Famous Quotes about structuralism

Terry Eagleton quote #74 from Literary Theory: An Introduction

Lacan as we have seen in our discussion of Freud regards the unconscious as structured like a language. This is not only because it works by metaphor and metonymy it is also because like language itself for the post-structuralists it is composed less of signs stable meanings than of signifiers. If you dream of a horse it is not immediately obvious what this signifies it may have many contradictory meanings may be just one of a whole chain of signifiers with equally multiple meanings. The image of the horse that is to say is not a sign in Saussures sense - it does not have one determined signified tied neatly to its tail - but is a signifier which may be attached to many different signifieds and which may itself bear the traces of the other signifiers which surround it. I was not aware when I wrote the above sentence of the word-play involved in horse and tail one signifier interacted with another against my conscious intention. The unconscious is just a continual movement and activity of signifiers whose signifieds are often inaccessible to us because they are repressed. This is why Lacan speaks of the unconscious as a sliding of the signified beneath the signifier as a constant fading and evaporation of meaning a bizarre modernist text which is almost unreadable and which will certainly never yield up its final secrets to interpretation.
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