Response to Levi Bryant: On Methodology and Dispositions

RESPONSE TO LEVI BRYANT:

On Methodology and Dispositions

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   Levi has recently made some preliminary comments about my article-review, published recently in the new issue of the journal Speculations. I thought I would use his response as an opportunity to say a few things left pending after writing the review, as well as to respond to some of Levi’s salient worries about the first half of the paper.

I – Behind Doors

Before tackling the philosophical issues, and considering that Levi begins his post with some rather generous comments, I thought I should reiterate my general opinion on Bryant’s work, and his temperament as a philosopher. Levi’s work has been a perpetual source of inspiration for us, aspiring philosophers, for many reasons. I think his appetite for learning from new sources, his intoxicating passion for philosophy, and his willingness to reinvent his positions time and time again, are all examples of philosophical virtue. His blog has been a constant reference point, sometimes crystallizing better than most secondary literature on the subject, the views of some notoriously obscure figures from the Continental tradition. He has a virtue for demystifying the impenetrable nature of philosophy, making it approachable and fascinating. It is no wonder that his work has become a source of inspiration for many outside the academia, and his sometimes fastidious insistence in that philosophy should always listen to what occurs outside of its academic ivory walls, is invaluable advice.

    As someone who has been deeply influenced by Badiou, as Levi notes in his post, I find such an attitude in tune with what I take to be a necessary part of any truly contemporary disposition in philosophy: it can only recover its synoptic ambition by being attentive to the procedures that condition it, and which occur independently of it. For all of these reasons, Levi has been, and continues to be, a mandatory interlocutor and someone for whom I feel much warmth and admiration. So hopefully, we can continue having a philosophical conversation without vitiating our mutual respect and affection. With that said, I want to address some of the philosophical issues raised by Levi, in response to my review-piece.

II -  On  Philosophical Methodology

    It is no secret by now that Levi expresses much hostility to philosophical schools which emphasize the need and importance of epistemology, at least as the latter has been understood by the post-Kantian analytic tradition, and more recently, by some of those who try to integrate concerns proper to this tradition with questions and ideas proper to the Continental tradition. In his book, Levi targets what he labels ‘epistemological realisms’, which emphasizes the idea that realism ought to begin by an examination of the conditions under which we can say that thought gains traction on being, rather than by an examination of being itself.

     But Levi also targets all forms of anti-realism that result from an exacerbation of critique, such as has been emblematic of many Continental figures during the 20^th Century, some of which are among Levi’s own intellectual heroes.

    This brings me to my first point: I think that Levi often construes epistemology as complicit with forms of anti-realism, or at the very least, that it collides with the prospect of giving a realist philosophy by way of ontological premises. But it should be always remembered that the anti-realisms that are in the process of being examined also include the positions of philosophers who thought they were restituting the priority of ontology in some form or other.

    Of course, Levi himself is well aware that the term ontology acquires a somewhat different meaning in the work of someone like Heidegger, where it becomes more a radicalization of the question of access rather than a positive metaphysical program. And I think that while Levi subscribes himself to the critiques advanced by such Continental figures against epistemology proper, he thinks that the preponderance of the question of access remains complicit with anti-realist thought. Nevertheless, epistemological realism remains the main point of contrast to his own ontological realism

   Levi expresses that he is somewhat amenable to my points about realist epistemology, and even that these might end up nurturing his thought in unforeseen ways. For this I am humbled, and grateful. Nevertheless, I should say that my concern in the review was not so much to defend a version of epistemological realism, but simply to say that epistemology as a whole is not susceptible to some of the objections that Levi proposes. In the book, Levi criticizes the priority of epistemology mainly by referencing the work of Roy Bhaskar, and against classical empiricist accounts which relativize knowledge to the givenness of perceptual or sensory data. My rejoinders to this part of Levi’s strategy were simply to indicate both that Bhaskar’s arguments for ontological realism are questionable when motivating realism, and that there exist a multiplicity of epistemological accounts that do not seem sensitive to the criticisms Levi levels against classical empiricist epistemology.

   Levi expresses himself somewhat strongly with respect to what he takes to be accusations of irrationalism that function more like a Stalinist bullying, and emphasizes that we just have different questions in mind, and different concerns. He ends his piece in a somewhat effusive declaration, which I quote:

“Daniel takes this claim as the claim I think everything is up to individual, subjective, human whim. Indeed, the claim that everything is up to individual whim is a claim that Daniel often attributes to me. I’m surprised by this and wonder if Daniel has read Koyre, Lakatos, and Kuhn. All I’m pointing out when I say such a thing is that certain research projects are incommensurable with one another. I’m surprised that Daniel, who has read and been influenced by Badiou so deeply, has difficulty seeing this point. Daniel seems to miss the point that the Galilean who has resolved to try to see if nature can be mathematized, cannot respond to questions within the Aristotlean-Ptolemaic context.”

 Indeed, one of the lessons I have learned from Badiou is that philosophy should be sensitive to paradigm shifts (to use Kuhn’s phrase), that it should develop a dialectics of change, and that it must include a theory of novelty and creation. But I do not believe that the reasons for why I insist on epistemology are explained because I am still operating within an Aristotelian framework, while Levi in a post-Galilean one. To understand this, I should perhaps say a few words about my own philosophical history, which might resonate with some of the affective declarations Levi makes.

      I started my studies in a Continental-oriented department in Peru, where philosophy was mostly aligned with the social sciences rather than with the ‘scientific’ vision proper to analytic schools, and where figures like Heidegger, the late Wittgenstein, Foucault, and Habermas were most influential. I remember at one point my good friend and excellent philosopher Erich Luna (who runs the blog Vacio) came to me with an article on Plato by Gail Fine, from Cornell. Fine was my first explicit encounter with contemporary analytic philosophy, and at the time I couldn’t but feel that I had been indoctrinated all along. As Levi emphasizes, one of the deficiencies of the Continental tradition is that it breeds generation after generation of historians of philosophy more than philosophers as such. They tend to nod patronizingly towards any form of critical engagement with the canonical figures, and prefer a more reverential approach geared towards hermeneutic precision rather than to argumentative polemics. But Fine was doing something else: she was actively discussing the cogency of the philosophical theses in Plato, and doing so in an extraordinarily rigorous manner, while preserving stylistic clarity, freeing itself of some of the bombast in the Continental rhetoric.

  Little did I know, I would end up transferring to Cornell, and studying under Fine as my advisor. During my years there, I became quickly astonished and intimidated by the methodological scrutiny of the analytic tradition, and Cornell’s heavily analytic-oriented department. I found myself out of my depth in most conversations, and I strived to learn from this tradition its formal tools for the making and defusing of arguments. And yet, I couldn’t help but feel that something was off. I couldn’t see why this linguistified philosophy wasn’t subject to the kind of criticisms that Heidegger leveled, and which detected unsaid ontological assumptions underneath every attempt at an epistemology. After reading Rorty, I became somewhat convinced that although the rigor and clarity of the school was of invaluable support when entering the trenches, the tradition was fundamentally misguided, and that it continued, somewhat obliviously, to dwell in the shadow of Kant, whereas Continental philosophy had moved far beyond it, and waltzed merrily into post-Modernity. The result? I ended up writing a thesis on Husserl and Heidegger, at Cornell.

   I returned to Peru fairly confident in my Heideggerean proclivities, which I found were fundamentally correct even in the wake of figures that were critical of Heidegger: Derrida, Foucault, Gadamer, Habermas, Lyotard, etc. It was not until I read Zizek and encountered Lacan that my confidence in the Heideggerean project was first shaken. And it was not until I read Badiou’s Being and Event that my thinking underwent a full blown ‘paradigm shift’. What was most striking in Badiou is that he began his treatise by making a significant concession to the analytic tradition, understandably in avowing the valence of formal thinking. But Badiou did something else too; he summoned from the dead specters that Continental philosophers had purportedly buried for good: words like ‘truth’, and ‘universality’, and the methodological valence of argument and proof, without the obscurity of style that characterized the tradition. The most important lesson I learned from Badiou was that philosophy could and ought to reinvent its central concepts in accordance with the procedures of its time, that no word was a ‘bad’ word in philosophy, that no view was forbidden in principle, and that one couldn’t bury corpses for good without the possibility of their return. Like Putnam emphasized apropos science, history brings us to retake theses that we had thought to have discarded in the course of progress: the idea that the universe had a beginning being a prime example.

   Having laid this out, the work of Meillassoux and Brassier further radicalized this sentiment. Both at an stylistic and philosophical level,  Brassier insisted on demolishing the sociological barrier that separated concerns proper to analytics and to Continentals, by demystifying the caricatures that each projected about the other. Just like Heidegger and Gadamer offered a ridiculous shadow of the analytic tradition as preoccupied with logic and language games only, Carnap and Searle did nothing but reinforce the suspicions of Continentals that analytics didn’t know how to read. From the beginning of his doctoral thesis, Brassier called into question the very patronizing of knowledge in the name of ontology that had been emblematic in 20^th Century philosophy, both in phenomenology and in vitalism, characteristically. 

 In the end, my diagnosis is that the affective antipathy that Bryant senses apropos epistemologists can be balanced out by reminding ourselves of some of the attitudes in Continental philosophers. Philosophical mediocrity begins when one thinks to be beyond learning, and one's opinions to be beyond revision. Just like the Continentals thought that to be concerned with issues of formal logic and proofs was myopic, analytics were seduced by the idea of progress and often patronized history and tradition. 

    But I believe in progress, and I think that just like Badiou and Sellars were perspicuous enough to realize there was much to be learned from the opposite tradition, we are now in an even better position to realize how this is so. I think that Bryant’s amenities to art, psychoanalysis, and media theory are resonant with concerns classically characteristic of the Continental tradition. But I think that the analytic tradition has done much work in the formal and natural sciences, to which it always remained close, and that we must learn from both. Recently, I criticized both Badiou for eliding epistemology and Brandom for eliding ontology. And I don’t think we have to choose between the two.

    More recently, Brassier’s work on Sellars persuaded me to revisit the work of analytic epistemology, under a more mature, fresh light. And the result was expected. The idea I had formed myself of the analytic tradition was indeed a caricature, and soon I realized that the interests that drove philosophers like Badiou were not incompatible with those of someone like Sellars, but congruent and indeed although in disagreement, potentially reinforcing. It showed me that, far from precluding the possibility of ontology in the name of epistemology, the analytic tradition, less encumbered by anti-realism, had actively pursued manifold metaphysical programs. 

