Formalizing the Subject (Session 2)

Hello and welcome to the new Center for Research and Practice seminar series, formalizing the subject dialectics and cybernetics in Cahiers pour l'Analyse and CCRU. This is the second session and now I will pass the mic to Danielle. Danielle please take it away. Thank you. Welcome, everybody. Good to see you. Hopefully you had a good week reading all the shit that I sent you. It was a lot of stuff. And probably this session is the load for this session is actually the most daunting load out of the entire eight weeks that we're going to be spending together.

it's it's you know unfortunately it's like one of those things where we have to grapple with classic well not classical but you know classical pros from post-war France which is uh you know daunting highly baroque stylistically you know exuberant and oftentimes very convoluted and difficult to figure out and you know this this cluster of thinkers that we refer to today Renault, Rokan, Jacques-Alain Miller, and Badiou are all difficult to follow. And yes, thank you, Eric, for sending that book. It was helpful. I haven't had time to really take a look at it very deeply, but it was fantastic. Also, as some have pointed out, the website where all the materials for the CA are compiled,

which is also run by Peter Hallward among other people Ray Brassier and our contributor is periodically. It's an invaluable resource among other things. There are these synopses from every for each of the articles written for the and those are incredibly lucidly written and I don't know who I mean they don't specify who's writing these things I presume it's a collaborative effort so of, you know, nobody takes the whole pie. But these can be a lifesaver, specifically when you get to some of the most esoteric parts of these texts. Like, for example, I think that Eriko, as we can mention, to the appendix in Miller's text on action and structure, where he starts going through big tests, and tries to sort

of, you know, go back to this question about the doctrine of science, blah, blah, blah. anyway so you know make use of these resources they're widely available they're they're they're widely helpful sorry one little bit of logistics before we get started on topic as I was mentioning next week I have a sort of unfortunate sort of practical demand that I need to be somewhere at you know simple which means I have to leave slightly earlier like an hour early However, what I will do just to compensate for that is what one of two things will coordinate. I mean, you don't have to worry about this. We can talk about this via correspondence, but just letting you know. We will either compensate by having the next session or two go for a little bit longer.

I understand you all have other obligations and whatnot. so we could do it such that it could be well anyway so we can do it probably one or two ways I it occurred to me which is for the following two sessions we can go for slightly longer each rather than you know doing an hour X rail for one or or we could just move the whole syllabus when we forward and leave next week blank but we we will be consulting this with obviously no one others and I'll send an email regardless to the whole class and see what's the most convenient way to do it we don't have to get into that right now I'm sorry about that it's

just like you know how Anyway, regardless. So before, you know, as usual, we have a presentation that will carry us through the materials. There's a lot of stuff, so I want us to be sort of point on point on point. There's a presentation and a respondent, which we will get to in relatively short notice. So what I'll probably try to do is first just to start us off, I won't be really speaking very much about Peter Hallward's text because that doesn't really need much explanation. I mean, it's just historical background. It introduces some of the topics in detail and sort of the connections that some of the

connections I was trying to draw last week in more substantive detail, you know, the relationship to the sort of philosophical ambience in France before and after the war, the general topics of the subject, ideologies, status of science, all of these things that animate the body of work we're looking at. But I want us to really get started with the materials, so start talking about them more carefully. So the way I thought we would structure this out is, we'll begin by talking really with the Lacan, which sets out a kind of obviously template or itinerary that becomes then the platform on whose basis all the other interventions by the other thinkers are directly

or indirectly in response to. So, of course, we can begin with talking about Lacan, then about what Miller does with Lacan, with Lacan, then talk about Badiou and Renaud. The Renaud piece is long and it's complicated, and there's a lot of scholastic issues there that I won't get into. And similarly, the Badiou in particular has a very demanding, well, not very demanding, but a technical appendix where he rehearses a kind of version of the proof for the incompleteness theorem and tries to sort of weave that into this account. But I don't want us to really spend too much time involved in those technical details because they're highly esoteric and I don't think they're terribly necessarily too long to explain.

But we can touch on anything that becomes important. So before we get started, anything anybody wants to say? I know the out of focus thing is happening again, so let me fix that while we're talking. Anything anybody? Anyone have any comments or questions to open the discussion? I'm just joining the class. I wanted to say hi, so I didn't like it. Oh, yes. Hello, can you briefly introduce yourself to everybody? Just say who you are, what's your background in this stuff, your interest in the class, that would be great. Yeah, sure. So my name's George Michel. My background is mainly in cognitive psychology

and East Asian studies, and currently computer science is what I work in. um uh well let's see my interest in the classes uh i i was uh when i when i read the collected writings of of the ccru i was just you know i was i loved it i mean like uh uh it was it was really kind of an interesting experience you know i'd uh uh looked forward to reading the illuminatus trilogy for a long time and i uh and when i finally did um i i don't know it wasn't as good as I'd hoped it would be. And somehow, like, sort of the number of threads that the CCRU writers brought together was a lot more dense. So it was almost kind of like the payoff of what I'd expected out of Illuminatus, which is, I don't know if that's a connection that's often made,

but, and then, you know, just the kind of, like, you know, seeing the CCRU is almost like carrying a torch that, like, you know, started by a surrealist in the movie situation to another extent. So, and I guess my background in philosophy is pretty informal, except for some exposure to like critical theory and a seminar on Hegel and another on Heidegger when I was in college. But I've kind of had a long bead of, you know, I think going through, you know, reading a number of Frankfurt schoolers and structuralism and, you know, Lacan, Foucault, Deleuze, Julia Kristeva, I liked a lot in college. I was kind of reading transgressively because, you know, a lot of French theory was kind of like, you know, not looked fondly upon by the psychology department.

But I guess I've had a longstanding interest in, you know, processes of subjectification and process philosophy and stuff, which drew me to Deleuze and like Whitehead and Bergson to a slightly lesser extent. But yeah, that's sort of me. Welcome George. Yeah, I had a feeling that you would like this seminar since you talked to me about CCRU before. You know, just so you know, your camera is disabled, so none of us saw you while you were introducing yourself. Oh, what's going on there? It's not a certain video because the host has disabled it. I didn't disable your video. Don't blame me. There you are.

Okay, so here. Okay, everyone, this is George. Hello. Okay, great. So, actually, George, what you just said, it's kind of with regards to, you know, how reading this stuff in a kind of psychology setting would be sort of anathema or sacrilegious or at least not, yeah, or frowned upon, but it's kind of funny. It's a nice segue into talking about Lacan. There's one thing about Lacan that I presume we all know at this point is that everything he ever writes, which is generally directed to an audience of psychoanalysts, has to include among itself, as part of its discourse, a long excursus about his own dramas with the psychoanalytic establishment and how it is that, you know,

he basically obviously was caught in this perpetual sort of tension with the kind of psychoanalytics sort of mainstream and there's a long story to that and unfortunately Miller picks up on some of his habits as well where at the beginning he begins, I think it's Sature or is in the action of Structure which begins with a really corny sort of body parts and chef metaphor. Yeah, it's a suture, right? Where he's addressing himself to an audience, a psychoanalyst, predominantly. But as I was mentioning, the Lacan piece, Science and Truth,

is really an incredibly important foundational text. Obviously, it was published in the first volume of the KAA. And everything in that, you know, ever since sort of revolves around the topics and the agenda it sets up in that essay. It's a very difficult essay. It's a very, very chaotically structured essay. One of the reasons why I think Miller has become so important for the work of the Kaya, I mean, and for philosophy after the Kaya in general, yes, there was an expansion. I mean, the science interpret, if you didn't get it, it doesn't matter because, well, I'm going to be talking about it in substantive detail. And regardless,

one way to understand Jacqueline Miller's work is he polishes or systematizes Lacan. When you read Lacan, Lacan is extremely hazard all over the place. And it's not that Miller is an analytic philosopher either. But regardless, Miller has a much more sort of systematic, organized style presentation. And a lot of the concepts that look for, or a lot of the insinuations or programmatic promises that Lacan lays forth in that essay, for example, and that will continue to occupy his practice until the very end. Nevertheless, across the works, and in particular the two essays that we write for the day at jacqueline miller really really sort of tidies up right that's one way to

look at it right and we'll be talking about this itinerary so what i want to do before getting so i want us to get to the presenters and uh who's responding today who's the respondent today i forget eric eric yes okay cool all right so let me let me uh just take off and uh begin by doing what I usually do is just this projection, blah, blah, blah. Give me one second just to share. I have a question just before we get into this stuff, and with regards to see Malaya's work

as some kind of systematizing of Lacan's work. And I wanted to ask if maybe there's some kind of necessity, Lacan thinks there's some kind of necessity to present his own work in this specific unsystematic style, if there is an internal logic of this unsystematic presentation. And that's just a question. Well, Valentin just was sort of... I just answered it, yeah. Yeah, exactly. He was just talking about that, and I think he's right, about Lacan's... Well, Lacan always writes and speaks in the form of a provocation, right? Everything that he talks about is cross-referencing stuff

that was either elaborated or worked through in previous seminars and previous talks and previous works. Many of his expressions are gnomic or suggestive or, you know, filled with traps, as he once put it. And so, yeah, it is by design. It's not that Lacan wasn't capable, let's say, of being, although, I mean, who knows, right? But he definitely leaves that labor to Miller or to others in any case, right? And yeah, that's one frustrating bit about reading Lacan, which is that he kind of forces you to have this kind of holistic engagement with his work in order to make sense out of meaning where if you are not familiar with what was going on in the seminar the year before the two years

before that you're going to be sort of lost in a sea of jargons uh you know cross references even like you know biographical details and all this stuff and that can be very frustrating with even though he's a beautiful stylist in a way he's also impenetrable and very very uh you know sort of indulgent in that regard. But Miller is a little bit more sober, and he's helpful for that exact reason. He brings it down to earth into a kind of more meat So let me begin by sharing. Boom. Are you guys seeing context? Yes.

