One of the great merits of Milner’s reading of Lacan is not only the fact that he places Lacan within the materialist tradition in philosophy, but that, by bringing Lacan into relation to Wittgenstein, he gets us to pay attention to a topic that any materialist project now should attempt to clarify: the relation between thinking and being. It is perhaps obvious why materialisms avoid this topic, since it seems to be the very stuff of idealism.
A common point shared by most contemporary materialisms is their degradation of the status of thinking, which is usually considered to be epiphenomenal and non-real, reducible to and constituted by brain activity. Why bother accounting for its status? Therefore, many contemporary philosophical materialisms do not at all require that thinking, or anything like it, be considered a part of the real.
The real, for these materialisms, can well be considered silent, and its silence is an unproblematic one — all the more reason why the “showing” of the real would be better than any possible “speaking” about it, which will always be off the mark. The real’s silence does not cause any difficulties for the sciences that study it, since these sciences circumvent ordinary human language and linguistic meaning in the first place, precisely by relying on a mathematization of nature.
It is not ordinary human language that hits the real at all, but a more formalized “language” that does so. None of this stops natural scientists from trying to convey in ordinary language
something about their discoveries sometimes but we know that, when they do this, their writing approximates the status of poetry, as Merleau-Ponty pointed out, and that such written texts are not really the conveyors of scientific knowledge anyway.
Such knowledge is in the formulas, the math (if it can be said to “be” anywhere), and not in the ordinary language descriptions of those formulas, which are always metaphorical.
Whatever is going on at the atomic or sub-atomic constitutive level of nature defies our ability to think, imagine, or intuit. Furthermore, our ability to manipulate the constitutive level of nature does not require that we think anything particularly clearly about it either. It simply requires a technical know-how, based on proper formalizations; not on the creation of correct linguistic expressions about it, and not on having proper intuitions about it either.
The sciences show us a way, then, in which knowledge is transmitted through mathemes, and what is said about them is basically superfluous.
According to Milner’s reading, Lacan embraces the Borromean knots because they are “saying” even less about the real than the mathemes do, and are therefore respecting even more ably what is supposed to be an inviolable barrier between the shown and the spoken. For that reason, Lacan’s is a failed or unachieved materialism: in fact, less a materialism than a mysticism.