    This brings me to my second crucial point: Levi writes as if I was interested in the question of truth, and of knowledge, at the expense of ontology. I think this is a brutally unfair caracterization, and one that forces one to choose between two things which in my mind are complementary.  The relevant quote is the following one:

“Daniel is obsessed with the question of how a human being knows what he says (it’s always a “he”) about the world is true. I find this question to be rather uninteresting as I think it contributes little to any real practice; scientific, artistic, personal, political, or otherwise. I see it as the question of a hall monitor. By contrast, I’m interested in making some small contribution to shifting the issues we discuss. I’d like to see theorization of how mercury from rain fall affects fish populations and enters human populations. I’d like to see discussion of why people aren’t buying hybrid or electric cars, and what this has to do with availability and semiotics. I want to talk about how sanitation technologies affect the economic and cultural development of a people. I’m interested in how mantis shrimps or bees experience the world. If I make claims about how they do, I’m fine with providing reasons for why I think this is true and how we might come to know this about bees, but I take umbrage at the suggestion that I’m just basing these claims on wild speculation and haven’t engaged in any research or inquiry that might justify these conclusions. I think knowing a bit about bees might go a bit further in addressing real issues such as their disappearance in the States than abstract epistemological questions about how we know in general. I’m not interested in legislating what “true reality” is, but in shifting discussion from an obsessive focus on how we know, on how our minds relate to the world, to a discussion of how things, including humans, interact with one another. Assertions made within this framework are not a mere “subjective whim”, as Daniel suggests. He’s welcome to question claims and ask for reasons. It could turn out that various accounts are mistaken. Be specific. Critique the account. That’s how accounts become better. Don’t, however, throw sand in the engine of inquiry. Daniel, I’m sure you miss this, but the basic point is that we’re tired of discussing your issue. We want to ask other questions and attend to other issues. That doesn’t mean we’re unwilling to provide reasons.”

     I cannot agree with Levi on these points, I’m afraid. First, my argument was not to claim that Levi did not provide reasons for his claims. The entirety of the first part of my review goes over Bryant’s arguments against epistemological realism, and for ontological realism. What I aimed to show was that his arguments do not do justice to the real work done by epistemologists today, and that the solutions he proposes to the critical problem about the connection between thought and reality remain pending and unresolved. It is no mystery that Levi wants to propose a concept of knowledge that amplifies the traditional scope on representational accuracy in favor of an account that takes practice and production as pivotal. But what my review intended to show is that the idea that concern with representation elided concern with practice was misguided. Indeed, one just has to read the work of someone like Tyler Burge to realize how proximate his questions go in hand with the practicing activity of perceptual psychologsts, for instance. My fundamental argument is that in spite of his arguments for ontological realism, the problem of representation remains, that the account he offers does not resolve it, and that furthermore his own account must tacitly accept representation, even if it doesn't explain it.

Levi questions the utility of these investigations, but such concerns can be answered without problems on a case by case basis: in asking about how our perceptual  faculties work and those of animals, for instance, taking Burge's project as an example, we explore the extent to which we share facultative capacities with other living beings, assisting us in understanding better the relation between primitive functional capacities and higher cognitive functions. These relations are fundamental in understanding both how we act and react to our environments, as well as how other animals do so in relation to their environments. We learn which kinds of operations we carry out according to which kinds of process, and we develop formal resources to comprehend the intricacies involved, allowing us to understand ourselves and the natural world better.

    Burge, Fodor and Carey, for instance, construe a concept of representation that includes conditions for veridicality and objective representing that precedes strict linguistic representation, and which expands our traditionally anthropocentric conceptions of how we access the structure and features of reality. These are not questions fundamentally about sentences or propositions; they are questions about the kind of things natural scientists are concerned with on a daily basis. Use of propositional logic is no more instrumental in this regard than the use of sentences to express our views about things: just because we write sentences to express a given claim, one couldn't make the suggestion that we are bound to remain in talk about talk, or become enclosed in an anthropocentric prison. And the same goes for using propositions to express the formal structure of thoughts, sentences, states of affairs, and whatever else.

    But Levi oscillates between saying that he has resolved the methodological questions indicated above by way of Bhaskar, and saying that he is not interested in these questions altogether. It is the latter which I find objectionable as philosophical practice: just like a person cannot call themselves an ontic structural realist and claim at the same time to be disinterested with the queston about the distinction between mathematical form and content (like Harman notes), the question about how our thoughts about things are distinct from the things we think of is a necessary critical filter to all forms of dogmatic metaphysics, and cannot be obviated by any claims to realism in ontology.

Put differently: there is a distinction between the question about WHAT are our ontological theses, and the question about WHY we should advocate an ontology with such theses. The latter is not itself an ontological question, but is set to explain the grounds under which we ought to endorse an ontological program over another. Without understanding the semantic proprieties of words such as 'being', or 'real', our discussions are bound to be too fuzzy to be of any use, or too lax to be appropriately answered. And such a propadeutic, methodological investigation, is the condition so that our metaphysics won’t be arbitrary or dogmatic. 

But if before we say what out metaphysics is we must say on what grounds metaphysical theses are adjudicated, dissuaded or encouraged, then we must accept that metaphysics is not first philosophy. This part of the critical legacy remains, I think, and leads one to ask: what status does such a propadeutic discourse have, if not epistemological? If one has no such account, then one’s metaphysics become precisely dogmatic. I think that Levi attempts to have such an account, but also wants to say he is ultimately not willing to engross himself in this issue.

    Levi formulates his propadeutic methodological enquiry by appears to Bhaskar, and the  first part of the review expresses why in my estimation: a) his argument does not succeed in motivating realism, b) it does not succeed in motivating an ontology of objects, c) it does not succeed in establishing the priority of ontology over epistemology. As a result, my contention was not that Levi was being irrational because he gave no reasons, but that a) the reasons he provided were not satisfactory, and that b) he seemed to relapse into pragmatic considerations when claiming that he could dismiss further argument, and let the epistemology police bitterly scold him from a distance.  But if the latter criteria for dismissal are what drives his obviation of epistemology, then Levi has surrendered his ontological program to a kind of subjective whim, to pragmatic considerations of the sort caracteristic proper to instrumentalist approaches, nevermind the talk about bees and Jupiter.

    The important point is that Levi’s motivations for his onticological program were problematic, and that without such resolution the program’s feasibility was suspect. When Levi emphasizes that he is just ‘not interested’ in the same kind of questions that I am interested in, I think he touches precisely on the point of concern.

It is not that I believe all philosophers should do the same thing, or that everyone should ask the same questions. But from this it is another thing to say that there are no questions that philosophers ought to answer, or be accountable for. Certain things must be done in order for us to be doing philosophy rather than something else. The question of whether we can sidestep the critical quandary about the connection between thought and reality by way of ontology, or whether epistemology can be motivated before ontology, are open questions. Indeed, towards the end of the first part, I acknowledge Levi’s virtuous considerations about this knot, and offer some arguments in the way which I won't repeat.

In any case, the problem about the connection between thought and reality is at the heart of any philosophy that claims allegiance to post-critical realism, and against dogmatic metaphysics. My idea, developed elsewhere, is that the epistemological corollary to ontology is necessary in order to proscribe the authority of subjective attitudes as admissible in philosophical argumentation. One can be as disinterested in epistemology as anyone else, but this this not mean that the cogency of one’s project remains without an answer to these questions. To say these questions are quixotic concerns of a pre-Galilean spirit seems to me a convenient scapegoat.

   Again, this is not to say that Levi does not offer arguments for his claims. It is to say that if the arguments he offers are inadequate in establishing what he intends them to establish, then not being interested in addressing these shortcomings surrenders one’s account to volitive grounds. It is not that I am not interested in ontology, or that I think epistemology is the telos of philosophical activity. It is simply that to acknowledge the separation and connection between thought and reality remains a necessity, and my arguments insisted in that these are not problems that Levi can sidestep. 

I refuse to accept that epistemology is ‘my issue’ simply because someone is tired to discuss it. I don’t believe philosophical legitimacy can be subjected to one’s interests, precisely because I believe philosophy must be synoptic. It is those who think they can afford to ask one set of questions at the expense of methodological clarity that end up making careers out of how many grains of sand make a heap, or whether Gadamer’s reading of Heidegger is good. One of the lessons I take from Heidegger, is that the beginnings are the most difficult, and that methodology is required. Finally, this does not mean that Levi’s ontological theses are false simply because they lack a proper methodological footing. Nor does it mean that they won’t help certain people do certain things, perhaps admirable ones. That’s all fine.

       But it does mean that without proper grounding, these theses are still not obviously yielding the kind of realism that he considers as a goal. Levi’s Spinozism seeks to inspire creative practices, and assist our negotiation with a material world in multiple forms. Yet it is important to remember that the desire to serve the interests of our kind, however noble, will only motivate philosophical positions at the expense of other considerations if one ascribes to philosophy primarily an instrumental status. Needless to say, as an aspiring realist and materialist, I think Levi should contend this possibility. The question is whether he is in a position to.

As Badiou mentions in his latest presentation from the EGS, I think we cannot begin from anthropologically configured considerations about practice, politics, creation, and whatnot. We need a new logic, in the primitive sense in which the latter entails the articulation of the conditions for what is thinkable. In this respect, I find that the projects of people like Badiou (thinking of a generic form of novelty) and Brandom (thinking of the articulation between semantics and pragmatics) can mutually reinforce each other, and therefore that ontology and epistemology can be reconciled in making a truly contemporary philosophy, beyond classical sociological dividing lines, and without stale strawmans thrown in each other’s way.

      To close up, I think that Levi has been negatively impressed by epistemologists to the point where his skepticism against the discipline is total. My only rejoinder to his remarks on affect would be to say that in patronizingly dismissing the work that drives many without having a solid grip on the field’s present state, it is he that seems to emulate Stalinist tactics: maligning thinkers for their thwarted temperaments, accusing them of endorsing positions they effectively don’t, and misconstruing their claims so as to effectively dismiss anything that might appear, even coarsely, as a challenge to one’s position. I know Levi is far better than this, so I don’t think we need to reduce the best of us to the worst representatives of each tradition. Lest, that is, if we want to return idiocy with idiocy, like the analytic lab rat who thinks Continental con artists do nothing but eloquent sophistry, or the pious Continental that thinks looking to the past suffices to skeptically dismiss or warn against novelties in the present. The real obscurantism comes in facile dismissals, in unwarranted disavowals, and in overconfidence in one’s assumptions about the other.

With that said, I think that Levi’s project is one that is just beginning, and that in the company of great thinkers, it will only continue to grow and nurture itself. Finally, we are all in this together, and if Levi can learn a single thing from my sincere attempts to find out what works and doesn’t in his incipient project, then I may have returned a fraction of the wealth he’s given me.

