What is a metaphor? It is a hidden comparison, an association through similarity or resemblance (which is distinguished from metonymy, an association through contiguity and not similarity).
In everyday speech, we are acquainted with handling homonyms by postulating a literal ‘main’ meaning and its secondary metaphorical meanings, creating a hierarchy where the literal meaning is implicitly superior or privileged in our analysis compared to the metaphorical meaning(s). It is almost as if the metaphorical meaning(s) emerged through a comparison with the literal meaning and not the other way around. When I use the term “eye of the stove”, we are used to thinking that we are comparing the circular shape of the object with the human eyeball and not the other way around.
Jacques Lacan, in his first seminar, tries to challenge this hierarchical thinking. He says that “Every kind of usage, in a certain sense, is always metaphorical […] Were I to address another being, whether created or not, in calling him sun of my heart, it would be an error to believe that it is a question of a comparison, between what you are in my heart and what the sun is, etc.”¹.
For Lacan, when you say something like “sun of my heart,” you aren’t just comparing two things. The phrase creates a rich network of associations organized in a horizontal, non-hierarchical symbolic space. We don’t need to imagine that there’s some extra, secret meaning hidden behind words. Every time we speak, even in what seems like a straightforward or “literal” way, we’re making connections (or metaphors) with lots of other ideas. Saying “sun of my heart” doesn’t just compare you to the sun in a one-directional manner, it also compares the sun to you. The relationship between the compared and the comparing term is biunivocal: we can imagine a non-directed graph structured in a rhizomatic fashion where signifiers are merely edges in this graph, and nodes are meanings: ‘sun’ is here simply a connection, without a direction, between you and that firey star in the sky we see during the day.
Lacan goes on to say: “Comparison is only a secondary development of the original emergence of the metaphorical relation to being, one that is infinitely richer than anything I could now illuminate. […] The emergence of the symbol creates, literally, a new order of being in the relations between men.”²
When we use language to make such metaphorical connections, we are not merely describing the world — we are actively creating a new order of being. That is, the act of naming or invoking something (like calling someone “sun of my heart”) changes the way that person or thing is related to us and to others. It’s not just a description; it’s an invocation, an act that embeds our very being and feelings into the symbolic world of language.
This blurred boundary between metaphor and literalness gets clearer the moment we look at a different example: the word ‘mother’. A few centuries ago, divorce and adoption were extremely rare, so mother was synonymous with “biological mother”. After adoption and divorces become more common in the 19th century, the signifiers “adoptive mother” and “step-mother” were created. However, in that time, an adoptive mother was a mother only in a metaphorical sense: adoptive mother wasn’t a literal mother but ‘like’ a mother, a mother in a metaphorical sense through similarity with the real, literal (biological) meaning of mother.
However, in the 21st century, adoptive mothers are so common that now an adoptive mother is a mother in a literal sense. Whether the meaning of a term is literal or metaphorical depends entirely on context in space and time: space as in culture and time as in historical epoch. An adoptive mother was a metaphorical mother in the 19th century and is a literal mother in the 21st century.
A more interesting phenomenon appears today: if your biological mother abandons you right after birth, and as a newborn another woman adopts you, that second woman would be considered by many your ‘real mother’. For many people, your real mother is the one who raised you, not the one who gave birth to you. It’s like the phrase “a real mother would never abandon her child”. Now, we have certain situations in which the terms have reversed: the biological mother is only a metaphorical mother since she did not live up to her role by abandoning you, while your adoptive mother is your real, literal mother since she was ‘more of a mother than the mother’, filling up that role in your life.
You can observe that we now have what appears to be three signifiers — “mother,” “biological mother,” and “adoptive mother” — but only two basic experiential or functional roles: giving birth and raising a child. In semiotic terms, this surplus of signifiers is not a contingency but a fundamental feature of language. Language is inextricably linked to taxonomy: a classification system will always create more universals than their meaning since every hypernym is essentially already a surplus: the reunion of hyponyms is simply enough to cover the set of all things described.
