Category: dia mat

Zupancic, Alenka. “The Fifth Condition.” in Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy. Ed. Peter Hallward, New York: Continuum. 2004. 191-201.

Most modern philosophers are ready to subscribe (and thus to abandon) ‘their’ philosophy to one of its conditions. One could say that in this case they are, strictly

speaking, no longer philosophers, but thinkers.

four generic procedures are being systematically replaced by other names which aim at effacing the procedures of truth involved in them: culture instead of art, technique instead of science, management instead of politics, sexuality instead of love.

One could add to this list: thinkers instead of philosophers. Except that thinkers, in the above-defined sense, are precisely those who usually fight against such re-nominations, especially those concerning the generic procedures to which they themselves subscribe their thought.

In this sense ‘scientific thinkers’ would be the last to fail to distinguish between science and technology, ‘poetic thinkers’ the last to confuse culture and art, engaged ‘political thinkers’ the last to abandon the name politics in favour of management . . . On the other hand, more than a few of those who, in recent decades, were happy to be called ‘philosophers’ have indeed embraced these re-nominations as signs of modernity, progress and the ongoing secularization of society.

This is probably why Badiou maintains, more or less explicitly, that modern anti-philosophy (and its ‘thinkers’) have been for quite some time the only guardians of the philosophical flame, so to speak. If philosophy did not die, but has continued to live in the element of its own suspension, this is largely the merit of anti-philosophy, i.e. of thinkers. 194

The relation of philosophy to its conditions is not simply that of certain conditions that have to be satisfied in order for philosophy to be possible. Although this is also true to a certain extent, the main accent of Badiou’s proposal is elsewhere: it is the thinking within (the dimension of truth produced by) its conditions that constitutes the condition of philosophy. Philosophy is work that takes place at a distance from its conditions, yet within the realm of these conditions. 194

One way of understanding more precisely the conceptual stakes of this ‘fifth condition’ leads to an interesting question that we have so far left unanswered. We saw that Badiou himself maintains that something did happen in the nineteenth century, ‘just after Hegel’ (MP49), something that changed the course (as well as the ‘nature’) of philosophy.  But what? Could one try to determine what exactly happened? Badiou does not address this question directly. He often hints, however, that it has to do with a destitution of the One, i.e. with the replacement of the ‘authority of the One’ with the ‘authority of the multiple’.

He also hints that (the development of) capitalism had an important role in this: ‘It is obviously the only thing we can and must welcome within Capital: it exposes the pure multiple as the foundation of presentation; it denounces every effect of One as a simple, precarious configuration; it dismisses the symbolic representations in which the bond [lien] found a semblance of being’ (MP37/56).

One could say that what happened in the nineteenth century is that a slow but massive shift took place from one dominant social bond to another. Yet what is at stake in this shift of the social bond is not simply the alternative between or the replacement of One with multiple. 194-5

In order to appreciate this properly it is important to determine what exactly the expression ‘authority of the One’ refers to. There is, first of all, an important difference between what Badiou calls the ‘authority of the One’ and what he calls the ‘count for one’.

The latter is simply the condition of any thinkable situation or thing: whereas the purely multiple is inconsistent and is a pure ‘excess beyond itself’, all consistent thought supposes a structure, a counting-for-one, such that every presented or presentable multiple is consistent. Every presentable multiple is presented, in other words, precisely as a set or consistent being-together of a certain collection of elements.

In this respect, the counting-for-one (and with it the notion of ‘one’) is perfectly compatible with the notion of pure multiplicity. However, excess beyond itself, which is the very being of Being as purely multiple, also takes place on the level of what is already counted for one, i.e. on the level of presentation, within a set, or within what Badiou calls a ‘situation’ (which is just another word for ‘set’): it takes place as the excess of the parts of a given multiple or set over its elements: if we have a multiple of, say, five elements, the possible combination of these elements – i.e. the number of the ‘parts’ – exceeds by far the number of elements (more precisely, this number amounts to two to the power of five).

This excess, that Badiou also calls l’excès errant, a ‘wandering excess’, is one of the crucial notions of his ontology, for he holds ‘the wandering [errance] of the excess to be the real of being’ (MP61/81).