Yes. Yes. Thank you to myself as well. Oui. Oh, okay. Let me, all right, cool. So the first thing to take note is just a little bit of context for the seminar. It takes place after Lacan's seminar 12, and she begins, Lacan, she begins this essay by saying something that, you know, that this seminar has presumably settled the question of the subject. Really, you know, seminar 11, which is the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, and seminar 12, I think, is called the Problems of Psychoanalysis or something like that, probably Valentin has the name better. But in these two seminars, the first thorough exposition on trying to arrive at a kind of

wrestling concept of the subject takes place. And it is also around seminar 11, when Lacan begins to flirt with this idea that would occupy until the end of his thinking, which is that mathematical formalization might be or provide the lever to achieve a robust science of the subject or theory of the subject. So obviously this essay is centered around I think three at least essential questions. One is the status and distinctiveness of science as a discourse, its relationship to the constitution of the subject and the concept of structure that becomes central as a methodological lever to think about these things together. And notice that it's interesting that from the very get-go,

this intervention enters into a polemical, in polemical sense, with the French epistemological tradition of Caballet, Poiré, and Vachelard, as well as with the history of modern philosophy in science so he you know he begins this this this essay by saying that really in what concerns the attempt to think the subject of science epistemology has not proven itself equal to the task and this this this question of how it is that epistemology must at the end of the day since its inception fail to give a a satisfactory account of the subject, is, of course, what he believes psychoanalytic practice

can sort of supplement or correct. But there are a battery of central notions that keep re-emergent from this branch of epistemological school. And even though Lacan himself does not have much to say concerning this very central notion, which is that of the epistemological break, I think Miller certainly does, Reynolds certainly does, and obviously Bajudin certainly does as well. But the two, again, these two ideas, I think, from the epistemological French tradition are native to this enterprise of the Caillère and to Lacan's interrogation of the status of science in the subject. One, as we saw, the relational conception of the object of scientific discourse, and

And second, this conception of the epistemological break that Bachelard and Coyer developed, which was basically the idea that science is organized around specific historical ruptures and that these ruptures have to do with how they operate on their own syntactical formal materials as opposed to some sort of wonky dialectic between normal science and revolutionary science in a sort of Kuhnian way, that there is this kind of self-operation that science performs with regards to itself, and that by attending to this way that science deals with its own material and stratifies itself eventually, is that you can find the clue to understand

the distinction between science and ideology that, of course, epistemologists and dialectical the materialists are concerned. We're thinking through. But here's a quote where Lacan tries to sort of call epistemology out for its insufficiency. And I'll just read it out. The theoretical practice of a science is always completely distinct from the ideological theoretical practice of its prehistory. I'm sorry, this is not the quote I was mentioning. This is a quote from Althusser. Yeah, sorry, that quote comes in the next slide. But this is a quote from Althusser in which he appropriates or rather sets the stage for this kind of Bachelardian idea of the epistemological break and how he wants to like bring it into this

discussion of the project to reconstitute the materialism. So in this quote you see this kind of very very clean attempt to tap this back into the question of the distinction between science and ideology. Okay so sorry about this um eric just asked in the in the uh chat window is the difference between science and ideology with every epistemological break revised or does it stay the same well actually i think so there's different people would have different things to say that's a good really great question but i think that one of the things we might get later about the renault is um you know when when he when he performs these kinds of variations or when he argues that the permanities gives you these sets of variations of every possible epistemological model that exists.

I suppose that how you conceive of the break, if there is indeed room for a break at all, will be relative to what kind of bind you establish between science and ideology. So that's precisely one of the issues, right? In order to have a conception of the epistemological break, you first have to understand what science is and how it relates to its other ideology or its outside right and this is going to lead us as you know and especially the renault piece through a series of considerations about the possible variations that it's not so we'll get to that i guess in short notice but uh to get back to the slideshow and to be able to serve the officer quote uh this is a very very important quote that i think sets up the stage um for the project of the kf the theoretical practice of the science is

always completely distinct from the ideological theoretical practice of its prehistory. This distinction takes the form of a qualitative theoretical and historical discontinuity, which I shall follow Bachelard in calling an epistemological break. This is not the place to discuss the dialectic inaction in the advent of this break, that is, the labor of specific theoretical transformations which installs it in each case, which establishes a science by detaching it from the ideology of its past and by revealing this past as ideological. So this is already an attempt to dialectically invricate the Bachelardian conception of epistemological break, which for him is this kind of formal self-operation that science performs in regards to itself, so as to explain how it is that science progressively sheds away its ideological

remnants. So rather than to think of science as this kind of absolutely constituted field in relationship to an ideological exterior, right, non-science, what Althusser is suggesting here and what the thinkers of the PAO will progressively try to do, including Miller, is try to think about how it is that at every stage in which there is a scientific breakthrough or revolution or whatever you want to call it, an epistemological break, science operates upon itself by decanting its residual ideological content. So it is that science always becomes overrating these ideological residues, oftentimes because it incidentally always has to be interpreted within discourse as well.

So how it is that it continues to shed this residual dependence on ideology and conceptualization is part of the dialectic that organizes the history of science. But for Altissera, this is a kind of promissory note or suggestion, which then all the thinkers in the CCRU, the CAE, are going to progressively elaborate and, you know, sort of explore. Federico just said, I was wondering about Deleuze and Guattari as well and Bordeaux. Structured structures is pure Bordeauxian analysis, and the virtual and the actual seem to share the same scholastic sort of Deleuze. I'm not sure I understand the kind of ideology, but I understand that there's some work involved with the ideology of the 20th century.

I mean, so, okay, two questions. First, with regards to the Deleuze. um so yeah i mean the yeah i mean this kind of the virtual and the actual that you know especially uh we get with with the millerian uh analysis and this is the section which is structure and structure and structure structure uh you can see that as a kind of uh reference to the list but or bordeauxian analysis in any case but it is yeah i mean it it is definitely informed by at least by Bardot. But this is a much broader conceptual dichotomy that I think keeps reappearing. It definitely probably has its roots in, you know, in Miller's case,

in his reconsideration of, what was this piece that Miller wrote where he settles this issue? Anyway, I don't remember, but I think you're right. And this is an obvious point of connection that one could draw between looking at the lows and looking at the malaria. And what about you with this machine of reason, which is completely self-constructing, right? And which lacks exactly, if you say lack or non-identity, it seems like a machine of conception, which he would later abandon, as we will see. but which, yeah, it seems closer to a machine of conception of rationality. Now, Valentin asked about whether the Einstein upgrade of Newton is more involved in the ideology of the 20th century.

That would be an interesting counter-contention. I mean, one of the things that happens regardless, right, is that once there is a new kind of like a scientific break at the formal level, there is this kind of like recapture or like, you know, new discourse that predates on it or that constitutes itself around it, which is, again, ideological in nature. So, yeah, sure. I mean, when Einstein upgrades Newton, then this will, you know, become invariably part of a new ideological cluster. But it's also the same process by virtue of which the old ideology becomes sort of displaced and, you know, sort of, you know, removed. Now, whether this is actually a convincing dialectical claim, you know, that's up for grabs, of course, for us to discuss, I guess.

But let me move forward a little bit. So this is a very, very brief introduction around the concepts of epistemological break and relationality becomes the basis for the ten volumes of the KF. And this is the possibility of thinking of a dialectical materialist science, giving structural Marxism in the place of subjectivity within its proper course. There's something I can call on. Let me just pass through the next. Now, one more thing to say about Althusser himself, which some of you might know. Now, Althusser had a very conflictive relation to Lacanian psychoanalysis and trying to negotiate this distinction between science and ideology.

