Action of the Structure.

Jacques-Alain Miller

Notice

This text was published in Cahiers pour l’Analyse 9 (Généalogies des sciences), Summer 1968.
It is a text that needs to be introduced by its circumstances. On June 27th 1964, Jacque Lacan
founded l’École Freudienne de Paris and opened it to non-analysts. In order to join, a few
students from the École normale got together and, as the statutes required, formed a “cartel”
which went by the name of its object of interest: “Discourse Theory.” The following pages
were meant to justify that title, a heading under which the members of this group thought to
place those works tributary and dated to the same conceptual field. They were to appear
inl’Annuaire de l’École Freudienne, which in the end was little more than a list of names, and
so they remained astray.

If I publish them today, it’s because it seems to me that despite the time gone by, the seminars
of all kinds held to decipher Freud, Marx, and Lacan, those that bring difficult truths within the
reach of all intellects being few and far between, despite what les Cahiers pour l’Analyse has
already made known—what was articulated in this text of the relations between the structure
of the subject and science is not yet realized by so many.

Preamble

Psychoanalysis, as with Marxism, sets out to organize anew the conceptual field. Which is why
no one knows just yet how to hear it properly, how to understand it, why they have it silenced,
or, suppression from the inside, welcome it in and ward it off by recitation in languages
theoretically anterior, even those over and against which it’s detached itself—psychology,
biology, the philosophy of spirit—its name is usurped and its truth exiled.

To call it up today is a demand forever untimely.

For our part, we intend to underwrite that reorganization, explicate the expenditure of its
economy. Perhaps it is believed that we are blind to our limits, that our ignorance of
psychoanalytic praxis necessarily narrows our discourse. But it seems to us that to have
recognized those limits does not undermine the legitimacy we claim, on the contrary, it
provides foundation and assures it against the possible intemperance of our presumptions.
The discourse in which we envisage this project would restrict itself to a critical vocation within
the Freudian field, experience, as such, appearing only in its conceptual form. Thus, our
intervention hinges on the mediation of a discourse that precedes it, one we’ve identified from
the beginning in that it alone takes its departure from an idea on the Freudian specificity of
Lacan’s own discourse. Our first undertaking—not the least ambitious—was to comprehend it,
to come to grips with it in furnishing a systematic exposition. Our thinking intends to extend
the consequences of its object, to join it with intersecting discourse, to elaborate their unifying
theory so that its power and its richness might diffuse in the various spaces in which some
among us will already be circumscribed. On the whole, this work on concepts takes for
watchword Georges Canguilhem’s definition: “…to work through a concept is to vary its
extension and comprehension, to generalize it by incorporating its exceptions, to export it

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beyond its origins, to take it as a model, or inversely, to seek a model for it, in short to confer
upon it, progressively in regulated transformations, the function of a form.” [1]

Naturally, critique may lay claim to free establishment: it is judged only by the measure of its
own rigor. In this occurrence, however, it receives the blessing and sanction of its discourse-
object; critique is brought swift before it to lend the means of its progress, the very concept of
its exercise; it hazards that it’s not only authorized, but already thought by what it thinks,
required and even already underway, that it is no way self-propagating: that it splits its object
without exceeding it. Little by little, this uncovering becomes its theme. What is proper to the
discourse of Jacques Lacan, to be the preceptor of its own critique, holds, first and foremost,
to what it has created and implemented in the concept of the structure.

Structure

Here, structure belongs within scientific discourse.

Models gain on the distance to experience, and yet, to include what is irreducible in their
definition, ensure the maintenance of the gap; this distance must now disappear and, in its
place, operate an exact integration that proceeds from the lived to the structural.

Structure no more subtracts the “empirical” content of a “natural” object than adds to it the
“intelligible”. When an object is set up, spread out, in the dimension of a network in order to
describe the organization of its elements, the product is isolated from its production, an
exterior relation is established, and so as to be rendered indifferent to the cause, one ends up
understanding it merely as the expedient guarantor of its effects: only a mechanistic thinking
could authorize such a comprehension.

