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Bachelard Lacan and the Im purity
of Scientific Formalization
T O M
E Y E R S
Abstract:
This essay examines the conjunction of French historical epistemology
and L acanian the ory in postwar France. In particular, Lacan s acco unt o
scientific formalization is scrutinized insofar as it develops aspects of the
prior epistemological research of Gaston Bachelard, whose innovative approach
to the problem of the nature and limits of scientific knowledge proved so
influential o n the subsequent field of French structuralism . Lacan s reflection
on formalization will be shown, in contrast to Bachelard, to place an emphasi
on the constitutive and limiting role of language in its interaction with logica
and scientific projects. In asking how Lacan s structural psychoanalysis ex tends
and subverts the rationalist emphasis of French philosophy of science, I hope to
provide a new optic th rough whic h to assess the role of formalization in critica
theory today.
Keywords:
epistemology, psychoanalysis, philosophy of science, Lacan,
Bachelard, French philosophy i
Th is article explores Lacan s co nc ep tio n of scientific form alization
in its relationship to his wider reconstruction of psychoanalytic
theory. Lacan approached the question of formalization via a certain
conception of language and writing, and his ideas are implicated in
the broader project, conceived in post-war France and associated with
the early work of Alain Badiou, Jacques-Alain Miller and others,
to synthesize the insights of rationalist philosophy of science with
the concept of the subject of the unconscious as developed by
psychoanalysis. Th e w ork o f the French ph ilosopher Gaston B achelard
is interrog ated as a key precurs or to Lacan s ep istemological innova tions
and to the post-Lacanian structuralism that, for a t ime, exerted a
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Bachelard La can and Sdentifc Form alization
3 2 1
defining influence on French thought.^ In recent years, the work of
Alain Badiou in particular has resurrected many, of the questions that
underlay French structuralism, and attention to the early exchange
between French epistemology and psychoanalysis may help to clarify
the continuing centrality of such debates in theory today.
Bachelard held the inaugural chair of the History and Philosophy
of Science at the Sorbonne until his death in Paris in 1960, and his
legacy can be read as a crucial variable in the rethinking of questions
of scientific legitimacy in the years after the waning of existentialism
in France. If, for post-Heideggerian phenomenology and Sartrean
existentialism, the techn ical objectifications of scientific practice
formed an object of critique, for the parallel field of French philosophy
of science it was the phenomenological emphasis on experience and
consciousness that represented a block to clear thinking. In particular,
Bachelard s influence can be said to have reinstalled at the very centre
of French intellectual life a rationalist concern for formalization.
Michel Foucault, and Bachelard s successors in the philosophy of
science, including Alexandre Koyr and Georges Canguilhem, all
took different things from Bachelard s rationalist theory of scientific
knowledge, but all three followed Bachelard in rejecting an empirical
or experiential account of the formation of knowledge. Instead, an
emphasis was placed on the constitutive role of theory in rendering
objects proper to the epistemological structures that different sciences
construct and reconstruct in perpetuity.
W hile reference is frequently made to A lthusser s borrowing of
Bachelard s idea of the epistemological ruptu re , my focus here is
on the less-interrogated relation of Bachelard to Lacan. My aim is
to understand bo th the inheritance of Bachelard s rationalism within
the revision of psychoanalysis proposed by Lacan, and the new model
of formalization that emerges with Lacan out of that inheritance, a
model that provides a retrospective critique of Bachelard s insistence on
a rigid distinction between the ordinary language of communication,
and conceptuality and formalization as best rendered within the terms
of mathematics.
References to Bachelard, and particularly to his successors
Canguilhem and Koyr, pepper Lacan s seminar, and Lacan s increasing
concern in the 1950s and 1960s with the mathematical formalization
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3 2 2 Paragraph
a necessary coexistence between the progressive rationalization o
analytic concepts, and an account of how both language and the
subject ground, and perhaps
disrupt
that process of rationalizatio
In w hat follows, I will explore Jacques-Alain Miller s own, post-
Lacanian attempt to encompass the psychoanalytic subject within
the formalism of structure, while also signalling an alternative way,
present in the very late Lacan, to complicate the inviolability of
the conceptual surface of scientific knowledge so often imputed to
Bachelard, an inviolability that would find its first points of doubt
within Bachelard s own recognition of the impurity of scientific
objects. First, however, it is necessary to gain a firm grip on the
powerful ambiguities of Bachelard s epistemology, ambiguities that
provide the route through which Lacan could both appropriate and
subvert the model of formalization therein.
