Signifier Quotes & Sayings

We know God by cultivating a relationship, not by understanding a concept.
The relation constitutes the very subjectivity of of our existence. We participate in existence consciously and rationally, with subjective self-knowledge and identity, because the erotic drive of our nature is transformed into a personal relation when there arises in the space of the Other the first signifier of desire: the maternal presence. The subject is born with love's first leap of joy. — Christos Yannaras

Besides, what's in a name? Actually, a lot. Whether taken from a parent or grandparent, some saint, or even the late great Elvis, your name insists another person's dream of what you should have been. The portrait of some ancestral ideal lingers through heirloom names. Gender specific names imply all sorts of expectations. More than just a signifier used to summon, instruct, address, accuse, sometimes praise us, our names define and thereby limit us. They put us in a cage. — Brien Piechos

My mother said the bizarre name Raccoona had surely been inspired, at least on a subliminal level, by the masks raccoons don't wear but simply have - the ones given them by nature ... [S]he pointed out that Le Guin had suspected all along that Raccoona and Tiptree were two authors that came from the same source, but in a letter to Alice she wrote that she preferred Tiptree to Raccoona: 'Raccoona, I think, has less control, thus less wit and power.'
Le Guin, Mother said, had understood something deep. 'When you take on a male persona, something happens.'
When I asked her what that was, she sat back in her chair, waved her arm, and smiled. 'You get to be the father. — Siri Hustvedt

If woman has always functioned "within" the discourse of man, a signifier that has always referred back to the opposite signifier which annihilates its specific energy and diminishes or stifles its very different sounds, it is time for her to dislocate this "within," to explode it, turn it around, and seize it; to make it hers, containing it, taking it in her own mouth, biting that tongue with her very own teeth to invent for herself a language to get inside of. And you'll see with what ease she will spring forth from that "within" - the "within" where once she so drowsily crouched - to overflow at the lips she will cover the foam. — Helene Cixous

The fateful law of human semiotics is this: that of all the objects in the entire Cosmos which the sign-user can apprehend through the conjoining of signifier and signified (word uttered and thing beheld), there is one which forever escapes his comprehension
and that is the sign-user himself ... The self of the sign-user can never be grasped, because, once the self locates itself at the dead center of its world, there is no signified to which a signifier can be joined to make a sign. The self has no sign of itself. No signifier applies. All signifiers apply equally. — Walker Percy

The New Testament is a brutal destroyer of human illusions. If you follow Jesus and don't end up dead, it appears you have some explaining to do. The stark signifier of the human condition is one who spoke up for love and justice and was done to death for his pains. The traumatic truth of human history is a mutilated body. — Terry Eagleton

A poem is a piece of semiotic sport, in which the signifier has been momentarily released from its grim communicative labours and can disport itself disgracefully. Freed from a loveless marriage to a single meaning, it can play the field, wax promiscous, gambol outrageously with similar unattached signifiers. If the guardians of conventional morality knew what scandalous stuff they were inscribing on their tombstones, they would cease to do so immediately. — Terry Eagleton

A cloud can look like a camel, but a camel is unlikely to look like a cloud. This is so because the signifier must be able to stand for the whole category of the signified. The cloud looks like all camels, but no camel looks like all clouds. — Rudolf Arnheim

Why do comparisons of words and tone poems (poetry and music) never take into consideration that the word is a mere signifier, but that the sound, aside from being a signifier, is also an object? — Franz Grillparzer

As my family story shows, Latinos have been a blessing for USA for many generations. The future of America depends in part on the success of the Latino community, and this opportunity is just one more signifier of that. — Julian Castro

The connection between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary. — Ferdinand De Saussure

When I came out publicly, some photo editors had a field day searching for pictures of me with a limp wrist or some other stereotypical gay signifier - as though, after decades in the public eye, they'd suddenly come across a trove of shots where I looked like a Cher impersonator. — James McGreevey

Contemporary poetry ... tries to transform the sign back into meaning:
its ideal, ultimately, would be to reach not the meaning of words, but the
meaning of things themselves. This is why it clouds the language, increases
as much as it can the abstractness of the concept and the arbitrariness
of the sign and stretches to the limit the link between signifier and signified. — Roland Barthes

I said before that McDonald's serves a kind of comfort food, but after a few bites I'm more inclined to think they're selling something more schematic than that
something more like a signifier of comfort food. So you eat more and eat more quickly, hoping somehow to catch up to the original idea of a cheeseburger or French fry as it retreats over the horizon. And so it goes, bite after bite, until you feel not satisfied exactly, but simply, regrettably, full. — Michael Pollan

The rite, the becoming-animal of the scapegoat clearly illustrates this: a first expiatory animal is sacrificed, but a second is driven away, sent out into the desert wilderness. In the signifying regime, the scapegoat represents a new form of increasing entropy in the system of signs: it is charged with everything that was "bad" in a given period, that is, everything that resisted signifying signs, everything that eluded the referral from sign to sign through the different circles; it also assumes everything that was unable to recharge the signifier as its center and carries off everything that spills beyond the outermost circle. — Gilles Deleuze

