Interventions
Open Letter to Badiou [9/2004]
By Robert Groome
0 - From Psychoanalytic Classicism to the Topological Baroque
Badiou's readings of Lacan are sufficiently important to have
elicited a recent series of conferences in 2003 at UCLA entitled: Lacan and the Real, Lacan's Anti-philosophy,
and The Mathemes of the Real.1 Most
recently, in the summer of 2004, Badiou was scheduled, but declined to present
his views on psychoanalysis at UC Irvine. Owing to the unusual perspicacity
of the commentator as much as to the exceptional difficulty, if not incomprehensible
nature of the Lacanian corpus, his readings give rise to several problems.
1- one need ask what is Badiou's contribution to the comprehension
of Lacanian studies as distinguished from the practice and theory of Lacanian
psychoanalysis itself;
2- one should also ask what is the place of Badiou's readings
of Lacan in his own philosophical work, and to what extent have they
been influenced by its development;
3- finally, Mr. Badiou's method requires attention.
The three questions are related, but undeniably, the third question
ties the knot between the first two. Badiou's exegetical method comes
directly from the premises of his philosophy; it is inseparable from
it to the point that one can speak of 'method' in the formal sense of
the term: of Badiou's thought in relation to mathemes or "formulas of
the real" written in set theory.
During one of the finest examples of a university discourse speaking
about psychoanalysis, Badiou has rendered homage to Lacan in commenting
and clarifying his texts. Can it be said, however, that both he and Lacan
are speaking about the same thing? The value of his contribution to Lacanian
psychoanalysis can be determined by the validity of a relation between
his thought and his method, which he has admitted (see L'etre et evenement) is an ontology and
not psychoanalysis. The interrogation of his method is a necessary introduction
to Badiou's notion of the psychoanalytic cure, which, as we will show,
is diametrically opposed to Lacan's.
1- From First and Second Classicism to the Topological Baroque
To explain the university scholar's reception of Badiou's essays
and conferences, we must bear in mind the special circumstances of his
work in relation to Lacanian psychoanalysis in Paris, while Lacan was alive
and after his death.
As editor of Cahiers pour l'analyse
with the Lacanians Jean-Claude Milner and Jacques-Alain Miller, Badiou
was part of a public clarification of a Lacanian discourse whose thought
had begun with a programmatic statement in Lacan's Discours du Rome. This discourse had
begun in 1953 and closed in the 1970s with an attempt to integrate its transmission
in the form of the matheme and install psychoanalysis in the university.
Beginning with his departure from St. Anne, the post-psychiatric Lacan
first awakened a university following of marxist-philosophical-linguist
students at Normale Superieure
who soon became concerned with the institutional problems of transmitting
a psychoanalytic discourse. For a long time in France this was the authoritative
interpretation of Lacan, and it is the one that Badiou brings to America
in the form of a university discourse. The considerable influence this
style of reading Lacan has exercised on Lacanian scholarship, first in the
universities of France, then in England and America, is well-known, and
can be stenogrammed under what Jean-Claude Milner has called the 'first classicism' of Lacan. Adopting
this periodization of Lacan as a guide, at least as an initial probe, we
follow Milner when he writes "The program
for the Cahiers pour l'Analyse is not due to Lacan; he did not make it his,
but he did not disavow it either (cf. Discours a' EFP, Sc., 2/3, p.17).
