Metaphor, metonymy, catachresis

by Armando Verdiglione

The etymon is index of the improprietas and the inopia: that is why it insists in the metaphor, in the metonymy and in the catachresis. The use is not proper nor is it common. And it is not instituted on the having or on the being.

The improprietas, the inopia, the incompleteness relate to the alingua. The theorem of incompleteness is the theorem of metaphor, metonymy, and catachresis as usury. It is alinguistics that accounts and recounts in the structure and in its writing. From the language of the syntax and of the phrase to the language of the pragma. And from the other language with which the syntax and the phrase write themselves to the foreign language with which the pragma writes itself. The meaning of the metaphor, the metonymy and the catachresis is alinguistic.

Jerusalem is neither a place nor a metaphor. Jerusalem, or naming: there is no Adamic language, there is no Adamic model. The Adamic model is the algebraic model or the geometric model. The algebraic model founds terrorism. And the geometric model founds the necropolis, which panic confirms.

The trope: a turn, a twist, and the interval between the turn and the twist. But no return. The trope dissipates the idea of return. In the structure and with the structure no return. No return neither of the account nor of the recount. The ference, which is structural, addresses itself to the symbol, to the letter, to the cypher. From the condensation proper to the translatio to the displacement (epiphora) proper to the metonymy, to the chance proper of the catachresis.

The tropology converts the turn and the twist, the version, into the return by a semantic, semiotic, ontological inscription of the metaphor, the metonymy and the catachresis, respectively, in function of good sense, consensus and common sense. Only the tripartition of the sign renders the count and the recount.

The root of the drive is the function, singular trial. The metaphor, metonymy, and catachresis indicate the function in its tension towards the symbol (in the register of the law of the word), towards the letter (in the register of the ethics of the word), towards the cypher (in the register of the clinic of the word), indicating it in its revolution as a spiral, and not as a circle. The drive device is the intellectual device of the word, device of memory and its writing. Qualification device of memory as experience, as originary disturbance, free.

Without grammatical faculty or competence, without ideality in its innatism and naturalism, the process of memory is the structural and alinguistic process, unassumable by the final cause, neither by  meaning as a final cause or form of truth, nor by knowledge as a final cause or form of truth, nor by truth as a final cause. It cannot be put on one plane or two planes. Unassailable to the dichotomy manifest-unmanifest, apparent-hidden, external-internal. The allegory respects neither transcendence nor immanence. It indicates that the gerund of life does not resolve itself in semiology, passing from codifiable to decidable, to signifiable. Allegory is the property of memory to write itself, arriving at the symbol, the letter and the cypher. It requires the metaphor, the metonymy and the catachresis.

“There is no more conjecture” is the theorem of the “gap”, which is structural. The conjecture falls within the mode of specular logic, mantic logic, inquisitorial logic, to which meaning and knowledge must give the form of truth and to which metaphor, metonymy, and catachresis are illustrations, figurations, visual demonstrations, imaginings. The principle of correctness is the principle of their economy, a tropological principle. The principle of correctness is the principle of the hunt for use, the hunt for usury (for metaphor, for metonymy, for catachresis), so that the metaphor responds to the algebraic model (political, social metaphor) and the metonymy to the geometric model (political, social metonymy).

The “use” is improper. The “use” is the property. The metaphor, the metonymy and the catachresis are the use, the usury. The metaphor is the property of the syntax. The metonymy is the property of the phrase. The catachresis is the property of the pragma. The usury proceeds from the opening, from the dyadic principle, a principle of contradiction. It proceeds from the irreconcilable of the relation, of the two. So that the adjacency does not vanish in the subjacency to favour the selective memory and the elective memory, to favour the principle of the excluded third as a principle of selection and hostility and the principle of identity as a principle of election and socialisation of the “stanza” in all its presupposed diversity.

Under the phantasm of mastery, the use is elided. Ideally, it is taken up and represented as good or as bad. Good use and bad use. Good usury and bad usury. A good metaphor. A good metonymy. A good catachresis. As if the structures conspired towards a field of hostility and death, towards the hell of evil and punishment, towards the pure, hence social spatiality, towards the commonplace of the universe of communication. The torsion is linguistic: the doing retains the fold. Without any detournement of sense. Without any apocalypse, because time will follow the number, the idiom.

The postulate of the hunt for equivocation, lies and misunderstanding is the postulate of the nude. The political and social metaphor is the metaphor of the nude. The political and social metonymy is the metonymy of the nude. The postulate of nudity is the postulate of the veil over the veil, of the fundament of the uniform, the postulate of the naked uniform. Catachresis: the dress is impossible and the uniform is impossible.

The substantial and mental process within the system of interdependent relations is signified by what is called cognitive capital. And gnostic capitalism is set up in place of intellectual capitalism. And “intellectual property” is converted into gnostic property.

The use is a property of disturbance, a property of memory as disturbance. The equivocation, the mistake of account: the wandering of the zero, of the functional zero. It is the syntax. The equivocation requires that property of the syntax which is called metaphor. A substitution. Without correspondence. Without equality. A substitution, in its anomaly. A substitution marked by the “gap”, that will never be filled by any conjecture. It is the syntactic brevitas, the brevitas proper to metaphor. It is the syntactic anomaly. Something starts, begins, grows, increases, by virtue of the zero function in the syntax, by the metaphor, by the fairy tale. Something is inaugurated. Here is the auctoritas. And the Auslassung, the omission, distinguishes the metaphor, as well as the syntax.

