THE DRIVE

In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant draws a distinction between negative and indefinite judgment. As Slavoj Zizek has pointed out, the example that Kant uses is very telling in the context of the un-dead: the positive judgment, by which a predicate is ascribed to a subject (S is P), is given as ‘the soul is mortal’; the negative judgment, by which a predicate is denied to a subject (S is not P), is given as ‘the soul is not mortal’, while the indefinite judgment, in which a certain non-predicate is affirmed (S is not-P), is given as ‘the soul is not-mortal’. The difference between the negative and the indefinite judgment thus appears as a matter of spacing. All this has an immediate bearing on the notion of the un-dead, or the living dead. As Zizek has also indicated, we resort to indefinite judgments in our ordinary language, exactly ‘when we endeavour to comprehend those borderline phenomena that undermine established differences such as that between living and being dead’. The same argument applies to the notion of the uncanny, which Freud similarly derives as an indefinite judgment, based on a consideration of the derivation of the word unheimlich and its relation to heimlich. (Nicholas Royle has shown that a similar relation holds between ‘canny’ and ‘uncanny’ in English.) The un-dead, that is, uncanny creatures such as vampires, zombies and so on, are neither alive nor dead: ‘he is un-dead’ thus is a perfect example of the indefinite judgment, inasmuch as vampires are excluded from the domain of the living without therefore being included in the domain of the dead. The un-dead retain the characteristics of a living creature, without being one. As Freud saw the matter, the uncanny pertains to all that was intended to remain secret, hidden away, but which has, nevertheless, come into the open. As Hal Foster has shown, the uncanny, with its attendant notions of repetition, the death drive and doubling, is as fundamental to the procedures of surrealism as it is to the horror film. The uncanny does not oppose the world; it hollows it out from within, opening it towards an abyss. The return from the grave of the un-dead is the appearance of something profoundly other, something that blurs the distinction between imagination and reality, between the symbol and what is symbolised. The vampire is an unrepresentable Thing, and the space he occupies is neither that of community nor that of society. The vampire occupies an uncanny space that Lacan called ‘l’entre-deux-morts’, between two deaths, a a gap between the Symbolic and the Real. For Lacan, it is what dwells here that is the ultimate object of horror.

A film that gives an overwhelming sense of this order of horror is Dreyer’s Vampyr. A similar order of experience is evident in Murnau’s Nosferatu. The film ends as Nina Harker sacrifices herself to save the city of Bremen. Jonathan rushes into the bedroom and embraces her, only for her to sink back and die. What one can say is that Nina is only able to destroy the vampire if she is willing to join him in that space between two deaths, and this she does, in her passivity, for all the time during the night while he remains beside her, bent low over her neck. It is the book Jonathan returned with, the Book of the Vampires, that has brought Nina to this condition: in other words, it is the Symbolic order itself, as represented by the book, an order that stands for death, in the sense of mortifying the Real of the body, that brings her to that which eludes symbolisation. As does Dreyer, Murnau associates the vampire with the very film that we are watching. Both films present us with issues of representation and meaning as they are inflected by the death drive, a force that, neither living nor dead, partakes of the demonic.







CINDERELLA’S ASHTRAY



a little shoe was part of it
finality
a slippage without cause

which I think was traced already
in my childhood

an image that should have stayed concealed
a sound one ought never to have heard again

the object
of objective chance

is a hole made of lilies


*


I must retrace my steps

the street’s deserted
the door open

a gold branch hangs above the stairwell
a sliver of crystal twists in a moulding of white sand

a woman pledged herself one day in that same space

a copper wire conducts the light


*


I attach no importance to it
it accords no significance to me

the plaster figures have lost nothing of their expression
the tears I shed are not mine

ON WITTGENSTEIN AND LACAN: A NOTE

‘In the beginning was the deed’ (OC §402). With this famous citation from Goethe, Wittgenstein seems to signal a gap or rupture between letter and voice, between signifying act and bodily singularity. The sense of an utterance cannot be separated from the conditions of that utterance, conditions that are accidental, contingent. One can see here something of how meaning, the flat, denotative meaning of a written chain of words, is transformed into sense. As Zizek has it, this takes place ‘only when a nonsensical vocal dark spot which, in its very opaqueness functions as the stand-in for the subject is added to it’ (IR, 197). If objective-denotative meaning is to be transformed into subjective-expressive sense, one has to supplement it with a vocal stain, a stain that is without meaning: sense = meaning + nonsense. This transformation of the chain is effected, of course, retroactively. (See the graphs of desire.)

The presence of this impenetrable vocal supplement effectuates the magic transmutation of a written chain of signifiers into ‘subjectivized’ speech in which one can discern, beyond its denotative meaning, the reverberation of a subjective position of enunciation. (IR, 197)

Wittgenstein evokes some thing very similar to this when he refers what he calls ‘the context of significant use’ in the Tractatus, a crucial insight which he goes on to elaborate in his later work. (See James Conant on this.) The transmutation of meaning into sense is inseparable from the unpredictable singularity of a language event. (See the discussion of Guetti and Read elsewhere on this site.)

As an example of what I have in mind here, I cite the following remarks from Zettel, remarks in which Wittgenstein also brings out with astonishing clarity the lack of foundation of language, the lack which alone supports it, the nothing from which it comes, ex nihilo:

Even where the feeling that arouses joy is localised, joy is not: if for example we rejoice in the smell of a flower. – Joy is manifested in facial expression, in behaviour. (But we do not say that we are joyful in our faces.)
“But I do have a real feeling of joy!” Yes, when you are glad you really are glad. And of course joy is not joyful behaviour, nor yet a feeling around the corners of the mouth and the eyes.
“But surely joy designates an inward thing.” No. “Joy” designates nothing at all. Neither any inward or any outward thing. (Zettel §§486-87)

One might substitute jouissance for ‘joy’ and the point will, I think, remain. Our having the concept of joy that we do is part of our having that kind of complex life with language, its words, its grammar (in Wittgenstein’s sense) into which agreement—agreement in judgements, not just in definitions—enters in specific and often unforeseeable ways. In Zettel §351 he remarks:

‘If human beings were not in general agreed about the colours of things, if undetermined cases were not exceptional, then our concept of colour could not exist.’ No: our concept would not exist.

It is in our lives with language that the concepts that we have are indeed the concepts that we have. There is nothing beyond this: our lives in language float free in empty space. We possess no firm ground under our feet. One might say, with Zizek, that language maintains ‘an unnameable distance from the Real’. One might also say that what is being revealed here is the primordial character of the word. Just as there is no name for the name, so there is no metalanguage. The import of Wittgenstein’s vision is also grasped by Agamben when he writes: ‘we finally find ourselves alone with our words; for the first time we are truly alone with language, abandoned without any final foundation. This is the Copernican revolution that the thought of our time inherits from nihilism: we are the first human beings who have become completely conscious of language’ (Potentialities, 45). To adapt a formulation of Zizek’s, the barrier separating language (the Symbolic) from the extra-linguistic (the Real), is impossible to trespass, since language (the Symbolic) is this very barrier. It is in this gap that Lacan locates the subject: the subject is in effect the ‘abyss that forever separates language from the substantial life-process’.

One can see here what is involved in Lacan’s later considerations of the Borromean knot. In the seminar of 1975-76, devoted to a consideration of Joyce, the knot moves from being threefold to becoming fourfold, the fourth element being le sinthome, that which links the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real together. This can be mapped—at the risk of gross oversimplification—onto the equation taken from Zizek that I gave above: sense (Imaginary), meaning (Symbolic and nonsense (Real). Le sinthome would then appear as a thread or line to be envisaged as looping around the three terms of the equation. The problem here of course is that the equation exists in the register of the symbolic, whereas the symbolic is only one element of the knot as it appears in Lacan’s presentation. What my suggestion does conform to, however, is Lacan’s insistence that the writing of the knot cannot be located ‘in symbolic structure, psychological meaning [‘sense’ in Zizek’s equation] or the mute insistence of the drive; in other words the knot itself is irreducible to the registers it inscribes’ (Luke Thurston, James Joyce and the Problem of Psychoanalysis, 195). The mute insistence of the drive is what turns around the black spot of the voice, object a. The topology of the split subject, barred S, in its circulation around the object is marked by Lacan in the matheme for fantasy as a diamond (the sign for ‘more than’ linked to the sign for ‘less than’): this dimension is to be located between ‘meaning’ and ‘nonsense’. The knot is thus a kind of letter, an asemic coincidence of linguistic substance and jouissance, and ‘it remains behind language as litter’ (Thurston, 196). According to Thurston, not only is the sinthome the non-metaphorical knot itself, but it appears in the knot and as its least stable element. (In my inscription of it onto the equation, it is not even ‘there’, but posited.) The sinthome is what reveals a singularity—what for Lacan is the untranslatable signature of a subject’s enjoyment.

On this showing, human subjectivity is not to be understood in terms of rules or laws of signification (as Wittgenstein had already shown): it is to be seen in terms of an act that is open to the void of creative jouissance-in-language. In Zettel we find the following remark: ‘Our language-game is an extension of primitive behaviour. (For our language-game is behaviour.) (Instinct.)’ The extension in question is the extension of a language-game, so that the ‘primitive behaviour’ referred to here is always already language: and the same holds for ‘instinct’. The language-game is there like our life; it is not based on anything, reasonable or unreasonable. It thus makes no sense to ask: ‘from what did language emerge?’ Language truly is a creation ex nihilo. In the light of this, one can perhaps come to see why Lacan finally understood language and the subject’s relation to it, not in terms of metaphor, the Name-of-the Father, but as bodying itself forth without reference to the Other. Just such a vision of language is manifest in Wittgenstein’s account of the experience of meaning, and of seeing aspects.

SOME REMARKS ON LOGIC AND LANGUAGE

I have suggested (on this site) that in TLP, so far as language and logic taken together are concerned, we are dealing with something that can be seen in terms of the Lacanian ‘il n’y a pas de rapport…’: what leads Lacan to the assertion that there is no sexual relation can also be taken to support the assertion that there is no relationship between language and logic. There is no meta-language enabling us to grasp the two levels of language and logic from the same neutral standpoint. They are inextricably intertwined. If the structure of such a relationship, of such an ‘impossible’ relationship, one might say, is to be represented, it is imperative that we look at a form favoured by Lacan, that of the Moebius strip: first, we move from language to its logical form, its logical infrastructure; then, we have to confront the irreducible dimension of language at the heart of logic itself. We derive the logical form of the proposition by means of what is called in TLP an operation, only to find that what constitutes an operation returns us, by virtue of what Lacan determines as the logic of the ‘not-all’ (pas-tout), to the context of significant use, to the specific occasion of an actual utterance. The attempt to step outside language, in order to say what it is that constitutes meaning as such, results in nonsense.