One can use it to reveal things; one recognizes it as a more adventurous
form and, from this fact, more readable..." (L'Oeuvre Claire, p.111)
It is this "more readable" Lacan which would later in fact find
its formal realization in the desire for an integral university transmission
of psychoanalysis in the form of the matheme. Following Milner's account
here to schematize our argument, let us agree to call this rupture Lacan's
'second classicism'2
— as such, it denotes the institutional will in which Lacanian psychoanalysis
opens with a certain notion of the matheme — and closes — with the university
formation of the L'Ecole de la Cause
Freudienne.3
There was, however, a third generation of Lacanian analysts, post-matheme,
and post-normalian, which grew out of Lacan's complaint that those who
were now reformulating his discourse institutionally were presenting
an obstacle to psychoanalysis and the practice of the analytic cure.4 With
this third generation, Lacan's matheme had taken on a form that to the classicists
of the 1st and 2nd generation
could only have seemed Baroque: as
it included a topological formalization of the impossibility of the integral
transmission of the matheme. Unlike Milner, who situates this third
topological intervention of Lacan as a "deconstruction" of his first
two classicisms, and unlike Badiou who considers topology outside the
analytic cure, the psychoanalysts of the third generation could not follow
the professors in calling this a de-construction or a simple theoretical
refinement, for it was precisely in a topological construction that Lacan
achieves his first public presentation of psychoanalysis in an open forum
at the Pantheon in 1969, beyond the strictures of the university. From
this moment onward, the public, not to mention the private, transmission
of Lacan's psychoanalysis was implicated by the problem of a topological
presentation of the knot. A presentation whose effect was to resituate
the place of the 'sayable' in a psychoanalytic transmission, not by reducing
it to silence in the formalization of the matheme, but in a problematic
of the 'showable' and a real of formalization intrinsic to the knot.5
Digression
Although it may be pedagogical to situate Lacan's topology as
the outcome of a rational history or a sociological movement, a more
rigorous exposition would have to follow its problematic in a re-examination
of the (w)hole of the Lacanian corpus in a way that its structural questions
are independent, though not arbitrarily so, from their linear sociological
and historical facticity. Through the addition of graphs, schematic re-drafts,
topological re-footnoting of the Ecrits,
Lacan not only revised his previous work but was revealing a truer, more
correct mode of its expression which seemed to resist a linearization
of his work. Reading Lacan in this way, we can present the initial attempt
at periodization:
First Classicism
Second Classicism
Baroque
Graphs
Surfaces
Knots
1953
1961
1969
1981
in correspondence with and as the effect of
a more structural problem of topological presentations. Reading Lacan
in this way, it not only becomes possible to revise his earlier seminars
in the addition of historical and philological annotations, but necessary
to topologize the problems found therein in their structure.6
Everything rests, then, on the crucial problem topology poses
for the presentation of psychoanalysis, not simply, or even primarily,
to the university student, but to the general public — thus opening up
the question of the place of the cure. Far from being a mannerism or periodization,
it is incumbent to examine this Baroque
of analysis and to determine how it defines the limits and the beyond
of the classicisms of Lacanian psychoanalysis today.
1.1- Thinking and Speaking of the Psychoanalytic Cure
Badiou, the university philosopher and Lacanian scholar, knows
the corpus well and proceeds in his honest and sensible way to provide
a coherent picture of Lacan in the discourse of the university. But it
cannot be denied that his interpretation bears the mark of its classicism,
in particular the notion that there is an integral transmission of psychoanalysis
in the form of the matheme.
The matter becomes, however, more complicated insofar as he tries
to transpose this same classicism, this same desire of a formalization,
into the analytic situation. Firstly, Badiou schematizes the cure into
3 stages: 1) situation of the impotency of the analysand; 2) elevation
of the impotency into a logical impossibility; 3) the conjunction of the
subject and the real in a "correct symbolization" or formalization. Leaving
aside for the moment the validity of this staging of analysis, it must
be observed that to accept his method is to accept its consequences, for
he then declares "in his opinion" that this formalization would not be
topological, and that "topology is only part of the theoretical (w)hole
of psychoanalysis" and "in his opinion, it does not have a part in the
cure".
Unlike a university discourse, contemporary Lacanian psychoanalysis
engaged in a practice cannot follow the philosopher in his "opinions"
about the cure and then disavow Lacan in the name of a methodology which
is pre-topological. Badiou's "opinions" on psychoanalysis, are not arbitrary
for a lack of rigor, but because they rely upon a method and idea of formalization
that permits, or even requires this arbitrariness in the public transmission
of psychoanalysis. For commentary and 'thinking of', which is the preservation
of the philosopher's Being, ultimately relies upon the very sense that
Badiou claims is 'ab-sens' in the discourse of analysis and the transmission
of its knowledge. This may explain why in the conferences, in a tactic
not fully conscious, he feels the need to 'speak of' himself among the
'we' of Lacanian psychoanalysts and often refers to the philosophers as
'them'. Or again, it may explain why he prefers to 'think of' a correct
formalization in the analytic cure (stage 3 above) as encompassing an intuitive
use of ordinary language and literature, and not as a more direct formalization
of such intuitions in a topology. No doubt, his schematization and good-hearted
commentary may suffice, in the first instance, as an inroad to the fantasy
of analysis, but it would, as yet, afford little help as to how to found
its traversing in a construction of the drives.
In the apparent excesses and reversals of sense, which invites
a parody of Lacan, but within Badiou's method is necessary, the ambition
is not only to 'speak of' Lacan, but to 'think of' the analytic cure in
the psychoanalytic tradition. The audience need know only how to listen
to the word and ask questions to install themselves in this thought, and
ultimately, to make sense of his thought about the Lacanian matheme. This
'thinking of' is his method and its transcription into a matheme-atics is his ontology.