The condition of the structure of syntax: the mirror. The “induction” of the mirror is impossible. The “denotation”? Work and play: the two aspects of the structure of repression, of the syntax. Distraction is proper of the syntax. The mirror is a condition, the point of distraction, a point of fall. As a point of distraction, it is the condition of work. As a point of fall, it is the condition of play.

But what the “description” which is proper to the élenchos calls “repression” is founded on the absence of naming, on the name of the name, on the principle of the name of the name. It is founded on the principle of death as principle of the name of the name.

Definition is the syllogism, where death is a universal quantifier and a function of the discursive economy. The ontological definition excludes  metaphor, metonymy and catachresis, except to make them instrumental to a semantic process, which resolves itself in the signification. Only that which ends signifies. And the definition is supported by the idea of ​​death, by the idea of ​​the end of time. With respect to this ideality, the syntax is the impossible definition by distraction, marked by the paradox of equivocation, the phrase is the impossible definition by subtraction, marked by the paradox of the lie, and the pragma is the impossible definition by abstraction, marked by misunderstanding.

The originary repression is a zero function. The repression (rejection, relief) pertains to the zero function. Thus, syntax is the structure of repression, where zero is a function and one is a variant: f(0)1. But where there is no more return. The syntactic turn, the turn of the metaphor, is no return. And the twist, which is of the metonymy, is no return. The twist is the variable, f(0)1.

Metaphor is condensation due to brevity, Auslassung, omission. But Roman Jakobson, Jacques Lacan – with a gap between the two – and others have assumed metaphor as a semantic or signifying category, that is, as a category of representation of the subject. The idea of the mirror does not act. The idea of the abolition of the mirror, which is the idea of a specular representation, acts. This idea that acts is the subject, the subjacency, the hypokeímenon. It is the idea of ​​return itself. The account must turn. Thus, the fairytale is subordinate to ontological use. And if the recount must turn, so   must the fabula. Thus metaphor, catachresis, and metonymy are subordinate to ontology.

But the process of substitution, that is, the syntactic process and the metonymic process, is not an ontological process. The metaphor assumed in the algebraic model becomes a metaphor for governance, a cybernetic metaphor. Similarly, the metonymy assumed as a geometric model becomes a cybernetic metonymy. These are models for governing the city.

By virtue of catachresis, doing cannot follow the model. Its right and its reason are the right and the reason of time, by which doing writes itself. Narrative right and reason. It is not the model that forces the use, but the use as abuse, catachresis, that forces the model from which it diverts every ideality, to the mode of doing and to the mode of writing of doing.

The idea of ​​the mirror is the idea that operates. It is not the idea that acts, the idea that becomes man, the rational animal. Therefore, instinct is not animal, it is not zoological, but indicates the equivocation, which cannot be resolved. Any presumed solution of the equivocation is an equivocation. Any presumed solution of the lie is a lie. And any alleged dissipation of the misunderstanding is a misunderstanding.

The idea intervenes with the syntax (in its metaphor), with the phrase (in its metonymy), with the pragma (in its catachresis). The idea intervenes, the idea operates. God operates. Experience, as syntax, as phrase, and as pragma, writes itself by the intervention of the operator, by the intervention of God. This is fidelity: syntactic fidelity, phrastic fidelity, pragmatic fidelity.

Memory is the disturbance. Oversight, mistake, deception, fraud, lie, because one is divided by one, by the admission of the one, by the one function: f(1)0. A substitution also in metonymy, property of the phrase. With a remainder. A substitution distinguished by the structural gap. This is what does not allow the structure to circulate. The gap: without unity, without totality, without reference to being. The subtraction, the escape, the deception, the strophe. Epiphora: the displacement. One is divided by one,  so that lack is the other name for abundantia. A prerogative of admission abundantia. Here lies the phrastic anomaly. Desire indicates the paradox of the lie that is not resolved, not attributed, not predicated. The account here (still the fairytale) is the structure of resistance. One divided by one is the resistant one, not at all immobile, not at all stationary, which never needs to become unity, never needs to divide into two. It is not one as one. It is not one as such. It is neither substantial nor mental one. It is not mortal one.

Frater certifies filius. Frater indicates the certainty of the one in its decision and in its election. The certainty stands out from the phrastic decision. Filius certus. Genitus nec generatus. The one function proceeds from the zero function. The one, not dividing into two, does not lend itself to represent the Other in all its amphibologies.

The idea of ​​the gaze never becomes subject. Only the idea of ​​the subtraction without a point or of the escape without a point, only the idea of an abolition of the gaze is represented and is subject, the subject of vision.

The visio is fictio. And the image in its alterity (constitutive of the structure of the exhibition, in which the one functions) is figura, so that the image never will become visual. The phrase of semblance is the structure of the exhibition, whose condition is the gaze, estranging and unclean. So much so that the vision is not a vision of the world and does not spectacularise the alterity as a diversion.

The idea of ​​origin, the idea of ​​mastery, becomes the despot, the tyrant, the vampire, or is embodied in the state subject or in the collective subject. The idea of ​​people is a corollary.

If the idea is postulated as an idea of origin, then the useful thing must be converted into the teleological thing, so the structure is assumed by ideality and the use is the spiritual use, the ideal use, the final use: the syntax becomes a metataxis, the phrase a metaphrase, and the pragma a metapragma.

The syntactic turn is not conversion but counterversion. And the twist is a perversion, strophe.

