Basic Groundwork and Ideas for the use and benefit of anyone.

(2011-2012)

Gabriel Tupinambá

Chapter 0

0. The introductory chapter begins by distinguishing between critical and consolidated knowledge:

We affirm that critical knowledge is structurally different from consolidated knowledge: the former is the field of a knowledge of epistemological inspiration - defined by the inclusion of its own structure as an object of knowledge - and the later, the field of constitution and articulation of knowledge, regardless of its foundations.

0.1 We bring to attention a further distinction: the difference between critical and consolidated knowledge is reflected within each one of the fields:

As an example of a consolidated knowledge which includes a critical apparatus, we present the relation between science and the scientific method - specially in the way Alexandre Koyré elaborates the relation between ʻthoughtʼ and ʻimaginationʼ in modern science: Koyré shows how Galileoʼs new conception of motion relied on a radical distinction between what was being thought in it and what imagination - common sense - was capable of understanding. Galileoʼs trust in the critical scope of the scientific method allowed him to develop a concept which went beyond the mere articulation of knowledge as such while, at the same time, it didnʼt rely on changing the coordinates of what science itself, as a potential object of epistemological enquiry, meant.

The existence of the scientific method is enough to distinguish, within the field of consolidated knowledge, Science from the study of the Law, for example.

The difference between structured critical knowledge and ʻpure critiqueʼ will be object of further investigation in this chapter, but we present the following basic distinction:

Certain thinkers, arguing that the relation between knowledge and power is intrinsic, and that there is no structured knowledge which does not repress and alienate the subject, defend that the critical function needs to be thought as distinct from knowledge altogether. This idea represents the position of a critique dissociated from knowledge.

Critical Knowledge Consolidated Knowledge

ʻpure critiqueʼ Purely consolidated knowledge

Structured critical knowledge Consolidated knowledge with critical apparatus

Critical Function Consolidated Knowledge

On the other side, there is a position which argues that the relation between knowledge and power is not intrinsic and that there is such a thing as a structured knowledge capable of critical function. This position defends that there is a possible relation between knowledge and truth.

0.1.1 We define ʻmarxismʼ as the actual tripartite theory of Marx: a dialectical-materialist philosophy, a critique of political economy and capitalist ideology and an affirmation of the revolution of the proletariat. Our reference is the thought that remains faithful to Marxʼs fundamental affirmation of class struggle preceding ideological unity, which can be summarized by Leninʼs concise statement regarding dialectics: “The unity (coincidence, identity, equal action) of opposites is conditional, temporary, transitory, relative. The struggle of mutually exclusive opposites is absolute, just as development and motion are absolute” (Lenin, V. I. 1976).

0.1.2 We also define ʻpsychoanalysisʼ solely as freudo-lacanian psychoanalysis - understood as the thought which is faithful to the fundamental axiom, presented by Lacan, which states that ʻthere is no sexual relationʼ.

0.2 We further affirm that marxism and psychoanalysis are both forms of structured critical knowledge.

1. We abide to the premiss that there is a knowledge of totality which is not a total knowledge, a ʻwhole of knowledgeʼ.

1.01 There is a fundamental distinction to be made between ʻTotalityʼ, as understood by Hegel and Marx, and the idea of a ʻWholeʼ: A ʻtotalityʼ implies that the very disturbance to the unity of its elements is included in its figure. On the other hand, a ʻWholeʼ implies that there is an harmonic or unified relation between its elements. One forms a ʻwholeʼ by not considering the elements which had to be excluded so that, in opposition, the remaining set of ʻincludedʼ could be perceived as a closed, unified, set.

1.1 Marxism and Psychoanalysis are structured critical knowledges precisely because in them the dimension of a knowledge of totality is operative.

ʻpure critiqueʼ

Purely consolidated knowledge:Law

Economics

Structured critical knowledge:Marxism

Psychoanalysis

Consolidated knowledge with critical apparatus:

Science

Critical Function Consolidated Knowledge

2. We present the formal structure called University Discourse, elaborated by Lacan as part of the Four Discourses. This structure accounts for a social bond which Lacan understands to be the hegemonic form of discursivity today.

In it, the master-signifier, which organizes the articulated field of discourse, is invisible, and the organized field of other-signifiers appears as self-evident and ʻneutralʼ. At the same time, this naturalization of knowledge - on account of the disappearance of the signifier which ties it together - relies on its own expansion: it must name everything, otherwise it becomes clear that there is nothing ʻnaturalʼ about it. Because of this, rather than an overarching principle regulating the structure, a visible master-signifier, there is an imperative to accumulate and to expand - to push its principle of organization as further into every realm as possible.

By presenting itself as neutral and unbiased, the University Discourse also produces a subject which is incapable of distinguishing the master-signifier which organized the field of articulated signifiers - of which the subject is a product.

2.01 The notion of ʻdiscursivityʼ as social link developed by Lacan in ʻThe Other side of Psychoanalysisʼ is both a radicalization and an overcoming of the foucaultian notion of discourse used in discourse analysis. Though Foucault already accounted somehow for the difference between enunciation and enunciated in his conceptualization of ʻstatementʼ as diverse from ʻpropositionʼ - thus allowing for the distinction between a discourse that is spoken by a subject and one which ʻspeaks the subjectʼ - the radical contrast between his concept of discourse and Lacanʼs is that the lacanian concept goes a fundamental step forward and includes the reason why there is a split between the two dimensions in the first place, which is the ʻobject aʼ. Without this concept, the notion of discourse seems to presuppose a consistent Other of the discourse, something outside of it which guarantees that something is ʻhiddenʼ from the speaker.

2.1 Following Lacanʼs own formulation, we affirm that the University Discourse is homologous to the Capitalist Discourse.

2.1.1 One of the consequences of the University Discourseʼs presentation as self-justifying and transparent, given the disappearance of the master-signifier, is that psychoanalysis, as a field of critical knowledge, is in crisis: there is a pressure from the contemporary situation to re-elaborate certain notions operative in the clinical and the institutional practices which deal precisely with the conjunction between master-signifier and enjoyment.

2.1.1.1 We believe that this pressure can be seen in the Anti-Oedipus critique of psychoanalysis.

2.1.2 One of the consequences of the Capitalist Discourse, in its homology to the University Discourse, is that by presenting itself as non-ideological, it confronts marxism with an impasse, asking of it to abandon certain notions which would be ʻout-datedʼ today, such as ʻclass struggleʼ and ʻproletariatʼ. Also, the idea that marxism can present us with an alternative political project - communism - is understood to be fated to totalitarism, insofar as it relies on the re-appearance of a master-signifier hovering above the individual liberties of the individuals - which are assumed, in this ideological discursivity, to be an untouchable natural right. Again, this crisis seems to be connected to the University Discourseʼs two main operations: hiding the master-signifier under a field of ʻneutralʼ

knowledge and producing a subject who cannot perceive himself as part of a class, but only as small groups, identified by traces of a particular ethnicity, gender or personal taste.

2.1.2.1 We believe that the current ideological mechanism of invalidating ʻclass struggleʼ can be exemplified by Fukuyamaʼs The End of History.

3. Though Deleuze and Foucaultʼs critique came from within the ʻpurely criticalʼ field whereas Fukuyamaʼs came from a more conservative position of a consolidated knowledge, both of them are defined by criticizing psychoanalysis and marxism in their affirmation of a knowledge of totality which is not a total knowledge, specially regarding the place that the master-signifier has in both fields.

3.1 We conclude that the master-signifier is one of the operators of the difference between critical and consolidated knowledge.

3.2 There is no need to oppose the critical knowledge to the consolidated knowledge, because we can now posit this distinction within the critical function itself: It becomes clear through Foucaultʼs and Deleuzeʼs claims that ʻpure critiqueʼ diverges from a structured critical knowledge precisely because the first assumes that every master-signifier serves a totalizing function, and thus serves to the alienation of the subject, and the later affirms that the master-signifier is the condition for the structure of a knowledge of totality which is not a totality of knowledge.

ʻpure critiqueʼ

Purely consolidated knowledge:Law

Economics

Structured critical knowledge:Marxism

Psychoanalysis

Consolidated knowledge with critical apparatus:

Science

Critical FunctionHas a name and formal place for the

master-signifier

Consolidated KnowledgeDoesnʼt need to formalize the master-

signifier within its field

ʻpure critiqueʼ:Master-Signifier = Signifier of Itself

WholeStructured critical knowledge:

Master-Signifier = Signifier without SignifiedTotality

Critical FunctionHas a name and formal place for the

master-signifier

3.3 We further affirm that, given the fact that both critiques such as Foucaultʼs - from within the ʻpure critiqueʼ field - and critiques such as Fukuyamaʼs amount to a repetition of the structure of the University Discourse, relying on the same premisses regarding the danger of master-signifiers and totalitarism, the field of ʻpure critiqueʼ is not a critical knowledge. There is no such thing as a critical function which is not a structured critical knowledge.

3.3.1 We are left with two possible hypothesis: either the relation between marxism and psychoanalysis is defined solely by the function of master-signifier, which would mean that they both belong to the field of structured critical knowledge but have no direct relation between them - since in psychoanalysis there is no such thing as a master-signifier which is not articulated to object a - or both marxism and psychoanalysis deal with the master-signifier and with object a.

H. 1

H.2

3.4 H.1 states that ʻdeath drive is a category solely of psychoanalysisʼ. H.2 states that ʻdeath drive is an ontological categoryʼ.

4. We use Alain Badiou as an example of H.1.

4.01 Badiouʼs generic procedures work in an homologous way to H.1:

MarxismPolitical Cause, but no

formal excess

Structured critical knowledge

PsychoanalysisMaster-Signifier and Object a

MarxismPolitical Cause and Excess

Structured critical knowledge

PsychoanalysisMaster-Signifier and Object a

H.1

Generic Procedures:

4.1 We show how Zupancicʼs critique of Badiou demonstrates that for Badiou to organize the distinction between the generic procedures and Philosophy proper, without falling pray to the idea that Philosophy is a meta-discourse, the philosopher must already, though implicitly, be assuming that the same principle which is operative within the generic procedure of Love is also operative within Philosophy itself, sustaining the difference between Philosophy and the generic procedures without relying on a third instance.

4.1.1 Zupancic maintains that Love - Psychoanalysis - is a generic procedure and, at the same time, gives the coordinates of the relation between Philosophy and the procedures as such. Though in an unelaborated manner, Badiou would already work with the idea that there is an excess which guarantees a Two which is not a ʻOne + Oneʼ and neither can be encompassed in a Whole. The name of excess is the death drive.

4.2 We conclude that there is a tension inherent to H.1 which points towards H.2.

4.2.1 We affirm that death drive is an ontological category, and thus operative both in psychoanalysis and marxism.

MarxismPolitical Cause(no Object a)

Structured critical knowledgeDeal with Master-Signifiers

PsychoanalysisMaster-Signifier and Object a

Politics(Marxism)

Generic ProceduresProduces new Truths

Love(Psychoanalysis)

count-for-Two

Science Art

PhilosophyArticulates truths

5. Slavoj Zizek is the only example of H.2.

5.01 The way that the affirmation that death drive is an ontological category appears in Zizekʼs work is through Hegel, as the name of a philosopher who maintains the ontological status of a negativity that cuts across the social and the individual spheres.

5.1 Zizek argues that lacanian psychoanalysis allows us to rehabilitate Hegel (to affirm that death drive is ontological) and this return to Hegel allows us to reformulate the marxist theory of ideology, elaborating the consequences of enjoyment as a political factor. The three fields form a borromean knot:

5.2 Our very path towards H.2 was also a deployment of the articulation presented in H.2. It also served as a confirmation that H.2 is the only hypothesis that explains the inconsistency of ʻpure critiqueʼ and of H.1: considering the relation between Object a and Master-Signifier we can understand the fantasy of a Whole, both in social theory and in individual clinical practice, while the opposite is not true.

5.3 We affirm that our thesis will be a zizekian thesis.

Marx

Hegeldeath drive is an ontological category

Freud/Lacan

Marx/Lenin

Hegeldeath drive is an ontological category

Freud/Lacan

6. Zizek recognizes two main problems to be dealt with in regards to the effects of the University Discourse: the need to return to the category of the proletariat, through a more radical and rigorous understanding of the position of the subject in this discursive formation, and the return to the category of ʻclass struggleʼ and of State politics, through further elaboration of the relation between Master-Signifier and Object a and an understanding of the place the master-signifier has in the University Discourse.

6.01 We believe that though these two issues have a direct effect on the workings of a new presentation of the Communist Hypothesis, they also contribute to better understand the crisis that psychoanalysis is going through today, both clinically and institutionally.

6.1 We define that the objective of our thesis will be to contribute to the elaboration of these two main points identified by Zizek, focusing on Lacanʼs Four Discourses. We intent to arrive at a clearer distinction between knowledge of totality - the name of which in Hegelʼs system is Absolute Knowledge - and the imaginary threat of ʻtotalitarismʼ, opening the space for a more courageous didatism on the part of marxism and psychoanalysis. We argue that there is no reason to fear ʻtotalizationʼ, because hegelian, marxist and lacanian knowledge are organized under the very distinct principle of ʻScilicetʼ: being allowed to know.

6.1.1 We believe that the principle of Scilicet can be better understood in contrast to the enlightenment's Sapere Aude. One permits us to know, the other dares us to. One says it is permitted, because there is no total knowledge on the horizon, the other still maintains that there is a danger lurking somewhere. It is this danger that we intend to show to be illusory.

6.1.1.1 Hegel, in the introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit - the book which introduces the idea of an Absolute Knowledge - warns us: “if the fear of faIling into error sets up a mistrust of Science, which in the absence of such scruples gets on with the work itself, and actually cognizes something, it is hard to see why we should not turn round and mistrust this very mistrust. Should we not be concerned as to whether this fear of error is not just the error itself?”

Chapter I

0. We start chapter 1 by analyzing two different breaks identified by Zizek: one represented by Hegel in the history of philosophy, another represented by the 20th seminar in Lacanʼs thought.

0.1 First, the break represented by Hegel. Here we will compare the zizekian interpretation of Hegel and the kojevian interpretation - chosen because it is a view of Hegel which supports the idea of the end of history and of absolute knowledge as a circular whole, two recurring motifs in contemporary philosophy. Other great french philosophers who were also great readers of Hegel - such as Jean Hyppolite and Jacques DʼHondt - do not contradict Kojève in these aspects of his reading of Hegel, but, when they do, its mostly to affirm a more vitalist or ʻfluidʼ reading of what Absolute Knowledge would mean. We also focus on Kojève not only because of his relation to Fukuyama but also because he was Lacanʼs master.

0.1.1 We give an overview of Alexandre Kojèveʼs interpretation of Hegel, focusing on three main points: the relation between Desire and the Master/Slave Dialectics, the status of Absolute Knowledge, and temporality in Hegel.

This is Kojeveʼs portrayal of the relation between concept and time in Hegel, presented in the figure 11 of his Introduction to the reading of Hegel:

We intend to show that the three kojevian thesis on Hegel - that Desire precedes the struggle for recognition - that Absolute Knowledge is circular - and that Hegelʼs claim that concept is Time means that there is only the historical temporality - are three sides of the same kojevian Idea.

0.1.2 After describing these three points, we will show how the third - the understanding of time as historical time, which comes hand in hand with Kojeveʼs affirmation that Hegelʼs greatest mistake was to reintroduce a different dimension of time in his later work - is the key to the understanding of the other two points.

0.1.2.1 We will briefly relate Kojèveʼs interpretation of Hegel to the series of ʻendsʼ claimed by XXth century philosophers: End of History, End of Metaphysics, End of Grand

Narratives, End of Authorship etc - all of which are also based on a notion of totality as totalitarism, as we have seen a propos of Fukuyama.

0.1.3 Following Zizekʼs affirmation that Hegel was the only philosopher to remain faithful to the true dimension of christian thought, of a God who truly becomes man, we will analyze Zizekʼs interpretation of Hegel, using the christian event as a privileged example of the logic at play in Hegelʼs thought.

0.1.4 We will demonstrate how the temporality at stake in Hegelʼs concrete universality, presented mostly in the Science of Logic - though already operative in the Jena and Frankfurt system fragments - radically diverges from the Kojevian reading.

0.1.4.1 Following Koyréʼs essay Hegel in Jena, which deals with the hegelian dialectics of time, we will show how a zizekian reading of Hegel brings to light the dimension of a temporality known, since Freud, to be the one of the death drive.

Since his early Jena system, Hegel was already aware of the dialectics of the instant resulting in a temporal flux which goes from future, to past and then to the present. This temporality of the ʻwill have beenʼ is built on the function of the ʻinstantʼ. The instant operates differentiation - not because it is a fixed point against which one can sense the change in all others, but because it itself is self-differentiated. The instant, in Hegelʼs dialectics of time, introduces difference because it is an even more radical form of differentiation. If we want to affirm the thesis that, in Hegel, death drive is an ontological category, it would not be enough to state that Hegel already worked with the freudian nachtränglichkeit: we must go further and claim that this is not a product of manʼs relation to time (how man perceives the instant), but a product of timeʼs relation to man (the instantʼs ontological status itself). It is because of the very ontological quality of the instant, of time as such, that the dialectics of time ʻsecretesʼ historical time as a chronological and historical movement.

We present the following figure to sum up this zizekian reading of Hegelʼs temporality:

0.1.5 The relation between the Absolute and death drive can then be affirmed to be the operator of the rupture which Zizek identifies to have happened in philosophy after Hegel, a claim he fully articulates in The Monstrosity of Christ.

This break represents as well a rupture with a certain political dimension, since Hegel was a philosopher who, in line with his system of thought, defended both the formation of a school - which he informally had around him even while he was still alive - and the importance of the State, which he understood as the ʻactuality of the ethical Ideaʼ, the very ʻmarch of God in the worldʼ- as he puts it in his Philosophy of Right.

