Jacques-Alain Miller, “La suture,” Cahiers pour l’analyse 1 (1966): 37–49; Alain Badiou, Le nombre et les nombres (Paris: Seuil, 1990).
One could cite as a further token another programmatic statement, the René Char quotation that Foucault emphatically placed on the back cover of his last two books on the history of sexuality: “The history of men is a long succession of synonyms of a same word [vocable]. To contradict this is a duty &leftbracket;Y contredire est un devoir&rightbracket;.” To contradict the synonymy of One—but with what?
One can find it, for example, in this minimal and straight form in one of Lacan’s last public statements: “L’Autre manque. Ça me fait drôle à moi aussi. Je tiens le coup pourtant, ce qui vous épate, mais je ne le fais pas pour cela” [The Other lacks. I don’t feel happy about it myself. Yet, I endure, which fascinates you, but I am not doing it for that reason].
But asking “What?” already precludes another way of asking, namely, “Who is the other?” For the question of the other, and this is just a digression, is first dramatically posed in relation to another person, this alter ego next to me, the same as me and for that very reason all the more the Other. This is where the whole drama of what Lacan famously called the mirror stage comes in, the mirror stage “as formative of the function of the ego,” as the title of his first paper runs. In this drama, the alter ego is constitutive of the ego, precisely insofar as it is the agent of alterity, opacity, the foreignness of the Other, under the auspices of “the same,” and it is only by this other and through it that one can assume the self of the ego as “my own,” The foreignness of the other intersects with the own-ness of the self; the other is on the one hand homogenized, so that I can recognize myself in it, but only at the price of alienating myself in this image of the other—the other is the same as me, my double, and precisely because of that my competitor, my opponent, an intimate enemy who threatens my life and integrity. And one can, in another quick aside, point to the fact that Levinas took his cue from this same constellation, from the question of “Who is the other?” from the alterity of the other, epitomized strikingly and immediately by his or her face, in a way that cannot be circumvented and that circumscribes the very notion of the self—so his whole enterprise hinges massively on the question of the two and how to conceive it, and on the ethics that follows, taking the Other as its guideline. This is his particular way of taking up the question of the two. But I will not pursue this further.
If the Char quotation used by Foucault placed the history of men under the banner of a long succession of synonyms, then in this first simple view one could maintain that what contradicts synonymy can be seen as the realm of homonymy. Against the unity of meaning that can be expressed by different means while remaining the same, there is the disruption of erratic similarity of sounds that don’t heed meaning—a dispersion of meaning along the lines of contingent similarities. The unconscious, at its minimal, contradicts synonymy by homonymy. Could one say: The one of synonymy vs. the two of homonymy?
The bug means 1. cimex lectularius, a nasty little creature, a small insect; 2. a defect, a deficiency, a malfunction; 3. a fixed idea, a folly (for example, one can be bitten by a “love-bug” or a “money-bug,” following the dictionary); 4. an imaginary object of terror; 5. a recording or eavesdropping device of tiny size; 6. bugger? The six meanings present a very good introduction into the theory of the object a. There are also “bug-eyed monsters.”
This is the point of another Lacanian dictum: There is no Other of the Other. Lacan first maintained that the Name of the Father was the Other of the Other, the guarantee of the symbolic, and only gradually came to demote it, to pluralize—Names of the Father—and eventually to turn it into the symptom of the symbolic rather than its guarantee. See the work of Lorenzo Chiesa.
Jacques Lacan, Encore (Paris: Seuil 1975), 40.
Ibid., 65.
Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), 575–584.
Jacques Lacan, Encore, 87. Opposed to this, the phallus is something that ceased not to be written with the advent of psychoanalysis. “Phallus … —the analytic experience ceases its not being written. This to cease not being written implies the point of what I have called contingency. … Phallus which was in ancient times reserved for Mystery, has through psychoanalysis ceased not to be written precisely as a contingency. Not any more” (86–7). What was veiled as a Mystery turned out to be the banal overlapping of the signifier and the bodily contingency. Cf. Zupančič, The Odd One In (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008), 205.
Lacan comments on yin-yang in The Four Fundamental Concepts (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1977), 151. “… primitive science is a sort of sexual technique.”
Jacques Lacan, Encore, 76. “Let’s look at how these notions of active and passive have dominated everything that has been conceived of the relation between form and matter, this fundamental relation on which Plato’s and then Aristotle’s every step is based. It is visible, palpable, that these statements take their support only in a fantasy, by the means of which they have tried to complete/complement that which cannot be said, namely the sexual relationship.”
Alain Badiou, Logiques des mondes (Paris: Seuil, 2006), 9.
Ibid., 12.
“The atomistic principle, with these first thinkers, didn’t remain in exteriority, but apart from its abstraction contained a speculative determination, that the void was recognized as the source of movement. This implies a completely different relation between atoms and the void than the mere one-beside-the-other [Nebeneinander] and mutual indifference of the two. … The view that the cause of movement lies in the void contains that deeper thought that the cause of becoming pertains to the negative.” G. W. F. Hegel, Logic, TWA 5, 185–6.
Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker II, ed. Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz (Berlin: Wiedmannsche Buchhandlung, 1935), 174.
Alain Badiou and Barbara Cassin, Il n’y pas de rapport sexuel (Paris: Fayard, 2010), 60–94.
W. I. Matson, “Democritus, Fragment 156,” The Classical Quarterly 13 (1963): 26–29.
Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, 63–4.
Jacques Lacan, “L’Étourdit,” in Autres écrits (Paris: Seuil, 2001), 494.
Samuel Beckett, Disjecta (New York: Gove Press, 1984), 113. He used it already in his early novel Murphy (1938) (“… naught than which, in the guffaw of old Abderite, nothing is more real”), and then again in Malone Dies (1951).