When the structuralist operation finds itself rejecting temporality and subjectivity in the
neutralized space of the cause, it is forced to guarantee its objects constituted beforehand,
referring them to “social life”, “culture”, anthropology, biology, spirit. To fault, it pleads with
linguistic structuralism to open its field by the preliminary exclusion of any relation maintained
by the speaking subject, forbidding itself so much as a word on the matter. Until the alteration
provoked by the exclusion of the speaking subject is made null and void, linguistic structures
do not hold outside the area of its origin. Psychoanalytic structuralism, in our opinion, realizes
their legitimate exportation insofar as its objects are experiences wherein an ineliminable
subjectivity is situated and which proceed according to their own interior time, indiscernible
from the progress of their constitution. Hence, the topology of the structure does not
contradict its dynamic, a pulse matched to the rhythmic displacement of its elements.

Structure is what sets in place an experience for the subject it includes.

Two functions qualify our concept of structure: structuration, or the action of the structure,
and subjectivity qua subjected (assujettie).

To take stock of the consequences of such a hypothesis engenders the structure.

To begin with, structuration must be repartitioned in two dimensions: the actual, in which it
would offer to an observer, and in which its state will be constituted, and the virtual, according

2
to which all of its states will be susceptible to deduction. Thus, it is necessary to distinguish
between a structuring structure and a structured structure (structure structurante, structure
structurée), between structurer and structured.

Thus far, the first belongs to the second as its immanent clause, that is: the point of view to be
taken by an investigation that de-implicates itself in order to pass from description to
knowledge. The two orders are in continuity with one another, their relation simple, their
partition relative only to the method employed, there is no delay and so no structural time,
and a movement established in the structure is only apparent.

If we now suppose an element that turns back on reality and perceives it, reflects upon it and
signifies it, an element capable of redoubling reality on its own account, a general distortion
follows which affects the whole structural economy and recomposes it following new laws. As
soon as this element is introduced:

— its actuality becomes experience

— the virtuality of the structurer becomes an absence

— this absence is produced in the real order of the structure: the action of the structure comes
to be supported by a lack.

The structurer, to disappear (pour n’y être pas), governs the real. Here we grab hold of the
driving strife: the introduction of the reflexive element is enough to institute the dimension of
the structured qua lived, as taking effect only of itself, lays down an imaginary ordinance,
contemporaneous and different from the order of the real, but nevertheless co-ordinated with
it, and henceforth, intrinsically taking part in reality. A tertiary structure, imaginary, constitutes
itself within the real. As a result, the structural system, ideal to begin with, is redoubled and
finally accomplished. This duplicity, in turn, afflicts the reflexive element that provoked it—
insofar as it isn’t reflexive on the level of the structurer—which is what defines it as a subject,
reflexive in the imaginary, non-reflexive in the structuring structure.

In the second case, its subjection reduces it to no more than a support. The relation of subject
to structure is circular in that the two terms owe each other their definitions, but dissymmetric
in that it’s an insertion, which turns out to be inconceivable without the mediation of
méconnaisance reestablishing a continuous reality through the production of representations
which themselves respond to the absence of the structurer, and compensate for the
production of the lack. Structuration functions behind the curtain of representation, and in this
sense, the imaginary is its means. But, at the same time, it is its effect: representations are
staged by that which they hide (dérober)—what they hide as a matter of function, they exist
only to conceal the reason for their existence. What is proper to their structuring structure is
that they conceal, for the same that structures reality structures representation. That their
reflection in subjectivity assures them a certain coherence, an inertia, constitutes them in
systems, and works tirelessly to give them the appearance of being independent from the
action of the structuring structure, implies that the lack, which they prepare and watch over,
intimates these representations interiorly.

