Bowie points out, however, that Lacan's reading of Saussure is no less selective and revisionary than his reading of Freud. Poetry, like polyphony, serves Lacan as a metaphor for the signifying chain, just as his view of literature manifests a control...
Bowie points out, however, that Lacan's reading of Saussure is no less selective and revisionary than his reading of Freud. Poetry, like polyphony, serves Lacan as a metaphor for the signifying chain, just as his view of literature manifests a controlled ambiguity. On the one hand, poets and critics already know the ways of the unconscious and its language; on the other, they have no privileged hold on language. Lacan's '"law of the signifier"... both bineds and liberates; it both cramps desire and sends it on an endless journey'(79).