UMBR(a)

1996

ISSN: 1087-0830
EDITORS

sam gillespie
sigi jattkandt
FACULTY ADVISOR

joan copjec
SPECIAL THANKS

alain badiou
center for the study of psychoanalysis and culture
marcus coelen
ken dauber
rodolphe gasche (eugenia donato chair)
graduate student association
charlotte pressler
catherine muslin (editions du seuil)

UMBR(a) is published at the university at buffalo.

all submissions and inquiries should be sent to the
address below

"Descartes/Lacan" and "Hegel" were originally published in Alain Badiou, L'Etre et

/'evenement. Editions du Seuil, 1988.
"Psychoanalysis and Philosophy" and "What
is Love?" were originally published in Alain
Badiou, Conditions. Editions du Seuil, 1992.
Reprinted with the kind permission of publisher and author.

cover and layout by sam gillespie

CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF PSYCHOANALYSIS AND CULTURE
409
CLEMENS
HALL
BOX
604610
BUFFALO,
NY
14260-4610
PSYCULT@ubvms
cc
buf falo
edu

CONTENTS

SUBTRACTIVE

sam gillespie
ALAIN BADIOU

11

bruce fink
DESCARTES/LAGAN

13

alain badiou
PSYCHOANALYSIS AND PHILOSOPHY

19

alain badiou

27

alain badiou

HEGEL

WHAT IS LOVE?

37

alain badiou
HEGEL UNSUTURED (AN ADDENDUM TO BADIOU)

'57

sam gillespie
THE LALANGUE OF PHALLOI: LAGAN VERSUS LAGAN

71

justin clemens
THE FLIRTATIOUS REMARK

87

jacques-alain miller
THE DESIRE OF FREUD IN HIS CORRESPONDENCE
WITH FLIESS: FROM KNOWLEDGE TO TRUTH

103

paul verhaeghe
ANTIGONE AND THE REAL: TWO REFLECTIONS ON THE
NOTION OF COHERENCE

109

andres zlotsky

THE QUESTION 'WHY A .JOURNAL?' IS PERHAPS NOT SO DIFFICULT TO ANSWER.

AS MAO TSE-TOUNG SAID, "IF YOU HAVE AN IDEA, IT'S NECESSARY TO DIVIDE IT IN TWO."
THINKING AND POLITICAL ACTION ARE ALIKE IN THAT THEY BOTH DIVIDE CONSCIOUSNESS - BETWEEN INSTANCES OF ENUNCIATION AND INSTANCES OF RECEPTION. TO
THINK, THEN, IS TO ENTER A PUBLIC SPACE; OR: TRUE THOUGHTS ARE ONLY THOSE
THAT RETURN TO US IN AN ALIENATED AND THUS INVIGORATED FORM. IN EMBRACING
THIS COLLECTIVE PROJECT, WE MEAN TO STAVE OFF A CERTAIN TREND TOWARD ARCHIVAL TERRITORIAUSM - WE MIGHT EVEN SAY, ARCHIVAL RACISM - THAT WOULD
SHORT-CIRCUIT ANY ADDRESS TO THE OTHER IN FAVOR OF SOME MISGUIDED NOTION
OF "MENTAL PRIVACY."
OUR COMMITMENT TO PSYCHOANALYSIS GOES HAND-IN-HAND WITH OUR COMMITMENT TO THIS DIVISION IN TWO. WE WILL MAKE OURSELVES THE CHAMPIONS NOT
SIMPLY OF DIVERSITY- WHICH IS ALWAYS l'v10RE OR LESS VISIBLY IN CAHOOTS VVITH
WHAT THE FEKS (IN RUSSIA, DURING THE TEENS) CALL THE "FACTORY OF KISSES AND
DOVES;" THAT IS, THE MACHINERY OF CONSENSUAL SERVITUDE- BUT OF THAT SUBJECTIVE DIVISION WHICH MAKES DISSENSION INEVITABLE. OUR PAGES WILL BE OPEN NOT
TO ANY IDEA THAT HAPPENS TO COME ALONG, BUT TO RIGOROUS DEBATE.
THIS OPENNESS TO DEBATE EXTENDS TO THE ISSUE OF PSYCHOANALYSIS ITSELF. WE INTEND TO BE AS CONTENTIOUS ON THIS SCORE AS FREUD HIMSELF ALWAYS
WAS. RECALL FOR EXAMPLE, HIS QUARREL WITH .JUNG, WHOSE MODIFICATION OF PSYCHOANALYSIS, FREUD ARGUES, PRODUCED THE EQUIVALENT OF THE FAMOUS
LICHTENBERG KNIFE: "HE HAS CHANGED THE HILT, AND HE HAS PUT A NEW BLADE INTO
IT: YET BECAUSE THE SAME NAME IS ENGRAVED ON IT, WE ARE EXPECTED TO REGARD
THE INSTRUMENT AS THE ORIGINAL ONE." NOT EVERY APPROACH THAT CALLS ITSELF
PSYCHOANALYTIC IS SO. THE CORRECTNESS OF THIS REPROACH TO .JUNG IS DECEPTIVELY EASY TO GRASP, GIVEN ITS PHRASING. FOR WHAT THE FATHER OF PSYCHOANALYSIS REALLY MEANT TO SAY WAS: "SOMETIMES A KNIFE IS STILL THE SAME KNIFE.

EVEN IF YOU CHANGE THE HILT AND PUT A NEW BLADE ON IT" THAT IS, IT IS WHAT IS IN
PSYCHOANALYSIS MORE THAN ITS TERMS, MORETHAN ITS VOCABULARY, THAT IS WORTHY OF BEING PRESERVED. IT'S NOT FOR NOTHING THAT WE CALL OURSELVES UMBR(a);
WE SEEK IN THE SHADOWS THE OBJECT OF PSYCHOANALYSIS AND WE WILL TRY TO
REMAIN FAITHFUL TO FREUD NOT BY PARROTING HIS WORDS BUT BY LOOKING AFTER
HIS DESIRE. THIS MAKES THE QUESTION OF FIDELITY MUCH MORE DIFFICULT AND MUCH
MORE ESSENTIAL.
BRECHT SAID: IF IT'S NOT FUNNY, IT'S NOT TRUE, AND LAGAN: COMMUNICATION
MAKES YOU LAUGH. OBVIOUSLY, NEITHER WAS INTERESTED IN ACADEMIC DISCOURSE
AND ITS HUMDRUM PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE AND FAILURE: KNOWLEDGE ASrrHROUGH
FAILURE. THEY PRIZED INSTEAD THE SURPRISE ENCOUNTERS WITH TRUTHS BEYOND
KNOWLEDGE. IN ORDER TO AVOID, AS FAR AS POSSIBLE, THE INEVITABLE MISFIRES OF
ACADEMIC PUBLICATIONS, WE HAVE CONCEIVED UMBR(a) NOT AS A PERIODICAL, BUT
AS AN UNPREDICTABLE. IT HAS NO SCHEDULE OF PUBLICATION, NO REGULAR FORMAT,
AND NO SET COLUMNS. SINCE THE .JOURNAL WILL ALSO HAVE NO STAFF WRITERS, WE
ASKALLOFYOU WHO ARE INTERESTED IN PSYCHOANALYSIS TO BECOME OUR SITES OF
"FLOATING ATTENTION," AND TO CONTRIBUTE TO FUTURE ISSUES OF UMBR(a) WHATEVER AND WHENEVER YOU CAN. WE WOULD LIKE, IN THE MANNER OF THIS INAUGURAL
ISSUE, TO PUBLISH LONG AND SHORT ESSAYS, TRANSLATIONS, FILM AND BOOK REVIEWS,
CONFERENCE REPORTS, PHOTOS, PHOTOGRAMS, .JOKES- ANY EVIDENCE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS. WE ALSO INVITE YOUR RESPONSES TO ISSUES AND ARTICLES.

joan copjec

SUBTRACTIVE

sam gillespie
Discussions of Jacques Lacan and philosophy conventionally revolve
around two familiar names: Alexandre Kojeve and Martin Heidegger. Alain
Badiou is one philosopher who stands outside this predictable trajectory; his
efforts to put philosophy back into commUc'L:ication with mathematics and symbolic logic, and his placement of Lacar,'s teaching within a philosophical tradition adjacent to the thought of Plato, Descartes and Cantor position him uniquely
within contemporary thought. Badiou's project is rare insofar as it foresees a
future to philosophy which has yet to be exhausted within contemporary ("parricidal") predictions of an end to philosophy and its subject. What such a
project may effect is a complete recasting of the anti-philosophical tenets of
Lacan's thought as a whole. It is clear that Lacan had repeatedly, throughout
his career, sought to separate philosophy from psychoanalysis - he refused to
elevate the former into a master discourse which sought truth through submitting the claims of philosophy to the finite horizon of human consciousness (a
project familiar to readers of Nietzsche and Heidegger). Badiou suggests that c
it is not philosophy which Lacan argued against as much as an anti~philosophi s:
OJ
cal trend that inhered in philosophy itself, within the works of Spinoza and lJ
Hegel or Nietzsche and Heidegger - a trend both anti-philosophical in its dis- ?
posal of the uses of reason for seeking truth, and humanist in its rejection of the
mathematical as a form of reason (in fact, of truth) sustained onto itself. Less
concerned with the ontological priority of the being of the subject, Lacan maintained a radical distinction between being and meaning. It was not the subject,
but rather the coincidence of consciousness with certainty that was excluded
from his system. As Badiou demonstrates in the essay "Descartes/Lacan/'
this radical separation of knowledge and truth aligns Lacan far more closely
with Descartes or Frege than with Heidegger, Kojeve or Jacques Derrida.
As Bruce Fink points out in his addendum to this dossier, truth is essentially an empty category for Badiou- it is produced, in Badiou' sown words,
as a hole in knowledge, an unnameable element. It is essentially something which
is indiscernible to either language or mathematical counting. Hence, Badiou's
recourse to a philosophy of foundations grounded on mathematical logic resulting in a refusal of the totality of the One (as given, paradoxically, in both
Spinoza and Hegel). For Badiou, the One is One through the effect of being
"counted-as-one." That is, the One is generated through a finite (and generic)
7

evaluation formed within the relation between what is i..11discernible (trans-finite infinity) and a
system in which such counting of Ones can be effected. And it is in this "rapport" between the
indiscernible (multiplicity) and knowledge (finite evaluation; singularity) that a particular condition
of philosophy can be established. Rather than insisting upon a singular condition in which philosophy can or should be realized, Badiou acknowledges that there are Jour conditions- art, love, science, and politics- in which truths can be effected (or: in which a philosophical system can force a
knowledge of the empty category of truth). For Descartes and Leibniz, it was the scientific and
mathematical which dominated philosophy; for Hegel and Rousseau, the political; for Heidegger
and Nietzsche, it was art which "unveiled" truth. Finally, it was in psychoanalysis that love was
located as the truth of the subject (its subject, to use Badiou's terms). Badiou privileges none of the
above as much as he works to interrogate the various mechanisms by which any one condition
maintains a "fidelity" to the hole where truth inheres in knowledge.
Fran<;ois Wahl has observed that there are two systems of philosophy: the descriptive and
the foundational. If Gilles Deleuze can be placed safely within the former, it is Badiou who opts
without hesitation for the latter. And this foundation is by no means given in accessible terms. For
American readers familiar with the work of Lacan, the most difficult part of Badiou's theory to
-. grasp will be the usage of mathematical concepts which go into forming the axioms of his philosoIIt:: phy. The terminology with which his views are presented (jor9age, generic process, indiscernible,
co etc.) are derived from contemporary mathematics a.rtd set-theory a.11d require/ no doubt an amount
of work outside the texts in order to be fully grasped. For exru.-nple, like Lyotard and Deleuze,
Badiou uses the terms "event" and ~'singularity," but in a manner which cannot be divorced from
its foundations in a subtractive ontology: Badiou's event does not inhere "in" a given situation, nor
should singularity be thought apart from Badiou's mistrust of the One.
It is of course impossible to give any sort of comprehensive overview of the mathematical
foundations of Badiou's work. Tne French speaker could look to L'etre et l'evenement, Le Nombre et
les Nombres, and Conditions for help in these matters. Nevertheless, there are two foundations, serving as the basis of his work, which can be given: the axiom of the empty-set (ensemble de vide- the
void as set containing no elements) and Cantor's conception of the pure infinity (that is, his proof
that there can be infinite quantities of different sizes which transcend any finite evaluation). They
comprise, perhaps, a foundation for what Badiou means exactly with the terms "event" and "pure
presentation." For Badiou, the infinite part "can only come into being through a series of finite
evaluations, and is thus never presented." And if that infinite part will never come to be presented
(or "will have avoided coinciding" with what knowledge determines as known, consistent, or "discerned") then a truth will have been produced. Never present, a truth can only function as the
"metonymy of the situation's very being." It could then be said that the series of finite evaluations
(the "countings" of the situation) determines the situation, the event is the "cause" of these evaluations, and the pure presentation of infinity is what the situation aspires towards but never realizes.
8

Badiou himself states that it is impossible to summarize the foundations of his

philosophy, but he has provided four "axiomatic shortcuts" for his English
speaking readers which need a careful, delineation since all understanding
hinges upon them.'
a.

A tntth is always post-eventual. The procedure of truth begins when a "supernumerary" name is put into circulation- "extracted from the very void which sutures
every situation to being." As Jacques-Alain Miller has already shown, it is the
inclusion of the empty set - 0 - the unequal element which allows for the evaluation of singular elements within a given series. It allows for the counting from zero
to one. The surplus "name" of the void confirms that the situation has been "supplemented" by a prior event.

b.

The process of a truth is fidelity to the event. The operator of fidelity evaluates the
"degree of connection" that is established between the terms of the situation and
the "supernumerary name of the event."

c.

The terms of the situation that are "declared [to be] positively connected to the event form
an infinite part of the situation." But this infinite part can only be constituted through
the succession of finite evaluations; the infinite part of the situation can never be
presented in itself as infinite.

d.

A truth is produced if the infinite part of the situation "avoids" coinciding with what can be
known or discerned. The temporality of the situation speaks to the future anteriority
of the "metonymy of the situation's very being." The situation hinges upon the
future with regards to the pure presentation of infinity, and the past with regards to
the event. Indiscernible within knowledge, one communicates with truth only
through a fidelity to the truth maintained within the situation.

Badiou' s mathematical doctrine of truth recasts the project of philosophy well outside the successive hermeneutics and critiques of truth that have
led philosophy down the path towards its purported demise. Yet his is more
than a conditioning of philosophy through the counter-intuitive "proofs" or
assumptions of modem mathematics: it constitutes a refusal of the completion
(his skepticism with regards to the One) that guides the course of contemporary humanism. One cannot, of course, expect any complete account or overview of Badiou's thought in the following. And, given the purposes of the
9

present dossier, it is only natural that we would have selected works which coincide more readily
with Badiou's interests in psychoanalysis. "Descartes/Lacan," "Hegel," "Psychoanalysis and Philosophy," and "What is Love?" only denote particular examples of this complex thinker's work.
No amount of explanation can justify what will be presented here, for such can only predicate an
amount of work which, in this country, has yet to begin.

These "axioms" have already been given in Badiou's article

"On a Finally Objectless Subject," trans. Bruce Fink, in Who
Comes After the Subiect? Cadeva, Connor, Nancy eds. (New York:
Routledge, 1991).

Unnameable

Undecidable
(event)
One+

One-

/
~

.
.

'

'?

Generic

Indiscernible

(Tmth)

infinite

10

(Knowledge)
Fidelity

Finite

ALAIN BADIOU

bruce fink
Alain Badiou is one of the only philosophers on the contemporary
European scene to affirm that the Heideggerian and Derridean critique ofWestem metaphysics has not dealt the death blow to philosophy as a whole. Rather
than accepting the view that the philosophical project has come to a definitive
close in the twentieth century, he sets himself the task of defining the conditions
and aims of a philosophy that is not simply reduced either to its own history
from the pre-Socratics to the present (that is, the view that philosophy is nothing more than the history of philosophy) or to a "rigorous" theoretical approach
to other disciplines such as art, poetry, science, and psychoanalysis. Philosophy, according to Badiou, has its own proper field and conditions and is anything but dead.
Nevertheless, Badiou, like other contemporary philosophers, agrees
that the philosophical project needs to be radically reconceptualized. The historical abuses of philosophical "enthusiasm"- or better fanaticism- whether in
the form of twentieth-century Nazism or Plato's Llws, do not effectively refute, c
morally prohibit, or rule out the pretension to be the locus of absolute truth. ~
til
Truth, in Badiou's view, is essentially an empty category; there are truths, local ll
truths, and such truths are produced by procedures specific to certain fields: ';:;'
art, science, politics, and love. These latter, which might be referred to as the
four major discourses Badiou recognizes as capable of producing truths, serve
as the conditions of philosophy- they precondition the existence of philosophical
activity as such, generating the truths which philosophy examines. Philosophy's
task is not to generate truths, but rather to maintain the distinction between
these local truths and Truth as such. The philosophical project is thus "subtractive"- it always maintains the concept of Truth at one remove from any and all
local truths generated by the different truth-producing discourses. It has a
certain "sobering" effect on such discourses, a restricting or limiting power
over them.
While essentially critical in nature - engaged in examining the status of
the truths generated by the procedures at work in these different discourses philosophy is not required to abandon theory construction. It constructs a site
in which the truths generated by these discourses can be "com-possible," that
is, true together, simultaneously true, all true in the same historical era.
As such, philosophy is one discourse among others, not the final or
11

meta-discourse which provides the Truth about the various truths.

Badiou is one of the foremost philosophical writers today on recent developments in mathematics, and has published a number of extremely rigorous papers on the finite and infinite, settheory, transcendental numbers, etc. (most notably in his magnum opus, L'etre et l' evenement [Being
and the Event]). In one of his more recent works, Conditions, he provides a beautifully lucid account
of the political and philosophical underpinnings of his work on modem mathematics.
Hegel marks, according to Badiou, a romantic, historicist tum in Western thought away
from the mathematical concept of the infinite, Hegel seeing the latter as "interesting" but fundamentally unsubstantiated compared to the "properly philosophical" view that man's existence is
essentially finite. Whereas Plato views mathematics as establishing a realm of discourse which has
no need to resort to myth or any other discourse to found its conclusions -which thus breaks with.
mythopoetic discourse and can serve as the foundation or precondition of another discourse (philosophy or dialectics) with its own grammar and methods- Hegel opposes philosophy and mathematics, invalidates mathematical notions of infinity, and rather than effecting an Aufhebung
(sublation), returns to a pre-Platonic view whereby a certain myth (of man's finitude) rules philosophical "reason."
!I\::!
This romanticism can be seen, according to Badiou, in both the Heideggerian project and
co the "postmodem" project, both of which refuse the notion of the infinite nature of every human
~ situ.ation, subjecting infinities to L~e horizons of the "human." The lack of serious attention devoted
::.> to mathematics- whether by Camap, Heidegger, or Derrida- is indicative of a philosophical tendency
which is ultimately conservative and romantic in content, Badiou argues, and which leads directly to the
view that philosophy has reached its end. Badiou proposes that we rethink the very notion of
endpoint and limit using modem developments in mathematics, a project which reestablishes mathematics as a condition of philosophy and allows us to think beyond the latter's supposed end.
The importance of Badiou's insight here goes far beyond the "simple" conditioning of philosophy upon mathematics. For what he refers to as romanticism is essentially defined by what he
terms the "regime of the One," that is, the regime or rule of a discourse of totalization. As antitotalizing as certain modem discourses may claim to be, they too succumb, Badiou sustains, to a
Parmenidean view of the whole, "counted as One," complete with notions of limits which predate
modern mathematics. Badiou's emphasis on the modem concept of multiple infi.ities, of infinities of
infinities, subverts traditional views of limits and horizons, and moves in a radically non-logocentric
direction. Badiou, in a sense, moves from the post-modem to the post-finite, from the end of philosophy to the beginning of philosophical multiplicity: towards the liberation of philosophy from
the regime of the finite.

12

DESCARTES/LAGAN

alain badiou
[The cogito], as a moment, is the aftermath (defile) of a rejection (rejet)
of all knowledge, but it nevertheless claimed to establish for the subject a certain anchoring in being.
-Jacques Lacan, "La science et la verite"1

Itcan never be sufficiently emphasized that the Lacanian watchword

of a return to Freud is originally coupled with an expression of Lacan's which
goes back to 1946: "the call for a return to Descartes would not be superfluous." The means by which these two injunctions are connected is the dictum
that the subject of psychoanalysis is nothing other than the subject of science.
But this identity can only be grasped by attempting to think the subject in its
own place. That which localizes the subject is at the same time the point at
which Freud is intelligible only through the lineage of the Cartesian gesture,
and where he subverts, through de-localization, the pure coincidence of the
subject with itself, its reflexive transparency.
What renders the cogito irrefutable is the form which one can give to it
where the where insists: "Cogito ergo sum," ubi cogito, ibi sum. The point of the
subject is that there where it thinks that thinking it must be, it is. Tne connection of being and place founds the radical existence of enunciation as subject.
Lacan exposes the chicanery2 of place in the disorientating utterances
of the subject that supposes that "I am not, there where I am the plaything of
my thought: I think of what I am where I do not think to think." 3 The unconscious designates that "it thinks" there where I am not, but where I must come
to be. Thus the subject finds itself decentered [excentre] from the place of transparency where it announces its being, without failing to read in this a complete
rupture with Descartes, which Lacan indicates by saying that the subject does
not "misrecognize" that the conscious certainty of existence- the home of the
cogito- is not immanent but transcendent. "Transcendent" because the subject
can only coincide with the line of identification that proposes this certainty to
it. More precisely, the subject is the refuse of this certainty.
There, in truth, is the whole question. Cutting quickly through what
this implies as to the common ground between Lacan, Descartes, and what I
propose here, which ultimately concerns the status of truth as a generic hole in
knowledge, I will say that the debate rests upon the localization of the void.
What still links Lacan (but that "still" is the modern perpetuation of

s;:
rD

~
:::.

sense) to the Cartesian epoch of science is the thought that it is necessary to hold the subject in the
pure void of its subtraction if one wishes that truth be saved. Only such a subject lets itself be
sutured in the logical, integrally transmissible form of science.
Yes or no- is the empty set the proper name of being as such? Or must we believe that this
term more appropriately applies to the subject - as if its purification from all substance that one
could know should deliver the truth (which speaks) through de-centering the null point in eclipse
in the interval of the multiple that, under the name of "signifiers," guarantees material presence?
The choice here is between a structural recurrence, which thinks the subject-effect as the
empty set, so exposed in the uniform network of experience, and a hypothesis of the rarity of the
subject, which defers its occurrence to the event, to the intervention, and to the generic paths of
fidelity, referring back and founding the void on the function of the suturing of being for which
mathematics exclusively commands knowledge.
In neither case is the subject substance or consciousness. But the first road conserves the
Cartesian gesture, its decentered dependence with regard to language. I have proof of this, since
Lacan, in writing that "thought only grounds being by knotting itself in speech where every operation goes right to the essence of language," 4 maintains the design of ontological foundation that
<::::
Descartes encounters in the transparency, both void and absolutely certain, of the cogito. Certainly,
IIl he organizes t.~e tu.rnings very differently, since the void for him is delocalized, no pure re1ection
~ can give us access there. But the intrusion of the outside term -language- does not suffice to reverse
:J this order which implies that it is necessary from the point of the subject to enter into the examination
of truth as cause.
I maintain that it is not truth which causes the suffering from false plenitude when the
subject is overcome by anxiety ("does or doesn't what you [analysts] do imply that the truth of
neurotic suffering lies in having the truth as cause?" 5). A truth is that indiscernible multiple a
subject supports the finite approximation of. In result, its ideality to come (the nameless correlate of
the name an event would have if it could be named) is the truth from which one may legitimately
designate a subject - that random figure which, without the indiscernible, would only be an incoherent continuation of encyclopedic determinations.
If one would point to a cause of the subject, it is less necessary to return to the truth, which
is above all the stuff of the subject, or to the infinite, for which the subject is the finite, as to the event.
Consequently, the void is no longer the eclipse of the subject, being in relation to Being such that it
has been summoned up by the event as the errancy in the situation by an intervening nomination.
By a sort of inversion of these categories, I will arrange the subject in relation to the ultraone (l'ultra-un), even though it would itself be the trajectory of multiples (the inquiries), the void in
relation to being, and truth in relation to the indiscernible.
Besides, what is at stake here is not so much the subject- save to free that which still, by the

rr

14

supposition of its structural permanence, makes Lacan a founder among those

who echo the previous epoch. Rather, it is the opening on a history of truth
finally totally disjointed from what Lac~ with genius, called exactitude, or
adequation, but what his gesture, too welded to a single language, allowed to
survive as the reverse of truth.
A truth, if one thinks of it as being only one generic part of the situation, is the source of the veridical from the moment that the subject forces an
undecidable into the future anterior. But if the veridical touches language (in
the most general sense of the term), truth only exists there as undifferentiated;
its procedure is generic insofar as it avoids the entire encyclopedic hold of judgments.
The essential character of names, the names of the language-subject,
attaches itself to the subjective capacity of anticipation, by forcing ifor(;age) that
which will have been veridical from the point of a supposed truth. But names
only create the appearance of the thing in ontology, where it is true that a generic extension results from the placing-into-being of the entire system of names.
However, even there, it is just a matter of simple appearance. For the reference
of a name depends upon the generic part which is implicated in the particularity of the extension. The name only founds its reference under the hypothesis
that the indiscernible will have been already completely described by the set of
conditions that, in other respects, it is. In its nominal capacity, a subject is under the condition of one indiscernible, thus of one generic procedure, thus of
one fidelity, of one intervention and ultimately of one event.
What is lacking in Lacan -even though this lack would only be legible
to us having first of all read in his texts that which, far from lacking, founded
the possibility of a modern regime of the true - is the radical suspension of
truth in the supplementation of a Being-in-situation by an event, separator of
the void.
The "there is" (il y a) of a subject is, by the ideal occurrence of a truth,
the coming-to-be of the event in its finite modalities. Moreover, we always
have to understand that there was no "il y a" of the subject, that this "il y a" is
no more. What Lacan still owes to Descartes, the debt whose account must be
closed, is the assumption that "il y a" was always there.
When the ChicagoAmericans shamelessly utilized Freud to substitute
the re-educative methods of a "consolidation of the ego" for the truth from
which a subject proceeds, it was with just cause, and for the salvation of all,
that Lacan opened against them this merciless war that his true students and

OJ
ll

,.-..._

;::,

heirs have continued to prosecute. But they have been wrong to believe that - things remaining as
they are - they could win.
Because it was not a matter of an error or of an ideological perversion. It is obviously what
one could believe, if one supposed that there were an "always" of the truth and of the subject. More
seriously, the people in Chicago acknowledged in their own fashion what the truth withdraws from
and, with that, the subject which authorizes it. They are situated in a historical and geographical
space where fidelity to the events - of which Freud or Lenin or Cantor or Malevich or Schoenberg
are the operators - is no longer practicable apart from the ineffective forms of dogmatism or orthodoxy. Nothing generic could ever be imagined in this space.
Lacan thought that he redressed the Freudian doctrine of the subject, but in fact, new-comer
to the Viennese shores, he has reproduced an operator of fidelity postulating the horizon of an
indiscernible, and we are persuaded again that there is, in this uncertain world, a subject.
If we now examine what is still allowed us in philosophical traffic in the modem dispensation, and consequently what our tasks are, we can make a table like this:
a.

It is possible to reinterrogate the entire history of philosophy since its Greek origin under

the hypothesis of a mathematical ordering of the ontological question. One will thus see
taking shape at the same time a continuity and a periodization very different from that
deployed by Heidegger. In particular, the genealogy of the doctrine of truth will lead us
to pinpoint, by singular interpretations, how the unnamed categories of the "event" and
of the "indiscernible" work throughout the text of metaphysics. I believe I have given
several examples of this.

'""'
t:::
._..

,.,.

u..

[!l

:J
b.

A close analysis of the procedures of logico-mathematics since Cantor and Frege will make
it possible to think what this intellectual revolution (a blind return of ontology onto its

own essence) conditions in contemporary rationality. This work will make it possible to
undo, on its own ground, the monopoly of Anglo-Saxon positivism.
c.

As regards the doctrine of the subject, this particular examination of each of the generic
procedures will open up to an aesthetics, to a theory of science, to a political philosophy,
and finally to the mysteries of love, to a non-fusional conjuncture with psychoanalysis.
All of modern art, all of the uncertainties of science, all of the militant tasks still prescribed
by a ruined Marxism and finally, all of that designated by the name of Lacan will be reencountered, reworked, gone through, by a philosophy brought up to date through clarified categories.

And we will be able to say in this voyage, at least if we have not lost the memory of that which
the event alone authorizes, that Being - that which is called Being - founds the finite place of a
subject who decides: "Nothingness gone, the castle of purity remains."

- translated by sigi jattkandt with daniel collins

16

Jacques Lacan, "Science and Truth," trans. Bruce

Fink, Newsletter of the Freudian Field 3.1-2 (1989): 5.
2

Chicanes- may be translated variously as squabbles,

trickery, zig-zags, etc. - Tr.

Jacques Lacan "Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious," trans. Alan Sheridan, Ecrits (New York:
Norton, 1977) 166.

"Science and Truth," 13.

"Science and Truth," 13.

17

PHILOSOPHY AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

alain badiou
I am here among you (as someone who, like the Eleatic Stranger of The
Sophist, is neither analyst nor analysand, expatriated from a memorable and
precarious place) to respond to your invitation to endure the suspicious detour
from your experience.
Shall I accomplish here (like the Stranger in the gaze of Parmenides) a
sort of speculative parricide? What brings me here is that, as the author of a
Manifesto for Philosophy, I doubtless occupy the place of a son of philosophy
itself; in short, of a son of Plato, of a son of parricide. This crim~al heredity
may govern a repetition. No doubt, what protects me from this is that I am
skeptical about the contemporary proclamation of the end of philosophy, that I
demand the modesty of one additional step, and thus, with parricide being the
contemporary currency of thought, filial respect appears singular.
But where your company takes hold of me and leads me, you must be
your own judge.
The law of compossibility is that according to which philosophy and C
psychoanalysis are arranged, a non-dialectical law between a feeling whose ~
essence is seduction, and a consent whose essence is reserve. I won't repeat its :o
textual and empirical data.
The question which organizes this domain can be stated as follows:
what can one say of the angle at which a truth touches being? What I propose
is to transform this question into another which, although ultimately identicaL
is more precise, namely: what is the localization of the void? We will agree, I
believe, in saying that it is through its suturing to the void that every text upholds its claim to express something other than a relation of realities, other
than what Mallarme called "universal reportage."
We are a priori in agreement in repudiating every doctrine of truth in
terms of the adequation of spirit, or statement, or thing. VVhether philosopher
or analyst, we certainly cannot take anything away from, or contradict, the
great axiom of the poet: all thought is a throw of the dice; by which thought exhibits (between itself and the continuity of place) the void of a suspended gesture.
This void, Mallarme calls it, as you know, Chance. Chance supports what Lacan,
in 1960, called- the expression is a true maxim- "the only absolute statement,"
pronounced, he said, "by he who has the right" [qui de droit]. This statement, of
course, is that "no roll of the dice in the signifier will ever abolish chance."
19

-..
~
((

m
:::;!