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Appendix - Added Friday, September 7th

Levi made a further response, to which I thought I would attach the following:

I think the claim that epistemological concerns are anthropocentric because they ask about relations between humans and the world is a bit like saying that questions about bees are beecentric because they ask about bees. In other words, it tautologically follows that in asking the question about the relation between humans and the world we are, well, asking a question or set of questions about humans. But epistemology is a bit broader that this. And I think anthropocentrism should entail something a bit stronger: namely, not only that a set of questions take place which are about humans or the relations between humans to other things. Rather, anthropocentrism entails that in asking these questions, these thinkers preclude or de-prioritize other considerations.

   I think that here it is important to distinguish methodological priority and general priority: to say that certain questions must be resolved before others does not mean that the former questions are more important than the ones which can only be answered on condition that the former have been. Epistemological priority, if it obtains, should be understood in the logical sense in which it conditions how we understand and adjudicate metaphysical theses, not in the sense that it favors or precludes metaphysical theses.

I think Levi is right in that much epistemology has been anthropocentric in that it construed its concept of representation on the basis of typical human faculties, and often using the linguistic capacity of humans as determining all forms of knowledge. But epistemology need not follow this route. Epistemology need not restrain itself to asking about language, or it need not suppose that only humans know. A good example is Burge's critique of what he calls 'individual representationalism', which he accuses of over-intellectualizing objective representing, in a way that precludes us from understanding how we share representational cognitive functions with other, non-sapient animals. Similarly, epistemology need not preclude connections between practice and discourse, like Sellars and Brandom propose in articulating semantics with pragmatics.

In this regard, I think epistemology is not so different than other scientific fields of investigation. From cosmology to biology and physics, our first theses are encumbered by assumptions, overdeterminations, etc. Epistemology has also had such faults, and one of the virtues of contemporary epistemology is its proximity to advances in cognitive science, in perceptual psychology, in neurophysiology, in ethology, etc. Epistemology today in fact is not constrained to asking questions about how we represent the world, even if the question about our relation to the world conditions this understanding, as the paradigmatic examples of Fodor or Burge show. In any case, epistemology does not in general preclude ontology, but conditions it, while allows us to distinguish between levels of priority by distinguishing ontological from logical priority.

This is a point that I think Sellars does well to emphasize: even though there is an ontological dependency of the logical on the causal (sentient and sapient creatures couldn't exist without the proper evolutionary conditions obtaining), there is an epistemological dependency of the causal on the logical (without the capacity to have beliefs, make claims and so on, we don't have theories). Burge and others suggest that, although knowledge in this strict sense depends on sapience, there are pre-linguistic forms of objective representation which we share with non-sapient creatures, and which they set out to investigate. In other words, human knowledge does not exhaust the question of knowledge, indeed of representation.

Finally, I would just say that in no way an exploration of the conditions under which we, as knowers, represent or know the world forecloses metaphysical investigation of the sort Levi wants to do. Just like asking about bees might become necessary at a certain stage of our argument without making our entire philosophy beecentric, we can acknowledge the question of our access to the world has a necessity and methodological priority with respect to other questions, without for this reason accepting that there aren't other questions, perhaps ultimately more interesting to us, to be answered.

In short, I don't think epistemology either: a) constrains us to ask questions about human knowledge, even if this is constitutive of its investigation, b) that it doesn't foreclose other kinds of investigation, including ontological investigation.  My concerns are that by eliding the epistemological component in philosophical thinking, we run into methodological quarrels of the sort I have been exploring, and that ultimately render suspect the status of our ontological claims.

   Now, ontological propositions can get off the ground without such footing, but at the price of rendering our metaphysics dogmatic, in the sense that it does not answer as to why we ought to endorse a given metaphysics, or it relies on instrumental considerations as the ultimate court. I think that these two ways are much more deserving of the label 'anthropocentrism', because they subordinate ontological theses to pragmatic concerns about our activities, our creative elan, our search for political emancipation, etc. But I think we can, and should, be concerned with exploring the world in ways that exceed considerations of the human. While scientists can carry an exploration suspending all kinds of questions, and have instrumental efficacity work on the background of no fixed ontological position, the distinctiveness of philosophy is that it, to use Badiou's phrase, begins with the beginning.

Can Psychoanalysis Speak About? The Cunning of Knowing

- CAN PSYCHOANALYSIS SPEAK ABOUT? -

The Cunning of Knowing

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Abstract/Introduction

        Throughout the majority of his work, Lacan purported to establish psychoanalysis not just as an autonomous discipline with respect to empirical psychology and the philosophy of mind, but as a clinical and theoretical practice that would reveal what underlies the very pretensions of those disciplines. A theory of desire, advancing towards the point of scientific formalization, promised to simultaneously explain and underdetermine conceptions of subjectivity, consciousness, knowledge, and being that preoccupied both philosophers and psychologists for centuries. The question about whether psychoanalysis is a science therefore can be said to supervene on whether it can position itself as a theory of the libidinal undergirding of philosophy and psychology. Whether psychoanalysis can indeed fulfill the promise it set itself with Lacan remains as much of an open question as if the one about its scientific status. This essay examines how psychoanalysis attempts to constitute itself as a theory.

           In what follows, I set myself two aims. First, following Alain Badiou, I seek to clarify the way in which Lacanian psychoanalysis appropriates and challenges philosophy, following the characterization of Lacan as an 'anti-philosopher'. Second, I suggest that an answer to this question reveals a fundamental quandary in the psychoanalytic edifice, ultimately rendering dubious both the status of psychoanalysis as a theory and as a clinical practice. More specifically, I argue that this predicament results from the attempt to elide the referential relation between mind and world, signifier and signified, that characterizes representational thought, in favor of the structuralist relation between signifiers that theorizes desire's inscription into the symbolic order, wherein philosophical propositions are negotiated as well. This alternative account is then coupled to a subtractive notion of the Real that refuses incorporation into the linguistic order. In short, Lacan’s subject of desire attempts to deflate the ontological-epistemological valences from his theory by supplanting the structuralist articulation between signifiers for the representationalist relation of reference between words and things.

 It is this re-articulation between the Real and the conceptual-linguistic order of the signifier that I seek to evince as problematic, in its purported demotion of representation and the philosophical task proper. I therefore propose to read Lacan's account of the unconscious as a bold, but nevertheless failed attempt to supersede empirical conceptions of the subject, epistemological accounts of knowledge and desire, and ontological conceptions of objective being. I claim that as a result psychoanalysis fails not only to secure its scientific status, but more generally its theoretical status as well.

 (a) The Oedipus Complex and the Imaginary - A Mythical Prelude  

         But in order to make our contention clear, a few preliminaries are well in order. First, we must understand precisely in what way Lacan's account of the symbolic and the Real purports to hijack traditional philosophical attempts to describe consciousness and knowledge, subjectivity and objectivity. This proximity to philosophical (and not just psychological) problems, remains a remarkable feature that sets Lacan apart from Freud's germinal psychoanalytic endeavor. For as Alain Badiou (2010) brings to attention, it is only in Lacan's work that we see psychoanalysis routinely reference, address and challenge the great Western philosophical tradition[1].

          And yet, Badiou also reminds us, this relation is not one of continuation or of the integration of psychoanalysis into the philosophical itinerary. Rather, Lacan deploys the term 'anti-philosophy' to characterize his position vis a vis philosophy, and wages against the latter, as every anti-philosopher attempts, hijacking from within the framework of questions and concepts that philosophy negotiates. In its Lacanian guise, the usurping of philosophical concepts is carried forth in the name of a theory of desire, which includes the philosophical desire for knowledge and truth, both about the subject and the world. Badiou writes that, "It is typical of anti-philosophy that its purpose is never to discuss any philosophical theses... since to do so it would have to share its norms (for instance, those of the true and the false). What the anti-philosopher wants to do is to situate the philosophical desire in its entirety in the register of the erroneous and the harmful." (WAP; Pg. 77; emphasis added). Only once we have understood the grounds for the psychoanalytic attempt to simultaneously reveal and challenge the feasibility and propriety of the philosophical desire as a desire will we be in a position to assess psychoanalysis' own "position of enunciation" with respect to philosophy. In order to do this, I propose first to briefly exegetically examine how Lacan carries forth his re-elaboration of the classical philosophical concepts outlined above, so as to articulate them anew in a theory of desire that would suffice to characterize not only philosophy, but yield a structural understanding of how discourse emerges and is entangled with desire in different ways, and according to general structural principles.

       In this regard, the point of departure is, nevertheless, already the Freudian one: to supplement an understanding of conscious psychic life, by way of an account of the unconscious dimension that animates subjective life. Crossbreeding the structuralist avowal of the primacy of the signifier with the Freudian account of the unconscious, Lacan proposes thus to articulate a theory of subjective desire around the singular idea that “the unconscious is structured like a language”[2]. This enigmatic formula is to be understood by way of Lacan's re-construction of the Freudian Oedipal myth, which leads to thinking of the subject as constitutively affected by loss, that is, seeing its being as lacking in relation to an ideal image. Lacan writes: "The domain of the Freudian experience is established within a very different register of relations. Desire is a relation of being to lack. This lack is the lack of being properly speaking. It isn’t the lack of this or that, but lack of being whereby the being exists. This lack is beyond anything which can represent it. It is only ever represented as a reflection on a veil. The libido, but now no longer as used theoretically as a quantitative quantity, is the name of what animates the deep-seated conflict at the heart of human action…."[3] The "lack of being" or the idea of being-as-lack condenses the  idea that the Real of the subject is never commensurate to the ideal identities that representation yields for conscious thought. Yet, as we shall see, this eventually leads Lacan to fully separate the ontological domain of being proper to philosophy and ontology, still engrossed in the symbolic commerce of the signifier, from the domain of the Real desire, which subtracts itself from the symbolic and which it falls to psychoanalysis to examine. Philosophy, according to Lacan, masks the vacuity of a Real subjectivity in the name of knowing, through the objective seal of the signifier and the idealities it projects.


But how does the Real of this voided subject, incommensurate to any substantive identity, relate to the signifying order, if not by way of gaining traction before being in representation? And similarly, how does the subject come to misapprehend or think itself in the guise of the signifier, as having a fixed identity? Finally, what kind of operation or place of enunciation does psychoanalytic discourse carry out in order to be able to speak about this formal subjectivity and the libidinal structure in which language becomes nested in; wherefrom does psychoanalysis issue its address? How does one produce a theory about the articulation between the symbolic commerce of the signifier along its imaginary-ideal envelopments, and the Real, without claiming we do so by representing the latter, as philosophers and psychologists purport to do? It is towards answering these questions that we are headed in what follows.

