Abstract
This chapter will focus on what can be described as Lacanian metapsychology, that is, that aspect of Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory that allows it to refer to itself, to its conceptual models and to its relationships with science. As Tombras explains, for Lacan psychoanalysis can speak about other discourses as it can speak about itself, but it never ceases to be one of the possible discourses. The chapter presents language in its corporeality (“lalangue”) and discusses Lacan’s views on the emergence of signifierness, the retroactive attribution of meaning, and the functions of metaphor and metonymy. Tombras discusses Lacan’s theory of discourses and focuses on his conceptions of truth, time and historicity, all of which are seen as emerging recursively in discourse. Tombras shows how Lacan’s claim that there is no metalanguage leads him to assert that a formalisation is only possible through mathematics, and specifically through set theory, knot theory and topology. The chapter concludes with Lacan’s clinical work on knot theory and his “anti-philosophy”.
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Notes
- 1.
Jacques Lacan, ‘At the Institut Français in London (3 February 1975)’ [1975], trans. Dany Nobus, Journal for Lacanian Studies, 3/2 (2005), 295–303, p. 297.
- 2.
‘Science and Truth’ [1966], in Écrits (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006), 726–745, pp. 728/857–729/858.
- 3.
The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III: The Psychoses [1955–56], ed. Jacques-Allain Miller (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1993), p. 243.
- 4.
The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XXV: The Moment to Conclude [1977–78] (www.lacaninireland.com), p. 1.
- 5.
See above, pp. 54–55.
- 6.
Après-coup is Lacan’s translation of Freud’s “Nachträglichkeit”, or retroaction. See also above, pp. 94–96.
- 7.
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis [1964–65], ed. Jacques-Allain Miller (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998), p. 22.
- 8.
See above, p. 55.
- 9.
Lacan, ‘Position of the Unconscious’, Écrits, p. 708/835. The term “real” in this quote should be understood in the sense of reality , rather, than of the real qua register of human experience.
- 10.
The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore, On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge [1972–73], ed. Jacques-Allain Miller (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998), pp. 24–25.
- 11.
The differentiation between horizontal and vertical dependencies should be understood here in a figurative way.
- 12.
It is interesting to note here that, indeed, in Greek the word metaphor (“μεταφορά”) means “transfer” and the word metonymy (“μετωνυμία”) means “renaming”.
- 13.
Lacan, ‘Ernest Jones’, Écrits, p. 594/708.
- 14.
This creative aspect of metaphor has not remained unnoticed by contemporary American pragmatist philosophers like R. Rorty. As he writes, “to think of metaphorical sentences as the forerunners of new uses of language, uses which may eclipse and erase old uses, is to think of metaphor as on a par with perception and inference, rather than thinking of it as having a merely ‘heuristic’ or ‘ornamental’ function”. (Richard Rorty, ‘Philosophy as Science, Metaphor, Politics’ [1986], in Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers, Volume 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 9–26, p. 14).
- 15.
Lacan, ‘Instance of the Letter’, Écrits, p. 431/518.
- 16.
See Freud’s account of his grandson’s game “o-o-o-o” and “da” (“fort”, and “da”) in Sigmund Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ [1920g], in James Strachey (ed.), SE vol. 18 (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974), 1–64, pp. 14–15.
- 17.
See also above, pp. 117–120.
- 18.
Lacan, ‘Signification of the Phallus’, Écrits, pp. 581–582/693. Spaltung is the term Freud used to indicate the splitting or division of the ego because of internal conflicts.
- 19.
In Seminar XX, Lacan had commented that the function of the phallus is “not unrelated” to the bar between the signifier and the signified—were it not for which “nothing about language could be explained by linguistics. Were it not for this bar above which there are signifiers that pass, you could not see that signifiers are injected into the signified” (Seminar XX, pp. 34, 40). Lacan’s suggestion can perhaps be understood in the sense that the bar represents that which allows us to see that there are signifiers beyond (or, perhaps, over) the signified—in other words, the bar is representing the effect of signifierness, and as such, it allows us to see language in its material aspect, namely beyond (or before) signifierness. That, as Lacan says, is “not unrelated” to the function of the phallus: it is because of a process akin to that of metaphor that the second signifier obtained the structural position of what we call signified. This process is what Lacan calls function of the phallus, and it is in this sense that the phallus can also be understood as the metaphor of desire (as lack).
