Abstract

This article seeks to assess the meaning and scope of one of Lacan's most famous and decried notion: scansion. Scansion is a notion of prosody which undoubtedly was not chosen at random by Lacan. Scanning, which proved central to his conception of the analytic cure and handling of the treatment, turns out to be a gesture of a very particular kind: through an action which involves minimal intervention is revealed a double entendre, the content of the unconscious fantasy. The clinical function of scansion is hence to accentuate a ‘part’ of the subject's discourse to make it resonate, to isolate a signifier, to make it audible through its material and phonemic plasticity in its irreducible ambiguity. As the article tries to demonstrate, scansion is for Lacan of Freudian descent: clinically stemming and theoretically deduced from the principle of the determinism of the unconscious, it relies on the ‘weft’ of the dream's written fabric as evinced by The Interpretation of Dreams.