Peter Erdélyi
Prof. Fynsk
English 673L
Heidegger
being and the being of language as the only possible site for the
thought of being as such.
(96)
Dasein. For Dasein, the limit of its inquiry into the meaning of
being is experienced as finitude: "We are so finite that we
the unconscious?
only by virtue of his proper name" (148).3 Then in the next move
the sign.
language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the
empties out and takes on the value of the actual lack of the
signified. What is "essential" for the structure of the
concerned. (153)
4It should be noted that the invocation of the term "usage" here in relation
to the structure of the signifier resonates with the homologous function of
the subject as the "slave of language" in Lacan's discussion.
Erdélyi 10
signifiers sliding over the bar, anticipates the play of the two
sides of the "effective field constituted by the signifier,"
philosophical relevance.
account for the emergence of being, out of the nothing, and its
being).
structure:
ƒ(S...S')S = S(--)s
indicates that
it is the connexion between signifier and signifier
bar which prevents its communication with the signified but also
"installs the lack-of-being" thus manifested in the signifying
ƒ (S')S = S(+)s
S
that causes that slow shift in the axis of being" and makes
transcendence in the Heideggerian sense possible (154-55).
The unconscious then is the locus where the "want-to-be"
signified:
This signifying game between metonymy and metaphor, up
rift both within the subject's being and the very concept of
identity as such. An experience of otherness confronts the
subject, the outside irrupting from within, when language assumes
into the signifier but also into the subject. This incorporation
could be taken quite literally, as the carnalization of the
nothing, turning the nothing into flesh, or, rather, the nothing
Being, Lacan explains, does not pose the question before the
subject but "in place of the subject" (168). The subject is thus
redefined in terms of usage; it is used by being to ask its
7The footnote appears only in the original (cf. the Fourth Series of Gestalt
und Gedanke, 1959; ed. Clemens Graf Podewils).
Erdélyi 17
Works Cited
Norton, 1981.
Nancy, Jean Luc and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. The Title of the
Letter: A Reading of Lacan. Trans. Francois Raffoul and