In The Parallax View (pp.37-40), Zizek has some comments that bear on the matter. He raises the question of how Lacan’s binary signifier, S1-S2, manifests itself in the context of the symbolic order. ‘What the symbolic order precludes is the full harmonious presence of the couple of Master-Signifiers, S1-S2 as yin-yang, or any other two symmetrical “fundamental principles”. The fact that “there is no sexual relationship” means precisely that the secondary signifier (that of the Woman) is “primordially repressed,” and what we get in place of this repression, what fills in its gap, is the multitude of “returns of the repressed,” the series of “ordinary” signifiers’. Zizek illustrates this by reference to Woody Allen, but so far as TLP is concerned we can see how the general form of the proposition marks the place of S1, inasmuch as it functions as the quilting point of the ‘multitude’ of empirical propositions (T/F).

This is not a binary logic, divided between the polar couple Masculine/Feminine (or logic/language). The split is not between the One and the Other, it is inherent in the One itself: the split comes between the One and its empty place of inscription (a theme made explicit by Wittgenstein in his presentation of the ‘operation’). In what looks like a critical aside aimed at Badiou, Zizek insists that the multiple is not ‘the primordial ontological fact’—an assumption that underpins Badiou’s system as a whole. The ‘transcendental’ genesis of the multiple, he argues, resides in the lack of the binary signifier: ‘the multiple emerges as the series of attempts to fill in the gap of the missing binary signifier’. What we are dealing with here is the minimal difference between a signifier and its place of inscription, between one and zero.

On the one hand, we have S1 as the empty signifier, together with S2 as the signifying chain in its incompleteness. It is in order to fill in this incompleteness that S1 intervenes, as the quilting point. This is the ‘masculine’ side, in which a multitude is organised into a totality, into an All, through the exception, S1, which fills in its void. On the other hand, the binary signifier, the symmetric counterpart of S1, is ‘primordially repressed’. It is in order to supplement the void of this repression that the chain of S2 emerges. Here, as Zizek has it, ‘the original fact is the couple of S1 and the Void at the place of its counterpart, and the chain of S2 is secondary’. It is in these terms that we may understand the ‘feminine’ non-All. It is the logic operative here that accounts for the emergence of the inconsistent multitude characteristic of the non-All: the emergence of the multitude must be seen in relation to the void or lack of the binary signifier.

In his later work, Wittgenstein elaborates his notion of ‘grammar’, and it becomes clear—from the perspective opened by Lacan—that such an idea can be seen in relation to the non-All. Wittgenstein writes, in Philosophical Remarks, as follows:

If I could describe the point of grammatical conventions by saying they are made necessary by certain properties of the colours (say), then that would make the conventions superfluous, since in that case I would be able to say precisely that which the conventions exclude my saying. Conversely, if the conventions were necessary, i.e. if certain combinations of words had to be excluded as nonsensical, then for that very reason I cannot cite a property of colours that makes the convention necessary, since it would then be conceivable that the colours should not have this property, and I could only express that by violating the conventions. [PR 53]

I do not call a rule of representation a convention if it can be justified in propositions: propositions describing what is represented and showing that the representation is adequate. Grammatical conventions cannot be justified by describing what is represented. Any such description already presupposes the grammatical rules. That is to say, if anything is to count as nonsense in the grammar which is to be justified, then it cannot at the same time pass for sense in the grammar of the propositions that justify it (etc.). [PR 55]

Rules of grammar, which he also calls grammatical conventions, cannot be justified by appeal to the supposed fact that they enable us to represent reality correctly. If it makes sense to say that an object cannot be reddish-green all over, then it must also make sense to say that it can be reddish-green all over. But then the grammatical convention is superfluous. Further, if one supposes that the colour word conventions are necessary, one could not say what property it is that makes them necessary, for then it would be conceivable that the colours might not have this property, and one could only express this fact by violating the very convention one was trying to justify. In effect, one has to say that there is no such thing as reddish-green, which means that the phrase ‘reddish-green’ is nonsensical, i.e. we have no use for it in making intelligible statements about how the colours are. (Analogously, there is no such thing as a double fault in chess, which is just to say that in chess there is no use for the phrase ‘double-fault’.) The nature of propositions of very many kinds can be elucidated by reference to the grammar they exhibit, but any attempt to impose a limit on grammar as such results in nonsense. This is part of the significance of the notion of a language-game: by means of it, language is exhibited in all its inconsistent and contingent multiplicity, and this in turn means that there is no point from which it can be surveyed in its totality. Language use is without justification, and language is without essence—a statement that is itself nonsensical.

One consequence of this view of grammar may seem paradoxical: it is that language is non-normative. Grammar is non-normative (a remark that flies in the face of most commentary on Wittgenstein). This is, however, a position that has been argued for by Stanley Cavell, and others, such as Steven Affeldt, James Guetti and Rupert Read. To see grammar in terms of the non-All is to see meaning in terms of the future. In this connection, Zizek cites a phrase of Brian Rotman’s: meaning is something which is always ‘borrowed from the future’, relying on its ever-postponed fulfilment to come [The Parallax View, p.51]. As Cavell has put it, ‘Is the issue one of a leap [not of faith, but, let us say, of reason] from a ground that is implied or defined by the leap? Or is the leap from grounds as such, to escape the wish for such definition [as if reason itself were a kind of faith]?’ Steven Affeldt glosses this by saying: ‘The idea is that to speak intelligibly is to define the ground from which you speak, it is to articulate the position that you are assuming and from which you speak’. To cite Zizek again: ‘subjects cut the impasse of the endless probing into “do we all mean the same thing by ‘bird’?” by simply taking for granted, presupposing, acting as if they do mean the same thing. There is no language without this “leap of faith”’ [p.54]. Guetti and Read have examined in close detail the operation of an example very similar to this—the use of the word ‘waxwing’ [I have discussed this elsewhere on this site].

Wittgenstein remarks: ‘If language is to be a means of communication there must be agreement not only in definitions but also (queer as this may sound) in judgments’ [PI sec.242]. Affeldt glosses the force of this remark by saying that our intelligibility for one another depends continuously, from moment to moment, and in each act of speech, upon precisely our agreement in judgment. ‘It is not that our shared language is the ground of our intelligibility. Our language is the vehicle through which, or the medium within which, we continuously undertake to make ourselves intelligible to one another by projecting the ground that we individually, at a given moment, occupy.’ One might reposition Zizek in these terms by saying that, for him, it is the status of such an agreement in judgment that it is not normative, nor could it be. It cuts across ‘the debilitating deadlock of language, its ultimate lack of guarantee, by presenting what we should strive for as already accomplished’ [p.52]. Language is a system that lives on credit it can never pay off.

NOTES:
Steven Affeldt, “The Ground of Mutuality: Criteria, Judgment and Intelligibility in Stephen Mulhall and Stanley Cavell”, European Journal of Philosophy 6:1 (April 1998): 1-31.

Stanley Cavell, “The Division of Talent”, Critical Inquiry 11:4 (1985).

James Guetti and Rupert Read, "Acting from Rules", International Studies in Philosophy 28:2 (1996): 43-62.

MAURICE BLANCHOT AND THE IMAGE OF LANGUAGE

Blanchot’s account of language and the religious experience of Simone Weil, and one should note that the significance of the word ‘experience’ is not straightforward here, draws together many of the insights of Blanchot’s literary critical writings in order to approach her in terms of what is described in those writings as an experience of the Outside. The Outside cannot be known, nor can it be experienced in any ordinary sense of the word. Nonetheless, the encounter of an ‘I’ with what is truly Other is the defining mark of experience as such. It is not a vision granted to mystics but a fleeting awareness of that which abides behind every experience. The Outside is the space of impossibility, not possibility, of dying, not death. The secret of the Outside is that there is no secret, only an empty depth. It is a mystery that involves the renunciation of mystery, and an acknowledgement of the ultimate insignificance of the lightness which the Outside is. It is in this spirit that he says of Simone Weil that ‘no one has set aside more firmly all forms of power, even spiritual power’ [The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p.115. Hereafter cited in the text as IC].

Man is able to do nothing in relation to God; insofar as the approach of man to God involves the exercise of power (or the illusion of its exercise) the truth will forever escape him. There is no way to God that we ourselves can inaugurate, and this includes not only the theology of the Church but also its observances. ‘It is categorically and almost with horror that she rejects all the diversions offered by faith: the idea of salvation, the belief in a personal immortality, the conception of a beyond, and, in general, all that would allow us to bring close to us what has truth for us only if we love it’ [IC 110]. Blanchot notes that, for her, ‘We can never put enough distance between ourselves and what we love’. To think that God is, is still to think of him as present, and this for her is a thought designed according our measure, its one purpose to afford us consolation. It is more fitting to think that God is not; the purity of our love for him should be such that it is indifferent to us whether he exists or not. It is for this reason that the atheist may be closer to God than the believer. The atheist does not believe in God. This is the first degree of truth, and, so long as he does not substitute for his lack of belief a belief in any other god or gods, if he is true to his atheism, if he is in no way idolatrous, then he will believe in God absolutely, even while being unaware of it and by the pure grace of his ignorance. We reach here a crux. Blanchot writes: ‘Not to ‘believe’ in God. Not to know anything of God. And to love in him only his absence so that this love, being a renouncing of God himself, may be a love that is absolutely pure and ‘the emptiness that is plenitude’. But we must not know even this, or we risk consenting to emptiness only in the hope of being filled with it’ [IC 111].

This movement appears to license no affirmation whatsoever concerning God. It would seem impossible to rest in any thought of God, whether that be the thought of God’s abandonment, or the thought of death itself. It is almost as though all her talk about God is, if not superfluous, then empty. The very statement she would appear to be intent on making seems to refute itself, as when she writes: ‘Obedience to God, that is to say, since God is beyond all that we can imagine or conceive, to nothing’. Or again: ‘Not to speak about God (not even in the inner language of the soul)….’ The aporia here, of speaking about that whereof one cannot speak, is not only in play in these propositions but throughout her writing, where, as Blanchot indicates, she speaks constantly of God and ‘she does so without prudence, without reserve, and with the facility that universal tradition has accorded her’ [IC 111]. She would appear caught in an ineluctable contradiction: where God is concerned, thought of the truth is alone enough to falsify it, just as knowing the rules for salvation already constitutes their violation. The conclusion appears to be that we are either absolutely without power and salvation is impossible for us, or we are obliged to place our hope solely in divine mercy.

