Psychoanalytische Perspectieven, 2017, 35, 1: 9-34

MATHEMATICAL REALISM AND THE IMPOSSIBLE

STRUCTURE OF THE REAL

Samo Tomšič

Humboldt Universität zu Berlin

Bild Wissen Gestaltung
Sophienstraße 22A
D-10178 Berlin
tomsic.samo@gmail.com

Summary: This article discusses the influence of Koyré’s epistemology on Lacan’s

conception of the real and more broadly on his critical examination of the relation between
science and psychoanalysis. The discussion necessitates a systematic return to Koyré,
whose visibility in contemporary philosophical and psychoanalytical debates is rather
marginal despite his major contribution to the development of epistemology, philosophy
and structural psychoanalysis in 20th century France and beyond. The article embeds
Lacan’s teaching in a broader intellectual movement of French philosophy of science,
which already recognised the necessity of a materialist epistemology. Following this
current, Lacan openly associated his take on structuralism with dialectical materialism. Or,
this positioning of psychoanalysis can hardly be understood in its overall complexity
without re-examining Koyré’s philosophical and epistemological polemics and the
influence of his historical examination of the foundations of modern science on mid-20th
century structuralism. The latter, one could argue, repeats the modern astronomical
revolution in the field of human objects (language, thought, society). Lacan’s structural
psychoanalysis was undoubtedly the most radicalised version of this repetition – but
precisely this would not have been possible without Koyré’s historical epistemology.

Keywords: Alexandre Koyré, Jacques Lacan, structuralism, dialectical materialism,

epistemology.

Received: February 8, 2017; Accepted: March 2, 2017.

Epistemological Polemics

The rather extravagant definition of the real as impossible is

probably one of Lacan’s best-known contributions to epistemological
debates.1 However, it is often forgotten that the formula was adopted
1. A shorter German version of this text will be published in V. Tanner, J. Vogl and D. Walzer
(eds.), Die Wirklichkeit des Realismus / The Reality of Realism, Paderborn, W. Fink, 2017.
10 SAMO TOMŠIČ

from Alexandre Koyré’s historical epistemology, where it describes the

mathematical and geometrical real – objects that have no adequate
match in the physical world and that are normally understood as
idealisations of form and experience, as constructions or fictions
standing opposite the natural real. In this empirical aspect the real of
mathematics and geometry seems to be impossible because it cannot
exist in the same objective way as sensuous objects. On the other hand
impossibility seems to be the wrong logical modality for describing
mathematical and geometrical objects. Instead they should be
understood as necessary, because mathematics and geometry ground
their objects and realities in a series of stable and invariable laws. From
this viewpoint defining the real as impossible seems to amount to
nonsense. But Koyré and Lacan open up another epistemological
orientation, which does not hide its attempt to challenge both
empiricism and logicism and which Lacan openly associated with
dialectical materialism. By linking mathematics and geometry with
onto-logical impossibility Koyré’s epistemology contains the necessary
potential, which enabled Lacan to think the intricacies of the object of
psychoanalysis. In his account of the history of astronomical revolution
Koyré detected an important ontological and epistemological scandal,
which is directly associated with a specific form of language – the
abstract and formal language of geometry and mathematics.
Psychoanalysis – and this is what Lacan’s teaching argued from the
very beginning – encounters the same scandal in language as such. This
encounter extended Koyré’s epistemological theses to other disciplines,
in the first place to psychoanalysis and linguistics and, one could add,
to the critique of political economy.2 With this extension a broader
discussion enters the picture, which concerns the philosophical,
epistemological and last but not least political consequences of
psychoanalysis. But what I will attempt here is merely to outline the
critical elements of Koyré’s epistemology, which have directly
influenced the orientation of Lacan’s teaching.
Lacan’s return to Freud repeatedly referred to Koyré’s programmatic
framework in order to systematically re-examine the relation between
science and psychoanalysis.3 In contrast to Freud, who pursued positive

2. No wonder Lacan eventually turned to Marx in order to establish a bridge between the object
of psychoanalysis and the object of critique of political economy. For a historical and theoretical
discussion of this alliance, see Žižek, 1989, pp. 11-53, and more recently my own attempts in
Tomšič, 2015.
3. Koyré was indeed Lacan’s “subject supposed to know” in matters of history and theory of
science (for a broader discussion, see notably Milner, 1995: 33-76).
MATHEMATICAL REALISM & THE IMPOSSIBLE STRUCTURE OF THE
REAL 11
scientific ideals throughout his life, Lacan inverted the perspective:
“Thus what remains is the question, which makes our project radical:
the one that passes from: is psychoanalysis a science? to: what is a
science, which includes psychoanalysis?” (Lacan, 2001: 187). For
Lacan the radicality of psychoanalysis consists of its subversive
consequences for the conception of scientificity. Its relation to
knowledge, objectivity and experience problematises the predominant
historical narrations of scientific development and theories of science.
It is at this precise point that Koyré’s epistemology, which proceeds
both historically and critically (and to which Lacan added his
dialectical-materialist twist), became the privileged ally of
psychoanalysis.
Koyré’s efforts famously evolved around the shift from the
premodern (Aristotelian and Ptolomeian) to the classical (Galilean and
Newtonian) astronomy and physics, and accentuated the role of
formalisation and mathematical realism (that Koyré equates with
Platonism) in the theorisation and mobilisation of the real,4 the complex
anchoring of scientific experimentation between mathematical
“idealisation” and “sensual” experience. Koyré’s attempt to think the
modern scientific revolution as metaphysical, rather than as an anti-
metaphysical or anti-philosophical revolution in knowledge, initiated a
wide-reaching polemic against Heidegger’s pessimistic view of
ontological consequences of modern science. According to Heidegger
the application of mathesis and technology on physical, biological and
human reality represents an ontological danger and radicalises the
oblivion of the original question of Being. Koyré also persistently
argued against the logical-positivist epistemologies, which tended to
reduce the endeavours of modern science to naive empiricism and the
rather limited striving for the accumulation of knowledge and progress
of cognition. In this framework the real is barely distinguished from the
empirical, and mathematical language presumably describes a stable,
functioning and necessary reality, the exact opposite of what Koyré and
Lacan targeted through their association of the real with the impossible.
Koyré’s position in the history of science should be described as
structuralist. Although such labelling may not be self-evident, it finds a
peculiar biographical support in the fact that it was Koyré who
presented Claude Lévi-Strauss to Roman Jakobson in New York during

