— Meaning flows backward from the period so the century ends before it begins.
Lacan's remarkable observation that "the sentence completes its signification only with its last term" and thus that realization flows backward from the period — the point de capiton — is most significant to poetry, exactly because poetry proffers the false period of the line break, with its incomplete completion of the phrase.
This is particularly true in the 20th century when the line ceases to be in main an instrument of formal measure. The confrontation which has always characterized poetry, between sentence and line, period and carriage return, point and counter-point, now takes on the signal quality of underscoring language's slippage — that dizzying opportunity for which the poem is a kind of alembic, testing, clarifying.
One sees immediately that this development must make its successful aesthetic claim at much the same time as the Course in General Linguistics, delivered as lectures between 1906-1911.
But one sees as well that this Saussurean-Lacanian operation of retroactive realization, this relation between the period and the meaning, is precisely the relation between price and value which circulates uncertainly until it comes to rest in a sale. Price is value's quilting point.