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Lacan, Calvino and Logics of the One

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 Lacan, Calvino and Logics
of the One
Arka Chattopadhyay

C an we re-think the psychoanalysis-literature dialogue through the

mathematical that has parallel implications for both discourses? In
what follows I will use the numerical paradigm as a bridge between
Lacanian psychoanalysis and experimental literature that belongs in European
late-Modernism of mid-20th century. Lacanian psychoanalysis and Modernist
literature have their own specific interest in the mathematisation of text and
discourse. Numbers have a significant role to play in this. The first critical
move will offer a reading of the Lacanian psychoanalytic postulations of the
One and see how they generate a notion of number as signifying element
for the human subject. Does the One stand in for unity? Can we think the
One as an index of uniqueness? Is the One a marker of solitude? Is there
a One that is all about difference? How do we count the One? As we shall
see, Lacan’s paradigms of the One speak to these questions. After establishing
the Lacanian coordinates of the One, in my second move, I will co-invoke
them alongside literary texts that have a complex and multifocal engagement
with the One. Our literary case study would be some of Italo Calvino’s
early short stories that diversely raise the figure of the One. It occasionally
comes across as a trope for the individual as a narrative personage who is
complexly situated between different groups. In other instances, the One is
a matter of law, prohibition and exception to the law. On another note, the
One becomes an external agent of change, if not collapse, for a collective
human structure. The gesture that underwrites my comparative intrication of
Lacanian psychoanalysis and literature here is an attempt to think through the
number One as it operates in both these discursive domains. Both Lacanian
psychoanalysis and literature allow us to construct a cultural logic of number
for the human subject. We will see how the number One is associated with
a wide cultural spectrum of human questions around desire, community, law,
hierarchy, dissidence and equality.
34 JADAVPUR UNIVERSITY ESSAYS AND STUDIES l XXXIII

Lacanian One(s): Number between Unicity

and Multiplicity
Lacan’s formula “There’s such a thing as One” [“Y a d’ l’Un”]1 constructs
the One in a logic of singularity that oscillates between solitude and seriality.
The formulation suggests, “there’s One all alone (il y a de l’Un tout seul).”2
There is no binary opposition between singularity and multiplicity here. In
fact, as we shall see, Lacan’s Real One is a One-multiple that formalises the
antinomy of the One and the multiple by combining them with one another.
In his sexuated logic, the One of solitude is the One that cannot be added
to its sexual Other to form a two.3 This is why Lacan will assert that there is
no sexual relation in a dyadic, unmediated and unproblematic sense. I am not
going to engage with the sexual aspect of this logic. I will rather be pursuing
its numerical dimension here. The One of solitude cannot produce the
twoness of a couple because “with 0 and 1, whether you add them, or raise
them one to the other, or even to itself, in an exponential relation, 2 is never
reached.”4 Zero and One which open the number series, cannot produce a two
together, neither through addition (0+1 2) nor through exponentiation (01,
10, 00, 112). Lacan uses Cantorian set theory to demonstrate this problematic
of zero and One in another way. A set can have an empty set as its only
constituent element. That empty set is considered a One and hence the
name “singleton” ([{0}]) for the set that contains the empty set as its only
element.5 This means that the zero itself is a One in set theory. Lacan also
evokes Cantor’s “diagonal method” which shows that the interval between 0
and 1 is “non-denumerable.” This means that the set of real numbers between
0 and 1 is uncountable. Lacan translates the Cantorian “non-denumerable”
in his register of the Real which is the order of impossibility. He calls it
“impossible to denumerate.”6 So, the interval between 0 and 1 is impossible
to count and as Lacan says, “it is very precisely in this that the real attached
to the One consists.”7 The Real One thus consists of this impossibility in the
movement from zero to one. The impossibility lies in that zero itself becomes
1 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XX. Encore: On Feminine
Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972–1973, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller,
trans. Bruce Fink (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998), 143.
2 Lacan, Encore, 67.
3 Lacan, Encore, 128.
4 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XIX. ...or Worse, 1971-72,
ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Adrian Price (Cambridge and Malden: Polity, 2018),
156.
5 Lacan, ...or Worse, 124.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
Arka Chattopadhyay 35