And yet she also writes: ‘For me, the proof, the miraculous thing, is the perfect beauty of the accounts of the Passion joined with a few fulgurating words by Isaiah and Saint Paul; this is what constrains me to believe’ [quoted in IC 109]. Again and again, she asserts that we know nothing of the Good and nothing of God except for the name. ‘Without the gift of this name we would have only a false, earthly God, conceivable by us. The name alone permits us to have a Father in the Heavens, about which we know nothing.’ The name alone, the gift of the name, is what permits us to know of God, and at the same time it is required that we do not speak about God, even in the inner language of the soul. Nonetheless, it is this aporetic doubling of the name, expressing most crucially what constrains us, displacing us from knowledge and from comprehension, that is at the same time the dynamic of her conception of God. For Simone Weil, the internal division of the name, its self-differing, would seem to inform not only man but God also. For her, man can do nothing, and God can do no more than man. A position such as this exhibits what Lacan calls the logic of separation. In contrast to the subject’s alienation within the symbolic order, where he is ‘spoken’ by the social structures of language, the big Other, separation takes place when the subject comes to see the Other as itself lacking, and ‘what we thought was the limitation of our knowledge about a thing is in fact an inherent limitation of the thing itself’ [Slavoj Žižek, Interrogating the Real (London: Continuum, 2006), p. 333. It is here that we can discern the ‘core of Lacan’s atheism’, according to Žižek]. Blanchot summarises the matter in the following words: ‘[God] is the absolute renunciation of power: he is abdication, abandon, the consent to not being what he could be, and this in the Creation as well as in the Passion. God is not able to do anything for us; as long, at least, as we are still ourselves encompassed by ourselves. ‘In this world God is a dissolvent. Friendship with him confers no power’ [IC 115].

There is, then, a question that imposes itself on Blanchot concerning what it was that so tore and divided Simone Weil from herself. He cannot, as an atheist, ascribe it to God’s doing, and clearly it was not within her own power. For Blanchot, the answer is absolutely decisive and of a piece with his thought in general: it was the tearing itself. It is here that her certitude and faith reside: ‘There is in us something that must be called divine, something by which we already dwell close to God: it is the movement by which we efface ourselves, it is abandon—the abandonment of what we believe to be, a retreat outside ourselves and outside everything, a seeking of emptiness through the desire that is like the tension of this emptiness and that, when it is the desire for desire (then a surnatural desire), is the desire of emptiness itself, emptiness desiring’ [IC 155].

This loving consent to be nothing, or what Blanchot calls ‘this immobile impetus of desire towards an anticipated death’, is the absolute itself—our common trait with God, our equality with him. ‘God abdicated from his divine omnipotence and emptied himself. By abdicating from our small human power we become, as regards emptiness, equal to God.’ (Blanchot, the atheist, comments: ‘we cannot but sense that there is in this humbling a great spiritual pride.’) A passage from Écrits de Londres (published in 1957) gives some insight into what it was for her to think in this way: ‘There is a poetry in poverty which has no equivalent elsewhere. This poetry emanates from the poverty-stricken flesh, seen in the truth of its poverty. The spectacle of cherry-blossoms in spring would not go straight to the heart as it does if their fragility was not so perceptible. It is, in general, a condition of absolute beauty to be almost absent, at a distance, fragile’. [Cited by Rush Rhees, Discussions of Simone Weil (New York: SUNY, 2000), p. 165.]

‘In creating what is other than himself, God necessarily abandoned it.’ God renounced both himself and us. (Blanchot draws attention to a parallel between Simone’s Weil’s thought and that of the sixteenth century interpreter of the Cabala, Isaac Luria: see IC 116-7.) Through renunciation God created the world, and through renunciation we become him by restoring unto him the being we are not. Simone Weil says: ‘The abandonment in which God leaves us is his own way of caressing us. Time, our single misery, is the very touch of his hand. It is the abdication by which he makes us exist.’ But from the moment I know this, I am again caught in aporia—the renouncing that is my divine part ceases to be pure and I renounce nothing, knowing that in renouncing I gain everything and more than everything: I become God himself.

What Simone Weil’s thought, in its undoing, its unworking, of itself, brings home to Blanchot—whose profound admiration for her is evident throughout his essay—is that the more thought goes toward expressing itself, then just to that extent it is obliged to retain a certain reserve towards itself, to retain some order of place that would be—as he puts it—an uninhabited, uninhabitable non-thought, a thought that would not allow itself to be thought. It is here that we encounter what Blanchot calls the impossibility of thinking, and it is this impossibility that thought becomes for itself in its reserve, that is, in its stepping back beyond or outside itself. We can become aware of the impossible in anything at all, in all that we may say and all that we may do, and yet despite this ubiquity there is something about the way it enters into our experience he wishes to call ‘negligible’. However, this word should not deceive us: negligible though it may be, the impossible can extend itself through the whole of our experience, until little by little that experience is transformed utterly. It is here, in the paradoxical space of the impossible, that Blanchot locates what he calls the thought of exile, and he seems to be absolutely in no doubt that the thought of exile is, finally, what characterises the thought of Simone Weil.

The ideas of the impossible and exile are integral to a particular picture of what language is, and in order to bring out what that picture might be, a comparison suggests itself between Blanchot’s approach to language and his ideas on the image. To that end it will be pertinent to examine a passage from Saint Theodore the Studite’s On the Holy Icons. In his third refutation of the iconoclasts, Theodore makes the following pronouncements: ‘The prototype and the image belong to the category of related things, like the double and the half. For the prototype always implies the image of which it is the prototype, and the double always implies the half in relation to which it is called double. For there would not be a prototype if there were no image; there would not even be any double, if some half were not understood. But since these things exist simultaneously, they are understood and subsist together. Therefore, since no time intervenes between them, the one does not have a different veneration from the other, but both have one and the same’ [St Theodore the Studite, On the Holy Icons, trans. Catharine P. Roth (Crestwood, N.Y.: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001), p. 110]. No image without a prototype, and no prototype without an image. This is very similar to an argument put forward both by Blanchot and by Emmanuel Lévinas: when a thing or an event presents itself it also gives an image of itself in the very gesture of its appearing. An event or thing resembles itself; it is doubled in its appearing, being both itself and its image. (This idea may be compared with Wittgenstein’s discussions of aspect change, or seeing-as.) Rather than a proposal to the effect that the real and the image are two distinct and stable orders, or that we can measure the truth of the image against the reality that it depicts, the argument is that the imaginary is already within the thing, or rather, that the distance between the thing and its image is always already within the thing. In the context of the icon, the argument suggests that Christ and His image should be seen as related in just such a manner. There is no secure interval between the icon of Christ and Christ Himself. The distance between the two is, in Blanchot’s idiom, already within Christ; in Him, we might say, ‘the limitless depth behind the image’ is ‘absolutely present although not given’ [St Theodore the Studite, On the Holy Icons, trans. Catharine P. Roth (Crestwood, N.Y.: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001), p. 110]. Seen in this way, the experience of the person in prayer before the icon will therefore be an experience of fascination, the fascination of being drawn endlessly towards the divine alterity depicted in the icon, for what fascinates us is what robs us of the power to give sense to what it is that is in the process of so captivating us. I cannot grasp the ‘meaning’ of the icon because its ‘meaning’ is precisely to disable meaning. For the worshipper, thus fascinated before the icon, there is no firm distinction possible between the icon in the world—in the church, in the home—and the world of the divine in the icon. Although the divinity of Christ cannot be circumscribed, it nevertheless dwells in the icon by way of a certain topology or radical reversal through which the distance between prototype and image within Christ is, so to speak, re-inscribed within the icon.

For Blanchot, literature is similarly part of a reversal to which it exposes the author and the reader. To name something is, according to Hegel, to annihilate its unique existence by bringing it under a concept. [For a brief comment on this idea of naming, see the note at the end of this piece.] Literature here idealises death by making it into a dialectical power; the negativity of death is given not in the senseless dissolution of life but in its ability to shape the world, and to master it. The literature of realism may, to a certain extent at least, be taken as an example of this. Blanchot’s example is de Sade. However, literature is linked to language in another, more problematic way. It is concerned not with the idea or concept but with retracing the passage between nothingness and language as such. Literature is an attempt—an attempt that must always fail—to bring about a return to an origin that must forever remain inaccessible. It is a process whereby words cease to serve as representations of something that pre-exists them. The word, bound no longer to representation, becomes in and of itself a sensible presentation, a non-existence made word. Seen like this, literature no longer exists in the realm of possibility and power, but in turning away from that becomes attentive rather to the materiality of words themselves. Language is manifest as itself a thing: words become detached from their contexts of significant use, and separated from meaning they acquire an empty power, a power no one can any longer do anything with, a power without power. (There is, perhaps, a comparison to be made here with Wittgenstein’s considerations of the ‘experience of meaning’.) Freed in this way from the concept, and the negativity of death attendant on it, literature transforms negativity into something unemployed, that renders it idle. Literature will have no work to do—its work is this nothing. The work unworks itself, it is nothing other than its own unworking of itself: it is its own undoing. From this there follows the inability of literature to invest dying with a context of meaningful action, an inability that consigns it to an endlessness that Blanchot calls the ‘impossibility of dying’, an infinite migration of exile, a slipping away both from life and from death that is enacted with exemplary power and precision in Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies, or The Unnamable. Literature is here a language no one speaks, addressed to no one, which reveals nothing. As a result, when I read it, it appears to be addressed to someone other than me, always awakening another person within me, speaking as if to my own difference from myself. Literature is the appearance of language within which the ‘other’ of language reverberates. Language no longer speaks, it is.

