Terry Eagleton puts it this way: "for Lacan all discourse is, in a sense, a slip of the tongue: if the process of language is as slippery as he suggests, we can never mean precisely what we say, or say precisely what we mean. Meaning is always in some sense an approximation, a near-miss, a part failure, mixing non-sense and non-communication into sense and dialogue. We can certainly never articulate the truth in some 'pure' unmediated way: Lacan's own notoriously sybilline style, a language of the unconscious all in itself, is meant to suggest that any attempt to convey a whole unblemished meaning in speech or script is a pre-Freudian illusion."
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, December 07, 2006 at 02:05 PM
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