            The Lacanian answer to the first two questions come of a piece. First, for Lacan, the subject finds and identifies itself outside of itself, in the form of an object for thought or an ideal correlate, that it intends towards and seeks to become equal to. It is this ideal unity which simultaneously forms the basis of what the subject identifies itself as, but also of what positions it in the course of an impossible desire for 'reconstitution'. This decentered (mis)identification of the subject with an-other, indicates that the ideal identity of one's individuated identity emerges from a structural alienation of the subject from itself, a lack that makes subjectivity not fully coincide with the ideality thus projected. It is insofar as the subject is never equal to its projected identity that desire, as an infinite tendency, hovers asymptotically around an impossible object-cause (which Lacan famously calls objet petit a): " …. Desire, a function central to all human experience, is the desire for nothing nameable. And at the same time this desire lies at the origin of every variety of animation. If being were only what it is, there wouldn’t even be room to talk about it. Being comes into existence as an exact function of this lack. Being attains a sense of self in relation to being as a function of this lack, in the experience of desire."[4] The ideality of whatever the subject imagines and explicitly relates to is then nothing but the symptom or point in its psyche, wherein  the empty reality of the impossible object-cause fixes itself.

         But what is the relation between this underlying object-cause, or the impossible Real object of desire on the one hand, and the also impossible ideal-investments which make up the objective figurations of the subject, and which constitute its illusory identity as an individual? Lacan's will answer by explaining the intentionality of consciousness and explicit "knowing" towards illusory ideals in terms of the intentionality of unconscious desire, as oriented towards the impossible Real object. We could tentatively propose that Lacan's initial coup against philosophy and psychology consists in positing that the libidinal intentionality of the unconscious founds the cognitive intentionality of consciousness by way of alienation. But in order to distinguish the Real dimension object from the imagined semblances that the phantasy of the subject projects, Lacan is forced into both identifying former with its formal dimension (as opposed to 'substantive' or ontological dimension), and subtract it from the commerce of the signifier wherein discourse tethers itself symptomatically. We shall first focus on the latter question, which provides the answer to how psychoanalysis attempts to trump philosophy, only then to move towards setting up a controversy as made evident by considering the second question.

         

    Psychoanalysis must hold this prerogative as the study of desire, since it is desire that evinces itself as the motor for any kind of intentional comportment towards being or entities. Lacan's account seeks to reveal how the objectivation of intentional consciousness is underdetermined by the psychic split that follows from the Oedipal castration-complex, and in which the subject is wrested from the immanent symbiosis with maternal body and into the order of the transcendental Law or language, thereby intending towards the recovery of the non-alienation which is thought to be lost. Insofar as every knowledge intends towards an object, all epistemological or phenomenological investigation into consciousness and its contents are uniformly treated as iterations implicating the same structure of psychic splitting or alienation. And it is on the basis of this shared libidinal structure that Lacan seeks to frame psychoanalysis as a theory that accesses the libidinal kernel behind philosophy and psychology.

        The core of the account involves tracing how the specular images that the subject builds an identity from support desire by being correlated to "the signifying chain" the symbolic or language, i.e. how the subject enters the "defiles through the signifier" within which the subject will circulate around the (impossible) object of desire: "There are in the unconscious signifying chains which subsist as such, and which from there structure, act on the organism, influence what appears from the outside as a symptom, and this is the whole basis of analytic experience.[5]"  Following Zizek, we can call the splitting of the subject symbolic castration, to describe how the division and articulation between the subject and its imaginary identifications is relative to how the subject becomes enjoined and invested from an impersonal cultural-linguistic order. Or, to quote Zizek, symbolic castration obtains where the "...gap between what I really am' and the symbolic mask that makes the subject into something. The subject is thus castrated from the 'real' "I" by projecting something else."[6] (Zizek, HRL, Pg. 34)

        The basic idea is that who the subject thinks it is or should be, its placing, so to speak, is determined on the basis of a language that he acquires by external conditioning, and never immediately or transparently as phenomenologists surmise. For Lacan, the self-alienation of the subject founds the notion of an ontologically consistent individual, identical to itself, thereby veiling the (unbridgeable) gap between its immediate (non)-being (or the void of its formal subjectivity) and its imaginary-symbolic figurations (which yield 'empirical' content).  Because self-relation and self-constitution is paradoxically grounded in this moment of self-alienation, it is both the moment of narcissism and that of absolute estrangement: "One can sense, one can pick up that narcissism is involved somewhere, and that this narcissism is involved at this moment of the Oedipus complex." (S6, L6, pp. 92)

        The "great outdoors" coveted by the philosophers turns out on this account to be a function of a subject that by virtue of desiring is split between the object it identifies itself with, and the formal void which subtracts itself from every such identification. Lacan's contentions against philosophy and psychology converge here, radicalizing the Kantian separation between the transcendental and empirical subject, that Zizek characterizes as a decisive mark of the modern breakthrough[7]. Lacan's appropriation of this split, however, defuses any attempts to reify the transcendence of the subject in terms of a consciousness furnished with a priori cognitive structures to individuate its contents[8].

          This entails that the unity and emergence of what Freud called the "perception-consciousness system" that characterizes thinking beings is to be explained by placing it in contrast to a notion of subjectivity that is recalcitrant with that of the ego qua decentered other. Consciousness is of the order of the ego, since it thinks that it is the imaginary projection of itself outside of itself that does the thinking, i.e. it identifies itself with what it thinks. But Lacan's point is precisely that the desiring subject is never such identical to what in intends towards as its objective pole, but precisely the contrary, and against Descartes, it thinks where it is not. This marks accordingly the foreclosure of all attempts to think of the subject of the unconscious as topic for "empirical" investigation. Desire entails, in short, a Gestalt, conditioning the entire field of the visible world; the individuated world of things and persons actually presupposes the structure of the subject of desire. As a result, the imaginary that furnishes the disclosure or revelation of being to man, the ideal investments, so dear to the philosopher, are suddenly made to appear as the ploy of desire's interminable ruse for the subject's self-reconstitution.

            Alienation therefore effectuates a commensuration between the images projected from the perspective of the subject's alienation, and the 'visible world' of things. It serves simultaneously as the germinal point of entry for both the epistemological myth of a fully consistent subject or self, as well as for the ontological myth of a fully consistent object or other; that is, for both philosophy and empirical (ego) psychology.  In other words, the subject-object dichotomy, from which both philosophy and psychology depart, begins in the infant's (mis)identification and de-centering: the idea that one's being lacks any unified substantiality or 'selfhood' (the pure membra disjecta) emerges as a result of the identification with a subsistent image.  It is my primary identification with an image that locates a gap between the reality of the subject as the agent of thought and as an object of thought. This seems to be the meaning behind the cryptic statement from Lacan that the ego, in its narcissistic stupor, constitutes "...a vital dehiscence that is constitutive of man" (E, pp. 4) But if the philosophical quest for knowledge and consciousness are unknowingly submitted to the rule of desire, then it what sense does psychoanalysis escape this fate? How does psychoanalysis prevent itself from trying to know in accordance to its own figurations, to the own reified individuality of the analyst, to occupy the position of being an observer of discourse? Indeed, is there room to speak of knowledge of desire, once we have demoted the idea that consciousness apprehends in representational terms? It is at this juncture that Lacan must reconstruct the traditional philosophical relation of representational congruence between words and things for the structuralist flattening relations that hold between signifiers in 'chains'.

          Thus, the next step, for us, is to explain how the imaginary functions of the ideal ego are at the same time mediated by the cultural order of language, the "(big) Other", which signals that it constitutes a decentered place of identification, like the other of the imaginary, but also an impersonal field constituted by the community into which one is inserted[9]. By tethering the subject of the unconscious to the symbolic Lacan means to say that language is in a sense a transcendent authority that ordains and issues the injunctions before which desire sets itself. Desire is the desire of the Other precisely insofar as it is mediated by an order or Law which pre-exists and determines its organization[10]. Or, put differently, one never desires what one sees or imagines immediately, but only through particular prescriptions and normative injunctions issued from the impersonal order of language. Chiesa explains that "...the specular, alienating identification of the subject with the imaginary other necessarily presupposes an earlier, original - and perpetual- alienation in the Other qua language." (Chiesa, 2009, pp. 25)

         In order to understand the (anti)-philosophical significance of this move, consider the following classical statement from Pufendorf, issued at the beginning of the Enlightenment, on the institution of norms by the rational adherence of individual agents: "[W]hen a man of his own accord consents to the rule of another, he acknowledges by his own act that he must follow what he himself has decided."[11] The same idea is later found in Kant, for whom it is the rational capacity for individuals to bind themselves to linguistically articulated norms that simultaneously subject them to authority and assessment, but also are the condition for their freedom and choice. Rationality endows the subject the capacity for freedom insofar as it reckons its power for adhering to the prescriptions issued as linguistic norms or laws. Ye who is it that binds itself freely, in advance of all prescriptions?

           Lacan's point is that in order to 'freely' bind oneself to a norm one must, already be bound by the Other, and that therefore, strictly speaking, there is no 'free' binding. For an individual to recognize itself as bound to a norm he/she must be already in possession of an inherited language  in terms of which he/she formulates his/her identity. This individual who presumably binds itself freely is then, to use an Althusserian expression, always already interpellated by the big Other, rather than the condition for the institution of the big Other. One always chooses that which has already been chosen; it is always from within language that one formulates the fantasy of a 'free' binding, or of the individuality required thereof. It is not a conscious self-recognition which allows one to bind oneself to linguistic norms; one must be already implicitly and unconsciously bound to norms in order to desire and think of a possible self-recognition. This individual who 'recognizes itself as free to bind itself' is thereby supplanted, by Lacan, for a subject who cannot but fail to recognize itself in the identity that is prescribed to him from the big Other. There is no meta-language, no position of an observer: "The subject is nothing other than what slides in a chain of signifiers, whether he knows which signifier he is the effect of or not. That effect- the subject – is the intermediary effect between what characterizes a signifier and another signifier, namely, the fact that each of them, each of them is an element. "[12]

       This leads us to question, then, about what possible role could psychoanalysis occupy within the 'sliding chain of signification', as it mediates the clinical intervention of the analyst by way of a corpus of theoretical claims that describe and prescribe the very subject matter for psychoanalysis? Indeed, what is the ethics of this peculiar discursive enterprise that warns against the temptation to position oneself as an external observer before the parade of signifiers? Who is, after all, the subject of psychoanalysis, and from what position does it issue its address? This question becomes pressing the more we realize that the very clinical practice psychoanalysis enacts is itself mediated by the series of principles, statements and formulas that comprise the 'theory' of psychoanalysis, and without which its practice in the clinical setting would be impossible. How does the 'binding' to these principles take place' in accordance to what rule, if not that prescribed by the big Other?  In order to see how this problem becomes particularly acute we must see how the Lacanian conception of a voided subjectivity in tandem with his adherence to a immanent structuralism within the order of the signifier leads to the problematic assessment of psychoanalytic claims, and finally to a quandary concerning its position of address. This becomes evident once we realize Lacan's liquidation of representation is the very condition for his claim that there is no meta-language. Let us examine the details involved in Lacan's account.

