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In semiotics and discourse analysis, floating signifiers (also referred to as empty signifiers, [1] although these terms have been made distinct [2]) are signifiers without a referent. The term open signifier is sometimes used as a synonym due to the empty signifier's nature to "resist the constitution of any unitary meaning", enabling its ...
Ernesto Laclau (Spanish:; 6 October 1935 – 13 April 2014) was an Argentine political theorist and philosopher. He is often described as an 'inventor' of post-Marxist political theory. He is well known for his collaborations with his long-term partner, Chantal Mouffe .
When a signifier crosses the bar, from above it to under it, it becomes a signified. But this leaves a space or gap above the bar which, according to Lacan, is the subject. [citation needed] In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the subject only appears fleetingly, on those rare occasions when a signifier crosses the bar, leaving an empty space above it.
According to Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), a sign is composed of the signifier [2] (signifiant), and the signified (signifié).These cannot be conceptualized as separate entities but rather as a mapping from significant differences in sound to potential (correct) differential denotation.
Over the course of the 1990s, Butler, Laclau, and Žižek found themselves engaging with each other's work in their own books. In order to focus more closely on their theoretical differences (and similarities), they decided to produce a book in which all three would contribute three essays each, with the authors' respective second and third essays responding to the points of dispute raised by ...
Developing several sharp divergences from the tenets of canonical Marxist thought, the authors begin by tracing historically varied discursive constitutions of class, political identity, and social self-understanding, and then tie these to the contemporary importance of hegemony as a destabilized analytic which avoids the traps of various ...
The test depends on substitution: a particular signifier is chosen, then the effect of substituting alternatives is considered to determine the extent to which the value of the sign is changed. This both illuminates the meaning of the original choice and identifies the paradigms and code to which the signifiers used belong.
There is a 'barrier' of repression between Signifiers (the unconscious mind: 'discourse of the Other') and the signified […] a 'chain' of signifiers is analogous to the 'rings of a necklace that is a ring in another necklace made of rings' […] 'The signifier is that which represents a subject (fantasy-construct) for another signifier'.