SEX AND NOTHING

Bridges from Psychoanalysis

to Philosophy

Edited by
Alejandro Cerda-Rueda

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CHAPTER FIV E

Psychoanalysis and anti ph i losophy:

the case of Jacques Lacan

Samo Tomsie

Why antiphi/osophy?
In 1975, when Lacan positioned his teaching under the title of antiphi-
losophy, the word was perceived as yet another provocation coming
from this structuralist enfant terrible. lts negative connotation immedi-
ately suggests that we are dealing with a simple rejection, degradation,
or mocking of philosophy coming from the pessimistic orientation of
Lacan's later seminars. 1 However, as soon as we place it in the broader
context of his teaching, such simplistic reading comes up short. Despite
his perpetual criticism of particular philosophers and of the structural
features of philosophy (recall the identification of philosophy with the

1
The term "antiphilosophy" might be badly chosen for historic reasons. The expres-
sion dates back to eighteenth century, when it d escribed the French Anti-Enlightenment
thinkers, wh o, in opposition to the authors of Encyclopaedia, defended religious dogmas
and church authority. Of course, Lacan gives antiphilosophy the opposite meaning, link-
ing it to the modern scientific revolution an d to its consequences for the premodern, nota-
bly Aristotelian orientation in philosophy and science. Badiou later adopted the term in
order to designate a more generat tendency in philosophy to dissolve the constellation
of its four conditions (science, politics, art and Love) and to abolish the minimal distance
that sep ara tes philosophical discourse from truth procedures. For a historic account of
antiphilosophy see Masseau (2000).
81
82 SEX AN D NOTH I N G

master's discourse), he repeatedly associates Freud with urisurpassable

thinkers such as Socrates, Descartes, Hegel, and Marx. Thus, one cannot
ignore the importance of Plato in thinking transference (Seminar VIII), of
Hegeland Marx when it comes to situating the political dimensions of
psychoanalysis (Seminar XVII), and most crucially, of Descartes in deter-
mining the philosophical importance of the subject of the unconscious,
as Lacan's "epistemological" seminars at the Ecole Normale Superieure
(Seminars XI-XVI) demonstrate repeatedly. Of course, Lacan's readings
of philosophers always amount to counter-intuitive results and inter-
pretations, but precisely therein lies their conceptual value and philo-
sophical relevance.
In short, there are more than enough reasons Lacan's antiphiloso-
phy should not be interpreted in a negative sense, i.e., as dissolution
of old theoretical alliances and a complete deconstruction of the earlier
teaching. 2 In the following, I want to examine Lacan's somewhat explicit
suggestion, which associates antiphilosophy with Koyre's discussion of
modern scientific revolution, in the context of which Lacan strived to
situate Freud's invention of psychoanalysis. I would also like to suggest
that Lacan's declaration be read in close reference to the critical tradi-
tion in philosophy, a tradition initiated precisely through the impact of
modern scientific revolution in the field of knowledge. In this respect
Lacan's antiphilosophical orientation shows several similarities with
the direction outlined by Marx's Theses on Feuerbach, which announces
his future involvement combining both a critique of political economy
and a critique of materialism, an essential subchapter of philosophy.
lt was the necessity to create a materialism that entirely accounts for the
lessons of scientific modernity that lead Lacan to speak of antiphiloso-
phy, which seems to suggest that the modern development of philoso-
phy did not fully succeed in mobilising the subversive potential of new
sciences. The problematic of language stands at the very core of this
philosophical failure.
Marx's critique departed from a similar move, expressed in the diag-
nosis that modern philosophical materialism failed to develop its own
theory of the subject. Self-proclaimed materialists, such as Feuerbach,

2
ln his reading of Lacan, Jean-Claude Milner (1995) outlined the perspectives of such
reading. Although I agree with Milner's reading, I think that Lacan's antiphilosophical
moment no less contains an attempt to repeat the "Cartesian" geshtre of refoundation
of philosophy. See notably Lacan (2005, pp. 144-145), where he explicitly addresses the
philosoph.ical potential of his Borromean mos geometricus.
 PSYCHO A NALYSIS AN D A NTIPHILOSOPHY 83

adopted the vocabulary of the theories of cognition (consciousness,

contemplation) or idealism (human essence), while a materialist orien-
tation would envisage in the subject a specific discursive consequence
irreducible to consciousness. This point is explicitly formulated in the
following theses:

• The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism-that ofFeuerbach

included-is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only
in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human
activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to mate-
rialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism-which,
of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such.

And further:

• Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence.

But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single
individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of soCial relations. 3

Marx leaves no doubt that the task of materialist orientation consists

in detaching the subject from the primacy of cognition, which mysti-
fied its true character and repeated the main operation of idealism, be
it religious, philosophical or ideological: they all conceived the subject
as a figure of centralised and conscious thought that assumes a cog-
nitive meta-position outside the contemplated reality. In this respect,
materialist theories of cognition remained in continuity with the ancient
episteme, whose hypothesis of metaphysical soul no less supported the
centralisation of thinking. The modern correlation of knowledge and
subject does not entirely abandon the ancient correlation of episteme
and psyche. Theories of cognition and philosophies of consciousness
therefore remain stuck in pre-modern idealism, not fully acknowledg-
ing the most subversive consequence of modern scientific revolution:
decentralisation not only of the universe but above all of thinking. The
downfall of the ancient cosmological hierarchy of the spheres implies
the abolition of the homeostatic model of thinking. Freud, on the other
hand, was fully aware that psychoanalysis abolished, not so much the
hypothesis of the soul, because the latter already lost its importance in

