56 This is the strict definition of the transcendental position: the privilege of one term within a series of terms that it makes possible and which presupposes it. Thus a category is called transcendental (transcategorial) when it "transcends every genus" (transcendit omne genus ), i.e. the list of categories of which it is nevertheless a part while accounting for it. This is the role of the phallus in the logic of the signifier. Therefore this is also the role of the hole and the lack in their determinable contours: ". . . for the phallus of his mother, that is to say, for that eminent manque-a-etre for that want-to-be, whose privileged signifier Freud revealed to us . . ." Ecrits (E), p. 170 ("The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious"). The transcendental eminence of this privilege is therefore placed in perspective, at its height, from the point of view of the horrified perception of the child--or more precisely of the little boy and his sexual theory.
This omnipresence of a condition of possibility, this permanent implication, in every signifier, of the "signifier of signifiers" ("The Direction of the Treatment," Ecrits (E), p. 265), of the "unparalleled signifier" (ibid., p. 277), can have as its element of presence only a milieu of ideality: hence the eminence of the transcendental eminence whose effect is to maintain presence, to wit phone . This is what made necessary and possible, in exchange for certain corrections, the integration of Freudian phallocentrism with a fundamentally phonocentric Saussurian semiolinguistics. The "algorithmic" transformation does not appear to me to undo this tie. Here is the best definition of the transcendental phallus, in relation to which all the protestations of antitranscendentalism (see Ecrits (F), p. 365) have the value of a denegation: "For the phallus is a signifier, a signifier whose function, in the intrasubjective economy of the analysis, lifts the veil, perhaps, from the function it performed in the mysteries. For it is the signifier intended to designate as a whole the effects of the signified, in that the signifier conditions them by its presence as a signifier." Ecrits (E), p. 185 ("The Signification of the Phallus").