What he calls the ‘state’ of a situation (playing on the double meaning of this word) involves the operation whereby this excess itself is counted-for-one, and thus fixed (or made consistent). The count-for-one itself, which takes place on the level of presentation, is thus counted-for-one. This is what Badiou also calls representation, or meta-structure.  195

Now, what is involved in the expression the ‘authority of the One’ is something quite different than the count-for-one which makes any multiplicity presentable or intelligible, as well as something other than a ‘state’.   Badiou usually employs the statement ‘the One is not’ as synonymous with ‘God is not’, or else as directly synonymous with the ‘death of God’. Yet at the same time he also identifies this statement with what is involved in his own fundamental ontological stance:

a multiple is always a multiple of multiples (of multiples, of multiples . . .),

and the eventual ‘stopping point’ can in no way be a  ‘one’ but only a void.

However, I would maintain that the ‘One is not’ (in the sense of ‘God is not’) cannot be situated on the same level as the positing of a void as ‘the stuff that being is made of’.   The reason for this is that – as Badiou himself points out – ‘God is dead’ is not an ontological statement but a statement that belongs to an evental horizon or, more precisely, to its closure.

In other words, I would suggest that we take the formulation ‘authority of the One’ to refer to a structurally as well as historically determinable social bond, and not as primarily referring to a conceptual choice between One and multiple.

The ‘authority of the One’ is a social bond which roughly corresponds to what Lacan conceptualized as the discourse of the Master. The Master’s discourse is not exactly a ‘state’ in Badiou’s sense. In it, the wandering excess is fixed, not by being counted as one, but by being subjected and attached, as Other, to the agency of the One.

The authority of the One is not based upon a totalization of a multiple, it is not a ‘forcing’ of the multiple by the One. It is based upon relating the One and Other in the element of their pure disjunction.

The Master’s discourse functioned so well and so long because it succeeded in transforming the ‘weakest’ point of a given multiple (the point of its very inconsistency) into the strongest lever, as well as the source, of its own power.

What was entirely mobilized or absorbed in the One was not the colourful multiplicity of Being, but the point of its potential generic power: its loose end, the point on account of which no multiplicity can be intrinsically ‘counted as One’.

The important thing to remember in relation to the Master’s discourse (or the authority of the One) is that the agent of this social bond is not the excessive multiplicity counted-for-one, it is not a unified totality of the excessive multiplicity, but an (empty) signifier of its impossible totalization.

In other words, the way multiplicity is attached (and fixed) to the One is that the One gives body to, or incarnates, the constitutive void of the multiple. This is how the master signifier, as agent of this social bond, fixates the excess, assigns it its place and keeps it there.

 

What happens with the destitution of the authority of the One is that the bond between the One and multiple, the bond that was there in their very disjunction, dissolves. The result is that the excess, as the very real of Being, emerges as a free-floating element and appears in a form of a ‘passionate
detachment’.

For what happens is not that excess loses its signifier or representation (since it never really had one), what it loses is its attachment to the One. One could say that a spectre of excess starts haunting the society, in its different spheres; and its ‘spectral’ form is in no way insignificant.

The Master’s discourse (or, if one prefers, the authority of the One) is a social bond in which this excessive element is, if one may say so, in the ‘ideal’ place, in the service of the hegemonic power of the One, which reigns by assumingthe very excessiveness of excess.

What happens with the destitution of this bond is, so to speak, that the ghost of excess escapes from the bottle.

This process could be said to have started with the French Revolution, to have reached its full extent in the nineteenth century, and to have continued through a part of the twentieth century.

The nineteenth century in particular was deeply haunted by this excessive element in all possible forms, from the conceptual to the phantasmagoric.

Perhaps no single phrase can capture, so to speak, the spirit of the thought of this period (regardless of different schools and orientations) better than this:there is something rotten in the State of Things.
Some thinkers of the time attributed this rot to the still-remaining pockets of the authority of the One,
believing that redemption would come only with their definitive elimination.

Others, on the contrary, saw the origin of discontent in the very destitution of the authority of the One.