Bachelard Between O bject Con cept And Signifier
In much of Bachelard s philosophical w^ork, the question of language,
and of writing, seems secondary, if not irrelevant. Bachelard had two
intellectual projects, received as distinct contributions to discrete sets
of questions. The central project that consumed Bachelard for most of
his professional life was an historical and epistemological enquiry into
the foundations of the physical sciences, perhaps especially chemistry.
But Bachelard also concerned himself with poetic imagination,^ and
it is in these works that one would normally look for his particular
account of language. N onetheless, whilst problematic, Bachelard s
account of language in his epistemological writings has pertinence
to the conjuncture of formalization and the logic of the signifier in
Lacan.
Responses to Bachelard have often taken the form of enquiries
into his relative debt to Descartes, and the question provides a useful
way into any more general account of Bachelard s brand of rationalist
epistemology. Mary Tiles, in her important study Bachelard: ci
and Objectivity
teases ou t the implications of Bachelard s shiftin
relationship to Descartes, as when she writes:
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Bachelard Lacan and Scientific Form alization 3 2 3
perfectly transparent and non-distorting, one cannot extract from wbat one sees
information concerning tbe sbape, size, color or surface features of tbe objects
viewed tbrougb it witbout learning wbat tbe cbaracteristics of tbe medium are.-*
With necessary caveats that I shall outline below, Bachelard adopts the
second perspective, whereby the philosopher of science must account
for both the delineation of a theoretical object of knowledge
distinct from any mere empirical object and the particular lens that
provides knowledge of
it
That lens, for Bachelard and in contrast to
much Anglophone philosophy of science, is irrevocably historical and
situated. Moreover, the particular psychology of the scientist or group
of scientists, inevitably immersed as they are in the vagaries of non-
scientific influences, must also be accounted for, contributing as they
do to what Bachelard refers to as epistemological obstacles , obstacles
that may militate against the emergence of an epistemological shift or
rupture in the developm ent of a science.
If, for Descartes, the reliability of the subject of enquiry is
guaranteed by the self-transparency of thought, for Bachelard thought
is inherently mediated both by sense experience in its potential
for mystification, and by the technical and epistemological lenses
through which the scientist defines his or her object. Bachelard
emphasizes, again in sharp distinction to the purity of
post-Popperian
Anglophone epistemology, the importance of the technical media
microscopes, ever more sophisticated laboratories that allow
scientists to sharpen the contours of their objects of inquiry. Against
the empiricist assumption that best scientific practice proceeds from
the observable and the given to the development of hypotheses and
theories, Bachelard, in typically rationalist fashion, considers the job
of the scientist to lie in complexifying the empirical by rendering it
amenable to conceptual qualification.
What is less typical, however, for a rationalism so often polemically
defined through its negative relation to empiricism, is Bachelard s
insistence that the subject or object is always-already mixed in with
its ostensible opposite. That is to say, there is no clean separation
for Bachelard between the empirical object of experience and
the theoretical object of science; their dialectical articulation and
distinction is the work in progress of science
itself
Here, we get the
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3 2 4 P a r a g r a p h
the signifier that complicates the formation of any discrete object o
inquiry.
For Bachelard, nonetheless, a general dualism persists, organized, a
Tiles has most explicitly shown, around the categories of subjectivity
and objectivity. It is important to stress, nonetheless, that this duality
is not mappable on to the distinction found in Karl Popper and other
between science and pseudo-science, in so far as the latter distinction
presupposes a continuum between common sense as revealed in
experience and the dom ain of the scientific. * To reiterate, it i
rather in the break with the empirically given that the beginnings
any scientific process must be found for Bachelard. He renders thi
starkly in his Th e Form a tion of the
cientific
Mind (193 8) : Im m edia
objective knowledge is necessarily incorrect by virtue of the fact tha
it is qualitative. It produces error that must be rectified. It lays an
inevitable burden of subjective impressions on the object; objective
knowledge must be unburdened. Th ere are a num ber of intriguing
ambiguities in this short passage. For what is the status, precisely, of the
ob ject referred to here? If, as Tiles insists, the pivotal distinction in
Bachelard s contrast is not between the empirically testable (falsifiable
and the empirically irrefutable, but between subjective and objective ,^
what status does incorrect, unscientific, intuitive but nonetheles
objective knowledge have for Bachelard, knowledge described abo
as objective know ledge to be unbu rdened ? Bachelard makes thing
a little clearer w hen he adds: The object may not be designated as an
immediate objective ;
in other words, a march towards the objectiv
not initially objective. ^
As Dominique Lecourt has observed, at play here is a deliberate
equivocation between different senses of the term object , betw een
the given object of experience with its burden of empirica
mystification and the object of science as it is produced through it
realization in scientific theory and praxis; or, alternatively, between
the different
aspects
of a single object, one empirical and the oth
the product of scientific and theoretical labour. And as Lecourt also
notes,
Bachelard will further underline the split in the object with the
coining of neologisms, such as super-object , defined as follows: The
super-object is the
result
of
critical objectification, of an objectivi
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Bachelard, Lacan an d Sdentific Formalization 3 2 5
objectification, even as that part of the object persists in the domain
of the objective. That persistence, m oreover, what Bachelard
considers the burdened part of objective knowledge finds an
intriguing echo in Lacan s recognition of the continuity of truth and
misrecognition.