- 20.
So, to give just an example, in what we call “psychotic structure” the network of signifiers fails to contain anxiety. The experience of the psychotic subject seems to involve the continuous renegotiation of the signifying network, via ad hoc imaginary identifications, in order to make up for its insufficient stability. This works most of the times. There are moments, however, in which this is no longer possible. In such moments, the network of signifiers is ripped and the subject itself is deconstructed. These would be the triggering moments of a clinically observable psychosis. The literature regarding a Lacanian clinic is quite extensive. See, for example, Joël Dor, The Clinical Lacan (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1997); Bruce Fink, A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Paul Verhaeghe, On Being Normal and Other Disorders: A Manual for Clinical Psychodiagnostics (New York: Other Press, 2004); and Darian Leader, What Is Madness? (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2011).
- 21.
It should be noted here that this is a phenomenon that happens at both a synchronic axis and a diachronic axis—synchronic in the sense of the individual and diachronic in the sense of a whole language as a structured system.
- 22.
See Jacques Lacan, ‘Préface à l’Édition des Écrits en Livre de Poche’ [1970], in J.-A. Miller (ed.), Autres Écrits (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2001), 387–391, p. 390. The Stoics had advocated a materialist theory of the mind, and their conception of the say-able was intended to explain how something immaterial (incorporeal) like meaning can come out of something material that can bear a meaning (a signifier). For them, a signifier, which is always a material, or corporeal, entity, was thought of as bonded with the incorporeal world of meaning. This bond was conceived by the Stoics as a product of an act of saying, hence its designation as “say-able”. The similarity to Lacan’s conceptualisation of the quilting point is evident.
- 23.
See ‘The Place, Origin and End of My Teaching’ [1967], in Jacques-Alain Miller (ed.), My Teaching (London: Verso, 2008), 3–55, p. 36; and also ‘Preface’ in Anika Lemaire, Jacques Lacan (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), viii–xv, p. xiv.
- 24.
See above, p. 103n34.
- 25.
For the most readily available example of lalangue, one could think of a baby playing with linguistic sounds, who might at some point say something like mah-mah-mah-mah; it is in the possible reaction of the primary carer that this utterance will become, for this infant, a reference to the carer and obtain the meaning “mother”. In other words, from some moment onwards, the babbling mah-mah will be taken as the word (or signifier) mama and will be accepted as referring to that woman, i.e. to “mother”. Other examples of lalangue can be found in the linguistic constructions of dreams, or even in the marginally linguistic constructions observed in cases of echolalia.
- 26.
This term, introduced by American linguist C. F. Hockett, refers to the fact that language, as a semiotic system, can be seen as organised on two distinct layers, one composed of meaningless elements or phonemes (differentiable sounds that can be pronounced by humans) and a second one composed of meaningful elements such as words and phrases. The French linguist A. Martinet has suggested the term double articulation, to describe the same phenomenon. See Winfried Nöth, Handbook of Semiotics (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), pp. 237–238. This term was also used by G. Deleuze and F. Guattari to describe in very generalised way phenomena of different types of organisation between what they called layers or strata. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Athlone Press, 1987), pp. 40–44.
- 27.
Signifying chains and their horizontal or vertical associative dependencies are what philosopher and biologist H. Maturana has in mind when he describes a linguistic domain as “a domain of consensual coordinations of actions or distinctions … [arising as] a particular manner of living-together contingent upon the unique history of recurrent interactions of the participants during their co-ontogeny”. (Humberto R. Maturana, ‘The Biological Foundations of Self Consciousness and the Physical Domain of Existence’, in Beobachter: Konvergenz der Erkenntisttheorien? (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1992), 47–117, p. 92).
- 28.
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis [1969–70], ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007), p. 13.
- 29.