a One. This means the movement from zero to one is a movement from one
to one. There is no succession (movement from one number to the next)
here. This Real aspect of the number One goes beyond number as word and
number as image. It suggests how counting numbers could relate to the play
of the impossible.
Insofar as the interval between 0 and 1 remains uncountable, there happens a
decoupling of number from counting. Number One resists additive counting
that is premised on the function of “succession” (234 etc.). As Lacan
observes, “the One begins on the level at which there is one missing.”8 This
means zero (one-missing) itself becomes the paradoxical foundation of the
One. There is a rift in the movement from zero to one at the inception of
number series. It casts a shadow on the counting of the entire series of natural
whole numbers.9 The One as number reproduces zero because it is composed
of this zero-void. This number One that originates the “succession” function
is called the “signifier of inexistence”10 wherein the passage from existence
to inexistence is marked by the zero-in-the-One. Though the One is solitary,
there can be as many Ones, as one wishes. This is a serial formation of Ones
that never constitutes Oneness as unity or totality. These Ones are singular
and solitary and yet they form an open series. This multiplicity is made of
a repetition of Ones that generate the “sameness of absolute difference.”11
In the seminar on Identification, discussing “unary trait” [Lacan’s mathematical
translation of Freud’s “single trait” in group-psychology where the subject
imbibes one trait from a significant Other] as a unit of number, Lacan evokes
a “multiplicity which arises precisely from the introduction of units.”12 He
clarifies that the “unary trait” does not offer an “identity of resemblance”
but incarnated in the signifier, this unary One produces a “presence of
difference as such” 13 insofar as every signifier is different from itself. For
Lacan, the unary trait “operates already before the subject knows how to
count properly.”14 In other words, the unary trait is the originary psychic
registration of number as One before the exercise of counting begins for the
subject. In the same seminar, Lacan dwells on the primitive hunter’s unary
8 Lacan, ...or Worse, 126.
9 Lacan, ...or Worse, 156.
10 Lacan, ...or Worse, 46.
11 Lacan, ...or Worse, 144.
12 Lacan, Identification, session of December 13, 1961, trans. Cormac Gallagher,
accessed March 10, 2014, http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/wp-content/
uploads/2010/06/Seminar-IX-Amended-Iby-MCL-7.NOV_.20111.pdf.
13 Lacan, Identification, session of December 6, 1961.
14 Lacan, Identification, session of March 7, 1962.
36 JADAVPUR UNIVERSITY ESSAYS AND STUDIES l XXXIII

marks: “The first hunter […] who made a notch on an antelope’s rib in order
to remember simply that he had hunted ten, twelve or thirteen times, did not
know how to count.”15 This is the unary operation of number One without
counting which involves addition or succession. Each notch on the rib is
a One and these Ones never become 2, 3, 4, et cetera, because the hunter
cannot count. They do not become a complete totality either. This One of
repetition thus becomes pure difference:
with the repetition of the apparently identical that there is
created, separated out, what I call, not the symbol, but the entry
into the real as inscribed signifier […]. The entry into the real,
is the form of this trait repeated by the primitive hunter of
absolute difference insofar as it is there.16
This is the Real One of repetition that generates “absolute difference” as
it reiterates itself in the form of multiple vertical marks spaced out from
one another. These marks are Ones all alone and despite their differential
solitude, they form a series. These potentially infinite Ones that materialise
the sameness of difference can never constitute a unitary totality. Lorenzo
Chiesa, in a discussion that connects Lacanian One with Alain Badiou’s idea
of the “count-as-One,” argues:
Marking signifying difference as such results in nothing other
than signifying sameness, in-difference, if the count is not itself
counted, if the ‘actual multiplicity’ / one-multiple that presents
the hunter’s adventure is not itself represented as 1.17
The difficulty of counting the One arises from the impossibility of counting
the count itself as another One. If we could count the count as a One,
there could be a totality, but there is not. This extra One jettisons the count
and takes us back to Gottlob Frege’s zero that haunts the number series by
conjuring itself at each interval of natural whole numbers. To consider the
zero and arrive at number two, we have to go through 0, 1 and 2 which
already gives us three numbers. Similarly, to come to number 3, we have to
have four numbers (0,1,2,3). This is the “plus-One”/ “one-multiple” of zero
that never stops writing itself against the succession function of numericity.
This gives us a unary series (1,1,1,1,1) as opposed to a succession (1,2,3,4,5).
Lacan reads Frege’s deliberations on number vis-à-vis this unary operation