For Lacan, the Imaginary (with its object, the ego) and the Symbolic
(defined by the movements of the signifier) are replete with necessary
illusions. The Imaginary, as the seat of specular identification, is
premised on the constitutive misrecognition of the mirror image as
evidence of the subject s self-mastery, while the Symbolic relies on
an illusory sense of wholeness in order to function as the subject s
condition of possibility. For Bachelard above however, it is the
object
rather than the subject, which is split between its potential as a
conceptually or theoretically produced nexus of scientific labour and
its burden as being situated within the domain of the empirical.
Bachelard hints as much when he com ments: It is also very difficult
to establish a hierarchy of error and to describe in an orderly way
the disorders of thought. F S M , 31) We can infer that any hierarchy
of erro r would have to presuppose a clean separation between the
empirical and theoretical object, something that Bachelard in the
quotes above seems to refuse by splitting the object, even in its
objective guise, between its rational conceptual core and its empirical
burden. Tellingly, the epistemological obstacles that Bachelard, in
the same book, argues must be overcome for the rational syntheses
of scientific knowledge to be possible, are described in a similar
language of impurity: it is the nature of epistemological obstacles
to be intermixed and polymorphous F S M , 31). I ll turn now to
Bachelard s The New cientific Spiri tto further refine the im purity
in question.
Published in 1934,
The New cientific Spiri t
seeks to interrogate
the implications for philosophy of science of the supersession of
Newtonian mechanics, among other leaps forward in geometry,
chemistry and elsewhere. Central to the book is the conviction that
developments in science pose a challenge to philosophy that should
be met by a nuancing of otherwise over-simple oppositions such as
that between rationalism and realism, between the observer and the
observed. Bachelard writes:
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Paragraph
closed system; apriori assumptions are subject to change (...). Science in effe
creates philosophy. Philosophy must therefore modify its language if it is to reflec
the subtlety and movement of contemporary thought. '
One might certainly take issue with Bachelard's simplification of the
tradition of philosophical rationalism here, a simplification that seems
set up to allow science its role of constitutive clarification. Nonetheless,
it seems clear that Bachelard is not content with advancing an a prior
rationalism unsuited to the complexity and constitutive
impurity
the scientific objects of his time. As he writes of developments in
physics, 'even notions whose essence is geometric, such as position
and simultaneity, carmot be grasped in any simple way but only in
composite (. ..) . Physics becomes a geometrical science and geometry
a physical science.' {NSS 47) Underpinning this recognition of the
intermixing of previously discrete practices is a sense, touched on
above, of the theoretical and conceptual interchange betw een differen
domains of scientific knowledge; thus, any
redu tion
of the process
scientific discovery to the constraints of empirical observation, or the
setting up of
symmetry between the theoretical and the empirical,
ill-suited to understanding the complexities of the post-Newtonian
scientific context. Such an attempt, moreover, would implicitly
subscribe to the possibility of there being a general account of Science,
rather than a theoretically attuned attention to the particular regimes
of knowledge proper to each particular scientific practice.