But we can say, without oversimplifying things, that virtually all serious thinkers sought to think at a maximal proximity to, if not in a direct confrontation with, this excess. A ‘tarrying with the excess’ thus became the most prominent figure of thought. Utopias, designed to eliminate social and other injustice, mostly proposed to achieve this by eliminating this very excess. To a certain extent, even Marx was tempted by the possibility of eliminating, once and for all, the excessive, disharmonious element of society – the element in which he himself recognized its truth, its real and its symptom.

As for Nietzsche, one could say that a ‘tarrying with the excess’ constituted the very core of his writings, although he certainly did not seek to eliminate it. In his recent book,On the Psychotheology of Everyday life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig, Eric Santner develops a reading of these two authors around the central notion of a ‘constitutive ‘‘too muchness’’ ’

which corresponds perfectly to the notion of ‘wandering excess’. In literature, the explosion of a ‘wandering excess’ is even more directly perceptible: the undead dead, spectral, unplaceable
figures and ‘Things’, fromFrankensteintoDracula, passing through all kinds of phenomena that Freud treated under the title ofDas Unheumliche, the uncanny. Not to mention that one of the most popular serials of the middle of the nineteenth century was Eugène Sue’s The Wandering Jew (Le Juif errant– another name forl’exce`s errant?).

And at the same time this (wandering) excess was increasingly becoming recognized as, precisely, the real of being, and also as the locus if its truth. If, for modern (anti-)philosophy, Hegel became one of the most criticized (if not directly loathed) of philosophers it is precisely since it seems that, in his
speculative edifice, everything adds up: there are no loose ends, no scars (‘the wounds of the spirit heal without scars’), no cracks. In short: no wandering excess.

Philosophy in general did not escape this mocking contempt: there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in (our) philosophy. Or, in another version of this objection: instead of disclosing it, philosophy conceals the real of being, its cracks and its critical points.

The post-Hegelian philosophy (or, if one prefers, anti-philosophy) started off with this fundamental claim: symbolic representations which were traditionally considered as access to the truth and to the real of Being in fact alienate us from Being and deform it (or our perception of it). And classical philosophy (or ‘metaphysics’) was suddenly recognized as the queen of this representative
misrepresentation.

Indeed, if one were to name one central issue that distinguishes the rise of modern thought it is perhaps none other than precisely the issue of representation (and the question of the One and/or Multiple is part of this issue), its profound interrogation, and the whole consequent turn against (the logic of) representation. This is perhaps most perceptible in (modern) art, which frontally attacked the notion of art as representation. Gérard Wajcman was right when he defined the central problem of modern art as follows: ‘How to find access to the world in some other way than through image? How to aim at the world, at the real, without at the same time interposing the screen of repre-sentation?’

In politics, this also was a central issue: who represents people and how they can be properly represented? Why are some represented and some not? And what if the very idea of representation is the source of society’s evils and its alienation? The realm of politics is especially interesting in this respect since the introduction of a ‘representative’ system coincided with the very questioning of its pertinence. Something similar took place in respect to the generic procedure of love: a simultaneous demand that love be properly represented by the institution of marriage (the new imperative that one should marry out of love), and a massive ‘observation’ that this is in fact impossible, i.e. that marriage can never truly represent the real of love.

It was this general interrogation of representation and, to put it simply, the conviction that the real of being escapes representation (or else is falsified, distorted by it), which drew philosophy towards embracing the immediacy of one or another of its conditions. Paradoxically, Badiou emphatically shares this view of representation, although he is as emphatic in rejecting the consequences
that philosophy drew from it.

Philosophy embraced the immediacy of its conditions since this immediacy seemed to be the only bond remaining between thought and being. It is not so much that philosophy was seized by a passion for a direct access to the production of truths (as I suggested earlier) as it is that this direct access seemed to remain the only possible bond between philosophy and the ontological layer of its conditions. The either/or of modern (anti-)philosophy sprang from what appeared as the very impossibility of a position that could satisfy Badiou’s ‘fifth condition’ (again, that philosophy has to pull itself away from the immediate grip of its conditions, while nevertheless remaining under these conditions).

Before, the scene for such composing of truths was provided by the faith in representation. I use the word ‘faith’ deliberately, since the correlation of an object and its representation presupposed an Other vouching for this correlation and its unchangeableness.

