Inventing Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Linguistics and Tropology in "The Agency of the Letter"

Abstract

While Lacan always insisted that he was a Freudian and therefore worked within Freudian Field, his approach to analysis nonetheless differs from Freud's. A primary difference relates to questions of poetics and discourse. Whereas some scholars contend that constructs his discourse of psychoanalysis around archaeology used as a trope, Lacan adverts in his rereading of not to archaeology, but to linguistics. Though linguistic terms are everywhere visible in Lacan and though many Lacanians address language and linguistics in his work, Lacan's use of linguistics is itself somewhat misconstrued. While much commentary surrounds his focus on language and not much of it actually discusses his rhetoric or his troping or even admits that he uses tropes, rather than merely discussing them, when talking about psychoanalysis. Because scholars both pro and con take it as if Lacan were really doing they have not fully recognized that linguistics is the constitutive trope in Lacan's rethinking of Freudian discourse. Between Mirror Stage of 1936 and the beginning of the famed seminar in late 1953, Lacan seems to have been only randomly rereading until he seized upon the explanatory power of linguistics as a trope for invention. Lacan offers his linguistic manifesto in Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis (1953) and makes more evident his use of Saussure in Freudian Thing (1955), but in of the in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud (1957) he goes beyond manifesto of change to his most systematic extrapolation of the new trope to constitute his discursive field. If Agency is locus classicus of Lacanian linguistics, it is also the site of Lacan's tropological reinvention Poetics Today 19:4 (Winter 1998). Copyright ? 1998 by The Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.55 on Tue, 23 Aug 2016 05:23:00 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 500 Poetics Today 19:4 of psychoanalysis through linguistics. As a discourse, the Lacanian is constituted in ways accessible through tropological analysis of the sort theorized by Hayden V. White. of the Letter exhibits the rhetorical phases White calls mimesis, diegesis, and diataxis. Moreover, it exhibits these three phases operating in close conjunction with an ordered series of tropes-metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony-forming the center of the tropological analysis White extrapolates from Giambattista Vico and Kenneth Burke. While the parodic term linguisterie that Lacan introduced in seminar twenty (1972-73) suggests an ironic awareness of linguistics as indeed a figure of speech, he does not express such an ironic detachment in