And he was directly inspired by Lacan and his group, of course. But he vacillated with regard to the status of the subject. He had this brief moment in the 60s, exactly around the time when the Keihe was being written, where he considers the possibility that the subject of the analytic discourse could give way for a conception of the subject that could be aligned with science as opposed to ideology. but then he very quickly gives up on this and this is kind of important to know because of course one of the things that will happen is that his school and in particular by view who exerts a considerable influence in the last stages of the AF follows through it you know with this basic I'll just hear in

diagnosis the the the kind of allotment of the category of the subject to the category of ideology and its complete separation from science. So this idea that of course we are going to get with Badiou that science has no subject, we have no exterior, and so that is actually, you know, surprisingly a position that Badiou at one point held, but this was indebted to Alcissara. And so this quote is from Hallward's exposition. This is from the from the Kea website, and I think it just like summarizes this point in this context very importantly. In the mid-1960s, however, at the very moment the Kea were reproduced, Althusser made a temporary and quickly abandoned attempt to construct a theory of the subject

compatible with structure. In a paper he circulated to a small group, including Kea editors Yves Dureau and Alain Badou, three notes on a theory of discourses, Althusser allotted a place to what he called subjectivity effects in the four discourses of science, ideology, art, and the unconscious. However, he soon changed his mind, and in the cover letter for Three Notes, Nodes, dated 28 October 1966, he says that, quote, everything I have said about the place of the subject in every one of the discourses must be revised. The more I work on it, the more I think that the category of the subject is absolutely fundamental to ideological discourse, that it is one of its central categories. One question could we, for the rest we discussed, could we please get just shortly clear what is actually meant by subject here?

Because I think that's not self-evident. You mean for Altusere? Yes, the whole context. Well, so that's going to be, there's no single answer. I think Lacan provides the template, right? Then the different thinkers that follow are each going to have their own like take on it. So, I'll just say before this flirtatious interval with the possibility of using or developing a theory of the subject, he squarely thought that the subject was simply an ideological construction, right? The category of the subject is simply an extension of ideology. It has no place in scientific discourse. Then after this brief flirtation,

he goes back to the same position. Ideology, basically. It's just a cognate and it plays a function within ideological discourse, but it really does not play a role in dialectical material science. No, what I meant is what kind of subject do they, Althusser and part of the career, do they think has no place in science? Not what alternative pictures of the subject do they produce, but what do they think is excluded from science and purely ideological. What kind of subject is this? Right, well in the case of Althusser, I think in the first instance he had, before this encounter with Lacan, he definitely had the sartrean notion of the subject. The notion of the

subject is this kind of free, self-determining agency and so on support, which as I was mentioning last week, becomes one of the pivotal points of rejection for structural Marxism, and one of the reasons why Marxism must go through structuralist grinding. In other words, the problem is that the fiction that becomes incubated not only in obviously the kind of voluntarism that you get from Sartre, but which then in the post-war era becomes a prescient form of discourse, for example, for liberal politics, right? The idea that you're a free self-determined allegiance. So that has to be very much in Althusser's mind when thinking about how it is that the Sartre model could no longer meet the demands of a rigorous science of history

or dialectic material of science. But it also, I think, directs itself against, you know, the phenomenological conception of the lived subject of experience. Because one of the things that he wants to do, and one of the things that all the thinkers in the media participate in, is the idea of voiding the subject. The idea that the category of subjectivity has to be thought of outside of the sphere of ideology, precisely by decanting it from any substantive content. We're going to get into detail very, very soon about what this exactly means, this voiding operation. But, I mean, of course, you know what we're talking about. It has to do with whether there's a place for the subject in science, as Lecom thinks, obviously, and Miller as well, and what this would take.

And what it would take, we'll see in short notes. Now, let's see. just like making sure. Okay, cool. So yeah. So let's move forward. Okay. Does that, Eric, is that satisfactory for you to tell me? Yeah. I mean, I can't hear anything. Yes. Yes. I just needed to unmute myself. Okay. Cool. Thank you. Okay. So Lacan, the subject of science and the science of the subject. So following Corée in Science and Truth, Lacan begins by arguing that epistemologists fail to rise to get a positive account of the subject that we can measure with the birth of modern science, even if the subject becomes only thinkable properly since the modern birth. So what is what is interesting about this text is that it's already there's already notice

of this kind of ambiguity about it, which is it is both an attempt to think of the kind of subject that emerges in modern science, that's why we say the subject of science, and it is also how it is that modern science enables a theory of the subject. So there's something like the subject of science in the sense of the actual agent or the subject that becomes constituted through the birth of modern science, but it is also a theoretical question about the object of study of a theory of the subject that begins with the modern scientific sequence. So there's this kind of like inherent ambiguity in the expression, which is that it is both the object of study and the agency that does the purification.

And this leading between these two things is constitutive, in fact, for Lacan and how he is going to define the subject at its core is involving a kind of division. And as you know, as Federico mentioned already briefly, Miller's attempt to think of the distinction between structure and structure and structure is also an attempt to think of this kind of inherent tension within the subject, which is amazing that, you know, it's again like a detective work that you always have to keep in mind when Lacan writes with every expression. This is just like, you know, obviously it just opens. Now, the grounding claim of this essay, again, in following Courier, is that the birth of every science or science in general is grounded in a procedure of reduction, which specifies a distinctive object.

So what reduction means here is not what reduction means for within the fields of logic, for example, where it generally means something like elimination. so classically for example when you talk about eliminativist or reductionist approaches in cognitive science for example right you might say for example that you can reduce intentionality that is to say beliefs intentions you know all those things that we associate with psychology to neurophysiological states in other words you can explain the former in terms of the You can just sort of get rid of the intentional talk and just talk about neurophysiological configuration.

But this notion of reduction that's at work here that Lacan invokes is slightly different. It's not an operation in which you trade one thing for the other, but it is an operation of voiding in which what you do is you desubstantialize a object of study down to its core, to a structural formal core. So a reduction is more like voiding or, again, desubstantialization rather than reduction in this more sort of, I guess, familiar sense that operates in the Anglo-Saxon of simology. So, the distinctive object of science involves a reduction, and the question then becomes,

well, if the subject is the topic, then what is the reduction of the subject for structural core involved? And so he traces the birth of the modern subject and this reduction of the subject of science to two central registers to begin with. First, the birth of mathematical physics with Newton and the Cartesian birth of the Cogut. And as you know, the essential reason why these are the two sort of important registers is because whereas Newton is describing this in the thesis universalis, this nature that is written in mathematical language at the birth of mathematical physics. and according to Lacan this squarely inscribes

the human within the natural order against any kind of religious exceptionalism that would try to place it apart from the overt nature Descartes similarly begins his meditations by this process which he calls radical doubt which completely voids the subject from any kind of knowledge. It separates it from knowledge. It arrives at this pure point of thinking, the pure cogito, in which the mind or the subject is defined as a thinking being or as a thinking thing. And what Lacan is going to say is that, yes, the Cartesian birth of the cogito, discovery of the cogito, however you want to put it, is the birth of the modern subject. However,

both Descartes, just like Newton before him and just like everybody after him until Freud, would have continued to latch to a kind of residual religiosity. So after the discovery of the Cogito, I'm sure all you know, Lacan nevertheless needs to leave room for God to guarantee the possibility of non-deception, right? So one of the things Lacan mockingly or like you know playfully uh alludes to is that there is this kind of like all this in this early modern sequence there's a relapse back to a theological framework in which the subject becomes once again sort of commensurate to knowledge and so this essential avoiding which inaugurates its proper position and its separation from knowledge which constitutes a splitting from

knowledge becomes betrayed and you know that this this this separation between the truth of the subject and knowledge which is that they're really the core you know division which was which constitutes internally is something that would repeat itself even after Freud you know he makes a mention to you and says that you know you would try to give depths again to what had become voided, right? Like this is a depthless conception of the subject that we are tracking. Now, as he moves into the more contemporary context, from the early context to the modern context, she addresses briefly the place that structural linguistics and logic play in this narrative.