For Blanchot, the form of writing that most crucially engages with the self-differing of language is not the novel (roman) but the narration (récit). If we think that implicit in the notion of the novel is an idea of human time, whereby the novel engages with human emotions and experiences, as in the ‘realist’ works of Balzac, then the récit will differ from the novel in a number of ways. First, the récit relates just one unusual event (Ahab’s quest for the white whale, Malone dying); second, ‘narration is not the account of an event but the event itself, its imminence’, that is, it does not report an event but creates it in the process of narrating it; and third, it is a strange movement, comparable to that of a Moebius strip, or a spiral turning ceaselessly in on itself and at the same time beyond itself. It is a movement ‘towards a point—one that is not only unknown, ignored, and foreign, but such that it seems, even before and outside of this movement, to have no kind of reality; yet one that is so imperious that it is from that point alone that the narrative draws its attraction, in such a way that it cannot even “begin” before having reached it; but it is only the narration (récit) and the unforeseeable movement of the narration (récit) that provide the space where the point becomes real, powerful, and alluring’ [Book to Come, p. 7]. Another passage similarly aims to capture Blanchot’s curiously topological vision: ‘It [the récit] only ‘relates’ itself and this relation, at the same time as it takes place, produces what it relates, and is possible as a relating if it realises/enacts what happens in this relating, for it includes the point or the level where the reality which the récit ‘describes’ can ceaselessly merge with its reality as récit, justify it and be justified by it’ [Book to Come, p. 7]. In this manner a paradoxical temporality emerges with regard to the space opened up by the récit, a space which has to be seen as both the genesis and the result of the work. The transformation effected by the work, the récit, involves a step back from representational language, and yet the space into which the step directs itself does not pre-exist the movement of stepping back; the space is the transformation of language wrought in language by language in its performance of that very step. This Blanchot calls ‘the space of literature’, and in it language no longer finds itself subordinated to the demands of truth or cognition.

The distancing or spacing at work in language, thus understood, is already present for Blanchot in the image. Here he is following Lévinas, reference to whose essay of 1948, ‘Reality and its Shadow’, will clarify what is at issue. The argument rests on a notion of resemblance as what constitutes an image. Resemblance, obviously enough, is the mode in which an image relates to its object. However, as we saw in relation to the icon, the resemblance of an image to its object is not to be thought of as an addition to that object. It partakes of the object itself. Resemblance is possible because objects are other than themselves: ‘A being is that which is, that which reveals itself in its truth, and, at the same time, it resembles itself, is its own image’ [Emmanuel Lévinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), p. 6]. The imaginary is what one might call an allegory of the real, which reality bears on its face, a distance which is inherent in the realm of proximate things themselves. A thing, an object, may very well exhibit qualities of an image—colour, form, a certain way of being in the light. Objects can be seen under new aspects: we can look at a thing and be overwhelmed by its exhibition of itself. A thing is and is not itself: non-identical, outside itself. It is what it is and a stranger to itself. An image is therefore not a concept: its relation to what it is an image of is not cognitive or one of knowing. It can take hold of us, grip us and in so doing make us passive, an experience that may overwhelm us whenever we look at paintings or at photographs. For Lévinas, this mode of captivation is also the captivation of poetry and music. ‘It is a mode of being to which applies neither the form of consciousness, since the I is there stripped of its prerogative of assumption, of its power, nor the form of the unconscious, since the whole situation and all its articulations are in a dark light, present’ [Lévinas, op. cit., p. 4].

The image does not go beyond the thing as its excess. It is on this side of the thing, the hither side of what it is in truth. The question is where this hither side is situated. Lévinas sees it as the place of the almost, the not-quite. He speaks of the ‘meanwhile’, which is the interval between neither and nor (neither the one nor the other)—not quite a past and not quite a future, and so not quite a present, not quite a moment or an instant, but an endless pause or interruption, a setting of time to one side, a spacing of time, so that art disengages time from its passing. ‘The eternal duration of the interval in which a statue is immobilised differs radically from the eternity of a concept; it is the meanwhile. Never finished, still enduring—something inhuman and monstrous’ [Lévinas, op.cit., p. 11]. It is in relation to this notion of the interval, this incessant and interminable entre-temps, the time of the impossible, outside possibility, that Blanchot’s vision of literature and language comes together with his understanding of the image, and nowhere more so than in the course of his reflections on the cadaver, the corpse. In The Space of Literature, he writes:

The cadaver is its own image. It no longer entertains any relation with this world, where it still appears, except that of an image, an obscure possibility, a shadow ever present behind the living form which now, far from separating itself from this form, transforms it entirely into shadow. The corpse is a reflection becoming master of the life it reflects—absorbing it, identifying substantively with it by moving it from its use value and from its truth value to something incredible—something neutral which there is no getting used to. And if the cadaver is so similar, it is because it is, at a certain moment, similarity par excellence: altogether similarity, and also nothing more. It is the likeness, like to an absolute degree, overwhelming and marvellous. But what is it like? Nothing. [The Space of Literature, p.258]

The corpse is a limit case: we experience it par excellence as an image, but an image more real than what it resembles, which is itself. It is like nothing: and it is the nothing it is like. Something is there before us which is not really the living person. Its is neither the same as the living person, nor is it another person, nor is it anything else. And to that extent it is the very embodiment of the uncanny. The image is the disappearance of the object and the appearance of its spectral double, but in the case of the corpse death has done the work of the imagination, and the spectral double—the shadow—has subsumed the object of which it is the shadow. There is an analogy with the damaged tool, which in its useless condition becomes its image. The tool, no longer disappearing into its use, appears. Art is linked to this possibility of objects appearing, of surrendering, that is, to the pure resemblance behind which there is nothing. And insofar as this is the index of the literary experience we may say that in literature we are brought into a passive relation with what cannot appear as a significant phenomenon in an event that cannot take place in the present. We are brought to a neutral zone outside of being: existence without being. ‘Man is made in his image: this is what the strangeness of the cadaver’s resemblance teaches us. But this formula must first be understood as follows: man is unmade according to his image. The image has nothing to do with signification or meaningfulness as they are implied by the world’s existence, by effort that aims at truth, by law and the light of day.’ Not only is the image of an object not the sense of the object, but in the case of the cadaver the object has finally been withdrawn from understanding into the immobility of a resemblance which has nothing to resemble. [Cf. The Space of Literature, p.260.]

This kind of a-theological reading of the notion of the image with respect to man has already been addressed in relation to St Theodore’s considerations of the icon. Simone Weil is someone who, at least as Blanchot’s writings present her, lived out the experience of the loss of subjectivity that in writing and art is thought of as a dying into the outside. Writing—as manifest in the récit—is an act of dying, but not as suicide is an act, since suicide is still a subjective act of self-expression, an intention and a meaning, an assertion of the right to death, or of a will-to-power over death. If we see dying in terms of the space opened up by writing, so that writing—or language transformed in and by writing—becomes the paradigm of our understanding, dying becomes an experience, if we can call it an experience, of the meanwhile. Dying is intransitive and indeterminate, a translation of what is intelligible into what is alien and unspeakable, into what is outside the intelligible, where the process of it is always incomplete, since it is nothing other than absence and impossibility as such. Lévinas writes: ‘The time of dying itself cannot give itself the other shore. In dying, the horizon of the future is given, but the future as a promise of a new present is refused; one is in the interval, forever in the interval’ [Lévinas, op. cit., p. 11].

To see not only the writing, but also the life, of Simone Weil in these terms is to enter into one of Blanchot’s most difficult areas, his account bearing on two aspects of the encounter with her experience, and which he takes to be essential to it, namely, affliction and attention. ‘The thought of affliction is precisely the thought of that which cannot let itself be thought’ [The Infinite Conversation, p.120]. Like the dying revealed by writing, it is an ‘enigma’. Furthermore, affliction has the same nature as physical suffering, from which it cannot be separated: ‘Physical suffering, when it is such that one can neither suffer it nor cease suffering it, thereby stopping time, makes time a present without future and yet impossible as present (one cannot reach the following instant, it being separated from the present instant by an impassable infinite, the infinite of suffering; but the present of suffering is impossible, it being the abyss of the present). Affliction makes us lose time and makes us lose the world’ [IC 120].

The parallel between the temporality of the space of literature and the way time is endured in suffering is here evident. Not only this, but those who are forced to endure the suffering of affliction undergo an alteration in their ontological status such that, for others, they acquire a mode of being aspects of which are similar to those exhibited by the corpse. Blanchot writes: ‘The individual who is afflicted falls beneath every class. The afflicted are neither pathetic nor pitiable; they are ridiculous, inspiring distaste and scorn. They are for others the horror they are for themselves. Affliction is anonymous, impersonal, indifferent. It is life become alien and death become inaccessible. It is the horror of existence where existence is without end’ [IC 120]. The horror of existence where existence is without end, where death becomes inaccessible, the impossibility—the interminability—of dying, is ontologically a condition of complete powerlessness, of consciousness deprived of subjectivity. It is a condition of existence without being, such that existence is refractory to any of the categories or concepts of being. Blanchot characterises it, using the idiom that Lévinas employs for it in Existence and Existents, as the il y a, the there is. He also calls it the outside, the neutral: we are not there, we are elsewhere, and we will never cease being there. It is existence at the limit of the human. In L’experiénce intérieure (1943), Georges Bataille speaks of ecstasy as a condition achieved by the renunciation of knowledge, action, work—of the whole field of project whereby the subject constructs its experiences out of the future. Inner experience does not occur in introspection but rather in the exposure or expenditure of the subject in communication, engendering that which is outside subjectivity and therefore outside the world that the subject creates for itself.

Simone Weil understood the extent to which affliction, far more than anguish, can hold within itself the limit from which we should be able to assume a perspective on the human condition—and yet she understood also that affliction is precisely that which ruins all perspective. As Blanchot puts it: 'In the space of affliction we have very close to us, and almost at our disposition, all that religion, in inverting it, projected up into the heavens. We are not above but beneath time: this is eternity. We are not above but beneath the person: this is the impersonal, which is one of the traits of the sacred. We are outside the world: this is not the beyond, nor the purity of nothingness, or the plenitude of being, but being as nothingness' [IC 120]. ‘For me who deliberately, and almost without hope, chose to take the point of view of those who are at the bottom . . . ’ These words of Simone Weil about herself, cited by Blanchot, are for him what we should be obliged to say about thought—if we are to talk about thought that is without fraudulence. Thought cannot but be fraudulent unless it is thought from out of the baseness and deprivation of affliction. And to think through affliction is to arrive at a point where one cannot arrive, where force is no longer the measure of what must be thought and said: thought becomes for itself the impossibility of thinking, an impossibility that is its ultimate centre. Through affliction we encounter time without event, a ‘pure’ time, without project and without possibility. We suffer an empty perpetuity that must be borne without end, and at every instant. We are time, time interminably endured. Attention, which is other than affliction, and is not to be confused with it, has nonetheless a very similar relation to time. For Blanchot, attention is an ecstasy of waiting, as though it were within an interruption that cannot be overcome. He says: ‘Attention is waiting: not the effort, the tension, or the mobilisation of knowledge around something with which one might concern oneself. Attention waits. It waits without precipitation, leaving empty what is empty and keeping our haste, our impatient desire, and, even more, our horror of emptiness from prematurely filling it in. Attention is the emptiness of thought oriented by a gentle force and maintained in an accord with the empty intimacy of time’ [IC 121].