:J

20

Because this statement is absolute (and the only one which is such), because it is pronounced by
Mallarme, of all of what I have to say throughout, let this be the statement that will support our
pact. You will accept that I translate it in this way: thought is only authorized by the void that separates
it from realities.
The whole question is thus: where is the void located? What is the precise point of the void?
If Mallarme brings together and makes the question absolute for us, it is because he is content to
name localization "place." The void is the essence of the place, of every place, such that a truth
(even if, in its language a Constellation, cold with forgetfulness and disuse) comes forth only in the
spacing of an arbitrary place. A truth is inscribed in the blackness of the sky if the non-place of the
dice throw, separatingly and undecidably, blocks the repetition which makes it such that, in general, beyond thought and gesture, "nothing took place but the place" [rien n'a eu lieu que le lieu].
And we would also agree that philosophy and psychoanalysis have no meaning beyond
the desire that something takes place other than the place.
But psychoanalysis and philosophy localize the place. They are specific regimes'of experience and thought, both subsumed by Mallarme's absolute statement, both thinkable not on the
basis of place in general, but from their place, fixed through destiny by their foundation (Freudian
with respect to psychoanalysis, Parmenidean with respect to philosophy).
Now, these places are initially disjointed. The place where philosophy localizes the void as
a condition of thought is being qua being. The place where psychoanalysis localizes the void is t.l-te
Subject, its subject, in such a way as if vanished in the gap of signifiers where the metonymy of its
being proceeds.
Must we conclude, then, upon this discordance and this impasse?
In the seminar of May 8, 1973, Lacan states explicitly that the place that founds truth is in
the guise of the void. This void is the Big Other insofar as the Other is a gap: "There is there a hole
[II y ala un trou], and this hole is the Other, the Other insofar as the place where speech, deposited
there, founds truth."
But what matters here is that the localization is shown to be contrary to that which Lacan
attributes to philosophy. "There is there a hole"- what is the "there" [quel est ce la]? What exactly is
that other place where the hole which founds truth arrives? The "there" or other place is a thought
supposable to thinking. The idea that there is a thought supposable to thinking brings us right back
to the supposition that the being thinks. For if thinking demands the place filled with thought, it is
because being as such thinks. It is in the very place of this supposition of a fully thinking being that
Lacan localizes the foundation of truth as a hole.
Now, this supposition, this other place into which the Big Other comes to make ''holes" is
exactly a supposition of philosophy. Here I cite: "That being is able to think: this is what founds the
philosophical tradition after Parmenides."
Thus philosophy establishes the place of its own void, namely, being, as the auto-foundation of thought, there where psychoanalysis establishes its own void, but as a radical decentring

from the breach from which originates the possibility that a truth can be the
cause of a subject. The apparent identity of place undoes itself from the fact
that it is as the point of the Same fl\at philosophy localizes its void, when
Parmenides states that "the same, it is at once thinking and being"; on the contrary it is at the point of the Other that psychoanalysis breaches the void because psychoanalysis de-supposes the thought that philosophy supposes in
thinking. The hole of the Other or the empty gap of the Same: these instances of
the void which intersect in relation to the space are incommensurable.
We cannot console ourselves by pointing out that Lacan attributes more
insight to Heraclitus than to Parmenides, for Heraclitus said that being neither
gives itself nor hides itself- it signifies. For, from the inside of philosophy, the
signifier produces the tradition which is the most distant from psychoanalysis,
the hermeneutic tradition. It is better to maintain discord than to confound
philosophy with the interpretive care-taking of sacred texts.
If, putting thinking aside, we tum to action, the situation does not improve. Under the name of Kant, philosophy this time determines the void that of practical reason - in the supposition of the purely formal character of
the Imperative. The Law is without content, and is constituted as commandment by being emptied out of all assignable reference. From this results the
capital point that philosophy supposes the void in signification. The moral
meaning of the act is that its signification is universally presentable and it is
only the formal void of the Law from which that universality of signification
originates.
Against that localization, Lacan establishes, in the seminar of July 6
1960, the three great propositions of the Ethics of psychoanalysis.:
First, "the only thing one can be guilty of is giving ground relative to
one's desire." 1
Second, the ethical hero is the one who, being betrayed, manifests no
tolerance for betrayal, for any tolerance of betrayal necessarily sends him back
to the service of goods.
Third, the true Good, the one that no service renders, is the one that
can serve to pay the price for access to desire, that is, access to the metonymy of
our being.
Where do these three propositions localize the void?
One cannot understate the significance of betrayal because betrayat
from the perspective of the act, empties the point where the risk of the service
of goods is revealed. The void is exactly this gap, the discovery of the service
of goods, such that betrayal opens the wound where, for not ceding on our

JJ
:;,

,....._

21

desire, should pass, at a high price, the metonymy of our being. If metonymy doesn't pass in this
actual void (which at once reveals and cuts the dormant massivity of the service of goods), the
metonymy of our being will always be articulated through this service. For, as Lacan says, "beyond
this limit, there is no return."
An important consequence of this situation is, in this instance, the fact that the void is not
presupposed in signification from the perspective of its universality. It is presupposed under signification, at the back of signification, as the slipping, the sliding, the streaming and the channel of
our being, in the unpresented that doubles the signifying chain. I cite:
The channel in which desire is located is not simply that of the modulation of the signifying
chain, but that which flows beneath it as well; that is, properly speaking, what we are as well
as what we are not, our being and our non-being - that which is signified in an act passes
from one signifier of the chain to another beneath all the significations.2

22

One could claim in this particular instance that, from the perspective of the act, philosophy
localizes the void in the formal universality of signification, while psychoanalysis situates the void
on the underside, in the doubling of the lining, of all significations. And we find again in this
instance our initial problem. For the universality of the moral act according to Kant opens, under
the species of the void, to being itself as being, which Kant names the supersensible. Whereas ethics
accordL.r;.g to Laca.Tt opens Lrt the sing11larity of a response to t..l)e discovery of betrayal, to our beingr
to what, in Lacanian terms, "we are and also are not, our being and our non-being."
Localization of the void in signification and in universality, or localization of the void in the
underside of all signification and in the singularity of the occurrence. Localization of the void as the
opening to the supersensible, or localization of the void as the channel of our being: the discord
displaces and aggravates itself when one passes from pure to practical reason.
If we now examine the general form of the question of truth, we will find that the opposition concerns (after Parmenides, Plato and Kant) Hegel and the dialectic.
The common point to philosophy and psychoanalysis is that truth and error are absolutely
interrelated. Lacan states their mutual relationship with the most extreme rigor in the seminar of
June 30, 1954: "As long as the truth isn't entirely revealed, that is to say in all probability until the
end of time, its nature will be to propagate itself in the form of error." 3
One can only consent to such a proposition.
But Lacan, in the same text, will pronounce from this viewpoint, on one hand, what he calls
discourse [le discours] (which concerns philosophy, and singularly Hegelian philosophy) and, on
the other hand, speech [la parole], which psychoanalysis authorizes as excessive to discourse.
What is then the maxim of discourse (and thus, of philosophy)? It is, "in discourse, contradiction begins between truth and error." Let us state that the void of the difference between truth
and error (admitted that the latter present the former) is located in the negative, in explicit contradiction. Or, as Lacan claims, "error demonstrates itself such that, at a given moment, it ends i...<

contradiction." vVhich means also that a philosophical dialectic locates the

void separating error from truth at the point where being as being should coincide exactly with non-being as being. The nothingness of being holds itself
there as the ultimate proof of the truth as error exposes it.
This is not the same for psychoanalysis. In an elementary fashion,
psychoanalysis asserts: the unconscious ignores the principle of contradiction.
More subtlely, psychoanalysis claims:
The genuine speech that we are supposed to uncover, not through
observation, but through interpretation ... obeys laws other than
those of discourse, which is subject to the condition of having to move
within error up to the moment when it encounters contradiction.
Authentic speech has other modes, other means, than everyday
speech. 4

It follows that, "the Freudian innovation ... is the revelation, within the phe-

nomenon, of these subjective, experienced moments, in which speech which

goes beyond the discoursing subject emerges."5
If dialectical philosophy localizes the void in contradiction, pushed to C
the purest point, sue.~ that being as being cannot support itself in the place of S:
being, psychoanalysis lozalizes the void in the excessive flovving of a speech, llJ
JJ
such that the subject of discourse breaks off and is interrupted.
;:;Localization of the void in what derails being from its self-identity, or '-'
localization in the excess of the subject, at the breaking point of discourse and
speech: you can conceive the insistence of the discord.
But, after all, after all .... All truth must pass from an impasse, and,
without doubt, this applies as well to the truth we seek to state and that is in
play empirically in the statement that neither has psychoanalysis interrupted
philosophy, nor could philosophy have deconstructed psychoanalysis.
I will commence by indicating a difficult twist in Lacan's text, by keeping myself (for not being immediately subsumed in the categories of discourse)
from speaking of contradiction.
In the March 20, 1973 seminar, Lacan declares that if analysis is supported by a presumption or by an ideal, it is from the fact "that it can constitute
from its experience a knowledge of the truth."
But in the May 15 seminar of the same year, in express opposition to
Plato, he declares that the essence of his teachings is to discern the conditions
of the following statement: "There is a relation of being that is not able to be
known." He will also state," on what cannot be demonstrated, something may,
23

however, be said to be true."

These theses, one must agree, cannot be connected without some exercise. And perhaps it
is this painful connection which makes Lacan, immediately after, say that he doesn't know how to
deal with truth.
For how can a truth come to knowledge, whose own being, or relationship to being, is not
able to be known? This determination of a knowledge of a truth of the unknown, does it not suppose, under the formula "it thinks," that it is said that being thinks, what Lacan discharged as the
defect of the inaugural hypotheses of philosophy? Against Plato, Lacan underscores that the aspect
or relationship of being is not reducible to the Idea as a knowledge that fills being, or a knowledge
of being immanent to being. But the exception of a relationship un-known (if, from the perspective
of psychoanalysis it gives itself in truth), does it not return to the limit of knowledge, and therefore
to the Idea?
Are there (this will be the most pointed form of the question) Ideas of psychoanalysis?
It is my opinion (in light of, or in the shadow of, this question) that Lacan, just like Plato,
summons mathematics. Mathematics has always been the substitute of the Idea as Idea, the Idea as
Idea which Lacan names the matheme.
In 1954, it is speech that was invoked as excessive with regard to the Hegelian discourse of
-..
if<::s contradiction. In 1973, the excess is expressly mathematical: "With regard to a philosophy whose
m peak is the Hegelian discourse, theformalization of mathematical logic, can it not be used in the
~ analytic process?"
::J
It is remarkable that immediately after having stated that "mathematical formalization is
our goal, our ideal," Lacan resumes the theme that the skeleton of his teaching is that "I speak
without knowing it."
We can therefore foresee an intimate link between three terms, or functions:

-first: the relationship of being is not reducible to knowledge,

-second: there is a possible knowledge of the truth of this relationship,
-third: mathematics is the place of the Idea.
One presupposes this time that the localization of the void is nothing other fr,an the "without remains" of the matheme: the matheme empties any waste in the transmission of what, in experience, touches the un-known of a truth. The void, presented in mathematizing literalization, is
what separates truth from knowledge, each time that psychoanalysis opens us to some knowledge
of a truth.
Plato was wrong, Lacan tells us, to fill being with knowledge. But the matheme authorizes
a completely different unachievable filling: to fill what disjoins the unknown and knowledge with
the void.
In this sense, there would be k.t<owledge of a truth un-known, at the point of the void. P...nd,
24

consequently, the meeting of being, just as in philosophy, will be in the supposition of a void that doesn't stick withovt. remainder (thus without fullness)
except for the small letters of formalization.
This presupposes that being is distinct from the real, insofar as the real
remains a function of the subject. This distinction occurs from the beginning in
Lacan. In the seminar of June 30, 1954, when speaking of the three fundamental passions -love, hatred, and ignorance- Lacan declares that these three passions are aOle to be inscribed "only in the dimension of being, and not in the
dimension of the real." He will not differ on this point, in spite of the incessant
re-elaborations of the category of the real. In the June 26, 1973 seminar, he still
states that "being as such, it is love that comes to meet it."
Philosophy and psychoanalysis can be compossible, as soon as the
doubly paradoxical condition of mathematics and love cross their localizations
of the void at the point of disjunction of a truth un-known and a knowledge of
this truth. This point, I maintain, is that of the Idea. Both psychoanalysis and
philosophy ultimately demand that the unfounded and unfoundable maxim
of Spinoza is maintained: "habemus enim ideam veram," we have in effect (but as
an effect of nothing, as the localization of the void) a true idea. At least one.
I will explain myself in order to conclude. Tnis conclusion contains
five theses which are philosophical, yet one can hope that they order a durable
regime of peaceful coexistence between us.
Thesis One:

only mathematics is able to suppose that the localization of the

void is made in being. There is no other onto-logy than effective
mathematics.

Thesis Two:

a truth is a meeting of the being that doesn't demonstrate itself,

that doesn't know itself, but infinitely proceeds in the Chance of
a trajectory. A truth is an indiscernible from the place where it
proceeds.

Thesis Three:

the inauguration of the process of a truth is exactly what Lacan

calls a "meeting" (rencontre), when he claims that "being as such,
it is love that comes to meet it in the encounter" It is, by the way,
in Plato's Symposium, exaiphnes, the "sudden." It is what I call
the "event." The event is undecidable.

Thesis Four:

the subject is nothing else, in its being, than a truth seized in its
pure point. It is a vanishing quantity of truth; a differential eclipse
in its unachievable infinity. This vanishing is the gap between
(entre-deux) the undecidability in the event and the indiscernibility
of the truth.

rn

II

Thesis Five:

philosophy and psychoanalysis have as a common aspect two procedures that are exterior to one another: mathematics, on the one hand, and love, on the other. The knot of
these components, of their external side, is the localization of the void in the link, or
rapport, that one would suppose held together (tenir ensemble) the Idea and the thing, or
being and the knowledge of being. Love effectuates the void of the link, because there
is no sexual relation. Mathematics effectuates the void because it extenuates the void in
pure literalization.

If, finally the common site of psychoanalysis and philosophy is the untying, the localization of the void in the non-relatedness of every relation, the subjective category of this link, you will
permit me to say its name, is unexpectedly: "courage."
On June 26,1973, Lacan says that "love can only be realized by what I have called (by a type
of poetry, in order to make myself understood) courage, with regard to this fatal destiny." But twenty
years earlier, on May 19, 1954, he asked himself this question: "Do we have to extend analytic
intervention to the point of becoming one of those fundamental dialogues on justice and courage, in
the great dialectical tradition ?" 6 This was almost to prepare psychoanalysis for a modern Platonism.
And Lacan found this difficult, because "contemporary humanity has become singularly unskilled
for approaching these great themes."
This lack of skill persists, but it is also against the lack that I call for an additional step that
philosophy should accomplish, tore-knot being, truth, and the subject, and to repudiate the lamentable apology of its end. If the common ground of our efforts, practice and thought is what I have
said, then we will be able to say to one another, with absolute clarity, this solitary word whose
pacifying rudeness is only anachronistic in its appearance: courage!

-translated by raphael comprone and marcus coelen

Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Bk VII: The
Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller~
trans and notes Denis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992)
321.

26

Seminar VII, 321-2.

La can, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Bk I: Freud's Papers on

Technique, 1953-1954, ed. jacques-Alain Miller, trans. and
notes John Forrester (New York: Norton, 1988) 263.

Seminar I, 267.

Seminar I, 266.

Seminarl, 199.

HEGEL

alain badiou
Infinity is itself the other of the empty being-other
-Hegel, Science of Logic

The Hegelian ontological impasse ultimately rests upon maintaining

that there is a being of the One; or more precisely: that presentation generates
structure, that the pure multiple holds in itself the "counting as one." One can
also say that Hegel never ceases to write the in-difference of the other and of
the Other. In so doing, he renounces that thing for which the ontological can be
a situation. This presents itself through two consequences which are tantamount
to proof:
-Since it is infinity which articulates the other, the rule, and the Other,
it is predictable that the impasse explodes with respect to this concept.
The disjunction between the other and the Other~ which Hegel seeks
to eliminate- reappears in his text in the form of two developments,
which are at the same time disjunctive and identical (quality and quantity).
-Since it is mathematics that constitutes the ontological situation, it is
necessary for Hegel to debase it. Also, the chapter on quantitative
infinity is followed by a gigantic "remark" on mathematical infinity,
where Hegel proposes to establish that, in regards to the concept, mathematics represents a state of thought "defective in and of itself" and
that its "procedure is unscientific."
THE MATHEME OF INFINITY REVISITED

The Hegelian matrix of the concept of infinity states: "concerning qualitative and quantitative infinity, it is essential to note that the finite is not surpassed by a third party, but that it is determinacy, in as much as it is dissolving
itself, that surpasses itself."
The notions which architecturally construct the concept are thus
determinacy [Bestimmtheit], the starting point of the whole dialectic, and the
surpassing [hinausgehen uber]. One easily recognizes here, on the one hand, the
initial point of being, and on the other, the itinerary of the dialectical movement which is that which I have also called the "already" [deja] and the "yet"
[encore]. It is not an exaggeration to say that all of Hegel rests in this: that the
27

"yet" is immanent to the "already," that everything that is, is already still.
"Something" - a pure term of presentation - is only determinate for Hegel in as much as it
can be thought as other than an other. "The exteriority of otherness is in the something's own
inwardness." 1 This signifies that the law of the "counting-as-one" is that the counted term possesses in itself the marking-other [Ia marque-autre] of its being. Or again: the one can only be said of
being insofar as being is its own non-being- is that which it is not. For Hegel, there is an identity in
becoming of the "there is," [i/ y a] (pure presentation) and of "there-is-one" [il y a de l'un] (structure),
of which the mediation is the interiority of the negative. Hegel posits that the "something" must retain
the mark of its identity. From this, every point of being is "between" itself and its mark. Determinacy
is that which, in order to found the Same, requires that the Other be in the other. There is the origin
of infinity.
The analytic is very fine here. If the one of the point of being (the counting-as-one of a
presented term)- that is to say, its limit, or that which it discerns, results from the fact that it detains
the marking-other in interiority (that it is what it is not), the being of that point (inasmuch as onething [une-chose]) is to overstep the limit: "the limit which constitutes the determination of the something but in a way that it is determinate at the same time as its non-being is limitation." 2
The passage of the pure limit [Grenze] to the limitation [Schranke] is the force of an infinity
I::
(I that is directly required by the point of being.
To say that one thing is marked in itself as one has two meanings, because tJ:-.e thing becomes at the same time the gap [I' ecart] between its being and the one-of-its-being. On one of the
sides of this gap, it is actually the thing which is one, thus limited by what it is not. We have here the
stationary result of marking, Grenze, the limit. But on the other side of this gap, the one of the thing
is not its being. The thing is, in itself, other than itself. This is Schranke, its limitation. But the
limitation is a dynamic result of marking, since the thing, in all necessity, supersedes its limitation.
For limitation is the non-being by which the limit occurs. Yet the thing is. Its being is accomplished
through the franchisement of non-being (that is to say, through the supersession3 of the limit). The
profound root of the movement is that the one - if it marks being in-itself- is superseded by the
being which it marks. Hegel has a profound sense that the counting-as-one is a law. But since he
wants this law to be, at all costs, a law of being, he transforms law into an ought. The being of the one
consists in the fact that it is imperative to supersede the limitation. The thing is determinate as the
"ought-to-be" of that which it is, while not being it. "The being in-itself of determinacy, in its
relation to the limit, to itself as limitation, is the ought-to-be."4
The one, insofar as it is, is the supersession of its non-being. Thus, being one (determinacy)
is accomplished as the franchisement of limitation. But at large, it is pure ought-to-be: its being is
the imperative of the supersession of its one. The supersession of itself and therefore the dialectic of
the finite and the infinite results directly from the fact that the point of being, always discernible,
possesses in itself the one. "In the ought-to-be, the transcendence of finitude, that is, infinity begins.
28

The ought-to-be is that which, in the further development, exhibits itself in

accordance with the said impossibility as the progress to infinity."5
The essence of the Hegelian ti:}e?is on infinity, at this stage, is that the
point of being (because always intrinsically discernible) generates from itself
the operator of infinity, in other words, the supersession, which combines, as
any operator of that type, the step on [le pas-en-plus] (the yet)- here, the limitation- and the automatism of repetition- (here, the ought-to-be).
In a subtractive ontology one tolerates (even, one demands) that there
is the extnnsic, since the counting-as-one cannot be inferred from the inconsistent presentation. In the Hegelian doctrine (which is a generative ontology),
all is intrinsic, since the being other is the one-of-being, and all retains a mark
of identity in the form of the interiority of non-being. This results in what, for
the subtractive ontology of infinity, is a decision (of the ontology), while for
Hegel, it is a law. The fact that the one-essence [essence-une] of being is to be
infinite follows in the Hegelian analysis from the fact that the being of the one
is interior to being in general.
With a special genius, Hegel attempts to co-engender the finite and the
infinite only from the point of being. The infinite becomes a reason internal to
finitude itself, a simple attribute of experience in general, because it is a consequence of the regime of the one, of the gap between [de l'entre-deux] where the
thing lies at the suture of its being-one and its being. Being ought to be infinite:
"the finite, is itself, therefore, that sublation [releve] of itself, the fact of being
infinite."

5.:

!D
ll

:::

HOW CAN THERE BE A BAD INFINITY?

However, what infinity do we have at our disposal? The split limit/

limitation founds the insistence of the finite to supersede itself, its ought-to-be.
This ought-to-be results from the fact that the operator of the itinerary (the
supersession) derives directly from the point of being (determinacy). But is
there exclusively only an infinity? Is there not only repetition of the finite under
the law of the one? In that which I have called the matheme of infinity, the
repetition of the term self/ other is not yet the infinite. For infinity to be, it is
necessary that the place: Other [le lieu Autre] exists- or that the other insists. I
have called this requisite the second existential seal, through which the initial
point of being is summoned to inscribe its repetition in the place of the Other.
That second existence alone merits the name of infinity. Now one sees very well
29

how Hegel (under the hypothesis of an identity that is fixed and internal to "something") engenders the operator of the itinerary. But how could he leap up to the recollection of a completed
itinerary?
The difficulty is evidently conscious. The ought-to-be, or progress to the infinite is, for
Hegel, nothing but a mediocre transition which he calls (a striking symptom) the bad infinity. For
as soon as the supersession is a law internal to the point of being, the infinite which results from it
has no other being than at this point. At the same time, it is no longer the finite which is infinite; it
is rather the infinite which is finite. Or precisely- a very strong description- the infinite is only the
void where the representation of the finite operates. Every step too many [chaque pas-de-plus] summons the void where it can repeat itself: "In the void beyond the finite, what arrives? ... [T]his new
limit is itself only something which has to be sublated or superseded. And so again there arises the
void, the nothing, in which similarly the said determinateness, a new limit, is encountered -and so

on to infinity."6
We thus have only the pure alternation of the limit and the void, where the statements
"finite is infinite" and "infinite is finite" succeed each other, in the ought-to-be, as the "perpetual
repetition of one and the same content, one and the same tedium, alternation."? This tedium is the
.-.. tedium of the bad infinity. It demands an even greater obligation: that the supersession, in other
<::::
words, be superseded, that the law of repetition be affirmed globally. Briefly, the Other occurs [advienne ].
m
But the task this time is of the greatest difficulty. The bad infinity, after all, is bad by that
which makes it Hegelianly good: of not interrupting the ontological immanence of the better one
deriving from it. Its character of being limited, or finite, stems from the fact that it is only locally
defined by the "yet" of the "already" which is determinacy. However, the local status assures the
hold of the one, since it is always locally that one term is counted or discerned. The passage to the
global, that to the good infinity, does it not impose a disjunctive decision where the being of the one
is going to lack? The Hegelian artifice is here at its peak.

rr

THE TURNING AND THE NOMINATION

Since it is necessary to resolve the problem without disjoining the dialectical continuity, we
ourselves tum once again, with Hegel, towards the "something." Besides its being, its being one, its
limit, its limitation, and finally the ought-to-be where it insists, what resources are at its disposal
which would authorize us, by superseding the supersession, to conquer the un-empty plenitude of
global infinity? The stroke of genius in Hegel (if it is not a supreme talent) is abruptly to tum towards pure presentation (towards the inconstant as such) and to declare that what constitutes the
good infinity is the presence of the bad. That the bad infinity can be effective is what its badness
cannot account for. Besides repeating itself, the something detains the essential and presentable
capacity which exceeds that repetition to repeat itself.
30

The objective, or bad, infinity, is the repetitive beating, the tedious encounter of finitude in the ought-to-be and of the empty infinity. The true infinity is subjective insofar as it is the virtuality contained in the pure presence of
the finite. The objectivity of objective repetition is, in this way, an affirmative
infinite. A presence. "The unity of the finite and the infinite ... is itself present."
Considered as presence of the repetitive process, the "something," has broken
its external relation to the other, from where it holds its determination. It is
now in a re,lation to self, pure immanence, since the other has become effective
in the mode of empty infinity where something repeats itself. The good infinity is
finally the repeating of the repetition as far as it is other than the void. "The
infinite is ... as if other to the empty being-other ... return to self and relation
to self."
That subjective infinite, or "for-itself," which is the good presence of
the bad operation, is no longer representable, for what represents it is the repetition of the finite. What one repetition cannot repeat is its proper presence there, it repeats itself without repetition. One can see here that a line is drawn,
a line of division between:
-the bad infinity: objective process, transcendence (the ought-to-be),
representation,

c
rn

s:
ll

- the good infinity: subjective virtuality, immanence, unrepresentable.

The second term is like the doubling of the first. And it is striking that
in order for Hegel to think it, he returns to the foundational categories of ontology: pure presence and the void.
It remains to be asked why it is here that presence, or virtuality, persists in being called "infinity" even in the mode of the good infinity. One easily
sees the bad infinity's connection to the matheme: one recognizes the initial
point of being (determinacy) and the operator of repetition (the supersession).
But the good?
In reality, this nomination is itself the result of the whole procedure,
which can be summarized in six stages:
a. The something is posited as one from an external difference (it
is other than the other).
b. But as it must be intrinsically discernible, it is necessary to think
that it has this marking-other of its one in itself. Introjecting
the exterior difference, it empties the other something, which
31

becomes no longer one other term, but an empty space, an other void.
c.

Having its non-being in itself, the something which is, sees that its limit is also a
limitation that its whole being is to supersede (being as the ought-to-be).

d. The supersession, as the result of point b, occurs in the void. There is an alteration
of that void and of that repetition of something (which re-deploys its limit, then
secondly, supersedes it as limitation). It is the bad infinity.
e. This repetition is present. "!'l!e pure :presence of something P?tenti.ally retains p~es
ence and the law of repetition. It IS the global of that wh1ch - m every beatmg
alternating finite (determinacy) I infinite (void)- is the local.
f.

To name this virtuality, I ought to draw up the name of that void, since the pure presence, as relation to itself, is, at the point where we are, the void itself. Ana since the
void is the trans-finite polarity of the bad infinity, it is necessary that the name be:
infinity, the good infinity.

The infinite is thus the virtual contraction of the repetition in the presence of that which
repeats itself: a contraction named "infinity" from the void where it exhausts repetition. The good
~ infinity is the name of that which happens to the repeatable of the bad, a name to draw from the
void which borders upon a certainly tedious process, but which to treat as presence one also knows
to have to declare subjectively infinite.
It seems that the dialectic of infinity is perfectly completed. How it is that it recommences?
_

THE MYSTERIES OF THE QUANTUM

The infinite was split into good and bad. But here it splits anew into qualitative infinity (of
which we have just studied the principle) and quantitative infinity.
The key to this turnstile resides in the equivocations of the One. If it is necessary to take up
the question of infinity, it is because the being-of-the-one does not operate in the same manner in
the quantitative as in the qualitative. Or better: "the point of being- determinacy- is quantitatively
constructed as the inverse in regards to its qualitative structure."
I have already indicated that at the end of the first dialectic the something has only a relation to itself. In the good infinity, being is for-itself, it has "emptied" its other. How can it retain the
mark of the one that it is? The qualitative "something" is, on the one hand, discernible in that it has
its other in itself. On the other hand, the quantitative "something" is without other and, in consequence, its determinacy is indifferent. We understand that the quantitative One is the being of the
pure One, which differs from nothing. This does not mean that it is indiscernible: it is discernible

among all, being the indiscernible of the One.

