Copject, Joan. Supposing the Subject. 1994. New York: Verso, 1996. Print.
We surrender our access to jouissance upon entering language.
It is the impasses of language that create the experience of the inexperiencable, the unsayable … Each side of the table describes a different impasse by means of which this question of the outside of language is raised, a different manner of revealing the essential powerlessness of speech.
But while the phallic function produces on each side a failure, it does not produce a symmetry between the sides (28).
What is a mathematical antinomy? How would we describe the conflict that defines it? (29)
Reason aims at the unconditional whole, THE ABSOLUTE OF ALL PHENOMENA. This attempt produces two conflicting propositions regarding the nature of this all —
- a thesis: the world has a beginning in time and is limited in space
- an antithesis: the world has no beginning and no limits in space, but is, in relation both to time and space, infinite.
🙂 Kant argues that both of these can prove the falsity of the other, but have a hard time proving their own truth value. He then says, rather than having to decide between these two alternatives we need not despair, because we do NOT have to choose either one because THEY ARE BOTH FALSE.
- bodies smell good
- bodies smell bad
Both are false, because they don’t take into consideration a third possibility: bodies are odourless.
“Are you still beating your wife” Whether one answers ‘yes’ or ‘no’, it is implied in the very question that one beat one’s wife in the past.
The form of the question, while seeming to allow the addressee to supply any answer he chooses, in fact allows him only to choose among contraries. It does not allow him to negate the accusation implicit in the question.
Kant avoids the skeptical impasse by refusing to answer the question ‘Is the world finite or infinite?’ and by negating instead the assumption implicit in the question: the world is. (30)
🙂 The assumption that the world exists is ill founded.
When [Lacan] says “the woman is not-all”, he demands that we read this statement as an INDEFINITE JUDGEMENT.
- a thesis: the world has a beginning in time and is limited in space
There is no phenomenon that is not an object of possible experience (or not subject to the rule of regress).
- an antithesis: the world has no beginning and no limits in space, but is, in relation both to time and space, infinite.
Our acknowledgment of the absence of a limit to the set of phenomena does not oblige us to maintain the antithetical position — that they are INFINITE — rather, it obliges us to recognize the basic FINITUDE of all phenomena, the fact that they are inescapably subject to conditions of time and space and must therefore be encountered one by one, indefinitely, without the possibility of reaching an end, a point where all phenomena would be known. (31)
[According to Kant] our reason is limited because the procedures of our knowledge have no term, no limit. What limits reason is a lack of limit.