Attention is impersonal. It detaches me from myself, and frees me for the attention that for a moment I become. Attention, according to our usual understanding of the word, organises what one sees and knows around the object of attention, enriching attention itself through the object one attends to and by so doing enriching the object also. The other attention, however, of which Blanchot speaks in respect of Simone Weil, is as though idle and unoccupied. ‘It is always empty and is the light of emptiness’ (IC 121). Attention of this other kind is thus paradoxical: attention is what escapes attention, an opening upon the unexpected, a waiting that is the unawaited of all waiting. Despite what appears to link attention to affliction, Blanchot is clear that one cannot conclude from whatever relation one seeks to ascribe to them that attention is in effect affliction redeemed and transfigured through its own agency, through its acting upon itself, or that the empty time of affliction can be transformed by that same agency into the empty time of attention. Simone Weil knows, and it is something she knows from her own experience, that extreme affliction is without relation to anything that could make it cease being what it is. Not even God himself could bring this about, for affliction removes God, making him ‘absent, more absent than someone who is dead, more absent than light in a dark cell.’ The relation between attention and affliction is a broken relation that only the plenitude of love can re-establish. It is love alone—become the immobility and perfection of attention—that by way of the gaze of the other, of the loving and attentive gaze of an other person, is able to open a way to the closing off of affliction. It is only under the gaze of love and attention that the afflicted are willing to allow themselves to be looked at, and are themselves able to acknowledge the other as other. ‘Knowing how to let a certain gaze take them in. This gaze is first of all an attentive gaze by which the soul empties itself of all its own content so as to receive in itself the being that it is looking at, such as it is, in all its truth’. Concerning God, she wrote: God is always absent from our love as he is absent from the world, but he is secretly present in pure love. Blanchot comments: ‘Affliction is inattention’s extreme. Attention is an attention that makes itself bearable to the affliction that cannot bear being attended to’ [IC122].

There is no dialectic of overcoming and synthesis in the relation between attention and affliction. The transfiguration of affliction—if there is to be such a thing—depends upon the intervention of someone other than the afflicted person. The instability of Simone Weil’s life and experience, an instability manifest, or so Blanchot affirms, in her argumentative and protracted questioning of those she knew, even of the priest who attended her on her death-bed, was an expression of the impossibility of remaining in place that comes with affliction. Affliction is the loss of a dwelling place, the unceasing disquiet—a cold and indifferent disquiet—with regard to what is never there. And yet, despite the agitated and uneasy details of her life, Blanchot insists that ‘Simone Weil gave in her thought the example of certitude and, in her works, the model of an even expression, almost calm and as though perfectly at rest in its movement’ [IC 122]. Attention is fully present in the depths of her language: through attention, language has with thought the relation thought would like to have with the lacuna in it—the affliction—that thought is and that it can never render present to itself. Blanchot concludes: ‘Language is the place of attention’. She herself remarked: ‘Humility is the primary characteristic of attention’. According to the standard notion—the pagan notion—of the link between man and God, man approaches God through spiritual purification, through casting off the ‘low’ material and sensual aspects—‘the flesh’—of his being and so elevating himself towards God. For Simone Weil, the Christian notion of that link is an inversion of the standard conception. When I, a human being, experience myself cut off from God, at that very moment of the most abject affliction, I am absolutely attentive to God, for I am myself in the position of the abandoned Christ, the Christ who cried out on the Cross: ‘Father, why hast thou forsaken me?’ The love to which Simone Weil attends is a love beyond mercy. Love is love for the other insofar as he is lacking, in his limitation, poverty, impotence, ordinariness. The celebration of Divine (or human) perfection is pagan; perfection, in Simone Weil’s understanding of it, is a loving attention to the other’s imperfection. It is here, for her, that one meets Christ.

Note: The conception of naming as the essence of language is a version of the so-called ‘Augustinian picture’ addressed by Wittgenstein in the opening parts of Philosophical Investigations. Hegel and his followers like Kojève—and of course Blanchot—would also seem committed to a version of the compositional theory of sentence meaning, i.e. that the meanings of sentences are made up from the meanings of their constituent words organised into wholes by an application of appropriate syntactic rules. These presuppositions, however, do not seem to be indispensable features of Blanchot’s view of literature, and one might here refer to the work of James Guetti, whose approach to literature by way of grammar—in Wittgenstein’s sense—may well provide support, albeit from a rather different direction, for what Blanchot has to say.

LACAN WITH WITTGENSTEIN 3

As for the analytic discourse, it is distinguished by advancing into this field in a way that is distinct from what is, I would say, found embodied in Wittgenstein’s discourse, that is, a psychotic ferocity, in comparison with which Ockham’s well-known razor, which states that we must admit only notions that are necessary, is nothing. (Lacan, Seminar XVII, p.62)

Psychosis is an essay in rigor. In this sense, I would say that I’m a psychotic. I’m a psychotic for the single reason that I’ve always tried to be rigorous.
(Lacan, 24 November 1975, at Yale)



François Roustang, in his book Lacan, de l’équivoque à l’impasse of 1986, which appeared in English translation as The Lacanian Delusion in 1990, addresses the development of Lacan’s idea of the Real. Roustang sees it as the impossible, the impossible being understood in the sense of that which it is impossible to symbolise. This being so, he says, it would seem unlikely that such a Real could have anything to do with the Real addressed by science: ‘it is hard to see how this Real-become-impossible could conceivably be the object of a mathematical interpretation’ (Roustang, trans. Greg Sims, 74). Nonetheless, for Lacan, according to Roustang, ‘the impossibility of mathematicizing and logicizing the object of psychoanalysis actually reveals the very essence of mathematics and psychoanalysis’ (p. 74).

I want to consider what this claim might amount to in the light of a comparison between Lacan’s Seminar XX, Encore (1972-1973) and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. To begin with, the focus of my attention will on Lacan’s formulae of sexuation, and the commentary on them proposed by Joan Copjec in her book Read My Desire (MIT, 1995), ch. 8, and subsequently developed by Slavoj Zizek, especially in Tarrying with the Negative (Duke University Press, 1993), chapter 2. [Zizek discusses the issues elsewhere: for example, in For they know what they do (Verso, 1991), pp.121ff, and Interrogating the Real (Continuum, 2006), pp.64ff.] I should say that the following few paragraphs derive wholly from Copjec’s and Zizek’s work, and are no more than a truncated restatement of a position they have given a full account of.

Lacan’s formulae may be found on page 78 of Bruce Fink’s translation of Seminar XX (Norton, 1999). It is to the formulae written in symbolic notation in the two rectangular boxes at the top that Copjec initially turns her attention, arguing that their proper significance emerges on their being mapped onto Kant’s antinomies of reason (Critique of Pure Reason B 454-88). Of Kant’s four antinomies it is the first and the third that she considers most pertinent to her purposes. An antinomy is a fallacy—or, as Lacan would have it, an impasse—that allows us to derive both a proposition and its negation from the same premise. As Roger Scruton points out, for Kant antinomies are not the same thing as contradictions; in the case of the first mathematical antinomy, for example, both of the propositions which constitute it are false, being based on a false assumption. Scruton is clear on the matter: ‘Kant’s point is that, in deriving each side of an antinomy, the same false assumption must be made. The purpose of his “critique” is to root out this false assumption and to show it to stem from the application of one of reason’s “ideas”. The ‘idea’ or assumption involved in cosmology, for example, is that we can think of the world in its “unconditioned totality”’ [Kant (OUP, 1988), p.49]. For Kant, ‘antinomies result from the attempt to reach beyond the perspective of experience to the absolute vantage-point from which the totality of things (and hence the world “as it is in itself”) can be surveyed’ [Kant, p.50].

Kant divides the antinomies into two groups: ‘mathematical antinomies arise when categories are applied to the universe as a Whole (the totality of phenomena which is never given to our finite intuition), whereas dynamical antinomies emerge when we apply categories to objects that do not belong to the phenomenal order at all (God, soul)’ [Zizek, Tarrying, p.54]. In the first mathematical antinomy, the first antinomy that Copjec considers, the thesis states that the world has a beginning in time and a limit in space, while the antithesis asserts that the world has no beginning in time and no limit in space (A426-7/B454-5). The third antinomy (A444-5/B462-3), the dynamical antinomy that Copjec selects as most appropriate to her purposes, is concerned with causality and freedom: the thesis asserts that ‘causality according to the laws of nature is not the only causality operating to originate the world’. A causality of freedom [a cause of all causes] is necessary to originate the causality of nature. The antithesis states that ‘there is no such thing as freedom, but everything in the world happens solely according to the laws of nature’ [Copjec, p.228].

Copjec and Zizek read the antinomies in terms of Lacan’s formulae of sexuation, and the formulae of sexuation in terms of the antinomies. (Whether or not Lacan had Kant in mind when writing/speaking on sexuality in Seminar XX is not the issue: the claim is that the structure of the Kantian antinomies and Lacan’s forms of argument mutually illuminate each other.) Copjec aligns the first mathematical antinomy with the female (or top right) side of Lacan’s formulae, and the male (or top left) side with the third antinomy, the dynamical antinomy relating to causality. What is of significance is the different logic of the two kinds of antinomy. Zizek sets this out: ‘Mathematical antinomies are antinomies of the “non-all” of the phenomenal field: they result from the paradox that, although there is no object given to us in intuition which does not belong to the phenomenal field, this field is never “all”, never complete. Dynamical antinomies, on the contrary, are antinomies of universality: logical connection of the phenomena in the universal causal nexus necessarily involves an exception, the noumenal act of freedom which “sticks out,” suspending the causal nexus and starting a new causal series “spontaneously,” out of itself’ [Tarrying, p.55]. The objects under consideration also differ radically: ‘the universe as a Whole’ is the totality of phenomena, whereas ‘God’, the ‘soul’, ‘freedom’ and so on, are noumenal entities beyond phenomena [p.55].