32

What founds the quantum, what discerns it, is properly the indifference of difference, the anonymous One. But if the qualitative being-one is without difference, it is inevitable that its limit is not one, because the whole limit,
we saw, results from the introjection of an other. Hegel will speak of
"determinacy which has become indifferent to being, a limit which is also not
one." Only a limit that is not a limit is porous. The quantitative One, the
indifferent One, which is number, is just as well many ones, since its in-difference is also the means that causes the proliferation of the self-same outside
itself. The'One whose limit is immediately a non-limit is realized "in the multiplicity exterior to itself which has for its principle or unity the indifferent
One."
One grasps therefore the difference of the movements where the qualitative and the quantitative infinity are respectively engendered. If the essential time of something qualitative is the introjection of alterity (the limit here
becoming limitation), the essential time of something quantitative is the
exteriority of identity. In the first case, the one plays with being, the gap between
[I'entre-deux] where the ought is the supersession of the limitation. In the second case, the One is turned into multiple Ones, a unity whose repose is the
spreading out of itself. Quality is infinity according to a dialectic of identification, where the one proceeds from the other. Quantity is infinity according to a
dialectic of proliferation where the same proceeds from the One.
The exterior of number is thus not the void where repetition insists.
The exterior of number is itself as multiple proliferation. One can also say that
the operators are not the same in quality and in quantity. The operator of qualitative infinity is supersession. The quantitative operator is duplication. The
one reposits the something (yet); the other imposes it (always). In quality, what
is repeated is that the other be that interior which ought to franchise its limit.
In quantity, what is repeated is that the same be that exterior which ought to
spread itself out.
A major consequence of these differences is that the good qualitative
infinity cannot be pure presence, the virtual interior, the subjective. For in itself, the same of the quantitative One proliferates too. If, in the exterior of self,
the qualitative infinity is incessantly number (the infinitely big) in the interior,
it remains exterior: it is the infinitely small. The dissemination of the One-initself balances its proliferation. There is no presence in the interiority of the
quantitative. Everywhere the same is at the disposition of the limit, since it is
indifferent. Number, agency of the quantitative infinity, appears to be univer-

~
C!l

lJ

33

sally bad.
Confronted at this impasse of presence (and it is for us a joy to see how number imposes the
danger of subtraction, of non-presence), Hegel proposes the following line of resolution: to think
that the indifferent limit finally produces real difference. The true quantitative - or good - infinity
will be the putting into difference of indifference. One can, for example, think that the infinity of number, beyond the One which proliferates and composes this or that number, is being a number. The
quantitative infinity is quantity as quantity, (the proliferating of proliferation, that is to say, quite
simply, the quality of quantity) insofar as it is discerned qualitatively from any other determination.
But to my mind, it doesn't work. What does not work? It is the nomination. That there is
a qualitative essence of quantity, I can easily see, but why name it "infinity"? The name suits the
qualitative infinite because it was drawn from the void, and because the void was the trans-finite polarity of the process. In the numerical proliferation, there is no void, since the exterior of the One is its
interior, the pure law which institutes its spreading of the same-as-the-One. The radical absence of
the other, indifference, does not legitimize declaring that the essence of the finite number, its
numericality, is infinity.
Stated otherwise, Hegel fails to intervene in number. He fails because the nominal equiva.-... lence which he proposes between the pure presence of the supersession in the void (good qualita<::::
tive infinity) and the qualitative concept of quantity (good quantitative infinity) is a trick of the eye,
CD an illusory scene of speculative theater. There is no symmetry between the same and the other,
2 between proliferation and identification. However heroic this effort might be, it is in fact interrupted
=> by the exteriority of the pure multiple itself. The mathematical comes here, then, as the discontinuity in the dialectic. It is this lesson which Hegel wants to mask in suturing by the same term infinity - two discursive, disjointed orders.

cr

THE DISJUNCTION

The Hegelian enterprise meets here, as its real, the impossibility of the pure disjunction.
Departing from Hegel's own premises, one ought to note that the repetition of the One in number
does not allow itself to be sublated [relever] by the interiority of the negative. What Hegel cannot
think is that the difference of the same to the same is the pure position of two letters. In the qualitative, everything originates from this impurity which wishes that the other marks the point of being
with one. In the quantitative, the expression of the One is not markable, in such a way that all
number is at once disjointed from every other and composed of the same. Nothing here can be
preserved if one wants infinity from a decision which, through a single strike, disjoins the place of
the Other from all insistence of the others themselves. In wanting to hold the dialectical continuity
in the equivocations of the pure multiple, and to make it proceed from the single point of being,
Hegel cannot return to infinity. One cannot always get rid of the second existential seaL
Dismissed from representation and experience, the disjointing decision returns in the same

34

text, through a re-splitting between two dialectics so alike - quality and quantity that only a fragile verbal footbridge, thrown from the one to the other,
provides a sounding of the abyss of their twinhood and finds there the paradox of their incongruity. This footbridge is pronounced: infinity.
The quantitative "good infinity" is in fact a Hegelian hallucination. It
is a whole other psychosis, where God in-consists [inconsiste], from which Cantor had to draw that by which he could legitimately name infinite multiplication, at the cost, however, of keeping there the proliferation of which Hegel
imagined that, being bad, it was reduced by the artifice of its differentiable
indifference.
translated by marcus coelen and sam gillespie
1

A.V. Miller's translation of Hegel's Science of Logic (Atlantic Highlands, N1: Humanities,1969) 131.

The distinction is made here between "la limite" and "Ia

borne" [Grenze and Schranke] which we follow Miller in
translating as "limit" and "limitation" - Tr.

"Outrepassement." La can' s translator, Alan Sheridan, translates

this term as supersession. It should be noted that in Miller's
translation of Hegel, the term is variously translated as "passing over" and "transcended" - Tr.

Hegel, 132.

134.

:s:

m
JJ

Hegel, 141. To maintain the consistency of our translation, we

have elected to change Miller's translation of outrepasser from
"transcended" to "superseded"- Tr.
142.

35

WHAT IS LOVE?

alain badiou
L PHILOSOPHY AND THE SEXES

It is commonly alleged that philosophy as a systematic willing erects

itself on the foreclosure of sexual difference. True, it is not in the most consistent parts of this willing that the word "woman," from Plato to Nietzsche, tends
to arrive at a concept. Is this not perhaps the vocation of the word? But is the
word "man," stripped of its generic freighting and returned to sexuation, any
better treated? And is it necessary to conclude that sexual difference is, in effect, what philosophy un-differentiates? I do not think so. Too many signs
attest to the contrary, if one is aware that the ruses of such a difference (certainly more subtle than those of Reason) adapt themselves well to what has not
been put forward by either the word "woman" or the word "man." This is
only the case because it is philosophically admissible to transpose to the sexes
what Jean Genet declared of race. Asking what a black is, he added: "And C
above all, what color is it?" If it is asked what a man or a woman is, it would be ~
the height of a legitimate philosophical prudence to add: "And above all, what OJ
sex is it?" Thus, it will be admitted that the question of sex is the primary ..2'!
obscurity, a difference thinkable only at the cost of a laborious determination ,:.._
of identity that it puts to work. Let us add that contemporary philosophy addresses itself at all times to women. It might even be suspected that it is, as
discourse, partly a strategy of seduction. Besides, it is from the bias of love that
philosophy touches upon the sexes, to the extent that it is to Plato that Lacan
must look for what hold thought has over the love of transference.
Nevertheless, it is at this point that a serious objection arises: what has
been said of the true reality of love, precisely outside of its Platonic inauguration- and before psychoanalysis unsettled the notion- has been in the order of
art, and most singularly in novelistic prose. This coupling of love and the novel
is essential, and it will be further remarked that women have not only excelled
in this art, but provided its decisive impetus: Madame de La Fayette, Jane
Austen, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, among many others. And before
all these, in an eleventh century unimaginable for western barbarians, Dame
Murazaki Shikubu composed The Story ofGengi, the greatest text in which what
is sayable about love in its masculine dimension is deployed.
Let it not be alleged that this is a classical confinement of women to the
37

..-.

'i

m
~

:J

effects of sublimated passion and the dimension of narrative. First of all, I want to show that the
signifying bond between "woman" and "love" concerns humanity in its entirety, and even legitimates its concept. Following this, I obviously maintain that women can and will continue to excel
in every domain, and thereby refound the field. The only problem, as for a man, is to know under
what conditions, and at what cost. Finally, I consider the novel an art of redoubtable and abstract
complexity, and the masterpieces of this art as one of the highest testimonies of which a subject is
capable when a truth traverses and constitutes it
From where can the coupling of the truth-procedures be observed, such as those I noted
between passion and the novel? From a place where it is shown that love and art are crossed, or
compossible in time. That place is philosophy. The word "love" will function here as a philosophical category, a legitimate construction as it is seen in the status of Eros in Platonism: the relation of
this category to the love that is at play in psychoanalysis, for example in transference, will undoubtedly remain problematic. The latent rule is a rule of external coherence: "Make sure that your
philosophical category, however specific, remains compatible with the analytic concept.'' I will not
verify this compatibility in detail.
The relation of this category to the revelations of the art of the novel will remain indirect.
Let us say that the general logic of love, as grasped in the rift between (universal) truth and (sexuated)
know ledges ought to be put to the test in singular fictions. This time the rule will be subsumption:
"Make sure that your category admits the great love stories like a syntax made from its semantic
fields."
Finally, the relation of this category to common beliefs will be that of juxtaposition (since
love, compared to art, science or politics is not necessarily the most frequent truth-procedure, but
the most proposed upon). In this case, there is a common sense from which one cannot depart without various comic effects. The rule might be: "Make sure that your category, if paradoxical in its
consequences, remains in line with socially acceptable amorous intuition."
II. OF SEVERAL DEFINITIONS OF LOVE THAT WILL NOT BE RETAINED

Philosophy, or a philosophy, founds its place of thought on rejections and on declarations. In

general, the rejection of the sophists, and the declaration that there are truths. In this case, there will
be:
1.

38

The rejectionof the fusional conception of love. Love is not that which makes a One in
ecstasy through a Two supposedly structurally given. This rejection is in its foundation
identical to that which dismisses Being-for-death. This is because an ecstatic One can
only be supposed beyond the Two as a suppression of the multiple. Hence the metaphor
of night, the stubborn sacralizing of the encounter, the terror practiced by the world,

Wagner's Tristan and Isolde. In my categories, this is a figure of

disaster, and as such related to the generic procedure of love. This
disaster is not that of love itself, but is the remembrance of a
philosopheme, the philosopheme of the One.
2.

The rejection of the ablative conception of love. Love is not the

prostration of the Same on the altar of the Other. I will maintain
belo:-v that love is not even an experience of the Other. It is an,
experience of the world, or of the situation, under the post-evental
condition that there were Two. I wish to subtract Eros from the
entire dialectic of Eteros.

3.

The rejection of the "superstructural" or illusory conception of love,

dear to a pessimistic tradition of French moralists. I understand
by this the conception that love is merely an omamental semblance
through which passes the real of sex, or that desire and sexual jealousy are the foundation of love. Lacan occasionally skirts this idea,
for example, when he says that love is what fills in [supplee] the
failure of the sexual relation. But he also says the opposite when
he accords to love an ontological vocation, that of the "edge [abord]
of being." But love, I believe, does not take the place of anything
[supplee]. It supplements, which is completely different. It is only
messed up under the fallacious supposition that it is a relation.
But it is not. It is a production of truth. The truth of what? That the
Two, and not only the One, are at work in the situation.
Ill. THE DISJUNCTION

I come now to the declarations.

It is a question here of an axiomatics of love. Why proceed in this
way? By right of an essential conviction argued, moreover, by Plato: love is by
no means given in the immediate consciousness of the loving subject. The relative
poverty of all that philosophers have declared of love derives, I am convinced,
from their starting from the angle of psychology or a theory of the passions. If
love, however, implies the follies and torments of those in love, it does not
thereby deliver its own identity through these experiences. On the contrary, it
is this identity on which their becoming [adviennent] subjects of love depends.
39

Let us say that love is a process which arranges such immediate experiences, without the law which
arranges them being decipherable from within these experiences. This can also be said: the experience of the loving subject, which is the matter of love, does not constitute any knowledge [savoir] of
love. This is even a distinctive feature of the amorous procedure (in relation to science, art or politics): the thought that it is, is not the thought of its thought. Love, as an experience of thought, does
not think itself [s'impense]. A familiarity [connaissance] with love certainly demands a test of strength,
especially the strength of thought. But it is also even intransitive to this strength.
It is thus necessary to keep the pathos of passion, error, jealousy, sex and death at a distance. No theme requires more pure logic than love.
My first thesis is the following:
1.

There are two positions of experience.

"Experience" taken in its most general sense, presentation as such, the situation. There
are two presentative positions: the two positions are sexuated, and one is named "woman,"
the other "man." For the moment, the approach is strictly nominalist: there is no question
here of an empirical, biological, or social distribution.
That there have been two positions can only be established retroactively. It is effectively
love alone that authorizes us to formally pronounce the existence of two positions. Why?
Because of t.lo.e truly fundamental second thesis, which states:
2.

The two positions are absolutely disjunct.

"Absolutely" must be taken literally: nothing in experience is the same for the positions

of man and woman. Nothing. That is to say: the positions do not divide up experience, and
there is no presentation affecting "woman" and "man" such that there are zones of coincidence or intersection. Everything is presented in such a way that no coincidence can be
attested to between what affects one position and what affects the other.
We will call this state of affairs "disjunction." The sexuated positions are disjointed
with regards to experience in general. The disjunction is not observable, and cannot itself
be made the object of an experience or of a direct k.'Lowledge [savoir]. All such experiences
or know ledges are themselves positioned within the disjunction and will never encounter
anything that attests to the other position.
To have knowledge of this disjunction- structural knowledge- there must be a third
position. This is prohibited by the third thesis:
3.

There is no third position.

The idea of a third position engages an imaginary function: the angel. Tne discussion
regarding the sex of angels is so important because its stakes are to pronounce on the disjune40

tion. But this cannot be done from the point of experience alone, or
from the situation.
What is it, then, which makes it possible for me, here, to pronounce on
the disjunction without recourse to, or without fabricating, an angel? Since the
situation alone is insufficient, it requires supplementation. Not by a third structural position, but by a singular event. This event initiates the amorous procedure: we w1ll call it an encounter.
IV. THE CONDITIONS OF HUMANITY'S EXISTENCE

Before proceeding further, it is necessary to tum to the other extreme

of the problem. This is the fourth thesis:

4.

There is only one humanity.

What does "humanity" signify in a non-humanist sense? The term
ccumot be founded by any objective predicative feature, which would
be idealist or biologistic (and, in any case, irrelevant). By "humanity,"
I understand t.'lat which provides the support for generic procedures,
or truth-procedures. There are four types of these procedures: science,
art, politics, and- precisely- love. Humanity is thus attested to if and
only if there is (emancipatory) politics, (conceptual) science, (creative)
art, or love (not reduced to a mixture of sentimentality and sexuality).
Humanity is what sustains [soutient] the infinite singularity of truths
that inscribe themselves in these types. Humanity is the historiaF body
of truths.

OJ
JJ

Let us agree to call H(x) the humanity function. This abbreviation indicates that the presented term x, whatever it is, is supported by at least one
generic procedure. One axiom of humanity indicates this: if a term x (let us
say, with respect to the Kantian atmosphere, a noumenal humanity=x) is active, or more precisely activated as a Subject in a generic procedure, then it is
attested to that the humanity function exists, insofar as it admits this term x as
an argument.
We insist on the point that the existence of humanity, the effectivity of
its function, arises at a point x which is activated by a truth in process as this
"local verification" [averer local] that is a subject. In this sense, the terms of any
41

[quelconques] x are the domain, or the possibility [virtualite] of the humanity function. Insofar that a
truth-procedure traverses the xs, the humanity function localizes them in its tum. It remains in the
balance whether the term x permits the existence of the function that takes it as argument, or if it is
rather the function that "humanizes" the term x. This balance is suspended by the initiatory events
of truth, in which the term xis an operator of fidelity which endures the coarse duration that an
encounter initiates as love. It returns to it through being localized, in which the famous solitude of
lovers is a metonymy, as a proof that Humanity exists.
The term Has such (let's say: the substantive "humanity") appears as a potential [virtual]
mixture of four types: politics (x militant), science (x scientist), art (x poet, painter, etc.), love (x,
"elevated" [relevee] in disjunction by the Two, male and female lovers). The term H knots the four.
The presentation of this knot, one notes, is at the heart of the disjunction between the positions "man" and "woman"- in their relation to truth.
Now our fourth thesis, which affirms that there is only a single humanity, comes to signify
this: all truth holds for all its historical body. A truth, whatever it is, is indifferent to all predicative
partition of its support.
This clarifies simply how the terms x, the noumenal variables for the Humanity function,
.-.. constitute an homogeneous class, susceptible to no. other partition than that which induces the
ift:: subjective activations initiated by an event, and thought according to a fidelity procedure.
ro
In particular, a truth as such is subtracted from every position. A truth is transpositional. It
:2: is, moreover, the only thing which is, and this is why a truth will be called generic. I have at~ tempted, in Being and the Event, an ontology of this adjective.
V. LOVE AS THE TREATMENT OF A PARADOX

If the effects of thesis four are related to the three preceding theses, we can formulate precisely the problem that will occupy us: how is it possible that a truth is transpositional, or a truth for
all, if there exists at least two positions, man and woman, that are radically disjunct in regard to
experience in general?
One would expect that the first three theses would entail the following statement: truths
are sexuated. There would be a masculine and a feminine science, just as it was thought at one time
that there was a proletarian science, and a science of the bourgeoisie. There would be a feminine art
and a masculine art, a feminine political vision and a masculine political vision, a feminine love
(strategically homosexual, as certain feminist orientations have rigorously affirmed) and a masculine love. It could obviously be added that, even if this is so, it is impossible to know it.
But this is not the case in the space of thought that I wish to establish. We hold simultaneously that the disjunction is radical, that there is no third position, and also that the occurrence
[qui advient] of truth is generic, subtracted from every positional disjunction.

42

Love is exactly the place where this paradox is negotiated [traite].

Let us take the measure of this statement [enonce}. It signifies above all
that love is an operation articulated with a paradox. Love does not relieve
[releve] this paradox but treats it. More precisely, it makes truth of the paradox
itself.
The famous curse "the two sexes die in their own way" is in reality the
non-paradoxical or apparent law of things. To stick to the situation (if one
economizes the eventual supplement and therefore pure chance), the two sexes
never cease to die in their own way. Furthermore, under the injunction of Capital,
which couldn't care less for sexual difference, the social roles are indiscriminated;
the more the disjunctive law is stripped away, without protocol or mediation,
the more the sexes (practically indifferentiated) nevertheless continue to die in
their own way. Tnis "way" is all the more compelling for having become invisible, and thereby returned to the total character of the disjunction. The staging
of the sexual roles, the enrollment of the terms x in two apparent classes which
we will call mx and wx, is not the expression of the disjunction, but its coverup, the obscure mediation administered by all sorts of distributive rites and
access protocols. But nothing is better for Capital than if there are only xs.
Thus our societies uncover-up the disjunction which again becomes invisible,
and without any mediating display. Whence the apparent indiscernibility of
the sexuated positions, which allows the disjunction to pass as such. This is a ::::
situation whereby each experiences that it murders possible humanity within
itself, grasping it by means of this x that it is through a veracious fidelity.
Love is thus itself stripped bare in its function of resistance to the law
of being. One begins to understand how, far from "naturally" governing the
supposed relation of the sexes, it is what makes the truth of their dis-conjunction.
VI. LOVE, AS THE STAGE OF THE TWO, MAKES THE TRUTH OF THE
DISJUNCTION AND GUARANTEES THE ONE OF HUMANITY

To understand this determination of love, and thus establish it as a

constant transformation in thought- as the poet Alberto Caeiro puts it, "to love
is to think" - it is necessary to return to the disjunction. To say that it is total is
not to speak from a neutral observation point or third position, but to say that
the two positions cannot be counted as two. How could such a count be made?
The two are not presented as something which, in the three, would be an element of the three.
43

One must carefully distinguish love and the couple. The couple is that which, in love, is
visible for a third party [un tiers]. This two is thus calculated on the basis of a situation where there
are at least three. But the third party in question, whoever it is, does not incarnate a disjunct or third
position. The two that the third party counts are thus an indifferent two, a two completely exterior
to the Two of the disjunction. The phenomenal appearance of the couple, submitted to an exterior
law of calculation, says nothing about love. The couple does not name love, but the state (even the
State) of love: not the amorous presentation, but its representation. It is not for love's sake that this
two are calculated from the point of the three. For love, there are not three, and its Two remains
subtracted from all calculation.
If there are not three, it is necessary to modify the statement of thesis one, because it is more
rigorous to say:
1 (a). There is one position and another position.
There is "one" and "one," who are not two, the one of each "one" being indiscernible,
although totally disjointed, from the other. Specifically, no position-one includes an experience of
the other, which would be an interiorization of the two .
.-This is the point that has always blocked phenomenological approaches to love: if love is
<:::
(I "the consciousness of the other as other," this means that the other is identifiable in consciousness as
m the same. Otherwise, how to understand how consciousness, that is the place of identification of
~ self as the-same-as-self, could welcome or experience the other as such?
:J
Phenomenology then has only two options:

-the weakening of alterity. In my vocabulary, this means that it detotalizes the disjunction and in fact returns the schism man/woman to a division of the human, where
sexuation as such disappears;
- the annihilation of identity. This is the Sartrean route: consciousness is nothingness,
and it has no position by itself, being self-consciousness or non-thetic consciousness of
self. But, to put this pure transparence to the test, it is well known what becomes of
love for Sartre: an impotent oscillation between sadism (making the other into an initself) and masochism (turning oneself into an in-itself for the other). Which means
that the Two are only a machination of the One.
To maintain at the same time the disjunction and that there is a truth, it is necessary to
depart from on the basis of love as a process, and not from an amorous consciousness.
We can thus say that love is precisely this: the ad-vent [l'avenement] of the Two as such, the
stage of the Two.
44

But wait: this stage of the Two is not a being of the Two, which would
suppose three. This stage of the Two is a work, a process. It only exists as a
track through the situation, under the supposition that there are Two. The Two is
the hypothetical operator, the operator of an aleatory enquiry, of such a work
or such a track.
This to-come [ad-venue] of the supposition of a Two is originally even tal.
The event is this perilous supplement to the situation that we call an encounter.
Properly understood, the event-encounter occurs only in the form of its disappearance or eclipse. It is fixed only by a nomination, and this nomination is a
declaration, the declaration of love. The name which declares is drawn from
the void of the site from which the encounter draws the bit-of-being [peu d'etre]
of its supplementation.
What is the void invoked here by the declaration of love? It is the void,
the unknown [in-su] of the disjunction. The declaration of love puts into circulation in the situation a vocable drawn from the null interval that disjoins the
positions man and woman. "I love you," brings together [accole] two pronouns
"I" and "you," that cannot be brought together [inaccoler] as soon as they are
returned to the disjunction. The declaration nominally fixes the encounter as
having for its being the void of the disjunction. The Two who amorously operate is properly the name of the disjunct apprehended in its disjunction.
Love is interminable fidelity to the first nomination. It is a material
procedure which reevaluates the totality of experience, traversing the entire
situation bit by bit, according to its connection or its disconnection to the nominal supposition of the Two.
There is here a numerical schema proper to the amorous procedure. This
schema states that the Two fractures the One and tests the infinity of the situation. One, Two, infinity: such is the numericity of the amorous procedure. It
structures the becoming of a generic truth. What truth? The truth of the situation insofar as there exist two disjunct positions. Love is nothing other than a
trying sequence of investigations on the disjunction and the Two, such that in
the retroactivity of the encounter it verifies that it has always been one of the
laws of the situation.
From the moment that a truth of the situation occurs as disjunct, it also
becomes clear that any [toute] truth is addressed to everyone [taus], and guarantees the uniqueness of the humanity function H(x) in its effects. Because
here this point is reestablished that there is only one situation, from the moment that it is truly grasped. One situation, and not two. The situation that is

:;: ,

45

the disjunction is not a form of being, but a law. And truths are all without exception truths of this
situation.
Love is this place which proceeds when the disjunction does not separate the situation in its
being. The disjunction is only a law, not a substantial delimitation. This is the scientific aspect of
the amorous procedure.
Love fractures the One according to the Two. And it is in virtue of this that it can be thought
that, although worked by this disjunction, the situation is exactly as if there has been a One, and it
is through this One-multiple that all truth is assured.
In our world, love is the guardian of the universality of the true. It elucidates possibility,

because it makes truth of the disjunction.

But at what price?
VII. LOVE AND DESIRE

0:<:::
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~

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46

The Two as post-evental supposition must be marked materially. It must have the primary
referents of its name. These referents, everyone knows, are bodies insofar as they are marked by
sexuation. The differential trait which bodies bear inscribes the Two in its nomination. The sexual
is tied to the amorous procedure as the ad-vent [l'avenement] of the Two, in the double occurrence of
a name of the void (the declaration of love) and a material disposition restricted to bodies as such.
A name, drawn from the void of the disjunction, and a differential marking of bodies, thus compose
together the amorous operator.
This quesfion of the becoming [advenue] of bodies in love must be carefully delimited, because it engages [oblige1 the enforced dis-relation [de-rapport] between desire and love.
Desire is the captive of its cause, which is not the body as such and still less "the other" as
a subject, but an object which the body bears - an object before which the subject, in a fantasmatic
centering, comes [advient] into its own disappearance. Love obviously enters into this defile of
desire, but love does not have the object of desire as a cause. Thus love, which marks on bodies, as
matter, the supposition of the Two that it activates, can neither elude the object cause of desire nor
can it arrange itself there any longer. This is because love treats bodies from the bias of a disjunctive
nomination, whereas desire is related to bodies as the principle of the being of the divided subject.
Thus love is always a predicament, if not with regard to the sexual, then at least with regard
to the object that wanders there. Love passes through desire like a camel through the eye of a
needle. It must pass through it, but only insofar as the living body restitutes the material marking
of the disjunction by which the declaration of love has realized the interior void.
Let us say that it.is not the same body that love and desire treat, even though it is, exactly, "the
same."
In the night of bodies love attempts to expand, to the extent of the disjunction, the always
partial character of the object of desire. It attempts to cross the barrier of stubborn narcissism, by

VIII. THE UNITY OF AMOROUS TRUTH; THE SEXUATED CONFLICT OF KNOWLEDGES

This point is very delicate. It is not only necessary to understand that love makes truth of
the disjunction under the emblem of the Two, but that it makes it in the indestructible element of the
disjunction.
The Two, not being presented, operate in the situation as a complex of a name and a corporeal marking. It seeks to evaluate the situation by laborious enquiries, understood here as enquiries
regarding its accomplice that is also its mistake: desire. Sexuality, but also cohabitation, social representation, sorties, speech, work, travels, conflicts, children: all this is the materiality of the procedure, its track of truth through the situation. But these operations do not unify the partners. The
Two operate as disjunct. There will have been a single truth of love in the situation, but the procedure
of this unicity stirs in the disjunction by which it makes the truth.
The effects of this tension can be observed on two levels:
1. There are in the amorous procedure certain functions whose grouping redefines the

positions.
2. What the future of the one truth authorizes by anticipation in knowledge is sexuated.
Foreclosed from truth, the positions return in knowledge.
On the first point, I will return to a text (last in this book), entitled "Generic Writing" and which
finds support in the work of Samuel Beckett. I establish that, for Beckett (I thus come here to
what of the prose novel has the function of thinking the thought of love), the becoming of the
amorous procedure requires that there be:
- a wandering function, of alea, of a perilous voyage through the situation, that supports
the articulation of the Two and infinity. A function that exposes the supposition of the
Two to the infinite presentation of the world;
- an immobility function, that protects, that withholds the primary nomination, that ensures that this nomination ofthe event-encounter is not engulfed by the event itself;
- an imperative function: continuing always, even in separation, and which holds that
absence is itself a mode of continuation;
- a story function which, as the work proceeds, inscribes by a sort of archivage the
becoming-truth of the wandering.

48

We can establish that the disjunction reinscribes itself in the table of

functions. Because "man" will be axiomatically defined as the amorous position that couples the imperative and immobility, while "woman" is that which
couples wandering and story-telling. These axioms do not hesitate to blend
both coarse and refined commonplaces: "man" is he (or she) who does nothing, I mean nothing apparent for and in the name of love, because he holds that
what he pas valued once can continue to be valued without having tore-attest
to it. "Woman" is she (or he) who makes love travel, and desires that her speech
constantly reiterate and renovate itself. Or, in the lexicon of conflict: "man" is
mute and violent, while "woman" gossips and complains. Empirical materials
are required for the work of the enquiries of love, in order that there be truth.
My second point is more complex.
What I will first reject is that, in love, each sex can learn about the other
sex. I do not think so. Love is an enquiry of the world from the point of view of
the Two, and not an enquiry of each term of the Two about the other. There is
a real of the disjunction, which is, exactly, that no subject is able to occupy at
the same time and under the same relation the two positions. This impossibility lies in the place of love itself. It entails the question of love as a place of
knowledge: what is it, on the basis of love, that is known?
We must carefully distinguish knowledge and truth. Love produces a
truth of the situation just as the disjunction is a law of the situation. This truth
composes, it compounds itself to infinity. It is thus never presented integrally.
All knowledge relative to this truth thus disposes itself as an anticipation: if this
never ending truth will have taken place, are judgments about it then not true,
but veridical? Such is the general form of knowledge under the condition of a
generic procedure, or a truth-procedure. For technical reasons, I call this forr;age. 2
We can force a knowledge through a hypothesis regarding the having-takenplace of a truth that is in process. In the case of love, the in-process of truth bears
upon the disjunction. Each person can force a knowledge of the sexuated disjunction on the basis of love, on the hypothesis of its having-taken-place.
But the Jorr;age is in the situation where love is proceeding. If the truth
is one, forc;:age, then knowledge is submitted to the disjunction of positions.
What "man" knows and what "woman" knows about love on the basis of love
remains disjunct. Further: the veridical judgments that bear upon the Two on
the basis of its evental opening cannot coincide. In particular, know ledges of
sex are themselves irremediably sexuated. The two sexes do not not know

~
~

;;:,

49

each other, but know each other veridically in a disjunct fashion.