We are far from the psychoanalytic concept of the matheme as an
abbreviation of what lacks sense and is impossible to think and pronounce
as words — therefore necessary to write and show. For today, the cure
of Lacanian psychoanalysis has passed from one still lodged in the Classical
"talking cure" and "talking seminars" to that of a Baroque "writing cure"
and "topological presentations".
2- The Inverted Cure of Badiou's Being: Lacanian Philosophy or
Badiouian Psychoanalysis?
Badiou's need for a witness to the Other of philosophy is comprehensible,
but why must it be Lacan? Indeed, no other psychoanalytic author, modern
philosopher, or anti-philosopher has become for Badiou as welcome an
interlocutor as Lacan? Why?
There are surely reasons of nationalistic and cultural concern,
but there is a more primary reason which justifies this choice: it is
the fact that Lacan says exactly the opposite of what Badiou makes him
say. Such an assertion is only paradoxical in appearance (it is the rule
when a student seeks to interpret the discourse of a master or a peer
in the form of a commentary — for instance, in the transmission from Socrates
to Plato7).
To make this problem evident is no easy task, since to distinguish between
a proposition and one that says just the opposite without a proper formalization
of the operation of negation is extremely difficult, if not impossible.
Yet, once such a correct formalization is established or implicitly agreed
upon, to state the opposite is still to talk of the same thing though
in an inverse sense: thus, the celebrated Lacanian formula "one receives their message inverted from the
place of the Other". It is already a certain advance in symbolization
to produce a dialogue in which two interlocutors suppose themselves
to be speaking of the same thing with only an inversion of sense. But,
it becomes a more difficult but urgent task to show how one text is saying
two different things: that is how can there be an intrinsic double lecture8 without
the hope of a dialectical reversal of sense or a synthesis of opposing viewpoints.
Beyond whatever reproaches one may have, Badiou's conferences and writings
have the great merit of making Lacan readable, thus bringing out many of
the fundamental concepts, and in this they go beyond other university studies.
Nonetheless, such readings systematically invert their sense, which allows
one to conclude that they symptomatically neutralize themselves by avoiding
a more primary reading of a psychoanalytic double lecture. In the end, it
may well be Badiou's resistance to reading psychoanalysts psychoanalytically,
that has been his strength and ultimate weakness from the beginning.
A monstration of these propositions formally would require more
time than we have in this essay, but let us continue to informally disengage
these inversions.
For Badiou, Lacan is a part of a problem that has tormented not
only thinkers but poets: how to preserve the transmission of the truth
of the One and Being. Yet, Badiou, not residing in the Heideggerian conception
of the Poeme, rarely situates this as a writing or formalization of truth
and language, and instead comes to side solely on a thought of the Lacanian
Matheme and the transmission of knowledge. Briefly, for Badiou to comment
on Being and the One is to account for the One's absence in a distinctive
regime of savoir, one in which
the 'truth' of Being can only present itself as paradox, the surnumerary, or at the level of extase — while this paradox itself is
never given a place, that is to say, never modeled intrinsically in
a mathematical logic or topology.9
Yet, for the promise of his philosophy to be realized,
this truth must still have a place; if it had not, how could we speak
of its presence or absence? In the absence of a construction of the topos
of truth and knowledge, this place becomes authorized and occupied by
not just anyone, but someone named Lacan: "Moi, la verite' qui parle". With respect
to himself, Badiou, except in certain slips of speech, never presents
himself as having a practice of psychoanalysis, nor of having an experience
of the place of truth outside of the paradoxes it poses to knowledge in
art and the discourse of the university. Yet, he does not simply give up
his discourse since it is still his ambition, as a thinker, to "think of"
this place and not regulate the Being of the One to a form of mysticism.
Thus, this place for the Being of the One must be submitted to a regime
of the thinkable, sayable, and be transcribable in a formal ontology. That
there must have been really a place of someOne then — at least One — for
the presence of truth to have entered into a language, the regime of knowledge,
and the categories of being, is the condition for his thinking about psychoanalysis.
Not just any language, but Lacan's language, is the witness to this truth
of the absent One and the problem of his Being establishes the occulted
basis of Badiou's philosophical system.