And here things get triggered, right? Because on the one hand, he credits linguistics and formal logic for instituting a kind of pure formal order in which you see the play of signifiers without any kind of like uh you know mention to an exterior and at the same time he credits the the specifically in this case the the the linguistic structural linguistics for drawing the important distinction between enunciation and enunciating uh so this is an important development, which then Miller, as you know, reiterates when he subordinates what he calls formal logic to the logic of the signifier, because Miller argues it is

only within the logic of the signifier that you can understand this important distinction between enunciation and enunciated, which is core to understand how discourse operates and communicates. In other words, how it is not a simple, pure, formal ideography, but that it harbors this, however repressed it might be, this essential communicative dimension, which is, of course, the description of the subject of discourse or language. And similarly, he credits modern logicians for having de-totalized the space of discourse. And here Lacan is implicitly referring to Gartel's incompleteness theorem, but in a very implicit manner. However, within these fields, you don't quite get what you need

fully. There is still an attempt to reconstitute the subject as a whole, to restore a totalized imaginary unity and its adequacy to knowledge. So one of the things that Lacan and Miller insists is that science does not want to know that it doesn't know, right? It wants to exclude this kind of primitive separation from knowledge and still wants to latch onto the possibility of this kind of completely self-sufficient, you know, closed system of knowledge. And this is precisely what can't be done successfully, at least according to Lacan, and which of course is going to leave miller's own construction in its own quarters now here by by drawing like making this this

reference to uh levi strauss's account of what he calls mythogenetic transformation um he gives you a the the basic concept of the subject here which is how it is that hold on there's a there's a comment here the mobius strip is a lovely metaphor even without involving the whole mathematics area Yeah, oh, and maybe I should just say this, because it's, of course, in the quote to come about how here, even though this is before Lacan really got involved with, you know, not theory and all this, like, stuff that you see in his later works, like from Seminar 17 onward, he already sort of describes the kind of formal index within the theory of the subject that's described as popologically, right, which is very strange. It's not like Lacan ever really has,

you know, mathematics, a real mathematics going. You're more like, I think Valentin himself was saying this last week, you know, it's kind of cute. You're more like paintings or metaphors or whatever you want to call it. But here he's already flirting with the idea that structural linguistics proper, you know, might have to give way to a more robust mathematical register in which topology will play a predominant role. Specifically not theory, as you know, in his later work, and also algebraic topology more general. But going back to this, like, basic definition, so here he defines the subject as internally excluded from its object cost, right? And this internal division or internal exclusion is constitutive of itself.

And this is the quote that already sets the stage for what he considers to be an anti-humanism. It ushers into every, quote, human science. It conquers a very particular mode of the subject for which the only index I have found is pathologic. the generating sign of the Mobius strip that I call the inner ape. The subject is, as it were, internally excluded from its object. And as we will see, one of the things that I just want to just like very briefly throw in there is that this account of mythogenetic genesis or transformation is actually part of how it is that Deleuze and Guattari reconceive of schizoanalysis

and a kind of structuralist register as well. And the CCRU and LAM bloat into something that you can call something like a mythontology, in which the real object cause and the myth that sustains it, that imaginary myth that sort of quilts this kind of formal point is no longer just a structure relative to human discourse or practice to a human psyche, but it becomes this kind of macro-historical agency or agencies which subvert the subject from the net. And so we're going to revisit this idea of myth-ontology that I think helps us think of the relationship between structural psychoanalysis and schizoanalysis later as we move into the CCRD. But that's just a brief suggestion. So as a result, I think there's a comment. Let's see.

Where's that 731 from? Eccreed. That's from the Eccreed. So all the references to this text that I mentioned here are from the Crete collection just because I have it with me so and that's like the kosher one okay sorry well oh I want to have here so uh yeah so so this is this sets the foundation the simultaneous for these two things a the voiding of the subject into a kind of pure formal kernel with no depths, A, and B, the idea that the subject is internally excluded from itself by the object cause of desire, of course, like what Lacan called object etiat. This is the template for a resolute anti-humanist program,

which completely liquidates or pulverizes any substantive sense of what humanity might be. And so here he takes real issue with psychology and anthropology, with the social sciences in general, and castigates them for this thing he calls the archaic illusion, which is the psychologization of the subject. And which is basically an attempt to reconstitute the internal division that lies at its core and which separates it from knowledge so that the subject is once again seen as something that has some kind of depth to it. And here's the very, very famous quote from Rakan, There is no such thing as the science of man, and this should be understood along the lines of there is no such thing as insignificant savings.

There is no such thing as the science of man because science is man does not exist. Only if the subject does. My life longed with Huffman's, or the appellation human sciences, is well known. It strikes me as the very call of servitude. That's a wonderful quote, and I'm sure you've heard it before. This essay, another just small comment, as you've noticed, this essay is one of, you can find many of Lacan's most famous thesis and formulations in this essay. It's hard to understate its importance. everything from like you know that there is no metal language this kind of first repudiation of the this repudiation of the human sciences a lot of this stuff

of course was already developed with seminars of 11 and 12 in particular but this is a kind of this essay really marks a transitionary moment in thinking of Lacan in which the the question of formalization really comes to a fore and and this kind of beginning of trying to reconstitute the thinking of psychoanalysis as a science of the subject. So this idea of the subject that's internally divided and the separation between truth and knowledge, he tracks back to Freud's account of the reality principle, right? Which is, as you know, well, in Lacan's reading, it marks the insertion of the body or the subject into this evolved order.

And so how it is that the thing or the object cause of desire institutes a kind of division or fissure within it precisely as a result of language, the acquisition of becoming ingrained or incorporated into the order of language. so you know for those of you who don't know that and I'm going to simplify to the outpost but in Freud's original account the reality principle is that which sort of comes after the pleasure principle or compensate for the pleasure principle the pleasure principle being of course the the way that the body is subordinated to needs and the pursuit of pleasure just kind of psychosomatic direct animal instinct in you well but the reality principle emerges as a result of acculturation or by becoming ingrained into a culture, community,

civilization, by acquiring a language, which is the means by virtue of which the subject begins to negotiate his or her actions with his or her environment and society against or by restraining or modulating the pleasure principle. So the reality principle is beyond the pleasure principle, strictly speaking. And so it is also by becoming integrated into this symbolic order of language that there is also this displacement that occurs or fissure at the heart of the subject in which there is something, this thing called the thing with a capital T, which is precisely this,

that which always eludes the subject's capacity for attaining completion. So whatever triggers desire or causes desire can never be suppressed, can never be quilted or positivized into an object of knowledge or something that can be practically appropriated or reappropriated so that the subject could reconstitute itself. It must always be missing. It's only something that falls out of place for the subject. and which triggers its libidinal mechanism, as it were, in motion. So the displacement or the splitting of the subject is directly correlative to its integration into language. I hope that is clear. And this quote that I just put here just brings the point home.

One thing is certain. If the subject is truly there, at the nexus of that difference, all humanist references become superfluous in science. The subject cutting them short, because he's giving a relational conception of the subject, as punctual and banishing, he being Freudian. That relationship to knowledge, which, since it's historically inaugural moment, has retained the name cogitin. So, again, here this idea that the subject is punctured by this vanishing point or vanishing externality is something that Miller will very elegantly try to reconceive precisely through the concept of suture.

right the way in which the impossible object cause of desire or freudian thing becomes quilted or substantialized by the subject through the imaginary by creating these systems of representations around it but which at the end of the day can only operate as a kind of repression of what is by definition excluded from the possibility of appropriation to the order of knowledge so regardless you can't get rid of this constitutive division right and I'll say a few more things about this and then we can get into the presentation I'm just like setting this essay as the kind of ground ground from which we're going to talk about the other things but here

you know when when discussing Freud Lacan introduces this this or rehearses this translation of, I don't remember the German, but the locution is where it was that there must come to be as a subject. This is a very famous re-elaboration of Freud's motto, which is also for Locan a way to understand the inversion or a transvaluation of the Cartesian cogito. The Cartesian cogito classically formulated, as you know, is, I think, therefore I am. But for Lacan, the problem with this idea is that there would be this kind of commensurability between the thinking and the knowing of it.

The truth of thinking as it manifests itself in the act of thinking and what can be known or made explicit to knowledge. and for him it's exactly the opposite right because insofar as the subject is internally divided from itself and insofar as that which divides it is the object cause of desire which can never be a part of knowledge the subject can never be as it were equivalent to what it knows so it must always attempt to reconstitute itself or lack behind itself uh from what where where it was before. So that's why it always says where it was, there I must come to be a subject. In other words, this is a very difficult, you know, known expression to impact. But what he's

trying to say is that there is a gap between how the subject sees itself or its imaginary figurations and its itself as constituted. You know, the void of the subject is always different from there where it is placed or there where it is localized. And he also makes here a reference to Spinoza, who he thinks, whose conception of God or substance, he thinks does not give you something like totality, but he gives you something that is precisely internally divided. So I'm sure you know that Spinoza's God is not a kind of amorphous, one in the in the sense that we're not will will will call an absolute one but it is a one that is

uh attributive attributively divided between mind and body on the one hand and that infinitely modally individuated or or expressed and concrete you know uh nature in in the different bodies and and, you know, things that there are in the world. So what is interesting is that God is one, you know, but at the same time, it is internally divided from itself in the sense that what is not God or the mortal beings, or, you know, they are internally constituted within God. So it's a non-totality, according to, you know, Le Conn 3. um and also just like you know you can tell that this um this entire series of thoughts of this

attempt to desubstantialize the subject and so on so forth is also very much of a piece with an attempt to come out of this kind of post-heideggerian saga in which metaphysics came under considerable stress and the idea of anything like an essence right a qualitative essence of of the object of being was voided. So Lacan is extending this desubstantialization or this critique of essentialism that Heidegger and others carry forth vis-a-vis being qua being, i.e. metaphysics or ontology, into a theory of the subject to similarly void the subject. But what's interesting for Lacan is that whereas for Heidegger

and others in that tradition, science and the kind of constitutive operation of modern science in particular is the most exacerbated form of metaphysics, right? Because for Heidegger, as you know, science does not think properly. It objectifies the world or reality. And the subject, the modern subject, which is characterized like a card, is nothing but its most rarified expression or exacerbated expression, which concentrates the whole motif of epistemology. for Lacan is exactly the opposite. What you see in the birth of modern science is a resolute de-metaphysation or de-essentialization of the subject and of the object of science at once,

so that science is in fact the counterpoint of metaphysics. And so far as metaphysics is essentialism by definition or something like that, then science is concerned with voiding assets and voiding subjectivity from its depths again. So this is of course, or Lacan, not predominantly addressed against Heidegger or phenomenology, although it's definitely in the ambiance, but more specifically, conceptions of the subject that you get from psychology, ego psychology, and from also phenomenological conceptions of the subject that come in the postwar French tradition. Let me see. So, yeah, I think this is, oh, yeah, and one last thing here is that he already here,