The syntax and the phrase are two disturbances, two disturbances proper to memory. The disturbance called syntax is memory by ellipses. The disturbance called phrase is memory by hyperbole. In the interval between the syntax and the phrase, the disturbance called pragma: memory by parable. The ellipse, the hyperbole and the parable are properties of memory, properties of disturbance. The ellipsis is a property of the miscalculation and requires condensation. The hyperbole is a property of the lie and requires displacement. Ellipsis: Verkürzung. Ellipsis, for Ferdinand de Saussure, becomes the surplus value.

The word ellipsis alone has a meaning that should make us reflect. Such a term seems to presuppose that we initially know how many terms the sentence should be composed of and that we compare the terms it actually consists of to those to determine the deficits. But if the meaning of a term can be indefinitely extended, then we see that the calculation we believe to establish between n ideas and n terms is of absolute childishness and at the same time of absolute arbitrariness. And if, leaving aside that particular sentence, we reason in general, we will probably soon see that nothing is actually an ellipsis, simply because the signs of language are always adequate to what they express – even if one recognises that such a word or phrase expresses more than one initially thought. Conversely, not even a single word would make sense without ellipsis, but then why speak of ellipsis (as Bréal does), as if there were any norm below which words are elliptical? They are so without any interruption or without any possible exact appreciability. Ellipsis is nothing but a surplus of value. (Course in General Linguistics, 1906-1911, Colombia University Press, 2011.)

But the value of syntax is the value of the law. What is the value of the law of the word? The sense and expenditure (enjoyment), without reference to the idea of good.

The “useful thing” is the metaphor, the metonymy, the catachresis. Syntactic utilitas, phrastic utilitas, pragmatic utilitas.

The property of the story, the catachresis, with which the contingency diverts the order of the possible and the probable and with which the pragmatic test debuts. The catachresis, property of the dream, property of the forgetfulness. The dream and forgetfulness will never form a discourse, nor a plan, nor a line, nor two lines. They establish the thread and the string of time: the thread, foot by foot, and the string, step by step. Foot by foot of time and step by step of time. Foot by foot, to the limit of time. And step by step, to the frontier of time. The story is inconsistent with the understanding, which needs the dress and the uniform. It constitutes in poetry, in engineering, in doing, which is of the word, the misunderstanding. And the things, which do themselves by speaking, divide themselves, so that the misunderstanding releases the enigma of temporal difference and temporal variety. By virtue of the abduction of the Other, the thread of time is the thread of truth and the string of time is the string of laughter. Time is cyphering. And the effects of truth and laughter are the effects of the cypher of the word.

The fabula stands out from the narrative, by what is being done, by the poetry, by the engineering. It stands out in its fabrica temporis. And it takes advantage of the news and the novella. The structure of what, in telling itself, is being done is the structure of the Other. The earth as surface is the rift, tempus faber. The enterprise is the property of the structure of the Other, of industry. In the interval between the register of the law of the word and the register of the ethics of the word, the memory in act is the narrative, the doing, the enterprise.

The catachresis: by chance, by abuse, according to the occurrence, the things do themselves. The catachresis establishes the res publica, the public of the thing, the infinity and eternity of time. The actual infinity and eternity, that is, proper of time in act, of pragmatic time. The infinity and eternity of what does itself according to arithmetics, what does itself by abuse. Abuse is a property of doing.

“Abuse” is a Latin lexeme that translates the Greek lexeme “catachresis”. There is no use that is not an abuse. No use is proper. By metaphor, the mistake, the equivocation. By metonymy, the lie, the oversight, the deceit, the fraud, unassignable, unattributable. By catachresis, misunderstanding. Pragmatic anomaly.

Citing the voice in question and in object, the story offers its testimony, which is what is most irreducible and most unsignifiable in doing, in industry, in the structure of the Other, and it is what is most irresolvable in misunderstanding. Testimony enunciates something that never becomes enunciate and which leads to an enigma through listening. The listening way is the way of misunderstanding. The way of listening is the way of misunderstanding. The testimony is a work of engineering, that is of poetry, because the Other is not represented in the third. The pragmatic evocation does not allow the Other to be represented in the third. This applies also to the testimony.

Humour is the gap between the law of the word and the syntactic effects, that is, between the law of the word and its responses. Witty saying is the gap between the ethics of the word and the phrastic effects. And the need indicates the misunderstanding, it is the index, the mark of misunderstanding. It does not signify it. The catachresis establishes the public. But it is incompatible with the “people.” There is no other people but the “people of Cesena,” which remains “satisfied and stupid” (Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, VII). The public, or the infinity and eternity of time, is without respect, without astonishment and without shame.

We, you, they, money, children: the public indicates the actual infinity and the actual eternity, the infinity and eternity of time. The time in act is the actual. The time in doing. The pragmatic time. The industrial time. And the private is the effect of what writes itself of what is being done. It writes itself through temporal difference and temporal variety. It writes itself through the foreign language. Parodying, we called the private unicum. The publicatio for Cicero is the confiscation, diverting the catachresis, time, the Other, abolishing the thing itself and its public.

The syntactic anomaly and gap are not exceeded with the imperative of enjoyment or sense, with the legal imperative. The phrastic anomaly and gap are not exceeded with the imperative of desire or knowledge, with the moral (or ethical) imperative. The superego is a specular, visual, spectacular ideal. The ego, denied, is assumed as ideality. There is no pragmatic or clinical imperative (“Do”, “Forget!”, “Dream”, “Tell”), which would respond to the ideal that assumes the negation of the voice. Every practical prescription or prohibition responds to this ideal. Every presumed clinical or practical imperative is without the voice. It is the imperative of common sense.