3
www.marxists.org.
84 SEX AND NOTHING

Cartesian rationalism, but that of the primacy of consciousness. Freud

indicated this when he associated his discoveries with the achievements
of modern physics and evolutionary biology: the psychoanalytic decen-
tralisation of thinking is inseparable from the astronomical decentrali-
sation of the universe and from the biological decentralisation of life.
According to Marx, the critical and dialectical materialism must show
that the subject is not an autonomous, conscious and substantial essence,
but a particular effect of the "ensemble of social relations": it is produced
in and through discourse, but as its real consequence-this is the main
materiahst point-and not as a mere imaginary or performative effect.
As such consequence, the subject cannot be transcendental, it is part of
reality constituted by the dominating mode of production. But as we
know from the final result of Marx's critique, Capital, this inclusion is
not problematic, since the system encounters in the subject it produces
(in capitalism, the subject is fabricated as labour-power) its own contra-
diction, inconsistency, and instability. The object of Capital is necessarily
two-fold: to determine the source of value and to analyse the produc-
tion of subjectivity. Marx's "labour theory of value" fulfils both tasks: it
provides a scientific theory of value (in opposition to political-economic
fetishisations and mystifications of the source of value) and a materi-
alist theory of the subject (which no less mobilises the revolutionary
potential of modern scientificity). If we return to his initial formulation
of the Theses, we can conclude that the focus on the "ensemble of social
relations", which brings the subject down from the idealist heights and
ranks it among the effects of the social mode of production, substitutes
the autonomy of consciousness with the autonomy of discourse. With
this materialist move, Marx anticipates two discoveries that marked the
twentieth century continental thought: the autonomy of the signifier in
structurallinguistics and the causality of the signifier in psychoanalysis. 4
Forthis reason, Lacan's teaching w ill eventually develop strong interest
in critique of political economy and the notion of antiphilosophy pro-
vides a condensed expression of this theoretical development.
Before beginning its discussion I cannot refrain from addressing a
rnisunderstanding that Lacan's term caused in the psychoanalytic com-
munity, making several analysts believe that it negated the pertinence
of philosophical concepts for psychoanalysis and justified a cynical

"This would be the main point of Lacan's reading of Marx. I engage more extensively
with this double anticipation in Tomsie (2015).
 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND ANTIPHILOSOPHY 85

attitude toward philosophical and political questions. In the recent

decade, even the most p rominent analysts have argued that Lacan's
later teaching directed psychoanalysis away from the universal and
the conceptual, these privileged fields of philosophical interest, to the
irreducible singularity of the unconscious. According to Jacques-Alain
Miller, this reorientation amounted to a "solitary psychoanalysis",
which supposedly decreased its interest in the "transference uncon-
scious" and instead focused on the "real unconscious" (Miller, 2008,
p. 134; Soler, 2009). According to this line, the unconscious-as far as it
does not cover merely the "abstract" metonymic articulation of desire
in language but above all the "concrete" production of enjoyment (jou-
issance) in the living body-rejects every contextualisation and stands
outside the social bonds: in its real dimension it is autistic and hermetic,
penetrable only in the solitude of a clinical Situation.
It is nevertheless questionable, whether this dualism of the uncon-
scious is truly at work in Lacan's teaching. We cannot overlook that
the notion of the real unconscious risks substantialism and essential-
ism, which turn the unconscious into some sort of ontological substance
accessible only to the initiated few, the analysts and the analysands.
Such a development comes suspiciously close to Freud's attempts in
linking the unconscious with phylogenesis and seeking its biological
foundations. But unlike Freud's bio-ontology, which, despite its prob-
lematic features, remained oriented toward politics, science and phi-
losophy, contemporary psychoanalytic attempts in substantialising the
unconscious drift in a mystification of clinical experience, even in self-
fetishisation, while their anti-scientific and anti-philosophical (in the
vulgar sense of the term) ressentiment presents psychoanalysis as some
sort of cultural heritage, which deserves permanent state protection.
Needless to say, this was never Lacan's path.
The notion of the unconscious challenges philosophy in a more fun-
damental way, by questioning its philia, its love for knowledge and
truth-not only because it goes against the primacy of cognition but
also because it examines the relation between the subject, thinking and
negativity. Psychoanalysis addresses this nexus through the concept of
castration:

What is the love of truth? It's something that mocks the lack in being
of truth. We could call this lack in being something else the lack of
forgetting, which reminds us of its existence in formations of the
86 SEX AND NOTHING

unconscious. This is nothing of the order of being, of a being that is

in any way full. [ ... ] The love of truth is the love of this weakness
whose veil we have lifted, it's the love of what truth hides, which is
called castration. (Lacan, 2007, p. 52)

Philosophieallave "forgets" the link between being and negativity, the

inscription of negativity into being. This forgetting can be envisaged
as repression (in the Freudian sense) through which philosophy would
introduce the idea of wholeness or fullness of being. Freud, who in a
famous text on world views, criticised philosophy for filling the gaps
in reality, and envisaged in every formation of the unconscious areturn
of this repressed negativity, the persistence of non-being within being,
and Lacan later linked this negativity with the set of questions that the
structuralist isolation of the signifier addressed to philosophy.
Through philia, pre-modern philosophy strived to establish a stable
and unequivocal relationship between aletheia and episteme, truth and
knowledge beyond the multiplicity of opinions, knowledge worthy of
love for its completeness, generality and invariability. For psychoanaly-
sis the unconscious reveals a concurrent form of knowledge, knowledge
that does not know itself, decentralised knowledge, which appears to
be without the subject, through which knowledge would come to think
its own thought. For this reason the unconscious reveals that the truth,
which still seems tobe compatible with knowledge (truth as convention,
relation between words and things, adaequatio, etc.), represses another
truth, which concerns the constitution of the subject, a truth that Marx
envisaged in his shift from the subject qua essence to the subject qua dis-
cursive consequence. Marx and Freud determine two privileged social
embodiments of this concealed dimension of truth, the proletarian and
the hysteric, the perfect oppositions of the philosophical personification
of knowledge, maftre, master and teacher (today we would probably say
the expert). Both critical personifications expose an underlying antago-
nism, be it dass struggle or psychic conflict, within social relations and
modes of production. The symptom thereby becomes the privileged
form of truth marked by conflictuality, and it was this conflictual truth
that Freud linked to castration.
Lacan summarised the Freudian lesson in his definition of the signi-
fier: "The signifier is what represents the subject foranother signifier."
Where is castration here? We first need to think away the dramatic bio-
logical and anatomical meaning of the term in Freud. In doing so, we
isolate its structural-logical meaning, which enables us to conclude that
 PSYCHOANALY SIS AND ANTIPHILOSOPHY 87

