I.
“By “letter” I designate that material support that concrete discourse borrows from language” (1130).
“no signification can be sustained other than by reference to another signification” (1131).
“the signifier, by its very nature, always anticipates meaning by unfolding its dimension before it” (1134).
“this structure of the signifying chain is the possibility I have . . . to signify something quite other than what it says” (1135).
“I shall designate as metonymy, then, the one side (versant) of the effective field constituted by the signifier, so that meaning can emerge there. The other side is metaphor” (1136).
“the creative spark of the metaphor . . . flashes between two signifiers one of which has taken the place of the other in the signifying chain, the occulted signifier remaining present through its (metonymic) connection with the rest of the chain” (1137).
“metaphor occurs at the precise point at which sense emerges from non-sense” (1137).
II.
“the dream is a rebus” (1138).
“The linguistic structure that enables us to read dreams is the very principle of the significance of the dream, the Traumdeutung” (1138).
“Enstellung, translated as “distortion” or “transposition,” is what Freud shows to be the general precondition for the functioning of the dream, and it is what I designated above, following Saussure, as the sliding of the signified under the signifier, which is always active in discourse” (1139).
“Verdichtung, or “condensation,” is the structure of the superimposition of the signifiers” (1139).
“Verschiebung, “displacement,” the German term is closer to the idea of that veering off of signification that we see in metonymy” (1139).
“Tagtraum . . . fantasies or daydreams” and “Wunscherfüllung . . . wish-fulfillment” (1139).
“the topography of the unconscious”:
(1141).
“I am not wherever I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am where I do not think to think” (1142).
“The unconscious is neither primordial nor instinctual; what it knows about the elementary is no more than the elements of the signifier” (1145).
III.
“the slightest alteration in the relation between man and the signifier, in this case in the procedures of exegesis, changes the whole course of history by modifying the moorings that anchor his being” (1148).