15 Lacan, Identification, session of March 14, 1962.

16 Lacan, Identification, session of December 13, 1961.
17 Lorenzo Chiesa, “Count-as-one, Forming-into-one, Unary Trait, S 1,” in
The Praxis of Alain Badiou, ed. Paul Ashton et al (Melbourne: re.press, 2006), 157.
Arka Chattopadhyay 37

that turns One into “One-multiple.”18 Justin Clemens connects this “one-
multiple” with the swarm of Ones. For him, S1 (signifier One as one avatar
of the Lacanian One) , homophonic with “l’essaim” or “swarm,” opens up
a differential repetition of unary trait in the form of “one-multiple.” 19
According to Clemens, “the unary trait must be re-marked (or re-marks
itself); it is only ‘unary’, one, by being so re-marked; as it is re-marked, it
becomes a swarm.”20
We do not have the scope here to delve deeper into Frege’s conceptual
extractions from zero and one. But to summarise, the concept of number
zero is riven by the contradiction that it is “identical to 0 but not identical
with 0.” 21 The problem stems from the fact that “no object falls under a
concept if the number that belongs to this is 0.”22 Zero can be self-same or
identical to itself but as the concept of zero is not backed by the presence
of an object, it cannot be “identical with 0” and this is the contradiction. As
1 is the number that follows 0 in the natural number series, it means that
number 1 “belongs to the concept ‘identical to 0’.”23 Stated differently, 1 can
only hark back to 0 and conceptually, it is “identical to 0” in the sense that
it is made of 0. On the other hand, 1 cannot be “identical with 0” because
there is one object that falls under the concept of number 1. Hence, both
0 and 1 are cloven by the antinomy of being identical to something but not
being identical with it. 0 becomes 1 by sharing this contradiction. This is
how Moncayo and Romanowicz restate Frege’s mobilisation of zero-as-one:
Frege […] defined zero as “the value-range of all value-ranges
with no members (empty set).” Since there is only one such
number zero, the concept of being identical to zero is initiated
once, and is used to define one, while zero is defined as the
number not identical to itself.24
The Real One that Lacan calls the “signifier of inexistence” is the Fregeian
zero-as-one that lies at the spectral generative point of the number series. It
ex-sists in the inter-numeric gap as a trace of the Real:
18 Lacan, Identification, session of February 28, 1962.
19 Justin Clemens, Psychoanalysis Is an Antiphilosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2013), 161.
20 Clemens, Psychoanalysis, 163.
21 Gottlob Frege, Foundations of Arithmetic, trans. Dale Jacquette (London and
New York: Routledge, 2007) 79.
22 Frege, Foundations, 77.
23 Frege, Foundations, 79.
24 Raul Moncayo and Magdalena Romanowicz, The Real Jouissance of
Uncountable Numbers (London: Karnac Books, 2015), 114.
38 JADAVPUR UNIVERSITY ESSAYS AND STUDIES l XXXIII