The Inverted Cure of Badiou's Being
Badiou's commentary on the psychoanalytic cure begins by situating
it in relation to Lacan's 1971 seminar 'Ou...Pire' in which the symptom is
defined therein as a form of pining (sou-pire)
for the One. For reasons we will simply abbreviate here, he is right to
see the analytic cure as homologous to a separation from the One as it
situates both the 'Un' of the Freudian "Un-bewusste" and the Lacanian problem
of the "L'Une Bevue". Indeed, this starting point is a good example of
the fundamental worthiness of his philosophical commentaries on Lacanian
psychoanalysis.10
But he begins to distort the theory and practice of psychoanalysis
when he schematizes the cure into three stages:
1- impotency
2- logical impossibility
3- formalization of impossibility leading to the subject conjunction
with object
There is reason to oppose Badiou's theses here, not so much in
their philosophical conclusions — we will leave this task to the psycho-hermeneuts
— but as for their psychoanalytic implications, which we will show are
diametrically opposed to the contemporary practice of Lacanian analysis.
In order to facilitate a reading of his inversion of the cure, we will
begin by juxtaposing it linearly in regards to Badiou's own presentation
in stages. Later, it will be necessary to present these oppositions more
carefully in accordance with the scansions of their logical time.
Stage 1
Here, then, firstly, for Badiou, analysis begins with a form of
"impotency" which we must assume, if we are to follow the logic of his
argument, is to be found on the part of the analysand — and not the analyst.
Yet, one may well ask, if the analysand is as impotent as Badiou would
have us believe, how did the analysis begin in the first place? Or is
it that we must split the patient in two in recognizing a partially
impotent analysand and the partially potent one who made it to the door?
Lacan, on the other hand, knew well that such questions are deceptive
insofar as they attempt to situate the suffering of the Un-bewusste within something like that
of the Hegelian Belle Ame. For the attributes of the Belle Ame, whether that of impotency
or folly, are those of a 'se faire tore/tort'
that prohibits, from the beginning, any possible entry into the dynamic
of the cure.
On the contrary, if one were to begin in this way, which is not
at all necessary, it would be more true to say that an analysis can only
begin in spite of the Belle-Ame, with a form of potency: that is,
with an assumption of speech by the analysand. In fact, an analysis has
always already begun with a temporality which is not a simple affair of stages,
but in a delay of the future anterior: there where it was, I will have become.
Consequently, someone who takes up an analysis is in the first instance
not looking to begin an analysis, but to conclude one. Or again the
analysand is not someone who is crazy or impotent who then becomes sane,
for the very reason that the moment one has assumed responsibility for their
speech in directing it to the Other, one will have already been committed
to a progress in the cure — before the first knock of the door.
In regards to the psychoanalytic cure, it is only in this assumption
of the analysis as such by the patient — and not simply by the analyst
— which requires his or her role in the division of labor of the medical
doctor/patient to be redefined in the properly psychoanalytic division
of the analyst/analysand.11
No doubt, the identifications with folly and forms
of impotency cut through the Freudian field, but they should not be confused
with that of psychic causality and the impossibility of the sexual relation;
or rather, if they are, one reduces psychoanalytic treatment to forms
of psychiatry or psychotherapy and sexology. From the beginning, psychoanalysis
does not determine a place to go to be crazy or impotent, as an asylum
or a peep show might, but a place where one cannot not be sane.
Stage 2
Badiou reduces the point of application of the analytic cure to
an analysand presenting an impotency expressed in a diachrony of symptomatic
scenes. In a second stage, these scenes will be "elevated" to forms of
logical impossibility. By this we must assume he means, since it is never
explicitly stated, that whatever is sensed as a form of impotency, can
on a second look be given a logical form, and it is this structure which
is impossible. By this we can assume he means that a woman who states of
her husband that she cannot live with him and she cannot live without him,
is stating a logical impossibility in the form of a scene of impotency.
In Badiou's reading, this impossibility — once defined as the Lacanian
real — situates a symbolic function which had only previously been lived
as an imaginary form of impotency. Overlooking the fact that a precise
syntactical form has never been given by Badiou in order to clarify just
what he means by impossibility — does the statement above merely translate
into the classical logic of propositions as (P and nonP)? Or must we modify
its means of logical expression? We can still try to clarify exactly what
is at stake here, leaving until another time a more precise definition
of this impossibility in its logical armature.
