The Symptom 10

Author’s Bio

In the Freudian Lacanian body

Author’s Bio

Although we have not yet clarified in any ultimate way the distinction between matter in motion and an animate, living body in motion, we have since the time of Heraclitus, with rare exceptions (the Eleatics thought motion an illusion), believed in motion as a cosmological principle underlying all physical reality. A body in motion, however, includes the opposition of movement and nonmovement. At either extreme of motion or immobility there is suffering, some kind of deadly bliss, or death itself. To live a human rather than an animal life, we have, paradoxically, to arrest life, to inhibit its fundamental motility. To create a modicum of stable civilization we have had to learn all about nonrandom motion and measured variations. At certain periods, we have tended to privilege nonmovement, at others movement. Nonetheless, we have always been haunted by the fact of some kind of polarity, which is why Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover is not only an antiphon to the unanswerable question after the cause of motion (and thus an arrest of infinite regression) but a symbolic image that reconciles two impossible reals: motion and immobility. [1]

I

“A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis” is an account by Freud at age eighty of something that happened to him in 1904′, when he was only forty-eight years old, and in Athens for the first time with his younger brother. The incident is one he says he has “never understood,” and one that has, in recent years, begun to recur, troubling him often. [2]

The essay is a miniature case history of Freud himself, a heautoscopy. Freud is analyzing an abnormal manifestation in his own mind: a repudiation of pleasure. He dissects a pathological moment, in which there is a certain failure of functioning on his part, a default of an earned experience of delight. His acknowledgement that there was a loss of “happiness” – of something that “would have been so lovely” (314) – lends the essay a melancholy and even tragic tone because it is painful to see that even Freud could not evade the common human lot of disappointment and could not solve even for himself the enigma of human unhappiness.

Freud offers this self-analysis, as “the gift of an impoverished being” (311), to Romain Rolland on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, noting that the ten year difference between himself and Rolland is the same as that between himself and the brother with whom he had traveled, On one level, therefore, the essay is addressed to this brother to whom he now says something he omitted saying on the Acropolis.

Why does this moment above all others recur to Freud and demand analysis? Why does it recur now? What is the pathological episode about?

In German culture, Greece is like Mecca, a national spiritual ideal of the ego repeatedly formed and reformed into an array of dazzling myths by important cultural figures like Winkelmann, Wieland, Lessing, the Schlegel brothers, Hegel, Goethe. Eichendorf. Kleist, Nietzsche, Hofmannsthal, and Rilke, to name only a few. The German dialogue with Greece has been more intense and continuous than that of any other European country. Greece is a cultivated German’s very soul, a site where he expects illumination, inspiration, revelation, even bliss, and at the very least, pleasure. Every notable German on the Acropolis, or at the very thought of it, has somehow been deeply moved. Here is where totality had once existed (Schiller), where the idea of Humanität developed (Herder), where Christ and Dionysus will one day be reconciled in a new golden age of love (Hölderin). Most recently, it is here that Christa Wolf heard the voice of Cassandra:

I began to read Aeschylus’s Oresteia. I witnessed how a panic rapture spread through me, how it mounted and reached its pinnacle when a voice began to speak:
Aiee! Aieeeee!
Apollo! Apollo!
Cassandra, I saw her at once, She, the captive, took me captive… It worked at once, I believed every word she said; so there was still such a thing as unqualified trust. Three thousand years – melted away. [3]

But Freud on the Acropolis, also an heir by education to all this love of Greece, hears nothing, He sees nothing, he feels no delight. He remains unmoved.

Instead, he stands there, like the obsessional he always was doubting that he is where he is. He finds himself disbelieving in the very existence of Athens, The specific thought (actually sentence) that disrupts any sensuous or aesthetic experience he might have had is: “So all this really does exist just as we learned at school!” (313)

Freud says his disbelief and doubt were doubly displaced: from his relation to the Acropolis to the very existence of the Acropolis and from the present into the past of his schooldays – for the initial, incredulous affirmation, with its effect of negation: “So all this really does exist, just as we learned at school,” is displaced temporally into a past. This past thought, in yet a further displacement, turns out to be the replacement of a quite different thought that he had in fact had as a child. For it is not that he had, as a child, ever disbelieved in the existence of the Acropolis, but that he had doubted that be would ever have the happiness of being there.

Incredulity is the essential subject matter of his thought or speech. Instead of a direct consciousness of “joyful astonishment at finding myself at that spot” (316), there is the distortion and the distorting, rather senseless, and unpleasurable mental action of doubting. Freud says to himself: “By the evidence of my senses I am now standing on the Acropolis, but I cannot believe it.” His momentary feeling is:

“What I see here is not real.” (317) The feeling of “the unbelievable” and “the unreal” are the essential elements in his experience, (316) so that he fails in fact to have a phenomenological experience of the Acropolis, but becomes absorbed instead in lucubrations and worries that concern, in a sense, the substratum or presuppositions of having any experience whatever. He stops at the threshold of the act of experience, debarred from entry by disturbing, irrelevant thoughts.

His self splits into a speaker and listener, where each is surprised at the other: because one is forced by sense evidence to accept what he had doubted and the other because he never imagined that the Acropolis’s existence had or ever could be an object of doubt. Such an inner division is always inhibiting and a sign of conflict. [4] Potentially, this kind of break within and disintegration of one’s being is also a sign of the death drive or the turning around of the aim of a drive from pleasure to pain.

Freud calls his experience an experience of derealization (ein Entfremdungsgefuhl). He feels estranged or distanced or alienated from reality. To de-realize or to estrange is to say that what is, is not. Or it is to say that what is does not belong to me; it is not familiar, but strange. Derealization is a refusal of phenomenological reality; it is a refusal to see, to form. Reality is undone: it is not formed; it is not.

Complete de-realization would be not to constitute reality at all, not to form, and not to be able to see it because it is not formed. Freud obviously does constitute it, but refuses to believe in what he sees. He cannot see what he sees because he cannot believe what he is seeing. He refuses to affirm it. He withholds a positive judgment. Freud says derealization involves an anxiety that concerns keeping something out of oneself, and he contrasts it with déja vu and fausse reconnaissance, illusions in which we seek to accept something into our ego. (317) Derealization is a judgment of negation: it is a refusal to incorporate whereas déja vu is an affirmation and a willingness to incorporate.

Every doubter seems to become once again a Descartes: does what I perceive exist or not? What is real? Am I and my body real? Freud twists what concerned himself – a burning desire of his childhood to travel – into an ontological question alter the existence or nonexistence of Athens – as well as into an epistemological question alter the status of perception: is what I see here real? so that his incredulity seems to be directed primarily at reality. But the real question concerns himself, his feelings, his body, and his desire to see Athens, which seemed to him as a child “beyond the realms of possibility.” (319)

Disbelief, which is an attempt to repudiate a piece of reality, is comprehensible when reality threatens unpleasure, but the real question, as Freud says, is: “Why should disbelief arise in something which, on the contrary, promises to bring a high degree of pleasure?” (314)

Doubt is capable of striking at one’s very existence, at the body, and Freud is aware of this when he says that derealization is intimately connected to depersonalization, a state in which a piece of one’s own self, rather than a piece of reality, is strange to one. (317) In his self-analysis Freud brings back one estranged piece of himself – the child with its immense longing to travel for which Athens had long been a “distant, unattainable thing of desire” – but he does not mention his disembodiment, the immediate failure of his senses and perception before the Acropolis, and the alienation of his drives. For to exchange sensuous perception for doubt is to submit to an estrangement of one’s drives and thus, to a partial kind of disembodiment. It is a consent to the loss of bodily sense pleasure. Freud here loses, as did the doubter, Descartes, his carnal value. He too becomes a disembodied thinker.

The range of one’s erotic life – in the broad sense of all that one can love, transfer or become attached to: new places, objects, knowledge, etc. – as well as the success of the psychoanalytic treatment, as Freud often said, depends on the fundamental mobility or lack of motility of the libido. [5] Everyone has certain transference boundaries. The Acropolis seems to be Freud’s. Why?

The Acropolis seems to symbolize for Freud an object that is unobtainable (and it remains that), inconceivably distant, and distant in particular from his father. The unsaid, the consciously unwished, the words that he utters now in retrospect to his brother and that he might have said to him when they stood on the Acropolis are: “We really have gone a long way! … ‘What would Monsieur notre Père have said to this, if he could have been here to-day?”’ (320) The Acropolis is “a long way” from the lather. Peter Gay writes of the most secret layer of Freud’s mind as “bespeaking his never-quenched thirst for the days when he loved his young, beautiful mother and ran away from his old father.” [6] Is it that the Acropolis, which could have been “so lovely,” is in some way connected as well to all the fantasies of happiness linked at one time with his young, beautiful mother, the one so different and distant from the old lather?

Freud’s associations and examples at this moment have to do with power. The second sentence above is a quotation from Napoleon, the words he purportedly said to one of his brothers during his coronation as emperor, confirming that for Freud too Athens is a crowning moment. Another example (given to illustrate that derealization is a defense) concerns King Boabdil, who, to retain his feeling of power, burnt the letter and killed the messenger who brought him news of his city’s fall. Is it that acknowledging joy, always a power-enhancing experience in itself, would give Freud too much a sense of power over his lather, bringing on a conflict with the father, just as joy might bring unity with the mother? Such a combination of power and joy has to be prohibited. His prohibition takes the form of a castration of the senses and of belief in the senses and their ability to deliver a world.

Freud, we can say, following a commentary of Jacques-Alain Miller, speaks to himself (in lieu of the father, who represents speech) and with speech interdicts himself enjoyment. As Miller says:

But what does it mean to speak of lather and mother as signifiers? It means … that for both sexes, the father is prohibitor, and … the mother is a signifier of the primary object…what we call the function of the father is language itself, as dead… On the contrary, the mother is always linked to jouissance, to enjoyment. And that is why… what appeared in Freud as the father prohibiting access to the mother appears in Lacan as speech interdicting jouissance. And that is why you find in Lacan the idea that enjoyment as such is forbidden to the one who speaks. [7]

On the Acropolis, then, Freud re-encounters his father, dead now eight years, the father who forbids enjoyment, dreaming, wishing, and fantasy, who makes one submit to law, and who is too impoverished to enable one to fulfill one’s dreams of traveling. Law is necessity, and necessity, as Hegel said, is motionless.[8] The fantasy of traveling, on the other hand, is motion, part of the motor imaginary, and the exterior realization of an interior desire. It is an imagined escape from the pressure of the law as well as from the reduction and impoverishment of one’s wild, wishful capacity for joy that the father’s presence opposes. It is an escape that Freud did not indulge in enough and that he now realizes he cannot ever have again since he is old and “can travel no more.” (320)

Traveling is a substitute for the kind of concrete motor activity, movement, and motor control for which Freud had such an immense appreciation. One need only think of his concern fundamentally with activity and rest or mobile versus bound excitation in the Project For A Scientific Psychology or of his sympathy for little Hans and his interpretation that Hans had at root difficulty understanding the movement and excitation in his own body (“I’m a young horse”) and in that of others, so much so that he had to bring everything to a phobic arrest.

The content of his phobia was such as to impose a very great measure of restriction upon his freedom of movement, and that was its purpose. It was therefore a powerful reaction against the obscure impulses to movement, which were especially directed against his mother…since this pleasure in movement included the impulse to copulate, the neurosis imposed a restriction on it and exalted the horse into an emblem of terror.” [9]

Freud was in many ways more obsessed with the “obscure impulses to movement” than with the “obscure object of desire” (to borrow a title from Buñuel). He never abandoned his conviction that primal satisfaction comes from a discharge through motility[10] and that jouissance is in an essential relation to motion. Motor action means that for a moment thought is suspended. And it is this essential suspension of thought that Freud cannot attain on the Acropolis. Instead he thinks, and ideas themselves, as Freud said, can be symptoms covering up the truth of wishes. [11]

Traveling is essentially moving from place to place, a displacement. Hence, it is also related, as Miller has brilliantly pointed out, to consistency (knowledge), staying in a fixed place mentally, and therefore, also to its opposite, inconsistency (truth), the new, different, that which displaces. Psychoanalysis, Miller has said, constantly relearns a necessary dissatisfaction with knowledge from hysteria, which questions knowledge in the name of desire. The “barred ‘S’,” says Miller, “is fundamentally the subject who does not keep to his place; a displaced person, and we know eventually the importance of the symptoms of travel for such a person.” [12] Freud in his search for truth never kept to his place. His displaced himself constantly, almost hysterically, while always searching for the new, right insight. It reminds one that Freud discovered hysteria as a substratum also in obsessional neurosis.[13]

Freud always spoke of the rebellion against God as a displaced rebellion against the father, and Freud says here that what finally interfered with their enjoyment of Athens was a feeling of piety towards their father. Freud says that Athens could not have meant much to his uneducated father and so it ends up not being able to mean much to the son, who finds himself unable either to trespass beyond the father or to believe in him. Freud’s use of the word piety as well as his concern with the polarity of belief-disbelief throughout the essay strongly suggests that in his own case too his religious stand reflects his ambivalent stand towards his father. Athens is the pagan and Freud despite his atheism and his severe criticism of religion remained a Jew: “My parents were Jews, and I have remained a Jew myself.” [14] He could resolutely reject belief in the religion of his father, but not the religion itself. A fundamental impiety would be involved in becoming Greek-identified, as had so many other eminent Germans. Thus, although Freud allowed himself to disbelieve in religious belief and to characterize it as illusion, he could not allow himself to believe in something else.

Credo ergo sum – “To believe is to be” – Kierkegaard wrote in answer to Descartes’ cogito ergo sum.[15] To believe is to be connected to something, to disbelieve is to be disconnected. Belief is love, connection, identification, and a sense of power.[16] Disbelief is inherently allied to negation, unpleasure, and unreality just as belief is to affirmation, joy, and reality. To believe is to be because one allows the other to guarantee that one is. Not to believe is not to be or at best to doubt. Freud here in part is not. He doubts. Something in him is dead; something (guilt?) makes him resistant to joy. The immobilization of his sensuous perceptions and imagination is a self- punishment.

Is this an inhibition or a symptom? Freud says it is a failure in functioning and an abnormal structure. (317) In Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, Freud calls an inhibition a “simple lowering of function” and a symptom an unusual change in function.”[17] A symptom is a degraded form of satisfaction, a substitutive process which must not find discharge in motility or become transformed into action, unless it is an action making an alteration in the subject’s own body.[18] Freud’s symptom is slight and momentary, a fleeting abnormality that most people would no more notice than they would a minor parapraxis, but Freud knows that the price such a momentary abnormality exacts is joy and that joy is related to motility.

Why is it so difficult to have pleasure? How much pleasure did Freud give himself? Enough to be on the Acropolis – for the most remarkable part of the essay for me is how he and his brother came to be on the Acropolis at all.

In Trieste on the way to Corfu, they saw an acquaintance who strongly advised them against going to Corfu because of the heat and suggested they take the Lloyd boat sailing to Athens that afternoon instead. The suggestion immensely depressed both brothers because they agreed that the idea was impractical, full of difficulties, and probably, impossible to execute because without passports they would not be allowed to land in Greece. Freud traces this depression to the immediate negation by his superego of such a deep fantasy, something he had uncovered in those wrecked by success and in those whose guilt or sense of inferiority made them feel unworthy of happiness and not capable of going beyond a certain pleasure-threshold.

Freud says that they spent the hours before the Lloyd office opened in a “gloomy state.”

But when the time came, we went up to the counter and booked our passages for Athens as though it were a matter of course, without bothering in the least about the supposed difficulties and indeed without having discussed with one another the reasons for our decision. (313)

Wordlessly, even stealthily, the brothers decide to go to Athens, an act of impious superiority over their father as it turns out later, as if these two represented the entire fraternal horde acting against the father. They move unhesitatingly, almost mindlessly, towards their object “as though it were a matter of course.” Freud sees their depression of that morning as a prefiguration of the symptom he experienced later: “We could not believe that we were to be given the joy of seeing Athens,” (315) but he says little about this sure, joint, silent action of their bodies, moving in mute consort, full of unspoken desire and belief, that brings the brothers to the Lloyd ticket window. He calls their behavior “strange” and says it was possible because Athens was at that moment only a possibility and not yet a reality! (313)

Thus the mere possibility of the actualization of a desire allows not only the motor imaginary, but motor movement and action whereas actuality itself stops motor activity – moving, even the drives, seeing, absorbing – because movement recalls some early unknown motion of excitement that it is dangerous to re-approach (perhaps in Freud’s case, the excitement and loveliness represented by his young mother, whom he saw undressed (nudam) as a child, on an overnight railway journey from Leipzig to Vienna).[19]

The Real (as opposed to reality) is approached by movement memories as well as by hallucination, and a motor image contains in it as much desire and as much danger of being transformed once again to jouissance as does an hallucination. For there is no doubt that only that has to be derealized which is immensely real: a reality that intimates behind it a Real, a desired encounter with sexual reality.

Freud was never quite sure where to locate motor movement. It is normally, certainly, in large part in the control of the ego (the will) and in the service of reality and action.[20] Still, given that movement has deep endogenous roots in the interior of our body and in our earliest experience, Freud also knew that the ego’s control of motility is more form than fact.[21] For the internal stimuli coming from our organs, that initially produce need, can, in their altered and modified erotic form as drive, produce a thrust (Drang) almost equal in charge to the major quantities of energy coming from the external world. It is certainly unusual to catch Freud himself at a moment when he is both wordless and acting wordlessly, a moment when his own motor movements are seemingly in the control of his id. Drive and desire join for a moment: he moves almost unconsciously (just short of literally sleepwalking) to get to Athens, but once there, he is immobilized. He does away with that which moves, his body. Disembodiment is not to be in the representation (the Darstellung as opposed to the Vorstellung) of the Real that is your body.”[22]

Thus we have, on the one hand, a cause of desire – the Acropolis – a fantasy object, associated perhaps in multifarious ways with all that for Freud was jouissance, and the elaboration of a motor imaginary, and real action. And, on the other, a lack of enjoyment, inhibition, and prohibition. Inhibition (the initial depression in Trieste) is the precursor of the prohibition (the disturbance on the Acropolis). The binding up of pleasure is a necessity, but an unconscious arrest of pleasure or a turning about of pleasure into pain or unpleasure is a symptom.

Freud chooses to analyze his unpleasure and failure rather than such pleasure as he had (after all he was there), giving himself more unpleasure (granted that it is less pleasurable to analyze unpleasure than to analyze pleasure). Thus, when it is a matter of enjoyment, Freud’s superego always returns him to the Imaginary relation (to the other who disapproves, the father who could be looking at him and his brother), to the oedipal scene and its forbidding laws, but when it is a matter of intellectual discovery, knowledge, and truth, Freud is unbounded and uninhibited, his own law. Evidently, his knowledge could not harm his father, but his desires, including those for his mother, could. His very desire for joy, maintained by a guilt at the thought of having it, assured his inability to have it.