Accordingly, the solutions to the two kinds of antinomy also differ radically. In the case of the mathematical antinomy, both the thesis and the antithesis are false (contraries), ‘since the very object to which the thesis attributes finitude and the antithesis infinitude does not exist’. This amounts to saying that ‘the universe as the Whole of phenomenal reality is a self-contradictory entity: it speaks of “reality,” i.e. it uses transcendental categories constitutive for the field of possible experience, yet simultaneously it reaches beyond possible experience, since the universe in its entirety can never be the object of our finite experience’ [Tarrying, p.55]. In the second case, that of the dynamical antinomy, where the disputed object (God, soul, freedom) is not conceived as an object of possible experience, that is, as part of reality, ‘it is possible for both the thesis and the antithesis to be true’ [Tarrying, p.55].

The ‘masculine’ and the ‘feminine’ are not biological categories. They arise as effects of the logic of the signifier, and are manifest as a result of the speaking being’s submission to language. It is these effects that are manifest also in the differences between the two types of antinomy. On the ‘feminine’ side, there is no exception (notEx.notFx: there is no x which is not submitted to the function F – the phallic function). From this a certain negation follows, that is, notAx.Fx: not-all x is submitted to the function F. The ‘masculine’ side concerns the universal (Ax.Fx: all x are submitted to the function F – the phallic function), which implies the existence of an exception (Ex.notFx: there is at least one x that is excepted from the function F). Zizek links the formulae with the antinomies thus: ‘The first two (“mathematical”) antinomies are “feminine” and reproduce the paradoxes of the Lacanian logic of “not-all”; whereas the last two (“dynamical”) antinomies are “masculine” and reproduce the paradoxes of universality constituted through exception’ [Tarrying, p.57]. Lacan concludes that it makes sense to say that the sexual relation does not exist.

Copjec, and, following her, Zizek , effect a Lacanian translation of the (first) mathematical antinomy into the two formulae of the ‘feminine’ side of the sexuation formulae. The antithesis on the infinity of the universe has to be read as a double negation, not as a universal affirmation. If we take the function F as ‘to be preceded by another phenomenon in time’, we get: there is no phenomenon which is not preceded by another phenomenon in time (there is no x which is not submitted to the function F – the phallic function). Lacan’s formula is: notEx.not Fx, which should not to be read as a positive assertion, i.e. ‘all x are submitted to the function F’. The thesis on the finitude of the universe is to be read as ‘not-all x are submitted to the function F’ (i.e. all phenomena are not infinitely divisible and/or preceded by other phenomena). This appears in Lacan’s notation as: notAx.Fx, a formula that should not be read as: ‘there is one x which is exempted from the function F’. The idea of ‘not-all’ (pas-tout), as presented here by Lacan, does not mean that in the case of woman some positive entity is being excluded from the symbolic order. ‘Not-all woman is submitted to the phallic signifier’ does not imply that there is something in her which is not submitted to it: ‘there is no exception and “woman” is this very nonexistent “nothing” which nevertheless makes the existing elements “not-all”’ [Tarrying, p.58].

The third dynamical antinomy relating to cause and effect displays the structure of the ‘masculine’ paradoxes of sexuation: ‘all x are submitted to the function F’ (everything in the universe is caught in the universal network of causes and effects: Ax.Fx) on condition that there is one x which is exempted from this function: Ex.notFx. As Zizek has it, the exception says that ‘freedom is possible; there is an element which escapes the universal chain of causes and is capable of starting autonomously, out of itself, a new chain’ [Tarrying, p.57]. The primal father of Freud’s Totem and Taboo is Lacan’s example of the ‘masculine’ exception, an exception that founds the law based on the acceptance of castration and governing the social interchange between the sons.

I want to suggest that the Tractatus (TLP) may be seen against the background of these considerations also. That Lacan had a keen interest in the Tractatus is clear from his remarks in Seminar XVII. However, my intention is to see what light (if any) the discussion of the antinomies and Lacan’s ‘translation’ of them casts on Wittgenstein’s remarks on logical form, initially with regard to section 6 of TLP. At TLP 6, the general form of a proposition is given as the general form of a truth-function. A truth-function is a proposition resulting from the application of a truth-operation, the operation being an application of the operator N, the formula for which is given in TLP 6. All propositions are generated by means of an operation: Ax.Fx, in Lacan’s notation. There is, however, an exception, the tautology. A clear explication of how the operation is carried out to generate propositions, with the exception of the tautology (TTTT)(p,q), is set out by Severin Schroeder in Wittgenstein (Polity Press, 2006), on pages.72-75, and particularly on page 73, note 25. On Schroeder’s account, in order to generate a tautology in the mode of the Tractatus it is necessary first to generate a contradiction by means of repeated applications of the N operator to propositions p and q, and then to negate the operation of negation. This procedure is expressed by the formula in TLP 6.01.The exception, the tautology, can be marked as Ex.notFx in Lacan’s formulae. This is followed immediately by 6.02, where numbers are derived as exponents of an operation. Since the propositions are countable, this amounts to saying that there is no proposition that is not the result of the application of an operation. There are no exceptions, or in Lacan’s notation: notEx.notFx. In other words, ‘nothing that is a proposition fails to be subject to logical operations’ [Juliet Floyd, ‘Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Logic and Mathematics’, Oxford Handbook of Logic and Mathematics (OUP, 2005), p.95].

As with the mathematical antinomy, so here: the incoherence, the nonsense, of the assumption that there is such a thing as the general form of the proposition becomes evident. Just as the notion of the world has been given no significance in Kant’s account of the antinomies, so, in the context prepared for it in TLP, the notion of the general form of the proposition similarly fails to make sense. The general form of the proposition is conceivable in relation to an absolute totality of propositions, which is graspable only as a whole, independent of my particular perspective on it. But there is no phenomenon that is not an object of possible experience, and what holds for phenomena holds also for propositions. There is no limit on phenomena in the phenomenal realm, since, as we have seen, there is no exception. However, the absence of a limit on the set of phenomena does not lead to the conclusion that phenomena are therefore infinite—we need to recognise that notions of finitude and infinitude have no grip in this context. As Copjec puts it, we have to acknowledge the fact that ‘[all phenomena] are inescapably subject to conditions of space and time and must therefore be encountered one by one, indefinitely, without the possibility of reaching an end, a point where all phenomena would be known. The status of the world is not infinite but indeterminate’ [Read My Desire, p.221]. This means that not-all phenomena are a possible object of experience: notAx.Fx. Propositions are encountered only in a context of significant use. Just as, for Lacan, the woman does not exist, so we may say the proposition does not exist. There is no such thing as the essence of the proposition, and so there can be such thing as the essence of language.

The idea of the indeterminate bears directly on what Kant and Wittgenstein mean by the limits of thinking. Kant’s essential point, according to Copjec, is that ‘our reason is limited because the procedures of our knowledge have no term, no limit; what limits reason is a lack of limit’ [Read My Desire, p.223]. That does not mean, however, that the negation of the world, or of universal reason and its pretensions to speak of the totality of phenomena, implies that what we may be said properly to know are finite, particular phenomena. ‘For in this case, we simply supply reason with an external limit by supposing a segment of time, the future, that extends beyond and thereby escapes reason. This eliminates from reason its internal limit, which alone defines it’ [Read My Desire, p.223]. The nature of this internal limit can be seen from the following passage, where Kant notes that what the first antinomy offers is ‘an indirect proof of the transcendental ideality of phenomena’: ‘This proof would consist in the following dilemma. If the world is a whole existing in itself, it is either finite or infinite. But both alternatives are false (as shown in the proofs of the antithesis and thesis respectively). It is therefore also false that the world (the sum of all appearances) is a whole existing in itself. From this it then follows that appearances in general are nothing outside our representations—which is just what is meant by their transcendental ideality’ (A506-7/B534-5) [cited by Copjec, p.223]. The logic of this passage would appear ‘flawed if the negation contained in the penultimate statement were taken as a limitation of all phenomena, or of the world, to particular phenomena’ [Read My Desire, p. 223]. That is, one can draw the conclusion—that phenomena are nothing apart from our representations of them—only if one takes the penultimate statement—that the world, the sum of all appearances, the content of all phenomena, is not a whole existing in itself—as an indefinite judgement.

What the idea of indefinite judgement involves is ‘not the negation of a copula such that “all phenomena” is completely cancelled and eliminated, leaving its complement—some or particular phenomena—to command the field, but rather the affirmation of a negative predicate’ [Read My Desire, p.224]. To avoid the antinomies that result from the idea of the world we have to affirm ‘that the world is not a possible object of experience’, and yet we must do so ‘without pronouncing beyond this on the existence of the world’. It is in this way that reason may be seen as limited by nothing other than its own nature (its dependence on the merely regulative idea of totality), as internally limited [Read My Desire, p.224]. For another, more blatant, example of indefinite judgement we may look to the cinema or literature of horror—to the vampire. The vampire is not dead, nor is he alive. He is undead. He ‘exists’ courtesy of the affirmation of a negative predicate.

In order to be able to say intelligibly that a thing exists, it also necessary to be able to say that it does not exist. It is the possibility of a proposition being true or false that in TLP Wittgenstein associates with that proposition having sense (Sinn). The exception to this, the propositions of logic, the tautologies, say nothing: they are without sense (sinnlos). It would seem, then, that the ‘propositions’ of TLP, concerning, for example, the fact that no proposition fails to be subject to logical operations, are neither propositions with sense nor propositions of logic: neither Sinn nor sinnlos, they are Unsinn—non-sense. In TLP, Kant’s cosmological antinomies would appear to have been turned through, and folded back upon, language as such. There is, therefore, no metalanguage: if there is no proposition that is not subject to logical operations, there is no outside, no beyond, from which language as a whole can be surveyed and understood as such: ‘The “God’s-Eye View”—the view from which absolutely all languages are equally part of the totality being scrutinized—is forever inaccessible’ [Hilary Putnam, Realism with a Human Face (Harvard, 1992), p.17].