the concept of castration addresses the fact that the subject can only
come into being in and through the difference between signifiers, or
more precisely, in and through the difference that is the signifier as such.
The subject's being can only be metonymical, shifting from one signi-
fier to another, involving movement and instability. The philosophical
love mocks castration (the subject's "lack in being") by repressing the
displacement in the field of being and excluding the signifier (pure dif-
ference) from the field of ontological investigation. Here, we encounter
another echo of Marx's claim that the subject should be thought of in
relation to the ensemble of social relations. Only when the subject is in
conjunction with the autonomy of the system of differences (signifier
in Freud, exchange-value in Marx), we can correctly situate the flip-
side of philosophicallove. In this respect, the Freudian discovery of the
unconscious contains an essentially philosophical anti-thesis regarding
the nature of thinking.
Because the unconscious signifies the decentralisation of thinking
and is as such a real discursive consequence, it makes little sense to
differentiate the transference unconscious from the real unconscious.
The transference unconscious (inconscient transferentiel) that Lacan pre-
sumably explored in the 1950s and 1960s, is no less real from the real
unconscious (inconscient reel) of 1970s, when his teaching elaborated
upon the concept of the real and was preoccupied with the problematic
of jouissance. What might appear as opposition reflects two imminent
aspects of the autonomy of the signifier: the transference unconscious
(the unconscious of desire) is the unconscious as it necessarily appears
through the logic of representation, while the real unconscious (the
unconscious of the drive) is the unconscious approached from the view-
point of discursive production. This shift from representation to pro-
duction overlaps with Lacan's move from linguistic structuralism to the
critique of political economy, a shift that radicalises the epistemological
and political implications of Saussure's isolation of the signifier. 5

5
Adopting Milner's terrninology we could call this transformed or intensified s truc-
turalism a "hyper-structuralism"- see Milner (2008, pp. 211-230) . A possible footnote
to Milner would be that Lacan upgrades Saussure with Marx, addressing the relation
between representation of the subject and production of jouissance, for which classical
structuralism did not provide the necessary conceptual tools. There is no theory of dis-
cursive production in Saussure, and it was only Marx who enabled Lacan to situate the
causality of the signifier in a materiahst way. Lacan thereby returned to a major Freudian
insight, namely that labour plays the main roJe in the unconscious. The Interpretation of
Dreams, indeed, proposed a labour theory of the unconscious.
88 SEX AND NOTHING

Let us return to Lacan's critique of philosophicallove. Among his

privileged targets is Plato, whose philosophy is said to contain ele-
ments of Schwärmerei. This German expression describes enthusiastic
daydreaming, but more generally stands for knowledge rooted in fan-
tasy. Here Lacan's reference is to Kant, who used the term in his cri-
tique of the Swedish mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg. Why such harsh
condemnation? Because Plato "projected the ldea of Sovereign Good to
[... ] the impenetrable void" (Lacan, 1998, p. 13) and thereby repressed
the negativity of the signifier, which could have been discovered in the
autonomy of eternal ideas. Through this projection, Plato could associ-
ate the philosophicallove, resumed in the tendency of the metaphysical
soul toward the supreme Good, with the ideal of knowledge without nega-
tivity, which is what wisdom is supposed to be. Loving the truth and
knowledge constructs the veil that conceals the lack in being, the rec-
ognition of which would undermine the founding philosophical axiom,
the sameness of thinking and being. Psychoanalysis, on the other hand,
finds in the subject of the unconscious the privileged embodiment of the
gap between thinking and being (as Lacan's discussion of alienation in
Seminar XI demonstrates ). Here, too, psychoanalysis merely joins Marx' s
critique of political economy, for which alienation is a structural feature
and thus constitutive for the subject of capitalism (labour-power).
Of course, Plato already problematized the sameness of thinking and
being in his discussion of sophistry, and several other thinkers in the
history of philosophy have taken the Parmenidian axiom with much
reserve. Nevertheless, it has persisted as a determining orientation of
philosophical discourse, together with another axiom that rejects nega-
tivity from philosophy: "Being is, non-Being isn't" (Lacan, 1999, p. 22). 6
The figure of the sophist reminds philosophy of a scandal that is closely
related with language and that becomes the point of departure of
structuralism: that the signifier, as pure difference to another signifier,
contains nothing that would link it to the signified. By privileging the
autonomy of the signifier over its referentiality, Saussure rejected some-
thing that we might call linguistic fetishism, an attempt to conceive
language exclusively as "language of being" (Heidegger). Differently