For Badiou could have just as well, and more interestingly,
begun by localizing the problem of impotency at the place of the psychoanalyst
(the famous silence of the analyst only serves here as a reminder),
if it were not for the fact that the virtues of his reading of the analytic
cure are based on an implicit notion of the cure centered on a medical
notion of the doctor/patient relation. But there is a drawback to this
very virtue: it assumes what it should set out to explain — the logical
possibility of analysis itself. Localizing any impossibility to the side
of the analysand, prudent therapeutic modesty, which takes for granted
the possibility of analysis itself, has left unresolved a number of issues,
namely, what Freud witnessed in the negative transfer (negative therapeutic
reaction), and the non-transfer (psychosis and sublimation). Yet, a less
interested reading of the psychoanalytic cure must go further in stating
that if there is analysis then there is surely a transfer, but just because
there is a transfer does not mean to say there is analysis — a lot more
is at stake in stabilizing the place of analysis than a psychoanalysis
of others and a regulation of their impotencies.
In Lacan's reading of the analytic cure, in which an impossibility
of analysis is posed absolutely and not relative to such and such a patient,
Freud is shown leading his patients just up to an analysis, but that
the moment psychoanalysis proper begins, it has already ended in a negative
therapeutic reaction, or at the limit, in an interminable reprise of
the aborted cathartic cure. In either case, Freudian analysis,
according to Lacan, was impossible. That is to say, it never was able
to begin a psychoanalysis proper without compromising its theory and practice.
This much said, it was precisely in not going beyond Freud, but in returning
to these problems and resolving their theoretical and practical dead ends
that psychoanalysis could claim, at least in principle, not simply to be
possible, but to exist, or indeed, to take place. Yet, once the problem
of impossibility is situated at the level of psychoanalysis itself, and
not simply put on the back of a medicalized patient; once psychoanalysis
is no longer a simple question of analysis of others, then it is indeed
no longer the subjective transfer which can form the guarantee of the analytic
setting, but its production of a fantasy object.
Stage 3
What Lacan proposed for the beginning movement of the psychoanalytic
cure Badiou proposes as the end, that is to say, they both postulate the
necessity of a correct symbolization of the symptom conjoining a subject
and the real in the fantasy object, but Badiou states this results in
the success of the psychoanalytic cure, whereas Lacan states that this
moment is both a beginning and an obstacle to the cure. For Lacan, this
scansion only makes analysis possible, and in no way determines that an
analysis will have effectively taken place or determined a real. For what
is required for the existence of the analytic cure, in the Lacanian sense,
is a traversing of the fantasy and a construction of its object, not in
a conjunction, but in a separation from the One. Indeed, how Badiou's initial
affirmation that the cure is a separation from the One corresponds with
his concluding remarks that the cure is the conjunction of a subject with
a real, is never explained and left in a state of ambiguity.
And it is here Badiou's advance "beyond" the teachings of Lacan
becomes apparent. For under the outward appearance of a simple linear
staging of the analytic cure, Badiou develops a notion of the analytic
cure that Lacan never wanted to consider: Badiou's proposal is only possible
in an inverted fantasy of psychoanalysis, whose boundaries he sets by reinventing
the myth of a genuinely classical form of psychoanalysis that Lacan had
definitively disposed of by 1970. Since it was precisely in the traversing
of the phantasm that the method of Lacanian analysis changed from analyzing
the fantasy's role in the interpretation of the transfer — as a conjunction
to the real — to its traversing in the construction of the drives — as
a separation from the One in the Sinthome.
Hence, the need here for a clarification of the function and field
of the fantasy object in psychoanalysis is a preliminary to a more systematic
treatment of the impossibility of analysis itself in the traversing
of the fantasy — a clarification which results in the Lacanian formulation
of the concept of the sinthome. We must, then, return briefly to a moment
in the history of psychoanalysis where its method is about to change and
its field extended significantly: that scansion introduced by Melanie
Klein and the Object Relations School through an analysis of the fantasy and its transformation
by Lacan into the fantasy of an analysis.
Digression
These questions have been gone over at length in the myriad histories
of psychoanalysis. We do not have to repeat them here, except to indicate
how contradictory the commentaries appear to be when situating the practice
of Lacanian psychoanalysis. It is therefore not at all surprising that
the strictly medical objections that have been raised to Lacan's short
session, and his final achievement of topological non-sessions, have no
merit, for it is manifestly by design that Lacan goes against the established
canons which take for granted the possibility of a psychoanalytic practice.
Yet, what has not been shown in any of the historiographies is exactly
why this mode of practice does not constitute a transgression of the guidelines
of psychoanalytic practice, but a generalization of its field and function
in a proper elucidation of the fantasy
of analysis.