‘Television’ [1970], in Joan Copjec (ed.), Television (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1990), 1–46, p. 3.
- 30.
The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique [1953–54], ed. Jacques-Allain Miller (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), p. 58.
- 31.
Alfred Tarski , a Polish logician and mathematician, had developed this semantic conception of truth by drawing on Aristotle’s insights and also on the medieval view of truth as the correspondence of a thing to the intellect. See Alfred Tarski, ‘The Semantic Conception of Truth’ [1944], in Maria Baghramian (ed.), Modern Philosophy of Language (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1999), 44–63. As Jaakko Hintikka explains, for Tarski “a truth definition can be given for a language only in a stronger metalanguage”. (Jaakko Hintikka, The Principles of Mathematics Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 15). See also above, p. 36.
- 32.
Lacan, ‘Subversion of the Subject’, Écrits, p. 688/813.
- 33.
‘Science and Truth’, Écrits, pp. 736–737/867–868.
- 34.
Cf. Lacan’s discussion of truth in four different guises: as the efficient cause of magic; as the final cause of religion; as the formal cause of science; and as the material cause of psychoanalysis. (See ‘Science and Truth’, Écrits, pp. 740–743/871–875.) This discussion leads to, and was superseded by, his more elaborate theory of discourses. See below, pp. 151–155.
- 35.
Seminar XX, p. 118. Of course, this does not mean that there are no beings. One needs to keep in mind Heidegger’s ontological difference ; otherwise, this whole conceptualisation runs the risk of becoming a set of mumbo jumbo.
- 36.
A potential solution might be given by methodologies closely related to efforts in modern logic to escape the limitations of the distinction between an object language and a metalanguage, as, for example, in Jaakko Hintikka ’s work. Hintikka has developed a first-order logic in which truth is defined and expressed with no need to refer to a metalanguage. He accomplishes this in terms of a game-like iterative (or recursive) process. According to Hintikka, his solution can be extended to natural languages as well. I will return to this below, pp. 200–203.
- 37.
In this “sophism”, as he called it, three prisoners are invited to solve a logical puzzle. Timing is crucial, because the first to solve the puzzle will be the first (and only one) to gain his freedom. The puzzle is designed in such a way that one cannot arrive at the solution in one step. Each of the prisoners needs to decide their own actions in connection with the others’ actions. In this way, Lacan is able to distinguish between three different aspects of time modulation: (a) the “Instant of the Glance”; (b) the “Time for Comprehending”; and (c) the “Moment of Concluding”. This modulation allows him to describe how the subjective sense of time (the hesitation of each prisoner in the story) is de-subjectified by the collective action of all three prisoners, resulting in the emergence of what Lacan calls “objective” time. See Lacan, ‘Logical Time’, Écrits, pp. 167–173/204–211.
- 38.
I have elaborated this argument elsewhere. See Christos Tombras, ‘Kicking Down the Ladder: Language, Time, History’ Journal of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research, 19 (2009), 119–137, pp. 127–129.
- 39.
For the term ex-sist, see above, p. 28n18.
- 40.
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VI: Desire and Its Interpretation [1958–59] (www.lacaninireland.com), p. 203.
- 41.
Adrian Johnston has argued that Lacan fails to reconcile the timelessness of the unconscious (as postulated by Freud) with his own attempt to derive temporality from the symbolic (logical time), and claims that the problem persists until the end of Lacan’s teaching, i.e. even until after Lacan decided to turn to mathematics and topology. See Adrian Johnston, Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005), pp. 55–57. His argument is weakened if, as suggested here, one considers Lacan’s conceptualisation of duration as time in the real and of temporality as a scaffolding of imaginary and symbolic time relations. Timelessness, in Freud’s sense, is not irreconcilable with Lacan’s “temporal logic”: the installation of temporal logic (i.e. the installation of the signifying chain) gives rise to the emergence of signification and opens a place for the unconscious. It is exactly because Lacan is able to discern a temporal logic in his conceptualisation of the unconscious that he can describe the formations of the unconscious as gaps in a signifying chain.