The idea that didatism and State politics have no direct responsibility for the alienation of the subject - in the sense of de-subjectivization - was obliterated by the trend of ʻpost metaphysicalʼ philosophy which came after him.

0.1.5.1 We then use Meillassouxʼs terms to define Hegelʼs position as the fidelity to the affirmation that there is a possible rational relation to the Absolute, in opposition to the ʻcorrelationistʼ thought which obliterated this dimension.

0.2 The other break happens in Lacanʼs thought, around the 17th Seminar. Here we will analyze Jacques-Alain Millerʼs ʻsix paradigms of jouissanceʼ - specially the break from the fifth to the sixth paradigm - and Jean-Claude Milnerʼs description of the rupture that happens in Lacanʼs last teaching. Both of them identify the period which corresponds to the elaboration of the Four Discourses as the moment prior to the break.

0.2.1 We begin by presenting each one of the six paradigms of jouissance described by Miller. Each paradigm describes a particular relation between signifier and enjoyment. We focus on the passage from ʻdiscursive enjoymentʼ to ʻenjoyment as a factʼ - the passage from the 17th Seminar to the 20th - and on the critique made by Zizek of this break in ʻOn Beliefʼ.

0.2.2 We then follow the description made by Milner of Lacanʼs ʻtwo classicismsʼ and the passage from the linguistic paradigm to the doctrine of the matheme in Lacanʼs teaching. We then concentrate on the ʻdeconstructionʼ of the doctrine of the matheme, which opened space for the primacy of the borromean knot in psychoanalytical consideration.

0.2.3 We move on to show how the moment of this rupture in Lacanʼs teaching corresponds to the moment where psychoanalysis attempted in the most radical way to account for its place in the social space, creating the Freudian School, the passe mechanism and the Scilicet magazine. Two of which were quickly dissolved and the third, the passe mechanism, is today object of reconsiderations which side it with a resistance against the institutionalization of psychoanalysis, rather than as the very mechanism which could guarantee it.

0.2.3.1 We also demonstrate how the later teaching of Lacan, which would come after this break, is said to support the new conceptual elaborations such as ʻordinary psychosisʼ and ʻcommittees of ethicsʼ, notions which answer to the ʻpressure of the contemporaryʼ, which demands that we understand the current moment in history as a true break from what came before, a time in need of deep re-elaborations of the conceptual frame psychoanalysis was founded upon.

1. After delineating the break represented by Hegel and the break represented by Lacanʼs doctrine of the matheme, we relate the two, using Zizekʼs, Zupancicʼs and Mladen Dolarʼs comments on Hegelʼs importance in lacanian theory.

1.1 We use Mladen Dolarʼs text Hegel as the Other Side of Psychoanalysis as our guideline to analyze Lacanʼs references to Hegel in his 17th Seminar. We show how Hegel is the reference Lacan uses to articulate each one of the Discourses, calling him ʻthe most sublime of hystericsʼ, then ʻgreatest example of the University Discourseʼ, then an example of the Master Discourse. This ʻshifting aroundʼ of Hegel opens up the space for the fourth, implicit, relation between Hegel and the Analyst Discourse, which gives rise to the other three.

1.1.1 As a relevant addendum, we speculate about the place of Freud in the 17th Seminar. We sketch the hypothesis that the many of the most important theoretical elements of this seminar - which revolve around themes such as ʻthe castrated masterʼ, ʻbeyond oedipusʼ, ʻfreudʼs dreamʼ etc - has to do with the castration of Freud himself as Lacanʼs Other. This would produce Hegel as a wandering excess and as the very operator of this new found “incompleteness” of Freud.

1.2 We follow Zizekʼs claim in Hegel the most sublime of Hysterics that Lacanʼs break with Hegel is actually a break with Kojeve, and marks the moment in which he became truly a hegelian. Lacan himself, then, would have been a thinker who kept himself faithful to the essential dimension of Hegel, even though in an implicit manner.

1.3 In a short detour, we analyze Zupancicʼs article ʻWhen Surplus Enjoyment meets Surplus Valueʼ and the concept of Two that the philosopher works with in ʻThe Shortest Shadowʼ and in ʻWhy Psychoanalysis?ʼ and highlight how Millerʼs fifth paradigm is operative in her texts.

2. We move on to conclude that the rupture in Lacan and in Hegel is homologous: both of them appear precisely when their teachings claimed the utmost rationality and the furthest reach socially.

2.1 Also, this homology also allows us to understand the conceptual step from Hegel to Lacan: while Hegelʼs Absolute Knowledge is, at the same time, master signifier and object a, Lacan manages to further distinguish the two, allowing him to better articulate the relation between a concrete left-over and the Universal struggling through it. The “fifth paradigm of jouissance” demonstrates how Lacan began to conceptualize the inscription of the signifier as, at the same time, the point of emergence of a surplus jouissance, which presupposes a prior full-enjoyment, retroactively. In the same way, the hegelian concrete universality has to do with an determinateness which in its realization in the world gives birth to the Notion of which it is a concrete representation. The problem is that the function of the ʻobject aʼ appears in Hegelʼs thought only as a temporal structure - a ʻwill have beenʼ - it has no name of its own and is, thus, liable to be distorted or misunderstood. This also explains why Lacan sheds such an interpretative light back at Hegel.

2.1.1 We believe that this passage is the true passage from ʻphenomenology of spiritʼ to ʻscience of the experience of consciousnessʼ, which was Hegelʼs first choice for a title of his first great book. He decided to change its name in the last minute. We will put forward the hypothesis that the object a - and the possibilities it opened for the doctrine of the matheme - was precisely what was missing to turn the ʻPhenomenologyʼ into a “Science” - in the sense of a formal, rigorous and articulated field of knowledge, capable of being transmitted.

2.1.2 Though this is just an speculative hypothesis, we will present further evidence of this by relating the lack of necessity of the concept of ʻconsciousnessʼ in Hegelʼs Phenomenology - and its distinction from ʻself-consciousnessʼ, which Zizek is strict in distinguishing from ʻconsciousnessʼ as such - and how the same lack appears in Freudʼs early writings, such as the ʻProject for a Scientific Psychologyʼ.

2.1.3 We will claim that it is the dimension of the jouissance which solves this issue. A dialectical movement presents itself to us: first we have Hegel and no formalization, but a notion of death drive which doesnʼt rely on any Thing outside of the symbolic. Then we have Freudʼs attempt at formalization, in his ʻProjectʼ, but which relies on an empty Thing

outside of language - as Zizek says, ʻa dimension of death drive which is non-dialecticalʼ. Freud himself moves away from this, but it is only Lacan who manages to formalize the dimension already present in Hegel, given up by Freud, of jouissance as a dimension of the signifier. This appears precisely at the moment of ʻfifth paradigmʼ.

2.2 We also conclude that an important trait of the ʻSlovene Lacaniansʼ is the fidelity to the development of the consequences of these breaks, fighting against the obliteration of the dimension that is articulated both Lacan and Hegel.

3. We claim that the Four Discourses, the most complex matheme formulated by Lacan in this moment of his teaching, is paramount to the development of such consequences, and is central to the zizekian project of articulating Lacan, Hegel and Marx.

3.1 Because of the strict relation between matheme and transmission, we will indulge in a brief excursus on the life and thought of Ramon Lull, who is said by Alexander Magee, a commentator of Hegel, to be one of his predecessors. Lull was a christian mystic from the 12th century who wanted to transmit the christian doctrine through the use of an apparatus very similar to the four discourses - though lacking in conceptual and philosophical rigor. By referring to Lull, we hope to include Hegel and Lacan more clearly in the line of rationalists who equated courage of thought with didatism, leaving the lack of clarity and the unavoidable misunderstandings of their work to the contingent situation of their histories.

Chapter II

0. In chapter 2 we will start the process of construction of the Four Discourses. We will present the well-known fundamental axioms of Lacanian theory, which later will be articulated to form the Discourses. Also, keeping true to Zupancicʼs affirmation of the ontological dimension of the death drive, we will highlight the relation of each axiom to its philosophical implications.

0.1 The ontological dimension of the death drive can be stated as an extra axiom, presented by Zizek: “hegelian dialectics and the logic of signifier are two versions of the same matrix”

1. “A signifier represents a subject to another signifier”

1.0.1 This first axiom opens up to lacanʼs theory of representation, which inverts the classical view of the relation between signifier and signified. This axiom affirms the primacy of the symbolic, as it moves away from ʻa signifier represents an object to a subjectʼ to a conceptualization in which the subject is a mediation and the signified is a relation between signifiers.

1.0.2 Relating this axiom to the articulation presented by Hegel between ʻobjectʼ and ʻNotionʼ, in the introduction of the ʻPhenomenologyʼ - but also re-stated in the ʻScience of Logicʼ - we can see that the prevalence of the symbolic is “another version of the same matrix” insofar as it also presents the articulation of in-itself and for-another as the intrinsic property of ontology.

1.1 “A signifier doesnʼt represent itself”

1.1.1 This axiom indicates that the ʻquilting pointʼ of the chain is not a signifier ʻfoldedʼ upon itself, but an even more radical signifier, one which has no conditionally-fixed signified, and thus represents the subject to the chain of signifiers itself. Through it, we can now differentiate the imaginary phallus - as the product of a fantasy of completion, a signifier of itself, precisely - and the symbolic phallus, the signifier without a signified.

1.1.1.1 We relate this axiom to the end of Hegelʼs chapter on Understanding in the Phenomenology of Spirit, when the figure of the for-itself first appears - the idea of non-coincidence of the thing with itself - giving birth to self-consciousness.

2. “There is not sexual relation”

2.0.1 As previously demonstrated by Zupancic, ʻsexual meaningʼ is produced by the constitutive duality of the sexes, an impasse which cannot be erased. It is the ʻsecretionʼ of this duality, both affirming and trying to disavow it. From the conjunction of axiom 1 and axiom 1.1 we can see how ʻthere is no sexual relationʼ amounts to the condensation of this irreducible Two of sexuality in the place of the ʻsignifier without signifiedʼ, a signifier which represents the irreducible duality of every signifier, its constant excess over itself. We can thus define ʻsexual relationʼ as the relation between signifiers which wouldnʼt produce an excess.

2.1 “There is no Other of the Other”

2.1.1 In the same way that axiom 1.1 guarantees the difference between the Imaginary and the Symbolic, the axiom 2.1 guarantees that the product of the sexual non-relation is not an external, third position, an Other which would guarantee externally the existence of the sexual duality. On the contrary, the duality is heightened and radically affirmed: Instead of an absolute Other, we open the space for an excess, a small other, which disrupts a pretense symmetry of this duality. For there not to be ʻan Other of the Otherʼ, there must be a dissymmetry in the non-relation of the sexes, which turns them not into ʻOne sex + One sexʼ, but into ʻOne sex + Other sexʼ - where this otherness is operative even for itself. Strictly speaking, for there not to be a sexual relation, there must be only one sex, but one sex parasitized by an excess, which is called ʻthe other sexʼ.

2.1.2 We present some relations between the four axioms presented until here and the formulas of sexuation that Lacan uses in his 19th and 20th seminar.

3. “The subject of psychoanalysis is the subject of science”

3.0.1 The previous four axioms delineate the logic of the signifier and, in it, the status of a divided subject. Through the analysis of them, we moved from psychoanalysis towards philosophy as we focused on the ontological implications of the lacanian axioms - now, the axiom ʻthe subject of psychoanalysis is the subject of scienceʼ returns us from ontology back to the social space: it states that the subject at work in the logic of the signifier is the same classical cartesian subject, with the difference - introduced by the axiom 2.1 - that there is no external Other to guarantee the consistence of the articulation of signifiers, like the cartesian God. There is an inherent excess of every signifying operation and it is of the subjectʼs responsibility to account for it.

At the same time that this axiom rehabilitates the cartesian subject, placing the cogito back into epistemological consideration, it also displaces it, focusing not on the whole of the sentence ʻI think therefore existʼ, but on the gap in between thinking and being. If there is no sexual relation, how can there be a consistent relation between Thought and Being? There is always an excess to this conjunction, creating an imbalance.

3.1 “The unconscious is structured like a language”

3.1.1 In line with the sub-axioms 1.1. and 2.1, this axiom ʻgroundsʼ the excess opened up by the previous axiom. In this case, it states that the excess that disrupts the cogito from inside, splitting the subject, is itself inscribed in language - it parasites from within, not without. The unconscious, this secretion of an ontological inconsistency, is subjected to the

same law of the signifier as anything else. This is an essential claim, because it closes up the set of axioms referring the last back to the first one. The movement we accomplished was setting off from a new theory of representation, in which the subject was a pure mediation between signifiers, and now we return to it through its very excess, now understood as a correlate of the subject, the product and cause of its splitting.

3.1.2 We began our axiomatics by relating Lacan and Hegel in respect to their theories of representation. We return now to Hegel and compare the radical claim by Lacan that ʻthe unconscious is structured like a languageʼ, which means that the excess of language is inherent to language, to Hegelʼs famous ʻthe actual is the real and the real is the actualʼ, showing how this claim, which appeared in Hegelʼs ʻElements of the Philosophy of Rightʼ, is a further development of the relation between ʻobjectʼ and ʻNotionʼ previously presented in the Phenomenology of Spirit. It points towards Hegelʼs radical commitment to castration above all other notions, even that of the Real, which is re-inscribed here into the actual.

4. It was said by both Freud and Lacan that the central question of psychoanalysis is ʻWhat is a Father?ʼ - we believe that the manner in which we presented the fundamental axioms of lacanian psychoanalysis makes it clear that there is not one of premisses of psychoanalysis which does nor concern castration: first imaginary, then symbolic and then real castration. But the question of the father is also the question of filiation, of transmission: the movement of extending non-coincidence all the way to the Father himself, barring even the very agent of castration (and thus truly turning it into the agent of castration, he who does not sustain for the subject a dimension of a full jouissance) is also the movement of guaranteeing that transmission is possible.

4.1 With this in mind, we briefly return to Ramon Lull and test the hypothesis presented at the end of the previous chapter, suggesting that the relation between castration and transmission was operative in christianity from the very beginning. We connect this hypothesis to the relation between Community and Holy Spirit in Hegelʼs thought and to Lacanʼs saying that ʻthe holy spirit is the introduction of the signifier in the worldʼ.

Chapter III

0. Chapter 3 will deal with the formation of the Four Discourses, using as material the axioms presented in Chapter 2. But, in order to go from the axioms to the matheme, we first need to define what a matheme is.

0.1 We begin by emphasizing a central aspect of Lacanʼs use of mathematics, already discussed by Milner in The Clear Work: the notion of ʻdeductionʼ does not apply to the lacanian mathemes. We use C.I. Lewisʼ distinction between ʻmaterialʼ and ʻstrictʼ implication in modal logic - which was later criticized by Quine - to explain that, for Lacan, the idea of ʻstrict consequenceʼ is the imaginary effect of the symbolic juxtaposition and articulation. Because of this, Lacanʼs mathemes articulate relations, but they do not allow for deductions as such. Lacanʼs use of logic throughout his seminars - specially after the 14th Seminar, on the logic of fantasy - relied precisely on this aspect: at the same time that Lacan moved away from ʻstrictʼ implication, he was being drawn to the idea of formalizing the very materiality of the letter, the formulationʼs excess, into the matheme, giving it the status of that which causes and guarantees the relations between the other terms.

0.1.1 To exemplify this, we briefly analyze the difference between scheme, graph and matheme in Lacanʼs teaching.

First, we analyze the composition of the L scheme:

Then the graph of desire:

And then the basic elements that the Four Discourses have in common with the “formulas of sexuation”, which we referred to above:

Here, we intend to show that the essential difference between the matheme and other formalizations is that the matheme paradoxically includes in it an element that stands for the very failure of its symbolization. It is enjoyment as a category, the object a, which allows for the appearance of the matheme. And though the object a was already at work in Lacanʼs theory since much earlier, it is only around the 16th Seminar that it is conceptualized in a purely formal way, “to the letter”, opening the space a new presentation of formal structures in the theory.

1. After pointing out that the letter is the foundation of the matheme, we can refer back to the six axioms and use them to trace the matrix of discursivity.

1.1 “A signifier represents a subject to another signifier”

1.1.1 “A signifier cannot represent itself”

We see that 1.1. can be written as a signifier (S₁) represents a subject ($) to another signifier (S₂). 1.1.1 guarantees that S₁≠S₁. When we analyze the positions and connectors from the Discourses we will see that the expression “represents...toʼ, which seems to make of (→) a connector of articulation, is, on the contrary, a symbol of impossibility. 1.1.1 already points to this.

1.2 “There is no sexual relation”

1.2.1 “There is no Other of the Other”

The axiom 1.2 states that the articulation between two signifiers (S₁➝S₂) is not without an excess (a). Axiom 1.2.1 guarantees that this excess is irreducible, because not only S₁ ≠ S₂ (as defined by axiom 1.1.1), but S₂ ≠ S₂: there are no consistent relations between signifiers, because the field of the Other does not constitute a closed set, there is no “whole” Other.

1.3 “The subject of psychoanalysis is the subject of science”

1.3.1 “The unconscious is structured like a language”

Axiom 1.3 guarantees that the articulation of signifiers (S₁➝S₂) which produces this evanescent negativity known as the cogito ($) also produces the excess of representation which disturbs the consistency of the relation between ʻthinkingʼ and ʻbeingʼ(a). To consolidate the ʻcogito ergo sumʼ as an atomic sentence, encapsulating the subject, means to disavow an excess, a non-knowledge of a surplus produced by this very operation of grounding the subject on a consistent relation between signifiers($ ◇ a ). Axiom 1.3.1 states that where there is a subject, there is enjoyment, and vice versa: both are produced simultaneously and both are subjected to the law of the signifier. The realm of the excess is no beyond.

