The Abnegation of Desire

Abstract

The article considers the intervention of negativity in the process
of signification starting from the articulation of two central ideas
from semiotics and psychoanalysis. The first is that the study of
meaning itself can be done in terms of its signifying articulation
and the second is that the dream is the disguised realization of
desire about whose meaning nothing can be known before it is
placed in a narrative. Meaning and desire exist as effects
produced by the text. It’s analysis in the torsions of the semiotic
process refer to the prohibition that gives birth to culture and
determines the subject’s “being of desire.” Linked with
prohibition, negativity sustains the logical structure of opposition
that directs desire’s and meaning’s pace through the signifying
chain.