Before his death Socrates’ daimon told him to “practice music!” Nietzsche interpreted this as Signifying that Socrates finally sensed that something was missing in his philosophy: the acknowledgement of death, of Dionysus, and of unreason.[23] One cannot accuse Freud of all these omissions, but if the essay on the Acropolis, written two years before his death, catches Freud as if asking for one last time: what have I missed and why? What crime have I committed that I am debarred from joy? One can imagine Freud’s daimon answering him: “practice movement!” Freud was condemned always to look for the meaning, but movement is designed for pleasure, not for meaning.

II

I turn now to the astonishingly brilliant commentary where Lacan looks at Freud looking at himself in the dream of Irma, in which Lacan is in fact not only interpreting Freud’s dream but presenting his own understanding of his three orders: the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary. Lacan says that he will try to see what the dream “signifies in the symbolic and the imaginary order,” but clearly what utterly fascinates him in the dream is the order of the Real.[24]

Lacan calls this the first dream, the initial, typical, inaugural dream – “the dream of dreams” (147,152) – not only because Freud positions it first in The Interpretation of Dreams (an act by means of which he in any case says implicitly that it is the most important dream) but because in it Freud discovers and reveals his own unconscious desire which is his desire for the unconscious and his desire to become the Freud he became, the founder of psychoanalysis. In essence, here Freud discovers that he desires to be Freud; he affirms being Freud: and he finds the way to be Freud.

Therefore, what Lacan is saying is that it is possible, paradoxically, to discover the truth in dreams. We come at once upon a reevaluation of the neoclassical evaluation of the dream. For example, Descartes believed that dreaming, like the imagination, was inevitably inferior to reasoning (less clear and distinct) and not entirely false only because it was God after all who had placed the senses and the imagination in us.

And because our reasoning is never so clear and complete during sleep as when we are awake, although sometimes the acts of our imagination are then as lively and distinct, if not more so than in our waking moments, reason furthermore dictates that, since all our thoughts cannot be true because of our partial imperfections, those possessing truth must infallibly be found on the experience of our waking moments rather than in that of our dreams.[25]

Lacan and Freud make much of this “more so than in our waking moments,” discovering that this long mysterious vividness of dreams is the result of the hallucinatory gleam casts by images afire with desire and of the extreme motility of signifiers free of their signifieds or meanings. Freud and Lacan reverse Descartes’ diminution of the value of dreams: our truth (although we ourselves can never entirely know it) is found in dreams.

Freud tells us that this dream reveals his wish “to be innocent of Irma’s illness.” Lacan brushes this aside as a preconscious or rather an entirely conscious desire.(151) The unconscious desire is far vaster, enormous, impossible to obtain: it is to be exonerated of all guilt, of the very guilt of having discovered the unconscious and of instituting psychoanalysis as such.

According to Lacan, the dreamer, the true subject, says:

I am he who wants to be forgiven for having dared to begin to cure these patients, who until now no one wanted to understand and whose cure was forbidden. I am he who wants not to be guilty of it, for to transgress any limit imposed up to now on human activity is always to be guilty. I want not be (born) that … Precisely to the extent that I desired it too much, that I wanted to be myself, the creator. I am not the creator. The creator is someone greater than I. It is my unconscious, it is the voice which speaks in me, beyond me. This is the meaning of this dream. (70)

Freud is the mere scribe, the recorder, not only of his own dream but of the dream of psychoanalysis itself: which has to be of and about the unconscious, concerned with its fundamental substance and form. Freud’s dream, for Lacan, states what the unconscious is, namely language, and affirms that the subject of the unconscious really says something beyond the ego or beyond what consciousness is able to say. Given that Freud is truly only a scribe, then he is exonerated in all guilt, even that of having discovered the unconscious, because it is and he is merely its spokesman.

In this dream, in which Freud establishes the truth of the existence of a subject of the unconscious, he moves definitively beyond the nineteenth century identification of the unconscious with the body to a vision where the unconscious is rather the recoil from carnal reality, a recoil and decampment made possible by language. (This decampment, of course, is never absolute, not even in psychosis). Lacan grants his own discovery of the unconscious, as built upon signifiers, scraps of linguistic material free of meanings, to Freud. Freud was already dreaming Lacan.(170)

The essence of the Freudian discovery, says Lacan, is that there is a subject beyond the ego and de-centered in relation to the ego. If this is not true, if this subject beyond consciousness does not exist, says Lacan, then all his own teachings are false.(148)

Philosophers have always looked for a subject beyond the ego, although never before in the dream. And it had not occurred to them to suspect that this subject is linguistic. One of the forms that this search for a meta-subject has taken is the notion of a social subject, ethically elevated above the individual. Thus, historically, a strong ethical injunction against narcissism (precisely. as certain moralists, like Rochefoucauld and Molière, pointed out, because we are selfish) always existed alongside the idea that the perfection of the self was attained together with the common social good.

Descartes helped do away with all these pieties about our interest in the good of the all, says Lacan, by discovering that a formal, empty, solipsistic subject is indeed all he is. He discovered, essentially: when I think, I exist; when I don’t think, I don’t exist. Beyond the certainty of my thinking, I know nothing. God alone guarantees everything else: the world, the body, others, and in a sense one can add, His own existence, because il one’s single and central certainty is that “I” exist, then by implication one is not sure that God exists. Not that Descartes ever said that, but his position implies a heresy.

Lacan asks, what thinks ”I” in Descartes? Does something like an object really become visible with or to the “think?” (6-7) Lacan wants to point out that language thinks this “I” of Descartes. What “thinks” is “materialism” (motérialisme), as he later calls it, playing on the French words, mot and matérialisme.[26] This “moterialism” is what is autonomous, not the ego, which is always dependent on others. (”The ego is never just the subject … it is essentially a relation to the other.”) (177) And only an “I,” emerging from “moterialism,” can attain separation from others (albeit not from language). Thus, the subject of the signifier, objective and “scientific”, is not the ego of classical theory, or the outwardly oriented individual of Darwin or the behaviorists, who talk of our adaptation to the world (8-9), but the inner core of our being (der Kern unseres Wesens), able to speak when we are not conscious.

It is clear that in the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant was also searching for a subject beyond the ego, an objective subject, free of purely subjective factors, such as need, sell-love, sell-interest, desire, inclination, or anything that appeals to our imagination, like the idea of perfection or social unity, or the classical ideal of the ethical citizen of the state. Kant’s subject wills only what is universal, necessary, unconditional, objectless, and free: “Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become universal law,” (a willing which in fact does not at all escape the relationship to the other but, on the contrary, makes it absolute).[27] This subject is dedicated to what would win everyone’s unqualified consent, as a mathematical truth or formula does: the categorical imperative. This imperative makes of every human being a legislative being, able to give the law to himself by his reason. It gives us the dignity of beings who need obey no other law but that which we have given to ourselves.[28] (The implicit heresy here lies in the fact that ethically we have obviated God and the need for the decalogue.)

Kant’s subject commands. it does not speak, which is why Lacan says in “Kant aver Sade.” that what we hear here is neither the voice of the ego nor that of the subject of the unconscious, but the inhuman voice of the superego.[29] By contrast, what humanizes Lacan’s (and Freud’s) discovery of the signifiers of the unconscious is that they are linked to desire, to Freud’s impossible wish, for example, to be completely exonerated. Because the Kantian voice commanded, nothing less than the universal. it could not wish the individual. The ten commandments (that Kant managed to reduce to one) and the categorical imperative prohibit subjective desires. Human truth, however, can only be found when you do not prohibit desires.

Thus, whereas for Kant it was reason that enabled us to legislate autonomously without God, and to create another realm, the realm of ends or of understanding (in opposition to the realm of nature, the Sadean realm of motion and motor discharge) and to apprehend a moral commandment that operates on us like a law of nature, like gravity, for Lacan what could give such impartiality can only be something other than us, as language is. Language as a set of material signs and syntactical rules (not speech) is autonomous and operative without us, like a machine. Such a semi autonomous mechanism, outside of us and yet inexorably active in us, gives us the equivalent of what the Greeks called fate, the irrational: a linguistic destiny, something which simultaneously exculpates us from guilt while making us guilty.

In the second and final climax of this dream, Freud sees “trimethylamine.” spelled out before him “very vividly, hallucinated as a formula.” as he says in the Project for a Scientific Psychology.[30] He sees signifiers in denuded, abstract, and skeletal form, “beyond the hubbub of speech.” language in fact as a wall, separating us both from the Real and the Imaginary. The formula, says Lacan:

gives no reply whatsoever to anything. But the very manner in which it is spelt out, its enigmatic, hermetic nature, is in fact the answer to the question to the meaning of the dream. One can model it closely on the Islamic formula – There is no other God but God. There is no other word, no other solution to your problem, than the word. (158)

The formula is a hallucinated vision of language as the Other: the signifier, without signified, without meaning, communication, or the transit to others: without the dimension of the voice or the drive or therefore the Real, as body or action.[31] As a radical reduction of language to structure, to a set of formal signs obeying formal rules (”This word means nothing except that it is a word”) (170), it is a kind of an extreme, an absolute, the Mene, Tekel, Upharsin of the Bible,” the mystifying handwriting on the wall in chapter five of Daniel.(158) But that, in fact, as Lacan says:

is what the dream leads up to. The coming into operation of the symbolic function in its most radical absolute usage endsup abolishing the action of the individual so completely that by the same token it eliminates his tragic relation to the world… The extreme use of the radically symbolic character of all truth makes it lose the sharp edge of its relation to truth. At the heart of the flow of events, of the functioning of reason, the subject from the first move finds himself to be no more than a pawn, forced inside his system, and excluded from any truly dramatic, and consequently tragic, participation in the realization of truth.(168)

The symbolic alone, disconnected from the other orders, is no longer human truth. In a world where we would be radically and exclusively determined by language, where there would only be “this speech which is in the subject without being a speech of the subject,” (171) all ethics would be abolished and we would, therefore, be guiltless. If language acts and we are only the subjects of language (subjected to language, its effect) our action loses its tragic character and we are no longer responsible or even co-responsible.

To excuse himself is Freud’s desire and he structures his dream brilliantly to attain his wish. In his dreams, albeit only in his dreams, Freud, always so guilty (as on the Acropolis), really has satisfaction and unlike most of us, he knows it. Outside of dreams, however, the price of being exclusively determined by the symbolic (which we are not) would be psychosis or death.

The formula issues from the “mouth” of no one (Nemo), from a “subject outside the subject,” (159) from a Freud who has broken away from others, from his body, and who has broken through his ego and its image, (which are both pure resistance and Vemeinung) (159), from a Freud, therefore, who is acephalic or headless because the head (the ego) is Imaginary.

If there is an image which could represent for us the Freudian notion of the unconscious, it is indeed that of the acephalic subject, of a subject who no longer has an ego, who doesn’t belong to the ego. And yet he is the subject who speaks … (167)

One can see in Lacan’s interpretation a clear prefiguration of what he later named the Borromean knot, the necessary interlinking of the three orders, because it is evident that Lacan sees at once the scientific subject (given to us by “moterialism”) and its limitations, meaninglessness, and even logical impossibility without the order of the Real and the Imaginary. The subject inheres in all three orders and uses one order or allows himself to be used by it in order to attempt to escape from another order. Freud lands in the unconscious symbolic (or Lacan grants him his own vision of the nature of the unconscious signifier) just after he has experienced a trauma in the Real and a crisis in the Imaginary.

It is Freud’s experience in his dream of a crisis in the Imaginary, a drastic impasse in all his relationships and identifications, that inexorably forces him to leap to the comparative stability and seemingly “scientific” orderliness of language, submitting himself to being caused by language rather than by nature (the Real), the body or by other people (his Imaginary identifications), and certainly not by their incoherent discourse, their “great cacophony” of dubious and unsure scientific opinions. (168) The only law which this crowd seems capable of coming up with is the nonsensical consensus: “if no one is right, everyone is right.” (160) It is the futility of the interhuman discourse, the speech of the group, of the polycephalic or multi-headed subject, (l67) that gives Freud’s desire the final incentive to find and encode another law, the speech of the unconscious.

After his trauma in the Real (to which I will return anon) Freud convokes his peers and friends (stand-ins and repetitions of his original oedipal relations) for succor, anchorage, and stabilization. 1167) He is trying to halt his dissolution, since he knows perfectly well that his ego is nothing but a contingent, ragbag collection of fusionary identifications, “a precipitate of abandoned object- cathodes,” other selves and things identified with to avoid helplessness or get a bit of power and pleasure.”[32] The encounter with the Real does not produce regression, (155) but makes us cry out for the other. The death-intimidating Real makes us want to be something, which means being with someone or something, almost anything, even something entirely inert, since the human capacity and tolerance for “structuring identifications” is as Lacan says, exceptionally loose compared to that of the animal. (166)

The ego is a wildly heterogeneous conglomerate, not an organically developed entity like a “great tree” which achieves “a miraculous equilibrium.” (155) Because it is a conglomerate, the ego can be lost, “blown up;” it can decompose, fade away, “dissociate into its various egos.” (176) In Freud’s dream, says Lacan, we are dealing with a “spectral decomposition of the function of the ego,” “with an imaginary decomposition.” (165) The “great tree” of consciousness (an allusion perhaps to Hegel’s mighty vision of the organic development of Absolute Spirit at the opening of the Phenomenology”)[33] – orderly, unified, and rational – cannot be relied on because it doesn’t exist. When the ego, with its special inertness, because structured always along the lines of the body image (167) is destroyed, so is Freud’s guilt (168) because the guilt is towards others, in the Imaginary order. Immediately, he finds himself in the liberating, but also dangerously abstract and scientific order of the Symbolic.

However the Symbolic, unless loosened psychotically from the Real – as is possible in dreams, which are, in any case, inherently psychotic”[34] – is not as autonomous as the nonhuman use of language (cybernetics for example) suggests, but still inexorably related to the Real – in the case of physics, to matter, and in the case of humans, to bodies, sex, and death. Freud’s trauma in the Real begins with the mouth.

What comes out of Irma’s mouth, a potent condensation if ever there was one (and for Lacan more so than Freud), is amazing: a chemical formula as well as the odor of spent sperm: words and vomit;[35] eros and death, the alpha and omega of life. The formula for trimethylamine, though itself abstract, is the sign of the chemical that is a decomposition product of sperm, the ammonia-like smell of sperm in the air, pointing to something absent but real. (158) In other words, the still and sacred signs beyond the ego, the handwriting on the wall, point back to sexuality and excitation, to something else, moving and in flow, which is neither Imaginary nor Symbolic, but Real, the smell of expiring semen. Given the two climaxes of the dream: the mouth (the encounter with the formless) and the formula (the form), we see that the one issues from the other, the word from the mouth, along with the sperm.

Irma, whose mouth Freud tries to open so that he can look in (the whole point of analysis, as Lacan points out), stands in at once for his relationship to the feminine as such, to that which makes “libidinal demands on the mind” (also Fliess), and to death (his two major anxieties). (176) She is the composite of several women whom he wants or doesn’t want (as patients), who are toothless or not (who can or cannot incorporate or devour him in an oral death), widowed or not, dead (Mathilde) or not, and who remind him of his own body, his ailments, his vulnerable finitude, and his desires.[36]

The mouth, for Freud, was itself something inaugural, a beginning:

The first organ to emerge as an erotogenic zone and to make libidinal demands on the mind is from the time of birth onwards, the mouth. To begin with, all psychical activity is concentrated on providing satisfaction for the needs of that zone…baby’s obstinate persistence in sucking gives evidence at an early stage of a need for satisfaction, which…strives to obtain pleasure independently of nourishment and for that reason may and should be termed sexual.[37]

This first zone, related to sexuality and the feminine, object and hole at once, absent pleasure and drive, is the point in the dream to which Lacan returns, again and again, almost compulsively, revealing his fascination in the very fact of the multiple returns as well as in his heightened figurative language. This mouth, says Lacan, is a horrendous discovery…of the flesh one never sees, the foundation of things, the other side of the head, of the face… the flesh from which everything exudes, at the very heart of the mystery, the flesh in as much as it is suffering, is formless, in as much as its form in itself, is something which provokes anxiety. Spectre of anxiety, identification of anxiety, the final revelation of you are this – You are this, which is so far from you, this which is the ultimate formlessness. (154-5)

“You are this” here means that Freud is looking at the very source of the drive, the unknowable point where it disappears into organic, somatic reality, where it and with it any sense of our body that we have, are lost in the organism as such, in formlessness. Freud leads us, says Lacan, to the terrifying anxiety-provoking image, to this real Medusa’s head, to the revelation of this something which properly speaking is unnameable, the back of this throat, the complex, unlocatable form, which also makes it into the primitive object par excellence, the abyss of the feminine organ from which all life emerges…and the image of death in which everything comes to an end. (164)

The metaphoric condensation collapses mouth, vagina, womb, phallus, birth, and death. It is a frightening, but privileged experience of the Real, the unnameable and unlocatable. What Freud sees is not seeable. because it is not an object, but an apparition of the real. It is:

the real lacking any possible mediation…the ultimate real…the essential object, which isn’t an object any longer, but this something faced with which all words cease and all categories fails, the object of anxiety par excellence. (164)

The third time Lacan turns to it, he calls it the “enigmatic image,” the navel of the dream, an “abyssal relation to that which is most unknown…in which the real is apprehended beyond all mediation be it imaginary or symbolic.” (176-7) Clearly, for Lacan, this encounter with the flesh is a sublime experience, but one in which the imaginative accent falls on the apprehension of formlessness and anxiety rather than, as in Kant, on the surpassing of the anxiety- provoking unbounded sublime by means of the concept of totality.

It is of course Lacan to whom the vision belongs or who extends it, because he seems to sense, as if for the first time, or certainly with the radiant freshness that characterizes the first time, the full weight of the Real compared to the other orders as well as the fact that the status of the unconscious depends as much on establishing its inherence in the Real as in language.

Lacan’s vision is a classical descent into “the inferior domain” as Cixous called it – a descent into Hell, into the Inferno, to death, to where creation begins, to where there is formlessness, namelessness, chaos, the intense anxiety of nonbeing, incoherence, physiological disfunctionalisation,[38] but where, one might add, there is also incomprehensible commotion, turbulence, and excitation; and undefined, meaningless movement – non coordinated, objectless, painful and pleasurable at once.

For why would we be so concerned with all that is stable and stabilizing: with the power of language images, names, nomination, structuration, law – if at the core were not something radically unstable, not merely the formless, but movement itself?