This Other (or, perhaps better, this other One), by fixingthe relationship between, for instance, words and things, corresponds to what Badiou calls representation as meta-structure. For this is exactly one of the ways we could resume Badiou’s distinction between presentation and representation: presentation involves naming the things (or ‘elements’), whereas representation involves fixing the relationship between things (or elements) and ‘their’ names.

For Badiou, representation also constitutes the crucial operation of the institution of a state, and as such he views it as repudiation of a truth procedure.

Hence Badiou’s principled position against representation and the state – a position he adopts while remaining, at the time, well aware of the difficulty of simply putting an end to all representation (or all state). Badiou acknowledges that the state is co-original to any situation, which is to say that ‘there is always both presentation and representation’ (EE110).

The end of representation and the ‘universality of simple presentation’ (an egalitarian counting-for-one) remains a goal that bears some resemblance to the Kantian notion of a ‘regulative idea’, i.e. an idea that cannot be realized but in view of which one orientates one’s engagement in reality.

This question of presentation and representation (and their distinction) is indeed a very difficult one, and constitutes a perhaps not yet entirely worked-out aspect of Badiou’s conceptual edifice.

At the same time, it is undoubtedly one of its central aspects. If nothing else, it is essential for the very possibility of philosophy (its ‘fifth condition’), for it seems that philosophy as composition and configuration of truths (produced elsewhere) cannot exactly be said to be a ‘simple presentation’.
More: could one not say that what comes the closest to philosophy as simple presentation is
precisely what Badiou calls modern anti-philosophy?

Philosophy as presentation is nothing other than philosophy abandoning itself to its conditions, philosophy as an immediate part of procedure(s) of truth (or else as a sophistic game of endlessly surfing on the waves of the ‘wandering excess’).

So are we then supposed instead to embrace representation as the meta-structure which alone could guarantee a space or scene for philosophy proper? Of course not; this would be falling back to the essentially premodern (or pre-Hegelian) position.

The answer – which I will only try to sketch or roughly indicate here – rather lies in acknowledging something that Badiou strangely refuses to acknowledge or at least to adopt. Something that happened in linguistics and gained a definite form in psychoanalysis (more precisely, in the Lacanian ‘use’ of linguistics). Something that can in no way be dismissed as yet another expression of the ‘linguistic turn’ and even less as a ‘poetic turn’. Something that is as important for contemporary philosophy as is Cantor’s secularization of the infinite: an entirely new conception of representation.
A conception which is not that of representation as meta-structure, and does not involve the idea of the signifier (or ‘name’) representing an object for the subject. A conception which strikingly meets Badiou’s own demand of ‘destitution of the category of object’ while preserving the category of the subject (cf.MP72–3/91–2). A conception that finds its most concise formulation in Lacan’s statement: ‘a signifier represents a subject for another signifier’.

This was a major breakthrough of contemporary thought, a breakthrough that could in fact provide philosophy with its ‘fifth condition’, i.e. its own distinctive conceptual space.

For in this conception, representation is not a ‘presentation of presentation’ or the state of a situation but rather a ‘presentation within presentation’ or a state within a situation.

In this conception, representation is itself infinite and constitutively not-all (or non-conclusive), it represents no object and does not prevent a continuous un-relating of its own terms (which is how Badiou defines the mechanism of truth).

Here, representation as such is a wandering excess over itself; representation is the infinite tarrying with the excess that springs not simply from what is or is not represented (its ‘object’), but from this act of representation itself, from its own inherent ‘crack’ or inconsistency.

The Real is not something outside or beyond representation, but is the very crack of representation.

Page 200

The problem of representation as meta-structure, and the consequent imperative to restrain oneself from representation or to pull oneself away from the ‘state’, is something that belongs to a different ontology than the ontology of the purely multiple, of infinity and of contingency.

It could only concern a universe in which the evental statement ‘God is dead’ for whatever reason does not hold true. In an infinite contingent universe (or ‘situation’), by contrast, there is no necessity for the ‘counting of the count itself’ to be situated on a meta-level.

It can very well be situated on the same level as the counting-for-one itself, only separated from it by an irreducible interval (and it is this interval that Lacan calls the Real).

Moreover, this is precisely what makesa situation ‘infinite’. What makes it infinite is not the exclusion of any operation of representation (which would ‘want’ to count it for one and thus to close it upon itself) but its inclusion.

