Post -Rationalism

Psychoanalysis, Epistemology, and Marxism in

Post -War France
Tom Eyers
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Tom Eyers, 2013
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ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-8688-1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Eyers, Tom.
Post-rationalism: psychoanalysis, epistemology and Marxism in
post-war France ITom Eyers.
pages cm - (Bloomsbury studies in Continental philosophy)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4411-8688-1 -ISBN 978-1-4411-4975-6 (epub)-
ISBN 978-1-4411-3998-6 (pdf) 1. Knowledge, Theory of-France-History-
20th century. 2. Rationalism. 3. Psychoanalysis-Philosophy.
4. Philosophy, Marxist. I. Title.
B2421.E94 2013
194-dc23
2012046572
Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India
Printed and bound in Great Britain
For my parents, John and Judy Eyers, and for my sister, Alice
Contents
Acknowledgments x
Introduction 1
1 Psychoanalytic Structuralism in the Cahiers pour fAnalyse 13
2 Bachelard, Lacan, and the Impurity of Formalization 49
3 Science, "Suture:' and the Signifier 81
4 Discourse and Ideology in Post-Rationalist Thought:
Althusser, Badiou, Lacan, Milner 115
5 Living Knowledge? Canguilhem, Deleuze, and the Problem of Life 153
Conclusion 191
Bibliography 205
Index 213
Acknowledgments
This book was written during my time as a Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral
Fellow within the Interdisciplinary Project for the Humanities at Washington
University in St. Louis. I'm grateful to the Mellon Foundation and to my
colleagues and friends Joe Loewenstein, Guinn Batten, Dillon Johnston, Philip
Purchase, Parker VanValkenburgh, Amy Lehman, Eric Nuetzel, and others for
making my time in S1. Louis so rewarding. Anna Kornbluh was kind enough to
invite me to the University of Illinois at Chicago to present some of these ideas.
Adrian Johnston and James Williams have provided intellectual and practical
support to my endeavors for a number of years despite their never having any
formal academic responsibility for me, and I'm very thankful for their efforts. My
PhD supervisor Peter Hallward has remained a stalwart supporter, and I'm very
lucky to have been his student. Tracy McNulty of Cornell University became a
crucial reader of my work during the latter writing stages. Audrey Wasser was
both rigorous and kind in her reading. Kelsey Garnett acted as an exemplary
research assistant during the final editing stage; he will be writing his own books
in no time. Finally, Barbara Barrow has been a loving and patient companion,
and this book would be much the poorer without her.
Introduction
Philosophy begins with the question of the relation between knowledge and
truth. If commonsense empiricism assumes an unproblematic connection
between the two, the most rigorous currents in both "Continental" and
"analytic" philosophy of the twentieth century severed and reposed the link,
in ways that force us to perpetually reassess any certainty we might have of our
knowledge of the world. It is the mark of the Anglophone world's currently
dominant epistemological reductionism that something like psychoanalysis,
as a body of theory and practice, is placed increasingly out of bounds, as
irremediably pseudoscientific. Freud's elaboration of the unconscious, gathering
and amending numerous philosophical and scientific sources that preceded
him, becomes unthinkable when the ways by which we conceive of the relation
between knowledge and truth, a relation that defines to a large extent the nature
and limits of the "scientific;' are cast within narrower and narrower confines.
1
Those confines seem increasingly defined by the demands of quantification and
the need, within diverse institutional settings, for knowledge to be assessed
in purely instrumental terms; the academy, needless to say, is very far from
being immune to these pressures. And yet, traditions continue to exist that
offer a more capacious way of accounting for the various objects of possible
knowledge, and it is a general aim of the following study to account for one of
them, a current that continues to influence some of the most cutting-edge work
in contemporary critical theory. My hope is that some of the thinking discussed
here will place in sharp relief the inadequacies of the spontaneous philosophy
of science that prevails in so many corners of Anglophone life.
2
2
of what has come to my
focus falls on the attempt made by students of the Marxist philosopher Louis
Althusser to meld the insights of French historical philosophy of science with
the structural revision of Freud undertaken by Jacques Lacan. Much of the
work produced by what I will call the French "post-rationalists;' undertaken
at the sharp edges of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and epistemology, found
publication within the pages of the journal Cahiers pour l'Analyse,3 written by a
precocious group of students at the Ecole normale superieur (ENS) who found
a mentor and a rival in the figure of Althusser, and an inspiration and agitator
in the figure of Lacan. Those students, including Alain Badiou, Jacques-Alain
Miller, and Jean-Claude Milner, would go on to indelibly mark the trajectory
of French philosophy and psychoanalysis as it wound its way to the end of the
century and beyond. During their time at the ENS, they formed a group called
the "Cercle d'Epistemologie;' membership of which overlapped considerably with
the editorial board of the Cahiers. Rather than providing a synoptic overview
or historical and institutional account of the period and of the production of
the journaV I have attempted to resume the very theoretical problems that
the Cahiers authors grappled with, problems that I take to be contemporary,
immanent to critical theory as it reinvents itself in the twenty-first century. As
such, the chapters that follow provide a reading of both the tradition of French
historical epistemology and a selected number of the key essays published in the
Cahiers as those two "moments" in French thinking intertwine and overlap, with
a number of the chapters addressing the same problems from varying angles of
approach.
French structuralism, as an intellectual movement with ongoing scholarly
repercussions, has been scantily provided for in the retrospective philosophical
literature. Although a number of works of intellectual history provide crucial
accounts of the work of single authors,S and while the complex institutional and
historical mutations of French intellectual life in the latter half of the twentieth
century have been documented at some length,6 the precisely theoretical makeup
and consequences of the foundational texts of structuralism have received
less attention. Excellent studies of the individual thinkers associated with
structuralism continue to proliferate,? but studies that seek to account for the
intellectual foundation and varied extension of structuralist thought are thinner
on the ground. Even less attended to are the texts of the pioneering students
Introduction 3
of the "celebrity" thinkers, students whose work often fearlessly exceeded the
ambitions of their mentors, providing a crucial insight into the advantages and
pitfalls of an unapologetically transdisciplinary and synthetic approach to the
central problems of philosophy and critical thought more generally.
Such problems-the nature and limits of subjectivity, the philosophical status
of mathematics and logic, the theorization of nonlinear or retrospective time,
the ineluctability of ideology-found a startlingly new form of expression in the
pages of the Cahiers, as an emergent generation of engaged intellectuals struggled
to draw together the aspirations of Marxism as reinvented by Althusser, divested
of any tolerance for the "humanism" of the liberal subject, with the thorny
problem of the divided, nonhumanist subject as proposed via the transformative
"return to Freud" of Lacan.
One of the aims of this book is to provide both a sense of the internal
heterogeneity of that experiment in thought, and an understanding, perhaps even
more crucial, of how such innovation was grounded in the work of key figures
in the parallel tradition of French epistemology, the ascendance to prominence
of whom occurred before the media-driven irruption of "structuralism" proper.
Those innovators include, most notably, Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem,
and Alexandre Koyre, and their work will be progressively encompassed, as my
argument develops, under the carapace of "post-rationalism;' the purpose of
which as a term I will explain below.
My intention, nonetheless, is not to provide a definitive, all-encompassing
philosophical reading of what has come to be known as French structuralism;
such a task is beyond the capacity of a relatively concise monograph. Instead,
I wish to account for the theoretical specificity of a moment in French
thought, the aftershocks of which continue to impact upon work within the
non-Anglophone philosophical world, and perhaps, gradually, the Anglophone
philosophical world too. That moment can be defined provisionally as marked
by the confluence of the proper names Lacan and Althusser, even if what would
result from their awkward and multiplicitous conjunction often departed
conSiderably from the theoretical output of the "master thinkers" in question.
As a result, my focus will frequently fallon the now canonical works of Lacan
and Althusser themselves, albeit always with the aim of understanding how
their theoretical interventions provoked the generation immediately following
their rise to eminence in the direction of both qualified fidelity and mindful
overcoming.
The temporal drift of the book is thus directed forwards from the maitre
penseurs of renown to the lesser known but daring work of their young students,
4 Post-Rationalisrn
also travels na,CKival-a in tlJe eX1Ta()rclm:u
work of French
whose work made the
the Cahiers innovators. Without Bachelard, CanguHhem, and Koyre, it is hard
to imagine how Lacan and Althusser, let alone their ambitious students, could
so convincingly, if problematically, trouble the boundaries normally erected in
philosophy of science between conventionalism and realism, empiricism and
rationalism. As we'll see, the rather restrictive terms of art that Anglophone
philosophy of science works with are placed in question when confronted
with the ambition, range of reference and philosophical acuity demonstrated
by the post-rationalists, even if many of the most intractable problems pored
over in English-speaking philosophy departments fall outside ofthe conceptual
architectures that French philosophy of the twentieth century worked within.
Strategically, I have chosen to term the work under consideration here
"post-rationalist;' as a means of marking my interpretations as distinct from
those who have drawn a large and oft-indiscriminate net over the thinkers in
question, a net invariably labeled "structuralist" or "post-structuralisf' Those
terms have frequently served to sever the crucial link between the writings of
those thinkers and their predecessors in philosophy of science. My intention
is certainly not to deny the usefulness of those terms, or their intermittent but
pronounced applicability; the link, for example, between structural linguistics
and French philosophy is labored over in some detail in the chapters that follow,
and I will myself resort to those terms when I need to signal the traditionally
accepted understanding of a thinker's position in intellectual history.
Nonetheless, I hope "post-rationalism;' as a modest addition to the
contemporary Continental lexicon, will meet the equally modest aim of tying
the work of post-Lacanian and post-Althusserian philosophy to its roots in the
French epistemological tradition, a tradition, in turn, that simultaneously affirms
and transcends its basis in Cartesian rationalism. As we'll see especially in our
reading of Gaston Bachelard in Chapter 2, the self-certainty of the cogito that,
for Descartes, remains after radical doubt has vanquished all other certainties is
itself challenged by post -rationalism, with the result that the "subject" is placed in
question, is interrogated as the unstable product, rather than center, of processes
of structuration and of knowledge formation. The book, to be clear, resists any
teleological imputation of "influence" from Bachelard et al. to Althusser, Lacan,
and their students. Rather, an ethic of temporal multidimensionality reigns in
the theoretical readings that follow, whereby common themes are traced across
multiple temporalities and authors. I use the term "ethic" because my practice of
5
sense that the here are somehow
of historical within which
written, This is notto of the and historical
conjuncture that helped birth many of the texts under consideration here, but
my strong claim is that virtually all of the logical and philosophical problems
addressed by the "post-rationalist" authors analyzed in this book are still among
the central problems that present themselves, irascibly, to contemporary authors
in Continental philosophy and critical theory,
Further than this, my use of "post-rationalism" over "structuralism" or
"post-structuralism" intends to signal that I reject what has, at least in some
readings, been imputed to French theory prior to the emergenceof deconstruction:
a rigid metaphorics of structure that is impervious to the dynamic incursion of the
new. In his magisterial assessment of twentieth -century French thought Logics of
Failed Revolt, Peter Starr writes of "a 'logic of structural repetition'" that he traces
to "a structuralist misprision of the critiques of Stalinist bureaucracy articulated
by [ ... J Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Leforf'8 Such a "misprision" is,
for Starr, ably articulated by Roland Barthes, when he writes of "a structural
agreement between the contesting and the contested forms:'9 One of the aims of
this study is to show that, while no doubt part of the logic of structural thought
in France, such a static and synchronous conception is complemented repeatedly
by an attention to the instability of structures, of the ways in which the elements
of structures or systems "vacillate;' to use Jean-Claude Milner's term, creating the
conditions for novelty. Instead of requiring a wholesale shift to the language of
indeterminacy or of vital evanescence, such a thinking of structural contingency
is to be located from within structural logic itself, in a variety of ways.
In equal measure, what follows takes a respectful distance from the
conclusion of Gregory Elliott, who defines Althusser's epistemology as "marked
by a characteristic tension between conventionalism and realism"lo; to the
contrary, I think post-rationalism, with Althusser one of its founding fathers,
renders unstable, if not finally and conclusively surpassable, the commonplace
epistemological distinction between truth as a measure of internal structural
consensus, and truth as unequivocal access to the real, a binary that has one of
its key philosophical antecedents in the debate between Burne and his critics.
Instead, what I hope to have unveiled in what follows is an epistemology and
philosophy that is productively suspicious of the claims of both conventional
varieties of realism and of relativism, one that expands the bounds of what
may be considered "rational" without lapsing into relativism or skepticism;
on this, post-rationalism as I understand it has at least one thing in common
6
the work little
relativism or
As Christopher Norris has usefully the tradition of French historical
epistemology, while sometimes interpreted in a strong relativist vein, is in fact
committed to a form of conceptualism that refuses any attempt to finally deny
or sever the link between knowledge and the real, even as it complicates that
link in ways that would be anathema to much analytic philosophy of science;
as he writes of both Bachelard and Derrida, "neither thinker subscribes to the
view-the simplistic postmodernist view-that 'all concepts are metaphors:
that reality is ultimately a linguistic or discursive construct, or that science
deals only in images and tropes whose 'truth' is a function of their instrumental
yield for short-term pragmatic purposes:'12 As we'll see, one of the tasks of
post-rationalist thought was to find a way to account for the complexity of the
objects of conceptual knowledge without lapsing into empiricism or an absolute,
a prioristic rationalism. It is worth briefly laying out the different variants of
constitutive instability and "indeterminism" that post-rationalism explored
before passing to a summary of the more involved readings that make up the
main chapters of the book.
Varieties of post -rationalist logic
There are a number of key characteristics that define what I'm calling
"post-rationalism;' both in its historical epistemological instantiation, and within
the post -Lacanian milieu of the Cahiers pour l'Analyse. The first congregates
around the question of the subject. For post-rationalism, and in a number of
different ways, the subject is figured as a constitutive exception to structure.
Structures or systems, that is to say, are read as gaining self-consistency via the
exclusion of the subject, an exclusion that renders the subject as both inside
and outside the structure that it serves to help constitute. The paradigmatic
example of this logic comes in Jacques-Alain Miller's essay "Suture;' published
in the first edition of the Cahiers and generating much debate in the editions that
followed. There, Miller expands on elements of Lacan's "logic of the signifier" by
proposing the subject as the nonidentical form that grounds the movements of
signification, an argument he makes by way of an analogy with the function of
the zero in Gottlob Frege's number theory. I discuss "Suture" at some length in
Chapter 1, and later chapters, especially Chapter 4, explore the ways that Miller's
Introduction 7
'Action of the Structure;' published in the penultimate edition of the Cahiers,
expands the theoretical elements available to post-rationalism to theorize the
complex relation of the subject to science, and to ideology.
The question of ideology is crucial for the post-rationalist field, for it is by
examining that which mystifies or blocks the production of scientific knowledge
that such knowledge might be better construed. Much of the epistemological
work pursued by Gaston Bachelard, explored most fully in Chapter 2, hinges on
the delineation of properly scientific knowledge from ideological or empirical
forms of mystification. Louis Althusser's famous theses on ideology, while
situated within a firmly political context, nonetheless take some of their emphasis
from this prior epistemological accounting. Indeed, as Althusser's thinking
progressed, he would come to recognize the frequent impurity and instability
in the science/ideology relation, and it is this question of impurity that, I think,
renders post-rationalism distinct from the ideals of clean, conceptual rationality
that motored prior epistemological attempts to ground science. As I show in my
reading of Bachelard in Chapter 2, and as I demonstrate again in my discussion
of the troubled border between the literary and the nonliterary in Pierre
Macherey's post-Althusserian thought in the same chapter, the persistence of
ideological or nonscientific elements within various domains of conceptuality
are often taken within post-rationalism to be definitive of those very domains,
or at least of the work of production that must repeat itself if such discourses are
to be properly adumbrated.
Different modes of formalization are, then, central to the analysis of
post-rationalism that follows. The influence of Lacan's structural reading of
Freud is crucial here. For Lacan, the Real is that which marks an "impasse in
formalization:'13 and thus the formalization of knowledge encounters an internal
limit that is, nonetheless, its condition of possibility. In Chapter 2, I provide a
reading of Lacan's neglected twenty-fourth seminar that focuses on the complex
relationship between formalization and language, and it is this relation that
defines more broadly the internal differences in post-rationalism around the
possibilities of formal conceptualization. If, for the young Alain Badiou, logical
languages must be distinguished from the signifiers that make up everyday
communication or the vicissitudes of the unconscious, for Lacan, and Miller
and Jean-Claude Milner after him, the question of the Signifier is irreducible,
determinative of even those abstract discourses that attempt a measure of
scientific precision. Badiou's Cahiers essay "Mark and Lack: On Zero:' analyzed
at length in Chapter 3, is the most trenchant example in the journal of an early
Althusserian severity as to the distinction of scientific discourse from the
8 Post-Rationalism
ideologies of language and the subject, although, in an article published earlier
in the journal and also discussed in the third chapter, Badiou allows for a more
extensive investigation of the immanent divisions and differences within formal
knowledge that allow for its perpetuation.
Althusser's notes on the "Theory of Discourses;' unpublished in his lifetime
and discussed in Chapter 4, show the philosopher distancing himself from aspects
of his earlier, strongly rationalist reading of scientificity, and his investigation is
of particular interest in its engagement with the problem of the unconscious
and of the different "subject effects" that formally distinct modes of discourse
produce. Indeed, the treatment of Althusser in the book as a whole will, I
hope, contribute to the ongoing project, initiated by Etienne Balibar and Pierre
Macherey in France and taken up by Ted Stolze, Warren Montag, and others in
the United States, to forge a substantial reassessment of this most misunderstood
of contemporary philosophers.1
4
The skill and nuance with which Althusser
folded difficult problems of epistemology into the project to revitalize Marxist
thought continues to have much to offer contemporary critical theorists, and my
readings here place an especial emphasis on Althusser's detailed engagement with
the problem of the subject in its interaction with the establishment of scientific
knowledge, an engagement sometimes overshadowed by his more polemical
pronouncements on the ideological implications of theories of subjectivity,
articulated most forcefully in his famous essay on "Ideology and Ideological
State Apparatuses" from 1970.
If it remains a commonplace to distinguish between "structuralism" and
"post-structuralism" in accounts of French theory, despite the distinction
having little purchase in the French context, my reading of Jacques Derrida's
contributions to the Cahiers show him working from within the same broad
problematics adduced in the work of the other thinkers addressed in the book.
As I show in Chapter 3, Derrida places a particular emphasis in his early work
on the formativeness of what he calls a text's "self-presentation;' its mystifying
but nonetheless essential ideological shell that conceals the heterogeneous
movements of signification that compose it. Those movements of signification,
marked by what Derrida would call the structure of the "trace;' are intriguingly
figured in the Cahiers contributions as reliant upon and secondary to the errant
self-presentation of the text.
This emphasis on the structural constitutivity of error, of the formative necessity
of the ideological, cuts across the entirety of post-rationalism as I conceive it here.
For Althusser, famously, the ideological is not simply that which is inaccurate or
misleading in a given conjuncture. Rather, and in line with Lacan's reflections
Introduction 9
the
a
being exterior to the concepts that science uses to grasp it, is in fact immanent
to them, interposed within their bounds in topologically complex ways. 1he
troubling of the border between epistemology and ontology in Canguilhem,
and his crucial writing on the concept of "life" is read alongside that of Deleuze
in Chapter 5, represents the culmination of the rejection, already pregnant in
many of the thinkers discussed here, of the subject/object opposition, and of a
number of other familiar philosophical binaries besides. Through Canguilhem
and Deleuze, we may begin to ask whether the dominant division of French
thought between philosophies of the concept and philosophies of life may be
challenged through a post-rationalist insistence on the conceptuality oflife, and
the vitality of concepts.
The first chapter takes up the ways in which post-rationalism, and especially
its post-Lacanian variant, reconfigures the concept of the "object:' Lacan's objet
petit a, the object-cause of desire in his structural reconfiguration of Freud,
serves as a conceptual container for a number of the different ways in which
post-rationalism rethinks the relations between subject, object, language) and
science. In his fourteenth seminar on "The Logic of Fantasy:' given in 1966-7,
around the same time as the Cahiers' founding, the object of psychoanalysis
is described as being of "the incommensurable:' or that "it is from its
incommensurability that there arises every question of measure:'l5 Captured
in this aphorism is something of post-rationalisrn's substantial reconception
of the nature of scientific formalization itself, its exhortation for rationality
to encompass those aberrant objects that fall between the metrics that prior
epistemologies imposed on the Real. In Lacan's formulation, the aberrant object
itself causes, acts as a quasi-transcendental condition for, every "question of
measure;' every logical language.
As we'll see in Chapter 3, it is precisely this claim that incites Jacques-Alain
Miller and the young Alain Badiou to disagreement; for the latter, logic and
science must be understood as radically outside the Mobius twists and turns of
psychoanalytic conceptuality, of the so-called logic of the signifier. But Badiou's
later work saw him circle back round to the problem of the subject and of the
appearance of objects in "worlds" through the very formal terms that first found
expression in the Cahiers, and that were prefigured in the epistemological
work of Bachelard and Canguilhem. In a certain sense, then, the heterodox
formalism that I'll explore in the following chapters won out over the austere
10 Post-Rationalism
Bacliou
have much to learn
for
times
instrumental that
to work. If nothing else, what
who would dismiss "structuralism" as an arid formalism, incapable of thinking
the vicissitudes of subjectivity and the irruption of the new.
Notes
Kurt Jacobsen offers an invigorating, polemical critique of this tendency to reject
psychoanalysis out of hand in his Freud's Foes. See K. Jacobsen, Freud's Foes:
Psychoanalysis, Science and Resistance (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009).
2 It would take another book to trace the contours of this pervasive reductionism,
but it generally manifests whenever science and the scientific method (conceived
in a uniform and ahistorical fashion, and dislodged from all contexts of discovery)
are presumed to be the bearers of self-evident truths, requiring little in the way of
elaboration or philosophical grounding. Many of Richard Dawkins's diatribes, too
numerous and repetitive to list, against what he perceives to be the "postmodern"
dismissal of science, as well as the anti scientific superstitions of religion, exemplify
this tendency, as does Alan Sokal's simplistic commentary on the philosophy of
science in his Beyond the Hoax. See A. Sokal, Behind the Hoax: Science, Philosophy
and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). As I hope this study will
show, it is quite possible to maintain a broadly realist outlook, whereby our forms
of knowledge, in complex and mediated ways, grasp something of the real state
of things, without descending to this kind of pretheoretical, philosophically naive
boilerplate.
3 The definitive work on the Cahiers pour l'Analyse, including translations into English
and full digitization, was undertaken at the Centre for Research in Modern European
Philosophy, Kingston University, tmder the stewardship of Peter Hallward. The results
of the project saw publication in two volumes, one containing select translations of
key Cahiers essays, the other containing important interpretive essays. I've made
substantial use of the translations in the study that follows. See P. Hallward and
K. Peden (eds), Concept and Form Vol. 1: Selections from the Cahiers pour l'Analyse
(New York: Verso, 2012); P. Hallward and K. Peden, Concept and Form
Vol. 2: Interviews and Essays on Cahiers pour l'Analyse (New York: Verso, 2012).
A comprehensive website is also available with the full French edition of the journal:
http://cahiers.kingston.ac. uk.
Such ,ill
See, for instance, E. Roudinesco, Lacan: An Outline
of Thought York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Y. Moulier-Boutang,
Louis Althusser: Une biographie (Paris: Livre de Poche, 2002).
6 See E Dosse, History of Structuralism, 2 vols, trans. Deborah Glassman
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); E. Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan
and Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925-1985, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); S. Turkle, Psychoanalytic Politics:
Jacques Lacan and Freud's French Revolution (New York: Guilford Press, 1992).
7 For Althusser, see G. Elliott, AUhusser: The Detour of Theory (Chicago: Haymarket
Books, 2009, 2nd edn), W. Montag, Louis Althusser (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2003); for Lacan, see 1. Chiesa, Subjectivity and Otherness: A
Philosophical Reading of Lacan (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), E. Pluth,
Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan's Theory of the Subject (New York: SUNY
Press, 2008); for Bachelard, see M. Tiles, Bachelard: Science and Objectivity
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); for Badiou, see P. Hallward,
Badiou: A Subject to Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003),
S. Gillespie, The Mathematics of Novelty: Badiou's Minimalist Metaphysics (Prahran:
Re.Press, 2008); for Jacques-Alain Miller, see N. Floury, Le reel insense: Introduction
ala pensee de Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Editions Germina, 2010); this is only a
small sample of the relevant texts available.
8 P. Starr, Logics of Failed Revolt: French Theory After May '68 (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1995): 2; Starr's book is a crucial resource tor those seeking
an historically and theoretically sensitive analysis of a whole host of thinkers
determinative of the firmament of what I call "post-rationalism;' including some
thinkers, such as Guy Lardreau and Christian Jambet, who fall outside the remit of
this book.
9 R. Barthes quoted in Starr, Logics of Failed Revolt, 3.
10 G. Elliott, "The Odyssey of Paul Hirst:' in New Left Review 159 (September!
October), 1986,88.
11 K. Popper quoted in F. Dosse, Empire of Meaning: The Humanization of the Social
Sciences, trans. Hassan Melehy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1999): 82.
12 C. Norris, Against Relativism: Philosophy of Science, Deconstruction and Critical
Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997): 14.
13 1. Lacan, Encore: The Seminar oflacques Lacan Book )LY, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller,
trans. Bruce Fink (New York: WW Norton, 1999): 84.
12 Post-Rationalism
14 See, for instance, E. Balibar, Bcrits pour Althusser (Paris: La Decouverte, 1999);
P. Macherey, In a Materialist Way: Selected Essays, ed. Warren Montag, trans. Ted
Stolze (New York: Verso, 1998); Montag, Louis Althusser.
15 J. Lacan, Seminar XIV: The Logic of Phantasy 1966-1967, lesson of 10 May 1967,
unofficial translation by Cormac Gallagher, available online: www.lacaninireland.com/
web/wp-contentluploads/201 O/06/THE-SEMINAR-OF-JACQUES-LACAN-XIV.pdf.
1
Psychoanalytic Structuralism in the
Cahiers pour l'Analyse
By 1966, the year of the Cahier's founding, both Lacan and Althusser had firmly
established their influence on a febrile Parisian intellectual scene, one that since
the end of the war had seen a partial, but frequently exaggerated eclipse of the
projects of both post-Husserlian phenomenology and Sartrean existentialism. In
part through the influence of the ethnologist Levi-Strauss, an increasing concern
for what lay beneath the flux of contingent sensory experience had come to the
fore, with linguistics, in particular, forming a central focus of attention.! Under
Lacan's tutelage, Freudian psychoanalysis had been accepted within the ranks
of both radical Marxist circles and within the wider institutions of academe;
a previous reticence to concede the divisibility of the subject of Cartesian
rationality had given way to a fascination with Lacan's own, partly rationalist
reconstruction of Freudian thought. Both Lacan and Althusser shared a concern
for the articulation of varying themes of structural causality and reproduction
with an acknowledgment of the dynamism of the unconscious, manifest in
Althusser's case by an increasing concern with the question of ideology.2 The
year 1966 saw Lacan's seminar address "The Logic of Phantasy:'3 It was in
this seminar that Lacan would give one of his most sustained treatments of
his concept of objet petit a, or the object-cause of desire, a concept that, in its
subversion of dichotomies of virtuality and actuality, of form and content, would
prove difficult to integrate within Althusser's reconstruction of Marx. As we'll
see, objet petit a is just one of the avatars of theoretical friction that define the
pages of the Cahiers, theoretically and productively torn between the relative
autonomy and permanence of structure, and the necessary contingency of the
irruption of the subject.
14
one should insist from the outset,
was less to assimilate burgeoning and Marxist themes to the
apparent austerity of an abstracted, formal logic, derived wholesale, we're often
told, from the epistemology of Jean Cavailles, Gaston Bachelard, and George
Canguilhem. While the epistemology of the time was no doubt central to the
foregrounding of questions oflogical formalization over ontological speculation,
the use oflogic in the Cahiers was much more in the service of a dynamization of
structure, in Franyois Dosse's useful phrase, as it was in the mere reproduction
of prior epistemological concerns. As such, the marshaling of resources from
mathematical and scientific sources produced a conceptual hybrid distinctly
colored by the wider concerns of the critical philosophies of the time. That
hybrid is defined in part by a creative appropriation of scientific, mathematical,
and logical resources, rather than an adherence to their originating contexts.
And as we'll see, the original sources for that dynamization of structure are
to be found in the work of earlier French epistemologists, even as the creative
appropriation of that work transformed its implications; taken together, this
work can be understood as a distinctly post-rationalist response to perennial
philosophical problems.
Nonetheless, it is, I'd like to argue, the varying reception of Lacan's thought
in the journal that best dramatizes the tension between static and dynamic
variants of structural analysis, and the aforementioned tension around the
concept of object-cause provides a useful way in to this conflicted terrain.
After considering the motivating contradictions attendant to the concept
of "object;' I'll turn to "formalization" and finally "subject" as subsequent
themes that especially define the formative elements of the Cahiers project
as it intersects with Lacan's work. Along the way, I'll introduce various
extensions and complications of Lacan's concepts presented by Andre Green,
Luce Irigaray, and Serge Leclaire as a means of marking what is distinct in
the post-Lacanian exploration of the problems of object and formalization,
of subject and structure. Finally, I'll turn to the work of Jacques-Alain Miller,
whose influential Cahiers essay "Suture" will be discussed in a number of
subsequent chapters. In those later chapters, the arguments given a broad
and overarching reading here will be returned to, albeit often with the aid of
different thinkers and through different philosophical apertures.
Psychoanalytic Structuralism 15
Object
As already mentioned, the year 1966-7 saw Lacan's seminar address the theme
of "The Logic of Phantasy;' and elaborating via the matheme of fantasy, formally
identical to the matheme for the subjective relation, the coincidence of lacks
produced in the convergence of the split subject of the unconscious, and the
object-cause of desire: S<> a. The object-cause, or objet petit a, was conceived
less as the positive object of the subject's desires and more as the formal causative
excess that motors desire as such, and that promises a subjective reconciliation
that the predominance of the signifier in the formation and reproduction
of the subject constitutively forecloses. In remarks that usefully prefigure the-
theme of the conceptual irrecuperability of objet petit a as manifested in the
Cahiers, Lacan, in May 1967, comments: "The Other is only the Other of what
is the first moment [ ... J: namely, this objet petit a [ ... J its nature is that of
the incommensurable, or rather, that it is from its incommensurability that
there arises every question of measure:'4 In other words, the object-cause is the
positivization of a necessary failure of form, the remainder of such a failure that
reiterates the subject's original division. Form in this instance signals the form of
the Symbolic, the battery of signifiers located in the Other.
Contrary to much commentary on Lacan, and as I have argued at length
elsewhere, we can locate the concept as having emerged, at least in germinal
form, in articles of the 1940s concerning primary narcissism, the period in
the development of a child where, prior to the onset of the Oedipus complex,
images of the Other form the material for the development of the ego.
s
In a
surprising parallel with Melanie Klein's work on the "good" and "bad" object,
these primary images exert a contradictory force of constitution and aggressivity
for the subject, simultaneously forming the contours of the ego while, in the
inevitable production of aggressive rivalry that develops, threatening it from
without. Later in this chapter, we'll see how Luce Irigaray sought, in the pages
of the Cahiers, to synthesize the post-rationalist concern for the "logic of the
signifier" and the object with this problem of specularity, of the Imaginary
relation that sustains the ego. Upon his own sustained interrogation of the
Symbolic, Lacan will transform his concept of the ideal-ego, the image that
forms the lynchpin of the formation of the ego, into objet petit a, as the precisely
nonspecular object that testifies to the persistence of the division of the subject
after the operation of Symbolic castration. Crucially, however, the object-cause
Post- Rationalism
an remainder within the of the
its Hll"'t't'U<U
to it as UH"n"1<ll
narcissistic resonance; late as the 19705, Lacan will refer
Andre Green's commentary on objet petit a, "The Logic of Lacan's objet a
and Freudian 1heory: Convergences and Questions;' was published in the
third volume of the Cahiers, after being originally delivered as part of Lacan's
thirteenth seminar on "The Object of Psychoanalysis" in 1965.
7
Green would
go on to become one of the foremost psychoanalysts in France, developing
his own distinctive brand of analytic thought, especially through an attention
to the psychic textures of affect, and to the lingering relevance of the death
drive to analytic thought and practice.
8
Green's commentary on Lacan in the
Cahiers is fascinating in many respects, not least in the way that it prefigures
Green's subsequent break with Lacanianism over the relative importance of
affect to psychoanalysis, but it serves our purposes as it lays out the tensions
and contradictions that attend the choice of the word "object" for Lacan's
conceptual innovation of the object-cause of desire, distinct as it is from the
mere "object" of one's desire. Instead, it specifies the formal cause that puts
desire in motion.
Psychoanalysis, Green suggests, operates with a concept of the object distinct
from that of science per se, an argument he adopts from Lacan's own Cahiers
article "Science and Truth;' which had initially appeared as the first week's
lesson of the thirteenth seminar.
9
There, Lacan had argued that the natural and
physical sciences, in contrast to analysis, seek to cover over (or "suture") the
subject and the irreducible gap that it creates in knowledge, and in so doing
obscure the importance of that absent subject of the unconscious as cause in
the production of all Symbolic structures. I'll return in more detail to Lacan's
important "Science and Truth;' published in the very first edition of the Cahiers,
in Chapter 4. For Green, objet a is best understood as an exemplar of the complex
relation of subject and object as, or as he puts it, "the function of mediation that
such an object plays out, not so much between the subject and the Other, as in
their relationship; my desire enters the Other who has awaited it, forever under
the form of the object that I am-inasmuch as the Other exiles me from my
subjectivity by including all signifiers:'l0
This ludic passage contains many of the contradictions that Green's argument
both identifies and perpetuates; its general intent, nonetheless, is to underline the
ways in which the "subject:' for psychoanalysis, is always also an object situated
within an economy of desire. Green shrinks from positing objet petit a as having
any ameliorative function precisely because he wishes to retain the errant quality
Structuralism
the lJS11CnOa,nal
its object-cause would smooth over this function of eccentricity or ambiguity,
rightly located by Green at its origin in the process of primary narcissism, the
point in the life of a child where images of significant others begin to form the
basis of identity, an identity as marked by aggression as any sense of completion
or wholeness. As Green writes, "[1] n the zone of the imaginary, the subject goes
in one of two directions: either toward the object or toward the ideaL We know
that in Freudian thought this orientation is heavily dependent on narcissism:'ll
In the early life of the child, that is, identity rests on the incorporation of "ideal"
images of significant others, while in the post-Oedipal context, the subject
incorporates objects of desire that are the successors of those "ideal" images
toward which the subject tended in early life, and which continue to exert a
palpable influence within the register of the Imaginary. Moreover, the object
itself comes to stand in for the logic of these early, "Imaginary" relationships at
the level of the Symbolic. Nonetheless, as a direct result of the transformation
of such Imaginary logics into their Symbolically situated objectal leftover, the
object is precisely not specularizable in the way that images situated within
the Imaginary are; rather, the object, in its very nonspecular "nature;' serves to
condense and embody the opaque promise of the Other's desire, and in so doing
to perpetuate the potential for desire in the subject. Thus, the object, for Green,
is a "function of the residue [le res tel stemming from the desire of the other;'12 a
formal result of the translation of Imaginary processes into Symbolic logics.
1here is, however, a sustained attempt to hold open the gap between subject
and Other in Green's account, a gap that seems to maintain something of the
symmetry that is otherwise banished through the association of objet a as the
excess of the Symbolic, as that irrecuperable element that sits askance from
the torm that it nevertheless inhabits. Green even goes so far as to write, in
the context of Lacan's "Mirror Stage:' that "(a) [ ... J can be understood as an
element of ineluctable mediation uniting the subject with the Other:'13 While
Green clearly locates this particular mediation at a logical point prior to the full
accession to the Symbolic, and thus governed to some degree by the dyadic logic
of the Imaginary and the subject's first identifications, his reasoning threatens
Lacan's own insistence on the conceptual continuity between the objects of the
Imaginary and the Symbolic, and therefore more generally of the genesis of
objet petit a out of the specifics of primary narcissism as it plays out prior to
Symbolic castration.
18
ideal
even at the at which Lacan
of the Other embodies an Ideal toward which the emergent subject aspires,
even as it simultaneously represents a threat to that Ideal, or, put another way,
the Ideal and the object, as elements that are both formative and deformative,
formally coincide. As Lacan put it in his fourth seminar, "Freud explains that
there is an identification of the ideal of the ego with objects which are thought to
be the same:'14 Two years later, Lacan comments: "[T]his imaginary object finds
itself [ ... J in a position of being able to condense in itself what can be called the
virtues [ ... J this veritable lure of being, which the object of human desire is''15;
such an object incites and withholds the subject's expectations and wants in such
a way that its full incorporation, even as the embodiment of an affect or a set of
dispositions, is impossible.
Upon the accession to the Symbolic, this coincidence of formation and threat
will be further registered by Lacan's moving of the object from the domain of
the Imaginary, where it acts as the fulcrum to narcissistic identification, to the
domain of the Real. As Real, the object of psychoanalysis can be neither mediatory
in any simple sense, nor can it be specular. Instead, it operates at an eccentric
position within the Symbolic, a formal object forever eluding the grasp of the
subject, never quite being covered by the signifiers that the subject produces
to gain a measure of her desire, and thus forever holding out the prospect of
a reconciliation that will never come.
16
By non -dialectically separating the
function of the object and that of the Ideal, Green risks closing off the possibility
of this transformation of the object qua Ideal into the object of the Real, and
thus introducing a discontinuity into a concept that, for its coherence, requires a
continuous account of its emergence and persistence beyond the movements of
primary narcissism and in the post-Oedipal, Symbolic context.
Leclaire on the object
Andre Green was not the only young psychoanalyst to write in the Cahiers. Serge
Leclaire had been an ardent follower of Lacan's seminar before contributing a
number of essays to various editions of the Cahiers, extracts taken from his
own ongoing seminar in psychoanalysis. In 1960, Leclaire had coauthored an
influential analysis of the concept of the unconscious with Jean Laplanche, and
his writings serve as one of the most rigorous and distinctive elaborations and
Leclaire instead consolidates
""'"I-''',U\}11;), and his is
the
constitutive interrelation of Lacanian in isolation,
none more so than the Lacanian theory of the object. If Green's contribution to
the "Cahiers" risks effacing the topological intrication of the subject, object, and
signifier, Leclaire's writings from the same period offer an alternative position
that is as mindful of the apparently "nonsignifying" elements of psychoanalytic
inquiry, perhaps especially the body, as he is of the nuances of signification.
Leclaire's Psychoanalyzing: On the Order of the UncotlScious and the Practice
of the Letter was published in 1968. The book comprises a series of essays that
resist any forced choice between an attention to the signifier, and an attention to
the body-to desire, to jouissance. For our purposes, Leclaire's reflections on the
Lacanian theory of the object are especially useful in their clarification of what
is specific about Lacan's concept of the object and how it might interface with
the epistemological question of the object of multiple discourses-scientific,
analytic, philosophical-as staged more broadly in the Cahiers.
In a chapter entitled "The Body of the Letter, or the Intrication of the Object
and the Letter:' Leclaire reads the theory of objet petit a together with a theory of
the body, emphasizing the stubborn materiality of both. As he writes, "[Jlust as
any part of the body may be an erotogenic zone and thus potentially a 'letter: so
too any part of the body can become an object:'17 For psychoanalysis after Lacan,
the body is rendered "erotogenic" in its articulation with the signifier as letter, or
in its relationship with the signifier as detached from relations of sense. Any part
of the body has the potential to operate in such a way, insofar as it breaks away
from any sense of the body as whole and begins to operate autonomously, as
subject to "a division [that J separates the object from the erotogenic whole that so
as to make of it a term then becomes, for the duration of its exclusion, inert and
'indivisible' [insecable J :'18 While Leclaire differentiates here between the "letter"
as the erotogenic zone and the object as that which breaks off from the former,
the two are nonetheless situated in a relationship of frictional co-articulation; as
Leclaire explains, "[TJhe object seems to become the tangible representative, one
could say the positive complement, of the irreducible difference that is set within
the limits of the erotogenic zone:'19 The object, that is to say, instantiates at an
immediate, positive level the negativity of the body as it is taken up by the order
of the signifier, an order that instills on the surface of the body an "irreducible
difference" that renders any notion of the body as a whole as fantasmatic,
mythical. In stark contrast to Green's arguments above, Leclaire understands
Post-Rationalism
an
within the broader terms of the
Nj4UH'''', or "letter" qua ' ~ J ' U ' ' ' '
meaning.
the
forms a the
Leclaire describes the articulation of the object and the signifier as a
"profound intrication of the literal function and the objectal function:' 1he
"literal" here refers to the signifier as letter, as material, and as abstracted from
relations of sense; for Leclaire after Lacan, it is this "aspect" of the signifier, what
I have, elsewhere, called its being "in-isolation;'20 that performs the function
of "erogenizing" the body, of taking it up into the significatory networks that
condition desire. At the level of the object, that signifier is posited as lacking,
such that the object itself "comes in the place of the lost letter. Or, inversely, one
could say that the object, in its opacity, takes the place of certainty concerning
this lack:'21 The object has the potentiaL on Leclaire's reading, to instantiate a
kind of "certainty of lack" that the very indifference of the signifier qua letter,
in its always being inadequate to the infinite circuits of desire, fails to provide;
instead, the letter simply lacks, without any specificity or subjective charge.
At different levels of analysis, then, the object and the Signifier qua letter
perform a similar function, inciting the drive and constituting a link to the
erotogenic body, albeit in different ways and by operating upon different
portions of the subject. Both remain pure forms, senseless insistences beyond
meaning. Leclaire writes of the object's "intrinsic neutrality (indifference);' an
indifference, indivisible in its insistence, that formally allies the object with the
signifier as letter, as Signifier abstracted from meaning. Again, in contrast to
Green, Leclaire's reflections usefully recompose a Lacanian understanding of the
relationship between the object and the signifier that refuses the externalization
of either term. Instead, and in keeping with Lacan's insistence on the immanent
imbrication of the three registers of the Symbolic, Imaginary and Real, the object
and the signifier are co-constituted, performing equivalent functions at different
levels of psychoanalytic conceptuality.
If the object and the letter, as two lenses through which to approach
psychoanalysis' understanding of the signifier-body relation, are situated in
a position of mutual implication, it is possible to situate alongside these two
key terms other notions that would increasingly come to define the Lacanian
redefinition of Freud in the late 1960s and the 1970s. Just as the "logic of the
signifier" and the object are to be understood as co-articulated, so also concepts
such as jouissance, the pleasure in pain that psychoanalysis takes to exist at the
ambiguous border between Symbolic desire and the antagonistic register of
must
that
Lacanian edifice can be' said to exist on
term requiring the other and no term operating as a transcendent
21
equally, at the level of the subject, the signifier and the object operate in tandem
despite their subtly different functions. It would be a mistake, however, to assume
that such an immanent arrangement of concepts implies a structural stability in
the lifeworld of the subject or at the conceptual level of psychoanalytic theory.
Rather, and as Leclaire notes, there is a fundamental precarity in the relations
between signifier and object, between subject and jouissance, that prevents
Lacan's account from remaining fixed or hypostatized, from assuming a position
of transcendence: "[Wj e will now bring out [the unconscious'l precarious nature,
which must be added here to the aspect of its primariness. Practically, one has in
fact to recognize that the system seems always threatened by a sort of reabsorption
into the very annulment whose permanent transgression it performs:'22 Leclaire
goes on to associate this "annulment" with Freud's death drive, but he is equally
keen to emphasize that it is the very ambiguity inherent in the subtly distinct
roles of the signifier and the object that produces this structural instability.
1be letter and the object are always threatening to collapse into one another, a
collapse that may reveal the void or negativity that underpins both: "With the
articulation of the letter in speech, the horizon of jouissance in annulment is
[ ... J constantly promised and withheld, to be granted only after death. Thus,
the letter [ ... J is constantly pulled toward a signifying reduction whereby it is
made to represent the object:'23 If one of the concerns of this book is to underline
the dynamization of structure that post-rationalist authors performed, Leclaire's
singular contribution is to highlight how such a dynamization reverberates as
traumatic within the lifeworld of the subject.
Formal elements such as the letter and the object simultaneously protect
against and instantiate that precarity, emblematic as they are of the void of
the unconscious that threatens always to leak into the subject's conscious
life. Parenthetically, Leclaire's emphasis on the immanent intertwinement of
Lacanian terms highlights, I think, the insufficiency of the arguments of those
for whom Lacan remains a thinker of the transcendent. As that argument often
goes, Lacan tries to think the signifier according to a logic of immanence, only
to implicitly subscribe to the prospect of a transcendent moment or breach from
within the immanent realm itself, a breach figured under the rubric of the Real.
Deleuze and Guattari famously criticized Lacan along these lines, as when they
wrote, in their Anti-Oedipus, that "[tJhe true difference in nature is not between
the
the which
Deleuze and Guattari's is that it is the Real, qua "machinic elemt:lll,
that actualizes a philosophy of immanence; the Symbolic and the Imaginary are
simply mythic, transcendent structures, tied to an illusory sense of wholeness.
But as Leclaire after Lacan makes strikingly apparent, the Symbolic and the
Imaginary are entirely immanent to the object of psychoanalysis, the object that
Lacan would, with increasing frequency after 1964, come to associate with the
Real. Indeed, for the articulation of object and signifier to make any sense, the
Symbolic, far from being a mythical whole must, as Lacan repeated endlessly, be
understood as barred, as incomplete.
If Green's analysis, then, threatens to artificially hypostatize the distance
between the object, the signifier, and the subject, Leclaire describes their
problematic interrelation in the terms of a distance or separation that is
constitutive of each element, and that as such can, as noted above, be collapsed,
both at the level of the subject and at the level of the conceptual abstraction that
psychoanalytic post-rationalism works with: "[Tlhe object constitutes the term
of a measurable separation that, in a certain way, is reducible even up to the
cancellation of the encounter. Whereas the interval that makes for the perceptible
difference of two lips can never be reduced, [ ... J the interval separating the
mouth from the object that will appease its desire can, by contrast, be reduced to
the point of the cancellation of any distance:'25 If there is an irreducible alterity
in the body, such that the body is, upon its inscription within the logic of the
signifier, always already in fragments, the site of an absolute difference, the object
for Leclaire, in its causative relation with the subject, is immanently, and never
absolutely, separated from the subject and the signifiers that are its condition.
The body echoes and resonates, in its fragmentary condition, with the object as
it incites the movements of drive and desire that are the receding horizons of the
subject.
Leclaire and Green were in frequent debate in 1960s Paris. As Edward Baring
has noted, the debate had its roots in the discussion that followed Laplanche
and Leclaire's presentation of their paper on the unconscious at a conference
organized by Henri Eyat Bonneval in 1960. Broadly, Ey's fidelity to an economic
and energetic model of the unconscious was challenged by Leclaire and Laplanche,
who proposed, along the lines elaborated above, a reading of the relationship
between drive and desire, between signifier and body, that read the ostensibly
opposed terms together. Baring argues that Green "hoped to balance out the
Psychoanalytic Structuralism 23
privilege of the linguistic elements in Freud's thought, granted by Lacan and
his student Leclaire, with a reassertion of the somatic side, especially pulsional
energy and affect:'26 But as my reading of Leclaire above shows, the Lacanian
"side" in this debate had already moved beyond any static opposition between
affect and signifier, between signifier and body. Rather, the concept of the
object began to function less as a mediator between the two poles, as in Green's
account, and more as a container for the zones of indeterminacy, of precarious
ambivalence-the signifier abstracted from relations of meaningfulness, the body
reconfigured as a site of absolute difference-that are analysis' especial focus. At
stake here is a resistance of any forced choice between body and signifier, logic
and desire; Lacan and Leclaire's wager, and indeed that of the Cahiers, is that it
is only through the immanent matrices of the signifier and its correlative object
that the subject can be produced as desiring, and that the body can impinge
upon consciousness as a site of absolute difference.
Excursus on specularity-Irigaray
If Leclaire offers a more expansive account of the interrelation of signifier
and object than Green's holding apart of the concepts allows, it remains to
account for the specificity of what Lacan called the Imaginary, the domain of
specular identification and its own articulation with the "logic of the signifier:'
What, precisely, constitutes the specular relation that Green traces from its
existence as the image of the Other in Lacan's "Mirror Stage" to objet petit
a, object of psychoanalysis proper? The most sophisticated reflection on the
specular relation to appear in the Cahiers came from Luce Irigaray. Irigaray
was a regular attendee of Lacan's influential seminar, from its early home at the
St. Anne hospital to the ENS, and her later, now familiar attempts to render
the psychic and philosophical specificity of the feminine were preceded by
texts marked by the sophistication of their extension of Lacan's theory of the
Signifier, and his concern for the constitution of egoic identity in the register
of the Imaginary. Her essay "Linguistic and Specular Communication: Genetic
Models and Pathological Models:' published in the third edition of the Cahiers,
is especially important for our purposes in its provision of an alternative optic
on the articulation of signifier and image, body and affect, than that outlined
by Green. If Green maintains a gap, as commented upon above, between the
"ideal" -the image of the other that the child tends toward in the formation of
its own identity-and the "object;' Irigaray suggestively incarnates both within
24 Post-Rationalism
the broader horizon of a linguistic and symbolic analysis. A brief reading
of her essay will allow us to appreciate in a rather fuller sense the import of
Jacques-Alain Miller's formalization of the subject's relation to structure
through the concept of "suture;' an argument analyzed at length both later in
this chapter and in those that follow.
There is some debate in Lacanian circles as to the precise relationship between
Lacan's theory of the "Mirror Stage" and his theory oflanguage. The theory of the
"Mirror Stage" was outlined definitively in 1949 and describes, simultaneously,
a point in child development where the child misrecognizes itself as whole
through its mirror image, and a more general structure of subjectivity that Lacan
would come to associate with the register of the Imaginary. He would return
repeatedly to the question of how this essentially specular relation, predicated
on images of the other, interfaces with the field of the Symbolic. If, as is so
often suggested by Lacan, the Symbolic must be taken as the incomplete but
nonetheless constitutive horizon of human subjectivity, how does a seemingly
pre-Symbolic specular relation emerge within the bounds of an always already
Symbolic plane? Irigaray gestures toward the seeming "primordiality" and
"primary" character of the specular relation, but she is equally insistent on
the "reciprocal integration of the body and language;' an integration that she
posits as the "origin of the imaginary:'27 Just as, in his "Mirror Stage" article,
Lacan will make reference to a "primordial symbolic matrix" that underpins the
specular relation, so also Irigaray insists that the Imaginary itself, as the register
of specular identification, is the consequence of the coming together of the body
and language, not something prior to or untainted by the signifier.
We may well ask what the status of the body might be prior to its installation
in language. Unlike Leclaire, Irigaray seems to hold open the possibility of
conceiving of the real body, prior to its being taken up in the Symbolic and
the Imaginary, as ultimately determined by biological necessity. However, she is
quick to insist that the ineluctability of the Imaginary marks the "impossibility
of the return to the body as the secure place of his [the subject's] identity to
himself'28 Even as the return to a bodily existence prior to language is rendered
impossible, the specular relation nonetheless represents, for Irigaray, an aspect of
subjectivity where the subject "has no language"29; if the signifier can be said to
operate as one of the conditions of the specular relation, the subject nonetheless
cannot be said to possess or command the signifier at the point of Imaginary
identification.
Instead, the subject as defined by a specular relation is merely the "plaything
without power"30 of language, subject to the signifier without yet having been
as
relation not
in its counted as 1, as what
accession to full Symbolic being
refers to as a
Irigaray suggests, a third term, akin to
Lacan's "name of the father;' a term that might transition the subject's existence
from "monologue"32-the endless iteration of the misrecognition of one's mirror
image-to "dialogue;'33 where the movements of the signifier ground any
possible distinction between an "I" and a "you:' The dyadic relation between
the subject and its mirror image, correlative to the dyadic relation between the
subject and its mother, must be broken up by the imposition of a third term, a
term that Irigaray associates with the father. The picture is further complicated
by Irigaray's insistence that, even with the intervention of the father qua third
term, this Ilyou relation remains stuck within a static logic of the One unless
the father and mother themselves can be understood as communicating. Only
with the assumed transmission of significance between the two terms (mother/
father) outside the subject can the subject fully recognize a "you" determined
outside of its bounds.
Like Leclaire, Irigaray understands the development of specular relations
and the precarious identifications that they support as underpinned by a void,
by a lack that threatens always to bleed into the lifeworld of the subject, even
as it provides that subject with its only support. As she writes, "The avatars of
specularization, and the distortions of language, can always be understood as
expressions of a primordial absence, or at least of the precariousness of the empty
set, of the <zero>, which underlies the structure of exchange and guarantees its
functioning:'34 As we'll see in our discussion of Miller below, the function of zero
as a ground for the subject, countable as 1 in lrigaray's terms, courses through the
Cahiers as one of its recurrent theoretical tropes. But if Miller wishes to secure
the zero as nonidentical ground for the self-identical procession of signifiers, a
supposition contested in my reading below, lrigaray instead theorizes the zero
as being as much a threat to the subject as it is its determining condition. The
subject must assume the place of the zero, of the nonidentical, if it is to recognize
its specular counterpart as both equivalent to and other to itself, and thus enter
into the minimal dialectic of identification that the specular relation affords.
And yet, to occupy this position of nonidentity is to be threatened with being
rendered identical to the signifier, a similarly nonidentical element that must
be endlessly negotiated with, lest the subject finds "a too precisely appropriate
representation of itself'35 Underpinning Irigaray's argument seems to be the idea
that, despite the constitution of the subject in and through the Symbolic and the
agency at it is between the cracks of the
speak, that the gains a foothold on its desire.
It remains to ask after the precise analytical status of the image and of the
specular for Irigaray. In what we've outlined of the argument so far, much of
what seems to define the specular-its function of a simultaneous constitutivity
and threat to the subject, its immanent relation to other key analytic terms-
can be equally said of the object and of the signifier as understood by Leclaire
after Lacan. Irigaray addresses the distinction between the specular image
and the signifier in an intriguing and ambiguous passage toward the end of
her Cahiers essay. There, she writes: "The specular image is the analog of the
signifier, but not of language in its double nature. 1he signified is on the side
of the non-specularizable:'36 'Ihe distinction made here between the signifier
and language as such hinges on Saussure's elementary definition of the sign
as the unity of a signifier and a signified. If the mirror image is an analog to
the signifier, it is in the sense that both are indeterminate, unmoored from any
fixed or final consistency. The specular image, Irigaray argues, is determined
by "synchronic instability;' while the signifier is determined by "diachronic
instability"37; signification presupposes a minimum of temporal progression,
while the specular image passes back and forth from the subject to the other in
an eternal present, both equally and structurally indeterminate.
