The term ‘signifiant’ occupies a pivotal and contested position across the depth-psychology and structural-linguistic corpus. In Benveniste’s foundational semiological work, the signifiant designates one face of the Saussurean dyad — the phonetic translation of a concept — bound to the signifié in what Benveniste insists is a relation of consubstantiality rather than arbitrary linkage. This consubstantiality underwrites the structural unity of the linguistic sign, even as Benveniste’s later lectures push toward ‘signifiance,’ a more dynamic notion that envelopes enunciation, the speaking subject, and intersubjective discourse. Lacan’s intervention is the decisive rupture: he severs the signifiant from any stable anchorage in the signifié, asserting the primacy and autonomy of the signifier as the ordering principle of the unconscious. For Lacan, the signifiant does not represent a concept; it represents a subject to another signifiant, composing a chain whose sliding under the signifié generates meaning through metaphor and metonymy — the very mechanisms Freud identified as condensation and displacement. Derrida further complicates the field by tracing, through Hegel’s pyramid, how the sign as monument subordinates the signifier to the life of the signified-soul. The tension between Benveniste’s linguistic structuralism, Lacan’s psychoanalytic radicalization, and Derrida’s deconstructive reading constitutes the primary theoretical drama surrounding this term.
Le signifiant est la traduction phonique d’un concept; le signifié est la contrepartie mentale du signifiant. Cette consubstantialité du signifiant et du signifié assure l’unité structurale du signe linguistique.
Benveniste establishes the signifiant as the acoustic face of the sign, arguing its consubstantial relation to the signifié against any merely arbitrary linkage, thereby grounding structural unity.
, Problèmes de linguistique générale, I, 1966thesis
la structure essentiellement localisée du signifiant… seules les corrélations du signifiant au signifiant y donnent l’étalon de toute recherche de signification
Lacan redefines the signifiant as a locally structured material element organized in closed chains, insisting that signification arises only from signifiant-to-signifiant correlations, not from reference to a signifié.
, Écrits, 1966thesis
le signifiant répond à la fonction de représenter le signifié, disons mieux: que le signifiant ait à répondre de son existence au titre de quelque signification que ce soit. Car même à se réduire à cette dernière formule, l’hérésie est la même.
Lacan polemically rejects the assumption that the signifiant exists to serve the signifié, declaring any such subordination — whether crude or refined — an equivalent theoretical heresy.
, Écrits, 1966thesis
ce que nous avons désigné plus haut avec Saussure comme le glissement du signifié sous le signifiant, toujours en action (inconsciente, remarquons-le) dans le discours.
Lacan identifies the unconscious sliding of the signifié beneath the signifiant — the foundational mechanism of discourse — with Freud’s Entstellung, linking linguistic structure directly to unconscious process.
, Écrits, 1966thesis
Ce que cette structure de la chaine signifiante découvre, c’est la possibilité que j’ai, justement dans la mesure où sa langue m’est commune avec d’autres sujets… de m’en servir pour signifier tout autre chose que ce qu’elle dit.
Lacan argues that the signifying chain, precisely by virtue of its shared linguistic character, enables the subject to mean something other than what is literally said — the structural basis of the unconscious and of deception.
, Écrits, 1966thesis
Un signifiant qui donne prise sur la Reine, que soumet-il à qui s’en empare?… Par cette chaine apparaît qu’il n’y a de maître que le signifiant.
Through the Poe scenario, Lacan announces the master-principle of his theory: the signifiant is sovereign, subjugating all who possess or are possessed by it.
, Écrits, 1966thesis
Ce jeu signifiant de la métonymie et de la métaphore, jusque et y compris sa pointe active qui clavette mon désir sur un refus du signifiant ou sur un manque de l’être et noue mon sort à la question de mon destin
Lacan shows that the subject’s desire is knotted to the signifiant’s operations of metaphor and metonymy, where a ‘refusal of the signifiant’ or ‘lack of being’ determines subjective fate.