The word is not subject to the imperative. It is not spatialised. Every imperative is spatialising. Its foundation is causalistic, deterministic, finalising. The “you,” in its ideality, imposes the imperative of the law and its syntactic effects, a legal imperative. The “I,” in its ideality, imposes the imperative of ethics and its phrastic effects, a moral imperative. The “you,” in its ideality, it is imposing the imperative of the clinic in its pragmatic and cyphral effects, a pathological imperative. The "you," in its ideality, is erected on the elision of the “you,” and therefore, the mirror. The “I,” in its ideality, is erected on the elision of the “I,” and therefore, the gaze. The “he,” in its ideality, is erected on the elision of the “he,” and therefore, the voice.

In what is dreamt and what is forgotten dwells what is being done. The catachresis is the abuse that is done because it is told. A pragmatic abuse. An industrial abuse. In the interval between the syntactic turn and the phrastic twist, the catachresis engages both the intellectual challenge and the risk of enterprise. The challenge and the enterprise are cyphral: challenge and enterprise of truth and laughter. By virtue of the catachresis, step by step, the violence of time establishes itself. The measure proper to the boundary of time is immeasurable, as the step is impassable. By virtue of the catachresis, foot by foot, the rape of time establishes itself. The terms as the property of the time limit are without mediation and without saving. The violence and the rape are the influence of time, its flow, its luxury, its lust. The catachresis is not sensus extensus, ready to make itself communis. It is not planned under the ax of the last blood, the last sacrifice.

The law of retaliation is the algorithm of the ontological closure, the algorithm of selective memory and elective memory, the algorithm of cannibalism, of the necessity of the last sacrifice, the last blood, the algorithm of the necessity of the economy of the negative, the hostile, the evil, the economy of the negative of time and the Other.

The illness of self and the Other is mental illness, which responds to an eschatological necessity: demonic illness, specular illness, illness that epiphanically certifies the functionality of death in relation to the economy of the discourse. The daemon is circular. And there is no mental illness without a subject.

Cicero calls the metaphor translatio verbi and the hyperbole superlatio. The metaphor, translatio verbi, requires the ellipsis. While the metonymy requires the hyperbole, superlatio. Quintilian called the hyperbole superjectio ementiens. Metonymy as exaggeration, hyperbolé. The parable, parabolé, is the arbitrary juxtaposition. The meeting happens by chance.

The parable prefers gambling and risk. Dreaming and forgetting leave no room for will or intentionality. The unfathomable approaches, arbitrary and free, for a meeting of poetry, where the superfluous matters, the superfluity of the other time. For each setback. Hospitality is an industrial virtue that is established with the right of the Other and with the reason of the Other. Any economic treatment of the catachresis turns hospitality into hostility. In the absence of one’s “own language”, no element is one’s own, neither zero, nor one, nor the Other. The enterprise is not one’s own unless it is assigned to finitude, in its potential, in its dynamics, between catabasis and anabasis.

Zero, one, Other: by virtue of the tripartition of the sign, there is no longer conduction, but, according to the functional idiom, deduction of the zero, seduction of the one and abduction of the Other. Metaphor, metonymy, catachresis. It is precisely through translation that the metaphor requires the writing of the syntax. It is precisely through transmission that metonymy requires the writing of the phrase. And it is precisely through the transposition that the catachresis requires the writing of the pragma. There are three ways of writing of experience: writing in the register of the law of the word, writing in the register of the ethics of the word, writing in the register of the clinic of the word.

Metaphor, metonymy, catachresis proceed, not from one or from the signifier or from analogy or from the idea of ​​an end, but from the oxymoron, the mode of the originary opening of the word. They are not significant, ideal, visual actions for the circular zoological economy. They are neither figurations nor representations nor significations of the Ouroboros. Neither specularity nor luminosity are needed.

Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) writes:

One day the history of metaphor will be written, and we will know the truth and the error enclosed in these conjectures. (History of Eternity, 1953)

The ontological recovery of metaphor, metonymy and catachresis takes place in terms of meaning, that is, in subjective terms. The idea of ​​the semblant, the idea of ​​self (the idea of ​​you, of I, of him) is unsubjective. “Feeling oneself”, “thinking oneself”, “wanting oneself”, “loving oneself”, “appreciating oneself”, “esteeming oneself”, “caring for oneself”: variants of the cogito, that is, variants of discourse as final cause, which has the subject as supposition, support and guarantor. The idea that acts is a system. The connection becomes a system. The connection reigns and governs with its system of interdependent forms and structures, where causality, once the cause is removed, is circular, which Paul Watzlawick (1921-2007), the Palo Alto School, calls “circular causality.”

The system of Roman Jakobson (1896-1982) is a phonological system, a system of gnostic significations, a semiotic system where what ends signifies and where metamorphosis and substitution serve the understanding of sense and circulation.

Jakobson created two tropological mechanisms, based on postulates (hence conventions) of a spatial nature: the similarity, the contiguity, the “relation” of selection, the “relation” of combination, the two “axes of language,” which relate to two “operations”, the “operations” of condensation and displacement.

The selection is produced on the base of equivalence, similarity and dissimilarity, synonymity and antonymity, while the combination, the build up of the sequence, is based on contiguity. The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination.