Language as such, however, as distinct from the analogously linked image
and signifier, presupposes a signified, even if that signified is pushed forever
out of reach of the subject, immersed as she is in the vagaries of the image and
the signifier. The signified, on this reading, would be a material, fixed point,
something akin to what Lacan called the point de capiton, a fixity that can only
be deduced retrospectively, after the fact. It is not as a result of such a signified
being lacking, Irigaray argues, that the signifier and the specular image are
indeterminate; rather, the image and the signifier are always doubled in their
attempt to grasp at the signified, are always reduplicated and reiterated in the
attempt to clasp at their target. As Irigaray writes,
It [specularity J does not function due to the relative inadequacy of the signifier
to the signified, but through a play of permutations of two signifiers to one
signified, reset continuously in motion by the fact that the stakes are never
engaged irreversibly. This can be ascertained through the fact that the subject
Psychoanalytic Structuralism
appropriates its own image, its metaphor, as soon as it is constituted, but with no
assurance of ever really seizing hold of itself there. 38
The very efficacy of the image lies in its elusiveness.
27
Returning to Green, we find, later in his Cahiers article on Lacan's concept
of the object, a seeming recognition of the potential of a nonmediatory account
of objet petit a, one that might take cognizance of the complex immanence of
signifier to object, of object to subject as described by Leclaire. Within the bounds
of a more general attempt to articulate the theory of the object with the theory
of the signifier as developed by Lacan, Green writes: "This conception [Lacan's
theory of the signifier] might be a compromise between a strict binary system,
which leads us to options bereft of tertiary mediation, and another system in
which causality is developed as a network-a reticular system, which does away
with all oppositional functioning:'J9 Thus, the logic of the signifier as theorized
by Lacan and developed by Miller allows the rethinking of the binary process
of mediation that Green finds in Lacan's account of narcissism, of the image as
it defines and threatens the nascent subject. As we saw above in Leclaire and
Irigaray, the immanent and frictional interrelation of object, signifier, and image
precisely conformed to such a nonoppositional, nonbinary structure. At this
juncture in Lacan's seminar, Lacan had turned increasingly to topological figures
as a means to instantiate the complex spatiality of his model of the unconscious
and its interrelation with the signifier and the subject, and one hears a clear echo
of this in Green's endorsement of a nonoppositional, nonbinary systematicity;
but it is precisely within the account of objet a in its articulation with the signifier
that such a nonoppositional, nonbinary logic first finds its roots for Lacan,
warding off as it does any strict separation of the Imaginary and the Symbolic
that would allow the object a role of mediation.
We can speculate that Green's wish to retain a mediated space between the
subject and the Other, embodied by the object, is, at least in part, a prefiguration
of his insistence on the centrality of affect in psychoanalysis, and his critique
of Lacan for his supposed neglect of it.
40
By reserving an essentially mediatory
function for the object, the subject can be allied with a new function, namely
affect, for which the logic of the signifier cannot fully account. "What qualifies
affect; Green writes, "is that it cannot enter into any combinatorial:'41; whereas if
we follow Lacan and Leclaire, by contrast, in situating the subject, object, and the
signifier according to an asymmetric, topological position of immanence, any
question of affect, or jouissance, must be posed within the immanent plane of the
28 Post-Rationalism
.Un"HH'H and its avatars, and the of
this in Green's Green for of
Miller that charges the latter with an effacement of the object.
he "[TJhe separation (of the subject) is of no importance since the suture
(of the objet (a) remains"42; by insisting on the ineluctability of suture, that is,
Miller risks condensing into a unitary formalism the myriad forms of mediation
and separation that must occur for the subject to assume its place as a subject of
the Symbolic. Affect and desire, as tied to the persistence of the object as cause
of the subject, are made less thinkable if the birth of subjectivity is reduced to a
logical operation of suture.
It should be underlined here that, in both his Cahiers article and in his
later Le Discours Vivant,43 Green directs a similar critique to Lacan as the
one I have leveled here at him. Lacan, Green suggests, fails to appreciate the
inherently dialectical relation between signifier and affect, itself a relative
of Freud's famous distinction between word-presentations (situated in the
preconscious and conscious psyche) and thing-presentations (situated in the
unconscious). For Green, Lacan hypostasizes the Symbolic in such a way that
the ambiguity of affect is ignored, even as that affect must always be understood
as dialectically bound up with the signifier, as emergent with it. But in his own
separation of the subject and the object and in his reliance on the concept of
mediation, Green risks reproducing a similar symmetry that undercuts the
necessary movement and topological ambiguity of the subject -object relation
in the psychic economy of the subject of the unconscious. More importantly
for the argument of this chapter, Green risks obscuring the properly resistant
qualities of the psychoanalytic object, qualities that bear more generally
on differences in the accounts of formalization to be found in Lacanian
psychoanalysis, and in the other traditions comingling within the broad
church of post-rationalism.
What are the stakes of this debate for the larger question of the tension
between a static and dynamic concept of form as it manifests in the pages of
the Cahiers? First, Green's trouble with objet a manifests a tension that we can,
for the sake of darity, identify as at work both in Lacan's work of the time, and
within the project of the Cahiers more specifically. Within Lacan, this tension
can be explicated by reference to the desirability of establishing psychoanalysis
as a science, or at least as a science judged according to its amenability to
mathematization. Under the sway of Alexandre Koyre, George Canguilhem, and
r-svcnc'an,C!lVi[lC Structuraiism 29
Lacan wished of
nt"l",p'ITPr is the tension between Lacan's
desire formalization, for the potentially infinite transmissibility that
formalization would afford, and his separate theoretical interest in formalization
as irredeemably subject to the vicissitudes and, most importantly, failures of the
signifier, failures that manifest simultaneously at the level of abstract conceptual
formalization, and at the level of the subject, the existence of whom is predicated
on similarly formal elements. To summarize what is a complex and frequently
contradictory concern in the years of the seminar early and late, Lacan will
insist on both the internal necessity of formalization to psychoanalysis, and
the tendency of all Symbolic systems to undergo formalization. He will equally
insist, however, that the urge to formalize encounters a limit internal to the
form in question, a limit that serves both as an impediment and a motor to
the continuing production and renewal of that form. In seminar 20, Lacan
associates his notion of the Real with an "impasse of formalization;'44 but he will
equally adopt the means of mathematical formalization to construct his theory
of sexuation. A passage from his seminar 3 years earlier sheds some light on this
seeming paradox. There, in the seminar The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, Lacan
comments:
The inside does not explain the outside. We are dealing with a relationship of
weaving, of text-of fabric, if you like. It remains no less true that this material
has a texture, that it captures something-not everything, to be sure, since
language shows the limit of this world which only exists through language. It
shows that even in the world of discourse nothing is everything, as I say-or
better, that "everything" as such is self-refuting, founds itself, even, on having to
be reduced in its employment.
45
This notion of the self-refutation of form is key to any understanding of
Lacan's concept of the Real; far from being simply opposed to the structuring,
formalizing logic of the signifier, the Real is both the condition of possibility and
impossibility that impedes and motors signification. In the above quote, Lacan's
"everything is self-refuting" points to the ways in which any system or totality
is reliant on elements that exist as both its condition and a threat to its bounds.
The object as understood by Lacan is one instance of such an eccentric element,
and as we'll see with Miller below, the subject is also to be understood as both
necessary and inadmissible within the terms of symbolic structure. The ability
to hold the two poles of this logic together-constitution and dissipation-is
30 Post-Rationalism
totalization of form is impossible, Lacan refuses the false choice of form or
contingency, structure or flux. It is not simply that Lacan recognizes the two
sides of formalization, the tendency of processes of formalization towards their
own undermining even as they persist and re-form, but that he actively insists
on both aspects of formalization as necessary, and as implicated furthermore
in the multifarious ways in which the formation of structure or form is also
necessarily a deformation. Objet petit a stands as a central conceptual conduit
for Lacan's thinking on such paradoxes of formalization.
The immanent gaps that result from such a de-totalized concept of form allow
Lacan the theoretical freedom to integrate his concept of the psychoanalytic
object into his broader theory of the logic of the signifier, even as his object
swerves to avoid the twin conceptual poles of subject and Other. Where,
paradoxically, Green's holding of the subject and the Other apart results in
theoretical stasis, in the inability to connect the paradoxes of Imaginary
narcissism with its immanently related logic of the signifier, Lacan's account
of formalization tends toward the dynamic: the very failure of form, that is, is
the condition of its renewal, or as Lacan puts it in seminar 17 and as quoted
above, "[W]e are dealing with a relationship of weaving;' which is to say a
knotting together and apart potentially without end. As we saw in our reading of
Leclaire above, the psychoanalytic object, as an "indifferent" form, marks both
the disturbing foreignness that incites the subject's desire, and a constitutive
element in the very formation of the subject, allied as it is to the signifier as the
immovable horizon of subjectivity. Leclaire marks this coincidence in the terms
of a "measurable separation that, in a certain way, is reducible"46; as something
apparently "outside" the subject, the object is nonetheless conditioned by the
signifier that is the horizon for subject and object both. In the next section of this
chapter, I'll consider Jacques Alain-Miller's own discussion of formalization in
his much discussed article "Suture" from the first edition of the Cahiers, with a
view to drawing out the immanent tension in his argument, expressive of a more
general tension at the heart of the Cahiers project, between Lacan and Althusser's
competing visions of the relationship between structure and subject. That tension
is drawn ever tighter by the restaging by Miller of the aforementioned problem
of the relation between signifier, object, subject with the problem of the status of
scientific knowledge.
Psychoanalytic Structuralism 31
Formalization
Jacques-Alain Miller first made contact with Lacan in 1964 while studying with
Althusser at the ENS in Paris. He would quickly become the most important
figure in Lacanianism after Lacan himself. One of the founding editors of the
Cahiers, Miller contributed, in its first issue, an article that continues to provoke
discussion among those attempting to read Lacan philosophically. Centering
on the concept of "suture:' a term that Lacan had only used inconsistently as a
means of explaining the stitching of the subject to the signifier, Miller generalized
the concept with a view to providing psychoanalysis with a crucial point of
articulation with mathematical logic, and in particular with Frege's number
theory.47 In so doing, Miller was following Lacan's own injunctions toward the
necessity of a formalization of psychoanalytic theory; we might ask, however,
whether Miller pays sufficient attention to the second aspect of formalization
discussed above, the tendency of form toward its own, constitutive dissolution.
Opening his argument, Miller lays out what he calls the "logic of the
signifier" as "a general logic in that its functioning is formal in relation to
all fields of knowledge including that of psychoanalysis which, in acquiring
a specificity there, it governs:'48 "It is a minimal logic:' Miller continues, "in
that within it are given those pieces only which are necessary to assure it a
progression reduced to a linear movement, uniformly generated at each point
of its necessary sequence:'49 Just this short quote tells us a lot about the variety
of formalization that Miller hopes to conjoin with Lacan's theory of the subject.
Miller seems to simultaneously attach the traits of generalizability-we're
told that this is a general logic relevant to all fields of knowledge-and of
minimality, of a minimum predictability that ensures the regular, or as Miller
puts it "linear:' replication of a given sequence according to a law of progression.
The signifier, on this model, is predictable, governed by laws of metaphor and
metonymy, of combination, that psychoanalysis traces according to a more
general logic associated with the interaction of the subject with structure, with
the articulation, that is, of the unconscious structured like a language with the
structured field of the Symbolic as such.
Miller is quick to emphasize that the stakes of such a formalization are severed
from signification; the signifier as it enters into a process of formalization is to
be treated as a unit that, while entirely defined by its relation to other signifiers,
is also situated in a specific position relative to those signifiers, and that such a
position is governed by laws that have, as such, nothing to do with the contingent
of discourse."su he another
that suture is "the relation of lack to the structure:'51 Structure here is
synonymous with the Symbolic, with the concatenation of signifiers situated in
the Other that Miller thinks is explicable according to a linear formalism. 'Ibe
subject, we note, is lacking from the structure; it is lack itself: insofar as suture,
the stitching of the subject to the signifier is, as we've already noted, "the general
relation of lack to the structure:' Subsequent to these introductory remarks,
Miller embarks on a heterodox reading of Frege, interrogating his theory of
number for what it might reveal for a more general logic of formalization that
might apply to psychoanalysis. Miller justifies his equation of the form of the
signifier with the form of number by claiming that the logic of the signifier
"should be conceived of as the logic of the origin oflogic;'52 which is to say that,
for Miller, the logic of the signifier is the transcendental horizon for logic as
such.
For Frege, Miller continues, and following Leibniz, elements in a system,
in this instance numbers, can only give rise to truth if one assumes their
substitutability, and this substitutability is predicated on identity, which is to
say, as Miller writes, "those things are identical of which one can be substituted
for the other without loss of truth:'53 To add to our previous traits associated
with this variant of formalization, then, traits that included generalizability,
minimality, and progressive linearity, we must add substitutability, and the
principle of nonidentity.
Miller reviews Frege's construction of number as follows 54:
Let there be a thing X of the world. Let there be the empirical concept of this
X. The concept which finds a place in the schema is not this empirical concept
but that which redoubles it, being "identical with the concept of X". The object
which falls under this concept is X itself, as a unit. In this the number, which
is the third term of the sequence, to be assigned to the concept of X will be the
number L Which means that this function of the number 1 is repetitive for all
things of the world. It is in this sense that this 1 is only the unit which constitutes
the number as such, and not the 1 in its personal identity as number with its
own particular place and a proper name in the series of numbers.Furthermore,
its construction demands that, in order to transform it, we call upon a thing of
the world-which, according to Frege, cannot be: the logical must be sustained
through nothing but itself.55
FSVCtl(,anmv;nc Structuralism
number a
that it the concept instantiates it
rnT'N""t of X can be a number:
the number 1. According to Frege's anti-empirical account, the object of a
schema is subsumed under the concept, which is then assigned a number; in
turn, the identity of the concept and its relation to 1 allows for the generation
of succession. For Miller, however, Frege's theory relies on the disappearance of
the thing itself to be conceptualized, and as such reaches an impasse; as I quoted
Miller above, "[I]ts construction demands that, in order to transform it, we call
upon a thing of the world-which, according to Frege, cannot be: the logical
cannot be sustained through nothing but itself:' 'The domain of logic, that is,
must be self-sufficient.
On Miller's reading then, Frege leans heavily on the self-identity of the concept
to ground his number theory. It is the concept's identity with itself that allows for
its substitutability and for the generation of number thereafter. But how, Miller
asks, is the self-identical as such to be grounded, if we necessarily disallow any
empirical reference?
The only way in which, without an empirical reference, the concept of
self-identity can be secured, and thus the construction of number allowed, is
via the invocation of nonidentity. It is only, Miller claims after Frege, through
the construction of zero as the concept of the nonidentical that allows the
generation of the 1 within the general logic of Frege's number theory. For 1 to
emerge, we must posit zero as the nonidentical that must be rejected from any
possible domain of truth, but in the very act of rejection, the concept of the
nonidentical qua zero acts negatively as the foundation of the self-identicaP6
The zero, Miller writes, "sutures logical discourse:'57 which is to say that it
provides a disappearing ground upon which the construction of number and
the necessity of substitutability can be guaranteed. Furthermore, the zero as the
stand in for the lack, here represented by the concept of nonidentity, must not
be mistook for that lack itself; instead, the zero subsumes lack qua nonidentity
and thus provides the basis for the development of numerical succession. The
paradox, Miller emphasizes, is precisely that of Lacan's logic of the signifier; as
Miller writes, "The central paradox to be grasped (which as you will see in a
moment is the paradox of the signifier in the sense of Lacan) is that the trait of
the identical represents the nonidentical, whence is deduced the impossibility
of its redoubling, and from that impossibility the structure of repetition, as the
process of differentiation of the identica!:'58
formalization of
, ' ~ ' H H ' ' ' ' , insofar as "the
that
And tor Lacan, the
a for
another as Lacan it in his eleventh seminar; the signifier, that
"represents" the subject even as the subject, qua the nonidentical, necessarily
disappears from view. The very disappearance of the subject from the field of the
Other, from the field of the signifier as such, itself generates another signifier,
which in turn represents the subject, and so on. As Miller comments, "[TJhe
definition of the subject comes down to the possibility of one signifier more;'60
just as for Frege, the import of the nonidentical zero as the ground for succession
is confirmed each time a new number is generated.
The analyst sans suture?
Miller's arguments, proceeding from the conviction that it is the logic of the
signifier that delimits all potential systems or logics as their very constitutive
horizon, seems to posit the suturing of the subject as a necessary structural
condition. But such a position was by no means uncontested by the Cahiers
authors, and it may be useful to consider the arguments again of Serge Leclaire,
whose Cahiers article "The Analyst in His Place?" published directly after
"Suture" in the same edition of the journal, argues for the irreducibility of the
place of the analyst, its singularity in the lace of other systems or structures. Such
irreducibility, for Leclaire, requires a more particular attention than is available in
Miller's generalizing account for the singular ways in which subjective positions
relate to their enabling Symbolic structures.
Leclaire begins his critique of Miller by acknowledging the gains of Miller's
foregrounding of the problem of "suturation:' Miller's strength lies in his
willingness to accept that logic itself, and the logicians practicing it, are subject
to the same structural paradoxes that more readily show themselves in the
linguistic rethinking of the unconscious. As Leclaire writes, "It is clear that Miller,
as a logician, or archaeologist, himself also sutures. But here is the difference: the
analyst, whether he likes it or not and even when he attempts to discourse upon
psychoanalysis, the analyst does not suture, or he ought to strive to be wary of
this passion [passion 1 :'61 By virtue of her very place in relation to the discourse
of the analysand, that is, the analyst resists the closure of the constitutive gap in
knowledge that, for Miller, is the site of the subject. The analyst imposes herself
Psychoanalytic Structuralism 35
at the point in the patient's discourse at which any suturing operation might
be possible, barring it in advance. If, for Miller, the simultaneous opening and
closing of the gap in structure correlative to the subject is a necessary instance
of all structure, for Leclaire psychoanalysis, or the singular structural relation
between analyst and analysand, takes a critical distance from other discourses as
its very defining feature.
Much of Leclaire's argument hinges on the relative place and importance
of the concept of nonidentity. If, for Miller after Frege, the object of logical
discourse must be self-identical if it is to be grounded by the nonidentical qua
zero, for Leclaire it is the permeation of nonidentity in the "place" of the analytic
encounter that makes of analysis an exception to the general rule of suture. Even
if, in Frege via Miller, the nonidentical occupies a central and determinative
place, acting as it does as the definitional if vanishing ground of the succession
of objects or elements in a structure, the site of the nonidentical is "blocked"
in the very recognition of its constitutivity; the zero, that is, precisely as the
aberrant nonidentical element that undergirds the succession of objects in a
discourse, nonetheless closes off the possibility of nonidentity emerging as the
principle of the discourse itself. Through enabling the self-identical elements of
a discourse or structure to persist, the zero-or the subject in Miller's analogous
extrapolation-condenses within itself the possibility of its diffusion across a
structure or discourse. For the analyst, by contrast, "not even the zero servers]
to hide the truth of a radical difference, of a difference to self rune difference a
soil that asserts itself in the last analysis in the face of the irreducibility of sexual
reality:'62 Leclaire draws here on an emerging argument in Lacan's seminar that
would find its most clear expression a few years later in Lacan's totemic insistence
on the nonexistence of the sexual relationship.
For our purposes, Leclaire's account is intriguing in its insistence on the
nonrelationality of the analytic encounter, of the distribution within the space
of the psychoanalytic encounter of a nonrelational nonidentity, in contrast to
the frictional but nonetheless constitutive relation between the self-identical
and nonidentical in Miller and Frege. By implication, the subject in Leclaire's
account loses its monopoly on non identity, in a manner congruent with his
complex multiplication of nonidentities in his reflections on the psychoanalytic
object and the letter, discussed above, and with Irigaray's similar concern for
the articulation of specular and significatory logics. As we'll see in subsequent
chapters, Miller and others writing in the Cahiers would develop and complicate
this foundational problem of relation and nonrelationality, of the identical and
36 Post-Rationalism
doser the
dravv
interaction of
and and in so doing Leclaire warns against any assimilation
of psychoanalysis to the broader epistemological project of the Cahiers and of
post-rationalism more generally.
How might we assess Miller's arguments around the problem of "suture:'
especially in light of Lacan's paradox of formalization as I've outlined it above,
and with respect to Leclaire's reservations? First, it is worth noting that, in Frege's
system as understood by Miller, each successive number must necessarily be
self-identical; that is to say, the structure governed by number is a structure of
identity. Necessarily, the concept of the nonidentical is constitutively excluded,
but returns with each new number generated, just as the Lacanian subject returns
as the absent ground of each new signifier in psychoanalysis. The punctual
drift of desire is, in this sense, equivalent to the repetitive reappearance of the
subject between the gaps of the signifiers that form the basis of subjectivation.
Nonetheless, a basic tenet of Lacan's theory of the signifier seems eclipsed in
Miller's account, namely that it is precisely the nonidentity of the signifier to
itself, the negative existence of the signifier as determined only through its
relations with other signifiers in a signifying chain, that produces temporary
meaningfulness and motors the subject's desire. By establishing number as the
analog to the signifier, this central characteristic of signification is hidden, with the
nonidentical relegated only to the position of the subject. While, in his follow-up
article to "Suture;' published as "Mat rice" in 1975, Miller would come closer to
acknowledging the distinctive priority of the signifier to number, commenting
that "numbers don't yet exist at the unfolding of the series of (split, repeated)
unary marks [originary signifiers 1:' in the Cahiers he remains beholden, if only
implicitly, to the signifier as self-identica1.
63
When Lacan repeatedly affirmed that there is no Other of the Other, that there
can be no meta-guarantee for the consistency of the Symbolic, he underlined
the centrality of nonidentity to the system of signification.
64
Any closed, total
system would not admit of the necessary interpenetration of subject, desire
and the signifier. Indeed, Miller's error in analogizing number theory with the
logic of the signifier is directly comparable to the tendency analyzed above in
Andre Green's essay on the psychoanalytic object, whereby the gap between
subject and Other is held open without properly accounting for their complex,
nonmediatory intercalation. Just as Green presupposes the Other as a complex
whole to be mediated by the psychoanalytic object, a whole, we might say, to be
l1!"HWll'. the movements of the
formula of with the
the Other
contrast, Lacan's
of the unconscious consistently
implicated in the barred Other, requires a recognition of the coincidence of
lacks between the subject and the Other. In his third seminar, Lacan would
go so far as to associate the Other constructed as a whole with psychosis: the
psychotic, for Lacan, is unable to take on the ternary logic of the signifier as
it both implicates and protects the subject from the desire of the Other. As a
result, the psychotic is wholly immersed in the Other, which, as a result of it
not having fully taken on the character of the barred Symbolic, appears as a
threatening totality.65
If Frege's account of numerical succession suggests precisely the qualities
of "linear progression" that Miller associates with proper formalization, it is
less clear that Lacan's insistence on the nonidentical intrication of the subject
and the signifier would permit such a specific logical reductionism; Leclaire,
as we saw above, is an especially astute ambassador for Lacan's emphasis on
the asymmetricality, if co-implication, between subject and object, subject and
signifier. And if Miller's analogy with number theory disbars the nonidentical
from its rightful place in the Other while acknowledging it as the condition
of the subject, the analogy of self-identical numbers with the signifier also
misses that aspect of the signifier that, for Lacan and Leclaire both, does exhibit
a principle of self-identity, namely the signifier as it exists in isolation, as a
material letter aside from the signification that is its contingent consequence.
Lacan emphasizes that, for the psychotic, the signifier loses its proper capacity
for relation, and instead remains at the level of its material isolation, as it figures
in the psychic economy during the process of primary narcissism. As the child's
ego is formed through the introjection of images of the Other, those images
are propped up by isolated signifiers that, for the child, exhibit no obvious
relational meaning. So, for example, a parent making encouraging noises while
a child jubilantly observes its own image in the mirror is producing signifiers,
the efficacy of which is determined by their isolation from any determined
meaning, and equally by their immediacy; their very abstraction from meaning
provides the child with the material fundaments with which to orientate or
map her initial identifications. The onset of the Oedipus complex, for Lacan,
can be recoded as the intervention of a third term, similar to that described by
Irigaray above, into the dosed, dyadic relation between the opaque desire of
38 Post-Rationalism
access
this third term, and so condemned to an ag\l:re:SS1'le immersion in the
relation.
56
Lacan will increasingly generalize this aspect of the signifier, its material
condition of isolation, as a necessary ground tor the signifier in its normal state of
relation. Thus, underwriting the nonidentical signifier's production of meaning
is the self-identity of the signifier as it exists as a meaningless mark or gesture.
67
Leclaire, in our reading above, refers to this aspect of the signifier as the "letter;'
implicated in the constitution and incitement of the body and the object. Lacan
will sometimes refer to this aspect of the signifier as the unary trait, the signifier
in its proto-form; that Miller himself refers to the unary trait as the minimal
condition of the signifier in "Suture" only underlines the limits of his analogy,
ignoring as it does both the implication of the unary trait qua material signifier
in processes of identity formation that supersede his logical analogy, and failing,
further, to register the necessary self-identity of the unary trait in its status as
proto-signifier, as the material undergirding for the relativization of sense in the
Symbolic proper.
While it would be easy enough to attribute Miller's urge to reduce Lacan's
paradoxical logic of the signifier to Frege's number theory as simply an
attempt to lend psychoanalysis a wider scientific respectability, I think we
should look beyond Lacan's presence here and take the measure of Althusser's
influence on Miller, and on the Cahiers more generally. Althusser, by 1966, had
published his seminal For Marx, rereading the foundations of Marxist theory
through the lens of Spinoza's theory of immanent causality. This break with
the Hegelian legacy of what Althusser called "expressive causation;' as well as
the more general legacy of absolute totalization associated, rightly or wrongly,
with the Hegelian dialectic as it lived on in Marxist philosophy, profoundly
influenced Miller and the other participants in the Cahias project. Given
that the model of formalization proffered by Miller in his Suture seems to
differ quite profoundly from the paradox of formalization being developed
at the time by Lacan, it seems likely that it was Althusser's influence, over
and above the specifics of Miller's recourse to Frege, that was particularly
tormative. How might we differentiate these alternative approaches to form
and structure?
Psychoanalytic Structuralism 39
The following quote from Reading Capital encapsulates Althusser's theory of
structural causation well:
[Elffects are not outside the structure, are not a pre-existing object, element or
space in which the structure arrives to imprint its mark; on the contrary, it implies
that the structure is immanent in its effect, a cause immanent in its effects in
the Spinozist sense of the term, that the whole existence of structure exists in its
effects, in short that the structure, which is merely a specific combination of its
peculiar elements, is nothing outside its effects.68
In other words, there is no formal discernment to be made between a cause
and effect considered outside the wider, complex structured totality, a totality
that resists any vertical or horizontal hierarchisization. Each instance in the
totality affects the other, even if one must, even if retrospectively, distinguish
the dominant instance in particular circumstances, for Althusser this being
the economic for any social totality. At first glance, it is easy to see why this
concept of immanent, structured causality dovetailed with Miller's interest in
the Lacanian logic of the signifier. For at least the Saussure co-opted in general
terms by structuralist thinkers, each signifier is determined-one might say
overdetermined-by its relation with each other signifier, such that the status
of a signifier is negative; it exists only in its relations with other signifiers. Or, a
signifier is a "cause immanent in its effects;' is one instance of a structure utterly
determined by multiple lines of differential causality. Despite Miller's imputation
of self-identity to the signifier in his analogy with number theory, this is broadly
the logic of the signifier that he wishes to extract from Lacan, with the addition of
a nonidentical subject at the edge of the frame, perpetually receding as punctual
cause of the structure.
It is worth asking, however, whether this is truly the logic that Laean wishes
to advance. As I've already indicated, the logic of nonidentity extends beyond
the subject for Lacan, infecting the signifier and rendering problematic any
ultimate division between the subject of the unconscious and the presentation
and re-presentation of that subject by the signifier; Lacan spoke in his seminar of
"putting the accent on the element of discontinuity of the signifier:'69 something
it is hard to imagine capturing with Miller's incorporation of the signifier into a
sequential, formal logic. Furthermore, and as I've already indicated, there is no
place for the psychoanalytic object in such a schema. At this stage in his career,
Althusser left little room for what he would come to call, in work published
40 Post-Rationalism
desire for an instant, the mechanical movements of
structured When in his "1he Materialism of
the Philosophy of the Encounter:' will foreground the contingency of what he
calls the aleatory encounter, the arbitrary Lucretian swerve that allows a social
formation to take hold, he will abandon precisely the model of structural causality
that, thus modified, would perhaps have better grounded his remarks on the
contingent event.
70
As a parenthesis, we might ask whether the strict dialectic
between contingency and continuity that seems to define Althusser's project,
and to a lesser extent Lacan's and those of the Cahiers writers, is a symptom of
a collective inability to properly conceptualize history and time. While I think
there is something in Robert Paul Resch's defense of Althusser on this point,
whereby it is teleology specifically and not history per se that structural Marxism
excludes,'! I am less sure that the remaining conceptual skeleton of differing
dominant instances adequately makes up for the synchronicity of Althusser's
materialism; this question will be taken up again in Chapters 4 and 5.
Nonetheless, there are important parallels to be drawn between the Lacanian
concept of the barred Symbolic, the Symbolic split by its incomplete intrication
in the subject and the Real, and Althusser's early thesis of structural causality. If,
for Althusser, a complex structured totality is explicable only by reference to its
effects at relative instances-if, in other words, the whole of any particular social
totality is only ever manifest in its partial effects-for Lacan, the Symbolic is
only ever manifest as a totality through the relativization of sense in the signifier,
what Jean-Claude Milner gestures to as the singular and singularizing "point"
of the signifier in his article of the same name in the Cahiers.72 Each instance
of signification, that is to say, relies on the Symbolic qua barred totality, but it
equally manifests the material instance of that form's failure, a failure that, as
we've seen, also results in the asymmetrical remainder of objet petit a, the motor
of desire.
Where Lacan differs from Althusser is in his further elaboration of a concept,
that of the Real, that acts as a positivization of this logic of necessary failure. With
Althusser's theory of structured totality, the logical necessity of the de completion
of social formations is not sufficiently registered conceptually, leading to the
sense ofimpermeability and synchronicity that frequently pervades Althusserian
theory. Lacan's Real cuts across his conceptual apparatus, again manifest only
in its partial instantiation within the Symbolic and the Imaginary, destabilizing
and thus dynamizing the metapsychological structures he wishes to elucidate.
41
One seminar 17,
as such is
in its employment:' Every structure that might
better that
to be reduced
toward closure finds itself
reduced, compromised, or shot through with hoies.
To conclude, I'd like to briefly consider another article by Miller, this time his
"Action of the Structure;' insofar as it might allow us to make some provisional
remarks about the antinomies of the subject in the Cahiers project more generally;
I will discuss this article in more detail in Chapter 4. The essay forms something
of a companion piece to Miller's "Suture;' and attempts to flesh out the links
first broached in that text between Althusser's theory of structural causality and
Lacan's theory of the subject. I'd like to focus in on the section of the paper Miller
explicitly labels "Subject:' and where he writes the following:
If therefore, against the philosophy of structuralism, we require a notion of
subjectivity, this subjectivity will figure not as regent but as subjected [sujette].
Although it is required by representation, this subjectivity is not required to
occupy the position of a foundation with the function of a cause.
73
Here, Miller restates the basic, polemical intent of the Cahiers project, insofar as
it seeks to both consolidate and distance itself from the prevailing structuralism
of the time, a structuralism the Cahiers group recognize as effacing the subject
from all consideration. Miller proceeds by distinguishing between structure as
such, the decompleted form that precedes the subject and that the subject must
negotiate, and structuration, the dynamic process by which such structures are
reproduced. Such reproduction, given the repudiation of historicism central to
the Cahiers project, can only operate via the eccentric element that structure
must produce as its constitutive remainder, and that operates as the agent of the
destabilization of prevailing form, and thus as the precondition for change. This
element, for Miller, may take the form of the subject itself, the subject as it recedes
upon its being taken up in the vicissitudes of signification. Miller continues:
The formation of any conceptual system, closed or as good as closed, continues
the dimension of the imaginary. The psychological sphere, that of volitions
and appetites, in other words of motivations, is derived from the functional
miscognition of the structuring, with the result that people always act in light of
an end, i.e., in light of what they perceive as useful. Since the adequate systems
that elaborate this miscognition of the form cause, for Claude Levi -Strauss, the
object of ethnology, this latter remains a psychology.74
42 Post-Rationalism
This is, I think, a less than charitable reading of Levi-Strauss, and one that fails to
fully account for his concept of the "mana signifier:' a floating signifier devoid of
meaning that, in its position outside all determinate fields of reference, provides
stability to symbolic systems.7
5
Arguably, without Levi-Strauss' innovation here,
the account of structure Miller wished to advance here would not have been
possible. While for Levi-Strauss such an element exists entirely at the level of
the semiotic, as its nonsignifying foundation, the conceptual element that
Miller identifies at this level of eccentricity is the subject, but nonetheless the
basic operation of constitutive foreclosure delineated by both thinkers is the
same.7
6
Without this element, Miller infers, one is left with a static, atemporal
conception of structure and form that fails to account for both the generation
of structure and form, and the ways in which, in all fields of knowledge, the
gap created by the subject is sutured. How might we integrate this extension of
Miller's argument with our reflections on objet petit a above, and with Lacan's
particular account of the logic of the signifier and of formalization, a logic that
I've suggested is distinct from Miller's?
For Lacan, as we've seen,' the existence of objet petit a, and the register of
the Real more generally, results in a fundamental asymmetric instability in
the subject/Other relation, such that their intrication is guaranteed in ways
resistant to any symmetrical mediation. The subject and the object, that is to say,
always remain a problem for one another, even as their situation in a topological
continuum ofimmanence renders their absolute separation as, finally, impossible.
Even with Miller's distinction between structure and structuration in relation to
the subject, his account remains partially at the level of the structuralism that
he seeks to critique, insofar as, while accounting via the logic of constitutive
exception mentioned above for the Symbolic in its tarrying with the subject,
he fails to properly articulate the relation between the Symbolic and the Real,
a relation that, for Laean at least, is principally embodied in the figure of objet
petit a. As Leclaire phrases it, the object "is defined as that which comes in the
place of the lost letter"77; it must be accounted for, not as something entirely
outside the signifier, but as awkwardly and obscurely sited within its bounds,
the form that registers the failure of the signifier to fully embody desire, and
that generates an ineluctable sense of "loss" as a result. In my reading of "Action
of the Structure" in Chapter 4, I'll highlight potential ways in which Miller's
argument can be extended beyond its apparent limits; for now, however, the gap
Psychoanalytic Structuralism 43
between the Symbolic and Real remains an impasse, a problem that we'll circle
around in much of the rest of this book.
Nonetheless, the specificity of Lacan's interventions around these crucial
questions will be foregrounded in what follows, insofar as the psychoanalyst,
especially in his concept of the object, draws out the simultaneity of the necessity
and impossibility of formalization. Such a recognition has broad implications
for any theory of the subject, insofar as it reorients our attention to those aspects
of objects and signifiers that resist incorporation, that display what Bachelard
called a "co-efficient of adversity"78 even as they contribute to the constitution
of that which they resist. Such adversity is not simply contingent, but rather
acts as the causative quality of the object, its traction in defining the contours
of the subject or the structure in question. In its generation of friction, in its
seemingly deformatory consequences, the object acts to cause, to incite, what
it may apparently only seem to harm. As Spinoza wrote, "[Ilt is never we who
affirm or deny something of a thing; it is the thing itself that affirms or denies
something in US:'79 Or as Lacan phrased the problem in one of his final seminars,
"The subject is caused by an objecf'80
Notes
c. Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology vols. 1 and 2, trans. Monique Layton, (New
York: Basic Books, 1976) [1958].
2 1. Althusser, "Freud and Lacan:' in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans.
Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971): 189-221.
3 J. Lacan, Seminar XIV: The Logic of Phantasy 1966-1967, unofficial translation by
Cormac Gallagher, available online: www.lacaninireland.com/web/wp-content/
uploads/2010/06/THE-SEMINAR-OF-JACQUES-LACAN-XlV.pdf.
4 Ibid., lesson of May 10,1967.
5 J. Lacan, "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in
Psychoanalytic Experience" and "Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis:' in Bcrits, trans.
Bruce Fink (New York: WW Norton, 2006) [1949, 1948]: 75-81, 82-101; see my
Lacan and the Concept of the "Real" (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012): 15-36.
6 J. Lacan, Encore: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XX, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller,
trans. Bruce Fink (New York: WW Norton, 1999).
7 Available in English in J. H. Smith and W. Kerrigan (ed.), Interpreting Lacan
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983): 161-93.
8
iVH:,rC(;(WI1HiiUn and
and New York: Routledge,
9 J. Lacan, "Science and Truth:' in
2006): 726-46.
trans. Bruce Fink (New York: WW. Norton,
10 Andre Green, "The Logic of Lacan's objet (a) and Freudian Theory: Convergences
and Questions;' in Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan (eds), Interpreting Lacan
(New Haven: Yale University Press); 168.
11 Ibid., 166.
12 Ibid., 170.
13 Ibid., 164.
14 ]. Lacan, "Seminar IV: The Object Relation;' unpublished translation by
1. V. A. Roche.
15 J. Lacan, Seminar VI: Desire and Its Interpretation, lesson of April 15, 1959,
unpublished translation by Cormac Gallagher, available online: www.
lacaninireland.com/web/wp-eontentfuploads/20 1 0/06/Book -06-Desire-and -its-
interpretation. pdf.
16 J. Laean, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques
Alain-Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1994): 79-9J.
17 Serge Leclaire, Psychoanalyzing: On the Order of the Unconscious and the Practice
of the Letter, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998)
[1968]: 55.
18 Ibid., 56.
19 Ibid.
20 See my Lacan and the Concept of the "Real" (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2012).
21 Leclaire, Psychoanalyzing, 57.
22 Ibid., 110.
23 Ibid., 11 L
24 G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia 1, trans.
Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York: Viking, 1977): 83;
see also Daniel W Smith's discussion in his "The Inverse Side of the Structure:
Zizek on Deleuze on Laean;' collected in D. W. Smith, Essays on Deleuze
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012): 312-24.
25 G. Deleuze and E Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia 1, trans.
Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York: Viking, 1977): 83.
26 E. Baring, The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945-1968 (Cambridge;
Cambridge University Press, 2011): 209.
Paris, J966, available online:
cpa3.3. irigaray.htmL
28 Ibid., 9.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid., 10.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid., 18.
35 Ibid.
36 Ibid., 22.
37 Ibid., 18.
38 Ibid.
39 Green, "Logic;' 176.
40 A. Green, The Fabric of Affect in Psychoanalytic Discourse, trans. Alan Sheridan
(New York: Routledge, 1999) [19731.
41 Ibid., 18 L
42 Ibid., 177.
43 A. Green, Le Discours Vivant: La conception psychanalytique de l'affect (Paris: PUF,
1973).
44 J. Lacan, Encore: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XX, ed. Jacques
trans. Bruce Fink (New York: w.w. Norton, 1999): 84.
45 J. Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis: the Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XVII,
ed. Jacques Alain-Miller (New York: w.w. Norton, 2007): 54.
46 Leclaire, Psychoanalyzing, 55.
47 In an article originally published in the final edition of the Cahiers entitled "Mark
and Lack: On Zero;' Alain Badiou takes Miller to task for misrepresenting the
fundamentally self-enclosed and self-sufficient domain of mathematical logic.
While, for Miller, the self-identical field of number necessarily covers over or
"sutures" its grounding in the nonidentical, for Badiou no such ground is necessary;
instead, the signal benefit of mathematical logic is its ability to provide its own
self-guarantee. A discussion of this disagreement torms the basis for Chapter 3 of
this book.
48 J. A. Miller, "Suture: Elements of the Logic of the Signifier;' in Peter Hallward
and Knox Peden (eds), Concept and Form Vol. 1: Selections from the "Cahiers pour
lAnalyse," trans. Jacqueline Rose (New York: Verso, 2012) [1966]: 92; originally
46
50 Ibid.
Ibid., 93.
52 Ibid., 92.
53 Miller, "Suture;' 96.
54 Miller's arguments refer to G. Frege, TIle Foundations of Arithmetic, trans. Dale
Jacquette (New York: Pearson Longman, 2007) [1884].
55 Miller, "Suture:' 96.
56 Frege phrases this as follows: "Because nothing falls under the concept 'not
identical with itself; I define: 0 is the number that belongs to the concept 'not
identical with itseW' He justifies his definition of 0 by arguing: "I could have taken
as the definition of zero any other concept under which nothing falls. It occurred
to me, however, to choose such a one that can be proved on purely logical grounds;
and for this purpose the most convenient that presents itself is 'not identical with
itself; whereby for 'identical' I accept the previously quoted definition of Leibniz's,
which is purely logical:' See G. Frege, The Foundations of Arithmetic, trans. Dale
Jacquette (New York: Pearson Longman, 2007) (1884]: 76-7. 1hus, Miller's
insistence that the nonidentical be grounded on purely logical grounds is consistent
with Freges own arguments. Needless to say, the analogy that Miller extracts from
Frege with respect to psychoanalysis and the subject is far outside the bounds of
Frege's own concerns.
57 Miller, "Suture;' 97.
58 Ibid., 99.
59 J. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques
Alain-Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Penguin, 1994): 207.
60 Miller, "Suture;' 100.
61 S. Leclaire, '''The Analyst in His Place?" in Hallward and Peden Concept and Form
Vol. 1: Selections from "Cahiers pour lAnalyse," 1 03; originally published in French
as "Lanalyste it sa place?" in Cahiers pour IAnalyse 1, Paris, 1966, available online:
http://cahiers.kingston.ac. uk/volO 11 cpa l.4.leclaire.html.
62 Ibid., 104.
63 J.-A. Miller, "Matrice:' in Ornicar? 4, Paris, 1975; translated into English by Daniel
G. Collins in Lacanian Ink 24, 2005.
64 See J. Lacan, "The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the
Freudian Unconscious;' in Bcrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: WW Norton,
2006): 671-703. See also Lorenzo Chiesa's illuminating discussion in his
Psychoanalytic Structuralism 47
Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2007): 104-40.
65 J. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book III: The Psychoses, ed. Jacques
Alain-Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: Routledge, 1993): 81.
66 Ibid.
67 Ibid., 33.
68 1. Althusser and E. Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso,
2009) [1968]: 208-9.
69 J. Lacan, Seminar VI: Desire and Its Interpretation, lesson of December 3,
1958, unpublished translation by Cormac Gallagher, available online: www.
lacaninireland.com/web/wp-contentluploads/20 1 0/06/Book -06-Desire-and-its-inte
rpretation. pdf.
70 L. Althusser, "The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter," in
Frans:ois Matheron and Oliver Corpet (eds), Philosophy of the Encounter: Later
Writings 1978-1987, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (London: Verso, 2006): 163-208.
71 R. P. Resch, Althusser and the Renewal of Marxist Social Theory (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1991).
72 J.-C. Milner, "Le Point du signifiant;' in Cahiers pour I?\nalyse 3, 1966; translation
in Hallward and Peden, Concept and Form Vol. 1: Selections from the "Cahiers pour
l?\nalyse," 107-19. See my discussion of Milner's article in Chapter 3.
73 J.-A. Miller, "Action of the Structure;' in Hallward and Peden, Concept and Form
Vol. 1: Selections from the "Cahiers pour l?\nalyse," 74; originally published in
French as "Action de la structure" in Cahiers pour I?\nalyse 10, Paris, 1969, available
online: http://cahiers.kingston.ac.uk!voI09/cpa9.6.miller.html.
74 Miller, "Action;' 65.
75 C. Levi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, trans. Felicity Baker
(New York: Routledge, 1987) [1950].
76 The young Badiou, for his part, recognized Levi-Strauss's crucial innovation
and its import for structuralism, as when he writes: "The fundamental problem
of all structuralism is that of the term with the double function, inasmuch as it
determines the belonging of all other terms to the structure, while itself being
excluded from it [ ... ] It is the immense merit of Levi-Strauss, in the still mixed
form of the zero-signifier, to have recognized the true importance of this question:'
A. Badiou, "The (Re)commencement of Dialectical Materialism;' in A. Badiou
(ed.), The Adventure of French Philosophy, trans. Bruno Bosteels (New York: Verso,
2012) [1967]: 157, n.45.
77 Leclaire, Psychoanalyzing, 57.
48
Dallas
vv.rrw.e.e Works, ed. L trans. Samuel
80 J. Lacan, seminar 22, lesson ofJanuary 21,1975, unpublished translation by
Cormac Gallagher, available online: www.lacaninireland.com/web/wp-content/
uploads/20 1 O/06/RSI -Complete-With-Diagrams.pdf.
2
Bachelard, Lacan, and the Impurity of
Formalization
In concluding his 1968 article "Action of the Structure;' a sequel to his already
influential "Suture;' Jacques-Alain Miller wrote the following:
We know two discourses of over-determination: the Marxist one and the
Freudian one. Because Louis Althusser today liberates the first from the
dangerous burden that conceives of society as the subject of history, and because
Jacques Lacan has liberated the second from the interpretation of the individual
as the subject of psychology-it now seems to us possible to join the two. We
hold that the discourses of Marx and Freud are susceptible of communicating by
means of prinCipled transformations and of reflecting themselves into a unitary
theoretical discourse.
l
I quote Miller at length here because his comments reflect broadly on the central
concern of this book, namely the attempt in post-war French thought to bring
together the psychoanalytic concept of the subject with an account of structure, in
this case the political structuration described by Miller's teacher Louis Althusser.
Miller is often assumed to have converted to Lacanianism immediately upon
attending Lacan's seminar in 1964, but the quote above demonstrates how
important Althusser's importation, and reconfiguration, of the psychoanalytic
notion of "overdetermination" was for the theoretical project that "Action of the
Structure" helps to define.
This chapter asks after the ways that Lacan conceived of formalization and
scientificity, implicated in the broader project outlined by Miller above, but
displaying a particular attention to the different facets of signification that form
and threaten to de-form any project of abstract systemization. Interrogated at
length as the essential background to Lacanian and post-rationalist accounts of
of
as
one of crucial variables that contributed to the of
scientific legitimacy in the years after the waning of existentialism in France.!
If, for post-Heideggerian phenomenology and Sartrean existentialism, the
"technical" objectifications of scientific practice formed an object of critique,
for the parallel but newly influential field of French philosophy of science, it was
precisely the phenomenological emphasis on experience and consciousness that
represented a block to clear thinking. In particular, Bachelard's influence can
be said to have reinstalled at the center of French intellectual life a rationalist
concern for formalization. Michel Foucault, and Bachelard's followers in the
philosophy of science, including Alexandre Koyre and Georges Canguilhem, all
took different things from Bachelard's rationalist theory of scientific knowledge,
but all three followed Bachelard in rejecting an empirical or experiential
account of the formation of knowledge; instead, an emphasis was placed on the
constitutive role of theory in rendering objects proper to the epistemological
structures that different sciences construct and reconstruct in perpetuity.
Althusser's relation to Bachelard is most famously underscored by his
adoption of the latter's notion of the "epistemological rupture:'3 For Bachelard,
the sciences-and the plural is central to Bachelard's refusal of any grand theory
of science per se-progress by means of fundamental events of reordering, events
that foist a new frame upon the phenomena under study. When transposed to
the political field by Althusser, the term figures above all in his still-controversial
thesis that Marx's discovery of the principles of historical materialism, expressed
most clearly in Capital, marked a radical rupture with the latent Hegelianism and
humanism that had defined his early and middle works. Here, however, my focus
will be on the less interrogated relation of Bachelard to Lacan. My primary aim is
to understand both the inheritance of Bachelard's rationalism within the revision
of psychoanalysis proposed by Lacan, and the new model of formalization that
emerges with Lacan out of that inheritance, a model that provides a retrospective
critique of Bachelard's insistence on a relatively severe distinction between the
ordinary language of communication, and conceptuality and formalization as
best rendered within the terms of mathematics. In the final section, I'll turn to
the work of the structuralist philosopher Pierre Macherey as a means of staging
the central concerns of the chapter within the heightened textures of the literary;
how might the category of literary writing, in its definitional distinction from
References to and pepper
Lacan's seminar, and Lacan's increasing concern in the 1950s and the 1960s
with the mathematical formalization of analytic concepts found a sturdy and
supportive context in Bachelard's own insistence on the centrality of mathematics
to any modern philosophy of science, At one and the same time, however,
Lacan's project of a return to Freud seems to imply a necessary coexistence
between the progressive rationalization of analytic concepts, and an account of
how both language and the subject ground, and perhaps disrupt, that process
of rationalization. In what follows, I will ask after Jacques-Alain Miller's own
attempt to encompass the psychoanalytic subject within the terms of structure,
while also signaling an alternative way, present in the very late Lacan, to question
the apparent inviolability of the conceptual surface of scientific knowledge so
often imputed to Bachelard and other inheritors of the rationalist mantel, an
inviolability that would find its first points of doubt within Bachelard's own
recognition of the impurity of the objects of scientific inquiry. First, however,
it is necessary to gain a firm grip on the powerful ambiguities of Bachelard's
epistemology, ambiguities that provide the route through which Lacan could
both appropriate and subvert the model of formalization therein.
Bachelard between object, concept, and signifier
In much of Bachelard's philosophical work, the question of language, and of
writing, seems secondary, if not irrelevant. Bachelard had two intellectual
projects, received as distinct contributions to discrete sets of questions. The
central project that consumed Bachelard for most of his professional life was
an historical and epistemological enquiry into the foundations of the physical
sciences, perhaps especially chemistry. But Bachelard also concerned himself
with poetic imagination,4 and it is in these works that one would normally look
for his particular account oflanguage. Nonetheless, I'd like to argue in this section
that, while problematic, Bachelard's account of language in his epistemological
writings has pertinence to the conjuncture of formalization and the "logic of the
sign ifier" in Lacan, even if that pertinence is potentially obscured by the relative
paucity of thinking on the question of language in the work of the former.
More than this however, Bachelard provides the crucial ground upon which
52
but critical
Bachelard have often taken into his
relative debt to Descartes, and the question provides a useful way into any more
general account of Bachelard's brand of rationalist epistemology. Mary Tiles,
in her important study Bachelard: Science and Objectivity, skillfully teases out
the general philosophical implications of Bachelard's shifting relationship to
Descartes. Descartes, broadly speaking, held to the transparency of reflective
thought. Insofar as the subject is present to itself, to its own thoughts, the subject
is able to confirm, beyond doubt, its own existence; thus, a certain permanence
and solidity characterizes the subject of ref1ective thought. As Tiles phrases it,
"[I]t is therefore within the subject, in his perfect self-knowledge, that all other
knowledge is to be grounded:'5 Bachelard held that Descartes, in assuming this
centering of knowledge within the cogito, "assumes a radical epistemological
asymmetry between the subject of experience and the phenomenon
experienced;'6 with the weight placed definitively on the subject. As he wrote in
his Rationalisme applique, "Rationalism [as reconceived by BachelardJ is in no
way linked to imperialism of the subject [ ... J it cannot be formed in an isolated
consciousness:'7 It is the subject, then, as well as the object of possible knowledge
that changes upon their interaction; as Tiles puts it, "the subject [for Bachelard]
changes as the [object 1 does, as his perceptions change:'8
'The subject, far from imposing itself on the object of knowledge as the only
possible site of certainty, is in fact as subject to the object as it is its master; if
the object might change upon its inscription in a scientific process, so must the
subject. This dialectical tension between subject and object, however, is only
the first of a number of complications that Bachelard addresses to rationalist
certainty. As we'll see, the very "nature" of the objects of scientific inquiry, what
we might more accurately call, in a Bachelardian context, scientific "labor:' is by
no means certain. That uncertainty is shot through both subject and object for
Bachelard. As Tiles writes,
If it can be presumed that the medium through which one is looking is perfectly
transparent and non-distorting, there is no problem in sorting out what part
of what is seen is due to the medium and what to the object viewed through it;
it can be assumed, with the naIve realist, that things are just as they are seen to
be. If it cannot be presumed that the medium through which one is looking is
perfectly transparent and non-distorting, one cannot extract from what one sees
information concerning the shape, size, color or surface features of the objects
KO,'hPI,(1,-,' Lacan, and the 1 >Mf"""';' ,
Rachelard,
\Vith necessary caveats that I'll outline Bachelard the second
perspective, whereby the philosopher of science must account for both the
delineation of a theoretical object of knowledge-distinct from any mere
empirical object-and the particular lens that provides knowledge of it, and
that may well be said to change the object in the very process of its coming into
view, That lens, for Bachelard and in contrast to much Anglophone philosophy
of science, is irrevocably and definitionally historical and situated. Moreover, the
particular "psychology" of the scientist or group of scientists, inevitably immersed
as they are in the vagaries of nonscientific influences, must also be accounted for,
contributing as they do to what Bachelard refers to as "epistemological obstacles:'
obstacles that potentially militate against the emergence of an epistemological shift
or rupture in the development of a particular science. It was, of course, the idea of
an "epistemological rupture" or "break" that Bachelard most famously passed on
to Althusser, and to the Cahiers authors whose work we'll trace in much of what
follows. That idea, deceptively close to Thomas Kuhn's notion of a "paradigm
shift;' threatens to obscure the ways that, for Bachelard, the sciences are always
and perpetually engaged in a charged dialectic with their objects, where either
side, scientist or object, is never finally in possession of the upper hand.lO
If, then, the Cartesian reliability of the subject of enquiry is guaranteed by
the self-transparency of thought, for Bachelard thought is inherently mediated,
rendered impure, both by sense experience in its potential for mystification, and
by the technical and epistemological lenses through which the scientist defines her
object. The process of defining that object, this is to say, is itself subject to objects,
objects that are potentially enabling of, but also threatening to, the scientific
journey to truth. This is not to suggest that Bachelard was a stern critic of the
Cartesian cogito. To the contrary, in a discussion of what makes a scientific object,
Bachelard wrote: "We must first posit the object as a subject of the problem, and
the subject of the cogito as a consciousness of the problem:'l! For the cogito to be
a "consciousness of the problem" however, and the problem to itself be subject to
the object in question, that consciousness can never be a transparency; it is always
and already thrown into the object world of which it hopes to gain knowledge
of As we'll see, the subjectivity of the scientist is problematized for Bachelard
precisely in this recognition of the interpenetration of seemingly opposite
domains: subject and object, empirical and conceptual, domains constructed and
reconstructed according to the scientist's materially rooted practice.
