the pleasure principle, to that desire for ontological certainty which manifests itself in the faith that man's fate, however grim, is once and for all decided. The "design of man's destiny," in Lacan's words, is always already traced "before he comes into the world" ("Symbols in fact envelop the life of man in a network so total that they conjoin, before he comes into the world, those who are going to engender him. . . so that they bring to his birth . . . the design (dessin) of his destiny."[27]), and for Lacan it is traced, like the handwriting on the wall ("les lettres de muraille") in such an indelible way that man has no alternative (barring madness, or worse yet, stupidity) but to accept it with stoic passivity. But on the other hand, and no doubt even more, the seductive power of the Lacanian text lies in the intoxicating promise of epistemological mastery implicit in the assumption that all discourse, including the most poetic, is constructed like a crossword puzzle, and that if anyone, it is the analyst who possesses the key.

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Yet if the rhetorical force of the Lacanian text lies in its power to persuade the reader that rhetoric is subject to the force of analytic mastery, Lacan, like Socrates, is far too clever a rhetorician to claim mastery of that knowledge himself. And it is for that reason that he insists that the analyst is not the "subject who knows," but merely the "subject who is supposed to know" (le sujet suppose savoir); and the analyst, if he knows anything at all, knows, like Socrates, that it is only others who suppose that he knows. But the irony - which can quite properly be called Socratic, and which serves so effectively to transmit the same metaphysical idealism - is that the "subject who is supposed to know" has done everything in his rhetorical power to persuade others to attribute to him the very knowledge he so modestly disavows.

The irony of rhetoric, in the classical sense of the term (and Lacan's use of rhetoric is, as I have attempted to argue, highly classical), is that the subordination of rhetoric ultimately depends on a rhetorical gesture; and the effectiveness of that gesture has little to do with its epistemological qualifications, but much more with its power to persuade the reader that such a mastery of rhetoric is legitimate. The mastery of rhetoric ultimately rests on a rhetoric of mastery. And Lacan, like Socrates, is one of the few to have understood that irony - despite a whole tradition which accuses it of negativity and destructiveness - is in fact the trope of mastery par excellence. For it is the trope which legitimizes, in disarming its opposition, the "tour de force" by means of which rhetoric has already been subordinated to the master's Truth.

The rhetorical force of a figure like "les non-dupes errent" ("the non-dupes err": that is, those who think they are not dupes, those who think they "know," are mistaken; but at the same time, "les noms du pere" and "les nons du pere," referring to the simultaneous assumption of the Name of the Father and of His symbolic interdictions[28]) does not lie in the somewhat heavy-handed and strictly circumscribed polysemics of the pun. Like Lacan's metalinguistic disavowal of metalanguage ("There is no metalanguage. This affirmation is possible in as much as I have added one to the list of those that abound in the fields of science"[29]), it lies in the ironic manipulation of self-referential ambiguity: ambiguity which, in this case (as in the case so frequently made for Socrates), has the function of defusing the metaphysical charges which can only be avoided, but not denied.

Following the advice he gives the Minister at the end of the "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter,' " Lacan consults his cards one last time before putting them on the table, and reading his own game, "he rises from the table in time to avoid the shame."[30]

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Lacan may err - as indeed he does, in the narrowness of his phallocentric determinism - but he is certainly no dupe: which is no doubt why he remains, in the eyes of his (non-) duped followers, a Master.