It is through nomination that man makes objects subsist with a certain consistence…The name is the time of the object…If the human subject didn’t name…no world, not even a perception, could be sustained for more than an instant. (169-170)

True enough, but there is something in the subject besides the signifier, or the object and non-object, or even the mysterious, founding, and lost objet a,[39] and that is movement and immobility, which we sense in the action of needs and drives. The original anxiety, provoked by the Real, is not only the anxiety of formlessness, or the loss and fall of objet a, but an anxiety having to do with movement and immobility. Objet a is unknowable, but motion, what Freud originally called “Q” in the Project for a Scientific Psychology, is also unknowable.

The mirror is a surface that reflects back form, the dream is a mirror that reflects back movement, being moved or not, being satisfied or not. The mirror provides us with the opportunity of a heautoscopy; we see our body image, and in the light of it, the world. The dreamwork is a labor for our satisfactions. Autoscopy forgets movement. The dream reminds us of all the motion and stillness we have lived and witnessed. It is the apprehension of living matter by its most essential characteristics: motility and mutability.

Lacan tends in this analysis to focus on the highly condensed images – the mouth, the acephalic Freud, the formula – that seem to form and then to explode under the force and pressure of their own massive condensation. But he also sees the fluidity and mobility of these images. They are unsettled, mutable, plastic, inconstant, and shifting. Pulsating with the libidinizing drives, these images, in the midst of waves and oscillations, are unarrestable, gleaming, driven; the entire dream, with “’the outline of Luder-Amour coming into Sight at the darkest center’” (162) is a pulsing series of micro and macro movements.

It is an image of waves, of oscillations, as if the entire world were animated by a disquieting imaginary pulsation and at the same time an image of fire…(162)

Dreamwork, the essence of dreaming, is not about thought, nor is it primarily about form, or the formation of hallucinated images, or even about transformation,[40] but about work. It is libidinized labor and action, a labor of desire that requires the literal moving about of “moterialism” and images to different positions and places to suit desire and to keep alive its fire, while avoiding conflagration by nothing less than an ingenious and “demonic”[41] activity of dramatization, displacement, fragmentation, and condensation. What guides all the commotion is actually “compromise.[42] Even while dreaming we seem to know that the reality principle for us concerns the moderation or inhibition of pleasure since otherwise pleasure ends (given that to cease is its aim) or becomes a painful excess. There is a shift in emphasis in the later Lacan, as Jacques-Alain Miller has argued, from “the unconscious speaks” to “the unconscious plays” and “enjoys,”[43] which also means, one might add: the unconscious moves, as it plays, as it enjoys.

In his effort to conceptualize movement in Die Kindliche Bewegungsunruhe (”Movement Unrest or Motor Restlessness in The Child”), Karl Landauer postulates that birth is an autoplastic “motor storm” – which subjects the newborn to an excess of stimulation both from the exterior world and its own interior organism (as temperature changes, new tactile sensations and respiration begin etc.) – and which creates a fundamental link between anxiety and movement, rather than anxiety and the objet a.[44] This initial movement is fragmented, afunctional. Incoherent, and at once pleasurable and unpleasurable: a catastrophic jouissance. In the infant’s initial movements pleasure and suffering are scarcely distinguishable. These movements are at once an expression of unpleasure (at excess stimulation) and an attempt to create satisfaction by means of a discharge of the stimulation (so as to bring about a stimulus stillness or arrest).

A continuity of movement is only established gradually, just as is the unity of the body image. Coordinated and coherent movements, and entire, harmonized movement sequences, montages, or scenarios come to inhibit and organize movement in order to assure motor pleasure and control. Landauer argues that movement is the very terrain where the reality principle begins as the infant learns to shape, to regularize, and to “rhythmisize” its movement, for example, by sucking. Sucking – an even, rhythmic movement, self- soothing and pleasurable – is already a considerable achievement (as every mother knows), a regularization of the oral drive, since the newborn does not necessarily know how to suck, but has to be forced into doing it or tricked by drops of milk on its lips.[45] Modeled, shaped, patterned – random motor excitation becomes a resource that can be deployed against catastrophic jouissance, and it can become a way to renew the pleasure that always ends, that plunges always into the death drive.

Motor anxiety concerns a fundamental apprehension of an inadequacy of pleasure within excitation, or an inability to elicit it out of excess excitation. Anxiety in relation to movement has to do with the absence of control, and the sense of one’s autoerotic inadequacy and incompleteness, as well as with the fundamental absence of the object.[46] Landauer gives the example of an infant whose hand would strike out wildly into space until she found her hair, a first love object, whose discovery allowed the movement to direct itself and to repeat itself, creating a scenario of more limited and regulated enjoyment, but one with a design, with a beginning and an end.[47] Here “the moment of the object is the moment in which movement congeals.”[48] But even when the drives course around the mere “presence of the hollow, the void” – and the itinerary is goalless and aimless, “the way taken” shapes the drive.[49]

There is no pleasure without movement or having moved. One cannot “come” without moving. This is why the Sadean philosopher in the bedroom can despise God because He does not move or only did “one single time and, thereafter through millions of centuries, is fixed in a contemptible stillness and inactivity.” The Sadean philosopher turns to nature which, by contrast, is matter in action.[50] To discharge is nature’s holy law. It God doesn’t move, He doesn’t “come”, and what is a God who cannot discharge!

Movement is pleasure, but not exclusively. The Sadean philosopher pursues pleasure (via pain) to its end, which is death. He knows nothing about the intricate compromises in movement and displacement demanded by pleasure and desire, as revealed in the dream. He sees no distinction between matter in motion and a living body in motion.

Insight into the motor imaginary is reached only when the physical body is forgotten and the body image and all the other forms and objects that are pinned on it are shattered. For the body image is too caught up in the pleasure of the perception of objects to describe the movement of the drives. Insight comes, perhaps, in dreams and art because these attack the ego, and go beyond the ego, putting consciousness in danger. When the ego is tom apart so is the body image, which means that the subject falls into pieces in immoderate excitation, and only then perhaps can it come symbolically to appreciate the absolute beauty and lenitive power of life in rhythmic motion.

This is why our more sophisticated cultural motor imaginary combines movement and immobility in its representations. Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover – immaterial, actuality without matter – is at rest, unmoved himself, but with the power to move other objects by acting as the object of their desire and their thought.

And Dante, at the end of Paradiso, contemplating the mystery of the three, the Trinity, and then of the two, the double nature of Christ, realizes that he is turning what is the eternal light into mathematics, “like the geometer who sets his mind to the squaring of the circle…I wished to see how the image was fitted to the circle.” The ancient and mathematically insoluble problem is something no mind is equal to, but he says he was granted, nonetheless, to experience a solution, that his mind was “smitten by a flash of lightening wherein came its wish” and he convinces us that he was satisfied because he goes on to say: “but now my desire and will, like a wheel that spins with even motion, were resolved by the Love that moves the sun and other stars.”[51] “Even motion,” the movement of the sun and stars regulated by perfect desire, a balance of the moved and the unmoving -that was Dante’s last vision.

Notes

[1] A shorter version of this paper was delivered at the Fifteenth Annual Meeting of The International Association for Philosophy and Literature on Bodies: Image, Writing, Technology at the University of California. Irvine on April 28. 1990.

[2] Sigmund Freud. “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis” in Character and Culture, New York: Collier Books, 1963.

[3] Christa Wolf, Cassandra, trans. Jan van Heurck, New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1984.

[4] Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. A.A. Brill, New York: Random House, 1938.

[5] See Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans.
James Strachey, New York: W.W. Norton. 1966.

[6] Peter Gay, Freud: A Life For Our Time, New York: W.W. Norton, 1988.

[7]Jacques·Alain Miller. “To Interpret the Cause: from Freud to Lacan,” Newsletter of the Freudian Field, Spring/Fall. 1989.

[8] G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Fine Art, vol. I., quoted in Reconstructing Aesthetics, eds. Agnes Heller and Ference Feher, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986.

[9] Sigmund Freud, “Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy” in The Sexual Enlightenment of Children, New York: Collier Books, 1963.

[10] See Sigmund Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, trans. Alex Strachey, New York: W.W. Norton, 1959.

[11] See Sigmund Freud, Five Lectures on Psycho·Analysis, trans. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990).

[12] Jacques-Alain Miller, “A and a in Clinical Structures” in Acts of the Paris-New York Psychoanalytic Workshop.

[13] Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety.

[14] Sigmund Freud, An Autobiographical Study, trans. James
Strachey, New York: W. W. Norton, 1952.

[15] Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death in Fear and Trembling and The Sickness unto Death, trans. Walter Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968.

[16] See also Freud’s discussion of variants of such Jove, identification, and power in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, trans. James Strachey, New York: W.W. Norton, 1959.

[17] Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety.

[18] Ibid

[19] Peter Gay notes that even at age 41, Freud cannot describe to Fliess this episode of the awakening of his libido “toward matrem” without “Iapsing into safe distancing Latin.” Freud: A Life for Our Time.

[20] Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, trans. Joan Riviera, New York: W.W. Norton, 1960

[21] Ibid

[22] Monique David-Ménard makes this distinction between Vorstellung and Darstellung in Hysteria From Freud to Lacan: Body and Language in Psychoanalysis, trans. Cathetine Porter, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989.

[23] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Goltting, New York: Doubleday, 1956. See Maire Jaanus, Literature and Negation, New York: Columbia University Press, 1979.

[24] Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book I, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954-5, ed. Jacques·Alain Miller, trans. Sylvia Tomaselli, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

[25] René Descartes, Meditations, trans. John Veitch in The Rationalists, New York: Doubleday, 1960.

[26] Jacques Lacan. “Geneva Lecture of the Symptom,” Analysis 1, 1989.

[27] Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals in Philosophical Writings, ed. Ernst Behler, New York: Continuum, 1986.

[28] Immanuel Kant, Foundations.

[29] Jacques Lacan, “Kant avec Sade,” in Écrits, Paris: Seuil, 1966.

[30] Sigmund Freud, “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” SE I.

[31] I am indebted here to Marie-Hélène Brousse and the distinctions that she made between language and speech.

[32] Freud, Ego and Id.

[33] G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J.B. Baillie, New York: Doubleday, 1963.

[34] See one of the many times Freud states this: “A Dream, then is a psychosis, with all the absurdities, delusions and illusions of a psychosis. A psychosis of short duration, no doubt, harmless, even entrusted with a useful function. None the less it is a psychosis, and we learn from it that even so deep-going an alteration of mental life as this can be undone and can give place to the normal function,” An Outline of Psycho-Analysis, trans. James Strachey, New York: W.W. Norton, 1979.

[35] Irma has a particular “tendency to vomit”, Lacan reminds us. Seminar II.

[36] Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.

[37] Freud, An Outline of Psycho-Analysis.

[38] Hélène Cixous, “The School of Roots,” a lecture at the University of California, Irvine, April 26, 1990.

[39] Jacques Lacan, Television, trans. Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, Annette Michelson and A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, ed. Joan Copjec, New York: W.W. Norton. 1990.

[40] Jean François Leotard, “The Dream·Work Does Not Think” in The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981.

[41] Sigmund Freud, On Dreams, trans. James Strachey, New York: W.W. Norton, 1952.

[42] Ibid

[43] Jacques-Alain Miller, lecture at the Lacan Conference 1990 April
14, 1990, Barnard College. New York.

[44] Karl Landauer, “Die kindliche Bewegungsunruhe: Das Schicksal dec den Stammganglien unterstehenden triebhaften Bewegungen,” in Internationale für Psychoanalyse, 12, 1926.

[45] Ibid

[46] David-Ménard, Hysteria, 160.

[47] Landauer, 383-4.

[48] David-Ménard, 155.

[49] Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho- Analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York. W.W. Norton, 1981.

[50] Marquis de Sade, The Philosophy in the Bedroom in The Marquis de Sade, Three Complete Novels, trans. Richard Seaver, Austrian Wainhouse, New York: Grove Press, 1965.

[51] Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, III , Paradiso, trans. J.D. Sinclair, New York: Oxford University Press, 1958.

literature and psychology, vol. XXXVI, 4, 1990.

Lacan’s Reading of The Visible and the Invisible

Author’s Bio

This cut in the signifying chain alone verifies the structure of the subject as discontinuity in the real.
-Lacan, “Subversion of the Subject…”

This moment of cut is haunted by the form of a bloody scrap—the pound of flesh that life pays in order to turn it into the signifier of signifiers, which it is impossible to restore, as such, to the imaginary body.
-Lacan, “Direction of the Treatment…”

A philosophy of the flesh is the condition without which psychoanalysis remains anthropology.
-Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible

1. The Limit of Language

When The Visible and the Invisible was published in 1964, Lacan was teaching for the first time at the École normale supérieure. In the fall of 1963, the previous semester, the French Society for Psychoanalysis had excluded Lacan from its list of approved training analysts, which also meant his rejection from the society founded by Freud himself, the International Psychoanalytic Association. As a result, Lacan cancelled his seminar at Sainte-Anne Hospital, where it had been running for ten years, and began teaching for the first time before a university audience (at the invitation of Femand Braudel, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Louis Althusser, and other supporters who had arranged for him to continue his teaching). Philosophers like Jean Wahl and Jean Hyppolite had of course taken an interest in his work for many years, but this was the first time that participants in his seminar no longer needed the special credentials required to enter the psychiatric clinic at the teaching hospital. The seminar was now open to the public, was considerably larger than it had ever been, and its participants came mainly from the university. Lacan was now obliged to make a case for his work before the academic world.

The seminar he had planned for that year was called Les noms-du- père (The Names-of-the-Father), but only one session took place. When he moved from Sainte-Anne to the École normale, he offered a different course, which was published as Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, although it was originally entitled Les fondements de la psychanalyse (The Foundations of Psychoanalysis). It is clear, therefore, that this seminar constitutes a new beginning of sorts, a return to fundamental principles. It also involves a concerted effort, on Lacan’s pan, to prove himself. If we begin with these historical details, it is not because of their intrinsic importance, or because a theoretical text can be reduced to its historical milieu, but because Lacan’s remarks on The Visible and the Invisible can be grasped only if we recognize the specific concerns that occupied him during this course.

Before we turn to that course, however, let us sketch its horizon more precisely. The ill-fated session from the Names-of-the-Father seminar, which has been published in the English (but not the French) edition of Television, contains an analysis of the “voice” which is very close to the account of the “gaze” that organizes his discussion of Merleau-Ponty (see Salecl and Zizek), The session on the “voice” develops through a reading of the biblical account of Abraham and Isaac (see Derrida), which is in turn elaborated by reference to Caravaggio’s depiction of the sacrifice of Isaac and Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling—the entire session providing a brief summary of Lacan’s course on anxiety from the previous semester (the unpublished Seminar X: L’ angoisse, 1962-63), in which Heidegger is never far away. The context for his treatment of Merleau-Ponty is therefore extremely complex and overdetermined, opening in many directions, but at the same time it is extremely precise, in the sense that Lacan’s purpose in exploring these materials is not primarily philosophical, but concerns the development of a fairly narrow and technical point within psychoanalytic theory, namely, the problem of the drive.

We thus have an initial orientation: as objects of the drive, the “voice” and the “gaze” are not properties of the subject (the power to look or to speak), and as a result, there is a considerable difference between “the gaze” as it functions in some film theory, and the gaze as an object of the scopic drive (see Saper). Lacan’s discussion in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis of Sartre’s account of the gaze (in which the voyeuristic subject is suddenly surprised by the look of the other) is intended to draw a sharp distinction between the Sartrean framework, which may do justice to the peculiar way in which the relation between two subjects can vacillate between “objectification” and “intersubjectivity,” and the Freudian account of the drive and its object. This suggests that if Lacan turns from Sartre to Merleau-Ponty, it is because Merleau-Ponty has moved beyond the intersubjective formulation toward a constitutive “invisibility” at the heart of the visible. But this only makes more acute the question of why Lacan in turn disagrees with Merleau-Ponty.

Let us recall the four fundamental concepts that Lacan treats in Seminar XI: the unconscious, repetition, transference, and the drive (SXI 16/12). The editorial divisions have broken the seminar into four sections and a short conclusion. The first section is called “The Unconscious and Repetition,” and the third section is called “The Transference and the Drive.” These two sections would therefore seem to cover the four main topics of the seminar. Two other sections remain. The second contains Lacan’s remarks on Merleau-Ponty (which occupy four chapters). The comments on Merleau-Ponty thus interrupt the seminar, suspending it at the very center, separating the first pair of “fundamental concepts” from the second pair. Lacan’s discussion of The Visible and the Invisible could thus be said to provide a sort of hinge, or a point of suspension, particularly between the treatment of the “unconscious” and the treatment of the “drive.”

As for the fourth section, I will not develop it here, although it has a crucial bearing on his treatment of Merleau-Ponty and can be said to contain Lacan’s most important theoretical contribution in this seminar, his main step forward in relation to his earlier work. Let us say only this: that it presents us with a consolidation of a development in Lacan’s work over the preceding two or three years, which concerns his refusal to account for the unconscious as an exclusively “symbolic” phenomenon. It is the notorious “symbolic” conception of the subject that Lacan now wishes to complicate or modify, by stressing the category of the real in an unprecedented way. And it is this emphasis upon the real that will lead him to develop his account of the objet petit a, the object of the drive. “In advancing this proposition,” Lacan says,

I find myself in a problematic position—for what have I taught about the unconscious? The unconscious is constituted by the effects of speech…the unconscious is structured like a language…And yet this leaching has had, in its approach, an end that I have called transferential. (SXI 137/149)

This transferential dimension introduces a problem because Lacan has insisted in this seminar upon a new definition of the transference, namely: “the transference is the enactment of the reality of the unconscious” (SXI 137/149, emphasis added). We may tend to think of the transference in purely “symbolic” terms, as a process of speech that allows the unconscious to appear through the signifier, in the classical form of the dream, in the lapsus or parapraxis, or in any of those verbal formations that present the subject’s “unconscious thought,” revealing in symbolic form what the ego does not wish to say. But with this definition of the transference as an enactment of the reality of the unconscious, we are forced to conclude that the unconscious is not reducible to a purely “symbolic” phenomenon. This is in keeping with Freud’s own claims, and Lacan immediately points this out, adding: “The reality of the unconscious is sexual reality” (SXI 138/150). Whatever he means by “sexual reality,” and however complex may be the relation between “reality” and the “real.” it is clear that the unconscious is no longer understood in purely “symbolic” terms (see Shepherdson, “Vital Signs”). As we shall see, this new development has a decisive bearing on his treatment of Merleau-Ponty, and on the concept of the “gaze.”