Love is this stage where a truth about the sexuated positions proceeds, across a conflict of
inexpiable knowledges.
This is truth from the point of the unknown. Knowledges are veridical and anticipatory,
but disjunct. Formally, this disjunction is representable in the insistence of the Two. The position
"man" sustains the split of the Two, this gap between [I'entre-deux] where the void of the disjunction
fixes itself. The position "woman" holds that the Two are lost in wandering. I have had occasion to
advance the following formula: man's knowledge organizes its judgments with the nothing of the
Two, woman's knowledge with the nothing that is the Two. We can also say that the sexuation of
know ledges of love disjoints:
1. the following veridical masculine statement: "What will have been true is that we
were two and not at all one;"
2. the feminine statement, no less veridical, that holds: "What will have been true is
that we were two, and otherwise we were not."
The feminine statement aims at being as such. Such is its destination in love, which is
ontological. The masculine statement aims at the change in number, the painful effraction of
the One through the supposition of the Two. It is essentially logical.
The conflict of knowledges in love shows that the One of a truth always exposes itself
logically and ontologically. Which returns us to the third book of Aristotle's metaphysics and to the
admirable recent commentary published by Vrin under the title The Decision of Sense. The enigma of
this Aristotelian text derives from the passage between the ontological position of a science of being
(insofar that it is), and the crucial position of the principle of identity as a pure logical principle.
This passage, in general, is no more frequented than the one which goes from the female position to
the male position. The authors of the commentary show that Aristotle passes "by force," in the
ardor of an intermediary style, that of the refutation of the sophists. Between the ontological and
logical positions, there is only the medium of refutation. Thus, for each position engaged in love,
the other position only allows itself to be attained as if it were a sophistics to be refuted. Who is not
familiar with the tiresome exhaustion of such refutations, which can be summed up by the deplorable syntagm, "you do not understand me"? An enervated form, we might say, of the declaration of
love. Who loves well understands poorly.
I do not know if it was accidental that this commentary on Aristotle, that I am augmenting
here in my own way, was written by a woman, Barbara Cassin, and by a man, Michel Narcy.

50

IX. THE FEMININE POSITION AND HUMANITY

This will be the final word. But I will add a post-script, that will return
to my beginning.
The existence of love makes it appear retroactively that, in the disjunction, the female position is oddly the bearer of love's relation to humanity as I
conceive it: humanity, the function H(x) that makes an implicative knot with
the truth-procedures, is science, art, politics and love.
It will be said that this is a trivial commonplace. It is said "woman" is
that which thinks only of love, and "woman" is being-for-love.
Let us courageously cross the commonplace.
We will axiomatically pose that the female position is such that the
subtraction of love affects it with inhumanity for itself. Or rather that the function H(x) is only able to have a value insofar as the amorous generic procedure
exists.
This axiom signifies that, for this position, the prescription of humanity is only a value insofar as the existence of love is attested to.
Let us note in passing that this attestation does not necessarily take the c
s:
form of an experience of love. One can be "seized" by the existence of a truth- IJj
procedure from an entirely other basis than experience. Once again, we must :::0
avoid all psychologism: what matters is not the consciousness of love but the ~
fact that it administers, for the term x, the proof of its existence. A term x, the
noumenal possibility [virtualitel of the human, whateverits empirical sex, only
activates the humanity function on the condition of such a proof, and we propose that this proof is woman. Thus "woman" is she (or he) for whom the
subtraction of love devalorizes H(x) in its other types, science, politics and art.
A contrario, the existence of love deploys H(x) virtually [virtuellement] in all its
types, and above all in the most connected or crossed. This undoubtedly explains the excellence of women in the novel- if it is admitted that it is a "feminized" x that is in question in the writing of the prose novel, which is to be
explored further.
For the male position, it is not at all the same: each type of the procedure itself gives value to the function H(x), without taking account of the existence of the others.
I have thus come to define the words "man" and "woman" from the
point where love cuts into the knotting of the four types of truth-procedure.
Again, in relation to the humanity-function, sexual difference is only thinkable
51

by using love as a differentiating criterion.

But how could it be otherwise if love, and it alone, makes the truth of the disjunction?
Desire cannot found the thought of the Two, since it is the captive of the proof of being-One which
the object imposes on it.
We will also say that, however it is sexuated, desire is homosexual, whereas love, even if it
can be gay, is principally heterosexual. It could also be said that the passing of love in desire, whose
difficult dialectic I have gestured towards above, makes heterosexual love pass in homosexual desire.
Finally, and without considering the sexes of those that a love encounter destines to a truth,
it is only in the field of love that there are "woman" and "man."
But let us return to Humanity. If it is admitted that His the virtual [virtuelle] composition of
four types of truth, we can advance that, for the female position, the type "love" knots the four, and
that it is only on its condition that H, humanity, exists as a general configuration. And that, for the
male position, each type metaphorizes the others, this metaphor willing the immanent affirmation in
each type, of humanity H.
We have the two following schemas:
H according to Woman

H according to Man

'

''

'I
I
I
I

''
'

Art

Politics

II I

. _ _ _ __ _- - . . J

Pohri"

'

L: '

..__- - - - - '

These schemas show that the feminine representation of humanity is at the same time conditional and knotting, which authorizes both a more total perception and in that case a more abrupt
right to inhumanity. However the masculine representation is at the same time symbolic and separative, which can entail not only i.Tldifference but also a greater ability to conclude.
Is it a question of a restricted conception of femininity? Does this commonplace, even if
elaborated, rediscover a scheme of domination which summarily states: access to the symbolic and
the universal is more immediate for man? Or that man is less the mere tributary of an encounter.
We could object that the encounter is everywhere: all generic procedures are post-eventaL
52

But this is not essential. What is essential is that love is the guarantor
of the universal, since it alone elucidates the disjunction as the simple law of a
situation. That the value of the humanity-function H(x) is dependent, for the
female position, on the existence of love, can be put just as well: the female
position demands for the H(x) a guarantee of universality. It only knots the
components of H on this condition. The female position sustains itself, in its
singular relation to love, so that it can be clear that "for all x, [there is an] H(x),
whatever the effects of the disjunction, or of the disjunctions (for the sexual is
perhaps not the only one)."
I make here a supplementary turn of the screw with regard to the
Lacanian formulas of sexuation. Very schematically: Lacan divides the phallic
function <P(x). He assigns the universal quantifier to the male position (forevery-man), and defines the female position by a combination of the existential
and of negation, which means to say that woman is not-all.
This position is to an extent very classicaL Hegel, saying that woman
is the irony of community, pointed to this effect of the existential border by
which woman breaches the all that men strive to consolidate.
But this is the strict effect of the exerdse of the function <P{x). The most c
clear result of what I have been saying is that the humanity function H(x) does not :i:::
Ill
coincide with the function <P(x). With regard to the function H(x), it is in effect ,......
JJ
woman who sustains the universal totality, and it is the male position that :::,
metaphorically disseminates the possibilities [virtualites] of the compositionone of the H.
Love is that which, splitting the H(x) from the <P(x), restores to
"women," across the entire extent of the truth-procedures, the universal quantifier.
-translated by justin clemens
1

The distinction is made here between the French

"historique" and "historial" deriving from the
French reception of Heidegger. Historial implies a
non-empirical concept- Tr.

Forr;:age- a term from mathematical set theory which

designates the practice of "forcing" an indiscernible- Tr.

53

HEGEL UNSUTURED: AN ADDENDUM TO BADIOU

sam gillespie
... there is in all this what is called a bone. Though it is precisely
what is suggested here, namely, that it is structural of the subject, it
constitutes in it essentially that margin that all thought has avoided,
skipped over, circumvented, or blocked whenever it seems to succeed in being sustained by a circle, whether that circle be dialectical
or mathematical.
Jacques Lacan "The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire"

Never known for his reserved statements, it was Lacan who stated, in
his tenth seminar, that "if there is anyone, I think, who does not mistake what
the Phenomenology of Spirit brings us, it is mysel." 1 This should hardly be
surprising: Lacan was a man of his times and, if we are to believe Borch-Jacobsen,
no less under the scrutiny of Alexandre Kojeve than any of his contemporaries.
Yet Lacan does not, from the moment he claims to be the authority on Hegel,
cease to underline the differences between Hegel and himself.
This again should hardly surprise: almost every other French intellectual of .the period has sought, in some manner or another, to surpass the deadlocks of the dialectic. Lacan should come as no exception. But his tactics are
not as predictable as one may think. Typically, the overturning of Hegelianism
seeks to undercut the unity of the sublated whole- Hegel's critics never stop
pointing towards the difference, or remaining end product of otherness, which
are refused in the Hegelian system. Examples abound: the Derridian supplement,
Lyotard' s dif{erend, the Deleuzian fold. One could assume as much from Lacan
-is objet a (that "remainder of the other") not the same as the element which
disrupts a negative economy? Is it not, strictly speaking, the correlate to
Derrida's supplement? The answer, unfortunately, is both yes and no.
vVhat Lacan distinctly opposes is the classical, even "moralistic" dimension of the Hegelian infinity: the recurring circle completely closed in upon
itself, the repetitive enfolding of the infinity in the One- the point, in short, at
which the infinite ceases to be the other of the finite as One. Lacan will have
little of Hegel's unity of the one and the multiple. For it does not suffice to say
that the recurrence of the One- its ability to become "its own other" by becoming another One (which is nothing other than the ability of the One to sublate
infinity)- exhausts the function of the Other. And so it would seem that Lacan
would be quite at home with other criticisms of Hegel in his efforts to uphold

~
ro
~

::;,

57

the Other against this sublation of infinity.

If I may be forgiven for stating the obvious, Lacan makes it clear that the repetition of the
One cannot exhaust the other without generating a new other in turn. Is this not what Freud teaches
in Beyond the Pleasure Principle? For the sake of clarity, let's assume that the entirety of my conscious
life is governed by the pleasure principle. Every attempt I make to recover an earlier state - every
time I "fill in" what I am missing through the sequential recurrence of signifying elements- demands that I repeat myself. In repeating myself, I am pushed forward, towards somewhere far
away from the earlier state I incessantly attempt to regain. Repetition replaces the first object (the
lack I fill in with various names and numbers) with a second object, the void I circumscribe when I
leap from the future (from which I am guided by repetition) towards the past (in which I am guaranteed the possibility of repeating again). There are, of course, many ways in which I can apprehend objet a, but few are ever so tangible as this. The fact that there can be no substantial "beyond"
to the pleasure principle (the fact that this beyond can only ever be supposed outside the pleasure
my ego confines me to) can be attributed to the bad timing inherent in the pleasure principle. To go
backwards towards an earlier state o~ affairs, I must make a step forwards. I repeat by necessity,
creating my object anew.
.-..
Consequently, what Lacan surely means when he upholds the "function of the other" in a
<:::
repetitive system is this very inclusion of a heteronomous element (the "interval," if you will) which
ro any system aiming at continuity must invariably include. But this object does not disrupt the con~ sistency of a perfectly dosed system; by including a heteronomous element within pleasure, it is
:J what provides that system with consistency itself. We can witness the distinctiveness of Lacan's
reproach' to Hegel. As Jacques-Alain Miller repeatedly states, the objet a is not simply a product of
otherness. It is a logical object, that which sustains a system in the absence of the Other. It replaces
the once full presence of the Other (the place from which meaning can be ~aranteed) with the
Other's function- that which repetition strives towards. 2 And it is towards this that Lacan gestures
when differing from Hegel.
If it were all this simple, there would be no point to the present discussion. There are two
purposes for writing this paper. One, obviously, is to sort out, at a very elementary stage, certain
differences between Lacan and Hegel. This is no easy task given the variety of viewpoints on the
matter. Some will say thatLacan is ''bad philosophy"- period; there is no point in discussing him
alongside Hegel. Others will read Lacan in line with contemporary, "post-structuralist," critiques
of Hegel, critiques which, as I have alluded to above, for the most part, undercut the unity of Hegel's
absolute through the interv~ntion of otherness, or difference, into Hegel's system. Finally, there are
those, most notably Slavoj Zizek, who will attempt to "rescue" Hegel from his critics by proclaiming him a Lacanian. If no one reading seems sufficient (although I admit a partiality to the final
interpretation), it is most likely the case that any of the above agendas (saving Hegel, saving Lacan,
critiquing both) overrides the difficulty- one could even say impossibility- of taking either Hegel or

rr

58

Lacan at their word.

Quite simply, it seems that distinctions need to be made, and if it is my
intent to do so here, it will be for the purposes of delimiting the above example
of Hegelian infinity that Lacan takes issue with. Hence, my second purpose:
what I propose is not solely a reading of Hegel avec Lacan, but to explicate
Alain Badiou's (Lacanian) critique of Hegel. Badiou's is not a simple thesisbut it does, to be sure, disclose Lacanian principles. What Badiou objects to in
Hegel is the rejection of the mathematical in favor of the essential finitude of
self-consciousness. Rather than viewing the mathematical as an independent
foundation of truth from which various other discourses are derived (as in
Plato, Descartes, or Leibniz), Hegel views the philosopher's task as being one
in which the mathematical (the infinite) is placed in a subordinate relation to
subjective reflection. Well, it seems clear enough where a Lacanian could differ; when acknowledging Lacan's use of cybernetics in the fifties, it is obvious
that the unconscious process of counting always exceeds what the conscious
subject can think at any one point. A symbolic or mathematical foundation of
existence cannot be sufficiently absorbed by the essential finitude of subjective
self-reflection. But to effect such an absorption seems to be Hegel's intent.
This, crudely put, would be a starting point for understanding Badiou: for the
latter, the mathematical imposes a structure which cannot be globally enveloped by a conscious subject.
This is only a very preliminary reading of Badiou, a reading which
will be far from exhaustive. Let it suffice to say that whereas Hegel (in his
efforts to subordinate the infinite to the status of the repetitive One) seeks to
establish the subject as a global site of truth, Badiou's subject is always a local
part of a logical structure in which truth is present. This subject is an indispensable part of this system, and, to be sure, there is no philosophy without a subBut this subject is always only a finite subject. There are four axioms,
derived from Badiou,3 which can be briefly given:
a. Any finite formula expresses a subject. The subject is not a transcendental
agency of a perceiving consciousness, but a point expressed by a finite number or signifier.
b. The Subject is the local status of truth. The subject is a point in a chain of
knowledge (in Lacanian terms: ... 53 54 . . . ) which is located somewhere between an event that has been presupposed (the "supernumerary
59

name" which inaugurates the procession of signifying elements: sl ... ) and the point towards
which that chain is directed (signification"). The subject is caught in the chain at any one of
these points. It is a part of the situation that the supernumerary name of the event constitutes.
c. Truth is constituted by a hole in knowledge. Truth is not qualified through an intelligible intuition.
A truth is indiscernible within knowledge; it is the unnamed towards which the signifying
elements which comprise knowledge as such are directed, but never reach.
d. The subject is not this void. The void is inhuman and a-subjective. Truth is realized through the
multiplicity of elements that the void generates of which the subject is a part. The subject is, in
effect, a finite part which is caught between an event and its truth. It is the local status of this
situation as truth. Ultimately, saying that the subject is a local status of truth is very different
from defining the subject as the hole in knowledge which is truth.

_....._

a:
ro
2

:J

60

This final point may come as a surprise- do we not usually conceive the subject as the void
which is represented by a signifier? Is this not how a subject is "sutured" into a symbolic; that is, as
a void that is named? This is usually how suture is understood: the element which is sutured is the
void of the subject. Badiou suggests something different, something, in fact, which comes much
closer to u'te actual definition of suture in psychoanalysis. What is sutured, strictly speaking, is not
the subject to the discursive chain, but the relation between the Symbolic as knowledge (or, to use
Badiou's terms, situation) and being (the Real). It would hardly seem necessary review the entirety
of the original theory of suture that Jacques-Alain Miller wrote thirty years ago if his thesis had
been sufficiently understood.4 Since the case is otherwise, an exegesis will prove necessary. To
expound both Badiou and his reading of Hegel requires that the reader devote his or her attention
to the relation between the One and the multiple.
Ordinarily, suture is read as an Imaginary process through which a subject is included in a
given system while disavowing, or annulling, Symbolic difference. But in Miller's argument, the
point is this: for a symbolic system to become a closed economy, it must account for the element it
excludes (the subject). The agent of suturing is that which puts the Symbolic in communication
with the Real, it installs "something" in the place where the subject is absent. And were it not for the
inclusion of this "something" (an' absence which is not nothing) within a given set (or symbolic
system), distinctions between its elements could not even be drawn, since these distinctions cannot
be empirically determined. This was a primary necessity for Frege's mathematics: the exclusion of
an empirical thing (its substitution by a number) was necessary to sustain a logical system. Yet this
substitution could not occur without marking the fact that the subject has already been excluded.
But if distinctions are no longer drawn between actually existing things, then there must, in that
system, be some other means of differentiating its elements.

The answer appears to be easy enough: what is sutured is the lacking

subject to its signifier or representative. We could imagine that a subject is
sutured when it is named as an individuaL Were this not possible, something
would be missing from the set- there would simply be a series of empty numbers. If the reader takes further notice, however, he or she will realize that it
would be contradictory to say that the subject is what completes the set, what
provide~ for the missing element, since it is precisely Frege' s point that the
subject be excluded. The goal is something other than a merely Symbolic rewriting of the subject; for Frege, it is the formal structure of the set that interests him. The missing element, in other words, must be logical, not subjective.
In any event, when turning to the original problem that Miller presents, it is admittedly true that one is dealing with the inclusion of a subject
within a given set. For Miller or Frege, there are two relations formed between
the subject and the set: there is the relation between the subject and its given
concept (subsumption) and there is also the relation between the subject and the
number which comes to represent it in the set (assignation). Given a hypothetical set consisting of the "members ofF," neither the concept ("member ofF")
of the set nor the elements (counted terms) which comprise it, comes first The
perfect logic of the system demands that the concept exist exclusively through
the inclusion of the members which it subsumes. Yet these members, as ob- ,.._
jects, are only insofar as they fall under the given concept (that is, so long as .=,.
they are no longer things). The paradox, or "performativity," of the set necessitates that neither assignation nor subsumption is primary: a subject is subsumed at the same time that it is assigned a number. To be included, the subject must be counted. So it is dear that if a thing is counted as a number, it is no
longer equal to itself but to the number which assigns its place in the set. When
counted, one does not emerge as a "member of F/' but as equal to the concept
"member of F." One is included through being equal to its representative, to
the number which stands in for the self.
But a volatile loss of truth is invoked by the very principle of exclusion
which founds a logical system. The subject's emergence in a set means that it is
counted as one, and this one {1) is what becomes repeatably representative for
all members in the set. We can see clearly where the potential loss of truth
occurs: how is it that one thing can be distinguished from another if they are
both counted as one, if they can no longer be empirically differentiated as things?
How is counting even possible if the distinction between "one" and "two" is
no longer evident? Let me begin again: to be truly distinct, any one element
61

must be equal to itself. One is one" insofar as it is equal to itself: it cannot be exchanged for "two"
without a loss of truth. And in order for this to be true, the number needs a "substance" of sorts, it
needs a self to be equal to. But this self cannot be an empirical thing. This, in fact, is the very
problem.
Something, Miller adds, must be added to the set in order to make counting possible, in
order to close the set, to make each element equal to itself. This "something" is the inclusion of that
which is not equal to itself- conceptually, zero, the empty set. We arrive at the empty set when we
conceive of a set having no members, that is, of a set whose members are not equal to themselves.
This follows (as we shall see with regards to Hegel) when we conceive of the possibility of an empty
set: of a set which contains no elements, yet has a property nonetheless. Let w represent an infinite set
of which x is a member precisely when it is not equal to itself. The empty set can be written thus:
11

0 = {x E ro: x

* x}

Our first set (members of F") is "sutured" through the inclusion of this other set as its
member. Given this reading, our first impulse would be to inscribe the empty set between the
numbers in the set, as if it is thatwhich emerges between 1 and 2 (e.g. 1 =1, (1 :t 2), 2 =2). We could,
'::::
(( in this instance, call the empty set the interval which emerges between the successive counting of
elements. This is not the point for Miller: the empty set is not generated by, or even between, repetitions -it is what allows for repetition itself. There would not even be the possibility of getting from
zero to one unless there were some means of counting the zero first. To get from zero to one, the set
must start with nothing, the empty set 0. In order to reach one, another empty set must be counted
irt addition to this- the first empty set becomes counted as one {0}. What sutures the set is not an
other" to its members: insofar as its members are founded upon the absence of the subject, they
can only be equal to something else. This element which is not equal to itself is what allows the
set's members to be exchanged for other elements without a loss of truth. Ergo: not being equal to
itself, it can always equal another. Consequently, the difference between 0 and {0} is the difference between zero and one- one is the set of the empty set. It is even more difficult to get to two: one
must add another set on top of this, the set of the set of the empty set. By the time 2 is reached, three
sets have already been counted. As for 3:
II

0=0
1= {0}={0}
2 = {0,{0}} = {0, 1}
3 = {0, {0}, {0,{0}}} = {0, 1,2}

Getting to four is still more arduous since 1 is the counting, in fact, of a nothing which must
62

come first. One is not primary, it is preceded by what engenders lack in the set
-it accounts for the inclusive element which does not belong (the missing subject). Or, as the counting of one (to use Badiou's terms), the subject as one must
seek to find its other half in the empty set which it is counted as.s This, in a
sense, is why Lacan's subject~ cannot be written without an objet a.
Now, where, in Hegel, does one encounter the need to produce, or
include,,an external object to render conceptual closure? Does the dialectic not
in fact depend on the exact opposite - the exclusion of externality? Our "answer" is unclear. Perhaps this is not the question to be asked; it is well enough
to suggest that Hegel excludes the Other, but this claim is not so easily made
when considering that the other, in Hegel, is not really excluded as much as it
is revealed in its nullity. The Hegelian knows very well that this nullity has a
generative function nonetheless. In the Science of Logic, Hegel begins with the
most basic of his categories which, of course, are being and nothing. The immediate goal is to unite the two in the "moment" of being's emergence out of
nothing, but matters are confounded once Hegel speaks of determinate being -a
being which is distinguished from mere being (where non-being is taken up in
a simple unity with being). As determinate, as something, a posited being no c
longer simply has non-being as its other, it must also relate to another being, ~
CD
determine itself as the negative of that something. To this other being, it is JJ
equally an other. The former unity of the becoming of being had being and -;:;'
becoming as its moments: here, dialectical thought must grapple with something and other ("something else"). Each "something" is equally its other: "there
is no determinate being which is determined only as such, which is not outside
a determinate being and therefore is not itself an other."6 Yet beyond this
vicious circle of each being other to its other, Hegel states that a determinate
being is an other to itself on its own account: "The other simply by itself is the
other in its O\Vll self, hence the other of itself and so the other of the other- it is,
therefore, that which is absolutely dissimilar within itself, that which negates
itself, alters itsel."7 Not being a substantial other, this other is a being's own
non-being.
Hegel here seems intent to unite being with non-being- to sublate otherness into a unity of self and other. In other words, the "dissimilarity" mentioned above apparently introduces a positive otherness into Hegel's system.
Being would not be equal to itself since it must share equivalence with its other
as well. Difference, it would seem, is not yet eradicated from Hegel's system.
But Hegel insists that the dissimilarity of being with itself does not result from
63

the immanence of otherness, but from the lack of consistency in the other's being. One could state
. this logic otherwise: being is not equal to itself because it is not not-equal to its other- it cannot posit,
or distinguish itself from, its other. This would be the true logic of the empty set: if zero was equal
to nothing, it would no longer function as the empty set, for that nothing, as equal, would then have
to be marked as something. To be truly unequal to itself, the empty set must have no equal. For
Hegelian non-being then, something becomes dissimilar to itself when its other does not possess
being:
Hence, being-in-itself is, first, a negative relation to the negative determinate being, it has the
otherness outside it and is opposed to it; insofar as something is in itself it is withdrawn from
otherness and being-for-other. But secondly it has also present in its own being itself, for it is
itself the non-being of the being for other.s

This can be better understood when we consider Hegel's critique of the Kantian thing-initself. We believe we are saying something profound when we speak of it, when we refer to something outside the imperfections in human consciousness. But to refer to something in itself is to
refer to something apart from that reference; as divorced from all being-for-another, it is stripped of
,-....
_:.. determination, which of course means that it is nothing - that it is impossible to know what it is.
Hegel then suggests that by this very realization, we know quite well what a thing-in-itself is: a
truthless abstraction. But, in truth, for Hegel, the thing is knowable in the Notion where its determinate content is united with the lack of being in its other (i.e. its positing, which is purely empty being).
The limit which separates being in-itself from being for-another is superseded once the split itself
becomes internally constitutive for the Notion. What a thing is "in-itself" can only be externally
determined through a being's own reflection upon its positing. So while Hegel may refuse the limit
which separates human consciousness from the thing-in-itself, he reaffirms it in the formation of
the Notion, where the sensible conditions which affirm the content of a being are supplemented by
the "sensuously unfulfilled," internal limitations of the remaining void of determination.9
It could be assumed that at this moment in the Logic, a sublation of sorts has occurred: that
this determined being, in revealing the "other" for the nothing that it is, has become realized, or
determinate, in itself as Notion. But there is more. What has actually transpired is that this being,
in reflecting inwards on itself, has moved beyond being determined through an external limit; it
now contains an internal limitation. That is, this being is now a finite being. Two consequences
follow:
1.

64

Limitation defines what something is, as opposed to the limit which determines what that being is not. Thus, for Hegel, this limitation is no longer separated from a finite bei..Tlg's being; as
a term, limitation paradoxically suggests that any being is something other than the limit- that

a being could "be" more than what it is were it not for its limitation. This
"more" is brought to bear upon a finite being in the form of the ought.
Something, in itself, ought to be more than what it is. "The ought as such
contains the limitation and the limitation contains the ought."lo Part of its
being, what it ought to be, inheres elsewhere. Yet this elsewhere, while
being opposed to the limitation, is implanted by that limitation.
2.

Through its limitation, the determinate being encounters its ought. There is
a vicious circle between the two: beyond the limitation is the ought, yet this
ought is expressed by the limitation. "Limitation is determined as the negative of the ought and the.ought is likewise the negative of the limitation."11
There is thus a double negation at work when a finite being goes beyond
itself: the ought, once realized, is now what the being is, yet the limitation
remains nonetheless. A first negation is necessary, where the finite becomes
determinate, and a second negation of this determination, where the finite
becomes another finite (hence, Hegel's famous "negation of negation").
Herein lies the first emergence of the infinite: it depends on the negation of
the finite. The infinite is the beyond of the finite. Of course, this is where
Hegel's reader encounters the ''bad infinity," where the infinite is revealed
as the empty beyond of a finite being:
In this void beyond the finite, what arises? What is the positive element in it? Owing to the inseparability of the infinite and the finiteor because this infinite remaining aloof on its own side is itself limited -there arises a limit, the infinite has vanished and its other, the
finite, has entered. But this entrance of the finite appears as happening external to the infinite, and the new limit as something that does
not arise from the infinite itself but is likewise found as given. And so
we are faced with a relapse into the previous determination which
has been sublated in vain.12

$;
(]

-"'
JJ

The infinite has no other determination than to be the empty negation

of the finite. Yet when the finite being transcends its limitation, it finds that it
has become another finite in turn. This would constitute infinity in the second
stage, where it becomes the alternate term between two successive finites.
Hegel's reader is faced with the dimension of the "tedious repetition of bad
infinity." The empty infinite,{ ... }, becomes nothing less than the void of determination, the empty limit of the finite. Hegel does however realize a third
65

moment of the infinite, when it is no longer pushed forwards from the one, but is realized within
the infinite generation of the one with itself Infinity would be the realization of the infinite return of
the one to another one. Reflection is required- and it does of course come into play in the Logic But
the reader should ask, in what manner?
For Hegel, it is important to remember that each polarity realizes itself through limitation.
The infinite (empty beyond of the finite) is itself finite by virtue of what it excludes. Similarly, the
finite, while limited, would be doomed to perish were it not for the perennial ought which posits the
finite over and against itself in the beyond. The mutual sliding into opposition of either term is
what, no doubt, provides for the circularity of the infinite judgment, for the "good" infinity. The
infinite is what is drawn from the repetition of either term - or better yet, from the emptiness of the
other which either term oscillates towards. Going towards its other, it returns to itself, the One is the
infinite that is coextensive with its other in the reproduction of itself. This is Hegel's thesis.
Over and against the image of a linear progression, the Hegelian infinite is the circle drawn
within repetition. "What arises is the same as that from which the movement began, that is, the
finite is restored; it has therefore united with itself, has in its beyond found itself again. "13 But even
if this reflective circle is composed of two terms, it is not a disjunctive process. This is no unity of
---.
difference.
In the first place, it is from the limitation of the One, which is indifferent to difference,
(::;
that the infinite is drawn. The very fact that two opposed terms could become their opposites
r:o attests to the very nullity of differences, to the fact that they differ only by virtue of limitation. Lrl
2 other words, it is not that a limit is necessary because of the immanence of otherness, since other:> ness only follows from the necessity of limitation. As Hegel later writes in the Logic, it is only when
the limitation becomes constitutive that the Notion is achieved.
If any of this exegesis on indifference, on the "bad infinity" of alterity and externality leaves
something to be desired in contemporary repudiations of Hegel, I will nonetheless stop short of
Hegel's critics. I will only draw two conclusions at this point:

o:

a.

66

That the repetition of the One, the continual reemergence of the same, does not sufficiently offer
a closure onto a Notion. Jacques Lacan observed as much when he distinguished himself from
Hegel: the false infinity is linked to a metonymy of recurrence, a metonymy which can luckily
be drawn from the function of the repetitive One. But, as Lacan adds, "what experience shows
us, is that the different fields that are proposed in it - specifically, the neurotic, perverse, and
indeed the psychotic - is that the One which is reduced to the successions of signifying elements, the fact that they are distinct and successive does not exhaust the function of the Other."I4 It
is not insignificant that Lacan calls it the function of the Other, for even if the Other is impossible,
it still possesses a function in the object that repetition generates. It is even from the repetition
of the One, from its recurrence, that the question from the other arises: "che vuoi?" what is it that
I, the Other, demand of you? Don't get me wrong: t.~ere is not a lot of bad infL."'lity in Lacan, this

is not a radical alterity of otherness, yet there is a remainder of the Other

which is buttressed through jouissance. And the trouble, as Lacan said in
Television, is that this latter term cannot be inscribed in a repetitive quantum. ]ouissance does not have a numerical constant, it does not register
"in" a given repetition. A repetitive quantum is not guided by the "energy" of a human constituent: it is guided forwards by a demand that must
be deciphered. To speak directly to Hegel on this count, recurrence does
not exhaust, much less explain, the determination of a singular being's ought.
b. For Badiou, on the other hand, it cannot follow that the repetition of the
repetitive One can be called infinite. Repetition, as a quantitative "bad" infinity, may indeed have qualitative being, but one may ask what it is that
makes this quality "infinite" (and a "good" infinite at that)? For Hegel, the
answer is simply because repetition "tires of the void," of the insubstantiality and empty beyond (or "trans-finite polarity") of the finite. For HegeL
the void does not present an obstacle because it is empty, nothing, not determinate.ls It is because of Hegel's vehemence on this point that Badiou
will fault his exclusion of the mathematical - in rejecting the bad infinity,
Hegel, in effect, excludes the empty set as well: "in the numerical proliferation, there is no void, since the exterior of the One is its interior; the pure
law which institutes the spreading of the same as One. The radical absence o.f
the Other- indifference- does not legitimize declaring that the essence of the finite
number, its numericality, is infinity." The void, the empty set, 0, cannot simply be reduced to nothing in repetition if, as interior of the One, {0}, it is
what is being repeated. It is only by a retroactive maneuver, (which places
the empty infinite as product, rather than origin, of the One) that Hegel can
then locate the good infinity elsewhere, outside the extimacy that the mathematical provides. In naming the true infinity, Hegel draws upon a "bad"
element, the void of the finite, to make his claims. There remains an empty
object in Hegel, despite his best intentions.

s:
ro

l1
~
._.

