Floating signifier

The term open signifier is sometimes used as a synonym due to the empty signifier's nature to "resist the constitution of any unitary meaning", enabling its ability to remain open to different meanings in different contexts.

"[4] In Emancipation(s), Ernesto Laclau frames the empty signifier in the context of social interactions.

For Laclau, the empty signifier is the hegemonic representative of a collection of various demands, constituting a chain of equivalence whose members are distinguished through a differential logic (as in elements exist only in their differences to one another) but combine through an equivalential one.

In his 2003 book City of Gold, David A. Westbrook refers to money as a "perpetually floating signifier" of pure potential, noting that "its promise to represent anything in particular is never fulfilled.

"[10] The Oxford Dictionary of Critical Theory gives the example that "Fredric Jameson suggests that the shark in the Jaws series of films is an empty signifier because it is susceptible to multiple and even contradictory interpretations, suggesting that it does not have a specific meaning itself, but functions primarily as a vehicle for absorbing meanings that viewers want to impose upon it.