The same difficulty is present at the very beginning of the seminar, in a chapter entitled “The Freudian Unconscious and Ours.” “Most of you will have some idea of what I mean when I say—the unconscious is structured like a language,” he writes (SXI 23/20). “It is this linguistic structure… that assures us that there is, beneath the term unconscious, something definable, accessible and objectifiable. But when I urge psychoanalysts not to ignore this field,” he asks, “does this mean that I hope to include the concepts historically introduced by Freud” within this linguistic structure? Can we maintain that the unconscious (or “sexual reality”) is reducible to a symbolic phenomenon? “No, I don’t think so. The unconscious, the Freudian concept, is something different, which I would like to try to get you to grasp today” (SXI 24/21). We will not develop this turn in Lacan’s thinking any further here. It is enough to recognize that the “gaze” introduces a dimension that is located at the very limit of the symbolic order, in the sense that the gaze marks the “limits of formalization,” the point at which the symbolic structure is incomplete. As such, the gaze belongs to the category of the real, which is neither symbolic nor imaginary, but is rather linked to the concept of lack, a concept which begins to play a new and decisive role in Lacan’s thought and presents us with a radical development in his conception of the subject. We can summarize this development through the epigraph chosen from his essay “The Subversion of the Subject…,” which speaks of a certain disruption in the linguistic field, a rupture in the signifying chain: “This cut in the signifying chain alone verifies the structure of die subject as discontinuity in the real” (Écrits, French 801/English 299, emphasis added).

Keeping in mind the basic orientation of his work in this seminar, let us now turn to a discussion of the second section, which deals directly with Merleau-Ponty, focusing in particular on the first two chapters of the four which treat The Visible and the Invisible. The question we will ask is how this conception of the subject as “discontinuity in the real” is linked by Lacan to the question of the body, and in particular to the problem of the drive.

2. The “Gaze” As Object

On February 19,1964. Lacan walked into his seminar and announced: “It is not by mere chance…if this very week I have received a copy of the newly published, posthumous work of my friend Maurice Merleau-Ponty” (SXI 68/71). It is not a matter of chance because this text addresses a problem which Lacan himself was trying to resolve, even if the two thinkers formulate this problem in very different ways. Lacan immediately dedicated the entire session of his seminar, and the following three weeks, to The Visible and the Invisible, posing questions which, even if they do not constitute a rigorous philosophical analysis of Merleau-Ponty’s work, nevertheless constantly bring him back to this remarkable text.

His comments are not easy to understand. The Visible and the Invisible is a notoriously obscure and difficult text, but this is not the only problem. Lacan’s references to philosophical works are never very well developed, and his treatment of Merleau-Ponty is no exception. When he speaks of Hegel or Aristotle, it is always in the course of an attempt to clarify some detail of Freudian theory, and not for strictly philosophical reasons. In addition, his references are usually combined with allusions to several other texts, so that one can never be sure how much he really knows about the material in question, or how precise his analysis is intended to be. And even when he speaks of particular details, of Aristotle’s concept of chance (tuche), for example, or the moral law in Kant’s ethical theory, one cannot know which version of the philosopher he has in mind, which school of thought or interpretive framework he is presupposing. He does not elaborate the philosophical text enough to show us exactly what he takes the author to be saying, and this makes it difficult to see what he is criticizing when he objects, and what he approves of when he agrees. It must therefore be acknowledged at the outset that we cannot find anything like a properly philosophical account of Merleau-Ponty, or a responsible exegesis, in the four chapters that touch on The Visible and the Invisible. Nor can it be said that he does justice to this work, or that he takes us very far into its intricately woven fabric.

The Visible and the Invisible, acknowledging its importance, yet marking what he takes to be its limitations. It should therefore be possible to isolate a few propositions and to grasp the essential features of Lacan’s encounter with this work. If he is concerned, as always, with Freudian theory more than he is with the philosophical tradition, it should be possible to grasp what it is in psychoanalysis that leads him to make the specific claims about Merleau-Ponty that we find in Seminar XI.

One might expect Lacan to take up Merleau-Ponty’s work in terms of the category of the imaginary and its role in the formation of the body—exploring the concept of the Gestalt and the question of the visual field as an imaginary formation that goes beyond classical theories of perception, sensation, or visual experience. But this is not what interests Lacan in 1964. One might expect him to stress the symbolic order, either celebrating Merleau-Ponty’s turn toward Saussure or criticizing him for elaborating the question of language without giving sufficient attention to the unconscious. But this is not what we find in his analysis of The Visible and the Invisible. One might expect, finally, that he would regard the most important achievement of Merleau-Ponty to be his remarkable treatment of the relation between the visual and the verbal—the complex interplay between language and perception that we find in his chapter on the “chiasm,” in the essay “Eye and Mind,” and in the impressive work on painting, in which Merleau-Ponty shows how color, texture, and the whole material arrangement of painting is already a rhythm, a harmony, a language and system that contains its own logic, its own mode of ideality, its own structure of memory and rigorous abstraction. “Once this strange system of exchanges is given.” Merleau-Ponty writes in “Eye and Mind,” “we find before us all the problems of painting” (164). And again in the chapter on the chiasm, he writes:

“Pure” ideality already streams forth along the articulations of the aesthetological body, along the contours of the sensible things. …It is as though the visibility that animates the sensible world were to emigrate, not outside of every body, but into another less heavy, more transparent body, as though it were to change flesh, abandoning the flesh of the body for that language. (VI 200/152-53)

“Ideality” would thus be given, not by the systematic logic of the philosophical tradition, but by that level of abstraction which is grasped by the painter’s eye and hand, that process of “emigration” which allows the visible world to inhabit the domain of language. Lacan was concerned for many years with the interplay between the imaginary and me symbolic, and there is perhaps no other thinker who addressed this problem with more diligence and sensitivity than Merleau-Ponty. Yet this is not what concerns Lacan when he turns to Merleau-Ponty’s last work.

Instead, we find that his remarks arc entirely focused on the Freudian concept of the drive, and that he turns to Merleau-Ponty’s account of the “gaze” in order to claim that the gaze is not a matter of vision or perception, nor even a matter of the invisible horizon of visibility, but must rather be understood as an object, and more precisely as the object of the drive. In short, the “gaze” is a version of the “object a” in Lacan, and it therefore concerns the category of the real, which is neither symbolic nor imaginary. As he says in the chapter entitled “What Is a Picture?” “The objet a in the field of the visible is the gaze” (SXI 97/105). The “gaze” is therefore placed by Lacan within a series of objects, each of which corresponds to a different corporeal dimension, a different aspect of the body. As we know, Freud distinguishes between different forms of the drive, and we find in his work a series of objects, the “breast,” the “feces,” the “phallus,” and so on, objects that correspond to the oral, anal, and phallic stages of what Lacan calls the constitution of the subject; and Lacan adds to the Freudian list, giving special attention to two other objects, the gaze and the voice—the first being the object of the scopic drive, the second being the object of what he calls the “vocative” drive. Merleau-Ponty’s remarks on the gaze are thus taken up by Lacan in terms of the object of the scopic drive, and thus in terms of a very specific moment in the constitution of the subject. This leads him to an entire series of questions that are quite removed from the ones Merleau-Ponty was asking in his final work. This difference in orientation is considerable and should not be overlooked, but it should nevertheless be possible to show how Lacan came to find his own concerns already present in Merleau-Ponty, though in a veiled or indirect way.

3. Beyond “Intentionality”: The Gaze and the Superego

We can distinguish three different moments in Lacan’s treatment of The Visible and the Invisible, one which designates the continuous path of Merleau-Ponty’s work, another which marks out what is new in his last writings, and finally a moment in which Lacan parts company with Merleau-Ponty. These three moments are stressed on several occasions by Lacan, and merit further elaboration.

In Seminar XI, in the chapter called “The Eye and the Gaze,” Lacan writes: “This work, Le Visible et l’invisible, may indicate the moment of arrival of the philosophical tradition. . . In this work, which is both an end and a beginning, you will find both a recapitulation and a step forward” in relation to The Phenomenology of Perception (SXI 68/71). He elaborates the recapitulation as follows:

One finds a recapitulation of the regulatory junction of form . . . which is governed, not only by the subject’s eye, but by his expectations, his movement, his grip, his muscular and visceral emotion—in short, his constitutive presence, directed in what is called his total intentionality. (SXI 68-69/71)

As always, this attention to form, and to the formative power of embodied life, is intended to avoid the alternative of idealism and empiricism: beginning with the gradual, quasi-dialectical movement in which the world takes shape and is realized through actual experience, thereby providing the subject with the finite, material horizon of its own corporeal existence and cognitive activity, Merleau- Ponty’s attention to form is intended to avoid the division between subject and object, the alternative which forces us to choose between (1) the traditional, constituting subject whose representations would serve as the transcendental origin of things, and (2) the domain of empirical positivity which would precede consciousness and exist independently, patiently awaiting the subject’s exploration. This concept of form also entails a more careful analysis of the body. The body provides us with a point of access to things, but it is also of the things themselves: its flesh is the flesh of the world. “To be sure,” Merleau-Ponty says in the chapter on the chiasm, “one can reply that… there is the abyss that separates the In Itself from the For Itself…But here, seeking to form our first concept in such a way as to avoid the classical impasses, we do not have to honor the difficulties that they may present” (VI 180/136-37). Like the concept of form, the question of the body thus continues to provide Merleau-Ponty with a properly phenomenological point of departure that would correct the deficiencies and contradictions of the philosophical tradition. Lacan begins by recognizing the continuity between this new vocabulary of the “flesh” and Merleau-Ponty’s earlier work, noting that the relation between the seer and the visible, between the touching and the touched, is in some respects a reformulation of earlier concerns.

In addition to this recapitulation, however, we also find something new: “Merleau-Ponty now makes the next step by forcing the very limits of this phenomenology” (SXI 69/71-72). How does Lacan characterize this “next step,” and what allows him to regard it as marking the “limits of… phenomenology”? We must understand Merleau-Ponty’s “step forward,” Lacan claims, through fee concept of the invisible, a concept Lacan specifies in terms of Merleau-Ponty’s account of the gaze, and more precisely, in terms of the division between the eye and the gaze. For with the concept of the ”invisible,” Merleau-Ponty brings to our attention what we might call the dependence of the visible on a gaze that precedes it, a gaze that opens the domain of visibility. As Merleau-Ponty says, “It is as though our vision were formed in the heart of the visible.” He elaborates:

What there is then are not things first identical to themselves, which would then offer themselves to the seer [au voyant], nor is there a seer who is first empty and who, afterward, would open himself to them—but something to which we could not be closer than by palpating it with our look [en le palpant du regard] things we could not dream of seeing “all naked” because the gaze itself [le regard meme] envelopes them, clothes them with its own flesh. Whence does it happen that in so doing it leaves them in their place, that the vision [la vision] we acquire of them seems to us to come from them. (VI T73/T31)

We must stress this final phrase, for it is this peculiar independence of the visible world that interests Lacan—not the autonomous existence of empirical things (a classical theme of philosophy), but the peculiar way in which vision occurs only under the sovereign, and pervading experience of a gaze which comes from the things themselves, a gaze which continues itself m the very act of one’s own sensory experience. “What is this talisman of color,” Merleau- Ponty writes, “this singular virtue of the visible that makes it, held at the end of the gaze, nonetheless much more than a correlative of my vision, such that it imposes my vision upon we as a continuation of its own sovereign existence?” (VI 173/131). And again, in another passage, Merleau-Ponty writes: “he who looks must not himself be foreign to the world he looks at… it is necessary that the vision… be doubled with a complementary vision or with another vision: myself seen from without, such as another would see me, installed in the midst of the visible” (VI 177/134). It is this imposition (”it imposes my vision upon me”), this sovereign invisibility of a “gaze” that precedes all our seeing, that allows Merleau-Ponty to restructure the entire question of “intentionality” and the subject-object relation.

What does Lacan take from this analysis? He is unequivocal: “What we have to circumscribe, by means of the path he indicates for us, is the pre-existence of a gaze—I see only from one point, but in my existence I am looked at from all sides” (SXI 69/72). “This experience of being under the gaze is what constitutes Merleau-Ponty’s “step forward” according to Lacan: “I mean, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty points this out, that we are beings who are looked at, in the spectacle of the world” (SXI 71/74-75).

We have thus arrived at the second stage of Lacan’s reading, the point where we can grasp what is new in Merleau-Ponty’s last work. Why, then, does Lacan find it necessary to reformulate Merleau- Ponty’s account of the “gaze”? Before we take up this question, let us open a parenthesis—for already at this second stage in Lacan’s account, it is possible to locate a certain convergence between Merleau-Ponty’s remarks and the concerns of Freudian theory. Faced with Merleau-Ponty’s analysis, and before any divergence between them, we can ask what Lacan will make of the “gaze.” How will Lacan develop Merleau-Ponty’s claim, and what does he regard as its importance for our understanding of the subject? Is the “gaze” a matter of the imaginary or the symbolic? Will it lead Lacan to a reflection on narcissism, or is it rather a question of the superego—a reflection on the punishing and obscurely malevolent presence that seems to watch us from above, invisible and omnipresent, like an agent of the Law that has suddenly shown its sadistic face? One recalls the last sentences of Merleau-Ponty’s essay “The Child’s Relations with Others” (1960):

We might ask what kind of relationship must be established between the crisis at three years mentioned by Wallon and the Oedipal phase of development which certain psyche/analysts locate at the same moment and which accompanies the emergence of the superego, the true “objective” relation, and the surpassing of narcissism. (155)

Could it be that the very moment in which narcissism is apparently overcome, the very moment in which the excesses of the ego appear to be tamed, and a mature, “objective” relation to the world has been established, is also, paradoxically, a moment in which the most unnatural dimension of the Other is manifested? Could it be that the supposed transcendence of narcissism somehow entails the peculiar production of the gaze, a dimension of experience in which the very fact of vision, the most “natural” sensory experience, is haunted by a peculiar, invisible, and tyrannical presence, a presence that cannot be seen but that looks at us and secretly governs the movement of the body with its own malicious or uncanny intention, soliciting our look, directing our vision as an extension of its own imperious existence? What does it mean for Lacan, and for the theory of the subject, when Merleau-Ponty opens up this experience in which we are “looked at in the spectacle of the world” (SXI 71/74-75)? Is it a matter of narcissism, or is it something that emerges precisely in the surpassing of narcissism?

Merleau-Ponty certainly seems to entertain the first possibility, when he writes these words in the chapter on the chiasm: “Since the seer is caught up (le voyant étant pris) in what he sees, it is still himself he sees: there is a fundamental narcissism of all vision.” Yet the passage immediately continues:

“And thus, for the same reason, the vision he exercises, he also undergoes from the things, such that, as many painters have said, I feel myself looked at [je me sens regardé] by the things, my activity is equally passivity—which is the second and more profound sense of narcissism: not to see in the outside, as the others see it, the contour of the body one inhabits, but especially to be seen by the outside, to exist within it, to emigrate into it, to be seduced, captivated, alienated by the phantom, so that the seer and the visible reciprocate one another and we no longer know which sees and which is seen (qui voit et qui est vu). (VI 183/139)

The gaze in Merleau-Ponty’s sense would thus seem to emerge only in the moment at which narcissism is overcome, only when the mirror no longer gives me back to myself in an imaginary form, only when my body is no longer its own possession, its own unity, but is rather mat opening upon the world in which “the seer and the visible reciprocate one another and we no longer know which sees and which is seen.” Let us not pursue these questions any further here. It is enough to see the first points of contact between Merleau-Ponty and Freud, as Lacan seems to present them. Let us close this parenthesis, and continue with our exegesis.

The concept of the gaze is a recapitulation, but it is also a “step forward” in relation to the earlier analyses of form and Gestalt. And this step forward would mark the limits of phenomenology insofar as it opens a certain invisibility at the heart of the visible, something that cannot be seen. that is beyond “appearance’” and “phenomenon,” but that looks at me as I look at the world, with a gaze that solicits my vision in advance, even before I begin to see. And since it is a matter of being seen, being “looked at from all sides,” the gaze is not a property of the subject, a power to look or to speculate, but something that comes from the world of things. The gaze is not a property of the subject, but at the same time, it is not a property of objects, a natural phenomenon, a feature of the empirical world, or even a characteristic of light, but something that precedes the domain of the visible and opens it up to our look. Such would be Merleau-Ponty’s step beyond phenomenology, as Lacan presents it: the gaze does not belong to empirical things, but designates a dimension of invisibility—not a transcendent sphere, but a domain of experience that is unique to the human animal, and that captures the peculiar character of human embodiment, something that cannot be grasped in terms of “subject” and “object,” sensory perception and external positivity.

In “Eye and Mind,” Merleau-Ponty speaks not of visibility, but of “the soil of the sensible and opened world”: “scientific thinking,” he writes,

[…] must return to the “there is” which underlies it; to the site, the soil of the sensible and opened world such as it is in our life and for our body—not that possible body which we may legitimately think of as an information machine but that actual body I call mine, [a body which can only be understood in its conjunction with] associated bodies… the others who haunt me and whom I haunt… as no animal ever haunted those beings of his own species. (EM 160-61)

It is therefore a question of the body not as an organism with its sensory-motor capacities, its memories and expectations, but as a uniquely human phenomenon: “not the body as a chunk of space or a bundle of functions but that body which is an intertwining of vision and movement” (EM 162), the body without which “there would be no humanity.” (EM” 163)

In short, the gaze is not a property of the subject, but it is not a property of things either; a feature of the visible itself. It has no specular image, but is rather something invisible, something that cannot be seen but that nevertheless comes from the world of things, something that, in Lacan’s language, comes from the Other, preceding my vision and calling it forth, “such that it imposes my vision upon me” (V/173/131), continuing itself in the very act of my vision, reducing my most active sensory exploration to a fundamental passivity, and indeed to the very point at which we may speak of the annihilation of the subject (see SXI 78, 83/82,88). The gaze is something to which I am subjected. This is what Lacan isolates from Merleau-Ponty’s last work: “It is no doubt this seeing, to which I am subjected in an original way, that must lead us to the aims of this work.” (SXI 69/72)

4. Negotiating Platonism: Chora or Subject?

According to Lacan, we thus have in The Visible and the Invisible a recapitulation of earlier themes and also a step forward, which consists, in the elaboration of the concept of the gaze. Finally, however, we must mark out the point at which Lacan parts company with Merleau-Ponty, the point at which his analysis of the gaze takes a different direction. For he also writes in this chapter that “the field offered us by Merleau-Ponty… is presented by its most factitious, not to say outworn, effects” (SXI 69/72). He continues:

It is not between the invisible and the visible that we have to pass. The split that concerns us is not the distance that derives from the fact that there are forms imposed by the world towards which the intentionality of phenomenological experience directs us… The gaze is presented to us only in the form of… our experience, namely, the lack that constitutes castration anxiety. The eye and the gaze—this is for us the split in which the drive is manifested at the level of the scopic field. (SXI 69-70/72-73)

We have distinguished three moments in Lacan’s analysis: first, a recognition of those elements in The Visible and the Invisible which deepen and continue Merleau-Ponty’s entire philosophical trajectory; second, the introduction of a genuinely new beginning, the invisible horizon of visibility; and finally, a divergence, in which Merleau-Ponty’s analysis would be deficient from a Freudian point of view.