I'll stop here for one second. One thing that he says here that's important, he already knocks toward the idea that Marxism is another register in which you have this notion of alienation or exclusion as constitutive of the subject. However, he warns us, Lacan, in this essay that he doesn't think that, so he's suspicious about the kind of dialectical materialist sort of insistence to try to bring this back into philosophy, dialectical materialist philosophy because he still sees a gap between theory and practice that uh can not just simply be done so in other words he says at one point something like that you know the the dialectic there's there's quite the gap between the dialectic

and uh practical organization or you're actually getting things done or something like that so so he's attentive to he's much more cynical in this regard than the theoreticism that you get from some of these other people. And I think actually, it surprised me because Lacan is histrionic, he's a diva. But when you read Lacan, he's also the most cold of all these people that we're reading for sure. He has a kind of bourgeois cynicism to himself that even Miller, who is a a very, very devout follower of Lacan sort of does not have. I mean, Miller still wants to bolster the possibility of reconciliation with Marxism in a moral of us. But I think I'll stop there for comments

and then to get to our presentation response because I don't want to lag. Any thoughts? Those are the main points of the essay as I see it. Anything anybody wants to bring up? Yeah, please. I mean, I see some people are posting in the chat bar, but it's always a little more engaging and lively if you speak up. Yeah. Daryl, I think, asked a question, which is, how can we say then that what kind of the formalism of the subject, the negation, stretches the subject? Well, I don't see why that would be incompatible. like why why would negation uh if negation is constitutive or well exclusion right which can

be thought as a as a kind of robust kind of negation maybe or alienation but why would that be um anathema i mean one thing that you can say for sure is that um well what kind of exactly like what kind of maps would be you know appropriate for this kind of register. It's not going to just be plain old structural linguistics, that we know, right? And here Lacan is not yet sure. I mean, he flirts with this suggestion that topology might give the trick and the Mobius script gives the kind of topological model for insofar as you can no longer tell where something is internal or external to itself, so there's this kind of ambiguity inherent to the structure. But really at this, I mean, I think that honestly

this is a proviso at this point and Lacan would only within his own account get to a sort of more robust account in his later seminars as this idea becomes flushed out in his later works. Doesn't exclusion only give you the possibility of something like a subject but it isn't it hasn't given any construction to it you're right it's very austerely defined at this point i think one of the things that that miller wants to do is be a little bit more precise about um you know just exactly what goes on here so of course i mean i'm simplifying and there's much

more at stake so one question would be how it is that this minimal formal structure of the subject or the split subject as internally divided from its object, the object of the causal desire, at the same time articulates this tripartite order that Watan is famous for having articulated between the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real. And this is one thing that I think Müller's piece is much more informative on, because one of the things that we get there with his elaboration of this account of what is called the point de capiton, or the vanishing point, is that, so you have the impossible object cause of desire, right, that's objectifiat, the impossible object which triggers desire,

which can never be, which is impossible, you can never assimilate that, it's just a pure formal thing that repeats itself, but at every point in the way, this point, this impossible object becomes objectivized, sutured, by creating a whole system of imaginary representations around it that, of course, provide the fiction for the subject of the possibility of completion, recapture, reconstitution, totalization, you name it. But this fails, right? This is an inherent delusion or failure of the imaginary that is very much at work even in the operation of science according to miller right so once miller starts speaking about

foreclosure and the operation how foreclosure operates science it is a it's a kind of like secondary repression second order repression that tries to exclude all that but lack remains right you can't get rid of it so there's and of course miller is also going to be concerned with this question of um it's not enough to have a mechanistic account of structure at this kind of bare thing you have to have a conception of the action structure or structuration or structuring you know as how it is that structure is generated or how does the subject comes into being right if i understand correctly negation is is only start another what what's negated is the structure

I mean, yeah, I mean, well, he describes foreclosure as a double negation, right? Miller does. So to the extent that the subject of science is constituted by this foreclosure, which is a double negation, negation is a word, but it's being understood not just in the formal sense of like, you know, the negation of a negation is an affirmation, blah, blah, blah. It's a kind of like secondary repression, where negation is a surrogate for repression. So repression and negation are being used interchangeably in this logic of the signal, which is not a purely formal logic. Yes. Yes. This is not exclusively or not specified to any of the text reads, but more...

Okay, I'm still here, but you can still hear me. Can you? Yeah. Okay, good. Because I've got a weird mention here. But, okay, so my question is, most of my knowledge about Lacan comes through Zizek. And one of my biggest problems in understanding Lacan and Zizek through Lacan was that, I take as example this, the formula of sex creation. I don't know. And yes, and this principle of differentiality from structural linguistics. How can it be that there is a difference without pre-constituted

distinct elements? How can that be? And I was just speculating if, okay, normally we we start from thinking okay there are discrete elements entities that are identical with themselves and in structural linguistics and Lacan and so on they start okay no that's still essentialism we own difference all we have basically is difference and this void and yeah I don't really know how to frame my question properly but it's just okay, am I on the right track in trying to understand them in this way?

So two things. The formula of sexuation is actually, you know, that's elaborated rather late. I think it's Summoner 20 or, I mean, I don't know if that's the first formulation of it, but it's for sure in Summoner 20. Am I right on that? I'm pretty sure. But that's already once he's like knees deep into his whole, quote, unquote, algebraic technology business. So he's moved out from the structural linguistic framework that he gets from Jacquecin. That's one thing to keep in mind. There he's trying to work with an algebraic, quote unquote, model. Even though everybody knows that the way that Lacan uses quantifiers and negation and everything else is hardly part of an axiomatic theory. He just uses these symbols as kind of paintings or illustrations more than actual formal parts

of a theory. We can never had a formal theory in the strict sense that we would say, in the sense of like an axiomatic, right? Nothing like that. But to answer your more substantive question, which is, so it seems like in order for you to be able to, whether it be in topology or structural, whatever, but if you want to have a relational conception of subjectivity or whatever else it is, you need to begin, it would seem regardless from elements that have to be identical to themselves, so that there has to be presupposed self-identity before you can even speak about relationality. And if you don't have that, and you have something like non-self-identity as constitutive, which

is what Miller will claim, that there is a kind of exclusion of the non-identical or substitution of the non-identical rather the grounds scientific discourse in particular well i think this is where things are a little complicated maybe but but like just to gesture about the just to give you a feel for why you can't think of self-identity without essentially and the way you can do this is by distinguishing two kinds of modes of identity there is Here's what we can call intentional with an S identity or extensional with an S identity.

So extensional means that something is only the conditions of identity of a thing are only explained in terms of what belongs to it or doesn't belong to it. So you explain a thing in terms of its elements or parts. is characteristically set theory, right? What it is to be a set is defined simply in terms of what other sets belong to that set and don't belong to that set, right? So the two sets are identical if and only if they share the same elements and parts. In contrast, you can have a notion according to which the identity of a thing is based on internal properties,

something like an essential property right so you know i don't know like characteristically there's like what's the essence of manhood you know of freedom for example you have to have the and there's these like substantive elements you know and one of the things that all of these thinkers are looking at with structural linguistics with formal logic which is of course written or underwritten in the vocabulary of said theory, is the idea of substituting an essentialist order of identity and individuation for an essentialist order, which is purely relational, in which you only define an element and its conditions of identity in terms of how they relate to other elements in a formal language. That will sort of have to do, as far as formalism,

because I would have to actually go through the math. But if you've read a little bit of even Badiou and how he introduces the axiom, take a look at the axiom of extensionality, which is the grounding axiom of identity for self-theory. And this will give you a feel for this contrast. Hopefully that somewhat helps. Yeah, and there are interesting kind of political exercises that can be done with this too. I think for example of Pierre Guillaume and some of his writings that he does on the Algerian war of independence as someone who fought in the Algerian war. You know, it's interesting to do an extensionist or extensional treatment of empire. Empire is something that is constantly trying in a ravenous manner to subtend and subsume other kind of possessions as elements of its own.

