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Saussure argued that the meaning of a sign "depends on its relation to other words within the system;" for example, to understand an individual word such as "tree," one must also understand the word "bush" and how the two relate to each other. [7] It is this difference from other signs that allows the possibility of a speech community.
In the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, objet petit a stands for the unattainable object of desire, the "a" being the small other ("autre"), a projection or reflection of the ego made to symbolise otherness, like a specular image, as opposed to the big Other (always capitalised as "A") which represents otherness itself.
Lacan uses his concept of the letter to distance himself from the Jungian approach to symbols and the unconscious.Whereas Jung believes that there is a collective unconscious which works with symbolic archetypes, Lacan insists that we must read the productions of the unconscious à la lettre - in other words, literally to the letter (or, more specifically, the concept of the letter which Lacan ...
Jaques (variously / ˈ dʒ eɪ k w iː z / and / ˈ dʒ eɪ k z /) is one of the main characters in Shakespeare's As You Like It. "The melancholy Jaques", as he is known, is one of the exiled Duke Senior's noblemen who live with him in the Forest of Arden.
The Symbolic (or Symbolic Order of the Borromean knot) [1] is the order in the unconscious that gives rise to subjectivity and bridges intersubjectivity between two subjects [citation needed]; an example is Jacques Lacan's idea of desire as the desire of the Other, maintained by the Symbolic's subjectification of the Other into speech. [2]
For Lacan "the Other must first of all be considered a locus in which speech is constituted," so that the other as another subject is secondary to the other as symbolic order. [52] We can speak of the other as a subject in a secondary sense only when a subject occupies this position and thereby embodies the other for another subject.
Daniel Chandler defines the term as "a signifier with a vague, highly variable, unspecifiable or non-existent signified". [4] The concept of floating signifiers originates with Claude Lévi-Strauss, who identified cultural ideas like mana as "represent[ing] an undetermined quantity of signification, in itself void of meaning and thus apt to receive any meaning".
In philosophy, deconstruction is a loosely-defined set of approaches to understanding the relationship between text and meaning.The concept of deconstruction was introduced by the philosopher Jacques Derrida, who described it as a turn away from Platonism's ideas of "true" forms and essences which are valued above appearances.