4. When talking about the “mobilisation of the real” I have in mind Heidegger’s term
Herausfordern, the isolation of something like surplus-reality within phenomenal reality (see
notably Heidegger, 2004 [1954]: 18-19).
12 SAMO TOMŠIČ

their exile from Europe (Jorland, 1981: 23).5 The structuralist Urszene
thus contains three core disciplines, structural linguistics, anthropology,
and history of science; it is more than symptomatic that Koyré remains
omitted from the structuralist family portrait despite the fact that the
leading French structuralists (and poststructuralists) extensively used
his doctrine of science. The framework, in which the structuralist
movement operated, perpetuated the formalist line in French
philosophy (including names such as Léon Brunschvicg, Jean
Cavaillès, Albert Lautman and the mathematical collective Nicholas
Bourbaki).6 The current renewed Plato’s mathematical realism, while
also affirming the dimension of becoming and the practice of
experimentation in mathematics. This modern Platonism maintained
the real status of mathematical objects and the autonomy of
mathematical language, while taking into account the historical
dynamic of the mathematical field and the immanent instability of
mathematical structures. In direct continuity with this perspective
Koyré raised a twofold objection against the logical-positivist research
programme: firstly against its pretention to direct philosophy from
metaphysical “speculations” and “false problems” to the apparently
solid ground of stable logical laws and objective experience; secondly
against its impoverished conception of scientificity, which unites the
striving for cognition with the idea of progress (progress of
consciousness supported by the accumulative regime of knowledge
represent two key elements of the positivist worldview).7
In contrast to the hegemony of logical positivism and empiricism,
Koyré proposed a reading of scientific becoming, which consequently
rejects every linear historical development. As we know, assuming such
development always risks placing scientific events in a teleological
horizon. In addition, postulating the univocity and continuity of
5. Even if this does not make of Koyré the godfather of structuralism, one should at least
acknowledge that his work after 1945 adopts the notion of structure. What is certain is that
Koyré’s epistemology resulted from a combination of the French philosophy of mathematics and
the structuralist research program. Curiously, the New York anecdote does not appear in Dosse,
1992.
6. Cavaillès described the conflictual situation in philosophy with the following line, which
openly rejects the primacy of cognition and experience in epistemological matters: “It is not
philosophy of consciousness but philosophy of the concept, which can provide a doctrine of
science” (Cavaillès, 1994: 560).
7. The conception of empiricism as the ultimate call to facticity plays an important role here. But
what is this facticity? With classical science all presumably solid empirical facts most definitely
melted into the thin air of mathematical experience (to paraphrase Marx), which is material
without being sensuous (cf. Milner, 2002: 117). For modern Platonism, mathematical language
remains the privileged example of abstract matter without sensuous qualities.
MATHEMATICAL REALISM & THE IMPOSSIBLE STRUCTURE OF THE
REAL 13
scientific history places the scientist in the position of a “subject
supposed to know” (Lacan), who in the last instance guarantees the
consistency of scientific knowledge and in whom the ultimate criterion
for the adequate relation between the empirical and the experimental is
anchored.8 For Koyré the epistemic situation is significantly more
complex: the subject of science (although Koyré avoids the term, but
this is where Lacan supplements Koyré’s epistemology) is a non-
psychological entity, which cannot be pinned down to any actually
existing individual. The subject of science manifests less in the positive
figure of savant (the scientist; literally, the one who knows) than in the
gaps and struggles, deadlocks and errors that accompany the formation
of a scientific theory, and which oppose a decentred, uncertain and
conflictual structure of science to the ideological tale of perpetual
scientific progress. Modern science “did not emerge straight away in
final form, like Athena from the head of Zeus, from the thought of
Descartes or Galileo,” the scientific revolution is a gradual process, “in
which the human mind can be observed obstinately grappling over and
over again with the same problems, untiringly coming up against the
same objections, the same difficulties, and slowly and laboriously
forging the instrument which would enable it to overcome them”
(Koyré, 1978: 131). The critical point is that this becoming is in no way
over-determined or directed at a point of closure. It is constitutively
open, non-finite and comprises the production of errors and deadlocks
just as it contains the production of knowledge. Modern science is an
epistemic panta rei, which holds on to the real through the
mathematical logos – and only in this respect it can be described as
“science of the real” (another term that Lacan adopted from Koyré).
Against epistemologies of progress, Koyré insists on the dialectical
kernel of modern science, which reflects its immanent becoming, as
well as the persistence of metaphysical “speculation” at the heart of
experimental sciences, dialectic of knowledge and non-knowledge,
discovery and error, semblance and the real. The philosophical
orientation of science emerges as an inevitable and inherent component
of science, its necessary mode of expression rather than its accidental
by-product. The philosophical and the scientific most consequently
meet in experimentation, which direct thinking toward a feature of the
real that resists the stabilising regime of logical necessity. In this

8. Readers familiar with Lacan’s theory of discourse will recognise the left side of the university
discourse: S2 (knowledge) assumes the position of a presumably autonomous agency; this
autonomy and neutrality of knowledge is sustained by S1 (the master-signifier), the function of
authority.
14 SAMO TOMŠIČ

framework, impossibility, rather than necessity, finally becomes for

Koyré and Lacan the privileged sign of the rational, dialectical and
materialist character of the real.
The persistence of modern science in the philosophical horizon
reaches its peak in the quarrel between the formalist and empiricist
conception of scientificity. This conflict finally shows that both
doctrines of science reproduce the opposition between Platonism
(mathematical realism or dialectical materialism) and Aristotelianism
(empiricist idealism). Koyré’s main thesis is that the modern scientific
revolution initiated by Galileo and temporarily stabilised by Newton
stands for an immense return to Plato; he even goes as far as to speak
of the “experimental verification of Platonism” (Koyré, 1968: 43,
transl. modified). This victory, however, is constrained by the
empiricist tendency that progressively reasserts its hegemony by
imposing a non-dialectical notion of the real and developing a
normalised vision of science from which every trace of dialectics and
negativity (in the first place the negativity of the impossible real) is
eliminated.