But what Giotat does is he does that, but he goes all the way and incorporates all of the abjection and horror of Imperium also under the French flag as well, as opposed to a kind of essentialist, kind of grandiose mythos of imperialism. So that's also something that's going on at the time, and Barge and other people are writing about that too. So science, but also politics. actually one of the things that one of the reasons why uh you know today we speak a lot about what is called flat ontologies right ontologies that destratify or flatten the distinction between i don't know the human and the non-human you know mind and world you name it

but what and this can lead very quickly to a kind of laxitude in the sense that you you stop making distinctions that are never less important but one of the things i think in jimmy that was like really really uh helpful is one of the things that attracts the people at the kaya towards this kind of formal formalization is the possibility of precisely deflating ideological constructions in the in the practical domain so so what you were just describing about empire right If you were in an essentialist model, you would say, yeah, the French empire or the history of the French colonial empire is just the history of its conquests, its heroes, and this and that. This is essential.

And all the other thing is accidental, right? Are just accidental properties, contingent things that we can do away with. Once you're in an extensional order in which everything is typographically the same of the same kind, and it's only relationally individuated, you no longer have that privilege of like sort of, you know, cherry picking your history. So that's actually helpful if you want to have a comprehensive science that is of history and that's going to be amenable to that. So thank you for that. That was a really insightful comment. Let me take a quick look at the chat just to make sure that we can see. I think Daryl and Valentin, I mean, Valentin, thank you for helping me with the Lacan.

I mean, I've read a lot of Lacan. I was in the ECT at UCLA for years, and I think I've read probably almost all of the seminars at this point, almost. and the Akri and everything, but it's, I don't understand Lacan. It's, I understand Miller, I think. I understand Gizet on Lacan. I understand everything that everybody says, but when I read Lacan himself, I need help. I just don't, you know, he's just confusing. Maybe just another question concerning this intentional and extensional properties. So could one say that the distinction between accidental properties and essential properties

only counts in the account of intentional identity? Exactly right. Yeah, yeah. In fact, there's this famous debate that Badiou, well, not debate, but this famous contention that Badiou has with analytic philosophy. but he looks he nods approvingly to Klein and one of the things he says is that Klein very quickly understood, very well understood how was the whole theory of meaning that comes downstream from Frege you know the account that there's this distinction between sense and reference and Frege thinks senses are the constituents of meaning, intentions with an S and he thinks

Klein thinks that intentions are Aristotelian essences and semantic fancy. And Badiou agrees, which is why he, like Quine as well, and there's a lot of parallels between Quine and Badiou, he advocates a completely extensional ontology, which is voided from intentionality with an S again, and voided from any residual essentialism. Although that comes with a problem, and we'll see what that problem is. both Miller and Baidu have then traced the question okay if science is imminent if there is no exterior as Baidu more strongly claims then what does philosophy do

right what is the discourse of science that goes around it is it just ideology then right or is what do we do with that how do we interpret this meta language that we impose on the mathematics, right? Because the mathematics is a pure symbolism. It doesn't tell you how you read the maths, right? So you need language. So that's what's going to lead to this dialectical reconstitution and infestimality. At least there is a dialectical reconstitution, which allows for some kind of historicity. I think the problem with this, with what we could call maybe a hard mode extension list where there is mathematics as a

ontological nexus but there's an empty signifier and this is you know continuous here then we get a flat ontology I mean this is something that of course Latour and Harmon's work really develops but you see it in most of course most of invocation of mathematics is a little bit more interesting, a little bit more multifaceted, but it still I think prompts this dehistoricization, which many people problematize for being politically superficial. Badoo doesn't lapse into this because I think Like, you know, I mean, I actually kind of wanted to ask, you know,

what is the move that you see between Badiou's existentialism and then what develops into, you know, because in both Merceau and Badiou, of course, it's mathematics as the ontological nexus. But in one, it sort of opens up like this Kantian transcendental beyond the human. So everything becomes sort of raised and flat, as in Mayasu's case. Whereas Badr, as an ardent Maoist, is always concerned with historicities. So I think, well, I'm not sure I would agree with the characterization of Mayasu, too, because of course, one of the things that Mea-Sue tries to think is how a concept

of historicity can be woven into this concept of absolute contingency. And one of the things that he tries to explain is how even beyond the quote-unquote truth event, which is of course the Badiouian model of historicization or subjectivation, there's this thing called advent ex nihilo, which of course is defined by bringing about these radical ontological ruptures right so there is this kind of like force for world succession um i don't know if you're familiar with this where he this is actually you know matter life thought justice right with the fourth world that is yet to come being the world of justice where there's rest you know you know the whole drill resurrection and so on so there is a concept of

historicity but it is what it is is it's radically subtracted from volunteers the only thing that so because at that point when you reduce historicity to pure contingency and so the advent of the world of justice can only come you know as out of out of the blue not because of an act or a true event or fidelity or anything like that, then you have another problem, which is, well, what do we do then? There's literally no difference between me here. I mean, everything we do makes no difference with regards to absolute contention. Nothing makes it more likely that the world of justice will occur or not.

I can pick my nose all day or go out and march against detention centers. That makes no difference. The world of justice is completely disconnected from action, from deliberation, from action, from organization, from anything like that. So that's an extreme case where reducing everything to an ontological generative principle completely annihilates politics. So Bidou is forced to say things like, well, but you know, it's the object of hope. You have to hope. So, I mean, yeah, sure. Okay, I'll hope for my house. Anyway, Badiou, on the other hand, yeah, he has this kind of, he has a flat ontology. Of course, his ontology is perfectly flat.

It's just everything is a pure multiple. And within Cermelo for Intellectual Meditation of Set Theory, there's no distinction between thinking and being. There's no modality built into the system. It's premodal. There's no modal operations. no distinction between the actual and the possible. However, he has a supplementary dialectic which is the advantage of the subject and all this shit. Now that comes with problems of its own. I mean, you get historicity there, you get subjectivation, you get the will, you get the importance of politics and revolutionary practice, if ever you want, but it's also cheating, right? I mean, here we go. Here's the axiom of foundation. We violate it. Here you have a self-belonging multiplicity.

This is the event. I mean, you can violate any accent like that, you know, if you just want it. So anyway, I mean, we're getting ahead of ourselves, and this is all stuff that others might not write, so I don't want to get engrossed in this. But I'll just wrap this point by saying flat ontologies are always both an opportunity to destratify structures that are ossified or essentialized, but they also come with a risk, which is that you align distinction between them. So, you know, with somebody like Latour, you get the obvious, you know, sort of banalization of this. Or Harmon more than Latour. Latour is actually quite new. But Harmon is like the pathological liberal extreme of this.

On the other hand, you have Manuel de Landa, who uses it responsibly, I think, in a natural register. He advocates quite a lot of the problems. So Levy's work too, I think. Yeah, yeah. Levi Bryan. Yeah, yeah. No, he's much more serious. So can we get to the presentations? Oui. So you take the podium. I'm going to sit back and rest of style, have a whisper. Not really. Oh, it sounds pleasant. Okay.

Let me just pull up the PowerPoint. Damn, fancy. It's not that fancy. That's just a PowerPoint. But, you know, so you gave us the liberties when originally allotting these presentations to sort of use our own vantage, our own research and interests. So that's what I did. I mean, I've been working on the digital continuous computation and sort of legacy of second order cybernetics with machine learning, neural nets, etc.

And the notion that Badiou brings up with self-suitability, I mean, really, Badiou sort of produces quite the revolutionary text amongst all of this corpus that we have for today, particularly against what Lacan and Miller's lack of a lack is a lack. gives something a bit more to quote what we were just discoursing, flat. But this flat allows for self-suitability. Before I really begin with my presentation, I think it's sort of important to have a kind of working definition of the digital.

There's many different ways to think about the digital. And the way I like to think about the digital, or at least begin to think about the digital, is is in contrast to the analog. And so what is the analog? Well, etymologically, analog, analogos, analogy. And I'm really following what Alex Galloway writes in Laurel Against the Digital is the analog is becoming united, the two becoming one. As in the case of an analogy, you have two different statements via the comparison they are united. In the digital, so you have the riven relationship,

the becoming bifurcated. And this is zeros and ones in computation. But also there are pre-computational digitalities. One can think of the DNA as digital. We can think of the alphabet as digital. So digitality predates digital technologies. So this is the working definition that I'm trying to look a little bit more adept, particularly to the digital, to digital philosophers, analog philosophers. and the only concept that I introduced that we did not cover in our text which I don't think

anyone really needs any background and knowledge in is I write quite a bit on Larwell I've been researching Larwell and reviewing Larwell's books and I've had quite a marked interest in Larwell for a while and then it's really only through Parmenides' hypotheses that we read today that I invoke Larwell as the philosopher of Parmenides' hypothesis, one equals one par excellence, as a way to sort of use a comparative between Larwell's radical imminence and then the sort of object petite a, that any one plus one plus one and the remainder that that do then problematizes a company's.

