Acknowledgements

Deborah Cameron, Marjorie Harness Goodwin, Bambi Schieffelin and Christopher Stroud provided invaluable reality checks while I was writing this text. The text was read as a plenary address at the Fifth Annual Conference on Language, Interaction and Culture, UC Santa Barbara, and as an invited colloquium paper at the Department of Linguistics, New York University. I am extremely grateful for all of the questions, comments and challenges I received on those occasions.

Notes

1. This wonderfully precise formulation is Niall Lucy's (Lucy 1995:26).
2. Julia Kristeva has also developed a body of work that could be used as a touchstone for linguistic rethinkings of the unconscious (e.g. Kristeva 1980; 1982). However, since a main point of departure for her oeuvre is Lacan's psychoanalytic framework, a working familiarity with Lacan's texts and terms is a requirement even for those who might wish to concentrate solely on Kristeva.
3. For another, quite different but very inspirational, take on the study of language and desire, see Keith Harvey and Celia Shalom's introductory chapter to their edited volume Language and Desire (Harvey and Shalom 1997). The articles in that volume, in particular those by Joanna Channell and Wendy Langford, provide solid signposts directing the way toward the kind of inquiry that I am advocating in this essay.

Formatting

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The maintainers of Language-Culture have broken up the paper into a few sections so as to ease internet access to the paper.

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