The Language of the Real

Experimentation is the methodical interrogation of nature, an

interrogation, which presupposes and implies a language in which to
formulate the questions, and a dictionary which enables us to read and
to interpret the answers. For Galileo, as we know well, it was in curves
and circles and triangles, in mathematical or even more precisely, in
geometrical language – not in the language of common sense or in that
of pure symbols – that we must speak to Nature and receive her answers.
Yet obviously the choice of language, the decision to employ it, could
not be determined by the experience which its use was to make possible
(Koyré, 1968: 18-19).
Against widespread conviction, observation and experience did not
ground modern science but rather represented an essential obstacle to
its constitution. Premodern science did not know the distinction
between reality and the real, appearance and structure, experience and
experimentation; it focused on describing the sublunary and
geometrising the superlunary, and in any case understood as its main
MATHEMATICAL REALISM & THE IMPOSSIBLE STRUCTURE OF THE
REAL 15
task “saving the phenomena”.9 Aristotle, the philosopher of common
sense, is in no way accidentally the founder of the epistemological
orientation, according to which the main scientific task consists in
describing sensuous experience and determining the necessary laws that
sustain the world of appearances. The real is here conceived as
necessary, stable and functional. In this respect Aristotelian science
remains in an epistemo-political accordance with the ancient master, the
master’s science: The discourse of the master, for instance, its goal is
that things march in step for the whole world. Well, this is not at all the
same thing as the real, because the real is precisely what does not go,
what gets in the way of this convoy, it is what does not cease repeating
itself in order to hinder this march. I said it first in this form – the real
is what always returns to the same place. The emphasis is on return. It
is the place that it reveals, the place of the semblance (Lacan, 2011: 15-
16).
Repetition of the real, which sabotages the apparently automatic
functioning of reality, takes place within the semblance. The real is thus
an immanent and not an external obstacle, and as such does not
represent an “other” reality, more substantial than the phenomenal
reality. What Lacan describes as semblance is real but with an
immanent ontological deadlock, which prevents it from forming a
closed order grounded on invariable, stable and necessary laws.10
While premodern science struggled to totalise the real by filling in
the gap between the world of appearances and that which presumably
sustains them as their necessary real, modern science focuses on the
symptomatic disruptions or distortions in phenomenal reality for the
price of abolishing the epistemic link between the real and the
necessary, which still conceives the real as something that repeats itself
in terms of automaton, always returning to the same place… of the
9. Cf. Duhem, 2003 [1908]. For Duhem, modern science continues to follow this line (saving
appearances, in the sense of their explanation). Koyré disagreed with this reading: modern
science deepens the gap between the phenomenal reality, to which sensuous experience is
restricted, and the impossible real, which is grasped by “mathematical experience” (Cavaillès)
and scientific experimentation.
10. For the same reason, Lacan rejected every comparison of his concept of the real with the
Kantian thing in itself: “It is not even remotely Kantian. I make that quite clear. If there is a
notion of the real, it is extremely complex and in that sense it is not graspable, not graspable in a
way that would constitute a whole.” Lacan, 2013: 80-81). Lacan then comments on the polemic
between Henri Poincaré and Émile Boutroux on the contingency of natural laws: “It is
exceedingly rare for a philosopher to be more intelligent than a mathematician, but here a
philosopher just so happened to raise an important question. Why, in fact, wouldn’t laws evolve
when we conceive of the world as having evolved?” (Lacan, 2013: 81) The concept of the real
as impossible targets this combination of structure and instability (or structure and becoming).
16 SAMO TOMŠIČ

semblance (or appearance). If for Aristotelians, the semblance stands

for the stability and necessity of the real, the moderns place the real on
the side of what gets in the way – an ontological obstacle in the
semblance, which indicates another mode of functioning, namely the
dis-functioning that Aristotle intuited in repetition described as tyché.11
The latter is what Lacan characterises as repetition that immanently
inhibits “the convoy”, the structuration of reality anchored in the two
central semblances, stability and necessity (incidentally, these are the
master’s key features, which is why the master-signifier is semblance
par excellence). The impossible real is thus not some separate reality
but a cut in the semblance or in objective appearance that characterises
phenomenal reality, an unstable structure, which is impossible in
relation to the apparent necessity of the semblant.
The question of the real is intimately linked with the scientific choice
of language. What stands at the core of classical science is no longer
the language of sound reason, human language or language of sense and
meaning, but the real of language, which is exemplified in mathematics
and geometry, a language deprived of sense and meaning but still
remaining a form of language – the form corresponding to the deadlocks
of the real rather than to the stabilising function of the master. Hence
scientific modernity is rooted less in the overlapping or adequate
relation between the semblance and the real than in the coincidence
between the real of appearances and the real of language: an encounter
of two impossibilities, which diminishes the role of human experience
in the foundation of the sciences. In other words what coincides are two
inadequacies or non-relations, that of language with itself and that of
reality with itself, both resulting from the fact that we are dealing with
non-totalisable orders (that premodern science vainly strived to totalise
and stabilise). The more or less explicit discovery of modern science is
that neither reality nor language function in an overdetermined and
necessary way, and that the encounter of two impossibilities, the
linguistic and the ontological, opens up an unprecedented epistemic
horizon. Not only human experience but also the accent on language
spoken by sound reason was the central obstacle to the foundation and
constitution of the “science of the real” and to the introduction of the
dialectical rather than empirical notion of the real.
Koyré’s distinction of experience from experimentation is crucial
here and is closely connected with the scientific choice of language.
This choice plays out “natural language” – the language of man, in

11. Lacan translated tyché (chance) as “the encounter with the real” (Lacan, 1998: 52, 53).
MATHEMATICAL REALISM & THE IMPOSSIBLE STRUCTURE OF THE
REAL 17
which premodern science struggled to sustain or save the semblances in
nature and inject totality, stability and necessity in the real – against the
“language of nature” – the impersonal, depsychologised and
speculative language of mathematically grounded experimentation and
simultaneously the realisation of autonomy inherent to the language of
man.12 The choice of language thus contains a choice of the real of
language against the appearance of language, the recognition of an
immanent short-circuit of semblance through mathematics and more
generally through the autonomy of the signifier. With this decision,
modern science progressively rejected the Aristotelian primacy of
automaton and reintroduced tyché in the field of knowledge. In doing
so it foreclosed the central position of sensuous consciousness, another
paradigmatic semblance: “Mathematics is science without
consciousness” (Lacan, 2001: 453) – but as Lacan demonstrated, this
does not imply that it is without a subject. The subject of mathematics,
and more generally, the subject of science is the subject of the
unconscious: thought decentralised and detached from its psychological
bearers. In this way, modern science lays, according to Lacan, the
epistemic foundations, which allowed Freud to isolate the real of
thinking in the guise of the unconscious.
The opposition “experience – experimentation” thus corresponds to
the opposition “natural language – language of nature”, as well as to the
opposition “interpretation – formalisation”: Galileo knows that
experience – or if I may allow myself to use the Latin word
experimentum in order to oppose it precisely to the common experience,
which is merely observation – that experimentum is prepared, that
experimentum is a question addressed to nature, a question posed in a
very specific language, in the geometrical and mathematical language;
he knows that it is not enough to observe what is, what is normally and
naturally presented to the eyes, that we need to know how to formulate
the question and that, in addition, we need to know how to decipher and
understand the response, that is, to apply to experimentum the rigorous
laws of measure and of mathematical interpretation (...) Galileo’s
instruments (...) are instruments in the strongest sense of the word: they
are incarnations of theory (Koyré, 1973: 59).

12. Lacan grounded his teaching on the connection of both abovementioned aspects, thus
showing that the signifier is inscribed in the same framework as formal languages and various
geometries. This means, then, that linguistics, notably in its structuralist guise, has to be added
to mathematics and geometry in order to think the extended epistemic platform of scientific
modernity. With such extension, disciplines like psychoanalysis could be included in the
historical development of the modern scientific revolution.
18 SAMO TOMŠIČ