Paradoxically, it seems as if Badiou and La can are at cross-purposes in

their critique of Hegel. For Lacan, Hegel's grandiose gesture exhausts, or denies, the function of the Other; for Badiou, there is too much otherness in this
meeting between the finite and the infinite, in this preservation of the difference-in-the-one. For the latter, the Hegelian One is both itself (finite) and its
other (void as indeterminate) which (illogically, for Badiou) thinks the infinity
67

of number from the being of One number. Why name the One "infinite/' if not because the "One"
(as counted, as title) must erroneously presuppose the infinite as its content? In his preservation of
the other through the interiority of the One, Hegel is not Hegelian enough- he is still located on the
side of Badiou' s nemesis- Deleuze. For what does De leuze designate as his formula for the subject?
Precisely the "Leibnizian" formula of the One over its infinite denominator: '/=.16 It is One with the
infinite, or rather, the infinite folded in the One as its pure interior. But Badiou cannot, nor should
his reader, think the being of the One in global terms. The One is not what contains the infinite, it is
what the infinite passes through.
Thus, what both Hegel and Deleuze presuppose, in spite of themselves, is an anti-mathematical theory of the subject. The very "point" of punctuality which marks the One receives its
consistency through being "filled out" by its infinite denominator. Prior to this, it must be asked if
there can even be a subject. For Badiou, there can be a different sort of consistency for his subject: it
entails that any finite point expresses a subject. This is not to say, however, that there is therefore a
formula of numbers (a Symbolic) wholly sufficient onto itself which can also exist without a subject.
There is, as Miller has shown, something more: the empty set, objet a. This does not presuppose a
"substance" of the subject: on the contrary, if anything, there is too much substance in this Hegelian
One.
And thus, finally, we are faced with a choice; if both Hegel and Lacan presuppose a subject,.....
~ which is the locus at which philosophy can persevere- it is Hegel who opts without hesitation for a
0:: multiple subject. Psychoanalysis proposes, in contrast, a subject of division, of the "cut." That the
m former would appear as more appealing is perhaps reducible to a refusal of the site where truth, in
2
::J psychoanalysis, is to be sought. Truth is produced through repression, through the hole it produces
in knowledge. It is here, impossibly, that the function of the Other (and, in consequence, of truth) is
not exhausted. As Badiou himself writes: "a truth is the principle of a subject, by the empty set whose
action it supports."17
What Descartes, Lacan, and Badiou all share is a view of the complete exteriority of the
subject to its representative. With the inauguration of the "I think" comes the guarantee that "I am"
must reside elsewhere. It is in this sense that the subject is not the void. The naming which effectuates
the subject leaves its indiscernible referent, its truth, in the future anterior of the situation of which
the subject is a discernibly finite part. The subject, as One, names that which will become the truth
that precedes it, the hole in knowledge, 5(0), which supplements its situation. It is the finite real, if
such can be conceived, of its situation. If there can be an agreement between Badiou and Hegel, it is
that the subject is indispensable for philosophy to persevere. What gets lost, however, in the latter's
insistence on the interiority of the finite, is the very extimate element that any external foundation
must presuppose as its truth. In subordinating the true to the interiority of a conscious subject, one
may as well dispense with it altogether. It is a small step that one takes when going from a point
where the true is subordinated to the "human" towards another point where philosophy realizes its
end. Badiou can evince the promises that this end affords, and it embodies everything which philosophy should save us from.
68

The quote comes from Lacan's unpublished tenth

seminar on anxiety. From a lecture given on November 14, 1962.

sequence in regards to the repetitions of

presents ... We do not repeat because we repress, we repress because we repeat."

See Miller, "To Interpret the Cause: From Freud to

Lacan," Newsletter of the Freudian Field, 3. 1-2 (1989):
50. In his book The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995),
Bruce Fink notes that Lacan at times has suggested
much the same: that is, that " ... all truth is
mathematizable. "He quotes from Lacan's unpublished Seminar XXI:

Deleuze, D~iference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton

(New York: Columbia, 1993) 105. vVhile Deleuze
repeatedly drew upon Lacanian concepts throughout his career as a philosopher, it is clear that for
psychoanalysis, his reading is absurd. Repetition
could not even be possible without the included element - the null set - following the exclusion (repression) of something- the empirical subject.

"[T]here is no such thing as a truth which

is not 'mathematized,' that is, written, that
is, which is not based, qua Truth, solely
upon axioms. Which is to say that there is
truth but of that which has no meaning, that
is, of that concerning which there are no
other consequences to be drawn but within
[the register] of the mathematical deduction." Fink, 121.
3

The majority of my interpretation comes from

Badiou's L'etre et L'evenement [Being and the Event]
(Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1988). The present volume
contains two articles in translation from this volume.
Also see "On a Finally Objectless Subject," trans.
Bruce Fink, Who Comes After the Subject, Connor,
Cadeva, and Nancy, eds. (New York: Routledge,

Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (Atlantic

Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1969) 117.

Hegel, 118.

Hegel, 120.

See Slavoj Zizek, Tarrying With the Negative

(Durham: Duke UP, 1993) 39.

10

Hegel, 136.

11

Hegel, 138.

12

Hegel, 141.

13

Hegel, 147.

14

Anxiety Seminar: November 14, 1962.

15

This seems to be n'Zek' s thesis as well. See "The

Wanton Identity" in For They Know Not What They
Do (London: Verso, 1991) 51-98.

16

Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans.

Tom Conley (Minneapolis: Minnesota, 1992) 130.

17

See Badiou, "Gilles Deleuze: The Fold- Leibniz and

the Baroque,'' in Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy, Boundas and Olkowska, eds. (New York:
Routledge, 1993) 69.

1991) 24-32.
4

See Jacqueline Rose's translation of "Suture (Logic

of the Elements of the Signifier}" in Screen, 18. 4
(Winter 1977-8). Also see Joan Copjec, "The Subject
Defined by Suffrage," Lacanian lnk 7 (1993): 47-58.
We can thus see the primary distinction between the
use that Gilles Deleuze makes of the term "suture"
and the import that it has for psychoanalysis. For
the former, the repression of the object proceeds from
repetition:
" ... we cannot suppose that disguise may
be explained by repression. On the contrary it is because repetition is necessarily
disguised by virtue of the characteristic
displacement of its determinant principle,
that repression occurs in the form of a con-

69

THE LALANGUE OF PHALLO!: LAGAN VERSUS LAGAN

justin clemens
GHE VUOI?

Deficiency in judgment is just what is ordinarily called stupidity, and for

such a failing there is no remedy. An obtuse or narrow-minded person to
whom nothing is wanting save a proper degree of understanding and the
concepts appropriate thereto, may indeed be trained through study, even
to the extent of becoming learned ... it is not unusual to meet learned
men who in the application of their scientific know ledge betray that original want, which can never be made good.
- Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason

Towards the end of his most recently published book, Metastases of

Enjoyment, Slavoj Zizek helpfully includes what he calls a "self-interview,"
which (somewhat ironically) presents itself as a work of correction and clarification. One of the (non) questions that Zizek thereby puts to himself concerns
the relationship in his work between Lacanian doctrine and popular culture. c
To which he ansv,rers, "the idiot for whom I endeavor to formulate a theoretical CD
point as clearly as possible is ultimately myself."l Which is also going provide JJ
the justification for this article as well: the confused and mystified idiot at whom ''
it is directed is first of all myself. However, as will hopefully also become
apparent, idiocy or stupidity is to be rigorously distinguished from banality,
simplification, or facileness for a number of reasons, some in fact strictly to do
with Lacanian dogma, some to do with other, perhaps nameless factors.
When I originally envisaged this article, I thought that I would speak
about the notorious Lacanian mathemes and diagrams, but my itinerary was
immediately and inexplicably diverted - 1 at once found my exegesis split between two of Lacan's more famous papers, one which stands close to the beginning ofLacan' s career, "The mirror stage as formative of the function of the
I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience" (hereafter referred to as "The Mirror Stage"), the second near its end, "Encore." 2 If any number of major Lacanian
theorists have recently begun to emphasize Lacan's "final phase" over those
preceding, in the name of a new and very different account of the status of the
Real, my own trajectory in this article will be very different indeed: on the
contrary, I wish to argue that "The Mirror Stage" essay has, almost uncannily
(as they say). already predicted and destined the emergence of the famous "for-

s:

71

mulas of sexuation," supposedly only adumbrated much later. As already intimated, then, this
paper is going to array Lacan against himself by claiming to return Lac an to himself, by means of a
debased and distanced Antipodean echo of Miller's 1993-1994 Paris seminar "La can con tre Lac an."
Which hopefully explains- at least in part- the "colonic end" of my title, "Lacan versus Lacan,"
which I'd like to be understood in the sense of "Kramer versus Kramer," as a sort of ressentimental
Hollywood melodrama.
Finally, I will suggest various linkages that can be made between Lacan and classical rhetorical theory, in order to produce a matheme to which Lacan himself might not assent, but which
certainly follows him in his later program of preposterous quasi-mathematical formalization. Hence,
also, the "Paris End" of my title, which refers to Lacan' s notion of "la lalangue," the pre-significatory
jacassement that underpins all discourse and being, and which is linked to jouissance, the deathdrive, traumatic enjoyment, etc. etc. To reiterate: the ludicrous aspect of my strategy here is hopefully not merely the index of a subjective insufficiency, but rather derives from the inadequation
and idiocy of two different institutional discourses (that of psychoanalysis and of the university)
with respect to each other. Indeed, according to Elisabeth Roudinesco, Lacan begins to produce his
mathemes at the very moment that Lacanian psychoanalysis begins to be taught in the state-fueled
- and driven French university system: the mathemes thus function as the constitutively foreign" ali~
(( mentary particles" of psychoanalytic knowledge, and precisely insofar as they fail to conform to the
co standard exigencies of academic research and teaching. Further, they also necessarily fail (albeit in
2 a very different way) vis-a-vis psychoanalysis itself: the mathemes succeed only to the extent that
~ they are miserably deficient3 ...
"A TRICK DONE WITH MIRRORS ..."

Idiocy, once again, is not something that one might possibly avoid, but rather an empty slot
in the subjectivity-machine: Lacan himself constantly refers to "the ineffable, stupid existence" of
the barred subject, which remains always an imbecilic and therefore culpable bystander of its own
life. Naturally, however, the subject witnesses and participates in its own life very differently according to which sexual position it assumes, and for Lacan, how one comes to be sexed is a tragicomedy of failure. As Judith Butler puts it: "Lacan disputes the primacy given to ontology within
the terms of Western metaphysics and insists upon the subordination of the question 'What is /has
being?' to the prior question 'How is 'being' instituted and allocated through the signifying practices of the paternal economy?"' 4 If, as many recent commentators have pointed out, Lacan's characterizations of the interminable failures attendant upon sexuation change dramatically throughout his career, just as many critics are still hung up on the characterization of male and female as
ideal positions to which of course any particular instantiation must necessarily fail to measure up.
However, such a view, while not altogether incorrect, remains at the level of what Lacan called the
72

Imaginary, or mirror-stage, in his famous article of the same name: furthermore, as I shall argue, such a view is also predicated on what is quite an egregious misreading of the scope and status of the Imaginary.
For if it is true, as Liz Grosz puts it, that "The Mirror Stage" is Lacan's
"first, and most accessible, intervention into the 'reading' of Freud,''s it is also
precisely because of this essay's supposed ease and accessibility that few people
- including Grosz herself- can be bothered taking the time to actually read it.
For if there is not one commentator on the mirror-stage that does not recognize
the centrality of "misrecognition" in that essay, there are a number of only-toofamiliar errors that crop up again and again: for example, the common emphasis on the dyadic nature of the mirror-stage (as opposed to the triadic structure
of the Symbolic), or on its nature as a spatial and/ or temporal stage through or
across which one passes and which is thereby finally surpassed.
I wish to suggest that these accounts remain significantly insufficient
in that they conflate or confuse the various levels at which this misrecognition
occurs. I am now going to proceed to an account of the very precise ways
according to which I think the mirror-stage functions: I will list, somewhat
tendentiously, eight analytically distinct "orders of misrecognition" (this list is c
perhaps not itself exhaustive) which are nevertheless tied together in various s:
OJ
ways in practice - the psychotic, for instance, will get knotted according to J)
procedures that radically differ from those of the pervert or the neurotic. Be- ;;'
fore proceeding further, however, it is also important to stress the dimension of
genuine "identification" in the mirror-stage drama: the infant at this moment,
and as if for the first time, identifies itself as a delimitable being-in-the-world,
and ~us one object among others. Again, Lacan makes clear that he is playing
also on the ambiguity of the word "identification": the child identifies as and
identifies with. However, and this is a point to which I will return below, it is
also crucial here to emphasize the "active" and "performative" nature of this
identification, which is by no means the simple registration of a fact, but has
rather simultaneously the status of cutting and suturing. Thus, for La can, identification and aggression are born together, as an asymmetrical doublet - as
Catherine Clement puts it: "aggressiveness is constitutive of the subject."6 Finally, I wish to note here a common criticism that has often been directed against
the mirror-stage: that the very notion of "misrecognition" presumes that there
is already a subject that misrecognizes its own image, when this notion was
invoked principally to explain how the subject came to be formed in the first
place - thereby catching Lacan in a vicious circle. To give another, related ex73

ample of common critiques of the mirror-stage: it supposedly also presumes a distance between the
child and its image, although distance itself will only be produced as such after the mirror-stage.
However, these criticisms tend to miss what is precisely the point- "misrecognition" for Lacan
should rather be conceived as a paradoxical structural exigency that dissimulates itself as a recognition for the subject produced as an effect that masquerades as its own quasi-cause. More simply,
one could say that this is a structure that seems to contradict logic: for rather than the model preceding its image, the mirror-stage image precedes its putative model, that is, the body of the infant.
The "primordial dehiscence" of the subject is thus the "non-identical Siamese twin" of a fundamentally bifurcated temporality, and the mirror-stage thus ought to be read not only as the paradoxical
event which constitutes the subject, but as the essentially impossible "moment" at which space and
time themselves come into (non)being. It's a bit like scientists talking about the Big-Bang ...
THE EIGHT ORDERS OF MISRECOGNITION, OR: THE COMPASS OF DISORIENTATION

The first order of misrecognition is very simple, and is primarily a spatial one: the kiddy,
"caught up in the lure of spatial identification,"? sees its image "over-there" as if it were "over--.
here." The first order of misrecognition thus involves what one might call a "stationary transport,"
(::;
(( and a misrecognition of the fact that, as Sartre put it in a different context, "the ego is outside in the
!!! world, like the ego of another."
The second order of misrecognition is the child's mistaking its own fragmentation for a
unified self. Now throughout the essay Lacan is at pains to demonstrate what he calls "a real
prematurity of birth in man," in that the infant cannot at the moment of the mirror-stage stand up
by itself, or control itself in any consistent manner, but is rather held up by means of an artificial
prosthetic device.s Thus the supposedly single entity the child sees in the mirror is by no means
simple: it is, as several commentators note, already an aggregate and an artefactuality. The
misrecognition thus consists in the child overlooking the external, material supports of its image
and covertly mis-assigning the exterior nature of the support to the vitalism of a self-generating
interiority. The infant thus misrecognizes this image as a manifestation of an interior self-sufficiency, rather than the directorial effects of a domestic mise-en-scene, which require, to give only the
most minimal of determinations, a baby-walker, a stage, a reflecting surface. This confusion of
inside and outside is generated on t.~e basis of a misrecognition of part for whole. Which also
means, in Clement's words, that "the identity of the subject, then, is a kind of prosthesis. Something
added, something that did not exist at birth that helps you to stand up straight within yourself. It is
a carefully located form, the form of the totality of the body, which the child sees for the first time in
the mirror. "9
The third misrecognition follows from the above: the image is misrecognized as human,
despite the fact that it is rather an artifact and, in Jane Gallop's words, "a trick done with mirrors."
74

This misrecognition thus illicitly renders the inhuman human by giving a face
to a Thing.
The fourth order of misrecognition devolves from the fact that the image of unity that the mirror reflects for the child comes, for Lacan, from the
future: in Marcel Duchamp's words, "the apparition is the mold of the appearance." Or, to put it another way, the mirror-stage is the moment at which the
hommelette thinks that it is already Humpty-Dumpty and in control of its movements, and destiny. Furthermore, the image itself is nothing other than the
prefiguration or promise of the phallus or Name-of-the-Father that is linked, in
Lacanian terms, with the realm of language, the Symbolic, the unconscious, a
stage which "succeeds" that of the Imaginary. The child looking into the mirror is thus, quite literally for Lacan, looking into the future per speculum in
aenigmate, and the mirror-stage or Imaginary is itself governed by a strange
temporal structure, that of the already /not-yet. Hence the fourth order of
misrecognition: the futurity of the image is misrecognized in the time of the
now. As Grosz puts it: "It is during the identificatory blurring of self and other
that ... the penis becomes regarded as a 'detachable' organ ... [and thereby]
prefigures the function of the phallus. It produces the penis as an object of sig- c
nification, rather than a biological organ" (my emphasis).JO
Ill
If the fourth order of misrecognition involves the mistaking of a prom- ,...._
Jl
ise for an already accomplished fact or possible manifestation, the fifth order :;: ,
involves the misrecognition of the status of this promise. To be more precise:
the promise of the phallus that the mirror gives to the infant is in fact the promise of a promise, and not something that might ever receive actualization. For
Lacan, of course, the phallus itself does not technically exist and remains eternally elusive and out-of-reach. The phallus, in this particular order, names
nothing other than the effaced and necessary failure of a promise to ever coincide with itself. Thus, the fourth order misprision of futurity neatly flips over
into the fifth: not only does the child mistakenly think that the future is now,
but it also implicitly misrecognizes the future as something that can possibly
become a now.
If the promise is thus always a promise of a promise, then the kid also
mistakes what the promise seems to hold out: the child greets its apparition
with jubilation. But, as everyone knows, what is promised is not reconciliation
or harmony or any such cause for jubilation, but rather the phallus in its role as
castration: fear and trembling and a sickness unto death .... Indeed, Lacan's
lifelong suspicion of reformers and revolutionaries stems precisely from his

s:

75

analysis of the ideals that such reformers claim as their good: the desire to reform is always for
Lacan doubled by, and complicit with, a disavowed aggression and pleasure in the suffering of
others through a misrecognition of what precisely it is that the phallus promises. This is also a
peculiarly Nietzschean point: the second book of the Genealogy of Morals revolves around the fraught
relationships between memory, terror, and the promise. This is the sixth order of misprision: a
misrecognition that proceeds by inverting the image's significance and value.
Up until now, I have pretty much been treating the Imaginary within its own terms, or
rather, within the tem1s that Lacan himself sets up as crucial to the drama itself. But, as any number
of commentators have pointed out, and several of the orders canvassed above suggest, the mirrorstage- which supposedly predates the child's acquisition of language- is nevertheless only accessible within the terms of the Symbolic. Now this point, apparently rather banal in itself, has a
number of quite important and complex consequences. Lacan himself explicitly announces the
fictionality that governs the unfolding of the mirror-stage, the dramatic quality of the event.n Given
that, in the Symbolic, there are supposedly no oppositions or fixed points, this Symbolic characterization of the Imaginary can only hold if it is the Imaginary (which is held to think in dualisms and
according to the primacy of vision) is here covertly ventriloquizing the Symbolic. In other words,
- the Imaginary masquerading as the Symbolic comes to make the distinction between Imaginary
<::
([ and Symbolic as if this distinction was something that preceded it, and then effaces or conceals the
fil traces of its own processes. A.Ji.d if t."tis is the case, then the mirror-stage carmot simply be some:2 thing that is traversed and surpassed, but something that "persists," and further, something that
::l cannot simply precede the acquisition of the Symbolic. I have already alluded to this paradox in my
above delineation of the fourth, fifth and sixth stages, in which an apparition of the phallus to come
is in a very specific sense already present- the Symbolic itself is already /not-yet prefigured in the
Imaginary, but all this occurs from the point of view of the Symbolic itself or rather the Imaginarymasquerading-as-the-Symbolic-in-the-Symbolic. Thus the very notion of a "mirror-stage" is itself
already a misnomer, and this is the seventh misrecognition I wish to mark here, the flawed if necessary misrecognition of the mirror-stage as stage. This misrecognition is more complex than the six
preceding in that, though it is self-reflexively aware of its own status as fiction and misrecognition,
everything nevertheless necessarily proceeds as if it were not. The event that is the "mirror-stage"
therefore undoubtedly occurs, but cannot ever be satisfactorily grasped.
Which leads us to the eighth misrecognition, perhaps even more thoroughgoing and convoluted than the last: the mirror-stage is impossible, and does not exist. This misrecognition is at
odds with the seventh, which still presumes that, despite the impossibility of naming the event
without injustice, there subsists something unnameable to which the appellation "mirror-stage"
thereby unsatisfactorily refers. Rather, the eighth misrecognition is founded on a self-reflexive recognition of the preposterousness of asserting its existence: as simply as possible, Lacan can say
anything that he damn well pleases about the mirror-stage, precisely because his assertions in this
76

regard, as an apocryphal American psychiatrist is said to have remarked of

psychoanalysis in general, "are just not testicle."
I now want to link these two later forms of misrecognition with what
Lacan says in his famous 1973 seminar Encore, about the formulas of sexuation.
My account of these formulas derives primarily from the reading offered by
Joan Copjec in her essay, "Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason," but I have also
implicitly drawn upon the accounts of theorists such as Charles Shephardson,
Alice Jardine and Catherine Millot.J2
3x<l>x

3x<i>x

Vx <l>x

Vx<l>x

I will deal with the male side of the table first. "There is at least one x
not submitted to the phallic function/ All x's are submitted to the phallic function" (3 x <l> x/ V x <l> x ). Man is, therefore, complete: paradoxically, given that
the limit that founds his consistency is elsewhere. This "x" is, of course, no one
other than the primal father of Totem and Taboo, who, in the berserk Freudian
c
anthropology, oversees his sons that are the primal horde, restricting their ac- S:::
cess to the women of the tribe. The brothers get together, kill this "master of CIJ
enjoyment," and then belatedly realize that daddy is stronger dead than he ~
was when alive. Furthermore, it is necessary to emphasize the complexities of :;:,
this murder. In order for the brothers to re-enter the system they are already
part of, it is not only a question of killing the father but, paradoxically, of simultaneously excluding themselves from the (Symbolic) system by way of the very
same gesture that permits their inclusion. Now this anthropological fantasy
underwrites the male side of the table in two ways: 1) it is just that, a fantasy; 2)
it is not a fantasy in the sense of wishful thinking or of an absurd and offensive
content, but rather an empty and fractured frame that is organized according
to eminently logical exigencies, and devolves from logic running up against its
own limits (I will come back to this question of logic below). As Copjec puts it,
"The initial cause cannot be tolerated by, or disappears from, the mechanical
field that it founds" (38). In other words, one can certainly make claims about
what constitutes man, who unquestionably exists, but "his ex-sistence, or being, remains inaccessible nevertheless, since it escapes the conceptual or Symbolic field in which his existence takes shape" (40). In more strictly psychoanalytic terms, the male side is, in Copjec's words, "an illusion fomented by a
prohibition" (41), that is, castration. Again, the paradoxical nature of this prohi77

"'(::!""'

0:
co
~

::J

78

bition must be stressed: castration is not simply the fear of losing an organ (the phallus), because
Lacanian doctrine hinges precisely on the impossibility of ever really "having" this organ. Rather,
the threat of castration functions precisely because it makes no sense - the terror which such an
injunction inspires is not the terror of a possible loss, but the terror that devolves from the tautological incoherence of its demand. "You could never have had the phallus, therefore you can lose it."
According to Lacan, since man possesses the phallus only in the mode of dispossession, castrationanxiety is delusory, and furthermore, a self-reflexive delusion: those sexed male in some sense already know this. However, it is precisely because the fear is redundant that it works: and this is why
recent rereadings of Lacan through Kant often invoke the Kantian dynamic sublime- whereby one
is terrified from a position of absolute safety. The links between the male side of the table and what
I called the seventh order of misrecognition are thus clear: man exists, but his being remains inaccessible. Furthermore, this argument emphasizes why the phallus - as a famous piece of graffiti at
a major Melbourne train station neatly puts it- must always be considered as "a pleonastic neoplasm."
With regards to the female side of the table, we are confronted, as Copjec puts it, not by a
contradictory opposition, but rather by contraries. "There is not one x that is not submitted to the
phallic function/Not-allx is submitted to the phallic function" (3 x "Ci>x/ 9 x <I> x). If contradiction
entails a mutual exclusivity at the moment that it divides the entire field, contraries, though still
mutually exclusive, nevertheless leave open the possibility of a third option that escapes the determination of both- it is thus a question of extremes rather than reciprocal exclusion. "The negation,
which bears this time only on the predicate, does not exhaust all the possibilities, but leaves behind
something on which it does not pronounce. For this reason both statements may simultaneously be
false" (Copjec, 30). Woman, for Lacan, does not exist, and according to Copjec this must be read as
a Kantian indefinite judgment, that is, as "an affirmation of a negative predicate." To extend this
chain of reasoning, "this means that everything can be and is said about her, but that none of it is
subject to 'reality testing' -none of what is said amounts to a confirmation or denial of her existence,
which thereby eludes every Symbolic articulation" (35). Thus - and this is a point echoed by any
number of recent accounts - woman functions as the failure of the limit that is castration in the
Symbolic economy, and can therefore appear within the Big Other only as the constitutively inconsistent 'not-all' formulated by Lacan. Hence also woman's "impossibility" and non-existence, but
also her freedom- she "escapes" the law precisely by inhabiting it absolutely.
What must be emphasized about these final two misrecognitions is their paradoxical imbrication: while the first six work "together" as it were, the final two are in fact at once mutually
exclusive and yet simultaneously "ghosted" by their other: one fails in either the male way or the
female way, but never both at once. They are, thus, not positive misrecognitions in any straightforward sense, but can rather only materialize in a "negative presentation" (as Kant says of the sublime), as the specific mode of failure of the first six. In Copjec's words, again, "The sexual relation
fails for two reasons: it is impossible and it is prohibited. Put these two failures together, you will

never come up with a whole" (41). In other words, there are not exactly eight
misrecognitions, but rather seven plus one which, in Lacanian arithmetic, equals
not eight, but six plus one minus one (7+1 6+1-1).
CATACHRESIS, METALEPS1S, CATALEPSY

I outlined above eight very specific and analytically distinct ways in

which misrecognition functions for Lacan in and around the mirror-stage essay. When I was discussing this paper with a few other people, it was suggested to me that these orders of misrecognition might be conceived of according to the terms of classical rhetorical analysis or tropology, and thus as a sequence of rhetorical tropes.l3 Such a procedure is, as will quickly become apparent, at once absolutely in accord with Lacan's own procedures (eg. his development of metaphor and metonymy) and wildly divergent. So if, as Samuel
Weber puts it, "Lacan's 'return to Freud' ... draws attention to itself, not so
much as a faithful rendering of a self-identical original, but as a tum of phrase
or trope,"14 let's return to Lacan by returning to Lacan. Allow me to list the
orders again, and provide a quick explanation of the linkages I am going to
effect amongst them.
1. The spatial "stationary transport" effected by the first order, of the over there/

5:

Ill
II
t;'

over here, is an perfect example of metaphor.

2. The prosthetic supplementation of the second-order misrecognition involves
mistaking a part for a whole: this is precisely the definition of the trope of
synechdoche.
3. The third order, which involves the personification of a radically inhuman
image as one's own corresponds to prosopopoeia, perhaps more popularly
known as anthropomorphization, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as "a rhetorical figure by which an inanimate or abstract thing is represented as a person, or with personal characteristics."
4. The fourth-order misrecognition, which consists of the making-now of the
phallus yet-to-come and is thus an anticipation of the future, corresponds to
the trope of prolepsis.

79

5. The fifth-order misrecognition was a misrecognition of the status of this future, and of the fact
that the promise that the phallus holds out was a promise of a promise. This redoubling links the
fifth order with the trope of metalepsis or transumption which Quintilian characterizes as providing "a transition from one trope to another ... It is the nature of metalepsis to form a kind of
intermediate step between the term transferred and the thing to which it is transferred, having no
meaning in itself, but merely providing a transition. "1s (He goes on to remark that "it is by no
means to be commended( ... ) I can see no use in it except ... in comedy").16 Or, in Harold Bloom's
words: "we can define metalepsis as the trope of a trope, the metonymic substitution of a word
for a word already figurative." 17 Promise of a promise, a trope of a trope ....
6. The sixth-order misrecognition proceeded by mistakenly inverting the significance and value of
the phallic apparition- what else is this but the trope of antithesis, defined by the OED as a "direct
or striking opposition of character or functions." Or, as the dictionary has J. Smith reporting it in
1657: "Antithesis is sometimes a figure, whereby one letter is put for another ... in order to make
the word or phrase more melodious."