For Lacan, it is here that the ethical force of the Tractatus is to be located. ‘There is no other metalanguage than all the forms of knavery, if we thereby designate these curious operations derivable from the fact that man’s desire is the Other’s desire. All acts of bastardry are based on the fact of wishing to be someone’s Other, I mean someone’s big Other, in which the figures by which his desire will captivated are drawn. Thus this Wittgensteinian operation is nothing but an extraordinary parade, the detection of philosophical skulduggery’ [Seminar XVII, trans. Fink, p.61]. Wittgenstein writes in the Preface to TLP: ‘In order to draw a limit to thought we should have to be able to think both sides of this limit (we should therefore have to be able to think what cannot be thought). The limit can, therefore, only be drawn in language and what lies on the other side of the limit will be simply nonsense’. In this context it becomes clear what Wittgenstein means when he insists (4.112) that a philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. It is a matter of bringing us really to see that if it is simply nonsense—einfach Unsinn—to think there is that which lies beyond the limit of thought, it is also nonsense to think there is that which lies within the limit of thought. The notion of a limit to thought is empty, void.

I suggest that this position is comparable to that argued for by ‘resolute’ readers of Wittgenstein, such as Cora Diamond, James Conant and Rupert Read. In his essay ‘The Search for Logically Alien Thought’ [Philosophical Topics 20:1 (Fall, 1991), 115-180], Conant characterises the end and purpose of the activity of elucidation that characterises TLP as follows: ‘All that we are left with is the realization that we were subject to an illusion of thought. . . what happens is—if the elucidation succeeds in its aim—we are drawn into an illusion of occupying a certain sort of perspective. . . From this perspective, we take ourselves to be able to survey the possibilities that undergird how things are with us, holding our necessities in place. From this perspective, we contemplate the laws of logic as they are, as well as the possibility of their being otherwise. We take ourselves to be occupying a perspective from which we can view the laws of logic from sideways on. The only “insight” the work imparts therefore is the one about the reader himself: that he is prone to such illusion’ [157].

According to Conant, the fundamental idea in TLP is ‘we cannot make mistakes in logic (5.473). There is no proposition not subject to logical operations, and it is the purpose of the logical apparatus set out in TLP to make this ‘truth’ evident. I have wanted to suggest that the structure of argument involved here may be said to exemplify the Lacanian ‘logic’ of the ‘not-all’. I want to suggest further that this same mode of thought may have a bearing, not only on how we may wish to see the relations between propositions (operations), but also on how we might understand Wittgenstein’s treatment of another pseudo-concept, that of the internal form, the logical or syntactic form, of the proposition per se.

‘Everything which is possible in logic is also permitted’ (5.473). Pertinent to this thought is the context principle as developed in TLP, i.e. the thesis that no word is possessed of syntactic character, no sign can be a symbol, unless it is itself a proposition or the component of a proposition. It underpins Wittgenstein’s discussion of what is nonsensical about nonsensical propositions. ‘The sentence is nonsensical because we have failed to make an arbitrary determination of sense, not because the symbol is in itself unpermissible’ (5.473). ‘We cannot give a sign the wrong sense’ (5.4732), that is, there is no such thing as illegitimately constructed propositions. The same point is made in the Investigations: ‘When a sentence is called senseless, it is not as it were its sense that is senseless’ (500). Conant writes: ‘This does not mean that we cannot give these words a sense, but only that we have (as yet) failed to do so’ [158]. One example of an illogical sentence given in TLP is ‘Socrates is identical’ (5.473). As it stands, this sentence fails to say anything: it is the combination as subject and predicate of what are not subject and predicate. We have (as yet) failed to give any meaning to ‘identical’. ‘Thus the reason why ‘Socrates is identical’ says nothing is that we have given no meaning to the word ‘identical’ as adjective. For when it appears as a sign for identity, it symbolises in an entirely different way—the signifying relation is a different one: the two symbols have only the sign in common, and that is an accident’ (TLP 5.4733). ‘Socrates is identical’ (a proposition, a propositional symbol) lacks sense insofar as it has a meaningless part, a part to which no meaning has been given. It is not nonsense because it expresses or represents a logically impossible sense, or category error. The propositional symbol ‘Socrates is identical’ does not represent a nonsense because of what ‘identical’ means (its being a relation word): it lacks a sense because no meaning has yet been given to one of its components, the adjectival symbol ‘identical’. [On this, see: Colin Johnston, ‘Symbols in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus’, European Journal of Philosophy 15:3 (2007), 367-394.] The string of words (marks on the page, signs) ‘Socrates is identical’, when considered apart from practice, means nothing. One may think that the distinction in TLP between ‘syntax’ and semantics’ is—on the basis of these considerations—a distinction whose only purpose is to bring us to see that this is so.

The context principle is implicitly at work throughout TLP, and it can be seen from the outset, informing the opening remarks. Just as the unit of the world is the fact and not the thing, ‘so the unit of syntax is the proposition and not the name. Signs are in syntactic use only within propositions: the logico-syntactic use of a sign, the use of a sign as the sign of a symbol, is a use essentially within propositions. As things (objects) occur in the world only within facts, so syntactic elements—symbols—occur in language only within propositions’ [Johnston, 384]. For a name to be a name it must have its place in a language, that is, a system of symbols whose structure mirrors that of reality. One result of the context principle so understood is that there can be no illogical propositions. That is, it makes no sense to take an illogical proposition to be an illegitimate combination of sub-propositional elements. For, as Johnston points out, ‘if there are sub-propositional symbols—sub-propositional logical elements as opposed to mere signs—only within what is already a proposition, then there can be no such illegitimate construction. There can be nothing illegitimate in logic (syntax), for there is logic (syntax) only within what is already legitimate’ [384].

There being no symbol not subject to it, the context principle may be said to be the means by which we come to recognise the very propositions that state it as pseudo-propositions, pure nonsense. Or, in Conant’s words, ‘Our guiding idea—the idea that “we cannot make mistakes in logic”—turns out itself to be a piece of nonsense. For if the sentence “we can make mistakes in logic” turns out to be nonsense, then so does its denial. But in order to make sense of either of these sentences we have to make sense of “the possibility of illogical thought.” Each rung of the ladder depends on its predecessors for support. The collapse of one rung triggers the collapse of the next. We are initiated into a structure of thought which is designed to undermine itself’ [Conant, ‘Alien Thought’, 158].

In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein tells us that his propositions serve as elucidations inasmuch as anyone who understands him (Wittgenstein) eventually recognises them as nonsensical. To reach this point, one must have ‘climbed out through them, on them, and over them’ (6.54). The reader is not called on to understand his sentences, but to understand him—and the activity on which his sentences show him to be engaged, the activity of elucidation. The activity of elucidation is irreducibly contingent, an activity in which error and illusion are immanent to truth. Wittgenstein’s introduction of himself allows us to see him responding to a lack encountered in the Other with a prior lack of his own; in effect, 6.54 articulates itself around what Lacan calls separation. So far from positing the Other as hiding some ‘hidden treasure’ (agalma, the object-cause of desire)—some ineffable meaning—Wittgenstein wishes to bring us, his readers, to experience this hidden kernel, this secret, as something the Other is already missing. ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’. As with the statement that we cannot make mistakes in logic, there is in this statement (TLP 7) only an illusion of something being forbidden. Zizek’s comment on the last remark of TLP is as follows: ‘The paradox of this “nothing”, of this pure semblance, is, of course, the very paradox of the object-cause of desire in the Lacanian sense of the objet petit a’ [Interrogating the Real, p.120]. I suggest that we may see here something at least of what a therapeutic reading might amount to, as that is understood on a resolute approach to Wittgenstein. To cite Zizek once more: 'Is this not the traversing of the fantasy [la traversée du fantasme], this experience of place in relation to the fantasmatic object, in the moment when, recalling the formula of Mallarmé, "nothing takes place but the place [rien n'aura pas eu lieu que le lieu]"'? [Interrogating the Real, p.46].

I began by citing Roustang to the effect that for Lacan the impossibility of mathematicizing and logicizing psychoanalysis actually reveals the very essence of mathematics and logic. If Lacan’s ‘logic’ of pas-tout casts any light on the Tractatus—and vice versa—it seems clear that the essence of logic is that it has no essence. The thinking (thinking as opposed to thought) exhibited in the Tractatus is such that it is not captured by the logic of Frege, Russell or that of the Tractatus itself. It may be that the 'un-logic', the nonsense, the Unsinn, of Lacan does more justice to it.


[I should point out that this way of thinking has been vigorously contested by Alain Badiou. See, for example, ‘Silence, solipsisme, sainteté: L’antiphilosophie de Wittgenstein’, Barca: Poesie, politique, psychanalyse 3 (1994), 13-53, and ‘Les langues de Wittgenstein’, Rue Descartes 26 (December, 1999), 107-116.]

LACAN WITH WITTGENSTEIN 2

In my earlier account (posted below) of Wittgenstein’s understanding of the role of grammar and our use of language, I suggested that there is in our meaningful utterances a double movement, a twofold temporality, of anticipation and retroaction. I argued that this is brought out by an argument developed by James Guetti and Rupert Read, to the effect that ‘we may say that each element of a linguistic sequence is presumed in order for another to follow it, or that it is transformed to presumptive status when—or even because—that further step occurs’ (52). They suggest that ‘a rule in action is "invisible" just in virtue of the fact that, to be taken as a rule—to be an actionable or capacitative concept—it must be un-expressed and un-exposed’ (52). In support of this view they cite an example from Wittgenstein, who imagines addressing someone who is in pain and simultaneously hearing a near-by piano being tuned in the following way: ‘"Were you thinking of the noise or of your pain?" If he answers "I was thinking of the piano-tuning"—is he observing that the connexion existed, or is he making it by means of these words?—Can’t I say both? If what he said was true, didn’t the connexion exist—and is not he for all that making one that did not exist?’ [48, cited from PI, 682] On the one hand, the ‘existence’ of the connection (between the person in pain and the noise of the piano-tuning) may be taken as a matter of the conditional, as a matter of what could or would have been said, had the question been put. On the other, the connection seems to come into being only when it is constituted retrospectively in the act of speech. The pre-existing conditions may be said to be what is anticipated by the connections of standing grammar, while the utterance itself constitutes that grammar in its pertinence, brings it into being, retroactively. The temporality of significant discourse is a temporality of the future anterior.