[…] the equinumerosity of the concept under which no object

falls, in the capacity of inexistence, is always equal to itself. There
is no difference between 0 and 0. It was from the angle of this
no difference that Frege sought to establish the function of 1.25
It is the undifferentiated nature of zero as the originary point of numeration
that inaugurates numerical difference as the successive passage from one
number to the next. One is based on zero’s self-sameness as a mark of the
void of inexistence. Zero is a numerical concept for which there is no object
and this leads us to the question about where the One comes from. It has to
come from the zero of undifferentiated inexistence and at the same time it
is this One that adds itself to every number when we pass from 2 to 3 and
3 to 4 by the function of succession. As the movement from zero to one is
an impossible move of producing something out of nothing, this originary
zero as one haunts the number series. This is the swarm of the “plus-One”
which can never be added properly to the collective, due to the originary
inaccessibility that marks the relation, or shall we say, the non-relation of 0
and 1.
To come to the Borromean One, there is both One and multiple in Lacan’s
Borromean knot as each ring is One-alone in relation to the Other and yet
the third knots them into a One. Lacan shows in RSI that this third which
founds the two as a structural principle could be any one of the three because
the Borromean knot is a strictly equivalent structure. While this focus on the
One may appear undemocratic, its emancipatory aspect lies in that it could
be any one. Whatever be the number of rings in a Borromean chain, the
Borromean property will still be intact, i.e. if any one of the rings is cut,
the whole chain will dissolve. This logic privileges the One as it becomes
the key to unknotting and yet, it maintains an emancipatory dimension by
empowering any one to become this “plus one” or master-signifier (S1). In the
third session of RSI, Lacan connects this any one of Borromean rings with
the logic of “plus-One”:
It is this +1 which ensures that, eliminate that one for example,
there is no longer a chain here, there is no longer a series since
from the simple fact of cutting out this one-among-others, all
the others, let us say, are freed as ones.26

25 Lacan, ...or Worse, 46; emphasis in the original.

26 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XXII. RSI, 1974–75, session of
January 14, 1975, trans. Cormac Gallagher, accessed March 10, 2014, http://www.
lacaninireland.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/RSI-Complete-With-
Diagrams.pdf.
Arka Chattopadhyay 39

The Borromean knot as a writing of the Real formalises the signifier One
which Lacan calls a “unary” signifier insofar as the knot as a writing supports
“unary trait.”27 The connection between Borromean One and “unary trait”
allows us to see how the Borromean subject is, among many other things,
a modality of re-thinking the questions of group-psychology and psychic
identification. There is a series of Ones at stake in this Y a d’ l’Un. It is a series
of Ones that formalises Y a d’ l’Un. Borromean logic of equivalence which
insists on any one is crucial. For Lacan, the “Borromean knot is the best
metaphor of the fact that we proceed only on the basis of the One.”28 Just
as the “Other cannot be added to the One” because the Other is “the One-
missing (l’un-en-moins),”29 similarly, in an infinite series of Borromean knots,
there is no way of grounding the knotting of the constituent Ones with
the constituted One. Any-One could be the ring that knots the chain into
a One. Once there is a chain, there is no knowing which One has knotted
it. Borromean property ensures that once you cut any one, the whole chain
dissolves. Thus, any-One in the Borromean chain has the agency to dissolve
the entire structure. Lacan calls this any-One, the “plus-One.”30
Let me return to Lacan’s formulation of these Ones that constitute Y a d’
l’Un. He articulates that “‘There’s such a thing as One’ is to be understood in
the sense that there’s One all alone (il y a de l’Un tout seul).”31 I will underline
this “one all alone” which combines the One and the multiple by balancing
the all with alone. It indicates that there is both oneness and multiplicity,
folded into one another. This coexistence of One and multiple is the effect
of Borromean knotting where there are three Ones (R-S-I), all alone in a
knot which is three and One at the same time. Each of the rings is beside
the Other but not a single One goes inside the Other to form the knot. If
one walks along one ring, they will never reach any of the other two. So,
Borromean logic posits a One that is all alone. But, as Lacan reflects in the
final session of Encore, it is not one One. It could be any number of Ones in
the swarm of S1s, just as there could be any number of rings in a Borromean
chain:
S1 (S1 (S1 (S1 S2)))32

27 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XXIII. The Sinthome, 1975-76, ed.
Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Adrian Price (Cambridge and Malden: Polity, 2016), 125.
28 Lacan, Encore, 128.
29 Lacan, Encore, 129.
30 Lacan, RSI, session of January 14, 1975.
31 Lacan, Encore, 67.
32 Lacan, Encore, 143.
40 JADAVPUR UNIVERSITY ESSAYS AND STUDIES l XXXIII

The series of opening brackets that separate one S1 from another imply non-
relation. Without the coupling of S1 and S2 that is compromised by sexual
non-relation, there could be an endless series of Signifier-Ones where each
One is unrelated from the other One [S1 (S1 (S1 (S1…]. So, there can be as
many S1s as you wish. The schema clarifies that, like each of the Borromean
rings, all these S1s are alone, i.e. they are separated from one another by
parentheses.

