Chiasmus, maybe.

In "The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious," Lacan sketches a series of graph fragments which trace several pathways of desire among subject positions until he has crafted the complete graph equipped with its own nomenclature and shorthand.

In “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud,” Lacan close reads—to the letter, literally—the position of the subject within the structure supporting both language and the unconscious through the Saussurian algorithm, S/s, a linguistic schema through which he also interprets and defends Freud’s dream interpretation technique, particularly symptom as metaphor and desire as metonymy.

Close Reading

I am thinking where I am not, therefore I am where I am not thinking. (430)

Yes! A chiasmus! Whether it’s a chiasmus in the strictest sense, though, is not as certain. I’ll suggest two readings of this sentence and let you be the judge.

In the first reading, the less-strict chiasmus, the first sentence before the comma, “I am thinking where I am not”, contains a subject (I), a present continuous verb (am thinking), and an adverbial phrase (where I am not) modifying “am thinking”. After the conjunctive adverb “therefore,” the sentence contains a subject (I), a helping verb (am), and a predicate nominative (where I am not thinking) renaming I. The present continuous verb am thinking positions the “I” of this sentence in a perpetual presence in time, in a state of being, “thinking,” at all times. This thinking I is in a place “where I am not”. Lacan invokes a spatial metaphor with the word “where” which both opens up space for the two “I”s of the sentence and positions them separately. When read as an adverbial phrase modifying “thinking” the “where I am not” divides the subject into a thinking I and a being I, the I whose subjectivity is presented after “therefore” when it declares “I am where I am not thinking”. The I here is renamed according to the very space the I occupies “where I am not thinking.” When read as a near-chiasmus like this, Lacan modifies the state of the “am thinking” with/by the proximity of the “I am not”, whereas in the second part he renames the being I, so that the being I is the very space of being. He privileges the being I by renaming it and undermines the thinking I by modifying the activity of thinking.

In the second reading, the strict chiasmus, the two sentences have parallel structures: subjects (I), helping verbs (am), and predicate nominatives (where I am not, in the first, and where I am not thinking, in the second). In this reading, the I is renamed twice. The first I is here: “thinking where I am not”; the second I is here: “where I am not thinking”. In this reading, like the first, the first I is the thinking I, the second is the being I. Nothing is modified; the I’s are equally renamed. But we still might interpret the sentence as privileging one I over another.

If we remove the word “thinking” from the sentence altogether, it becomes the sentence repeating itself: I am where I am not, therefore I am where I am not. It’s the thinking that modifies what would be a repetitive sentence. In the first part, thinking is dropped in after the being verb “am”; in the second, it’s dropped in after the word “not” so that it is negated. Whether it’s being positioned next to or after a being verb or negated entirely, rereading the sentence in terms of the way that “thinking” modifies it both suggests that we should read this sentence as a strict chiasmus and that Lacan is keeping the being I in stasis while the thinking is moving all over the place. And, either way you read it, this sentence divides the subject into the here and the now: I is both a physical presence that takes up space and place and a thinking presence with its own motility.

He follows this enigmatic passage with

These words render palpable to an attentive ear with what elusive ambiguity the ring of meaning flees from our grasp along the verbal string. (430)

The two passages taken together are a bit confusing because in the first sentence, from above, Lacan draws a spatial metaphor, using the word “where” to separate a here from a there; it’s also held in a specific space in time, using the present continuous tense to situate the “I”s of that sentence in abeyance in a continual present. This second passage, which followed the first, moves through space and time. The sentence even moves more gracefully than the first, avoiding the abrupt shift in the middle of the conjuctive adverb. Even in the English translation, it reads beautifully aloud with the slant internal rhyme of “ring of meaning flees” and the mixed metaphors. It also solicits reader’s haptic senses by calling upon the sound of “the ring of meaning” and the sense of touch as “meaning flees from our grasp”. Noting the instructions hidden in this sentence—that is, to read it out loud with “an attentive ear”—and despite the issue of translation that might obscure such a reading, I read the sentence out loud; this is what I heard:

I am thinking where I am not, therefore I am where I am not thinking.

The words I chose to emphasize in my reading were chosen, of course, after multiple rereadings, putting words in order in my head the way that they are on the page. I had the luxury of hindsight, of the sentence making sense after I’d read it. Listening to the sentence’s cadence and my voice’s natural emphasis for the sake of making meaning, I heard myself read the sentence in the syntax and diction of the first reading from above, the near-chiasmus. But knowing Lacan’s love for wordplay and attention to sentence structure, I still question which reading is “the right one” or if there’s a right one.