..-... 7. The seventh misrecognition, which resided in the necessarily flawed characterization of the mir<::
((
ror-stage as a distance to be traversed, or a moment to be passed through, a stage on which one is
seen and begins to see, corresponds to the trope of catachresis or misnaming. I have already argued above that the seventh and eighth orders of misrecognition are qualititatively different from
the preceding six, though they can only work by dissimulating themselves as if they worked in
the same way. As we have already seen vis-a-vis the male side of the table, though "man certainly
exists, his being remains inaccessible." In other words, it is precisely a question of words: "existence is not a predicate," and any predications or propositions that one might adduce with respect
to man necessarily fall short of the mark. It is thus possible to rewrite this side of the table in
rhetorical terms: as a deictical failure that, while recognizing its own status as a necessary failure,
nevertheless sustains itself on the paradoxical presumption that the unnameable referent 1) exists
somewhere, but elsewhere (i.e. the primal father); 2) is retroactively produced and uncontrollably
transformed in and by the very act of naming. The male failure is thus a catachretic one.
8. The eighth order presents the entire scene as if it, despite all the complexities and complications,
takes place despite its impossibility: this is thus an absolute irony - for as you rabbit on straightfaced about the limits of history and sexuality, what you are referring to has no claims to existence
whatsoever. Which is not, of course, to say that the event does not occur, but rather that everything transpires precisely because of its non-existence. Again, though irony is a self-reflexive trope,
all the commentators on irony agree that irony cannot function unless there is the possibility that
it can be taken "literally" or overlooked: hence, it also fails in two senses - if one recognizes the
80

irony, one is left with only the slick patina of a nothingness which masks a
nothingness, while if one does not, the failure itself fails to materialize as
failure. We can thus refigure the so-called female side of the table in the
terms of irony.
The rewriting of the mirror-stage and the formulas of sexuation in terms
of rhetorical tropes also enables the opening of a series of unexpected connections, and an appreciation of Lacan's distance from the common doxa of poststructuralism. First of all, whereas various post-structuralists have attempted
to contest the supposed primacy of logic (caricaturely characterized as the ultimately forlorn attempt to identify and ground Being) by recourse to the ruses
of an agonistic or playful rhetoric, Lacan inverts and complicates the relationship between the two. For Lacan, it is precisely rhetoric that attempts to ground
Being, whilst logic (qua the formulas of sexuation) is simply the modality of
rhetoric's inevitable failure in this regard.
Now, there are obviously a number of ways in which the orders of
misrecognition can be organized and reorganized, and the structure that I am
about to offer is by no means necessarily the simplest or most elegant. Let me c
reslot these eight tropes into four pairs, and offer some justification for doing ~
OJ
so (Harold Bloom slots his six tropes into three pairs, following the Lurianic ll
.......
Cabbalistic triadic sequence: contraction-catastrophe-restitution: unsurprisingly, .,::_
what his sequence cannot account for is sexual difference). I am going to call
each pair a phallomatrix, thereby efficiently combining the senses of phallus,
mother, generation, domination (dominatrix, phallomatrix), quantification
(speedometer, phallometer), and mathematical vector analysis.
1. Phallomatrix of Stationary Transport: metaphor I prolepsis: smooth
homogeneous time and space.
2. Phallomatrix of Supplementarih;: synechdoche I metalepsis: disjunctive, surplus time.
3. Phallomatrix of Uncanniness: prosopopeia/ antithesis: space/ time
oscillates uncontrollably into its uncanny other, in a sort of unhinged Hegelian sublation.
These three phallomatrices work at the level of history itself, and are
81

thus able to generate objects of predication and desire in an everyday sense: one can quite easily slot
historical evidence into the matrices, which regulate the transformations that occur at the intersection of the an-existent barred subject and the similarly lacking Big Other. However, the final "pair"
are rather a "dispair" (in the senses of not-pair, despair, disparity and disappearance) in that they
cross each other (being mutually exclusive and, indeed, qualitatively different) and thus cross out
the preceding six, on the basis of which they can nevertheless appear in the first place. They thus
"double-cross" the first six tropes, as aforementioned, as two different modalities of the same failure:
- the failure of rhetoric to coincide with itself or ground Being. As Copjec points out, they cannot
provide or produce objects that might become the subjects of predication: rather, they simultaneously open up and fracture the very field of history which determines their actualization as they
escape its spatio-temporalization. Despite, then, both subject and Other being empty sets or idiotic
zeros, it is paradoxically at their intersection that a transient and evanescent positivity erupts into
its own traumatic dissolution. Indeed, the intolerable suffering necessarily attendant upon sexuation
derives from the nailing of any subject to this particular cross.
But what is the point of rereading or rewriting Lacan in this way? Here are some rather
elliptical answers:
'::!

(! 1. It provides a way of reading Lacan against himself L"lat at once assents absolutely to all of his
LD

2
:,)

82

procedures and propositions and nevertheless demonstrates an irreducible primordial schism in

his own discourse. Hence the motivation for refiguring the orders of misrecognition as tropes:
compared to the consequent lush tropical profusion, Lacan's own later rewriting of the Symbolic
order in terms of metaphor and metonymy begins to look miserably impoverished, and on its
own terms. Indeed, in Ecrits Lacan at once explicitly unhinges and covertly confirms what is held
to be his own characteristic practice in a much under-cited passage: "Ellipsis and pleonasm,
hyperbaton or syllepsis, regression, repetition, apposition - these are the syntactical displacements; metaphor, catachresis, autonomasis, allegory, metonymy, and synechdoche- these are the
semantic condensations in which Freud teaches us to read the intentions ... out of which the
subject modulates his oneiric discourse." 1s However, despite Lacan's seeming contestation of his
own practice here, he still propounds or maintains a distinction between syntactics and semantics, which he elsewhere associates, respectively, with displacement and condensation - in other
words, syntax works metonymically, and semantics metaphorically. A very bizarre claim, then,
given that Lacan here identifies both metonymy and metaphor with semantic condensation, and
thereby ensnares himself in an vicious circuit of untenable nominations. Indeed, the mistake, if
that is what it is, is too marked not to be deliberate, and the most generous reading of this passage
is a reading that would see the passage as an example of the very oneiric discourse to which it
refers: there is no contradiction in the unconscious, and the truth must speak through error, that
is, by means of the impossible ruses of an ungrounded tropology. Further on this point: Lacan's

delineation of the three orders of the Real, Imaginary and Symbolic can now
be read, not as the primary matrices of subject-formation, but rather as his
own secondary narcissistic revisions of a less structured, more primordial,
more offensive tropology.
2. This rewriting enables the production of a Lacanian matheme that on the one
hand,evades the criticisms of Lacan offered by everyone from Deleuze and
Guattari to Judith Butler and, on the other, can conversely provide an account of the ways in which these readings tend to miss the mark. For example, Deleuze and Guattari (hereafter referred to by the acronym "DAG")
claim, against psychoanalysis that "The three errors concerning desire are
called lack, law, and signifier. It is one and the same error ... "19 and that
If desire produces, its product is real. If desire is productive, it can be
productive only in the real world and can produce only reality. Desire is the set of passive syntheses that engineer partial objects, flows,
and bodies, and that function as units of production. The real is the
end product, the result of the passive syntheses of desire as auto production of the unconscious. Desire does not lack anything; it does
not lack its object. It is, rather, the subject that is missing in desire, or
desire that lacks a fixed subject; there is no fixed subject unless there
is repression. Desire and its object are one and the same thing: the
machine, as a machine of a machine. Desire is a machine, and the
object of desire is another machine connected to it.2D

In other words, the Lacanian principle that "all desire goes from one lack to
another" derives, for DAG, from an illicit initial affirmation of the primacy of
the subject and its constitution through repression, rather than beginning
from desire itself. As such, psychoanalysis is not so much incorrect as it is
caught up in a normalizing misrecognition of the fact that desire is in fact
more primordial than the subject which, though it seems to give rise to it, is
just one secondary by-product of maChinic desire. However, it seems that
DAG is here simply a very poor reader of psychoanalysis: psychoanalysis
does not simply conceive of desire as lack, but rather simultaneously as both
lack and a productive positivity. As I have argued above, the tropes, prior to
any subjectivity whatsoever, produce both the subject and its objects as themselves simultaneously lacking and as bloated plenitudes; furthermore, the
subject itself is never thereby simply "fixed," as DAG claims, whether by
repression or otherwise. When Lacan talks then of desire as going from one
83

lack to another, he does not simply mean that desire is that of a subject that lacks an irretrievable
and phantasmatic object, but rather that the lacks between which a positive desire shuttles are
precisely subjects themselves. Not only, then, has DAG formulated as a reproach to Lacan an
argument gleaned from Lacan himself, but DAG thereby completely reduces the subtlety and
ambivalence of Lacan's position, in order to produce a crude and reductive formulation of its
own which is then confusedly offered as "preferable to psychoanalysis."
It is also possible to use the orders of misrecognition to renegotiate the fraught relationship
between Slavoj Zizek and Judith Butler, who for a number of years now have been engaged in a
peculiar exchange of "love-letters," whereby each criticizes the other's brilliant misunderstandings of Lacan.2 1 Once it is recognized that the dominant rhetorical figure that underwrites Butler's
work is in fact catachresis (the male failure), and that Zizek's characteristic mode is in fact irony
(the female failure), the dispute between the two reduces to this: they are both absolutely correct
about the other's supposed misreadings, but only to the extent that they (necessarily) miss the
fact that the other's implicit account of how Being is un/ grounded is at once infinitesimally close
and infinitely distant- irony and catachresis being eternally fated to miss the other on which they
depend. Hence also, the ambivalent fascination that I predict Zizek and Butler will continue to
exert upon one another ....
3. It provides a nifty way of circumventing the interminable differend between historical and ahistorical critiques as \veil as negotiating the tension between universal categories and particular
examples, without either lapsing into strictly psychological explanation on the one side or sociological reductions on the other. Since the phallomatrices are, rather, "predictive after the fact," all
they do is offer a set of transformations that represent the emergence of historical events and their
failure in a format that would be intolerable both to the individual subject thereby formalized, as
well as to the Big Other. The matrices thereby provide an account of the very specific, non-generalizable ways in which subjects attempt to plaster over their own necessary failures to achieve
identity, by means of a non-totalizing quasi-mathematical typographical formalization that thereby
"regulates" the fleeting subjectivity-effects that are produced at the null intersection of two empty
sets.

84

S. ZJ'Zek, Metastases of Enjoyment (London: Verso,

1994) 175.
2

See J. Lacan, Ecrits, trans. A. Sheridan (New York:

Norton, 1980) and J. Lacan, "God and the ]ouissance
of The Woman" and "A Love Letter" in Feminine
Sexuality: Jacques Lilcan and the Ecole Freudienne, ed.
Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (New York:
Norton, 1982) 137-161.
Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lilcan and Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925-1985, trans. J.
Mehlman (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990) 562-564.
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1989) 43.

E. Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction

(Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1990) 31.

C. Clement, The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lllcan,

trans. A Goldhammer (New York: Columbia UP,

1983) 95.
7
8

Ecrits, 4.
Ecrits, 1.

Clement, 91.

10

Grosz, 117.

11

My analysis in this section derives in no small part

from the accounts of the mirror stage given by
Samuel Weber in Return to Freud: jacques Lilcan's Dislocation of Psychoanalysis, trans. M. Levine (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991) and by Jane Gallop in
Reading La can (Ithaca: Cornell UP 1985).

12

See Joan Copjec, "Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason," and Charles Shepherdson, "The Role of Gender and the Imperative of Sex," both in Supposing
the Subject, ed. Joan Copjec (London: Verso, 1994),
Alice Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and
Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985) and Catherine
Mil!ot, Horsexe, trans. K. Hylton (New York:
Autonomedia, 1990).

13

I would like to thank, in particular, Jonathan Carter

for this suggestion; Liam Leonard and Bridget
Bainbridge ought also to be recognized here.

14

Weber,S.

15

Quintilian, VITI, vi. 37-38, 323.

16

Quintilian, VIII, vi. 37 and 39, 323.

17

H. Bloom, A Map of Misreading (Oxford: Oxford UP,

1980) 74.
18

Ecrits, 58.

19

G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism

and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley et.al. (New York:
Viking, 1977) 111.

20

De leuze and Guattari, 26.

21

See, for instance, Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter

(New York: Routledge, 1993) esp. chapter 7, orS!avoj
Zi'Zek, "Identity and Its Vicissitudes: Hegel's 'Logic
of Essence' as a
of Ideology," in The Making
of Political Identities, ed. _Ernest Laclau (London:
Verso, 1994) 71, n. 9, and Zi'Zek, Metastases of Enjoyment, 202-203.

s:
ro

II
,.-.

::.

'-'

85

THE FLIRTATIOUS REMARK

jacques-alain miller

The title announced for this conference, the title I had the weakness of accepting, is "Psychoanalysis and Language." It is an issue that can be approached
in many ways, and it is of essential concern in psychoanalysis in the spirit of
Freud and Lacan. You will understand this readily by remembering Lacan's
axiom: the unconscious is structured like a language.
Here, then, in little over an hour, how to begin to address this vast question? I could start from the point of view of the grammarian, the point of view
of the philosopher, the point of view of the linguist, be it either
transformationalist or structuralist. I could address it through the discourse of
the professor, as I'm doing today. I could approach it from the angle of the
materiality of the signifier which is registered by the microphones featuring in
this hall and by those little cassettes which tum and record what I say.
But I have decided to follow another detour, for which I will ask some
indulgence on your part, because this-detour is not from my cultural area, but
from yours. Thus, if I am wrong, you will be able to correct me or to provide c
me with the right data. It is something about which I have been thinking for
CD
the last three days.
J)
I would like to attend to the question of language from the starting point of '"
the flirtatious remark (piropo), which, I am told, is an accepted and practiced
activity in the streets of Caracas even today, although it seems that in Spain this
tradition is on the decline. This issue enables one to see the superior vitality of
Latin America as compared to her sister, her European parent.
I imagined the flirtatious remark to be a concrete, exemplary situation, to
understand in vivo the function of language. A concrete situation, and actually
quite an enigmatic one; because, what could the jauissance be that a man- since
in this case the speaker is always a man - what could the jouissance be that a
man finds in addressing an unknown woman, in directing a message to her, or
even a witticism or a short poem to honor her charms? The flirtatious remark,
so far as I understood it, presupposes that the speaker not aspire to retain that
woman; and if there is an erotic message there, an erotic connotation, there is at
the same time, singularly, a profound lack of interest which turns the flirtatious remark, when it reaches its excellence, into an aesthetic activity. In fact,
the flirtatious remark shows us the gap between saying and doing. The flirtatious remark seems, I dare say, exemplary of the function not only of language

s:

87

but also of the relation between the sexes, even if only because it shows from the outset the dissymmetry between them.
I owe a large portion of my information to a book, that I recommend you to read, translated
from German a few years ago: Piropos, by Werner Beinhauer, subtitled The Humourism in Spoken
Spanish, published in the Romanic-Hispanic Library.
So, the successful flirtatious remark is a witticism. What does its excellence consist in? Like all
witticisms it owes its excellence to a certain form of incongruity. A simple mannerism does not
suffice for a flirtatious remark to be successful. 'VVhat is necessary, for there to be a witticism, a joke,
is for the message not to be featured in the code in an already firm and recognized manner. The wit
is valid as such in so far as it implies a certain infraction of the code of decency. The message - that
message - is valid because of the fact that it differs from the code. But for there to be a wit, an
infraction of the code is not enough. It is also necessary- this is well known- that the other to whom
it is addressed should want to smile or laugh. Therefore, what separates a sheer vulgarity from the
most exquisite wit is the sanction of the Other to whom I address myself. Likewise, a flirtatious
remark is truly accomplished only when the other to whom it is addressed - in this case the unknown woman - sanctions it, either with her amiable smile, or with the sense of being offended it
.-.. produces in her.
<:::
(f
You see here, incarnated in the woman, in any woman, the Other, the great Other of whom I
Ill told you already the last ti..'Tie; the Big o+.her, in this case the place of the funda..rnental code of
::2: language. If the flirtatious remark seems, to me, to be an exemplary situation, it is because in there
::J the structural function of the Other - the Big Other - is sustained by the woman who represents,
since time immemorial, the Other sex; and you can write Other with a capital letter, in a very different sense from that in which one could say that the man is the other sex to her. In a way, both sexes
are, each one, the other's Other; but in a deeper sense it is the sex called feminine which is fundamentally Other. Its mystery has never ceased to keep men in its hold, even male psychoanalysts,
and Freud was effectively the first one to say that he had not deciphered that mystery, the mystery
of knowing what a woman wants. This is, I might say, a milestone in psychoanalysis.
Of particular interest in the flirtatious remark- at least in the forms which the German scholar
found in the book I mentioned to you - is the fact that it always designates that to which it refers but what does it refer to? - always designates it laterally. It does not carry a direct reference -to
what? - to the sexual relation. On the contrary, it points, always a bit laterally, at lower ranking,
secondary elements. For instance, there exist these forms to celebrate the beauty of the woman that
crosses the man's path. The expression that the author of the flirtatious remark uses might very well
be- jOle, tu madre! (Ole, your mother!). Clearly, the case here is to point at the issue, but only by
allusion. The allusion underscores even more the beauty, the radiance of the beauty that is being
celebrated. There exists an entire range ofpossibilities for this purpose. It is possible to celebrate the
father, the country, the region - I was fascinated by the lecture of this text.
88

This can be taken even further, up to one example which seemed especially significative to me. This particular flirtatious remark consists of saying
"i Viva la Virgen de la Esperanza mia!" (Hail the Virgin of the Hope of mine!).
Here we are, in fact, in the absolute indirect. Secretly in this witticism, an identification is made between the woman to whom one talks and the essence of
that hope qualified as "mine." Indeed, the motor of the flirtatious remark is the
hope: that that woman might ever be- but she will never be- his. It is only by
means of an abuse that a man can imagine a woman to be his. Men mvented
marriage in order to be able to imagine it.
The book of the German scholar is subtitled "Improvised Spontaneous Creations." They are indeed poetic spontaneous creations. Let us not hesitate in
applying the qualification of poetic for this humble and daily activity, for poetry is nothing but the operation of a certain modification of the daily code.
Sometimes this operation is not the reproduction of what exists in reality, but it
is, strictly speaking, a creation of sense. One has to be as far removed from
reality as a logico-positivist to imagine that the essential function of language
should be to describe reality in an exact manner. Only a very particular operation, and a very recent one too, has made it possible to innovate, at the level of c
:;:
language, instruments which one expects will be able to describe reality exCD
actly. But the language-object, as for instance Bertrand Russell calls it, the lan- ll
.-...
guage with which one can simply say "there is cheese in the store-room," is a l:l
completely special and artificial region in the sphere of language.
The most remarkable feature, perhaps, of the flirtatious remark and its indirect character, is that it does not vacillate in trifling with nonsense in its relation to signification; and that this nonsense, curiously, attracts significations
much wider and fresher than a pure and simple description could ever provide. This is a paradox for you to become familiar with, that nonsense is precisely the creator of signification. Take, for instance, the hyperbolic nonsense in
which the man who flirts does not stop at the comparison of the woman's breasts
with lemons, two lemons, but says, according to the compilation by the scholar
Beinhauer, "tiene usted mas limones que el camino de La Caleta" (you've got more
lemons than the road to the Bay). Now, this nonsense, this absurdity which
does not describe anything objective, is nevertheless especially evocative and
capable of creating significations well beyond the accepted meanings. Thus
there is, in the flirtatious remark -like in all witticisms- a play that on the one
hand implies the treasure (this is a Lacanian term), the treasure of the ideas and
expressions accepted in language, and on the other hand, the infraction which
89

the subject commits regarding the Other, the Big Other of language, while requiring, at the same
time, the Other's backing. The scholar- who is no Lacanian -points it out: no flirter creates out of
nothing; the central element of his art consists in the graphic and timely manipulation of a rich resource of
poetic themes which are public domain. The expression "public domain" reveals precisely the values of
the Big Other in Lacan's sense. This Big Other is also the Other of the Law; the Other, one might say,
who represents decency - in so far as decency consists of prohibitions and inhibitions. This is also
what Freud tried to indicate by the name of superego, which must be placed fundamentally at the
level of language; and if there is an ontogenetic, a philogenetic inheritance in the superego, it is in
the first place the inheritance of language. The flirter, that unhappy man who always sees, passing
in front of him, the unknown woman whom he tries to retain for an instant - the time necessary for
her to admit that he exists; this flirter is the man who has not yet renounced his attempts to make
himself be heard by the Other, incarnated in the woman.
Obviously, some spirit is required, which Baltasar Gracian in his language calls acuteness. I
would advise, to those wishing to understand more profoundly the theory of Lacan, to read first the
short treatise by Freud called Jokes and their Relations to the Unconscious- a text forgotten by psychoanalysts until Lacan comments on it - and to collect, in the superb Spanish literary tradition, the
---. literature of conceptism, and in particular the excellent treatise by Gracian on acuteness.
c:::
There is an achievement, a joy pertaini..rtg to the wit, because one sees the linguistic order vacilcn late at once, and the nonsense is instantly discovered as capable of castir1g doubt upon even the
~ most established significations of the Law, which is not just a political law, though it can also be. We
:J have here a subversive power that goes beyond the establishing of a new order. As you should note,
in the wit, as in the lap sus, the subject is surpassed by his own creation. In Freud, the lapsus and the
wit have the same structure; often the response of the Other alone is what transforms a lapsus into
a wit. There is an entirely undefined area related, in the first place, to the addressing to and the
reception by the Other. In this sense, Lacan can say that in human communication the receptor
sends a message to whom will later emit it. He sends it because he decides fundamentally its sense.
Talking to the other implies in no way knowing what one says. The Other alone can show it to us,
and this is why we talk to each other; not just to communicate essential information, but to learn
from the Other who we are. And when the daily chit-chat is not enough, we go in search of a
psychoanalyst, who even by being silent gives you the hope of learning: who am I?
A thesis of Lacan, to which I hope you have become a bit accustomed, is that the signifier and
the signified are not parallel, not homologous, and not isomorphic. In the second place, it is wrong
to think that the signifier is there at the service of the signified so that one can say the things that one
has in mind just like one wants to say them. Lacan's thesis is that the signified is an effect of the
signifier, and that the effects of the signified are created by the permutations, the plays of the signifier.
The sense appears fundamentally from t..l-te substitution of a signifier by another. I will try to describe to you, by writing it on the blackboard, the small formula Lacan sometimes employs to say it:

rr

90

by which one must understand that the 52 plus(+) results from the substitution of a signifier 52 by a signifier 51, and that the (+) emerges above the bar, as
what we call simply the signified or sense (s). If you read the small book by
Beinhauer, you will notice that -even without him being a Lacanian- he explains the same thing, because he approaches language from the right angle.
The emergence of a new sense effectively requires the apprehension of the right
opportunity, and the flirter is excellent in that: in his appropriation, given the
case- and one must understand case etymologically, casus as that which fallsof the results of either his lap sus or his wit.
What is language made of? When one follows etymology, language is made
only of witticisms. Language is an alluvial accumulation of wits. Open any
etymological dictionary and you will realize that the signified never stops gliding (glissement) in its relation with the signifier. Somebody who I think was for
a long time a professor at this University, and is one of its glories, and whom I c
find fascinating since the last three days I refer to Angel Rosenblat, whose s:
OJ
compilation in four volumes, which is called Good and Bad Words in the Spanish ::D
of Venezuela I found upon my arrival at Caracas- I must say that I found there a ::::
profound sentiment of language which I intend to communicate to you, despite my not being an etymologist. Language is by no means what some tried
to create as Esperanto. Esperanto is based upon the idea that language would
rest upon an univocal relation between the signifier and the signified. That is
why Esperanto is a language that nobody wants to speak. You can also see why
it is wrong to speak of an animal language. The fundamental difference between human and animal language is that the so-called animal language is
never equivocal, whereas that equivodty is constitutive as much of French as it
is of Spanish and every language in which a people condense the individual
experiences, one might say, in which they have been interested. It is a difficult
idea, but one I would like you to become familiar with, that all the words, all
the expressions, all the mannerisms of a language have emerged from a subjective experience. In Rosenblat' s works I have read with pleasure that he has also
this impression. There is a very beautiful article by him about the name of Venezuela, and even if it is a fiction -which I don't think it is- even if it is a fiction,
it is beautiful: in the origin of the name Venezuela- little Venice - lies the nos91

.-..

0:
I::S

m
~

92

talgia for the lost Europe. Also, who amongst you know the origin of the "vale" (yeah, all right),
which is the scansion of the appeal to the Other in the Spanish of Venezuela? In the four volumes by
Rosenblat one can see all these strata, all these allusions, the elements of a language which is truly
notable for its vitality. To a logico-positivist there are always too many words in language, but
language is made precisely and always of a plethora. In language there are always too many words,
and, singularly, there are, at the same time, never enough to say what one wants to say.
Rosenblat, for instance, distinguishes three vectors of linguistic creation in Venezuela: a first
one which he calls machismo, a second one which he calls play, and in between these two a third one,
gibberish. Thus, in a magnificent way, there emerges an extraordinary redundance, which to the
information theorist appears as a fundamental luxury and excess; but the jouissance of language lies
precisely in this excess. In 1950, Rosenblat says, there were about thirty expressions to name "disorder"; recently an extra forty have been found. I continue- I am fascinated, dazzled by this labyrinth
of language. French is somewhat inferior to Spanish in this aspect, though there is a French argot
which to some extent could be compared with Rosenblat's argument.
Now, what one inconveniently calls the code of language - inconveniently because there is no
univocal relation between signifier and signified -is the accumulation of formations of the signifier
in their function of creation of the signified. Communication specialists cannot elucidate this. Those
who can inform us are writers, poets, and also spontaneous poets - persons making flirtatious remarks as well as analysands, those carrying out their analyses when no one prevents them, in the
name of a pre-established theory, from giving free course to these signifying inventions which, I
would dare to say, are the only things capable of curing.
In a language, people try to catch their own jouissance. Is it possible to speak of the life of language? Philosophers usually stop at this point. It is not certain; there is, to be sure, transformation.
But one must not forget that the vehicle of language is, rather, death. Without language we could
not anticipate that which distinguishes us from animals and other living beings: the knowledge that
we are mortal. It is necessary to make an articulation between this desperate jouissance of language
and the knowledge that it permits us, that we are mortal. Evidently, there are things which are
common to animals and people; but language is not one of them. This marks the limits of psychology, and, intelligent as it may be, Skinner's rat does not have at its disposal seventy expressions to
name "disorder."
Fundamentally, the signifier leaves a trace in the Real and gives rise to the signified. The original aspect is the substitution of signifiers. One word instead of another is enough for sense to appear, and if one does not invent new words, then one should not expect to have new ideas. Lacan is
certainly a great creator of words, a great creator of signifiers. That may be the initial difficulty of his
language, but it is also what allows his discourse to persevere for more than thirty years without
having become banal, by resisting its integration in the Other of the pre-established ideas. Certainly, as one exposes it here, where one tries to comprehend it -like I do- one works at the same

time towards its progressive reabsorption in the Other of the pre-established

ideas. But this is the way of all things in the world.
The subject, the speaking subject, is not the owner and master of what he
says. No sooner than he speaks and imagines he is using language, that language is using him: he says more than he wants, and at the same time he says
something else. This is why metaphor and metonymy never cease in traversing each other throughout a discourse, and why, when we talk, we are carried
beyond ourselves. It is even quite offensive to take someone literally; one should
rather listen to him beyond what he says, for the sense lies always beyond.
When somebody making a flirtatious remark says "Oh mother!," the sense is
obviously somewhere else, though it plays a part. As soon as we want to say
something, and professors are persons who always want to say something,
then incidents occur; things never go right. Therefore it is better not to be too
serious a professor; when one tries to be too serious a professor, one ends up
provoking laughter. It is better to possess some humor, the humor of the signifier.
As soon as one speaks, one is in fact spoken by language. Freud's discovery of the unconscious is nothing but this. When the psychoanalyst invites the
subject to speak, the subject discovers himself spoken by language, as he has c
::;::
always been. It would be good to realize that the difference between man and
OJ
animal is that man is a speaking being. The reason why this should be good is :n
that one would then avoid the extrapolation of results obtained in animal psy- 'il
chology onto human individuality. Perhaps one would also avoid thinking
that one is scientific only when one extracts from man results comparable to
those obtained from animals. Naturally, there are functions that can be compared. But when one avoids these differences, it is because one thinks that language is just a characteristic among others, a secondary characteristic; while
psychoanalysis' discovery is that language transforms the human individual
even bodily, down to the deepest stratum of his being; it transforms his necessities, it transforms his affects. Obviously, one can also transform animals
through language; all laboratory animals are transformed in this way, they are
crazy, just like domestic animals are also somewhat neurotic, because they are
immersed in our bath of language a thesis which, I think, not even Konrad
Lorenz would deny; he readily admits that this is the fundamental difference
between domestic and wild animals. Domestication occurs through language.
We are domesticated from the outset; this is why we are so good at obeying
throughout our lives and we occupy the roles which we are expected to fit.
This is why we can spend hours either speaking to others or listening to others
93

speak. Thus it would be well to realize that man is a speaking being.