Equivalence is promoted to the constitutive device of the sequence. (Linguistics and Poetics, 1963)

The carousel of conventions is doubled by the carousel of postulates and culminates with the concept of sequence.

Speech implies a selection of certain linguistic entities and their combination into linguistic units of a higher degree of complexity. At the lexical level this is readily apparent: the speaker selects words and combines them into sentences according to the syntactic system of the language he is using; sentences are in their turn combined into utterances. (Two aspects of language and two types of aphasia, 1956)

The unit, the system, the speaker, the use of language.

The constituents of a context are in a state of contiguity, while in a substitution set signs are linked by various degrees of similarity which fluctuate between the equivalence of synonyms and the common core of antonyms. (Id.)

The state, the set, the link between the signs, the degree of similarity, the common core.

Competition between both devices, metaphoric and metonymic, is evident in any symbolic process, be it intrapersonal or social. Thus in an inquiry into the structure of dreams, the decisive question is whether the symbols and the temporal sequences used are based on contiguity (Freud’s metonymic “displacement” and synechdochic “condensation”) or similarity (Freud’s “identification” and “symbolism”. (Id.)

The symbolic process, both intrapersonal and social, the temporal sequences.

Every form of aphasic disturbance consists in some impairment, more or less severe, either for the faculty of selection and substitution or for combination and contexture. The former affliction involves a deterioration of metalinguistic operations, while the latter damages the capacity for maintaining the hierarchy of linguistic units. The relation of similarity is suppressed in the former, the relation of contiguity in the latter type of aphasia. Metaphor is alien to the similarity disorder, and metonymy to the contiguity disorder. (Id.)

The form of disturbance, the faculty, the contextualisation, the metalinguistic operations, the hierarchy of units, the relation of similarity!

The semiotic formalism responds to the necessity for a system of interdependent relations, instead of the two, instead of the relation. Language becomes a category of discourse, rather than a dimension of the word.

Speaking of Jakobson’s Essays on General Linguistics, Oswald Ducrot and Tzvetan Todorov write:

The difficulty of this text lies in the fact that the constitutive relation of the paradigm appears there either as the relation of selection (and in this case one has precisely the “paradigm” in the strict sense of linguists), or as the relation of similarity (and in this case “paradigm” can signify “category”, in an extremely broad sense). (Encyclopaedic Dictionary of the Sciences of Language, 1972)

Relation of selection, relation of similarity, category, signification. Both Jakobson and Lacan overlook the contribution of Freud’s essay On aphasia (1891, not included in the Standard Edition of Freud’s works): they need, for their spatialising construction, the concept of lesion as a limit of the discursive economy.

Lacan: “The creative spark of the metaphor”, “the occulted signifier” (Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis, 1953), “the sliding of the signified beneath the signifier always in (unconscious) action in discourse” (The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, 1957), condensation (Verdichtung) and displacement (Verschiebung) as “the two sides of the incidence of the signifier on the signified” (id.), condensation as the “structure of superimposition of signifiers where the metaphor takes its field” (id.), displacement as “this transportation of meaning that metonymy demonstrates” (id.), as “the means of the unconscious most suitable for thwarting censorship” (id.). Representation, signification, “crossing the bar” (id.) by the emergence of signification. Thus, the signifier represents a subject for another signifier:

The subject is never more than punctual and vanishing, for it is a subject only by a signifier and for another signifier (Seminar XX. Encore, 1972-73)

Caricaturing Freud, the “primordial ideography” (Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis), “the subject modulates his oneiric discourse” (Id.), the primacy of the signifier, the unmanifest sense. The desire “leaves somewhere, not just traces, but an insistent circuit” (Seminar V. The Formations of the Unconscious, 1957). The signifier gives the scope of signification:

The dream is a rebus (says Freud). He did not have to elaborate on this for us to understand that he was referring to the words of the soul. Have the phrases of a rebus ever made the least bit of sense, and the interest we have in deciphering it, doesn’t it come from the fact that the meaning manifested in its images is annulled, having no relevance except to make intelligible the disguised signifier? (Situation of Psychoanalysis in 1956, in Écrits)

The signifier incarnates the symbolic.

Lacan writes:

By letter we designate that material support which concrete speech borrows from language. (The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, 1957)

And he writes of psychoanalysis:

[...] its domain is that of concrete discourse, insofar as this is the field of the transindividual reality of the subject (Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis, 1953).

And of the language he writes: “It is a subtle body, but body it is” (Id.). And the subject is “what the signifier represents” (Position of the Unconscious, 1964). Thus:

[...] the signifier is what represents a subject for another signifier. (Subversion of the Subject and Dialectic of Desire, 1960)

[…] the subject is what the signifier represents, and it can only represent something for another signifier. (Position of the Unconscious, 1964).

Lacan makes an imaginative, illustrative, doctrinal use of the metaphoric-metonymic process. This results in a spatial model, and his definition of the signifier, functional to his theory of the subject. All of Lacan’s discourse is an illustration of the maternal phantasm in the apotheosis of the circular trinitarian androgyne, on the carousel of ideophany, from the mirror stage, to the signifier, to the Borromean knot.

The metaphor in its political use makes itself algebra of politics in all its good sense. The metonymy in its political use makes itself geometry of politics in all its consensus. The catachresis in its pathological use makes itself bureaucracy of the city in all its common sense. It is the subjugation of the metaphor, the metonymy and the catachresis to the chain of social sense, of shared sense, of the sense of the uniform. For the public good. For the common good. For the social good.