Gilles Deleuze describes this phenomenon of the surplus of signification in the sixth chapter of The Logic of Sense. He describes the ‘paradoxical element’ that ties a relationship between a signifying series and a signified series: “What are the characteristics of this paradoxical entity? It circulates without end in both series and, for this reason, assures their communication. It is a two-sided entity, equally present in the signifying and the signified series. It is the mirror. Thus, it is at once word and thing, name and object, sense and denotatum, expression and designation, etc. It guarantees, therefore, the convergence of the two series which it traverses, but precisely on the condition that it makes them endlessly diverge.”³
This paradoxical element correlates very strongly with what Lacan called ‘objet petit a’ which is simultaneously a surplus and a lack. The objet petit a is a Platonic universal, like a category in a taxonomy tree, but it is not just any universal: it is the empty universal, a universal without a particular, ‘the universal lack’, as Todd McGowan might put it in “Universality and Identity Politics’. This paradoxical element is an empty template, like a class in object-oriented-programming that does not have any objects. It’s a universal that fails to instantiate itself, but through its failure to have a particular, it creates the conditions of the possibility of having a taxonomy in the first place. Carl Jung gave a perfect example of the objet petit a when describing the process of ‘anima projection’ in men: you are always looking for ‘the one’ in romantic love, but each time you find a woman, it is not ‘it’. Jung’s anima here is the objet petit a: so vague and so abstract that it can’t be verbalized, but it acts as the motor driving the process of classification in the first place. It’s at once a lack (inexistent in reality) and a surplus (a surplus category with no correlate in reality in the list of categories).
In our example from before, Deleuze’s paradoxical element or Lacan’s objet petit a is the word “mother”. Despite us only needing two signifiers to describe the set of all mothers (“biological mother” and “adoptive mother”), we nevertheless have three signifiers, with that “real mother” that we endlessly search for but never find, since no one is ‘it’, being the paradoxical surplus-lack element tying together the two series.
For Deleuze, the signifying series is always in excess compared to the signified series (in our case, through the term ‘mother’). He goes on to explain: “We will not say, therefore, of the two series it animates, that the one is originary and the other derived, though they certainly may be originary or derived in relation to one another. […] It behooves it, therefore, to be in excess in the one series which it constitutes as signifying, and lacking in the other which it constitutes as signified: split apart, incomplete by nature or in relation to itself. Its excess always refers to its own lack, and conversely, its lack always refers to its excess. But even these determinations are still relative. For that which is in excess in one case is nothing but an extremely mobile empty place; and that which is lacking in another case is a rapidly moving object, an occupant without a place, always supernumerary and displaced.”⁴
Let us recap: ‘mother’ here acts as an autohyponym — a term which is both a hyponym and a hypernym to itself. The word “dog” is an often-cited example of an autohyponym: it has both a more general meaning (any animal of the species Canis familiaris) and a more specific meaning (only males of that species). This is why Deleuze’s analysis of the paradoxical element must be supplemented through the linguistic concept of autohyponymy: that element is paradoxical since it allows us to say phrases such as “That dog is not a dog, it’s a bitch!”. Our analysis of paradox here is not Hegelian, contradiction is not intertwined in the imaginary order but only in the symbolic, through the sheer fact that a signifier can have two different, contradictory meanings. It’s the Lacanian symbolic order, which introduces both lack and surplus, that allows us to say perfectly true phrases such as “That dog is not a dog”, through two meanings of the word dog (a more general and a more restrictive one).
However, paradox is merely the other side of pleonasm. Consider an extremely used phrase nowadays: “drugs and alcohol”. If alcohol is a drug, then why the hell do we say ‘drugs and alcohol’ and not simply ‘drugs’? It’s almost as if we said ‘alcohol and alcohol’. This phrasing is necessary due to the ambiguous meaning of the autohyponym ‘drug’: it has a more general meaning (any mind-altering substance) and a more restrictive one which acts as hyponym to the first one (an illegal mind-altering substance). This is why Deleuze says “We must say that the paradoxical entity is never where we look for it, and conversely that we never find it where it is”⁵. Lack and surplus are merely two sides of the same coin: the paradoxical element is always displaced in relation to itself, creating an apparent pleonasm through surplus and an apparent contradiction through lack.
Aren’t we experiencing this same shift today in the evolution of the words “man” and “woman”, an evolution that already happened two centuries ago with the words ‘father’ and ‘mother’? The evolution is the turning of a term into an autohyponym: if today an adoptive mother can be ‘more of a mother’ than a biological mother, then will it be possible in the future for a trans woman to be ‘more of a woman’ than a biological woman? If so, this would challenge both mainstream discourses around transgender issues: the self-identification discourse and the biological-reductionist discourse. This is not a value-judgment, I am not saying whether this is good or bad, but merely a description of a process. We would expect that history would repeat itself, but in a Deleuzian fashion, it repeats itself differently each time.
One question is still left unanswered however: how come the word ‘mother’ experienced the same fate as the word ‘woman’ about two centuries before, and not later? What does it say about our social unconscious? Our common-sense intuition would have us believe that the signifier ‘mother’ is subordinate to the signifier ‘woman’ since all mothers are women but not all women are mothers. But truth is stranger than fiction.
NOTES:
1: Jacques Lacan, Seminar I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, pg. 238
2: ibid.
3: Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, pg. 40
4: ibid., pg. 41
5: ibid.