Ones in Calvino: Ambiguous Communities

To turn to Italo Calvino’s brief parabolic stories, let us see how they think
through the manifold question of One(s). Though these early texts predate
his 1973 joining of Oulipo, a writers’ group that attempted to mathematise
literary texts, these tales are replete with the trope of number. “Fables and
Stories” date from 1943 to 1958—generally considered Calvino’s neo-realist
phase. But as Gabriele Lolli has shown, there is an intrinsic relation between
the narrative form and mathematics that Calvino finds in these parables,
fables and folk tales: “Fairy tales and folk tales are told with great expressive
economy. If a king is sick, there is no need to telling his ailment.”33 Lolli as
a mathematician connects the generic and formula-like nature of a folk tale
to the way description operates in mathematical discourse:
Those who are familiar with mathematics immediately
perceive that Calvino’s description applies in a literal sense to
mathematical proofs, in particular to formal ones. These are not
the way mathematics is done, but the ideal form of expression
that captures its essence.34
From Lolli’s discussion, let me pinpoint economy as a critical hook that
enables a logical interface between mathematical discourse and fabular
form in Calvino. The critically neglected early stories have a paradoxical
combination of indefiniteness and precision that hinges on textual economy.
They lack realistic details like period, setting, character and motivation.
This parabolic indefiniteness ironically contributes to their mathematical
precision. These stories activate number as a Platonic dialectic of handling
the One and the Many in the world. When a human being engages with

another human, animal or thing or with a community of humans, animals

or things, number becomes an integral part of this relationality because it

33 Gabriele Lolli, “Mathematics according to Italo Calvino,” in Imagine Math

2: Between Culture and Mathematics (Milan: Springer, 2013), 54.
34 Ibid.
Arka Chattopadhyay 41

mediates the encounter. What is the cultural valence of number for human
subject(s)? Is the human individual a One in the mathematical sense? Rather
than reducing the human to numericity, this encounter builds number as
an item in the signifying economy of the subject. Different Calvino stories
would offer us different nuances of this One. As we have seen in Lacan’s
elaborations on Frege, number One is riven by the antinomy that marks
its emergence from zero. When we take the individual in a story-world as
an epitome of number one, it returns us to the question of how zero or
void is encased in this first number that generates the mathematical idea of
“succession” and gestures toward a community (many).
In Calvino’s story “The Man Who Shouted Teresa”, we observe the process
whereby a community is formed one-by-one through the chance-event of
a prank. The first-person story begins with the “I” as a One who decides
to play a game. He shouts the name “Teresa” to the top stories of a block
of buildings without knowing any Teresa there. After a while, a second
person comes in and asks him to shout louder. This other One joins in and
gradually we have an entire crowd, shouting Teresa to a building where no
such person resides: “Somebody else came by and joined us; a quarter of
an hour later there were a whole bunch of us, twenty almost. And every
now and then somebody came along.”35 This is the contingent construction
of a community, powered by the One. Not only does this community get
created one-by-one, but it is also the game of the first One that generates
the collective. The possibility that this is a prank played by the first person
does not readily strike anyone and they keep shouting the name. They discuss
the musicality of the phonemes in the signifier, “Teresa,” and decide on
a particular cadence and pitch. Everyone always shouts the name at the
count of three which echoes the three phonemes in the signifier (Te-Re-Sa).
This counting is a community ritual that generates temporal coordination
and makes everyone say the word at the same instant. Counting therefore
happens as a collectivising exercise, not just at the level of numbers but also
on the plane of the human community. Because everyone other than the
first One considers this exercise to be time-bound, when no Teresa appears
after a considerable period, they start asking him questions about whether
he has lost his key or if Teresa is home and so on. When the narrator, i.e. the
first One, reveals that there is no Teresa there and they might as well shout
another name, some show signs of annoyance, others, incomprehension. But
as a group, they decide to shout the name one last time. They act upon this
decision and disperse.