         As we have seen, the logical priority of the symbolic entails both that the self-identification of the subject with the imago occurs as the subject is inserted into language, and that the identification of others as others (both individuals and objects, persons and things) is conditioned by the linguistic order of the signifier, i.e. individuation is a function of language, and this articulates both the epistemic-psychological dimensions of self-understanding, as well as the ontological dimensions of understanding others and the world[13].  This forms a necessary corrective the myths of knowledge and thinking that located desire at the level of explicit consciousness, since for them "... it seemed that consciousness was inherent to what the subject had to say qua signification" (SV, pp. 105).

          Redoubling the earlier distinction between individual ego and subject, at the level of the symbolic we can map the distinction between the subject of the statement and the subject of enunciation. The former is expressly formulated in speech or writing, individuated by the inclusion into the symbolic order and grammatically objectivated within the sequences of signifiers and sentences that structure discourse. The subject of the enunciation, on the other hand,  is the slippery index for the subject of the unconscious, which remains forever subtracted and incomplete from desire’s imaginary-symbolic operations, and from the statement. Lacan reverses Descartes dictum accordingly: "I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think" (Lacan 1977: 166).

         However, the most important point we must underline here is that the subject of enunciation does not stand to the subject of the statement as signified stands to signifier, or represented to representing. Lacan is adamant to insist in that the individuating function of the big Other is not merely representationalist in the sense that it 'tracks down things' through words or signs; it refuses to be ontologised or positivized. This constitutes the kernel of Lacan's flattening of the Saussurian relation of signification as holding between signs and things, to one where signification obtains between signifiers exclusively: "The signifier doesn't just provide an envelope, a receptacle for signification. It polarizes it, it structures it, and brings it into existence." (SIII, pp. 224), and "...the sign does not take its value with respect to a third thing that it represents, but it takes on its value with respect to another signifier which it is not." (Ibid; pp. 7) Or yet again: "The signifier is a sign that doesn't refer to any object... It is a sign which refers to another sign, which is as such structured to signify the absence of another sign, in other words, to be opposed to it in a couple." (SXI, pp. 167)

         What I would like to suggest is that it is not only the subject of the unconscious which becomes delivered from the empirical pretences of ego-psychology or transcendental philosophy into the order of language, but also the intended objects of consciousness which become delivered from the empirical pretences of metaphysicians and ontologists to the delirium of the signifier. As a result, the unconscious is crucially neither the subject, nor an object; it has no determinate ontological or epistemic status: "...what still becomes apparent to anyone in analysis who spends some time observing what truly belongs to the order of the unconscious, is that it is neither being, nor non-being, but the unrealized." (SXI, pp 30)


    As a result, the disjunction between psychoanalysis and philosophy is total since "the gap of the unconscious seems to be pre-ontological... it does not lend itself to ontology" (Ibid. 29) The psychoanalytic relation to the non-ontologizable  reality of the unconscious is not the search for a pre-linguistic positive content hidden behind the signifying chain, which would constitute the ‘real subject’ after sublating and shedding off its feeble illusions[14]. Whereas the subject of knowledge is an illusion, the subject of the unconscious is not merely a myth: "the subject [of knowledge] correlative to the object, the subject around whom turns the eternal question of idealism, and who is himself an ideal subject...he is only supposed." (S6, L2, pp. 18). It is not the ideal subject that underlies the signifier, but the pure formal placement of signifiers that comprises the subject: " The subject is nothing other than what slides in a chain of signifiers, whether he knows which signifier he is the effect of or not".[15] As a result, both subject and object are delivered to a structure of signification, void of any ontological status, and to relations between signifiers, void of epistemological status.

              And yet, does this leave it open that something like being-as-such may nonetheless subsist in the order of consciousness, along its much vaunted intentionality? For if indeed, as Lacan puts it, "the Freudian world isn't a world of things, it isn't a world of being, it is a world of desire as such", then couldn't the relation of knowing in which things, and not just words, come into mind, be said to subsist at some level? (S2, pp. 222) Yet insofar as the relation between words and things is flattened to the relation between signifiers, ontology could only be said to subsist trivially at the price of subordinating it to the structure of desire. This weakens the ontological valence of 'beings' or 'being' to merely ideal poles for the phantasies of philosophers, which does not so much deny ontology as much as it suspends its purported prerogative when securing our access to the "world of being", understood as that of a mind independent reality. It thereby flattens the philosophical pretence of gaining traction before the world to the uniform register of an unconscious desire which, like every other, is supported in nothing else than in the signifying chain and its metonymic inscriptions. As Alain Badiou puts it: "An important consequence of this situation is, in this instance, the fact that the void is not  presupposed in signification from the perspective of its universality.  It is presupposed under signification,  at the back of signification, as the slipping, the sliding, the streaming and the channel of  our being, in the unpresented that doubles the signifying chain" (Badiou, Umbra, Pg. 28)

              This answer seems to preemptively defang ontology from its capacity to prey on the world, after which its peculiarity becomes a matter of organization at the level of signifier. In this regard, Badiou's reading of Lacan as an anti-philosopher stresses how, once demoted to one more discursive practice among others, psychoanalysis would carry out "a deposing of the category of philosophy to constitute itself as theory... philosophy is an act, of which the fabulations about 'truth' are the clothing, the propaganda, the lies." (Badiou, 2010, pp 75) I will later suggest why it is not clear, however, that psychoanalysis can legitimize itself as a theory without reactivating the kinds of distinctions it takes to be proper of philosophico-scientific discourse, and will proceed to ask what consequences follow for the formal coherence of psychoanalysis, as well as for its purported content. That is to say, we shall ask how psychoanalysis relates to its subject matter.

        Since there is no substantive content proper to the voided, barred subject and no statement which predicates its 'proper being', Lacan consistently claims that there is no Other of the Other: that there is no subject to be captured ‘outside’ of the Otherness of language or, what amounts to the same, that “…there is no metalanguage.” (E, 688) Put differently, one never "reaches out" outside of language, either directly onto an other subject, or, what amounts to the same, to being as an object, since "...what characterizes the demand is not just that it is a relationship of a subject to another subject [or between a subject and an object], it is that this relationship is made through the mediation of language, through the mediation of a system of signifiers." (SVI, L3, pp. 27) The movement of the Real occurs by and through the order of the signifier, not as a foreign transcendence. The primitive individuation of the imaginary realm, which as we saw constitutes the entire field of the visible, traverses the order of the signifier constituting the vain phantasy to regain the impossible object which would endow its void with an integral consistency.

  (c) The Cunning of Being or the Being of Cunning?

     If the subject of the reality unconscious is indeed structured like a language, and desire is nothing but that which slides in the articulation between signifiers, then the much vaunted Freudian 'world of desire' is an idealized world populated by phantasms; not a world as much as the height of narcissistic alienation, the nightmare which is nothing but a dream come true. At this point we should ask again: does this mean that even if the relation of knowing between words and things does not hold good for the structure of the unconscious, it might nevertheless be thinkable within the realm of consciousness?

           In this stronger formulation, I believe that the question must be answered to in the negative. For it is clear that the "Freudian world" isn't just another world which, in dualist metaphysical spirits, would neatly leave the innocence of the world of knowing to its own operations, untouched. Indeed, Lacan is adamant to show not only that the world of desire is not the world of things, but that the unconscious conditions the operations of consciousness and seals its every pretence within the economy of desire: "Relations between human beings are really established before one gets to the domain of consciousness. It is desire which achieves the primitive structuration of the human world, desire as unconscious." (S2, pp. 224) More dramatically still, it's precisely desire's undermining of consciousness that makes the explicit conscious claims to the universality of being subordinate to the unconscious singularity of the symptom, or as Lacan reminds us: "...don't forget that consciousness isn't universal." (Ibid). If this is so, then the ontological independence of the 'realm of things' could at best be an epiphenomenal illusion, a veil under which the iterations of desire and the symptom displace themselves in the order of the signifier.


 In fact, Lacan explicitly subordinates the object of knowledge to the object of desire, and claims that in the vector leading from the barred subject to its decentered other, the small impossible object of desire, one finds the (illusion) of knowledge: "$ [stands] in the presence of o and which we call the phantasy, which  in the psychic economy represents something that you know." (Ibid, pp 214). This is why it is, paradoxically, desire that is the metonymy of being in the subject, insofar as it is through the self-alienating insertion into the impersonal Other of language that the subject releases its intentionality, and not from the realm of "Being" that offers itself 'as a gift' to immediate experience. What philosophers reify as knowledge of being is in truth the knowledge of the Other, insofar as it is attributed to and assumed by the subject as individuated in the impersonal symbolic order: ""What is it that knows?" Do we realize that it is the Other?... as a locus in which the signifier is posited, as without which nothing indicates to us that there is a dimension of truth anywhere, a di-mension, the residence of what is said, of this said whose knowledge posits the Other as locus." (SXX, pp. 96)

          The philosophical questioning that aims at knowledge is thus to be understood as the subject's depositing of his speech within the punctuation of the symbolic, rather than by corresponding to the Real. The power of the question brings us closer not to a palpitating realm behind the order of the signifier, but  only to the demand issued from within this order; thought must subordinate its positivity to it, and find itself always-already lost in it. For the subject, "what he is questioning himself about is far from being the response, it is the questioning. It is effectively 'What is this signifier of the Other in me?" (S1, L9, pp. 132). By fixating itself into the order of the signifier, ruminating in search for the impossible lost object, the quest for self proves, ironically, an inversion of the philosophical genealogy of thought, a predecessor of the quest for being as such: "... the bar is the hidden signifier, the one that the Other does not have at its disposition, and which is precisely the one which concerns you: it is the same one that makes you enter the game in so far as you, poor simpletons, since you were born, were caught up in this sacred logos business." (Ibid; L16, pp. 207). And indeed it is telling that the quest for being should be of no concern for the psychoanalyst, but that he rather makes of desire that which deserves to be called "the essence of man", signaling its logical, if not chronological, priority (S6, L1, pp 4)[16].

