Is it with the gifts of Danaoi (the Greeks who laid siege to Troy) or with the passwords that give them their salutary non-sense that language, with the law, begins? For these gifts are already symbols, in the sense that symbol means pact and that they are first and foremost signifiers of the pact that they constitute as signified
as is plainly seen in the fact that the objects of symbolic exchange – pots made to remain empty, shields too heavy to be carried, sheaves of heat that wither, lances stuck into the ground – all are destined to be useless, if not simply superfluous by their very abundance.
Is this neutralization of the signifier the whole of the nature of language? On this assessment, one could see the beginning of it among sea swallows, for instance, during the mating parade, materialized in the fish they pass between each other from beak to beak.
And if the ethologists are right in seeing in this the instrument of an activation of the group that might be called the equivalent of a festival, they would be completely justified in recognizing it as a symbol.
Mexican soap operas are shot in such a fast rhythm (every single day a 25 minutes episode) that the actors do not even get the script to learn their lines in advance; they have tiny receivers in their ears which tell them what to do, and they learn to enact directly what they hear (
(“Now slap him and tell him you hate him! Then embrace him!…”). This strange procedure provides us with an image of what, according to the common perception, Lacan means by the “big Other”. The symbolic order is the second nature of every speaking being