35 Italo Calvino, Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories, trans. Tim Parks
(London and New York: Penguin, 2009), 7.
42 JADAVPUR UNIVERSITY ESSAYS AND STUDIES l XXXIII

Now that the game is over, the community is unmade and we are back
to the narrator as a solitary One. As he slowly departs the scene, he can
hear a shout: “I’d already turned into the square, when I thought I heard a
voice calling: ‘Tee-reee-sa!’” 36 Calvino ends the story at this point with a
lingering logic of One: “Someone must have stayed on to shout. Someone
stubborn.”37 This ending preserves the ambivalence of the One. The One
began the formation of the community and played a central role in making
that community of Teresa-shouters operative. After this community is de-
formed, who is this One that continues to shout the name? Is this the
narrator’s (first One) auditory fantasy of wish fulfilment? Alternatively, if
there exists this One, we cannot be sure if this is simply a residual One.
Hypothetically speaking, this One could be someone who was part of the
group and simply decided to stay back and shout again. But it could also be
someone who had heard the last shout and gathered at the spot to shout the
name himself or herself. If we continue to speculate an afterlife of this story,
this “stubborn” One could reopen another human series. This could go on
forever in a potentially infinite loop. The story thus gives us the One as the
possibility of the multiple. The delicate point suggested by the ending is that
this One can shift as a mathematical function from one individual to another
and initiate different communities. The game started by the narrator is taken
up by a “stubborn” One who has the agency to inaugurate yet another
multiplicity. The One is this open function that migrates from one person
to another. As in Borromean logic, any-One has the agency to embody
this “One-multiple.” Calvino’s text establishes a homology here between
One and multiple by indicating a “One-multiple.” This is where it resonates
with the Lacanian One of “plus-One” or “One-multiple” that is neither
solitary nor solidary. It opens up a structure where each One is always already
constructible, vis-à-vis a collective.
To continue with the One as a complex intersection between more than
one community, let us now look at the story, significantly titled “Solidarity”.
This is another first-person narrative and the first sentence exposes the
relational bridge of number between the One and the many: “I stopped to
watch them.”38 The narrator says, “I was walking around, going nowhere in
particular, on my own.”39 He sees a group of people, struggling to pull open
a shutter. The narrator gives them a helping hand and “they ma[k]e room”

36 Calvino, Numbers, 8.
37 Ibid.
38 Calvino, Numbers, 20.
39 Ibid.
Arka Chattopadhyay 43

for him.40 After they make room for the narrator, his pronoun changes from
“them” to “we” which signals identification and inclusion with and into
the group. Together, they somehow pull up the shutter and go inside. As we
realise soon, this is a group of thieves who are burgling a shop. After they
go in, one thief asks the narrator to go out and patrol the streets and make
sure the police do not arrive suddenly. When he comes out, he interacts with
others, “hugging the wall, hidden in the doorways.”41 The sentence “I joined
in” suggests the narrator’s second inclusion, this time into a group of cops
who are keeping their eyes on the burglars. The group of policemen decides
to encircle the thieves and the narrator plays along. The use of the pronoun
“we” again connotes this second identification: “[w]e moved in bursts, on
tiptoe, holding our breaths.”42
The narrator, now a part of the group of cops, enters the shop; but as he
goes in, “a little way ahead,” he gets absorbed within the first group of
thieves again. He behaves like one of the thieves, just as before, and flees
the shop with them. While escaping, he trips and finds himself “with the
others running after them.”43 One of the cops tells him: “‘[c]ome on, they
won’t get away.’”44 He meets a burglar on his way out into the streets. The
burglar tells him: “‘[c]ome on, this way, we’ll lose them.’”45 Soon, he meets a
cop who says: “‘[c]ome on, this way, I saw them. They can’t have got far.’” 46
In this way, the narrator as One, keeps oscillating between two antinomic
communities of cops and thieves until he finds no one and resumes his
solitary walk: “[t]here was no one left, I couldn’t hear any more shouting. I
stood with my hands in my pockets and started to walk, on my own, going
nowhere in particular.”47 This final moment is a recursive return to the One
of solitude from the One of solidarity that remains ambivalently distributed
between two contrary groups throughout the story. Is the narrator a thief or
a cop or both or neither? The One thus maintains itself as an open interval
between the two identificatory groups. In fact, the One becomes a point
of ironic dialogue between the cops and the thieves, who otherwise would
not have seen eye to eye as discrete groups. Thus, while “The Man Who
Shouted Teresa” emphasises the agency of the One to open and reopen
40 Ibid.
41 Calvino, Numbers, 21.
42 Ibid.
43 Ibid.
44 Calvino, Numbers, 22.
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid.
47 Ibid.
44 JADAVPUR UNIVERSITY ESSAYS AND STUDIES l XXXIII