54
scientist
UILllYUlVil that best scientific rw')rr,ro
and
the given to the creation of hypotheses and theories, Bachelard, in typically
rationalist fashion, considers the job of the scientist to lie in qualifying the
empirical by rendering it amenable to conceptual capture. What is less typical,
however, for a rationalism so often polemically defined through its negative
relation to empiricism, is Bachelard's insistence that the subject or object is
always mixed in with its ostensible opposite. That is to say, there is no clean
separation for Bachelard between the empirical object of experience and the
theoretical object of science; their dialectical articulation and distinction is the
work in progress of science itself, and thus to separate them a priori is to deny
the very labor of scientific inquiry. Here, we get the first glimpses of what I
think will characterize the distinctly post-rationalist character of Lacan's take
on epistemology, but while for Bachelard, this muddying of the purity of the
theoretical object occurs as a result of the given ness of experience, for Lacan
(and, in places, for Althusser too), it is principally the structure ofthe signifier
that complicates the formation of any discrete object of inquiry. I'll address
Lacan on this point at length below.
For Bachelard, nonetheless, a general dualism persists, organized around the
categories of subjectivity and objectivity. It is important to stress, nonetheless,
that this duality resists being mapped on to the distinction found in Popper
and others between science and pseudoscience, insofar as the latter distinction
presupposes a continuum between common sense as revealed in experience
and the domain of the scientific.
12
To reiterate, it is rather in the break with the
empirically given that the beginnings of any scientific process must be found
for Bachelard. He renders this starkly in his The Formation of the Scientific Mind
(1938) as follows:
Immediate objective knowledge is necessarily incorrect by virtue of the fact
that it is qualitative. It produces error that must be rectified. It lays an inevitable
burden of subjective impressions on the object; objective knowledge must be
unburdened.
13
There are a number of intriguing ambiguities in this short passage, found two
thirds of the way through the book and intended to summarize the conclusions
of the main portion of the argument. For what, precisely, is the status of the
"object" referred to here? If, as Tiles insists, "the pivotal distinction in Bachelard's
Bachelard, Lacan, and the Impurity of Formalization 55
contrast is not between the empirically testable (falsifiable) and the empirically
irrefutable, but between subjective and objective;'14 what status does incorrect,
unscientific, intuitive but nonetheless objective knowledge have for Bachelard,
knowledge that seems to be the topic of his concern in the quote above, described
as "objective knowledge" to be "unburdened"? Bachelard makes things a little
clearer when, also in The Formation of the Scientific Mind, he writes, "The object
may not be designated as an immediate "objective"; in other words, a march
toward the objective is not initially objective:'15
As Dominique Lecourt has observed, at play here is a deliberate equivocation
between different senses of the term "object;' between the given object of experience
with its burden of empirical mystification and the object of science as it is
produced through its realization in scientific theory and praxis
16
; or, alternatively,
between the different aspects of a single object, one empirical and the other the
product of scientific and theoretic labor. And as Lecourt also notes, Bachelard
will further underline the split in the object with the coining of neologisms, such
as "super-object;' defined as follows: "The super-object is the result of a critical
objectification, of an objectivity which only retains that part of the object which
it has criticized:'17 It seems to me that we must complicate the sense, then, of an
absolute break between the subjective and the objective in Bachelard if we are to
account for the persistence of error, or that "part" of the object that will eventually
be jettisoned through a process of critical objectification, even as that part of the
object persists in the domain of the objective.
Althusser was attentive to this aspect of Bache lard's epistemology, assimilating
it for his own purposes. Discussing Spinoza, he remarks: "[W]e are never faced
with a new object but simply a new form of appropriation (the word is Marx's)
of an object that was always already there since the first kind of knowledge
(imagination):'18 In other words, and taking into account Althusser's concession
to Spinozist monism, the object that occupies a science is never "new" in the
sense that it might represent an absolute break with its empirical or ideological
source. An epistemological break may represent a radical shift in a given scientific
optic, but the objects treated through that optic are composites, unstable, and
always at least in part burdened by their obscure origins in the empirical. In
this sense, I disagree with Peter Starr's assessment of Althusserian epistemology,
whereby its final consequence is an unbreakable circularity between the object
and its conceptualization. Starr writes, "No truly dialectical conception of
'well-founded' knowledge [for Althusser] as a 'circle perpetually opened by its
very closures' can fail to grasp the necessary circularity of knowledge production
as a process of transforming 'something which in a sense already But
Althusser's
that
Post-Rationalism
a closed circle or an irredeemable idealism, although I admit that the
ever present.
is
Detectable in all of the above is Bachelard's materialism, his refusal to
jettison those parts of the object that are ill-fitting with its incorporation in a
new conceptual framework. It is worth noting the echo here with our discussion
in Chapter 1 of the theoretical work that Lacan's objet petit a performs for
psychoanalytically inflected post-rationalism. 1here, as here, it is the resistant
qualities of the object that motor the development of new forms; for post -Lacanian
thought however, those forms are, above all, marked by the split subject of the
unconscious and the signifiers that encase it.
For Bachelard by contrast, it is the scientific that manifests this tension,
the domain that may reasonably have been presumed to be impervious to
such nagging resistances, such breakdowns in the liaison between object and
concept. To be rational for Bachelard, nonetheless, is precisely to recognize such
ambiguities in the development of scientific knowledge, to encompass them
within the ambit of ongoing rational inquiry. If he will always describe such
impurities as part of the progress toward the rational, as corresponding to "a
transformed reality, a reality rectified, a reality which precisely has received the
human mark par excellence, the mark of rationalization;'20 there is no cleanness
or symmetry in the rational order that results, at least if one reads Bachelard
closer to the consequences of his theory than to its letter.21 Such a cleanness
or symmetry would remove science from the roughness of the material world
and project it into the ideality of theological certainty. The upshot of Bachelard's
reinvention of rationalism is a readiness to accept the persistence of aspects of
objects that are in contradiction to the order of conceptualization within which
they are progressively installed; that recognition is, of course, the motor to
further conceptualization and clarification of that object, what Bachelard refers
to as its "objectification:'
To be clear, Bachelard's aim is not to collapse scientific rationalism into
skeptical chaos. His vision is very much one of the viability of scientific progress,
albeit one that recognizes the complex interpenetration of the subjective and
the objective in the constitution and reconstitution of the object domain of
the science in question. The ability to at least temporarily resolve the complex
composition of its objects is performed by a science's "problematic;' or its unified
field of questions and hypothetical expectations. In a useful passage from his
Bachelard, Lacan, the 57
nomination
an that someone its usual name, don't know
whether it is the name or the thing which comes to my thoughts, or even this
mixture of name or thing, intemvined, monstrous:'22 Such an impurity or
intertwinement is ultimately static; it persists merely as unknowable, yielding no
increase in knowledge. With the imposition of a problematic, the object is now
"an interesting object, an object for which the process of objectification has not
been achieved, an object which does not return purely and simply to a post of
knowledge encrusted on a name:'23
Upon its insertion into the field of a problematic, the object is rendered as
interesting, as dynamic, as generative of possibilities. If that object will never
purely or simply shake off its origins, neither will it "return purely and simply"
to its past, indistinct existence. Bachelard points toward two kinds of impurity
here; first, an indistinct, unproductive impurity that relies on the ambiguity of
nomination in common language, and the productive, "interesting" impurity
produced by the interposition of a scientific problematic. Note here again
Bachelard's intriguing reference to an "object:' something that exists by definition
outside the subject, as nonetheless something that has yet to be fully "objectified";
such is precisely the work of scientific labor. If, as Bachelard writes, "rationalism
is a philosophy that continues; it is never truly a philosophy that begins:'24 we
might add that rationalism never ends; the object may always incite new kinds
of labor, new kinds of objectification.
An object, furthermore, may exist simultaneously within different
problematics, within different domains of scientific legibility. As Bachelard
writes, "[A]n object can determine several types of objectification, several
perspectives of precision; it can belong to different problematics:'25 Thus, along
with its being a composite of empirical and conceptual components, the scientific
object may provoke different processes of objectification with different results
across multiple domains. Bachelard continues: "In every case, a scientific object
is only the instructor with respect to a preliminary, to-be-rectified construction:'26
Key here is the agency placed by Bachelard on the object itself. Far from being
a passive form lying in wait of a rational mind's comprehension, the object is
figured here as that which provokes scientific labor.
Bachelard's complex insistence on the "burdened" part of objective
knowledge finds an intriguing echo in Lacan's recognition of the continuity of
truth and misrecognition. For Lacan, the Imaginary (with its object, the ego)
and the Symbolic (defined by the movements of the signifier) are replete with
58
relies on an illusory sense of wholeness, the sense that it may encompass all
possible signifying combinations, in order to function as the subject's condition
of possibility. For Bachelard however, it is the object, rather than the subject,
that is split between its potential as a conceptually or theoretically produced
nexus of scientific labor and its burden of being situated within the domain of
the empiricaL The subject is subject to the object, and yet the object too is split,
rendered impure, spread across multiple problematics. When Bachelard writes
that "[iJt is [ ... J very difficult to establish a hierarchy of error and to describe in
an orderly way the disorders of thought;'27 we can infer that any "hierarchy of
error" would have to ultimately presuppose the clean separation of the empirical
and theoretical object, something that Bachelard in the quotes above seems to
refuse. Tellingly, the "epistemological obstacles" that Bachelard, in the same book,
argues must be overcome for the "rational syntheses" of scientific knowledge to
be possible are described in a similar language of impurity: "[IJt is the nature
of epistemological obstacles to be intermixed and polymorphous:'28 Both the
obstacles to be overcome by scientific endeavors, and the theoretical objects that
result, are formatively and materially adulterated. I'll turn now to Bachelard's
The New Scientific Spirit to further refine the "impurity" in question.
Published in 1934, Bachelard's the New Scientific Spirit seeks to interrogate
the implications for philosophy of science of the supersession of Newtonian
mechanics, among other leaps forward in geometry, chemistry, and elsewhere.
Central to the book is the conviction that developments in science pose a
challenge to philosophy that should be met by a nuancing of otherwise oversimple
oppositions such as that between rationalism and realism, between the observer
and the observed. Bachelard writes:
What does it mean to say that science can "rectify" metaphysics? As an example of
what I have in mind, consider how "realism" changes, loses its naIve immediacy,
in its encounter with scientific skepticism. Similarly, "rationalism" need not be a
closed system; a priori assumptions are subject to change [ ... J Science in effect
creates philosophy. Philosophy must therefore modify its language if it is to
reflect the subtlety and movement of contemporary thought.
29
One might certainly take issue with Bachelard's simplification of the tradition of
philosophical rationalism here, a simplification that seems set up to allow science
its role of constitutive clarification. Nonetheless, it seems clear that Bachelard
Bachelard, Lacan, and the Impurity of Formalization 59
is not content with advancing an a priori rationalism ultimately unsuited to
the complexity and impurity of the scientific objects of his time. As he writes
of developments in physics, "even notions whose essence is geometric, such
as position and simultaneity, cannot be grasped in any simple way but only in
composite [ ... J Physics becomes a geometrical science and geometry a physical
science:'3o Underpinning this recognition of the intermixing of previously discrete
practices is a sense, touched on above, of the theoretical and conceptual interchange
between different domains of scientific knowledge; thus, any reduction of the
process of scientific discovery to the constraints of empirical observation, or the
setting up of a symmetry between the theoretical and the empirical, is ill-suited
to understanding the complexities of the post-Newtonian scientific context. Such
an attempt, moreover, would implicitly subscribe to the possibility of there being
a general account of science, rather than a theoretically attuned attention to the
particular regimes of knowledge proper to each individual scientific practice.
Ialike to underline a certain vacillation in Bachelard's thought here, between
his rejection of empiricism and his generally rationalist approach to the
predominance of theory on the one hand, and his complex but suggestive account
of the impurity of the objects of scientific enquiry on the other,31 an impurity
that points toward an ultimate rejection of the very terms of the empirical/
conceptual opposition itself. If nothing else, the consequences of this vacillation
render highly problematic the reduction, made most recently by Paul Thomas
in his critique of Althusser, of Bachelard's epistemology to a thoroughgOing and
easily assimilated rationalism built on a clean opposition between science and
ideology. As Thomas sees it, "Science according to Bachelard [ ... J cannot be
reached or judged by ideological means, and no ideological path is ever about to
lead to science, for the latter cannot be so much as identified by any ideological
mechanism:'32 While it is no doubt true that "absolutely" scientific practice, as
a goal to be worked toward, must be rigorously distingUished for Bachelard
from the "epistemological obstacles" of nonscientific or ideological thinking, the
quotes above suggest, at the least, that the process of separating the two is one of
coming up against the persistent seepage of the object's empirical or ideological
constitution into its scientifically produced conceptual existence.
Between Bachelard and Lacan
In a manner formative of Lacan's later fascination with mathematical
formalization, Bachelard insists on the sovereignty of mathematics as the basis
60
for rational In this sense, should be less
medium for constituted scientific and more as that which is
of the scientific as such. he writes in The Formation
Mind, "Mathematism is not descriptive but formative. The science of reality is no
longer content with the phenomenological how: the mathematical why is what
it seeks:'33 Under the sway of developments in physics, and perhaps especially
quantum mechanics, where the reliability of observation was evermore under
question, Bachelard emphasized the constitutivity of mathematics over and
above its role in expressing or quantifying that which is observed; mathematics,
for Bachelard, is uniquely able to capture the instability and interlacing of the
subject/object distinction, between observer and observed, as we've outlined
it above.
I'd like to draw an initial, tentative parallel here with Lacan's treatment
of the signifier. If, even in the structural linguistics of Saussure, the ultimate
function of the signifier is to couple with a signified, Lacan's innovation
was to insist on the material isolation of the signifier from sense, expressed
most famously in the concept of the "letter:'34 Insofar as the signifier has the
capacity to uncouple from its representative function, to persist and insist
as a senseless mark, it assumes much the same role as Bachelard imparts to
the mathematical, forming, grounding what it is only expected to describe,
providing a material basis for that which it will come to represent. For
Lacan, that is, the signifier constitutes the immovable horizon of all human
activity, assuming a status, and there is, particularly in the
critique of the psychological subject common to Bachelard's reflections on
mathematics and Lacan's reflections on the signifier, a shared concern for
the structural constitutivity of elements previously only considered reflective
of prior experience or observation. If Lacan will most obviously absorb
Bachelard's influence through his attempt to formalize psychoanalytic ideas
through the creation of "mathemes;' I'd like to argue that this broader sense of
structural constitutivity is crucial too in assessing the crosscurrents between
psychoanalysis and French epistemology. Those crosscurrents, moreover,
define "post-rationalism" as explored in this book.
The most obvious shared concern in both Bachelard's philosophy of
science and Lacan's return to Freud, over and above a shared insistence on
the importance of mathematical formalization, is the critique of the subject
as formulated by psychology and philosophical anthropology, a critique that,
tor Bachelard especially, emerges around the question of mathematics in its
Bachelard, Lacan, and the Impurity of Formalization 61
relation to scientific knowledge. In an especially suggestive passage, Bachelard
writes:
It has been repeated endlessly that mathematics is a language, a mere means
of expression. People have grown used to the idea that mathematics is a tool
wielded by a self-conscious mind, mistress of a set of ideas endowed with
premathematical clarity. [ ... J The new science shuns naive images, however, and
has in a sense become more homogenous: It stems entirely from mathematics.
35
Here one of the most important, if underlooked, potential sources for what
would become Lacan's critique of the subject is crystallized; along with taking
from Bachelardian epistemology the importance of the formalization of
concepts, Lacan also thought the subject, and its formalization in psychoanalytic
conceptuality, in a manner entirely without the logic of self-conscious, centered
expression described by Bachelard above. But despite this obvious common
ground, Lacan will also insist on the limits of formalization, expressed pungently
in the twentieth seminar with the claim, "The real can only be inscribed on the
basis of an impasse of formalization:'36 At one and the same time, mathematical
formalization is essential for Lacan in rendering the apriority and nonempirical
status of psychoanalytic concepts. Moreover, formalization itself becomes an
object of psychoanalytic interest in its very failure. What indexes this failure
for Lacan is the status of mathematical formalization as a form of writing, as
interlaced with the logic of the Signifier. As he goes on to claim in seminar 20,
"That is why I thought I could provide a model of it [the real as impasse] using
mathematical formalization, inasmuch as it is the most advanced elaboration we
have by which to produce signifierness:'37
The gap between the thinking of the relation between mathematization,
language, and knowledge as undertaken by Bachelard and Lacan becomes clear
here. For while both explore the nonexpressivity of mathematics, its inherent
complication of any mirror model of representation, they differ in the precise
relationship of that complication to the question oflanguage more generally. For
Lacan, the signifier, as the immovable horizon of the subject of all knowledge,
cannot be reduced to being simply a mystifying tool of intuition, what Bachelard
refers to as that which "localizes a name in a vocabulary rather than a thing
in the universe:'38 Both mathematical formalization and the signifier, rather,
reveal for Lacan the inherent, and indeed constitutive, impasses that de-totalize,
render impure, both the seeming purity of mathematical number and the grip
of the Signifier qua "big Other:' As he continues in his twentieth seminar, "it
62 Post-Rationalism
the
In other words, there is a domain
both the centrality of formalization and its necessary impasse, and that, further,
figures their very coincidence, a paradoxical conjunction I addressed brietly in
the previous chapter; I will return to this problem of writing in Lacan presently.
Bachelard, by contrast, often seems to consider language to be a mere nuisance,
in need of perpetual rectification. In The Formation of the SCientific Mind,
Bachelard refers to the "artifices oflanguage"40 and links this artifice to the mere
sense or intuition of scientific progress that may, in fact, act as a block to genuine
advances. In a striking critique of the pretensions of psychology to scientific
status, Bachelard writes: "Whenever a known phenomenon is designated by a
learned name, lazy thinking gets a real sense of satisfaction. Certain medical
diagnoses and psychological insights that make play with synonyms could easily
provide us with examples of those verbal satisfactions:'41
One may benefit from paying especial attention to Bachelard's own choice of
words. Not only is language figured as a salve to lazy thinking, as the recourse
of thinking predicated on a lack of innovation, in hock to everyday idiocies, but
it is also described in terms of satisfaction, of enjoyment, of "play" -in short,
as something frivolous, laden with enjoyment. The reduction here of language
to science's opposite belies Bachelard's wider urge to destabilize canonical
distinctions in philosophy of science. This tension, between the reductive
reification of the subjective/objective, empiricallrational oppositions, and an
acknowledgment of their constitutive impurity, is nicely exemplified in the
following:
We must constantly strive towards desubjectification if we are to live and relive
the instant of objectification, if we are to remain forever in the nascent state
of objectification. The mind that psychoanalysis has freed from the twofold
slavery of subject and object can savour the heady delight of oscillating between
extraversion and introversion. An objective discovery is at once a subjective
rectification.<2
What might seem initially to be a simple plea for the reduction of the subjective
influence on the search for objective truth is, in fact, much more ambiguous,
and productively so. First, Bachelard seems to abandon his implicit recognition,
as commented on above, of the impurity of the objective, the potential for error
to persist within the field of the objective. Instead, we get a sense of immanent
the 63
the condition of accurate Also in the
quote, however, is an acknowledgment of the worked upon impurity outlined
above; thus, objectification is a "nascent state;' one constantly works toward,
and a state implying a symmetrical rectification in the subjective. And yet,
desubjectification, the total evacuation of the subjective, is posited, in the very
first sentence, as a seeming condition of the "instant" of objectification. At one
and the same time, then, Bachelard seems to wish for the disappearance of the
subject as a condition of the objective, even as the two poles are situated in a
position of mutual interdependence, as co-constituting. We can ask of Bachelard,
therefore, how the objective could persist if "desubjectification" were ever fully
achieved. Might this be a process without end, a perpetual oscillation between
poles that, given the comments above on the impurity of the object of objectivity,
are never finally and absolutely distinguishable?
Bachelard, in sum, provides both a rationalist account of the conceptual
autonomy of science, and the beginnings of what I am calling a post-rationalist
critique of the sustaining binaries of rationalism itsel It is necessary to read
Bachelard against himself, to perform a "symptomatic reading" in Althusser's
sense of Bachelard's writing, in order to extract this critical destabilization of
rationalist approaches to the justification of knowledge. It is precisely this second
stream of thinking that, I'd like to argue, sets the stage for the attempt within the
broader project of French psychoanalytically informed structuralism to provide a
theoretically rigorous account of the signifier and the subject in their disjunctive
(and formative) relation with the "objective" domain of scientific knowledge. Next,
ICllike to focus on how aspects of Lacan's late thinking significantly further, and
yet subvert, the ambiguities of Bache lard's epistemology as underlined above.
Lacan and the impurity of the signifier
If Bachelard's partial recognition of the persistence, even constitutivity, of
subjective error within the "objective" is let down by his reductive accounts of
language and the subject, Lacan would transpose the sense of a noncontradictory
and constitutive impurity into every facet of his metapsychology. Through
a reading of key passages in his unpublished twenty-fourth seminar, I hope
to demonstrate here how the complexity of Lacan's account of the priority of
the signifier further undermines the distinction between the subjective and
64 Post-RatlOnalisrn
Lacan the inevitability of the interpenetration of the vicissitudes of
the signifier in the domain of the objective, an interpenetration that is not, in
itself, a threat to the "scientific" as such. What links Lacan's reflections on the
coincidence of the "impasse" of the signifier and the centrality of formalization
to Bachelard, and what makes a comparison of their approaches so suggestive,
is their shared concern for the mathematical as the site of formalization. And to
reiterate, the destabilization in both thinkers of the gap between the subjective
and objective is not undertaken in the name of skeptical relativism; to the
contrary, it is by recognizing the adulterated character of the objects of science
and those of psychoanalysis that their truth may be ascertained. Before drawing
out the full implications of the comparison with Bachelard, it is necessary to
take a detour through Lacan's rethinking of the signifier through the concept
of the symptom.
Lacan's twenty-fourth seminar, one of his last and one of his most innovative,
builds upon the insights of the previous few years, where the psychoanalytic
concept of the "symptom" as a knot of occluded meaning to be interpreted was
replaced by the "sinthome;' as a material signifier lending consistency to the
subject from a point of eccentric interiority. Early comments from the 19508 on
the symptom significandy prefigure the concept of the "sinthome;' emphasizing
as they do the particular problem that the symptom poses for the production
of sense. In 1957, Lacan wrote: "The fact that symptoms are symbolic is not the
whole story [ ... J their use as signifiers distinguishes them from their natural
meaning:'
43
1heir "natural meaning" refers to what, elsewhere,44 I have called the
signifier's being "in-relation;' its being in a situation of negative codetermination.
With the symptom, by contrast, there is a certain disconnection of the signifier
from its determining others, leaving it in isolation, and thus somewhat askance
from the "natural meaning" that it is so often assumed it is the signifier's role
to facilitate. To recognize Lacan's insistence on the materiality of the isolated
signifier is also, crucially, to recognize his transcendence of the influence of
Saussure, whose account of the generation oflinguistic meaning relies on the idea
of the signifier as only ever existing through its relations. As Lacan comments
in the twenty-fourth seminar, "what's annoying is that all we ever do is involve
linguistics. I passed that way, but I didn't stop there:'45
In the second half of the seminar, given the title "Towards a New Signifier" by
its editor Jacques-Alain Miller, this materiality of the signifier, its disconnection
Bachelard, Lacan, and the Impurity of Formalization 65
from the relationality of sense, is in turn interrogated as the specific "object" of a
psychoanalytic theory of writing. There, Lacan comments:
A new signifier that wouldn't have any kind of meaning, that would perhaps be
what would open us up to what, in my clumsiness, I call the real. Why couldn't
we try to formulate a signifier that, contrary to the usage that we currently make
of it, would have an effect?46
It's crucial to note here the immanence of the signifier, especially in its
dimension of meaninglessness, to the Real, as what Lacan elsewhere designates
as the conjunction of contingency and impossibility. Against any tendency to
cleanly separate the Real from the Symbolic, here the Real exists within the
Symbolic as the signifier in its isolated, nonsensical state. Whereas for Bachelard
the subjective persists within the objective as that aspect of the object "burdened"
with the empirical, the domain of contingency and non-sense not only persists
within the "objective" domain of structure for Lacan but, rather, exists in a state
of definitional dependence upon it. We can furnish this point by underlining
the continuity between this aspect of the signifier and mathematics for Lacan;
whereas Bachelard will posit mathematics as a formative conceptual domain
distinct from the impurity of the subjective and the experiential, for Lacan
the signifier as it figures in writing and the mathematical are fundamentally
intercalated. As he writes,
One tries to reach language by writing. And writing doesn't give us anything
but mathematics, where it's a matter of working by formal logic, that is, by the
extraction of a certain number of things that we define as fundamental axioms.
Thus we extract letters.
47
When read together with his attempt to articulate the "impasse" of formalization
with a new conception of writing as distinct from speech, this quote emblematizes
the singularity of Lacan's thinking on the linkage of formalization and language.
Lacan, it seems to me, offers here a more expansive, ifless systematic, treatment
of the constitutive impurity of the objective/subjective distinction, bridged by
a focus on the signifier or "letter:' than is present in latent form in Bachelard's
reflections on the impurity of the production of objective knowledge. When
Lacan writes of "the extraction of a certain number of things that we define
as fundamental axioms:' he struggles to raise psychoanalytic conceptuality
to the level of the axiom in mathematics, whereby any act of interpretation is
grounded in a priori constructs that are particular to psychoanalysis as a domain
of knowledge. At the same time, Lacan associates this axiomatic character of
Post-Rationalism
are
years earlier
material and as it exists outside
sense, and it is this dimension oflanguage, its material that forms the
link between the matheme and language, while gesturing toward the generation
of a "new" signifier coextensive with a new take on the stakes of scientific
formalization.
Instead of subscribing to the either/or of formalization as the key to any
successful grounding of psychoanalytic claims, or the alternative move away
from the sciences in favor of a hermeneutic or purely textual interpretivism,
Lacan locates within the process of formalization itself its own immanent, and
constitutive, failure, indexed to the signifier as its formative, and deformative,
ground. In the twenty-fourth seminar, Lacan will evoke formalization through the
concept of "metalanguage:' or a language that might step outside the vicissitudes
of the signifier; Bachelard's dream, we might say. Lacan writes: "There is an
embryo of metalanguage, but it always goes off the skids for the simple reason that
all I know about language comes from a series of actual [incarneesllanguages:'49
Any attempt to surpass language in favor of a pure conceptuality, that is to say,
must contend with the elements that would make up that conceptuality, namely
signifiers composing "actual languages:' the movements of which resist any
transcendental purity.
Here, it is useful to briefly compare the argument made by Jacques-Alain
Miller, in his "Suture" discussed in the previous chapter, with Lacan's given
in seminar 24. In "Suture;' Miller foregrounds the destabilizing yet formative
insistence of the nonidentical subject, whereas here Lacan alights upon the non-
or a-subjective insistence on the signifier in the Real as the point of impossibility
in processes of formalization. Briefly to recap, Miller's "Suture" argues, through
a reading of Frege, that the succession of self-identical numbers must rely on
zero as its nonidentical foundation. For the very self-identity of numbers to be
meaningful, that is to say, they must refer back to a nonidentical element that
acts to negatively determine them. Extrapolating from this specific example,
Miller writes:
In effect, what in Lacanian algebra is called the relation of the subject to the field
of the Other (as the locus of truth) can be identified with the relation which
the zero entertains with the identity of the unique as the support of truth. This
relation, in so far as it is matrical, cannot be integrated into any definition of
objectivity-this being the doctrine of Lac an. The engendering of the zero, from
world
this to
Miller draws a formal relation the function of zero as the
nonidentical ground for the self-identical or "unique" succession of numbers,
and the function of the subject in Lacan, conceived of here as providing the
nonidentical ground for the "Other (as the locus of truth):' or the domain of
the signifier. While it is certainly true that, especially in the eleventh seminar,
Lacan discusses the subject in the terms of an occluded "cause" of the Symbolic,
punctuating the battery of signifiers while forever "fading" before the signifiers
that will come to represent it,51 Lacan's remarks in the twenty-fourth seminar
seem to suggest a displacement of this "eccentric element" onto the signifier
itself, when taken in its self-identical, abstracted, isolated guise as "letter:'
A little further on from his comments on the possibility of a new signifier
apart from meaning, Lacan's remarks bear on this seeming replacement of the
nonidentical subject as constitutive cause and threat to formalization with the
signifier as it is abstracted from meaningful relation. Lacan, elliptically, writes:
There's only one case in which I risk working in the direction of metalanguage.
1be metalanguage in question consists of translating Unbewusst by une-bevue.
It's absolutely not the same meaning. But it's a fact that as soon as he sleeps,
man blunders [une-bevuel with all his might [ ... J What Freud said, and what I
mean, is this-there isn't, in any case, a waking up. Science can only be invoked
indirectly in this case. It's a waking up, but a difficult and a suspect one. One is
only sure that he is woken up if what is presented and represented doesn't have
any meaning at all.
52
Leaving aside the elaborate wordplay that had become a mainstay of Lacan's
seminar by this point, what is initially striking in this passage is the reference to
science as a "waking up;' even if a difficult and "suspect" one. At least superficially,
Lacan is close to Bachelard here, whose emphasis on the production of scientific
knowledge as a process of unburdening the object of knowledge from its
encrusted mystifications bears a similar sense, perversely Heideggerian despite
the opposite intentions, of a waking up into truthfulness. But Lacan frames
his own account of a scientific waking up with a reference to metalanguage,
something he had previously deemed impossible. If science, we infer, can be
considered a metalanguage, then it is only half possible, or "indirect;' and subject
ultimately to the fact that, as Lacan suggests was already stated in Freud, "there
isn't [ ... J a waking up;' or there isn't any final dean break from the "blunders"
68
the unconscious. to read Lacan not
ambitions achieve the
of of Lacan's comments resides
in the idea that, if science is to approach a position of such self-transcendence, it
may only do so "if what is presented and represented doesn't have any meaning
at all;' if, in other words, it recognizes simultaneously its total reliance on the
signifier-that which presents, and represents-and the possibility, internal to
signification, of signifiers, those axiomatic "letters" referred to above, that don't
have a relation to meaning as it is normally conceived.
To reiterate, Lacan's comments here retrieve an aspect oflanguage for formal
conceptuality in the face of Bachelard's earlier dismissal oflanguage, a retrieval
crucial to the "objectivity" that Miller above argues must rest on the nonidentical
subject. Here, however, it is less the nonidentical subject that might ground this
conceptuality, and more the self-enclosed "letter;' an element that is, by definition,
a-subjective, even as it forms the material ground upon which the subject of
the unconscious may cohere. One year prior to the twenty-fourth seminar and
as mentioned brief1y above, Lacan had developed his striking concept of the
"sinthome;' as the symptom abstracted from any regime of meaning or analytic
interpretation, persisting as a knot of senseless jouissance at the eccentric
center of the subject. But instead of reverting to a Freudian energetics, and thus
conceiving of this binding agency of lin the subject in terms of energy or libido,
Lacan insists on the role of the signifier as it exists in isolation, detached from
the psychic architecture of meaning, in providing the vehicle for this subjective
consistency. In other words, an element, the signifier, normally associated, as
in Bachelard above, with the confusions of meaningful, empirically directed
discourse, becomes the very abstract (even objectal) condition for the persistence
of the subject itself. As Lacan puts it in his twenty-third seminar, this consistency
can only be understood as "an ex-sistence [ ... J which for its part belongs to the
Real which is its fundamental character:'53
The concept of the Real, at this stage in Lacan's teaching, had become
associated with the particular kind of formalization proper to psychoanalytic
conceptuality, a formalization that recognizes the coincidence of Symbolic
consistency and its immanent tendency toward dissolution. Lacan's concept of
the sinthome places this coincidence of formation and deformation, of creation
and potential destruction, at the center of the subject. A subject's "sinthome;'
that is to say, coheres as a result of the isolated signifier's self-consistency, its
abstraction from relation, but that very isolation is also a condition of great
precarity; in analytic practice, by consequence, displacing a subject's "sinthome;'
Lacan, the
that
For our purposes, Lacan's of this
significantly complicates Bachelard's relegation oflanguage, while fundamentally
reintroducing the subject as a condition and consequence of formalization,
in precisely the way that Bachelard, in his emphasis on the desubjectification
proper to scientific conceptuality, rejects. In a theoretical move redolent of
the topological complexity that defined his seminar at the time, Lacan loops
the "formal" elements of psychoanalytic conceptuality, the axiomatic letters so
closely related to the matheme, back into the concept of the subject, such that
the very clean separation of the subject from the formal movement of conceptual
elements is problematized. Miller's attempt to ground logical consistency on the
nonidentity of the subject, while suggestive, can be supplemented by reference
to this late attempt by Lacan to theorize a formally senseless signifier; in so
doing, Lacan recognized the self-identical, "formal" elements present in the very
subject itself, thus significantly complicating Miller's dualistic attempt to think
the reliance of self-identity on the nonidentical, and extending the productive
ambiguities in Bachelard's theorization of the impurities of the scientific object.
Literary formalization-on Macherey
In this section, I'd like to ask whether the impasse that divides Lacan and
Bachelard above, an impasse that marks the distance between the direct and
nonmediated discourse of formalization and the problem of impurity incarnated
in the signifier, might be resituated within the terms of the "literary:' Specifically,
I'd like to turn to the work of Pierre Macherey, a student of Althusser's whose texts
are nonetheless missing from the pages of the Cahiers. Much has been written of
Macherey's attempts to forge an Althusserian literary theory during and after his
famous collaboration with Althusser's Reading Capital,54 but my focus here will
be specific to the problems oflanguage, scientificity, and formalization identified
above. I hope to show that Macherey, working in parallel to the Cahiers project,
posed a number of the same questions in a manner that nonetheless sought to
foreground the relative autonomy of the literary as a domain where the complex
relations of science and ideology, of subject and signification could be posed.
Machereys reflections will be shown, in turn, to interface usefully with Lacan's
concerns for a "new signifier" insofar as, for both thinkers, the aspect oflanguage
most closely attuned to structural analysis, whether psychoanalytic or Marxist,
70
can the most detached
the end seminal he
engages with a seminar given by the young Alain Badiou and transcribed in
the journal Cahiers marxiste-leniniste, the periodical that the young editors of
the Cahiers pour l'Ana/yse were involved with prior to the founding of their
new journal. On Macherey's reading, Badiou's seminar addresses the "relations
between ideological utterances and properly fictional utterances:'55 Fictional
utterances are those that seem organically attached to the wider narrative of
the literary work in question, whereas ideological utterances seem transplanted
without alteration from the broader ideological context within which the novel
was conceived: "[ Cjertain utterances are directly linked to the functioning of the
fictional system; other utterances are 'detachable' -they seem to have been taken
as they are from ideology and inserted into the texture of the nover'56
Crucially, for both Badiou and Macherey, there is no final or absolute means
by which fictional and ideological utterances as defined above can be identified
with certainty; even if the texture of a literary work is defined to a large extent
by the interaction between the two types of utterance, the very structural
"nature" of texts, their plastic interruption of borders between "inside" and
"outside;' prevents the absolute sifting of ideological from fictional parts. Here,
the particular argument of Badiou and Macherey as to the modes of utterance
at work within texts jOins the most compelling aspect of Macherey's broader
account of the literary as a domain at least relatively autonomous from other
cultural and political spaces. 1he text, for Macherey after Althusser, should be
understood less as an easily delimitable object, and more as an overdetermined and
multifaceted space, one striated by multiple and conflicting lines of determination.
As Macherey writes, "The literary text does not constitute a homogenous whole:
it does not inhabit a single place prepared in advance to receive if's7 Just as
for Althusser, and as explored in the previous chapter, social totalities should
not be understood as defined by a single expressive cause, so also for Macherey,
literary texts must be understood as complex structured wholes, immanently
transformed by the intersecting and contradictory sources that compose them.
The "important thing;' Macherey writes, "is not a confused perception of the
unity of the work, but a recognition of its transformations (its contradictions, as
long as contradiction is not reduced to merely a new type of unity):'58
Further to this, the differing modes of utterance are not the sole province of
an author's imagination, but are rather subject to the "real inscription" of the
materials that compose literary objects "in a history of forms"; such a history,
Bachelard, Lacan, and the Impurity of Formalization 71
multiple as it is, "means that they [the elements composing a text] cannot be
defined exclusively by their immediate function in a specific work:'59 The forms
that go into the production of a literary work and the term "production;' is
essential for Macherey in capturing the properly dynamic semi-autonomy of
literature with respect to the other levels of a social totality, weave their multiple
trajectories in such a fashion that the extraction of that which is specifically
ideological, and that which "properly" belongs to the fictional world of the
work, is impossible. Such an impossibility is the result of the very texture of
the literary object itself; instead of being a self-enclosed, pure form, the result
either of the totality of its contexts (formed according to a unilinear model of
historical causality) or the sovereign agency of a writer, the text is a multilayered
assemblage, the boundaries of which are in constant flux, but the specific
resultant form of which transforms ideological raw matter into the ambivalent,
polyvalent stuff of the literary.
As Macherey writes, "[T]hese [ ... ] utterances are not detached utterances:
they are in the work not of real utterances, but as fictional objects; in the work
they are a term of designation, of a demonstration [ ... ] the mode of their presence
is that of a presentation which hollows them:'60 Upon being caught up in the
texture of the literary, that is to say, ideological elements are altered, such that
their constitution is no longer straightforwardly ideological, straightforwardly a
product of their context. Or, their being caught up in a fictional logic reveals that
such utterances were always conflicted, always torn between being in service
of the dominant state of things and pointing beyond such a state. As Macherey
phrases it, "[T]hey are not in the text as intruders, but as effects: they have meaning
only by that metamorphosis which makes of them elements among others in the
process of fictional production:'61 The effectivity of the literary object consists in
its ability to transform, through a process of ongoing production, its constituent
elements such that they reflect the contradictory impulses that gave birth to
them, and that lie at the basis of all discourse.
At this stage, we can compare Macherey's suggestive description of fictional
utterances with the complex dialectic between the real, ideological, and
scientific objects discussed above. For Bachelard, recall, "objective" objects
subject to scientific labor are, at least in places in his work, posited as always
already "impure;' as split by dueling empirical and conceptual determinations.
For Macherey, the utterances that make up a literary object are similarly impure,
and in their very impurity, their being caught between their real existence, their
ideological function, and their fictional state, they come to reflect the truth of
the literary itself, as a domain with permeable and uncertain borders, partially
72 Post-Rationalism
outside
correct when he writes
the "distances from the instead of a mere
mirror of dominant ideological currents, the literary object stages the conflicts
and confluences that ideology is made up of. It is in this sense literature's formal
nature, its internal distance from its own content, that allows for its relative
autonomy. For Bachelard too, and perhaps for post-rationalism as a whole, the
very formal nature of conceptuality, far from being an index of the ahistorical,
nonsituational character of different types of discourse, in fact makes all the
more dear the thoroughly immanent immersion of apparently distinct systems
of knowledge, whether literary or scientific, within their enabling contexts; but
that very immersion is also the site of an internal self-distancing that, under
such conditions, renders conceptualization or formalization possible.
While "structuralism" has often been criticized for being unable to account
for history, Althusser and others underlined at the time that it was the very
distinction between synchrony and diachrony, and the continualist model of
time that underpinned it, that was at issue, not history or temporality per se.
Macherey's account of literature as a process of production that splits its objects
from within, and Bachelard's account of the formative interpenetration of
the empirical and the scientific, mirror this tendency within what I'm calling
post-rationalism to upend binary ways of conceiving text and context, history
and progress, form and content. Warren Montag is characteristically apposite on
this point: "Once the text is no longer either a system or closed, its opposition to
history disappears. It is no longer external to history, or history to it; the work
is itself fully real and historical, no longer a mere representation or reflection
of that which is outside it:'63 The problem with "historicism:' precisely, is its
assumption of a dean and symmetrical separation between the object that is to
be considered "historicaI;' and history itself. Equally, Macherey and Bachelard's
efforts to rehder "impure" the objects of literature and science points to a
disturbance of the distinction between form and content; as Montag writes,
"[IJf there is anything 'Hegelian' about the positions proper to A Theory of
Literary Production [ ... J, it is not Macherey's supposed privileging of 'art: but
rather his refusal of the distinction between form and content, and, perforce,
his rejection of any notion that the former could be 'imposed' upon the latter
indifferently, from the space of an indeterminate outside:'64
Montag's observation leads us to another, central point of congruence between
Bachelard and Macherey's thought, namely the parity to be found between the
"raw" materials to be rendered literary and the process of literalization itself, or
Lacan, and the 73
a
crucial in
eIIlplnClsnl distinction
so often used to teach the history of philosophy, and it forms one of the reasons for
my attaching "post-" to rationalism in the title of this book. Instead of subsisting
entirely within the realm of pure ideas or concepts, as empiricism's straw man of
rationalism would have it, post-rationalism, in both its strongly epistemological
and its post-Lacanian variants, traces within the empirical itself sites of redoubling
or self-distancing, sites that render the (impure) conceptualization of the empirical
possible; the empirical is, on this model, always already proto-conceptual. In the
very recognition of this impurity, moreover, the distinction between the empirical
and the rational becomes unstable if not unusable.
In his subtle discussion of Bachelard in his essay "White MytllOlogy:' Jacques
Derrida frames the latter impurity of the distinction between the "raw materials"
of conceptualization and conceptuality itself in terms of the relationship,
already discussed in this chapter, between the intuitions of "ordinary" language
(specifically the function of metaphor) and the apparent precision of conceptual
scientific terminology. While, as we've seen, Bachelard could seek to downgrade
language and its accompanying metaphorical strategies, he could also recognize
that metaphor "can work for the critical rectification of a concept, reveal a
concept as a bad metaphor, or finally 'illustrate' a new concept:'65 even if science
must ultimately "denounce 'immediate metaphors'" in favor of those that are
nonimmediate, constructed in the service of critical elucidation. The point is
that, for Bachelard as much as Macherey, there is, even in the cloudy domains of
ideology (Macherey) or metaphor (Bachelard), an already existent potential for
the conceptual or for processes of literary transformation.
In her discussion of Alexandre Koyre's epistemology, itself foundational for
post-rationalist thinking on science and knowledge, Ann Banfield comments:
For there to be science-i.e, Galilean science-in Koyre's account, theory must
bring about the formalization or mathematization of the empirical. That is, science
is defined by the conjunction of two factors: the empirical and the mathematical,
Le. a mathematical writing [. , .J Koyre's claim [ ... J also involves the assumption
a prior condition permitting this mathematicization: the empirical is discovered
to be "mathematizable" -representable in a formal writing-where the adjective
"mathematizable" designates a quality inherent in the empirical.
66
The same is true for Bachelard, for whom, as weve seen, "objective knowledge'
has the potential to be "unburdened" by scientific labor, and for whom the
Post -Rationalism
the scientific for obfuscates their
intrication, an intrication that literary, rather like domain
science for Bachelard, stages and reforms in a process of ongoing (re)production.
This intermixing, further, is not simply the result of the meeting of empirical
and conceptual objects; rather, the "empirical" itself contains within it, in proto
form, the potential for the logic that will come to transform it. And as Montag's
comments above indicate, Macherey is similarly concerned for the ways in which
the "nonliterary:' the "content" to literature's "form;' already contains within it the
contradictions and confluences that their being rendered literary will fully expose.
As such, the very holding apart of form and content becomes problematic; the
literary does not supervene upon language from some indeterminate "outside;'
but rather distances and contorts language from within. Much the same might be
said of the scientific, for Bachelard, in its relation to the empiricaL
Despite all this, Macherey's account introduces distinctions that aren't
necessarily apparent in Bachelard, distinctions that are, I think, a product of the
former's admirably tight focus on the ambiguities and potentialities oflanguage
itself. We note, for instance, Macherey's concern to distinguish the ideological,
the real, and the fictive, if only to subsequently emphasize their complex
intercalation. In that spirit, Macherey's account draws dose to Lacan's focus on
the effectivity of signifiers in altering that which they may seem only to represent,
a focus that found its apogee in the twenty-fourth seminar discussed above.
Macherey writes that discourse "implies the temporary absence of the object of
discourse; the object has been put to one side, banished into silence. Speech is
par excellence an act which modifies the reality of that to which it is applied:'67
And yet, such "banishment" does not result in discourse becoming sealed from
those other domains, such as the ideological, that materially constitute the
lifeworld of subjects. Rather, we "find, at the edge of the text, the language of
ideology, momentarily hidden, but eloquent by its very absence:'68 Texts are not
purities encased in aspic outside the confusions and distortions of ideological
thinking; rather, they are defined by their very (ideological) contradictions. The
question that Macherey's reflections pose is precisely the question raised above
in relation to Lacan, namely: what aspect of signification, of language, is most
amenable to the tracing of the impurity of the ideology! science relation, or that
between language and the literary?
Macherey's answer departs from Lacan's singular, formalist focus on the
signifier, a focus that underlines, as we've seen, the isolated signifier's abstraction
Bachelard, Lacan, and the Impurity of Formalization 75
from meaning. Rather, for Macherey, it is literary language itself that, in a manner
similar to its relationship to ideology sketched above, distances language from
within. This internal reconfiguring of the properties oflanguage makes the literary
especially illuminating as a reflection of the inherent impurities of discourse as
such. Where Bachelard's ideal of science, above, moves progressively from the
impure to the pure, even if it finally fails to leave the impure behind, the literary
foregrounds impurity in such a way that it, in Macherey's words, "establishes a new
relationship between the word and its meaning, language and its object:'69 If the
rationalist ideal of science is one of absolute self-sufficiency, an ideal articulated
most pungently by Alain Badiou's texts in the Cahiers as we'll see in the next
chapter, the literary digs out the impurity, the contradictory polyvalence, that is
constitutive oflanguage itself, that is always already part oflanguage from the very
start. Just as Lacan insists on the constitutivity of misrecognition in his account
of identification, so also Macherey insists on the formative power of illusion in
literary language: "[TJhis illusion is constitutive: it is not added to language from
the outside, conferring a novel usage on it; it changes language profoundly, making
it into something different:'7o Again, note here the refusal of any externalization
of two terms or domains, one waiting passively for transformation, the other
enacting such a change. In the same way as Koyre finds within the empirical
itself the conditions for its formalization, so Macherey locates within language
tout court the conditions for its literary transformation. The literary, instead of
supervening from an absolute "outside;' rather finds within the very structure of
language itself the conditions for its becoming-literary.
Thus, there can be no innocent or pure language prior to its transformation
into a literary object. Macherey offers the suggestive example of the character of
Napoleon in Tolstoy's War and Peace:
[Tlhe Napoleon in Tolstoy's War and Peace is not open to refutation from
historians. If we are reading properly we know that the name is not quite being
used to deSignate a real person. It derives its meaning only from its relationship
to the rest of the text of which it is a part. The writer is able to create both an
object and the standards by which it is judged.
71
Macherey's aim here, to be clear, is not to deny the existence of a reality beyond
the text's bounds; what's at stake in Macherey's account of the literary is not a
hyper-textualization of the world, as was so often wrongly alleged of Derrida by
the enemies of deconstruction during the "culture wars" of the 1980s and the
1990s. Rather, Macherey's interest lies in the ambivalence, the founding impurity,
oflanguage and its objects. In the example above, the Napoleon in War and Peace
76 Post-Rationalism
is neither a pure and absolute fiction, nor a faithful reproduction of an externally
existent person. Instead, the literary character falls between the absolutely "real"
and the absolutely "fictional"; its enclosure within a text, within the multiple
lines of force and contradiction that are the material of textuality, force it into
the logic of ambivalence, of in-betweenness, that texts operate with and within.
The point is not that Napoleon, by virtue of the historical overdetermination of
the proper name, instantiates a special kind of linguistic ambivalence. Rather,
as Macherey puts it, the becoming-literary of an object points to "a remarkable
freedom and power of improvisation which has wrongly been considered to be
the monopoly of poetry but which actually defines all types of writing:'n Such
a power has at least something in common with the precisely material power
of the signifier stripped of its sense-relations that Lacan remarks upon above,
that "new signifier" that in its inert materiality seems to point toward the Real.
For Macherey, however, the singular power of the literary is less its exposure
of the formally nonsensical quality of language, but rather the superabundance
of contradictory meanings that the literary is especially predisposed to reflect.
Such impure crisscrossings of meaning are the truth oflanguage itself in its very
generality, not the preserve of aesthetic forms.
My point here is certainly not to deny the significant differences between the
domain of the scientific as conceived by Bachelard, and the domain of the literary
as understood by Macherey. But there are, nonetheless, clear convergences around
the notion of a founding impurity in the objects of discourses, an impurity that
distinguishes post-rationalism, in all its variants, from any mere replication or
updating of the pure consciousness of the reasoned cogito. No doubt there are
other, important lines of filiation that one should underline; in the recognition,
in both Bachelard and Macherey, of the always already tainted "nature" of the
empirical, of that which is to be rendered scientific or literary, one is reminded of
Derrida's rhetorical question from his The Post-Card: "What happens when acts
or performances (discourses or writing, analysis or description, etc.) are part of
the objects they designate? When they can be given as examples of precisely that
of which they speak or write?"73 Bachelard's contention, in his Le Rationalisme
applique, that rationalism, as he understands and practices it, is a philosophy
that "continues" but never "begins"74 hinges on the same intermixing of the
object to be rationalized (or discursively captured, in Derrida's example) and
that very rationalization, that becoming-science, itself. Such a process can never
be said to begin because the impurity or intermixing of the object of a discourse
and its "subsequent" representation is foundational, goes all the way down.
Toward the end of the chapter that follows, I'll trace more closely how Derrida's
Bachelard, and
echoes with a the I
Notes
J-A. Miller, "Action de la structure;' in Cahiers pour l'Analyse 9, Paris, 1968, 103;
translation taken from B. Bosteels, Badiou and Politics (Durham; Duke University
Press, 201l): 67.
2 For an excellent intellectual biography of Bachelard that accounts for both his
epistemological and literary concerns, see C. Chimisso, Gaston Bachelard: Critic of
Science and the Imagination (New York: Routledge, 2001).
3 L. Althusser, Elements of Self-Criticism, trans. Grahame Lock (London: New Left
Books, 1974); 101-62.
4 G. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994) [1958]; G. Bachelard,
On Poetic Imagination and Reverie (New York: Spring Publications, 1994).
5 M. Tiles, Bachelard: Science and Objectivity (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994): 36.
6 Ibid., 37.
7 G. Bachelard, Le Rationalisme applique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1975): 8; translation taken from M. Tiles, "What Does Bachelard Mean By
Rationalisme applique;' in Radical Philosophy 173(May/June), 2012, 25.
8 Tiles, Bachelard, 37.
9 Ibid., 39.
10 Margaret A. Majumdar puts this well, when she ""'Tites: "This was not a
contemplative rationalism which stood back from its object, but an active dialectical
rationalism which applied theory and experiment to the current state of objective
knowledge to produce an object which was ever more precise:' See Margaret A.
Majumdar, Althusser and the End of Leninism? (London: Pluto Press, 1995): 40.
11 G. Bachelard, "Correlationism and the Problematic:' trans. Mary Tiles in Radical
Philosophy 173(May!June), 2012, 30.
12 K. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge
(New York: Routledge, 2003) [1963].
13 G. Bachelard, The Formation of the Scientific Mind: A Contribution to a
Psychoanalysis of Objective Knowledge, trans. Mary McAIlester Jones (Manchester:
Clinamen, 2002) [1938]: 210.
14 Tiles, Bachelard, 53.
J 5 G. Bachelard quoted in D. Lecourt, Marxism and Epistemology: Bachelard,
Canguilhem and Foucault, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1975): 52.
16 Lecourt, Marxism and Epistemology.
78
17
and the Politics
where I was first alerted to this important quote. H. Sharp,
and the Politics of Renaturaiization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2011): 77.
19 Starr, Logics of Failed Revolt, 82.
20 Bachelard, Le Rationalisme applique, 8; translation taken from Tiles, "What Does
Bachelard Mean By Rationalisme applique;' 25.
21 It would be interesting to compare how Bachelard's epistemological reflections on
impurity and their appropriation in Althusser's Marxism relate to or contradict
the highly controversial British strain of Althusserian epistemology, developed in
particular by Paul Hirst and Barry Hindess in the 1970s. Against the dismissal of
Perry Anderson and others, it may be possible to detect a Similarly subtle concern
for how scientific objects lie between determinate fields such as the "empirical" or
the "conceptual:' Hirst gestures toward such a position as follows; "Many people
[ ... ] argue that we consider that all the world consists of discourse and that we are
unwilling to consider something called the 'extra-discursive'. Now this is absurd.
The point very simply is that the objects of theory are in a sense constructed within
theory, that the objects involved are diverse [ ... J This is not to argue that there
are not things which are outside or discourse [ ... ] but rather that those things
do not have the form of a Single 'reality' to which all theories can be measured or
correspond:' What might seem initially to be a simple critique of empiricism in
fact gestures toward something like the recognition of constitutive impurity that
I'm reading off portions of Bachelard's text; the objects of theory, that is to say, are
defined, rendered positive, by their very indeterminate position within the domains
within which they travel. P. Hirst, "Interview with Local Consumption" Marxism
and Historical Writing (London: Routledge, 1985); 137.
22 Bachelard, Le Rationalisme applique, 29.
23 Ibid., 30.
24 Ibid., 29.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid.
27 Bachelard, The Formation of the Scientific Mind, 31.
28 Ibid.
29 G. Bachelard, The New SCientific Spirit, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1984); 3.
30 Ibid., 47.
31 It is Bachelard's recognition of the impurity of the scientific object, of the
interpenetration of the empirical and conceptual facets of the object, that explains
Bachelard, Lacan, and the Impurity of Formalization
his comment that "rationalism is a philosophy which continues; it is never truly a
philosophy that begins:' See G. Bachelard, "Correlationism and the Problematic:'
trans. Mary Tiles in Radical Philosophy 173, 29; taken from the third chapter of
Bachelard, Le Rationalisme applique, 50-60. To the extent that there can never
be a pure "empirical" object, nor a pure "conceptual" object, the process of
their interrelation and differentiation has always already begun, and rationalist
philosophy perpetually "continues" without positing an origin.
32 P. Thomas, Marxism and SCientific Socialism: From Engels to Althusser (New York:
Routledge, 2008): 117.
33 Bachelard, The Formation of the SCientific Mind, 17.
79
34 J. Lacan, "The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud;' in
Ecrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: WW Norton, 2006): 412-45.
35 Bachelard, The New Scientific Spirit, 55.
36 J. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XX: Encore, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller,
trans. Russell Grigg (New York: WW Norton, 1998): 93.
37 Ibid.
38 Bachelard, "Correlationism and the Problematic," 29.
39 Lacan, Encore, 93.
40 Bachelard, The Formation of the Scientific Mind, 104.
41 Ibid.
42 Ibid., 246.
43 Lacan, "Psychoanalysis and Its Teaching:' in Ecrits. trans. Bruce Fink (New York:
WW Norton, 2006): 364.
44 See the argument in the preceding chapter.
45 J. Lacan, lesson of May 17, 1977, in seminar 24: J:insu que sait de /'une-bevue, silile a
mourre, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, unofficial translation by Dan Collins, 61.
