The term ‘signifier’ traverses the depth-psychology corpus along two partially overlapping axes: the structural-linguistic and the psychoanalytic. Lacan is the decisive figure, appropriating the Saussurean dyad of signifier/signified and radically transforming it: where Saussure posited a stable bond between the two faces of the sign, Lacan insists on the primacy and autonomy of the signifier, which represents a subject for another signifier and whose sliding beneath the bar of signification generates desire, symptom, and the unconscious as such. The phallus emerges in Lacan as the privileged—perhaps the only absolute—signifier, not as an anatomical referent but as the mark of lack within the symbolic order. For Benveniste, working from within linguistics proper, the signifier/signified pair belongs to the semiotic dimension of language and must be distinguished from the semantic, which operates at the level of the sentence and discourse; this distinction complicates any simple transposition of the Saussurean sign into psychoanalytic theory. Derrida, meanwhile, interrogates the classical semiology that subordinates the signifier to a presence it merely defers, showing how the sign is structurally bound to absence and the deferral of truth. Taken together, these positions constitute an ongoing contest over whether the signifier is an instrument of representation, a structural operator of subjectivity, or the very site at which metaphysics undoes itself.
seules les corrélations du signifiant au signifiant y donnent l’étalon de toute recherche de signification
Lacan argues that signification is constituted exclusively through the correlation of signifier to signifier, not through any direct bond between signifier and signified, establishing the autonomy of the signifying chain.
, Écrits, 1966thesis
this thing which for us converges towards a notion that we know well, that of the signifier — that does not mean that this einziger Zug, this single trait, is, by that alone, given as such, as signifier. Not at all… In order to say that it is a signifier, more is needed: we require its subsequent utilisation
Lacan distinguishes the single identificatory trait from the signifier proper, insisting that a mark becomes a signifier only through its differential deployment in a chain, not through its isolated occurrence.
, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 2015thesis
the object in analytic object-relations is an object which we ought to locate, make emerge, situate at the most radical point at which there is posed the question of the subject as regards his relationship to the signifier.
Lacan situates the analytic object at the intersection of the subject’s relationship to the signifier, where the endless referral of sign to sign within the unconscious chain forecloses any final resting point.
, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 2015thesis
the organ is not taken up, brought, approached, except as transformed into a signifier and that, because it is transformed into a signifier, it is in this that it is cut off.
Lacan demonstrates that the phallus functions as signifier precisely through the organ’s transformation and consequent separation from bodily presence, constituting it as the sign of absence.
, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 2015thesis
the real presence threatens the whole signifying system… this need to fill in the signifying interval as such
Lacan locates the real as what irrupts in the intervals of the signifying chain, and reads obsessional symptomatology as a compulsive effort to close every gap within the signifier’s coverage.
, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 2015thesis
The pyramid becomes the semaphor of the sign, the signifier of signification.
Derrida reads Hegel’s figure of the pyramid as the sign of the sign itself, exposing how metaphysics encodes the signifier as a monument to a living meaning that is always already mortified.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982thesis
the substitution of the sign for the thing itself is both secondary and provisional: secondary due to an original and lost presence from which the sign thus derives; provisional as concerns this final and missing presence toward which the sign in this sense is a movement of mediation.
Derrida exposes the classical semiological assumption that the signifier is a temporary mediation toward a presence it will ultimately restore, a structure he proceeds to deconstruct.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982thesis
Every signifying battery can always say everything because what it cannot say will signify nothing at the locus of the Other and because everything that signifies for us always happens at the locus of the Other.
Lacan argues that the signifier’s universality is guaranteed not by its completeness but by the structural position of the Other as the locus where all signification is ratified.
, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 2015thesis
it is the instrument thanks to which the two personages, masculine and feminine can extroject themselves for their part from the objective situation… the father, in effect, under the form of the not too cross ego-ideal, should be a signifier from which the little person, male or female, comes to contemplate his or herself
Lacan recasts the paternal function as a signifier—not a person—from which the subject derives the capacity for reflexive self-relation, linking the signifier to identification and ego-ideal formation.
, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 2015supporting
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 situates the signifier/signified dyad within his broader theory of signifiance, suggesting that the apparent dichotomy conceals a prior generative force distributed across the semiotic and semantic levels of language.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting
the semiotic (from semeion ‘sign’, characterised by its ‘arbitrary’ link — the result of a social convention — between
Benveniste distinguishes the semiotic dimension, in which the signifier/signified relation is arbitrarily conventional, from the semantic, reserving the former for sign-recognition and the latter for meaning-production in discourse.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting
the notion of sign is in solidarity with the semiotic considerations. It actually implies — Saussure himself says so — the same level as gestures of politeness, etc.
Benveniste critiques the Saussurean sign, and by extension the signifier, for being confined to the semiotic plane of recognition rather than the semantic plane of sentential meaning, a limitation with serious theoretical consequences.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting
this desire of the Other essentially separated from us by this mark of the signifier… To see desire produced as a sign is not for all that to be able to enter on the path through which desire is caught up in a certain dependency
Lacan distinguishes desire as signifier from desire as mere sign, arguing that Alcibiades’ demand to see Socrates’ desire directly confuses the two registers and short-circuits the properly analytic path.
, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 2015supporting
quand on dit que tel élément de la langue… 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 sense, as a property of the signifier, is structural and relational—constituted by opposition and delimitation within the system—not by reference to an external object.
, Problèmes de linguistique générale, I, 1966supporting
Far from abandoning the ‘sign’, signifiance includes it in ‘discourse’ as an intersubjective illocutionary act which transmits ‘ideas’.
Benveniste’s concept of signifiance incorporates the signifier/signified structure of the sign without reducing meaning to it, embedding the sign within the enunciative act and its intersubjective dimension.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting
it is perhaps in effect the only signifier which merits, in our register and in an absolute fashion, the title of symbol.
Lacan singles out the phallus as the one signifier that achieves the status of symbol in an absolute sense, distinguishing it from all other elements of the signifying chain.
, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 2015supporting
signifiance… refers to the general condition of being meaningful
The editorial gloss on Benveniste’s term signifiance clarifies its relationship to the signifier by situating it as the broader condition of meaningfulness that encompasses but exceeds the structural sign relation.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting
rejection of its signs. And it is from this that there emerges and is determined this very particular impossibility which hits at the manifestation of his own desire.
Lacan analyzes obsessional neurosis in terms of the rejection of the Other’s signs of desire, showing how the subject’s relation to the signifier of the Other’s desire determines the inhibition of its own.
, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 2015supporting
What is the language’s mode of signifying? It is not a worry about taxonomy that led Saussure to conceive this place for the language.
Benveniste frames Saussure’s placement of language at the center of semiology as motivated by the problem of the mode of signifying rather than by classificatory concerns, situating the signifier within a broader semiological question.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012aside
They devoted themselves to reflecting on the sign and on meaning. But their education, their methods, their relationship to the object of their research are utterly different.
Benveniste contrasts Peirce and Saussure as the twin founders of sign theory, establishing the theoretical genealogy within which the signifier concept was elaborated.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012aside
Why is the metaphysical concept of truth in solidarity with a concept of the sign, and with a concept of the sign determined as a lack of full truth?
Derrida poses the structural question of why metaphysics requires the signifier to be constituted as a deficiency relative to truth, pointing toward his broader deconstruction of the sign/presence opposition.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982aside