Modern science goes beyond the question of Being, which restricted

philosophy to the register of semblance – and maybe this was the aspect
of Galileanism that scandalised Heidegger to the extent that he refused
the attribute of thinking or thought to science. The Parmenidian
question of Being is not radical enough in problematising the world of
appearances. It is the Heraclitian question of becoming that will
progressively become central in the new regime of knowledge and raise
the question of the instability in Being, the intertwining of Being and
Non-Being, or the vacillation of semblances through something that is
neither Being nor Non-Being but rather insists as non-realised in the
framework of reality and stands for the driving force of the non-
teleological becoming of reality. Scientific experimentation
demonstrates neither Being nor Non-Being in the world of phenomena
but the dynamic of the real. In the experimental scientific method,
mathematics determines the scope of research, and simultaneously
enables mobilising the impossible of reality.13
For classical and modern science, mathematics is the realisation of
the symbolic and demonstrates the inclusion of the symbolic in the real.
Of course, this inclusion can be acknowledged only under the condition
that language is detached from its human users. This detachment
implies in turn that the Scientist is neither a psychological individual
nor a subject of cognition. The Scientist is unconscious (just like God,
according to Lacan – and maybe the Scientist is indeed the modern
substitute for the dead God, as experimental in its profession as God at
the moment of creation). Classical science contains an emancipation of
language through the affirmation of mathematical realism. In any case
it should be stressed that experimentation is an inhuman experience,
which in its peculiar empirical character (in the sense that it still verifies
or falsifies scientific hypotheses, however through the artificially
generated empirical conditions) inevitably presupposes the discursive
apparatus in its autonomy. The same goes for technology, which is
another mode of realisation or materialisation of mathematised theories.
To recall Koyré’s illustrative example (Koyré, 1961: 311-329), an
object like the telescope is conditioned by optics, which presupposes in
turn the modern geometrisation of space and, one could say, the
detachment of the gaze from the eye: an apparatus incarnating

13. In other words, the experimental method is the concretisation of the fact that a discourse can
produce real consequences. But mathematics is not the only form of language, which is at stake
here. Poetic language provides another example of experimentation and another concretisation
of the real of language. Such experimentation is brought to the point of the unconscious.
MATHEMATICAL REALISM & THE IMPOSSIBLE STRUCTURE OF THE
REAL 19
autonomised vision. We are merely one step away from Lacan’s
conception of the gaze as object small a.
In opposition to logical positivism and empiricism, which continue
to build on (the language of) common sense and in this regard stretch
Aristotelian epistemology well into modernity, we find at the core of
modern science, not a necessary empirical real described in natural
language, but an impossible real demonstrated in formal language and
verified through experimentation. In short, we find a dialectical and
materialist form of language (mathematics as concrete realisation of the
autonomy of language) and of experience (experimentation, which
corresponds to the autonomy in question).
With the decentralising effect of mathematics, cosmology inevitably
entered into a phase of decline since it lost its privileged object, the
cosmos, understood as the closed, totalised world presumably marked
by harmonious order. The modern detotalisation and decentralisation of
reality, accompanied by the shift from the necessity to the impossibility
of the real clearly does not mean that the real is no longer conceived as
rational but merely that, ontologically speaking, it does not form a
totalisable and hierarchically ordered ensemble, or in other words, that
it pertains neither to the order of Being nor to that of logical necessity.14
The rationality of the real differs from the rationality of common sense,
and while premodern science approached the real through the imaginary
of correct forms (hence the discourse on totality, harmony and beauty,
which makes of cosmology some kind of cosmetics of the real), modern
science approaches it exclusively through the symbolic apparatus
(mathematics and technology), thereby abolishing the premodern
qualitative opposition of correct and incorrect forms as ungrounded and
non-scientific. Another crucial implication of the choice, according to
which the language of the real is the dialectical and speculative
language of formalisation rather than the non-dialectical and logically
normalised language of sound reason, consists in the differentiation of
consciousness and subjectivity. At this precise point Lacan’s teaching
will extend the scope of Koyré’s epistemology with the thesis that “the
subject upon which we operate in psychoanalysis can only be the
subject of science” (Lacan, 2006a: 729). The possibility of a Lacanian
epistemology is anchored in this crucial step.

14. On this background Lacan eventually deduced the three negative features of the real: absence
of law, foreclosure of sense and fragmentation. This does not mean that the real is not structured;
the non-all is precisely the Lacanian term for the structure of the real qua impossible. (Cf. lessons
IV, VIII and IX in Lacan, 2016.)
20 SAMO TOMŠIČ

The Real of Language

With Saussure and the Prague Circle linguistics was grounded on a

cut, which is the bar between the signifier and the signified in order to
expose the difference, on which the signifier is constituted in an
absolute way but which is also effectively charged with an autonomy
that has nothing to envy the effects of the crystal (Lacan, 2001: 403-
404).
The destruction of the cosmos and the geometrisation of space, the
two principal achievements of classical science, have in one and the
same gesture introduced the epistemic conditions for a new topology of
thinking and language, which was eventually elaborated by structural
linguistics and psychoanalysis. The idea of finite order supporting the
ontological hierarchy of beings was replaced by a disclosed, but also
unstable historical structure. Lacan’s concept of the non-all is the
general topological index of the structure that modern sciences
encounter as real, including the real of language and thought. The
structuralist movement recognised in the intersection of synchronicity
and diachronicity an example of such non-all and thereby exposed the
inclusion of the symbolic in the real. This went against postmodernist
relativism and anti-realism, which embedded thinking in the
proliferation of linguistic games; it also opposed the commonplace
objection that Lacanian structuralism promotes language qua Absolute.
Conceiving the real in terms of the impossible is twofold: on the one
hand, the real is desubstantialised in accordance with the epistemic
horizon of modern science, and on the other, deadlocks, inhibitions,
failures, breakdowns and paradoxes of discourse become the privileged
mode of encounter of the real in the symbolic. Such encounter can be
possible only under the recognition that there is something like a real of
language, that language is always-already operative in the real, or to
recall Lacan’s phrasing from Seminar XVI, that discourse has
consequences.
With the abolition of the ancient division on the superlunary sphere
of eternal and necessary mathematical truths and the sublunary non-
mathematical sphere of generation and corruption that science could
describe only in the language of (common) sense, another crucial
structural intertwining was introduced that Koyré associates with the
foundational quarrel of philosophy: If you claim for mathematics a
superior status, if more than that you attribute to it a real value and a
commanding position in physics, you are a Platonist. If on the contrary
MATHEMATICAL REALISM & THE IMPOSSIBLE STRUCTURE OF THE
REAL 21
you see in mathematics an abstract science, which is therefore of a
lesser value than those – physics and metaphysics – which deal with
real being; if in particular you pretend that physics needs no other basis
than experience and must be built directly on perception, that
mathematics has to content itself with the secondary and subsidiary role
of a mere auxiliary, you are an Aristotelian. What is in question in this
discussion is not certainty (…) but Being; not even the use of
mathematics in physical science (…) but the structure of science and
therefore the structure of Being (Koyré, 1968: 36-37).
There is strict homology between the structure of science and the
structure of Being, or rather the structure of the real, since Koyré here
does not account for the fact that the modern scientific revolution
contains a philosophical displacement from the premodern question of
Being to the properly modern question of the Real. And if antiquity
departed from the “sameness of thinking and being” (Parmenides) then
modernity departs from the sameness of thinking and the real, with the
important difference that the sameness now does not manifest in terms
of closure and adequation but rather of disclosure and inadequation, as
symbolic instability rather than imaginary stabilisation. The sameness
of thinking and the real is underpinned by a fundamental “non-
sameness” of language and of the real. For this reason Heraclitian
becoming turns out to be crucial for the modern regime of knowledge,
including psychoanalysis.15 Experimentation, understood as
depsychologised mathematical experience, is central in this respect.
When demonstrating a real that disrupts rather than sustains the
phenomena, experimentation also demonstrates the autonomy of
mathematics, a real of language irreducible to meaning and
communication, as well as a mode of thought that contradicts the sound
reason of Aristotelian logics. This internally tripled demonstration is
what differentiates modern experimental Platonism from empiricist
Aristotelianism, which considers the function of language to be in
providing adequate representations of reality and thus precisely
sustaining the appearances.
The continuity between modern science and structuralism concerns
the extension of these epistemological lessons to other domains, notably
to that of “human objects” (language, society, subjectivity), where an
inhuman dimension at the core of the human finally comes to the
foreground. No wonder that the problematic of alienation and negativity
15. Cf. Lacan’s Seminar XX, where he openly sides with Heraclitus against Parmenides (Lacan,
1999: 114) after previously declaring the latter’s position as “stupid” (Lacan, 1999: 22).
22 SAMO TOMŠIČ

