The castrated signifier

- Writing was always linked in history to a type of sacred object: from myth, philosophy, to science, to intention to form to structure to a UG. The dialectics of the logic of the Signifier vs the logic of the Signified. The recession and resurrection of the various signifieds in history, from the sacred to eide to social reality to intention to form and so on. Autotelic as a signifier without signified, leading to materiality of signifier in 20th century art, writing. To take away the logic of the signified does not mean leading to meaninglessness, which is meaningless by itself. Instead it reduces its cultural logic to material production, even if traces of the old aesthetic remain as skeuomorph, working as an indirect commentary on the surplus cultural cues for reception. Cf. the recession of the Signified in materialist poetics, in Cecil Touchon, in asemic writing. When all forms of the signified had been detached from the signifier.

- The logic of the signified is both repressed and recovered, like in the psychoanalytic dynamic of the signifier. This logic hides the absence of the signified. (In Zizek, the pure Master Signifier governs politics, culture.) 20th century criticism has always linked the signifier to a signified, but must posit the signified as beyond the play of signifiers. The absent phallus is posited as the sublime objet petit a. To accept castration, then relegate the nostalgia for the signified as a muted exteriority, being reduced to a harmless symptom of production. The dream logic of unreadable scripts: because the readable is elsewhere displaced, as already consumed or consummated libidinal production, already enjoyed, but not foregrounded.  Because to signify my jouissance is obscene, that is, pornographic, as when an actress announces ''I'm coming.'' The consumption of the signified today is perhaps like that: in the mode of the obscene (J. Baudrillard). The hyper-hilarity and giddiness of advertising, the over-demonstration of the cause and effect chain, mediatization of the real, and so on.