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Cause is reflected among the effects it determines and which, as such, are ignored. It follows
that their subordination to the formative transformations is necessarily indirect. The action of
structuring, according the degree of resistance present in representations or systems of
representations, exerts itself in measure upon the imaginary (and so upon the real), and
differentiates and multiplies the levels of the structured as a whole. We call surdetermination
the structuring determination which, in order to exert itself through the imaginary, is made
indirect, unequal, and eccentric with respect to its effects.

To reconstitute the totality of the structure, effects and their lateral cause must be made to
correspond within this space of permanent distortion, shifting, and gap. The incidence of the
cause must be measured and brought back to the lack as to its principle.

And yet, the lack is never apparent; precisely in that the structured misrecognizes (méconnaît)
the action that forms it, and is itself ostensibly coherent, homogenous. From this, we can
deduce that at this place where the lack of the cause is produced in the space of its effects, an
element intervenes to accomplish its suturing.

Hence, every structure includes a lure, taking the place of the lack, connected to what is
perceived, but as the weakest link in the given sequence, a point of vacillation, which only
belongs to the actual plan ostensibly: the whole of the virtual plan (the structuring space)
erases it from the map. This element, exactly the irrational in reality, by inserting itself,
denounces the place of the lack.

Of this element, which does not frame, but tricks the eye, through which all perception is
méconnaisance, of this element we distinguish its function in naming its place the utopic point
of the structure, its improper point, or its point at infinity.

Without a doubt, positivist investigation doesn’t miss the opportunity to bite the lure and to
be eluded by it, for nothing falls into its trap that exceeds the flat surface over which its gaze
meanders. Its apperception demands a conversion of perspective. This place, impossible to
occupy, is announced by its singular allure, contradictory, unequal to the plan; the element
that masks it now signals, by a kind flexion in its configuration, that its presence is undue, that
it shouldn’t be there. But it is to this point, precisely here where the outspread space of the
structured and the “transcendental” space of the structurer intersect and join together that its
gaze must be led and fixed and the taking-place (tenant-lieu) be taken for the very principle of
organization: soon enough that space will pivot on itself, accomplishing its division with a full
rotation, discover what reigns on the inside of its law, the order that adjusts in secret what is
offered up to the onlooker: the translation of the structure opens it to a diagonal reading. The
topology that represents it must be constructed upon a space wherein its center joins with the
exteriority of its circumscription in periodic convergence: its peripheral exterior is its central
exterior. The outside passes into the in.

Every activity that does not simply play out in the imaginary, but transforms the state of the
structure, begins at this utopic point, this strategic post specific to each of the levels where the
structurer is lacking. It goes without saying that the subject concerting such a practice is not,
for all that, relieved of the méconnaisance proper to its place.

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Subject

The theory of the subject must be approached starting from the structure; the subject takes
for granted his insertion therein. It is essential to preserve this order, from structure to
subject: it’s enough to deny the very possibility of a discourse when foundation is sought in the
sphere of immediate givenness, at the end – at the very beginning—of the historical or
methodical course of a consciousness—self-consciousness (de soi), the detour being at once
preambulatory and essential. But if structure alone is at origin, if no amount of self reflexivity
could discover for consciousness its organization, then the immediate is no more ultimate than
it is initial, it’s neither a matter of rediscovering it nor waiting for it, reality is neither to be
unburied (désensevelir) nor passed over, it must be crossed, traversed, and in its withdrawal,
occasion what sets it in place. If, against the philosophy of structuralism, we implicate
subjectivity, it is not as monarch but subject of the kingdom. Subjectivity is required by
representation, but not to the position of foundation with the causal function that implies. Its
blank (lacune) repartitions conscious being along each of the levels induced by the imaginary in
structured reality; as for its unity, subjectivity holds fast to its localization, its localization
within the structuring structure. Thus, the subject in the structure retains nothing of the
attributes of the psychological subject; it escapes definition, forever vacillating between the
theory of knowledge, morality, politics, and law.