2. Using the six axioms, we constructed the matrix of the Discourses, which coincides with the Master Discourse. Now we focus on decomposing this matheme into its elements, positions, connectors and operations.

2.1 The Discourses are composed of four elements:

2.1.0.1 Here we will focus in analyzing each element from two perspectives: of the modal logic square of contingency, impossibility, possibility and necessity and of its relation to the category of the One - our intention with this second aspect is to show that the fantasy of completion is not inherent to any of the terms of the discourse, but a product of their disavowal.

2.1.1 S₁: Master-Signifier

2.1.1.1 We will start by showing that the master-signifier is the mark of contingency in the body - as Lacan develops it a propos of the unary trait, in his Seminar 17th. The unary trait is precisely that which ceases not to write itself. “Contingencyʼ is precisely the name of a written mark which is not written because it articulates something, it was not a ʻpossibleʼ or a ʻnecessaryʼ inscription. This contingent inscription ʻtraumatizesʼ the body and, introducing the subject into the dimension of death drive, allows for the field of the possible, represents the necessary and fails at the impossible.

Commonly referred to as the “irrational” dimension of the signifier, we believe that calling it the “contingent” dimension allows for a better understanding of it: after all, it is the signifier of Reason par excellance, opposed to the chain of signifiers, where one articulates the Understanding. Lacanʼs claim that the science is structured like the hysteric discourse allows us to clarify this, since it is a discourse which questions the master-signifier in order to produce knowledge.

We will also relate the master-signifier with Quentin Meillassouxʼs claim in After Finitude that the only Absolute is Contingency. We will argue that answering Leibnizʼs question of “why is there something rather than nothing?” (as Meillassoux does) doesnʼt go far enough: the insight into the relation between Contingency and the Absolute actually allows us to correct the question itself. Basing ourselves on the well-known freudian elaboration regarding the relation between ʻtraumaʼ and the non-existence of the motherʼs phallus, we will claim that the truly materialist question might rather be: “Why is there Nothing rather than Something?”.

2.1.1.2 Then we will show that the master-signifier is the signifier of a “Two”, not of a “One”. Following Zupancic, we will argue that “S1 as ʻpoint de captionʼ is not a meta-signifier in relation to S2, to the virtually infinite battery of signifiers and their combinations that Lacan also calls ʻknowledgeʼ. S1 quilts this set not by counting the count itself, but by ʻpresentingʼ the very impossibility of an immediate coincidence of the two counts, i.e. by presenting the very gap between them. In other words, S1 is the signifier of the impossibility of the two (counting and counting the count itself) to be One. It is the signifier of the very gap or interval or void that separates them in any process of representation.”

2.1.1.3 We will briefly relate the master-signifier with Emmaʼs case in Freudʼs ʻProject for a Scientific Psychologyʼ, in which he already showed that the invested signifier of the trauma actually represents a void which is posited behind it.

2.1.2 S₂: Chain of Signifiers, or Knowledge

2.1.2.1 We will begin by stressing that the chain of signifiers is the field of all possible articulations - it is the field of the Other, which includes the signifiers of the individual, as well as the social body, without distinction. It is also a virtually infinite set, defined not by

the signifiers it contains but by the signifier it does not contain (the master-signifier), which sheds a certain “potentiality” over all the other signifiers. In contrast to the empty signifier, which traumatizes language, carrying the enigma of that which, for no reason, “ceased not writing itself”, the battery of signifiers is defined as that which ceases to write itself. The possible is not what is, but what could be otherwise and still keep within the ʻwrittenʼ coordinates of our Understanding.

2.1.2.2 We will try to explain what Lacan means by knowledge being ʻthe Otherʼs enjoymentʼ (16th Seminar) and also a ʻmeans of enjoymentʼ (17th Seminar). We believe that though the focus is commonly on the relation between knowledge and enjoyment, on the failure of repetition, it is essential to demonstrate how the impossibility of repetition is an effect of the master-signifier: the production of surplus-enjoyment is an effect of the operator of castration - which means that the chain of signifiers is, using Lacanʼs expression, ʻnon-allʼ. It does not form a totality of knowledge, because the very constitution of the chain relies on it being infinite. When Lacan says that knowledge is a means of enjoyment - and, which amounts to the same, the Otherʼs enjoyment - what is at stake is actually the fact that, being non-All, the chain ʻinvitesʼ the subject to suture it, constituting the Other as a full ʻentityʼ. But for this, the essential condition is that the chain does not form a One or whole.

2.1.2.3 Without going into much detail, we point out the fact that the relation between Freudʼs paper on Telepathy and the famous paper On Fetishism amounts to a similar conclusion than Sohn-Rethelʼs seminal critique of Kantʼs transcendental subject: For there to be a fully constituted discourse of the Other, one needs to fetishize a certain articulation of representations into a fixed and immutable Ego.

2.1.3 $: Subject

2.1.3.1 We already explained how the master-signifier is the inscription of contingency in language, constituting, in opposition to it, the realm of the possible, the virtually infinite chain of articulated signifiers. But this passage from contingency to the field of the possible is necessarily mediated - there is a gap between the empty signifier and any other signifier, since the very definition of master-signifier is that it doesnʼt form consistent relations of signification. As far as the empty master-signifier is never articulated in the chain (only articulated ʻagainstʼ the chain), it is constantly absent - necessarily absent, it doesnʼt cease to write itself as absent. And this void, which is not an actual signifier, is the place of the subject. But not only that: by adding this “nothing” to the operations of signification, the signifier becomes not only ʻotherʼ to another signifier, but also to itself, not coinciding with its material support. This excess - the object a - is then the material correlate of the subject, its substance, in the hegelian sense.

Also, analyzing the relation between subject and necessity allows us to understand Zizekʼs argument that more crucial than Meillassouxʼs claim of the ʻnecessity of contingencyʼ is the hegelo-lacanian claim of the ʻcontingency of necessityʼ: the contingent signifier which represents the subject becomes essential - this is precisely Freudʼs (and Hegelʼs) point a propos of the retroactive temporality of subjectivity. We can return here to Lacanʼs first seminar and to the parallel that he creates between Freudʼs famous “wo es war soll Ich werden” and Angelus Silesiusʼ verse: “mensch, wird wesentlich”.

2.1.3.2 To fully elucidate why the subject is a split subject one must analyze the two ʻsplitsʼ at work. First, the one between the master-signifier, which is a void signifier, and the subject, which is itself a void. This difference between two ʻvoidsʼ is one of the dualities

which splits the subject. The other comes from the split between the subject qua negativity and its material correlate, that stain of substance forever parasitizing this negativity, which also is not a ʻOneʼ of nothingness. Even the void is in excess to itself.

We can see here how castration coincides with dialectics: first the subject is supposed to be a substance, then it is opposed to it, through the inscription of the paternal Word. But this is not all: then, the very opposition between subject and substance is transposed to the subject. The subject is constitutively split between itself and the material remainder it cannot but produce. As Jean-Pierre Lebrun reminds us, in the first moment of castration the paternal injunction says: “not-all in the Thing!” (moving away from the Imaginary consistency towards the Symbolic chain), but this is not enough, and in the second moment the paternal injunction repeats the movement and states: ʻnot-all in Words!ʼ (moving from the Symbolic as a closed set towards the internal stumbling block of language, the Real).

2.1.3.3 We refer here to Freudʼs paper from 1919 A Child is Being Beaten to emphasize how fantasy is constituted not only against the background of the inscription of this empty signifier, the unary trait, in the subjectʼs body - but also in relation to the production of an excess to its own operation, to an excess which will cling to the subject, his/her enjoyment.

2.1.4 a: Object a, or Surplus-Enjoyment

2.1.4.1 First, we focus on how the ʻobject aʼ incarnates an impossibility - that of enjoyment. To understand this, we must turn first to the impossibility of repetition. One of the most important points here - one Lacan developed in his 11th Seminar - is that this impossibility is not just the one Deleuze brilliantly elaborated in Difference and Repetition: the point is not that it its impossible to repeat, and that this would create difference - the crucial fact is that even difference itself fails, something does repeat: the failure of the signifierʼs consistency. This is what the object a incarnates. It gives body to the fact that ʻthe real is that which returns at the same placeʼ.

The object a is then both the material left-over of the impossibility of a consistent relation between signifiers - a relation without an excess - and the impossibility of this excess counting as just another ʻnewʼ articulation. If the failure of repetition amounted just to the appearance of difference, then it would be just something else which can ʻcease to be writtenʼ in the chain. But since it is a failure of the signifierʼs repetition and a failure of difference itself, the repetition that is prompted by the object a is one which does not cease not to be written - it is a constant failure. It gives us the measure of the inexistence of a full Other of enjoyment - this Other would be equally consistent if “pure” repetition was possible or if “pure” difference was possible. This is why the object a is not the element of ʻenjoymentʼ but of ʻsurplus-enjoymentʼ. It incarnates the failure of enjoyment as such.

2.1.4.2 In his 16th Seminar, Lacan formulates the ʻobject aʼ within different contexts: Marxʼs surplus-value, Pascalʼs famous wager and in relation to the philosophical One. Lacan also relates the object a to the golden means and the Fibonacci sequence, but we will not deal with that presentation here.

2.1.4.2.0.1 As an extra comment, it might be worth noticing how Lacanʼs 16th Seminar seems to present 5 different formulations of the object a: a political, a mathematical, an artistic, a religious and a philosophical one. This reverberates in an interesting manner with Badiouʼs four generic procedures and his account of philosophy as distinct from them. This seminal seminar confirms in the most rigours form both Zupancic and Zizekʼs claims a

propos of the double status of psychoanalysis in relation to the generic procedures, a question with which we dealt in out Chapter 0.

2.1.4.2.1 To clarify the relation between the non-existence of “full” enjoyment and the production of surplus-enjoyment, we will first show how the creation of surplus-value and its articulation to use-value as a category of the relation between “man and nature” in Marxʼs theory of value is homologous to the way Lacan conceptualizes the production of surplus-enjoyment. To demonstrate this, we will refer both to Lacanʼs 16th and 17th Seminars and to Zupancicʼs essay When Surplus-Value meets Surplus-Enjoyment.

Marx defined the circuit of exchange in the capitalist system in the form of M - C - Mʼ (Money turns into Commodity, which is then sold for a different, higher quantity of Money). This process is divided into two steps: first [M - C] (production), and then [C - Mʼ] (circulation). What allows for the commodity to be sold for more than what it costed to produce it is that the circulation imbues it with an extra value, produced by the very act of exchange. This difference is what is profitable.

The second step is that once this surplus-value is produced, it “casts off” its use-value as such. In capitalism, use-value - as the ʻenjoyment of a thingʼ - is a spectral product sustained by that ʻremainsʼ of it: surplus-value. It is the exchange which defines the value of use of a commodity, depending on how much surplus-value can be produced in its exchange. The more something is profitable, the more the value of use is retroactively heightened. As Zizek puts it, in Living in the End Times, “value is surplus-value over use-value”. “Use”, as such, doesnʼt exist - what exists is the extra value one can produce in the process of exchange.

It is useful here to juxtapose the two moments of the circuit - [M - C], and then [C - Mʼ] - and notice that one of the most crucial aspects of this operation is the postulation that the first C coincides with the second C: this is the role of what Marx calls ʻreal abstractionʼ, the empty, useless form of the commodity which is itself exchanged in the form of money. Money, under certain rules and calculable rates, stays the same in time and space. Because there is a common measure which guarantees the common ground for exchange (M), one can calculate the value of a commodity (C) in a way that it too remains fixed and stable (C=C). But this is an operation of disavowal, it is a fetish. For “the relation between people”, which constitutes the commodity, to be reified into “the relation between things” something must be lost, so that permanence (repetition) can be affirmed. So, while the ideological operation guarantees the commodity fetishism, it is the constitutive failure of repetition, the disavowed core of this operation, which gives rise to profit.

So we see that the disavowed excess of the commodity returns as the production of surplus-value. And use-value - which is a concept partially kept outside of the matrix of social exchange, since it is partially defined in relation to nature - holds open the space for an ineffable dimension which can support and act as ʻoriginʼ of the surplus. In the same way that the internal contradiction of the form of the commodity is disavowed so that profit can emerge, it also retroactively “invests” into the use-value a certain excess, which guarantees the fantasy that the surplus-value was not created by a disavowal, but by a recognition of the “ineffability” of things in themselves. So the enjoyment one can get out of a commodity is defined by how much surplus-value can be extracted from it in the exchange market: it is an spectral dimension which cannot be accessed directly. This also accounts for the reason why the capitalist is not the one who makes use of this wealth (that is, who enjoys the use) the commodities, but the one who accumulates richness (who accumulates the produced surplus).

2.1.4.2.2 Another dimension of this impossibility of enjoyment can be seen in Lacanʼs elaborations regarding the pascalian wager. In his Pensées, Pascal invites us to consider the question of the existence of God and Heavens from the perspective of a wager: if we live as if God exists, and it turns out that He doesnʼt, what we lost was the possibility of a “full” enjoyment of one life. If He does exist, then we gained “an infinite amount of infinitely happy lives”. On the other hand, if we live as if he doesnʼt exist, and he does, we lost this infinity of lives in favor of one life. If he doesnʼt, we donʼt lose anything, but we also gain nothing. Pascal argues that the infinitude of what there is to gain, in contrast with the little we have to lose, shows us that there is only one true possible conduct. Let us show Lacanʼs schematization of the four possibilities:

In the case of [0, ∞], we abdicate the enjoyment (ʻaʼ becomes 0) of this life, but we gain an infinite amount of happy lives (∞). If God doesnʼt exist, [-a, 0] then all the enjoyment there was to have (a) was abdicated (-a) and I didnʼt gain anything (0). But if I bet against God, and He does exist [a, -∞], then though I didnʼt abdicate the little enjoyment one can get from one life, I lost infinity (-∞). And finally, in case of betting against God and of Him not existing [a, 0], then I got the enjoyment of one life (a) and there isnʼt any other enjoyment to have been lost (0).

Lacan then demonstrates that Pascalʼs wager is divided into two different types of positions: the one of [0, ∞] and [a, 0] on one side, and the one of [-a,0] and [a, -∞] on the other. The second couple, in which one bets against the actual status of the Other, against oneʼs ʻbetter knowledgeʼ, we find negative signs, (-a) and (-∞). Lacan argues that in both of these cases what is not abdicated is a certain limit: when we bet in favor of a God that doesnʼt exist, the little enjoyment that we lost is elevated into a renunciation, a sacrifice (-a). And when we bet against a God that does exist, we are also elevating the enjoyment we do have into the whole of all possible enjoyment. Both of these positions are accomplished against the background of a full enjoyment, and Lacan does relate them to the structure which articulates this full Other, perversion. They fit the structure of ʻI know very well, but all the same...ʼ.

In the case of [0, ∞] and [a, 0], Lacan is more radical than Pascal himself. Pascal argued that to believe in God was the surest bet, since in worst case scenario we only lose ʻaʼ, which is “nothing” when compared to what, in the best case, we win: everything. Lacan goes even further and claims that these two cases ([0, ∞] and [a, 0]) are not wagers at all. In both cases we are led by that which we know. This is why to abdicate ʻaʼ in the first case is not to lose it, its not a sacrifice (-a), it is to abdicate nothing (0). In the second case, to

stick to our enjoyment is not to abdicate of an Other-enjoyment, there is no sacrifice of the Beyond - it is to abdicate of a dimension which does not exist. Both of theses positions are accomplished against the background of an enjoyment produced by the Law, rather than being something which is abdicated when one abides to the norm.

So we can see that there is a diagonal line which cuts from [0, ∞] to [a, 0]. The passage from something we didnʼt have, but constituted a Beyond, to some little enjoyment which exists only insofar as we give up the Beyond itself altogether.

This leads Lacan to write a different version of the wager, in which what is at stake is solely the position of the subject and the “finitude and the infinitude of a” - meaning that it doesnʼt relate to the “confirmation” from the afterlife:

Here we see that the ʻobject aʼ as such appears only as the surplus of a prohibited enjoyment. That which is abdicated by the christian believer retroactively “contaminates” the inaccessible, opening up to infinity at the same time that it is renounced. There where the object a was ʻat graspʼ, for the subject who doesnʼt believe in God, it is written as 0. Lacan adds: “the zero here has the value of a question”. In this position what we find is that the object a, when it is not abdicated as such, remains present only as a material nothing, a reminder of the “inexistence of the wager”, the mark of finitude.

This is a really important point: the object a cannot but appear as loss. It is only in the case of the believer that one finds the object. This is what leads Lacan to write the non-believerʼs object as 0. Here is appears in its dimension of nothing, to ʻgainʼ the object is not to gain anything, if the one who gained it doesnʼt relate it to the loss of something more.

Relating all of this back to Marx, we can see how the capitalist and the christian have something in common: the accumulation of surplus-value can only be done in the form of a negation of its use. Use-value as such is solely the Capitalʼs enjoyment.