      However, this predicament forces psychoanalysis into a quandary. For if the subject of knowledge is indeed subordinate to the unconscious, and if the relation between signifier and signified is flattened to the chains in the former, how are we to understand what for Lacan, indeed for psychoanalysis, must be a theory of desire? That is, how can Lacanian psychoanalysis, in erecting its formidable conceptual structure, proclaim to give a structured theory and not just constitute an improvised practice, i.e. how is it to become a discourse in which the structural features of desire are outlined and articulated? For if there is no relation between words and things, then what relation do the theoretical statements formulated in psychoanalysis purportedly bear to its presumed subject matter? What is the role of the peculiar signifier "desire" in the economy of psychoanalysis, if there is, strictly speaking, nothing 'out there' to be spoken of, no 'thing' populating the world which can escape the latency of the phantasy?  And similarly for 'unconscious', 'signifier', "subject", the entire roster of concepts that psychoanalysis deploys continuously, when claiming to explain the generality of desire as a structure, and not just as manifesting one more iteration of desire as a symptom, like every other.

          Preemptively, one might answer that indeed because psychoanalysis elides the priority of the referential relation it is never trying to 'reach out' onto things or to give an ontology, peeking behind the words, but is rather consigned to survey the latent content in which the signifying chains become deployed and used. Thereby, the analyst is not a knower, claiming to access the 'things behind the appearances', since that would performatively contradict the purported demotion of epistemology/psychology and philosophy by reifying the subject supposed to know into a kernel for empirical investigation. Rather, the analyst is concerned with the reality of appearances only, with how they find their place within the structure of signification as such.

         But this is simply to inflect the issue into the order of language. For if psychoanalysis is not just one more phantasy caught around its impossible object, then this is because what Lacan is effectively doing is not simply writing/speaking to us qua analysands, addressing the particularity of our (paradoxically) universal symptom. Rather, he is outlining the general structure of desire. In other words, the statements issued by psychoanalysis allegedly pertain not just to one more discourse in the same footing before desire as all others, but must rather gain traction before desire as such. If not, then the artifice of psychoanalytic claims and formalizations would do nothing but make of the signifier "desire" its very own symbolic fiction, another specular symptom fixing the localization of an impossible object, in an attempt to wage against the organization of the purported hegemony of philosophers and psychologists. Yet Lacan repeatedly insists on both the preponderance of a Real that is radically recalcitrant to any symbolization on the one hand, and which is also the subject of psychoanalsysis itself. How are we to understand the relation between the claims of psychoanalysis and the Real that it comports itself towards? From where can psychoanalysis issue an address about the Real without reifying an epistemological relation between knower and known, which would depend on an ontologized conception of subjectivity?

           First, it is clear that the position of enunciation that corresponds to the analyst's theoretical statements and formalizations cannot be rendered equivalent to the position he/she occupies as an analyst in the clinical setting[17]. But wherein is this theoretical meta-discourse to be located then? How does it escape the impersonal pretences of the University discourse, or the hegemonic address of the Master discourse? How does it function in abstraction from the commerce of the symbol?

        These questions are pressing, since the theoretical claims of psychoanalysis function as the transcendental condition for the division between the different formalizations of discursive positions, and so also for the delineation of the analyst's role apropos the other three positional registers. It seems to be, in this sense, functioning as a kind of exception to the discursive hegemony of signifiers circling around the object-cause with respect to the place of the signifier. But this is precisely the kind of meta-linguistic position that Lacan seemingly wants to avoid at all costs, and it is not clear on which methodological grounds one could purport to occupy such an exceptional position while denying the valence of transcendence which conditions epistemological investigation. The transcendental regulation by the theoretical, however, seems function as the condition for the displacement of philosophy, by assuming the epistemic rights before desire as a structure, and against being and ontology. Thus, the theorerical claims of psychoanalysis condition both the typology of subjective positions fro outside, as well as the variegated semantic valences that give meaning to its own claims about the Real.

         I would suggest that, if as Badiou insists, Lacan is an anti-philosopher, it is insofar as in waging war against the ontological phantasy, he nevertheless remains within its confines; where the position of enunciation of the University and the claim to objective knowledge, that is, the "cohort of being", is typified within psychoanalytic theoretical statements themselves. It is crucial to note that this theoretical operation is not only external to the clinical practice of the discourse of the analyst, but also that it conditions the separation of the analyst's discourse from the rest of discourse. For what could the deliberate intent to subvert the 'dominating discourse' that symptomatically evinces an instance of phantasy in analysis mean for someone who is addressing the psychoanalytic community itself? From which position of enunciation could the theoretical statements of psychoanalysis be issued from, if it is neither a form of the presumed neutrality of objective knowledge proper to University discourse, but neither an instance for the discourse of the analyst? What could psychoanalysis claim to be doing if, as Lacan has repeatedly insisted, there is no meta-language, and if "there is no Other of the Other? " (Ibid; L16, pp. 206).  Yet if knowledge of desire can be obtained or localized from the vantage point of psychoanalytic theory, there seems nothing to keep the philosopher from claiming that what Lacan is doing is effectively ontologizing desire and thus the subject of the unconscious as the libidinal variant of the realm of appearances, and that therefore Lacan has merely supplanted philosophy and psychology with its own prescriptive ideational framework, apt for empirical investigation, i.e. the realm of the unconscious that is "structured like a language"[18].

         Indeed, Lacan himself seems to have been aware of this crucial paradox within his theoretical register from very early on. In what I take to be a decisive statement, Lacan claims with regards to the conceptual status of the psychoanalytic theoretical endeavor: "There is a fundamental ambiguity in the use we make of the word 'desire'. Sometimes we objectify it- and we have to do so, if only to talk about it. On the contrary sometimes we locate it as the primitive term, in relation to any objectification." (S2, pp. 225) This ambiguity is not trivial whatsoever. For if desire must be objectified in order to be spoken about, in what sense is it any different than any of the other terms that philosophers or scientists purportedly use to describe phenomena of all kinds, desire included? How are we to understand the claim that desire is simultaneously of the order of signifier and that which conditions any objectification whatsoever? How to address the Real of the libidinal subject and its Real of the object if, like Zizek insists, "There is no ontology of the Real: the very field of ontology, of the positive order of Being the Real are mutually exclusive: The Real is the immanent blockage or impediment of the order of being, what makes the order of Being inconsistent..." (LTN; Pg. 958).

         This problem is particularly acute: Lacan insists that desire cannot be ontologised. But then what is it that psychoanalytic theory is doing when they 'objectify' desire "if only to speak of it"? How could such an act constitute anything but the making of an ontological valence? Despite his precautions, by flattening the symbolically enveloped epistemological relation between knowing individual and known object into the relation between the Real of the unconscious subject and the impossible object, Lacan seems to be effectively ontologizing the relation between the desire and its object-cause. The deflection of the transcendental relation between words and things at the level of the symbolic is coupled to a reification of the relation between the desiring subject and desired object, at the point where the Reality of both becomes indiscernible.  The Real of desire appears thereby as the ontologization of the relation between the Real subject and the Real object, as the distinction between them becomes a nullity.

        Yet to claim that desire is not just one more signifier in the commerce of the symbolic, but rather the enabling condition for signification and objectivation, is once again to reactivate the relation between signifier and signified, only this time in terms of desire as Real precondition for objects understood as linguistically individuated posits.  In other words, although Lacan has done away with the transcendental relation of reference at the level of the symbolic, he must still covertly depend on the connection between the Real of desire as condition of possibility for the symbolic individuation of the signifier. This is to covertly ontologise desire as an Aristotelian 'first mover', as the 'ground of being', as Ineffable Being stripped even of the honor of the name. And since symbolic objectification occurs on condition of the Real unobjectifiable cause, it follows that even the theory of desire, that psychoanalysis purports to advance, is conditioned on separation between the claims and formulas about desire, and desire itself.  In other words, if Lacan claims that the objectification of desire relates to a pre-objectified desire, then he has reactivated the referential relation between signifier and signified, sign and referent, in the dichotomy between objectual desire-for-us and unobjectifiable desire-in-itself. This surrenders Lacan to a bizarre, libidinal paradox of Kantianism. But to do that he must once again rehabilitate not just the ontological valence of desire as such, but the epistemological valence of the relation between desire's objectification in language and the depths of the desire that it bridges us to in the act of theorizing it, that is, in the making of claims and formulas that express it or which are about it. It is impossible to understand Lacan's claim that desire is a 'precondition' for its objectification unless one reenacts this philosophical cunning of the original psychoanalytic coup against philosophy and science.

           Alternatively, Lacan can insist that the objectification in question needs of no such relation, and consistently maintain that the signifier "desire" is, like every other, merely in relation to other signifiers, but never aiming towards anything like an ontologically generative 'in-itself'. Thus the terms of psychoanalysis would escape the faith of standing as signifiers for signifieds, and so avoid tacitly playing the role of a 'meta-language'. Indeed, this is what at some point Lacan himself seems to want to claim when he says that "Desire emerges just as it becomes embodied in speech, it emerges with symbolism." (SII, pp. 234). In this reading, the original ambiguity is resolved in favor of a pure objectification of something which, strictly speaking, does not preexist the act of objectification itself.

          Nevertheless, this raises the question about how there could ever be a theory of desire (indeed of anything) having done away with the Real. Without distinguishing how its theoretical statements fulfill a descriptive role without becoming one more instance of the University discourse, but neither falling into the other three forms of discourse, this route ultimately undermines the theoretical status of psychoanalysis. The purported connection to the phenomenon of desire, however enveloped by the signifier, becomes in principle proscribed, and psychoanalysis ends up depriving itself of any authority when describing the subordination of knowledge to desire in theoretical terms. For there could be no categorical distinction between those signifiers that will play the role of "mere signifiers" in their discursive operation according to the four forms, and those of psychoanalytic theory which may unravel their conditions of possibility, lest we return to the philosophical vocation of distinguishing empirical terms from transcendental terms which condition the former, or occupy once again the position of the University discourse by prescribing a kind of knowledge. In the light of such exigency, psychoanalysis must accept that its attempt to objectify desire, if only to speak of it is finally led by the proto-philosophical urgency to know, despite its protestations to the contrary.

          More dramatically, if psychoanalysis cannot validate itself as a theory, neither can the structure of desire it purportedly formalizes and describes as being intractable to knowledge be used to undermine itself in relation to other theories and discourses in general. In other words, psychoanalysis couldn't even surrender its rights to desire without already having 'spoken that which can't be spoken', that is, without already assuming a theoretical position claiming to know of desire as that which slides through everywhere but is nowhere. The result is a fundamental paradox whereby psychoanalysis ceases to be a theory because the exigencies of desire undermine it, and where desire ceases to be the structural phenomenon psychoanalysis describes because the latter is not a theory[19].  Needless to say, this paradox threatens to jeopardize even the clinical practice of psychoanalysis, insofar as once the theoretical valence of its claims and principles have been rendered dubious, so are the practices articulated and prescribed on the basis of those claims and principles suddenly in a precarious position.