In the next chapter, “Anamorphosis,” we find the same three steps. This chapter provides an analysis of the scopic drive, and Lacan returns again to Merleau-Ponty, acknowledging that “the scopic function is situated…by Merleau-Ponty’s recently published work, Le Visible et l’invisible” (SXI 75/79). At this point, having introduced Merleau-Ponty’s name, Lacan recalls some major figures in the philosophical tradition, and in two pages he refers to various conceptions of the subject—(1) “the irreducible method of Bishop Berkeley,” which “goes so far as to reduce the subject apprehended by the Cartesian meditation to a power of annihilation,” (2) the Hegelian revolution which “throws the subject towards the transforming historical action,” and finally, (3) “as for the meditation on being that reaches its culmination in the thought of Heidegger, it restores to being itself that power of annihilation” (SXI 77/81). This does not tell us much about the philosophical tradition, but it allows us to see how Lacan situates Merleau-Ponty’s work: “This is also the point to which Merleau-Ponty leads us” (SXI 77/81). Here again, according to Lacan, we have a continuation of the philosophical tradition in its reflection on the subject, and a certain “negativity” in the subject, but one that is formulated in a manner that carries us right to the limit of this tradition, right through Heidegger’s deepest ontological investigations. We are now presented with a conception of the “flesh” as the element in which my body as well as the things themselves are given. As Merleau-Ponty himself says:

[…] the thickness of flesh between the seer and the thing is constitutive for the thing of its visibility as for the seer of his corporeity: it is not an obstacle between them, it is their means of communication….It is thus, and not as the bearer of a knowing subject, that our body commands the visible for us, but it does not explain it, does not clarify it, but only concentrates the mystery of its scattered visibility; and it is indeed a paradox of Being, not a paradox of man, that we are dealing with here. (VI 178-80/l35-36)

Following Mzerleau-Ponty, and regarding his work as a path that takes us right to the limit of the tradition, to the point at which the question of the subject can no longer be posed in anthropological terms, Lacan nevertheless insists that Merleau-Ponty does not take us far enough, at least not far enough to grasp what is at stake in the psychoanalytic account of the scopic function, of the gaze as an object of the drive. Following his summary of the tradition and his reference to Heidegger, Lacan writes:

[…] this is… the point to which Merleau-Ponty leads us. But if you refer to his text you will see that it is at this point that he chooses to withdraw, in order to propose a return to the sources of intuition concerning the visible and the invisible, to come back to that which is prior to all reflection, thetic or non-thetic, in order-to locate the emergence of vision itself. For him, it is a question of restoring…. the way by which, not from the body, but from something he calls the flesh of the’” world, the original point of vision was able to emerge. (SXI 77/81 -82)

Why does Lacan regard Merleau-Ponty’s meditation as somehow falling short, or withdrawing in the face of its own most radical analysis? Is it because Merleau-Ponty’s account of the gaze somehow remains bound to the metaphysical tradition, or marked by a certain “Platonism”? Some writers (in particular Lacanian analysts) have made precisely this claim, arguing that, for Merleau-Ponty, there is an all-seeing presence, something like a Platonic divine being who remains unseen, invisible, but who looks at us and directs our vision toward the splendor of the phenomenal world (see Quinet, “Look” and “Gaze”). This is a reductive and mistaken account of Merleau- Ponty, and Lacan himself does not appear to settle for it. To be sure, it is a possible understanding, a possible way of taking, or perhaps mistaking the strange experience of the gaze. As Lacan says, “The spectacle of the world, in this sense, appears to us as all-seeing. This is me phantasy to be found in the Platonic perspective of an absolute being” (SXI 71/75). But we do not have to put this phantasy of an absolute being in place of the “phenomenon” (it one can still use this term) that Merleau-Ponty uncovers for us, even if the phenomenon of the gaze may also explain the phantasy that it makes possible. Lacan writes: “There is no need for us to refer to some supposition of me existence of a universal seer” (SXI 71/74).

Let us be clear on this point: Lacan seems to entertain the possibility for a moment that Merleau-Ponty indeed falls prey to the idea of a “Platonic” universal seer, a sort of “substance” or primordial “element” which would precede me subject and serve as its place of birth, its origin, chora, and so on. Referring to the “gaze” that comes from the world and solicits our vision in advance, and to the concept of the “flesh,” Lacan writes:

It would seem that in this way one sees, in this unfinished work, the emergence of something like the search for an unnamed substances from which I, the seer, extract myself. From the toils (rets), or rays (rais), if you prefer, of an iridescence of which I am at first a part, I emerge as eye. (SXI 77/82)

On this view, the gaze would be something that, in the arena of vision, functions like the chora, the primordial substance or place that would precede the subject, and from which the subject would emerge. But this is not what Lacan takes Merleau-Ponty to be doing. He immediately adds: “Yet is this the way he really wished to take? The traces that remain of the part to come from his meditation [i.e. the “working notes”] permit us to doubt it” (SXI 77/82). What then is Merleau-Ponty doing, if not engaging in the great, speculative enterprise of the metaphysical tradition, “the search for an unnamed substance” (SXI 77/82)? In Lacan’s view, “he may have been directed towards some search/original in relation to the philosophical tradition, towards that new dimension of meditation on the subject that analysis enables us to trace” (SXI 77-78/82). It is therefore a new meditation on the subject, and not a metaphysical speculation on primordial substance, that Lacan finds in the concept of the gaze.

5. Of Sacrifice: The Other and the Object

Why then does he insist that psychoanalysis must part company with Merleau-Ponty, or that we will find in psychoanalysis a more precise account of the gaze than we find in Merleau-Ponty? The answer to this question is obvious: where Merleau-Ponty presents the gaze as something that comes from the world—not from objects in the world but from the world as a whole, the world in a phenomenological sense, and even perhaps from the experience of the worldhood of the world, that invisible horizon in which visible things find their place—where Merleau-Ponty, in other words, presents the gaze as something that, in Lacan’s language, comes from the Other, Lacan by contrast regards the gaze as an object, not as an empirical thing but as a specific form of the objet petit a, and more precisely as the object of the scopic drive. What does this mean, and what is its importance for our understanding of the subject?

In order to clarify this final point, let us return to the question of passivity, to the point at which Lacan speaks of the experience of the gaze as something “to which I am subjected,” so that we may even speak of the “annihilation of the subject.” In the experience of the gaze, “we find ourselves looked at in the spectacle of the world” (SXI 71/74-75). Our look is solicited in advance by a gaze that continues itself in the very act of my perception. Thus, in the experience of the gaze, my perception is revealed in its fundamental passivity—not a passivity understood as the familiar opposite of “activity,” in keeping with a symmetrical and binary dualism, but a more fundamental, more primordial passivity, on the basis of which both passivity and activity are possible. It is a question of that elemental experience which precedes the division between subject and object and makes possible both my passive reception of sensory data and my active, intentionally directed exploration of the world. The flesh opens us to a fundamental passivity in which activity and passivity, subject and object, no longer retain their traditional meaning. Stressing this point, and noting the remarkable richness of Merleau-Ponty’s prose, its atmosphere of luxurious sensuality, Lacan asks the following question: “Is there no satisfaction in being under the gaze?” (SXI 71/75). Why does Lacan focus on the question of “satisfaction” at precisely this” moment, at precisely this level in the structure of the subject? We are brought by Merleau-Ponty to see the remarkable way in which our look is already possessed, already compelled to emigrate beyond itself, to be seduced and captivated in advance by the gaze of the world, a gaze which continues itself in my own experience of vision, as if my sight were the implement and medium of a gaze that comes from the Other. “What does this mean,” Lacan asks, if not that “some form of ’sliding away’ of the subject is apparent” (SXI 72/75)? One hundred pages later, Lacan returns to this point, claiming that it is precisely in the encounter with its own lack, its own radical division, and as a unique attempt to circumvent that division, that “the subject makes himself the object of another will” (SXI 168/185), “It is the subject who determines himself as object, in his encounter with the division of subjectivity” (SXI 168/185). We thus see more clearly the function of the “objet petit a” in Lacan, as a paradoxical “object of lack.” a localization of lack, a “particularization” which allows the lack in the Other to be veiled at the very moment of its manifestation and veiled in a quite precise way, namely, in a peculiar instance of substitution (metaphor), which Lacan regards as sacrificial, since the subject offers himself up as the object that shows itself to be missing in the Other, identifying himself with the primordially lost “Thing” which makes the symbolic order incomplete. This is why Lacan claims that the experience of the gaze has to do with the lack that constitutes “castration anxiety”: “the eye and the gaze—this is for us the split in which the drive is manifested at the level of the scopic field” (SXI 69-70/72-73). “At this level,” Lacan says, “we are not even forced to take into account any subjectification of the subject. The subject is an apparatus. This apparatus is something lacunary, and it is in the lacuna that the subject establishes the function of a certain object, qua lost object” (SXI 168/185). In short, in the experience of the gaze, it is the subject who identifies with the object that would make the Other complete, fading or vanishing in a sacrificial movement of identification.

In 1963, during the only session of the cancelled seminar on the Names-of-the-Father, Lacan provides a remarkable account of the sacrifice of Isaac and the symbolic relation which allows the ram to be substituted for the child, thereby also defining a new relation between the Jewish people and the Other, beyond this “pound of flesh,” beyond the sacrificial labor that seeks to satisfy the Divine jouissance. In the face of the enigma presented by the inscrutable Other, the void that is opened by this “question of being” (”What does the Other want from me”?), the subject can only be propelled into a profound and unnatural anxiety—one that brings with it a peculiar temptation: in Lacan’s words, “the offering to obscure gods of an object of sacrifice is something to which few subjects can resist succumbing, as if under some monstrous spell” (SXI 246/275). The symbolic pact of substitution, represented by the hand of the angel, a hand that reaches out to touch the hand of Abraham, stopping it at the very instant of the sacrificial cut, at the very limit of the Law, is thus a new way of touching, a new way of negotiating the division, within the field of the Other, between desire and jouissance.

It is here that we find the clearest division Between Lacan and Merleau-Ponty: for Lacan, Merleau-Ponty’s analysis has shown us— perhaps without intending to do so— what Freud meant when he spoke of the satisfaction of the drive, a phrase Lacan recalls in asking, “Is there no satisfaction in being under the gaze?” (SXI 71/75). It is a question, for Lacan, of that peculiar pleasure in which we simultaneously see the annihilation of the subject, the fading or aphanesis of the subject, that fundamental mark of death which Freud insisted upon when he wrote that all the drives are death drives. For Lacan, it is a question of distinguishing between the pleasure of the drive, that pleasure in which the subject disappears (which Lacan called jouissance), and, by contrast, the order of desire in which the subject finds its life. According to Lacan, this is the antithesis that Merleau-Ponty uncovers, without pursuing it in the direction Freud requires us to take: the experience of being under the gaze, and more precisely the satisfaction that attends it, is precisely the experience of the scopic drive, that primordial experience which is always a possibility of the subject, but one in which desire is lost, and the subject moves toward its own annihilation.

Diacritics, vol. 27 no.4, Winter 1997.

Art: Shilpa Gupta, Untitled, C-print, 2006.

Author’s Bio

In the reading room at the British Library, a number of subject- headings are displayed in white lettering above the bookshelves at regular intervals around the circular wall. Anyone who wishes to consult Freud’s works will find that these are located exactly mid- way between two of the subject-headings. These two headings are ’science’ and “religion”.

The librarian at British Library is certainly not the only one to have wondered about the status of psychoanalytic theory. From its very first days, psychoanalysis has been the subject of an intense debate over whether or not it truly merits being described as a science. Freud himself, however, had no doubts. ‘While it was originally the name of a particular therapeutic method,’ he wrote in 1924, “it has now also become the name of a science—the science of unconscious mental processes” (Freud, 1925d: 70). In The Future of an Illusion, he went on to contrast the scientific approach employed by psychoanalysis with childishness of religion (Freud, 1927c).

On this point, Lacan agrees completely with Freud. His boldest statements come towards the end of The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, when he states that “psychoanalysis is not a religion. It proceeds from the same status as Science itself (Lacan, 1964: 265). These claims invite reflection on the nature of scientific enquiry and psychoanalytic research, and Lacan hoped that such reflection would both throw light on psychoanalysis and also “may even enlighten us as to what we should understand by science.” (Lacan, 1964: 7).

Lacan’s engagement with these questions can be traced back to some of his earliest writings on psychoanalysis. However, it is not until 1964, in The Four Fundamental Concepts, that these questions receive his full attention. This seminar is followed by that on Problèmes cruciaux pour la psychanalyse (1964-5), in which he seeks to support his claims for the scientificity of psychoanalysis by further developing his earlier (1961-2) remarks on the topological figures of the moebius strip, the cross-cap, and Klein’s bottle. The following seminar, L’objet de la psychanalyse (1965-6), also deals extensively with questions of science, thus completing a kind of trilogy. The text which forms the basis of the principle seminar programme in the London Circle this year, “Science and truth”, is in fact a transcript of the first talk in the 1965-6 seminar.

In this text, Lacan takes up a number of themes from the two previous seminars. One important theme revolves around the concept of “Science itself”, La science (Lacan italicizes the definite article here and spells it with a capital L). This, Lacan argues; is a strictly modern phenomenon which must be rigorously distinguished from all pre-modem simulacra of scientific enquiry. “Science itself” first emerges in the seventeenth century with the birth of modem physics, which is also the moment of the Cartesian cogito. These two events are not merely related by some accident of time; Lacan argues that the Cartesian subject is none other than the “subject of science”, the subject implied by the axioms”of the scientific method.

Lacan bases this account of the history of science on the writings of Koyré, whose account of Newtonian physics seems to have been a great influence on Lacan. In addition to Koyré, Lacan is indebted to the philosophical work of Bachelard and Canguilhem, which clearly place him in the rationalist rather than the empiricist tradition in the philosophy of science. In other words, for Lacan, what marks a discourse as scientific is a high degree of mathematical formalization. This is what lies behind Lacan’s attempts to formalize psychoanalytic theory in terms of various mathematical formulae. These formulae also encapsulate a further characteristic of scientific discourse (perhaps the most fundamental one in Lacan’s view), which is that it should be transmissible (Lacan, 1973: 60).

Lacan’s allegiance to the rationalist tradition helps to explain the often biting criticisms which he levels at much modern scientific research. These criticisms are almost always aimed at forms of science based on empiricist assumptions (whicb Lacan regards ultimately as a false form of science), and not at science itself. When he criticises modern science for ignoring the symbolic dimension of human existence and thus encouraging modern man “to forget his subjectivity” (Lacan, 1953: 70), he clearly has sueh empiricist vehicles as communication science and behaviourist psychology in mind. Thus Lacan is not criticizing Science itself, but only a particular form which he regards as a deviation from ‘true science’.Thus it would certainly be wrong to describe Lacan as a luddite, fiercely opposing the advance of any and all scientific enquiry. Far from it; he insists that the subject of psychoanalysis can only be the subject of science, for in the era of science it is impossible to recapture any ‘humanistic’ subject. Indeed, Lacan stresses that this is what separates Freud from lung. Whereas lung wanted to restore ‘a subject gifted with depths’, a subject with some direct, archetypal access to knowledge (which can be seen as a form of intuitionism), Freud insisted that an exclusively rational route to knowledge is now such a common presupposition that it cannot be ignored. In stating that psychoanalysis operates only on the subject of science, Lacan is arguing that psychoanalysis is not based on any appeal to an ineffable experience or flash of intuition, but on a process of reasoned dialogue, even when reason confronts its limit in madness.

The “subject of science” and the “subject gifted with depths”, are not the only subjects whom Lacan mentions in the article. Indeed, the article prolifera’:es with different subjects, the relationship between which is not immediately apparent and invites further reflection. Thus, in addition to the two subjects already mentioned, and the kng-farniliar “subject of the enunciation” and “subject of the signifier”, Lacan also introduces new terms such as the “responsible subject”, the ’suffering subject’, and the “subject of understanding”. Such distinctions introduce greater complexity into the Lacanian theory of subjectivity, and undermine any simplistic account of Lacan’s thought that is content with merely outlining his distinction between the subject and the ego.

As well as discussing the subject of science, Lacan is also concerned to elucidate something about the object of science. There is something about this object, Lacan argues, which has remained obscure ever since the birth of modern science, and upon which psychoanalysis can perhaps throw some light. However, it is not simply a question of identifying the object of Science itself, but also a question of identifying the object which is unique to psychoanalysis. For two decades prior to the paper on science and truth, Lacan had been arguing that a science is only constituted as such by isolating and defining its particular object of enquiry. Thus in 1946 he had argued that psychoanalysis had actually set psychology on a scientific footing by providing it with a proper object of enquiry —the imago (Lacan, 1946: 188). Hence when, in the 1965 paper which is our text for this year, he isolates the objet petit a as the object of psychoanalysis, he is in effect claiming a scientific status for psychoanalysis (Lacan, 1965: 863).

This brings us back to our initial problem. What status are we to attribute to psychoanalytic theory? Is it a truly scientific discourse? Lacan’s confident claims in 1964 about psychoanalysis ‘proceeding from the same status as science’ seem to imply that it has already attained scientific status. However, in “Science and truth”, only a year later, there are signs that Lacan is becoming more cautious. Thus he now distinguishes psychoanalysis from science on the grounds that each has a different mode of relationship to truth as cause. His growing uncertainty is reflected by apparently contradictory statements in the same paper; he both states that psychoanalysis is not a science but a “practice” (pratique) with a “scientific vocation” (Lacan, 1965: 863), and also speaks of ‘the psychoanalytic science’ (Lacan, 1965: 876). By 1977 he has moved even further away from the confident claims of 1964, and now explicitly denies that psychoanalysis is a science.

Psychoanalysis is not a science. It has no scientific status – it merely waits and hopes for it. Psychoanalysis is a delusion—a delusion which is expected to produce a science… It is a scientific delusion, but this doesn’t mean that analytic practice will ever produce a science. (Lacan, 1976-7: Ornicar? 14: 4 [seminar of 11.01.77])

However, this statement is perhaps less categorical than it seems at first sight. For in psychoanalytic theory, ever since Freud’s remark on the similarity between delusions and philosophical systems, there has been an awareness of the logical rigour of psychotic phenomena (Freud, 1912-13: 73). Indeed, in his later work, Lacan goes on to describe psychosis as “an essay in rigor”, and half-jokingly (but only half) muses that if he had been a little more psycholic he might have produced a more rigorous theorisation of psychoanalysis than he did. However, in the paper on science and truth, it is not psychoanalysis that Lacan compares to a delusion. but science itself; he describes science as “a fully realised paranoia” (Lacan. 1965: 874). This is because scientific constructions resemble the architecture of a delusion in their rigour and explanatory power, and because both science and paranoia are based on the operation of foreclosure.