For if an analysis of the fantasy has always served as a means
to resolve the logical impossibility of the symptom12
it must also be observed that, at least since the work of Melanie Klein,
a proper theory of the fantasy also extended the function and field
of psychoanalysis in many ways that the more traditional forms of Freudian
psychoanalysis had not foreseen. Melanie Klein and the Object Relations
School have, for example, sought to establish the basis of analysis, not
just on the possibility of the transference, but on the existence of an
object relation which is specifiable and unique to its theory. Thus, they
extended the field by constructing an actual clinical reference for many
of the notions in Freud which remained non-analyzable or latent — that
the Kleinian analysis of an actual infant is not the Freudian analysis
of the infantile, is just a case in point. Yet, the promise held out in
such extensions, of an analysis based on situating the convergence between
the fantasy object and the symptoms of the patient, cannot, strictly speaking,
materialize unless the fantasy is generalized to the analytic process itself
— and thus, not reduced, once again, to being merely that of the patient's
fantasy. The reasons for this are forthcoming.
It is true that the Kleinians have attempted to generalize the
fantasy by extending it diachronically in an analysis of the infant. It
is also interesting from a more synchronic perspective that an analysis
of the 'in-fant' as "the one who does not speak" also puts into question
the classical conception of the "talking cure" upon which Kleinian analysis
was implicitly founded (not only the pre-verbality of the infant, but the
silence of the analyst must be situated here). Such extensions started
from the premises that a theory of the fantasy is only an analysis of fantasy, and not a more
disturbing, but primary, fantasy of analysis.
The question of the impossibility of psychoanalysis can only be symptomatically
avoided if the conditions for analysis are taken for granted; especially
if the guarantee for the possibility of analysis is left at the level of
an identification with the analyst in the transference, for then a negative
therapeutic reaction or an interminable analysis becomes inevitable as
a return of the real of analysis.
But even if its theory were on the point of being overtaken by
a more rigorous approach, Kleinian analysis and the Object Relations school
would still have made a considerable contribution. On the positive side,
by fostering a refinement of analytic methods and didactic techniques
that necessitate questioning the role of speech in the analytic cure they
extended the reference of its field and determined its existence on the
basis of an object relation. On the negative side, by confusing this problematic
place of speech in analysis in a developmental or diachronic theory,
they confined the object relation to the pre-verbal and the premier. Habitually, having situated
the importance of something 'before' speech and language, the subject's
fantasy relation to an object is reduced to an experience of what is premier, the infant, the pre-oedipal,
sensations, raw feels, and so forth. The development of such a theory
may well hold a premonitory value of a theory not yet able to distinguish
between what is primary in structure
from what is premier in development.
In its own inadequacies, it brings the problematic relation between saying
and showing to the surface, and thus leads to an authentic questioning
of the role of the fantasy in analysis which stops just short of a topology.
For Klein's pre-verbal and premier in development encounters a productive
tension in Lacan's hyper-verbal
and primary in structure
that reveals the complexity of a psychoanalytic climate in which the debate
between a diachronic and a synchronic conception of the fantasy has not
yet taken place.
We are led, in conclusion, to a psychoanalytic history that differs
entirely from the customary picture. In Lacanian analysis the fantasy
is no longer being made to resolve — or symbolize — an analysis of the
impossibility indicated in the symptom
of the patient, but the fantasy is now a screen hiding the impossibility
of analysis indicated in the sinthome
of the analyst. Too little attention has been paid to this conflict
of interpretation between a more traditional diachronic theory of the
fantasy-symptom-analysand
and its generalization in a synchronic fantasy-sinthome-analyst.13
Their routes may at times have differed, but psychoanalysts of both schools
have come to recognize that their professional fantasies give rise to
the same symptoms as that afflicting their patients. The phrase
analysis of the fantasy abounds
in the contemporary analytic literature, but without situating it in
its properly synchronic dimension as the fantasy of analysis, it will never
be able to gain an entirely ethical hold of its practice.
Writing clinically about psychoanalysts, then, becomes a way,
not to critique other psychoanalysts or scholars — only the 'mechant' would think so — but to situate
the fantasy of analysis as
such in relation to an impossibility of theory and practice.14
This does not simply mean that prior to making any valid statement about
the fantasies of others, the psychoanalyst is obliged to become as clear
as possible about his or her own fantasy — clearly an interminable task
— rather a similar, but more primary division of the subject already
exists in everyday language in the impossibility of making the signifier
coincide with the signified. As a consequence it is the distinctive privilege
of analyst and analysand to be on the same side of the wall of language
in analysis — there is no intersubjective relation or two subjects facing
each other, but only a divided subject. That this wall would determine a
real of language that is not a simple convention, and that this real — or
impossibility — would invoke a fantasy relation as an organizing principle
of an analytic practice, requires re-thinking analysis beyond the guidelines
for the restrained analytic cure.
