Quotes About Signifying

Hence, it is not that one cannot get outside of language in order to grasp materiality in and of itself; rather, every effort to refer to materiality takes place through a signifying process which, in its phenomenality, is always already material. In this sense, then, language and materiality are not opposed, for language both is and refers to that which is material, and what is material never fully escapes from the process by which it is signified.

Life is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing

Sexuality and sexual difference are absolutely, and irreducibly, linked to the signifying order, yet this does not mean that sexual difference is a symbolic construction. Sex is real because it marks an irreducible limit (contradiction) of the signifying order (and not something beyond or outside this order).

Minus one/plus enjoyment—this is the necessarily distorted structural topology where the subject of the unconscious dwells. This subject is never neuter; it is sexed, since sex(uality) is nothing but a configuring of the signifying minus and of the surplus-enjoyment: a configuring which cannot escape contradiction, the latter being the logical consequence of the one (the Other) that is not there.

Life is a tale told by an idiot -- full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Certain things had to be done in certain ways to mark the end of the cycle of events; like secular voodoo, it helped to resolve matters, signifying and punctuating.

If I acknowledge my dependency, I do so because for me it is a means of signifying my demand.

I have an investment in the signifying aspects of the material as well as an understanding of antecedent bodies of work. That informs the way I make marks and make decisions.

Perhaps we are, somewhere, the deep impulse which generates semiosis, And yet we recognize ourselves only as semiosis in progress, signifying systems and communicational processes. The map of semiosis, as defined at a given stage of historical development (with the debris carried over from previous semiosis), tells us who we are and what (or how) we think.