I'd like to underline a certain vacillation in Bachelard here, between
his rejection of empiricism and his generally rationalist approach to
the predominance of theory on the one hand, and his complex but
suggestive account of the impurity of the objects of scientific enquiry
on the other, an impurity that points towards an ultimate rejection
of the very terms of the opposition empirical/conceptual. If nothing
else, the consequences of this vacillation render highly problematic
the reduction, made most recently by Paul Thomas in his critique of
Althusser, of Bachelard's epistemology to a thoroughgoing and easily
assimilated rationalism built on a clean opposition between science
and ideology. As Thom as sees it, 'Science according to Bachelard (...)
cannot be reached or jud ged by ideological means, and no ideological
path is ever about to lead to science, for the latter cannot be so much as
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Bachelard Lacan and Scient i f ic Formal izat ion 3 2 7
suggest, at the least, that the process of separating the two is one of
coming up against the persistent
impurity
of the objects of possible
knowledge.
B e t we e n B a c h e la r d a n d L a c a n
In a man ner formative of Lacan s later fascination with mathematical
formalization, Bachelard insists on the sovereignty of mathematics
as the basis for rational knowledge. In this sense, mathematics, for
Bachelard, should be seen less as a medium for priorly constituted
scientific inquiries, and more as that which is
f o r m a t i v e
of the
scientific as such. As he writes in Th e F o r m a t io n o f th e cientific
Mind
M athem atism is not descriptive but formative. T he science of reality is
no longer content with the phenomenological
how:
the mathematical
wh y
is what it seeks. (17) Un de r the sway of developments in physics,
and perhaps especially quantum mechanics, where the reliability of
observation was ever more under question, Bachelard emphasized the
constitutivity of mathematics over and above its role in expressing or
quantifying that which is observed.
I d like to draw an initial, tentative parallel here with Lacan s
treatment of the signifier. If, even in the structural linguistics of
Saussure, the ultimate function of the signifier is to couple with a
signified, Lacan s innovation was to insist on the material isolation of
the signifier from sense, expressed most famously in the concept of
the letter .^^ In so far as the signifier has the capacity to uncouple
from its representative function, it assumes much the same role as
Bachelard imparts to the mathematical, forming what it is only
expected to describe. For Lacan, that is, the signifier constitutes the
immovable horizon of all human activity, assuming a quasi-ontological
status, and there is, particularly in the critique of the psychological
subject comm on to Bachelard s reflections on mathematics and Lacan s
reflections on the signifier, a shared concern for the structural
constitutivity of elements previously only considered reflective of
prior experience or observation. If Lacan will most obviously absorb
Bachelard s influence through his attem pt to formalize psychoanalytic
ideas through the creation of m athem es , this broader sense of
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subject as formulated by psychology and philosophical anthropology
a critique that, for Bachelard especially, emerges around the above
mentioned question of mathematics in its relation to scientifi
knowledge. In an especially suggestive passage, Bachelard writes:
It bas been repeated endlessly tbat matbematics is a language, a mere means o
expression. People bave grow n used to tb e idea tbat matbematics is a tool w ielde
by a self-conscious mind, mistress of a set of ideas endow ed with prematbematica
clarity. (...) Tbe new science sbuns naive images, bowever, and bas in a sens
become more homogenous: It stems entirely from matbematics.
{NSS
55)
Here, perhaps, one of the most important, if underlooked, potentia
sources for what would become Lacan's critique of the subject i
crystallized. But despite this obvious common ground, Lacan will also
insist on the limits of formalization, expressed most pungently in t
20'*^
Seminar with the claim that 'The real can only be inscribe
on the basis of an impasse of formalization.' At one and the same
time, mathematical formalization is essential for Lacan in rendering
the a-priority and non-empirical status of psychoanalytic concepts
Formalization, in turn, becomes an object of psychoanalytic interes
in its very failure. What indexes this failure for Lacan is the status
of mathematical formalization as a form of
writing
as interlaced wi
the logic of the signifier. As he notes, 'That is why I thought
could provide a model of it [the real as
impass]
using mathemat
formalization, inasmuch as it is the most advanced elaboration we have
by which to produce signifierness.'^^
Here, the gulf between the thinking of the relation between
mathematization, language and knowledge as undertaken by Bachelard
and Lacan becomes clear. For while Bachelard and Lacan both explore
the non-expressivity of mathematics, its inherent complication of any
mirror model of representation, they differ in the precise relationship
of that complication to the question of language more generally
For Lacan, the signifier, as the immovable horizon of the subjec
of all knowledge, is not simply a mystifying tool of intuition. Both
mathematical formalization and the signifier, rather, reveal for Lacan
the inherent, and indeed constitutive,
impasses
that de-totalize, ren
impure, both the seeming purity of mathematical number and the grip
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worked towards, and a state implying a symmetrical rectification in
the subjective. And yet, desubjectification, the total evacuation o
the subjective, is posited, in the very first sentence, as a seeming
condition of the instan t of objectification. At one and the same time
then, Bachelard seems to wish for the disappearance of the subjec
as a condition of the objective, even as the two poles are situated
in a position of mutual interdependence. We can ask of Bachelard
therefore, how the objective could persist if desubjectification were
ever fully achieved. Might this be a process without end, a perpetua
oscillation between poles that, given the comments above on the
impurity of the object of objectivity, are never finally and absolutely
distinguishable?