We have to take another small step and realize that man is also a spoken being; this is why
Lacan invented this signifier that maybe will pass on to French language. I will write it on the
blackboard: "parletre," the speaking-being; but is not as nice as in French. Then, the speaking-being
always says something different than what he wants to say, and at the same time he requires being
understood beyond what he says. This is called interpretation. It consists in hearing, understanding
the subject not about what he imagines he says, for instance, rationally, but about the desire that
flows through the signifier he emits.
Finally, the tragic aspect of the flirtatious remark is that, in its extreme form, it can be reduced to
an interpellation of the Other, to a simple vocative. It is the attempt, profoundly desperate, to establish contact with the object of desire, this unknown and therefore absolute woman. The limit, minimal flirtatious remark, which one is it? It might be simply "Girl!" or "ole!" It could not be poorer;
yet it remains poetic in its situation. In this compilation I found one even more reduced; it is touching, because it is a way to substitute the lack that separates the subject from the Other, yet at the
same time this thrills him. It is about a young man from Seville who every time looks at a different
woman passing by; because she is unknown to him, it can be said that she is always the same one.
,-.. He sees her passing by and he exclaims in a tone - according to the book - between soft and pro~::~
found: "Aye!" Despite its brevity, one can feel that life's most profound significations are mobilized.
m At once, we find here Camus' absurdity, RacL"'1e's tragedy and existentialist despair. Everything is
::2: there, in that signifier which is simply a sigh, a sigh very hard for a Frenchman to utter because it is
:J an onomatopoeia based upon the phonematic matrix of Spanish. A translated onomatopoeia would
be very different; in French one would say something like "oh la Ia!" This shows that language
actually elaborates even the particular sounds we are capable of uttering. It has been proved, in a
way that satisfies psychologists, that the vocal capabilities of very young children are very extensive, but a few months later these assume the style of a particular language. Incidentally, this shows
that a human being's capture by language starts earlier than we usually imagine.
Freud's initial discovery, which left an indelible imprint, consisted in the integration, to science,
of language and all the negative phenomena of sense: lapsus, mistakes, displacements of attention.
Freud did not believe that to reason about language it would be necessary to take a lecturing academic as model. He thought that the most significant moments for the subject were precisely those
moments when his discourse could faint, dissolve, fall; where there could be an error, a fault, something forgotten; he re-established the positivity of these negatives.
I like positivists very much. I would even say that I read them a lot; and I take them very
seriously when they are serious, but I don't when they are not, that is, when they imagine they are
teaching us the essence of language. Thus I consider Chomsky just moderately serious, even though
transformational linguistics has ended up covering the planet. The difference between Chomsky's
and Jakobson's linguistics is that Jakobson was interested in poets. I am convinced that he would

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even be interested in flirtatious remarks. Chomsky is an idealist philosopher

who repeats Descartes in a very amusing way. This year, he came to Paris to
play his game with us; and with all due respect for his discovery, it was quite
amusing from that point of view. In reality, Chomsky does not conceal his game:
he introduces the ideal locutor-auditor as the basis of his linguistics. The ideal
locutor-auditor, that is somebody who is pure fiction, who belongs to a perfectly homogeneous linguistic community, and who knows his language without qny vacillation whatsoever. One should see to what extent this idea of a
complete knowledge of language is a fiction. I am persuaded that there are
many people here who speak Venezuela's Spanish very well, without having
read Rosenblat's works with due attention. But Chomsky's locutor is never
distracted, he never has displacements of attention, I am quoting here exactly
his book Aspects of the Theory of Syntaxis. In fact, everything is made clear through
employing a single term: locutor-auditor. On the contrary, the value of the flirtatious remark is to show us that language attains its excellence with the separation of locutor and auditor. In Chomsky's model, the one who talks is the
same as the one who listens. Doubtless, this makes possible a linguistics applied to a computer; but this is not the linguistics of a language of a man talking to a woman. It is certainly clear that Chomsky's Other, the ideal Other to
whom both man and woman try to approach, is the computer. That means that
Chomsky's linguistics, however scientific, exclude the relation between the
sexes. The analytic operation, on the contrary, consists in reintroducing it at the
center. Indeed, what goes by the name of transference in the analytic experience is a sort of flirtatious remark the analysand addresses to the analyst. And
if it is necessary for this love to remain suspended, this is only so that this love
might return to the light of the day- that love discourse which human beings
never cease to address to the Other from their arrival into the world. In fact,
Chomsky's ideal locutor-auditor is what Lac an calls elsewhere the subject-supposed-to-know (sujet-suppose-savoir); the subject supposed to completely know
the language, the subject supposed always to know what he says. This person~
age, unique, invariable, impeccable, of whom one may dream, does not exist.
Then, there would be progress in the scientific consideration of language if
one would depart from a point which Lacan formulates very simply, and which
is a kind of primary truth- it takes time to say it but it is a primary truth- that
the essence of communication is the misunderstanding. The mistake made by
a number of sciences is to imagine that the essence of communication is that
which is well understood. It has become a tradition in the logical consideration

:;:,

of language, which is very different from the logic of mathematics, to imagine that the function of
language is to grasp a reference in .an exact manner. The logic of mathematics is a very interesting
science, very respectable, which Lacan tries to apply to the structure of the terms of the analytic
experience. But theoreticians of logic, or at least some of them, go well beyond the limits of their
discipline and apply it to the general consideration of language. Last year we had in Paris the visit
of Mr. Quine, who is the most important contemporaneous American philosopher, even though
Chomsky is catching up with him. Then Quine, who has made excellent expositions of propositional logic and quantification logic - I love to read what he writes in these fields - imagined a
projection of this to describe the genesis of language in the child, who would miraculously follow
his treatise of logic. Thus, just as one might admire his treatise of logic when the purpose is to teach
it to students, it seems to me a phantasmagoria to imagine that the real development of language in
the child would follow the titles of the chapters and the paragraphs of his propositional logic. I
must say that this is a projection, an illusion, of which Piaget gave, in his way, the first example.
While this logic is a very elaborate and recent cultural product, one needs to make an absolutely
non-scientific effort to believe one would find its origin in the poor child who cannot defend himself.
.--.
Concerning reference, the whole problem of language is that it can never designate it; as soon as
t::
one wants to designate a reference, one remains captured between metaphor and metonymy; the
references sP.ift. Quine has criticized very well what would supposedly be the ultimate level of
indication: one points at something and says "that." But this is already too ambiguous; if I say
"that," what am I indicating? the table? its color? the person sitting on it? the paper? Even in the
indication it is very difficult to know the reference, and in the use of language the reference vanishes no less. Strictly speaking, there is not an adequate word to say something, and one always
says a word in relation to other signifiers. Therefore, the minimal matrix of language, as Lacan
describes it, is first a signifier, then another. The minimum amount of signifiers is two, 51 and 52; in
modem mathematical theory this is called an ordinate pair. Amusingly, Quine also knows this in
his good moments; and somewhere he says very clearly that when one tries to define something,
one can only define it through something else. He does not realize that he is evoking the essential
displacement of the signifier, but he says it very well: the general answer to the question "what is A" is
always that "it is B." This is a kind of a witticism by the logic, which might be signed by Lacan. The
language-object is an illusion. There is no production of language, strictly speaking, without the
effect of subject being already there. In the same way, Lacan says there is no metalanguage. Certainly,
there are logical metalanguages, etc. But in the end, there is something which cannot be surpassed
even when one creates formal languages, and that is the so-called vulgar language, which is always
necessary to introduce even the most sophisticated formal signifiers. There is an unsurpassable
limit there, and I found this in a quotation by Emile Borel, a great French mathematician of the tumof-the-century, who wrote a book about the theory of functions which made science in its time. He

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said: the pretended entirely logical systems always rest upon the postulate of the existence of vulgar language. That language, common to millions of persons who use it to
more or less understand each other- you can see that Borel was not far from knowing that misunderstanding is the essence of communication - that common language is a given fact that would imply a great number of loopholes if it had to be created
ex-nihilo. I think this is an important quotation, corning from, precisely, a great
mathematician.
VI liked the idea and I dared to talk to you about the flirtatious remark, it
is because that situation seemed to me exemplary of the separation between
the speaking subject and the Other- the Other who is there fundamentally out
of reach, lost. The Other emphasizes the separation of the sexes which no sexual
relation can ever bridge; and that language, in its function of poetic or spontaneous creation, occupies the very place where this separation emerges. Hence
Lacan formulated a proposition that may appear difficult to you, but of which
the flirtatious remark offers an image. Lacan formulates that there is no sexual
relation - I hope the translator has found a word other than "relationship" for
"rapport." Indeed, there are as many sexual relations as one could think of; but
there is not a fixed and invariable relation, a proportion between the sexes, C
contrarily to what can be observed in animals at the instinctual level, when ~
they have not been driven too crazy. There is no sexual relation, no sexual pro- _E
portion at the level of the signifier. In the latest issue of the magazine Ornicar? :;:,
(which has not yet been published but I hope to find after my return to France)
I gave, as an example of sexual relation, the habits of crabs. The male possesses
an enormous claw, larger than the entire rest of its body, behind which it can
hide. It moves this claw in a particular manner (which differs with each species
of crab). Darwin developed a great interest in this phenomenon; he thought
that the female crabs would race towards the male with the largest claw. But he
eventually discovered that the female crab identified the male of its species
through the type of sign it made with its claw. In other terms, there is an invariable, sernaphoric sexual relation there. One may seek to find a sexual relation
of this type in humans; the attempts are useless. There are many discourses
attempting to order what emerges precisely as the fundamental disorder of
human creation. Men have been busy with this since time immemorial. For
instance, Dionysus of Halicamasus said men always attempted to restore order to
that by which children come to this world. But while in animals this issue is always
in harmony, we always need more or less elaborate creations in order to mimic
the sexual relation which does not exist. We need, in particular, churches, which
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occupy that place, the place of the lack. And if the church is so powerful in resisting the changes of
the modem world, it is perhaps because it knows how to be docile to the structure, it knows the
structure and sometimes exploits it. If it succeeds in moderating sexual guilt at the same time as
provoking it, it is because the church has understood very well the mechanisms of the unconscious,
though it certainly uses those mechanisms for a very different purpose than psychoanalysis does.
Freud said that priests and doctors threaten psychoanalysis the most, because it attracts them.
The woman to whom the man making a flirtatious remark addresses himself is obviously a
fiction; she is all women in one, and that does not exist. "All men in one" might perhaps exist - at
least in psychoanalysis it sometimes appears as if it did; but all women in one, that is a fundamental
dream, existing only as a fiction. For a man making a flirtatious remark, that woman has the exact
value of his own castration; she has the emblematic value of a phallus which is fundamentally lost.
This is the news of psychoanalysis, and it cannot be said that it is good news; psychoanalysis is not
a Gospel. Psychoanalysis promises no harmony, no achievement, no success, and no fulfillment of
any lack, which is, on the contrary, structural. The flirtatious remark, despite its praise, is also an
aggression - occasionally a hyperbolic aggression. Its exuberant eloquence towards the woman is
the correlative of the destitution of her condition. This is why it can be uttered as an offence: there is
,_.,_ an undecided area between compliment and offence. I think of a flirtatious remark from Beinhauer' s
<::::
(:( compilation, in which a man calls the woman thief. We find there something which is obviously
OJ between injury and praise. We also find it in the flirtatious remarks which are based upon the disin~ tegration of the woman's body, where the praise of particular parts of her body acquires a symbolic
~ value which effectively presupposes the remark not to be addressed to the person, but to the fetish is tic value of parts of her body. In this sense we must admit that human sexuality- different than the
rat's when it is left alone- is fundamentally perverse.
I have promised not to speak for too long, in order to enable you to ask me questions. I stop
now, in the hope that in the twenty minutes we have left we can keep our conversation together.
X: My question is the following. You have chosen the flirtatious remark, like Freud chose the wit or the

lap sus, to point at a global characteristic of language, namely, that the signifier and the signified are not
necessarily equal, that they usually never are, and that the sense of language is the misunderstanding.
This is obviously the case with the flirtatious remark. But is it also the case with other discourses? yours,
for instance? I tend to share your point of view. You attack Chomsky. But there are different styles and
languages. There is a daily language, banal, familiar, of which the flirtatious remark is a part. There are
others more solemn. Were it not so, there would be few chances of believing the scientific reality of your
discourse. What is the difference between both of them?

J. A. Miller: There is indeed a problem here, because I am the Lacanian, that is, I defend the thesis
of the ambiguity and fundamental equivocity of language, while Dr. Lacan mobilizes and dem98

onstrates all rhetoric resources in his own discourse. On the contrary, I try
to approach as much as possible an ideal univocity, and I would say that
the univocity is my Other. But I would also say the separation of signifier
and signified is a general truth in so-called vulgar language, that there is
no possible univocity once one uses the maternal language. The need to
create artificial languages demonstrates this clearly, but nobody speaks these
languages; they only exist at the level of writing, in order to obtain univocity.
Obviously, when one writes "p" for predicate, "x" for variable, and
when one defines a certain number of rules, one obtains a so-called formal
language, which is at once univocal and polyvalent; but this is a place of
pure writing. This has drawn Dr. Lacan's attention, because he fills his
own discourse with writing. In a sense, Lacan's discourse is rhetoric and
plays with the displacements of the signifier, but at the same time it is filled
with formal markings, with formal points of reference of which one might
say they have only one sense, but in reality they have no sense at all. Written languages function only because they kill signification, they empty the
sense. I believe there is a very important difference between the opportunities writing offers language and the modality of the word, the languages
which can be spoken.

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Prof. J.M. Cadenas: I believe Professor Miller has made an extraordinary exposition, ''
of great poetic content, to convey to us what appears to be the Lacanian point of
view. My question is- since the logico-positivists, the Chomskians, the behaviorists to whom you alluded not very kindly, they are all absent; my question is the
following: if the universe of language is the universe of ambiguity, what place does
the scientist's activity occupy? Should the scientist not strive towards the establishment of an order of comprehension of that universe? The effort - I am not
Chomskian - the effort by Chomsky towards finding structures in the complexity
of language, is it not an attempt to explain something extremely complex? The
effort by Piaget to discover structures underlying thought, is it not an attempt to
introduce order in something very complex? The way Professor Miller proposes
would seem to lead to the impossibility of knowledge.

J.A. Miller: By no means do I believe that it would lead to the impossibility of

knowledge. In my third conference I shall speak of "savoir" and "science,"
which in English are marked as knowledge and science. These have different value to Lacan. Like Professor Cadenas, I think that the idea is to dis99

cover the structural laws of an order, but one should not place the order of one dimension in
another dimension. In the first place, science - at least at the level of physics, though not of
mathematics - is something very recent. The scientific certainty dates back to the XVII century
and rests upon an act of faith. The faith in the regularity of nature requires an extraordinary
conceptual elaboration. I mean that science rests upon the conviction that there is an Other, a
Big Other who does not deceive. Whereas in earlier centuries it seemed by no means impossible
that there would be an Other, who would be the Deceiver of the world. Thus we agree about the
scientific ambition, which was Freud's ambition, in contrast with that of the mystic-obscurantist schools. Freud always emphasized the relation between psychoanalysis and science, and
Lacan certainly differs from many other psychoanalysts in his constant elaboration of scientific
disciplines such as linguistics, logic, etc. But the problem lies in the validity of transporting
elaborations which are valid in one field, on to another field. Propositional logic is a powerful
instrument, and so is quantification logic. These are very elaborate products. But it is a nonscientific displacement to imagine that the child would follow the phases of those constructions
in the course of his development, and I consider that it has not been scientifically demonstrated.
I say this for those who extrapolate the behavior of the rat onto the behavior of man; and not
only do they extrapolate, but in the end they would like not to extrapolate. In their phantasms,
they would subject people to the same treatments to which they submit the rats. But for as long
as they may not do that, they keep making an extrapolation. Of course one ends up obtaining
interesting results, even with rats, precisely when they are driven to insanity, when they are
deranged enough; at that momentthe rats can become somewhat like man. When Skinner, in
his famous experiment, stimulates the rat's pleasure centers and leads it to discover that by
leaning its paw on a handle it can obtain one or another pleasure, what do we observe? That the
rat is so captured by that pleasure that it sacrifices even its vital interests. I mean that it becomes
so mad with pleasure that it ends up dying of pleasure. At that moment we are far from pleasure as a simple regulator of the living individual. What has been introduced in the rat is effectively a jouissance, a deadly jouissance that it can only repeat without end. I mean to say that
through this experiment, the rat has been humanized. That is, it has been driven to commit
suicide.
But I would not like to leave the impression - which you formulated so vigorously at the
end of your intervention- that I advocate the impossibility to know. On the contrary, Lacan's
own ambition, like Freud's, is the scientific study of realms hitherto abandoned to speculation
and phantasmagoria. Everything concerning the properly human relation between the sexes
has always been left to charlatanism, to the exploiters of beliefs. On the contrary, the psychoanalytic effort is to elaborate this dimension as scientifically as possible. Evidently, no one can
believe what is being said when one speaks of the relation between the sexes while having, as a
reference, animals. Effectively, a whole field is left open, into which only poets, writers and
100

persons making flirtatious remarks have ever ventured. The issue is for
science also to venture in this field. It is not the issue of sexology; nor is it of
the disciplines which apprehend sexuality at the level of genes; we will
never obtain a fact such as the ffirtatious remark from their approaches.
This is precisely what Lacan emphasizes when he says that there is no sexual
relation. That invariable relation exists at the level of the animal, the soma,
or the germ; but at the level of the signifier, the sexual relation does not
exist. And I believe we can affirm that this is a scientific truth.

X: I would like you to clarify what you said about the woman, that the women cannot
make one.

J. A. Miller: I opened the way to that difficult formula of Lacan's, which should
be approached with care, "the woman does not exist," from the starting
point of the ffirtatious remark. What does exist are women, a woman, another woman and yet another. Obviously this is difficult. Lacan explained
this once in Italy, I believe, and the newspapers' headlines said "Dr. Lacan
Says that Women Do Not Exist," which worried the Italians very much.
I will simply try to show you this issue from the basis of the woman
who is the object of a ffirtatious remark In herself she is also quite enigmatic, since she is every time a different woman, and yet the same one; in
a sense, she is all women in one.
Why did I say, too quickly perhaps, that in the case of man there exists
all men in one, but not in the case of woman? We would have to make a
long excursion into Freud's theory of sexuality, and of the difference between masculine and feminine sexuality - I cannot explain this now in detail. For both sexes there is only one signifier of reference, which is phallic.
This has always scandalized feminists, the idea that there would not be a
feminine signifier. But, as I mentioned to the group of psychoanalysts that
I met after my arrival, the feminists are very wrong if they believe that it is
of any advantage for men to possess the real correspondent of that signifier.
To Lacan, I believe, it is rather a nuisance which makes men, much more
than women, slaves of the superego and of duty. The woman has always
been a mystery to Freud, who said- I do not know if I should say it, but in
the end I am going to say it- that he had the impression that women do not
have the same superego than men, that women are much more free with
respect to the superego than men, that they do not have that limit which

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we observe in the conduct and the activity of men. In this sense, one should not imagine, as
feminists do, that Freud was anti-feminist. The woman was simply a mystery to him. The issue
is to explain, from this point, how is it possible that men are so much more likely to confine
themselves to specific social roles, while there is a dimension, in the woman, that most certainly
exceeds the limits of male routine. This is clear, for instance, in the difference between masculine and feminine jouissance, in the localization of the former and the boundlessness in the latter.
This is not to say that the woman would mention this; but men have always been attracted by
the unlimited character of feminine jouissance. Take, for instance, the myth of Tiresias, who
wanted to know what the jouissance of the woman was. He obtained, from Zeus, the opportunity of being transformed into a woman - Tiresias the transsexual. He came back saying that if
there were ten parts of jouissance in the world, nine would be the woman's and only one the
man's. The idea, which I can only mention here very quickly, is that if the man is One and the
woman is always the Other - this is what the flirtatious remark evokes in relation to Freud's
assertions concerning the lack of superego in the woman - she occupies, within the setting of
the flirtatious remark, the place of the superego's Other. This can be observed, for example, in
the name given to the woman in popular French, "la bourgeoise" -she is in charge of the purse.
The woman does not exist, but that does not stop men from dreaming of her. It is precisely
because she cannot be found at the level of the signifier, that her phantasm does not cease to be
fomented, her photograph does not cease to be multiplied, and the attempts to apprehend her
essence never cease- attempts concerning a being about whom the universal folly (which always contains a grain of truth) has always doubted it had any essence. On the one hand, this
could lead to her devaluation; but on the other, not to have an essence seems to me a relief,
which makes women much more interesting than men.
FIVE CONFERENCES ABOUT LACAN

Caracas, Venezuela, October 1979

translation from transcript: andres zlotsky

102

THE DESIRE OF FREUD IN HIS CORRESPONDENCE WITH FLIESS:

FROM KNOWLEDGE TO TRUTH

paul verhaeghe
Honor, power and the love of women: that is the classical Freudian
answer to the question "What does a man want?" Men differ in the way they
try to achieve this common goal, but as far as Freud is concerned, the path is
always through knowledge. The ambition of the young Freud is well known:
one has only to sample his pre-analytical writings to find some of the ambitious projects he hoped would bring him fame. He almost made it with the
coca business. Some of his projects are really premonitory for his later work:
he tried to develop a method for making visible the neuronal cell; at the same
time, he tried to find an answer to the riddle of sexual difference with eels.
Making visible the riddle of sex! In this respect, the Freud-Fliess correspondence
can be read as a report on this search for knowledge, resulting in a nearly complete psychology and nevertheless ending with a very deep split with psychology..
As a report, the correspondence can be read in two different ways. On
the one hand, we can read the letters looking for Freud as a classical scientist at
the end of the previous century. As a scientist, he formulated hypotheses, put
them to the test in his clinical practice, changed and reformulated them, and so
on. It is, for example, really interesting to read how Freud developed his ideas
on the relationship between real traumatic incidents and fantasmatic constructions. These ideas form, of course, the very kernel of the correspondence.

s:

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This first reading permits us to evaluate a classical growth of a classical knowledge. Besides this way of reading, there is another possibility.
Throughout his search for knowledge about the other- namely, his patients
Freud was confronted time and again with himself. That is, he discovered a
knowledge that concerned himself as a divided subject. The aspect of being
divided shows in the impossibility of this knowledge to reach a final signifier.
On the contrary, each acquisition of a new piece of knowledge refers one to yet
another piece: the Zuyderzee seems endless. Moreover, there is a definite difficulty in the verbalization of such, even to the point of impossibility. In this
respect, Freud used the word dunkel (dark) several times; at other times, he
recurred to Latin (e.g. mater nudam), or to mere allusions (e.g. concerning birth
control).
103

This second reading demonstrates how man, through the confrontation with self-knowledge, reaches a point beyond knowledge- that is, the point of truth. Why do we call it "truth"; why
does it differ from mere knowledge? One could answer that truth always concerns desire and
jouissance, but the same goes for the Freudian knowledge from the very beginning: just think of his
ideas about Lust (pleasure) and Wunsch (wish). The particular characteristic of truth is that it confronts us with the ultimate point where knowledge about desire and jouissance can no longer be put
into words. Knowledge itself always remains within the realm of the signifier, truth starts within
this realm but evokes a dimension beyond it. The ultimate dimension of desire and jouissance is the
driving part of it, which is not only beyond our self-knowledge, but eventually opposed to it. ln
spite of the impossibility of putting this part into signifiers, there are two characteristics that keep
on returning: they are as traumatic as they are sexual.
So, the Freud-Fliess correspondence contains, on the one hand, the development of a scientific body of knowledge, and, on the other hand, an ever increasing confrontation between Freud
and his truth as a divided subject. The knowable part develops itself along classical lines, while the
way in which Freud is confronted with the truth is completely new. It consists in a particular relationship that obliges a patient to produce signifiers in such a way that a confrontation with his truth
,..... becomes inevitable. In its rudimentary form, we find this relation exemplified with Freud and
t:
Fliess. Freud granted his partner the position of one who knows, and that is why he himself prom duced knowledge (that is, si011ifiers) for this Other who is "supposed to know." It is this specific
2 relationship between subject and Other that impels the patient to speak or write- that is, to produce
:J signifiers. Free association is only an implementation of this more fundamental precondition, and
is in this respect merely instrumental.
The important thing to stress now is the fact that during the correspondence, and for a very
long time afterwards, Freud focused exclusively on the knowable part. Even more so, knowledge
and the expansion of knowledge become for Freud the almost exclusive goal of the psychoanalytic
cure. It is only much later on that the typical relationship between the analyst and patient came into
focus.
So, with a paradoxical expression, we can state that the pre-analytical analysis arises from a
certain aspect of the Freud-Fliess letters. ln this respect, the analytic cure is a search for lost knowledge, lost because it has become unconscious; the aim of the treatment is the reinscription of this
unconscious knowledge into consciousness. The implicit expectation is that the therapeutical effects will follow almost automatically. The main obstacle is the patient himself who does not want
to know: there is a resistance at work against this knowledge, presumably the same that was originally responsible for the disappearance of knowledge. All technical innovations in this period are
meant to counter this resistance: the typical couch situation, the pressure on the head, free association, even the transference relationship. The task of the analyst seems strictly instrumental.
ln view of this therapeutical aim, Freud's main problem concerns the correctness of the

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knowledge gathered during the analysis. There is a twofold source of error.

On the one hand, we have the overzealous patient, producing material in abundance- Freud will coin this the "compulsion to associate"- but this material
could very well be of a fantasmatic nature- that is, not real. On the other hand,
we have the overzealous analyst, which is even worse, overwhelming his patient with abundant explanations that could very well be wrong and induce
the patient to the wrong knowledge. The technical term used by Freud for this
situation is of course suggestion.
Now, I think it is very important to understand that this problem is an
artifact of Freud's therapeutical aim during his pre-analytical period, that is:
the correct acquisition of the lost knowledge. If one changes this therapeutical
aim, the artifact will disappear. It is our thesis that Freud will keep the aim and
the problem in spite of the fact that he will elaborate a whole theory that surpasses these ideas. The core of this theory is about transference: the new therapeutic aim will be the point beyond castration.
As long as one sticks to the pre-analytical theory and practice, there is
always a problem with suggestion: either there is too much of it, or too little. In
the beginning of the treatment, there is usually too much of it, the patient ac- c
cepts everything from the analyst and reveals himself as an incarnation of the s::
Ill
perfect analytical patient. Glover has written a classical paper on this topic ll
with a very revealing title: "The Therapeutic Effect of Inexact Interpretations." ''
At the end of the treatment, there is usually too little of it. Indeed, as the point
of ultimate Freudian knowledge, the patient refuses to accept it from the analyst. Freud will coin this refusal in a gender specific way: castration anxiety for
the man, penis envy for the woman. This is the exact opposite of Glover's
paper, because it concerns the absence, even the refusal, of the therapeutic effect of an exact interpretation.
Now, there is something very specific about this point of Freudian despair. Freud wants to convince his patient with a knowledge about the nonknowable, what he calls the great riddle of sex. That is, he wants to impose
knowledge upon the very point where the confrontation with truth goes beyond knowledge, that is, beyond the signifier. In this respect, Freud reveals
himself as an inheritor of the Enlightenment, there where he believes that the
mere transmission of knowledge will induce change. The failure of this hopeful idea led him to his well-known therapeutical despair about the impossible
professions.
Nevertheless, in the Freud-Fliess correspondence there is already ample
105

evidence of the other factor at work beyond mere knowledge. The correspondence can be read as
one continuous demonstration of this factor, of the relationship between a subject and an Other
who is supposed to know, especially in matters of desire and jouissance. This relationship forms the
kernel of the analytic practice and determines this practice in a twofold way. First of all, the relationship must be made productive so that the patient produces signifiers; secondly, the relationship
itself must be worked on. The first relationship induces knowledge, the second concerns truth.
The productivity of the relationship consists in the fact that the patient ascribes to the analyst the position of one who knows, and that's why he himself produces knowledge- signifiers- for
this Other who is supposed to know. At this stage, analysis can be understood in terms of a master
discourse. Indeed, from the point of view of the patient, the analyst is a master, and that is why the
patient himself produces signifiers at the place of the Other, and thus produces knowledge:

rr

This first stage during an analysis results indeed in a considerable growth in knowledge.
That's why Lacan considered psychoanalysis to be an effective remedy against ignorance. An appropriate name for this first stage could be a Socratic discourse: the analyst functions as Platonic
midwife, enabling the patient to formulate a knowledge already there.
Inevitably- &.at is, structurally- the next step in this discourse is the production of the objet
petit a, beyond the knowledge that can be expressed in signifiers:

a
This second stage implies the limit of the master-discourse, which means that we are
faced with two possibilities: either there is a regression or a progression from it.
This regression brings us to the university discourse, where knowledge as such is staged as
the agent.

