Quotes About Metonymy

Meaning was not a pitch but an interval. It sprang from the depth of disjunction, the distance between one circuit's center and the edge of another. Representation caught the sign napping, with its semantic pants down. Sense lay in metaphor's embarrassment at having two takes on the same thing. For the first time, I understand Emerson's saying about the use of life being to learn metonymy. Life *was* metonymy, or at least stood for it.

Is it really her I love, I thought to myself as I looked again at Chloe reading on the sofa across the room, or simply an idea that collects itself around her mouth, her eyes, her face? In using her face as a guide to her soul, was I not perhaps guilty of mistaken metonymy, whereby an attribute of an entity is substituted for the entity itself (the crown for the monarchy, the wheel for the car, the White House for the US government, Chloe's angelic expression for Chloe…)?

the philosophers of history privileged particular tropes, or figures of speech: Marx emphasized Metonymy and Synecdoche to organize the historical field, whereas Nietzsche relied on Metaphor and Croce on Irony.

For once desire is articulated in words it does not sit still, but displaces, drifting metonymically from one thing to the next. Desire is a product of language and cannot be satisfied with an object.

Metaphors, similes, puns - all manner of metonymy - I'm interested in language that cannot be parsed by a machine - language that can only be understood through acculturation.

la historia del deseo se organiza como un discurso que se desarrolla en lo insensato. Esto es el inconsciente. Los desplazamientos y condensaciones en el discurso del inconsciente son sin duda alguna lo que en el discurso en general constituyen desplazamientos y condensaciones, o sea, metonimias y metáforas. Pero aquí son metáforas que no engendran sentido alguno, y desplazamientos que no transportan ningún ser y en los cuales el sujeto no reconoce algo que se desplace.