the upper and the lower Waters

א



א

We are forced then to accept the notion of an incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier - which Ferdinand de Saussure illustrates with an image resembling the wavy lines of the upper and the lower Waters in miniatures from manuscripts of Genesis; a double flux marked by fine streaks of rain, vertical dotted lines supposedly confining segments of correspondence.
All our experience runs counter to this linearity, which made me speak once, in one of my seminars on psychosis, of something more like 'anchoring points', [points de capiton] as a schema for taking into account the dominance of the letter in the dramatic transformation that dialogue can effect in the subject.

(Écrits. New York: Norton, 1977. 154)

א