The idea that acts, that is, the idea that everyone has of the place of the mirror, the place of the gaze, the place of the voice, is also the idea of sacrifice. “God dies” is the idea that acts. The idea that acts is the idea of the necessity of sacrifice. The idea of origin is the idea of subjacency, the idea of mastery, the idea of the end of time. The necessary idea. Ontological necessity is ideal necessity. The ideal necessity, therefore the necessity of the end of time, is the ontological necessity of sacrifice. What is proper to sacrifice is utopia as pure spatiality.

The word acts. The word in act. The redundancy of the word preserves, of the word, the act, as well as the action. The word acts, not the idea. In the word, the idea operates, it does not act. In the word, the idea operates: and the doing resides in the word. The idea acts: then the sacrifice, even to the last drop of blood, is necessary. The essence of compensation is stored in the ontological equation: death compensates for death.

The idea of ​​the end of time is the idea of ​​the division introduced in the relation, hence it is the idea of ​​the division within the system, the conflict within the system, the necessary sacrifice within the system, violence and rape, given in their economic representation, within the system. Violence and rape are no more violence and rape of time established by catachresis, but violence and rape denied and represented in economic form, that is, as marked by ideality. Economic reproduction is proper to the phantasm of the end of time.

But time ends because “God is dead”, the salvific action happens because God is dead: this is the question that Freud touches upon. But Freud creates a mythology.

The unnameable crime was replaced by the hypothesis of what must be described as a shadowy original sin [Das unnennbare Verbrechen wurde ersetzt durch die Annahme einer eigentlich schattenhaften Erbsünde]. (Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 1934-38)

The name is the zero, unnameable and anonymous. The crimen is a virtue of the principle of the word: nothing escapes the science of the word, so that the crimen is not the fact nor its phantasm. The crimen is a “scientific” property. In the beginning was the word, not the fact, not the death of the matter of the word. Remove the crimen: and you have the grip on the word, you have the death of the father, the death of the son, the death of the Other, you have the feast as a place of death for the functionality of the economy of discourse, you have the necessity of sacrifice, in all the ceremonials that the bureaulogy will dictate.

God dies? He is already dead with Plato, he is already dead with Aristotle! He is already dead every time the cogito, the discourse as a cause, is established. Plato: the metaphor of wax, the metaphor of the mirror, knowledge as vision, as contemplation, as revelation, the reminiscence are established because God is dead. God is dead? You have the subject, you have the gnosis. God is dead? You have the idea of ​​origin, the idea of ​​death, the idea of ​​mastery, the idea of ​​the end of time, the idea of return, or the circular idea, the circular causality, the circular interdependence, the circular communication, the circular economy, the circular finance.

Theaetetus, 191 c/e: just like for the seals (semeía) imprinted (ensemaíno) in wax, we remember and have knowledge of what is impressed as long as the image of the impression remains on the wax. Theaetetus, 193 c/d: just like when looking at two shoes in a mirror, we refer, mistakenly, one shoe to the imprint of the other shoe. Republic, VII, 514 b-520 a: the myth of the cave.

Augustine of Hippo. The mystery of man: a) the spirit, self-knowledge, love (on the front of the soul); b) memory, intelligence, will (on the front of psyche). The contemplatio: the temple is the place of the end of time, the place of the cut of the cut. The place of the idea that guides relations and interdependencies on a divisionist principle. The discourse mirrors the trinitarian androgyne.

Thomas of Celano (1190-1265), writer and Franciscan monk: “Let them look into the mirror of his life and they shall learn all perfection”. And Bonaventure (1217/1221-1274), cardinal and theologian: speculum mentis. The mental knowledge. The world a mirror of God. Speculum vitae, speculum mortis, speculum divini luminis. Whence speculum: the demon.

Angela of Foligno (1248-1309), the mystic beatified in 1693 and canonised in 2013, repents and sells her castle, lands, jewels and all her other possessions and gives it all to the poor. Ecstasy and revelation. The imago Christi. The tomb is empty. The body is lost. The body is unknown: the soul is in Paradise.

[...] But I beheld a Thing, as fixed and stable as it was indescribable; and more than this I cannot say, save that I have often said already, namely, that it was all good. And although my soul beheld not love, yet when it saw that indescribable Thing, it was itself filled with indescribable joy, so that it was taken out of the state it was in before, and placed in this great and ineffable state. I know not whether I was then in the body or out of the body. (Memorial, about 1294)

The mystique of the ineffable is exerted on the threshold between darkness and light: “There was a time when my soul was exalted [...] then I saw Him darkly” (Id.). The mortal, sacrificial body turns to ashes and regenerates itself in the mystical body.

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) proposes his fantastic animal:

What a chimera then is man, what a novelty, what a monster, what chaos, what a subject of contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, yet an imbecile earthworm; depository of truth, yet a sewer of uncertainty and error; pride and refuse of the universe. If he exalt himself, I humble him; if he humble himself, I exalt him; and I always contradict him, till he understands that he is an incomprehensible monster.  (Pensées, XXI, Éditions de Port-Royal, 1670)

The subject remains, for every mystic doctrine called ideology of reform and enlightenment-romantic ideology. For Martin Heidegger, the mystery of man is the ontological mystery. He wrote in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 1929: “No era has known less of what man is”. What is he?

