The Unconscious: Inscription-Text-File

Abstract

This paper is based on the lacanian concept of the signifier, as the material out of which the unconscious is made.
The unconscious may be considered: 1. As a place: that of the first inscriptions. The dream Ent-stellung names the
transposition to this place. 2. As an event in this place. The dreamwork, the primary process produces
the text and originates the formations of the unconscious. 3. As the construction of the façade, the dream façade, with the material produced at this place. Through Nachträglichkeit (deferred action) with screen memories, by means of daydreams, the texts are arranged and disarranged in archive. The archive is the name of the documents as well as the place where they are kept.
The unconscious is this odd relation between Letter and Place. Freud considers that the novelty of his discovery is that memory is deposited in different kinds of signs: perception signs and language signs. In his “Autobiography” Freud mentions infantile sexuality and the Œdipus wish. I believe that these three original discoveries of Freud: that of an unknown memory, that of a rare sexuality, that of a disconcerting desire, conjugate in the concept of unconscious.  The primal phantasies structure infantile sexuality which materializes through primary inscriptions inspired by the Œdipus wish. The regression towards the first inscriptions, the recreation of infantile sexuality and the impulse repetition belong one to another. I think that the kaleidoscope is an
adequate optic model for this triple belonging. A triangle of three mirrors (the three primary phantasies) produces a symmetrical configuration of multicoloured fragments (the inscriptions), this configuration being each time different when the kaleidoscope
revolves (repetition impulse). There is no chronology. The intemporality of the unconscious is kaleidoscopic.
Freud sustains that the manifest dream is the outcome of a transposition of the latent content into another form of expression comparable to a hierogliphic scripture. These perception signs in their synchrony are the signifiers —says Lacan.
The child, when acquiring language becomes a Dasein in the world. The distance constitutes a lack, lack which generates desire, desire that impulses to regression. With the acquisition of language the subject is divided into the one who speaks and the one
who is erased when being spoken. The kaleidoscopic time spectralizes the signified in chain of signifiers, chain which
subverts the autonomous subject carried along by the desire of the lost object. The difference Freud establishes in the beginning between signs of perception and signs of language —which is the basis of his most important theoretical discovery:
primary process and secondary process— corresponds in my hypothesis to the difference which is at present made between graphic signifiers and phonic signifiers. The intertextual reading of Derrida and Chomsky clarifies the lacanian signifier. The
phonic signifiers establish the system of phonemas. Through the interpretation of this system by means of the deep syntactic structure, described by Chomsky, the child starts to inhabit the language and to be in the world. When he starts to speak, the
division of the subject through original repression arises. When Lacan discovers that the bar of de Saussure is the barrier of primary repression, the dream text appears as woven by the intercrossing of the graphic signifier chains. Freud compares memory with an archive which is complex due to the different kinds of chronologic order and chain association order. This interference of two
temporalities: the chronologic one and the kaleidoscopic one arises from the description Freud makes of the secondary elaboration mechanism. It is a dream process temporality. The barrier of original repression operates as a
sensitive plate where the unconscious structured as a language, communicates with language in a strict sense. Freud, describing the dream façade, compares it with the Roman barroque palaces in the construction of which ruins of the Empire were used.
The simultaneousness of primary inscriptions, the synchrony of the signifiers, the barroque synthesis of the texts are the levels of intemporality of the unconscious and constitute the archive