Bachelard, in sum, provides both a rationalist account of the
conceptual autonomy of science, and the beginnings of what I would
like to call a post-rationalist critique of the sustaining binaries o
rationalism itself It is necessary to read Bachelard against himself
to perform a symptomatic reading of his writing, in order to
extract this critical destabilization of rationalist approaches to the
justification of knowledge. It is precisely this second stream of thinking
that sets the stage for the attempt within the broader project o
French psychoanalytically informed structuralism to provide a more
theoreticaUy rigorous account of the signifier and the subject in
their disjunctive relation with the objective dom ain of scientific
know ledge. Nex t, I d like to focus on how aspects of Lacan s late
thinking significantly further, and yet subvert, the ambiguities o
Bachelard s epistemology as underlined above.
La can a nd the mp uri ty ofth Signifier
If Bachelard s partial recognition of the persistence, even constitutivity
of subjective error within the objective is und erm ined by his
reductive accounts of language and the subject, Lacan would transpose
the sense of non-contradictory and constitutive impurity into every
facet of his metapsychology. Through a reading of key passages
in his unpublished 24 seminar, I ho pe to dem onstrate here how
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Bachelard La can and Sdentifc Form alization 3 3 1
of scientific knowledge, Lacan recognizes the inevitabihty of the
interpntration of the vicissitudes of the signifier in the domain of
the objective, an interpntration that is not, in
itself
a threat to the
scientific as such.
W ha t links Lacan s reflections on the coincidence of the impasse
of the signifier and the centrality of formalization to Bachelard, and
what makes a comparison of their approaches so suggestive, is their
shared concern for the m athematical as the site of formalization. Before
drawing out the fuU implications of the comparison with Bachelard,
it is necessary to outline the ways that Lacan, in his very late work,
rethought the relationship between language, formalization and a
certain conception of writing.
Lacan s 24 seminar, one of his very last, builds upon the insights
of the previous few years, where the psychoanalytic concept of the
sym ptom as a knot of occluded meaning to be interpreted was
replaced by the sin thom e , as a material signifier lending consistency
to the subject. Early comments from the 1950s on the symptom
significantly prefigure the concept of the sinthome, emphasizing as
they do the particular problem that the symptom poses for the
production of sense. In 1957, Lacan wrote: The fact that symptoms are
symbolic is no t the whole story ( .. .) , their use s signifiers distinguishes
them from their natural meaning. * Their natural m ean ing refers to
what, elsewhere, I have called the signifier s being in-rela tion ,
s
being
in a situation of co-determination.^^ With the symptom, by contrast,
there is a certain disconnection of the signifier from its determining
others, leaving it in isolation, and thus somewhat askance from the
natural meaning that it is so often assumed it is the signifier s role
to facilitate. To recognize Lacan s insistence on the materiality of the
isolated signifier is also, crucially, to recognize his transcendence of the
influence of Saussure, whose account of the generation of linguistic
meaning relies on the idea of the signifier as only ever existing through
its relations; as Lacan com ments in the 24 seminar, what s annoying
is that all we ever do is involve linguistics. I passed that way, but I didn t
stop there. ^
In the second half of the seminar, given the title Towards a New
Signifier by Jacques-Alain Miller, this materiality of the signifier, its
disconnection from the relationality of sense, is in turn interrogated
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that, contrary to the usage that we currently make of it, would hav
an effect? It is crucial to note here the immanence of the signifie
especially in its dimension of meaninglessness, to the Real, as wha
Lacan elsewhere designates as the conjunction of contingency an
impossibility. Against any tendency to cleanly separate the Real from
the Symbolic, here the Real exists within the Symbolic as the signifie
in its isolated, non-sensical state. Whereas for Bachelard the subjectiv
persists within the objective as that aspect of the object bu rdened
with the empirical, the domain of contingency and non-sense not onl
persists within the objective domain of structure for Lacan but, rather
exists in a state of definitional dependence upon it. We can furnish thi
po int by underlining the con tinuum between this aspect of the signifie
and mathematics for Lacan; whereas Bachelard will posit mathematic
as a formative conceptual domain distin t from the impurity of t
subjective and the experien tial, for Lacan the signifier as it figure
in writing and the mathematical are fundamentally interlaced. As h
writes, O ne tries to reach language by writing. And writing doesn
give us anything but mathematics, where it s a matter of working b
formal logic, that is, by the extraction of certain number of thing
that we define as fundamental axioms. Thus we extract letters.