46 Lacan, seminar 24, lesson of May 17,1977.
47 Ibid.
48 "[I]t is first of all the materiality of the signifier that I have emphasized, that
materiality is singular in many ways, the first of which is not to allow of partition. Cut
a letter into small pieces, and it remains the letter it is:' See J. Lacan, "Seminar on 'The
Purloined Letter:" in Ecrits. trans. Bruce Fink (New York: WW Norton, 2006): 16.
49 Lacan, seminar 24, lesson of May 17,1977.
50 J -A. Miller, "Suture: Elements of the Logic of the Signifier:' in The Symptom: Online
Journalfor Lacan.Com, Winter 2007 [1966].
51 J. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York:
WW Norton, 1998): 53-67.
52 Lacan, seminar 24, lesson of May 17, 1977.
53 J. Lacan, seminar 23, lesson of December 9,1975: Joyce and the Sin thome, unofficial
translation by Cormac Gallagher.
80
333.
56 Ibid., 332.
57 Ibid., 333.
58 Ibid., 48.
59 Ibid., 47.
60 Ibid.
61 Ibid.
Post-Rationalism
62 T. Eagleton, "Preface;' in P. Macherey (ed.), A Theory of Literary Production
(London: Routledge, 2006): ix.
63 W. Montag, "Introduction;' in P. Macherey (ed.), In a Materialist Way: Selected
Essays (London: Verso, 2008): 10.
64 Ibid.
65 ]. Derrida, "White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy:' in Margins of
Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982): 259; quoted
in C. Norris, Against Relativism: Philosophy of Science, Deconstruction and Critical
Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997): 14.
66 A. Banfield, "Introduction: What Do Linguists Want;' in J.-c. Milner (ed.), For the
Love of Language, trans. Ann Banfield (London: Macmillan, 1990): 13-14. There is
a discussion of this quote from Banfield in my Lacan and the Concept of the "Real"
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012): 69.
67 Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, 67.
68 Ibid., 68.
69 Ibid., 50.
70 Ibid., 49-50.
71 Ibid.,50-l.
72 Ibid., 51.
73 J. Derrida, The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987): 391.
74 See note 15 above.
3
Science, "Suture;' and the Signifier
In recent decades, Alain Badiou has recast the fundamental questions of
psychoanalytically inflected structuralism within the terms of set theory and
other mathematical traditions. In doing so, Badiou's philosophy has marked a
strong shift away from the nominally epistemological questions around structure
and science that characterized the temporary collaboration staged in the 1960s
between followers of Jacques Lacan's "return to Freud;' and the Marxism of
Louis Althusser, expressed most innovatively, as we've seen, in the Cahiers pour
liinalyse. In his recent construction of ontology via the mathematical concept of
"inconsistent multiplicity:'] Badiou has resurrected the Platonic view, whereby
mathematics gives privileged access to that which is most fundamental about
being and existence. Being as such, for Badiou, is inconsistent multiplicity,
even as any regional access to being is always structured according to some
model of consistency and appearance.
2
Despite the forcefulness of Badiou's
turn to fundamental ontological questions, it is clear that Badiou's recent
work rephrases and restages questions that were central to the conjunction of
Lacanian and Althusserian themes in late 19608 Paris, in ways that draw out the
latent ontological implications of Lacano-Althusserian thinking on the question
of science.
In light of this historical continuity, it may be of value to consider anew the
debate between Jacques-Alain Miller and Badiou that played out in the pages
of the Cahiers, represented in particular by the essays "Suture" and "Action of
the Structure" authored by Miller and "Mark and Lack: On Zero" by Badiou.
Turning our attention again to Miller's early work will allow us to see more of
the ways in which the Cahiers sought a certain "dynamization" of the concept
Post-Rationalism
more of Miller will
of the unconscious became a tool in the t h ' n ~ t
introduce contingency, chance, and the irruption of the new into the domains
of structure and logic so much debated in the pages of the Cahiers. In noting
these innovations, I hope that some of Bachelard's concern for the constitutive
impurity of scientific objects, discussed in the previous chapter, will echo with
the different accounts of conceptual admixture that permeate Miller's work, and
that reecho again with the return to fundamental questions of text, context, and
contingency in Jacques Derrida's Cahiers contributions.
While I touched upon the usefulness of counterposing Derrida with
post-rationalism in previous chapters, the conclusion of this chapter will attempt
a more sustained attention to this intriguing conjunction. My aim there will be
to underline the parities and distinctions that inform the relationship between
deconstruction and post-rationalism, insofar as they may shed a new light on
both. If nothing else, I hope to show that Derrida, far from being an outsider
imposing his stern criticisms on structuralism from without, was among the
most acute thinkers from within of structuralism's, of post-rationalism's, internal
aporia, aporia that can be said to be as formative as they are deformative, as
necessary as they are impossible, to temporarily adopt Derridean parlance.
Badiou's "Mark and Lack: On Zero;' published in the final edition of the
Cahiers, willoccupya significant amount of our attention here. It is ofinterestin its
rigorous defense of the self-identity and self-enclosure of mathematics and logic,
their "purity" we might say, in the light of the arguments of the previous chapter.
For Badiou in 1969, and contra Miller, the question of the subject, and especially
the subject of the unconscious, is irrelevant to the self-sustaining movements of
logical and mathematical reasoning. Ironically, Badiou's subsequent move, in
the 1980s, to a fundamental ontology of set-theoretical mathematics required a
rapprochement with the concept of the subject, albeit on terms rather different
from those extrapolated by Miller from Lacan's revision of Freud. And, as I'll
note in a final section of this chapter, Badiou, even at this early stage in his
career, presents a slightly more equivocal position, rigorously formal as it is, in
his "Infinitesimal Subversion;' also published in the Cahiers; there, as we'll see,
Badiou affirms the revolutionary power of abstraction and formalism, while
discussing at greater length than in "Mark and Lack" the problem of the empty
place of structure, the pregnant place of lack that, in Miller's hands, becomes
Science, "Suture," and the Signifier 83
equivalent to the subject of psychoanalysis. By attending to these differing
approaches to the defining problems of post-rationalism, we may be able to
further distinguish between the differing models of formalization, scientificity,
and the meaning of subjectivity as they are articulated in the Cahiers and in
post-war French thought more generally.
Suture revisited
In order to properly frame Badiou's critique of the concept of "suture;' it is
necessary to briefly recapitulate the arguments of Miller's "Suture as already
analyzed in Chapter 1. Miller proposes what he calls the "logic of the signifier
as "a general logic in that its functioning is formal in relation to all fields of
knowledge including that of psychoanalysis which, in acquiring a specificity
there, it governs:'3 Such a logic, that is, forms the horizon for all other logics,
even those that fall under the rubrics of mathematical and logical specialization.
"It is a minimal logic;' Miller continues, "in that within it are given those pieces
only which are necessary to assure it a progression reduced to a linear movement,
uniformly generated at each point of its necessary sequence:'4
Suture for Miller, most importantly, "names the relation of the subject to its
chain of discourse:'5 If the subject is necessarily implicated in any structure or
system, as the nonidentical element that grounds the structure from a position of
illegitimacy, so too must that illegitimate foundation be covered over, "sutured:'
Soon afterwards, he provides another definition of his key term, writing that
suture is "the general relation oflack to the structure:'6 Structure in this instance is
synonymous with what Lacan called the Symbolic, with language as it is situated
as the enabling "Other" of the subject. The subject, we note, is lacking from the
structure; it is lack itself, insofar as suture, the stitching of the subject to the
signifier is, as Miller writes, "the general relation of lack to the structure:' Such
a lack, as we've seen, is foundational for Miller of the structure that nonetheless
covers over its reliance upon the subject as absent cause.
As we saw in Chapter 1, Miller embarks on a heterodox reading of the German
logician Gottlob Frege, interrogating his theory of number for what it might
reveal for a more general logic of formalization applicable to psychoanalysis.
Miller justifies his equation of the form of the signifier with the form of number
by claiming that the logic of the signifier "should be conceived of as the logic
of the origin of logic;'7 which is to say that the logic of the signifier, of language
84 Post-Rationalism
in its overarching constitution of the world, is the transcendental horizon for
scientific logic as such. More importantly, Miller adopts Frege's argument for
zero as the nonidentical ground to the self-identical procession of numbers. And,
in an analogical move that would no doubt have met with Frege's disapproval,
Miller identifies this relation of the nonidentical as ground to the structures
of numericity to the relation between the subject of psychoanalysis, and the
signifiers that operate as its only vehicle of (re)presentation. The crucial point,
at least for an understanding of Badiou's trenchant critique, is that, for Miller,
the seemingly self-sufficient domain of self-identical numbers, or in fact any
comparable system or structure, requires the positing of a nonidentical element,
the subject, as its negative ground, a ground that the system in question must
efface even as it forms its keystone. As we'll see, Badiou sees no such need
for a founding element of nonidentity; logical and scientific structures are
self-sufficient and self-enclosed.
Badiou and ascetic formalism
Badiou's essay "Mark and Lack: On Zero" is a stark and uncompromising
rejoinder to Jacques-Alain Miller's argument above. If Miller suggestively
breaches the surface continuity of formal logic via the question of its determining.
nonidentical ground, such a move is strictly illegitimate for the young Badiou.
While the question of the nonidentical may be relevant to the ways in which
psychoanalysis understands the articulation of the subject and the signifier. it is
fundamentally inadmissible to any discussion of mathematical logic. Instead,
the purity of the divide between science. as defined by the potential for any
discourse to be mathematized, and ideology. defined by the mystifications
of sensory experience, must be rigorously policed. As Badiou writes, "[BJoth
Frege's ideological representation of his own enterprise and the recapture of
this representation in the lexicon of the Signifier, of lack and the place-of-Iack,
mask the pure productive essence, the process of positing through which logic,
as a machine, lacks nothing it does not produce elsewhere:'8 In an audaciously
sweeping fashion, Badiou indicts both Miller and Frege, both of whom stray from
the strict laws of the logical systems they appropriate in order to "ideologically"
reappropriate their claims.
Logic is rendered by Badiou here as a self-constituting, self-perpetuating
"machine:' impervious to the vicissitudes of the subject or the signifier. Two
of Louis
the domain of
as being purely and constitutively distinct
85
Badlou describes as "ideological recapture:' or the ways in which science, even
in its purity, must "com [e 1 to mime its own reflection:'lO It is Miller's supposed
jump from this recognition of science's institutional situation and forms of
representation to the positing of the nonidentical as its necessary ground that
Badiou considers illegitimate. Instead of encompassing the "scientific signifier"
within the broader terms of signification tout court, Badiou reframes the
production of a logical system in terms of its "cut" or separation from its "raw
material:' As he writes, "The theory oflogic pertains to the modes of production
of a division in linear inscription: the dichotomy of a structured set of statements
which have been 'introduced' in the final mechanism as an (already processed)
raw material:'ll
The second, unexpected voice is that of Gilles Deleuze. 1he pure productivity
that Badiou ascribes to logic, the "pure productive essence" that disbars any
attempt to incorporate logic within the Lacanian schema of constitutive lack,
uncannily mirrors Deleuze's constructivist metaphysics, whereby the derivation
of difference from identity illegitimately defines as negative a plane of pure
positivity. Ironically, Badiou would mercilessly castigate Deleuze's immanent
philosophy of difference in the years following his involvement with the
Cahiers, condemning it for its supposed reactionary assimilation within the
incessant, positive productivity oflate consumer capital is mY But here, Badiou's
characterization of logic, albeit firmly restricted to the domain of epistemology,
is similarly unwilling to accede to the logic of negativity and differential
causality, otherwise so characteristic of at least aspects of what I'm calling
post-rationalism. In his later works, Badiou would rethink his own relation to
ontology in the language of mathematical set theory, but at this early moment,
the speculations of ontology seem definitionally illegitimate when set against
the self-sufficient enclosure oflogic. In Chapter 5, we'll have recourse to Deleuze
again, where his philosophy oflife will be shown to have a surprising ally in the
work of Georges Canguilhem, the French philosopher of biology whose work
on the historicity of concepts had such a formative influence on the Cahiers.
For now, it's worth marking the surprising, if largely rhetorical, coincidence
of these apparent antagonists of twentieth-century French thought. If nothing
else, there is in Badiou's reflections in "Mark and Lack" a strong sense of the
lines distinction between rival
while no doubt a good incentive to
permeable than is frequently assumed.
France,
production, are often rather more
Pregnant in Badiou's choice of terminology, his references to the "raw
material" of scientific production, is Althusser's o\"n reinvention, particularly
in his lecture course "Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of Scientists"
and in the posthumously published "Notes on the 'Theory of
analyzed at length in Chapter 4, of the terms in which a scientific object should
be understoodY Instead of being the representation of a priorly existing,
determinate object in the real, the object of science becomes the end result of a
process of production. That object's incorporation within a logical system must
similarly be understood in the terms of an internal, non empirical consistency,
over and against any idealizing claim of a direct or un mediated link to the "real:'
Thus, while the bulk of Badiou's essay deals with the question of logic, what
Badiou characterizes as "a particular sphere of technical production" composed
of "graphic marks, separable and indecomposable;'14 one finds claims too about
the objects, or "raw materiaI:'15 that compose such logical systems. And yet,
as we saw in the previous chapter, Bachelard, one of the crucial progenitors of
Badiou's early account of science, is signally less certain of the purity of scientific
discourse. Badiou's philosophical operation here resembles one of purification,
of distilling logical discourse into its absolutely essential elements.
In contrast to the signifiers of ideology, the elements that compose logical
writing for Badiou are without remainder, and are selected according to
a mechanism that institutes a "perfect dichotomy:' dividing "well-formed
expressions" from "ill-formed" expressions.
16
The operators that form this
division are the "rules of formation" 17 that are particular to each system; Badiou
uses the example of such a rule as the "predicate calculus with equality"18 that
serves to render certain configurations admissible and others as inadmissible.
Moreover, the self-governing quality oflogical systems constitutively excludes for
Badiou any reference to objects inassimilable to the self-identity of the scientific
mark; as he writes, "The concept of identity holds only for marks. Logic never
has recourse to any self-identical thing, even when 'thing' is understood in the
sense of the object of scientific discourse:'19 Thus, it is not simply the empiricist
assumption of correspondence between the object in the real and the object
of science that is jettisoned in Badiou's logical asceticism; rather, it is the very
self-relating "thingness" of the concept of the object itself that is rejected, in favor
Science, "Suture," and the Signifier 87
of an epistemology of identical marks with delineable and finite functions. The
stark differences between Miller and Frege on the one hand, and Badiou on the
other, seem clear enough here: for the former, logic, even in its rigorous purity,
requires a nonidentical support; for the latter, such a support would undermine
mathematical logic itself, insofar as it is, by definition, a domain of axiomatic
self-definition.
Underlying the early Badiou's conception oflogic is a sense of the materiality
of the language oflogic, its autonomy and self-sufficiency as rendered in "marks:'
Miller, in his "Suture;' had also described the signifier as self-sufficient in contrast
with the nonidentical subject of the unconscious, but where for Miller such
signifiers indicate a general logic of signification governed by an underlying logic
of formative lack, for Badiou the scientific signifier's self-sufficiency is in stark
contrast to the differential quality of the ideological signifier. Intriguingly, and
despite his cautioning against assimilating the objects of psychoanalytic concern
to the domain oflogic, Badiou chooses a Lacanian category, that of "foreclosure;'
to describe the internal self-sufficiency of the logical. He writes, "[O]ne must
say that the existence of an infallible closed mechanism is the condition for the
existence of a mechanism which can be said to be unclosable, and therefore
internally limited. The exhibition of a suture presupposes the existence of a
foreclosure:'2o
It is at this point, I(f like to argue, that Badiou's choices of metaphor, the
tropic texture of his writing, begins to work against the severity of his rendering
of the division between science and ideology. For, despite his avowed aim in
critiquing Miller's own incorporation of psychoanalytic concepts to the analysis
of logical processes, Badiou's recourse to the concept of foreclosure operates
to reveal a deeper, critical connection to Lacan's so-called logic of the signifier,
his vision of psychoanalysis as reimagined through the science oflinguistics. In
the quote above, Badiou reverses the order of priority that he detects in Miller's
concept of suture: whereas for Miller, Badiou infers, the general logic of the
signifier, defined by the operation of "suture;' is determinative for the more local
domain of science and logic, for Badiou, it is the "infallible closed mechanism"21
oflogic that is primary. The concept of suture, which presupposes a significatory
domain that is de-totalized by its grounding in a nonidentical element (and is
thus "unclosable"), is only explicable if one already presupposes the possibility of
a closed and self-sufficient system, which for Badiou is emblematized by logical
formalization. In such a system, the only measure of truth would be the ways in
which the system is governed by the cuts and axiomatic decisions that render it
consistent according to its own internal criteria.
88 Post-Rationalism
Lacan's revision of denotes the process
""IS"tH"'-' that governs the subject's immersion in the Symbolic is absent without
any connotation ofloss or tackY Where the concept of "suture" presupposes an
element that is occluded but nonetheless resonant in its very lack, foreclosure
denotes an absolute lack of an element without trace, a lack that renders the
already opaque structure of the Symbolic de structured, without anchor-a
lack of a lack. In Lacan's account, the result of the foreclosure of the Name-of-
the-Father, or the signifier that, in common variety neurotic subjectivities, allows
the breaking up of the dyadic logic of the pre-Oedipal scene, is psychosis. As
Badiou writes, "Foreclosure, but of nothing, science may be called the psychosis
of no subject, and hence of all: congenitally universal, shared delirium, one has
only to maintain oneself within it in order to be no-one, anonymously dispersed
in the hierarchy of orders:'23
While foreclosure for Lacan fails to imprint a lack on the system or
structure at hand, and thus seems congruent with Badiou's wish to construct
an epistemology reliant only on its own positive terms, the concept nonetheless
institutes a comparison with Miller's borrowing of "suture" from psychoanalytic
discourse, shifting the defining frame of Badiou's text away from its surface
patina of logical purity and revealing its rhetorical supports. Intriguingly
however, Badiou's appropriation of foreclosure departs in interesting ways
from Lacan's own use of the term. Whereas for Lacan, the foreclosure of the
Name-of-the-Father as the quasi-transcendental guarantor of the Symbolic
results in the radical dispersion of psychosis, for Badiou, and for the theory
of scientific foreclosure he wishes to construct, foreclosure can only be
"foreclosure [ ... J of nothing:'24 a kind of nonextensive redoubling of the space
of scientific discourse that is, in itself, precisely nothing, simply the facticity
of the positive completion of scientific logic. That completion is at odds with
Lacan's account of psychosis, whereby the operation of foreclosure de-totalizes
the battery of signifiers and leaves the subject immersed in the Real, in the kind
of randomness and contingency that seem definitively excluded from Badiou's
account of logic here.
Despite the apparent performative contradiction of Badiou's use of
psychoanalytic terminology to advance an argument against the relevance of
psychoanalysis to epistemology, the choice of metaphor effects an intriguing
echo between two key aspects of Badiou's account oflogic, namely the apparent
self-sufficiency of logical systems and the self-identity of the scientific "mark:'
"Suture," and 89
In the
never
has recourse any even when is understood in the
sense of the object of scientific discourse:'25 1hat is to say, logic never grasps the
object in the real, even when that object has been made amenable to scientific
qualification. Rather, logic "counts" only its own elements, according to its
own self-sustaining laws of construction. As a result, the "marks" that come to
arrange what Badiou refers to as the "raw materials" of formalization become
autonomous, and thus need ultimately refer only to themselves in order to
function, in sharp distinction to the "signifiers" that Badiou infers are the concern
of psychoanalysis. Such ideological elements gain their sense not in self-identity,
but in the system of difterences within which each element is situated. In sharp
contrast to Miller, Badiou insists further that zero, far from being the dynamic
marker of nonidentity and lack, is merely the "sign that abbreviates the lack
of a mark;'26 the sign of the simple fact that logic must distinguish between
legitimate and illegitimate elements according to its specific and immanent laws
of construction.
The use of the term "mark" here does much of the work in distinguishing
logical elements from signifiers more broadly understood. For while Badiou
implies the distinction between the signifier as it is understood in psychoanalysis
and "mark" as it is understood in logic rests on the notion of identity, Lacan
too will make much of the potential self-identity of the signifier as it falls out
of relations of sense. In his unpublished ninth seminar on "Identification" in
particular, Lacan constructs a theory of the signifier qua mark, understood as
a "unary trait;' a proto-Symbolic element that notates the logical, rather than
temporal, beginnings of language for the subject. There, Lacan writes that the
unary trait is "linked to the extreme reduction, precisely with regard to it, of all
the opportunities for qualitative difference:'27 In distinction from the Signifier
in its usual position of relation or differential constitution, then, the unary
trait or isolated mark is self-sufficient, unrelated to the qualitative difference
that would implicate it in relations of sense. Whereas Badiou relies on a sharp
break between the signifier and the mark, derived from his equally unequivocal
understanding of Althusser's understanding of the distinction between science
and ideology, Lacan dialectizes his concept of the signifier from within, such
that it can instantiate two distinct but interconnected logics: a logic of relation
or sense, whereby the signifier combines with other signifiers to produce the
effect of meaning, and the signifier as it exists abstracted from such relations, as
material insistence or "mark:'
90 Post-Rationalism
Lacan comments of the latter that "[it is) the very one that cannot repeat
itself, except always by being another one:'28 This unary signifier, then, is defined
by its indivisibility, by its consistency as "one;' a consistency remarkably similar
to that imputed by Badiou to the marks that make up logical systems. Crucially
however, Lacan allows for the possibility that sense itself, the fullness of meaning
that Badiou would ascribe to ideology, might have its roots in the nonsense of
the mark, of the formal purity of the signifier's relation to itself, thus collapsing
the rigidity that Badiou insists upon in his cleavage of science from ideology.
For Lacan, that is, the unary trait. or the aspect of the signifier that exists
"in-isolation:' apart from networks of sense, nonetheless grounds its corollary
aspect of being "in-relation;' its negative determination of sense through its
relation with all other signifiers.
29
For Badiou, then. logic's foreclosure, its seamless closure upon itself. disbars the
relational logic of signification that defines ideological discourse. The ideological.
on this reading, is fundamentally a system of relations; each ideological signifier
gains its sense through its negative relation to other signifiers. As a result. the
concept of foreclosure and the concept of mark are connected, the latter being
the product of the former. This brings out a further surprising connection to
Lacan, at the very moment that Badiou tries most forcefully to distinguish
himself from psychoanalytic reasoning. In his third seminar on "The Psychoses;'
where Lacan most systematically lays out his theory of the foreclosure of the
"Name-of-the-Father" as the negative condition for psychosis, Lacan analyses
the discourse of Judge Schreber as emblematic of the psychotic's relation to
language in general. There, commenting on the proliferation of neologisms in
Schreber's discourse, Lacan writes:
The meaning of these words [neologisms) that pull you up has the property of
referring essentially to meaning as such. It's a meaning that essentially refers
to nothing but itself, that remains irreducible [ ... ) Before being reducible to
another meaning it signifies within itself something ineffable, it's a meaning that
refers above all to meaning as such.
30
Here, Lacan distinguishes between the two, defining aspects of the signifier.
If. in its general state, the signifier relies for its sense on the totality of all
other signifiers in any given set, the signifier as it manifests in neologisms is
disbarred from such relations, and thus begins to operate at a meta-reflexive
level, referring only to itself. This material insistence of what, elsewhere, I have
called the "signifier-in-isolation"3! seems close, at least in its self-sufficiency, to
what Badiou calls the logical "mark:' For Lacan however, the signifier's isolation
Science, "Suture," and the Signifier 91
is, despite its insistence beyond or beside sense, inextricably connected to
the problem of meaning ("it's a meaning that refers above all to meaning as
such"), and to the problem of the subject of the unconscious. More precisely,
the signifier-in-isolation figures as the material, unconscious underside of
(conscious) sense itself. Thus, if Badiou cleanly separates the logical domain
of self-sufficient marks from the ideological domain of relational meaning,
Lacan dialectizes the relation such that the two domains are condensed into
two aspects of the same signifier-the signifier in its isolated, "foreclosed" state,
as "mark;' and the Signifier as it couples with its determining others in relations
of sense. Furthermore, Lacan's isolated signifier, far from being a pure "mark"
to be taken up by science in its rupture with ideology, has the potential, realized
most persuasively by Lacan in his seventeenth seminar with the notion of the
"master signifier;' to consolidate an ideological field in and through its very
emptiness-a notion expanded notably by Laclau and Mouffe in their Hegemony
and Socialist Strategy.32 It is questionable, then, whether the self-sufficiency or
self-identity of a "mark" results in it being clean of ideology; Lacan, at least,
entertains the idea that it is the very non-sense of the isolated signifier, its
material insistence, that gives body to any relational set of ideological signifiers.
Social and political identities rely precisely on the "suturing" of their elements
under such empty signifiers.
When, in his Number and Numbers, written over 20 years after "Mark and
Lack:' Badiou returns again to his critique of Miller, he cautions that the status
of Miller's recourse to Frege's number theory remains unclear. Badiou asks
whether Miller's argument should be understood as "an analogical reading:'33
the implication being that such a reading would render Miller's reflections
on number subordinate to his attempt to clarify Lacan's logic of the signifier;
number would remain at the level of the heuristic at best, a domain forced to
conform to a domain, psychoanalysis, that is foreign to it. And yet, given the
work done by the concepts of "foreclosure" and "mark" in Badiou's own, earlier
reflections on logic, we need to ask after the precise status of psychoanalysis in
Badiou's own discourse, its own analogical investment. Tentatively, we might
conclude, against Badiou, that analogy has more of a constitutive power than
he allows here, insofar as even the (ironic?) use of psychoanalytic terminology
in the latter's "Mark and Lack" reveals something of the concealed truth of his
own argument, namely the inextricable connection between the question of the
self-sufficient logical "mark" and the logic of the signifier as Lacan developed it.
Badiou's "Infinitesimal Subversion:'34 published in the Cahiers the year prior
to "Mark and Lack:' acts to both consolidate and question some of the positions
92 Post-Rationalism
Radion underlines the its
of
while nonetheless as he does in "Mark and
Lack:' on the affirmative self-sufficiency of number, its self-formation. 1bat
formation, however, is given an extra twist in "Infinitesimal Subversion;' insofar
as an excluded element-in the example given by Badiou, the "infinity-support"
proposed by certain readings of differential calculus-acts as its constitutive
support, an element that compresses together possibility and impossibility in
a manner directly compared by Badiou to Lacan's "ReaI:' We must ask, then,
precisely how Badiou defines this logical operation, given that it must be
sufficiently distinct from the formative exclusion of the subject described by
Miller, and the place of the zero adumbrated by Frege, for Badiou's subsequent
critique of Miller to hold. To anticipate our conclusion, Badiou will be shown
to have adopted a logic of the constitutive exception that is remarkably close to
that which he criticizes in Miller, although the logical terms through which he
develops his account are sufficiently unique to warrant our analysis here. Badiou,
we might say, offers a variation on the theme of the constitutive exclusion so
central elsewhere to post-rationalism, in a manner that makes distinctive room
for a logic of self-identity and self-sufficiency, in direct contrast to the various
forms of negation and negativity that are characteristic of alternative attempts to
define the eccentric element of structure.
The characteristics that Badiou associates with the "ideological objectives"
mentioned above, listed defiantly at the conclusion of the essay, are" [q] uality,
continuity, temporality and negation"36; characteristics that, not coincidentally,
we can think of as defining Hegel's idealist metaphysics. For Hegel, the
development of the dialectic is continuous, even if it relies on the repetitive
irruption of determinate negation; it performs the conversion of quantity
into quality; and it helps define a progressive, even teleological temporality
proper to the movements of the Absolute.
37
To this, Badiou opposes "[nlumber,
discreteness, space and affirmation: or, better, Mark, Punctuation, Blank
Space [Blanc] and Cause:'38 Such are the qualities that, for Badiou, define the
revolutionary rigor of science in its opposition to ideology. Those qualities,
in turn, possess an unequal weight in Badiou's formulation; it is affirmation
that lends its imperative to the other qualities, protecting as it does against
the illegitimate imposition of negation within the self-enclosure of logic. Even
if, as we'll see, Badiou allows for a defining element in the account given in
Science, "and the 93
Subversion" to
and " it remains an
of a countable form of that would find its apex in Cantor's "continuum
hypothesis:'39 central to Badiou's later adoption of a mathematical ontology,
The key point, again, is that this empty place or point of definitional exclusion
remains an affirmative positivity for Badiou, unrelated to the hypostatization of
lack that he reads in Miller's "Suture:'
How does Badiou conceive of the infinite in its relation to number? In parts
of "Infinitesimal Subversion:' he writes of the infinite in its relation with the
finite in a way that avoids the suggestion that a finite set or structure requires an
excluded, infinite support. As he writes, "The finite-which Hegel describes as
the iterative transgression of its own limit-is essentially that which allows, and
thereby demands, a supplementary inscription:'40 The order of priority here is
worth noting; instead of the infinite taking precedence, it is the finite-the set of
self-sufficient denumerable elements or marks described in "Mark and Lack"-
that allows, and thereby demands, the infinite as an inoccupable place. More
specifically, Badiou, through an ingenious articulation of calculus and Mallarme,
constructs the actual infinite, what he calls the "reality of the infinity-support;'41
as testified to, as revealed by, the potential infinity of the succession of numbers;
each number, in its supersession (1, 2, 3, ... ), testifies to the potential for further
elements in the chain, a theoretically infinite succession that relies upon actual
infinity as its effaced support.
A striking echo sounds here between Badiou's argument and Jacques-Alain
Miller's, especially as we outlined it in detail in Chapter 1. If for Miller, the
succession of natural numbers requires the supposition of the zero as support,
for Badiou the "numerical effect exhausts itself in the shunting along of the
empty place space:'42 For Miller as we've seen, that empty place is formally
equivalent to the subject. For Badiou, by contrast, it is the "un occupiable empty
place:'43 the "infinity-point of the domain;'44 and thus something strictly internal
to mathematical logic. If Badiou seems, on the face of it, to openly contradict his
subsequent interdiction, in "Mark and Lack:' against the interposition of a logic
of constitutive lack into the seamless self-enclosure of science, he insists that the
infinite is untainted by negation, by the logic of lack that he imputes to Miller.
Instead, it testifies to a strictly internal operation within logic itself, whereby
"the infinite is the designation of a beyond proper to the algorithms of the
domain: the marking of a point that is inaccessible according to the algorithms
themselves, but which supports their iteration:'45 As a designation of the beyond,
94 Post-Rationalism
the infinite does not, for all
a of that domain. it is the
inscribed holding place or supplement that marks the immanent and potentially
infinite succession of elements within it
For the Badiou of "Mark and Lack;' Miller's delineation of suture is precisely
such an illegitimate imposition of transcendental negativity within the affirmative
domain of logic. As he writes there, "[t)o say that zero [ ... J 'aims at' ['vise']
a non-self identical object, or that it is the predicate of the void, convokes a
metaphysical reading of Being and its Plenitude precisely at the point where only
substitutions of inscriptions obtain:'46 The self-sufficiency of the "marks" that
compose logical structures, while self- identical, are nonetheless strictly set apart
from any metaphysic of plenitude and lack. Even the "non-place" of infinity
cannot be conscripted into a terminology of absolute lack or impossibility,
precisely because actual infinity is, as demonstrated by Cantor in set theory,
countable, accessible to scientific reason. If many philosophers of mathematics
have shown less certainty than Badiou in affirming Cantor's reconfiguration of
our understanding of the mathematical infinite, the consequence for the former
is decisive: even the infinitesimally small, since Zeno's paradoxes a central
problem for philosophy, is encompassable within the terms of a logic, a broader
science, that breaks definitively with the continuities of ideology.
In the next part of this chapter, I'd like to introduce the argument of Miller's
"Action of the Structure" as a way of problematizing the severity of Badiou's
distinction between logic and ideology. To do so will, eventually, require a return
to the question of the signifier, a question convoked but ultimately effaced in
Badiou's use of the term "mark:' We will eventually find, in Derrida's contributions
to the Cahiers, a language that reaffirms the impurity and instability of structures
that marks one of the signal theses of post-rationalism, one rather defiantly
refused by Badiou.
Miller, the "lure:' and the concept of the Imaginary
Miller's "The Action of the Structure;'47 written contemporaneously with his
aforementioned "Suture" but published (auspiciously?) only in 1968, deepens
the latter's commitment to an account of structure as dynamic, against what
Miller perceived to be the static accounts offered by structuralist orthodoxy. Of
fractious relation of the
When structuralist and from the
neutralized space of the cause, it obliges itself to guarantee its already-constituted
objects by referring them back to the categories of "social life;' "culture" [ ... J It
makes an illegitimate appeal to linguistic structuralism: the latter, by opening its
field of analysis through preliminary exclusion of any relation that the subject
maintains with its speech, prohibits itself from saying anything about it
4S
95
1h us, orthodox structuralism composes itself through a rejection of the speaking
subject, a rejection-perhaps even a foreclosure-that forces it to render its
objects as a priori and fixed, as already constituted through the ideological
optics of the "social" or the cultural. Such a move acts to efface what Miller goes
on to call the structure's "dynamic;' which "the displacement of its elements
articulates [scand):'49 Miller seems to imply that the objectivizing impulse
of orthodox structuralism, its desire after Levi-Strauss to render universal its
claims to knowledge, forced it to retain the restrictive philosophical architecture
of the subject/object distinction, with the constitution of the objects of structure
covertly reliant on the displacement of an errant nonidentical subject. For
Miller's "psychoanalytic structuralism;' by contrast, the internal rhythms
and displacements that mark all structures, the constitutive interposition of
the subject within the domain of the object, forces a distinction between the
structure's "structuration" -the ebbing and flowing of structural elements, the
"action of the structure" of the essay's title-and subjectivity as the paradoxical
product and condition of that process of structuration.
To simplify somewhat, Miller relies for his account of structuration on
the notion of a reflexive element, something that disappears but nonetheless
conditions any structure's dynamic. Here, the influence of Lacan's reflections on
the subject as cause in his eleventh seminar, the first that Miller attended and
the first that he would transcribe, is readily apparent. In that seminar, Lacan
borrowed Aristotle's distinction between "tuche;' as a punctuating cause, and
"automaton" as the reproduction of the symbolic chain, of the general state of
things.
50
Lacan associates the subject of the signifier with the "tuche" of the
cause, punctuating the symbolic chain that acts to represent it-"a signifier is
that which represents a subject for another signifier:'SJ Miller borrows this logic,
whereby the field of the subject folds into the reproduction of objectivity at the
96 Post-Rationalism
point of the subject's fading, when he writes of "the relation of the subject to the
structure, a relation that is circular insofar as each of its terms owes its definition
to the others, but that is dis symmetrical since it is an insertion:'52 Thus, the
rigorous holding apart of subject and object implied in Badiou's evacuation of
the subject from the field oflogical structure is disbarred in favor of a dialectical
logic of co-implication, even as that co-implication precludes symmetry, much
less than any putatively Hegelian logic of supersession; rather, the subject sits
askance, in "dissymmetry;' from the structure that it punctuates, definitional but
somehow irrecoverable.
At this point at least, Miller's argument seems rather less distinct from
"orthodox structuralism" than he might wish us to believe. Levi-Strauss himself
had enquired after the "mana signifier" as a kind of empty, self-reflexive element
constitutive of, but somehow decentered from, symbolic structures, and
Althusser's developing theory of structural causality also relied on the theorization
of causality as immanent to but askance from its outcome. Miller, of course, was
happy to identify with the latter, but simply by positing an element definitional
but eccentric to structure, he fails to truly distinguish his position, at least at this
stage in his argument, from the orthodoxy, itself something of a straw man, that
he seems keen to combat. Further, he lays himself open again to Badiou's charge
that, by simply collapsing a logic derived from psychoanalysis into a broader
logic of "structure" as such, 'he fails to properly distinguish between different
levels of knowledge and between differently constituted modes of discourse.
It is, however, in his notion of the "lure;' only provisionally sketched out in
~ c t i o n of the Structure;' that Miller's argument begins to pull away from any
standard "structuralist" account of the eccentric element that both conditions
and de-totalizes a given structure or system. Initially, nonetheless, the "lure"
seems close to the logic of the self-reflexive element of Levi-Strauss et al.: "Every
structure, in our sense of the term, thus includes a lure or decoy [leurrel which
takes the place of the lack, which is linked to what is perceived, but which is the
weakest link of the given sequence, a vacillating point which belongs only in
appearance to the plane of actuality: the whole virtual plane (the plane of the
structuring space) crushes down at that point [sy ecrasej:'53 On this account, the
lure functions both as a condition of possibility and of impossibility, defining a
structure in its very eccentricity to it. As the "weakest link" in a given structure
or sequence, the lure is only in a limited fashion part of the defining logic that
surrounds it. But precisely as a result of this eccentricity, it provides that structure
with a sense of its limits, of its constitutive bounds.
signals that "its presence is
Miller continues: "But it is at this
97
the
of
'""'I 1'V,", [, , ,] that it should not
where the
spread-out space of structure and the 'transcendental' space of the structuring
interconnect and are articulated, that we must regulate our gaze, and adopt as
our principle of organization the placeholder itsel:,s6 Miller gives his lure a sense
of Lac an's register of the Imaginary here; instead of being simply the out-of-place
that defines the space of a structure, formally equivalent perhaps to a symbolic
element that stops up the play of the signifier while eluding the demand for
sense, the lure figures here as regulative of the gaze, that "misleads the eye:'S7
as something that projects its own sense of meaning and order through space.
And yet, there's no question of the "lure" being reducible to the Imaginary, to
something akin to egoic misrecognition that simply reproduces the state of a
given structure or situation. Instead, "[ e 1 very activity that does not play out
solely in the imaginary but which instead transforms a state of the structure, sets
out from the utopic point, a strategic post, specific to each of the levels in which
the structuring lacks:'58 This point, then, condenses both the reproduction of
structure, and the potential for its transformation.
And yet, there remains something indelibly Imaginary about the lure.
As Miller writes, "It goes without saying that the subject which devises this
efficacious practice is not thereby exempt from the miscognition pertaining to
its place:'59 Any subject produced by the lure as the weakest link, as the point of
transformation of a structure, will nonetheless retain its Imaginary aspects, even
at the point of absolute rupture with the "structured:' In line with Althusser,
and with aspects of Lacan's development of the Imaginary, Miller concedes the
necessity of misrecognition, of an ineluctable mediation enrolling the subject at
the level of the specular, even as he points beyond its logic. Intriguingly, Miller
offers a kind of intuitive geometry of structure here that opens out the previously
two-dimensional geometry of the self-consistent structure with its eccentric,
defining element; here, two structures, one "actual;' already structured, the other
virtual or potential, compositional of the structure's action, come together at this
ambiguous point or lure, a weak link that provides the possibility of fundamental
rupture with both the structured and the "structuring:' the latter naming the
kinds of change that are permitted within the prevalent logic. Insofar as the latter
is the set of all immanent possibilities in a given structure or system, and the
"structured" names the relations that currently obtain in that given structure,
98
the to become
our discussion and
in 1. 1here, we saw in her own contribution to the Cahiers,
developed a complex logic of the specular relation, indebted to but expanding
upon Lacan's theory of the "mirror stage;' and thoroughly intertwined with the
logic of the signifier. Irigaray posits the specular relation as being a product of
the coming together oflanguage and the body, and Miller seems concerned here
also with the "lure" as the enigmatic juncture between two separate structures or
logics. And yet Irigaray's description of the Imaginary as the domain in which the
subject is the mere "plaything" oflanguage should alert us to how Miller's "lure"
departs from any mere repetition of Lacan's logic of the Imaginary; somehow,
the lure both persists within and exceeds the specular relation, such that it
points toward an internal, immanent decomposition of the logic-ideological,
in Althusser's terms-that allows a given structure to persist.
The lure then, what Miller subsequently refers to as a "utopic point:' is
always at the center of any shift in the structure, any rebalancing of the relation
between the virtual and the actual, or between the structured and the yet-to-be
structured. Indeed, Miller seems to suggest that it potentially exceeds even the
virtual domain of the structuring, of the yet-to-be structured that nonetheless
remains within the parameters of the structure at hand. As he writes, the lure
is "unequal to the plane on which it appears;'60 eccentric to the two spaces that
conjoin at its obscure point, and in so being, it provides a potential route beyond
prevailing logics, both virtual and actual. Furthermore, this lure or point is
theorized as being separate to, but constitutive of, the subjectY If, in previous
figurations of structure, the eccentric element or point that both defines and
limits a structure was often reduced to the function of the subject itself, not
least in Miller's own "Suture;' here the lure functions to attract the subject, even
to constitute the subject as subject to the structure at the point of the latter's
transformation, but it cannot be reduced to it. Badiou's "Mark and Lack;' we can
say, operates within the former, reduced version of the relation between subject
and structure; thus, for Badiou, "there is no subject of science;'62 as the seamless
consistency oflogic could not permit its interruption. Science, that is, cannot be
governed by something external to it. Instead, it establishes its own guarantees
and exclusions in a manner that leaves unperturbed its seamless reproduction.
For Badiou, one must choose: subject or science. As a result, scientific structures
for Badiou are necessarily defined by foreclosure, by a psychotic lack of a lack
that guarantees their self-sufficiency. But Miller, instead of merely signaling the
its transi()rmative a lure or ele.ment that definitional of the
subject's state of subjection, but nonetheless distinct from it, or at least from its
ideological self-presentation.
What are we to make of Miller's innovations here? First, it is important to draw
out the key intellectual influences that would have governed Miller's decision
to separate the function of the lure from the function of the subject. Most
pertinently, it was Althusser's insistence on the importance of an expanded theory
of ideology-rendered sensitive to the material inscription and reproduction of
ideology in everyday life-that resonates in Miller's description of the lure, as
the point in any structure that governs the subject's practical integration and
misrecognition and that points nonetheless beyond the state of things.
63
Equally
however, we might conclude that Miller's separation of the lure from the subject
marks an advance on Althusser, to the extent that, in the latter, the subject
risks forever being reduced to being nothing but an effect of the ideological, a
reduction that may well have inspired the turn toward Lacan by Miller and his
contemporaries. Lacan, by contrast to Althusser, holds on to the philosophical
conception of the subject, even while using the specificity of his psychoanalytic
orientation to disperse it from within. In the theory of the Imaginary, Lacan
elaborates a more expansive theory of misrecognition as one of three competing
agencies, along with the Symbolic and the Real that, when taken together, form
the horizon of the subject of the unconscious. While, in such a conception, the
ideological misrecognition of the Imaginary plays a crucial role in forming
and reforming the ego and the various specular identifications that govern the
subject's surface identity, the Symbolic and the Real embody other functions
irreducible to being simply the effect of an ideological lure.
If Miller, on the one hand, wishes to formalize Lacan's theory of the subject
such that the Imaginary, primary narcissism, all of the ego's identifications, are
to be simultaneously encapsulated and exceeded in one function-the lure as
the obscure hinge between a structure and its outside-he also seems to urge
a complication of Althusser's reduction of the subject to its function as a mere
effect of specular, ideological misrecognition. 'The lure on this reading exceeds the
Imaginary and points to the possibility of a more fundamental transformation
of structure that would, by virtue of the formal coincidence of the lure and the
subject, implicate the latter; as Miller avers, "'The topology that might possibly
figure it would have to be constructed in a space the centre of which is united, in
a punctual convergence, to the exteriority of its circumscription: its peripheral
100 Post-Rationalism
exterior is its central interior. The outside passes into the inside:'64 Thus, the
"topology" of the lure is one of the interpenetration of outside and inside, of the
structure's "periphery" and that which lies beyond it. Far from representing a
quasi-Hegelian recuperation of the "outside" into the inside, I think Miller's aim
here is to suggest that this utopic point may, in rare instances, genuinely open a
structure onto the new. The question that Miller leaves hanging is how to account
for this passing of the outside into the inside in a manner that doesn't suggest
a simple assimilation or recuperation of the outside's interruptive force. What
conditions might be necessary to prevent the lure occupying a transcendental
and determinative position relative to the structure, and thus preventing its
rupture and recomposition? As we'll see in the section on Derrida below, it may
require a return to the question of the signifier to approach such a possibility of
inassimilation.
The result of Miller's reflections on the lure read something like a synthesis
of Althusser's commitment to (post-)rationalist formalism, and Lacan's rather
more ecumenical account of the subject in its relation to structure, of the
subject's role in puncturing the surface of signifying systems that give it a
"voice:' In contrast to the rather static, ascetic account of rational self-sufficiency
described by Badiou in "Mark and Lack;' where all that can be said about that
which is foreign or nonself identical to logical structures is that it is external
to such structures, Miller transplants a constitutive eccentricity or foreignness
into the heart of structure itself, an eccentricity that provides both a sense of
the externally directed nature of structure-what Deleuze went on to refer
to as its nonspatial extensiveness
65
-and its capacity for change and internal
rupture.
That Miller should wish to divide this capacity between the subject and the lure
itself marks an advance on his earlier position in "Suture:' There, a more unitary
formalism prevailed, with the subject posited as the primary and constitutive
exception to structure, absented from the self-identical set of signifiers and
in some sense causative of them. Here, a pure formalism of the subject, with
the subject reduced to a zero point within an otherwise entirely dominant and
determinate structure, is replaced by a recognition of the split nature of the
subject, its intrication in logics that we can identify as being influenced by those
ofLacan's Imaginary (the "lure") and Symbolic (the subject as zero point) without
being entirely reducible to them. The irony here is that Miller's complication of
his previous account of the subject via the notion of the lure relies on perhaps
the most reductive element of Althusser's recommencement of dialectical
materialism, namely his insistence, qualified at different points in his work, that
Science, 101
the is
the
in order that he shall submit the commandments of the "661here
is much more to be said, of Althusser's theorizations of ideology and
the subject, some of which depart considerably from the determinist account
just elaborated, and I'll provide a more detailed reading of the complexities of
those theories in the next chapter.
To complicate matters further, Miller is by no means faithful to the innovations
of his own concept. At points in "Action of the Structure;' and in particular in
the long section on the question of the subject, Miller seems to reorient his lure
back into being the mere function of misrecognition, stripping it of its properly
transformative potential. As he writes, "[T]he discourse of overdetermination
[ ... ]leads us to the point where we can recognize as spontaneous the subject's
orientation towards the decoy [leurre J. Fundamentally, the subject is deceived:
its misunderstanding or mistake is constitutive. "67 Ironically enough, Miller
serves to "suture" his concept back onto its animating influences, in a way that
is itself a reduction of Lacan's own, complex account of the antagonism of the
Imaginary and its intimate connection with the Real. The Imaginary, for Lacan,
is never simply or unequivocally constitutive; rather, it is one of the domains
within which the destabilizing function of the Real appears, where antagonism
emerges between the cracks of the subject's identifications.
68
Lacan refers in his
fifth seminar to "all sorts of excesses in imaginary life, where there are similar
things that we have moreover the greatest difficulty in understanding:'69 and it is
that properly traumatic dimension of the Imaginary that threatens to be lost if its
function is reduced to that of soldering the subject to its environs.
Miller goes on to distinguish two different versions of misrecognition,
or meconnaisance, one that is "adequate [ ... J, necessary to the action of the
structure;'7U one that successfully stitches the subject to the structure, and "an
inadequate miscognition, which damages the subject's subsistence:'71 Miller fails
to elaborate on this intriguing distinction, but I wonder whether the second
meaning of the "lure;' one only fleetingly glimpsed in Miller's text, whereby the
lure has the potential to exceed both the virtual space of the "structurer" and
the actual space of the structured and thus condenses within it any potential
for transformation, could be assigned to the second of Miller's functions of
miscognition. Such a transtormative lure would, as well as performing its
Imaginary function of reconciling the subject to the structure, also uncomfortably
expose the subject to the structure's outside, and such a function would
102 Post-Rationalism
necessarily grate against the subject's immediate needs and comfort, threatening
its "subsistence;' in Miller's terms.
What remains untheorized by Miller, and what is present in the early
Badiou despite his aversion to the importation of psychoanalysis into the
philosophy of logic, is the category of the "mark;' or the signifier in its
material, isolated dimension, as it subsists beyond sense. If for Badiou, as we
saw above, the self-sufficiency of the "marks" of logical discourse mirror the
more general self-sufficiency of science itself, for Lacan the material signifier
is thoroughly implicated in, if eccentric to, the subject and its placement in
structure. The question that remains open is the extent to which Miller's lure, as
seemingly Imaginary, or "ideological" in Badiou's terms, might nonetheless be
supplemented by a more thoroughgoing materialism of the signifier that could
further explain the subject's subjection to structure, and its tendency to fall for
the lure of misrecognition; as well as, perhaps, its potential to supersede its own
Imaginary constraints. Such a recognition would reqUire, again, a retheorization
of structure as that which is fundamentally unstable, as impure, as, in Milner's
words from the previous chapter, in "vacillation:' In the final section of this
chapter, I will turn to Jacques Derrida's contributions to the Cahiers as a means
of thinking this internal decomposition of the concept of structure.
Derrida and the Cahiers
It is often assumed that Jacques Derrida's work assumed, from the beginning,
a distance from structuralism. Insofar as he has become the primary totem
of so-called post-structuralism, a term that has had much more success in
the United States than in France, Derrida is thought to have rejected outright
the stabilization of the sign prominent in Saussure's revolutionary structural
linguistics, and in the theories in anthropology, history, and philosophy that have
arisen out of the consequences of that revolution. One of the aims of this book,
however, is to argue that "structuralism;' or what I'm calling post-rationalism,
theorized a dynamization of structure, and of the various conceptual and
discursive languages that make up science. Attendant to that dynamization is, as
I've argued, a concern for thinking together both the perpetuation of structures
over time, and the ways in which the conditions for the emergence of structure
are always and simultaneously the potential conditions for their dissolution.
Derrida's early work is, I think, entirely in keeping with this most consequential
aspect of structuralist thought, and it is no coincidence that his "Nature, Culture,
Science, "Suture," and the Signifier 103
Writing: The Violence of the Letter from Rousseau to Levi-Strauss;' collected
in Of Grammatology in 1967, appeared in the fourth edition of the Cahiers;
indeed, Jacques-Alain Miller refers positively to Derrida's reading of Husser! in
his "Suture:'72 Derrida also provided a short but resonant foreword to the same
edition of the journal, actually an excerpt from the more substantial text on
Rousseau and Levi-Strauss, and my reading begins with that shorter foreword.
Among other things, a reading of Derrida's reflections on text and language will
provide a useful supplement to both Miller's orientation of structural analysis
toward the Imaginary "lure" above, and, perhaps more importantly, to Badiou's
association oflogic and science with the "mark;' with the pure signifier abstracted
from sense. Derrida's interventions ask how the logic of textualization, of the
incorporation of the mark within the differential spacing of textuality, affects
any potential stabilization of signifiers in a regime of sense. At the same time,
Derrida's remarks provide an intriguing echo with Macherey's contemporaneous
analysis of the impurity of textuality, as explored in the previous chapter.
Derrida's preface to the fourth iteration of the Cahiers engages the wider
theme of that edition, "Levi-Strauss in the Eighteenth Century:' while proViding
in condensed form some of the most pertinent questions motoring his then -new
philosophy of deconstruction. A text, he argues, can never be provided with a
history or genealogy that fully accounts for its internal contradictions and aporia.
To fully house a text within its historical determinations is to falsely smooth over
the aspects of texts that resist assimilation, the presence of which are, in Miller's
term, "undue"; as Derrida comments, "In its syntax and in its vocabulary, in its
spacing, through its punctuation, its gaps, its margins, the historical belonging of
a text is never a matter of direct descendence:'73 Neither, for Derrida, is a text to be
understood as a "simple accumulation oflayers"74; to designate it as such would
be to assume that each layer, in its progressive temporal sedimentation, could
be accounted for in advance, as something like the predictable actualization of
what Miller, above, describes as a structure's "virtual" aspect. Instead, texts, for
Derrida, are complex "rootings;' albeit rootings that must, as Derrida phrases it,
''give [ ... ] a certain representation of [their] own roots"75; that representation,
moreover, instead of being a second-order illusion or ideological effect that
dissimulates the truth of that which it represents, is in fact primary. As Derrida
puts it, "[Tlhese [the text's roots] only live off this representation, which is to
say on condition that they never touch the ground:' If, as Geoffrey Bennington
has remarked, Derrida's theory of reading puts into question the stabilization
of a text within its context, we must conclude that textuality itself for Derrida,
the writing of texts, performs a similar refusal.
76
In both instances, the multiple
104
lines of (lelenrmlatilon
enclosure within any determinate historical "moment:'
Derridas and it
First, he posits the text as an irreducible complexity, one that nonetheless requires
a "representation" of itself in order that it might cohere. That representation
is, in some sense, more like a presentation, a primary grid through which the
text's irreducibility may be temporarily suspended; to assimilate it, as Derrida
admittedly does in his foreword, to the concept of representation risks obscuring
its primary, even formative character. As Derrida notes, the text's "roots;' its
projections of its own determination in a linear history, are actually a secondary
function of that primary presentation, and are thus, ultimately, illusory, a
concession to the structural necessity of a grounding that, by virtue of the very
character of textuality, is impossible. Note here the reversal of the standard
order of causality: instead of the text being a primary material, sourced in a
particular historical context and determined by the intentions of an author, and
then subsequently subject to representations depending on its various afterlives,
the text here is composed, first and foremost, of an illusory if primary and
constitutive presentation that allows its "roots" a sense of consistency, on the
condition that "they never touch the ground:' In other words, those same "roots"
can never be said to be absolutely grounded in actuality. Only the representation
of a text might suggest such a foundation.
A striking parallel is apparent here between Derridas reorientation of the
relation between a text and its representation and the uses of Lacan's Imaginary
repeated throughout the Cahiers. In Miller's "Action of the Structure" above,
and perhaps especially in Althusser's theory of discourse elaborated in the next
chapter, the Imaginary, as the domain of necessary illusions that stitch the subject
to its enabling structures, is similarly only an apparent second-order illusion; in
fact, it provides the necessary and primary re-presentation that allows a subject
or, in Derridas terms here, a text to appear as legible in a given context. The gaps
and inconsistencies of symbolic structures and texts, instead of being outside or
in contradiction with this Imaginary re-representation, are in fact profoundly
and formatively soldered to it; as Derrida writes in his Cahiers foreword, "The
text's consciousness of itself ( ... J, without collapsing into this genealogy per
se, plays an organizing role, precisely through this gap, in the structure of the
text:'77 The "gap" Derrida refers to are the "punctuations;' "gaps;' and "margins"
proper to texts and given in the quote from him above, and thus there is a
structural liaison, a necessary co-intrication of the text's "consciousness of
itself:' its Imaginary sense, and the reality of its multiple aporia and unbounded
Science} the 05

and textual
as we've seen, the
of the structured with its indeterminable outside is simultaneously a disjoining,
to the extent that the lure points beyond even the "virtual" potentiality of the
structure in question.
