Q: When is a mytheme not a mytheme?

A: When it's a matheme.

Mythemes are generally, but perhaps not exclusively, Barthesian. Mathemes, in contrast, are positively, or indeed negatively, Lacanian. From Blah-feme:

Lacan’s formulation of neurosis is constituted in particular in a deliberate refusal to name as normative any notion of mental health, and leads to a radically re-formulated conception of what is general and what is particular in mental health and in the analytic situation; in the neurotic logic we have identified here as that grounded in the neighbourly encounter, the undecidability is what is crucial here, and, in particular, how one deals with that undecidability. In Raimunda’s disavowal or refusal of it, in her ritualised displacement of it in favour of a kind of imago-in-process (as if to say, ‘as I sing I refuse the ambiguity of modernity’), we encounter a particular formation of neurotic disavowal (repression) in what Lacan terms the discourse of the hysteric:

The symbols, oft-used Lacanian ‘mathemes’ in this ‘algebra’, represent the following actors: the barred subject ($); the master signifier (S1); knowledge (S2); and the objet petit a or ‘thing’ as cause of desire or as symptom (a). The four elements $, S1, S2 and a are ranged across the four positions (‘functions’) thus:

The hysteric for Lacan positions itself in relation to the discourse of the master as one who disavows it, refutes it and yet fundamentally relies on the master signifier for its subjectification through the question: “what/who am I?”  Hence the statement $ → S1 (the question posed by the hysteric of the master signifier) is wrought thus: Tell me who I am? → You are what I say.  

If you say so.

Not for the first time, Blah-feme talks of "musicking". A musical interlude is called for. So let's strike the viol, touch the lute, wake the harp, and inspire the flute. Make all that discourse disappear.

Next Tuesday: Mytheme or Motheme? Literary Lepidoptera, with special reference to Nabokov.