2.1.4.2.3 Finally, we come to the way Lacan formalizes the ʻobject aʼ in relation to the One.

Letʼs admit a signifier S. For it to be constituted as such, it needs to be opposed to an other signifier - let us call this ʻotherʼ A. So [S→A] names the way a signifier is differentiated from A. ʻAʼ can stand thus for any signifier which is ʻnot-Sʼ. But for this operation to work, there is another fundamental step to be made: this difference between S and A needs to be itself represented in A, as the field of ʻother signifiersʼ. In the first case

A was ʻany other signifierʼ, but now we see that it has to stand also for the field of signifiers as such, the field of the Other. So after [S→A], the second step could be written as [S→(S→A)], in which the (S→A) could be again substituted for A, and this double operation of differentiation, [S→A], and then articulation, [S→(S→A)], can go on indefinitely, [...→(S→(S→(S→A))], because A stands for the opposing signifier and for the signifier of the field of signifiers at the same time. All of this can be summarized in the following graphic:

But, following the paradox of the set of all sets, which would include itself, made famous by Bertrand Russell, this is strictly impossible. There cannot be a ʻsetʼ of all ʻsets which do not include themselvesʼ. In the same way, there cannot be a field of otherness (A) which includes all signifiers which are “otherʼ (A), because this would rely on a fundamental identification between all of them, depriving them of their operational place of differentiation.

The fundamental step given here by Lacan is to go from this paradoxical Other of totalization to the formalization of the impossible failure of totalization as the other, the name of which is ʻobject aʼ. It is the material remainder which causes the process of signification [S→A] to forever slide, without the need to rely on a constituted field of the Other. The relation is actually inverted: it is the excess of signification which constitutes the semblance of “constitution” of the incomplete field of the Other. From the above graph, we move to:

As we described above - regarding Lacanʼs reading of the pascalian wager and of Marxʼs surplus-value - the object a is both the product of the impossibility of the One, its excess, and the cause which drives signification to strive for ʻunificationʼ (or ʻcommunionʼ).

2.1.4.3 We will briefly return to Freud, and his essay The Uncanny, to show how his analysis of Hoffmannʼs ʻThe Sandmanʼ relies precisely on the passage from the full-Other -

the mysterious and abominable friend of the protagonistʼs father - to the object a, the particular element which returns in different moments, always with the same trace, endowing a doll with desirable qualities, then giving a terrifying twist to all his thoughts and relations, disrupting the protagonistʼs understanding and signification of others and the world.

2.2 Four positions:

2.2.1 Agent, Semblance or Desire.

The most important aspect to stress here is one which can be summarized by one of Lacanʼs definitions of it: “it is a double agent...it acts and is acted upon”. What this statement affirms is that this is not the position of an agent which ʻimposesʼ itself upon the Other. The “agency” of the term which occupies this position is a semblance, it is the result of its interaction with all the other terms. As we previously demonstrated, none of the four elements of the Discourse are ʻwholeʼ, they do not have enough consistency on their own to be ʻagentsʼ in the sense of causa sui or prime mover. The element which occupies this place is rather the one which, given the relation between all the terms in the discursivity appears as an agent.

Lacan uses three terms to name this position - ʻagentʼ, ʻsemblanceʼ and ʻdesireʼ. The aspect of agency and semblance were already touched upon in the above comment. The third name, Desire, which appears right at the beginning of the 17th Seminar, gives us a hint of how the matrix of the Four Discourses is very much indebted to Hegelʼs Master/Slave dialectics. The position of the master, as the one who wins the struggle for recognition, is the one of having its desire recognized by the Other. To have oneʼs desire recognized means to oppose the Other not in a basis of substance, but of a lack.

2.2.2 Other, Enjoyment, or Work.

Lacan uses three names to define the place on the upper right of the Discourses - Other, Enjoyment or Work. In the same way that the ʻAgentʼ was defined by being juxtaposed to ʻOtherʼ and ʻTruthʼ, the position of ʻOtherʼ or ʻWorkʼ is itself trapped between the semblance of agency and the place of loss or production. Because of this, it cannot but be the place where whatever was lacking to the first term (which is also called Desire) is put to work, producing something else. And since the place of production is also the place of loss, it is no wonder that Lacan equates the place of the Other with the place of Enjoyment: both of them donʼt exist as such, they have no consistence, only in opposition to what is produces ʻfrom/toʼ them.

2.2.3 Truth.

The place of truth is defined both by the retroactive relation it has with the Agency and the Other, as the negative mediator of two, and the relation that it doesnʼt establish with the place of Production.

The hegelian notion of Totality can be of help understanding what is at stake in the position of Truth. Insofar as the Semblance or Agency is seemingly transparent and self-grounded, and seems to be sustained solely by the Other which it tries to inscribe or be inscribed by, there seems to be a duality of interior/exterior a split between two terms - we have here the structure of something which is excluded in order to constitute a Whole. The concept of totality, which is defined by Hegel right at the beginning of the Phenomenology of Spirit, affirms that a consideration of knowledge needs to include in it the position of the knower - or, in regards to the Thing in Itself, that the negative dimension of the Thing, its pretense inaccessibility, needs to be conceived not as a veil, but as its own mode of appearance, there is nothing behind that. The logic behind this movement affirms that to consider a situation one needs to take its negative dimension in its very negativity as part of a totality. This is the movement from knowledge to truth, the movement from the split between two elements to the conceiving of their split as what constitutes the two in the first place.

Thus, place of Truth names the negative mediation between the apparently self-sufficient ʻexcludedʼ term - the Agency - and the apparently consistent place of the Other. When seen from this position, the impossibility which separates the two upper terms binds them and gives the actual ground to the seemingly self-grounding of Semblance.

It is also essential to grasp that the Truth is non-related to the Production. The separation between the two terms guarantees that the knowledge of totality (truth, that is) is not a totality of knowledge - it does not “include” everything, doesnʼt predict the losses of the process it mediates, it is rather the position from which the “naturality” of a certain element in the discourse is referred back to that which constitutes it, on account of there being always an excess to this operation. It is because the position of truth names the very partiality of a given discursivity that it can account for the formal excess it inherently produces.

2.2.4 Production or Loss.

Since the ʻobject aʼ was conceptualized much earlier than the Four Discourses, it is the actual place of production within the matheme which represents the true breakthrough of this moment in Lacanʼs teaching. The formalization of the place of loss as the place of production is both an advance from what Hegel had set forth as the Dialectics of Master and Slave and a further development of Lacanʼs conceptualizations of the relation between signifier and enjoyment. We could maybe say that the place of loss in the formal apparatus of the Four Discourses is some sort of beckettian radicalism of Lacan: though he already had the concept of surplus-enjoyment to account for an irreducible loss (the inescapable ʻdimnessʼ which Beckett talks about in Worstward Ho), still the failure itself had to fail - the object a and its place as loss donʼt coincide. Without this, the Four Discourses could not be four, but one. How could there be more than one discursivity if the enjoyment always appeared as the same? As we described in 0.1 and 0.2 of this chapter, this universalization of castration, of a ça rate, is what allows the discourses themselves to be formalized and then slide.

2.3 Two connectors:

2.3.1 Impossibility (→)

In contrast to Badiou - who uses the same symbology to account for the classical theory of representation, in which a signifier represents an object to a subject - Lacanʼs use of the symbol ʻ→ʼ represents not ʻconsequenceʼ but ʻimpossibilityʼ.

Based on what we developed until now, we believe it is not difficult to understand that all the relations of consequence are internal to the place of the Other, they are side-effects of the articulation of signifiers. The way this symbol relates the two upper terms is by defining, according to the lacanian axioms described above, that is impossible to include the signifier which constitutes the Other into the Other itself. It names the exclusion of the Master-Signifier from the Chain of Signifiers - or, in terms of the positional system, it names the way a semblance of Agency is alienated from the Work it sets to motion.

Relating this connector to the lacanian axioms, specially axiom 2.1, we can see that ʻ→ʼ is the operator of the impossibility of a consistent relation between two signifiers, one which wouldnʼt produce an excess to itself. It affirms that “there is no sexual relation”.

2.3.2 Impotence (◇)

The relation between Truth and Loss is defined as another form of non-relation, a crucial one, for it names the non-relation what sustains the discursivity as such. We already saw that the place of Production in the matheme is an innovation of Lacan, which inaugurates the matheme as such. The symbol ʻ◇ʼ is the term which possibilities the differentiation of this new formal position.

If ʻ→ʼ connects the upper terms by alienating one from the other, the term ʻ◇ʼ connects the lower terms in their utter separation. These two movements - alienation and separation - were extensively developed by Lacan in his 11th Seminar.

Lacan calls this symbol ʻpunctionʼ. In his 14th Seminar, titled Logic of Fantasy, Lacan defines it as a term “coined to unite in it that which can be isolated from it, depending on if we separate the symbol with an horizontal or vertical line”. We could say that it is formed by a disjunctive synthesis of ʻ<ʻ and ʻ>ʼ and ʻ∧ʼ and ʻ∨ʼ. In the matheme of fantasy, arguably the first matheme, we already see its operation: $ ◇ a. The subject and its material correlate are utterly separated, they can in no way coincide or appear at the same time.

Regarding the lacanian axioms, the connector ʻ◇ʼ seems to be closely related to axiom 2.2, since it is the operator of an incommensurability of the Truth and the Product of a discourse. It affirms that there is no position from which one can relate the two, no “Other of the Other”.

2.3.2.1 It might be interesting to relate the ʻpunctionʼ to the function of the verb ʻto beʼ in Hegelʼs statement that ʻthe Spirit is a Boneʼ. A long lacanian reading of Hegelʼs logic of essence can be found in Zizekʼs Tarrying with the Negative.

2.3.3 We are not considering the two bars which separate the upper from the lower elements as connectors, because they do not name non-relations, they name simple juxtapositions - in the lacanian theory of representation we have been presenting, “to represent” something is never to change registers, for example, from a word to a thing, but to articulate a relation between to terms of same quality, signifiers. Because of this, the bar is not so much a connector - it just states that the terms that occupy each side of the bar are opposed and differentiated from each other.

2.3.4 Maybe it is interesting to consider the following notation of the discursivity matrix:

... ◇ w / x → y / z ◇...

In which we can see that the two connectors, or non-relations, are two different ʻstumbling blocksʼ of an otherwise articulated field. This also allows us to answer in a direct manner to the question of why is it that the order of the terms in the Discourses never changes: though we will deal with this question later on, when we analyze the Discoursesʼ “genesis”, we can already begin to see that at the terms cannot change order because they are defined by their juxtaposition. What changes from one discourse to another is the type of connector in between them. There is no other possible order for the four terms if not

... $ S₁S₂ a ...

2.3.5 This relation between the bars, impossibility and impotence amounts to six vectors, and an inherent imbalance. In his seminar The knowledge of the Psychoanayst, from 1971-72, Lacan summarizes these properties in the following manner:

“You should carefully note that, putting four points at equal distance is the maximum of what you can do in our space. You will never be able to put five points at an equal distance of one another. This tiny shape, that I have just recalled here, is there to make you sense what is involved here. If the quadripodes are not tetrahedral but tetrade, the fact that the number of vertices are equal to that of the surfaces is linked to this same arithmetical triangle that I traced out in my last seminar.(...) The tetrahedron, to call it by its present appearance, has curious properties. The fact is that it is not like this one, regular - the equal distance is only there to recall for you the properties of the number four, with regard to space - if it is indifferent, it is properly impossible for you to define a symmetry in it. Nevertheless it as this particular quality. The fact is that if its sides, namely, the little strokes that you see which join what are called in geometry vertices, if you vectorize these little strokes, namely, if you give them a direction, it is enough for you to posit as a principle that none of these vertices will be privileged in something, which would be necessarily a privilege. Because if that happened, there would be at least two which could not benefit from it - if then you posit that nowhere can there be a convergence of three vectors, and nowhere a divergence of three vectors from the same vertex, you will obtain necessarily then the arrangement:

2 arriving 1 parting2 arriving 1 parting1 arriving 2 parting

1 arriving 2 parting

Namely, that all the aforesaid tetrahedrons are strictly equivalent and that in every case, you can, by suppressing one of the sides, obtain the formula by which I schematized my four discourses. (...)

Which is the property of one of the vertices, the divergence, but without any vector that manages to nourish the discourse, but that inversely, at the opposite side, you have this triangular trajectory. This is enough to allow there to be distinguished in every case, by a character that is absolutely special, there four poles that I am stating with the terms of truth, of semblance, of enjoyment and of surplus enjoying.”

We can see that the structural imbalance which defines the matrix of discursivity appears when we suppress one of its vectors, creating a position which triangulates the relation between other two (surplus enjoyment, which “loops” from enjoyment back to semblance), and one position in which none of the vectors arrive (truth).

2.4 Four possible operations, or ʻquarter-turnsʼ, which allow for four discourses:

2.4.0.1 We will analyze each of the discourses in detail in Chapter 4. Our goal here is just to present their configurations:

Masterʼs Discourse (dM)

University Discourse (dU)

Hystericsʼ Discourse (dH)

Analystʼs Discourse (dA)

3. After constructing the Discourses, it is worthwhile to analyze two temporal dimensions of the mathemes: their relation to History and the temporality at work within them.

3.1 Here we focus on Milnerʼs interpretation of the discourses as ʻanti-historyʼ. Milner emphasizes that the ʻquarter turnsʼ between the discourses are not chronological, but logical. As Lacan himself said in the 17th Seminar “my quadripodes are not the mystic table of History”. The discourses can be found in History but they do not correspond to each other as historical moments.

Milner says that the relation between propositions in different discourses can only be of homonymy, never of synonymy, which is another way of saying that ʻsuccessionʼ amongst Discourses is an imaginary notion, a product of the repetition of an homonymous element, rather than the repetition, in two different discourses, of the relation between elements. Because of this, in the theory of discourses, “the notion of a cut and the notion of discourse co-belong entirely: between two really distinct discourses there is no other relation than that of a cut, but the cut names only the real difference between discourses.”

So, in contrast to the chronological time of history, defined by a form of continuity, the passage from one discourse to another can be only understood in the mode of logical cuts. The serial order which punctuates the path from one discursivity to another must be located within the discourse from which it is enunciated.

In relation to this, it might be worthwhile to relate Milnerʼs topic of ʻanti-historyʼ with Laplache and Pontalisʼ book Originary Fantasy, Fantasy of Origins, Origins of Fantasy. In it, the authors brilliantly demonstrate the relation between the attempt to give meaning to the master-signifier of sexuality - the attempt to suture the impossibility of the ʻgapʼ and the series of signifiers - with the underlaying fantasy of this very discourse - the relation between the subject and the enjoyment produced by this operation.

3.2 Then we move on to analyze in more detail the temporality at work within the discursivity. Given its vectors, we can see that there is a logical loop which ties the ʻS₁ʼ to the little ʻaʼ, through ʻS₂ʼ and mediated by the subject.

As discussed before, this is the movement from the contingency (of the S₁ʼs inscription) to the essence (of the necessity of the subject). The presupposed start of its movement is a ʻcutʻ or ʻgapʼ,which retroactively gains consistence through the ʻloopʼ mentioned above.

This is precisely the function of the symbolic phallus, as one of the names of the master-signifier: it is that which represents a gap, but at the same time that it “is not”, it “will have been” something, by the force of the excessʼ retroactive force. Hence it being a gap and a Two, at the same time.

The temporality within the Discourses is thus not chronological as well. Its operator is a cut which divides the position of ʻagencyʼ from within, giving it the semblance of ʻit which actsʼ at the same time that it relies on the remainder from its operation to ʻact uponʼ it.

3.3 In 3.1 we showed that the temporality between Discourses is not chronological. In 3.2 we showed that within the Discourses there is also no chronology. We have two ʻnon-coincidentalʼ circles (in which the place we leave is different from the place we arrive), tied together by the operation of a cut.

We had seen this temporality at work in Hegel, when, in Chapter 1, we compared Zizekʼs and Kojeveʼs reading of the temporality of the concrete universality and of the dialectics of time.

We saw that Kojeve portrayed Hegelʼs relation between concept and time in the following manner:

In which the small circle that goes from historical time of the concept to eternity of its immutable form (a=A by relating to Eternity) in Plato was cast off, and only historical time remained (a=A in absolute knowledge). We showed that Zizekʼs reading of Hegel presented a figure much more similar to:

In which ʻaʼ presupposes an ʻAʼ, but the realization of ʻaʼ changes this presupposed ʻAʼ itself, so that there is a non-coincidence in the larger circle, a gap, which goes all the way to the Notion, which is also cut from within, struggling with its concrete appearance. The

difference that was first apparent in a≠A becomes internalized by a (a≠a) and by A (A≠A), so that in their inner split, they do coincide.

We argue that the temporality at work in Lacanʼs Four Discourses is precisely this second one - with the further addition that, because there is a formal place for the difference which prevents any term form coinciding with itself, named ʻobject aʼ, Lacan goes from the double-circle developed by Hegel, to the figure of the torus, in which the temporality of Demand (D), akin to the movement from one ʻaʼ to another, and of Desire (d), akin to the movement from ʻaʼ to ʻAʼ are articulated together, around the empty centre of the object a (a):

We can decompose Demand into S₁➝S₂, in which S₁ - written without ʻaʼ, its excess - could be said to name the imaginary phallus φ, the signifier of “itʼ-self or of coincidence (hence the “circularity”). The impossibility at the horizon of Demand is the inscription of S₁ back into S₂, another way of writing $ ◇ φ. On the other hand, Desire is written as $ ◇ a, because the failure of Demand - the impossible coincidence of a signifier with itself which it demands from the subject - opens the space for the impossibility which cuts through the Other and the subject, the empty place marked by the object a. We can return to the torus and draw in it the composite line of this two simultaneous movements, both prompted by the impossible incarnated by the ʻobject aʼ:

In Hegelʼs work we could already name the operation of non-coincidence from the side of the concept. We could see how - in his not yet fully developed theory of representation - there is no outside of the Notion, there is only a notion-in-itself (representations of “itself”, the imaginary phallus) and a notion-for-itself (representations inherently split from within, opening to other representations, the symbolic phallus). But we still lacked a formal name for that which causes the split - in Hegel this formal place was filled by Time itself.