became all too fashionable with the rise of structuralism.16 The first
structuralist lesson comes from the extension of the autonomy of
mathematics to language in general and in the corresponding
intensification of experimental Platonism. Mathematics is merely the
most evident expression of autonomy, which can be demonstrated in all
symbolic systems (value, signifier, knowledge). According to Lacan,
the inscription of structuralism in the horizon of modern science
becomes most evident in its isolation of the signifier. The bar that
separates the signifier from the signified unveils the contingent
character of the relation between words and things and shows that the
real of language is not to be mistaken for its presumably necessary and
invariable grammatical laws: “Structure is to be taken in the sense,
where it is most real, where it is the real itself. This is in general
determined by the convergence towards an impossibility” (Lacan,
2006b: 30). Lacan’s statement (which only makes sense in the universe
of modern science) holds for any structure, not only the one linguistics
isolated in language (the chain consisting of pure differences, a chain
made of structured nothingness), and one can again repeat at this point
that every encounter between discourse and the real is a convergence of
two impossibilities, two impossible and hence real structures.
The famous Lacanian dictum “the unconscious is structured like a
language” targets the same dynamic and instability in the linguistic
structure, and one could equally argue that sexuality and the
unconscious were for Freud expressions of the fact that there is constant
linguistic experimentation taking place in the speaking body, an
experimentation evolving around the inexistence and impossibility of
sexual relation. Lacan hereby does not say that the unconscious should
be identified with language but that the unconscious is an effect of
language, its real consequence, which is precisely structured and
therefore rational; a dynamic structure rejecting the stabilising
framework that the Aristotelian logic imposed to thought, in the first
place the principle of non-contradiction and the excluded third. This
Aristotelian framework is what Freud most openly targeted with his
occasional remark that the unconscious knows no contradiction: the real
of thinking does not obey the laws, for which Aristotle presupposed that
they were universal and valid for all thought. Contrary to classical logic,
with the concept of the unconscious psychoanalysis rigorously

16. Of course, these problems traverse the entirety of philosophical modernity, beginning with
the Cartesian encounter of alienation in radical doubt, via Hegel and Marx’s discussions of the
alienation of labour, up to the Freudian unconscious.
MATHEMATICAL REALISM & THE IMPOSSIBLE STRUCTURE OF THE
REAL 23
demonstrates that there is no such thing as all thought. This
demonstration is both logical, insofar as it follows the essentially non-
Aristotelian logic of the signifier, which abolishes the conception of
language in terms of a tool-organ, and experimental, insofar as the
unconscious stands for the materialisation of experimentation taking
place in language.
The epistemic object of the “science of the real” violates the regime
of human cognition without therefore being a “great Outdoors”
(Meillassoux, 2007). Rather, its object exemplifies the topological
“paradox” of interior exteriority, the extimate, to use the appropriate
Lacanian term, whereby the Platonism of modern science consists in
the fact that it attributes to mathematics (and more broadly to language
as such) precisely such an extimate status. Mathematics can grasp the
impossible structure of the real without this grasp being anchored in a
transcendental subjectivity, metaphysical soul or sensuous
consciousness: it throws thinking out of its conscious joint. However,
mathematics (and, again, language in general) contains an ontological
scandal that Plato did not acknowledge and that Koyré formulates in the
following way: This is a very strange approach, for it does not involve
the explanation of an observed phenomenon by reference to a
hypothetical underlying reality (…) nor does it involve the analysis of
the phenomenon into its simple constituents and then its reconstruction
in thought (…); what it involves, strictly speaking, is the explanation of
that which is by reference to that which is not, which never is, by
reference even to that which never could be. The explication of the real
by reference to the impossible: what a strange way of proceeding! A
paradox if ever there was one. We shall call this approach Archimedean,
or rather, Platonist; the explanation, or rather the reconstruction, of the
empirical real on the basis of an ideal real (Koyré, 1978: 155, transl.
modified).
In classical philosophical terms this would mean that modern
science explains Being with Non-Being: Being coincides here with
reality, in the frameworks of which human experience takes place, and
Non-Being with the domain of mathematical objects, which are
idealities without even approximate realisation in the world of
experience. Of course, this would still be the Aristotelian formulation
of the problem,17 which is why Koyré prefers to speak of the impossible
rather than of Non-Being. The ontological scandal and the epistemic

17. The real as impossible, or the non-realised, finally abolishes the all too comfortable
philosophical dichotomy of Being and Non-Being – it stands for the excluded dialectical third.
24 SAMO TOMŠIČ

efficiency of mathematics consists less in the idea that its objects would
represent an autonomous stable order of Being, opposite to the unstable
order of phenomenal reproductions. They contain a surplus of reality,
but this surplus does not yet mean – as Plato thought – that they
constitute a higher sphere of Being, ranked between appearances and
ideas. Again, mathematical objects are not impossible because they lack
full empirical realisation in the phenomenal world, but rather because
they resist assimilation both to Being and Non-Being. Mathematics is
too ideal to be empirical (in this respect Aristotle is conditionally right:
mathematical objects are non-beings) and too efficient to be fictitious
(in this respect Plato is conditionally right: mathematical objects are
beings). What is at issue is precisely this perpetual oscillation between
Being and Non-Being. This is what makes mathematics an example of
impossible structure, since the impossible neither is nor is not. It
becomes but can never be.
At a crucial point of his teaching, Lacan argued that the sole question
worth raising was not that of naïve realism, which assumed,
unproblematically, the existence of external world, but rather that of the
real, in which discourse itself produces real consequences, a real, which
comprises the real of the symbolic (cf. Lacan, 2006b: 31, and Zupančič,
2014).18 This inversion of realism is crucial because psychoanalysis
was born the moment Freud stumbled upon the problem of discursive
production, with the discovery of the materiality and causality of the
signifier, where the latter no longer merely represents, reflects or
imitates external reality in a more or less adequate way, but rather
produces a peculiar surplus, which has no matching correlate in external
reality and for which Freud chose the term Lust (pleasure, enjoyment,
lust). From the psychoanalytic perspective, the main problem with Lust
is that it neither exists objectively outside language nor is it its simple
performative effect. Being too material to be pure appearance and too
dependent on symbolisation to be pure neuro-biological process, Lust
can only be conceived as real in the sense of the impossible. The same
goes for the unconscious. Since it is structured like a language,19 the