Descartes: res cogitans, res extensa. That is, the specular idea, the demonic idea, the acting idea, the idea as subject. “De  reali  mentis  a  corpore  distinctione” (Meditationes de prima philosophia, 1641).

Tertullian, De idololatria, I, 1: “Principale  crimen  generis  humani,  summus saeculi  reatus,  tota  causa  iudicii  idololatria”. Idolatry is the worship of direct access, direct communication, direct vision, the worship of the idea that acts, purifies, redeems, returns, welds, saves, the worship of the idea that carries out the economy of hostility, falsehood, evil, the negative, is ontology in all its ceremonies, is the pure number, the pure model, the pure image.

Imago Dei imago Christi: vision, contemplation, revelation. The hypostatic union. The mystery of God, the mystery of man.

The fourth constitution of the Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et spes, promulgated at the close of the Council, December 8, 1965, formulates in its own way the doctrine of the imago Dei, leaving the mystery intact:

The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light. For Adam, the first man, was a figure of Him Who was to come, namely Christ the Lord. Christ, the final Adam, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear. It is not surprising, then, that in Him all the aforementioned truths find their root and attain their crown.

The mystery of the incarnate Word; the mystery of man; Adam, the figure of Christ; Christ, the new Adam; the revelation of the mystery of the Father and of his love; Christ reveals man to himself; Christ, the source and summit of all the mysteries of the truth. “Christ enlightens every man.” The Father has destined men “to be conformed to the likeness of that Son Who is the firstborn of many brothers.” The imago Dei, the imago Christi: the mystery requires conformity. Through the action of the Spirit (the spirit acts), Christ transforms human beings of good will, deifies them: omnia in Deo et omnia per Christum ad Deum per Christum.

The death of self, the death of the Other, the sacrifice of self, the sacrifice of the Other: the gap from anthropomorphism to deification is accomplished by evading the woman question, and the question of the nomination. The mystery feeds on the ineffable. The last flesh and the last  blood are ideally assumed. The white cannibalism is the spiritual cannibalism, the social cannibalism, consecrated in the social consciousness. Every criticism of the subject, every self criticism, is a cannibalistic criticism, a social criticism, a social mysticism.

Authenticity is a syntactic property, next to the auctoritas. It is not the origin. But every economic reproduction makes, of the authentic, the origin. For Henri Bergson, “to perceive means to immobilise” (Matter and Memory, 1896), and his still image serves the difference between static and dynamic, between the visible and the invisible. For Hegel, “the works of art are sensitive shadows (simple aspects or shades of things)” (Aesthetics, 1817-1829 lectures, published posthumously).

From Aristotle to every logical-scientific circle, the ontological definition implies a tropic economy, it is the transitory abandonment, the abandonment to death. Inquisitorial, speculative, circular, sacrificial definition.

Ludwig Wittgenstein: The picture: representation, reproduction. Model and system. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1921: “The proposition is a picture of reality”. “The proposition is a model of reality as we think it is”. Philosophical Grammar, 1932-34: “The system of language constitutes the surroundings in which the proposition is not dead”. Death. The proposition. The prosthesis. The picture of reality. The model of reality. The picture as a model. The theory of Abbildung (Tractatus, 2.1): “We make to ourselves pictures of facts”, the “propositional representation”. The picture proposition. “Truth is a relation between the proposition and the state of affairs” (Notebooks 1914-16). The mathematical or projective picture.

The proposition communicates to us a state of affairs, therefore it must be essentially connected with the state of affairs. And the connexion is, in fact, that it is its logical picture. The proposition only asserts something in so far as it is a picture. (Tractatus, 4.03)

The ideality acts and guides the pictures, the names, the things and their relation:

One name stands for one thing, and another for another thing, and they are connected together. And so the whole, like a living picture, presents the atomic fact. (Id., 4.0311)

The picture, the “more direct language.” “Thinking is quite comparable to the drawing of pictures” (Philosophical Grammar). The ideals, the thought, the model. “To say that a proposition is a picture gives prominence to certain features of the grammar of the word ‘proposition’” (id.). Again the idea of ​​death, again the spirit that gives life: “Without a sense, or without the thought, a proposition would be an utterly dead and trivial thing” (Notebooks 1914-16). The life of signs is ideal. And the system of understanding is the system of signification.

The sign (the sentence) gets its significance, its meaning, from the system of signs, from the language to which it belongs. In short: to understand a sentence means to understand a language. It is as part of the language system that the sentence has life. (Id.)

Naturalism supports the Ouroboros between death and renovatio:

Our thought here marches with certain views of Goethe’s which he expressed in the Metamorphosis of Plants [...]. Goethe’s aphorism “All the organs of plants are leaves transformed” offers us a plan in which we may group the organs of plants according to their similarities as if around some natural centre [...]. That is precisely what we are doing here: we situate a linguistic form in its surrounding, we see the grammar of our language against a background of similar and related games, and that banishes disquiet. (Our Method, in Talks at the Vienna Circle, annotated by Friedrich Waismann, 1931)

But Nietzsche:

Every concept comes into being by making equivalent that which is non-equivalent. Just as it is certain that no leaf is ever exactly the same as any other leaf, it is equally certain that the concept ‘leaf’ is formed by dropping these individual differences arbitrarily, by forgetting those features which differentiate one thing from another. (On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense, 1873)

 Again Wittgenstein:

Words have meaning only in the flow of thought and life. (Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, 1946-48)

The ideality makes bank-notes alive:

You could say: in any case, for “thinking” means what is living in the proposition, that without which it is dead, that without which it is merely a series of sounds, a series of figures on the paper. [It’s like] we speak of something that distinguishes the bills from mere printed cards, giving them meaning and life! (Philosophical Grammar)

The grammatical ideal is the synoptic, the overview, the third eye, the eye that sees everything, the system of representation of the pictures, of the propositions, of the things.