Okay. So before I actually even get into digitality, I want to begin with sort of an admission. So everyone can see the PowerPoint, right? Okay, good. So I personally, in my philosophizing, writing, and so on, I'm opposed to using lived experiences, or what Badiou terms, indiscreet judgments. This is affect as sensation. This is sort of the misreading of what emotion in Bergsonian vitalism indexes, which is truly motion, but has been through affect theory, particularly in literary studies, comparative literature, etc.,

amongst theorists like Lauren Barland, Eugene Brinkema, even Brian Masumi to some extent, emphasized emotion and sensation. Badiot-Terms's industry judgments, ideas like, I like this, this felt good, et cetera. This, I think, is a helpful vantage because now we can look at some non-Euclidean geometry and we can look at that through, developed by Lapshevsky, Reimann in the mid-19th century, presents a multitude of counterintuitive spaces such as geometric axioms that had to be sort of reduced to irreducible relativity and to a particular model of space.

So unlike the science of geometry from Euclid through Descartes and Newton, which was based on sort of these idealized points, lines, planes, three-dimensional spaces, and physical notions of extension, we can use the intuitable or actual against true multiplicity. And so linealities is a good way to approach computational. Rather than lines, linealities accompanies for the discrete, the probabilistic, that which exists between Cartesian lines. So similarly, Cantor and Hilbert in Germany and Saval in France insisted on the sufficiency of exumatic principles applied to terms whose reality is of no consequence for the application of principles.

so you know there is this you know Badu is probably the most Althusserian of all at least in the remaining literature Althusserian Lacanian in his methodologies Balabar was probably the last holdout I guess of Althusserianism in its purest form But, you know, there's this determination, the last instance, DLI, which becomes quite important for literature we read today. And it's invoked in L'Arwell. It's also an important Marxist term. Determination, last instance, DLI is, you know, the structural causality of economic factors.

It's one that produces different strands of dimensions. I like to think of it as a lineality, whereas Levi Strauss and sort of this vulgar structuralism of history itself, of lineages, can be grasped as an intelligible domain amenable to scientific analyses and stratiated lines. you know neo-hegelians like Lukács, Gramsci, Sark, the secret of intelligibility in linealities is not accessible to optical processes but only through the mathematical so as the economic determinant last instance never asserted structural causality but is fully imminent to them digitality and computation, the discrete is what makes the heterogeneity

sort of apparent. You know, so there's this in Badiou, and I will return to Badiou a little bit, but so, you know, in Badiou, there's a way, I think, to approach the digital that's quite helpful. So on digital and analog, there is this projection in both instances. In digitality, that projection is not simply externalization, but this form of externalization that's inflected. If we consider second order cybernetics, I'm giving this example because just like Valentin said, I do think having some sort of case study helps.

Ashby and the Shannon Weaver Thesis of information Had this informatic And environmentally embedded way Of regarding information That accounted for environmental feedback So this is the beginning of the discrete Digital processes Whereas the analog on the other hand The becoming united Of which Deleuze is quite possibly The template philosopher But which Lacan's treatment of inserted knowledge As object petit à makes him a viable contender for wealth is that of projection through unity. This is inaugurated, I would pose with Cogito as an extension by the ego come dream in Descartes as it allows for a sort of anchoring. This is an anchoring that is that of prognostication into the suture,

internal exclusion, which we see in Lacan and Miller. But make no mistake, the suture is simply the becoming analog because it is also the result of a trauma and that trauma is a projection, an erection, an externalization, an alienation, becoming artifact or becoming media. And this is the case in the phantom, the parasite of the dream or the ego. Badiou takes us towards imminence and self-critique. The will of knowledge is a transformation, traversal of a sort of stratified space, and the full force of Badiou's ontological thesis, that being is nothing, is only realized when it's supplemented by the trans-standal hypothesis. And this is something that I extract from Lorwell, and I will sort of elaborate a bit.

But we can distinction the void as unilateral duality with being nothing, in which is rooted as an indivisible zero, upon which one plus one plus one, lack of lack of lack, is sort of the haunting parasite of the becoming analog, where dialectics proceeds by the one dividing into two. Unilateralization consists in the two of the void, effectuating the zero of being nothing. So non-dialectical negation is this voiding out. This is why I think that there is a third possibility between the analog and the digital of the prevent, the logic of the unilateral duality, the irreversible cut.

using Godel's cut reminiscent of the open hole in the Hegelian system rather than the thesis and thesis of Fichte. Bajot's treatment of excess is not as remainder but as a functional limitation a distance without concept. Separation's great success is that it is evolutionary and genetic it continues the marker of identity. The digital process is... Hey, Ankin, just for your reference, you have maybe like three to seven more minutes. Okay, can you put your hands up with like a five when I'm at five? Sure. I mean, can you see my screen in the sidebar? Yes. Okay, great. So yeah, I mean, I have like a long presentation. I won't present everything just as much as I have time for.

The digital process is a process of logic and an epistemological question that forecloses the subjective. So this is, in fact, a recursion of recursion, which rests inherently on identification. Like science, cybernetics treats information as if it has no systematic substructure other than self. So the subjective lacks a distinct marker, a suture, and thus is marked by self-suitability. The production of the logical concepts and equality and self-inequality presupposes the foreclosure of what is scripturally non-self-identical. So the lack in Badiou of the equal is built upon absolute absence and the non-identical. Well, vegetality is a determinant ontic system.

As Badiou treats science, this treatment of mathematics as univocally, as unequivocally self-determined will eventually displace Badiou's historicity with Quentin Melssoe perhaps emptying the sign. But as we said, there is something beyond finitude. So this becomes, you know, something that in Harmon and Latour, we can maybe make the comparison with the atomist, the shul of dialectic materialism. But what I'd like to also, if I have time to, is consider those philosophers of the analog. world. So Parmenides is a relative one and hypothesis two, evinces that science is always

determined and that science is always integrated. In Larwell, we see how the relative one is, you know, relativism at work. And unlike Renoir, we do Regnoir, we do not need to return to the dialectic exercise following Hegel's dialectic of being and nothingness, because being, this is a false. I think Reginald recognizes the problem of indetermination, the problem here that I'd like to consider of becoming digital and the pre-event, discrete moment here held in the computational metaphor, an absolute one accompanies the relative one, thus his Hegelianism.

Deleuze, Lacan, Parmenides, these are the monist philosophers of univocal being. For Lacan, the supplementary A always accompanies the one, so that the true duality can never serve as a basis. For Deleuze, multiplicities of the instance of being are concordant with univocity. all these philosophers avoid the classical binarisms of metaphysics that Guenois sort of carves for Lurwell we see the science bound we're doomed to clone the super superposition one in Guenois epistemology matrix it I think occludes the question of the sensible although not that of sensation not affect but

does science not make possible transcending the subjective condition of sensibility? So even if we distinguish from qualitative science that, you know, the work of Braunschweig extolled, can we ask whether mathematical thought breaks with sensation? The phenomenological message essentially answers in the negative. The realities in physical mathematical science reach, they derive their meaning from procedures that proceed from the sensible. But total alterity, in which being does not refer to enjoyment and presents itself out of itself, this is sort of

what I like thinking of in terms of the computational, of the reproduction that occurs in digitization. Whereas Galloway looks at the becoming digital as a becoming riven, I think what's more interesting and perhaps quite appropriate is a becoming repeatable ad infinitum of identity, something akin to mitosis, because there is always an originator in, for instance, this fork bomb, which is not really quite clear, but you see the code, whether it repeats or bifurcates, there is an originary, there is a sort of identity. So yeah, I think I have maybe

three minutes left. But so really what I wanted to consider is that the process of digital differentiation is a process of the repeated interior. It's fitted in concoction with generation, but also more primarily with resolving the paradox of the signifier. I think that resolving the paradox of the signifier, there's this contending with paradox. We have to contend with what Miller aptly calls insertion of the subject, which is vanishing. uh evanuswa evanuswemam this is the effect of the signifier as a becoming analog as the

introduction of the signifier is simultaneously to the anonement of the other uh which is here called the other scene uh the consciousness uh and uh making manifested division that that Miller calls alienation. So in, yeah, I mean, in concluding here, I think that there is a quite interesting way to look at Badiou's terming mathematics as the universal property of things, looking at second-order cybernetics, where information, unlike the, you know, the classical Church-Turing thesis, information is rendered as a closed loop within itself, becomes more allometric and homeostatic regulation that involves the environment.