- 42.
Sigmund Freud, ‘New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis’ [1933a], in James Strachey (ed.), SE vol. 22 (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974), 1–182, p. 21.
- 43.
See also above, p. 95.
- 44.
Lacan, ‘Function and Field’, Écrits, pp. 261–262/318.
- 45.
See Marcelle Marini, Jacques Lacan: The French Context (New Brunswick, NJ: Rudgers University Press, 1992), p. 247. See also Johnston, Time Driven, pp. 51–52.
- 46.
Lacan, Seminar XVII, pp. 17, 12–13. Social link or social bond (in French: lien social) is a term borrowed from Saussure , who used it to describe what constitutes the basis of a linguistic group.
- 47.
‘Kant with Sade’, Écrits, p. 653/774.
- 48.
Seminar XVII, p. 15.
- 49.
This relates to the concept of surplus jouissance . See above, p. 120.
- 50.
Lacan, Seminar XVII, pp. 14–15.
- 51.
Seminar XVII, p. 14. In Kant with Sade, Lacan had constructed a schema with four place holders representing, as he explained, the Sadean phantasy. Further in the text he transformed it by a 90-degrees rotation. See ‘Kant with Sade’, Écrits, pp. 653/774, 657/778. Dany Nobus points out that Lacan had already used this quarter-turn operation in the early 60s but suggests that at that early stage of his thinking, “Lacan himself may have not made much of it”. (Dany Nobus, The Law of Desire: On Lacan’s ‘Kant with Sade’ (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), p. 74n1).
- 52.
It appears that Lacan has formulated this anti-clockwise rotation as the result of operations involving the application of radical (square root) functions on vectors in a two-dimensional complex (“Argand”) plane. (I owe this suggestion to Bernard Burgoyne.) It is possible that Lacan plays on the fact that operations involving complex numbers are symbolic operations on the complex plane that includes an axis of real numbers \(x\) with an axis of imaginary numbers \(iy\), where \(i = \sqrt { - 1}\). In this way, the order of the symbols be retained, something that might explain why Lacan does not accept a transformation based on an horizontal or vertical axis of symmetry.
- 53.
Speaking at Milan University, in 1972, Lacan discussed a fifth discourse, a substitute, as he said, of the master discourse, which he called discourse of the capitalist. To produce it, Lacan suggested a simple inversion of the two left-hand side legs of the master discourse:
The discourse of the capitalist, he said, “is untenable. … It works like a clockwork, cannot go better, but in fact it goes too fast, it consumes, it consumes so well that it will consume itself” (Jacques Lacan, ‘Du Discours Psychanalytique’ [1972], in G. B. Contri (ed.), Lacan In Italia – 1953–1978 - En Italie Lacan (Milan: Salamandra, 1978), 32–55, p. 48). Apart from few other mentions, however, he does not return to it in any systematic way, allowing one to suspect that it was a token of political criticism rather than a formal extension of his discourse theory.
- 54.
See, for example, Paul Verhaeghe, Does the Woman Exist? From Freud’s Hysteric to Lacan’s Feminine (New York: Other Press, 1999), p. 98.
- 55.
Lacan, Seminar XVII, p. 188. For Lacan’s referring to “radical functions” see above, p. 153n52.
- 56.
Colette Soler, ‘The Body in the Teaching of Jacques Lacan’ Journal of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research, 6 (1995), 6–38, p. 7.
- 57.
Jacques Lacan, ‘Some Reflections on the Ego’ International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 34 (1953), 11–17, p. 15. See also above, pp. 104–106.
- 58.
For a discussion, see Paul Verhaeghe, ‘Subject and Body: Lacan’s Struggle with the Real’, in Beyond Gender: From Subject to Drive (New York: Other Press, 2001), 65–97.
- 59.
In comparison to the chimpanzee, humans are born prematurely. Researchers estimate that human gestation period should be at least double if the human infant was to be born at a neurological development stage comparable to that of a chimpanzee infant. Even though there is no consensus in regard to why this is the case, there are those who argue that it might be connected to the fact that humans are “cultural animals”. It appears that such short gestation period, with all it entails, would not be possible if there were no social structures that would provide a safe environment for the infant for the period just after birth until the age of 2–3 years old.