W hen read together with his attempt to articulate the impasse
of formalization with a new conception of writing as distinct from
speech, this quote emblematizes the singularity of Lacan s thinkin
on the formal linkage of formalization and language. Lacan, it seem
to me, offers here a more expansive treatment of the constitutiv
impurity of the objective/subjective distinction, bridged by a focu
on the signifier or lette r , than is present in latent form in Bachelard
reflections on the impurity of the production of objective knowledge
even as the latter s emphasis on impurity seems decisive in laying th
ground for Lacan s innovations. W he n Lacan writes of the extraction
of
certain num ber of things that we define as fundamental axioms
he raises psychoanalytic conceptuality to the level of the axiom in
mathematics, whereby any act of interpretation is grounded in
priori constructs that are particular to psychoanalysis as a domain o
knowledge. At the same time, Lacan associates this axiomatic characte
of psychoanalytic conceptuality w ith letters , or signifiers as they ar
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3 3 3
'new' signifier co-extensive witb a new take on tbe stakes of scientific
formalization. .
t\
Instead of subscribing to tbe either/or of formalization as the
key to any successful grounding of psycboanalytic claims, or the
alternative move away from tbe sciences in favor of a bermeneutic
or purely textual interpretivism, Lacan locates witbin the process of
formalization itself its own immanent, and constitutive, failure, indexed
to tbe signifier as its formative, and deformative, ground. In tbe
2 4*
Seminar, Lacan w^ill evoke formalization tbrougb tbe concept of
'metalanguage', or a language tbat might step outside the vicissitudes
of tbe signifier; Bacbelard's dream, we migbt say. Lacan writes: 'There
is an embryo of metalanguage, but it always goes off tbe skids for the
simple reason tbat all I know about language comes from a series of
actual
[incarnes]
languages.' Any attempt to surpass language in favour
of
pure conceptuality, tbat is to say, must contend witb tbe elements
tbat would make up tbat conceptuality, namely signifiers composing
'actual languages', tbe movements of wbicb resist any transcendental
purity.
Here, it is useful to briefly compare tbe argument made by Miller
in 'Suture'. Tbis article, published in tbe
ahiers pour l Ana lyse,
foregrounds the destabilizing yet formative insistence of tbe non-
identical subject, witb this seemingly
n o n -
ora subjective insistence on
the signifier in the Real as tbe point of impossibility in processes
of formalization. Miller argues, tbrougb a reading of Frege, tbat tbe
succession of self-identical numbers must rely on zero as its non-
identical foundation. For tbe very self-identity of numbers to be
meaningful, that is to say, tbey must refer back to a non-identical
element tbat acts to negatively determine tbem. Extrapolating from
tbis specific example. Miller writes:
In effect, wbat in Lacanian algebraiscalled tbe relation of the subjecttotbe field of
tbe Otber (as tbe locus of trutb) can be identified witb tbe relation wbicb tbe zero
entertains witb tbe identity of tbe unique as tbe support of trutb. Tbis relation,
in so far as it is matrical, cannot be integrated into any definition of objectivity
tbis being tbe doctrine of
Lacan.
Tbe engendering of tbe zero, from tbis not-
identical witb itself under wbicb no tbing of tbe world falls, illustrates tbis to
y o u .
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Paragraph
of tru tb ) , or tbe dom ain of tbe signifier. W bile it is certainly true
tbat, especially in tbe 11* Seminar, Lacan discusses tbe subject in tbe
terms of
n
occluded cause of tbe Symbohc, punc tuating tbe battery
of signifiers wbile forever fading before tb signifiers tbat will come
to represent it,^^ Lacan s remarks in tbe 24* Seminar seem to suggest a
displacement oftbis eccentric element onto tbe signifier
itself
wben
taken in its self-identical, abstracted, isolated guise as letter .