different multiplicities, the One in “Solidarity” problematises the notion of

the solidary as a point of indeterminate identification between two groups
of oppositional multiplicities.
Our next story of the One, “Making Do”, is a parable that politicises the One
vis-à-vis questions of law, prohibition and exception. It tells the story of “a
town where everything was forbidden.”48 However, the very next sentence
declares that there is One exception to this prohibitive legal machinery: the
game of tip-cat.Town-folks assemble on meadows behind the town and spend
their time by playing this game. The text specifies that these prohibitive laws
were put into place one-by-one and hence everyone became habituated with
them: “as the laws prohibiting things had been introduced one at a time and
always with good reason, no one found any cause for complaint or had any
trouble getting used to them.”49 The One (one-by-one) of implementation
is a statist strategy that keeps the possibility of revolt at bay. If the state had
forbidden everything together, there would have been a strong chance of
opposition. The One is counter-posed with the “all” here. It hegemonically
avoids contradiction. After a number of years, constables find no need to
prohibit everything anymore as the citizens behave in a docile manner. They
send messengers to inform the people that they “could do whatever they
wanted.”50 People pay no heed and play tip-cat. The messengers try alluring
them about many other things they can do, now that the prohibitions are
lifted. But by this time, habit has deadened them and all that they are good
for is playing tip-cat. When the messengers report to constables that they
have failed to persuade people to do anything other than playing tip-cat,
the constables decide to forbid the game. The story ends with the following
sentences: “That was when the people rebelled and killed the lot of them.
Then without wasting time, they got back to playing tip-cat.”51
“Making Do” places the One as the One of exception that generates a logic
of rebellion. The One is situated here in relation to a positive and a negative
notion of totality. The positive totality is that in which there is no prohibition,
while the negative totality is the one where there is only prohibition. When
everything other than tip-cat was banned, the prohibitive law machine must
have passed off the game as an innocuous exception that would engage the
populace and divert their attention away from revolt. The negative totality
thus excluded the One as the innocent One of exception. When this totality
was flipped into a positive one, initially, everything was allowed and there was
48 Calvino, Numbers, 11.
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid.
51 Calvino, Numbers, 12.
Arka Chattopadhyay 45

no exception. At this stage, the One was not treated as an exceptional outside
to the “all.” In fact, it was included in the positive totality as One of its
constituents. But when the state-machinery realised that this positive totality
would be counterproductive and would generate indifference to the state’s
command, they decided to exercise their sovereign power and generate the
One of exception. Sovereignty after all is precisely this power that can create
exceptions. This meant that they subtracted tip-cat as an activity from the
“all.” This decoupling of the One from the positive totality instantly became
the driving force of rebellion and destroyed the state’s power structure. If we
were to draw out a political logic of the One from this text, it would be the
following axiom: excluding the One as exception from a negative totality
sustains a centrist power structure but excluding the One as exception from
a positive totality decimates the same structure. The One of exception has
this antinomic relation with totality. When the totality is negative, the One
at a point of exceptional exclusion is precisely what sustains the structure.
But when the totality is positive, the One at a point of exceptional exclusion
is that which leads to its breakdown. What is common to the One’s relation
with positive and negative totalities is the fact that it can make or break the
structure. If the One is forced, the entire structure collapses. As we see in
‘Making Do’ this One of exception can be any-One—something as innocent
as the game of tip-cat. This is where we have a dialogue between Calvino’s
logic and Lacan’s Borromean logic, in which cutting any One ring undoes
the entire chain. This is the unary movement of One toward “plus-One” or
“One-multiple.”
To extend the discussion on One and all, let us turn to “The Black Sheep”,
our final parable that depicts a “country where they were all thieves.”52 The
country of thieves is ironically, a society without any deprivation whatsoever.
At night, everyone burgles their neighbours’ houses, only to come back to
their own homes, robbed by others. As every-One robs and gets robbed,
there is absolute equality and no rich and poor divide to be found. This
is a perfect order of number in which every One equally composes the
totality: “each stole from the other, and that other from another again, and
so on and on until you got to a last person who stole from the first.”53 What
introduces disturbance in this perfect structure of Ones constituting an “all”
is an external One: an honest man who comes to this country of thieves and
refuses to steal. As he never leaves home at night to burgle other people’s
houses, the thieves who come to his house always find the lights on and go
away with nothing. This is how one family always remains deprived. When
the honest man gets to know this, he leaves his house at night so that others
52 Calvino, Numbers, 23.
53 Ibid.
46 JADAVPUR UNIVERSITY ESSAYS AND STUDIES l XXXIII