6
An axiom that Lacan at some point describes as stupid, undoubtedly because it con-
ceals the "stupidity of the signifier", the fact that the signifier neither supports a univocal
relation to the signified nor does it represent the subject in an adequate way but only for
another signifier.
 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND ANTIPHILOSOPHY 89

put, linguistic fetishism would be an attempt to establish a relation and

continuity between what Saussure called linguistic value (horizontal
relation between signifiers) and meaning (vertical and arbitrary relation
between the signifier and the signified). In the history of philosophy
there are two prominent cases of fetishism, which determined subse-
quent philosophical views on language. First in Cratylus, where Plato
strives to demonstrate the relationship between words and things, and
to think of linguistic value as a perfect correspondence to the natural
connection between the signifier and the object: "Then, as to names,
ought not our legislator also to know how to put the true natural
name of each thing into sounds and syllables, and to make and give all
names with a view to the ideal name, if he is tobe a namer in any true
sense?" (Plato, 1963, p . 428).
The mythic figure of the namer translates physis into language with-
out any loss. The development of the entire dialogue amounts to the
idea that language stands in a harmonious mimetic relation to nature,
so that even in its fundamental elements, the phonemes, we encoun-
ter the imitation of natural sounds. Plato thereby provided a mythical
expression to the idea that the relationship between the signifier and the
signified is rooted in nature, and that language serves as an approach
to external reality in a stable and univocal way. Of course, we could
immediately associate this imaginary scenario with Galileo's claim
that the book of nature is written in mathematicallanguage. However,
Plato seems to formulate something else, the mythological version of
what would later become the doctrine of adaequatio, adequate relation
between words and things.
Another case of linguistic fetishism and another founding myth of
linguistics can be associated with the pragmatic tradition beginning
with Aristotle. This pragmatism no Ionger strives to demonstrate an
ontologicallink between Iogos and physis, but simply presupposes that
the true nature of language consists in reference and communication.
Language is defined as organon (tool and organ) whose value consists
in supporting exchange and grounding stable social relations. In this
respect, Wittgenstein, Chomsky, and Habermas remain within the
Aristotelian paradigm. Aristotle's pragmatism abolishes Plato's mytho-
logical excess and isolates the "rational kernel" of his speculations on
the nature of linguistic signs.
Aristotle's main concern is to determine the good and the bad use
of language. For him, the paradigmatic case of good use of language is
90 SEX AND NOTHING

not simply communication, but even more so, the language of ontology
spoken by none other than being itself. Ontology understands itself as
an immense prosopopoeia of being and the ideal functioning of lan-
guage takes place in philosophy, whose love of knowledge is also the
exemplary foundation for stable social relations (love, as such, is a form
of social band). The linguistic ideal of philosophy becomes language
without negativity. In opposition to this, the sophists, these misusers of
language repeatedly demonstrate that language is not only about com-
munication, but also about production, that there is no correct use of
language, and consequently, that being is always-already contaminated
by the signifier. More precisely, the signifier is non-being, which has
an effect of being. And because the sophists are repeatedly accused of
seduction and deception, their preference for lies are at opposite ends
to philosophicallove. Lies becomes synonymaus to the dissolution of
stable social relations.
The same scandal of discursive production is met in economy.
What sophistry is in relation to language, chrematistics is in relation to
money. lt detaches money from its social function, turning it into a
self-engendering entity, "money-breeding money" (Marx). The soph-
ists separate language from its communicative aspect, turning it into an
apparatus of enjoyment, while the usurers liberate money from its social
function, inverting its teleology and making it its own reproductive goal.
If commodity exchange contains a social relation then usury stands out-
side society and undermines human relations by contaminating them
with monetary enjoyment. By delimiting the normal and the patho-
logical functioning of linguistic and economic systems-which is an
impossible task and calls for a fantasmatic foundation of the presup-
posed relation-these philosophical attempts overlook that the border
is simultaneously nowhere and everywhere in the system of values and
signifiers. From the philosophical condemnation of chrematistics and
sophistry, it follows that the main point of philosophical repression is
the intimate connection of language and production-that the signifier
is not merely a tool of communication but also a cause of enjoyment
and of alienation. Consequently there are at least two discursive
consequences/ which undermine the regime of positive being: the
stability of being is challenged through the subject of the signifier, the

7
For the discussion of psychoanalytic realism, w hich departs from the recognition of
real discursive consequences, see notably Zupan i.'ii.' (2011, p . 29ff).
 PSYCHO A NALYSIS AND ANTIPHILOSOPHY 91

negativity in being, and through the surplus object (jouissance, surplus

value), the excess in being. Language knows no right measure and the
Aristotelianism in linguistics is doomed to fail in constructing the ideal
language.

The antiphilosophical quadrivium

Lacan introduces antiphilosophy in a short and rather marginal text
published in 1975 to support the reform of the Department of Psycho-
analysis at the University Paris VIII. The text contains a proposition
of transmitting psychoanalytic knowledge without subjecting psy-
choanalysis to the university discourse. Lacan's interference with the
organisation of teaching provoked strong resistance in the Department
of Philosophy. In a short intervention published in Les temps modernes in
autumn 1974, Deleuze and Lyotard accused Lacan of Stalinist methods,
adding that a new order is being established "in the name of a mysteri-
ous matheme of psychoanalysis" (Deleuze, 2003, p. 56).8 Lacan's text
implicitly responds to these accusations, without mentioning the math-
eme. Instead, he introduces antiphilosophy, in which some readers see
a synonym for the matheme (Milner, 1995, p. 145). 9
What is this mysterious matheme? A result of logical or mathemati-
cal formalisation, in short a formula, which is supposed to transmit
knowledge without recurring to interpretation (meaning or sense) and
without involving transference (love of knowledge). In this regard it is
indeed the opposite of philosophical transmission, rooted in the figure of
the master (in both meanings of the ward) and supported by philia. The
matheme doctrine involves a proposition of teaching, which suspends
the dimension of love and the hierarchy of knowledge (doxa, episteme,
sophia). Formalised knowledge is also transmitted beyond commodi-
fication and institutional or disciplinary segregation, and as a result,
it rejects the logical frames imposed by the university discourse that
Lacan associates with capitalism. Transmission through formalisation