18. Recognising the inclusion of the symbolic into the real accomplishes the philosophical move
from the “necessary real” to the “impossible real”. Plato’s realism is so to speak the embryonic
version of the realism of the impossible – embryonic because Plato still conceives mathematical
objects and ideas as ontological stabilisers rather than unstable structures, which are endowed
with becoming of their own.
19. This means precisely that the unconscious neither is nor is not language, or better, the
unconscious is neither purely linguistic (this would be a simplification of Lacan’s statement) nor
purely corporeal (Freud’s later developments tended in this direction) but a material discursive
MATHEMATICAL REALISM & THE IMPOSSIBLE STRUCTURE OF THE
REAL 25
unconscious is a major actualisation of the autonomy of language and a
real discursive consequence in the speaking body, rather than an
imaginary effect of linguistic sense or meaning. In other words, if
unconscious formations parasitise the production of meaning this does
not mean that they are productions of meaning in themselves. The
entire conflict between Freud and Jung evolved around the question
whether the sexual should be reduced to meaning, or whether meaning
camouflages and feeds the very production of enjoyment.
Structuralism repeated the main gesture of Galilean science: it
explained language through something that strictly speaking does not
exist, the signifier and the system of differences forming a chain-like
structure. The same repetition can be found in Freud, who as well
explained thought mechanisms through something that strictly speaking
does not exist, the unconscious. This inexistence clearly does not imply
that we are dealing with simple illusions. On the contrary, what is at
stake are ontologically incomplete realities or realities that are not
thoroughly constituted (as Žižek would put it). Hence, Lacan
incessantly repeated that the big Other does not exist. Language, this
object of the science of language, in the first place does not exist in the
Aristotelian sense, as a stable and ready-made organ-tool of
communication. Language always comes in combination with
autonomy and causality.20 A Koyréian thesis on language would
therefore be: language does not exist, but this inexistence does not
prevent it from having real consequences, or in Lacan’s wording, “What
has a body and does not exist? Answer – the big Other” (Lacan, 1991:
74). Le langage is what the scientific discourse extracts, constructs,
fabricates from the “living language” (lalangue), or rather, language,
this epistemic fabrication, is in the best case the isolated and formalised
logical and efficient autonomy of the symbolic and in the worst case a
fictitious collection of grammatical and semantic rules, which
presuppose a “someone” (intentional consciousness) and an idealised
communicational model. In other words, for the Aristotelian tradition,
which is today most openly perpetuated by the analytic philosophy,
language is still an inefficient existence (mental or cerebral organ). By
contrast, for consequent structuralists, language is an efficient
consequence with disruptive effects in the biological body. Vulgar materialism and empiricism
is more than incapable of thinking this paradox in the ontological status of the unconscious. For
this precise reason Lacan turned toward dialectical materialism (cf. Lacan, 2007: 28, and the
introductory lessons in Lacan, 2006b, where the discussion of Marx is constantly in foreground).
20. Lacan’s neologism lalangue accounts for this dimension and proposes a broader scope of
discursive autonomy than Koyré, who restricted this autonomy exclusively to mathematics and
geometry.
26 SAMO TOMŠIČ

inexistence (logic materialised in the multiplicity of unconscious

formations, sexuality, discursive poiesis etc.).
We can understand why Saussure insisted that linguistics, in order
to become a (Galilean) science of language and break with the
(Aristotelian) philosophy of language, needed to be grounded on the
separation of language from speech and treat language as if no living
being would speak it, as a language of pure spirits rather than a language
of speaking bodies. Speech is not only the realm of uncountable
variations and the proliferation of subjective dialects but also the
terrain, on which Aristotelianism imposed the organonic conception of
language and removed linguistic autonomy from the picture. Saussure’s
insistence on the side of the “ideal language” thus missed the material
consequences, which perpetually dynamise the linguistic construction.
Saussure nevertheless acknowledged that two main features mark the
object of linguistics: it is unstable and it does not exist (it is no positive
ontological substance). Linguistic structure is organised inexistence
(synchronicity) marked by permanent instability (diachronicity).
Lacanian structuralism began with a wager that the discursive
consequences registered by psychoanalysis in the speaking body (the
unconscious and sexuality) were no less capable of becoming an object
of science in Koyré’s sense (science of the real). This means that the
discursive consequences registered by psychoanalysis in the speaking
body could be treated by means of the apparatus of formalisation, by
the autonomy of language, that they indeed actualise in the first place.
Lacan’s unification of the Freudian unconscious with the Saussurean
signifier implies that the unconscious could become the object of a
Galilean science, and consequently that its ontological status is
equivalent to the objects of modern science. Just as the latter treats
external reality as reified mathematics and geometry, psychoanalysis
thinks all unconscious formations as materialised discourse, and in
doing so it brings about another return to Plato. Freud baptised his
epistemic invention in an openly anti-Aristotelian manner: he rejected
the term psychology (logos of psyché, science of the soul) and instead
coined psychoanalysis (analysis of psyché, dissolution of the soul). The
Freudian invention is only possible in the soulless universe of modern
science and provides yet another case of the experimental verification
of Platonism, its clinical verification, given that the Freudian laboratory
is the psychoanalytic cabinet, in which experimentation, that is, an
experience of “the real insofar as it is impossible to sustain” (Lacan,
1977: 11) takes place.
MATHEMATICAL REALISM & THE IMPOSSIBLE STRUCTURE OF THE
REAL 27
The discovery of neurosis not only emerged from the abolition of the
metaphysical hypothesis of the soul but also is the first consequent
falsification of this hypothesis. Every formation of the unconscious
proves that the soul is a feint hypothesis. Freud chose as the epigraph
of The Interpretation of Dreams a fragment from Virgil, acheronta
movebo (“I shall move the underground”) but he could have equally
taken Newton’s hypothesis non fingo (“I do not feint hypotheses”). On
the ruins of Aristotelian psychology Freud constructed a discipline,
which replaced the Aristotelian hypothesis of the soul with the Galilean
hypothesis of the unconscious. As Freud himself already noted, his
theorisation of the unconscious is inscribed in the movement of the
scientific revolution, comprising the decentralisation of thinking, just
like Galileo, Descartes and Newton decentralised the universe (the
downfall of cosmos) and Darwinian biology decentralised life (the
downfall of bios as different from zoe, or the downfall of man as the
Crown/Master of creation).
When describing mathematics as a “science without consciousness”,
Lacan leaves no doubt that there is an absolute correspondence between
mathematical rationality and the form of rationality that psychoanalysis
discovers in the guise of the unconscious. Contrary to Heidegger, who
scandalised his audience by stating that mathematised science does not
think (in this respect, his philosophy remains within the horizon of
Aristotelian epistemology, for which mathematics is empty thought),
Lacan saw in mathematics not only a decentralised form of thinking but
also the necessary condition for thinking the real of thinking and the
real of language. Through the description of mathematics as science
without consciousness we thus touch upon a crucial aspect of Lacanian
theory, its theory of the subject contained in the axiom: “The signifier
is what represents a subject for another signifier”. Lacan leaves no
doubt that “what structuralism has since allowed us to elaborate
logically” is “the subject caught up in a constituting division” (Lacan,
2006a: 729). By isolating the signifier, Saussure thus made the
inaugural step in thinking the real of language and the real of thinking.
But Saussure’s step was lacking an important materialist turn, which
links the logic of the signifier with its causality or with discursive
consequences. This is where Lacan’s occasional description of the
subject of the signifier (or the subject of the unconscious) as a “response
of the real” (Lacan, 2001: 459) distinctively appears.
28 SAMO TOMŠIČ