Tasks for a theory of the subject: To begin, it must refute the phenomenological attempt to
recover the naïve, savage state of the world through an archeological investigation bearing on
perception. In effect, phenomenology, proceeding with a reduction of the visible to the visible,
hopes for the givenness of a secret support, the unchanged, ahistorical, underbelly of
knowledge and of history; definitively, the invisible it encounters is nothing but the inverse of
the visible of miracles. When, on the contrary, the invisible is taken to house a structure that
systematizes and conceals the visible, when the invisible varies and transforms the visible,
there begins a truly radical archaeology of perception, through and through historical,
absolutely specialized, and structured like a discourse, which restores seeing and saying their
principal identities (identité principielle). Of this archaeology, Michel Foucault’s work is today
the first example. [2]

Second, the psychological analyses of the subject must be considered and worked through in
detail. These intersect in that they assign the subject a position statutorily identical before the
various objects of the world, the function of the subject coming down to grouping the objects
together, gathering them between a parenthetical under the name reality. This reality, in turn,
measures the correction of what is functionally subjective. On the contrary, the discourse of
surdetermination leads us to recognize in the subject a spontaneous orientation towards the
lure. Fundamentally, the subject is deceived, and the mistake is constitutive. This does not
prohibit the subject from taking in, registering, and capitalizing on experience, from having a
system of awareness and detection in reality whereby existence adapts and perseveres. But of
the subject’s adaptation to the real, nothing can make native. The adaptation cannot be
thought according to the models that apply in the animal world; it is executed only through the
secondary intervention of a correctional system. Here, it is necessary to distinguish between
two kinds of misrecognition (méconnaisance): one that is adequate and necessary to the
action of the structure, and one that is inadequate, one harmful to the subsistence of the

5
subject. At this point, perception and ideology, as well as what we can now call sensibility, are
brought together in the single concept of méconnaisance.

Méconnaisance is not quite the opposite of knowledge (connaissance); it is not terminated

with awareness (la prise de conscience), that is the operation whereby the lived becomes
explicit, but, on the contrary, it takes part in it. The formation of conceptual systems, which are
closed for all practical purposes, continues the dimension of the imaginary. The psychological
sphere of volitions and appetites, which is to say motivations, derives from the functional
misrecognition of the structurer, wherefrom it follows that men are always acting in view of an
end, toward the useful insofar as they can make it out. For Claude Lévi-Strauss, the adequate
systems that work out the misrecognition of cause comprise the object of ethnology, and so
ethnology remains a psychology; only psychoanalysis is capable of delimiting the psychological
field.

The theory of the subject leads to a doctrine of intersubjectivity that cannot be articulated in
terms of simple reciprocity. The relationship established between one subject and another is
no more reversible than it is exclusively dependant on one of the two: even this simple alterity,
twins or binary fission, dwells in the imaginary, and deducing its organization from just one its
terms is hopeless, a fact which qualifies it for the miraculous. What unites and arranges its
links, what is only visible in the intimation of its effects, takes shape and is decided on an Other
Scene and refers to an absolute alterity in absentia, exponentiated so to speak. It is never
given in the present, and yet, there is no presence that does not pass through it, that is not
constituted in it.

No relation between a subject and another subject, or between a subject and an object can fill
up (combler) the lack, except in the imaginary formation that sutures it together, only to be
found again on the inside. The contestation of reciprocity in the psychologies of
intersubjectivity must come in corollary to the refutation of every politics of liberalism or
humanism. These, it could be said, stem from reciprocity, and are perpetually in search of the
object that will come and fill the stomach of human hunger, satisfy what they conceive of as
human “dissatisfaction” (Locke’s uneasiness), and thus assure the transparence of all
interhuman relations. Knowing that it’s not after a “having” that man has, but rather, after his
“being” or, without the metaphor, that the imaginary determines a structure which includes
and comports a subject, a politics of happiness, i.e. an adaptive politics (politique de
l’ajustement) must be considered the surest means to reinforce the inadequacy that goes from
subject to the structure.