Thus the statement in 1977 that psychoanalysis is not a science but a delusion invokes an opposition that is simply not present, even undermined, in the 1965 paper on science and truth. In terms of the 1965 paper, the statement that psychoanalysis is a delusion can only be read as confirming its scientific status. This radical position places, Lacan at an even further distance from the empiricist tradition than do his appeals to rationalist philosophers. And this is what makes Lacan particularly impervious to’the kind of criticisms levelled at psychoanalysis today by Anglo-American philosophers of science. Inspired by Eysenck’s famous tirade against psychoanalysis in the 1970’s (Eysenck & Wilson, 1973), a new generation of philosophers have argued in recent years that psychoanalytic theory is not scientific because it is not falsifiable (eg. Grunbaum, 1984; Macmillan, 1991;’ Esterson, 1993). Such criticisms are based entirely on the empiricist account of science which Lacan rejects.

Despite their inadequacies, the criticisms of Grunbaum, Macmillan and Esterson raise complex and important issues in the philosophy of science which could be profitably reworked in the light of Lacan’s 1965 paper. However, although the question of whether or not psychoanalysis can be called a science is an important matter for debate, it is perhaps more interesting in the present situation to step back from this debate for a time and to consider the question as to why the accusation of unscientificity carries so much weight. The answer is surely that science occupies a hegemonic place in modem society as the exclusive means of access to “the truth.”

It follows from this that the question raised by the accusations of unscientificity is that of the relationship between science and truth. It is thus not only important to examine what we understand by “science” but also important to clarify what we mean by “truth.” Does something qualify as truth only when it can be validated by the discourse of institutionalized science? Or does modern science, as Lacan argues, derive its power precisely from the fact that it wishes to know nothing of truth as cause? It is to these questions that the London Circle will turn its attention this coming year.

Author’s Bio

TRANSLATED BY RICHARD KLEIN

Is psychoanalysis a science? How does it find a standing amongst the sciences? These crucial questions repeat themselves in the teaching of Lacan. As they repeat themselves, they receive different replies. We are not going to consider all of them, not going to exhaust them. We are going to concentrate on a single point: how Lacan put back into question in the name of psychoanalysis the classical epistemological postulate which claims to define a science by its object.

When Lacan intervened in it, psychoanalysis was the object of a lively debate: is it a science of nature or a science of culture? The Hungarian psychoanalytical school, with the ethnologist Geza Roheim and the biologist Michael Balint, was particularly torn by debates of this kind. In the adventures of Wilhelm Reich the Viennese encountered another, more political and social way of exploring the scientific postulates of the Freudian discipline. From the 1920’s until his death, Freud never stopped redefining psychoanalysis from the point of view of civilisation and its discontents. Without renouncing in any way the drive as “rudder” with one end of the stern-post in biology and the other in grammar, he kept open the trans-individual perspective of psychoanalysis. Past and present collective modes of organization—religion and politics—are for Freud indissociable from psychoanalysis whose curative mission is for him more global than individual. The paradox of his modus operandi, from case to case, one by one, is only apparent.

At the end of the 1930’s Lacan established his epistemological point of departure in two texts, one from 1936 and the other from 1938. In “Beyond the reality principle,” he proposes the term “complex” as ‘the most concrete and fertile one to have been brought into the study of human behavior in opposition to the concept of instinct which had been shown to be inadequate and sterile in this domain’. Two years later, in Les complexes familiaux, he adds that in this opposition one recognizes ‘translated into psychological terms … the essential character of the object studied: its conditioning by cultural factors ai the expense of natural factors’. This ‘a; the expense of seems today to be the key-term. Lacan refuses to consider one of the options in the alternative culture/nature and proposes, on the contrary, to maintain the predominance of the relation to the counterpart insofar as man is, from the beginning, a “denaturalized” animal, exiled from a felicitous union with nature by the vital misery of his, early years. This first proposition has a number of repercussions: as far as we are concerned, we will limit ourselves to questioning the absolute separation between natural science and cultural science in order to determine the object of psychoanalysis. On this point we shall probably already meet the premiss Lacan established in his text of 1965, “Science and truth” (Écrits), advancing in another direction, as formulating ‘the opposition between exact sciences and conjectural sciences which can no longer be held’ today.

In this way, from his entry into psychoanalysis. Lacan endangers the intellectual comfort of those who believed that a vague reference to biology was enough and that, whatever the progress of this science and its branches, the Brucke/Helmholtz model adopted by Freud at the beginning of his work remained adequate to anchor psychoanalysis in science.

In any case, we see that Lacan’s point of view cannot be reduced to a culturalist proposition. It consists in a subversion of any myth of naturality in the heart of psychoanalysis.

The decisive step in the 1950’s which Jacques-Alain Miller has called “Lacan’s hypothesis about the unconscious”, the definition of the unconscious as structured not by the complex or by me imago but like a language, will radicalise the epistemological question. Beginning here, the scientific horizon of psychoanalysis will have to be sought in the forms of knowledge produced by the formulation of the discourses: languages and logics. To the point, still happening, at which exact science and conjectural science—according to the terminology proposed by Lacan—join up.

We shall limit ourselves today to formulating two observations on the development of Lacan’s epistemological point of view. The first refers to the mode of emptiness introduced by what Lacan calls the subject of science. The second refers to the relation that the “subject of the drive” maintains with excess generated by the objects produced by science.

The subject of science and emptiness

According to a certain epistemological current, the sciences can only be defined by the relation they have with the local knowledge that they develop. As for other currents, it is possible to establish alongside the plurality of science, the relation of science itself with the beyond of knowledge; truth.

Karl Popper and his students were able to impose a singularity on the Anglo-Saxon domain which was not favorable. For Sir Karl, a statement is scientific if an ordered experiment can invalidate it. To the thesis according to which science is a set of confirmations of knowledge, he opposed another: “what can be falsified is scientific.” In this way, he situated the position of truth in science. In order then to deduce that science pursues and carries to its culmination the task of the science of being, that the true philosophical activity of our time is epistemology such as be practised it.

Lacan also chose to consider the links between science and truth but in order to deduce something very different. In agreement with French epistemology in the way Bachelard and Koyré developed it, he insisted on the radical discontinuity introduced by the inception in the sixteenth century of mathematical physics which established, after Galileo, a new regime of scientific activity in general. Sciences as intellectual activity existed before this: the calculations of the Chinese and Egyptian astrologers did not wait for the century of genius, and nor did the Greek geometers. Chinese physics and chemistry, capable of producing bronze and very remarkable canons, besides gunpowder, ensuring the success of the armies of the Empire of the Middle Dynasty, did not wait for mathematicalphysics. Needham was able to demonstrate in his studies on Chinese science to what point physics and chemistry preceding science had experimental aptitudes.

What was at stake with Galileo is very different. From the moment when the conjunction of the preoccupations of the well-diggers in Florence with mathematical calculations cut off from the will of the master was produced, science penetrates into the sublunar world in a way which escapes any discourse which pretends to master it. Science does not have any need of heroes and martyrs in order to ensure i;s expansion; apparently, it is enough to be open to anyone who leafs through its writings. In his Galileo Galilei, Berthed Brecht grasped in a remarkable way the profound changes operated by science in the traditional figures of the great man.

Lacan accepts the “epistemological break” of French epistemology but in order to radicalize it, having remained broken down in its task of explaining the new status of science in the world—to explain it, it had remained too attached to the reduction by which each science defines its object. Indeed, epistemology ensures that no science is a science at all except by describing its slow reduction from the enormous field it confronts initially to obtaining a limited object.

In the very terms of Bachelard, science goes from the complex to the simple, and Koycré has shown that the definition of the object of physics supposes the invention of a new concept, acceleration, hence the definition of a new movement, a movement of uniform acceleration. Accepting favourably the results obtained by this proposition, Lacan considers it insufficient and questions it in an explicit way in 1965: “for I don’t know that it (epistemology) has fully taken into account by the means of that decisive mutation which by way of physics founded Science itself in the modern sense, a sense taken as absolute.”

To the diversity of objects in play in the different sciences., Lacan opposes “a (radical) modification in our position of subject in a double sense: that it is inaugural and that science is always reinforcing it more.” In 1964 Lacan asks what a science which could include psychoanalysis would look like, The following year, he takes a step towards that inclusion, in advancing the concept of the “subject of science.”

His point of departure consists in reconsidering the Cartesian cogilo defined as a moment of ‘rejection of all knowledge’. The term rejection (rejet) carries a lot of weight because Lacan uses it for psychosis; throughout his teaching he himself brought into focus the relations between science and psychosis. That does not imply that they are confused, but rather that psychosis and science have the same model as do obsessional neurosis and religion.

Lacan reads the first meditation of Descartes as the rejection of knowledge, which implies its reappearance in the being of the subject, under the form of the “I am”, which “attempts to found for the subject a certain anchorage in being (un certain amarrage dans l’être), whence the subject of science is constituted. What Lacan understands by this term is a radically new way of conceiving of the subject: as the product of an operation which strictly concerns knowledge.

Armed with the subject of science, Lacan was able to re-read the Freud of “Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defense’ and “The Loss of Reality in Neurosis and Psychosis.” Indeed, Freud defined the splitting of the subject as an operation which concerns knowledge with respect to the existence of the maternal penis. From the logical structure of the subject of the fetish is deduced his place in being. “The Loss of Reality in Neurosis and Psychosis” establishes the same movement between rejection and anchoring. What is lost in psychosis cannot be distinguished from what returns in that place, Freud emphasizes. Negative phenomena are no longer anything but a time of productive phenomena.

The discussion thus considered from the perspective of rejection allowed Lacan to refuse a certain reading of the term “psychic reality” in Freud. The reading consisted of opposing it to “perceptible reality’ by the system Pept-Cs. in such a way that it would suffice to rectify the subject’s relation to his psychic reality, understood as fantasy, in order to situate himself in reality—such as it is and as sense data inform us about it. The fundamental scope of the subject is not the perception of something which would already be present but of something which comes in the place of what has been submitted to doubt, rejected. This scope is made of what was bejahgt, admitted, and what was rejected, aussgestossen, in accordance with the terms that Freud employed in Die Verneinung. The real of the subject’s position, his place in being (here we admit the equivalence of two formulations, even it means discussing them) depends not on the positivity of a perception but on a previous, rejecting movement. That does not imply a confusion of the two.

In this reading of Freud the link between science and psychoanalysis is founded on the identity of the operation of the subject of science and of the subject of the unconscious. The psychoanalytic unconscious, founded in the discussion of the subject, would never have been able to emerge before scientific experience. The man of re-emerging humanism does not lead to psychoanalysis despite his preoccupation with love; it is more the Pascalian man, the mathemaiisation of human experience in the conjecture of probability, which will lead us there.

Knowledge is not obtained in the name of man but in the name of the subject linked a knowledge but which it is demonstrated that he was already there, suddenly. In order that one may believe it, in order that one believe in the unconscious, it will be necessary for science to discover an ordered knowledge to a point previously unthinkable. Lacan makes his perspective precise in his “Italian note” of 1974. What is crucial in science does not reside in if, mode of transmission by the matheme but in what refuses it, in what ceaselessly escapes and permits new refutations. Lacan uses the Popperian term of refutation in order to link refutation and rejection. “To believe that science is true on the pretext that it is transmissible (mathematically) is a properly delusional idea that each step of science refutes by rejecting a first formulation to old means. By virtue of this fact there is no progress that would be notable because what follows is not known. There is only the discerning of a knowledge in the real.” This accounts for the belief of certain actual researchers, for whom knowledge is posed in the real. written in mathematical language, by God himself. Newton maintains he read the great divine book with its mechanics in the same way that he would have read the Book of Daniel. Contrary to the belief held for a time in the nineteenth century, not only were the great physicists not spontaneous atheists but, moreover, it seemed especially difficult for them to become so.

The reason for the consistency of psychoanalysis is its articulation, not with the belief of scholars, but with the “subject of science.” Freud is not a man of a scientific epoch but a man of all time—to paraphrase Ben Johnson speaking of Shakespeare—in as much as according to Lacan, he linked the unconscious with the subject of science. Freud got out of the impasse of the fin de siecle Viennese spirit by inventing a new concept: the divided subject.

Where is this subject to be met? What is his mode of being? The most contrary to the Lacanian orientation—the title of a course by Jacques-Alain Miller—would be to give body to the subject of the unconscious by making it a homunculus. The error, the epistemological obstacle, against which other disciplines before psychoanalysis knock up, is to pretend to incarnate it according to the teleological term used by Lacan. For example, when considering permutation groups of a certain number of statements which operate in the configuration of the structure of myth, one attributes to them a pre-logical character. The same thing happens when a Piagetian child, passing from a topological orientation in what concerns the world to metric space is qualified in the same way. We could add the child of psycholinguistics.

It is precisely where the subject has been most “disincarnated”, in game-theory, linguistics and logic, that access to a new knowledge is gained. What Lacan calls in 1965 the “work of structuralism” is the rejection uf the incarnation of the subject of supposed knowledge which subsists in a mode of a particular presence, the last approximation to which is the incompleteness theorem of Godel. This theorem demonstrates how in a system as well defined as arithmetic there will always be indemonstrable true propositions. In 1964, Jacques-Alain Miller proposed the term ’suture’, or rather the impossibility of such a suture between knowledge and truth, to designate this phenomenon.

To speak of subjective incidence in a given discipline that Lacan proposes is “a very special mode of the subject which has only a topological index… (a subject) in internal exclusion to its object.” This subject, produced by a truth which reserves itself for knowledge, emerges, sent like algae against the rocks in a baroque cascade. Psychoanalysis has access in the treatment to a certain practice of this subject as the latter acquires in it an ethical status. Lacan says in his “Founding Act” of 1964: “a practice of theory is required without which the order of affinities that we call the conjectural sciences design will remain at the mercy of a political derivative which supports itself with the illusion of universal conditioning.” Although psychoanalysis admits no other subject than the subject of science, it notes that the ‘for all’ that the application of science supposes produces in the master the illusion of a universal treatment. In the meantime, multiplication of the means of calculation by computer always allows larger sets to be treated. This illusion of mastery provokes in the mirror the illusion of the neurotic subject who struggles not to be a number and to preserve a status of exception by carrying it to the height of narcissistic rage or of hysterical insurrection, also of obsessional sabotage which, striving for the piece of number, touches it again ceaselessly and errs ritually in calculation. The subject ol the unconscious is “for all”, but the facts of desire and the replies of jouissance are singular. By using the distinction between the universal and the existential logical quantifiers. Lacan carries this dialectic to an extreme, showing that not only does the universal not imply existence but also that the existential is an objection to the “for all” of the universal. In its references to the existence of the psychoanalyst this dialectic is carried to its apotheosis.

The analyst and the excess of the objects of science

In the “Italian note” from 1974, Lacan indicates that Freud in creating the International Psychoanalytical Association made the function of the analyst exist in the world. Today, “there is some analyst” functioning. But, does there exist one, or are there only servants of psychoanalysis, of a mystery which goes beyond us? In order TO reply to this question, there is no reason to begin with an ideal definition of the function but with the result when it is set going, that is the objet a which is produced as reject of the analytical operation, limit and point of arrest in the domain of application of the function.

Psychoanalysis, as a practice of disidentification, as rupture by the unchaining of the subject of the unconscious, of the established identifications, produces an emptiness and in this operation leaves a remainder. This operation permits the analysand-subject new possibilities. The knowledge that the subject produces about his jouissance can allow him “to support in the fantasy the most effective realizations and the realities to which he is most attached.” But in psychoanalysis, if it is carried to its end. it is a matter of going beyond, to the point at which the objects of the fantasy and the being of the subject separate. We can illustrate this by using the painting that appears on the cover of The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis; Holbein’s The Ambassadors. It is not a question of adding one more trick to the background, but of perceiving (he death’s head in anamorphosis.

In Seminar XVII The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, four years before the “Italian note”, Lacan brings out in a different way the same point about the moment when the production of objects for science intersects with the production of the object for psychoanalysis. Chapter eleven, entitled “The furrows of the alethosphere”, begins with an observation on the objects produced by science. Science allows us to see, not the objects already present initially, but the objects it itself produces as a result of its own operation. Lacan clearly takes sides a rationalist epistemology which generates the development of science from the results of its calculus. Science adds objects to the real. Hence the term Lacan invents, operévoir, coined from opérer (to operate) and perçevoir (to perceive). How does the subject link itself to these productions since it does not do so by means of sense-perception? The example Lacan takes is that of the cosmonauts. In space they are moored to earth by the means which permanently supply them with calculations, permitting them to know where they are and what they can do. Nonetheless, they are limited to keeping up an exchange of words which is very poor in information. This participation of the voice permits them, says Lacan. although having no perception of the entities which populate the universe and which are produced by science, to keep up their morale. Throughout their mission, they will be certain that they are men and women.

We have the following sequence, science produces the object-cause and immediately finds the means to unite the subject to this object by virtue of the voice. It is what the voice hides in a complete deception in order to set up the subject. Psychoanalysis for its part must operate in this retracing by means of which it gives some voice everywhere in order to keep itself in the productions thai receive operators. That is the knowledge that psychoanalysis can bring into the world where the discourse of capitalism, encouraged today by science, distributes what we might call gadgets which drown the truth and the jouissance of the subject.

If psychoanalysis can proceed by backtracking from this excess of production of objects, it can only do it in any case by following the path of the furrow traced by science. Il is by adding itself to the world as the result of an operation thai psychoanalysis can bear witness to the destiny of the drive such as it is elaborated in psychoanalysis. It is a matter of discovering, beyond phallic signification, how the crossing of the fantasy can be transmitted outside meaning. In these two aspects, that of the emptiness of the subject of science and that of the excess of the objects it produces, psychoanalysis is confronted with the horizon of its ethics. It is a matter for psychoanalysis of breaking with the imaginary just as mathematics has, since the Greeks, been able to break with the figure. The inventory of the imaginary has already been made. Lacan ends his “Italian note” thus: “The knowledge designated by Freud as the unconscious is invented by the human for its durability from one generation to (he next, and now that it has been inventoried, one knows that it’s proof of a frantic lack of imagination.” The exhaustion of fantasies has already been done. From thence the desire “to plug an organ on into the instrument.” Not to plug into the nerves a microphone with a voice or a television screen in order to feel the eye but to plug something logical into the device produced by psychoanalysis.

The unique proof of the effect that psychoanalysis produces in the way an epoch lives the drive is to verify it by the result of psychoanalysis. It determines the pass as the experience and the device which must contribute to the passing of psychoanalysis towards science. The pass is the mark which permits (he verification of a subject who operates/perceives (aperçoit) the sexual.