8
For a detailed historical account of the events that accompanied the reorganisation
of the Department of Psychoanalysis, see Roudinesco (2009, pp. 1345-1359). Here, I will
leave aside the problematic take-over of the Department and focus merely on the theoreti-
cal value of Lacan' s intervention.
9
Badiou, on the contrary, interprets Lacan's matheme doctrine as the Platonist kerne!
of Lacan's teaching. See Badiou (1991, p. 135ff). In the above discussion of matheme I
mostly rely on Milner's reading, although I'm not opposed to Badiou's developments.
92 SEX AN D NOTH IN G

stands in constant tension with the transmission through transference,

thereby questioning the institutional politics grounded in love and
desire. lt imposes a different form of institutional organisation. It is true
that Lacan's institutional experiment CEcole Freudienne de Paris) ended
in failure and a renewal of the sectarianism that the doctrine of formali-
sation was supposed to overcome. However, this does not undermine
or discredit the critical value of matheme.
In his short intervention, Lacan proposes the following definition of
antiphilosophy:

Antiphilosophy-with this I would like to entitle the investigation

of what the university discourse owes to its "educational" sup-
position. Unfortunately, the history of ideas will not deal with it.
A patient collection of imbecilities that characterize this discourse
will hopefully enable the evaluation of its indestructible roots, its
eternal dream. From which there is but a particular awakening
(Lacan, 1975/2001, pp. 314-315).

This formulation leaves no doubt that the privileged target of antiphi-

losophy is not so much philosophy, but the university discourse, which
places the quarrel in a different light. Lacan's theory of discourses
envisages in the university an intertwining of capitalism and scientific
knowledge, and in its socio-political context the rise of bureaucratic
power and the proliferation of experts. These privileged social embodi-
ments of seemingly neutral instrumental knowledge, which replaces
the pre-modern figure of the master and, integrated in the logic of
capital, grounds a new regime of domination (Lacan, 2007). Through
the coupling with science, capitalism introduced a new fetishisation of
knowledge, different from its philosophical fetishisation through love:
namely, fetishisation through commodification.
In Lacan's proposition, antiphilosophy closes the list of disciplines,
which should be included in the formation of analysts: linguistics,
mathematical logic and topology, which already guide his return to
Freud, but which also indicate the epistemological horizon that enable
the isolation of the subject with the unconscious. Being the last in line,
antiphilosophy determines the critical value of other disciplines. Lacan' s
background in this matter is Koyre' s discussion of modern scientific rev-
olution, whose crucial aspect consisted in detaching mathematical dis-
course from the "eternal dream" of pre-modern cosmologies, the ideal of
 PSYC H OANA LYS IS AN D AN TIPHIL OSOP H Y 93

totality and harmony. Modern mathematisation of natural phenomena

abolished the ancient division of the world on the superlunary sphere
of eternal mathematical truths and the sublunary sphere of generation
and corruption, initiating the path which grounds science not only on
exact experimentation but above all, on the autonomy of formal lan-
guage. Lacan's main epistemological claimwas that there is only one
step from this mathematical autonomy to what linguistic structuralism
isolated in naturallanguages under the concept of the signifier. The lan-
guage of mathematics becomes a concrete case of the autonomy of the
signifier.
Structuralism and psychoanalysis-and to this list one should add
the critique of political economy-extend the lessons of scientific revo-
lution to the field of "human objects" (language, society, subjectivity).
This extension, however, does not leave the scientific field unaltered.
Lacan already indicated this by claiming that the question to ask is
not "Is psychoanalysis a science?" but rather, "What is a science that
includes psychoanalysis?" (Lacan, 1965 / 2001, p. 187). Psychoanalysis,
tagether with structuralism and historical materialism, transformed the
notion of scientificity by confronting modern sciences with the question
of the subject.
By isolating the signifier in its absolute autonomy, structural lin-
guistics extends the autonomy of mathematical language to natural
languages and thereby abolishes the "qualitative" distinction between
natural and formallanguages. The limit of Saussure' s theory of language
is, however, that it does not operate with the notion of the subject. In
this respect, Lacan's first return to Freud had already advanced a step
beyond the initial frames of linguistic structuralism, when it equated
the structures of the unconscious (condensation and displacement)
with the linguistic structures (metaphor and metonymy). Adopting the
Freudian association of psychoanalysis with the history of scientific rev-
olution, Lacan concluded that the subject of the unconscious couldn't
be other than the subject of modern science. We can recall that Descartes
made the first attempt in determining this subject in his deduction of
cogito, but ended up producing the abstract subject of cognition. In his
return to Descartes, Lacan claimed to have made the necessary correc-
tion of Cartesian rationalism, when he situated the Freudian subject of
the unconscious in the minimal gap in the enunciation of cogito, the
gap between thinking and being. This perspective necessitated a refor-
mulation of Descartes' formula into "I think: therefore I am", where
94 SEX AND NOTHING