What does it mean that the most popular and unifying form of entertainment in America circa 2014 features giant muscled men, mostly African-American, engaged in a sport that causes many of them to suffer brain damage? What does it mean that our society has transmuted the intuitive physical joys of childhood - run, leap, throw, tackle - into a corporatized form of simulated combat? That a collision sport has become the leading signifier of our institutions of higher learning, and the undisputed champ of our colossal Athletic Industrial Complex? — Steve Almond

Woman, then, stands in patriarchal culture as a signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of a woman still tied to her place as the bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning. — Laura Mulvey

For the signifier is a unit in its very uniqueness, being by nature symbol only of an absence. — Jacques Lacan

The difference between structuralism and existentialism is simple: the world-constituting 'I' of existentialism is displaced by the linguistic relation between signifier and signified. — Stephen Trombley

All I can claim in this respect, alas, is that I think I may know just about enough theology to be able to spot when someone like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens - a couplet I shall henceforth reduce for convenience to the solitary signifier Ditchkins - is talking out of the back of his neck. — Terry Eagleton

(the pharmakon is neither remedy now poison, neither good nor evil, neither the inside nor the outside, neither speech nor writing; the supplement is neither a plus nor a minus, neither an outside nor the complement of an inside, neither accident nor essence, etc.; the hymen is neither confusion nor distinction, neither identity nor difference, neither consummation nor virginity, neither the veil nor unveiling, neither the inside nor the outside, etc.; the gram is neither a signifier nor a signified, neither a sign nor a thing, neither a presence nor an absence, neither a position nor a negation, etc.; spacing is neither space nor time; the incision is neither the incised integrity of a beginning, or of a simple cutting into, nor simple secondarity. Neither/nor, that is, simultaneously either or; the mark is also the marginal limit, the march, etc.) — Jacques Derrida

Meaning is produced not only by the relationship between the signifier and the signified but also, crucially, by the position of the signifiers in relation to other signifiers. — Jacques Lacan

I was later to realize that a neatly trimmed lawn was a powerful signifier and should have commanded in me a slight sense of fear and respect, especially in conjunction — Matt Haig

He had a theory about it. It happened, and re-happened, because it was a city uninterested in history. Strange things occurred precisely because there was no necessary regard for the past. The city lived in a sort of everyday present. It had no need to believe in itself as a London, or an Athens, or even a signifier of the New World, like a Sydney, or a Los Angeles. No, the city couldn't care less about where it stood. He had seen a t-shirt once that said: New York F***in City. As of it were the only place that ever existed and the only one that ever would. — Mccann Colum

Try telling the boy who's just had his girlfriend's name
cut into his arm that there's slippage between the signifier
and the signified. Or better yet explain to the girl
who watched in the mirror as the tattoo artist stitched
the word for her father's name (on earth as in heaven)
across her back that words aren't made of flesh and blood,
that they don't bite the skin. Language is the animal
we've trained to pick up the scent of meaning. It's why
when the boy hears his father yelling at the door
he sends the dog that he's kept hungry, that he's kicked,
then loved, to attack the man, to show him that every word
has a consequence, that language, when used right, hurts. — Todd Davis

gifts - that strange word, a signifier meaning disappointment you can hold in your hands. — Jeanette Winterson

There's a gap between what I want to do, what I do on camera, and what gets edited. Right? So the goal is to try and close the gaps. What's the biggest compliment is if I read a review and it's exactly what I wrote down in my diary before ever filming it. That's really cool. That's the biggest signifier of closing the gaps. — Matthew McConaughey

The different strategies and visions of 'reformists' and 'radicals' are not the only subject of major debate within lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer politics. The fact is that only a tiny minority of non-heterosexuals are involved in any sort of political activism. Various writers and activists have noted with rising alarm an almost mass depoliticisation of lesbian and gay communities in the 1990s. The crass commercialism of the gay scene and the rise of the so-called pink pound and of 'lifestyle' as a signifier of sexual identity (and human worth) has allowed huge profits to be reaped. Playing on the insecurities of people sells 'packages' which can include everything from 'gay apartments' to 'gay holidays' and 'gay clothes' to designer drugs. — Richard Dunphy

Cigarettes are an instant signifier in culture. It punctuates a joke, or puts that extra zing on a punch line. I like them as a prop. I think it can be really useful for character and texture and contrast and all of that. — Martha Plimpton

The horror movie will not go away. Look at the change in the Hollywood landscape as a signifier of its durability. At one point it was just one of many styles of films called 'product' that between, say, 1930 and 1970, the movie city ground out like sausages or hula hoops at a rate of four or five a week. — Stephen Hunter