signifier

The present article aims to investigate the appropriateness of the concepts introduced by modern sciences of the sign, particularly by structural and poststructural approaches, to studying God-man communication in the Quran. Such a conception of communication can be described in terms of two models, namely, communication as sending and communication as reading. These two concepts which represent an uncompromising dualism in the modern approaches to the sign, come to a compromise in the religious discourse, leading us not merely to conceiving a powerful God but also to a powerful man.

The present article investigates Emily Dickinson's poem "I taste a liquor never brewed" and aims to solve the confusion of scholars that struggled to specify the precise meaning of some of the terms in the text and fully appreciate the psychic dynamics of it in terms of Lacanian psychoanalysis. The first question the article asks is how is 'desire' represented, and the second is whether the speaker of the poem longs for an 'Other jouissance.' In Seminar XX, Lacan defines Other jouissance as the most intense and ineffable kind and equals it to the jouissance of the mystics. Desire, in Lacanian teachings, is unattainable and an inevitable consequence of language. The famous Lacanian maxims "desire is the desire of the Other," and the "Other is the treasure trove of signifiers" indicate that desire could be represented through signifiers. The article integrates These Lacanian notions in Paul Ricoeur's three-staged hermeneutic Arc, which consists of 1) explanation, 2) understanding, and 3) appropriation. The poem will undergo these three stages of interpretation. By the end of the last stage, the world of the text is appropriated by the selected Lacanian notions. The results of the study are the following: 1) the poem is unique in displaying what Lacan termed 'Other jouissance,' 2) it demonstrates an intense desire for a supreme being—the Other, 3) desire is explicitly named in the poem: it is manifested explicitly in the words ‘liquor," tankards," Alcohol," inebriate," debauchee," drams," drink," little tippler.'

The article treats some underlying motifs of Slavoj Žižek’s reading of Hegel, according to which Hegelian dialectic and the Lacanian “logic of the signifier” are homologous. After a brief conceptual-historical contextualisation of Žižek’s Hegel against the backdrop of early twentieth century Hegelianism (Lukács, Kojéve), the article attends to some programmatic remarks in The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), Žižek’s first English-language book. There, he for the first time presents a Hegel of constitutive antagonism, contrary to prevalent readings of Hegel as a thinker of final resolution. Žižek nevertheless provides his most systematic account of Hegel, including the 2012 tome Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, in the Sublime Object’s sequel, for they know not what they do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (1991). The majority of the article therefore deals with the initial chapter of for they know not, where we encounter the foundations of Žižek’s specifically Lacanian Hegel. The latter holds accountable theoretical currents such as negative dialectic and deconstruction for insufficiently rigorous readings of key Hegelian categories, not least that of identity. Instead of entailing a conceptual imperialism that swallows difference within itself, Hegelian identity is by Žižek read against the background of Lacan’s account of structuralist differentiality. What comes to the fore here is the question of the self-identical One, whose qualitative manifestation in The Science of Logic’s “Doctrine of Being” Žižek casts in terms of the Lacanian trait unaire (unary trait), that is, the nascent form of the signifier.