          Two scenarios appear possible at his point, as the necessary correctives to psychoanalytic theory. Yet, as we shall see, that the ambiguity of desire as a term and as a condition is ultimately irresolvable. Lacan claimed to have superseded the pretences of philosophy but in turn seems to be forced into the choice between a variant of transcendental idealism and sophistry. The former scenario has itself two possibilities: a) a kind of negative-theological epistemic understanding of the foreclosure of Real desire as that which resists objectification and meaning, and b) a variety of textual idealism where desire is immanent to the signifier, while admitting of a typology of signifiers. Let us assess each of these .       

            First, a possible answer is to leave it open that psychoanalysis may gain traction with respect to Real desire, via the objectification of the signifier. That is, the signifier might grant access to desire as an unknowable, unobjectifiable, but nevertheless thinkable condition of possibility for signification (a variety of 'weak correlationism'[20]). Under this light, Lacan's account of desire as Real precondition begins to startlingly resemble the minimal realism of Heidegger, for whom the opaqueness of the Earth qua unobjectifiable being stands as necessarily refractory to the variegated structure of Worldhood, with its populating entities and individuations at the ontic level. Real desire would be the proto-ontological motor conditioning, ironically, the merely ontic register of being and the symbolic investment of symptoms. The early Lacan seems to indicate this much when he claims in a rather cryptic passage: "Desire... is the desire for nothing namable... this desire lies at the origin of every variety of animation. If being were only what it is there wouldn't be room to talk about it. Being comes into existence as an exact function of this lack." (SII, pp 223). This is the direction in which the later Lacan, through his idea of the Real as that which resists symbolization, seems to have succumbed, as we shall see below[21].

          Alternatively, in this first re-philosophizing scenario, the structure of desire remains epistemically accessible without residue, but confined to the signifying order, in which case Lacan is involved in a bizarre structuralist parody of textual idealism. Yet as we surmised above, this cannot be done, strictly speaking, without a qualitative distinction that vitiates the structural uniformity of the signifier. In other words, it requires a qualitative distinction within the order of the signifier, a typology that sets those signs which map the structure of desire from those which are merely within the libidinal commerce of phantasy, and so those which are theorized by the former in expressing their conditions of possibility. Both options in this scenario rehabilitate the philosophical spooks that Lacan took to have demoted, at the price of reactivating the possibility of a special kind of reference or relation between signifiers, apart from the articulation of the four discourses, and with it one must accept the neutral possibility of attaining the status of a 'meta-language' to save psychoanalytic theory from itself.

        The second alternative, foreclosing the explanatory purchase on desire, and leaving the exteriority of Real desire unthinkable, shuns the status of psychoanalysis as a theory and surrenders it to a sophistic endeavor marking its internal contradiction (a variety of strong correlationism). This is the tragedy that we surmised above, when showing that psychoanalysis couldn't even surrender its rights to knowledge if it fully relinquishes its epistemic vocation, and the possibility of distinguishing between Real desire and its theorization. For in this scenario, the Lacanian edifice ends up undermining itself, rendering the conceptual endeavor it pursues into utter incoherence, the knowledge of desire undermining its theorization, and the theorization of desire undermining the possibility of knowledge of it[22].

         As we suggested above, however, Lacan seems to have progressively realized that he couldn't do without explaining how a theory of Real desire relies on such a conceptual envelopment, as evinced in a particularly telling passage: "[Our] conception of the concept implies that the concept is always established in an approach that is not unrelated to that which is imposed on us, as a form, by infinitesimal calculus. Indeed, if the concept is modeled on an approach to the reality that the concept has been created to apprehend, it is only by a leap a passage to the limit, that it manages to realize itself. We are then required to say in what respect- under what form of finite quantity, I would say- the conceptual elaboration known as the unconscious may be carried out." (SXI: pp. 19) The metaphor is that of an asymptotic approach to the Real via the matheme, forever removed from the concept's touch.

            Yet at this point, signaling both the beginning of a mathematical obsession and that of a poetic escape, Lacan begins to opt for the first horn of the dilemma and to surrender psychoanalysis to what appears under all lights to be a re-philosophizing of its fundamental task, along with the valence of knowing. A passion for the purity of formalization and the inscription, which begins sliding down to the notion that the matheme is closest to the Real. The matheme becomes the receptacle of a pure transmission, insofar as formalization subtracts writing from its conceptual envelopment, prizing it free from any semblance of meaning or intention. This is why, for Lacan, "The mathematical formalization of signifierness runs counter to meaning." (SXX, pp. 93)


The matheme is said to be closest to the Real insofar as it formalizes while symbolizing nothing: it has a Real status insofar as it cannot be positivized in a representation. The Real subtracts itself from all positive content and all imaginary-symbolic envelopments; it is delivered only to the pure act of transmission, the transference of the analyst's intervention which opens the promise for the traversal of the phantasy. Just like the subject, there can be thus no theoretical knowledge of the Real: the latter cannot be totalized or unified by a predicate, or thought of consistently through definable properties. Therefore, it cannot be qualitatively determined so as to be tractable conceptually: "If there is a notion of the real, it is extremely complex and, because of this, incomprehensible, it cannot be comprehended in a way that would make an All out of it."[23] What formalization enables, Lacan wants to say, is not a representation of desire and so of a knowledge about the Real, but rather an experience or 'act' with respect the Real, a possibility for transference in analysis: "Truth cannot convince, knowledge becomes act.[24]" (Ibid; Pg. 104)   

          And yet, as we saw, as much as the matheme itself remains recalcitrant to the symbolic, it is just as true that Lacan cannot dispense of the task of deploying the matheme to formalize psychoanalytic concepts and structures. Lacan himself says that the formalization is the formalization of the signifier: of whatever is articulated through the signifier, psychoanalytic claims included. But if mathematics can operate to formalize psychoanalysis, this is because formalization operates over the concepts and claims that psychoanalysis deploys. But in order for psychoanalytic claims and concepts to be any more apt for the formalization which 'touches the Real' of desire, then the claims of psychoanalysis must be in some respect different than all others; or else the formalization would appear arbitrarily dependant on a discursive register. Yet the on what methodological grounds could we assess whether psychoanalytic enjoy this priority, if not epistemological or semantic?

         At this juncture, the claim that the matheme resists translation is merely to refuse to explain how it is that it functions as a formalization adequate to the statements of psychoanalysis, and which concern the Real as much as the symbolic or the imaginary. The matheme is said not to obey the norms of knowledge or enter into the rule of the symbolic, but at the same time is coordinated with a series of theoretical interpretations, granting it rights before the Real. But what grounds this proximity between the matheme and the Real, as regulated by psychoanalytic concepts? Without explaining this connection, psychoanalysis fails to adequately account for the relation between the practice of formalization and the theoretical statements which provide the semantic interpretation for the mathematical formulas. For the psychoanalyst needs not only the matheme which is recalcitrant to meaning, but a series of theoretical claims explaining how the matheme formalizes certain structures. Without this connection, any mathematical inscription cannot count as the formalization of anything, is truly 'meaningless', and there would be nothing to distinguish pure mathematical forms from Real psychic structures[25]. This would render psychoanalysis complicit with a kind of Pythagorean upsurge. Just like unobjectifiable desire was 'objectified' in theory only to speak of it, the Real non-translatability of the matheme is translated by psychoanalytic theory since, without such a theorization, the matheme could not stand for the formalization of anything whatsoever. The interesting paradox is therefore that although in order for the matheme to be non-translatable to any discursive register that operates under the symbolic it must, paradoxically, be able to be translated into the conceptual register of psychoanalysis, for the latter provides the interpretation without which, the abstract terms would fail to account for anything.

         What this evinces is that psychoanalysis ultimately is forced to speak of the Real ambiguously: in one sense it said to pertain to formalization in its untranslatable dimension, and in another to desire as the unobjectifiable condition for any discourse. It is precisely at this juncture that the unobjectifiable Real of desire, touched only in the act of transference, is mediated by a tacit separation from the matheme that ordains it, evincing a division that psychoanalysis ultimately cannot resolve.  Much like for Heidegger Being qua the unobjectifiable opaqueness of the Earth cannot be apprehended conceptually but must be delivered to the poetic word of the thinker and the act of the artist, the Real qua unobjectifiable opaqueness of desire cannot be known but must be delivered to the epistemic opaqueness of the matheme and the transference occasioned by the analyst in act. As Lacan puts it: "Mathematization alone reaches a real - and it is in that respect that it is compatible with our discourse, with analytic discourse- a real that has nothing to do with what traditional knowledge has served as a basis for, which is not what the latter believes it to be- namely, reality, but rather phantasy... The Real, I will say, is the mystery of the speaking body, the mystery of the unconscious." (SXX; pp. 131)

          However, the call for the bodily act signals also the inevitable moment of loss for explanation, the moment in which, no longer capable of separating the thought of the Real from the Real itself, one must surrender all theoretical pretences and en-act the traversal itself, a clinical pilgrimage before the inflections of the symptom through the lessons of formalization. The discursive access to knowing-that becomes delivered to the oblique efficacy of  non-discursive know-how. This is how we should coordinate these two seemingly disparate statements from Lacan: "There is some rapport of being that cannot be known" (SXX, pp. 119, TM), and "If analysis rests on a presumption, it is that knowledge about [subjective] truth can be constituted on the basis of its experience" (Ibid, pp. 91). The impossibility of a knowledge of being is but the obverse of the possibility of knowing how to speak in bringing about the transference. Or as Badiou formulates it: "The paradoxical position of Lacan concerning truth is that there is no knowledge of truth, but finally there is a psychoanalytic knowledge concerning this absence of knowledge. This is the great paradox of the unconscious...a subject can have an experience of its proper Real only in the form of an act." (Badiou, 2010)

       The levels must be clearly demarcated: the analytic transference enjoins the traversal of the phantasy and is supported by the formalization of the symbolic by the matheme. But as we have seen, the operation of formalization which demarcates the positions and structures is in turn supported by the conceptual register of psychoanalytic theory itself. Lacan can thus claim that: "It is in the very act of speaking that makes this formalization, this ideal meta-language, ex-sist." (SXX, Ibid; pp 119) The two Reals glare forth in their unresolved difference: the pure form of the mathematic inscription, recalcitrant to incorporation within the symbolic order of language, and Real of desire in the passage to the pure act that deposes all representational knowledge, where the traversal of the phantasy takes place. As Badiou stresses: "This act is like a cut in language and also a cut in the ordinary representation of the world- a representation which is imaginary. So the act suddenly isolates the Real from its normal collection to the imaginary and symbolic orders." (Badiou, 2010).

