The signifying interval

Analytic work shows us a paradoxical truth: the subject is not a substance that pre-exists language, but the very effect that emerges in the play of signifiers. We are not the cause of our saying, but its consequence: we appear as that fleeting flash that arises when one signifier articulates with another, in that interstitial space where meaning is produced.

Subjectivity resides in no fixed point nor stable essence: it is that perpetual movement that slides between words, that productive absence that allows signifiers to chain together and produce effects of meaning. Like a shadow that exists only between the objects that project it, the subject emerges in the interval between signifiers.

What we call "I" is merely the attempt to give consistency to this elusive play of representations. The true subject is not the one who speaks, but the one who is spoken in the signifying chain, the one who appears as an effect of meaning between the words that name and constitute it without ever being able to capture it completely.