the "I am" becomes the content of "I think". The gap remained over-
looked because of Descartes' immediate move from cogito to res cogitans,
from enunciation to substance, in which thinking and being apparently
found their reconciliation. The antiphilosophical claim of Lacan's read-
ing of Descartes would be that modern philosophy is grounded on a
misunderstanding, which perpetuates the resistance to negativity that
marked the foundation of philosophy in Plato and Aristotle. Philoso-
phy did register that the modern scientific revolution no Ionger sustains
the hypothesis of the metaphysical soul, but it failed to isolate the actual
subject that corresponds to the autonomy of mathematical language,
which grounds the efficiency of scientific discourse.
The introduction of antiphilosophy accentuates that formalised
knowledge has nothing in common neither with philia nor with con-
sciousness. Forthis reason, Lacan argued that mathematics is "science
without consciousness" (Lacan, 1972 / 2001, p. 453). Formalisation
does not need a "thinking substance" in order to verify or falsify its
theories, and in this respect, too, Lacan's declaration follows Koyre,
who persistently rejected empirieist epistemology and its reduction
of modern sciences exclusively to experimentation. Experimentation
still presupposes a psychological observer, while the foundation of
science on the ideal of formalisation entirely depsychologises knowl-
edge. However, "science without consciousness" does not suggest that
science is without any subject whatsoever. On the contrary, it implies
that the subject of the unconscious is precisely the depsychologised
subject of modern science.
The problern for Lacan isthat Koyre' s history of scientific ideas cannot
deal with the university discourse, in which empirieist epistemologies
result more useful to a successful combination of science with the inter-
ests of capitalist economies. Koyre did criticise readings that depicted
Bacon against Descartes, yet he failed to raise the question of the subject
of modern science. Formalisation against verification, Descartes against
Bacon-this also means the subject of the unconscious versus the sub-
ject of cognition. The empirieist epistemology contains a normalisation
and recentralisation of thinking, as well as neutralisation of the emanci-
patory potential of modern science. 10

10
We can add that the revolutionary human sciences-critique of political economy,
psychoanalysis, and structural linguistics-find its corresponding "empiricist" coun-
terparts in liberal and neoliberal political economy, where the recentralisa tion takes the
 PSYCHO ANA LY SIS AN D AN TIPHILOSOPHY 95

As already mentioned, the university discourse stands for com-

modification of knowledge. Here, the notion of antiphilosophy most
explicitly abandons its negative connotation and shows its continuous
philosophical aspirations. By going further than the history of ideas,
antiphilosophy attempts to inscribe psychoanalysis in the critical tra-
dition, through which the philosophical and political signification of
Freud's efforts to link his invention with the epistemological frames of
revolutionary sciences is pushed to the foreground.
In conclusion I would like to summarise the central lessons of the
other three disciplines (linguistics, mathematical logic, topology) and
their importance for psychoanalysis and philosophy.

The linguistic lesson

Lacan's proposition on teaching introduces its disciplinary quadrivium
with linguistics. "Let it be clear that linguistics is principal here" (Lacan,
1975 / 2001, p. 313), stresses Lacan, but immediately adds that it does
not suffice him as an analyst. This additional remark, insignificant as
it may be, indicates that we are not dealing with simple application
of linguistic knowledge to psychoanalysis, but with a moresubversive
engagement, which implies a reinvention of the linguistic field. For
instance, in Seminar XX, Lacan explicitly claims that his axiom "the
unconscious is structured like a language" does not belang to the field
of linguistics, even if it was developed with the help of its formalisa-
tion of operations such as metaphor and metonymy. This exteriority
is due to the productive dimension of the unconscious (production of
jouissance and production of subjectivity) that the Saussurean model
excludes from the science of language. In this regard, Lacan's material-
ist turn in the structuralist theory of language is entirely foreign to the
infamaus linguistic turn in philosophy. The main difference between
Lacan's structuralism and the philosophies of language isthat the lat-
ter were concerned solely with the production of meaning and with
the theory of performative, which neither questions the transcenden-
talism of symbolic nor does it propose a rigorous materiaHst theory of

shape of homo oeconomicus, the political-economic subject of cognition; in psychology,

where the same recentralisation concerns the renewed focus on the conscious ego as the
central instance in mental apparatus; and finally in the cognitive linguistics and analytical
philosophies of language, which renew the "organonic" understanding of language.
96 SEX AND NOTHING

the subject. Lacan's radicalisation of the structuralist programme, on

the other hand, detects an "other production" behind the production of
meaning and the performative effects of language. This other produc-
tion is intimately connected with the dimension of the drive, but also
with the attempt tothink the subject of the unconscious as a "response
of the real," 11 a non-psychological discursive consequence.
In Lacan's teaching the ties between psychoanalysis and structural
hnguistics were loosened up by the critique of political economy and
the problematic of jouissance, where it turned out that the unconscious
necessitates a different notion of structure, without therefore losing
sight of the autonomy of the signifier. The notion of non-all (pas-taut),
which in Lacan's later teaching substitutes the term "structure", strives
to accomplish this necessary step: "The structure is to be taken in the
sense, in which it is most real, in which it is the real itself [ ...]. In gen-
eral, this is determined by the convergence toward an impossibihty. It is
through this that the structure is real" (Lacan, 2006, p. 30).
The difference between the classical structurahst and the Lacanian
notion of structure is in fact already indicated in Lacan's founding
axiom: the unconscious is structured as a language. Theindefinite arti-
cle prevents a total identification of the unconscious with the symbolic.
The unconscious is a quasi-language, "private language" but this does
not suggest that it is an impenetrable autistic One. A double rejection
is at stake here. The claim that the unconscious is structured rejects
the romantic and the hermeneutic conception, according to which the
unconscious designates an impenetrable and irrational depth without
order, the chaotic "night of the world" full of erring phantoms and mem-
bra disjecta . With the structurahst reference, the unconscious becomes a
thoroughly rational notion. However, Lacan's later developments shift
from the linguistic structure in the abstract sense to the dynamic of lan-
guage: "But does lan guage plug into something admissible b y way of
any hfe, this is the question that would not be bad to awaken among
hnguists" (Lacan, 1975/2001, p. 313). The structure of the unconscious
is hence not an abstract and static system of differences but a process of
becoming. Only here a materiahst theory of the subject and a materiahst
linguistics that Seminar XX calls linguisterie can be articulated.

11
"[. •• ] what concerns the analytic discourse is the subject, w hich is, as an effect of

signification, a response of the real" (Lacan, 1972/ 2001, p. 459).

