The happy fall: Lamentation and digression in the modern French text.

Abstract

Whereas any signification is characterized by Saussure's distinction between the signifier and the signified, this difference is conventionally represented as a lack or insufficiency of the signifying system even as its productivity is demonstrated in its own textual enunciation. The translation of literary texts, as an act of imitation that cannot reproduce the specificity of the original, is haunted by a sense of linguistic lack. Similarly, in Lacanian signification, one is doubly split because of difference: as both a signifying and a desiring subject, one is haunted by the impossibility of recuperation of the originary fullness of the prelapsarian sign which is promised by the phallus as the privileged signifier. The presupposition of the lamentation is that language could be other than a signifying system inhabited by difference. To produce the lament is to posit the possibility of a sign that is never different from itself. Hence, it is to posit a language that could "do justice" to the intended meaning of the subject. However, the lament of difference is always complicated by difference itself. The lamenting subjects in Baudelaire's "Le Cygne" and Mallarme's "Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd'hui" can do nothing other than affirm their exile from the originary in the very production of the lament, since it can only be articulated from within difference. That difference can be understood not only as a lamentable lack but also as the condition of the productivity of discourse is demonstrated by Robert Desnos's Rrose Selavy in which resignifying practices occur that produce new meanings in a "digression" from the signifier of a pre-existing discourse. The digressing subject enacts signification seemingly toward no communicated end but rather to discover the other significations that always haunt discourse. My reading of Desnos's La Liberte ou l'amour! and Deuil pour deuil suggests a rethinking of such concepts as the signifying subject, which is always split in the conventional perspective, and such distinctions as that of originality and imitation to imply the inevitable citationality of discourse.