What makes any particular ‘presentation’ infinite is precisely that it already includes representation.

This conception also allows for an effect of unification (or fixation) taking place, yet a different one from what Badiou calls ‘state’. Lacan links it to his notion of the ‘quilting point’ (point de capiton).

This unification of a (potentially) infinite set is not the same as in the case of meta-structure. S1as ‘point de capiton’ is not a meta-signifier in relation to S2, to the virtually infinite battery of signifiers and their combinations that Lacan also calls ‘knowledge’.

S1 quilts this set not by counting the count itself, but by ‘presenting’ the very impossibility of an immediate coincidence of the two counts, i.e. by presenting the very gap between them.

In other words, S1is the signifier of the impossibility of the two (counting and counting the count itself) to be One.

It is the signifier of the very gap or interval or void that separates them in any process of representation: a void that is precisely the cause of the infinite layering of repre-sentation.

For Lacan, the Real of being is this void or interval or gap, this very non-coincidence, whereas the wandering excess is already its result.

S1presents this void by naming it, it does not represent it.

Lacan’s S1, the (in)famous ‘master signifier’ or ‘phallic signifier’ is, paradoxically, the only way to write that ‘the One is not’ and that what ‘is’ is the void that constitutes the original disjunction in the midst of every count-for-one.

The count-for-one is always already two. S1is the matheme of what one can describe as ‘the One is not’.

It writes that ‘the One is not’ by presenting the very thing that prevents it from being One.

This is what S1 says: the One is not; yet what is is not a pure multiple, but two.

This is perhaps Lacan’s crucial insight: if there is something on which one could lean in order to leave the ‘ontology of the One’ behind, this something is not simply the multiple, but a Two.

This, of course, is directly related to the point in which Badiou recognizes a major contribution of psychoanalysis to the conditions of philosophy: psychoanalysis is the first (consistent) thought of the generic procedure of love.

Which is to say that it is the first thinkable articulation of ‘a Two that would neither be counted for one nor would it be the sum of one + one.

A Two that would be counted for two in an immanent way (. . .), where Two is neither a fusion nor a
sum; and where Two is thus in excess over that what constitutes it, without there being a Third [term] to join it.’

Page 201

This singular notion of the Two is very much related to the question of representation, i.e. of the possibility for the ‘counting the count itself’ to be situated on the same level as the count (and not on a meta-level), yet dislocated in relation to it.

For this is precisely what it implies to think a ‘Two that would be counted for two in an immanent way’.

Badiou was not only the first philosopher explicitly to conceptualize this singular notion of the Two in philosophy, he also reminded psychoanalysis of the production of this truth that it sometimes tends to forget.

By conceptualizing it within philosophy, i.e. within the space of a ‘general compossibility’ of truths, he gave contemporary philosophy one of its most precious concepts which, although it comes from a singular generic procedure, has its universal value and is in no way limited to that procedure.

I would also add that with this concept, Badiou addresses the question of representation from a new
and different angle, an angle which avoids the difficulties sketched out above and which, at the same time, directly concerns the conditions of philosophy.

If philosophy is to take place within the space of the infinite process of truth without itself being a process of truth, if it is to be situated on the same level as generic procedures yet at a certain distance from them (i.e. dislocated in relation to them), then it has to rely precisely on such an ‘immanent count-for-two’ as is at work in a Badiouian conception of the Two.

This would imply, of course, that one of the four conditions of philosophy (love, with its immanent count-for-two) is also its ‘fifth condition’, the condition that defines the very relationship of philosophy with its conditions and keeps it from merging with them, as well as from appearing as their independent sum.

As a thought that operates within the field of four generic procedures of truth, without simply merging with this field and becoming indistinguishable from it, philosophy presupposes ascène du Deux, a ‘stage/scene of the Two’.

In other words, in the configuration of conditions of philosophy, one of its conditions – the immanent count-for-two, which Badiou recognizes in the figure of love – has itself to be counted-for-two.