Does Derrida's account of the text and its "consciousness of itself" engender
a similar sense of a potential overstepping of the representations consolidating
role? The answer is no doubt yes, albeit in a way distinct from Miller. Derrida's
foreword describes the trajectories of a text as follows: "To say that we only
ever intertwine roots ad infinitum, bending them to take root in roots, to pass
through the same points [ ... J, to circulate between their differences, [ ... J to say
that a text is only ever a system of roots:']g And yet, that infinite circulation is in
contradiction of the very definition of "system" and of the "root" as understood
within the bounds of what Derrida calls the "metaphysics of presence;' the
pervasive metaphysics that assumes that the causative foundations of texts
are delimitable within a finite and concrete time and space. That metaphysical
enclosure is, for Derrida, never finally dissolvable; just like the text's
self-presentation, it is the quasi-transcendental horizon through which all
systems and structures cohere. "System" implies closure, a finite and organized
series of elements that can be counted, and yet, as Derrida also makes clear,
such a notion of delimitation is inadmissible within the actual structure of the
text, an open and undecidable lattice of intertwined roots determined according
to an infinity of potential permutations. Thus, a paradox or aporia emerges,
between the necessary but ultimately illusory metaphysical enclosure that
serves as the text's self-presentation, and the hidden but nonetheless efficacious
materiality of the text, its resistance to self-closure in the multiplication of its
potential trajectories.
How do these two facets of the text, its finite self-presentation and its
potentially infinite indetermination, relate? Martin Hagglund describes
the actuality of the text, its (in)determination through the trace structure
of "differance;' what Derrida will also refer to as "arche-writing:' as follows:
"Arche-writing [ ... J is not only a transcendental condition for the experience
of a finite consciousness; it is an 'ultratranscendental' condition for life in
general:'79 On this reading, the "ultra" transcendality of arche-writing, or what
we're referring to as the text or textuality in its infinite possibility, is the absolute
horizon for life itself, for the existence of anything whatsoever. And yet, as we've
seen above, Derrida also insists on the inextricable and foundational connection
106 Post-Rationalism
least
logic, as per Hagglund, is situated at a transcendentalleveI in of the
text itself, the text becoming as a consequence the temporary sedimentation of
arche-writing's transcendality, Derrida above seems to locate both logics, the
finite and arche-transcendental, within the text itself. And while it could no
doubt be argued that such an insistence is apparent only in this, perhaps more
obviously "structuralist" moment in Derrida's career, such a structure seems
to mark any number of the concepts that arise in the so-called late Derrida.
The structure of the gift, a preoccupation of Derrida in his later years,80 is
defined by its being caught in a similar structural aporia; as Hagglund himself
remarks, "When Derrida analyzes the conditions for a 'pure' gift, he is thus not
promoting purity as an ideal. On the contrary, he demonstrates why the gift
even in its purity must be contaminated and why a pure gift is neither thinkable
nor desirable as such:'81
The order of priority here between the ultratranscendental condition of
contamination and contradiction, and the "purity" or ideal stability of the "gift:'
what we can associate with the text's idealized self-presentation and self-enclosure,
is clearly, for Hagglund, on the side of the former, the arche-transcendental. It
is the "truth" of the gift or text, the impurity of which is a result of their being
caught up in the iterative process of becoming-time and becoming-space. And
yet Derrida insists in his Cahiers foreword that the ideal self-presentation of
the text is primary and formative; the multiple "roots" of the text rely on its
primary, dissimulating coherency. And further, in our reading above, it is the
primary, idealizing self-presentation of the text that is finite, predictable, and
delimitable; what Hagglund calls the "ultra transcendental" condition of the text
as arche-writing is, to the contrary, by definition infinite. As Derrida remarks of
the text's inevitable, at least partial metaphysical enclosure, it is situated in "a finite
configuration-the history of metaphysics-taken from inside a system of roots
that never ends and that still has no end:'82 That system of roots that "never ends"
is precisely the infinite condition of the text veiled by its self-presentation. The
architecture of Hagglund's sweeping interpretation of Derrida, to the contrary,
relies upon the ultratranscendental condition, the truth of the text, as being read
as inducing finitude; as he writes, "Derrida repeatedly argues that difJerance (as
a name for the spacing of time) not only applies to language or experience or
any other delimited region of being. Rather it is an absolutely general condition,
the
that
finitude.
At the very that the order of
between the finite and infinite, np,''vIH'pn
enclosure, is far less obvious or absolute. The ambiguity of that order of priority
is made plain, too, in Derrida's more substantial contribution to the journal
"Nature, Culture, Writing;' itself a more extended version of the excerpt that
makes up the foreword. There, he writes of the "exemplary system of defense"
that metaphysics has erected "against the threat of writing"!l4; against, that is,
the indetermination of what other Cahiers authors call, as we've seen repeatedly,
the "logic of the signifier:' That logic is described elsewhere in the article as an
"obliteration that, paradoxically, constitutes the originary legibility of the thing it
erases"; precisely as "originary;' that logic of obliteration must, assumedly, come
before the "thing" it erases, namely the finite object, text, or, later, gift that is split
by its determination within the transcendental logic of arche-writing.
85
It is the
infinitude of that "ultratranscendentallogic;' moreover, that is effaced in the finite
enclosure of the text's self-presentation-a finite enclosure that is, remember,
necessary, even primary, an illusion but a constitutive one nonetheless; the
numberless "roots" that Derrida figures as the truth of the text, recall, rely upon
the text's finite self-representation.
Nonetheless, the ambiguity proves difficult to resolve: Derrida writes that the
"thing;' the text or object, is erased, suggesting that it preexists, at least on some
temporal or logical level, the (quasi-transcendental) logic of infinitude that
comes to both constitute and obliterate it. The crucial point, I would suggest, is
that the temporal and logical priority between the ultratranscendental condition
of impurity and the self-representation of a text is properly undecidable, a key
property of Derrida's immanent deconstruction of Western metaphysics that
Hagglund's emphasis on absolute finitude risks eclipsing. Both facets of a text,
indeed of any zone of finite existence, are irreducible and interlaced, adopting
different orders of priority depending on the aperture or context through
which one approaches the text or object in question. Hagglund partly gets
around the probJem of the indeterminacy of the finitude or infinitude of the
ultra transcendental condition of texts by writing of "infinite finitude;' an infinity
that nonetheless gives rise to an irreducible finitude. Nonetheless, this fails to
solve the problem of the logical and temporal priority of the two aspects of the
text; ultimately, the very undecidability of that problem is, I think, Derrida's
most valuable contribution to an understanding of textuality per se.
108
reHections on the interaction between the finite and the between the
text's actual indeterminacy and its Imaginary and the other thinkers
discussed in this study so far. Consider, for example, the explicit language
of purity and impurity that Hagglund and Derrida both use in rendering
the paradox of the gift, a paradox equally applicable to the text as discussed
above. That foundational impurity, what at a temporal level we can associate
with a potential infinity of displacements or cuts within the very texture of a
structure or system, is very much at issue in Bachelard's tentative recognition of
the constitutive impurity of scientific objects and their multiple problematics,
discussed in the previous chapter.
That impurity is, rather like Derrida's ultratranscendental field, formative.
Without it, the objects that a science comes to extract from the indeterminate ground
of the empirical could have no purchase, just as those objects are rendered indistinct
without their multiple problematics. Recall, too, Koyre's insistence, also explored in
the previous chapter, that the empirical must be always already amenable, always
already contaminated we might say after Hagglund, with that which will come to
formalize it. No doubt Derrida's deconstructive disassembly of presence goes rather
further than those important post-rationalists, but at least at a formal, logical level,
many of the moves are the same: a recognition of the constitutivity of impurity, an
attention to the cross-pollination of a concept and the object to be conceptualized.
A more marked parity exists, I think, between Miller's concern for the ineluctability
of the Imaginary lure, the structure's self-presentation, and Derrida's concern above
for the self-presentation of the text; both, far from being mere contingencies, form
the keystone of both thinker's differing arguments around structure and form.
Standing in stark opposition to both, of course, is the early Badiou, whose "Mark
and Lack" insists, axiomatically, on the self-sufficiency of logical marks. In the
next chapter, these questions among others will be broached, in part, through
the alternative optic of Althusser's attempts to link the question of ideology with
the questions of discourse, and of the unconscious.
Notes
See A. Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2006)
and A. Badiou, Logics of Worlds, trans. Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum,
2009).
Science, "Suture," the 109
best
of lvIinnesot.a Press, 2003) and E. Pluth, Badiou:
New (Cambridge: Polity,
3 J. -A. Miller, "Suture: Elements of the Logic of the Signifier:' in Peter Hallward
and Knox Peden (ed.), Concept and Form Vol. .1: Selections from the "Cahiers pour
l'Analyse;' trans. Jacqueline Rose (New York: Verso, 2012) [1966]: 92; originally
published in French in Cahiers pour l'Analyse 1, Paris, 1966, available online:
http://cahiers.kingston.ac. uk/volO 11 cpal.3.miller.htmL
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid., 93.
7 Ibid., 92.
8 A. Badiou, "Mark and Lack: On Zero;' in Hallward and Peden, Concept and Form
Vol. 1: Selections from the "Cahiers pour l'Ana/yse," 160; originally published in
French as "Marque et manque: a propos zero;' in Cahiers pour l'Analyse 10, Paris,
1969.
9 See, in particular, Althusser's "On the Materialist Dialectic;' in For Marx (London:
Verso, 2005) [1965J: 161-219.
10 Badiou, "Mark and Lack;' 159.
11 Ibid., 160.
12 "Whoever renounces antagonism and thinks in the element of indifferent
affirmative multiplicity has the need sooner or later to kneel down, under the cover
of the cult of the Self, before the real political powers, before the separate unity of
the State. This is why Deleuze and Guattari are pre-fascist ideologues:' See
A. Badiou, "Le fascisme de la pomme de terre:' in La Situation actuelle sur le front
de la philosophie (Paris: Franyois Maspero, 1977); translation taken from A. Badiou,
"The Fascism of the Potato:' in A. Badiou (ed.), The Adventure of French Philosophy,
trans. Bruno Bosteels (New York: Verso, 2012): 201.
13 See L. Althusser, Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of Scientists and Other
Essays, ed. Gregory Elliott (New York: Verso, 1997); L. Althusser, "Three Notes on
the Theory of Discourses;' in Franyois Matheron (ed.), The Humanist Controversy
and Other Writings, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (New York: Verso, 2003): 33-85.
14 Badiou, "Mark and Lack;' 16l.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid., 165.
20 Ibid., 162.
110 Post-Rationalism
21 Ibid.
22 See, in particular, Lacan's discussion of foreclosure in his third seminar. J. Lacan,
The Seminar of Jacques Lawn Book III: The Psychoses 1955-1956, ed. Jacques-Alain
Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: w.w. Norton, 1993): 321-4 ff.
23 Badiou, "Mark and Lack;' 172.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid., 165.
26 Ibid.
27 J. Lacan, Seminar IX: Identification, lesson of December 6, 1961, unpublished
translation by Cormac Gallagher.
28 J. Lacan, Seminar IX: Identification, lesson of May 9, 62.
29 I develop the logic ofthe "signifier-in-isolation" and the "signifier-in-relation" in
my Lacan and the Concept of the "Real" (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
30 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book III: The Psychoses, 33.
31 Eyers, Lacan and the Concept of the "Real."
32 E. Laclau and C. Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical
Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985).
33 A. Badiou, Number and Numbers, trans. Robin Mackay (Cambridge: Polity Press,
2008): 28.
34 A. Badiou, "Infinitesimal Subversion;' in Hallward and Peden, Concept and Form
Vol. 1: Selections from the "Cahiers pour l'Analyse," 187-207; originally published
in French as "La Subversion infinitesimale;' in Cahiers pour l'Analyse 9, Paris, 1968,
available online: http://cahiers.kingston.ac.uklvoI09/cpa9.8.badiou.htmL I have
benefited in writing this account of Badiou's article from the synopsis proVided by
the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University,
available online: http://cahiers.kingston.ac.ukIsynopses/syn9.8.html.
35 Badiou, "Infinitesimal Subversion;' 206.
36 Ibid.
37 This is no doubt a rather conventional reading of Hegel, but it forms one of the
philosophical consensuses that French thought of the post-war years sought to
contest. Recent years have seen the publication of a series of texts that, in different
ways, challenge the standard reading, and in particular the imputation of an
ineluctable teleology to Hegel's philosophy. See. for instance, C. Malabou, The
Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic, trans. Lisabeth During
(New York: Routledge, 2004); F. Ruda, Hegel's Rabble (London: Continuum, 2011);
S. Zizek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism
(New York: Verso, 2012).
38 Badiou, "Infinitesimal Subversion;' 206.
Science, "Suture," and the Signifier 111
39 A readable account of the philosophical implications of Cantor's set theory, and in
particular the different ways in which infinity was defined mathematically prior
to Cantor's revolution, can be found in M. Tiles, The Philosophy of Set Theory: An
Historical Introduction to Cantors Paradise (Mineola: Dover Publications, 2004;
2nd edn).
40 Badiou, "Infinitesimal Subversion;' 187.
41 Ibid.
42 Ibid.
43 Ibid., 188.
44 Ibid.
45 Ibid.
46 Badiou, "Mark and Lack;' 170.
47 J-A. Miller, "Action of the Structure; in Hallward and Peden, Concept and Form
Vol. 1: Selections from the "Cahiers pour l'Analyse," 69-83; originally published
in French as "Action de la Structure;' in Cahiers pour l'Analyse 10, Paris, 1969,
available online: http://cahiers.kingston.ac.uklvoI09/ cpa9 .6.miller.html.
48 Ibid., 71.
49 Ibid.
50 J. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York:
w.w. Norton, 1998): 53-67.
51 Ibid., 221.
52 Miller, ~ c t i o n of the Structure;' 72.
53 Ibid., 73.
54 Ibid.
55 Ibid.
56 Ibid.
57 Ibid.
58 Ibid., 74.
59 Ibid.
60 Ibid., 73.
61 Paul M. Livingston provides an admirably succinct account of Miller's arguments
in ~ c t i o n of the Structure" in his important book The Politics of Logic: "[Flor
Miller, it is the reflexive element itself-which we may identify with the subject, or
anything which reflects the totality of structure into itself-that comes to 'support'
the total effects of structure, and any action of which it is capable, by 'disappearing'
or manifesting itself as a generative absence or lack:' P. M. Livingston, The
Politics of Logic: Badiou, Wittgenstein and the Consequences of Formalism (New
Post-Rationalism
of the Structure" seems to point toward a logic at least partially distinct from the
logic of the constitutive exception developed in "Suture;' gesturing instead toward
the specific function of the Imaginary in articulating the subject (as reflexive
element) to its corresponding structure and, at least in fascinating if fleeting
moments in Miller's text, to the transcendence of that articulating function.
62 Badiou, "Mark and Lack;' 171.
63 Althusser's ideas were eventually published as "Ideology and Ideological State
Apparatuses" [1970j. See 1. Althusser, On Ideology (New York: Verso, 2008): 1-14l.
64 Miller, ~ c t i o n of the Structure;' 74. (Translation modified).
65 See G. Deleuze, "How Do We Recognize Structuralism?" in "Desert Islands" and
Other Texts, 1953-1974 (Los Angeles: Semiotext( e), 2004): 170-93.
66 1. Althusser, "Lenin and Philosophy:' in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001): 123.
67 Miller, "Action of the Structure;' 75.
68 This double function of the Imaginary, as being both enabling and disabling
for the subject, offering a chimera of fullness, is replicated in many of Lacan's
pronouncements on the nature of the Symbolic and of the signifier; see my Lacan
and the Concept of the "Real." Martin Hagglund's critique of Ernesto Laclau in
his justifiably influential Radical Atheism rests, albeit distantly, on a reduction
of the function of the Imaginary and the Symbolic to only their reparative roles,
and the subsequent claim that Ladau falls into contradiction by recognizing, on
the one hand, the necessity, in political hegemony, of a sense of "fullness;' and
on the other hand, the ineluctability of lack. Hagglund writes: "1he structural
contradiction in Laclau's theory should now be apparent. On the one hand, he
maintains that political engagement requires a radical investment that identifies the
object of engagement with the idea of fullness. On the other hand, the democratic
society that Laclau advocates actually precludes such a radical investment:' See
M. Hagglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2008): 200. There is no such contradiction if one accounts for
the complexity of Lacan's theories of the Imaginary and the Symbolic that Laclau's
political theory relies upon; instead, it is the very coincidence of the necessity and
impossibility of fullness that generates, for both Lacan and Laclau, the sustenance
of the desire for self-completion, scaled up to include society's sense of itself in
Ladau's interpolation of Lacanian theory. That this so obviously resembles Derrida's
own repeated insistence on the inevitability of the conjunction of necessity and
Science, the 113
the
69 J. Lacan, Seminar Unconscious, lesson of December 11, 1957,
unpublished translation by Cormac Gallagher; translation available online:
WI'.'W.lacaninireland.com/webh"p-contentl uploads/20 1 0/061 Book-05-
the-formations-of-the-unconscious.pdf.
70 Miller, "Action of the Structure:' 75.
71 Ibid.
72 Miller, "Suture;' 92.
73 J. Derrida, "Foreword;' in Cahiers pour l'Analyse 4, 1966, available in French online:
http://cahiers.kingston.ac. ukivol04! cpa4. introduction.html; English translation
in Hallward and Peden, Concept and Form Vol. 1: Selections from the Cahiers pour
l'Analyse, 60.
74 Ibid.
75 Ibid.
76 "[TJhis point is also just what the famous argument about context is establishing
in 'Signature, Event, Context' and 'Limited Inc: If I can caricature a little and say
that the historian will always want to put it back into its context (the tiger is out
of the cage, the historian always wants to put it back inside), then Derrida will
always be urging the question: 'How did it escape in the first place?' And the best
proof that it did escape seems to be the irreducible (and somewhat mad) fact of
reading:' G. Bennington, "Derrida's 'Eighteenth in Not Half No End:
Militantly Melancholic Essays in Memory of Jacques Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2011): 108-9. Bennington's essay is a good short introduction to
the stakes of Derrida's career-long concern for eighteenth-century philosophy and
literature.
77 Derrida, "Foreword;' 60.
78 Ibid.
79 Hagglund, Radical Atheism, 73.
80 See, most pertinently, J. Derrida, Given Time: i. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy
Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
81 Hagglund, Radical Atheism, 37.
82 Derrida, "Foreword;' 60.
83 Ibid., 3.
84 J. Derrida, Of Grammat%gy, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1976): 101. The French version of the Cahiers article, later
collected in OfGrammatology, is available online: http://cahiers.kingston.ac.uk/
vol041 cpa4.1.derrida.html.
Post -Rationalism
that found in Lacanian-account
Recall how Miller sets up the nonidentical as the obscure condition of the
self-identical procession of signifiers, As I noted in Chapter 1, Lacan's own concern
was for the extension of nonidentity beyond the domain of the subject, such that
it infects, renders impure, the domain of the signifier itself, the very move that
Badiou insists, in his "Mark and Lack;' is inadmissible within the domain oflogic.
Andrea Hurst makes important strides in analyzing the similarities and differences
between Lacan and Derrida's theories of language in her Derrida vis Ii vis Lacan:
Interweaving Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2008).
4
Discourse and Ideology in Post-Rationalist
Thought: Althusser) Badiou, Lacan, Milner
If it was often the problem of the subject in its disjunctive relation to structure
that motivated much of the theoretical work of the Cahiers, it is important to
recognize that, underlying this question and to some degree exceeding it, is
the more general problem of language and "discourse" and how they relate to
both the question of the subject, and the question of scientific knowledge. As
we've seen, Miller and Badiou are both, in different ways, concerned with the
relative admissibility of the "logic of the Signifier" in processes of formalization,
and of importance to Miller too is the ways in which a concept of the subject
might be incorporated into a broadly structural understanding of signification
and its local instantiations. And as we saw in Chapter 2, Bachelard, Lacan, and
Macherey articulate, in strikingly different ways, the constitutive impurity of
processes of formalization and of the transformation oflanguage into the formal
domain of the literary.
In this chapter, I'll analyze texts by Althusser, unpublished in his lifetime,
that show him grappling with the question of the link between the concept of
the subject and of language, incorporated into the (productively?) ambiguous
concept of "discourse;' and related to his career-long project of reinventing the
Marxist concept of ideology. As a means of framing my discussion of Althusser,
I'll begin with a reading of Bad iou's 1967 review of the former's For Marx, a review
essay that has yet to be given sufficient weight and import. Attendant to both
these readings will be an attempt to understand how one of the most important
of the Cahiers authors Jean-Claude Milner offered his own reflections in order to
bridge the seeming chasm between the "lOgiC of the signifier," the philosophical
116 Post-Rationalism
notion of the subject, and the ambivalent statuses of both ideology and science
as they interact with both. Milner, as we'll see, inserted the formal questions that
define post-rationalism into the terms of the canonical Western philosophical
tradition, and in particular within the terms of Plato's metaphysics. Intervening
between my discussion of Althusser and Milner is a reading of Lacan's "Science
and Truth:' a text published in the very first edition of the Cahiers that offers
some useful clarification of the multiple theoretical problems at stake.
As I've already established, Althusser's thinking was central to the Cahiers
project, even if much of the innovation in the journal is marked by its attempt to
supersede the early Althusser's characterization of the subject as a mere effect of
ideology, and of science as definitively outside the bounds of the empirical and
the ideological. At this stage in the book, it is important to underline once more
the ways in which Althusser himself came to grapple with the problems that his
young students were similarly occupied with, as a means of framing those other
responses within the terms of their antecedents, and of firmly reconnecting the
general problematic of French post-rationalism to the specific political debate
around the interruptions of history, class, and ideology that concerned so many
in post-war France.
l
Much debate in Continental philosophy has centered on the
relative inability of "structuralism;' broadly and often simplistically conceived,
to incorporate an adequate account of dynamism and change, and if one of
the tasks of this book is to highlight the ways in which certain of the younger
thinkers of the period were concerned precisely with the integration of ideas
of instability and interruption in structural thought, so it may be useful to ask
whether Althusser's Marxism, predicated as it is on a seemingly "functionalist"
interpretation of the role of ideology, can itself bear the weight of those ideas.
Recent work has usefully challenged a number of canards about the supposed
insufficiencies of structural/formalistic thinking on the question of change.
I'm thinking in particular of Paul Livingston's important The Politics of Logic, a
work I will return to, and my hope is that the reading of Althusser, Milner, and
others here will contribute to such a reassessment. If, for Livingston and others,
the crucial variable of change to be identified within the thinking of structure
falls upon the logical incompletion of all totalities, an incompletion that we've
already remarked upon in previous chapters with reference to the subject as
the constitutive exception to structure, then it might be of use to consider the
alternative ways in which post-rationalist thought struggled with the problem of
change, and perhaps especially within the terms of the materialist rethinking of
signification and discourse undertaken by Milner, Miller, and Althusser himself.
How might the constitutive exclusion of the subject from structure be duplicated
level
how
To I'd like to
question oflanguage, science, and the
of Althusser from 1967.
Althusser's own
through Badiou's
Badiou on Althusser on science
around the
reading
In 1967, Alain Badiou published a long and detailed review ofLouis Althusser's
for lVfarx and his collaborative work Reading Capital. After celebrating Althusser's
excoriation of humanist Marxism and his insistence on the importance of the break
between the "early" and "late" Marx, Badiou opts to "play" with the theoretical
concepts that Althusser adumbrated to refine his break with humanism, using
the Marxist philosopher's ideas so as to "investigate if this work obeys the rules
whose operation it isolates as the law of the construction of its objects:'2 To do
so is to underline the lacunae of Althusser's texts, to "introduce into the text the
problems whose absence it indicates:'3 Badiou's aim, then, is to employ the very
same method of reading that Althusser himself, in collaboration with Balibar et
al., outlined as "symptomatic" in Reading Capital,4 a reading that might serve to
bring to light constitutive gaps and absences, the better to unveil the ideological
situation of the text at hand.
In an intriguing moment of connection that nicely demonstrates one of the
central claims of this book-the importance of the dialogue between rationalist
philosophy of science and French "structuralisrn"-Badiou marshals Bachelard
to justify his own practice of theoretical intervention. Badiou quotes the former
to the effect that "rationalism is a philosophy that has no commencement;
rationalism is of the order of the recommencement"5; rationalism, that is to say,
or post-rationalism as I have styled the specificity of Bachelard's return to and
reinvention of rationalist philosophy, is a recommencement in its repetition of
the blind spots, the constitutive aporia, of previous philosophical moments, and
perhaps especially those of rationalism itself. More than this, and as we saw in
previous chapters, Bachelard's rationalism insists that epistemology proper never
"begins"; rather, it is a perpetual recommencement of the dialectic between the
impurity of the objects of scientific inquiry and the process of their conceptual
refinement.
In a further repetition of Bachelardian conceptuality, albeit this time
uncommented upon, Badiou emphasizes the impurity of the distinction in
118 Post-Rationalism
Althusser between Dialectical Materialism and Historical Materialism, an
impurity that becomes more marked as Badiou's argument progresses. If, for
reasons of analytical expediency, we should understand Dialectical Materialism
as the theory of science as such, as the domain of the production of concepts,
Historical Materialism can be said to provide a more local theory of historical
transformations. Nonetheless, for Althusser via Badiou, the distinction is
immanent to Dialectical Materialism itself; to assume otherwise, to render
Historical Materialism autonomous or primary, would be to disbar the
conceptual autonomy of the objects of Marxist science, and to submit them to
the idealist temptations of a mystifying historicism. Marxist science, that is to
say, must ensure its critical purchase, its capacity to break with ideology, and
to do so it must break with the doxa of the historical period within which it is
situated, even if it subsequently comes to construct a theory of that historical
conjuncture. Dialectical Materialism cannot, then, risk being subsumed within
any historical period or set oflocal discourses.
Just as we saw with Bachelard's vacillations over the purity/impurity of
objective and subjective domains in science, however, Badiou too emphasizes
the theoretical stakes of the ambiguous interpenetration of different aspects or
levels of Marxist theory. If one begins with the specificity of the objects that
Historical Materialism works with and upon-modes of production, social
formations, and so on-one is nonetheless implicitly bound to a discussion
of the "scientificity" of such concepts, the more general position of (scientific)
enunciation by which such local concepts gain their theoretical validity. Such a
position precisely defines the labor of Dialectical Materialism for Althusser via
Badiou, insofar as it clarifies the scientific stakes of Marxist theoretical practice
tout court. As Badiou writes,
[I]n conformity with what we would have to call the paradox of the double
break, DM [Dialectical Materialism] depends on HM [Historical Materialism],
in a theoretical dependency that is still obscure: not only because DM naturally
cannot produce the concept of "new forms of rationality" except by considering
some existing sciences in which, in an enigmatic expression from Althusser,
these forms exist "in a practical state"; but more importantly because, as opposed
to idealist epistemologies, DM is a historical theory of science. DM is the "theory
of science and of the history of science:'6
Thus, Historical Materialism must be understood as the local science of history
that is always already encompassed within the broader terms of the theory of
science and its history. The theory of science is, on this reading, primary in relation
19
sciences that rise to the break of Dialectical Materialism the first
Dialectical Materialism concerns itself with the historical, but is not
itself absolutely determined by its historical position; it emerges from within
history, but nonetheless comes to obtain critical purchase on that history from
a distance.
By the same token, Dialectical Materialism, even as the theory of science
that renders concepts appropriate to their local application in the science of
history, cannot be understood as isolated from that field of application. To the
contrary, it must rely to some extent upon its own historical determination,
as well as other local sciences, in order to build the concepts that enable its
scientificity, that enable its very break from its historical situation. Thus,
there is a kind of contamination of Dialectical Materialism with its historical
application, even if that contamination is enabling, rather than disabling of
scientific knowledge. As Badiou himself puts it, the recognition of impurity, of
the implication of all conceptuality on that which it conceptualizes, "renders
vain all symmetry"7 in much the same way that Bachelard, as we've seen,
insists on the asymmetry of the relation between scientific conceptuality and
its object. Crucial to both Bachelard's epistemology and Althusser's theory of
science, then, is the recognition that science is at least partially reliant on its
raw materials, on the history that science itself will take as its object. Even
if science must ultimately mark a rupture with prevailing ways of thinking,
those currents can never be entirely drained from the scientific knowledge
that results; to insist otherwise is to leave materialism behind in favor of the
more comforting climes of idealism. The difficulty that Badiou identifies,
and that Althusser arguably never quite comes to terms with, is the fine
balance between the necessarily distinct knowledge that science produces,
and its necessary connection, even reliance upon, the raw materials that it
conceptualizes.
Crucially for our argument here, Badiou identifies within Althusser's writings
a division between the question of the "presentation" of scientific knowledge
and the practice of science itself. If, as I'll show below, Badiou shares some of
Bachelard's skepticism as to the finality of the science/ideology distinction,
he is more certain of the distinction found in Althusser between "the order of
combination of the concepts in the system and their order of presentation -linkage
in the scientific discursivity:,g a division that bears a distant affinity with the
Anglophone distinction between the context of scientific "discovery" and its
Badiou's own ""'''>Lv'''V for
a of science uncontaminated saw
Badiou defines his own account of philosophy and science, at least at
this stage in his thinking, in distinction to the post-Lacanian project of Miller,
whereby the particular machinations of scientific logic are secondary to the
broader problematic of the subject and its suture. In the reading of Althusser's
posthumously published "Notes on the Theory of Discourses" that will follow
below, we'll see how Althusser's own hesitant formulations begin to challenge any
absolute separation between science and signification, in advance of his famous
"self-criticism" of 1973.10 If that later moment of self-reflection is defined, in
part, by an auto-critique of the severity of the distinction between philosophy
and science on the one hand, and ideology and science on the other, we might
locate the beginnings of such a questioning in Althusser's earlier reflections on
discourse.
For Badiou, nonetheless, "science is the practice that produces forms of
knowledge, whose means of production are concepts; whereas ideology is a
system of representations, whose function is practico-social and which designates
itself in a set of notions:'ll At this level of the argument, a fairly stark distinction
between science and ideology obtains, at least insofar as both are manifest
differently in discourse. The distinction is maintained by the representative, and
thus passive, function of ideology, expressed in "notions:' in its opposition to
the productive conceptuality of scientific knowledge. And yet, Badiou is quick
to put this opposition in question, and it is via an analysis of the type or quality
of discourse that science and ideology are defined by and through that such a
problematization can occur.
As Badiou writes, "Science is indeed a demonstrative discourse that is
related, as far as the order of succession of the concepts is concerned, to a
systematic combination that hierarchizes them 'vertically':'12 On this reading,
what characterizes a scientific discourse, as opposed to what Badiou calls
the ideological "effect of recognition, and not of knowledge:'13 is its powers of
demonstration, its ability to lift an object from its ideological milieu and to
subject it to theoretic labor. What results is "an object that is essentially different
from the given object, and different even from the real object:'14 Ideological
recognition is here allied with Lacan's notion of the misrecognition proper to the
Imaginary, where the ego is installed as a product of alienation in the image of
the other; what, at the level of the subject, can be compared to re-presentation,
Post-Rationalist
did much to detail what he
considered the necessary of the the
"immanent in the One encounters here a lineage extending from
back through Bachelard, and coming to rest with Spinoza, whose distinction
between adequate and inadequate ideas forms the ambient material from which
the mystificatory if determinant power of Imaginary ideas in Bachelard, Lacan,
Althusser, and Badiou is at least partially constructed.
16
Science, by contrast, presents what it produces without unnecessary mediation,
avoiding the specular reproduction of what, on the surface, exists and persists
ideologically. It is important to note the distinction Badiou makes here between
the "given" object, which is to say the object as represented in ideology, the "real"
object, the object in its raw determination outside discourse (insofar as such
a thing is at all accessible), and the scientific object. As we saw in our reading
of Bachelard, there is no clear or easy way to absolutely separate the objects of
ideology, of science, and of the real, especially given the thoroughgoing rejection
of empiricism that conditions post-rationalism. If an empiricist reading would
emphasize the progressive narrowing of the gap between the scientific object and
the real object, such a process of adequation is not available to post-rationalism;
instead, the post-rationalist account of scientific knowledge, for all its internal
heterogeneity, emphasizes the constructability of the objects of science, a
constructability that renders oblique the precise borders between conceptuality
and its outside.
Badiou is quick to offer his own account of the complex interpenetration of
science and ideology: "[TJhe opposition science/ideology is not distributive:'
Badiou writes; "It does not allow us immediately to classify the different
practices and discourses, even less to valorize them abstractly as science
'against' ideologY:'17 Such a reduction, Badiou argues, would be akin to the
theological game where good and evil are endlessly pitched against each other,
defining each other mutually in a nonsublatable, potentially endless dialectic. IS
Instead, science is always the science afideology, is always the process by which
knowledge is produced of an object "of which a determinate ideology indicates
the existence:'19 Science, on this reading, is constrained in its choice of objects by
the ordering processes of ideology, the processes by which subjects and objects
are arranged in a determinate situation. The end result of scientific labor may
be, as Badiou claims, an object that is distinct from both the ideological and
real object, but the initial selection and subsequent labor upon an object must be
122
for
to outside of bounds, It is worth here the rather
subtle account of the interaction of science and than is in
Badiou's "Mark and Lack;' analyzed in the previous chapter; if in that essay,
Badiou forcefully cleaves science from ideology, with the fonner defined by its
self-sufficiency, here science works upon ideology, progressively distancing itself
from ideology from a position inside the very texture of the latter.
Despite this crucial insight, Badiou goes on to emphasize that, even given
the instability of the Science/ideology opposition, the ideological context from
which scientific production draws its initial material "cannot be the negative
of the production of an object of knowledge:'20 1he scientific, that is to say, is
not the mere negative reflection of the ideological. If it were, it would simply
be the negative projection of the specular logic of misrecognition, defined by
Irigaray, as we've seen, as restrictively dyadic, caught up in the warp and weft of
its closed movements, of what Badiou describes as its "process of repetition:'21
More than this however, the scientific cannot be understood as finally and
absolutely banishing the ideological, for this would misrecognize the properly
constitutive condition of ideology, its irreducibility. As Badiou phrases it,
[ I] deology is an irreducible instance of social formations, which science will not
be able to dissolve:'22 Althusser's insistence on this point was a matter of serious
controversy in Communist circles in France and elsewhere, not least because
to understand ideology in such a way is to concede that a future Communist
society would remain, in some way, ideologically determined.
Something difterent in kind, nonetheless, is produced upon the transformation
of determinate ideological material into the conceptual objects of scientific
knowledge. It is telling that Badiou characterizes the ideological at this stage in
his argument as "a practico-social Junction that orders a subject to 'keep to its
place7'23 Here, as in "Mark and Lack" published the following year, Badiou holds
to the idea that the subject, as such, is a category of ideology, its passive, chimeric
product.
24
In the next section, I'll provide a reading ofAlthusser's own "Notes on
the Theory of Discourses;' written roughly at the same time as Badiou's review,
to demonstrate the potential for a more nuanced understanding of the subject
in its problematic relation to discourse, science, and the domain of ideology. In
contrast to Badiou, Althusser will be shown to direct a serious and sustained focus
upon the signifiers that make up all discourse, whether scientific, ideological, or
unconscious, without necessarily providing an adequate account of how the use
of the signifier by each domain differs in quality or kind.
Discourse and Ideology in Post-Rationalist Thought 123
Althusser, science, discourse
In a postscript to the English translation of his Language, Semantics and
Ideology, written in 1979, Michel Pecheux outlines what he considers to be
the fundamental philosophical aporia that led to the self-criticism conducted
by Althusser and some of his followers in the 1970s. Quoting his earlier
French text now translated, Pecheux writes: "The subject-form of discourse,
in which interpellation, identification and the production of meaning coexist
indissociably, realizes the non-sense of the production of the subject as cause of
himself in the form of immediate evidentness:'25 Such a formulation, Pecheux
suggests in the later appendix, manifests a "limit point in Marxist reflection
that, ideology interpellating individuals as 'subjects', we run into the impossible
fact of a 'subject-form' in History as a 'process without subject or goal(s)7'26
How, in other words, to account for the tacit theoretical wish to hold onto a
"subject -form" that is, at least in some ways, resistant to or transformative of the
processes that constitute it?
Pecheux's question is one of the central problems that animated the Cahiers
authors, and it was crucial too to Althusser's theoretical development in the
1960s. Although it has often been assumed that Althusser's description of
history as a process without subject or goal definitively foreclosed the question
of the subject, notes written by Althusser immediately following the publication
of his "For Marx" suggest that, at the very least, the question of the subject,
or subjects, remained a problem, something to be worked upon. "Notes on
the Theory of Discourses" is thought to have been intended to form the
beginning of another large collaborative work with the projected title Elements
of Dialectical Materialism, something that Althusser himself referred to, with
characteristic modesty, as comparable in its scope to Spinozas Ethics. The
intended collaborators, significantly including members of the editorial board
of the Cahiers, were Badiou, Yves Duroux, Etienne Balibar, and Pierre Macherey.
The text by Althusser that survives is organized as a series of summary notes
that anticipate in nascent form many of the themes that Althusser would pursue
in the 1970s, in particular within those texts that were destined to form another
unfinished manuscript, Sur la reproduction, the most famous extract of which is
Althusser's "Ideology or Ideological State Apparatuses."27
Acting as the conceptual background to Althusser's reflections on discourse
is the distinction between ideological discourse as such, and unconscious
discourse, and the question of their articulation. Beginning with a general
reflection on the state of psychoanalytic theory, taken to be a privileged discourse
124 Post-Rationalism
the
but that nonetheless acts in the service of "the realization of this
Psychoanalysis, in other words, is constituted as a set of systematic
concepts with a regional application and a consistent theoretical object (the
unconscious), but it lacks a unifying "general theory" that might, once and for
all, render psychoanalysis a positively defined science with a clear purpose and
distinction from ideological mystification. Althusser, it can be presumed, has in
mind the very distinction, as cloudy as we ultimately showed it to be, between
Dialectical Materialism and Historical Materialism discussed above. Dialectical
Materialism, recall, operates as the "general theory" to the "regional theory" of
Historical Materialism.
For Althusser, every new science begins from such a limited or regional
position. With a science's irruption, it forms itself as a local intervention in
knowledge that "strives to 'achieve closure', but fails to; or, to put it in other
terms, it tries to define its own object differentially (in contradistinction to other
theoretical objects: in the present case, those of biology, psychology, sociology,
etc.) but fails to:'29 Such a failure is testament to the "de facto absence of a general
theory, the eXistence of which is nevertheless called for, de jure, in order to found
these attempts:'30 The foundation of a science, that is to say, is predicated on the
risks it takes in trying to establish the objects of its inquiry without the conceptual
security of a general, unifying theory. The result is that psychoanalysis, while
undoubtedly a science with a delimited object and relatively systematic set of
concepts with which to constitute and understand it, is unable to legislate, at a
"meta" level, its own scientificity, and thus to close the gap between the practice of
analysis, and its broader claims as a science of the psyche. Althusser's comments
echo, of course, with Badiou's review as discussed above, where Dialectical
Materialism, despite its striving to break with its context, must nonetheless
initially draw upon the raw resources of its contextual situation. Althusser's own
science, as a consequence, may not be impervious to such a gap between the
global production of its concepts and their regional application.
In Althusser's account, it is through a process of differential, relational
constitution that concepts proper to science are brought into being. Such a
process is also that which, ultimately, allows a general theory to emerge out of
the regional arrangement of knowledge. In Badiou's terms above, a science is
arranged as both a "demonstrative discourse" with a regional set of objects and
applications, and a "vertically arranged" discourse that serves to "hierarchize"
J1SCOUT.Se and h1e,]imrv in Post- Rationalist
the The
orders or directs the armature of such that purpose
of scientific labor is clarified and defined without any recourse to the
of the "real" object, contaminated as it inevitably is by ideology. Even
as the raw concepts of the regional theory have their origins in the field of the
empirical, the measure of scientificity, as we saw in Chapter 2 with Bachelard, is
the extent to which the constructed object of scientific inquiry is distinct from
its real origin. Or, as Althusser puts it, "Every theory [ ... J goes beyond the real
object that constitutes the 'point of departure for the historical constitution of
the theory [ ... J and produces its own theoretical object as well as knowledge of
it:'32 The object produced as a result is examined as having possible effects that
exceed its "real" or empirical manifestation in any given situation, with the result
that knowledge is gained of "the possible effects of this object in its real forms of
existence:'33 Just as a science's regional theory can be guided and impacted by an
assumed general theory that is not yet existent, so the "real" object is subject to
the field of possibilities that only the construction of a theoretical object allows
us any knowledge of. Within the terms adopted by Miller in his "Action of the
Structure" and as analyzed in the previous chapter, the raw object of scientific
labor is retrospectively redetermined by science in its virtual possibility; all of its
potential manifestations and trajectories are mapped "after the fact" by science's
intervention.
Here, the relationship between the empirical and conceptual "aspect" of the
object of scientific inquiry that was so crucial to our reading of Bachelard in
Chapter 2 is rejoined, albeit with some important differences. First, Althusser,
unlike Bachelard, seems to hold to the possibility of a theoretical object existing
without the constraints or "burden" of the empirical, even if that object derives
from and gives knowledge of the objects of the latter. Badiou above, we might say,
provides something of a mediation between the positions adopted by Bachelard
and Althusser; if, for Bachelard, the theoretical object of science is always a work in
progress, a composite of empirical and conceptual components to be perpetually
"unburdened;' for Althusser, a science can only truly be considered scientific
upon the proper delimitation of its theoretical object from its "real" source,
and the subsequent mapping of that former object in its virtual possibilities.
Badiou, ranged somewhere in the middle, emphasizes the irreducibility of
ideology even as the theoretical object of science cannot be considered the mere
positive reflection of the negativity of the empirical; even as, that is to say, there
is a positive existence to be granted to theoretical objects, over and above their
126 Post-Rationalism
lost in his a Mark and a year after his review
Althusser, a loss motivated his desire to undermine Miller's expansion
of the "logic of the signifier" to include science and mathematicallogk. In any
case, just as for Badiou, Althusser's reflections on science at this stage of his
teaching come to revolve around the problem of discourse, though in Althusser's
case such reflections also involve a sustained attention to the scientific character
of psychoanalysis and its object, the unconscious, and it's to those important
elements of the text that I'll now turn.
Discourse and the unconscious
Althusser proposes the problem of language and its structural arrangement in
discourse as key to an understanding of the unconscious as psychoanalysis, after
Lacan, conceives it. Just as in the theory of structural causality outlined in his
For Marx and Reading Capital, the unconscious, for Althusser and with qualified
fidelity to Spinoza, exists only through its effects. In terms familiar to readers of
Althusser's canonical works, the unconscious is described as a "manifestation"
that is "not that of an essence whose effects are its phenomena:'34 Such an
understanding, a (pseudo)-Hegelianism whereby existence expresses a prior
essence or spirit, should be rejected in favor of a reading of the unconscious as
"a theoretical object which allows us to think the formations of the unconscious,
that is, systems functioning in accordance with mechanisms producing effects:'35
Althusser's formulation here is ambiguous; how, for example, are we to think a
theoretical object that allows a subsequent understanding of "formations" that
belong to it, without lapsing into circularity? Won't we remain caught in the
circle of the concept, and isn't the apparent lack of an outside to conceptuality a
manifestation of idealism? Althusser fails to give a clear answer to this, although
his subsequent specification of the type of causal structure that the unconscious
embodies sheds some light on his intentions.
The unconscious for Althusser is a "structure whose elements are signifiers;'36
a clarification that allows the specification of the "general" and "regional" theory
proper to psychoanalysis to come into view. Insofar as the unconscious operates
as a structure composed of signifiers, the "general theory" that one might
assume would explicate the regional formations of the unconscious is the logic
Discourse and Ideology in Post-Rationalist Thought 127
of the signifier, broadly the Symbolic as Lacan understands it. Quickly however,
Althusser signals the problem with such a position, emphasizing that the signifier,
in its very generality, is determinant of a host of different discourses, including
ideology and art. How might the signifier be understood as the determinant
element or structure of the unconscious, if it is also determinant of disparate
other discourses? The answer lies in understanding the "subject-effect" that each
discourse produces, so as to uncover what is specific about the unconscious
in its arrangement of signifiers. "Every discourse;' that is to say, "has,. as its
necessary correlate, a subject, which is one of the effects, if not the major effect,
of its functioning:'37 Crucially, it is in the relationship between the discourse
in question and the subject it produces that, for Althusser, each discourse can
be distinguished; such a relationship is, necessarily, a question of how each
discourse uses signifiers as its constituent elements in order to produce and
sustain a relationship with its subject.
In his laying out of the different ways that discourse relates to its resultant
subjects, Althusser's arguments both coincide with and depart from that of his
students writing in the Cahiers. First, the "ideological subject" for Althusser-the
subject that sustains and is part of the constitutive presentation of any complex
social totality-is described as "present in person;' to be contrasted to the subject
of scientific discourse who is "absent in person:'38 The presence or absence in
question seems to be conditioned by the presence or absence of a signifier or set
of signifiers to stand in for the subject; as Althusser has it, the ideological subject
"is itself a determinate signifier of this discourse;' whereas the subject of science
is absent by virtue of the fact that "there is no signifier designating it:'39 Althusser
leaves unclear how t ~ ideological subject can be both the product of and
determinative of ideology, seeing fit only to underline the substantial presence
of such a subject, but we can infer that Althusser's arguments here are sustained
by Lacan's category of the Imaginary and its accompanying "Mirror Stage:' Thus,
the ideological subject's presence is sustained both by its constitution in the
image of the other, and in its being sustained by the signifier as its necessary,
material backdrop. The subject of science, by contrast, is "an evanescent subject
which is inscribed in a signifier only on condition that it disappear from the
signifying chain:'4Q Althusser seems to move slightly beyond Badiou's position
in "Mark and Lack;' where both the subject and the signifier (as determined
differentially) are foreclosed from the domain of science and logic, arriving at
the paradoxical claim that the subject of science, and its representative signifier,
are definable only in the act of their vanishing.
128 Post-Rationalism
Here again, Althusser seems to be drawing on Lacan, and specifically the
arguments made by the psychoanalyst in his eleventh seminar along with those
found in the essay "Science and Truth:' a text that I'll turn to in the next section
of this chapter. In the eleventh seminar as weve seen, Lacan characterizes the
signifier as "representing the subject for another signifier:' which is to say that the
subject falls between the signifiers that are the only condition for its precarious
existence. The subject proper, insofar as it is to be distinguished from the ego
as the site of Imaginary misrecognition, is never "present" in the manner of the
Imaginary or ideological subject, but is rather figured as simultaneously possible
and (substantially) impossible by its constitution in the movement of signifiers.
For Lacan, however, such a definition of the signifier, and by implication the
subject, is applicable to the subject of the unconscious as such, rather than in
the terms of the more specific definition of the subject of science that Althusser
proposes. In order that Althusser might maintain a relatively strict distinction
between ideology, as the seat of subjective misrecognition, and science as the
theoretical practice that is able to distance its object from ideology, the vanishing
subject that Lacan considers definitional of the subject of the signifier in toto
is restricted to science, so that the illusory subjectivity of ideology and the
essentially nonillusory practice of science can be kept apart. at least in the final
instance. Recall that, in our readings of Miller, such a cleavage of the subject from
science, even if rethought here in terms of a vanishing or "evanescent" subject, is
impossible, insofar as it is the logic of the signifier, and its accompanying subject,
that defines even the logical operations of scientific discourse-operations that
are always local. Here, again, is one of the defining distinctions between the
"master" and his students: for Althusser, science as a province must remain
unpeturbed by the subject that is only a ghostly, vanishing presence at its feast.
Finally, for Althusser, the subject of the unconscious is defined by "one
signifier that 'stands in' for it, which is its 'lieu-tenant: Thus it is absent from
the discourse of the unconscious by 'delegatiOn' [par 'lieu-tenancel:'41 Leaving
aside Althusser's recourse to Lacanian punning here-the "lieu" in lieutenant
Signaling the absence ("in lieu of .. :') of the subject that is being represented-
the key distinction seems to be between the relative persistence of the elective
signifier that stands in for the subject of the unconscious. and the necessary
absence of such a signifier to mark the subject of science. The difference between
the various subject-effects of discourse, then, is predicated upon the particular
form that the relation between subject and signifier assumes.
There is little doubt that Althusser's position on the question of the subject in
his "Three Notes" marks a significant complication, even an advance upon, his
Discourse in Post-Rationalist 129
rendered as
but the notes also different from the
definition of the subject that would become so influential upon the publication
of the "Ideological State Apparatuses" essay at the beginning of the 1970s. There,
Althusser will invoke the metaphor of interpellation to capture the means by
which ideology, and seemingly ideology alone, comes to constitute the subject,
broadly definable within the terms of Lacan's "Mirror Stage" and the capture of
the ego by the image of the other. In the later essay, Althusser writes: "[I]deology
has the function (which defines it) of 'constituting' concrete indh'iduals as
subjects, ideology being nothing but its functioning in the material forms of
existence of that functioning:'42
In the form that the question of the subject and discourse is presented in
the later text, a number of problems arise that are at least partially avoided in
the earlier proliferation of different subject-effects. First, as has frequently been
noted, Althusser posits a "concrete individual" prior to subjectivation without
accounting for the precise status of this individual; are we to take Althusser's
individual as a necessary myth, something akin to Lacan's occasional recourse
to the "myth" of the child situated prior to the Symbolic? In the earlier text, by
contrast, the signifier goes all the way down, such that there is no "individuality"
prior to its instantiation across the dyad of the Imaginary relation and the
movements of the signifier.
43
But the common debt to Lacan manifested in
different ways in both texts poses another problem, namely that the effectivity
of the Symbolic seems, in the latter text, to drop away, in favor of a subject that
exists purely as an Imaginary mirage, even if a constitutive and necessary one.
By reducing the question of the subject to the Imaginary, Althusser lays himself
open to the stereotyping of structural Marxism as a theory without agency,
without a proper account of the transitional and contingent nature of (Symbolic)
structural positions and complex social totalities.
Despite the relative nuance of Althusser's account of the relation between
discourse and the subject in the earlier text, problems soon arise when he
attempts to account for the difference in kind between the signifiers that make
up the various discourses in question. The discourse of science, we are told, is
composed of concepts, while the discourse of ideology is one of "gestures, modes
of behavior, feelings, words"44; yet it is left unclear how the specific properties of
the signifier, as understood by Lacan, are to be mapped on to such an eclectic set
of elements. The signifiers of the unconscious, even more problematically, are
said to be "fantasies;' with their "material" being the "Imaginary:' Here, perhaps,
30 Post-Rationalism
on the presence material
effects of the signifier, Althusser lapses into a to posit the Imaginary
as ultimately and totally definitional of the subject. Althusser makes good on
this initial displacement by previewing what will become his central argument
in the "Ideological State Apparatuses" paper, namely that "ideological discourse
induces an ideological subject-effect (as all discourse induces a subject-effect
specific to it) inasmuch as ideological discourse interpellates individuals:'45 But
how are we to make sense of the fact that all discourse, at least on the reading
provided earlier in the "Three Notes;' is composed of signifiers? How does
an arrangement of signifiers structure "gestures:' or is it the Imaginary that is
primary after all? As we'll see, this is an inadmissible concession for Lacan, for
whom the structure of the Imaginary requires the Symbolic as its constitutive
horizon.
The seeming contradiction becomes acute when Althusser attempts to
account for the ways in which ideology and the unconscious interrelate. As G.
M. Goshgarian phrases it, "The unconscious [for Althusserl [ ... J is realized in
articulation with ideology: when it comes together with ideological structures
with which it has 'affinities: it abruptly 'takes hold':'46 But if, as we saw above,
the unconscious is composed of fantasies, the material for which are taken from
the Imaginary, from the specular (mis)recognitions that constitute the ego, it
becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between the unconscious and
ideology at all: both seem assimilable to Lacan's Imaginary, leaving the question
of the role of the signifier, so important in the earlier portions of Althusser's
notes, suspended. We can speculate, further, that it is precisely in the different
ways in which the signifier is configured in the different discourses in question
that the "affinity" between ideology and the unconscious might be produced, but
without an account of that interrelation, of its specificity, such an affinity must
be largely assumed.
Ideological discourse, on this reading, is primary in any understanding of
subjectivity, and it comes to produce the "effect" of the unconscious in the service
of ideology's own reproduction: "{TJhe interpellation of human individuals as
ideological subjects produces a specific effect in them, the unconscious-effect,
which enables these human individuals to assume the function of ideological
subjects:'47 The circularity here seems dear, and it results from Althusser's
gradual elision of the distinction between the Symbolic and the Imaginary: the
Discourse and Ideology in Post-Rationalist Thought 131
ideological qua Imaginary constitutes the subject, which is further encouraged
in its taking on of its ideological place by the unconscious, itself a function of
ideology.48
Althusser attempts to head off the problem by proposing a link between Marx's
account of the link between different social formations and the understanding
of the link between ideology and the unconscious. As Althusser writes, "It is
not a matter of demonstrating the engendering or filiation of the unconscious
by the subject-effect of ideological discourse [ ... J it is a matter 0) of observing
the existence of an unconscious-effect that constitutes an autonomous structure;
and (ii) of thinking the articulation of this structure with the structure of the
ideological:'49 Thus, the unconscious is not to be understood as directly or
absolutely produced or expressed by the subject-effect of ideology, just as
the different, relatively autonomous levels or instances of sociality cannot be
understood as immediately produced or expressed by the economic. ("Marx
situates the different instances [of sociality J and thinks their articulation, without
concerning himself with the genesis of one instance by the others:'50) Rather, the
unconscious is to be understood as an autonomous structure that nonetheless
supports and grounds the discourse and subject-effect of ideology. Again, there
are few clues as to how, precisely, we are to understand this autonomy from, and
support of, ideology, but Althusser hints at a possible answer in his claim that the
unconscious is a "discourse made possible by the existence of a certain number
of signifiers of a peculiar kind (which, generally speaking, are not words):'51
As we saw in our reading of Badiou's "Mark and Lack" and Miller's
"Suture;' the question of the different aspects of the signifier is crucial to any
real understanding of the attempt in the "Cahiers" and within the field of
"post-rationalism" more generally to articulate the relation between science, the
subject and psychoanalysis. Might the type of signifiers Althusser refers to here
be something akin to what, in the previous chapter, we characterized as material,
isolated signifiers denuded of relations with other signifiers that induce the effect
of sense (those relational signifiers that, like "words;' are at least contingently
meaningful)? Badiou, recall, claimed such isolated signifiers-"psychotically"
foreclosed from sense-for logic, understood in sharp distinction to the
relational sense produced in ideological experience. Miller, by contrast, locates
such signifiers, in their indivisibility, at the level of the discourse that the subject
is constitutively excluded from. For Lacan, in contrast to both Badiou and Miller,
the isolated and relational aspects of signification may be present in one and the
same signifier, and this janus-like logic of Signification defines all local instances,
132 Post-Rationalism
unconscious and conscious, of the signifier in its (re)presentation of the subject.