, Écrits, 1966thesis
The pyramid becomes the semaphor of the sign, the signifier of signification. Which is not an indifferent fact.
Derrida reads Hegel’s pyramid as the figure that monumentalizes the sign, making the signifier a marker of signification itself — a hieroglyphic resistance to dialectical movement.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982thesis
c’est donc entre le signifiant du nom propre d’un homme et celui qui l’abolit métaphoriquement, que se produit l’étincelle poétique ici
Lacan demonstrates through poetic example that metaphor operates as a collision between two signifiants, the proper name and its metaphorical abolition, generating the spark of new signification.
, Écrits, 1966supporting
Quand on dit que tel élément de la langue, court ou étendu, a un sens, on entend par là une propriété que cet élément possède en tant que signifiant, de constituer une unité distinctive, oppositive, délimitée par d’autres unités
Benveniste specifies that having meaning, for any linguistic element, is precisely its property as signifiant — to constitute a distinctive, oppositional unit delimited by other units within the system.
, Problèmes de linguistique générale, I, 1966supporting
les aphasies… s’avèrent dans leur ensemble répartir leurs déficits selon les deux versants de l’effet signifiant de ce que nous appelons ici la lettre, dans la création de la signification
Lacan draws on Jakobson’s aphasiology to demonstrate that pathological deficits map onto the two axes of the signifiant’s effect — metaphor and metonymy — confirming the neurological reality of the signifying structure.
, Écrits, 1966supporting
Far from abandoning the ‘sign’, signifiance includes it in ‘discourse’ as an intersubjective illocutionary act which transmits ‘ideas’. Signifiance is a syntagmatic organisation comprising the various types of syntactic constructions
Benveniste’s late concept of signifiance repositions the sign — and implicitly the signifiant — within discourse as syntagmatic organization, embedding the dyad in intersubjective enunciation.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting
there is an original force at work behind the great separations of units that appear to us eternally divided, such as ‘form’ and ‘meaning’, ‘signifier/signified’.
Benveniste posits an originary force underlying the very distinction between signifier and signified, suggesting that the dyadic split is a theoretical abstraction from a more primary signifying unity.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting
Signification is organised in a language at two levels.
Benveniste’s semiology distinguishes two levels of signification corresponding to the semiotic and the semantic, implicitly articulating the signifiant’s operation at each distinct plane.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting
il nous semble que cette question reste entière, à dégager dans sa rigueur l’instance du signifiant.
Lacan, citing Benveniste’s philological correction of Freud, argues that the question of antinomous meanings remains open and must be resolved by rigorously foregrounding the instance of the signifiant.
, Écrits, 1966supporting
Pure vocal signifiance such as ‘natural’ cries are not yet enunciation. As soon as enunciation occurs, there is signification, which entails structur
Benveniste demarcates the threshold between mere vocal signifiance and genuine signification, marking enunciation as the moment when structure — and thus the signifiant’s full function — becomes operative.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting
On appelle signe « le total résultant de l’association d’un signifiant [= image acoustique] et d’un signifié [= concept] »
Benveniste rehearses Saussure’s foundational definition, establishing the signifiant as the acoustic image component of the total sign-unit — the point of departure for all subsequent critique.
, Problèmes de linguistique générale, I, 1966supporting
la passion du joueur n’est autre que cette question posée au signifiant, que figure l’attéparov du hasard.
Lacan figures the gambler’s passion as an existential interrogation directed at the signifiant — chance incarnates the fundamental question the subject puts to the signifying order.
, Écrits, 1966aside
It is tempting to find another English word, such as ‘signification’ or ‘meaningfulness’, and explain in a note which aspects of signifiance have been lost or camouflaged.
The translator’s note on rendering ‘signifiance’ into English illuminates how far Benveniste’s technical vocabulary — including the signifiant’s expanded role — exceeds standard semiological terminology.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012aside