 PSYCHOANALYS IS AN D AN TIPHILO SO PHY 97

lt is not surprising that psychoanalysis began with the aetiology of

neurosis, reframing the problern of causality, in which the signifier was
ranked among material causes. Philosophy, on the other hand, always
refused to include the signifier among possible tauses. To say that
language is an organon means that the signifier cannot become a cause.
But the Saussurean formalisation of language into an abstract system
of differences is not yet materialistic either. Only once the autonomy
of the signifier has been associated with production, and thus the cau-
sality of the signifier has been acknowledged, a critical and materiaHst
orientation can be integrated into linguistics. This orientation introduces
the split subject and the surplus object in the science of language.

Th e mathematicallesson
The mathematicallesson concerns the already mentioned effort to sepa-
rate knowledge from its anchoring in transference love (fetishisation).
The matheme is also Lacan's answer to the dilemma of the relationship
between theory and practice in psychoanalysis and a way to prevent
the closure of psychoanalysis from other disciplines. lt is interesting,
nevertheless, that Lacan proposes precisely mathematical formalisa-
tion. Is jouissance, for instance, possible to formalise? This is actually
the wrong question to ask, since for Lacan mathematical formalisation
imports mainly because it reveals the paradoxes of the symbolic order
and provides the paradigmatic example of the realisation of structure,
next to the unconscious. 12
Formalisation in psychoanalysis thus uncovers and transmits above
all the symbolic deadlocks, like in the case of four discourses, which
expose the structural instability and demonstrate the rootedness of
sociallinks in the inexistence of social relation (social contract, economic
contract, normative social model, etc.); or in the formulas of sexuation,

12
"Can't the formalization of mathematical logic, which is based only on writing,
serve us in the analytic process, in that wha t invisibly holds bodies is designated therein?
If I were allowed to give an image for this, I would easily take that which, in nature,
seems to most closely approximate the reduc tion to the dirnensions of the surface writing
requires, at which Spinoza hirnself 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 ernerg-
ing from an opaque point of this strange being, the trace of these writings taking form, in
wruch one can grasp the limits, irnpasses, and dead ends that show the real acceding to
the symbolic" (Lacan, 1999, p. 93).
98 SEX AN D N OTH I N G

which demonstrate the inexistence of sexual relation (radical absence of

normative sexuality).
And so, the critical value of formalisation stands in the foreground.
For instance, Marx's Capital no less formalises the capitalist mode of
production and, at the same moment, denounces false naturalisation of
its relations of production, notably the fantasy of social relation sum-
marised in the four cornerstones of economic liberalism: freedom (of
the market), equality (in exchange), (private) property, and "Bentham"
(private interest) (Marx, 2008, pp. 189-190). Marx's critique reveals
behind these ideological foundations exists a fetishist operation, which
mystifies the actual structure of social links (structuration through
alienation, dass struggles, and contradictions) and imposes a set of fan-
tasies regarding the self-regulating character of the market and the self-
engendering of value.
The matheme doctrine exposes the split that defines psychoanaly-
sis from within. Situated between transmission and transference, and
one could say between science and philosophy, psychoanalysis needs
to reject this very opposition, without simply rejecting philosophy or
science, in order to maintain its autonomy. The critique of transference
detects in philosophy a possible resistance against psychoanalysis. This
was Freud's suggestion in his New Introductory Lessons an Psychoanalysis,
where he reduced philosophy to a worldview. Freud believed that psy-
choanalysis can become a scientific practice only by overcoming all
worldview illusions. One could even interpret the entire analytic pro-
cedure as an attempt to eure the subject from the philosophicallove of
knowledge. Then, is psychoanalysis a way to extract philosophy out of
the illusions that determined it throughout history, a therapy of philo-
sophical thinking? From this viewpoint, formalisation would provide a
means for suspending transference through knowledge that resists love:
a knowledge that is not supported or centralised by a master-signifier.
Lacan's relation to philosophy is more complex. If philosophical
love of knowledge is the privileged terrain to study the mechanisms of
transference, this does not suggest that psychoanalysis assumes a meta-
position, from which it articulates its critique. If anything, then psycho-
analysis continually demonstrates the tension between formalisation
and transference and insists on the boundary which exists between the
two. This tension is what is most philosophical in psychoanalysis, and
precisely for this reason psychoanalysis is the heir to the critical and
materiaHst tradition.
 ---- - - - - - - - - -- - - - - - - - - -- - - -

PSYCHOA N ALYSIS A N D A N TIPHILOSOPHY 99

On the other hand, psychoanalysis needs to resist the temptation

to identify with science, a mistake that Freud made in his lecture on
Weltanschauung, claiming that by rejecting philosophicat politicat and
religious worldviews, analysts should adopt the scientific one, namely
positivism. The only problern isthat such a positivist worldview would
abandon the main psychoanalytic hypothesis, the subject of the uncon-
scious. If natural sciences produce knowledge without a subject and
even legitimise the "ideology of repression of the subject" (Lacan,
1970/2001, p. 437), then neither the adoption of a scientific worldview
nor mathematical formalisation can be the ultimate goal of psychoanal-
ysis. What can be its goal is the transformation of the very idea of sci-
entificity, andin this respect Lacan's formalism again pursues Koyre's
efforts to counteract the empirieist epistemologies, whose reduction-
ist and pragmatist tendencies reject every critical and "speculative"
dimension in modern sciences. Formalisation matters precisely for its
materialist and dialectical value.

