Languagein Psychoanalysis,5 places the accent on the intersubjective dimensionof speech: speech as the medium of the intersubjective recognitionof desire. The predominant themes in this stage are symbolizationas historicization and symbolic realization: symptoms, traumas,are the blank, empty, non-historicizable spaces of the subjects symbolicuniverse. Analysis, then, realizes in the symbolic these traumatictraces, including them in the symbolic universe by conferring uponthem after the fact, retrospectively, some signification. Basically, aphenomenological conception of language, close to that of Merleau-Ponty, is here retained: the goal of analysis is to produce the recognitionof desire through full speech, to integrate desire within the universeof signification. In a typically phenomenological way, the orderof speech is identified with that of signification, and analysis itselffunctions at this level: All analytical experience is an experience of signification.6The second stage, exemplified in the interpretation of The PurloinedLetter, is in some ways complementary to the first, just as languageis complementary to speech. It places the emphasis on the signifyingorder as (that of) a closed, differential, synchronous structure:the signifying structure functions as a senseless automatism, to whichthe subject is subjected. The diachronic order of speech, of signification,is thus governed by a senseless, signifying automatism, by a differentialand formalizable game that produces the effect of signification.This structure that runs the game is concealed by the Imaginaryrelationship one is here at the level of the schema L:7I am, of course, aware of the importance of imaginary impregnations(Prgung) in the partializations of the symbolic alternative that give the signifyingchain its appearance. Nevertheless, I posit that it is the law specific tothis chain which governs the psychoanalytic effects that are determinant forthe subject effects such as foreclosure (Verwerfung), repression(Verdrngung), and negation (Verneinung) itself and I add with the appropriateemphasis that these effects follow the displacement (Entstellung) of the39/464signifier so faithfully that imaginary factors, despite their inertia, figure onlyas shadows and reflections therein.8If the first stage was phenomenological, this one is rather morestructuralist. The problem of this second stage is that the subject insofar as it is the subject of the signifier, irreducible to the Imaginaryego is radically unthinkable [impensable]: on the one hand, there isthe Imaginary ego, the location of blindness and misrecognition, thatis to say, of the axis a-a; on the other hand, a subject totally subjectedto the structure, alienated without remainder and in this sense desubjectivized:The coming into operation of the symbolic function in its most radical, absoluteusage ends up abolishing the action of the individual so completely that bythe same token it eliminates his tragic relation to the world ... At the heart ofthe flow of events, the functioning of reason, the subject from the first movefinds himself to be no more than a pawn, forced inside this system, and excludedfrom any truly dramatic, and consequently tragic, participation in therealization of truth.9The subject that liberates itself completely from the axis a-a and entirelyrealizes itself in the Other, accomplishing its symbolic realiz