Conventional reality, the shared reality, the conformist reality, the social reality is in place of intellectual reality, which is the reality of the word. The social reality is a demonic reality, between the extinction of the simulacrum and the extinction of time. An ideal reality.

Kríno,  diakríno,  kríma,  krísis,  cerno,  cribrum  (sieve), crimen, discrimen (diagram), certus. Cicero turns dogma with decretum. As sobriety is a virtue of repression, discretion is a virtue of resistance. In ecclesiastical jargon, incriminatio is inexpugnability. Secretum: the secret is the sign of the economy of the negative of time and the Other, the sign of the economy of evil of the Other, the sin of the Other, the incest of the Other, the sign of the economy of the impure. The secret is the secret of death and renovatio. The principle of mental reserve is the principle of omertà as principle of the secret, principle of negation of temporal difference and temporal variety.

For Eliphas Levi (Alphonse Louis Constant, 1810-1875), French occultist and esoteric, the secret principle is the principle of death and truth, the principle of cosmic revolution. So much so that the mystical doctrine defines the ontology:

Occult philosophy seems to have been the nurse or godmother of all religions, the secret mainspring for all intellectual forces, the key to all divine obscurities and the absolute queen of society, at the time when it was exclusively reserved to the education of priests and kings. (The Magic of the countryside and the sorcery of shepherds, 1855)

Feeling, chained to oneself, getting lost in the negative of self-feeling. Thus Hegel (Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, 1827-30, vol. 3, Philosophy of the Spirit, § 407):

As individuality, the essence of the feeling [fühlende] totality is to divide itself internally, and to awaken to basic internal division by virtue of which it has particular feelings [besondere Gefühle], and is a subject in relating to these its determinations. It is the subject as such which posits these within itself as its feelings. It is immersed [versenkt] in this particularity of sensations, and at the same time, through the ideality of what is particular, combines with itself in them as subjective One [mit sich als subjektivem Eins zusammen].

And again:

Man alone has the capacity of grasping himself in the complete abstraction of the ‘I’. Thus is why he has, so to speak, the privilege of folly and madness. (Id., Addendum to § 408)

Self-consciousness, body-consciousness, property, whereby “the subject is, to this extent, a person [ist das Subjekt insofern Person]” (Principles of Philosophy of Right, 1820, § 35). Freedom, thought that is action itself: “When we think, we are, at the same time, active” (Id., addendum to § 4). And “resolute”: sich entchliessen. Freedom is edifying: valuing oneself, for oneself and through the other, recognising oneself, alienating oneself, with a process of recognition. “This process is a struggle [Kampf]” (Philosophy of Spirit, § 431). Mutual recognition. Return to the state of nature. “The contract presupposes that the contracting parties recognise themselves as persons and as owners” (Principles of Philosophy of Right, § 71).

The subject is the activity of gratification of drives [die Tätigkeit der Befriedigung der Triebe], of formal rationality, namely of transposition [Übersetzung], passing from the subjectivity of the content, which within these limits is the aim, to objectivity, in which the subject coalesces with itself [mit sich selbst zusammenschließt]. (Philosophy of Spirit, § 475)

First the substrate, then the true subjectivity. The judgment, in its ideality, is a penal action, an economic action. The “mystery of freedom” (Principles of the Philosophy of Right, cit., § 139) passes from the intelligence to the will: I want, I choose, I cut, I judge. The necessity is transformed into freedom. The outside-inside amphibology is dialectically resolved. The ideality guides the criminal necessity of the state as well as the criminal necessity of the subject. The state exercises the monopoly of crime. At the end, with self-consciousness, the universal assumes the particular, the particular is assumed spatially in the universal. The system of relations is the system of sacrificial economy, the spatial system. And it serves the state:

The state must be treated as a great architectonic structure, as a hieroglyph of the reason which reveals itself in actuality. (Principles of the Philosophy of Right, addendum to § 278)

Police is the essence of the state. And the court, with its final judgment, is the court of social conscience, the court of self-consciousness.

Crimen. The phrastic decision is affected by the division of one by one. The pragmatic decision stems from the division in doing. The judgment disregards the friend-enemy, good-evil dichotomy. The judgment that faces the friend-enemy, good-evil alternative is converted into the sign of the enemy, of evil. Interpretation does not subject metaphor to the primacy of meaning, but draws on the contribution of metaphor to the writing of the syntax. Discernment does not subject metonymy to the primacy of knowledge, but draws on the contribution of metonymy to the writing of the phrase.

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) defines metaphor under the sign of ideality, of the subject, of the manifest-unmanifest, apparent-hidden, evident-latent amphibology:

There is metaphor only in the extent to which someone is supposed to make manifest, by means of statement, a given thought that of itself remains inapparent, hidden, or latent. (White Mythology, 1971)

The question of catachresis, the question of misunderstanding, is not the question of meaning. It is the question of truth and laughter. It is the question of the city. It is the question of the enterprise.

Milan, October 22, 2016

Translation from the Italian by Mats Svensson.

Work of Christiane Apprieux