Further, as Lacan expresses it in his twenty-fourth seminar, such signifiers have a
privileged relation to formalization, insofar as formalization presents something
of the Real, of the unconscious in its efficacious insistence beyond sense: "A new
signifier that wouldn't have any kind of meaning, that would perhaps be what
would open us up to what, in my clumsiness, I call the real:'52
Althusser only hints at such a connection in his notes on discourse, going on to
argue that the unconscious, in its structural specificity, works upon the ideological,
even providing ideology with its fuel, "in the sense in which one says that an
engine 'runs on petrol':'53 If the signifiers that compose the unconscious (and its
subject-effect) form the raw material for the relational signifiers that come to
define ideology, such a metaphor perhaps becomes marginally explicable, and yet
Althusser proceeds to define the "situations" in which the unconscious manifests
in a way that, again, makes it difficult to discern the fundamental difference
between the unconscious and ideology: "These 'situations' [of the unconscious]
are observable and definable, just as the effects of the unconscious in them are
observable and definable. The characteristic feature of these 'situations' is that
they are intimately bound up with the formations of the unconscious realized
in them:'54 And yet, "what is a 'situation'? It is a formation of the ideological, a
singular formation, in which what is 'experienced' is informed by the structure
(and specified modes) of the ideological:'55
Here, the opacity of the distinction noted above between the discourses of
ideology and the unconscious is resituated within the terms of a "situation;' the
definition of which remains caught between its position within the unconscious
or ideology, or within an unspecified and unarticulated interleaving of the two.
The relation of "affinity" between the unconscious and ideology is, Althusser
insists, not given in advance; rather, it is only certain ideological formations that
allow the unconscious to "take hold:'56 But we are given little sense of why such
an affinity should be functionally supportive of ideology, rather than disruptive
of it, especially if, as I've suggested above, we might understand the unconscious
as being composed of aspects of the signifier distinct from the relational
"experience" of meaningful signification proper to ideology. Such signifiers, in
their very insistence beyond sense, provide a link, unthematized by Althusser
but pregnant in Lacan's later seminars, to both the disruptive effects of the
subject, and the formal indivisibility oflogical discourse in its-also potentially
disruptive-escape from the doxological certainties of ideology.
Between the two texts, then, the collection of notes from 1966 and the
"Ideological State Apparatuses" essay, we have broadly equivalent problems. In
Discourse and Post-Rationalist
to the
fails to
between material of the
discourses that produce those effects and the subject-effects themselves. The
result, as we've seen, is a falling back on an implied generalization of the Imaginary
as the sale condition for the subject, a generalization that renders opaque the
distinction between the unconscious (understood either as comprised of "fantasy;'
of the Imaginary, or of particular kinds of signifiers distinct from "words"), and
ideology and the subject, distinctions that are nonetheless presupposed in their
utilization as separate terms of analysis.
In 1976, Badiou, having broken decisively with his former mentor,
excoriated Althusser's theory of ideology precisely for its seeming generality or
imperviousness to the specificity of other ontological elements, noting, "We can
clearly see where the difficulty is for Althusser: to seize ideologies as processes
of scission demands the point of view of a particular class:'57 In other words,
Althusser naturalizes the seeming unity and imperviousness of ideology that
is, in fact, only the contingent perspective of the ruling class, to be undermined
by assuming the "point of view of a particular class;' the proletariat. But at
the surface of Althusser's text, in particular in his earlier notes, one senses the
potential for an alternative understanding of the significatory elements that serve
to distinguish the composition of the unconscious, the subject, and ideology,
one much more attentive than Badiou allows above to the refractory ways that
the signifier might relate to different elements that it helps define. In the next
section, I will read Lacan's "Science and Truth" as providing one route to such
a fuller understanding, before turning to Jean-Claude Milner's Cahiers essay
"Point of the Signifier" as a way of mediating between Althusser and Lacan.
"Science and Truth"
Lacan's "Science and Truth" appeared in the very first edition of the Cahiers,
serving to frame the journal's attempt to meld a psychoanalytic account of the
unconscious with a broader account of signification and its relevance to scientific
knowledge. The text was initially read at the beginning of Lacan's thirteenth
seminar, and consolidated certain of the key themes developed in the eleventh
and twelfth seminars. (Texts read out by Miller and Green, among others, were
published in the Cahiers subsequently; Miller's "Suture" was one of the texts
originally read out in Lacan's twelfth seminar, and Green's reflections on objetpetit
134
had extended Lacan's earlier definition of the
the of the signifier; as Lacan
defined it that year, and as we've had cause to note a few times now, the signifier
is that which "represents a subject for another signifier:' Notice, once again, the
shift in causative weight determinative of Lacan's reorientation of psychoanalytic
and philosophical thinking on the subject: whereas the self- transparent subject
of humanism is situated, even in its most minimal definition, within the center
of a consciousness directed outwards toward the world, the subject on Lacan's
reckoning is itself subordinate to the signifier, and is thus opaque even to its own
"thought:' The signifier, not the subject, takes on the task of (re)presenting the
subject to another signifier, such that it is the "logic of the signifier" itself that is
determinative, which allows the subject a minimum quanta of consistency.
At one and the same time, and as we've seen with Miller's account in "Suture;'
the subject for Lacan must fade before the signifier that is its only condition. As
Lacan phrases it in "Science and Truth;' "[Tlhe subject is, as it were, internally
excluded from its object [en exclusion interne Ii son object):'58 Insofar as the
subject is both conditioned and excluded by the signifiers that are its only vehicle,
the subject finds itself "internally excluded" from the signifiers and objects that
incite its iteration. In a move that is definitional for the Cahiers project, Lacan
identifies this account of the subject, coming into its own notion (to temporarily
adopt Hegelian phraseology) only upon Freud's epistemological break, with
the discontinuous, ruptural progress of science into the mathematized realm of
post-Newtonian physics.
The break announced by the mathematization of physics, Lacan suggests,
is such that it redefines what might count as scientific knowledge: "'Science'
should be taken here in the absolute sense just indicated, a sense which does
not efface what formerly went by the same name, but which, rather than harking
back its archaic roots, draws to itself the latter's lead in such a way as to better
demonstrate its difference from any other science:'59 Such a science, Lacan avers,
is no longer assimilable to a humanism that would symmetrically correlate the
subject, transparent to itself, to a world that is its passive object of retlection.
Instead, "[tlhere is no such thing as a science of man because science's man
does not exist, only its subject does:'6o The question for psychoanalysis, then, is
less of a compliant assimilation to existing sciences; rather, as Adrian Johnston
has succinctly noted, "Lacan turns the tables, reversing the standard angle of
Discourse and Ideology in Post-Rationalist Thought 135
approach: How must the sciences change in order to account of everything that
is revealed in the theory and practice of analysis?"61
Significantly, it is in "Science and Truth" that one of Lacan's only references
to "suture" occurs. Miller would take this isolated instance and develop it into a
concept that helps account for the ways in which the fundamental break of the
subject with the world as previously understood by pre-Newtonian science is
covered over, stitched up by the (mis ) recognitions of the Imaginary. Nonetheless,
Lacan's use of the terms helps us split the conceptual valence of "suture" into
two distinct meanings: first, it refers to the necessary and constitutive structural
relation of the subject to (Symbolic) structure; second, it accounts for the
dissimulation, artificial "stitching up:' of the subject -as-void that the break of the
signifier, formally correlated to the break of mathematized science, constitutes:
"I will indicate further along how modern logic is situated [ ... J It is indisputably
the strictly determined consequence of an attempt to suture the subject of
science, and Godel's last theorem shows that the attempt fails there:'62
In other words, suture, in this instance, names the attempt, present even in
variants of modern logic, to re-totalize that which is constitutively incomplete,
and the subject that correlates to that incompleteness. As Livingston phrases
it, "It is [ ... J in the formal schematizations of mathematics, which are without
meaning, that it is alone possible to locate the Real as it manifests itself in signs;
this manifestation is to be found, moreover, at the structurally necessary point
of the impasse of formalization, where the 'non-whole' of the entire structural
order is itself signified by the mathemes of the subject:'63 We would need to
add to this that modern logic itself, at least on Lacan's reading here, can be
utilized to cover over the very de-totalization that its break with meaning or
sense should entail, a conviction shared by Althusser, whose reflections on
the "spontaneous philosophy" of scientists similarly attempts to recognize
the potential for mystification even within the tools gifted by modern,
post-Newtonian scientific truths.
64
Livingston's account bears quoting for a number of reasons, not least for his
recognition that the Real itself, that which is at one level of analysis excluded
from the Symbolic, nonetheless must "manifest" or insist in signifiers, signifiers
that are denuded of the meaning that their aspect of being "in relation" affords.
The Real, on this account, is the concept that positively encompasses the
(negative) incompleteness that afflicts all structures, that manifests a necessary
failure of form, as I phrased it in Chapter 1; that, paradoxically, encompasses
in a positively instantiated concept all that is negative and inadmissible, and
136 Post-Rationalism
comments are made in relation to Lacan's seminars, think it
is dear even the time of "Science and Lacan had come to
situate his category of the Real in these terms, especially through his construction
of the concept of objet petit a, as we'll see below. In Lacan's reasoning in "Science
and Truth;' the signifier acts as the element that, in its multiple instantiations,
comes to form and deform all that it is conceivable for modern science, and for
psychoanalysis, to capture within its logics.
The subject proper to this de-totalized and constitutively incomplete "world"
is the correlate, the logical consequence, of that incompletion, its necessary and
irreducible result. 1bis insight helps us get a sense of how Lacan's account differs
from both Althusser's and Badiou's positions already outlined in this chapter. For
Lacan, in contrast to Althusser, it is as much within the domain of the Symbolic
as the Imaginary that the impasses of the subject are to be registered, and it is
precisely for this reason that science itself, as predicated on the signifier, must
register rather than conceal the subject at its foundation. If, in the last analysis,
the subject for Althusser is to be explained by reference to the Imaginary, to the
specular relation constitutive of misrecognition, for Lacan, science is rendered
scientific precisely by its inclusion of the radical dihesence of the subject, as an
element simultaneously formative and deformative of its logics; a recognition,
further, that accords with Bachelard's attempts to formulate an epistemology
capacious enough to account for the impurity of the objects of modern science,
as we've seen. It is this recognition, of the subject-Signifier conjunction as central
to even science as formalized with the degree of axiomatic certainty available to
mathematized physics, that fueled the disagreement between Badiou and Miller
discussed in the previous chapter, with the latter adopting a broadly Lacanian
position. But there's an aspect of Lacan's argument in "Science and Truth" that
even Miller doesn't quite come to terms with, and it centers on the very topic of
the seminar that Lacan used as a venue for the first airing of "Science and Truth;'
namely the question of the psychoanalytic object. A brief reading of Lacan's take
on the object will help us resituate our understanding of the similarities and key
differences between the thinkers in question here.
Lacan's object
Although the context within which it was written is rather different, a quote
from Bachelard's Rationalisme applique may help us begin to gain a sense of
Discourse and in Post-Rationalist 137
the of the
broader raised
the of and the of the cogito as a
consciousness of the problem:' Bachelard reflects on the ways in
prior to the establishment of a subject/object relation, a field or "problem"
must be established that sets fhe terms available for the composition of
that relation, that incites its generation. Thus, in science, the problem to be
investigated establishes the inquiry's object as "subject" to it, as definitional
of its bounds. Subsequently, the subject (here the Cartesian cogito, claimed
also by Lacan in "Science and Truth" as definitional for scientific modernity)
rises to consciousness of the object in question. That subject is, to a significant
extent, defined by the very object that forms the focus of its inquiry, one of the
reasons that, for Bachelard and for post-rationalism more broadly, fhere can
be no recourse to a correspondence theory of truth: fhe subject, object, and
problematic of science push up against upon one another in the process of their
mutual definition and distinction, to the extent that any reliance on a reflective
account of the acquisition of knowledge would falsely render static what is a
dynamic movement of mutual and frictional constitution.
How can Bachelard's comment help us appreciate the importance of the
object, what Lacan came to call objet petit a, to the relation of the subject to
Symbolic structure, and to the Imaginarylideology? In "Science and Truth;'
Lacan claims that "fhere is somefhing in fhe status of science's object that seems
[ ... J to have remained un elucidated since the birfh of science"66; that, further,
psychoanalysis as a theoretical practice may be able to provide that missing
knowledge-providing fhat the very status of the "knowledge" in question is
consistently scrutinized and problematized. The object, for Lacan, is a problem
for fhe subject, in much fhe same way that, for Bachelard, the articulation of
fhe subject, object, and problem (what Bachelard will also refer to, influentially,
as fhe "problematic")67 prevents any simple translation of the properties of the
object into knowledge of them. The question that motivates Lacan is in many
ways applicable to fhe problem of the scientific object in its relation to fhe field of
ideology fhat motivates Bachelard and later Althusser and Badiou; fhus, Lacan
asks, "Is knowledge of object a thus fhe science of psychoanalysis?"68
We can translate Lacan's enquiry into the more general question of
whether knowledge of fhe object as such should be taken, within fhe field of
post-rationalism under discussion here, as fhe principle intention of scientific
labor. The answer must be in the negative. As weve seen in our discussions of
Althusser and Badiou, the object is not to be taken as a passive, inert container
38
to be
the
POSI- Ratio nalism
the "demonstrative" powers nomination
distinct from the relational of ideological discourse. Crucially,
however, the object, in its very resistance to capture by the concepts of an
emergent science, comes in turn to help define, in the friction generated by its
attempted ensnarement, the possible terms of the science that would seek to
provide knowledge of it.
lt is, perhaps, this resistant and yet definitional aspect of the object that is
missing in Badiou's account above. For Badiou, science must always select its
objects from the ideological field, from the "raw" materials available in a given
situation. But given their situation in an always already ideological field, it is
debatable how much the object of Badiou's account is comparable to the object
given such prominence in Lacan's epistemological reflections. Lacan is adamant
that knowledge of the object is precisely not the concern of psychoanalysis: "This
is precisely the question that must be avoided, since object a must be inserted
[ .. J into the division of the subject by which the psychoanalytic field is quite
specifically structured:'69 The object, far from something to be ascertained by
an already existent subject, is here figured as a correlate to the very division of
the subject itself. Importantly however, the object is not symmetrically situated
in relation to that subject. Rather, the subject "faces" the Other qua Symbolic,
and the object sits askance from both, even as it incites the subject in his or her
desire. In a certain sense, the object, for Lacan, exists as a corollary of the cut in
the Real that announces the birth of subjectivity as such.
Crucially, then, the object is resistant for Lacan; as he phrases it, "Object a is
not peaceful, or rather should one say, could it be that it does not leave you in
peace?"70 The different ways that Althusser considers the discursive production of
subject-effects misses, at least on Lacan's account, this resistant or irrecuperable
aspect of the delineation of science, ideology, and subject. 1he object, for Lacan,
falls between the gap between knowledge and truth that Althusser identifies
with the division between ideology and science. As we saw above, science,
for Althusser, must select its objects from the "real;' which is always already
enmeshed in the ideological, but that can, by virtue of scientific conceptual
labor, come to produce a new "theoretical" object that is free of the illusions
that previously constrained it. The object of theory is thus rendered qualitatively
distinct from the ideological object that was its partial source. For Lacan, by
contrast, the object, when understood as that which resists incorporation into
the Symbolic logics that compose science, will always at least in part remain
Discourse and Ideology in Post-Rationalist Thought 139
set aside, antagonistically other to the structures that it nonetheless comes to
inhabit. This is one of the reasons why Lacan will so firmly situate the object
of psychoanalysis within the register of the Real, explicitly from seminar lIon
but implicitly much earlier. While being constitutively interconnected to the
registers of the Imaginary and the Symbolic, the Real nonetheless captures those
elements within the other two domains that fall out of dominant logics, that
resist capture, but that nonetheless act as causative in their very elusiveness.
Genevieve Morel has usefully figured this asymmetry between knowledge
and truth in Lacan as equivalent to the ways in which scientific knowledge
frequently falls short of the real; as she phrases it, "[TJhere is a boundary between
knowledge and the real, and [ ... J this boundary is mobile; furthermore, it is not
the same now as it was in the seventeenth century:'71 The example discussed by
Morel is the resistance of the element Mercury to conform to the gravitational
laws outlined by Newton. That resistance resituates the boundary between itself
and knowledge, such that knowledge falls short, and must try once again to catch
up with the Real that races ahead of it. Here, the Real is a kind of constitutive
limit point in all knowledge, that point at which knowledge fails. But Lacan's
reflections on the object in his "Science and Truth" arguably point beyond this
definition of the Real, one that threatens to fall into empiricism: who, after
all, would dispute that scientific knowledge is only contingent, is subject to
empirical, experimental refutation? Lacan's object, however, bears not simply on
the consequences for knowledge of the Real as conceived by psychoanalysis, but
has Significant consequences for the ways in which we conceive the subject too.
For if the object eludes knowledge, and is thus on the side of the truth qua
Real, the subject can equally be understood as an absent cause that interrupts
the surface of knowledge. Whereas the Imaginary, and the specular relation
that constitutes the ego, provides a mirage of identity, the subject proper fades
before the signifier that is its only means of {re )presentation. If the consequence
of Althusser's ultimate reduction of the subject of the unconscious to the
Imaginaryfideology is an inability to capture the disruptive, discontinuous
aspects of subjectivity, Lacan is quick to underline the importance of precisely
those aspects of the subject for any understanding of science. One of the reasons
that Lacan designates the "exclusion" of the subject from its object as "internal"
to the former is precisely that the subject is "caused" by the object; the subject's
very division is a mark of the object. To anticipate somewhat my discussion of
Canguilhem in the next chapter, we can say that the object" in -forms" the subject,
provides the formal limits of its potential manifestation, while nonetheless
remaining distinct from and inassimilable to either the subject or ideological
140 Post-Rationalism
knowledge. In the final part of this chapter, I will turn to the work ofJean-Claude
Milner as a means of trying to further understand how post-rationalism sought
to reconcile the problem of the subject with the logic of the signifier, and the
problem of ideology.
"The Point of the Signifier"
Jean-Claude Milner's72 "The Point of the Signifier:' ostensibly a reading of
Plato's Sophist, was originally presented as part of Lacan's twelfth seminar,
"Crucial Problems of Psychoanalysis:'73 It was composed in part as a response
to Miller's "Suture;' while self-consciously resituating the abstract question
of the subject's relation to science and the Signifier within the broad sweep of
Western philosophical history, and in particular within the terms of Platonic
metaphysics. Of particular interest for our purposes is Milner's reflections on the
role of Lacan's objet petit a in its coupling with the logic of the signifier; to what
extent might Milner help supplement Lacan's own account of the resistances of
the object, especially insofar as that object must "appear" within the broader
horizon of the Symbolic? And how might Milner's reflections help us extend
and revise our understanding of Badiou's and Althusser's contributions, as
assessed above?
Milner's essay, revised and published in the third edition of the Cahiers,
begins with a statement of purpose, one that crystallizes something only
implicit in the writings of Miller and Badiou considered thus far. The affinity,
that is, between logic and the structural account of Signification increasingly
motivating Lacan's reflections also marks an affinity between philosophy as
such and the "logic of the signifier:' As Milner phrases it, "We have inherited a
relation between being and computation:'74 Such an inheritance marks the link,
present from the inauguration of philosophy proper with the Socratic dialogues,
between mathematics and metaphysical speculation, but it also underpins the
psychoanalytic attempt to think the conjunction of the subject and the logically
traceable movements of the signifier. Milner notes that, in Plato's "Sophist:'
the attempt to list types of being must inevitably, even when couched within
the sophistic riddles of "doxography;' result in an enumeration, a list that is
amenable to calculation. Even more importantly for Milner's broader argument,
the attempt to think "being" at all must necessarily produce reflection on
"nonbeing;' on the possible outside to any being whatsoever, and it is the echo of
this relation with Miller's grounding of the signifier in the nonidentical qua zero
in 141
structural for he writes, "Consider the genera as the
elements of the collection to be deduced or deducted [a out of which
non-being should arise through e-numeration:'75
Plato's attempted solution to the question of the possible generic list of states
of being is, in Milner's account, to propose the largest possible states of being,
and to analyze their interrelation according to whether they mayor may not be
mixed. Thus, Plato "enumerates" being, rest, and movement, and establishes that
rest and movement can be "added"to or blended with being (as predicates), but
that rest and movement are self-canceling when held together. The most crucial
elements isolated by Plato for the purposes of Milner's argument, and as already
commented upon by Lacan, are those of sameness or difference, the latter term
introducing the question of otherness to being, its determining outside. In
the very act of enumerating the basic, generic forms of existence, Plato is led
inexorably toward otherness-to what cannot be counted as eXisting on being's
own terms. "Being" itself is included in all of the terms of the series; as Milner
writes, "Being spreads throughout the whole series. It is the very element of its
own development since all the terms, as terms, have being:'76 And yet, in the
very act of enumeration, through the very "modality of its expansion;' "being
becomes a term that can be delimited in its singular concentration:'77
Being, despite its generality, is forced to assume its particularity, its "oneness;'
when listed as just one of a number of potential terms. That "concentration" is
what allows being to be posited against nonbeing; as just a general amorphous
mass, "being;' if it can even be said to have a definition at all, is certainly not
amenable to negation. But in its manifestation as a particular "term;' in the
act of its being "counted:'78 being is confronted with its opposite, a term that
"it is powerless to deny or refuse: non-being:'79 And yet, Plato refuses to assign
nonbeing a place among the series of generic types. To do so would be to efface
the fact that, as Milner expresses the point, "non-being has no assigned place,
other than those points of inflection (tlechissement] where the limiting shape
[cernel shows itselC
80
Milner's language is obscure here, but the crucial point is
that nonbeing must be presumed and yet excluded in order that being i t s l t ~ as
incarnated in both its assigned term and as presupposed by all the other terms
(terms that are potential predicates of being), coheres. Despite this exclusion,
and at every turn, nonbeing as its definitional other haunts being; being, and the
terms that might predicate it, carry the spectral weight of non being as the price
for their being rendered amenable to counting, to precise delimitation.
not, an element
Such an interaction,
what Milner suggestively calls a "vacillation;' necessarily occurs in order that
each of the constituent elements of the series gain their consistency, and yet that
very definitional interaction threatens the autonomy of the terms as much as it
molds them. 1be initial model for Milner's creative reading of Plato is clear: the
series of generic terms operates in the same way that, for Ferdinand de Saussure,
signifiers operates, which is to say through a process of negative definition.
Each signifier gains its coherency only through a negative relation with all other
signifiers that it is not. In much the same way, the terms of being elaborated by
Plato in his dialogue are appreciable only when set in negative opposition to
all other terms. Nonetheless, Milner supersedes Saussure's logic in a way that
captures the more general supersession of Saussurianism in post-rationalism:
rather than the terms of being requiring a simple negative interaction to cohere,
they also require a more fundamental and founding exclusion, in a manner not
dissimilar to the psychoanalytic account of primary repression. There, as here,
an element must be pushed out of consciousness in order that consciousness
itself might form a totality. The name for the excluded term in Milner's account
is, of course, nonbeing itself.
Nonbeing, then, is described by Milner as occupying a paradoxical position
with respect to the other terms in the series. It is required in order that the
relationship of the other terms to being can be clarified, and yet it threatens
the consistency of the series in its negation of the former. As Milner writes,
"Insofar as it is a term in the chain, it is the abyss which erases all terms:'81 In
a logic familiar to post-rationalism, "nonbeing" operates as a paradoxical term
that both completes and de-completes, forms and threatens to deform a chain
of elements. In so doing, it functions in much the same way as the subject, for
Miller, operates in relation to the logic of the signifier: "How can we not read, in
their double dependence, being as the order of the signifier, the radical register
of all computations [ ... J And non-being as the signifier of the subject, [ ... J
reprise of the specific power of the subject to annul every signifying chain ?"82
Here, the subject is figured as equivalent to the signifier "nonbeing;' in its
power to both "cause" and disrupt the series of signifiers. Computation itself:
when understood as the movement of signifiers, produces as one of its terms
that which then serves to negate it. Subsequently, the same paradoxical element
can, retrospectively, be assigned as "cause" of that which it negates, insofar as
Discourse and Ideology in Post-Rationalist Thought 143
its (non)-presence within the series of terms establishes their coherency. The
"vacillation" of elements within a series conditions the eventual, and retrospective,
assignation of causality; as Milner writes, "[Vjacillation of the cause, in which
being and non-being never stop overflowing into one another, each only able to
posit itself as cause by revealing itself to be the effect of the other:'83 Thus, the
paradoxical element of a series relates, in its negative "presence:' with all the
other elements, such that those elements are put into motion, made "dynamic:'
and are thus made amenable to the new. The very paradoxicality of the element
that ensures the consistency of the series makes room for the transgression of
that series, the generation of a "third term" that conforms even less to the rules
that govern the series in question.
Intriguingly, Milner quickly distinguishes his position, dose in some
respects to Miller's appropriation of Frege, by reference to the latter's apparent
"summary formalism"; it is in the name of a "less summary formalism:' one not
purely reducible to the interplay between two terms, that Milner introduces
the concept of objet petit a, as a concept that might transcend the doublet
of the subject/signifier and bring into question the possibility of elements
that may escape delineation in a formal chain. Crucially, such a qualified
"escape" should not be taken as occuring ex nihilo, as imposing itself on a
series or structure from an absolute outside. Rather, it is the very vacillation
of the elements within the series, the "looseness" of their interaction, that
allows for eccentric elements to assert themselves, to break free from any
organization in advance. The object, on this account, is that which positivizes
the "vacillation" of elements within a series, elements whose consistency is
guaranteed, paradoxically, by the very instability of their relatedness. Note here
a certain advance upon the positions of both Miller and Derrida as explored
in the previous chapter; there, we saw how, for both thinkers, two aspects of
a text or structure, its illusory stable self-presentation and its actual state of
indetermination (concentrated for Miller in the single term "lure"), serve to
point toward an outside, albeit an outside that, in the case of Miller at least,
seems likely to be incorporated in advance by the "virtual" aspect of a structure.
For Milner, however, this ambiguous state, of the potential transcendence of a
locked-in structure, receives a positive concept of its own: Lacan's objet petit a,
an object that, in its elusive singularity, issues from, but is not finally reducible
to, the unstable elements of a given structure or system.
It may be of use to pause here and note the resonance between Milner's
insistence on the internal generation of the new within the terms of a structure,
and the earlier French epistemological account of the historical progress
144
of the sciences,
twentieth
the
its refusal
Post-Rationalism
features of
continualist of alterations in scientific between accounts
the
in Kuhn's terms, foreground tectonic "paradigm shifts" in understanding, and
those that would, in a more cautious Popperian vein, trace the gradual refutation
of existing hypotheses. French epistemology, instead, tends to emphasize
both the radicality of "breaks" in scientific history, and the elements within a
given situation that allow such breaks to emerge. Alexandre Koyre provides
an elementary example of such logic, as when he writes: "Modern science did
not spring perfect and complete, as Athena from the head of Zeus, from the
minds of Galileo and Descartes. On the contrary, the Galilean and Cartesian
revolution-which remains, nevertheless, a revolution-had been prepared by
a strenuous effort of thought:'84 While Koyre's and Milner's texts are pitched at
very different scales of analysis, the one general and historical, the other tightly
attuned to abstract conceptual nuances, a similar logic is at work: within a given
situation or structure, existing elements serve, in different ways, to prepare the
ground for the immanent irruption of the new.
85
At any rate, Milner's identification of objet petit a as the conceptual key to a
loosening of the reduced formalism of Miller's "Suture" chimes with Lacan's own
recognition of the transitivity between psychoanalysis' object and the object of
science. (See my reading of Lacans "Science and Truth" above.) For Milner after
Lacan, the object, insofar as it positively (re)presents the inherent vacillation of
signifiers in a series, marks an alternative way of thinking consistency from the
canonical attempts, predicated on the principle of noncontradiction, that have
dominated Western philosophy. If one of those canonical ways of conceiving
the formation of a unity of elements in philosophy is the recourse to a notion of
the One-most influentially, perhaps, in Plato's discussion of Parmenides-here,
in typically post -rationalist fashion, an eccentric element, precisely not reducible
to the One, nonetheless confers a certain consistency or form on the elements
in a series. Such a consistency, achieved despite the very errancy of the element
that serves as its ground, is no doubt one of the abiding and consistent concerns
of the Cahiers authors as we've addressed them thus far.86
How might Milner's reflections shed new light on Badiou's discussion of
Althusser, and Althusser's own reflections on discourse, above? In response to
Badiou's assertion of the relative autonomy of science, an assertion rendered in
starker terms in his "Mark and Lack" than in the review essay on Althusser above,
Milner proposes an understanding of (scientific) truth that is immanent to its
field of articulation. In a long and detailed analysis of the figure of the Sophist,
and Post-Rationalist
Milner
nplnm'pn the VV.,"UVH
the' latter
to his and the
in its relation to as above. we can be
understood as excluded element that, in its expulsion, founds the coherency
of the set of types of being. Similarly, the Sophist is positioned as an excluded
remainder by Plato. As Milner comments, "In the course of the dialogue, the
sophist [ ... J appears at the points where he is pursued, pushed from definition
to definition, surviving its inflections fflechissements 1 :'87 The Sophist, that is,
reappears even as the argumentative strategies of his opponents pursue him and
seek his disqualification from truthful dialogue; the Sophist remains, clinging
to more "truthful" arguments in a way that suggests a relation of definition or
formation. Even more, the Sophist, for Milner, is desubstantialized as a subject
Instead of being an ''1;' a fully embodied subject, the Sophist is "that of a he,
as opposed to an I or a you, pronouns specifically designating the partners of
speech:'88 Without the aid of such pronouns, the Sophist is reduced to a pure
form, an excluded element that nonetheless "is essential in order to be able to
detach from the he of a partner another he with different properties:'89 In other
words, the reduction of the Sophist to a pure form, a structural element that
persists beyond any overt semantic function, allows the other participants in
the dialogue a foil, a kind of reflective formal surface, through which to try to
bend or re-reflect discourse toward truth. To do so would be, in some sense, to
transform the formal nonbeing of the Sophist into the full being of the Socratic
philosopher.
Crucially, and perhaps in contradiction of my analogy with repression
in psychoanalysis above, the excluded Sophist is entirely immanent to the
discursive field within which he or she operates. His or her exclusion, that is, is
an internal one, a negative distancing within the texture of discourse that fails
to break fully with its bounds. To render the Sophist excluded in this way, as
entirely outside the discursive field of truth would, paradoxically, be to denude
the Sophist of his or her constitutive role. To cast him or her entirely out of
the dialogue, in other words, would prevent the Sophist adopting his or her
role as, in Milner's words, "both pretext for the discourse as well as its measure
[pesee):'90 It is this emphasis on the importance of immanent exclusions,
definitional torsions of unstable discursive or structural fields, that marks one
of the specific characteristics of post-rationalism. Think, for instance, of Miller's
complex exploration, in his ''Action of the Structure" analyzed in Chapter 3, of
the immanent exclusions that characterize both the "subject" and the "lure"
relative to their encompassing structures.
]46 Post-Rationalism
constitutive PYiPr'TlC.n
of the
mrprlnct'n from its structures, but as
lJ'''"U'U v situated, as what Miller would later call "extimate" to the
structures they serve to partially constitute.
91
Badiou, and the early Althusser's,
pitching of the element of exclusion as entirely outside or beyond the purview
of science marks, thus, an alternative current in post-rationalism, one insistent
upon the specificity of the structural conditions of science in contrast to those
discourses that rely on subjectivity. As I've shown in his chapter, however,
Althusser himself gestured toward a pOSition with respect to the subject and to
discourse that recognized the complex, topological inherences of each element
to its constitutive other. In the final chapter, we'll see how an entirely separate
current of thought in post-war France, congregating around the problem of
"life;' nonetheless reproduced many of the questions that we've encountered
thus far, bridging the apparent gap between philosophies of lived existence, and
philosophies of the concept.
Notes
The best account in English of the political and institutional debates within the
French Communist Party that gave rise to some of Althusser's interventions is to be
found in W. S. Lewis, Louis Althusser and the Traditions of French Marxism (Lanham:
Lexington Books, 2005).
2 A. Badiou, "The (Re)commencement of Dialectical Materialism;' in A. Badiou
(ed.), The Adventure of French Philosophy, trans. Bruno Bosteels (New York: Verso,
2012) [1967]: 143; originally published in French as "Le (Re)commencement du
materialism dialectique;' in Critique 240, Paris, 1967,438-67.
3 Ibid., 143. In a telling footnote, Badiou acknowledges the source of his use ofthe
term "suture;' before insisting that it is only used "in passing"; a later note will refer
in more detail to Miller's argument in critical terms, prefiguring the disagreement
between Badiou and Miller analyzed in the previous chapter. See Badiou, "(Re)
commencement of Dialectical Materialism;' 143 and 157.
4 See L. Althusser and E. Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (London:
New Left Books, 1970): 133-4.
5 G. Bachelard quoted in Badiou, "(Re)commencement of Dialectical Materialism;'
143-4.
6 Badiou, "(Re)commencement of Dialectical Materialism;' 145.
7 Ibid., 144.
8 Ibid., 151.
Discourse and Ideology in Post-Rationalist Thought 147
9 This remains a distant echo, not least because, for Badiou, what he understands as
prior to the "presentation" of scientific knowledge is still to be understood in the
terms of ordered concepts, and thus before any attempt to fully distinguish between
discovery and justification, the former suggesting an essentially preconceptual
"moment;' is largely moot.
10 See L. Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism, trans. Grahame Lock (London: New Left
Books, 1976).
11 Badiou, "(Re)commencement of Dialectical Materialism;' 146.
12 Ibid., 151.
13 Ibid., 147.
14 Ibid.
15 G. Bachelard, Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement,
trans. Edith R. Farrell and C. Frederick Farrell (Dallas: The Dallas Institute
Publications): 4.
16 Bachelard makes much of the human tendency toward imagination in his texts on
poetry and archetype, perhaps most especially in his Psychoanalysis of Pire.
G. Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis ofPire, trans. Alan C. M. Ross (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1987).
17 Badiou, "(Re)commencement of Dialectical Materialism:' 147.
18 Bruno Bosteels has also noted the importance of what he calls the "primitive
impurity" signaled by Badiou in assessment of Althusser between science and
ideology. Bosteels's discussion usefully situates the review essay within the wider
terms of Badiou's subsequent development, and his discussion also refers to
Althusser's unpublished notes on discourse, also raised, albeit with different
emphases, in this chapter. See B. Bosteels, Badiou and Politics (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2011): 50-67.
19 Badiou, "(Re)commencement of Dialectical Materialism;' 148.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid., 147.
22 Ibid., 148.
23 Ibid.
24 Badiou would significantly shift his position in his text of 1982, Theory of the
Subject. There, Badiou would begin to develop an understanding of the potential
subject of revolution, theorized as distinct from the subject in its ideological guise,
outlining different subject positions and their varying tenacity (or, later, fidelity) in
the face of political rupture. This typology would be revised again in 2006, in Logics
of Worlds. For an excellent account of this crucial, transitional period in Badiou's
thinking, see Bruno Bosteels's translator's introduction to A. Badiou, Theory of the
148 Post-Rationalism
(London:
of
M. Pecheux, L(l,nx1Ulx;t:, Semantics
26 Ibid,,213.
Conclusion,
ItJP'flUlVV (London: Macmillan,

212.
27 Sur la reproduction has been published in its entirety in French; see L Althusser,
Sur la reproduction (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995). Warren Montag
has noted that the extraction of the "Ideological State Apparatuses" essay from
the larger manuscript of Sur la reproduction was accompanied by a removal
of "all references to the ideological apparatuses as sites of struggle rather than
machines for the reproduction of the relations of production and exploitation:'
W. Montag, Louis Althusser (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003): 156. One can
only speculate as to Althusser's reasons for doing so, but it is notable that, in the
unpublished works under discussion in this chapter, he was very much concerned
with the instability of ideology in its forms of discursive articulation; see the section
"Discourse and the Unconscious:'
28 L Althusser, "Three Notes on the Theory of Discourses;' in Franyois Matheron
(ed.), The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings, trans. G. M. Goshgarian
(New York: Verso, 2003): 38.
29 Althusser, "Notes on the Theory of Discourses;' 40.
30 Ibid.
31 Badiou, "(Re)commencement of Dialectical Materialism;' 15l.
32 Althusser, "Notes on the Theory of Discourses;' 39.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid., 47.
35 Ibid., 47.
36 Ibid., 48.
37 Ibid.
38 Ibid., 49.
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid.
41 Ibid.
42 L Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes towards an
Investigation:' in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 1971): 171.
43 Nonetheless, Judith Butler's defense of Althusser on this point is well taken,
as when she writes: "To literalize or to ascribe an ontological status to the
grammatical requirement of 'the subject' is to presume a mimetic relation
between grammar and ontology which misses the point, both Althusserian and
Lacanian, that the anticipations of grammar are always and only retroactively
installed." See J. Butler, The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford: Stanford University
]49
individual
of the individual in Althusscr's
account As we'll see, though, Althusser, unlike Lacan, inconsistently takes
account of the effects of the signifier, of "grammar" in Butler's terms, on ideology,
and he does so mostly in the notes analyzed in this chapter, unpublished in his
lifetime. By the time of the "Ideological State Apparatuses" essay, ideology and
interpellation will be associated almost exclusively with the (mis)recognition
proper to the Imaginary.
44 Althusser, "Notes on the Theory of Discourses;' 50.
45 Ibid., 54.
46 G. M. Goshgarian, "Translator's Introduction;' in L. Althusser (ed.), Philosophy
of the Encounter: Later Writings, 9 7 8 ~ 1987, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (New York:
Verso, 2006): xliii.
47 Althusser, "Notes on the Theory of Discourses;' 56.
48 It is true that Althusser, at least by the publication of the "Ideology and Ideological
State Apparatuses" essay, was concerned to resituate ideology in the unconscious,
as a corrective to humanist understandings that might locate the distortions of
ideology in a problematically symmetrical opposition to the "true state of things:'
Pierre Macherey sums up the stakes of this position as follows: "By establishing
this relation between ideology in general and the unconscious, and by forcefully
underscoring [ ... J the 'necessary' character of this relation, Althusser prepares
the 'subjectivating' conception of ideology that he will introduce a little later,
according to which ideology's intervention in the process of social reproduction
is reduced to the constitution of individuals as subjects, a constitution for which
the interpellation scene constitutes the metaphor:' See P. Macherey, "Figures of
Interpellation in Althusser and Fanon;' trans. Zachary Luke Fraser in Radical
Philosophy 173 (May/June 2012),10. Even with this in mind, however, the unstable
distinction between the presence of ideology in the unconscious that Macherey
locates in the "Ideological State Apparatuses" essay, and the seeming elision of
ideology with the unconscious that marks the earlier "Notes on the Theory of
Discourses;' should be taken as symptomatic-in the precisely Althusserian
sense-of Althusser's lack of clarity on the ideology-unconscious relation.
49 Althusser, "Notes on the Theory of Discourses;' 56.
50 Ibid.
51 Ibid.
52 J. Lacan, Seminar XXIV: L'insu que sait de rune bevue sailea mourre, lesson of May 17,
1977, unpublished translation by Dan Collins.
53 Althusser, "Notes on the Theory of Discourses;' 58.
54 Ibid.
50 Post-Rationalism
A. Badiou and Balmes, De 1976); translation
taken from Z. L Frazer, "Introduction;' in A. Badiou, The An
Introduction to the Materialist Epistemology of Mathematics, ed. and trans. Zachary
Luke Fraser and Tzuchien Tho (Melbourne: Re.Press, 2007): xix.
58 J. Lacan, "Science and Truth;' in Eerits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: w.w. Norton,
2006): 73l.
59 Ibid., 728.
60 Ibid., 730.
61 A. Johnston, "Turning the Sciences Inside Out: Revisiting Lacan's 'Science and
T r u t h ~ in Peter Hallward and Knox Peden (eds), Concept and Form Vol. 2: The
Cahlers pour l'Analyse and Contemporary French Thought (New York: Verso, 2012).
62 Lacan, "Science and Truth;' 73l.
63 P. M. Livingston, The Politics of Logic: Badiou, Wittgenstein, and the Consequences of
Formalism (New York: Routledge, 2012): 79.
64 See 1. Althusser, Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists, ed.
Gregory Elliott (New York: Verso, 1997).
65 I reflect on this particular definition of Lacan's "Real" at length in my Lacan and the
Concept of the "Real" (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
66 Lacan, "Science and Truth;' 733.
67 For an excellent discussion of Bachelard's idea of the "problematic;' see P. Maniglier,
"What Is a Problematic?" in Radical Philosophy 173 (May/June), 2012.
68 Lacan, "Science and Truth;' 733.
69 Ibid.
70 Ibid.
71 G. Morel, "Science and Psychoanalysis;' in Umbr(a): A Journal of the Unconscious,
"Science and Truth;' 2000, 67.
72 It is beyond the purview of this chapter to provide an account of the oft -eccentric
breadth and controversy of Milner's career, but for an excellent discussion that
discusses Milner's recent debates with Badiou over the status of the signifier "Jew"
among other things, see K. Peden, "The Rights of the Imaginary: On Jean -Claude
Milner;' in S: Journal of the Jan Van Eyck Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique
3,2010, 115-36, available online: www.lineofbeauty.org/index.php/s/artide/
viewFile/46/11O.
73 ]. Lacan, Seminar XII: Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis, unpublished
translation, available online: www.lacaninireland.com/web/wp-contentluploads/2
01 0/06/12-Crucial-problems- for- psychoanalysis. pdf.
74 J. -CO Milner, "The Point of the Signifier;' in P. Hallward and K. Peden (eds), Concept
and Form Vol. 1: Selections from the "Cahiers pour l'Analyse" (New York: Verso,
Discourse and Ideology in Post-Rationalist Thought 151
2012): 107; originally published in French as "Le Point du signifiant;' in Cahiers
pour tAnalyse 3, Paris, 1966, available online: http://cahiers.kingston.ac. uk/vo1031
cpa3.5.milner.html.
75 Ibid.
76 Ibid., 109.
77 Ibid.
78 To adopt the terminology of the later Badiou to my own purposes; see A. Badiou,
Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2006).
79 Milner, "The Point ofthe Signifier:' 110.
80 Ibid.
81 Ibid., 111.
82 Ibid., 113.
83 Ibid., 112.
84 A. Koyre, Metaphysics and Measurement (London: Chapman and Hall, 1968): 1.
85 Jean Cavailles adds his own inflection to this theory of the immanent generation
of the new from that which is present, as when he writes: "One of the fundamental
problems with the doctrine of science is precisely that progress is in no way
comparable to increasing a given volume by adding a small additional amount
to what is already there, the old subsisting with the new. Rather, it is perpetual
revision, in which some things are eliminated and others elaborated. What
comes after is greater than what came before, not because the present contains or
supersedes the past but because the one necessarily emerges from the other:' Just
as for Koyre, the present germinates the new, although Cavailles is a little more
insistent on the radicality of what emerges, and the need to break fundamentally
with gradualist accounts of scientific progress. See J. Cavailles, Sur la logique et la
theorie de la science (Paris: Vrin, 1976): 70; translation taken from G. Canguilhem,
Ideology and Rationality in the History of the Life Sciences, trans. Arthur
Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988): 14.
86 Jacques-Alain Miller, in a recent text, comments on Levi-Strauss in a way that
resonates with the broader post-rationalist concern for introducing a certain
(constitutive) instability into the elaboration of structures, via a recognition ofthe
"agency" of the very elements that occupy places in the structure: "Levi-Strauss
had already said it, long ago, that it was the superiority of structuralism over
formalism. [ ... J He said: for the formalist there is a form, and the details are like.an
amorphous material that does not count; for a structuralist, on the contrary, there
is no distinction between material and form and the structure is found in the things
themselves:' See J.-A. Miller, "The Logic of the Cure;' in Lacanian Ink 33 (Spring),
2009,29. In Milner's argument, however, and I think for the early Miller too, it is
less the indistinction between form and content that allows post-rationalism to
transcend the terms of a limited formalism; rather, it is the theoretical recognition
52
grate their form; tha!
elements that threatens its dissolution.
S7 Milner, "The Point of the Signifier;' 114.
88 Ibid.
89 Ibid.
90 Ibid., 115.
the very element or
91 See J.-A. Miller, "Extimite;' in The Symptom: Journal of Lacan.Com 9, 2008,
available online; www.lacan.com/symptomPp=36.
5
Living Knowledge? Canguilhem,
Deleuze, and the Problem of Life
Introduction
According to an orthodoxy that continues to gain ground, one originally
defined by Michel Foucault, French philosophy of the twentieth century can be
understood as being organized into two broad streams.! The first, encompassing
the neo-vitalist metaphysics of Henri Bergson,2 the affirmationist ontology
of Gilles Deleuze,3 as well as various kinds of phenomenology, privileges an
experiential, antistructural, generally monist account of the productivity of life,
over and above temporary individuations and contingent assemblages. Such a
philosophy is characterized, so the story goes, by its emphasis on a preindividual
stream of virtuality over the actually existent, and by a suspicion of what it
perceives to be the overly reductive move of rendering subjective experience
in the terms of deeper "structures" or concepts. The second stream, indebted
to the post-rationalist philosophy of science of Gaston Bachelard and Georges
Canguilhem and most fully expressed in the high structuralism of Michel
Foucault, Louis Althusser, Levi-Strauss, and Lacan, privileges the metaphorics
of structure as a means of capturing the underlying matrices-linguistic,
unconscious, political-that produce the effect of subjectivity.
This stream is generally characterized as "antihumanist;' and is said to be
as suspicious of the turn to life as the first stream is suspicious of the apparent
aridity of the metaphorics of structure. One charges the other with a scholastic
disregard for change and vitality, while the other responds with the accusation
154
as least in the that it dominant trends and
will contest the of the distinction between French
of life and French philosophies of the concept through a criticaL comparative
reading of two thinkers on seemingly opposed sides of the divide-the French
epistemologist Georges Canguilhem and the philosopher Gilles Deleuze.
In doing so, I hope to extend the insights of the previous chapters, especially
insofar as they challenge dominant understandings of structuralism as "static"
or undynamic, and insofar as they recognize the crisscrossing temporalities
that allowed "pre-structuralist" French epistemology to form the conditions
for post-rationalism proper to emerge. Here, we'll see how a thinker not
associated with the Cahiers, Gilles Deleuze, nonetheless may be of assistance
in reenvisioning, once again, post-rationalisms concern with structure and
with the various dynamic principles that have been identified as animating
it. Deleuze's work can help us in part because of the ways in which it bears a
striking affinity with the work of Georges Canguilhem, the French epistemologist
whose epigraph adorned every edition of the Cahiers, but whose insistence on
grounding biology in a philosophy of "life" brings into view the question of the
dynamism or vibrancy of structures, and whether the post-rationalist concern
for conceptuality may be able to admit questions of vitality, of change.
By drawing a line of continuity between these singular figures in the history
of French philosophy, I hope to emphasize that, even at the height of the
abstractions of the post-rationalist "movement:' attempts persisted to find a
way of bridging the seeming dichotomy between an antihumanist philosophy of
the concept and the quasi-vitalist attention to the specificity of living creation.
If, in a recent essay, Badiou has called for just such a creative bridging of the
philosophies of the concept and of vital experience,s my argument here will
be that such a bridging already exists, albeit in nascent form. The attempts at
an alliance between principles of singularity and of structure in the Cahiers,
that is to say, echoed the earlier project of Canguilhem to unite a philosophy
of life with a philosophy of the concept.
6
I'll begin with a critical reading of
Canguilhem and Deleuze on the question of life, before reading some of the
results back onto the post-rationalist thinkers already considered. As we'll see,
the question of the immanent generation of the new from the old, as well as the
relatively consistent way in which post-rationalism theorized time, will become
crucial to my argument.
Canguilhem, Deleuze, and the Problem of Life 155
Canguilhem on life
According to the generally accepted history of recent French thought, the work
of the French philosopher of science Georges Canguilhem forms something
of an anomaly. Most obviously, Canguilhem's epistemological emphasis on
the constitutive power of concepts, and in particular his historical effort to
understand how conceptual opposites-the normal and the pathological being
the most celebrated example-determine the bounds for possible knowledge
in particular periods, exerted a strong influence on the subsequent school of
structuralism in its efforts to understand the determinative power of conceptual
and linguistic elements prior to their sedimentation in "individuals" or
subjects. And yet, Canguilhem's work is fundamentally grounded in a theory
of life, derived from his career-long attempt to provide biology and the medical
sciences with a proper philosophic ground. As critical as he was of what he saw
as the irrational vitalisms of the nineteenth century, Canguilhem nonetheless
argued persistently against the opposite extreme of mechanical reductionism,
whereby organic matter would be understood as formally and ontologically
equivalent to inorganic matter. But the particular excess proper to organic
matter, for Bachelard, is equally irreducible to an elan vital, or a mystical
force that comes to exogamously animate otherwise immovable or inorganic
objects. How is it possible to conceive, as Canguilhem does, of life as something
problematic, as internal to organic matter, as the proper object of biology, and
yet as fundamentally, perhaps inextricably linked to the capacity for conceptual
rationalization? A brief comparison of Canguilhem's position to that of his
predecessor Bachelard may prove useful here.
There is much that unites the epistemological philosophies of Bachelard and
Canguilhem. As we've seen, Bachelard's emphasis in books such as The Formation
of the Scientific Mind
7
was on the discontinuous progress of particular sciences,
apart from any grand theory of science per se. Against the positivist, particularly
Anglophone emphasis on the primacy of experimentation and the extraction
of scientific truth from the empirical, Bachelard proposed an epistemology
of concepts, one that foregrounded the rational elaboration of autonomous
theories, progressively, if never totally, purified of their empirical encrustations.
Such a process constituted, for Bachelard, the dialectical progress of scientific
knowledge. Canguilhem, too, gave primacy to conceptual elaboration as the
particular condition of scientific knowledge. As the epigraph to each edition
of Cahiers quoted him, Canguilhem saw the work of science as premised on
156 Post-Rationalism
of the act
upon it the function of a very
we can take "work" to signal the ways that different scientific
PHlcnces extend and limit their conceptual bases such that they render a
specific, theoretical form upon their objects of inquiry, objects that should thus
be conceived of as distinct from, if perpetually in contact with, the objects of
the empirical. "Form" here signals the properly formal, nonempirical basis of
scientific concepts, their ability to undergo formalization.
On this score at least, Canguilhem and Bachelard are very dose. Nonetheless,
the particular objects of their respective enquiries are very different: Bachelard,
in a choice of object redolent of his fore grounding of mathematization as the
condition for scientificity, worked almost exclusively on the "mature;' physical
sciences. Canguilhem, by contrast, and in keeping with his concern for the
elaboration of a problematic oflife, focused almost exclusively on biology. This
obvious difference between the two threatens to obscure, nonetheless, a more
subtle difference: Canguilhem's concern, signaled already in my comment above
as to his interest in the extension and limitation of concepts, on the gradual
accumulation of knowledge, premised-crucially-on a nonteleological,
nonprogressivist conception of scientific practice. In work that would have a
significant influence on Michel Foucault, Canguilhem emphasized that each
epoch in a science's history is defined by the extension and limitation of
particular concepts, often arranged in opposition; such concepts, furthermore,
can transcend the particular histories within which they're arranged and come
to constitute the condition of possibility for knowledge in differing epochs.
"Life" itself, perhaps, is one such meta-concept, abstracted from its emergence
in the particular development of the life sciences and from its convoluted
philosophical history and serving to provide a meta-guarantee for all discourse
around the organic.
Canguilhem's book Knowledge of Life,
8
originally published in French in 1965,
offers the philosopher's fullest account of the specificity of his concept of life,
over and against competing vitalist and other conceptions that govern work in
the natural sciences.
9
As in so much of his writing, Canguilhem is at pains to
outline the specificity of biology as a science. As he writes, the philosopher of
biology "should not expect much from a biology fascinated by the prestige of the
physico-chemical sciences, a biology reduced or reducing itself to the role of a
satellite of these sciences:'l0 Such a biology, or such a philosophy of biology, risks
losing the specificity of its object, concerning itself instead with the mechanistic
Deleuze, and the Problem 157
other sciences
autonomous,
does so ",,,,el,llC1
relation to life is to invite accusations of vitalism. Such accusations, Canguilhem
suggests, are productive, to the extent that they enjoin the philosopher of science
to further refine the specificity of biology's object, against the false choice of a
mechanistic materialism or a quasi-mystical vitalism. As Canguilhem writes, "At
stake is not a defense of vitalism from a scientific point of view; such a debate is
of real concern only to biologists. Our concern is with understanding vitalism
from a philosophical point of view. It may be that vitalism appears to today's
biologists, as to yesterday's, as an illusion of thought. But far from forbidding
or foreclosing philosophical reflection, this denunciation [ ... J calls for such
reflection [ ... J the illusion's tenacity has obliged its critics to reforge their
arguments and weapons:'ll
Buried in these reflections is something central to Canguilhems epistemological
understanding of the relationship between science and philosophy, so important
to Althusser's contemporaneous rethinking of the role of philosophy. For
Canguilhem, the philosopher intervenes in the praxis of a science in order to
clarify its conceptual basis; thus, whereas to working biologists the accusation of
vitalism seems disastrous, sending them to the erroneous security of the language
of the physicochemical sciences, the philosopher can work past this false choice
and understand the negative potential of vitalism itself, as something that, even
in its very illusory nature, specifies something important about the object of
biology. How does Canguilhem conceive of that object?
Crucially, Canguilhem is at pains to disturb the common distinctions between
the permanence or nondynamic character of structure, and the movement oflife.
Even as Canguilhems critique proceeds via a thorough rejection of the reduction
of biology to physical mechanism, he remains skeptical of any attempt to reduce
what he suggestively calls the "vitality of vitalism" to the latter pole of a stability/
instability or permanence/contingency binary. As he writes,
This permanent oscillation [between Mechanism and Vitalism or Continuity
and Discontinuity]' this pendular return to positions that thought seemed to
have definitively left behind, can be interpreted in different ways. [ ... J one
can consider this apparent theoretical oscillation to be the expression of an
undiscovered dialectic and understand the return to the same position as
occurring by the optical error thanks to which we always perceive different
points on a line as one and the same when projected on a perpendicular
158
the
As the between the of
mechanism and the ineffable movements of the vital is merely the illusory
epiphenomenon of an underlying "essence;' the name of which is life itself. Here,
life is less the indescribable "extra" that, while escaping all attempts at definition,
makes biological matter distinct from the inanimate. Rather, life for Canguilhem
is the most central, the most determinative aspect of the development of the
organic, and thus is in some sense more "material" than the physical matter that
physicochemical science reduces all life to, insofar as life roots the organism to
its surrounding milieu (a term that, in an irony underlined by Canguilhem's own
history of the word, originated with mechanist explanations of life). If there's
an error in classical vitalism for Canguilhem then, it lies in its overemphasis on
the ineffability or immateriality of life. Rather, life permeates organic matter,
is in some sense indistinguishable from it, and yet points beyond the limits of
inert matter to the ways in which organisms must maintain a relationship to
the changing context of their milieu in order to remain alive. As Canguilhem
writes, "Once one recognizes the originality of life, one must 'comprehend'
matter within life, and the science of matter-which is science itself-within
the activity of the living:'13 To do so is to relate each organism, each structure,
to the relational context upon which it depends. Thus, "It is the position of a
living being, its relation to the experience it lives in as a totality, that gives the
milieu meaning as conditions of existence. Only a living being, infra-human,
can coordinate a milieu:'14
Instead of remaining content, then, with the concept of isolated matter
that serves physics, understood in its mechanical connections but nonetheless
abstract, Canguilhem demands of the philosophy of biology a concept oflife that
encompasses matter within a broader emphasis on dynamic lived experience.