In generalizing the function of fantasy and extending its field
synchronically Lacan not only determined a beyond of analysis in regards to
the classical limitations, but produced the means for their traversing
in the construction of a topology; leaving a place for those who would,
in separating from the sinthome of the analyst, accomplish this task
under the name of future and non-analysts. Without being excessively
schematic, it remains for us to define this beyond of psychoanalysis as what establishes
its guidelines, not simply of a possible analysis, but the existence
of analysis as such, in the traversing of the fantasy and a construction
of the drives.
Conclusion: For a Topology of the Cure
Whether in France or in America, the foremost characteristic of
applied psychoanalysis is the tendency to expect something like art,
literature, or poetry, to relieve the symptom and conjoin the gap that
cleaves the Being of the One — or in less philosophical terms, to conjoin
the divide of the subject of the unconscious. It is a tendancy that digresses
into a therapeutic hope shared not only by the title of Badiou's conference,
"For an Aesthetics of the Cure",
but by a psychotherapy desperately searching cultural forms of sublimation
to supplement their ever growing reliance on pharmacological solutions.
But if what can be globally gathered under the name of aesthetics
and art comes the closest to naming the symptom in its most chronic
aspect, it appears as the furthest remove from the ability to account
for the psychoanalytic cure. For it only reveals a desire that haunts
the modern identification of the One in the being of the artist, the genius,
the hero, etc. — that is to say, in a sinthome. It is evident, at least
to some psychoanalysts, that one is far from the truth of knowing how
to separate from the One of metaphysics — of which the artist is just
one of the modern avatars — when one proposes sublimation as a form of
the cure, or more in the more sophisticated versions, as a form of treating
the 'incurable'. But one is also quite close to the border here, but
inversely oriented, in the sense that an artistic desire of recognition (sublimation) is
diametrically opposed to a psychoanalytic recognition of desire. For it is at the
level of the drives and the sub-perversion of the subject that the artist
constitutes the supreme wager of life and death. Since, one has however,
wagered a passional entry into the Other — and not a construction of
its desire — it is this substance or jouis-sens which is itself the abyss.
As long as this is the case, one is still left with the "pining", "or worse"
(ou pire) for the One.
Therein lies the difference with the Lacanian cure insofar as
it proposes to account for a beyond of psychoanalysis with a traversing
of the fantasy which would result in neither a negative therapeutic reaction,
nor a psychotic rejection, nor a cultural sublimation — all of which are
today sinthomes — but in a topological construction of the drives.
Instead of saying that this construction would occur intuitively,
that is to say, in an interpretative use of form and figure that goes
beyond the concept in a work of art, we must speak of a construction in
which the concept goes beyond an intuition in a psychoanalytic work, that
is to say, in a topological construction of a psychoanalytic writing of
the sinthome.
Instead of calling this writing a nosology, and confusing its
place with a psychiatric writing of the asylum, we must determine it
topologically at the place of a clinic. Instead of saying that the entry
into this Other of the Un-conscious occurs in the place of a psychoanalytic practice,
we must reorient its entry by a practice
of a psychoanalytic place: the former, remaining at the level
of an analysis of fantasy, doubles
the patient in a transference relation to a doctor; while the latter,
as a fantasy of analysis, de-doubles
the analytic situation by unmasking the professional being of the analyst
— separating from the sublimations of recognition — and constructing an
object in its place.
Instead of analyzing the symptom
diachronically, in scenes of impotency resolved by the analysis
of the patient's fantasy relation, we must begin by constructing the
symptom synchronically as a
sinthome: that is to say, as
a border signaling a beyond of the fantasy of analysis as such. In this respect,
an analyst is not someone who analyzes others, but is a support of the Other
insofar (s)he stabilizes a place for its construction. Instead of solidifying
the sinthome by identifying with it artistically: Joyce, Holderlin, etc.,
analysis situates a topological construction of the drives in the likes of
a Listing, Poincare, Brouwer, and Cantor.
Locating this place as the border "between two deaths", Lacan first gave
it a topological modelization in the center cut of the mobius band in the
theory of surfaces. On what does psychoanalysis operate in the cure today?
