What Did Lacan Mean by “a signifier is that which represents a subject for another signifier”?

I think it’s easier to understand if we begin with what the word “represents” means. For someone who is trying to understand this for the first time, I think the word is misleading. It would be better to use the word “evokes” or “implies” because the “subject” he is referring to doesn’t actually exist. It is only an effect of language that emerges from using the language.

This is easy to understand if you think about talking to ChatGPT. Even though we know there is no real person behind it, we still address it using “you” as if we are talking to a real person. The use of language by AI produces the illusion of a subject.

When we use the word “represent,” we end up assuming that what it represents must exist first before a signifier can be assigned to it, but what Lacan means is the other way around. So, even though it’s technically correct to use the word “represent,” it’s misleading.

Also, another confusing factor here is that there are two different levels to which his statement can be applied: macro and micro levels. The statement refers to the micro-level (how a sentence comprises words), but it’s easier to understand if we first discuss the macro level, where the whole sentence is a signifier that represents (or evokes) a subject.

Imagine you walk into a room and find a piece of paper on a table that says, “Chair is in closet.” You assume that someone wrote it, and he is trying to express something. If you take the whole sentence as a signifier, it’s easy to see how it represents the subject, although what Lacan means by “subject” is not the person who wrote it. The existence of a real person, however, is irrelevant. The use of language itself, even if ChatGPT wrote it, implies or evokes a subject after the fact as an effect of language.

So far, I have explained the first part, “a signifier is that which represents a subject.” Now, what does “for another signifier” mean? The word “for” is arguably the most difficult and important part to understand.

Let’s imagine this note was written thousands of years ago by someone whose language nobody speaks today. Even though we cannot understand what it means, we can still glean some things from it. First, someone wanted to say something. That is, we perceive a subject. Second, it wasn’t just a private code that he alone understood. It must be part of the language that his society spoke. “For another signifier” at this macro level refers to this language, what Lacan called “the [big] Other,” without which the sentence cannot signify anything. At the time he was still alive, it represented him for the language others in his society shared.

As you can hopefully see, at the macro level, it is relatively easy to understand, but it gets more complex at the micro level, where each word is “a signifier” in Lacan’s statement, and “another signifier” refers to other words within the note.

Imagine if you saw the note one word at a time. At the point where you see the first word, “chair,” you can still see that someone is trying to communicate something using that word. That is, it represents a subject. But, what does “for another signifier” mean at this level?

By seeing one word at a time, endless possibilities exist in terms of what could come after it. It could be “chair is missing,” “chair broke,” “chair in physics,” and so on. As the subject writes the next word, “is,” he retroactively modifies the meaning of “chair”; it is no longer “chair broke” or “chair in physics.” Therefore, when the subject writes down the word, “chair,” he means to use it as a signifier “for” the next one. Because words can only function in a differential chain of signifiers, each word becomes a signifier as we write it down in a sentence. In contrast, if we write down a random collection of letters, like “ghpbt,” by itself, it would not function as a signifier. A word becomes a signifier only within a chain. You could write down “sit” and still make sense, but that is possible only because it belongs to the network of other signifiers within the language as a whole, “the Other.” In that example, it’s the lack of the next word (or the implied period or an exclamation mark) that completes the meaning of the word “sit” as a command.

And as he writes down the next word, the whole cycle begins again. The new word represents the subject for the next signifier, and so on, which is what Lacan meant by “a subject emerges in the state of barred subject as something which comes from a locus in which it is supposedly inscribed, into another locus in which it is going to be inscribed anew.” Here, he uses the word “emerge” because a subject does not pre-exist as the word “represent” might imply. It is “supposedly” inscribed because it’s only that the language implies the existence of the subject. For Lacan, a subject exists (or “ex-sists”) only as a barred subject, split and incomplete, beyond the reach of language, which is a topic for another discussion.