can burgle but he will not steal himself. This means his assets keep getting
depleted and he eventually dies in a famished state.
But before he dies, his honest practice destabilises the equality of the country
of thieves. Because he never steals, someone always goes back home to find
their house untouched. This is the house the honest man does not rob. The
subtle point here is that this One house is never the same house. This is
the One of repetition which is also the One of pure difference. This One
of function moves houses. As a result of this, the unrobbed people become
rich. When the honest man’s belongings dwindle, there is nothing to steal
and those who venture his house cannot rob anything and become poorer.
The rich soon establish a police force and build prisons to make sure the
poor do not steal from them. This is how class as a category enters this social
structure and a state-machinery is formed. The roots of this stratification go
back to the external One of exception. The equal society of thieves loses
its equality due to the inclusion of this external exceptional One. Ironically,
even though the One subverts the entire structure, it cannot sustain itself.
The final sentence is telling: “The only honest man had been the one at the
beginning, and he died in very short order, of hunger.”54 The One therefore
has the agency to upturn the entire structure but cannot survive in the new
structure that is created through the inversion. This is a poignant human
paradox, Calvino’s text attaches to the Lacanian logic of the “One-multiple.”
Not to lapse into applied reading and to stick to the comparatist register, I
would say that Calvino’s stories add to the Lacanian edifice of the One by
introducing a set of complex cultural and political questions of community
formation. Due to the originary complication of 0 and 1 and 0 as 1, the one
that becomes one-multiple through re-marking, resists any totalising logic of
collective subjectivity. The One(s) in Calvino remain impossible to totalise
and yet they form a unary community. There is no simple aggregation here.
The One is irreducible to any such linear logic of counting. Positional
bivalence (“Solidarity”), recursiveness (“The Man Who Shouted Teresa”),
exceptionality (“Making Do”) and disturbing externality (“The Black
Sheep”) of Calvino’s literary Ones bring us back to the Lacanian bifidity
of zero and One. The One is troubled by the paradox of being made of
zero. The One, as Lacan insists, emerges from where it is found missing.
The One that we have situated in Calvino resists additive counting due
to its ambivalence. This justifies its dialogue with Lacan, whose notion of
unary trait fundamentally decouples number from the succession-function
of counting. The movement from the One to the plus-One of the One-
multiple connotes a serial deployment without counting. It is a flurry of

54 Calvino, Numbers, 25.

Arka Chattopadhyay 47

Ones that never becomes two and three and so on. This unary operation
undercuts the link between number and counting as we stare at a figuration
of number without succession. It is because the One is made of zero that it
has more than an iota of trouble in passing on to two, three, four, etc. Both
psychoanalysis and literature offer us this cultural paradigm of numericity
where the human subject is far from being reduced to a number. In fact, the
endless hesitation between 0 and 1 that composes a subject shows how it can
never be counted as one (unitary or unique or solitary) in a simple linear
logic. The same hesitation also produces a complex and non-aggregationist
model of the human collective. The mathematical charge of the number One
between Lacanian psychoanalysis and literature thus allows us to develop a
series of socio-political and subjective reflections on human community in
its constitutive and de-constitutive moments.

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