Finally, the analyses must be grouped and gathered into a doctrine of alienation in open
conflict with Hegel and neo-hegelianism. When reflexivity no longer suffices to define
subjectivity, alienation cannot be treated as the hell out from which it must be freed to
possess itself and jouir his activity; all of that is conceivable only in the autonomous sphere of
self-consciousness, not so with a subject reduplicated and so porous (lacunaire), the imaginary
subject-agent of the structured structure, subject-support and element of the structuring
structure, which only appears as a subject in the real on the condition that it’s misrecognized
(méconnue)in the imaginary as an element in the structuring structure. But a kind of alienation

6
is essential to the subject in that it only effects itself as agent in the imaginary to mistake for its
own the effects of the structuring structure, wherein it’s already been counted.

Science

Once the enterprises of the subject are brought back into their radical dependence with
respect to the action of the structurer, and alienation is defined as constitutive of the
subjected subject, the question becomes whether or not a discourse that takes up an
adequate object and develops it set of norms is possible. Even before that we have to ask if the
discourse of surdetermination is itself possible. The very fact that it is open to come up
against, or better, in its advance necessarily gives rise to the problem of its own possibility, a
problem, moreover, which is beyond the question of scientificness in general, manifests a
singular circuit of a reflexive implication: it falls under a scientific doctrine based on reason,
but it belongs to the discourse alone to assign its place therein, to constrain the concept, and
dictate the categories. It is this problem, which comes both first and last, from which we
intend to take our thematic departure and order our process.

If we consent to say that it is in the field of the statement where logic establishes itself, the
field of speech being that of psychoanalysis – anticipating our aim, we will announce the need
for a new position within the space of language, and we will put forth this proposition: that a
field, which considers of cardinal importance the question of scientificness, is to be constituted
under the heading: the field of discourse.

When logic constructs a formalized system, it writes in the alphabet of its symbols an initial set
of formulas and rules for their subsequent formation and deduction, such that the statements
produced are not doubled and a virtual dimension is avoided; when a logical activity attaches
to systems that it didn’t itself engender, the resulting virtual dimension always remains
reducible de jure. On the contrary, statements isolated in the linguistic field refer to a code
whose virtuality is essential and, in effect, defines them as messages. But communication itself
isn’t taken into account and emission, as well as reception, delimits the field more so than it
takes part in it.

If, from the linguistic relation, we try to derive a subject capable of supporting it, it becomes
clear that an undivided support, at once of message and of code is impossible. The subject
cannot maintain an identical relationship with them both: the code, necessary to the
production of speech, but absent from the word as the subject states it, does not belong to the
subject that issues speech and so is not to be situated in his place; reception requires the code
as well, and it’s there, in the exponentiated dimension of alterity that we’ve indicated above
where it must be situated. The distribution of topics taking shape disjoins the plan wherein the
subject, in first person, is effectuated and the place of the code where the subject ends up but
precisely as subject-agent is elided. His speech can trace its origins to this same place where it
turns over its utterance and to which it returns in definitive, for here is the place that
guarantees its intellection and its truth. Together, the lack of the code on the level of speech
and the lack of the subject-agent at the place of the code (the two being correlative) open,
within language, the splitting (refente) of the unconscious. Thus, it can be said: the subject is
capable of an unconscious.

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To this splitting, psychoanalysis articulates that Other scene where speech is decided and
structured, where the subject figures with a passive function as an element whose transitivity
is commissioned by a quaternary combinatorial, an other Scene which brings the human
animal into language, and towards which his word, left alone, turns as if to primordial and
generate dependence.

But other circuits plug into this splitting. We concern ourselves with a speech constrained by
the conscious aim of its end in truth, which we name discourse. The topology remains intact,
but, here, the connection is only established by a secondary selection, in the Other scene, the
primordial; said otherwise: according to the modes of language, the connection is made with
other Other scenes grafted onto the place of the code. For example, the Other scene of the
class struggle, wherein the combinatorial disposes of “class interests”. A specification of lacks
is thus announced.