Author’s Bio

TRANSLATED BY BRUCE FINK

What does our era enjoin us to do? Are we equal to the task? It seems to me too easy to claim that the imperative of the times is one of completion, and that, as modem Narratives linking subject, science and History are foreclosed, we must either explore the formless dis-covered this foreclosure bequeaths us or sustain turning back towards the Greek origin of thinking – a pure question. I propose instead the following hypothesis: what is demanded of us is an additional step in the modem, and not a veering towards the limit, whether it be termed “post-modem” or whatever. We know, thanks in particular to mathematics, that the making of an additional step represents a singularly complex task as the local status of problems is often more difficult and muddled than their global status. The predication of an “end” is a hurdling lacking in resolution value when one is unaware of how to proceed on to the next step. Rather than ask “what is there beyond?”, because of methodical distrust of the beyond, I will formulate the question as follows, on the basis of the hypothesis that modem thinking requires its continuation: what concept of the subject succeeds the one whose trajectory can be traced out from Descartes to Husserl, and which wore thin and fell into ruin between Nietzsche and Heidegger, as well as throughout the whole of what should be called “the age of the poets” (Hölderlin, Hopkins, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Trakl, Pessoa, Mandelstam, Celan)?

Which amounts to asking: can we think an objectless subject? In the twofold sense in which, concerning such a subject, one can neither designate his correlate in presentation, nor suppose that he answers to any of thought’s objectives. I would argue that the process of the destitution of the subject has, over the course of a complex history going back at least as far as Kant, been confused with the ineluctable process of the destitution of the object. From within the modem imperative – to which the predication of an “end” opposes but a dissipated torment – we must base what succeeds on the fact that the form of the object cannot in any way sustain the enterprise of truth. This imperative thus raises the following question: is it possible to de-objectify the space of the subject?

If it is possible, what is thus beyond the subject if not the very same subject dissociated or subtracted from reflexive jurisdiction, un- constituting, untied from all supports unrelated to the process of a truth – of which the subject would be but a finite fragment?

I call subject the local or finite status of a truth. A subject is what is locally born out.

The “subject” thus ceases to be the inaugural or conditioning point of legitimate statements. He is no longer – and here we see the cancellation of the object, as objective this time – that for which there is truth, nor even the desirous eclipse of its surrection. A truth always precedes him. Not that a truth exists “before” him, for a truth is forever suspended upon an indiscernible future. The subject is woven out of a truth, he is what exists of truth in limited fragments. A subject is what a truth transits, or this finite point through which, in its infinite being, truth itself passes or transits. This transit excludes every interior moment.

This is what allows me to deny that it is necessary “truth” henceforth being disjoined or dissociated from “knowledge” – to suppress the category “subject”. While it is impossible in our era to identify “truth” with a status of cognitive statements, it cannot be inferred that we can thereby go beyond what modem thought (post-Galilean or post- Cartesian) has designated as its own locus using the term “subject”. Granted: the meaning of the word “truth” may hang on the question of being; still it seems more apposite to make this meaning depend on the supplementation or exceeding-of-being which I term “event”. Does it follow that the “subject” is obsolete? That would be to confuse the classical function of the subject (as transparent punctuality on the basis of which the true or its limit is established) and being which props up this function (i.e. the finite which, since Galileo, must endure truth’s infinite nature).

Let us make a forward pass with this being, dissociating it from its hereditary function.

1. Axiomatic provision

An irrevocable step forward has been made through the critique of earlier concepts of the subject, which is thoroughly based on the notion that truth is neither a qualification of knowledge nor an intuition of the intelligible. One must come to conceive of truth as making a hole in knowledge. Lacan is paradigmatic on this point. The subject is thus convoked as a border-effect or a delimiting fragment of such a hole-piercing.

To conceptualize the subject outside of any object position makes no sense except from the point of view of a doctrine of truth which has been so completely recast as to go well beyond the critique of correspondence theories of truth, and to out-radicalize hermeneutics of unveiling. Such a doctrine cannot be laid out here in its ontological complexity. I will simply summarize it in four theses, fully aware though I am that in philosophy summary is impracticable; one would better conceive of it as an axiomatic shortcut. The four theses which follow must thus be solidly founded as everything else depends upon them.

(1) A truth is always post-eventual. Its process begins when a supernumerary name has been put into circulation – extracted from the very void which reduces every situation to its being (”sutures” every situation as being) – by which it has been decided that an event has supplemented the situation.

(2) The process of a truth is fidelity (to the event), i.e. the evaluation, using a specific operator (that of fidelity), of the degree of connection between the terms of the situation and the supernumerary name of the event.

(3) The terms of the situation that are declared positively connected to the supernumerary name form an infinite part of the situation, which is suspended upon a future, as this infinity only comes into being through a succession of finite evaluations, and is thus never presented.

(4) If this infinite part will have avoided (we have here the future anterior as truth’s own temporal regime or register) coinciding with what knowledge determines as known, consistent or discerned sets in the situation if, thus, the part in question is indiscernible for knowledge, i.e. absolutely indistinguishable or generic – then we will say the post-eventual procedure produces a truth. A truth is therefore, in substance, a procedure of post-eventual fidelity which will have been generic. In this sense, a truth (indiscernible within knowledge), is the metonymy of the situation’s very being – i.e. of a pure or unnamed multiple into which this being is resolved.

Let us call “subject” every finite state of a generic procedure.

2. Negative delimitation of the concept of the subject

From the preceding definition, we can infer a whole series of negative consequences which make it clear that we are proceeding (through discontinuous continuity) forward from the classical concept of the subject.

(a) A subject is not a substance. If the word substance has a meaning, it designates a multiple which is counted as one in a situation. The intrinsic indiscernibility into which a generic procedure resolves excludes a subject’s being substantial.

(b) Nor is a subject an empty point. The void, which is a proper name of being, is inhuman and a-subjective. It is an ontological concept. In addition, it is clear that a truth is realized as multiplicity and not as punctuality.

(c) A subject is in no sense the organizing of a meaning of experience. He is not a transcendental function. If the word “experience” means anything, it designates presentation as such. Now a generic procedure, hinged as it is on the event which a supernumerary name qualifies, in no way coincides with presentation. We should also differentiate meaning and truth. A generic procedure realizes the post-eventual truth of a situation, but this indiscernible multiple in which a truth consists yields up no meaning.

(d) A subject is not an invariant of presentation. The subject is scarce in that the generic procedure runs diagonally to the situation. One could add that each subject is rigorously singular, being the generic procedure of a situation which is itself singular. The statement “there is subject” (il y a du sujet) is uncertain or haphazard: it is not transitive with respect to being.

(e) A subject is neither a result nor an origin. He is the local status of the procedure, a configuration which exceeds the situation.

Let us now examine the twists and turns of the subject.

3. Subjectivization: intervention and the faithful connection operator

The subject is at the core of a problem of twofold origin concerning fidelity procedures. We have the name of the event, which I say results from an intervention, as well as a faithful connection operator which regulates the procedure and institutes truth. To what extent does this operator depend upon the name? And doesn’t the emergence of this operator constitute a second event? Let us take an example. In Christianity, the Church is that through which connections to and disconnections from the Christ-event, originally called the “death of God”, are evaluated. As Pascal says, the Church is thus verily “truth’s history”, as it is the faithful connection operator sustaining “religious” generic procedures. But what is the link between the Church and Christ? Or between the Church and the death of God? This point is continually under debate and has given rise (like that concerning the link between the Party and the Revolution) to all kinds of schisms and heresy. One suspects the faithful connection operator itself of being originally unfaithful to the event in which it takes pride.

I will call subjectivization the emergence of an operator which is consecutive to the interventional naming that decides the event. Subjectivization takes the form of the Two. It is oriented towards the intervention in the vicinity of the eventual site. But is also oriented towards the situation by its coincidence with the rule of evaluation and proximity which grounds the generic procedure. SUbjectivization is the interventional naming from the point of view of the situation, i.e. the rule governing the intra-situational effects of putting a supernumerary name into circulation.

Subjectivization, i.e. the singular configuration of a rule, subsumes the Two of which it consists in the absence of meaning of a proper name. St. Paul for the Church, Lenin for the Party, Cantor for ontology, Schoenberg for music, but also Simon or Claire, should they declare their love, are all designations – made by the “one” of a proper name – of the subjectivizing scission between the name of an event (the death of God, the revolution, infinite multiples, the destruction of the tonal system, or an encounter) and the setting into motion of a generic procedure (the Catholic Church, Bolshevism, set theory, serialism, or singular love). The proper name here designates that the subject, qua situated and local configuration, is neither the intervention nor the fidelity operator, but rather the advent of their Two, i.e. the incorporation of the event into the situation in the form of a generic procedure. The absolute singularity of this Two, dissociated as it is from its meaning, is shown by the un-signifying nature of the proper name. But this un-signifying nature also dearly recalls that what the interventional naming convoked was the void which is itself the proper name of being. Subjectivization is the proper name in situ of this general proper name. It is a manifestation of the void.

The commencement of a generic procedure grounds, as its horizon, the collecting of a truth. Subjectivization is thus that which makes a truth possible. It turns the event towards the situation’s truth for which this event is an event. Thus the proper name bears the trace of both the event and the situation, being that by which one comes to be for the other, qua generic trajectory of a truth. “Lenin” is at once the October Revolution (the eventual component) and Leninism – true-multiplicity of revolutionary politics for half a century. Similarly, “Cantor” is at once the madness which requires the conceptualization of pure multiples and articulates and relates the infinite prodigality of being-as-being to its void, and the process of total reconstruction of mathematical discursivity (up until Bourbaki and even beyond). The fact is that the proper name contains both the interventional naming and the faithful connection rule.

Subjectivization – as the aporetic nexus of a name-too-many and an un-known operation – is what traces in situ the multiple becoming of the true, starting from the non-existent point at which the event has convoked the void and interpolated itself between the void and itself.

4. Randomness, from which every truth is woven, is the subject’s material

If we consider the local status of a generic procedure, we notice that it depends on simple encounters. The faithful connection operator prescribes if one or another term of the situation is linked or not to the supernumerary name of the event. It in no way prescribes, however, that we examine one term before, or rather than, another. Thus the procedure is regulated in terms of its effects, but entirely random in its trajectory. The only empirical evidence in this respect is that the trajectory begins just at the outskirts of the eventual site. Everything else is lawless. There is thus an essential randomness in the procedure’s itinerary. This randomness is not visible in its result, viz. a truth, for a truth is an ideal collecting of “all” the evaluations: it is a complete part of the situation. But the subject does not coincide with this result. Locally there are only illegal encounters, for nothing ordains – neither in the name of the event nor in the connection operator – that one term be evaluated at a certain moment and in a certain place. If one considers the subject’s material to be the terms submitted to the fidelity operator, this material – as multiple – has no assignable relationship with the rule dividing the positive results (where connection is established) from the negative ones (where disconnection is. established). Conceived of in his operation, the subject is qualifiable though singular: he breaks down into a name (of the event) and an operator (of fidelity). Conceived of in his multiple being, i.e. in the terms which figure in the actual evaluations, the subject is unqualifiable in that these terms are arbitrary with respect to his twofold qualification.

Of course, a finite series of evaluations of terms encountered by the fidelity procedure is a possible object of knowledge. But the active element of the evaluation – its evaluating – is not, as it is only accidental that the terms evaluated therein by the faithful connection operator turn out to be presented in the finite multiple of the evaluations. Knowledge can retroactively enumerate the components of this multiple, as they are finite in number. As knowledge cannot, at that very moment, anticipate any meaning whatsoever of their singular regrouping, it cannot coincide with the subject whose whole being is in the encounter with terms within a random trajectory. Knowledge never encounters anything. It presupposes presentation, representing it in language by discernment and judgment. What, on the contrary, constitutes the subject is the encounter with his material, though nothing in its form (viz. the name of the event and the fidelity operator) orders this material. If the subject has no other being-in-situ than the multiple terms he encounters and evaluates, his essence – having to include the randomness of these encounters – is rather the trajectory which links them. Now this incalculable trajectory comes under no determination within knowledge.

There is, between the knowledge of finite regroupings, their principled discernibility, and the subject of the fidelity procedure, this indifferent-difference which distinguishes the result (some of the finite multiples of the situation) from the partial trajectory of which this result is a local configuration. The subject is “between” the terms the procedure.

The subject is neatly separated from knowledge by randomness. He is randomness vanquished term by term, but this victory, subtracted from language, is accomplished only as truth.

5. Subject and truth: indiscernibility and nomination

I axiomatically stated above that “a-truth” – infinitely gathering the terms positively evaluated by the fidelity procedure – is indiscernible in the language of the situation. It is a generic part of the situation.

As the subject is a local configuration of the procedure, it is clear that truth is equally indiscernible “for him”. For truth is global. “For him” means exactly that a subject who effectuates a truth is nonetheless incommensurate to it, he being finite, truth being infinite. Moreover, the subject, being within the situation, can only know (i.e. encounter) terms or multiples presented (counted as one) in this situation. And finally, the subject can only construct his idiom (langue) out of combinations between the supernumerary name of the event and the language (langage) of the situation. It is in no way assured that this idiom will suffice to discern a truth, a truth being in any case indiscernible by the resources of the language of the situation alone. One must absolutely abandon every definition of the subject which would assume that he knows the truth or is adjusted to it. Being the local moment of the truth, the subject fails to sustain its global adjunction. Every truth transcends the subject precisely because his whole being consists in supporting the effectuation of that truth. The subject is neither consciousness nor unconsciousness of the true.

The singular relationship of a subject to the truth whose procedure he supports is the following: the subject believes that there is a truth, and this belief takes the form of knowledge. I term this educated belief “confidence”.

What does confidence mean? The fidelity operator locally discerns connections and disconnections of multiples of the situation with or from the name of the event. This discerning is an approximative truth, for the terms positively connected are yet to come – in a truth. This “yet to come” is the distinctive characteristic of the subject who judges. Belief here is the yet-to-come which goes by the name of truth. Its legitimacy derives from the fact that the name of the event, having supplemented the situation with a paradoxical multiple, circulates in the evaluations’ as that on the basis of which the void as latent and wandering being of the situation – has been convoked. A finite series of evaluations thus possesses, in a manner at once effective and fragmentary, the being-in-situ of the situation itself. This fragment materially pronounces the yet-to-come for, though it is locatable by knowledge, it is the fragment of an indiscernible trajectory. Belief consists merely in the fact that the encounters’ randomness is not vainly gathered up by the faithful connection operator. Held out as a promise by the event alone, belief represents the genericalness of the true as possessed in the local finitude of the stages of its trajectory. In this sense the subject is self-confidence, in that he does not coincide with the retroactive discernibility of these fragmentary results. A truth is posited as the infinite determination of an indiscernible of the situation, the latter being the intra-situational global result of the event.

That this belief may take the form of knowledge results from the fact that every subject generates namings. Empirically, this point is born out. What one can the most explicitly connect up with proper names that designate a subjectivization is an arsenal of words which make up the deployed matrix of fidelity marks. Consider “faith”, “charity”, “sacrifice”, and “health” (St. Paul), or “party”, “revolution”, and “politics” (Lenin), or “’sets”, “ordinal numbers”, and “cardinal numbers” (Cantor), and everything which then articulates, ramifies and stratifies these words. What is their particular function? Do they simply designate terms presented in the situation? In that case they would be redundant as concerns the established language of the situation. One can in fact distinguish ideological sects from truth’s generic procedures on the basis of the fact that whereas the words used by such sects only replace – through meaningless shifts – those declared appropriate by the situation, the names used by a subject in supporting a generic truth’s local configuration generally have no referent in the situation. They do not thus double over the established language. But what purpose do they then serve? They are words which clearly designate terms, but terms which “will have been” presented in a new situation, one which results from the adjunction of an (indiscernible) truth of the situation to that same situation.

Belief is sustained by the fact that with the resources of the situation – its multiples and its language – a subject generates names whose referents are in the future anterior. Such names will have been assigned referents or meanings when the situation will have come to be in which the indiscernible which is only represented (or included) is finally presented, as a truth of the former situation.

At the situation’s surface, a generic procedure draws attention to itself above all by the nominal aura which surrounds its finite configurations: the subject. He who is not involved in extending the procedure’s finite trajectory – who was not assessed positively regarding his connection to the event – generally considers the names to be empty. He obviously recognizes them, as these names are fabricated on the basis of terms of the situation. The names with which a subject surrounds himself are not indiscernible. But the outside observer, noticing that the names are mostly lacking in referents in the situation as it is, considers that they make up an arbitrary and contentless language. Which explains why revolutionary politics are always thought to involve utopian (i.e. unrealistic) elements, scientific revolutions are greeted with skepticism or viewed as non-experimentally continued abstractions, and lovers’ babble is cast aside as infantile madness by prudent people. Now these observers are, in a certain sense, right. The names generated – or rather composed – by a subject are suspended, as concerns their meaning, upon the yet-to-come of a truth. Their local use is to sustain the belief that the terms positively polled designate or describe the approximation of a new situation in which the truth of the actual situation will have been presented. Every subject is thus locatable by the emergence of a language inside the situation, whose multiple-referents are, however, conditioned by an as yet uncompleted generic part.

Now a subject is separated from this generic part (of this truth) by an infinite series of random encounters. It is entirely impossible to anticipate or to represent a truth, as it comes to be only in the course of evaluations or connections which are incalculable, their succession being solely ruled by encounters with the terms of the situation. It follows that, from the subject’s point of view, the referentiality of the names remains forever suspended upon the uncompletable condition of a truth. It is only possible to say that if such and such a term, when it will have been encountered, turns out to be positively connected to the name of the event, then such and such a name will be likely to have a certain referent, for the generic pan which remains indiscernible in the situation will have such and such a configuration or partial property. A subject is that which uses names to make hypotheses about truth. But as he is himself a finite configuration of the generic procedure from which a truth results, one can equally sustain that a subject uses names to make hypotheses about himself, “himself” meaning the infinite of which he is the finite. An idiom (la langue) here is the fixed order in which a finitude attempts to postulate – within the condition of the finite effectuated by the finite – a referentiality yet-to-come. Finitude is the very being of truth in the combination of current finite evaluations and the future anterior of a generic infinity.

One can easily show that this is the status of names such as “‘faith”, health”, “communism”, “transfinite”, “serialism”, or names/nouns used in a declaration of love. Let us note that these names can support the future anterior of a truth (be it religious, political, mathematical, musical or existential) as they combine local evaluations (predications, statements, works, addresses) and (re)appropriated or recast names already available in the situation. They slightly shift the established meanings so as to leave the referent empty, the referent which will have been filled if the truth comes to be as a new situation (the reign of God, the emancipated society, absolute mathematics, a new musical order with a range comparable to that of the tonal order, a thoroughly amorous life, etc.).

