Desire, metaphore and metonymy: effects of Lacans encounter with the 1950s linguistics

Abstract

The purpose of this project is to investigate how the operations of the signifying chain, metaphor and metonymy, differ from the alienation with the Other's demand and also from the exploitation of the structure from desire, both of them produced by the capitalist discourse. We claim that this movement in the signifying chain, understood as a material space where desire can be visible, demonstrates a cut-off with this alienation and a singular engagement made by the subject with his own desire. This research is located in the main issue of my Master's work, which intends to investigate to what point the concepts from metaphor, metonymy and signifying chain, derived from a Saussurean Linguistics, affected Lacan when he reformulated the concept of desire already developed in Freud's work. By taking some texts from the compilation called "Écrits" (Lacan, 1966) as a starting point, we orient ourselves by this moment where Lacan does not dispense the reading from a particular linguistics and we intend to explore its effects. (AU)