The articulation is fundamental; it structures discourse as constrained speech and prescribes a

reading that is neither commentary nor interpretation. Not a commentary because it’s not in
search of a sense-making that, owing to a misfortune inseparable from the verb itself, the text
somehow abstains from. And yet the text calls for it, implicates it necessarily, calls for what
could be restored and indefinitely multiplied with recourse to tacit foundations, for what is
inexhaustible in all exploitation, for speech. Neither is it a matter of extracting the meaning
from one text and applying it to another, for example, translating it into the vernacular of a
philosophy constituted without excluding the possibility that another interpretation might
come along reclaim its meaning; such a discourse is, with respect to the first, a neutral element
and it latches on like a parasite. To pick up a statement through others supposedly closer to
the mystery of its meaning presupposes the relationship to the letter that Spinoza critiqued in
his biblical exegesis. In the end, a text cannot be restored to continuity, to logical simultaneity,
by spelling out the surface. “Structuralism” at the level of statement can be no more than a
passing moment for a reading that seeks, across its taking-place, the specific lack that supports
the structuring function. For that reading, for the transgression that crosses the statement
towards the stating, the name of analysis seems, to us, suitable.

The lack concerned is no dead word wherefore it’d suffice to bear unto the light of day, it’s not
the impotency of the verb nor the ruse of the author, it is silence, the default that organizes
stated speech, the concealed place which sheds no light nor lets light be shed for it is only in its
absence that text is possible and that discourse is uttered: Other scene where the eclipsed
subject sits, from whence he speaks, wherefore he speaks. The exteriority of the discourse is
central, this distance interior. The reciprocal determination wherein the elements of an object
confer in a structured network, must be broken: we are seeking an unequivocal
determination—not only what it means to say but what it doesn’t say at all, insofar as it means
not to say it. Thus, we consider the whole of a text to be the border of a lack, principal of the
action of the structure, which bears the marks of the action it accomplishes: the suture.
Beginning with the taking-place toward which the disorders of the statement of its
contradictions converge, pivoting the plan of the statement will reveal the discourse of the
subject as a discourse of misrecognition at the place where, qua element or support, it is
situated in the structuring structure. The subject receives the very same discourse it issues; it’s
just that determination is reversed so that it’s heard in first person. Thus, we will explore the

8
space of determination displaced. At once unequivocal, suppressed and interior, withdrawn
and declared, that space can only be qualified in terms of metonymical cause. Cause changes
itself into a discourse, an in general, such is that case for all structures: for the necessary
condition of functional structural causality is that the subject takes the effect for the cause.
Such is the fundamental law of the action of the structure.

How then, is a discourse that only takes orders from itself, a flat discourse and adequate to its
object, how is it possible? Clearly, it’s not the return to a reality beyond all discourse, a de-
implicated attention and simple positivity that opens its field; once more, it is the singular
state of the structurer, a position particular to the subject with respect to the place of truth,
which closes speech on itself. This closing of scientific discourse is not to be conflated with the
suture of non-scientific discourse, because that one shows the lack to the door, reduces its
central exteriority, disconnects it from the other Scene. Thought of as being interior to the
field it circumscribes, it will be named: cloture. But this is a circumscription with thickness, it
has an outside, an exterior; said otherwise, scientific discourse is not struck with a simple lack,
but the lack of a lack is also a lack.

This double negation confers a positivity on its field, but on its periphery one must recognize
the structure that makes it possible, a structure whose development is not independent.
Within scientific discourse, the lack of a lack leaves open the place ofméconnaisance; the
ideology that accompanies it, without being intrinsic to it: a scientific discourse, as such,
includes no utopian element. It would be necessary to figure two spaces superimposed onto
one another, without an anchor point (point de capiton), without slippage between them.
Thus, the closure of science effectuates a repartition between a closed field, limitless when
considered from the inside, and a foreclosed space. Foreclosure is the other side of cloture.
The term is sufficient to indicate how all science is structured like a psychosis: the foreclosed
returns in the form of the impossible.