Mathematical Realism and Dialectical Materialism

With the choice of autonomous language against human language

scientific modernity brought about a “foreclosure of man” (Jorland,
1981: 147) from the field of knowledge and thereby challenged the
Aristotelian foundations of science. The foreclosure was historically
accomplished with Freud, who grasped knowledge in terms of the
unconscious (decentralised “knowledge that does not know itself”
[Lacan, 1999: 103] – which is also a fitting definition of scientific
knowledge). The final stage of the scientific revolution turns toward
thought itself (in this respect the unconscious stands for thought without
qualities) and thereby subverts the predominant philosophical,
psychological and sociological conceptions of subjectivity: the ego is
in no way the real centre of a mental microcosm, it is a manipulable
imaginary projection, and consequently, there is no such thing as an
internal mental microcosmos, which would relate to an unproblematic
external macrocosmos. The problematic of alienation highlights this
decentralisation. Lacan’s proverbs such as “the unconscious is outside”,
“man thinks with his object” or “structure is real” address the same
topological issue, namely that with the geometrisation of space the
founders of modern science “had to reshape the structure of our
intelligence itself” (Koyré, 1968: 21, transl. modified).21
The kernel of the psychoanalytic contribution to epistemology
consists in its attempt to elaborate an orientation, which is both critical
and materialist. Such an endeavour stands at the heart of Lacan’s
radicalised Koyréianism, which combines three major philosophical
statements about the real: “the real is ideal” (Plato), “the real is rational”
(Hegel) and finally “the real is impossible” (Koyré). The last statement
gives the former two their materialist twist, insofar as it presupposes a
concept of the real that unites three negative features: the real is without
a stable law, the real forecloses sense and the real is non-all. With the
affirmation of mathematical realism and structural instability, Koyré
and Lacan outline a broader historical framework, which begins with

21. The abolition of the soul that can be associated with the modern reinforcement of
mathematical realism indeed restructured the space of thinking. But centuries passed before this
decentralisation of thought was theoretically grasped. Descartes’ move from cogito to res
cogitans ended up in recentralisation. It was only the Freudian shift from the thinking substance
to the mental apparatus that challenged the Cartesian re-substantialisation of thought. Hence
Freud undermined the encapsulation of thought in its conscious mode and every previous attempt
at epistemic certitude.
MATHEMATICAL REALISM & THE IMPOSSIBLE STRUCTURE OF THE
REAL 29
Heraclitus and Plato (in opposition to Parmenides and Aristotle),
continues with Descartes and Hegel (in opposition to Hume and Kant),
and leads to their own positions (in opposition to Popper and
Wittgenstein).
As previously stated, Lacan and Koyré’s epistemological line has an
important precursor in Cavaillès’ philosophy of mathematics, which
departs from a peculiar “reversal of Platonism” (Deleuze, 1990: 262).
For Deleuze reversing Platonism meant as much as focusing on the
subversive and destabilising potential of the lowest of beings: the
simulacrum, a paradoxical being with no adequate model in the world
of ideas. Thus, for Deleuze the simulacrum violated the ontological
regime where all appearances are supposed to be anchored in a stable,
univocal and necessary Being. However, the simulacrum, this
ontological garbage without any ideal grounding whatsoever, is not the
only reality capable of destabilising the world of presumably eternal
and invariable models. An analogous ontological scandal can be
detected in mathematics and geometry, whose objects seem to be the
perfect inversions of the simulacrum: if the latter is appearance without
idea, the former are ideas without appearance. This means that the
simulacrum and mathematical objects are marked by non-identity,
inadequacy and non-relation: features, which in the same move
significantly challenge the schoolbook understanding of Plato’s realism
of ideas. The truly revolutionary contribution of Plato’s philosophy
(even if unintended) resides less in the assumption of a solid ontological
relation between ideas and phenomena than in the discovery of two
materialisations of non-relation, which reveals the fictional character of
this apparent relationality: simulacrum and mathematics.
The essentially problematic aspect of mathematics becomes evident
as soon as we consider its historical development. Departing from
Plato’s affirmation of the autonomy and efficiency of mathematics,
Cavaillès recognises in it an unstable historical structure, which cannot
be reduced to anything other than itself. Internal crises and epistemic
destabilisations signal the persistence of temporality and history in
mathematics: [E]very definition, within a given epoch, is relative to that
epoch – that is to say, to the history that gives rise to it. There is no
eternal definition. To speak of mathematics is always to remake
mathematics. This becoming seems to be autonomous; it seems possible
for the epistemologist to find beneath the historical accidents a
necessary consecution: the notions introduced were necessitated by the
solution to a problem – and by virtue of their sole presence amongst the
notions that already existed, they pose, in their turn, new problems.
30 SAMO TOMŠIČ

There really is a becoming: the mathematician embarks upon an

adventure which can be arrested only arbitrarily, every moment of
which endows it with a radical novelty.22
Cavaillès argues that “we can perceive necessities beneath the
sequence of notions and procedures”, but this necessity is traversed by
contingency and is constituted only retroactively. One could also say
that mathematical objects and axioms are temporary stabilisations of
perpetual processes, whose outcome is strictly speaking unpredictable.
This dynamic component makes of mathematics a dialectical discipline
(becoming is for Cavaillès “the fundamental dialectic of mathematics”)
and an experimental discipline (“the activity of mathematicians is an
experimental activity”). The combination of dialectics and
experimentation, or in other words, the conception of scientific
experimentation as an essentially dialectical (discursive) practice, lies
at the heart of a materialist orientation in epistemology. But it should
once again be made clear that the experimentation does not come down
to some presupposed conscious experimenter or intentionality.
Experimentation is an autonomous and unconscious process, in which
the subject is not so much experimenting as (s)he is (co-)experimented:
the subject is produced as an inevitable real effect of the practice of
experimentation.
With Lacan’s extension of the autonomy of mathematics to language
as such, structural instability, or linguistic structure qua instability,
meets the instability of the real recognised in the three already
mentioned negative features of the impossible real. Just as classical
science abolished the division between the mathematical and the
physical, the superlunary and the sublunary, the question of the real
must be formulated in such a way that it includes the real of language.
“Let us say that in principle it is not worth speaking of anything else
than of the real, in which the discourse itself has consequences (…) To
be a philosopher of nature never passed for a certificate of materialism
nor of scientificity” (Lacan, 2006b: 31, 33). By including the symbolic
in the real or through the realisation of the symbolic on the background
of the affirmation of its absolute autonomy, science brings about a
double rejection of philosophical idealism. Classical physics could thus
suspend the premodern fetishisations of nature because it began to treat
nature with a depsychologised discourse rather than with a love
discourse (in this sense, new-age obscurantisms and environmentalist