- 60.
Cf. in this connection what Lacan says about his dog: “I have a dog … My dog, in my sense and without ambiguity, speaks. My dog has without any doubt the gift of speech. This is important, because it does not mean that she possesses language totally. … What distinguishes this speaking animal from what happens because of the fact that man speaks … is that, contrary to what happens in the case of man in so far as he speaks, she never takes me for another. … By taking you for another, [a] subject puts you at the level of the Other with a big O. It is precisely this which is lacking to my dog: for her there is only the small other. As regards the big Other, it does not seem that her relationship to language gives her access to it”. (Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book IX: Identification [1961–62] (www.lacaninireland.com), pp. 21–22).
- 61.
Seminar XX, p. 70.
- 62.
Seminar XX, p. 71.
- 63.
See, for example, Sigmund Freud, ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’ [1905d], in James Strachey (ed.), SE vol. 7 (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974), pp. 123–246; ‘Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes’ [1925j], in James Strachey (ed.), SE vol. 19 (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974), pp. 241–258; and “Femininity” in ‘New Introductory Lectures’, SE vol. 22.
- 64.
See Jacques-Allain Miller, ‘Les six Paradigmes de la Jouissance’ La Cause Freudienne, 43 (1999), 7–29, http://www.causefreudienne.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/JAM-Six-paradigmes-jouissance.pdf.
- 65.
Lacan, Seminar XX, pp. 6–7.
- 66.
‘Conférence à Genève sur le Symptôme’ [1975] Le Bloc-notes de la psychanalyse, 5 (1985), 5–23, p. 15 (my translation).
- 67.
Seminar XX, p. 7 (translation slightly altered).
- 68.
It should be reminded here that this discussion has nothing to do with the biological sex as such. The symbol \({\text{x}}\) represents a human being with no reference to biological sex.
- 69.
See above, p. 137.
- 70.
Cf. Lacan: “I write \(\overline{{\forall {\text{x}}}}\, \Phi {\text{x}}\), a never-before-seen function in which the negation is placed on the quantifier, which should be read ‘not-whole’”. Lacan, Seminar XX, p. 72.
- 71.
Cf. here Bruce Fink, ‘Knowledge and Jouissance’, in Suzanne Barnard and Bruce Fink (eds.), Reading Seminar XX: Lacan’s Major Work on Love, Knowledge, and Female Sexuality (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 21–45, p. 40.
- 72.
In contrast to Heidegger, for example, who postulated the ontological neutrality of the Dasein, accepted the ontic reality of sexual difference, but was not able to speak ontologically about it.
- 73.
Jacques Lacan, ‘Overture to the 1st International Encounter of the Freudian Field: Caracas, 12 July 1980’, trans. Adrian Price, Hurly-Burly, 6 (September 2011), 17–20, p. 18.
- 74.
In knot theory, a knot is defined as a curve in space that is closed, while a link is a configuration of several such disjointed curves. In this sense, the Borromean knot should actually be thought as a link.
- 75.
For the background of Lacan’s becoming interested in it in 1972, see Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 363–364.
- 76.
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XXIII: The Sinthome [1975–76], ed. Jacques-Allain Miller (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016), p. 74.
- 77.
Dany Nobus, ‘Lacan’s Science of the Subject: Between Linguistics and Topology’, in Jean-Michel Rabaté (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Lacan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 50–68, p. 63.
- 78.
Lacan, Seminar XXIII, p. 71 (translation slightly altered). See also above, p. 164n74.
- 79.
In knot theory, the crossing number of a knot is its smallest number of crossings. It remains invariant for all equivalent knots.
- 80.
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XXII: RSI [1974–75] (www.lacaninireland.com), p. 40.
- 81.
Denis Lécuru and Dominique Barataud, quoted in François Roustang, The Lacanian Delusion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 99. Their work, “Essai sur quelques raisons d’une lecture borroméenne du symbolique”, written in 1982, is available to researchers but remains unpublished.