This is, in fact, the old manner of the epistemological break (coupure épistémologique), but
approached from the outside; we must recognize the privileged and the almost unheard of
status of a discourse of surdetermination which constitutes its field outside of science in
general; its injunction, theoretical as well as practical, is given in the Wo es war, soll ich
werden, which, for us, convokes the scientific subject as it is to be grasped.

There are two discourses of surdetermination: the Marxist discourse and the Freudian. Louis
Althusser has bailed out the first from the bad mortgage that weighed it down in the
conception of society as a historical subject, just as Jacques Lacan has done for the second in
the debunking of the notion of the individual as a psychological subject—to join the two now
seems possible. We hold that the discourses of Marx and Freud are given to communicate by
the means of regulated transformations and mutual reflection in a unified theoretical
discourse.

September 1964

9
Note on the causes of science

The crucial problem for the Doctrine of science, the same that defines it, hinges on its proper
status.

Science alone, in effect, has the power to confer that status, for unlike a particular science it
has no outside: the principles that govern it fall under their own jurisdiction. Thus, the
Doctrine cannot be asserted lest it be counted among its own objects; if it has no outside, it is
interior to itself. As soon as it is established, it is subjected to an introjection and doomed to
the phenomena of self-reflexivity.

The consequences of this property are as follows: the Doctrine doesn’t make sense, or at the
least none that could be stated. As such, it cannot be said because it cannot be constructed.
Right away, to expose it (that is unfurl, explain it, set it out) is impossible. If nothing is that
cannot be said, it is because nothing is without name (our version of the principle of reason,
and according to punctuation there are two ways to understand it – Heidegger demonstrated
as much for Leibniz), [3] the project of a Doctrine of science is impossible, it has the name of
the un-nameable: the “Anonymous Doctrine.”

Hence, every statement that aims at such a thing as a Doctrine of science would be
perambulatory and peripheral, and at the same time, the thing itself is nothing but preamble
and periphery, it is sucked up by what surrounds it. The discourse, which is adequate to it, is
always beside it, for it is itself nowhere, and so too, everywhere.

Such marvelous properties follow from this alone: self-reflexivity, forbidding its statement to
be divided, produces in its field the indiscernible meta-language of the language-object. To
isolate the “Anonymous Doctrine” somewhere within the Universe of discourse runs counter
to its very concept. To expose it amounts to missing it (la manquer), and exposing by
entourage to produce its absence in language is an infinite enterprise.

No doubt, this is why Fichte, who was working towards exactly that, is first and foremost a
philosopher who speaks, whose books comprise no more than the residue of his words. In a
way, his was a discourse that couldn’t keep, uttered with a nod to its disappearance, and
always including the clause of annulment which echoes in 6.54 of Wittgenstein’s Tractus: the
Science of Knowledge of 1794 is “manual for its listeners”, every presentation of the Doctrine
takes up again the conference at large. The Doctrine’s interior incompletion isn’t an accident:
dispersion is the sole form of its possibility. There is no meta-language of the Doctrine and the
essential is never said, or it is said at every instant, always present, but never there. Its
listeners don’t amount to a public, each one before the work, confiding in his own solitary self.
The discourse does not think for those who listen, in their place perhaps, or outside of them
altogether; but for their own sakes, and each time as if it were the first, each among them
must effectuate the annulment of the enunciation process, for the process can only end when
it discovers itself unending, when the operator catches sight of the fact that he wasn’t
constructing the Doctrine in himself, that it was the Doctrine in which he himself was
constructed. Thus, it amounts to same thing to say that the Doctrine is impossible, that its
exposition is infinite, that it precedes all that it concerns, that it envelops all that would seek to
hem it in. And so for everything that lives and moves within it, everyone who seeks to speak it

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or to write it down, the Doctrine presents itself as a considerable effort: “not as something
that exists, but as something that we ought to, and yet cannot achieve”. [4]

What is stated here depends on a law: a priori of reason, or a posteriori of the sign: a self-
reflexive object, thus a self-reproducing object, takes for correlate an impossible construction,
or an infinite activity.