With Lacan, temporality is itself “castrated”, split, and the relation between historical time and the time of the Notion is now formally defined. The confusion of the two, as we showed before, is what allowed the naive kojevian reading of Hegelʼs Absolute Knowledge as the moment of the “whole” where the two temporal structures should intersect. This reading can be explained now as a disavowed moment of the matrix of discourse (and of the true development of Hegelʼs dialectics), because we now know that the two temporalities “intersect” in a double cut or gap.

We can relate this to Lacanʼs development of the relation between the RSI and the torus in his 23rd Seminar (lesson 1), when Lacan demonstrates that to hold together the relation between S and I (between the temporality of the death drive and the normal continuity of the chronological nexus) by the knotting of the third ring, of the Real, which can also be thought as an “infinite line”, guaranteeing that the knot between the two other registers is not held by a consistency, but by a gap, which then forms the torus.

From:

To:

4. One of Zizekʼs most important contributions to a renewed, lacanian reading of Hegel is the insistence precisely on this temporal dimension which sets out from nothingness towards Being. This appears as a nodal argument not only in his comments on concrete universality and the Absolute Knowledge, but also in his emphasis on the conceptual point that self-consciousness is not itself conscious.

And indeed, in the same way that Alfredo Garcia-Rosa remarks, concerning Freudʼs first attempts to formally conceptualize the psychic apparatus, that consciousness was not only poorly accounted for in them, but seemed not to be needed at all, it is worth asking the same question regarding Hegel: the dialectical movement goes towards Spirit knowing itself - but does this also imply that consciousness needs to move towards self-knowledge? If this were so, wouldnʼt “consciousness” and “self-consciousness” be two moments of the same Notion?

Since Hegel did not have a concept to name the excess of the cogito - though its internal split is effectively operative - the difference between the ego and the subject is sometimes sutured in the figure of self-consciousness, as if in the figure of Absolute Knowledge the ʻI thinkʼ would fold itself over the ʻI amʼ.

Only with the addition of a formal place for the excess/cause which holds the two moments of the cogito structurally apart can we guarantee that the subject is not the ego and that, because of this this double temporality mentioned above, that of the death drive, the Spirit is precisely that which institutes the unconscious in the world.

Only in this way can we formally differentiate “consciousness” and “self-consciousness” and come to the true formulation of what Hegel first wanted to call his Phenomenology: The science of the experience of consciousness. It is ʻexperiencedʼ because ʻconsciousnessʼ and ʻsubjectʼ are not the same.

4.1 We have defined Lacanʼs notion of ʻdiscourseʼ as ʻsocial link or bondʼ, but after constructing the matheme of the Discourses, we can move a bit further and claim that ʻdiscourseʼ for Lacan means the same as ʻdialecticsʼ for Hegel.

Chapter IV

0. In this chapter we will analyze each one of the four Discourses - the Masterʼs, the Hystericʼs, the Universityʼs and the Analystʼs Discourse - and deprehend some important articulations made possible by them. This will simultaneously allow us to exemplify the application of the matheme of the Discourses.

1. Masterʼs Discourse (dM)

1.0.1 Characteristics of the matheme:

1.0.1.1

The enunciation seems its own justification; The irrationality of the Master as Agency; the reproduction of the split inherent to the subject as the split between subject and its representation (the quote x the enigma); “we are not without a relation to truth”

1.0.1.2

“anguish is not without an object”; repetition, tautology and “viscosity” of enjoyment; Knowledge and entropy.

1.0.1.3

“The master just wants it to move”; The ignorance of the Law; 16th and 20th Seminars: (S➝A) and (S₁➝S₂); from 0 (∅) to 2([∅]), $ ◇ D; the impossibility of governing

1.0.1.4

The matheme of fantasy; Kant ($ ◇ a) with Sade ($ ◇ D, or ($ ◇(S₁➝S₂))) - Zupancicʼs reading of the immortal body in Kant and Sade; Castration and Law

1.1 dM and the dialectics of the Master and the Slave: the relation between Master, Slave and the risk of Death.

1.1.0.1 Here we will focus on Lacanʼs critique of (the kojevian reading of) Hegelʼs Master and Slave dialectics. Lacan repeatedly commented that there is no reason why the struggle for pure prestige should amount to the figure of death as the absolute master. His comments allow us to further demonstrate the development of Hegel that the Discourses represent.

1.1.1 The Christian Event in Hegel and Lacan: the two deaths and Padre Antonio Vieiraʼs The art of dying.

Here we will use Hegelʼs account of the Christian Event - in which the death of Christ is his resurrection - to argue that one of the consequences of this Event is that rather than serving death (as the Absolute Master) the Christian Event inaugurates the possibility of serving ourselves of death - this is what the death driveʼs dimension is.

In line with Hegelʼs presentation of the Christian Event, we affirm that the risk of death, which is the operator of the dialectics of the Master and the Slave, cannot be made absolute - it is necessarily separated from the place of the Master. Here we refer to Padre Antonio Vieiraʼs sermons on death and Christ, as well as to Brechtʼs play on consent, to show that it is precisely when one is in accord to this double dimension of death - on getting past Death as the Absolute Master, recognizing castration and the place of the object a - that one can serve oneself of it.

1.1.2 Brazilʼs declaration of independence: “Independence or Death!” as another example of the relation between Master, Slave and Death.

Here we will use the famous tale of Dom Pedroʼs cry ʻIndependence or Death!ʼ, on the margin of the Ipiranga river, to relate the semblance of mastery, the risk of death and the foundation of a community on this disavowal. We relate ʻIndependence or Death!ʼ to ʻPurse or your life!ʼ, the famous foundation of usury. The relation between death and usury can be seen in the word “mort-gage” and its disavowal can be exemplified by a further “diptych”, one which happened recently in Brazil, when a man was about to win a million reais if he answered correctly what was written in the brazilian flag (Order and Progress) and he changed the ʻandʼ for an ʻʼorʼ - showing that he rather win the surplus over the direct investment (one million)!

1.2 The difference between “God is Dead” and “God is Unconscious”.

Following Hegel and Zizek, we have established that there is a complex relation between the death of Christ and the death of God, in which a retroactive movement from Christ to God changes the very notion of what God is. Using Zizekʼs affirmation of the Event of Christ having the structure of the hegelian concrete universality, we return to our analysis of the Christian Event using François Regnaultʼs God is Unconscious as a reference to argue for a hegelian reading of the question of filiation.

In his book, Regnault presents different versions of the relation between Father, Son and Holy Spirit - but he leaves one out: the one in which the Father is constituted by the non-coincidence of the Son with himself, a non-coincidence of which the Holy Spirit is the operator. This is precisely the reading which opens up the space for us to emphasize how the discourse of the Master can be overcome only by “loving God”, as Lacan says in The

Subversion of the Subject and Dialectics of Desire, which, we affirm needs to be seen as the passage not from dM to dA, but from dM to dH via dA: the movement from the murder of the father, which institutes the beyond of enjoyment, to the “true formula of atheism” is operated by the knowledge that ʻGodʼ is a retroactive function of the excess inherent to speech. As Meister Eckhart said, after Christ, it is God who needs us, not the other way around.

1.3 dM and Badiouʼs matheme of the faithful subject: the difference between a unary trait and an evental trace.

Our presentation of the Christian Event led us to talk about the structural aspect of the generic Event as such, which is found in its most complete elaboration in Badiouʼs philosophy. We begin by presenting Badiouʼs matheme of the faithful subject and its elements:

We then compare it to the structure of the dM, elaborating on its similitudes and differences. We already saw that there are two different theories of representation at work - and while the subject in psychoanalysis is barred because he is not fully represented by the operation of the unary trait, because there is always an excess, the object a, the subjectivized body of the Event is split between the evental trace and the Present, he is split because he is fully represented between the two.

This leads us to Badiouʼs reading of ʻthere is no sexual relationʼ, which - together with our previous claim that the figure of the Two of non-relation can be found in sexuality as well as in class struggle - explains why Badiou abides to the current resistance to State politics as a form of alienating the subject in meta-presentations. The relation between Event and State is of necessary disjunction, since the State is a One of meta-representation, closing the gap in Being, the inscription of the Event.

1.3.3 Fidelity to Desire; Fidelity to Drive.

Still on the same subject, we move from the place of the Event to the question of fidelity. If fidelity is directly related to the (empty) inscription of the evental trace in the world, then it is a matter of desire: a matter of finding a place in the Present for the forcing of the inscription of the founding mark of truth. If the fidelity is to the excess - if enjoyment is a category of fidelity - then fidelity is a matter of drive. The space to think fidelity in relation to the death drive allows us to think of a third perspective regarding the repetition of historical figures and situations, first conceptualized by Hegel, then additionally thought by Marx: there is a positive aspect to the repetition ʻas farceʼ: in order to open the space for the New, the repetition of the Old makes it a farce, it is the repetition of the master-signifier of a given situation which makes its imposture discernible.

1.3.3.1 When we betray the Cause, do we feel guilty or ashamed?

To conclude the argument about the difference between desire-fidelity and drive-fidelity, we take on Millerʼs interpretation of Lacanʼs last lesson of the 17th Seminar to argue that while for Badiou the subject is either at service of the truth or of its denial, or occultation, for psychoanalysis the subject is both faithful and in denial at the same time. Because of this, the faithful subject is above all the one who feels shame. And in betrayal, guilt. This also leads us, relating back to the Christian Event, to say that the faithful subject, for psychoanalysis, is always a resurrected subject. The difference between christianity and dialectical materialism is that, in the former, one reincarnates after life, while in psychoanalysis one reincarnates within life.

1.4 Hegelʼs discourse as the Masterʼs Discourse

We focus here on Mladen Dolarʼs explanation of why Hegel fits the Lacanʼs claim of being the greatest example of the dM in his 17th Seminar - a claim he contradicts two times in the course of his lectures of that year. Dolar nevertheless affirms that Hegel does fit all of the contradictory positions he is ascribed to by Lacan.

1.5 There are two modes of disavowing the dM - two ways of including a back into S₁:

or

1.5.1 We propose here that the indistinction between S₁ and a - the conceptual disavowal of their separation/articulation - amounts to a ʻperverseʼ matrix of discursivity. As we previously demonstrated, the master-signifier is the signifier of the Two because it is always in excess to itself - it is an empty signifier that cannot be inscribed without also inscribing its empty place, with which it doesnʼt coincide, forever separating every other signifier from its material support (the letter, the object a).

To think the master signifier as One is to inscribe back into it (S₁) the material support of the signifier (a) from which it is forever separated, and which marks the effects of the master signifier in the body. This amounts either to the positing that there is something else, a particular signifier (S₁+a), that could fill the Otherʼs lack or to positing oneʼs own body as this signifier (a+ S₁).

Both cases amount to the substitution in the matrix of discursivity of the pair [S₁;a] for what Lacan calls the imaginary phallus (φ), the support of a fantasy of completion. We thus put forward the hypothesis that the disavowal of the articulation between signifier and jouissance amounts to the two formalizations presented above, in which we can see that all the other terms also suffer a change: if there is no excess, S₂ becomes A, and the barred subject ($) is not barred anymore - and is thus written as S.

The two versions are equivalent, the only difference is where the imaginary phallus is posited - in the subject or in the Other. To explain this, we will refer to Hegelʼs chapter on Perception in the Phenomenology of Spirit, which explains how the movement of positing self-coincidence sometimes posits the subject as ʻidentical to itselfʼ and sometimes the object - through these continual displacements the subject can keep as a background the fantasy that there is One. We find these two strategies fully described by Lacan in his 4th Seminar, when he deals with fobia and fetishism.

(As an alternative mode of writing, we suggest that on the side in which the element appears alone (A in the first case above, S in the second) it might be helpful to also write the “lack in being” (-φ) to demarcate the place where the imaginary phallus is not.)

2. University Discourse (dU)

2.0.1 Characteristics of the matheme:

2.0.1.1

Knowledge as Semblance: grounding Understanding on itself; the difference between S₂ /S₁ and S₂ / a: a knowledge which lacks the lack or a knowledge that produces a loss; The passage from impossibility (S₁➝) to unthinkability (/ S₁) and the “totality of signifiers”; Fetish and coincidence - the ʻIʼ-cracy;

2.0.1.2

The small other in the place of the Other; From $ ◇ a, to a ◇ $ (matheme of the obsessive symptom), and then a / $; from impotence (◇ a) to production (a / ) or the “totality” of what is not a signifier;

2.0.1.3

The fantasy of the Whole: the logic of inclusion; the disappearance of contingency: “it had to happen so that I would become who I am”; The door into the University Discourse is the door out of it.; the impossibility of teaching

2.0.1.4

The impotence to distinguish the father is not the impotence of the father itself; “The new blessed ones”: post-traumatic subjectivity;

2.1 Time and History in dU.

2.1.1 The passage from dM to dU as seen from dU: here we read Milnerʼs comment on the Discourses as “anti-history” with Laplancheʼs “Originary Fantasy, the Fantasy of Origin and the Origin of Fantasy”: this allows us to stress that the passage from one discourse to another , though thought in history, is only done so retroactively and says more about the discourse it is done from than about the actual shift it describes.

2.1.1.1 Is the Masterʼs Discourse the Discourse of the Master?

We have shown that the structure of the dM is based on the separation of death into two - S₁ and a. Having now presented the structure of dU, we proceed to state that it is the confusion of the master signifier and the object a which defines the discourse of the Old Master, not so much the irrationality of the master as agent.

2.1.2 Living in the End Times: when ʻapocalypseʼ is the only possible name of Time. The relation between symbolic and imaginary phallus: “itʼs the end, this is it”

We used a zizekian reading of Koyréʼs article Hegel in Jena to affirm that the symbolic phallus is equivalent to Hegelʼs “now”- the signifier which “is and is not” and, as such, operates the passage of Time. Time, as Hegel repeatedly claims, is what fills the dialectics with life, and, because of that, Koyré claims that the dialectics of the instant mirrors the whole logic of dialectics in general.

If we accept - in a manner that seems somewhat acceptable now even by some scientists, such as Prigogine - that the arrow of time is somehow the product of entropy, which is, in psychoanalytical terms, a product of the circulation prompted by the master-signifierʼs emptiness, then the seeming disappearance of the master-signifier in dU can be said to be the root of the double-threat of ʻthe End of Historyʼ and of the Eternal Present of which Badiou has been currently writing.

2.1.3 “End of History” and Nietzscheʼs ahistorical Time.

We have nevertheless argued, in line with Lacanʼs teaching in the 17th Seminar, that it is the real father who is the agent of castration, which is in itself a claim that already shines through to another dimension, one which is not bound by whatever quarter-turn is operated in the Discourses.

With this in mind, it might be useful to compare Fukuyamaʼs ʻEnd of Historyʼ with Zupancicʼs reading of Niezscheʼs ʻahistorical timeʼ - which she relates and contrasts to the

badiouian Event, focusing not so much in how the subject lives up to the declaration of the New, but on how the very declaration is done from the place of its own failure.

Zupancicʼs reading of Nietzsche is particularly contrasted to Badiouʼs theory of the Event on their different understandings of the status of the declaration of the Event. While Zupacic argues that the declaration is itself the Event - that they take place at the same time - Badiou understands that the Event and the declaration are two separated moments. The philosopher goes as far as stating that it was precisely Nietzscheʼs attempt to make the two be the same that led him into madness.

Our presentation of the four Discourses and the comparison we made to Badiouʼs work allows us to side with Zupancic and further affirm that what is being introduced into Badiouʼs theory of the Event by Zupancicʼs reading is precisely the dimension of the inherent failure of the declaration as the space of the Event - the idea that what makes a mark in History, “breaking it in two” is precisely Time insofar as it parasites History, never allowing it to be the ʻwholeʼ of time.

This is also connected to Fabio Vighiʼs plea for the reconsideration of the act that is inherent to the dimension of the word, rather than the idea that the act purely coincides with action.

2.2 Sohn-Rethel with Lacan: from the fetish of the commodity to the fetish of the signifier.

Here we analyze the relation between the transcendental subject - as the subjective formation which coincides with itself in an “I=I” - and real abstraction, mostly summing up Sohn-Rethelʼs account of this relation. We intend to show how Lacanʼs claim of dUʼs “I”-cracy is structurally homologous to what Sohn-Rethel was arguing.

Our task here is to give Hegelʼs and Zizekʼs claim a more descriptive - and lacanian - support: “In the social field, the “as if” is the thing itself”. This can be seen as a reworking of Zizekʼs early thesis that the Capital is the Real, the other-wordly place of enjoyment which is sustained by the the excess to the operations of exchange and production of surplus-value. We will use Fabio Vighiʼs reading of “Lacan with Sohn Rethel” to demonstrate this.

2.2.1 The Universityʼs Discourse is not the discourse of the university

After talking about the relation between the articulation of signifiers and the imaginary formation of the transcendental I, we stress that it is not knowledge which alienates the subject, for there is knowledge which does not suture the subjectʼs desire (as this thesis itself shows). It is the very thought that knowledge alienates which grounds the idea that knowledge should not be shared, which is what actually has an alienating effect.

2.2.2 Zupancicʼs When Surplus-enjoyment meets Surplus-value, or when the Capital enjoys what the capitalist accumulates.

After focusing on the relation between real abstraction and Capital - in which real abstraction is that which holds the space open for Capital qua Thing - we analyze Zupancicʼs text with attention to the relation that is established in dU between enjoyment and accumulation: insofar as the capitalist must put the surplus-value extracted from the worker itself to work, he is also bound to the Capital in a way that expropriates from him his work as well. As we previously discussed, regarding the concept of ʻslave moralityʼ,

directly associated to the functioning of dU, what happens in the so called free market is not that the proletariat disappears, but that it is universalized.