Life, again, is figured here less as an obscure animating force, and more as the
essential relation of an organism to its world, a relation that Canguilhem figures
as overdetermined by the organism itself, an organism that, we might say, feeds
back upon the milieu that en frames it. Despite this concern for the relationality
of the organisms milieu, Canguilhem warns against any contextualist
understanding that would reduce an organism to the totality of its relations
or to the structural background within which it persists. Instead, Canguilhem
assigns an active role to the living organism that, while ultimately constrained by
Problem 159
contrast,
classical vitalist > . ~ ' - ~ . ~ ~ ~ . the insertion of the
into a physical milieu to whose laws it constitutes an exception:'lS
abstract and indeterminate the active relation of that organism to the milieu it
ultimately reconstitutes in its image. Life, then, must be understood negatively,
against the following presumptions: (a) that life is solely contained within
the individual organism; instead, life is defined as the dynamic connection
between the organism and its milieu, (b) that the organism must be posited, as
in classical vitalism, as an exception to its surrounding, structural milieu, and,
most crucially, (c) that the direction of influence between milieu and organism
is unidirectional, traveling only from surrounding environment to the organism
and not the other way-the understanding that a physicalist mechanism would,
according to Canguilhem, impose on biology. Instead, for Canguilhem, the
organism, in overcoming the obstacles that constitute its milieu, imposes its own
form progressively upon it.
It's important to underline that Canguilhem's definition of life here is not
reducible to the kind of metaphysics of Virtuality that I have signaled remains
part of the caricature of French intellectual history. On that model, the organism
would ultimately be nothing more than its relations to its environment, or it would
be the mere expression of a force entirely beyond or outside it. Canguilhem,
by contrast, wishes to emphasize the constructive relation of the organism
to its milieu; as he writes, "The relation between the living and the milieu
establishes itself as a debate (Auseinandersetzung), to which the living brings its
own proper norms of appreciating situations, both dominating the milieu and
accommodating itself to it:'16 The living, that is, is not overdetermined by its
surroundings, but is rather in a state of dialectical tension with it; "a center does
not resolve into its environment:'17
Intriguingly, Canguilhem frequently describes the dynamic relation of the
organism to its milieu in terms of significance, of the generation of sense. On this
model, no absolute binary exists between the pulse of life and its sedimentation
into more and more abstract symbolic codes. Rather, life must conceptually
encompass the generation of sense out of the dynamic interaction of elements in
a given milieu. As Canguilhem phrases it, "Biology must first hold the living to
be a significative being, and it must treat individuality not as an object but as an
attribute within the order of values. To live is to radiate; it is to organize the milieu
160 Post-Rationalism
from and around a center of reference, which cannot itself be referred to without
losing its original meaning:'lB The use of "significative" and "reference" is itself
significant here, and we can extrapolate from those terms a further loosening of
some of the sustaining binaries of life/structure, vitality/Symbolic meaning that
prevent access to the specificity of biology's conceptual object. Here, the living
being constitutes itself through the organization of an "order of values," values
that, at least in the most cognitively advanced of living beings, coalesce into
a dynamic logic of sense-the echo of Deleuze here is not accidental, as we'll
see. Thus, there is no absolute separation for Canguilhem between the domain
of the conceptual and that of the dynamism of life. Rather, life itself organizes
the domain of sense around its own, unique point of "reference;' in a manner
that stages a drama, a dialectical play, between the elements of a milieu and
the living being or beings that progressively come to confer form upon it. The
progressive organization of sense into higher conceptual knowledge does not
ultimately sunder the immanent link between the movements of an organism
within its milieu and the generation of knowledge. Again, we should appreciate
Canguilhem's move here in its radical undermining of many of the presumptions
that guide historical and contemporary critical theory: "meaning" is not be
understood as the afterthought of reflection, but as the emergent, immanent
product of life itself, understood less as an obscure pulse or dynamic energy,
and more as the unstable totality of interactions between a creative being and
its environment.
Even as Canguilhem is at his most detailed in outlining the connection
between life and knowledge in his reflections on "The Living and Its Milieu"
late in Knowledge of Life, he is at his most clear and programmatic in the short
introduction to the book. There, Canguilhem explicitly states, "We accept far
too easily that there exists a fundamental conflict between knowledge and life;'
a conflict that leads us to the false choice "between a crystalline (i.e., transparent
and inert) intellectualism and a foggy (at once active and muddled) mysticism:'19
In the presentation of this forced choice, Canguilhem anticipates what would
come to be seen as the key dividing line in the history of twentieth-century
French thought, between philosophies of life and philosophies of the concept.
Rather than knowledge destroying life, or life rendering knowledge obsolete in
its animate and dynamic pulse, knowledge should be understood for Canguilhem
as "consist[ingJ in the search for security via the reduction of obstacles. [ ... J It is
thus a general method for the direct or indirect resolution of tensions between
man and milieu:'20
Lumnmnem U ~ U L , , and the Prohlem 161
should rather be understood as an
prc,au,ct that comes to act as the very condition of life's
knowledge, that is to say, assures the overcoming of obstacles present in a
particular milieu, assuring the persistence of the organism in question. But
instead of remaining content with what threatens to seem a merely functionalist
or adaptationist account of knowledge in its relation to life, Canguilhem
complicates things by redefining life as "the formation of forms" and "knowledge
[as] the analysis of in-formed matter:'21 As such, life, far from being a vital
energy that encompasses knowledge in the very breadth of its powers, instead
becomes a kind of proto-knowledge, a form that imposes itself on brute matter,
allowing in turn the analysis of that matter (matter as "in-formed" by life) in the
production of further knowledge. A complex dialectic emerges here, between an
organism and its milieu on the one hand, and between the broader conception
of life as an in-forming power on the other hand, and I think Canguilhem,
despite the language of "in-forming" here, wishes to gesture beyond any strict
separation between form and content or matter and form. As we'll see presently,
Canguilhem himself uses Aristotle as a foil in constructing his arguments around
the inherence of knowledge to life, but whether he fully transcends Aristotle's
own account of the forming of matter is open to question.
To restate, the temptation to be avoided is the reduction of Canguilhems
thinking here to that of an absolute relationalism. In order that the materially
rooted, in-formed but dynamic power of life is fully understood, it cannot be
reduced to the contextual elements that make up its milieu. Rather, as Paul
Rabinow remarks of Canguilhems commentary on the discovery of the genetic
code, "the code and the (cellular) milieu are in constant interaction. There is
no simple, uni-directional causal relation between genetic information and its
effects:'22 What goes here for genetics goes equally for Canguilhem's more general
account of the relationship between living organisms and their environments.
Thus, the maintenance of the distinction between the two constitutive elements
of life-in this instance, genetic code and its cellular context-is key to any
understanding of their interaction; one cannot be reduced to the other, but their
interaction is rather one of a mutual and repeated problematization, the specifics
of which is determined by the particular obstacles proper to the particular
milieu in which such an interaction occursY We should note in passing the
influence of Bachelard on Canguilhem here, and the latter's subtle departure
from his predecessor. As we saw in the previous chapter, Bachelard foregrounds
162
across the milieu and the
any epistemological positing of the problem as
the necessarily immanent relation of organism, milieu, and life itself.
Canguilhem makes frequent reference to Aristotle in his attention to the
specificity of the elements of life, especially in terms of the interaction of life
with knowledge as something inherent to and constitutive of it. As Canguilhem
writes, "[Tlhe Aristotelian theory of the active intellect, a pure form without
organic basis, has the effect of separating intelligence from life [ ... ]The theory
thus makes the conception of concepts either something more than human or
else something transcending life:'24 It is precisely this extra-organic conception
of knowledge that Canguilhem seeks to avoid. Rather, in a manner that
echoes suggestively with any number of philosophical precedents but perhaps
particularly with Spinoza, life is a monistic, dynamic, and material event with
knowledge nested within it as both its condition and product. Far from being
opposed, life and knowledge, life and the conceptual, are dynamically and
constitutively conjoined.
Deleuze
Canguilhem maintained an interested but distant relationship to the emergence
of structuralism in the 1950s and the 19608.
25
Much has rightly been made of the
influence of Canguilhems approach to the history of science on the discursive
archaeologies of Michel Foucault, but it may be equally possible to locate the
influence of his particular approach to life on the work of Gilles Deleuze, a
figure only marginally related to the structuralism that he would, in his later
collaborative works with Guattari, forcefully critique. The polemics that have
often accompanied accounts of the criticisms of structuralism and psychoanalysis
in those later books threaten to render opaque the continuities between the
post-rationalist philosophy of science that influenced the emergence of French
structuralism, and the seemingly antithetical philosophy oflife that forms a large
part of Deleuze's metaphysics, an antithesis that this chapter, in a broader sense,
aims to contest. If, in the above, I locate in Canguilhems philosophy of biology
a concept of life that refuses the externalization of knowledge, it is possible to
locate in Deleuze's work a similar concern for the philosophical encompassing
Deleuze, the
and
threatens untether life
are its irrevocable conditions, I'll with a
"Immanence: A Life;' before moving back in time to his
of Sense, published in 1969,
163
"Immanence: A Life" stands as one of the most programmatic statements
of Deleuze's ontological position, useful in its compressed summation of some
of the main concerns of both Deleuze's stand-alone works, the most important
being Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense, and his collaborative
works with Guattari. Coursing through all of these texts is an insistence on an
ontology of immanence, Too often, Deleuze argues, philosophers have artificially
derived their ideas of difference and change from a priody assumed concept of
identity, rendering inaccessible to thought the virtual, dynamic conditions that
result in temporary and contingent manifestations, While recent commentary
on Deleuze has urged caution in assimilating this monist philosophy of virtuality
to a philosophy oflife,27 there is, especially in Deleuze's later, collaborative works,
an emphasis on creative becoming that is frequently posed in the terms of life,
and in terms that invite an at least quasi-vitalist interpretation. Nonetheless, in
what follows, I want to underline that which is specific and problematic about
Deleuze's account of life, and why the counterposition of it to Canguilhems
own philosophy of life might alter our sense of both thinkers, and the wider
philosophical context within which they worked.
Deleuze's essay begins with his account of "transcendental empiricism;' the
category he frequently invoked to define his ontological work. A transcendental
field, for Deleuze, should not be reduced to its purely Kantian acceptation,
where a sharp break persists between the conditions of knowledge and the
objects of that knowledge. Rather, the transcendental can be rendered within the
terms of "immediate givens;' as an "a-subjective consciousness, a pre-reflexive
impersonal consciousness, a qualitative duration of consciousness without a
selC
28
Instead of manifesting the field oflogica!, categorical conditions that allow
an approximation of the real, the transcendental on this model is dose to what,
elsewhere, Deleuze referred to as the field of the virtual, as the field of immanent
potentiality that conditions the actual. Most importantly, the rendering of the
transcendental within the terms of an a- or pre-subjective flux allows Deleuze
to avoid the reification of the subject/object polarity; as he writes, "[W]e will
speak of transcendental empiricism in contrast to everything that makes up the
world of the subject and the object:' To divide the world in such a way is to efface
164
latter distinction itself
Post -Rationalism
interaction
rather too
the
too abstract in
and manifestation.
As opposed to the traditional empiricism ofHume or Locke, Deleuze regards
even the apparent immediacy of sensation to be secondary to the absolute
immanence of the transcendental field. As he writes, "There is something
wild and powerful in this transcendental empiricism that is of course not the
element of sensation, for sensation is only a break within the flow of absolute
consciousness:'29 Thus, the flow of the a-subjective is primary; any localization
of that flow within a contingent sensation, much less than in a self or subject, is
a temporary and contingent derivation-and, crucially, such derivations should
not be accorded the primacy of the concrete or the material. It is, rather, the
a-subjective transcendental field itself that is, in an ontological sense, most
"actual;' most loaded with power. Deleuze refers to the temporary sedimentations
of senses and selves, as a consequence, as "transcendents;' a term that underlines
their ephemerality. Such transcendents occur when "a subject is produced
at the same time as its object, both being outside the field and appearing as
'transcendents"'30 Such temporary instances of the coupling of a subject and an
object, furthermore, are to be understood as separate from the field from which
they emerged, that field "elud[ingJ all transcendence of the subject and of the
object. Absolute immanence is in itself: it is not in something, to something; it
does not depend on an object or belong to a subject:'3!
If Canguilhems understanding of the relation between an organism and its
milieu foregrounds the friction or obstacles between the two, obstacles that serve
as an impetus to a constant, dynamic renegotiation of that relation, Deleuze's
description of the relation of the transcendental field to contingent "transcendents"
seems, to the contrary, to border on the frictionless, the antiseptically smooth.
The self-relating absolutism of Deleuze's ontological immanence, especially
when described in terms of "complete power, complete bliss;'32 seems resolutely
extra-material, ultimately unconnected to the perishability of organic matter.
And yet, upon Deleuze's introduction of the term "life;' some striking
congruities with Canguilhem come into sight. First, Deleuze emphasizes
the connection between the "plane of immanence" qua transcendental field
and the singularity of "a life;' with the "indefinite article as an index of the
transcendentaI:'33 For Canguilhem too, each instantiation of the concept of
life takes on an irreducible singularity defined by the particular elements of its
milieu. Rabinow characterizes this singularity in terms of the tendency of life to
165
to "CUBBY'''"
to 'TIlis condition of
accidental or external to but is its fundamental form.
for Canguilhem, such a "fundamental form" is inextricably historical, connected
to the particular lifeworld upon which an organism implants its influence.
The singularization that the definite article affords is, for Deleuze, precisely a
mark of the transcendental field; here again, the usual philosophical order of
priority is reversed, such that it is the horizon of possibility that gives birth to
the actual that should be considered as singular, as primary. Canguilhem insists
too on the specificity, even singularity, of the imprint of the organism upon its
surrounds, such that the movement of life, understood as the in-forming of
matter, takes on an irreducible singularity depending on the circumstances of
its manifestations.
Central to the coherence of Deleuze's argument, and implicit in Canguilhem's,
is the notion, perhaps confusing at first, that life can be understood as singular,
and yet not individual; life, that is, can supervene as a singularity in a particular
situation, a particular milieu, without being reducible to a characteristic set
of properties that must always be present if life is to be averred as present.
Canguilhem's critique of Aristotle's naturalism hinges on precisely this problem
35
;
as Canguilhem writes, "Life's teleological process is not perfectly efficient and
infallible [ ... J 1he existence of monsters shows that nature does make mistakes,
which can be explained in terms of matter's resistance to form:'36 Mechanism
makes the same error of assuming an indivisibility, a stasis in form, at the heart
of life; Canguilhem writes that "a mechanism is an assemblage of parts whose
relation to one another changes over time but is periodically restored to an initial
configuration:'37
Read together with the primacy of error in the explanation of life, with
Canguilhem's definition of what it means to be a subject of knowledge as "simply
to be dissatisfied with the meaning one finds ready at hand:'38 we can read into
Canguilhem's definition of life a tolerance for the singularity of the milieu, but
not for the stasis that individuality, paradoxically, would suggest if yoked to a
general definition of life. Deleuze evokes the distinction by reference to the faces
of small children: "[V)ery small children all resemble one another and have
hardly any individuality, but they have singularities: a smile, a gesture, a funny
face-not subjective qualities:'39 Whatever one makes of Deleuze's choice of
example-and its eccentricity is apparent-his intent is clear: singularity breaks
through the homogeneity of an immanent field in a way that individuality,
166
the
and
in an passage on from his d'histoire et de
philosophie des sciences (1968). While Canguilhem concludes that, at least on
its own, a nominalistic choice between a universal genus or individual instance
does not do justice to the concept of life, he nonetheless provides a succinct
definition that captures Deleuze's emphasis on the singular. "There are two
possibilities;' Canguilhem writes: "Is it the universal that makes the individual
a living thing as well as this particular living thing? If so, singularity is to life
as the exception is to the rule. The exception confirms the rule, in the sense of
revealing its existence and content, for the rule, the violation of the rule, is what
makes the singularity apparent, indeed glaring:'40 The other possibility would
be to confer on the singular being the ability to "len[dJ its color, weight and
flesh to that ghostly abstraction, the universal:'41 The problem, for Canguilhem,
is precisely to overcome the forced choice that such a dichotomy represents.
Rather, life, when understood as the dynamic interaction of an organism with its
milieu, encompasses within it the pulse, the tug back and forth, between lived
experience of a milieu and knowledge, where knowledge should not be reduced
to an abstraction oflife's, but as a crucial, constitutive component of them.
Nonetheless, we can infer from Canguilhem's emphasis on the constitutive
centrality of error, of the frustration created by the obstacles in a milieu, that it
is the very production of such error that perpetuates life, as the "resistance of
matter to form:'42 Such a resistance can be understood as being in the service of
producing singularities, if, as I have quoted Canguilhem above, "the violation
of the rule [ ... J is what makes the singularity apparent."43 In reacting to and
negotiating such resistances, an organism takes on its power of in -forming matter,
instantiating a singular point of interaction between the resistance of matter
and the reactive power of the organism. Taking these quotes and inferences
together, we can ascribe to Canguilhem a concern, not unlike Deleuze's, with the
singularizing power of life, understood as immanent to the dynamic negotiation
of a singularity and its milieu. Just as, for Deleuze, it is the transcendental field as
the site of potentiality that has the most power, the most immediacy, rendering
contingencies such as a fixed subject/object relation epiphenomenal, so for
Canguilhem, it is the organism that possesses the most life, that which in-forms
matter even as it stands over and above such matter, just as a Singular point
emerges from a homogenous background.
Canguilhem, Deleuze, and the Problem of Life 167
Deleuze explains the evanescent power of such singular emergences of life
in his analysis of a near-death scene written by Charles Dickens in his novel
A Mutual Friend. A disreputable man is found dying, and "[sJuddenly, those
taking care of him manifest an eagerness, respect, even love, for his slightest
sign of life:'44 Everyone gathers together to try and save the man, such that the
man himself, despite being in a deep coma, senses something "soft and sweet
penetrating him:'45 But the more the man revives, the more the crowd grows
distant and cold, and the more he adopts his role as a rogue, as a mean and
unsympathetic man. "The life of the individual:' Deleuze comments, "gives way
to an impersonal and yet singular life that releases a pure event freed from the
accidents of internal and external life, that is, from the subjectivity and objectivity
of what happens:'46 And yet, that singular emergence of life is conditioned,
potentiated, by the material interaction of the rogue and his sympathizers.47 In
such a moment, "the life of [ ... J individuality fades away in favor of the singular
life immanent to a man who no longer has a name, though he can be mistaken
for no other:'48 Such a moment, for Deleuze, explicates a more general force
proper to life, a force that arranges the interaction of material things and the
impersonal singularities that emerge from them.
49
Here, Canguilhem would offer some criticism; after all, life for him is
thoroughly and irreducibly situational, even if it cannot be entirely reduced
to the relations that structure a given milieu and that limit the actions of the
organism. The specific negotiations between an organism and its milieu are,
furthermore, dynamic and ongoing, precisely not reducible to a "moment:'
and certainly not reducible to the particular instance when life threatens to
submit to death. Deleuze clarifies his position a little later in the text, however,
arguing that "we shouldn't enclose life in the single moment when individual life
confronts universal death. A life is everywhere, in all the moments that a given
living subject goes through and that are measured by given lived objects:'5o The
subject, on this reading, is subject to the impersonal transcendental field that
finds a temporary home within it. It is only within the temporary logic of the
actual, furthermore, that definite "moments" can be located; immanent life, by
contrast, "does not itself have moments [ ... J but only between-times, between
moments:'51 Insofar as immanent life forms a thoroughly real but nonetheless
transcendental horizon for the actualization of subjects and objects, it persists
or subsists "between" the definite temporality of the actual.
While Canguilhem does not address the question of temporality directly,
we can infer that there is a similar irreducibility at the center of his philosophy
168 Post-Rationalism
of life between the "time" of life as such, and the time of particular organisms
as they interact with their milieu. Recall that, for Canguilhem, each milieu is
irreducible to the other, but that irreducibility is not in itself a bar to deriving
a general concept of life. Rather, it is in the general form of the interactions
between the elements of specific milieu, the in-forming of matter as a process
general enough to be deduced from the specificity of milieu, that life, perhaps
as a transcendental horizon in Deleuze's sense, is to be found. At the least, both
thinkers seem concerned to elaborate a concept of life irreducible either to a
purely vitalist energetics, whereby life would sit entirely outside the comingling
of material elements in a given situation, and a mechanist or vulgar materialist
reduction of life purely to its material elements. It is the "in-between" of life, its
immanence to the resistant spaces between an organism and its surroundings,
that is sacrificed if one chooses vitalism or mechanism.
Nonetheless, different emphases characterize Canguilhems and Deleuze's
philosophies of life, and it is not the aim of this chapter to underplay those
differences. The language of Canguilhem, rooted as it is in a rationalist and
materialist understanding of the history of biology, seeks to underline the
relevance of a concept of life to all species, even if the specific ways in which
knowledge increases in complexity according to the relative sentience of the
species in question is left rather ambiguous. Deleuze, by contrast, while cognizant
of the elisions between human and animal that manifest in his concept of
"becoming-animal:' nonetheless argues for the actualization of life in subjects,
the precise status of which are, at least in "Immanence: A Life:' left unclear.
More than this, Deleuze's frequent recourse to a language of sublime, indifferent
beatitude when describing life-he will, at one point in the Immanence essay,
refer to "pure power and even bliss"52-reveals an extra- or even antimaterialist
tendency that militates against what is more radical in Canguilhems philosophy,
namely his tight draWing together of organic and inorganic interaction with the
genesis of knowledge; in other words, his refusal to disassociate a materialist
account ofliving interactions from a rationalist concern for the concept.
We might turn to an earlier text by Deleuze in order to understand his
account of sense and knowledge in their relation to the movements of
immanent life that we've already traced in Canguilhem. Deleuze's The Logic of
Sense, published in 1969 and perhaps his most "structuralist" work, sets out to
understand, through an innovative reading of analytic philosophy of language,
how "sense events:' Deleuze's term at this stage of his career for what he would
come to call immanent life, 53 relates to its capture in propositional logic. Among
Deleuze, Problem 169
Ddeuze seeks to
irreducible
the relation of sense to its in The at its is the
relation of things to language; as Deleuze writes, ''"The event [of sense J belongs
essentially to language; it has an essential relationship to language. But language
is what is said of things:'54 Sense cannot be said to exist outside of the language
that confers upon it a propositional direction, but neither is it reducible to the
material interaction of bodies.
s5
Rather, "Sense is both the expressible or the
expressed of the proposition, and the attribute of the state of affairs. It turns one
side toward things and one side toward propositions:'56
Thus, sense-the incorporeal "event" or singularity that language organizes-
falls in between both the propositions that give it form, and the "state of affairs" -
we might say milieu-within which it arises. "It is:' Deleuze argues, "exactly the
boundary between propositions and things. It is this aliquid at once extra-Being
and inherence, that is, this minimum of being which befits inherences:'57 Not only
should we draw a line of continuity between Deleuze's concept of incorporeal
sense and his later notion of immanent life, but we should also underline the
parallels between his insistence on the inextricability of the sense event and
language, and Canguilhem's distinct but similarly motivated insistence on the
parity between life and knowledge, even while noting the difference between
"sense" as Deleuze understands it, and conceptual knowledge as sense situated
at a certain level of abstraction.
Claude Imbert has characterized Deleuze's arguments on "sense" in a way
that further aids our comparative reading. For Imbert, Deleuze's peculiar brand
of empiricism is designed to transcend the very distinction between empiricism
and rationalism as conventionally understood in Western philosophy; Imbert
poses the question of "why [DeleuzeJ didn't ( ... J resolve the whole problem of
sense by appealing to mere sensation:'58 1be answer lies in Deleuze's suspicion
of prior philosophy's reduction of the question of life to the static domain of
polarized concepts or sensations, what Deleuze refers to as "the traditional
image of philosophy;' analyzed in his Difference and Repetition; the very false
choice between concept and structure on the one hand, and life and experience
on the other, that I posed at the beginning of this chapter. Instead, a new kind
of philosophical language is required to capture the immanent differences that
cut across the categories inherited from older philosophical traditions. As
Imbert phrases it, quoting from Deleuze, "[TJhis is not about 'a reaction against
concepts, nor a simple call to lived experience':' Instead, empiricism itself must
170
transcendental
theoretical labor as "life" does in Canguilhem, as it does to account
for processes that definitively cross the boundaries erected between knowledge
and experience, between objects and their "representation" in language.
Just as, in his Immanence essay, Deleuze emphasizes the "in-betweenness" of
life, so he ascribes a similar liminality to the event of sense in his earlier work,
and just as Canguilhem describes the immanent generation of knowledge out
of the movements of a milieu, so Deleuze will insist on the paradoxical reliance
of the sense event on the propositional structures that order it, that-to echo
Canguilhem-in-form it. The sense event, or life, cannot exist without these
ostensibly second-order processes of representation, and yet it cannot be
reduced entirely to them; rather, it forms an immanent totality with the specific
"state of affairs" or milieu within which it arises, and the knowledge that gives it
its direction.
There is a profound, transhistorical, transconceptual link to be discerned
here between the work of two philosophers otherwise understood as existing
at different poles of French intellectual life. To emphasize this link is not to
suggest any direct or determinative "influence" of Canguilhem upon Deleuze.
Rather, it is to hint at the possibilities of overcoming the tendency to conceive of
philosophies ofHfe and philosophies of the concept as externally opposed to one
another, an overcoming that may not simply correct past assumptions, but may
serve to produce something generally new. What I hope I have pointed toward
in the above is a way of thinking life, pregnant in both Canguilhem and Deleuze
despite their differences, that avoids the extra-material idealism of vitalism, and
the asceticism of conceptual rationalism.
Post -rationalist connections
Any attempt to fold back our reading of life here onto our previous readings
of the "Cahiers" post-rationalists must be cautious and provisionary. There
is always a danger that, by underlining homo1ogies and logical consonances
between otherwise distinct and even antagonistic thinkers and movements,
the force and specificity of both sides of the comparison are lost-indeed, any
argument for maintaining Foucault's distinction between philosophies of life
Canguilhem, Deleuze, and the Problem of Life 171
and concept must surely rest on this claim. Nonetheless, there are, it seems to
me, clear and important parallels to be drawn between the thinking of structure
and change in both some of the earlier thinkers considered in this book, and
those addressed in this chapter. More specifically, I wish to focus in on the
suggestive interrelations around the following questions: first, the question
of how the new might be immanently generated from the "old;' or from the
formal bounds of a structure or series; second, how the resultant instability of
structures relies on a relatively consistent logic of temporality, expressed in two
broad streams or aspects.
If, as we've seen, the concept of "life" in Canguilhem cannot be detached
from the organisms and milieu that grant it materiality, much the same can
be said of the relation between subject and structure in Milner's reading of
Miller, one of the central topics of the previous chapter. The logical connection
between "being" and "nonbeing" that Milner reads off Plato's Sophist, whereby
any presentation of being must conjure nonbeing as its negative supplement,
can be said to travel in the opposite direction too. "Nonbeing;' allied in Milner's
argument with the similarly paradoxical function of the subject as understood
by Miller, is formally nonexistent except in its instantiation in and through
"being;' reconfigured in Milner's parallel reading as equivalent to a chain of
signifiers. As Milner phrases this relation of dependency, "being and non-being
never stop overflowing into one another, each one only able to posit itself as
cause by revealing itself to be the effect of the other:'59 This conceptual dance
between "being" and "nonbeing" is strikingly close to Jacques-Alain Miller's
understanding of the tacit dependence of the subject on the signifier in his
"Suture;' whereby the subject forms the negative element the rejection of which
forms the defining "moment" for the chain of signifiers. Lacan rendered this
pithily in his eleventh seminar as we've already seen: "[Tlhe signifier represents
a subject for another signifier"; the Symbolic is "caused" as a result of its
puncturing by the subject, whose only measure of consistency is provided by
the signifier that acts as its support-a support that is simultaneously an erasure
(the subject fades before the signifier that is its only possible condition).
In much the same way that Milner, Miller, and Lacan are concerned to
desubstantialize the subject, while nonetheless holding on to subjectivity as
a formal operation that underlies and punctuates the movement of signifiers,
Canguilhem wishes to hold onto "life" as that which renders biology a specific
science, while nonetheless resisting the temptation to substantialize life as
essence or vital "spark:' As he wrote in his Knowledge of Life, "The thought of the
172
the And Nikolas Rose
the consequence of the
and and the is that there can be no
betw'een the order of thought-of the concept and the theoretical objects of the
life sciences-and the order of the referent-the extra-discursive vital order:'60
Rose's observation should be supplemented by the account of the complex relation
between life, organism, milieu, and knowledge developed in my arguments above,
such that life can be taken as that which in-forms the interaction of organism
and matter, milieu and knowledge, without ever appearing as a substantial entity
itself. The point is not that the concept of life, for Canguilhem, is reducible to or
is simply apparent as a concept; rather, the very terms of what can be considered
to be "conceptual;' to count as knowledge, are expanded to include what might
previously, in Rose's terms, have been reduced to being the "extra-discursive"
outside to knowledge. Concept and life are co-emergent.
Between Milner, Miller, and Lacan's account of the constitutive and
desubstantializing relation of subject to structure and Canguilhem's account
of life, a structural, logical if not substantial homology obtains. "Subject:' in
post-rationalism, can only manifest negatively, within the "vacillation" (Milner)
of elements within a series or structure. Similarly, "life;' for Canguilhem, names
the dynamism of the interaction between an organism and its environs, weighted
increasingly in favor of the organism as it comes to dominate its surrounds. Just
as strikingly, both the post-rationalist subject and Canguilhem's life are defined
by their resistance to, as well as their constitution of, the structures that are their
only arena of efficacy. For Canguilhem, the resistance of living matter to its
milieu, a resistance that serves to reform that milieu in living matter's "image;'
is a part of life's function, a function that is as likely to manifest in "error;' in a
discordance between organism and milieu, as it is in a close fit between the two.
(No doubt Canguilhem derives his emphasis on the resistance of organism to
milieu, and vice versa, at least in part from Bachelard, who wrote of a "coefficient
of adversity" in matter; this recognition of resistance was explored in Chapter 1
in relation to Lacan and Leclaire's accounts of the psychoanalytic object.)6!
Pierre Macherey sums up the constitutive character of error and resistance in
Canguilhem's account of life well: "[LJife becomes known, and recognized,
only through the errors of life that, in every living thing, reveal its constitutive
incompleteness:'62
Similarly, the post -rationalist subject is the subject of misrecognition, of a term
that is excluded from the structure or series that it nonetheless helps constitute
173
on
to the term,
to account for the subject in terms radically different those down
from Cartesian, "traditional" rationalism. Perhaps it is the shared debt to, and
distance from, Descartes that renders this affinity even clearer: Canguilhem, for
his part, resists any Cartesian duality between mind (as the domain of thought,
of knowledge) and matter, while nonetheless taking from Descartes a sense of
the force of concepts, of their constitutive power. Milner and Miller are similarly
distant to any more traditional rationalism that would propose the subject
as a mode of substance, and yet their retention of the subject as an abstract
form presupposes something of rationalism's practice of mathematization, its
investment in abstraction.
As noted above, Althusser argued that the different levels or "instants" of social
structure are temporally heterogeneous, in much the same way that different
milieu, for Canguilhem, may be nested within one another without holding
anything of the same structure of time. This particular congruence allows us
to specify what, from the work of Bachelard and Canguilhem on, seems to be a
broadly consistent approach within "post-rationalism" to the problem of time.
We can characterize this approach as being defined by two broad logics. The
first is a resistance to any linear or sequential theory of temporality, in favor
of an emphasis on retrospection. The second is the aforementioned positing
of heterogeneous orders of temporality, often nested within one another but
remaining distinct.
I'll take each of these two broad temporal logics in turn, as a means of further
bringing together our reading of Canguilhem and Deleuze, and our prior account
of the post-rationalist, post -Lacanian account of subject and structure. For their
part, Milner and Miller are both concerned, according to the first, "retrospective"
temporal logic, to delineate the after-the-fact, and reversible, causality of the
subject and structure; as we saw in the previous chapter with Milner, being and
nonbeing, that which is permissible and that which is inadmissible in a structure,
can both assume the function of cause, depending on the position taken within
the looped continuum of retrospective time. At one level, the subject is "caused"
by the signifier, insofar as, without the signifier, the subject has no means of
(re)presentation. But the logic of the signifier is equally "caused" by the subject,
as a result of the subject's status as the excluded term, the very exclusion of
Both are indebted to Lacan this
insisted that the of is irreducible to the
of the dock. Instead, the subject of the unconscious "comes to be" where it has
already been, comes to insist in a signifier at a point anterior to its always already
having "been" at the level of the unconscious. Such is one of the meanings of
,
Lacan's labrynthine reinterpretation of Freud's "Wo es War, solI Ich werden;' at
one point re-rendered in terms that resonate strongly with Milner's invocation
of being and nonbeing: "Being of non -being, that is how I as subject comes on
the scene, conjugated with the double aporia of a true survival that is abolished
by knowledge of itself, and by a discourse in which it is death that sustains
existence:'63 In other words, the limited "being" of the subject, for Lacan, is
predicated upon the "nonbeing" that marks the signifier in its endless iteration;
the "true survival" of the subject within the movements of the signifier is, at one
and the same time, the subject's erasure, to be discerned only in the trace left by
the substitution of one signifier for another. At a lesser pitch of abstraction, Freud
had already recognized this fundamentally aporetic nature of psychoanalytic
time and temporally situated causality in his reflections on trauma, For Freud,
repressed memories are rendered traumatic only at a later event; thus, for example,
a child witnessing his or her parents having sex may experience confusion and
distress at the time, but it is only later, with puberty, that the act is registered as
sexual, and thus is, under certain conditions, reconstituted as traumatic in the
unconscious, As Freud wrote as early as 1895, "a memory is repressed which has
only become a trauma after the evenf'64
The French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche, initially a follower of Lacan's who
moved decisively away from his former master, has developed at length the
temporal logic of this "deferred action:' Crucially, for Laplanche, the movement
of what Lacan called "apres coup" must be understood as traveling in two
directions, forwards and backwards through time. Defining his own theory in
distinction to what he characterizes as an overly determinist account present in
some of Freud's writings, whereby a past repressed event operates like a time
bomb, waiting to explode at a later date, Laplanche offers instead a sense of
"afterwardsness:' as he christens it, that emphasizes the double directionality of
time in the psyche. It's worth quoting Laplanche at some length:
I would like to say that Freud's concept of afterwardsness contains both great
richness and a certain ambiguity, combining a retrogressive and a progressive
Canguilhem, Deleuze, and the Problem of Life 175
direction. I want to account for this problem of the different directions, to
and fro, by arguing that, right at the start, there is something that goes in the
direction of the past to the future, from the other to the individual in question,
that is in the direction from the adult to the baby, which I call the implantation
of the enigmatic message. This message is then retranslated, following a
temporal direction which is, in an alternating fashion, by turns retrogressive
and progressive.
65
For Laplanche after Freud and Lacan, the "enigmatic message" implanted in
the unconscious of the baby as a result of her parents' opaque signifiers acts
to influence the subsequent psychic life of that subject; at one and the same
time, such enigmatic messages or signifiers are translated and retranslated,
reconstituted backwards and forwards in time, according to the Symbolic
contexts with which the subject is confronted at a given moment. If we were
to exchange the terms "adult" and "baby" with "subject" and "signifier" in the
above quote, something of the unstable and dual temporality suggested by the
first post-rationalist logic of time might be captured. At any given moment,
the subject of the signifier may appear as an enigmatic, paradoxical sign
within the movements of signifiers, puncturing the metonymic movement of
signifier to signifier; those same signifiers, at one and the same time, may act
upon that subject so as to, in Laplanche's terms, "translate" or, in Lacan's terms,
"represent" the subject, thus erasing it at the same moment that it is given the
means of its manifestation. It is this uncanny sense of time, irreducible to the
synchronism or "presentism" so often imputed to structuralism, that renders a
little clearer Milner's insistence that both being and nonbeing, the signifier and
the subject, can be taken as "cause" of the other. Such a seemingly paradoxical
imputation of causality to two distinct elements is possible when one recognizes
the co-constituting character of the dual terms, and the ways in which they are
temporally situated within the loop of "afterwardsness:' where one may appear
both "before" and "after" the other.
The second broad temporal logic of post-rationalism concerns the coexistence
of radically distinct and incompatible orders of time within one or more
overarching structure. To reiterate, Althusser's contribution to Reading Capital
brings out the observation already immanent in Marx, where the different
levels of a social formation or structure are bound by variant logics of time.
As Althusser bluntly phrases it, "[T]he model of a continuous and homogenous
time which takes the place of immediate experience, which is the place of the
immediate existence of this continuing presence, can no longer be regarded as
176
the time of
be said
Post-Rationalism
each of these times and each of these histories is autonomous does not
make them so many domains which are independent of the whole:'67
it is in the articulation of the relatively autonomous levels to one another and
to the totality that exposes both their distinction and their dependence on the
whole. 1hus, "[tlhe specificity of these times and histories is [ ... J differential,
since it is based on the differential relations between the different levels
within the whole:'68 There is, for Althusser, an immanent relation between
the differentially constituted levels of a complex totality and the whole, even a
dependence upon the whole; but, crucially, that dependence is not of a type that
would reduce the logic of each level to an overarching, transcendent logic of the
whole. To maintain the immanent account of structure that Althusser desires
while still recognizing the ways in which the grouping of levels into a totality
renders that totality itself as an efficacious entity, Althusser must posit the
dependent relation to the totality as itself granting autonomy to its levels; as he
writes, "[Tlhe conception of this 'relative' independence defines its 'relativity',
i.e., the type of dependence that produces and establishes this mode of 'relative'
independence as its result:'69
One finds an equal insistence in Canguilhem on the coexistence of
irreducible "levels" or milieu: "What the milieu offers the living is a function
of demand. It is for this reason that, within what appears to man as a single
milieu, various living beings carve out their own specific and singular
milieus in incomparable ways:'70 Particularly suggestive here is the notion
that milieus are "singular" and "incomparable"; instead of there being a single
"logic" of the relation between organism and milieu, different beings operate
with entirely different orders of value that come to structure that relationship.
While Canguilhem's theory derives from an entirely different domain and set
of questions,?! it is, in a manner not dissimilar to Althusser, concerned with
problematizing any understanding of structure as homogenous or governed by
the overarching dynamic of a singular element or system, effecting its influence
in a unidirectional fashion.72 The mediating influence between Canguilhem and
Althusser here is no doubt Bachelard, for whom "two theories may belong to
two different rational systems [ ... J they may contradict each other on certain
points while remaining individually valid within their own rational system:'73
Where Canguilhem transposes this sense of the autonomy of different rational
and the Problem
One of the most perspicuous accounts of this aspect of Canguilhem's
thought is that offered by Alain Badiou, in his "Is There a Theory of the Subject
in the Work of Georges Canguilhem?"74 As the title suggests, Badiou's concern
is whether, despite the obviously historical and epistemological motivations
of Canguilhem's philosophical work, the latter might nonetheless propose an
implicit theory of the subject. Addressing the concept of "milieu;' Badiou detects
in Canguilhem an argument for two broad understandings of the concept, the
"objective universal milieu ( ... J coupled with the absolute character of subjective
need:'75 The objective universal milieu is broadly comparable with what we
understand by the universe, and is mappable by the technical innovations of the
contemporary sciences; Badiou refers to this first understanding of milieu as
"the absolute character of the scientifically determined universe:'76 Canguilhem,
for Badiou, moves from positing this universe, a kind of container for all that is
objectively verifiable by science, to positing the opposite, if equally important
absolute of subjective need, a "living subject who produces norms that are
always centred by an absolute need:'77 Despite Canguilhem's recognition that,
in Badiou's words, "the living being is the original condition of any science
of life:' Badiou nonetheless argues that a determining opposition arises for
Canguilhem, a clash of absolutes between the indifferent milieu of the universe
and the subjective world of needs, with the latter associated with norms, with
points of reference, with the basic characteristics of milieu as weve outlined
them in this chapter; Badiou reduces these to three characteristics, "centre (or
centring), norm and meaning:'78
In Badiou's reading then, a discordance opens up between the universe
and subjective milieu, between the objectivizing logic of science and between
the points of reference proper to life. Evidence for this is gathered by Badiou
from a text that has proved centrally important to this chapter, Canguilhem's
Knowledge of Life. Badiou writes: "[T)his absolute character [of the scientifically
knowable universe J is immediately contrasted with another. For, Canguilhem
says, 'the natural milieu of men is not situated in the universal milieu like
a content in its container. A centre is not resolved into its environment:"79
We might ask, however, whether Badiou is right to assert an antimony here
between the universal absolute and the subjective; Canguilhem's argument is
that a "centre is not resolved into its environment" and, as we noted above,
178 Post-Rationalism
its miiieu. It is
is concerned with can be understood as that between two externally
absolutes; rather, it should be understood as marking the internal opposition
between an organism, a "centre of reference;' and its milieu. Badiou's argument
is in the service of drawing out a wider concept of the subject that emerges
from these antinomies, and he skillfully positions this subject as "entailed in
both terms of the conflict. As the subject of science, [. , .J it constitutes the
absolute real universe from which every centre is absent. As a living subject, it
objects to this universe through the changeable singularity of its own centred,
normed and meaningful milieu,"80 Thus, it is the concept of the subject that,
for Badiou's Canguilhem, mediates between the two absolutes. Nonetheless,
I think Canguilhem is rather less willing to posit such a transcendental
opposition, insisting as he does on the thoroughly immanent nesting of milieu
within milieu. For his argument as to the generation of sense and reference
from life to have force, the space in which such a process occurs must be one
of immanence.
Where Canguilhem, perhaps, goes further than Althusser, or further than
Badiou in his reading of the former, is in cutting out the very concept of
totality itself; rather, there seems no reason to delimit the space of irreducible
milieu as they coexist within and yet without one another. And thus just as
Canguilhem's philosophy veers from any classical vitalist opposition of life and
its sedimentation, or life and its contingent and temporary capture in meaning,
so too does his attention to the structural complexity of living milieu move
intriguingly close, at least in the form of its conceptual architecture, to the
post-rationalist, Althusserian concern for complexifying our understandings
of structure. Arguably, Canguilhem, precisely as a rationalist concerned with
the effectivity of concepts, goes further than Althusser in proposing the utter
co-implication of the domain ofUfe and the domain of conceptuality; indeed, as
we've seen, life generates conceptuality immanently in its dynamic interaction
with its milieu. Life, by contrast, would no doubt be swept into the conceptual
dustbin by Althusser as a remnant of pre scientific humanism or, worse, as a
concept irretrievably connected to empiricist ideology; indeed, Althusser directly
associated "life" with ideology in the debate that followed his presentation, in
1968, of his "Lenin and Philosophy": "One even notes that the fact that sciences
like biology have been considered sciences of life. Now life is obviously an
ideological notion that is in the process of disappearing:'81
Canguilhem, Deleuze, and the Problem of Life 179
Of course, my focus here on the specifics of Canguilhem's philosophy of
life doesn't directly account for the more obviously rationalist elements of his
broader rethinking of the history of the sciences. Even today, the best assessment
of this important element of Canguilhem's thought remains Pierre Macherey's
1964 text "Georges Canguilhern's Philosophy of Science: Epistemology and
History of Science:'82 Published with an admiring introduction by Althusser,
the essay presents Canguilhem's various writings on the history of scientific
concepts, from his account of the development of the "reflex" to his history of
the "thyroid;' as a complex unity, one concerned above all with correcting past
errors, errors committed under the names of mechanism but also under the
rubric of prior philosophical "rationalisms:' Most strikingly for the problems
of history and time already raised in this chapter and elsewhere in this book,
Macherey emphasizes the critique of continualist or progressive historicism
that lies at the basis of all of Canguilhern's innovations. Instead of artificially and
teleologically resuscitating the past of a science in the terms of an encompassing
whole, Canguilhem instead opts to place a science's present under suspicion,
digging beneath its constituent myths. As Macherey writes, "Canguilhem
substitutes the filiation of concepts for the chain of theories. In this way every
internal criterion will be rejected which can only be given by a scientific
theory"83; that it to say, for Canguilhem an account of science that privileges a
logically developed chain of theoretical development can only be written from
the perspective of the present; a history of the victors, so to speak. Instead, the
properly multiple and overdetermined trajectory of concepts provides a more
historically precise account of scientific labor, one that "pursu[esJ the history
external to science itself [ ... J that [ ... J is the effort to think science in its real
body, the concept, instead of in its ideallegality:'84
An account of scientific history that conformed to such an "ideal legality"
would be one that serves to retrospectively justify the science's current state.
Canguilhern's focus on concepts, by contrast, endeavors to trace those moments
in scientific history when an original irruption of thought conditions the
new, giving birth, in the terms elaborated above, to a new "milieu" and a new
concomitant logic. A concept for Canguilhem, as described by Macherey,
"allows a protocol of observation to be established;' without which the flux of
experiential and experimental data would be formally indistinguishable from
ideology; note here the obvious similarities with Bachelard's earlier emphasis
on the constitutivity of concepts, as explored in Chapter 2. One must contrast,
then, between theories and concepts; the latter are primary, constituting the
frame through which scientific knowledge might be advanced, with the former
180
insofar as it opens, in its
onto the specificity of a domain of inquiry, the knowledge and nn1rtli-p of which
goes under the name "biology:' Concepts are moments of what Macherey calls
"absolute commencement;' and they are ultimately irreducible to a merely
contextual or reductively historicist account of their emergence. Instead, they
serve to retrospectively reconfigure the very specificity of the context from
which they emerged.
In a certain sense, it is the absolutely "new" that is lacking from Canguilhem's
account of life above, and it remains a problem that troubles at the edges of
post-rationalism more generally. As we saw with Milner and, in a slightly
different register, with Althusser, the problem of causality is closely tied to the
problem of the new, and it is arguable whether Canguilhem fully bridges the gap
in scale between the rigorous epistemology of concepts that Macherey describes,
an epistemology fundamentally oriented toward the new, and the account of
life described earlier in this chapter, an account that is simultaneously more
microscopic and more general than the history of concepts would allow. It is
further arguable with a fully elaborated principle of transformation is available
to Canguilhem's complex reflections on milieu and organisms, but this shouldn't
blind us to the ways in which Canguilhem's thinking of conceptuality prefigures
much that is dynamic in contemporary critical thought; one might only notice
the obvious similarities between the retrospectively transfiguring properties of
concepts as outlined by Canguilhem via Macherey, and Badiou's recent attention
to events that similarly transfigure their conditions of emergence. More than
this, and to conclude, there is a profound link, if hidden by the fragmentary
nature of Canguilherris corpus, between his philosophy of life, and his historical
attention to the mutation of scientific concepts.
Conclusion
Toward the beginning of the chapter, I quoted the epigraph of each issue
of the Cahiers, an epigraph that selects a definition of conceptual work from
Canguilhem. To work a concept, Canguilhem argues, is to "confer upon it
progressively the function of a form:' My previous analysis of the quote above
emphasized the ways in which Canguilhem understood conceptual labor as
involving the extension and limitation of concepts, based on their relations with
VU"CftlCffL Deleuz(', the 181
my
imbrication
an account that defines as the
situated analysis of "in-formed" matter, we might interpret the
epigraph differently; what if, instead of being contained solely within the rational
extension and limitation of concepts, Canguilhems reflections interface with
and echo his account of life?
On such a reading, to confer on a concept the "function of a form" would be
to relocate it within the in-forming context of the multiple milieu within which
knowledge, even the highest kinds of conceptual knowledge, is birthed. Such
a reconnection of Canguilhem's post-rationalist concern for the understanding
of science through its conceptual transformations with his broader philosophy
of life may also provoke us to reconnect the accounts of knowledge and life, of
epistemology and ontology in a more general sense, in other spheres of French
thought. Such a connection, as I've provisionally demonstrated it in this
chapter, should emphasize the consonances between the resistances of subject
to structure, of structure to subject, of life and milieu, in a manner that may
usefully supplement the emphasis on life as creaturely contingency, fleshly
vulnerability, recently advanced so convincingly by Eric Santner,S5 The stubborn
material resistances of structure and life, resistances that point nonetheless to
the fundamentally interlaced nature of the relationship between subject and
structure, between organism and milieu, may point beyond the political analytic
of finitude that defines much work in contemporary theory, in a way that may
resonate with the arguments for formal infinitude so definitional of Badiou's
era-defining philosophical project. I have tried to show how such a reconnection
is possible through a combined reading of Canguilhem and Deleuze, and through
the looping back of that reading onto the post-rationalist thought of Milner,
Miller, and Lacan, but it seems feasible that our understanding of other texts of
twentieth century French philosophy may benefit from such a reconstructive
project. The aim would not be to argue away the key and constitutive differences
between different strands of French philosophy, but to locate within those
differences points of dynamic continuity and interchange, that point toward the
potential for a new way of thinking the co-implication of life and its conceptual
elaboration, a thinking that would refuse the implied hierarchy between the
"spontaneity" of lived experience and its registration in Symbolic or conceptual
forms. A philosophy, that is, that might pay equal heed to what George Eliot
famously described as "that roar which lies on the other side of silence;'86 the
teeming multitudinous mesh of life, and the concepts that we use to define it.
181
Foucault outlines this intluential claim, as we'll see, in his
to the language translalion of Canguilhem's The Normal and
the Pathological, published in 1978. He contrasts the "philosophy of knowledge,
rationality and the concept" with "the philosophy of subject and experience;'
the latter representing various kinds of phenomenology, as well as the different
emphasis on experience and life found in the works of Deleuze. Most recently,
the divide has been explored by Alain Badiou. Badiou writes, "To think the
philosophical origins of this moment we need to return to the fundamental
division that occurred within French philosophy at the beginning of the
twentieth century, with the emergence of two contrasting currents. l ... J In
Bergson we find what might be called a philosophy of vital interiority [ ... J This
orientation will persist throughout the twentieth century, up to and including
Deleuze. In Brunschvicg's work, we find a philosophy of the mathematically
based concept [ ... J which likewise continues throughout the century, most
specifically in Levi-Strauss, Althusser and Lacan:' See A. Badiou, "Preface: The
Adventure of French Philosophy:' in The Adventure of French Philosophy, trans.
Bruno Bosteels (New York: Verso, 2012): !iii. For Badiou, the question is less an
empirical accounting of the nuances of these thinkers, as it is the identification
of a transcendental, determining dividing line in thought, where one is enjoined
to "take a stand:' Nonetheless, as I hope this chapter will demonstrate, there is
a benefit in muddying the distinction between "life" and the "concept:' at least
if "life" can be distinguished from what Badiou calls "vital interiority:' from the
irrationalism of vitalism, and if "concept" can be rejoined to its determining
conditions. Canguilhem will be crucial to this effort.
2 The crucial role of Bergson in this history is beyond the purview of the current
book, but for an excellent account of how Bergson's metaphysics troubles the divide
between "concept" and "experience" in the intellectual history of French philosophy,
see G. Bianco, "Experience vs. Concept? The Role of Bergson in Twentieth-Century
French Philosophy;' in European Legacy 16(7),2011, 855-72.
3 I take the term "affirmationist" from Benjamin Noys's superlative critique of what
he identifies as an overemphasis on the positive over the negative in contemporary
theory. See B. Noys, The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary
Continental Theory, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010; Deleuze is one of
Noys's signal targets. While I share some of Noys's political suspicion of
ontologies, my chapter will extract a rather different logic from Deleuze, one
oriented toward reconciliation of his affirmationism with a post-rationalist logic of
the concept.
Canguilhem, Deleuze, and the Problem of Life 183
4 For a particularly trenchant contemporaneous critique of Deleuze's work as a form
of "irrationalism;' written by a student of Althusser and a key French philosopher
in his own right, see E. Balibar, "Irrationalism and Marxism;' in New Left Review
107,1978.
5 Badiou identifies the experimental bridging oflife and the concept with the
engagement, in moments of French philosophy of the twentieth century, with the
literary: "One could even say that one of the goals of French philosophy has been
to construct a new space from which to write [ ... ] A space [ ... ] where there is no
longer a formal differentiation between concept and life, for the invention of this
writing ultimately consists in giving a new life to the concept: a literary life:' See
Badiou, "Preface: The Adventure of French Philosophy;' lix. For a discussion of the
relationship of the literary to post-rationalism, see my discussion of Macherey in
Chapter 3.
6 Christian Kerslake has approached this problem in a different way, foregrounding
the shared concern in both Canguilhem and Deleuze with the articulation of a
philosophy of "desire." See C. Kerslake, "Desire and the Dialectics of Love: Deleuze,
Canguilhem and the Philosophy of Desire;' in 1. De Bolle (ed.), Deleuze and
Psychoanalysis: Critical Essays on Deleuze's Debate with Psychoanalysis (Leuven:
Leuven University Press, 2010).
7 G. Bachelard, The Formation of the Scientific Mind (Manchester: Clinamen Press,
2002).
8 Paola Marrati and Todd Meyers's Introduction to this English translation of
Canguilhenis text, published in 2008, is an exemplary gUide to some of the key
themes that animated Canguilhenis scholarship, and I have taken inspiration from
it in my approach to Canguilhem's texts. P. Marrati and T. Meyers, "Translators'
Introduction;' in G. Canguilhem (ed.), Knowledge of Life, trans. Paola Marrati and
Todd Meyers (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008) [1965].
9 While it is outside the scope of this chapter to interrogate the collaborative nature
of Canguilhenis attempt to reconstruct a biologically rooted philosophy of life,
Charles Wolfe offers a superlative mapping of the links between Canguilhenis
work and that of his contemporaries, Georges Simondon and Raymond Ruyer,
in his unpublished 2009 paper "The Return of Vitalism: Canguilhem and French
Biophilosophy in the 1960s;' available online: http://ugent.academia.edu/
Charles Wolfe/Papers/162618/The_Return_oC Vitalism_ Canguilhem_and_French_
Biophilosophy _in_the_1960s
10 Canguilhem, Knowledge of Life, 59.
11 Ibid., 60.
12 Ibid., 6l.
13 Ibid., 70.
184 Post-Rationalism
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid., 113.