A little further on from bis comments on tbe possibility of a new
signifier apart from meaning, Lacan s remarks bear on tbis seem ing
replacement of tbe non-identical
subject
as constitutive cause and tbre
to formalization witb tbe
signifier
as it is abstracted from meaningfu
relation. Lacan writes, eUipticaUy, tbat
There s only o ne case in wh ich I risk work ing in the direction of metalanguage
The metalanguage in question consists of translating Unbewusst by une bvue.
absolutely n ot the same m ean ing. B ut it s a fact that as soon as he sleeps, man
blunders[une bvue]with all his might (...). What Freud said, and what I mean,
this there isn t, in any case, a waking u p. Science can only be invoked indirecdy
in this case. It s a waking up, but a difficult and a suspect one . O ne is only sure
that he is wo ken up if wh at is presented and represented doesn t have any m eaning
at all.
Leaving aside tbe elaborate wordplay tbat bad become a mainstay
of Lacan s seminar by tbis poin t, wbat is initially striking in tbis
passage is tbe reference to science as a waking u p , even if
difficult
and suspect one. At least superficially, Lacan is close to Bacbelard
bere, whose empbasis on tbe produc tion of scientific know ledge as a
process of unburdening tbe object of knowledge from its encrusted
mystifications bears a similar sense, perversely Heideggerian despite
tbe opposite intentions, of
waking up into trutbfulness. But Lacan
frames bis ow n account of a scientific waking up w itb a reference
to metalanguage, sometbing be bad previously deemed impossible. If
science, we infer, can be considered a metalanguage, tben it is only
balf possible, or ind irect , and subject ultimately to tbe fact tbat, as
Lacan suggests was already stated in Freud, tbere isn t (.. .) a waking
up ,
or tbere isn t any final clean break from tbe blunders of tbe
unconscious. Crucially, I think it s important to read Lacan bere not
as a standard bumanist sceptic, cautioning science in its ambitions
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U - . .. -^ -s-, v s . I
Bache lard Lacan and Sden t i f i c Formal i za t ion
3 3 5
words, it recognizes simultaneously its total reliance on the signifier
that which presents, and represents and the possibility, internal to
signification, of signifiers, those axiomatic letters referred to above,
that do not have a relation to meaning as it is normally conceived.
To reiterate, Lacan s com ments here retrieve an aspect of language
for formal conceptuality in the face of Bachelard s earlier dismissal of
language, a retrieval crucial to the objectivity that Miller above argues
must rest on the non-identical subject. Here, however, it is less the
non-identical subject that might ground this conceptuality, and more
the self-enclosed lette r , an element that is, by definition, a-subjective,
even as it forms the material ground upon which the subject of the
unconscious may cohere. One year prior to the 24* Seminar and as
mentioned briefly above, Lacan had developed his striking concept of
the sinthome , as the symptom abstracted from any regime of meaning
or analytic interpretation, persisting as a knot of sense-less jouissance
at the eccentric centre of the subject. But instead of reverting to a
Freudian energetics, and thus conceiving of
t is
binding agency of/in
the subject in terms of energy or libido, Lacan insists on the role of the
signifier as it exists in isolation, detached from the psychic architecture
of meaning, in providing the vehicle for this subjective consistency.
In other words, an element, the signifier, normally associated, as
in Bachelard above, with the confusions of meaningful, empirically
directed discourse, becomes the very abstract (even objectai) condition
for the persistence of the subject itself As Lacan puts it in his 23
Seminar, this consistency can only be understood as an ex-sistence
(...) which for its part belong to the Real which is its fundamental
character . ^
The concept of the R eal, at this stage in Lacan s teaching, had
become associated with the particular kind of formalization proper
to psychoanalytic conceptuality, a formalization that recognizes the
coincidence of Symbolic consistency and its immanent tendency
towards dissolution. Lacan s concep t of the sinthome places this
coincidence of formation and deformation, of creation and potential
destruction, at the centre of the subject. A subject s sinthom e , that
is to say, coheres as a result of the isolated signifier s self-consistency,
its abstraction from relation, but that very isolation is also a condition
of great precarity; in analytic practice, by consequence, displacing a
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3 3 6
Paragraph
fundamentally reintroducing thesubjectas a condition and consequenc
of formalization, in precisely the way that Bachelard, in his emphasis
on the desubjectification proper to scientific conceptuality, rejects.