Pluth, Ed. An Adventure in the Order of Things: Jean-Claude Milner on lalangue and Lacan’s Incomplete Materialism

Lalangue, Milner argues, is not unstructured and without reason. It is structured and, according to Milner in L’amour de la langue, its structure marks the presence of a kind of “knowledge in the real.” This is what “dooms” language “to equivocity” (L’amour22). The structure or “reason” intrinsic to lalangue can even be considered extra-linguistic since it involves things like resemblances among sounds, or, in writing, the physical arrangement of letters. It is “extra-linguistic,” therefore, on the condition that language is thought of along the lines of Saussurean linguistic structure.  Milner writes that “homophonies, homosemies, palindromes, anagrams, tropes, and all the imaginable figures of association” are the effects of lalangue, and are due to nothing other than the materiality or physicality of languages, and not to that in languages which is involved in the creation of meanings — such as relations and differences among signs (L’amour104). On Milner’s reading, lalangue is, therefore, also a term for what it is of language that escapes and exceeds formalization, and it therefore presents a challenge to the science of linguistics.

The way back to dialectical materialism?

Can a materialism that would not be eliminative or reductionist, but instead dialec-tical (because it posits a real transformation of being by something like thinking), and, in turn, a real influence on thought from being (if not in the domain of the hard sciences then in that of the old “human” sciences) … can such a project do anything with the idea of a “knowledge in the real,” as odd as this sounds, and as outré as such a thing would be for most types of materialism? If Hegelian idealism is to be avoided — if there is to be no super-subject who knows, no spirit or mind who is driving things—and yet thinking and being are to be aligned in a way that is more vig-orous than what occurs in the natural sciences or in mathematics itself, should this relation be put in such a way that there can be said to be a “knowledge in the real”?

The “knowledge in the real” allegedly contained in lalangue, according to Milner’s reading in L’amour de la langue, involved an ordered appearance of phonemes; an appearance that is not guided according to the dictates of sense and classical Saussurean differential relations among signs, and thus also not in accordance with a language-user’s intent, or with what a language-user wants to say. This order is guided simply by resemblances among sounds, by homophonies, or by other physical factors. Structuralist linguistics did much to teach us that a speaker says more (or less) than what she wants to say: a linguistic system generates a surplus of meaning. There is, in language use, a production of meaning that occurs in indifference to anything like the conscious intent of a speaker. This perspective affects how the relation between thinking and language should be conceived, and it helps to refute the idea that there is a clearly articulated thought that precedes its expression in language.

Rather, it is the case that being put into a form of expression gives a thought or an intention a clarity it did not previously have. This is why we continue to work with and alter the form of expression, and is why we feel that our thoughts have sometimes not been adequately expressed: not because the form of expression (language) fails to portray them accurately, but because what is expressed is itself, if not inexhaustible, then at least vague enough and indeterminate enough to allow for repeated and multiple expressions. Here, linguistic form not only forms content (meaning) but indeed makes (much of) it.

It is no wonder then that structuralist approaches to language were of interest to psychoanalysis. Lalangue shows us instead a kind of stupidity proper to language, something that concerns not the relation between thinking and language, and not the generation of unintended meanings, but rather a level of no meaning at all. A zombie-like level of language, the level of language’s materiality itself, the phoneme or grapheme; a level responsible for homophonic insistences (one sound influencing the sounds that appear elsewhere), resemblances, etc., which insist within or alongside what is meant, running parallel to what is said. As we have seen, Milner at one point  wanted to call the structure that guides such articulations in lalangue a “knowledge in the real” (as opposed to the knowledge in/of the symbolic that classical linguistic structure would be). In L’Œuvre clairehe reconsiders this, because what goes on in the real no longer deserves the name of thinking. I will go over his case for this in a moment.

What Milner overlooks, however, is the fact that the dimension of lalangue can, of course, serve as a basis for the development of potential linguistic content, and for thinking. But here it is not a matter of there being, first, a relatively undetermined, vague thought that is the seed for continuing formation, precision, in words, as is the case for the relation between language and thinking.

In lalangue we see how the matter of language itself can inspire further adventures in thought. If Saussure is right about Saturnian poetry, we would have an entire genre based on this dimension. But, as I will explain in a moment, something as simple as punning shows us the same thing. And beyond punning, everyday language use contains aspects of the same thing. What I am getting at, then, is the idea that lalangue is a positive factor in, and a genuine contributor to, the creation of thought. Lalangue shows us how an adventure at the level of things can feed an adventure at the level of thought—exactly the sort of relation between thinking and being that a dialectical materialism is about.