2.2.3 Claudio Oliveiraʼs Witz, Surplus Value and Surplus Enjoyment, or: why does the capitalist laugh?

We then compare Zupancicʼs basic thesis of The Odd One In - in which she presents the matheme ½+½=1+a as the formula of comedy - with Claudio Oliveiraʼs essay, which deals with the hypothesis that capitalism has the structure of a joke (S₂➝a)

2.2.4 From the proletariat to the sub-proletariat

From this notion of ʻuniversalization of the proletariatʼ, we move on to Lacanʼs claim that the position of the subject in dU is not that of the proletariat, but of the lumpenproletariat. We briefly describe Lacanʼs argument, for we will return to this later and deal with the position of the subject in dU in more detail in Chapter 5.

2.3 Some fantasies of the University Discourse:

2.3.1 ʻObject aʼ in the zenith of discursivity. Here we discuss Millerʼs diagnosis of the dA as new hegemonic discourse and of the current state of ʻshamelessnessʼ focusing on how dU can appear as dA on account of the structure of perversion.

2.3.2 Pierre Brunoʼs “fifth discourse”: the matheme of capitalism as the matheme “of a discourse without excessʼ, which was presented, and discarded, by Lacan himself.

Here we present Pierre Brunoʼs version of the capitalist discourse and claim that it is a product of the fantasy of the whole, which is supported by dU.

2.3.3 What is made of the RSI in the dU:

Real returns as the Imaginary shocking images, obscenity...

Symbolic is called the Real Ryzome, Deconstruction, etc..

Imaginary is called the Symbolic the consistency of sense guarantees the validity of

the relation

2.3.4 We also discuss the relation between the lower matheme of dU - S₁◇ $ - can be said to support the diagnosis of ʻordinary psychosisʼ only if we accept that ʻS₁◇ $ʼ works as forclusion of S₁, which would imply a different quality to the connector ʻ◇ʼ, which operates a radical separation. Forclusion, on the other side, is a radical alienation. It is important to point this out in our analysis of the dU, but we will return to this point once we focus on the position of the subject in dU, in Chapter 5.

2.3.4 Hegel as “the sublime representative of the discourse of knowledge and the university knowledge”

We return to Mladen Dolarʼs essay Hegel as the Other Side of Psychoanalysis to present the reasons why Lacan believes that Hegel “is the most exemplary representative of the discourse of knowledge”.

2.4 The crisis in sublimation: how to elevate something to the dignity of the Thing when the Thing is unthinkable, or said not to exist?

We claim that one of the most concise manners to name the most important consequence of the seeming disappearance of the master-signifier in dU is to refer to a crisis in sublimation. Zupancic gives a long account of it in her book on Nietzsche and, after presenting the basis coordinates of her presentation of this crisis, we try to relate it to the structure of dU - a relation already made quite explicit in Zupancicʼs work as well.

2.4.1 From the crisis in sublimation we move back to Badiou. Following the philosopherʼs book on Saint Paul, we argue that in ʻdemocratic materialismʼ, the badiouian name for the current hegemonic social bond, the four generic procedures - Love, Art, Science, Politics - are perverted into Law, Entertainment, Technology and Management. Badiou proposes different terms (Sex instead of Law, for example), but our previous account of the place of sexuality and the death drive lead us to propose a slightly different version of them.

2.4.2 After describing how the crisis in sublimation affects all the generic procedures, not only the artistic one, we move back to Zupancicʼs and Zizekʼs work, where we find the notion of Real as ʻminimal differenceʼ, a notion very much indebted to Lacanʼs formalization of the object a in the 16th seminar. The real as ʻminimal differenceʼ could, maybe, be also called a surplus-real. It is through this particular notion of Real that both authors see the possibility to maintain operational the space of sublimation. The political relevance of the notion of non-coincidence, in a time in which not even Time, as we previously saw, is directly sublimated, should become a bit more clear here.

2.5 Disavowal of the University Discourse:

or

3. Hystericsʼ Discourse (dH)

3.0.1 Characteristics of the matheme

3.0.1.1

Negativity as Agent: to speak of the split, from the split or in the name of the split; the difference between a /$ and $ / a; Enjoyment as the Truth of discursivity; “refusal of the body”; Castration and the love of truth; “an injustice is being done to the subject”

3.0.1.2

Galileo: Nature as a letter; The symptom is rational but not understandable; S₂/S₁, S₁➝S₂ and S₁/S₂: it is natural, it has to work and it has to be known; “the signifier always fails to account for the truth”

3.0.1.3

“Father canʼt you see Iʼm burning?”; the impossibility of causing desire: there is no cause of the cause; Ms. K and S₁ as One, Dora and S₁ as Nothing; From “the emperor is naked” to “the emperor is not the emperor”, or “the master is incompetent”; S₁◇ $ and $ ➝S₁: from one non-relation to another.

3.0.1.4

”Truth can only be half-said” (and supposing all the truth on “the other half”); “satisfaction is always a false satisfaction”; pointing towards the structural: the necessity of the object a; “Why do you say x when you mean x(+a)”?

3.1 “Hysteria” and “Proletariat” - Freud, Marx and the symptom.

Here we will analyze some elements of the relation between ʻhysteriaʼ and ʻproletariatʼ as two positions defined by their relations to the totality. Following Zizek, we intend to show that the two occupy the same structural place, articulated by the structure of dH.

This is an important point, because it allows us to create a distinction between ʻrevolutionaryʼ and ʻproletariatʼ subjectivity. Though the first can be equated with dA, as Zizek himself has shown, it is the proper formalization of the later that we are concerned with, since before thinking of revolution we should recognize which is the class which can potentially follow such an act.

We intend to show that what is normally considered to be the difference between dH and dA should be internalized to dH itself: though in the end of analysis the analysand is ready to occupy the position of the analyst, this does not mean that a ʻwell analyzedʼ hysteric simply changes from dH to dA: we should consider and formalize the possible differentiation that can be accomplished within dH itself.

3.1.2 What does it mean to want a new master?

Once we established that there is a difference between a disavowal of dH and dH proper, we should move on to state that Lacanʼs response to the students who were screaming ʻrevolution!ʼ back in ʼ68 didnʼt simply refer to their ignorance - it also made clear the difference between the two hysterics: when one doesnʼt want a master, what we get is dU, an even more tyrannic form of mastery, but when we do want one, we move into a completely different realm. The discourse of the hysteric is not the Hystericʼs Discourse.

At this point we claim that it is precisely this resistance against mastery that allows us to confuse not only dM and dU, but also dH and dA - diminishing the victory that being a well positioned hysteric can be, in favor of the maintenance of a fantasy of revolution which gets invested in dA.

3.1.3 A knowledge that doesnʼt know itself.

After establishing the importance of dH we refer back to an element of this discursivity that is present not only in Freudʼs concept of hysteria and Marxʼs proletarian, but specially in the hegelian subject as such: the disjunction between Being and Knowledge, which Mladen Dolar reminds us to characterize the subject in the Phenomenology of Spirit - and which was later fully developed by Lacan a propos of the cartesian cogito.

3.1.4 Marxism and Psychoanalysis are answers to the Event...Hegel.

After encountering in dH the zizekian triad of Marx, Freud and Hegel, we pose the following hypothesis: one of the breakthroughʼs of Hegelʼs work was the affirmation of the ontological position of subject qua hysteric. But since this could not be properly formalized by the philosopher himself, because of the issue of temporality we analyzed in Chapter I and III, it was left to Marx to identify how this subjectivity appeared in History - the proletariat - and to Freud to analyze how the other side of temporality, death drive, affected individual bodies - hysteria. In this way we claim that Hegel names the Event to which both Marx and Freud were faithful to, and which, with Lacan and Zizek, find now a new presentation, in which the two temporalities are not thought separately anymore.

3.2 dH and fidelity: to be faithful to a Cause

When we analyzed dM we referred to Badiou and the theory of the Event. We proposed to think fidelity in psychoanalytical terms. Here we try to find a more solid support for the claim that fidelity needs to be thought in relation to enjoyment.

3.2.1“the only way not to believe in God is to love Him”

We focus on the non-relation between $ ➝S₁ in dH to claim that the movement from ʻGod is Deadʼ to ʻGod is unconsciousʼ, described above, is another version of the movement proposed by Lacan in Subversion of the Subject and Dialectics of Desire when he moves from ʻto get rid of the Big Otherʼ to ʻlove the Otherʼ.

3.2.2 From disavowal to hysteria - not ʻdespiteʼ, or ʻeven soʼ but because.

This movement from a disavowal of dH to dH proper can be seen also in J-C Milnerʼs hommage to Lacan, at the end of The Indistinct Names:

“The fact that homonymy is the Real of lalangue doesnʼt amount to the inscription of whatever it is in lalangue being unnecessary; from the fact that all thought, once named, is equivocal it doesnʼt result that it is unnecessary to think; the fact that all names are multiply ambiguous doesnʼt amount to naming being unnecessary; that univocity is the impossible doesnʼt mean that it shouldnʼt command a desire. One must talk, think and name, and, singularly, one must talk, think and name the homonymy - even if this means concentrating it with one sole signifier, which is a proper noun: Lacan”

We hold that the courage implied by his statement is that of accepting castration even if the cost is losing the semblance of saintliness that characterizes the desire to be an analyst.

3.3.3 To serve oneself of the father: From Joyce (“letter/litter”) to Beckett (“Fail again. Fail better”)

We exemplify this by briefly comparing the commonsensical claim that Joyce is the subject of the sinthome with the beckettian motto, incarnated by many of his characters, of ʻfail again, fail betterʼ. We also propose the hypothesis that though Joyce was the perfect example for what Lacan was answering to in his Seminar 23 - how is clinic possible in dU? - it is Beckett who gives us the best reference as hysterics on how to position ourselves. No wonder he is Lacanʼs reference in Lituraterre.

3.4 Hegel, “the most sublime of Hysterics”

We already suggested, following Zizek and Dolar, that Hegel was the first to place the hysterical subject at the heart of philosophy and, in a way, overcame the opposition between philosophy and sophistry. We now return to Dolarʼs text and present his reading of Lacanʼs claims a propos of Hegel as “the most sublime of hysterics” in his 17th Seminar.

3.5 Disavowals of the dH:

or

4. Analystʼs Discourse (dA)

4.0.1 Characteristics of the matheme:

4.0.1.1

Object a as semblance - knowledge as truth; From the failure of appearance to appearance qua appearance; Zizekʼs “Hegel with Lacan”: matheme of Absolute Knowledge and the cause of the mathemes;

4.0.1.2

The emergence of the New: to produce emptiness out of nothingness; The subject in the position of enjoyment and production of the name of jouissance; From $ ➝ S₁to $ / S₁: from the enigma to the transmission - or: The Rooster of Mid-Day and the Owl at Dusk; Science produces Understanding, Psychoanalysis produces Reason

4.0.1.3

The analytical act and its ʻacting uponʼ; The subject supposed to know; $ ◇ a and a ➝ $: from one non-relation (◇) to another (➝); the discourse of the analyst is not the discourse of the analysand

4.0.1.4

Is knowledge in the place of truth a knowledge with “truth-value”?; knowledge of totality is not totality of knowledge: “docte ignorantia”?; lalangue and the non-All; the master discourse is not the other side of psychoanalysis.

4.1 Is ʻa discourse without wordsʼ a ʻdiscourse that would not be of semblanceʼ?

Here we will compare Lacanʼs claim that psychoanalysis is a discourse without words to the claim, made specially in his 18th Seminar, that it is a discourse that would not be of semblance.

We begin by focusing on the difference between word, writing and speech, to emphasize that a discourse without words is not a silent discourse. If ʻknowledge writesʼ and ʻtruth speaksʼ, one must also not forget that the two realms cross somewhere: something must be written in order for it to speak, and something of speech moves towards writing itself. This is why Lacan is very precise in reminding us that the word as such is neither the written nor the spoken. Because of this, ʻa discourse without wordsʼ is an even more radical mode of writing and speaking: it is a discourse which knots knowledge and truth not in the word - the word is still too much articulated, there is too much imaginary at stake - but in the literality of the letter.

We then move on to the second claim, of ʻa discourse that would not be of semblanceʼ. It is important to note the temporality of this sentence: in it is written in the conditional form - qui ne serait pas - ʻthat would not beʼ of semblance. As both Zizek and Milner have argued, the division between the Lacanʼs seminars and writings is also the division between Lacan speaking from the position of an analysand (seminars) and Lacan writing from the position of an analyst (his scripta). Lacan begins the 18th Seminar by affirming that ʻthe discourse that would not be of semblanceʼ is not the discourse he is speaking.

If we agree with Zizek and Milner in their claim that it is in Lacanʼs scripta that we find him addressing us from the position of the analyst - as the introduction to the Écrits makes it very clear - one further claim that we can make is that what the discourse of the analyst produces is a writing (S₁), but one which is not meant to be read - as Lacan commented a propos of the Écrits. If to read is to articulate a certain mark into a network of associations (S₂) we can see that the matheme of the lower part of the dA (S₂◇ S₁) presents precisely a mark which is non-related to the field of knowledge qua association. But at the same time, since we have previously established that S₁ is to Reason such as S₂ is to Understanding, we can thus affirm that the analystʼs discourse deals with Reason as such. If the hegelian ʻcunning of Reasonʼ is the rational movement from contingency to essence (the vector in dM goes from a to S₁), the analytical discourse is what founds Reason proper, by affirming that what has the place of essence has such a place precisely because it is contingent to start with (the vector goes from S₁ to a) - the contingent and unpredictable remainder itself becomes essential. The dA is more rational than Reason.

4.2 Homo Sacer and the Saint: From the fantasy of pure desire...

Following Lacanʼs famous claim that the analyst is a saint (which can be found in Television and in the Discourse to the Freudian School) and Teixeiraʼs and Regnaultʼs

readings of this affirmation, we focus here on the relation between enjoyment and the position of the analyst.

Put succinctly, Lacan defines the analyst-saint as the one who is “the refuse of enjoyment”. But the formulation of the analyst as saint appeared almost simultaneously with the doctrine of the matheme, which is itself defined by the conceptualization of enjoyment as surplus-enjoyment, as a mode of ʻrefusingʼ an enjoyment which is in itself impossible.

It is clear then that a “refusal of enjoyment” is not enough to differentiate the two sacers which appear in the Four Discourses: the analyst-saint (a/S₂), agent of “trashery” (a pun with ʻtrashʼ, in opposition to ʻcharityʼ), and the homo sacer, the subject in the dU, which is produced as a remainder from surplus-enjoyment itself (a/ $), because of its continuous re-inscription in the chain of signifiers (S₂➝a).

So - as Zupancic has brilliantly put in The Shortest Shadow - the question which distinguishes the two positions is: how to resist the imperative to enjoy without producing surplus-enjoyment? The answer sketched by the philosopherʼs reading of Nietzsche should be read together with Lacanʼs reading of Pascalʼs wager (which we analyzed in Chapter 3): the passage from (the christianʼs) a to (the atheistʼs) 0 is not a matter of resistance, but of what does a stand for. In the same manner, Zupancic argues that rather than look for a “no!” which could be opposed to the “yes!” of the imperative of enjoyment - which is, strictu sensu, already a reinforced negation - we should look for a “minimal yes”, to the little of enjoyment that one cannot get rid of. Here is the whole passage in which this is elaborated by Zupancic:

“The whole difficulty lies in the question of if and how it is possible to say “No” to this suffocating Superego imperative of enjoyment. Here we could recall the joke about John, who decides to pay a visit to a psychiatrist because he wets his bed every night. He explains to the doctor that every night, a dwarf appears in this dream, saying to him: “And now, dear John, we are going to pee” And John duly pees in his bed. The psychiatrist advises him to respond to the dwarfʼs invitation with a determined “NO!”. John goes home, but returns the next day. “I followed your advice,” he says to the doctor. “When the dwarf appeared, and encouraged me to pee, I firmly said NO! But then the dwarf replied: Very well, then, in that case, we are going to shit.”

So the question is how to escape the imperative of enjoyment, if - as Freud has so brilliantly shown - every new renunciation, every “no” of this kind, has the effect of involving us even more deeply in this logic of the Superego. Maybe we should try through a Nietzschean gesture: with a “yes” - a “yes” not to the imperative of enjoyment, but to the little bit of enjoyment that keeps persisting on the subjectʼs part, although he believes that (as a result of his renunciation of enjoyment) all enjoyment is now the property of the Thing. This would mean, for instance, that we would reply to the dwarf appearing in our dreams along the lines of: “Hello there! The very sight of you makes me want to pee.” This could have the effect of waking the subject, waking him from his dream (but also awakening him to the Real of his own desire and enjoyment) Instead of spending all his energy in trying to escape this Thing that persecutes him so passionately, he just might manage to feel some passion for the Thing.”

We claim that this “yesʼ is the “zero with the value of a question” that Lacan elaborated in his reading of Pascal. What this entails is that positions which apparently represent an exiting of the dimension of enjoyment, moving towards the sainthood of the analyst - such as the indifference to political movements, or the “refusal” of institutionalization, both of

which are variations of an attempt not to get stained by the enjoyment that the fidelity to a master-signifier implies - are still trapped in the logic which gives rise to surplus-enjoyment. Maybe - in light of the current disorientation with the extended reach of dU - we should ask ourselves if are we ready only to occupy the analytical position of ʻtrashʼ when it also implies being the ʻtrashʼ of the position of the analyst itself.

The famous transition between Antigone and Signe de Coufountaine - which is said to signal the passage to modern ethics - should be maybe applied to the position of the analyst itself. In the same way that it was dA which clarified this passage, within dH, from the ethics of Antigone (of the Real as Thing) to the ethics of Signe (of the Real as non-coincidence), we should maybe consider what it is that dH can clarify for dA as well. We should remind ourselves of Brechtʼs poem “To Posterity”, in which he reminds us that in times of crisis, :

“(...) Alas, weWho wished to lay the foundations of kindnessCould not ourselves be kind.”

