Essay on Sacrifice to the Signifier, in Comic Praise of...

Sacrifice to the Signifier, in Comic Praise of the Logos When Socrates wanted to inspire Glaucon with knowledge of the pure forms, he conjured up a rhetorical fantasm—a word-picture whose referent could appear no other way, and whose signified emerged from a cluster of signifiers (men chained before a blazing fire, shadows on a cave wall, etc.). At once self-consciously artificial and didactic, Socrates’ allegory prompts an understanding, produces a knowledge that leans upon fantasy and imagination as its only supports. Replying to Socrates, Glaucon registers his appreciation of the allegory: All this I see. Perhaps this primal scene of philosophical instruction can most productively be grasped as a deaf moment, or as an†¦show more content†¦Glaucon’s utterance—All this I see—is a paradigmatic figure of speech, not a literal knowledge-claim, which composes a prominent pattern of response to the words of others. I see what you mean, I see it clearly now, I’ve seen the light, etc.—such a pattern of response pins abstract cognition to sensual particularity. Furthermore, the rhetorical/poetic category of imagery suggests similar principles of anchorage. Vividness, clarity, scope, proportionality, elegance, and other criteria for rhetorical excellence all imply firm grounding in the utilities and pleasures of sight. The prominence of that pattern or grounding may indeed imply a hegemony of vision over other sensory modes, but it does not perform a radical break from what Gadamer terms linguisticality or what we typically refer to as the logos. Nor does it recommend the displacement of other ways of essentializing human subjectivity, e.g., homo faber, homo dialecticus, or man the symbol-using and misusing animal. (Consider how much would be lost and how little would be gained if a definition such as the seeing animal or the image-making and unmaking animal were supplied.) Even Lacan’s insistence on the visual, his heavy investment in the relationship between imagery and desire, and his