The topologicallesson
The topological lesson concerns the constitution and the structure of
the space of thinking. The link between Lacan' s teaching and topology
is manifested from the very outset. A significant break occurs at the
beginning of 1960s in the seminar on identification, where the aspheric
objects offer an indispensable tool for a non-metaphorical spatiali-
sation of psychoanalytic objects and structural relations, for instance
between the subject and the Other, the subject and the object a, desire
and drive, etc. The interest in topology will progressively escalate and
during the so-called Borromean seminars prevail over linguistics and
mathematicallogic.
The first question concerns the surplus produced by the manipula-
tion of topological objects, for this differentiates Lacan's use of topology
from models and metaphors. lt is well known that the topological refer-
ence was not unknown to Freud, who repeatedly referred to the spatial
dimension of psychic apparatus and for whom topology visualises the
relation between the conscious, the preconscious, and the unconscious,
and later between the ego, the id, and the superego. But for Freud topol-
ogy remained a metaphorical reference. He was searching the episte-
mological surplus in biology and thermodynamic, which lead him from
the logic of the unconscious to its pseudo-vitalist ontology.
100 SEX AND NOTHING

Milner argued that topology addresses the opposition of showing and

saying, which also marked Wittgenstein's critique of philosophy. What
is impossible to say can be shown-this would be the basic premise
of the use of topology suggesting that psychoanalysis encounters
something that cannot be said. There is a deadlock of enunciation,
requiring an external device, which will visualise the unspeakable.
Yet, the unspeakable in psychoanalysis does not imply the same as
Wittgenstein's imperative of silence. While Wittgenstein concludes from
the impossibility of saying to the necessity of silence, psychoanalysis,
on the other hand, strengthens the ties between the impossible and the
enunciation, the real and the symbolic. Lacan associates topology with
the attempt to construct a new " transcendental aesthetics", which will
support a materiahst orientation in thinking. This is the main point of
identification of topology and structure, which traverses Lacan's later
writings and provides further developments to the already mentioned
inclusion of the structure in the real.
The peak of this orientation is "L'etourdit", the programmatic ecrit
that inaugurates Lacan's later teaching. There we read the following
contextualisation of topologicallessons:

Is topology not this no-space, where the mathematical discourse

leads us and which necessitates a revision of Kant's aesthetics? [... ]
Structure is the reat which unveils itself in language. Of course, it
has nothing to do with the "good form." [... ] Topology is not "made
to guide us" in structure. Topology simply is this structure-as
retroaction of the chain order that constitutes language. (Lacan,
1972/2001, pp. 472, 476 & 483)

What matters in topology is its m ateriahst and realist perspective, where

the topological object is the thing itselt not a numb witness of the col-
lapse of language but an orientation that directs enunciation and think-
ing. As a support of materialist orientation, topology stands in strong
continuity with linguistics and mathematical logics. lts rejection of
Wittgenstein's imperative of silence places it on the side of what Lacan
occasionally calls "half-saying" (mi-dire) and "well-saying" (bien-dire).
In short, in bringing tagether both the real of structure and the struc-
ture of the reat topology is both a forcing and a disclosure of thinking.
For Wittgenstein, on the other hand, the space of thinking is a closed
totality of regulated enunciation and philosophical grammar, beyond
 PSYCHOANALYSIS AN D AN TI P HILO SOP HY 101

which there is only the mystical. Nothing could be further away from
psychoanalysis, 13 for which there is no totalisation of the Other and "no
universe of discourse" (Lacan, 2006, p. 14): the Other is inconsistent,
and precisely this inconsistence needs to be visualised with topological
objects, which play the same role as mathemes in logics and signifiers
in linguistics.
Lacan complained that Freud's topology provided a misleading
image of psychic apparatus and insisted that the difference between
Freud and hirnself overlaps with the difference between the spheri-
cal and the aspherical topology: "There you have it: my three are not
the same as his. Mine are the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary.
I managed to situate them through a topology, the one of the so-called
Borromean knot" (Lacan, 1986, p. 82). He then continues that Freud's
notion of psychic apparatus is modelled on the sphere, which still pre-
supposes a clear division between the inside and the outside, thereby
neglecting the most crucial critical point of his own discoveries: that the
unconscious is not a phenomenon of psychic depth but an effect of the
curved space of language.
Unlike philosophy, linguistics, and mathematicallogic, topology is
the only discipline that does not need any subversion: "Topology-I mean
the mathematical one, without the analysis (in my view) beingable to
bend it any further" (Lacan, 1975/2001, p. 314). Topology is enough
subversive in order to correct Freud's spatial metaphors: "[ ... ] all the
forms, in which the space breaks or accumulates are made to provide
the analyst what lacks him: namely a support other than metaphor in
order to sustain metonymy" (Lacan, 1975/2001, p. 314). In its critical
value, topology enables to construct a new mos geometricus, a formal
method, which repeats the gesture of Cartesian rationalism and allows
detaching philosophy from the discourse of metaphor (transference,
meaning).

* * *

13
For this reason Milner overestimates the weight of the "Wittgenstein-problem" in
Lacan's final teaching. See Milner (1995). Another overestimation concerns the role of
Joyce, the perfect opposite of Wittgenstein. It is therefore worth doubting whether Lacan's
teaching truly amounts to the double deadlock of linguistic jouissance, on the one hand,
and mystical silence, on the other.
102 SEX AN D NOT HI N G

In conclusion, the three disciplines and their lessons turn around the
three crucial decentralisations conditioned by scientific modernity:
decentralisation oflanguage, w hich suspends the organonic (pragmatic)
theory of language; decentralisation of knowledge, which detached it
from the human observer; and finally, decentralisation of space, which
progressively gave rise to non-Euclidian geometries and restructured
the space of thinking. The disciplinary knot is constructed under the
banner of antiphilosophy, which joins them as the fourth term that
links them in a Borromean way: linguistics, a science of the symbolic;
mathematicallogic, a science of the real; and topology, a science of the
imaginary. Pursuing this Borromean reference, we can conclude that
antiphilosophy assumes the role of the symptom, which resumes the
main lesson of psychoanalysis: decentralisation of thinking. The move-
ment of Lacan' s teaching leaves no doubt that this symptom does not aim
at the abolition of philosophy but at the possibility of its reinvention.

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