- 82.
Lacan, Seminar XXIII, p. 77.
- 83.
Seminar XXII, p. 98.
- 84.
Jean-Louis Gault, ‘Two Statuses of the Symptom: Let Us Turn to Finn Again’, in Véronique Voruz and Bogdan Wolf (eds.), The Later Lacan: An Introduction (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 73–82, p. 79.
- 85.
Joël Dor, ‘The Epistemological Status of Lacan’s Mathematical Paradigms’, in David Pettigrew and François Raffoul (eds.), Disseminating Lacan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 109–121, pp. 117, 120.
- 86.
Jacques-Allain Miller, ‘Mathemes: Topology in the Teaching of Lacan’, in Ellie Ragland and Dragan Milovanovic (eds.), Lacan: Topologically Speaking (New York: Other Press, 2004), 28–48, p. 35.
- 87.
David Corfield, ‘From Mathematics to Psychology: Lacan’s Missed Encounters’, in Jason Glynos and Yannis Stavrakakis (eds.), Lacan & Science (London: Karnac, 2002), 179–206, p. 189.
- 88.
Lacan, Seminar XI, p. 90.
- 89.
‘Of Structure as an Inmixing of an Otherness Prerequisite to Any Subject Whatever’ [1970], in Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (eds.), The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 186–200, pp. 195–196 (translation slightly altered).
- 90.
Bernard Burgoyne, ‘What Causes Structure to Find a Place in Love?’, in Jason Glynos and Yannis Stavrakakis (eds.), Lacan & Science (London: Karnac, 2002), 231–261, p. 251.
- 91.
‘Place in Love’, Lacan & Science, pp. 251, 257n53. Burgoyne credits the Hungarian psychoanalyst Imre Hermann as the originator of the idea that psychical structure has its parallel in the domain of mathematics, and adds that Lacan knew of Hermann’s work. See ‘Autism and Topology’, in Bernard Burgoyne (ed.), Drawing the Soul: Schemas and Models in Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac, 2000), 190–217.
- 92.
For an overview of some recent work, see Michael Friedman and Samo Tomšič (eds.), Psychoanalysis: Topological Perspectives (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2016).
- 93.
Lacan, Seminar XX, pp. 130–131.
- 94.
Lacan, quoted in Marini, Lacan, p. 242.
- 95.
It has to be stressed: to the real, and not to reality .
- 96.
Lacan, Seminar XX, p. 119.
- 97.
Cf. in this connection Badiou ’s statement that “Mathematics is ontology—the science of being qua being”. See Alain Badiou, Being and Event [1988] (New York: Continuum, 2005), p. 4.
- 98.
Lacan, Seminar XX, p. 118.
- 99.
Martin Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’ [1947], in William Mcneill (ed.), Pathmarks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 239–276, p. 239.
- 100.
Cf. Lacan’s early comment, in Seminar III, regarding “the discovery that consisted in observing one day that certain patients who complain of auditory hallucinations were manifestly making movements of the throat, of the lips; in other words, they were articulating them themselves”. Lacan, Seminar III, p. 49.
- 101.
See above, p. 30.
- 102.
Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude [1929–30] (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 180.
- 103.
Lacan, Seminar XX, p. 118.
- 104.
See above, p. 120.
- 105.
Lacan, then, uses mathematics in the same way that Heidegger uses phenomenology.
- 106.
Lacan, ‘Peut-être à Vincennes…’, Autres Écrits, pp. 314–315 (my translation). See also Marini, Lacan, pp. 242–243. For a further discussion of Lacan’s anti-philosophy, see Adrian Johnston, ‘This Philosophy Which Is Not One: Jean-Claude Milner, Alain Badiou, and Lacanian Antiphilosophy’ Journal of the Jan van Eyck Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique, 3 (2010), 137–158.
- 107.
See above, pp. 43–46.
- 108.
Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, p. 359.
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Tombras, C. (2019). Lacanian Metapsychology. In: Discourse Ontology. The Palgrave Lacan Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13662-8_5
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