4.2.1 ...to Money as the Name-of-the-Father

Here we will analyze Pierre Martinʼs book Psychoanalysis and Money, in which the author relates the place of money in the clinic with the matheme of dA , in which the subject produces a master-signifier ($/ S₁).

Martin argues that money must be taken in consideration in the analytical process not only in its symptomatic place - in its investment and handling in obsessive neurosis, for example - but also in its structural effectivity. The fact that the session is payed and the “contract” between analyst and analysand is not only sustained by the work(ing through) of the analysand, transference, but also by money, which has itself the structural place of guaranteeing the relation between use and exchange by being useless itself - the structure of a master signifier - has the secondary effect, in a society ruled by dU, that the production of master-signifiers in the analytical act is done against the background of an even more unassignable signifier, money.

A psychoanalysis disassociated from the insights of marxism could possibly come to a moment in which the foundation on which the value of money lies undermines the strength of the New which is produced by the analytical act proper.

4.3 dA is a discourse and the object of Discourses.

In the same way that it was the formal elaboration of the object a that allowed for the development of the Four Discourses, we should also note that the dA has a also a differentiated position to the other discourses.

First, in Chapter 3, we showed how the matrix of discursivity articulated its four terms

We argued that it is the particular quality of the object a in Lacanʼs elaboration of surplus-enjoyment that allows for the articulation of the Discourses, since this formulation of the excess as that which retroactively positions the presupposed prime mover of discursivity is what sustains the vectors of the matrix of discursivity and the logical temporality they imply.

We also argued, following Zizek, that this temporality is the one at stake in the hegelian Absolute Knowledge. We finished Chapter 3 by showing the passage from the kojèvian Absolute Knowledge/Temporality

To the zizekian Absolute Knowledge/Temporality, which accounts for Hegelʼs reading of the Christian Event and for concrete universality in general:

We then presented a first hypothesis, showing that the zizekian reading of Hegel is present in Lacanʼs developments a propos of the torus as the topological figure which articulates desire and death drive.

Despite of the clear difference between Kojève and Zizek - or, more to the point, between Kojève and Hegel - and the clear homology between Zizek and Lacan - and Lacan and Hegel - there was still an issue to be solved in this presentation, because Milnerʼs claim regarding the theory of the cuts and the Discourses as ʻanti-historyʼ could not be clearly deprehended from the above mentioned development. We did state that the point of articulation between the two temporalities at play is a “double cut”, a gap in which the two ʻcoincideʼ, but this claim still allowed us to think of it as a gap which is equal to itself, given the circular quality of the torus and the double-circle of concrete universality.

The object a was what allowed us to move from the kojèvian Hegel - where a=A (see Chapter I.0.1.1 and III.3.3) - to the lacanian/zizekian one - where a doesnʼt coincide with itself, and neither does A (I.0.3 and III.3.3):

And, in the same way, it is the dA which now allows us to move a further step in the formulation of the relation between Absolute Knowledge and temporality, because rather than presenting the outer circle as a non-coincidental circle, in which the theory of the cut is only present through the further claim that the point of closure does not coincide with itself, the Four Discourses, together with Lacanʼs use of the topological figure of the torus, allows us to further develop this non-coincidence into a more precise presentation.

In order to achieve this, we need to recall two points previously made: That the logic of Demand can be written as S₁➝S₂ - and that the logic of Desire can be written as $ ◇ a. As we also saw before, it is precisely the articulation of the two which is described in the lacanian torus. The outer equator of the torus was written by S₁➝S₂ (D) and the meridian by $ ◇ a (d).

But Chapter 4, focused on the four “quarter-turns” of this matrix, allowed us to explore 4 different modes of relation between S₁and S₂ , and $ and a. Keeping true to Milnerʼs reading of the theory of the cuts, we can now develop a more precise figure of the articulation between the four elements (S₁, S₂ , $ and a) and the four Discourses (dM, dU, dH and dA):

The first thing to grasp in this figure is how the outer circle is composed of S₁ and S₂ in their different articulations - up until dA, in which they are utterly separated. All the shorter circles, on the other hand, move away from the longer, non-All, circle, and towards different articulations between $ and a - except dM, which, giving us the matheme of Desire as such, presents the two terms separated by the punction. Let us present some different versions of the same figure, as to display some of its features. First, the figure without the Discourses superimposed to it:

Now, the same figure, but with the vectors between the elements of each Discourse drawn into it, allowing us to draw just one a at the middle, rather than four, making the torus it forms more distinct:

And now a simplified version of it:

We can see through these many versions, that this new figure “expands” on the non-coincidence between the signifier and itself (which can be summed up by the matheme S₂◇ S₁), which we previously wrote as a≠a. As we said before, this non-coincidence is what engenders the New, the creation of a new master-signifier (which can be written, given Zupancicʼs notion of the Two, as A≠A).

This allows us to see that the analystʼs discourse functions among the Discourses in an homologous way that the object a functions in the matrix of discursivity: the Discourse in which a appears (dA) is also the moment in which ʻopensʼ up to the absent object around which the torus is formed.

4.4 From the matheme to the knot.

Here we would like to put forward an hypothesis which offers itself as an alternative to Miller and Milnerʼs readings of the rupture in Lacanʼs teaching - not so much as an alternative to their brilliant interpretations of the theory of the knots, of course, but an alternative to the notion of ʻruptureʼ between the two moments: As Milner already claimed, the core issue with the Four Discourses is that its literality is based on the emptiness of the letter, not in its materiality. This can be felt specially in the relation between the matrix of the Discourses, which coincides with dM, and the four possible quarter-turns: the Four Discourses is first and foremost a dispositif which names and places the discourses - it is always trapped in the “twoness” of the element and the position it occupies. The primacy is that of the master-signifier.

If we analyse the very matrix of the discourses, the relation between the vectors, we see that beyond the name of each empty place at the end of the vectors, it is the very mode of their knotting, the non-relation between them, that gives each place its name. Our hypothesis is that the theory of the knots which followed the Discourses needs to be thought as the primacy of the connectors over the elements. It is a radicalization of the Discourses, accomplished by moving from the split between element and position to its excess, “the support of literality itself”, as Milner calls it. We could say that, if the formalization of the object a in the 16th Seminar allowed Lacan to formulate the matheme of the excess of formalization, it was this same formulation which allowed him to move further into the excess of the matheme itself, which is not bound to the “twoness” of the master-signifier, so much as to the excessive character of the materiality, with which one can think the name-of-the-father when all we have to ʻhandleʼ is the Real. This allows us to think the theory of the knots as a response to the dU - in which we need to arrive at to S₁, since it is hidden under the bar, unassignable.

4.5 Disavowed dA and Kojeveʼs Absolute Knowledge as Circular:

4.5.1 There are two figures of dAʼs disavowal:

and

4.5.2 And now, using all the disavowed mathemes, we can posit them over Kojèveʼs circle:

Since the Kojèvian Absolute Knowledge is based on the possibility of A=A, of a signifier of itself, it is the imaginary phallus which operates the point of closure of the circle and what we see in the figure above is precisely the different modes of displacing the imaginary phallus from the subject to the Other or the object, disavowing castration. This allows us to see also how certain confusions regarding the Discourses appear, given the simple ʻinversionʼ of one matheme into the other, as is the case of dʼʼH and dʼʼA, for example.

5. Lull, Hegel, Lacan.

We return here to the catalan mystic Ramon Lull in order to focus again on the joint aspects of transmission, formalization, Absolute Knowledge and didatism. We want to argue that the Lacan, Hegel and Lull form an RSI triad of the matheme.

We first presented Lull in I.3.1 in order to relate what we had just elaborated on a propos of Hegel and Lacan: their radical rationalism and the relation between Reason and transmission. We return to the triad Lacan-Hegel-Lull in II.4.1, to develop the first comment even further, relating now castration and transmission, with focus not so much on Hegel and Lacan, but Lull and Hegel, the two who spoke more directly about the christian doctrine.

Through these two comments, we have presented the mostly unknown figure of Lull and the methodology of his teaching, focusing on the unheard-of attempt of this mystic to create a combinatory art of quantitative elements which was based on the ʻstructure of reality itselfʼ at the same time that it served as a tool for teaching and conversion of non-christians.

As Frances Yates notes in her writings on Lull, the lullian ars combinatoria was partly a logic, but not quite: one does not find any implications or deductions, it proceeds to what Lull called ʻnatural reasonʼ. Since it was a system based on the very structure of reality, all possible combinations of elements - when done according to the operations that were allowed by such a structure - gave insights to the knowledge of the universe and of particular fields (Lull wrote on the study of law, medicine, botanics, etc). There was a formalization at stake, but it was not mathematical, it was almost cybernetic, pointing towards the matheme. But though the system itself was constructed solely through letters and operations, it was the (infinite) interpretations that they made possible that interested Lull.

So we propose, following Yates, that Lull “was the root of Europeʼs search for method”, and that in this search for method his Art stood for the imaginary conception of the matheme - a configuration of letters and operations from which one could deprehend knowledge from the structure of the universe. But, in Lullʼs case, it was held together by interpretation, not by what could not be interpreted.

Still following Glenn Magee, who proposed that the relation between Lull and Hegel was not to be reduced to Hegelʼs comments on Lull in some of his lectures, we move on to Hegel. As we have been repeatedly discussing until now, a propos of the relation between Hegel and Lacan, Hegelʼs relation to mathematization was of aversion: he thought that there was no use for a formalized presentation of dialectics because dialectics was sustained by what was in excess to each presentation of the Spirit, an excess which carried out the split in substance, always driving dialectics into its next moment - how could it then be formalized and not lose its excessive core?

Hegel thought that mathematics was the science of Understanding and, as the Phenomenology of Spirit makes it very clear, is thus bound to tautological statements. Hegel affirmed that there is an element of ʻself-coincidenceʼ that mathematics could not get rid of. So, if we do find death drive operating in Hegelʼs system, and without any recourse to a beyond-Reason, it is on account of Hegel dismissal of formalization. As we have shown thus far, his thought is the base of the matheme, but, without the object a to account for the formal place of that which could not be formalized, Hegelʼs use of a formal apparatus was reduced to the triangles (which Magee shows to have a root on Lullʼs thought) with which he presented the overall structure of his system - but not the dialectical movement as such. Because of this, Hegel names the matheme in its symbolic register, he was not worried with the infinite interpretations that the juxtaposition of moments of Spirit retroactively allowed for - he was worried with the very logic which ʻsecretsʼ these will have beenʼs.

This leads us to Lacan, who stands for the reconciliation - in the hegelian sense - of matheme and Real: the split between letter (Lull) and death drive (Hegel) is internalized into the letter itself.

Chapter V

0. We will begin Chapter V by recapitulating the whole movement of the thesis so far.

0.0.1 Chapter 0

Critical x Consolidated Knowledge

Pure Critique x Structured Critical Knowledge

Thought of the Absolute without excess x Thought of the Absolute with the excess

Death Drive is ontological

0.0.2 Chapter 1

Rupture in Hegel: Kojève x Zizek

Rupture in Lacan: Miller x Zizek

Rupture in Reason: Lacan and Hegel x postmodern thought

Lull, Hegel and Lacan: transmission and Reason

0.0.3 Chapter 2

The lacanian axioms

Hegel and Lacanʼs theories of representation

Lull, Hegel and Lacan: transmission, Reason and castration

0.0.4 Chapter 3

The lacanian axioms and the formation of the matrix of discursivity

Master Signifier

Chain of Signifiers

Subject

Object a

Temporality and History

0.0.5 Chapter 4

dM: the Masterʼs Discourse

dU: the Universityʼs Discourse

dH: the Hystericʼs Discourse

dA: the Analystʼs Discourse

Lull, Hegel and Lacan: matheme and RSI

0.1 Now we move on to proposing - in line with those developments - one fundamental corollary to the zizekian project of thinking Hegel, Marx and Lacan together, that will ground both the question of the proletariat as well as the enquiry about the State: in the same way that we had to go through Lacan to find Hegel, it is only now, having at hand the formal structure of Absolute Knowledge - emptying the Concept from the libidinal substance precisely by formally inscribing it back into it - that we can find Marx.

Because of this, we should affirm that it is our time that is the time of the Communist Idea.

0.2 To support this claim, let us first take a look at the two main conceptualizations of Absolute Knowledge we presented in this thesis, which condensate what was elaborated thus far:

The Kojèvian Absolute Knowledge as Circularity (AbKn.1):

And the Zizekian Absolute Knowledge as non-coincidence (AbKn.2):

0.1.1 We claim that the passage from AbKn.1 to AbKn.2 - which can be understood as the inclusion of the object a into philosophical considerations - is homologous to the passage from imaginary to symbolic castration, since it gets rid both formally and conceptually of the necessity of thinking totality as a ʻwholeʼ, even as a negative reference.

To arrive at the figure of AbKn.2 is both to arrive at the zizekian formulation of the hegelian Absolute Knowledge and to confirm that, in Absolute Knowledge, castration and transmission are intertwined: we formalize in a transmissible way the very structural impossibility of knowing and being at the same time.

0.1.2 With AbKn.2 we also moved from a circle to a torus - but not only that: the torus we developed is always already cut, the meridian and the equator are interrupted at different points, where we get the matheme of fantasy ($ ◇ a) and the matheme of non-coincidence (S₂ ◇ S₁). It is well known that Lacan was highly interested in the inversion of the torus, in which Demand (D) and Desire (d) interchange, the equator (D) becoming the meridian (d) and vice-versa. The torus of AbKn.2 is cut precisely in the manner as to be inverted. If we accomplish that operation, we are presented with the following (simplified) figure:

In the same way that it was Zizekʼs lacanian reading of Hegel which brought us to the AbKn.2 torus, we believe that this inverted presentation of the torus could be referred to as the parallax of AbKn.2, to use Zizekʼs own terminology, for it does not contradict or develop on the relations presented in the previous figure, but displaces the accent from the signifier to its excess.

The most important aspect here is that we came to AbKn.2 by analyzing how the master-signifier always produced an excess - which, in the AbKn.2, remains at the center, as the impossible element around which Demand and Desire organize their failures. What the parallaxian figure articulates is how the very failure changes the master-signifier itself. It allows us to think how the struggle between the subject and its enjoyment retroactively affects the very principle which founded the subject.

1. Referring again to the Communist Idea, we claim that it is only when the failure of the Idea can be thought through the parallaxian Absolute Knowledge that we have reached the place of a “commitment without confuse servitude” - the lack of which is Lacanʼs repeated critique of the relation between communists and Communism.

1.0.1 Let us exemplify the passage from AbKn.1 to AbKn.2 (parallax) in terms of the inscription of a new Idea into the world - in a terminology explicitly indebted to Badiouʼs vocabulary:

AbKn.1:

1) There is a present (A) and the election of an Idea (S₁) which is not already included in that present (A ≠ S₁).2) There is an attempt to inscribe that Idea into a new present (S₁⇒S₂), which differs from the old present (≠ A).3) It comes to be that the new present does not fully represent the Idea (S₂ ≠ S₁).4) It also comes to be that the new present is somehow included within the horizon of the old present (S₂= A).5) The Idea is known thus only because it is itself (S₁ = φ), since it could not take place in a new present. Or, the Idea is fully implemented in the world, because it itself is included in the present, old and new, and is, itself, the Idea that the two presents are the same (S₁= φ)

AbKn.2:

1) There is a present (A) and an Idea (S₁) which is not included in the present (A ≠ S₁)2) There is an attempt to inscribe that Idea into the new present (S₁⇒S₂), which differs from the old present(≠ A).3) It comes to be that through this process of inscription, the Idea not only is not fully inscribed in the present, but this non-inscription is understood as one of the essential traces of the Idea: the Idea does not coincide with itself (S₁ ≠ S₁) and the new present differs from the old present insofar as the new does not contain the failed inscription - there is something lacking in it (S₂ ≠ A).4) The operation of the inscription of the Idea into the present (S₁ ⇒ S₂) is now rethought as an impossibility - as the impossibility of the inscription, as a failure (S₁ ➝ S₂).

5) The Idea becomes not the index of a coincidence, but of a non-coincidence, a failure which is both the failure of its inscription in the present and the what sets the present into its becoming-other (a). This becoming-essential of the contingency of failure, is the operation of a subject ($ ) and is correlate to the impossibility of the full inscription of the Idea (◇ a) both as a substantial Notion - a Notion which coincided with itself in its contend (φ) - and as a void Notion - a Notion which coincided with itself formally (-φ).

AbKn.2 (parallax)

1) From the standpoint of the parallax, there is a present (S₂) that is sustained by the subjectʼs ($) enjoyment (a) of the failure of the Ideaʼs (S₁) inscription.2) But the Ideaʼs failure to be inscribed is no longer thought as an impossibility in the sense of an infinite task (S₁ ➝ S₂), but of a constitutive impossibility (S₂ ◇ S₁) which opens the space for the subject of that present. It is the subjectʼs enjoyment of the impossibility ($ ◇ a) which turns the contingent and empty character of the Ideaʼs (S₁ / $) inscription into a necessity. The present is a ʻmeans of enjoymentʼ (S₂ / a).3) But once the parallax allows us to realize that the failure is not constituted (S₁ ➝ S₂) but constitutive (S₂ ◇ S₁), we must now turn to the subjectʼs enjoyment (a ➝ $ ) as the non-relation which sustains the structure of the present.4) To put into question the subjectʼs relation to the impossibility (a ➝ $) of the full inscription of an Idea (S₂ ◇ S₁) is thus already to produce a new Idea ($ / S₁), because to move from dM (S₁ ➝ S₂ / a) to dA (a ➝ $ / S₁), is to place not the excess of the Idea as the unfathomable center which does not cease not to write itself, but the Idea itself. It is the very empty Idea which is produced through the struggle of the subject with its enjoyment of the remainders of the present.5) To return then from dA to dM, is not to complete a circle: if before we were in dM (S₁ ➝ S₂) under the primacy of dU - which shared with the initial dM the fantasy of the Idea being fully inscribable into the present (S₂ ➝ a) - now we are in dM under the primacy of dH: the Idea produced by the act (a ➝ $ / S₁) is tainted by the very act which produced it, it is known (a / S₂) that the subjectʼs enjoyment ($ ◇ a ) sustains the semblance of unicity of the Idea (S₁ / $ ). We could sum up saying that the parallaxian movement went from dM(dU) to dM(dH) through the act of dA. We went from revolution as cyclical return to revolution as topological inversion.