My contention is that this understanding of anticipation and retroaction is comparable to Lacan’s account of the temporality of the signifier. It is an idea of temporality that underpins the Lacanian graphs of desire, beginning with the ‘elementary cell of desire’ [see Graph 1 in ‘The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire’ (1960), Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (Norton, 2006), p. 681]. Lacan says of his graphs that they lay out ‘the topology that I have developed in my teaching over the past few years’. Topology, a notion that was to play a crucial role in his later thought, is worth pausing over. It is a form, such as that of the Moebius strip (or an Escher painting), that is not reducible to the linear: if we try to think of language in topological terms such as these we will, it would seem, be led to question any picture of language that represents it as governed by rules laid down in advance, stretching like rails into the future. We may think of anticipation and retroaction as inseparable from each other, each one being the other seen under a different aspect, like the sides of a Moebius strip, a three-dimensional figure with one surface and one edge only. The fact that Lacan designates this figure by the lozenge in his matheme for fantasy, $<>a, suggests that we should see it as an attempt to capture something fundamental about the manner in which he wants us to think through, or think with, the manner of his writing, the mode or style of his presentation. For example, in his formula for the signifiers, S1/S2, the two letters, S1 and S2, are to seen as passing through each other, in a kind of self-exceeding and interminable dialectic: the signifier is the signified of the signified, the signified the signifier of the signifier. The aim is to represent in writing the lack of the very function that engenders it. He writes in 1953 [‘The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis’, trans. Fink, p. 247]: ‘I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it as an object. What is realised in my history is neither the past definite as what was, since it is no more, nor even the perfect as what has been in what I am, but the future anterior as what I will have been, given what I am in the process of becoming’. Lacan’s concern is not with knowledge-that, nor even with knowledge-how, but with language in act, in its dynamic employment, and I have to say that the assumptions informing his approach seem to me very like those that the various writings of Guetti and Read have also brought out.

Let us look, then, at the ‘elementary cell of desire’, Graph 1. Some pre-symbolic intention (denoted by A) cuts through (or ‘quilts’) the chain of signifiers, S→S’. The result of this is the subject, denoted by $, a matheme that indicates at once the divided, or split, subject and the effaced signifier, the subject as void or empty space in the signifying chain. As Slavoj Zizek has noted, ‘A crucial feature at this elementary level of the graph is the fact that the vector of the subjective intention quilts the vector of the signifier’s chain backwards, in a retroactive direction: it steps out of the chain at a point preceding the point at which it has pierced it’ [The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1999), p. 101]. To say that the effect of signification is retroactive in character amounts to saying that in the progression or unfolding of the signifying chain the signified is left behind, as a kind of after-effect: ‘the effect of meaning is always produced backward, après coup’ (Zizek, op. cit., p.101). The onward, forward movement of the signifying chain, the uttering, is at the same time a turning or folding back of itself upon itself. To put it another way, the act of enunciation always is always ahead of, in excess of, the enounced, until, at some point, this excess is momentarily subdued. ‘Signifiers which are still in a "floating" state – whose signification is not yet fixed – follow one another. Then, at a certain point – precisely the point at which the intention pierces the signifier’s chain, traverses it – some signifier fixes retroactively the meaning of the chain, sews the meaning to the signifier, halts the sliding of the meaning’ [Zizek, op. cit., pp.101-2].

The signifier that fixes meaning retroactively is what Lacan calls the point de capiton, the upholstery button, quilting point, anchoring point (Sheridan) or button tie (Fink). Lacan sums up the situation thus: ‘The diachronic function of this button tie can be found in a sentence, insofar as a sentence closes its signification only with its last term, each term being anticipated in the construction by the other terms and, inversely, sealing their meaning by its retroactive effect’ [trans. Fink, p.682]. Zizek exemplifies the matter by taking an instance of what he calls ‘ideological quilting’. One may think of ideology as a space where signifiers float unanchored, signifiers such as ‘freedom’, ‘state’, ‘justice’, ‘freedom’ and so on. It is not until their chain is supplemented by some master signifier (‘Communism’) that their (Communist) meaning is retroactively determined [Zizek, op. cit., p.102]. Zizek goes on to argue that such capitonnage or quilting is successful only insofar as it effaces its own traces. To put it another way, the grammar of Communism is presumed when it appears to us (Communists) as if real freedom is ‘in its very nature’ opposed to bourgeois freedom, that the state is ‘in its very nature’ a tool of class domination, and so on. This presumption he sees as an instance of the fundamental illusion of transference, an illusion the untying of whose binding structure must be accomplished during the course of an analysis. For Zizek, this aim is pertinent not only to psychoanalytic therapy but also to the analysis of ideology and ideological ‘transference’ also. (We may think in this context of the therapeutic understanding of philosophy, as that is undertaken by Wittgenstein, and by the analyses, including those considered earlier, of Guetti and Read.)

Lacan’s purpose seems rather different, however, inasmuch as he is seeking to give what would appear to be a general account of language and the structure of signification as such. In ‘The Subversion of the Subject’, in the paragraph immediately following his remarks on the diachronic function of the button tie, he writes: ‘But the synchronic structure is more hidden, and it is this structure that brings us to the beginning. It is metaphor insofar as the first attribution is constituted in it—the attribution that promulgates "the dog goes meow, the cat goes woof-woof," by which, in one fell swoop, the child, by disconnecting the thing from its cry, raises the sign to the function of the signifier and reality to the sophistics of signification, and in his contempt for verisimilitude, makes necessary the verification of multiple objectifications of the same thing’ [trans. Fink, p.682]. By metaphor he is referring to the originary substitution of the word for the thing, an evocation of the idea initiated by Hegel and given currency by Kojève, that of the word as ‘murderer of the thing’. In Seminar I he says: ‘Everything begins with the possibility of naming, which is both destructive of the thing and allows the passage of the thing onto the symbolic plane, thanks to which the truly human register comes into its own’ [The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book I, trans. John Forrester (Cambridge, 1988), p.219]. Now, while the idea that there is a founding of language at all is dubious, let alone a founding of it on naming, what Lacan is after is, I think, not a theory of language but rather a prompt or reminder, to the effect that language is given all at once. Jacques-Alain Miller sums up Lacan’s position in exactly these terms: ‘The consequence of all this is that an evolutionary point of view concerning language is very difficult to bring back. On the contrary, we cannot imagine the slow, gradual learning of language, but, rather, language created at one stroke. It is a holistic theory, I would say. If a child can learn language, it is on the precondition that he is already in language’ [‘Language: Much Ado About Nothing’, in Lacan and the Subject of Language, ed. Ellie Ragland-Sullivan and Mark Bracher (Routledge, 1991), p. 33]. Miller hangs on to the notion of theory here, but in effect his argument subverts it. On his own showing, there is simply no position from which such a theory can be elaborated, since we are, all of us, ‘already in language’. Some earlier remarks in the same essay make this conclusion unavoidable: ‘nothingness enters reality through language . . . this void is created by language. That is, we replace the correspondence theory of language with a creation theory of language, the first creation being a lack, and in this sense it is a lack of all things’ [op. cit., p.32]. What ‘a creation theory’ of meaning amounts to is no theory at all—it is the subversion of theories of meaning as such.

Lacan’s considerations of Graph 2 (Fink, p.684) elaborate his ideas on signification further, and can be mapped onto the operations of grammar as understood by Guetti and Read. Lacan draws attention to two points of intersection on the graph, A, the Other, on the right of the signifier-voice chain, and s(A), the signified, the meaning, a function of the big Other, on the left of it. He writes: ‘The first, labelled A, is the locus of the treasure trove of signifiers, which does not mean of the code, for the one-to-one correspondence between a sign and a thing is not preserved here, the signifier being constituted on the basis of a synchronic and countable collection in which none of the elements is sustained except through its opposition to each of the others. The second, labelled s(A), is what may be called the punctuation, in which signification ends as a finished product’ [trans. Fink, p.682]. If we put aside for a moment the idiom deriving from Saussure, and see in the topological relation between A and s(A) the relation of grammar and empirical statement, as in, say, the waxwings example, we may see the working together of anticipation and retroaction, presumption and action, that Guetti and Read, in their account of meaningful consequences and the following of a rule, have also addressed. The mode of this relation is captured by Lacan in the following: ‘The subject’s submission to the signifier, which occurs in the circuit that goes from s(A) to A and back from A to s(A), is truly a circle, inasmuch as the assertion that is established in it . . . refers back only to its own anticipation in the composition of the signifier, which is in itself meaningless [insignifiante]’ [trans. Fink, pp.682-3]. Substitute grammar for signifier, and Lacan’s prose may be seen as an attempt to enact, at a schematic level, what is involved in a dynamic use of language, in a use of language to say something meaningful. The complex role of the subject is similarly captured, inasmuch as it constitutes itself only by subtracting from the circuit A-s(A) ‘and by decompleting it essentially, such that he [the subject] must, at one and the same time, count himself here and function only as a lack here’ [trans. Fink, p.683]. The subject is not an ‘after-effect’ of the signifying chain, as certain commentators have argued, it is both inside the chain insofar as it is outside it, and excluded insofar as it is included: it is ‘extimate’ In this, it is rather like the set of Russell’s paradox, the set of all those sets that do not include themselves . [Further commentary on the graphs may be found in Zizek, The Sublime Object, ch. 3.]

Wittgenstein writes in Zettel, 545: ‘Being sure that someone is in pain, doubting whether he is, and so on, are so many natural, instinctive kinds of behaviour towards other human beings . . . Our language-game is an extension of primitive behaviour. (For our language-game is behaviour.) (Instinct.)’ Rush Rhees has suggested that the implication of the first remark in parenthesis is that the extension of our primitive behaviour Wittgenstein has in mind is the extension of a language-game [Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, ed. D.Z. Phillips (Blackwell, 2003), p.94: commentary by Phillips, p.163]. The second parenthesis – ‘(Instinct)’ – endorses this reading, insofar as it implies that the language-game does not result from reflection or ratiocination. Rhees goes on to cite On Certainty, 559: ‘You must bear in mind that the language-game is so to say something unpredictable. I mean: it is not based on grounds. It is not reasonable (or unreasonable). It is there, like our life’. He then insists: ‘In this context it would make no sense to ask, "From what did it emerge? And still less, ‘From what did language – Sprache – emerge?’ [op. cit., p.95]. Wittgenstein, he notes, does not speak of any development from something prior to a language-game: language, we may say, is given at one stroke, in one fell swoop. The conclusion to be drawn regarding Lacan is that drawn by the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus regarding his own propositions: ‘My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognises them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must overcome these propositions, and then he will see the world aright’ [6.54]. There is no Other of the Other—the Other does not exist.

© 2008 Michael Grant