17 Ibid., 120.
18 Ibid., 114.
19 Ibid., xvii. It is this insistence in Canguilhem that knowledge, including scientific,
conceptual knowledge, is not opposed to the vitality of life that separates him from
Bergson, whose own insistence on the primacy of life otherwise marks him out as
an exemplary influence on Canguilhem. See E. During, '"A History of Problems':
Bergson and the French Epistemological Tradition," in Journal of the British Society
of Phenomenology, 35(1), 2004. Andy Wong Tai Tak has explained the difference
between Canguilhem and Bergson's philosophies of life in terms of the difference
between a "concept of life" (Canguilhem) and a "metaphysics oflife" (Bergson).
Tai Tak, ''A Critical Investigation of the Concept of Life: Canguilhem or Bergson?"
unpublished seminar paper given at the University of Liege, August 12,2011,
available online: www.edl.ulg.ac.be/sdltextes/20111208-Wong.pdf.
20 Canguilhem, Knowledge of Life, xviii.
21 Ibid., xix.
22 P. Rabinow, "Introduction: A Vital Rationalist;' in G. Canguilhem (ed.), A Vital
Rationalist: Selected Writings from Georges Canguilhem (New York: Zone Books,
2000): 20.
23 It is interesting to consider whether Canguilhem's general philosophy of life
could be integrated into a reading of evolution. As Perry Anderson (of all people)
reminds us, "The mutation of genes is a strictly random element within the
process of natural evolution. That is, the cause of misprints of DNA have no
relation whatever to the filter that selects these: they belong to another order
of determination altogether:' While Canguilhem accounts for the frictional
interaction between genetic code and its cellular basis, it is harder to imagine
how the irreducibility of milieu in his account of life might take cognizance of the
complex but nonetheless quasi-systemic evolutionary development of species. In a
sense, the problem of evolution seems to fall between the two determining scales
of Canguilhem's analysis, the particular and irreducible logics of milieu, and the
overarching, general logic of life itself. See P. Anderson, "w.G. Runciman;' in
A Zone of Engagement (London: Verso, 1992): 165.
24 Canguilhem, A Vital Rationalist, 306.
25 Fran,<ois Dosse comments: ''At the end of his presentation of Foucault's work,
Canguilhem asked what Cavailles meant when he called for a philosophy of the
concept, and he wondered if structuralism might not be an answer. Although
he referred to Levi-Strauss and to Dumezil, Michel Foucault was, for him, the
De/euze, the Problem 185
correct to Foucault's self-avowed debt to Canguilhem, risks
the view of Canguilhem as an ascetic conceptualist that my reading contests;
instead, the irrevocable position of conceptual knowledge within the wider sphere
of life points to the potential overcoming of Foucault's own famous distinction
between philosophies of life and philosophies of the concept, a distinction with
which this chapter begun.
26 Peter Hallward prOVides an excellent critique of Deleuze's tendencies toward a
philosophy of the extra-material and the extra-worldly. See P. Hallward, Out of this
World: De/euze and the Philosophy of Creation (New York: Verso, 2006).
27 See Ian Buchanan's polemical arguments against reducing Deleuze's oeuvre to
that of a philosophy of life in his lecture "Deleuze's 'Life' Sentences;' given at
Manchester Metropolitan University in 2006, available online: www.hssr.mmu.
ac.ukldeleuze-studies/journallav-3/.
28 G. Deleuze, "Immanence: A Life;' in Pure Immanence: A Life (New York: Zone
Books, 2001): 25.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid., 26.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid., 27.
33 Ibid., 28.
34 P. Rabinow quoted in D. F. Pilario, Back to the Rough Grounds of Praxis (Leuven:
Leuven University Press): 188.
35 Arthur Goldhammer has argued provocatively that Canguilhem remains an
Aristotelean, that he "invented a sort of structural Aristotelianism according
to which the cosmos is built of great conceptual oppositions: continuity versus
discontinuity, equilibrium versus disequilibrium." A. Goldhammer, "Canguilhem
and 'French remarks prepared as comment on papers by Jean
Gayon and Claude Debru at the Boston University colloquium "Topics in French
Philosophy of Science;' May 6-7, 1996, available online: www.people.fas.harvard.
edu/-agoldham/articles/Canguilhem.htm. Upon consideration of Canguilhem's
complex theory of life, and in particular his insistence on the irreducibility of
milieu, it is hard to imagine how such a holistic and totaliZing concept as "cosmos"
could function in his oeuvre, however.
36 Canguilhem, A Vital Rationalist, 206.
37 Ibid., 293.
38 Ibid., 319.
Ibid.
42 Ibid., 206.
43 Ibid., 306. There is a striking accordance here between Canguilhem's
understanding of life's resistances as productive of the singular, and the
account of individuality as error offered by Schopenhauer: "Por, at bottom,
each individuality is nothing but a special error, a misstep, something that
would be better off, yes, something from which bringing us back is indeed
the aim of every life." A. Schopenhauer quoted in V. Safatle, "Death, Libido
and Negative Ontology in the 1beory of Drives;' in J. de Vleminck and E.
Dorfman (eds), Sexuality and Psychoanalysis: Philosophical Criticisms (Leuven:
Leuven University Press, 2010): 68. Elsewhere Schopenhauer will insist on
the vital force as immune to the materiality of form, in stark contradiction
to Canguilhem; nonetheless, the historically determined, metaphysical
qualities so apparent in Deleuze's monism, openly indebted to Spinoza
above all, are also apparent between the lines of Canguilhem's rationalism.
Perhaps even more striking is the accordance between Canguilhem's attempt
to think the constitutive relation between life and concept, life and logos,
and that developed in German Idealism; leaving aside Canguilhem's clearly
materialist attempt to root his theory of life within the constrained parameters
of particular milieu, there is an interesting echo between, say, Schelling's
understanding of logos as a reaction to the aporias of the prelogical ground of
existence, and Canguilhem's emphasis on the development of knowledge out of
the errors and obstacles of existence within a milieu.
44 Deleuze, Immanence, 28.
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid.
47 One of the abiding concerns of the recent return to metaphysics in European
philosophy, christened "speculative materialism" by some of its exponents,
has been a rethinking of the relationship between virtuality, potentiality, and
actuality, terms previously central to Deleuzian and post-Deleuzian accounts of
immanence. Quentin Meillassoux's essay "Potentiality and Virtuality" proposes
that the distinction between the two terms be sharpened by defining the former,
potentiality, as "non -actualized cases of an indexed set of possibilities;' with
the latter rethought as giving rise to "a becoming which is not determined by
any pre-constituted totality of possibles." It is the latter, for Meillassoux, that
more accurately captures the "hyperchaos" of existence, to be defined only by
the necessity of contingency. See Q. Meillassoux, "Potentiality and Virtuality:'
Canguilhem, Deleuze, and the Problem of Life
in Collapse: Philosophic Research and Development 2,2007,71-2. See also the
discussion in S. Zizek, Less Than Nothing (London: Verso, 2012): 227-30.
48 Deleuze, Immanence, 29.
187
49 Todd May has argued for a political reading of "life" through Deleuze, a reading
that equally warns against the reduction of our concept of life to the purely organic:
"[WI hat is often most 'vital' about life is its capacity for disorganizing what is
organizing and repressive:' See T. May, "The Politics of Life in the Thought of
Gilles Deleuze:' SubStance 20(3), 1991,24-35. Leaving aside the questionable and
uninterrogated association of organization with repression, May's description of
the resistances ofHfe bears some comparison with Canguilhem's emphasis on life
as the overcoming of the resistances and obstacles proper to particular milieu. As
May adds, "We must understand it [life J [ .. ] as a form of evaluation;' an assertion
that Canguilhem, in his encompassing of evaluative knowledge within his concept
oflife, would certainly agree with. And yet, May argues, in the next paragraph,
that, for Deleuze, life can be defined by reference to three qualities: "positivity.
productivity and incorporeality" (May, "The Politics of Life;' 25). The affirmative
nature of such a triumvirate risks effacing precisely the resistant, abrasive quality of
life. qualities that Canguilhem underlined.
50 Deleuze, Immanence, 29.
51 Ibid.
52 Ibid., 30.
53 Todd May has argued for incorporating Deleuze's emphasis on sense events in
"The Logic of Sense" with his broader concept of life as follows: "In The Logic of
Sense, Deleuze discusses the Stoic distinction between 'stages of things; which are
corporeal and of the present moment, and 'events'. which are incorporeal and occur
as becomings in time. Life is concerned not so much with the physical as with what
occurs between bodies'" (May, "The Politics of Life;' 26). Such a reading accords
with Deleuze's emphasis, in "Immanence: A Life;' on the "in-betweenness" of Hfe's
temporal status. Nonetheless, as we saw with Deleuze's reading of Dickens, such
incorporeal life is intimately, even dialectically related to the material conditions
that it weaves between, with, in the example from Dickens, the comingling and
dispersal of the bodies of the onlookers and with the dying body of the rogue.
54 G. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1990) [1969]: 22.
55 Claire Colebrook has recently argued for an understanding of Deleuze's philosophy
as maintaining a discontinuity between the origination of systems in life, and
their subsequent, potentially autonomous functioning. While Deleuze no doubt
held such a potential for autonomy as integral to his broader wish to construct an
ontology of creative becoming, my focus here is on the nonetheless irrevocable
188 Post-Rationalism
connection that Deleuze, especially in The Logic of Sense, perceives between life and
its capture in language and logic. See C. Colebrook, Deleuze and the Meaning of Life
(London: Continuum, 2011).
56 Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 22.
57 Ibid.
58 C. Imbert, "Empiricism Unhinged: From Logic of Sense to Logic of Sensation;'
in J. Khalfa (ed.), An Introduction to the Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (London:
Continuum, 2003): 133.
59 J-C. Milner, "The Point of the Signifier;' in Peter Hallward and Knox Peden (eds),
Concept and Form Vol. 2: The Cahiers pour ~ n l y s e and Contemporary French
Thought (New York: Verso, 2012): 112.
60 N. Rose, "Life, Reason and History: Reading Georges Canguilhem Today;' in
Economy and Society 27 (2-3), 1998, 156.
61 G. Bachelard, Earth and Reveries of Will, trans. K. Haltman (Dallas: Dallas Institute
Publications, 2002): 39; Sartre would make reference to the notion in his Being
and Nothingness. See the discussion in S. Zitek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the
Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (New York: Verso, 2012): 160-1.
62 P. Macherey, "From Canguilhem to Canguilhem by Way of Foucault," in Warren
Montag (ed.), In a Materialist Way: Selected Essays, trans. Ted Stolze (London:
Verso, 1998): 108.
63 J. Lacan, "The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, Or, Reason Since Freud;'
in Bcrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: w.w. Norton, 1977): 300.
64 S. Freud, "Project for a Scientific Psychology;' in Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 1 (New York: Vintage, 2001) [1895]: 356.
65 J. Laplanche, "Notes on Afterwardsness," in Essays on Otherness, trans. John
Fletcher (New York: Routledge, 1999): 265.
66 L. Althusser and E. Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (London:
New Left Books, 1970): 99.
67 Ibid., 100.
68 Ibid.
69 Ibid.
70 Canguilhem, Knowledge of Life, 118.
71 More specifically, Canguilhem's account is in dialogue with a centuries-old
tradition of philosophical reflection on biology, sometimes explicitly and
sometimes implicitly. Unfortunately, it is beyond the purview of this chapter to
take account of this rich and varied history, concerned as I am with Canguilhem's
resonance with later trends in French thought, but there are a number of intriguing,
unacknowledged parallels between Canguilhem's reflections on the relation of the
organism to its milieu, and nineteenth-century biological thought. One of the most
striking, and unexpected, parallels is to be found in Herbert Spencer's "Principles of
Deleuze, and the Problern 189
in complexity-and this despite Canguilhenls frequent polemics against Spenser's
evolutionism. I'm grateful to Barbara Barrow for pointing out this connection.
72 In his recent Logics of Worlds, Badiou has offered an intriguingly similar account
of "worlds;' as irreducible domains governed by their own transcendental
principles and logics of appearance. I'll comment further on this striking afterlife of
post-rationalism's concern for the irreducibility of structures in the Conclusion. See
A. Badiou, Logics of Worlds, trans. Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum, 2008).
73 G. Bachelard, La Philosophie du non (Paris: Presse Universitaire du Paris, 1975)
[19401: 140; translation taken from Margaret A. Mujamdar, Althusser and the End
of Leninism? (London: Pluto Press, 1995): 181, n.73.
74 Published in French as "y a-t-il une doctrine de sujet dans l'oeuvre de Georges
Canguilhem?" in Georges Canguilhem: Philosophe, historien de science. Actes du
colloque, 6-7-8 decembre 1990 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1993): 295-304; translated into
English as "Is There a Theory of the Subject in the Work of Georges Canguilhem?"
by Bruno Bosteels in A. Badiou, The Adventure of French Philosophy (New York:
Verso, 2012): 39-53.
75 Ibid., 42.
76 Ibid., 41.
77 Ibid., 43.
78 Ibid., 40.
79 Ibid., 41.
80 Ibid., 43.
81 Bulletin de la Societe fran raise de Philosophie LXIII, 1968,61-81; unpublished
translation by Ted Stolze.
82 Original French version appeared in La Pensee 113 (January-February), 1964,
50-74; English translation in P. Macherey, In a Materialist Way: Selected Essays
(London: Verso, 1998): 161-87.
83 P. Macherey, "Georges Canguilhem's Philosophy of Science: Epistemology and
History of Science:' in Macherey, In a Materialist Way, 171.
84 Ibid., 171-2.
85 See, in particular, Eric Santner's superlative contribution to the biopolitical analysis
of sovereignty, The Royal Remains: The People's Two Bodies and the Endgames of
Sovereignty (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011).
86 G. Eliot, Middlemarch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997): 182.
Conclusion
To conclude, I'd like to bring the debates discussed previously to the present
day. In what follows, I'll pursue brief analyses of a number of texts that inherit
the concerns and styles determinative of what I've called "post-rationalism:' It
is impossible to be comprehensive here; the main task of this book has been to
reconstruct the little-discussed debates that motored the reception of Lacan and
Althusser's structuralism, debates that definitively reconnected the rationalistic
tendencies of structuralism to its prehistory in French philosophy of science.
And while much has come since in the development and consolidation of French
philosophy, many of the questions, themes, and rhetorical tropes that course
through the preceding chapters and in the pages of the Cahiers pour l'Analyse are
still the concern of contemporary critical theorists. 1he miniature "case studies"
presented here will provide the beginnings of a sense of how the defining themes
of post-rationalism have persisted since the dissolution of the Cahiers in 1969.
In the Introduction, I laid out what I take to be the principle themes and
characteristics that define the post-rationalist field, including a concern for both
the evacuation of the Cartesian subject of cognition and, just as importantly,
its subsequent reintegration into a formalist account of the simultaneous
constitutivity and contingency of structures. Of the different authors discussed
in the book, it is only the young Badiou who avers on this question, preferring
instead to construct an epistemology that is radically impervious to lack or to
subjectivity. Badiou's trajectory since his articles in the Cahiers is instructive
insofar as it underlines the seeming inevitability of the return of the problem of the
subject, ghosting even the most ascetic of mathematically based philosophies.
From the mid-1980s on, Badiou provides perhaps the most rigorous and
suggestive reconstruction of the problem of the subject from within the terms
of debate established by the post-rationalist "moment" of the late 1960s.
192
an attention to how Badiou achieved this reintegration of the problem of
subjectivity will serve as a useful nexus through which to ask how, more generally,
critical theory has continued to labor upon the problem of the posthumanist
subject. For these purposes, I will read Badiou's recent text Logics oj Worlds as
exemplary of the persistence of the problem of the subject beyond the main time
frame of this monograph.
Another persistent trend in post -rationalism as laid out in the Introduction is
a concern for the paradoxical element or elements that both ground and disrupt
the structures or systems they inhabit. While Miller's "Suture" and aspects of
Lacan's metapsychology ascribe this function to the subject, other texts in the
post-rationalist field, including Miller's own "Action of the Structure" as well
as Bachelard's complex reflections on the impurity of scientific objects, expand
this logic beyond the subjective domain. Perhaps the most persistent move in
this direction since the dissolution of the Cahiers pour l'Analyse has been within
the domain of a heterodox approach to political theory, pursued by Badiou
but also by Jacques Ranciere, whose violent break with Althusserianism in the
early 1970s has not prevented him from adopting the logic of the paradoxical
element in his influential reflections on politics, especially those written in
the 1980s. Ranciere's influential book Disagreement will occupy the second of
our brief case studies here. Of course, there are numerous and comprehensive
treatments of the contemporary work of these thinkers available, and thus
my aim here is not to compete with or supplement those accounts. Rather, I
hope to zero in on the elements of thought in these contemporary works that
are most faithful to the various logics of post-rationalism that we've already
outlined; getting a sense of how those ideas have evolved should provide a
useful perspective from which to consolidate some of the philosophical
observations laid out in previous chapters.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of post-rationalism as we've elaborated it
so far is its multifarious and by no means unitary approach to the questions
of formalization and scientificity. There are, broadly, two competing models of
formalization that cut across the epistemology of Bachelard, Canguilhem, and
Koyre and the post -Lacanian philosophy of the Cahiers. The first, appearing in
aspects of Bachelard's work, circled over in portions of Althusser's reflections
Conclusion 193
and in dean
and sustainable break between science and with the former
associated with the hermetic formal movements of mathematical logic, and the
latter reduced to a quasi-functionalist logic of the perpetuation of the status quo,
if not the definition of the very bounds of the subject.
The second model, and I think the more pervasive in post-rationalism,
treats formalization as an ideal that is both necessary and impossible, and that
subsequently seeks out the element or elements that embody this ambiguity, the
divide between science and its other, whether figured as the empirical, as ideology,
or as language in its nonliterary manifestation, as in Macherey. The aim of the
latter model is not to contest the status or viability of science-to the contrary,
the continuing rationalist imperatives worked out in those philosophies insure
that the mathematical sciences are very much the ideal toward which knowledge
is enjoined to aspire. Equally, this model of formalization disjoins the category of
the scientific from the muddying waters of the empirical, sharpening our sense
of what counts as "scientific" even while recognizing its inevitable impurity.
Nonetheless, the conceptual objects that are permitted within this second strand,
and the unconscious stands as the signal example here, compel it to acknowledge
that the very terms of rationality require a recognition of their contamination with
their determining others, with the materials from which the scientific is woven.
The distance between the generous, capacious, and self-consciously rigorous
account of scientific production, of scientific labor, encompassed in this model
of formalization, and the frequently reductive and unquestioningly empiricist
thinking on the status of science that passes for a consensus in much of the
English-speaking academy today is deeply consequential for the production of
contemporary knowledge, in all of its forms.
In the final brief case study here, I'll take the measure of Fran<;:ois Laruelle's
increasingly influential attempt to formalize philosophy in a nonphilosophical
register. Laruelle's work will allow us to see how the urge to formalize has been
both extended and displaced in the contemporary theoretical conjuncture.
If at least one of the models of formalization delineated in detail in many
of the chapters of this book take cognizance of the subject as the inevitable
product or remainder of processes of structural composition, Laruelle's
attempt to formalize philosophy as a set of invariant operations will shift the
onus of attention onto the production of philosophical knowledge itself, of
the seemingly transhistorical and formally delineable operations that produce
philosophy as a practice of knowledge.
194 Post-Rationalism
Since the dissolution of the Cahiers pour in 1969, Alain BadiNl of
all the figures published in the journal, remained the most vigorously faithful to
its ideals of formalization and critique. Since the belated English translation of
his magnum opus Being and Event in 2006 (published in French in 1988), Badiou
has come to occupy the position that was accorded to Derrida in the 1980s and
the 1990s, namely the "house" French philosopher for the critical humanities
in the United Kingdom and the United States. It is far beyond the capability of
this short reflection to capture the multiciplity and richness of his post-Cahiers
philosophical and political reflections on, among other things, the metaphysical
implications of mathematical set-theory or the paucity of contemporary,
mainstream philosophical ethics, and so instead I will focus on two interesting
points of parity and divergence with post-rationalism as it is laid out in this
book. Ihe first concerns the status of the subject. As we saw in our reading
of Badiou's "Mark and Lack" and "Infinitesimal Subversion;' the category of
subjectivity for the young Badiou is firmly aligned with the ideological, with the
nonscientific and the apolitical. The situation is far more complex for the Badiou
of today, for whom the subject is a complex, formal operation that is produced
by the intervention of a universalizable truth, arising from an occluded point
within what Badiou has come to call a "world;' or a set of relations governed by
transcendental rules of composition.
Logics of Worlds, the follow up to Being and Event, was published in French
in 2006. Where the latter text laid out a complex ontology of what Badiou refers
to as "inconsistent multiplicity:' an ontology that sets out from the axiom that
ontology is equal to mathematics, the former follow-on text describes how
local situations or "worlds" are organized, and how fundamental breaks with
those worlds, coded in both books as "events;' are sustained by differing forms
of subjectivity. Thus, the subject is figured as a strictly formal procedure that
supervenes after the irruption of an event, a radical break that may take place in
any of the four "truth" conditions of love, politics, art, or science. Rather than
being the site of a unified consciousness, or the formal exception that is sutured
to a structure (a la Miller), the subject here is "a formalism borne by a body;'!
with the body, far from being a perishable organic appendage to the "individual;'
defined instead as "a multiple-being"2 produced by an event that allows for the
subject to appear.
Conclusion 195
The publication in French in 1982 of Badiou's Theory of the Subject
already marked a radical shift in Badiou's thinking on the question of the
subject. Having formally excluded subjectivity from the domains of science
and philosophy, Badiou readmitted the problem, albeit strictly within the
terms of particular dispositions that bear on the possibility of the success of
political revolutions. Logics of Worlds revives this line of thinking. The theory
of the subject, Badiou writes, "is not descriptive (phenomenology), nor is it
a practical experimentation (moralism) nor is it an instance of materialist
critique (imaginary, ideology):'3 It is, of course, the final of these alternatives
that Badiou fully identifies with the subject in his Cahiers contributions. More
generally, though, this negative accounting for a theory of the subject affirms
the formal principle that underlines much of the thinking of the subject
in post-rationalism, whereby the subject is to be distinguished from any
descriptive or unitary function, and against the phenomenological emphasis
on the intentional movements of a transcendental consciousness.
Against the post-rationalist emphasis, nonetheless, Badiou now suggests that
the subject "cannot be deduced, because it is the affirmation of its own form:'4
Instead of being the eccentric and yet foundational element of a structure or
system, the subject on this model marks a radical and affirmative break with
that system; it comes (logically and temporally) after it, not before it or as its
occluded condition. Thus, the double function of definition and negation that
accompanies much post-rationalist thinking on the subject is rejected in favor
of an affirmative self-creation, a logic of the subject as fundamentally new, even
if immanently arisen from the old, from within the bounds of a particular world
with its particular transcendental rules of composition.
Badiou analyzes three different, formal manifestations of the subject as
produced by the irruption of an event: faithful, reactive, and obscure. The faithful
subject, briefly put, is the subject that remains temporally and spatially wedded
to the consequences of an event. A faithful subject, Badiou writes, "explor[esl
the consequences of what has happened, engenders the expansion of the present
and exposes, fragment by fragment, a truth. Such a subject realizes itself in the
production of consequences, which is why it can be called faithful:'5The faithful
subject, then, is a subject (a multiple-being) that furthers the event in the name
of a truth. By contrast, the reactive subject, itself also defined by the presence
of a truth, works nonetheless against that truth, producing what Badiou calls
"reactionary novelties"6 in order to resist the consequences of the event. Instead
196 Post-Rationalism
of being simply the manifestation of the old, the resistance of the old to the
new, the reactionary subject must itself produce novelties that are, nonetheless,
merely reactive, produced in opposition to the logic of the event; the reactive
subject "denies the creative power of the event in favour of a deleted present:'7
The obscure subject, finally, rather than producing its own, degraded novelties
in denial of the new, seeks to render the new present of the event inexistent,
obscure, unilluminated. Again, such an obscuration is not a mere reverse into
the old; rather, as Badiou writes, "this night [the obscuring of the new 1 must be
produced under the entirely new conditions which are displayed in the world by
the rebel body and its emblem:'8
Against, then, the prior post-rationalist emphasis on the subject as an
eccentric element foundational to a structure, or, in Lacan's case, as the nexus
of three intercutting formal registers (Symbolic, Imaginary, Real) governed by
paradoxical logics of formation and deformation, the subject for the later Badiou
is a formal consequence of the radically new. If, as we've seen, the problem of the
radically new is one that post -rationalist frequently approached after establishing
the criteria for a synchronic structure and its attendant subject, for the later
Badiou it is the new that is primary; the event, as the rupture that produces the
potential for the subject to form, subsists on its own axiomatic self-affirmation,
borne by a subjective process of fidelity. (That Badiou should progressively move
toward the analytic prioritization of the new at just the historical juncture when
the organized left suffered defeat after defeat is perhaps not coincidental; when
political reality slumps in possibilities, theory takes up the slack.)
In a certain sense, the axiomatic self-enclosure of the "marks" of mathematical
logic that Badiou analyzes in "Mark and Lack" and that we discussed in Chapter 3
is transferred on to the new, here, as its own ground or justification. Badiou
proceeds, we can say, in the opposite direction of Althusser; for Althusser, recall,
the problem of science is the problem of how to maintain a distance from ideology,
and subtending such a question is the dilemma of how to conceive of a subject
that is not fully embroiled in ideological misrecognition. For Badiou, by stark
contrast, the subject is only a category of the new, of the event as production of
truth. What both share, problematically, is an inadequate conception of the state
of the subject outside the Imaginary (in Althusser) or an inadequate conception
of the subject prior to its evental subjectivization (Badiou). Psychoanalysis,
as weve seen, offers some answers to the exclusivity of the Althusserian and
Badiouan conceptions of the subject.
Badiou spends much of both Being and Event and Logics of Worlds elaborating
the process by which an event takes hold within a world, and it is here that
Conclusion 197
is
of an event, to use Badiou's while
indexed the of its outside that
And yet, it is not sufficient, for the late Badiou, to explain such a paradoxical site
only by virtue of its intuitive ambiguity in relation to its surrounds. Rather, the
very specific mechanism through which the site composes itself in distinction
from the other elements of its world must be adumbrated. As Badiou explains,
"[AJ site is a multiple which happens to behave in the world in the same way
with regard to itself as it does with regard to its elements, so that it is the
ontological support of its own appearance:'9 At the risk of brutalizing Badiou's
subtle argumentation, the site is a site by virtue of its self-authorization, by
virtue of its subtle detachment from the prevailing logic of a world via its setting
up of its own principles of organization. Note again here how Badiou rejects
the principle of negative definition that characterizes much post-rationalist
thinking on the subject in its relation to structure. Just as we saw Badiou, in
his "Infinitesimal Subversion;' reject negation as a holdover from Hegelian
metaphysics, so here it is affirmative self-definition, axiomatic self-grounding,
that defines the site of the new.
There is, I think, a greater continuity between post-rationalism as we've
understood it and the later Badiou in the latter's notion of "worlds:' Recall
how, in our discussion of Canguilhem and his theory of the "milieu;' it was
the irreducibility of the latter, its potential nesting in a series of other milieu
governed by their own logics, that made Canguilhem's account distinctive. For
Badiou too, a "world" is defined by its own, irreducible criteria, what he refers to
as "local procedures of access"lO that make the elements of that world legible. Of
course, Badiou's reflections on the transcendental logical principles that govern
the appearance of elements in worlds are pitched at a far higher level of formal
abstraction than Canguilhem's descriptions of milieu, and we'd do well not to
conflate them too easily. Nonetheless, our brief comparison here yields what
I think is a more general condition of post-rationalist thought, one that cuts
across both the rationalist philosophy of science of Bachelard et al., and the
post-Lacanianism of Badiou, Miller, and others.
That condition can be characterized as a refusal of transcendence (if
not the transcendental), of recourse to principles or conditions outside the
immanent logics of structures, systems, or worlds. For the Althusserian strain
of post-rationalism, such a transcendence is exemplified by history when
conceived according to a teleological or expressive model of causality. For
Lacan and Miller, it would be either the subject or the Other when conceived
198
as
even
themselves
transcendental rules that govern worlds are
to the world in Those it should be
are rendered in Worlds in strikingly similar terms to the description
of the rules of admission described by Badiou in his "Mark and Lack;' where
logical sequences are governed by operations of exclusion and inclusion. In the
next section, I'll consider the work of an author whose work was not published
in the Cahiers, but who worked for a time in collaboration with Althusser and
whose subsequent break with Althusserianism didn't prevent him from applying
aspects of post-rationalist logic to the analysis of politics.
Post-rationalist politics: Jacques Ranciere and the
"part of no part"
If Badiou's innovation in Logics of Worlds, and indeed in a number of his texts
from the mid-1980s onwards, is to transform the post-rationalist evacuation of
the subject as a form, as a formal element relative to a structure, into an affirmative,
post-ruptural process, much work broadly within the ambit of post-rationalism
has attempted a similar transformation with the problems of politics writ large.
Jacques Ranciere is absent from the pages of the Cahiers pour l'Analyse, but he
wrote a central section of Reading Capital, unfortunately not translated in the
English edition, before breaking decisively with Althusser in 1974 in his book
Althusser's Lesson.
11
Ranciere charged Althusserwith an overweeningtheoreticism
that resulted in the abstraction of Marxist philosophy from its true roots in the
creative thought and practices of the masses themselves. Ranciere spent much
time subsequently in the archives, producing rich philosophical readings of key
but often overlooked moments in labor history,12 but he would return to the
more general, philosophical conditions of a critical political philosophy in his
1995 text Disagreement. Here, I'd like to read just a few passages from that text as
a means of illustrating the potential political uses of some of the procedures and
logics that post -rationalism is concerned with, but that, at first blush, may appear
ascetically formal and abstract, unsuited to the grit and fervor of politics.
There is a striking similarity between Ranciere's description in Disagreement
of what he calls the "police;' the general distribution of power and roles in a
given social space, and the manner in which Badiou, above, describes the
transcendental ordering of "worlds:' Ranciere writes of the "[tlhe distribution
of places and roles that defines a police regime stem[ming] as much from the
199
Ranciere
that produces a social space; while the state may seem to be
"rigid," imposing its power from without, the police must in fact be conceived as
"an order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being,
and ways of saying:'l3 We might call the shared reconfiguration, in both the
later Badiou and Ranciere, of the relationship between a structural space and
its ordered elements an example of "immanent transcendentalism:' a refusal to
concede an absolute separation between a logic of immanence and a philosophy
of the transcendental, a refusal of a binary choice redolent of much that we've
christened "post-rationalism" here.
Note, also, the partial, implicit rapprochement with Althusser's recomposition
of the concept of ideology in the description of the "police" in Ranciere. It is the
"assumed spontaneity:' the ideologically "natural" character of social relations
that allows forms of domination to persist. Political analysis must proceed, then,
from a telescoped appreciation of how the very visibility of elements in a social
space are decided. No doubt influenced by Foucault's decentering of political
understandings of power, Ranciere's descriptions of political organization carry
with them the formal character and implicit dialectics between part and whole,
between inclusion and exclusion, that form a major part of post-rationalisms
conceptual armature.
More specifically, however, it is Ranciere's elaboration of the logic of what
he calls the "part of no part" that echoes with much that we've seen so far of
post-rationalisms concern for the eccentric element, the element that exists
both inside and outside a structure. Politics itself, for Ranciere, consists in a
determined attempt to give visibility and existence to those aspects of social
structures that are rendered illegible. As he writes, "I now propose to reserve
the term politics for an extremely determined activity antagonistic to policing:
whatever breaks with the tangible configuration whereby parties and parts or
lack of them are defined by a presupposition that, by definition, has no place in
that configuration-that of the part of those who have no part:'14 Insofar as the
policed order is "defined" by the presupposition of the part of no part, of those
people and practices that are rendered illegible in a determined space, we can
define such exceptions as constitutive, just as, for Miller and others, the subject as
such occupies an eccentric position outside and yet determinative of the structure
from which it is excluded. By bringing that eccentric political component to
visibility, Ranciere argues, the very contingency of the social structure that relies
upon it is revealed. This shift, from a previous post-rationalist concern for the
200 Post-Rationalism
structure
as he
as "different from
internally divided;'15 defines a more general move in the French thought in
question from a partially disembodied logic to one of the political mobilization
of post-rationalist abstraction.
The afterlife of post-rationalist formalization: Laruelle
How, finally, has the post-rationalist emphasis on formalization as the condition
of theory been taken up in the years since the dissolution of the Cahiers? Badiou's
ongoing work, of course, has been significant in affirming the revolutionary
potential of formalization against any countertendency of, say, Deleuzian
vitalism. 16 But in this short section, I'll turn to the work of a philosopher only now
gaining visibility in the Anglophone academy, Fran<;:ois LaruelleY Laruelle is of
a generation that slightly postdates the reigning masters of "structuralism;' but
his rigorous attention to the formal structure of philosophical knowledge itself
marks an intriguing displacement of post-rationalism's concern for a philosophy
of the formal; where, for the likes of Althusser, philosophy intervenes in the field
of science in order to clarify its formal conditions, Laruelle asks of philosophy
itself its internal formal prinCiples, the logics that allow its perpetuation. 'That
perpetuation, for Laruel1e, is largely predicated on a distance from the real.
It is only the radically non-philosophical lens used in the practice, explicitly
christened "nonphilosophy" by Laruelle, to objectify philosophy that, in turn,
produces something that is axiomatically and unconditionally attached to the
real, to the "One" as Laruelle conceives it. Philosophy thus becomes the raw
material for a nonphilosophical practice radically productive of knowledge of
the real. There are some striking parallels and divergences between Laruelle's
project and that of post-rationalism, and I'll sketch these as a preliminary to
introducing the details of nonphilosophy.
In his "Elements of Self-Criticism;' published in 1974, Althusser revised his
previous account of the relation between philosophy, science, and ideology.
Loosening the science/ideology divide in a manner foreshadowed in at least
sections of his "Notes on the Theory of Discourses:' and as discussed in
Chapter 4, science is now understood as discurSively situated, as implicated
in the languages of ideology that it must distance itself from, in a process of
production and reproduction that is ongoing. Philosophy, having previously
been too assimilated to definition of its
is now a that intervenes to
conditions and the historical conditions of its of
Althusser writes, philosophy is science but class struggle in
an "interposed conflict between tendencies (idealism and materialism):'19
Philosophy does not produce its own truths, but rather passes judgment as to the
"correctness" of the sciences. Philosophy's role, then, is to adjudicate between
correct and incorrect propositions, but its role in doing so marks it as explicitly
outside the sciences (most crucially the science of history, historical materialism)
that it takes as its object. But what if philosophy itself, far from being the practice
with the sovereign capability to make such engaged divisions within knowledge,
itself becomes prey to such an account?
This, loosely speaking, has been Laruelle's project since his turn to
"nonphilosophy" in the 19808. Aspects of philosophy's own tools of formalization
are turned on philosophy in turn, so that, as Laruelle writes, philosophy is
understood as being "regulated in accordance with a principle higher than that
of Reason: the Principle of sufficient philosophy. "20 Philosophy, that is to say,
regulates itself as autonomous, as self-sufficient; it is constituted, further, by the
splits or "decisions" that it makes as to what is to count as philosophical or not,
and its ultimate aim is its self-perpetuation. Described in this way, philosophy
for Laruelle appears strikingly dose to mathematical logic as described by
Badiou in "Mark and Lack:' although for the former, this self-enclosure of
philosophical knowledge produces only a "transcendental hallucination of the
ReaI:'21 Thus, instead of producing a rigorous metric or set of concepts that
allows a superior approximation of the real, philosophy becomes something
like psychosis as understood by Lacan, a practice that follows it own rigorous
laws but that is ultimately an "idealist pretension:'22 subsisting on the dualisms
that it produces in order to define itself against what it imperiously marks out
as its nonphilosophical other. Philosophy's pretensions to grandeur, moreover,
prevent it producing an adequate account of its own self-formation, an account
that must become the task of a rigorously nonphilosophical theory.
The solution for Laruelle is the axiomatic positing of the Real, or the One,
as entirely outside philosophy, of thought as it has been indexed to reason since
the Greeks. The One or Real cannot be approached using philosophy's tools,
for to do so is simply to lapse into philosophy's autonomous self-perpetuation.
Nonphilosophy, then, does not "think" the Real-to do so is to make the latter
disappear-but rather thinks from the Real or according to it, taking it as an
axiom radically disjoined from being or thought. Further, thought exists not

we
the One of philosophical concepts from their normal
philosophical usage, a usage that serves to mystify the Real. As Laruelle explains,
"a transformation" is required "of that usage of philosophical
language which regulates the statements of philosophy, into a new usage (one that
is real and transcendental, of identity and of unilateral duality) furnishing those
statements with a double and identical aspect axiomatic and theorematic:'23
What is required, in brief, is a new, nonphilosophical language that would
think "according" to the One, in a manner, given the enigmatic title "vision-in-
One" by Laruelle, that resists philosophy's relatedness, its positing of the Real as
an object of scrutiny. The axioms and propositions that might result from such
an experimental language are to resist any recourse to philosophy's reciprocal
dualities, those binaries that serve simply to produce and police the boundary
between what is philosophy and what is not. The One or Real, finally, is radically
and axiomatically immanent. Even those philosophies that have insisted on
immanence as their absolute condition have, for Laruelle, "posit[ ed] immanence
in a transcendent fashion:' and thus in a way that betrays the One of true
immanence. The One is "immanence (to) itself without constituting a point, a
plane, without withdrawing or folding back upon itself. It is One-in-One:'24 It
is philosophy that insists on such points of delineation, but the One, as beyond
even being, is immune to its efforts at capture or neutralization.
Leaving aside the innumerable epistemological and ontological questions
and objections that Laruelle's absolute immanentism and nonphilosophical
absolutism raise, how does his project relate to the emphasis on formalization
foundational of post-rationalism? As I've noted, Laruelle transfers aspects of
the transcendental project of formalization onto philosophy itself; philosophy
is "formalized;' in Laruelle's putatively nonphilosophical and nontranscendental
method, in a manner that identifies its formative operations, its principles of
inclusion and exclusion. In our brief description of Althussds self-criticisms
above, and in our discussion of Althusser's posthumously published notes in
Chapter 4, we saw how, at a crucial period of the post-rationalist appropriation of
rationalist epistemology, the question of the precise theoretical relation between
philosophy, science, and truth were paramount.
Laruelle has resuscitated this mode of epistemological questioning and has,
no doubt unintentionally, reproduced a number of its tropes. For one, knowledge
for Laruelle is defined by its disposition towards the Real, conceived not as an
Conclusion 203
Real was as that which au",,,,,,,,, and a similar sense obtains
in Laruelle. Materialism as understood Miller et and as
developed by Laruelle, posits the Real in a way that resists the symmetry of the
subject/object opposition or the recuperative terms of empiricism. The Real is
aberrant; it sticks out of knowledge in a way that renders philosophy, at least as
it was classically formulated, inadequate to its demands.
To finally conclude, the project of thought explored throughout this book
remains very much alive. Just as I noted, at the outset, the division between
thought and being as marking the beginning of philosophy itself, so here does the
at least partial irrecuperability of the Real to strategies of formalization announce
the beginning, not the end, of a critical philosophical practice. Post-rationalism
accounts for the errancy of the Real not by an outright rejection of philosophy's
founding assumptions, as in Laruelle, but via a progressive incorporation of
nonphilosophical materials-mathematical, psychoanalytic, political-into
its bounds, making of philosophy a theoretical practice that combines both a
concern for formalization, and a capacious regard for objects that mark the limits
of formalization-limits, finally, that do not announce the end of the project of
formalization so much as they signal its radicalization, its touching of the Real.
Notes
A. Badiou, Logics of Worlds: Being and Event, 2, trans. Alberto Toscano (London:
Continuum, 2009): 569.
2 Ibid., 580.
3 Ibid., 50.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid., 53.
6 Ibid., 54.
7 Ibid.,58.
8 Ibid., 59.
9 Ibid., 363.
10 Ibid., 114.
11 J. Ranciere, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1999); originally published in French as La
Mesentente: Politique et Philosophie (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1995).
204
the
The Intellectual and His York: Verso,
13 Ranciere, Disagreement, 29.
14 Ibid., 29-30.
15 Ibid., 87.
16 See A. Badiou, Deleuze: the Clamor of Being, trans. Louise Burchill (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2000), for an especially trenchant critique of
Deleuze's supposed "vitalism"; although see ]. Roffe, a d i o u ~ De/euze (Durham:
Acumen Publishing, 20 ]1), for an effective rebuttal of the former.
17 Of a proliferating number of texts in English that discuss Laruelle, the most
original and creative remains that of Ray Brassier, one of the first to appear; see
R. Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007): 118-49; for a trenchant critique of Laruelle's methodology
and, in particular, his reading of Derrida, see A. McGettigan, "Fabrication Defect:
Fran<;:ois Laruelle's Philosophical Materials;' in Radical Philosophy 175 (September/
October), 2012, 33-42.
18 1. Althusser, "Elements of Self-Criticism;' in Essays in Self-Criticism, trans.
Grahame Lock (London: New Left Books, 1974): 142.
19 Ibid., 144.
20 F. Laruelle, "A Summary of Non-Philosophy:' trans. Ray Brassier, in Pli: The
Warwick Journal of Philosophy 8, 1999, 138-9.
21 Ibid., 139.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid., 140.
24 Ibid., 141.
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Index
Absolute, the 92
absolutism 164,202
afterwardsness 174 see also Freud
Althusser,1. 2-5,7-8,10,13-14,30-1,
38,40-1,49-50,53-4,56,63,69,
72,81,85-6,89,96-101,104,108,
115-33,153,173,175-80,191-2,
196-8,200-2
"Elements of Self-Criticism" 200
ForAlarx 38,115,117,123,126,129
Badiou on 117-22
"Ideology and Ideological State
Apparatuses" 8,129-30,132
"Lenin and Philosophy" 178
"Notes on the Theory of
Discourses" 120, 122-33,200
Reading Capital (with Balibar) 39,69,
117,126,129,175,198
"Underground Materialism ... ,The" 40
see also expressive causation
Althusserianism 198
antihumanism 153
aporia 82, 105-6
apres coup 174 see also Lacan
arche-writing 105-6
Aristotle 95, 161-2 see also tuche
ascetic formalism,
Badiou and 84-94
Auseinandersetzung 159
Bachelard, G. 2-4,6-7,9,14,43,50-6,58,
60,62-3,65-9,76,108,115,117,
119, 121, 125, 137, 153,155, 161,
172-3,176-7,179,192,197
Formation of the Scientific Alind,
The 54-5,60,62,155
and Lacan 59-63
Le Rationalisme applique 76
New Scientific Spirit, The 58
Rationalisme applique 136
see also co-efficient of adversity
Badiou, A. 2,7-10,70,75,81-94,96,98,
100,102-3,108, lIS, 117-22, 177,
178, 180-1, 194-200
Being and Event 194, 196
Infinitesimal Subversion" 91-3,194,197
"Is There a Theory of the
Subject. .:' 177, 195
Logics of Worlds 192,194-6,198
and Ranciere's Disagreement 198-200
"Mark and Lack: On Zero" 7,81-2,84,
85,91-4,98,100,108,122,126-7,
131,144,193-4,196,198,201
"Nullity of the Thing-Identity of
Marks" 89
Number and Numbers 91
see also inconsistent multiplicity
Balibar, E 8,117,123
Reading Capital (with Althusser) 39,69,
]17,126,129,175,198
Banfield, A. 73
Baring, E. 22
Barthes, R. 5
Bennington, G. 103
Bergson, H. 153
Cahiers marxiste-leniniste 70
Cahiers pour l'Analyse 2-4,6-9,81-2,85,
91,94,98,104,106-7,115-16,123,
131,133-4,140,154-5,170,180,
191-2,194-5,198,200
Derrida's contributions to 102-8
psychoanalytic structuralism in 13-43
Canguilhem, G. 2-4,9,14,28,50-1, 85,
139, 153-4, 155-67, 170, 172-3,
176-81, 192, 197
Etudes d'histoire et de philosophic des
sciences 166
Knowledge of Life 156,160,171,177
"Living and Its Milieu, The" 160
Cantor, G. 93-4 see also continuum
hypothesis
of 43
see also Bache/ard
the necessity of 40
continuum hypothesis 93 see also
Cantor
conventionalism 4-5
deconstruction 5,75,82, 103, 107
see also Derrida
Deleuze, G. 85-6,100,153-4,160,162-70,
173,181
Difference and Repetition 163,169
"Immanence: A Life" 163-8,170
Logic of Sense, The 168-70
Derrida, J. 6,8-9,21, 75-6, 82, 94, 100,
102-8, 143
Of Gram mato logy 103
"Nature, Culture, Writing: .. :' 102-3,
107
Post-Card, The 76
"White Mythology" 73
see also deconstruction; self-presentation,
text's
Descartes, R. 4, 52, J 44, 173
desire 16
Dialectical Materialism see materialism
and historical materialism
Dickens, C. 167
Mutual Friend, A,
near-death scene in, Deleuze's analysis
of 167
differance 105-6 see also Derrida
discourse,
Althusser's reflections on 123-6
and the unconscious 126-33
Dosse, F. 14
doxography 140
Duroux, Y. 123
Eagleton, T. 72
Ecole normale superieur (ENS) 2
ego, the 15,37,130,139
see also ideal-ego
Elliott, G. 5, 181
empiricism 4, 10,54,59,73,139, 169
see also Deleuze; transcendental
empiricism
Bachelard's
French 3,60,144,154
ethnology 41
existentialism 50
Sartrean 13
expressive causation 38 see also Althusser
Ey, H. 22
finite, the 93
Hegel's description of 93
see also infinite
foreclosure 88,91, 98
form, Lacan's theory of 30
formalism 10, 82
post -rationalist 100
formalization 29-30,31-4,43,51,59,
61-2,64-6,68-9,83,89,92,132,
192-4,200-3
literary 69-77
Foucault, M. 50,153,156,162,170,199
Frege, G. 6,31-4,36,38,66,83-4,91-2,
141, 143
Freud, S. 1-3,7,9,18,20-1,23,28,49,51,
60,67,82,88,134,137,174,175
"Wo es War, sol! Ich werden" 174
see also alterwardsness
Galileo 144
GOdel, K. 135
Goshgarian, G. M. 130
Green, A. 14,16-20,22-3,27-8,30,36-7,
133
Ie Discours Vivant 28
"Logic of Lacan's objet a and Freudian
Theory ... , The" 16
Guattari,F. 21-2,162-3
Hagglund, M. 105-6,108
Hegel, G. W. F. 92-3
historicism 72
humanism 3,117,134
Hume, D. 5,164
Husser!' E. 103
ideal-ego, the 15 see also ego Lacan
idealism,
metaphysical 154
Index 215
identity 89
ideology 9,56,74,84-6,90-1,94,99,101,
115-16,120-2,128-9,131-3,140,
193,200
science and 89-90, 116,200
see also subject unconscious
Imaginary, the 22,26,40,57,97,99, 120,
127, 129-30, 136, 139
Irigaray's description of 98
see also Real
Imbert, C. 169
immanent causality 38-9 see also Spinoza
immanentism 202
inconsistent multiplicity 81 see also Badiou
indeterminism 6
infinite, the 93 see also finite
Irigaray,1. l4-15, 23-30, 37, 98
"Linguistic and Specular
Communication .. :' 23
Johnston, A. 134
Klein,M. 15
Koyre, A. 3-4,28,50.51, 73, 75,108, 144,
192
Kuhn, T. 53, 144
Lacan, J. 2-4,6-8.13,15-19,21-3,26-7,
29-31,33-4,36-8,40-3,49-51,56,
61-9,75,81-2,88,90-2,97-102,
98,104,115-16,133-41,153,
171-2,174-5,181,191-2,196,201,
203
"Crucial Problems of
Psychoanalysis" 140
"Logic of Fantasy, The" 9,13,15
"Object of Psychoanalysis, The" 16
Other Side of Psychoanalysis, The 29
"Science and Truth" 16,116,128.133-6
see also apres coup, ideal-ego objet petit
aReal
Lacanianism 16,31, 49
Ladau, E. 91
Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (with
Mouffe) 91
Laplanche, J. 18,22,174-5
Laruelle, F. 193,200-3
Leclaire, S. 14,18-27,30,34,36-8,42,172
"Analyst in His Place?" 34
Psychoanalyzing 19
Lecourt, D. 55
Lefort, C. 5
Leibniz, G. 32
letter, the 66-7 see also signifier, the
Levi-Strauss, c. 13,41-2,95-6,103,153
life 9
Canguilhem on 155-62,165
Deleuze on 162-70
singularity and 166
Livingston, P. 116, 135-6
Politics of Logic, The 116
Locke, J. 164
logic 84-6,88-9,91-3
and ideology 94
lure 95-7, 103, 108, 145
and the Imaginary 94-102
see also Miller
Macherey, P. 7-8,50,69-77,103,115,123,
172,179-80,193
"Georges Canguilhems Philosophy of
Science ... " 179
Theory of Literary Production, A 70, 72
Mallarme, S. 93
Marx, K. 13,49-50,55,131,175
Capital 50
Marxism 3
humanist 117
materialism 203
Althusser's 40
Bachelard's 56
dialectical 100,118-19,124
historical 50, 118, 124, 201
Mathematism 60
mathematization 173
mechanism 157-8, 165, 168
physicalist 159
see also naturalism vitalism
mediation 28
metalanguage 66-7
metaphysics,
neo-vitalist 153
metapsychology 29,63, 192
milieu 167-8,176-7,197
objective universal milieu 177
subjective milieu 177
see also Canguilhem
Miller, J.-A. 2,6-7,9,14,24,27-31, 33-4,
36-8,41-2,49,51,64,66-9,81-5,
on Frege's construction of number 32-3
"Matrice" 36
"Suture" 6,14,30,49,66,81,87,93-4,
100,103,131,133-4,140,144,171,
192
see also lure
Milner, J. -c. 2, 5, 7, 40, 102, 115-16,
140-5,171-5,180-1
"Point of the Signifier, The" 133,140-6
Mirror Stage, the 9,17,23-4,98, 127, 129
see also Lacan
Montag, W. 8,72,74
Morel, G. 139
Moufre, C. 91
Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (with
Laclau) 91
narcissism 17,27, 37
naturalism (Aristotle's),
Canguilhem's critique of 165
see also mechanism
Newton, 1. 139
nominalism 166
nonbeing 142
Milner's description of 142
nonphilosophy 200-3
see also philosophy
Norris, C. 6
number 36
Frege's construction of 32-4
numbertheory(Freges) 6,33,38-9,83,91
object, the 15-18,56,58,86,96,121, 203
and the ideal 18
Leclaire on 18-23
of psychoanalysis 144
of science 144
and the signifier 20-2
subject and, the 42
objet petit a 9,13,56,133,136-40,143
see also Lacan
Oedipus complex, the 15,37
One, the 202 see also Real
ontology 9,85,181
affirmationist 153
mathematical 93
19?
and
overdetermination 49
Pecheux, M. 123
Language, Semantics and Ideology 123
phenomenology,
post -Husserlian 13
philosophy 1-2,5,157,200,202
Althusser on 201
science and 157
see also nonphilosophy
Plato 116,140-2,144-5,171
Sophist 140, 171
pluralism 10
Popper, K. 6, 54
post-Althusserian philosophy 4
post-Lacanian philosophy 4,197
post-rationalist politics 198-200
see also Ranciere
post-structuralism 5, 8, 102
presentism 175
psychoanalysis 1-2,16,18,27,31-2,36,
38,60,62,64-5,83-4,87-9,91,96,
102, 124, 134, 136, 138-9, 145, 196
Green on 16
scientificityof 29
psychosis 88, 201
negative condition for 90
psychotic, the 38
Rabinow, P. 161, 164
Ranciere,). 192, 198-200
Althusser's Lesson 198
Disagreement 192, 198
Foucault's influence 199
see also post-rationalist politics
rationalism 4,56,58,63,73,117,169-70
Cartesian 4, 52
philosophical 58
scientistic 10
Real, the 18,21-2,29,40,42-3,65-6,68,
88,92,99,101,132,135-6,138-9,
200-3 see also Lacan One
realism 4-5, 58
reductionism 155
relationalism 161
relativism 5-6, 64
Resch, R. P. 40
Santner, 181
Saussure,E de 26,39,60,102,142
science 134, 157,200
Althusser on 117-22
Badiou on 117-22
scientific formalization 9
scientificity 192
self-presentation, text's 8, 106
see also Derrida
self-refutation,
ofform 29
set theory (Cantor's) 94
sexuation, theory of 29
sign 26
signified, the 26, 60
signifier, the 7,23,27-8,30,33-4,36,
38-9,42,54,60--1,63-5,67-8,
83-4,87,90-1,94-5,97-8,102,
120, 127, 130-1, 136, 140, 173-4
and affect 28
Lacan and the impurity of 63-9
logic of signifier, the 6,15,20,22-3,27,
29-34,36-9,42,51,61,83,87,91,
98,107,115,120,126,128,134,
140, 142, 173
and mark 89,91, 94
nonidentity of, the 36
and number 36 see also letter
singularity 25
skepticism 5-6
specularity 23-30,98
Spinoza,B. 38,43,55,121,123,162
Ethics 123
see also immanent causality
Starr, P. 5, 55
Logics of Failed Revolt 5
Stolze, T. 8
structural causality 40
structuralism 3,5,8,10,41-2,63,72,82,
102, 162, 175, 191, 200
French 2-3, 117
orthodox 95-6
psychoanalytic 95
structuration 95
and strucluration
the 49,58,
133,135,145,172, 197,203
see also ideology unconscious
subjective, the 63
and the objective 64
subjectivity,
and the later Badiou 194-8
suturation 34
suture 31-2,66,83-4,87,94
Symbolic, the 15-17,18,22,24-6,28,32,36,
40,42-3,57-8,65,83,88,99-100,
127, 129-30, 136, 138-40, 171
temporality 167
textuality 105, 107
Thomas, P. 59
Tiles, M. 52-4
Bachelard: Science and Objectivity 52
Tolstoy, L 75
War and Peace 75
totality 36, 39
totalization 30, 38
ofform 30
transcendental empiricism,
Deleuze's reflections 163-4
tuche,
and automaton 95
see also Aristotle
unconscious, the 99, 174
Althusser's formulation of 126-33
subject of, the 82, 128
vacillation 102, 142-3, 172
vitalism 157-8,168,170,200
classical 159
quasi-mystical 157
see also mechanism
word-presentations 28
and thing-presentations 28
zero, the 25,66,84,89,92-4
see also number