¹Department of English, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA

Correspondence: Dr Todd McGowan, Department of English, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT 05405, USA. E-mail: todd.mcgowan@uvm.edu

Abstract

The political utility of psychoanalytic theory lies in the way that it conceptualizes the missing signifier, the signifier that marks the inability of language to say everything. The three predominant approaches to this failure can be identified as the positivist, the fundamentalist, and the hermeneutic. Psychoanalytic thought provides a fourth alternative, an alternative that views the gap of the missing signifier as an absence inherent within language itself. Grasping the failure of language as a phenomenon internal to the structure of signification allows us to construct a politics that views what has been excluded from the signifying structure as the essence of the structure.