In a theoretical move redolent of the topological complexity
that defined his seminar at the time, Lacan loops the formal
elements of psychoanalytic conceptuality, the axiomatic letters so
closely related to the matheme, back into the concept of the
subject, such that the very clean separation of the subject from
the formal movement of conceptual elements, a separation that
underlies Bachelard s epistemology, is problem atized. Miller s attem pt
to ground logical consistency on the non-identity of the subject, while
suggestive, can be supplemented by reference to this late attempt
by Lacan to theorize a formally sense-less signifier; in so doing,
Lacan recognized the self-identical, formal elements present in the
very subject
itself
thus significantly com plicating Miller s dualistic
attempt to think the reliance of self-identity on the non-identical,
and extending the productive ambiguities in Bachelard s theorization
of the impurities of the scientific object. When read critically
together, Bachelard and Lacan, and the post-Lacanian extension of
psychoanalytic ideas represented by Miller, provide an internally
heterogeneous but nonetheless related attempt to undermine clean
distinctions between formalized knowledge and its hidden subject. It
is, nonetheless, their crucial differences, especially around the relative
status of language, that pose anew the determining problems of French
structuralism.
NOT E S
1 It was the jou rna l
ahiers pourl Analyse,
published in Paris between 1966 a
1969,
that hosted much of the most experimental writing at the intersection
between psychoanalytic theory and philosophy of science, including early
wo rk by Alain Badiou, Jacques-Alain Miller, Jean-C laude MOner and others.
See http://cahiers.king ston .ac.uk for the comp lete text of the jou rna l in
French.
2 Gaston Bachelard,
The
Poetics
of
Space[1957], translated by M aria Jola
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1994) and
On
Poetic Imagination andReverie transla
7/23/2019 Eyers - Lacan Bachelard and Formalization
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Bachelard
Lacan andScientific Formalization
337
5 Gaston Bachelard,
TheFormation ofthe Sdentijk Mind : A Contribution to a
Psychoanalysis of Objective Knowledge
(1938), translated by Mary McAUester
Jones (Manchester, Clinamen, 2002), 210. Further page references are
includ ed in the tex t, nd foUow the abb reviation
FSM.
6 Tiles,Bachelard 53 .
7 Bachelard quoted in Do m inqu e Lecourt,Marxism andEpistemology: Bachelard
Canguilhem and Foucault translated by Ben Brewster (London: New Left
Books, 1975), 52.
8 Lecourt,
Marxism
andEpistemology.
9 Bachelard qu oted in Leco urt, Marxism and Epistemology, 52.
10 Gaston Bachelard,
The New
Scientific
Spirit
translated by Arthur Goldhammer
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 3. Further page references are included in the
text, and follow the abbreviation
NSS.
11 Paul Thom as, Marxism andScientific Socialism: From Engels to lthusser (New
York: Routledge, 2008), 117.
12 Jacques Lacan, T he Instance of the Letter in the Uncon scious, or Reaso n
Since Freud in crits, translated by Bruc e Fink (Ne w York: W. W N or to n,
2006), 4 1 2 - 4 1 .
13 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XX: Encore, edited by
Jacques-Alain M iller, translated by Russell G rigg (N ew York: W. W. N or to n,
1998), 93 .
14 Lacan, Psychoanalysis and its Teach ing in crits, 36483.
15 See my Psychoanalytic Structuralism and the Cahiers pour l Analyse in
Angelaki :Journal of theTheoreticalH umanities, forthcoming 2012.
16 Jacques Lacan, session of 7May 1977, in Seminar 24:
L insu
que sait de
I une-
bvue, s aile
mourre, edited by Jacques-A lain M iller, unofficial translation by
Dan Collins for personal use.
17 Jacques-A lain M iller, Su ture: Elem ents of the Logic of the Signifier [1966]
in
The Symptom : Online Journal for
Lacan.
Com(Winter 2 007).
18 Jacques Lacan, TheSeminar ofJacques Lacan Book XI: The FourFundamental
Concepts of Psychoanalysis, edited by Jacques-A lain M iller, translated by Alan
Sheridan (New York: W. W. No rton , 1998), 53 -6 7.
19 Lacan, session of 9 D ecem ber 1975, Seminar 23:Joyceand the Sinthome,
unofficial translation by Cormac Gallagher.
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