Which is why you can say in the same breath that it doesn’t exist at all, or that it’s
indestructible.
Freud had to have some knowledge of this object (whose self-reproduction is not division, it’s
indivisible, but repetition) to have recognized the indestructible in desire [5] and subtracted
the unconscious on the principle of contradiction. As for analysis, its termination can have
nothing in common with the end of a physical process; its movement is perpetual.

I add, to mark the spot for further developments, that Fichte’s proposition above is the point
of departure for his conversation with Spinoza.

“If we go beyond the I am, we necessarily arrive at Spinozism”, [6]and hold to the I am as the
Unconditioned returning to give the absolute Ego (Moi) the properties of substance, as
indicates the young Schelling in Of the Ego as Principle of Philosophy: “Spinoza characterized
the Unconditional perfectly, for everything he says about substance can be applied, word for
word, to the absolute Ego.” Know this however: because God is not self-conscious, Spinoza’s
theory is exposed definitively as a text.

Perhaps these coordinates for Fichte, somewhere between Spinoza and Freud, curb the
laughter of he who senses right under his nose, in the aporia of Doctrine, an ideology.

To explain my position, that it is, in fact nothing of the ideological kind, we have to take up
Fichte’s four problems in the opuscule of 94: Concerning the concept
of Wissenchaftslehre [7] or of So-called Philosophy, take them back, hijack them for our own
ends.

How can the Doctrine be sure to exhaust all science, including the science to come?—it must
discover its causes. How is it to be distinguished from particular sciences?—in that the
Doctrine thinks what the particulars cannot integrate into their fields, namely, the decisions
that found their principles. How is it to be distinguished from logic?—as the logic of the
signifier. How does it behave with respect to its object?—the Doctrine is antinomic to its
object, that is, incompatible with it, the Doctrine absorbs it or the object fades into the
Doctrine: they exist together only in a non-rapport, incommensurable with one another.

These responses are not to be mistaken for the Doctrine itself: I’m merely outlining what it
must be. But it’s already clear that what is to be understood by science is not the indistinct
sum of human knowledge (that is, what for Kant began experience without deriving from it),
but the thinking that calculates, verifies and experiments, at the exclusion of perception, of
consciousness, of all the modes of sentiment; there is room in the Doctrine for the history of
the sciences insofar as it teaches the position of the subject that makes science possible.

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To situate the position of a subject in all conjecture, the relations it undertakes must be
known: relation to the instance of the guarantee, relation to its statements and relation to the
objects thereof. If and only if we succeed in fixing the modes wherein the subject correlative to
science relates to these three determinations, will we be capable of knowing the causes of
science.

Notes

[1] Dialectique et philopsophie du non chez Gaston Bachelard”,Revue Internationnale de

Philosophie, 1963.

[2] Such is the explicit theme in Birth of the Clinic. This is less about discrediting the
phenomenological discourse (Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s work in particular), positivist discourse
insofar as it blinds itself to the mutations of the structural invisible, than picking it up again to
set it on a new foundation: as a rigorous discourse, in and of the imaginary.

[3] Tr. The French reads: Et si rien n’est qui ne peut être dit, c’est si rien n’est sans nom.
Liebniz’s formulation is in Latin: nihil est sine ratione.

[4] Johann G. Fichte, Science of Knowledge, tr. Peter Heath and John Lachs (New York:
Meridith Co., 1970) p. 102.

[5] Preservation in the sense that Spinoza gives the term is an identical effect

[6] Loc. cit.

[7] TR. The German word Wissenschaftslehre is rendered “Doctrine de la Science in French.”
Literally, Wissenschaftslehre translates to “Science-teaching,” the teaching of science.

Translated by Peter Bradley

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