What is going on in lalangue can be described as a zombie-like non-thinking. But punning is something else, and the punning during the silent seminars is like a folding in of lalangue into sense, an exploitation of it for sense, for thinking . . . or a  forcing of sense from lalangue, such that any purity in the domain of the real is not respected at all. (And isn’t this one of the lessons of the knots anyway — the interweaving of all three orders, the abolition of the distinctness of any one of them from the others?)

We are back to what was always Lacan’s violation of Wittgenstein’s prohibition. The purity of the ineffable is rejected. Milner might take this assertion to be, in fact, a negative conclusion about theory and language — because it would seem to sanction saying whatever, presumably. Yet Milner’s interpretation of lalangue in Lacanian theory points to just what a philosophical materialism needs.

Lalangue shows us a de-individualized “knowledge in the real,” and a link between thinking and being that is more vigorous than what Quentin Meillassoux’s interesting and important project gives us.

One needs to look outside the hard sciences to find this, to what used to be called the “human sciences.” Not only linguistics, but economics and, of course, psychoanalysis need to be considered by such a project as well, as cases in which an interaction between thinking and being indeed takes place.

 

A table from Alain Badiou’s Theory of the Subject is very helpful for gaining clar-ity on the nature of this debate and where I wish to take it—toward a position that I would describe as some variant of dialectical materialism. [Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject, trans. Bruno Bosteels (London: Continuum, 2009) 117.]

Nor is it the point of a dialectical materialism to claim that being and thinking are really one (à la Parmenides). Rather, what is desired is a theory in which the actual reciprocity and strong mutual influence between thinking and being, theory and practice, at least in some domains of human life, is accounted for; a theory in which there is no absolute barrier between thinking and being (and also not between saying and showing) that would require us to adopt silence as the most appropriate philosophical attitude (and therefore devaluing thought itself).

As Georg Lukàcs put it in History and Class Consciousness, when contrasting dialectics to what he called metaphysics, “in all metaphysics the object remains untouched and unaltered so that thought remains contemplative and fails to become practical; while for the dialectical method the central problem is to change reality.” Obviously, the merely contemplative status that thinking must have in mathematics is one of the things that concerns me about Meillassoux’s attempt to refute correlationism. Much better, it seems to me, is to reconsider what a dialectical materialism can do.

In response to my points here, Meillassoux may be able to assert that mathematics does have effects on being too. The natural sciences have assisted, after all, in the creation of new material beings, as well as new types of beings, and have certainly given us an effective “know how” with the real. While this is certainly practical, and suggests that mathematics is something other than merely contemplative, it does not allow us to assert that any change in the nature of being itself has come from mathematics (or from any of the hard sciences). In fact, it is difficult to see how the hard sciences could offer us any examples of the kind asserted by a dialectical theory in which being and thinking would be mutually influencing each other (unless one adopts an undesirable “quantum mysticism”). And therefore it is difficult to see how the hard sciences can offer a model for how thinking and being are actually unified, along the lines of the Parmenidean thesis Meillassoux himself wishes to rehabilitate. It would seem that Meillassoux’s position is, by Lukàcs’ standard, metaphysical rather than dialectical, even though it does qualify as a philosophical materialism.

My study of Milner’s interpretation of the notion of lalangue in Lacanian theory in the next section will give us an example of what is desired: something like a dialectical materialism on the question of the relation between thinking and being. Yet lalangue also plays a key role in what Milner considers to be the impasse in Lacan’s materialism, because Milner ultimately concludes that what is going on in lalangue cannot be called a thinking at all. Thus, it functions as a “silent” real, and the barrier between thinking and being is reinstated. This is the point I will question in my conclusion.

Lacan introduced the term lalangue in the 1970s to address what there is of the real in language — something like the very sound of a language, such as phonemes considered apart from the creation of sense. The phrase lalangue is itself written in a way that is supposed to get us to pay attention to the sound of language under or alongside its meaning, which is the very thing the term is about. Bruce Fink uses “llanguage” as an English translation for this, in which the graphically repeated,and in speech a bit elongated “l” gets us to hear the word differently, having basically the same effect— calling our attention to the thing the concept is supposed to designate.