Abstract

Does humanismhumanism’s focus on ethics, rationality, personal rights and liberties, creativity, and individual insight depend upon the metaphorical symbolicsymbolic structure, the sinthomesinthome, the topological version of the symptom that links the realreal, the, the symbolicsymbolic, and the imaginaryimaginary? Does a shift in the character of this sinthomesinthome from a reliance on speechspeech and metaphormetaphor to a belief in the metonymic primacy of mattermatter account for the emergence of objectsubject/object-oriented and material ways of thinking that reduce the human subject to object? The “symptom” is a “metaphormetaphor,” a part of languagelanguage, a signifiersignifier.1 In Seminar XXIII, Lacan locates the symptom as the subject’s mistake, a stumbling block that signifies a search for meaning in speechspeech and whose formation eventually links the three orders—the symbolicsymbolic, imaginaryimaginary, and real—as a way to subtend the subject.