22. Cavaillès and Lautman, 2016, available online at: www.urbanomic.com, last accessed:
14.11.2016. All quotes are taken from this version.
MATHEMATICAL REALISM & THE IMPOSSIBLE STRUCTURE OF THE
REAL 31
ideologies reinstall these premodern fetishisations). As Lacan put it,
“for physics something is worth saying, namely that there discourse has
consequences, whereas, as everyone knows, no discourse has any
consequence in nature, and that is why one loves it so much” (2006b:
33). In order to translate Koyré’s idea of scientific choice of language,
one could say that a Platonist insists that discourse has consequences in
the real, whereas an Aristotelian draws pleasure from a presupposed
natural order, in which discourse presumably has no consequences.
Koyré’s critique of empiricist reductionism already intervened in a
materialist quarrel, which represents the next major philosophical
conflict apart from idealism versus materialism, namely empirical
materialism versus dialectical materialism. And there is one final
problematic, which particularly enforces the materialist and dialectical
perspective on modern science, namely the void. The void is the driving
force behind the modern geometrisation of space and conditions the
abolition of the spherical model of reality (cosmos) and of thought
(soul). As Koyré writes, “in the void (i.e. in the space of Euclidian
geometry) there are no privileged places or directions (…) a body in the
void would not know where to go, would have no reason to move in
one direction rather than another, and therefore would have no reason
to move at all (…) not only would there be no natural places, there
would in fact be no places at all” (Koyré, 1978: 7-8, transl. modified).
The geometrisation of space and the abolition of the divide between the
superlunary and sublunary sphere nevertheless leave room for blind
spots, which can be most evidently seen in Descartes, whose geometry
and philosophy eventually slide into a foreclosure of temporality. In
doing so, Descartes again replaced the idea of mathematical and
ontological becoming with the traditional question of Being, dynamic
structure with static structure: Cartesian motion (…) is a geometer’s
motion, the motion of geometrical entities: the motion of a point which
traces out a straight line, the motion of a line which describes a circle.
But motions such as these, in contrast to physical motions, have no
speed and do not take place in time. Thorough-going geometrisation –
the original sin of Cartesian thought –leads to the intemporal: space is
retained but time is eliminated. It dissolves the real being into the
geometrical. But the real has its revenge (Koyré, 1978: 91-92, transl.
modified).
The revenge of the real took a peculiar shape, which detached
mathematical realism from its Cartesian version and amounted in an
apparently extravagant combination of Platonism and atomism, thereby
introducing a truly materialist mathematics of the void. With the
32 SAMO TOMŠIČ

atomistic component the dynamic character of space could be fully

affirmed and the consequences of the Cartesian rejection of temporality
reverted: “The XVII. century revolution that I once called ‘Plato’s
revenge’ was in fact the effect of an alliance, that of Plato with
Democritus. What strange alliance! Upon my word, it happens in
history that the Turkish Sultan allies with the Christian King – the
enemies of our enemies are our friends” (Koyré, 1961: 239). In the end
it was Newton, who accomplished this peculiar synthesis: “For him, just
as for Boyle, the book of nature is written in corpuscular characters and
words. But, just as for Galileo and Descartes, it is a purely mathematical
syntax that binds them together and gives its meaning to the text of the
book” (Koyré, 1965: 12). Newton’s solution thus returns to two entities
that scandalised Aristotle to the extent that he refused them any real
status whatsoever: Democritus’ atom and Plato’s idea (or matheme).
Classical science may stand for the triumph of Plato over Aristotle, but
this triumph could only be achieved in the context of a synthesis
between Platonism and atomism: in other words, under the conditions
of an epistemic and philosophical unification of dialectics and
materialism. In this overcoming of the classical dualism of form and
matter, mathematical and material, one can recognise an effort to think
the in-betweeness, intertwinement or equivocity of discourse and the
real. In this ontological grey zone between the symbolic and the real the
notion of dynamic structure or structure qua instability is anchored.23
What results from all of this is a dynamic Platonism, or simply
dialectical materialism, comprising Cavaillès displaced perspective on
mathematics that he fittingly formulated when he spoke of its singular
becoming. Mathematics is clearly the first one to fall into the grey zone
between the symbolic and the real. As a process of structuration and
restructuration, its language and objects stand both for the absolute
autonomy of the symbolic and for a dynamic of the real, which is
grasped through the realisation of the symbolic. Finally, dialectics and

23. Lacan gives an illustrative example of this intertwining and the difficulties it causes to
thinking in the following quote: “The real can only be inscribed on the basis of an impasse of
formalization. That is why I thought I could provide a model of it using mathematical
formalization, inasmuch as it is the most advanced elaboration we have by which to produce
signifierness. The mathematical formalization of signifierness runs counter to meaning (...) If I
were allowed to give an image for this, I would easily take that which, in nature, seems to most
closely approximate the reduction to the dimensions of the surface writing requires, at which
Spinoza himself marvelled – the textual work that comes out of the spider's belly, its web. It is a
truly miraculous function to see, on the very surface emerging from an opaque point of this
strange being, the trace of these writings taking form, in which one can grasp the limits, impasses,
and dead ends that show the real acceding to the symbolic” (Lacan, 1999: 93).
MATHEMATICAL REALISM & THE IMPOSSIBLE STRUCTURE OF THE
REAL 33
materialism are brought together based on the insight that a structure is
real only insofar as it is unstable, i.e., impossible.
The materialist turn of Platonism thus consists in the temporalisation
of mathematics: “Mathematical entities have to be, in some sense,
brought nearer to physics, subjected to motion, and viewed not in their
‘being’ but in their ‘becoming’ or in their ‘flux’” (Koyré, 1965: 10). It
was atomism, which prevented modern science from sliding into
idealist realism, to which Plato’s philosophy is all too often reduced.
However, atomism guarantees merely one side of the truly materialist
orientation. The other side is sustained by the matheme, which rules out
the risk of atomism sliding into vulgar materialism, to which it has been
reduced since Aristotle. Materialism consists only in the seemingly
bizarre synthesis of the mathematical and the atomistic object.
In this materialist orientation, in this speculative synthesis of
Democritus and Plato science can finally be envisaged as Kampfplatz,
not simply between empiricism and idealism, but between vulgar
materialism and dialectical materialism. In this way the modern
scientific revolution retroactively changed the sense of the quarrel that
inaugurated philosophy: Aristotle’s empiricism is in fact a masked
idealism, and Plato’s idealism a dialectical materialism. This quarrel
animates science, philosophy and thinking in general even today, and it
is also the point, where epistemological questions become
indistinguishable from political ones. Lacan’s teaching rigorously
demonstrated that dialectical materialism is inscribed directly in the
mathematical realism of modern science. It appears as an orientation in
thinking that is entirely synchronic with the emancipatory potentials of
scientific modernity. The task of dialectical materialism remains to
detach the realism of modern science from the fetishism that Marx so
vehemently criticised in political economy, and in which capitalism
anchors its relations of power.

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