I don't think metaphor is quite right. Rather, Lacan is 
being hyperliteral (or literally literal). Lacan and 
Benveniste, who was in Lacan's early seminars, argue that 
(inter)subjectivity is a function of language. Therefore 
the subject is very much the grammatical subject.  For 
example, Benveniste writes in "Subjectivity in Language" 
(_Problems in General Linguistics_p. 224):

"The capacity of the speaker toposit himself as a 
'subject'...is defined not by feeling which everyone 
experiences if being himself (this feeling, to the degree 
that it can be taken note of, is only a reflection) but as 
the psychic unity that transcends the totality of actual 
experiences it assembles and that makes the permanence of 
the consciousness. Now we hold that 'subjectivity,' whether 
it is placed in phenomenology or psychology, as one may 
wish, is only the emergence in the being of the fundamental 
property of language. 'Ego' is he who _says_ 'ego.' That is 
where we see the foundation of 'subjectivity,'which is 
determined by the linguistic status of 'person.'" Those who 
loath Lacan may prefer hearing a similar point from the 
eminently respectable Charles Taylor: "I am a self only in 
relation to certain interlocutors: in one way in relation 
to those conversation partners who were essential to my 
achieving self-definition; in another in relation to those 
who are now crucial to my continuing grasp of languaggges 
of self understanding--and, of course, these classes may 
overlap. A self exists only within what I can 'webs of 
interlocution.'" (_Sources of the Self_, p. 36).

As for the future anterior tense, I think the point is that 
when one speaks, one submits to discourse. The "I" one 
speaks is returned to him/her as "you" and this "you" never 
quite coincides with what we thought we meant (even when we 
talk to ourselves), so we discover our meaning, who we are, 
discursively, by accepting or rejecting the identifications 
of our interlocutors. We discover ourselves in terms of the 
future "meaning" of our words (and deeds).

For example, when Howard Baker famously asked "What did the 
president know, and when did he know it?" he aimed at 
defining the ethics of the Nixonian text by retrospectively 
identifying various choices as episodes in an unfolding 
narrative. The intent of the question was to allow Congress 
to predicate Nixon's ambiguous words and performence on 
specific causes and intentions. Once the ethos of the Nixon 
administration was read out of the actions of the 
"cover-up"--the inception and, so to speak, paternity, of 
which was established by Nixon's replayed words in the 
"smoking gun" tape-- it would pecome possible to read that 
ethos back into the whole panoply of "White House Horrors" 
and hod Nixon responsible for them. Presumably Nixon's 
sense of self was revised in this process as well as 
Congress's sense of him--not necessarily that he accepted 
himself as perfidious, but perhaps that he became, for 
himself the hapless victim of his "enemies'" locutions. In 
any event, Nixon as the subject of his acts (verbs: 
"ordered, "condoned," "covered-up," "said on tape," etc.in 
will have been determined by the events that followed.

With apologies for citing my own work, I will mention that 
I discuss this and related issues much more coherently in 
Chapt. 2 of _The Story of All Things_ (Duke, 1998) and that 
the Nixon example is explored in relation to Henry the 
Fourth (What did the Prince know and When did he know 
it?)and Harry the Berger in _Shakespeare Studies_27 (1999).
 
And a thought about the long posts railing about the 
unscientificity of Lacan, French speaking philosophers, 
Heidegger, Saussure, Freud et al: Neuro-science can tell us 
the chemical distinctions between red wine and white wine. 
It may be able to tell us exactly how those distinctions 
map onto the firings of neurons in the tongue and nose. 
Having done so, it will have told us precisely nothing 
about the difference we experience in tasting one or the 
other. The brain it seems to me is the vehicle of the mind 
but the mind's experience is qualitative and the brain's 
function is quantitative and, as the thoroughly discredited 
Marx, building on the absurd Hegel, tells us, the 
transition from quantity to quality is a tricky business.

I think those who find Lacan et al interesting should read 
them and those who don't should let us be, but those who 
want to charge us with some imperial crime for indulging 
our interest, should be under some obligation to read what 
they hate too and not rely on secondary and tertiary 
sources.

> >From my reading of Marshall Grossman's excellent post, I gather that Lacan
> is using verb tenses as a metaphor for something else -- "what I shall have
> been for what I am in the process of becoming."  Is Lacan suggesting that
> when I die I shall no longer be in the process of becoming, and if I look
> at that feared culmination from the point of view of the present -- when I
> am yet in the world of becoming -- I will or shall think of my history in
> terms of the future anterior -- I shall have been?  Or is this merely
> adding mist to linguistic mysticism? 
> 
> Certainly Marshall's concept of metalepsis calls the idea that, for Lacan,
> "desire is proleptic" into question.
> 
> Yours, Bill Godshalk
> 
> Yours, Bill Godshalk
> **********************************************
> *    W. L. Godshalk                                                          *
> *    Professor, Department of English              *
> *    University of Cincinnati                                             *
> *    Cincinnati OH 45221-0069			*   Stellar Disorder 
> *    [log in to unmask]                                *
> *
>           *
> **********************************************

----------------------
Marshall Grossman
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