1.1 This example serves two purposes: it demonstrates how the Idea only becomes itself when its failure is understood as its essence - and it affirms in a more categorical manner that the revolutionary act (dA) does not rely on the permanent subversion of the matrix of discursivity (dM) - as if we would suddenly stop enjoying, and begin to know and to be at the same time - but the change of accent from dU to dH.

From these two principles - Idea as a failure of itself and shift from dM(dU) to dM(dH) - which we claim to be essential not only to the next presentation of the Communist Idea, but to be the moment in which it rises up to its Notion, we can now move to sketch a contribution to the the two conceptual challenges proposed by Zizek: the re-conceptualization of proletariat as ʻlibidinal proletariatʼ and of State as the actuality of the ethical Idea.

2. Libidinal Proletariat

2.1 The subject of dU: Ordinary Psychosis and Ordinary Perversion

Here we will discuss Jean-Pierre Lebrunʼs thesis that the current crisis of the paternal function has not as its operator a foreclusion, but a disavowal. This, as we have seen, fits much better the zizekian reading of Lacanʼs claim that the dU is the hegemonic discourse today. This also allows us to stress our fundamental thesis of didatism and totality, because from this claim it follows that it is not the lack in knowledge that is lacking, but that it has been turned into a fetish.

The thesis of ordinary perversion is also support by one of Zizekʼs most important insights into contemporary ideology: even though it is said that ʻGod is deadʼ, we have never believed so much as today - but this belief is displaced, and the other believes for us. Isnʼt the “ordinary psychotic” precisely the ʻsubject supposed not to believe”, the guarantee that the Other does not exist today, a sort of fetish of privation?

In line with Zizek and with Lebrunʼs thesis, we affirm that the new symptomatology must be seen under the light of dU. We we would also like to propose, though a more developed formulation of this point should follow in a work of its own, that fantasies of generalized madness became one of the modes of disavowal of misery.

2.2 Classless society in and for-itself

In IV.2.2.2 and IV.2.2.4, we spoke about the passage, in dU, from proletariat to sub-proletariat and the universalization of the proletariat as such. We return now to this point, emphasizing how this universalization can be understood as the in-itself of the moment of a classless society - the apprehension of all subjects as equal against the disavowed background of our inner split.

We also argue that this is one of the most important and urgent uses of Lacanʼs teaching: to disclose this new moment in which the freudian subject and the marxist critique of economy superimpose, the two becoming invisible through the action of the other. Though this gives us the measure of our challenge today - for the condition to organize the proletarian class today is first and foremost to recognize a split in the worker himself (dH) - it also gives the unheard of measure of a new notion of a classless society: its condition is the psychoanalytical theory of the subject as inherently split by desire and enjoyment.

3. State as ethical Idea

3.1 A State that is not a ʻState-meantʼ

We analyze here Domenico Losurdoʼs Hegel and the Freedom of the Moderns and, following Zizek, propose to sum up our elaborations thus far as an emptying of the ideologically charged notion of the substance of the State being representation (according to the classical theory of representation). Through Losurdo, we present the basic traits of Hegelʼs notion of State as actuality of the Ethical Idea, and argue that Lacanʼs theory, which set forth a new concept of ethics, allows us to move beyond the two possible “consistencies” which ʻfixedʼ Hegelʼs Idea of State in our century: State as substance and ethics as substance.

In the same way that we do not propose a new definition of proletariat, but only present the route opened up by Zizek, we also do not propose a rethinking of the notion of State, but affirm, through Zizek and Lacanʼs contributions, that the strict conceptualization of the articulation between master-signifier and the object a - between the representation and the enjoyment invested in/through it - we can release the notion of State from its synonym with

repression, that has been working against the political Left for so long. The tyranny is on the side of enjoyment.

3.2 Law and Letter: only the parallaxian view of Absolute Knowledge meets the State face to face.

Recently, Zizek has been using the joke of the castration of the mongol solider as an example of a different relation to the Master, in which the Master remains a Master not despite of the inherent imposture in his position, but because of it. We believe that our elaborations so far have supported this claim.

Here we return to Zizekʼs joke to stress how it summarizes our position regarding totality and totalitarism, showing that the difference should not be placed on the Law - as if to move beyond a situation was to resist the Law - but on the movement of ʻemptyingʼ the agency of the Law until it becomes a ʻhigh-pitchedʼ letter.

Chapter VI

0. In Chapter V we summarized our presentation of the Four Discourses and their relation to Hegel in the figure of Absolute Knowledge and the zizekian parallax view. We also presented some basic elements which might contribute to the further elaboration of the two fundamental conceptual challenges of today: to rethink the notion of proletariat and the notion of State.

In this last chapter we now return to the first presupposition we started from - that there is a distinction between critical and consolidated knowledge - and rather than simply summarize the many elements we covered throughout the thesis, as we already did in Chapter V, we move a step forward and include the thesis itself into the movement we accomplished.

This means two things:

First, that the enlightenmentʼs principle - Sapere Aude - which we set off from and repeatedly affirmed to be the core of Hegelʼs and Lacanʼs fidelity to rationalism, when seen from the perspective of Absolute Knowledge, must be rephrased into the lacanian motto Scilicet.

The small shift from ʻdare to knowʼ to ʻone is permitted to knowʼ, we claim, is the shift from simply distinguishing that there is critical and consolidated knowledge - a shift operated by the master-signifier - to a more radical implication of the subject in this very distinguishing - the affirmation that it is the subjectʼs enjoyment which is responsible for the election of the signifiers which operate both its alienation and its separation from a particular ideological formation.

Second, to include the writing of this thesis into the conceptual journey we went through serves the purpose of exemplifying the very point we have tried to make: that Absolute Knowledge is not a Absolute of Knowledge. It rather means to pay the price for knowing.

We move on to analyze each point in more detail.

1. Sapere Aude and Scilicet

1.1 We focus on Kantʼs text What is Enlightenment? and trace its basic structure, emphasizing the relation between obeying the law and daring to think for oneself.

The text revolves around two basic claims. The first, the one Kant proposes as the motto of the Enlightenment - Sapere Aude - which means ʻDare to Knowʼ. Referring to the Enlightenment as the ʻcoming to maturity of menʼ, the philosopher relates this historical moment with the courage to exercise oneʼs own understanding rather than to pay other people to do it - priests, lawyers, accountants, etc. The second, which appears at the end of the text, and seems contradictory to the first, if read from a commonsensical position, states “think freely, but obey!”.

At first it seems hard to make sense of why Kant would say that the Enlightenment is the historical moment of having the courage to think for oneself and a couple of pages later say that one should think freely, but nevertheless obey the law. But this is not all: these two claims find their measure in Kantʼs plea for the public use of Reason.

He starts off by making sure that the public use of Reason is not confused with using Reason publicly. As Kant exemplifies, to address a big crowd, in a classroom for example, is still a ʻdomesticʼ use of Reason, insofar as it is not the public space as such that is being addressed by the teacher. His speech is directed at a particular group of people. The Reason one exercises in a professional milieu is not the public use of Reason. Kant defines the public use as that which “anyone as a scholar makes of reason before the entire literate world”. It is Reason as addressing all.

Kant explains it by using a Pastor as an example. The Pastor has no right to disobey the rules of the Church he serves - but he also has the freedom, the duty even, “to impart to the public all of his carefully considered and well-intentioned thoughts concerning mistaken aspects of that symbol, as well as his suggestions for the better arrangement of religious and church matters.”

The public use of Reason is not so much an expression of the thoughts of an individual, but the consent to express them in a way that concerns all - to express them in accordance with the law. We could define it as the courage to extend the realm of the Law into the individualʼs own understanding. The relation between public use of Reason, transmission and castration is made clear if we remember that the philosopher calls this process “manʼs emergence from his self-imposed immaturity”. Immaturity, Kant says, is the “inability to use oneʼs understanding without guidance from another”.

This, of course would be contradictory with his writings on education - in which he defines man as the animal who needs a master - if it meant to get rid of the master, favoring oneʼs own use of Reason. But it is clear now that Sapere Aude is actually a call to consent to the Law so that we do not only follow the law, but partake on its maintenance and reformulation.

1.2 We then present Lacanʼs argumentation as to why he decided to call his magazine Scilicet. We also give an overview of how this same principle was effective in his path-breaking implementation of ʻla passeʼ and in the fundamental pillars of the School he created.

The first thing which becomes clear is that Scilicet is not an inversion or break with the Enlightenment. On the contrary: as Lacan wrote in the back cover of his Écrits, the debate of the Lumières is precisely the one he subscribes to. If we note the subtitle to the magazineʼs motto and title it becomes clear that it works an addition rather than an critique of Sapere Aude: “you are permitted to know...what the Freudian School thinks”. It is not the individual who is invited to raise his understanding to the dignity of the public use of Reason, contributing to the Law. It is the Law - the institution itself - which must be positioned so as to allow the subject to know, if he or she desires to.

In the “Overture to this Collection” which opens the Écrits, Lacan writes: “In the place man marked for Buffon, I call for the falling away of this object [a], which is revealing due to the fact that the fall isolates this object, both as the cause of desire in which the subject disappears and as sustaining the subject between truth and knowledge. With this itinerary, of which these writings are the milestones, and this style, which the audience to whom they are addressed required, I want to lead the reader to a consequence in which he must pay the prince with elbow grease.”. Buffon was previously quoted in this same overture: “Style is the man himself”. But Lacan first adds “...the man one addresses”. And then, in the place of the man who is style, he calls “for the falling away of this object”. The object a

shapes the style which addresses man. This is Lacanʼs bet: to address us from the position of that which sustains “the subject between truth and knowledge”. The price, though, must be payed by the reader, who must do the work.

As we commented before, to write from this position is to place oneself within the analystʼs discourse. The reader, working his way through the text, knows himself to be responsible for the desire the text incites.

When, not that much later - since the introductory text to the Écrits was written in 1966 - Lacan created the magazine Scilicet, electing the emblem of that moment in his teaching, clinic and institutional practice, the “permission to know what the Freudian School thinks” carried forward the core of the ethical stance proposed in the overture.

ʻTo permitʼ is not the same thing as ʻto inviteʼ or ʻto dareʼ. It does not demand a position from the subject in the sense of calling the individual to action. To use Lacanʼs terms in Science and Truth, it is much more “terroristic” than that: it does not state that one simply ʻmustʼ do it, it states that one must account for oneʼs desire to know. The duty is not a duty to the law as demand, but to the law as desire.

It is important to notice that this works both ways: the subject is permitted to enquire about the Freudian Schoolʼs thoughts and the Freudian School positions itself as to allow such an enquire. It is “permitted to know” precisely because the School will not resist this desire. “Resistance” must be understood here in the sense that Lacan developed the concept since his first Seminar, the School as an Institution will not fall prey to the imaginary consistency (aʼ) that an individual might ʻtemptʻ it to fill (a), it will position itself as to allow for the Idea (A) to shine through it, opening the space for the subject (S), who is responsible for his desire to know and for what, desiring, he learns.

1.3 We relate Kant and Lacan and claim that the passage from Sapere Aude to Scilicet is the passage from democracy to communism.

Let us start by presenting again both emblems under a different light.

We could summarize Sapere Aude as an injunction that comes from the world, incites the subject to partake with his own understanding in the maintenance and creation of the public sphere, and - by extending the realm of the public use of Reason from others (who we pay to exercise it for us) all the way back to the subjectʼs priorly private elocubrations - it produces what is truly private, that which has no place in the public sphere. We could say that the Enlightenmentʼs motto invents what is properly private, insofar as it is private because it has no public use.

This structure fits the Masterʼs Discourse perfectly:

But it does not only fit the structure, it also makes sure that there is no disavowal of it. This is precisely what Kant aims at when he says that as an immature man I “have a book to serve my understanding, a pastor to serve as my conscience, a physician to determine my diet for me, and so on, I need not to exert myself at all. I need not think, if only I can pay: others will readily undertake the irksome work for me.” It is the passage from the disavowed mastery to a responsible one that Kant advocates. “Have the courage to partake in the Masterʼs ruling”. And the inverse as well, for Kant hails Prince Frederick as an enlightened King because his rule was based on keeping the space open for the reformulation of the Law by those whom he represented, as long as they did it accordingly to the Law itself.

The crucial point to emphasize here is the place of resistance in this structure. Kant writes that “if only they [the governments] refrain from inventing artifices to keep themselves in it [in immaturity], men will gradually raise themselves from barbarism”, because “manʼs emergence from self-imposed immaturity” is practically a natural development from being free: “nothing is required for this enlightenment (...) except freedom, and the freedom in question s the least harmful of all, namely, the freedom to use reason publicly in all matters.”.

We see that the division of the subject (his ʻself-imposed immaturityʼ) is overcame by not resisting the Law, by inscribing oneself in its extending reach - in an homologous operation to castration - which retroactively produces the true place of the pathological, the realm of the private life. This private life, which is not elaborated in the text itself, would have to be defined as something which is not proper of the field of Understanding - since those private thoughts which could publicly circulate and serve the Law through the public use of Reason are, at least virtually, inscribed in the public sphere - so it would have to remain somewhat opaque to the subject himself.

The problem with this conception - which is similar to the issue Zupancic identifies in the whole of Kantʼs philosophy - is that the ethical injunction of Sapere Aude, which incites in the subject the courage to not resist the Demand, can itself become an imperative to enjoy. This can be seen when we realize that Sapere Aude also fits the Universityʼs Discourse structure:

Here we see that the invitation to use oneʼs own understanding to know, to take part on the Law, can be turned into a law itself, one which has the side-effect of turning that unaccounted excess, that we called ʻprivate lifeʼ, into the object of the Law. The public sphere can be defined as that which aims at the inclusion of the private life, under the injunction of ʻknowing more and moreʼ, as Lacan says in his 17th Seminar, and Foucault comments in his own text on Enlightenment. This produces a subject who only has his barbarism as what belongs to him, since all that can be public must be so.

Even so, we must admit that Kantʼs plea is still different from the current presentation of the Universityʼs Discourse, insofar as he directly states the principle which gives the truth of the discursivity. That which is produced, the subject as the barbarian, cannot relate itself to the Sapere Aude, but Kant nevertheless gives us the key to what would otherwise be another form of an ideological naturalization of the principle of knowledge.

This shifting between dM and dU is possible because manʼs “self-imposed barbarism”, that which causes the subject to simultaneously accept and disavow castration (to others), is understood only in its dimension of ʻimmaturityʼ, and not of perversion. The remainder of the process, that which is not fit for the public sphere, is understood only as an excess to the contribution of man to the Law, but not as cause.

To address the subject as a cause, rather than as a Cause, this is how Lacan introduces his Écrits. But this is Lacanʼs position as the author of the poubellication (pun with rubbish and publication): one cannot read the text from the position he wrote it. All we can do is to enquire the letter of the text and to produce a knowledge, knowledgeable also that it is our desire that is at stake in front of us.

This is the double dimension we believe to be operative in Scilicet. It does not contradict Kantʼs Sapere Aude, insofar as, being injunctions, they both “behave” in the same way when enunciated:

Aware of the role the object cause of desire plays in the election of a Cause - which is particularly clear in the figure of the parallaxian Absolute Knowledge - the enunciation of Scilicet does not allow for the homonymic transformation into a superegoic imperative. It can only be claimed by the Hysterical Discourse, insofar as the subject must be aware that there is no wissentrieb, no drive to know, it is only in the name of its “barbaric” excess which it can enquire the Cause and begin to learn.

We could say that Sapere Aude represents the communistic principle of didatism and Reason before Absolute Knowledge - before we know that being and thought do not coincide, and that we are caused by their very disjunction, and thus falling prey to that which is an obstacle to (the Kingʼs) representation - while Scilicet is the communistic principle which knows that a rational relation to the Absolute exists because of the excess, not despite of it.

It is worth recalling Platoʼs famous Republic, and the inscription at its gates: “let no ignorant of geometry enter”.

We could maybe sketch a relation between the three statements regarding communism and didatism in the following manner:

a) Let no one who enjoys not-knowing enter the Idea (the geometry of the Idea)b) Dare to know and enter the Idea (the calculus of the Idea)c) It is allowed to enter the Idea insofar as you pay the price for your enjoyment in not-knowing (the matheme of the Idea)

What Scilicet ultimately states is that what was always written at the gates of the Republic was not meant only for men, but also for the Gods. It is only once the Other itself is barred, that it is understood that the Ideal is itself a product of the same inconsistency which ties

the subject to his enjoyment, that we can start building what is on the other side of those gates.

2. Absolute Knowledge, didatism and transmission.

Here we will briefly elaborate on the place this thesis has within the elements it presents. Our goal is to show how a knowledge of the totality is not a total knowledge by using this very thesis as an example. We will give an account of the motivations behind the work and of the impossibilities we came across, even if we cannot be aware yet if they are conceptual deadlocks or aspects of our own symptoms.