-t
II

The regression was the Freudian choice for a very long time, there where he hoped that
know ledge as such would be sufficient to bridge the gap between the subject and its object of desire.
The result is exactly the opposite of the expected one; namely, an ever increased division of the
106

subject: 52 a. In this light, it is perfectly understandable that Freud's last paper

was about a generalized splitting of the subject: Die Ichspaltung im
Abwehrvorgang.
The progression, on the other hand, brings us to the paradoxes of the
analytical discourse. There we find know ledge (i.e. the body of signifiers) at
the position of truth.

i
II
This is the body of signifiers, produced during the first stage of analysis. By the way, this first and necessary stage does not consist in analytic discourse, but makes it possible by producing this ever increasing knowledge.
With the analytic discourse, we find the confrontation with the object beyond
this signifiable knowledge that is the other side of the truth, the part that cannot be put into words, the part that causes desire. That is why we find objet C
petit a at the position of the agent in this discourse as a radical determinant of s;:
the subject at the place of the Other.
ro
The difference between these two possibilities- the regression and the .22
:;:,
progression- is very considerable. In the regressive solution, the analyst acts
as knowledge, in the progression he's merely a support of objet petit a. The first
solution is an attempt to keep the master discourse going on at a lower levet
the second one is radically different in the sense that the relationship as such between the one supposed to know and the one producing knowledge- ends
in an exact reversal. Indeed, the analytic discourse is a reversed master discourse. The choice for a psychoanalytic solution requires this reversal of positions, the working through of the transference relationship at the point where
the analyst is put into the position of the guarantor of the truth. The net and
always unpredictable result of this working through resides in the way a subject is able to tolerate the existence of the fundamental lack in the Symbolic
without a need either to fill it up, to disavow, or to reject it.
Now, back to the correspondence. The relationship between Freud
and Fliess is a perfect illustration of what we have called the first stage, the
production of knowledge up to the confrontation with the truth. The second
part, in which the relationship as such has to be worked through, enabling the
subject to take a stand against the fundamental lack without a guaranteeing
107

Big Other, is lacking completely. The paradox is that while Freud succeeds in formulating the importance of the Big Other there where he writes about the pre-historischen unvergefllichen Ander- the
"prehistoric, unforgettable Other," he does not succeed in taking the consequences of this knowledge for himself. Indeed, this is a brilliant illustration of the fact that knowledge and insight are not
enough in order to induce change.
This is what Lacan had in mind when he wrote about Freud's original sin in his eleventh
seminar. I think it is very important to look at the consequences, especially concerning the goal of
psychoanalysis and the statute of psychoanalytic knowledge. One should keep in mind the saying
about the sins of the father coming down on the shoulders of his sons.
It isn't very difficult to recognize the traces of it in post-Freudian analysis. Indeed, the
stress laid on the importance of insight and resistance are the necessary, although not too dangerous, outshoots of it. We find the same problem with the gross caricature of the post-Lacanian analyst as the incarnation of a very difficult and extremely important knowledge, shared only by a
small circle of insiders. Things become a bit more complicated and even dangerous there where
one is confronted with the hidden precondition of this process - namely, that knowledge can only
function as an agent of truth thanks to a guaranteeing instance, that is, thanks to a divine instance.
~ Once this is installed, the world becomes divided into believers and non-believers, apostates and
[I heretics, with a mission to convert the non-believers and, of course, to bum the heretics.
Ill
The two analysts who have focused on the gap between knowledge a..11.d truth beyond a
~ guaranteeing instance are, without any doubt, Sandor Ferenczi and Jacques Lacan.
Ferenczi was the first one to stress the importance of the person of the analyst himself for
the result of the analytic process, which led him to formulate the basic condition ever since: i.e. a
self-analysis. He very soon came to the conclusion that insight and knowledge through interpretation did not suffice. In his search for alternatives, he invented on his own nearly the complete
theoretic armory of our century, starting with the active technique (Gestalt!), the frustrating-forbidding one (abstinence), the permissive-accepting one (Rogers), up to the authentic therapist of the
sixties. His final point, although a failure, is a very intriguing one. Indeed, when one reads his
ideas on authenticity, it is not very difficult to see that this authentic position implies the acknowledgment of the fundamental lack on the part of the analyst. The hysterical style in which Ferenczi
staged this acknowledgment obliterated the more fundamental issue at stake.
The issue will receive its proper name with Lacan: the confrontation with that part of desire
and jouissance beyond the signifier is an ethical one. Ultimately, the analytical experience confronts
the subject with ethical choices which he has to make by himself- eventually, after that, the analysis
liberates him from the burden laid on him by the choices others have made in this respect. That is
why Lacan could say that "la psychanalyse est un remede contre !'ignorance; elle reste sans effet contre la
connerie." Psychoanalysis is a remedy against ignorance, but remains powerless against crookery.
108

ANTIGONE AND THE REAL:

TWO REFLECTIONS ON THE NOTION OF COHERENCE

andres zlotsky
INTRODUCTION

Nearly a century after Sophocles' Antigone was first performed in Athens in 411 BC, Aristotle laid down, in his Poetics, a number of features which
defined tragedy as the didactic genre par excellence. Although it would be pointless to speculate on the motives behind Aristotle's specific purport, it is safe to
assume that the political successes which Sophocles achieved through the popularity of Antigone played a role in shaping his norms. In this - and in more
issues to which I will return- Aristotle distanced himself from Plato. The latter's
thought might have been speculative; however, each of his fantasies was designed either to prove a point or to fulfill a role, in accordance with the norms
of what we know as the Symbolic. On the other hand, Aristotle's line of argument calls for retroactivity when logic fails and all justification for the tragic
events and their meaning dissolves, rendering powerless even the most noble C
of heroes. What Aristotle shows are the effects of the Real, for only the Real ~
allows one to reconstruct the peripeteia in which the roles of the hero and its fate ~
become reversed, in which all fruition of the hero's and spectator's assump- .:.,
tions come to naught.
The first issue which I will contend in this paper is that, through the
impact of the Real, Aristotle becomes the inaugurator of the modality of the
apres coup in its first systematic expression- therewith outlining the premises
of what we know today as theory- and that the operating mechanism supporting Aristotle's retroactive reading is that of identification.
Because of his act of retroactivity, and because of this act only, Aristotle
is able to illustrate the notions of verisimilitude and inevitability through kinship relationships. As Lacan notes, Aristotle's rule of thumb concerning the
purpose of tragedy is based on the ability to elicit catharsis: ol. i:A.eou xa\ tp6pou
neptti vooott -rftv -rwv -rmou-rwv naih1ptt-rwv x6:iJttpot '.!to arouse pity and fear in
order to purify from similar passions. 1 This means a treatment of emotion by
emotion with the aim of discharging it.
The problem, however, with the notion of catharsis is that, in focusing
on the affect as its object, the cathartic moment obscures the fact that all affect is
109

effect: effect of language and the narrative which it develops; affect of the audience, of the actors,
even of the playwright. As Aristotle well knew, family issues are familiar enough (in the sense of
proximity) to entice those concerned with it to assume the roles it involves. Not for nothing does
Aristotle dwell so explicitly in the particular instances at which family becomes tragedy:
When [...] the tragic event occurs within the sphere of natural affections- when, for instance, a brother kills or is on the point of killing his brother, or a son his father, or a mother
her son, or a son his mother, or something equally drastic is done- that is the kind of event
a poet must try for. 2
"Natural affections" or afflictions of fate? If we read Aristotle's exemplifications in the light
of the necessity of producing the catharsis, then his notion of inevitability is not so much related to
"what must happen of necessity" as it is to "what cannot be avoided"- a precise reference to the
nature of family membership. The confusion which later surrounds the notion of tragedy and fuses
the tragic with bad fortune- a confusion which survives very much intact today -has a much more
solid basis in the lack of choice than it does in the necessity of a particular event. Much more - and
much more obviously- than logical necessity, the lack of choice furnishes the spectator or actor with
~ something with which he or she will feel compelled to identify himself oi herself. Nobody, after all,
a:'-' chose his or her parents. To mistake this lack of choice for a logical inevitability is to tum tragedy
CD into a comedy. The central point here is: the fact that those participating in tragedy in any capacity
::2
::J suffer points at the emergence of the Real. The cathartic purification is an attempt to cope with the
wounds of the Real by means of a process of imaginarization.
The second issue which I will develop has to do with Sophocles' Antigone. Aristotle is uncomfortable with this play. Although Antigone possesses the qualities which characterize a tragic
hero, it is not very clear precisely how the catharsis functions in her case. Neither is it clear that the
peripeteia occurs without Antigone's active "participation." Indeed, Antigone's relationship with
her fate is unique: she actually shapes it. This is not to say that she enjoys the privilege of a coherent
fate! On the contrary, the logical gaps and blind spots introduced by the Real pervade throughout
the most intensely dramatic moments of the tragedy and, true to tradition, they pertain to the structure of her family- but, very much in contrast with the cathartic reversal in other plays, it is Antigone
herself who remains steadfastly incoherent in the motivation behind her actions. In her last lyric
exchanges with the Chorus 3 Antigone laments once again her fate. This time, her lamentations include an astonishing explanation of her reasons to bury Polynices:
[... ] for never, if I had been the mother of children, or if my husband had been mouldering
in death, would I have taken on this task in defiance of the citizens. To what law do I defer in
saying this? My husband being dead, I could have another, and child by another man if I
110

had lost a child; but, as my m9ther and father are hidden in the house
of Hades, no brother could ever be born again. Such was the law by
which I singled you out for honour[ ... ]4

At first sight, it would appear that Antigone's real purpose is to express her absolute devotion to Polynices, whom she has, in a sense, preferred
to a husband or child, in that she has forfeited the chance of marriage.s But this
is incompatible with the second last sentence of the passage, in which she indicates that she might not have buried even her brother if her parents had happened to be alive. As I see it, through Antigone the Real has the last word, and
the meaning of her motives is the support of the lack of choice which constitutes the structure of her family. And this is only one link in the string of the
unstrung in Antigone. Equally startling, even scandalous in its context, is the
reaction of the Chorus upon learoing of her death sentence:

Love invincible in battle. The Chorus experiences beauty. The effect of the
aesthetic experience is the temporary suspension of the Chorus' capability for
critical judgment. It can only sing about its love for Antigone, about the way
this love can lead to the transgression of every limit, because Antigone has
become the expression of desire rent visible (lpep6.;; tvapy111;). The Greek language possesses a term which appears several times throughout the tragedy
and signifies the utter confusion to which I pointed above: that term is ii-r11. As
Lacan points out, the expression is at once untranslatable and irreplaceable in
the articulation of the tragedy: untranslatable because all its renderings- doom,
lethal rashness, willed curse, rotting, blindness - far from conveying the concept in question, function as allusions to its original signification; irreplaceable
because it alone makes it possible to comprehend Antigone's position beyond
the blindness to which her brilliance gives rise. My contention is that iilltigone
stands for the effects of the Real, the appearance of the objet a. As such, not only
does she contextualize the incoherence of the characters in the play; she also
points out, through the ii-r11, the stage at which even Aristotle's theoretical
thought cannot but falter.
This paper is not an attemptto elaborate anew translation of Cft17; rather,
I shall be analyzing the term through some of the peculiar effects it induces in
the symbolic apprehension of the personages within the play as well as of those

S:
OJ

~
l:l

111

who write about it. In order to illustrate the issue, I shall employ some of the discourse formulae
which Lacan develops in his XVII seminar, L'envers de la psychanalyse.
FREUD, JAKOBSON, LACAN: THE DISCOURSE MODEL

In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego 7 Freud explains the processes of group formation through a double bond: a horizontal bond linking the members of the group on the basis of a
vertical bond between each member and the leader of that group. Freud studied the bond between
the members in terms of the mechanisms resulting from thir identification with each other vis-avis their relation with the leader. Whereas the leader appears to be radically individualized- insofar
as he imposes his aura and his ideas under the pretense of originality, and insofar as he is seen as the
example to be followed or shunned- the individuals the group following him consists of become an
undifferentiated mass; they acquire the attributes of a crowd; they accept/reject/ enact the Master's
commands/prohibitions. Another source of critical importance in Lacan's formulation of the discourse model are the writings of Roman Jakobson, in particular those concerning his communication theory. 8
.-.
Jakobson distinguishes six functions which represent different instances in the process of
t!
communication: the sender" of a message, its receiver," the nature of the contact" between them,
co the "code" through whic.~ the contents of the message are expressed, the "context" within which
2 the communication takes place, and finally the "message" itself. Jakobson intends these functions
:.::> to enable one to outline a more or less stable chart of the communication process as well as the
points at which it might falter.
Combining Freud's notions on the heterogeneity of the leader-crowd and individual-flock
dyads with the functions of Jakobsen's communication model, Lacan formulates a generic signifying pair, 5 1 ~ 52 In contrast to Jakobsen's model, Lacan's formulation preserves intact the social
disjunctions Freud describes in Group Psychology; conversely, the signifying pair assigns a specific
role to language within that social structure. On the other hand, the bond between 51 and 5 2, although discursive, does not necessarily require any particular linguistic utterance to operate: it
precedes all such utterances. Like language itself, this discursive structure pre-exists the subject's
entrance in it. In Lacan's model then, the notion of discourse is by no means limited to speech or
writing- the discourse structures are, in fact, in place before any concrete words are spoken. 9 Nevertheless, discourse and language are intertwined, and variations in the fundamental relations subsisting in language are correlated to variations in the social bond; they define particular basic discourse types.
Lacan, however, also finds grounds to refute the supposed stability and univocality of
Jakobsen's scheme of functions. Freud's works on the joke and the lapsus show that merely linguistic or psychological models do not suffice adequately to characterize the role of the Symbolic in

cr

112

If

II

II

humans. For instance, Freud's demonstration that the lapsus can sometimes be
a more successful instance of communication than "normal" speech leads Lacan
to question the apparently self-evident relationship between "sender" and
"message." Indeed, in the lapsus, but also in many other instances of communication, it is not at all obvious that the sender's intention is univocal. On the
contrary, it is necessary to speak of a number of intentions which operate next,
besides, throughout, and even against the allegedly intended message. Does
the sender really possess such a message? Does he intend to apply a code to
render that message conveyable? And is that message- and no other- the one
that the sender really intended to convey in the first place? Is the sender in
possession of the code, or is he in fact possessed by it? And, as sender, is he not
rather the receiver of the message sent by the code? Is he truly able to decode
the message quickly, efficiently and flawlessly? If not, does he not elect not to
know anything about these shortcomings? And where is the interference located: in the channel, in the sender, or already in the code itself? Similar questions arise on the side of the receiver. In the first place, the code also speaks to
him; the receiver is thus the code's object. Also the receiver is hindered by the
interference produced by the many "para" messages which simultaneously c
demand his attention. To compound matters even further, the receiver is also ~
til
exposed to the ubiquitous, often unpleasant messages about himself that the ll
......
code sends. Neither is the receiver's intention to decode the sender's message :;:,
unambiguous or pure. The incarnated code is not an abstraction; it is acquired
throughout the development of a strictly personal subjective history. In tum,
this modifies the way any ulterior message is to be decoded, as well as the way
any question to the code is to be posed.
A model intended to map the phenomena of discourse must be able to
account for- rather than resolve or eliminate - the nuances mentioned above.
Lacan's use of Jakobson's model involves both an acceptance and a radical
modification of the latter. He replaces Jakobson's static roles by four functions
which are independent of, and precede, the participation of any given individual in a discourse.1o
The truth drives the agent of a discourse to address himself to an other
in order to obtain a more or less anticipated product. In representing these four
functions along a synchronic scheme, Lacan renders each one of them as defining a logical place or topos:

113

agent

other

truth

product

The "sender" of Jakobson's model subsists here only as an apparent agent, driven by an
unconscious truth. This agent does not have direct access to the unconscious; on the contrary, it is
the unconscious' pawn. The contents of the unconscious can only be constructed fragmentarily, and
only through the Other. On the other hand, the "receiver" is divided between the other who is
spoken to and the effect taking place in his unconscious. The signifier divides thus both speaker
and addressee; the word, therefore, necessarily follows a path which is doubly articulated through
the unconscious. In Lacan's synchronic representation this results in a double disjunction between
the places, which has far reaching consequences for each discourse type. He portrays this double
disjunction by the arrow (~) which represents the impossibility characterizing the relationship between agent and other, and by the double bar(! I) representing the impotence of any attempt to link
the truth with the product:

(relation of impossibility)

agent
truth

other

II

---.!product

(relation of impotence)
The disjunction between the truth and the product marks the border of the discourse with
the Real. I shall further characterize the variations in the nature of these disjunctions when describing each specific discourse type.
The scheme of the four places - the truth, the agent, the other and the product - forms the
basis of Lacan's discourse model. Each of the places can be occupied by one of four terms, resulting
each time in a different discourse type.
The first element to consider for the occupation of the four places is the signifier. As he
further elaborates on Freud's observations concerning the falsity of the pretense of any original
signification, Lacan establishes that, by themselves, the signifiers are made of non-sense: they only
signify within diacritical oppositions. For a signifier 51 to have a meaning, it must stand in opposition to the "signifying crowd" 52, the rest of the set of signifiers- which must consist of at least two
signifiers other than 5 1. The elision of a signifier from the set 52 becomes at once the Master's point
of address, the divided subject ; it is divided in both its relations to the signifier whose place it
114

occupies, and to the master signifier it follows and denies.

The basic dyad sl - 52 is the prototype for any further possible pair of
signifying combinations. The divided subject is represented for the elided
signifier- the place which the subject occupies- by the master signifier to which
it responds: $ --7 5 1 --7 5 2
Eventually, the divided subject is confronted with the fact that the
master signifier does not succeed in entirely restoring the primal subjectivitythat is, the impossible, mythical stage in which the subject was not yet separated from the signifier it replaces- and its corresponding jouissance: the words,
Lacan says, do not suffice.ll In different terms: conceived as the Big Other, the
Symbolic order is incomplete, as it bears the trace of the traumatic Real marked
by the loss of the primal- or phallic- signifier. Lacan notates this deficiency in
the Symbolic as A 12
The counterpart of the failure in the Symbolic is the rest of the unattainable, mythical undivided subject: the plus-de-jouir or objet petit a, which
emerges as the result/refuse of any given signifying process:$ --7 51 --7 52 --7
L

s::

Ill

The four elements thus defined are the terms of the discourse. The objet ,.....
lJ
a slips away from all attempts by the divided subject fully to integrate it in the :;,
Symbolic order so as to regain the lost - but never experienced, never possessed - mythical primordial unity. At the same time, the objet a emerges as the
result of those attempts, so that an incessant discursive chain results:

Since their logical sequence is invariable, only four different groups of four
elements can be formed:

115

THE DISCOURSE TYPES AT A GLANCE

Lacan obtains four discourse types by rotating the chain of four terms in their constant
order, on the four places. The resulting discourse types are the master, hysteric, university and analytic
discourses. For this paper, the master and analytic discourses are the most important.
The master discourse is the first type Lacan describes. 13 The signifier 51, which represents the
divided subject, occupies the place of the agent: the Master pretends to coincide with a unique,
privileged signifier, which activates the knowledge contained in the signifying chain, 52:
agent

other

51

The master signifier at the place of the agent labels the other as lacking, as incomplete. The
most important characteristic of the master discourse is the reduction of the other to a thing: his
response to the question of who the subject is, is a description of what the subject is. By the same
token, the only alternative left to the Master- if he is to maintain his position- is to deny his subjectivity as his driving, initial predicament. In so doing he consolidates his castration in the place of the
"; repressed truth of his discourse:
........
(impossibility)
agent

51

other

Sz

i-

J,

$
truth
The dilemma with which the Master contends arises because the jouissance remains inaccessible to him. He wishes to attain it through the other; but the latter holds the key to the Master's
subjectivity, the suppression of which defined the master position in the first place. That means that
the other is the locus of the Master's jouissance, which emerges at the place of the product when the
knowledge contained by 52 is exhausted:
(impossibility)
agent

other

Sz

51

$
truth
116

II
(impotence)

a
product

J,

To reach the objet a, the Master would have to place his subjectivity in
the place of the agent; but that would necessitate the acceptance of his castration - which would, in tum, bring about the end of the master discourse.
The hysteric discourse emerges as an answer to that of the Master. The
split subject in the place of the agent installs the master signifier in the place of
the other and questions it about the jouissance- the truth of the divided subject
-which is beyond the Master's reach:

(impossibility)

i-

-7

s1

truth
But the Master, as shown above, cannot answer that demand without C
undermining his position. Upon the Master's failure to provide a final answer, S:
the hysteric subject unmasks him and declares him bankrupt. The knowledge OJ
which is the result of this operation - the incomplete knowledge with which ~
;::.
the Master pretended to coincide- appears in the place of the product.
The structure of the university discourse is the reverse of the hysteric:
hysteric discourse

university discourse

-i
a

II

II

In the university discourse, the knowledge (Freud's "crowd"), occupying the place of the agent, commands its own growth to continue by endlessly displacing the impersonalized objet a. The objectivity of scientific discourse corresponds to the exclusion of the subject from the signifying relation
and the knowledge functions without its repressed inaugural point- the intervention of the Master positing basic axioms. The opposite of the master discourse is the analytic discourse, to which I shall return later.

117

Before returning to the cX't"T) and the limits it stands for in Antigone, there are some instrumental notions to obtain through a summary lecture of the discourse types in terms of the registers
of the Imaginary, Symbolic and Real.
The two most obvious places of the discourse scheme are the agent and the other: they
come closest to the notion of communication as developed by Jakobson. Obvious places means:
they could be thought of without taking the unconscious into account. This takes me directly to a
first conclusion, namely: the relationship between the agent and the other ("impossibility") belongs
to the order of the Imaginary. In attempting to reach the other directly, the agent must first identify
himself with the Other. On the other hand, we see that once the unconscious comes into the picture,
any relation between the truth and the product is interrupted by a double bar. One can thus eliminate any possibility of successful communication between agent and other.
The disjunction between the truth and the product ("impotence") belongs to the Real, which
is the register that has no access to the signifier.
The Symbolic is the register of the subject. 14 To analyze the symbolic component of the
discourse type I will focus on the terms of the signifying function rather than on the places of the
discourse. This is in accordance with Lacan's definition of the subject: a subject is represented by a
~::: signifier for another signifier, $ ~ 5 1 ~ 52 . Contrary to the case of the Imaginary and the Real, this
(f Symbolic triad is located at different places for each discourse type. In the master discourse, the two
m terms of the signifying chain, 5 1and 5 2, occupy the upper half of the diagram. The split subject in the
~ place of the truth. must remain repressed if the master discourse is to be maintained. In the analytic
::> discourse 52 and 5 1 are separated by the barrier of the Real(//). The emergence of the split subject
is related exclusively to the revelation of the phallic signifier 51 by virtue of the fact that objet a is in
the place of the agent. The restrictions of the Symbolic order 52 are suspended in the place of the
truth.
DISCUSSION

One of Lacan's most extensive accounts of the Real is to be found in the fifth chapter of his
seminar of 1963-1964.15 He centers his presentation on two terms, 'tUXT) and cxu'tOJlCX"WV, as used by
Aristotle in the second book of Pltysics. Lacan renders 't"UXT) as the "encounter with the real" that lies
beyond the au"t"OJlCX'tov, "the return, the coming back, the insistence of the signs, by which we see
ourselves governed by the pleasure principle." 16 The actual characterization Laca.<'"l gives of the Real
is quite often in negative terms, i.e. "the little we know about the real shows its antinomy to all
verisimilitude. " 17 The definition which best suits the effect of the Real upon the psyche is the advent
of a trauma - a rupture in the fabric of the Symbolic as well as the origin of all imaginary identifications. And- I would add- trauma is the term that most precisely renders Aristotle's attitude when
it comes to the ill-logic of tragedy.
118

The subject cannot cross the border of the Symbolic and into the Real
with impunity. Neither is it possible for the subject to speak of an experience"
of a Real which is not susceptible of representation. However, the subject does
experience the approach of the inner border of the Symbolic with the Real as
anxiety and as perplexity - that is, as a clouding in the processes of signification. From the perspective of the subject, the Real itself appears as death. And
death is precisely where Antigone's passion takes her.
Antigone's death is not the conventional death to which all humans
are subject. As Lacan abundantly shows and exemplifies, the text of the Chorus
is significant and insistent about it - Antigone goes CX!O<;; a-rae; - beyond the
U!T]. I will focus on a single moment in the play- the only one that Lacan brings
over from the seminar into Kant avec Sade- to analyze the status of the a-r11 from
the perspective of Lacan's discourse model.
II

Although Freud does not explicitly address Aristotle's notion of the

cathartic process, he nevertheless homes into the catharsis and he describes it
almost casually in terms of an intrapsychic process, and not a sociological phenomenon:
[...] A single idea of general value dawned on me. I have found, in
my own case too, [the phenomenon of] being in love with my mother
and jealous of my father, and I now consider it a universal event in
early childhood, even if not so early as in children who have been
made hysterical.[ ...] If this is so, we can understand the gripping
power of Oedipus Rex, in spite of all the objection that reason raises
against the presupposition of fate; and we can understand why the
later" drama of fate" was bound to fail so miserably. Our feelings rise
against any arbitrary individual compulsion;[ ... ] but the Greek legend seizes upon a compulsion which everyone recognizes because
he senses its existence within himself. Everyone in the audience was
once a budding Oedipus in fantasy and each recoils in horror from
the dream fulfillment here transplanted into reality, with the full quantity of repression which separates his infantile state from his present
one. 19

From here, it takes only one step to unravel the fact that the catharsis,
as Aristotle presents it, will never be effective if it is based on a simple drama of
fate. On the contrary, what matters is that each individual composing the audi119

ence be gripped by the memory of the primal incestuous wishes. The impossibility to confront this
prevented Aristotle from distinguishing the familiarity necessary for the catharsis to take place
from the family situation in which it must take place. In other terms: Aristotle became a subject to
his own theory.

In a parallel which foreshadows Goethe's wish that the verses describing the incestuous

nature of Antigone's relationships with Polynices and Oedipus would one day prove to be extrapolated, the a'tT) overcomes the Chorus, makes it blind to the nature of Antigone's announced end- it
is not a pleasant end, to be sure - and causes it to fall in love. "The term [ cX'tT)] is repeated twenty
times, which in such a short text resounds like forty, though even then this does not prevent one
from not reading it," says Lacan. 19 This applies first of all to the Chorus.
To grasp the signification of Antigone's cXi.'TJ beyond a mere translation it is necessary to
study the effects of the cXi.'TJ on discourses within and beyond the play. The Chorus refers explicitly
and markedly to the cXi.'TJ looming over the Labdacydes and the manner in which Antigone incurs it.
And yet, paradoxically, the moment when Creon spells out Antigone's destiny is the moment at
.-..
which the Chorus becomes blind to that revelation- it falls in love. I suggest that only the structure
(:::!
of the analytic discourse can adequately account for the logical interval between Antigone's posiro tion and that of the Chorus and Creon. Antigone's position is, after all, the pivot of the play's devel~ opment, but only on the basis of its denial. Tiresias' voice reaches out to Creon from beyond the
:J second death. It traverses the obscurement of the ihT) and reveals the object which is Creon's truth:

cr

analytic

-l-

discourse

II
The privileged positions of the objet a and the split subject are based on a symbolic disjunction, 52 I I 5 1, which indicates that there is a fundamental gap between the knowledge and the
master signifier allowing only one of them to bear relevance - not both. When Antigone crosses the
limits of the cX"l:T), she overcomes that limitation, appearing to the Chorus to achieve a completeness,
the sum of knowledge and signifier, 52 + 51 = A, the Other unbarred. This is, I believe, the basis of
Antigone's eclat.
In bridging the border of the Real, Antigone exits the structures of discourse and enters
death - the second death, which cancels her subjectivity. The Chorus is stricken with blindness
120

because it sings Antigone's doom while perceiving her as something more which
it cannot see: the objet a. Antigone's death is the death of fullness: a ~ $ becomes g + a = S, unbarred. A brilliance indeed - without gaps. In an
anamorphosis pivoted on desire, the discourse finally dissolves into death:

Impossibility
(Tiresias)
a

s,

Antigone's ii-rTJ
The First Death

s, 0

s,

$
~

II s,

Impotence
(Creon)

L'eclat d'Antigone
(Oedipus, Polynices)

The Second Death

(The Catharsis)

s
l

The Chorus' Myth

(The Whole Play)

In the end, the story of Antigone becomes the final phase in the fulfillment of the curse of the Labdacydes. The vehicle through which that curse
develops is the inflexibility of her will - a will which literally transports her
beyond the realm of the human. Once she attains her Ci:-rT]- which is the endterm of her desire, Antigone iS free.

lJ
-...
:;:,

CONCLUSION: A QUESTION OF STYLE

Lacan opens his Scrits with a reference to style. The very first sentence
of the Ouverture de ce recueil reads "style is man himself"- Buffon's definition of
style.20 In conformity with the thesis that the subject receives his message from
the Other in an inverted form, and stressing the importance of the imaginary
register for the ego, Lacan rephrases Buffon as "style is the man to whom one
speaks." Judith Miller once inferred that "the substitution of 'himself' by 'to
whom one speaks' indicates that identity is divided between what style represents and the one before whom it is represented." 21 This reveals directly the
relationship between style and the objet a.
The relevance of the response of the objet a to the question of style leads
us to posit that nowhere can this be more evident than in the psychoanalytic
discourse: the objet a occupies there the place of the agent. And, I would add, in
few instances is the role of the objet a shown as clearly as in Antigone.
Within the analytic discourse, style can never be a personal matter (5 1
121

~ 52 ). Moreover, 52 I I 51 means that the knowledge 52 does not have access to expression- which
could only take place through 51. Coherently with Lacan's theory, the subversion of his teaching is
limited to the field of language. Its most provocative aspect lies in posing the most fundamental
questions without offering a synthetic view which would neutralize the analytic discourse. 23 Conversely, whatever 5 1 expresses, it will not be a knowledge.
Between the knowledge of the analyst- or, for that matter, that of the analysand- and the
phallic signifier there is the barrier of the Real (/ 1). Antigone shows what the crossing of that barrier can be, other than a mirage. In a highly unusual combination, a formal instrument yields light
on language at its poetic level.

122

16

Lacan, Four Fundamentals, 53.

17

Lacan, Four Fundamentals, ix.

18

Sophocles, Antigone, ed. and trans. Andrew Brown

(Warminster, Wiltshire: Aris & Phillips, 1987) 891931.

See The Complete Letters. of Sigrnund Freud to Wilhelm

Fliess 1887-1904, ed. and trans. J.M. Masson (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1985) 272.

19

Lacan, Le Seminaire. Livre VII, 305.

Antigone: 905-914.

20

Lacan, Ecrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966) I: 15-17.

See C. M. Bowra, Sophoclean Tragedy (Oxford UP:

1944) 95.

21

Judith Miller, "Style is the Man Himself," in Lacan

and the Subject of Language. Ellie Ragland-Sullivan

La can, Le Semina ire. U{}re VII, 311; Antigone, 781.

Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis

of the Ego, in the Standard Edition of the Complete
Writings of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Stratchey (New
York: Norton, 1950) vol. XI: 1-94.

Roman Jakobsen, "Linguistics and Poetics," in Style

and Language, ed. T.A. Sebeok (Cambridge: MlT,

1960) 350-368.

CD
JJ

Jacques Lacan, Seminaire. Livre VII: l'ethique de Ia

psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1986) 290.
2

Aristotle, Poetics, trans.

Norton) 1453b.

J.

Hutton (New York:

Lacan, Le Seminaire. Livre XVII: !'envers de Ia

psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1991) 11.

10

For an exhaustive development of the questions

surrounding Jakobsen's model, see Julien
Quackelbeen, Zeven Avonden met jacques Lacan
(Ghent, Belgium: Academia P, 1991) 76-98 and 107153.

11

Lacan, Television (Paris: Seuil, 1974) 1.

12

Lacan, Television 9.

13

Lacan, Le Seminaire. Livre XVII, 31-41.

14

Jacques-Alain Miller, Cinco Conferencias caraquefias

sabre Lacan, coli. analitica (Venezuela: Anteneo de
Caracas, 1979) 18.

15

See Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Seminar XI), trans. Alan Sheridan (New
York: Norton, 1977).

and Mark Bracher, eds. (New York: Routledge,

1991) 144-151.
22

Lacan, Le Seminaire. Livre XVII, 79-80.

123

ALAIN BAD IOU teaches philosophy at the Universite de Paris VIII. He is the
author of L'etre et l'evenement (Paris: Seuil, 1988), Manifeste pour la philosophic
(Paris: Seuil, 1988), and Conditions (Paris: Seuil, 1992).
JUSTIN CLEMENS is a doctoral candidate at the University of Melbourne
where he teaches literary theory.
BRUCE FINK is a Lacanian psychoanalyst, member of the Ecole de Ia Cause
freudienne, and Associate Professor of Psychology at Duquesne University. He
is the author of The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton
UP, 1995) and A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis (Harvard UP,
forthcoming).
SAM GILLESPIE is currently the graduate assistant to the Center for the
Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture at the University at Buffalo.
JACQUES-ALAIN MILLER is the head of the Ecole de la Cause freudienne,
chairman of the Department of Psychoanalysis at the Universite de Paris VIII,
and editor of the complete seminars of Jacques Lacan.
PAUL VERHAEGHEisapsychoanalyst,memberoftheEuropeanSchoolfor
Psychoanalysis, and Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of
Ghent, Belgium. His book, From the Hysteric to the Woman, is forthcoming from
Rebus Press, London.
ANDRES ZLOTSKY is a doctoral candidate in the department of Comparative Literature at the University at Buffalo, where he works in semiotics and
psychoanalysis.