              And yet we must insist, that for all its purported deflection of knowing-that, the abyss that separates the Real voided matheme from the Real of desire merely reproduces the dyad of signifier/signified in the dichotomy between theoretical inscription and practical transmission. That is, Lacan reproduces the problem between thought and reality that he takes to be emblematic of the philosophical forms of 'knowing' in the tacit distinction between the formal ideography of the matheme in its presentation, and the singular act of speech in which transference finally takes place and Real desire 'moves'. For Lacan cannot conflate the speciousness of the formulaic writing of the matheme with the act of speech through which the subject traverses the phantasy, nor with the desire in the subject itself. That this distinction is ultimately unexplainable, that the connection between the Real qua formalized matheme and the Real qua act cannot be justified but merely presupposed by psychoanalysis, reveals the latter's internal gulf, delivered as it is, both to the requirement to forego knowledge, and yet also to ordain it by yielding knowledge of its own.  This separation ultimately makes the status of the Real undecidable, or fatally ambiguous, i.e. playing the role of a pure inscription without exteriority (the Real of the matheme as formalization), or a pure exteriority without symbolization (the Real is that which resists symbolization). With the Real subtracted from the traction of knowing, it becomes a noumenal phantasm suspended between the void of an empty formalism, or a mystical surrender to the ineffable Otherness that animates the act.

               And so one notes also, alongside the obliqueness of the matheme, a desperation against the threat of the "dialectic" and a helplessness evinced toward the poetic rumination, thinking from a distance the untouchable purity of an Otherness so unblemished that it does nothing but subtract itself from the signifier and its operations. Such is the sliding down to the identification of the Real with that which is ultimately beyond all capacity for individuation, rendering the conditioning of the Real of desire excised from its pseudo-objectifications[26]. Unfortunately then, the question about the legitimacy of desire as a suitable structure to explain to ontogenesis of thought and being, returns into the market of theories negotiating an unnamable void for their founding gesture. Perhaps this is why Lacan struggles, refusing to fully embrace the prospect of ontologizing the unconscious and desire, to the point of reverting into the desperation of sophism: "the gap of the unconscious is pre-ontological... it is neither being nor non-being, but the unrealized." (SXI: pp. 29)

            We hear echoes of Heidegger's attempts to reconcile himself with his own theory, trying to save the Great Outdoors from the clutches of Dasein's world-producing prerogative (claiming animals have and do not have worlds by saying they are 'poor in them', for instance). Lacan, scavenging for the Real, this being without the honor of the name, urges the separation between psychoanalysis and philosophy, much like for Heidegger poetic thought could only free itself by separating itself from the loudness of metaphysics. A scission, to be sure, that appears as the uncompromising desire for desire, stubbornly clinging to its own impossible object, its own unrequited passion. For the Real does not speak, after all, putting an end to the disguised epistolary confession of the philosopher and the scientist, as well as the analysand. Is this not where the tormented psychoanalyst geared towards the interruption of the symptom by the act and the matheme, and the disillusioned  provincialism of the poetic philosopher traversing metaphysics through poetry meet again: in the desire for silence?

         Ultimately, the Real anchor of desire and its object, this 'indivisible remainder', does not absolve Lacan from the faith of the philosophical dictum, but rather delivers him back into what Badiou has called 'the effects of skepticism': "The effects of this kind of frenzied upsurge, in which the real rules over the comedy of our symptoms, are ultimately indiscernible from those of skepticism.[27]" (LOW: Pg. 563) And indeed, I think Badiou is correct here: Lacan's cryptic statement from 1977 that "truth can only concern the Real" is perhaps the point of the unique symptom, the torsion where, suspended between the choice between being and nothingness, Lacan nods for the all-too-familiar philosophical maneuver, and proceeds to identify them. The sliding void of the object names the passion for the unnamable stain that, repudiating the stringency of the symbolic demand, refuses to extirpate itself from thought, however elusive to its feeble touch. The Real nothingness of Being, and so philosophy, appears now as the stain for psychoanalysis, refusing to let the words come to an end. That is, without ever traversing its own fantasy, absolving the tormented analyst from his own confessional delirium.

Index of Abbreviations

E = Ecrits
SII: Seminar II
SIII: Seminar III
SVI: Seminar VI
SXX: Seminar XX
SXI: Seminar XI

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[1

[1] The attempt to define and restrict the scope of the thinkable in terms of fixed categorical determinations already presupposes the libidinal core of the subject as void of any content, as it passes through the experience of alienation by becoming integrated into language: "If what Freud discovered, and rediscovers ever more abruptly, has a meaning, it is that the signifier’s displacement determines subjects’ acts, destiny, refusals, blindnesses, success, and fate, regardless of their innate gifts and instruction, and irregardless of their character or sex; and that everything pertaining to the psychological pre-given follows willy-nilly the signifier’s train, like weapons and baggage" (E, Pg. 30)

[1] This explains Jacques -Alain Miller's formulation apropos Lacan's teachings during 1955 under the title "From the small to the big Other", which also marks Lacan's more pronounced reworking with the structuralist tradition in linguistics, and thus with the problematic of language in general.

[1] It is clear that, at least in the 1950's, Lacan's concept of the unconscious is deeply influence by the Hegelian-Kojevian notion of desire as the desire of recognition of the other.

[1]

[1] Seminar XX, p.50

[1] This structure is simultaneously that which provides thus the condition for consciousness as consciousness of something, and that which eludes the explicit 'aboutness' of conscious intentionality.  It is insofar that the subject constitutes its unconscious as a result of this alienating operation of 'symbolic castration' that the latter is not a mere myth to be allotted alongside the inventions of philosophers and psychologists alike: “...what is not a myth, although Freud formulated it just as early on as he formulated the Oedipus myth, is the castration complex” (E; Pg. 695).

[1] More subtly, it attempts to find within the signifying chain itself those symptomatic points of capture and torsion, the anomalies and ruptures which locate the subject’s unconsciously articulated desire, i.e. its metonymic points of torsion and articulation. Thus Lacan emphasizes the “…the radical role of metaphor and metonymy, substitution and combination of signifiers in synchronic and diachronic dimensions" (Ibid).

[1] - Seminar XX, p.50

[1] Indeed, the word "ontology" is not mentioned once in Seminar VI.

[1] For the development on the four discourses, see especially Seminar XII, Norton 2007.

[1] It is obvious at this point that Lacan cannot mean that the unconscious is determined by a language, since this would make it a kind of signified upon which the signifier would work. Rather, the unconscious is the very process of signification: You see that by still preserving this ‘like’ [comme], I am staying within the bounds of what I put forward when I say that the unconscious is structured like a language. I saylike so as not to say – and I come back to this all the time – that the unconscious is structured by a language. The unconscious is structured like the assemblages in question in set theory, which are like letters" Seminar XX, p.48 (Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, W.W. Norton, 1999) Although the appeals to set theory here are obviously metaphoric, they point to the idea, emphasized by Badiou that, just like sets are not multiples of anything, language is not of the unconscious; the latter would be to reconstitute the relation between signifier and signified that Lacan is in the process of dismantling. 

[1] MEILLASSOUX, Quentin, After Finitude, translated by Ray Brassier, Continuum, 2006.

[1] Roughly, from Seminar XI onwards.

[1] Even if we agree with Badiou that psychoanalysis is indeed closer to politics in seeking the singularity of the individual symptom rather than the repetition of the scientific thought, it must be stressed that, irrespective of the clinical practice, the theoretical endeavor carried out by psychoanalytic thought cannot but be subject to the norms of conceptual consistency which binds scientific thought. If this is the case, then the way that psychoanalysis shields itself against the dogmatism of embracing alienation in the signifier to its fullest extent would not be to simply listen to the 'affirmative' vocation of political thought, but also to the scientific vocation for what renders its theoretical posits possible, i.e. formal coherency of its ideography.

[1] Lacan, J., Le triomphe de la religion, précedé du Discours aux catholiques, Paris: Seuil 2005, p. 96, 97.

[1] Accordingly, the object-cause of desire as a Real is thought through the formalization of a vanishing object, non-identical to itself, always alienating the subject from the place of enunciation.  This is why the phallus, as the mask hiding the displacement of the object, constitutes the metonymy of the subject in being: the object of desire is 'subjectivized' insofar as it refuses to ever coincide with the phallic semblances under which it appears or is formulated. This 'becoming subject of substance', to speak Hegelese, is what makes the meaningless formalism 'nearest' to the Real object and so to the unconscious desire.

[1] This is why Zizek calls "the scientific Real" that  "...of a formula which renders the nature's meaningless functioning." (Zizek, How to Read Lacan, http://www.lacan.com/zizalien.htm)

[1] It is not only the structure of unconscious desire that is beyond recalcitrant to ontology: the object of desire itself is, paradoxically, unobjectifiable insofar as it remains impossible, non-self identical, never coincident with a  being with fixed qualities and properties. This indicates another level of the fundamental coincidence between the non-symbolic inscription of the object, and the object itself. This is because objet a is both resolutely material (it is localized) and a formal index signaling that which is never localizable, but which functions as an impasse for meaning, and so which indexes the asymptotic horizon of the subject's intentional desire. The object of desire is neither being (it resists objectification or self-identity, thus enacting the infinity of  subjective desire) nor non-being (it must nevertheless be indexed as impossible object cause, 'if only to speak of it', as that which consists as inconsistent, subtracting itself from the signifying chain).  The Real object can only be Real insofar as it is also, and paradoxically, a 'non-object', that is, insofar as it is on the side of the formal stringency of the matheme and not of the symbolic-imaginary operations of the signifier. Only the pure matheme approaches it in its barren formalism by ordaining it to the act of analytic transference facilitating the traversal of the phantasy: "[Objet a] would have us take it for being, in the name of the following- that it is apparently something. But it only dissolves, in the final analysis, owing to its failure, unable, as it is, to sustain itself in approaching the real." (SXX: Pg. 95)

[1] In this regard, I would emphasize that, in spite of Badiou's commendable attempts to characterize psychoanalysis as a candidate for thinking but perhaps not a science, where the latter term is understood as "the unity of a theory and a practice", does not help solve the issue. This can be easily seen if we realize that the incapacity to separate theory and practice is not something we can straightforwardly allot to science; even if psychoanalysis is thought as closer to politics, the question about the relation between the statements of such a thought and the thing itself remains. To stipulate an absolute inseparability between thought and world is to surrender to idealism; to claim such a distinction is possible is to rehabilitate the valence of knowing within a philosophical thought. I believe, for reasons that Ray Brassier has pointed out, following Wilfrid Sellars, that the methodological separation between the space of reasons and the space of causes is the condition of possibility for the ontological unity between thought and being, reason and nature. The consequence, against Badiou's depiction, is not a thinking of the articulation between a theory and a praxis, but rather how such an articulation is to be understood as that between world that is not thought and thought that thinks the world.