A subject is that which fends off the generic indiscernibility of a truth – a truth he effectuates in discernible finitude by an act of naming which leaves its referent in the future anterior of a condition. A subject is thus, through names’ good graces, at once the real of the procedure (the assessor of the assessments) and the hypothesis of the novelty the procedure’s uncompletable result would introduce into presentation. A subject emptily names the universe yet-to-come which is obtained from the fact that an indiscernible truth supplements the situation. He is concurrently the finite real, the local stage of this supplementation. Naming is only empty insofar as it is pregnant with what sketches out its own possibility. A subject is the autonym of an empty idiom (langue).

Author’s Bio

TRANSLATED BY PETER BRADLEY

Notice

This text was published in Cahiers pour l’analyst 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 in l’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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 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 dependent 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 jour 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 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.

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 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 of méconnaisance; 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

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 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.

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.

Author’s Bio

On the year 2002, in Mashad, the sacred and pilgrimage town of Iran, a serial killer appeared who had killed 19 women and been named by press as “spider killer” because of his constant way of murdering. As a typical trend, all his victims were helpless disfranchised rejected women, i.e. addicted aged prostitutes. Then a TV documentary made by an Iranian director for BBC network, including some interviews with murderer, his wife and his son, father and two daughters of a victim, judge of the case and some people who had acquainted murderer through living in same neighborhood or working in same place. What was probably surprising for good- willing people was all interviewees’ same position about these crimes. Murderer claimed his only intention was cleansing the society of guilty ones, of those villains who aimed corrupting his people’s living atmosphere. All interviewees, certainly except victim’s relations, praised his intention and actions. After all, they attested he was a pious, well-behavior and very civilized man. Nevertheless the “spider killer” is not an exceptional phenomenon, whether in east or west. Everywhere we witness the man who think of himself as a kind of savior whose mission is “to refine” society, even world; but eventually, albeit his supposedly benevolent motive, his actions take on monstrosity shapes.

Although in reality almost no one wants to meet a serial killer or other kinds of monster-man, all kinds of cultural representations of them occupy a privileged status. Horror movies have populated fan- communities, modern gothic fictions are among best-selling literature and monsters and evil agents are objects of cultural fascination. Twenty century did witness this frenzy fascination to evil and gory representations even in high-art movements: horrifying writings of Bataille, Artaud’s “cruelty theater”, scaring paintings of Bacon or disgusting artworks of artists like Stuart Brisley who belonged to “happening” movement and violent praised movies of Lynch or Cronenberg.

Now the question is raised here is that whether there is a link between serial killers and contemporary cultural representations of monster, especially in the frame of horror (slasher) movies? From the outset, we must keep in minds that this question does not mean that whether slasher-movies monsters are the adequate representations for the serial killers in the world outside the movies; but that aims that which thing prompt us to call these two kinds of beings with the same name? And similar horror monsters appear on a screen, “on what screen social serial killers appear”? This question is inserted because it is evident that close encountering with monsters must be so shocking and the reason of maintaining the ordinary lives of those ones lived close to such serial killers, as “spider killer” is these monsters appear on screen too, providing some easiness and security for the others. Psychoanalytically, this screen is of fantasy and maybe the “big Other”; for thank to that, we can conceive everyone, certainly who we designate, as innocent. This is some kind of “inter-passivity” and somehow a pervert inclination, for as though we know perfectly who we are (for the Other). But presently it is sufficient.

Before turn to our question, let’s make a detour, and to do so, we should recall Lacan formula of signifying, i.e. that one which about relations about signifier and subject. Beware that we use this for notifying what is remained un-signifying and whether we are right to call killers, such as “spider”, monsters?

S1 —————> S2 $ ————————a

We also note this formula to elucidate function of screen that is covering the bars which mean inconsistencies and dissymmetry of representation. More than this, the screen provides some sense of security and also a means of perceiving things which projected on it. Now, let’s come back to notion of monstrosity.

The first way of observing beings called monsters is that one is offered by Freudian conception of “the uncanny” or “unheimlich”, in the sense of something bizarre, something unhomely, the homelessness, something that can not be posited. In one sense, especially in the terms of language and representation, the uncanny is the same with the Real, something, or better speaking, a trauma that can not be symbolized, i.e. the Real of sexual difference.

If we elaborate further, we can claim that the uncanny is excrement, the waste that must be expelled but its otherness marks, or infects, the clean body of representation. As Lacan noted, the burden of excrement is characteristic of human culture and civilization. The human being is that being who (or what) do not know what to do with his (or its) shit. Shit is a natural excess that through the treatment of human being turns into the unnatural, turns into a means that demarcates the man. So the dark moment, the vanishing mediator that gives possibility to culture is the moment a being forges a way to expel this waste. So the way to treat this disturbing excess, the rituals of cleanliness and purification provides the index of cultural difference and symbolic identity. It may sound Freud elaboration of development of child identity: passage from anal stage to oedipal stage. If we turn to Lacan interpretation of evolution of human identity, we must regard child’s relations to its specular double, its image in the mirror. Through the mirror stage, the distinct presence of (m)Other inserts itself to the psyche of child; and by the strategy of recognizing itself in regarding to (m)Other, the child’s psychic drama begins. Subject is born when the child can situate itself in the world that names Other’s desire. It is well-known debate but it is crucial to keep in mind this fact that thing is not prior to word, contrary, it is word creates thing; so this is the signifier that give birth to subjectivity. Subjectivity is Hegelian moment that the signifiers which mark child psychic separation of maternal realm are repressed. This process is castration. Castration does not mean enslaving child by authority of father but emancipation of devouring mother’s jouissance. Castration means subversion of omni-powerfulness of mother for she lacks signifier of phallus, and more, the child cannot provide this for her or offer himself to her as phallus. Also it is crucial that from this lack of phallus erupts sexual identity.

The strategy that is adopted by subject to treat with mother’s desire forms its psychic state: neurosis, perversion or psychosis. It is worn debate that how is the logic of perversion, so it seems enough merely to note that perversion is result of refusal of lack in the mother. The pervert does not accept that his mother lacks signifier of phallus, and more, he unable to act as what she lacks. So as though, mother, or the Other, is the main feature for perverts. Social interactions for perverts devoid of small others, so their world is empty of human passions, especially capacity of negation or “saying- no”. And for this reason, usually perverts are completely socialized. Their actions are fully in accordance of social rules. Perversion is the way of perfect compromise. They act as so obediently, as we see in the most of slasher movies (or in Kantian moral subject who with no condition, actualizes universal imperatives).

We concentrate on the role of “the Other disguised as mother” in the purpose of observing closely Psycho of Hitchcock, that movie which apparently has had a main effect on formation of subgenre slasher. This movie had major slasher generic elements such as blade or sharp murdering tool, gory scene(s) of murdering, collection or heap of dead bodies (in this case, taxidermist birds), silent dim building and a weird family (as if the only constitutive element which was absent in Psycho was displaying of mutilation scene itself). Except this inventory, nowadays some unimportant scenes in psycho has supplied standard images in slasher movies: brutally murdering victim because of some unrelated moral deficiency, horrified searching in a silent gothic house with the premonition of a fatal attack, being killed when been showering or been naked, conversion of subjective point of view (supposedly belong to a pursuer killer) to the objective P.O.V. (for example, the picture could be said framed by the gaze of house). In the heart of psycho, we can see some paradigmatic figures and themes of main slasher movies: murdering as a kind of consummate sexual relation, or strictly speaking, successful intercourse; intervention of dead mother into tragedy, mummy mom or undead maternal figure and embodiment of lingering omen voice and so on. Norman Bates is a harmless adolescent-like son who is subordinated to his mother; a meek-hood one who shockingly slaughters a defenseless female figure while the face of he, himself, is not shot. We can say Norman Bates is psychically disturbed one, a split subject who resigns his place to his dead (or better, un-dead) mother, and finally can overcome to this schism through offering his body for inhabiting his mother phantom (the final scene where dead mother talk through the Bates’ mouth).

Before we go further, it is worthwhile to note that every subject is split, so it must find a way to tarry with its split-ness. Some subject get satisfaction of playing with this split who called hysteric, and some try to suture every split symbolic it find called obsessive. Maybe it can be possible to design some formulae about subjects in respect to kinds of treatment with their split; but now, this is not of interest. Presently about Bates, he is confronting with a split between horizontal motel and vertical house (just as the narrative itself that is compound two dissymmetrical parts: the horizontal metonymic half that is a moral adventure tale and the vertical half that is a mystery fiction revolved around a murder); a split between being a desiring subject and being a desired object; a split between treating as a living servant and treating like an undead, a moving haunted body.

This spectral plot and subject matter haunt the edifice of slasher subgenre: a ruptured psych lives on in a pre-oedipal state, the one who does not succeed to separate his ego from his monster mother (to be more effect, dead in Halloween or undead, mummified mother, in Texas Chainsaw Massacre), acts like a serial killer. Evidently, refusing to enter (or better, banned of entering to) symbolic order and being castrated, he invents a fundamental fantasy to secure himself of threats of The Real, forges a fantasmatic solution to the enigma of sexuality. He disavows the lack of phallus in her mother and so can not translate his desire into Other’s desire. In this sense, in psycho, watching the naked Marion by the killer, was not a voyeuristic sexual act because his only act from which he could derive sexual satisfaction was being an object/thing for her mother’s jouissance, and punishing a guilty sexy girl who could seduce him, so actually could introduce a fissure on the imaginary perfect surface of the continuity between child and its mother or Other. Its likely aftermath would be foreground the real lack in (m)Other.

This is exactly what that happens in the apropos of many supposedly reformist serial killers, for example “spider” and the likes, make themselves appointed to annihilate all that is somehow a threat to their fantasy, i.e. being the object/thing of (m)Other’s jouissance. For “spider” the serial killer, the addicted prostitutes, not even “grandiose whore”, were the mere objects what impede realization of society’s unity. They were conceived as threats for they acted like objet a, they are treated as though they were stealing the jouissance that was belonged to Other. For such male serial killers, suggestive women are those not only snatch their jouissance, but also hindrances to fulfill their fantasy; and perverts are those ones who, unlike neuroses, starve to fulfill them. Paradoxically, these women are known as a foreign body and at once the only one that could access to the most intimate and hidden treasure of Other. The perverts like “spider” think they have become deprived of being happy for losing especial concern and desire of Other because of some mysterious guilt and some obtrusive stain obstacle receiving Other’s gaze; so cleansing this stain could establish the perfect state, i.e. being the only object for Other’s jouissance. Only recall obsessive Bate’s works for keeping clean everything. These obsessive actions are not interpreted as neurotic deeds, because these deeds are done with a kind of successful air not desperation.

It may be fruitful to reflect a little on act of cleansing or purifying, especially when be acted obsessively, the act aims obliterating all stain, all left-over. Is not it familiar with God’s anger, with divine supreme punishment, in cases such Sodom’s or Pharaoh’s soldiers who pursuit Moses’ people? It suffices to recall etymology of “monster”: derivative of “monere” means “warning” or “anticipation of impeding catastrophe”. In this sense, monster is an agent of God’s will and this equation echoes Lacan’s seminar on “God and Woman’s jouissance” which relates jouissance with “just”, “justice” and Aristotle’s notion of justice as “golden mean” or “happy medium”. When cleansing is a medium to receive enjoyment to its proper possessing, that means justice again, so it sounds logical to say that the divine to fully attain itself, must rely on something that is not divine; it means “God” lacks something that a monster can afford: this is another translation of pervert theology. This theology is worked through an affirmative divine gesture, the divine that disavows its incompleteness. So, do not these etymological plays witness to the fact that monster is an (secret) agent of mother jouissance, especially when this enjoyment bears witness to desert a body? Is not that that enjoyment equates with pain?

Now we can step back and review our statements about the lost moment when mankind traverse from nature and receive culture: repelling the one’s own waste. But presently when the notion of “God” is involved, is it working to incite from Luther (through Lacan quotation) that “human kind literally are the waste matter which falls into the world from the devil’s anus”. The world is all and all is sinful and has excremental nature; so the most authentic deed, for a protestant, is say no to the world, just like a devotee believer of Buddha. Thanks to Weber and Zizek (in the cases of Protestantism and Buddhism, respectively) we know the inverted result (rise of capitalism and brutal crimes). But this belief is not restricted to religion.

In some respect, all humane rituals and customs are efforts to wash away these disgust waste. Some feminist thinkers, for example Julia Kristeva, claim that patriarchal societies always identify feminine body with abject and many cultural representations we call monsters are various embodiments of masculine fear of other repressed feminine, fear of all repressed things that coming back with doubled power. It may sound homological to Freud’s interpretation of monster as embodiment of coming back of something that is repressed; but in fact it is not. The reason lies in statements like “there is only one libido”; “there is no woman” and so on. Thanks to Lacan’s formulae of sexuation, we know that there is nothing beyond phallic function and that the notion of existence of something hidden, mysterious and subversive in women that evades from phallic function is only another masculine fantasy, serving to secure subject from The Real of sexual difference. From this perspective, such interpretations that are based on equation of monster and feminine thing are various male fantasies. They work like strategy of enemy-making in formation of nation-state in narration of Carl Schmitt. Unity and harmony of our world relies on a powerful enemy what threats our world with a vengeance. Equation of feminine with a all-powerful evil monster resulted from male fantasy not something intrinsic and essential called femininity.

What is feminine sexuation? There is a kind of covering lack of phallus that is conceived feminine and evolves around masquerading, i.e. being masked, playing hysterical, pretending to be phallus. But what is under mask? Nothing. The real horror is this nothing and in order to not being faced with this nothing, the man invents some fantasy signifying that there is something: a kind domestic angel, a demonic monster, something revolutionary and so on. But what is relation between this “nothing behind feminine sexuation” and “destitution of subject”?

The answer is they are the one. Destitution of subject is the end of psychoanalytic experience when as analyst occupying the position of objet a, the analysand acknowledge that subject is an effect of signifiers, that all the time subject is nothing but presupposition. Subject is nothing, is Cartesian Cogito itself when the world is wholly subtracted of that. In this respect, what is desiring subject? Let us back to one of our departure points, that is formula about signification: “subject is what that one signifier represents for another signifier”. After all, afore-mentioned formula originally based on Charles Peirce’s model of sign and it means a sign (compounded of signifier and signified) refers to another sign. After post- structuralism we know that signifying is the infinite play of signifiers, as even Lacan said. But from the notion of The Real, it becomes evident that there is some stopper to that play that maybe not fair. (It maybe interesting to posit that believing unending play of signifier and un-decidability is somehow perverse theory, is somehow academic discourse that is unable to say no and insert an end to that unending chain, that is unable to act messianic, as Benjamin theorized.) That is a, objet petite a. And what is this element? This is very object that causes our desire, in meaning that is Other’s desire. This is not some structuralist notion, meaning that we do not desire, we are forced to desire by something could called Other, language and so on. This object is a question that asked by subject addressing Other: “what do you want of me?” or “what am I for you?”

This question remains without answer and it remains enigmatic for good. Fantasy is an effort to prepare an answer to this question that is not grasped at all. But why? Because the subject has no substance, it is produced of signification, strictly speaking, subject is what rejects being subjected, subjected to any signifier. Subject is very impossibility of being positioned the subject. In this sense, subject is what that is “unheimlich”, is “uncanny”. So, what is true monster?

Referring to the formula that is introduced in this essay firstly, we can conclude that subject is not “somebody” but is “something”, and furthermore, supposing this subject is a barred subject for this is not “one”, subject is pure negativity, is suspending all reality, is an empty void that has no content. The subject is a fissure on the surface of nature, is the vanishing mediator between nature and culture. (In this sense, subject likes cracks on the walls of “house of Usher”. In this story, the male protagonist, Radrick suffers of a family sickness, of an evil power inclining melancholia and intensified sensation. In other hand, the mansion that is called Usher refers both to mansion itself and the family. So, male Usher represents a perfect thought-sensation machine; but in this so human one, the madness is intrinsic. So fall of Usher is fall of reason too, because madness is not out of this machinery but is very element that constitutes reason.)

We claimed that subject is the very Cartesian Cogito. Remembering the name Descartes gave to Cogito, Res Cogitant, we can call creatures like Androids in Blade Runner subject too. So is not the only real monster is very the subject? Referring to figures like “creature of Frankenstein”, “Count Dracula” and so on bears witness to this statement. So we can conclude every horror narrative is narrative of subjectivization, or in another way, narrative of constituent fantasy of a subject or subject-position (it is crucial that we must distinguish between subject and subject-position, and this fact can make for us a cognitive tool to categorize two distinct horror narrations: narration of “void” and narration of “loss”, narration of fear of internal impossibility or fear of external block for realization). Now we can relate sub-subgenres of horror movie (sub-slasher) to relevant fundamental (male) fantasies, for example: Texas Chain- Sow Massacre signifies possibility of a harmonic society (murderer family locate outside of industrial society). Dominant orthodox interpretation of this narration is this is embodiment of repressed groups by industry trends: a bankrupt farmer family because of industrialization of butchery. In this respect, this movie narration of un-symbolized people, those ones that are not integrated by current order. But all this interpretation is an imaginary fantasy.

A Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th stage the male fantasy about the role of femme fatale that is portraying dangerous female serves for unity and stability of male universe and covering the Real of sexual difference. Prevailing avant-guard interpretation shows this fantasy in another way, an exegesis that is found mostly in feminist writings which say: “historically individual identity is marked by the rejection of the maternal bond and acceptance of the law of the father. But the abject is never far removed, always threatening the stability of the subject and the social order as a whole and consequently always in need of ritual expunging of the abject element”.

(We can continue this praxis and demonstrate fundamental fantasy for another sub-genres:

Ring, exemplary Far-East horror movie about malevolent ghosts embodies fantasy about perfect and harmonious society that could be retained through paying an undoubted symbolic debt that is realized by revenging specter. Notably, the most of these phantoms have feminine figure (mother and child) that their existence demonstrate the male fantasy about constituent and mysterious power of maternal figure.

Zombie movies purportedly give image to fear of uncivilized people, actually stage a Nazi-like fantasy about society and Zombie, pointing to Jewish-like man who is devoid of all citizenship rights, embodies bare life.)

From this account, we can prepare a sense interpretation for some stereotypes in these kind movies: for example, “last girl”, a virgin female who finally come over the monster is representation of phallicized female who could be occupies position of castrated mother; we must not forget that monster or serial killer have some kind of interest to this girl who is innocent and never have affair with guilty ones.

Some movie theorists relate the rise of these movies to intensification of feminist and homosexual movements that insert a sense of instability to societies, especially the USA. Ideological delusion lies here for referring inner instability of sexuation to some external cause, making an implicit hint that establishment of stable sexes is possible. As we reviewing this account, we most keep in mind that psychic romance is not merely a familial case, but a universal one; for example, is Obama a “last girl” eventually kill Bush the monster? So, it is necessary to be acute and do not err that a kind of phallicization could be attained. Furthermore, we must learn how to tarry with the monsters and this does not mean the only way to treat a monster is killing as done in so many places and times.

Art: Hellen Van Meene, Untitled #318, C- print, 2008.