— the Sinthome — the fourth round of a four-ring Borromean Lock. As such,
this reaffirms the need, for what we have called here a Topology of the Cure.
Robert Groome
Santa Monica, CA
Fall 2004
NOTES:
1 The title
of the last conference was changed. Originally entitled "For an Aesthetics of the Cure".
»
2 Milner states "...in 1970 the
process of transformation [of the second classicism] is largely engaged..."
Our presentation aims to show that a certain notion of the matheme had
almost already completed itself, for the discourse of Lacan, in 1969,
had already changed its function and field in moving from Normale Superieure to an open amphitheater
at the faculty of law at the Pantheon. »
3 No longer that of the Cahiers
de l'Analyse, the official journal of Lacanian Psychoanalysis
became in this second period, Ornicar?
created by Miller in 1968. Following one of the better histories of French
Psychoanalysis, Roudinesco states "...[Miller] consolidated his power
at the university with a clinical section where the matheme was still an
instrument of a dogmatic new order..."; and again, "Finally, it is with
a matheme always closed, and distinctly different from that of Lacan, that
Miller composed his 'Discours du Rome' delivered the 31 of October 1974...Lacan
scarcely appreciated the image that his son-in-law gave to him, but he gave
him his complete support." Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, Esquisse d'une vie... (Librairie
Arthème Fayar, 1993), p.468. (my translation) »
4 For one example among others in regard to this see Lacan's comments
in "Position de l'inconscient", footnote in Ecrits, (Editions du Seuil, 1966), p.850.
»
5 "...there is no theory of knots. In regards to knots, to this
day, there is no mathematical formalization". Jacques Lacan, Le Seminaire, Livre XX, Encore (Paris,
Editions du Seuil, 1975), p.116 (my translation). No doubt, one must
explain exactly what is meant here by "knot". »
6 One such topologization that had been suggested by Lacan himself
was to view the "Encore" seminar
as a topological re-edition of what is being said in the earlier seminar
"L'Ethique de la psychanalyse"
[private communication reported between Lacan and Pierre Sourry]. »
7 Another, perhaps more relevant example of this inversion of influence
would be that between Marx and Lenin: the former constituting the theory
and practice of Marxism, the latter precipitating it in a passage to
the act through an institutionalization. »
8 Freud's discovery of the unconscious proceeds with a method not
unlike that used by Champollion to decipher the Rosetta Stone. A method
of interpretation that consists in comparing, at least two versions of
the same text. »
9 After initially discrediting the use of intuitionist logic (see
Le Nombre et les nombres)
Badiou ventured into the realm of category theory (see TOPOS ou Logiques de l'onto-logique) as
it is used in the theory of topoi. This much said, he has not attempted to
use either in regards to the theory of knots; nor has there been an explicit
attempt at a formalization of a theory which would take into account
the specification of the language of a theory or its semantics (as in
the manner of Tarski and the Polish School, for instance). This in itself
could only be considered an oversight in regards to psychoanalysis as
it leaves unanswered exactly how to render account of the problematic
relation between categories of signification and those of being, as well
as how to explain Lacan's use of the logic of propositions and predicates
without reducing this to a 'logic
of ontology', i.e., an onto-logic of sets. »
10 One of more the direct
examples of a philosophical discourse having psychoanalytic ramifications,
Plato's Banquet, has been noted many times by the psychoanalysts. Lacan
dedicates his "Le transfer" seminar
to the problem of a conjunction-separation of the One in the impossibility
of the sexual relation: Two bodies can never come together to make one.
»
11 If the problem of separation
lies in the Being of the One, for analysis the One is already divided
and insists structurally, not as a simple opposition between the impotent
analysand and the potent analyst in the phenomenon of the transfer, but
as a division of the subject of analysis as such. It is precisely the
procedure of the pass that requires an assumption of this subjective division
and its putting into place through a transmission of the analytic act.
»
12 For example, the proposition
'to have one's cake and eat it too' is a logical impossibility,
which could only be satisfied by a fantasy object that is only ever approached
symptomatically, i.e., through a certain mental anorexia (refusing to
eat cake) or bulimia (eating it then throwing it back up). »
13 The Lacanian concept
of the sinthome is established in the unpublished 1975-76 seminar of the
same name 'Le Sinthome'. See
for instance, Lesson 10, April 13, 1976,
in which it is stated, "I believe that effectively the psychoanalyst
can not be conceived other than a sinthome". »
14 The fantasy relation
is not an imaginary relation to a possible world, but on the contrary,
the fantasy situates an impossible as a certain screen of the libido.
»
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