Still a closed loop, but one that deals with the recursion of recursion. And then, you know, sort of complicating identity and how identity has a remainder or that remainder is identity reproducing itself in digitality, which we can look at for, you know, DNA is an example of a digitally that behaves as such code etc but I will I will end here because I could keep going for quite some time something I've been working on and this body of text was quite helpful so thank you can I ask you to like give a thesis or two in very like clear and simple manner

without any references just just for like sake of clarity for myself thank you I think you're muted I think you're muted it is second-order cybernetics treatment of information maps quite well onto Badeau's movement towards imminence and self-critique. So looking at transformation as stratiated rather than reduction, just this ontological thesis that we see in his is essentially closing the problem of identity in Miller and Lacan with a

mathematical ontology at the core. The problem of identity and digitality, you know, is not one that I have quite of a finished thesis for. It's one that I'm building from Galloway's working definition of the analog and the digital. But whereas he sort of poses digitality as the Hegelian formula, really more actually as an even split, the one becoming two, the one becoming split. I'm interested perhaps in how it's a bit more complicated, it's a bit more involving identification and generation, particularly degenerative as we were reading about in Miller and Lacan,

but resolved in Badiou. okay valentine said no references did you say no references sorry uh then i would i mean if if it counts that you can say second order cybernetics without that being a reference uh because there's a historical moment that i kind of i think it's okay so that would be the one that i yeah just mathematics is a closed loop again sorry um we do need to make haste because we're gonna run out of time and Eric I think you're responding right now so can I I mean for the in the interest of time can I ask you because we're getting regardless we're gonna run out of time but I don't want to select too much okay so I'm sorry yes no no no problem at all the point is I cannot really

respond that much to Atkins talk because I think it was presumed very very much knowledge about the fields you were talking about so I cannot really respond to that. What I will try to do is I'll try to post some questions that I think are important to the general outline of the course and more more specifically to the work of the cashier and our overall project here so um one of my uh one of my central questions is basically and i think i posted it in the chat or in the classroom i think in the chat last time was um the relation between anti-philosophy and

philosophy and that anti-philosophy is already a philosophical concept. It's the picture that philosophy makes itself of its other, of anti-philosophy. And my question is basically, okay, we have a difference, but this difference seems to look differently depending from which side you look so you don't have the difference between philosophy and anti-philosophy isn't really thinkable as an as a universal difference i hope it gets quite uh um i hope that's quite understandable and um i think that i i'm really don't know if i quite understand this but i think

that's a that's this this notion of parallax in Zizek that this is basically just okay you have this unthinkable difference which looks different from from each side he gives this example that in the political spectrum that the difference between the left and the right looks different depending from from which side you look at it and so that the that there is a real conflict is indicated by the fact that the conflict itself is asymmetrical. There isn't even a consensus about what the conflict is, what the two sides are. And this, how can we think about what is philosophy,

what is science, what is its relation to its outside, with keeping this in mind, this question of, Is there some kind of unthinkable difference? And maybe as a question that relates to this, a question I ask myself a lot, because I think for a lot of people this is pretty self-evident, or I've never seen it discussed, how do I know what I can think? Because this relates totally to this question of an unthinkable difference. is difference in itself thinkable and if yes how do i know what i can even think of what is uh i think that's not as self-evident as one may think and um i think i'll leave it with this because uh

ferderico says um he wanted to ask a question if there's still time if that's okay if that's enough for the response yeah jack wants to ask a question okay okay okay so um this is kind of of going off of Akeen's work, you know, as I'm familiar with Weaver's work, and not to be too outside of the purview of the course, but, you know, he sets up this model of how basically noise added into a system that blends with signal increases what he labels information. So So noise is basically the factor in your presentation.

You're labeling as like the analog. It's that which is bringing several distinct classes of two sources, I guess, and blending it into one, which is then summed as quote unquote information. um i guess the problem i i'm having and granted i'm not particularly well versed in the caher yet um but the problems i had with the reading and i guess this might be a broader problem with rationalism in general is how are they filtering out the subject from their scientific endeavor So as I understand it, isn't the subject like a lens?

Or if you're thinking about it in terms of these cybernetic models, that the subject is the channel through which the signal ultimately flows, adding noise in at every single stage? I don't know if this is completely missing the point or rudimentary, but there seems to be this willful negligence of how the subject colors its informational output. And so there seems to be a supreme faith in the objective nature of the scientific discourse or method that I don't understand.

So whether we're talking about it in terms of this cybernetic model that's been presented on as a sort of metaphor, or if we are looking at it in terms of how the primary sources are actually discussing about these things, isn't the subject sort of lingering in all of these discussions and somehow not? I don't know. I'm just confused on that point. Can I say one thing about this? Yeah, absolutely. This is kind of a general question to the panel. So let me answer to that very quickly. And I will also get back to Eric's question.

I want me to be brief, though. So there's a couple of questions. One is how does something like structural linguistics or a theory of the subject that's based on structural linguistics or topology or whatever relate to something like information theory, right? Or an information theoretic basis, if you want to call it that. Now, what I would say is, of course, neither LeConte nor Badiou, or Miller or Reynolds, none of the people in the CA are working within an information theory frame. So it's sort of talking in a different register altogether.

However, if your central concern, which I think is your central concern, is that these registers seem to suppose that there's this kind of transparent transmission that is not interfered by something like noise or distortion, in which the message gets made to be unpolluted or unperturbed. Especially as it relates to the perceptual faculties of the subject. The sort of measurement takes place at an inherently flawed or distorting node, I guess. Okay, great. So what I would say is, at the very least, the psychoanalytic side of the spectrum, so Miller and Lacan, certainly don't want to say that the process of constitution and structuration that the subject carries out is in any means transparent.

In fact, as you know, just from having read these few texts, one of the essential things that's going on is a kind of operation of repression. now what repression involves is not exactly distortion in the sense of uh like noise interfering with a signal but it is something like there is something there which namely lack right there's a there's a blind spot to knowledge which has to be compensated for by creating a a whole battery of representations which are precisely imaginary. And so Lacan and Miller are very much attentive to how it is that this over-determination of

lack, right? And Miller coince this, like, reconstitutes this concept of over-determination, which is of course from Marxist, from dialectical materialism, into this kind of structural was registered to say that you have to understand how the discursive space of the subject organizes itself around a battery of distortions and illusions so I think they are certainly sensitive to at least how language enables these representational veils or ideological sort of extortions into the field. However, one thing that they do not have a theory of is anything

quite like the sensory faculties and how in something as pedestrian as sensory information, in the blunt psychosomatic act of seeing something, even there, there's a kind of informational process that is interfered by noise and things like that. You know, like there's this like sort of material level underlying the dispersive operations that they are describing. But the Leuzen-Guattari and the CCRU and the people who follow that line are much more, let's say, concerned perhaps with trying to have not only what Nick Land once called the structuralist parking lot of language, but the material and physiological

basis that underlies, which is why cybernetics becomes a more attractive paradigm for them to pursue a naturalist, a structuralist account, both of the subject and of being. So I think many of your concerns, I think Lacan and Miller are certainly sensitive to distortions, but they operate at the level of the discursive space, of the subject that's mediated by language, right, of an unconscious that is structured by the language. And I think that what we will be looking at with the CCRU later is going to be more amenable to the kind of information theoretic register that you want to situate as that. Is that hopefully somewhat helpful? Yeah, and I'm more familiar with the CCRU, so I see how that relates, and I understand their more sort of empirical mindset is more prone to that, you know, this idea of how the subject plays this role.

I guess I'm just trying to kind of crack through the shell of this structuralist theory to understand just like where is the subject in this model essentially, you know, and using information theory only as a metaphor, you know, right now, for me at least. But yeah, I think that's a good enough working just sort of idea for me to be satisfied with right now. I mean, just very briefly, one thing that one can also say is that Lacan wasn't a naturalist in a way. In the sense that he really, I mean, he did not want to elide the dimension of what biology could tell you about the body and so on.

but um so then there's the then there i guess there's this like bigger methodological question which we can carry with us which is these rationalists attempt some naturalists some not um when there's when they attempt to think of science or thinking ideology clearly they're we're talking here about something like science as a human discursive practice is a theoretical but it's inscription in the world of discourse and so on. Now, this is one I think that Reynolds does touch upon this, which is, so then is being, the question of actually what is the world delegated to science itself and epistemology or the dialectic that at this point the people in the TIA are trying to do

does not talk about that at all. So that, you know, strictly speaking, the questions that you are raising would have to be delegated to science proper. That's an empirical question for the scientist to answer, not for the philosopher who's concerned with analyzing these macro structures. Or, right, and Renaud also considers this as another possible figuration, there's a continuity between epistemology and science in that they address being. And so philosophy has to also be able to account for that dimension, like biophysical dimension or material dimension, informational transmission dimension, whatever you want to call it. But that's open. Yes, this will become clear hopefully moving forward.

I think Federico wanted to ask. Yes, we have another question. Federico, go for it. Can you hear me well? Yes, yes. Yes. Okay. While reading the texts, I was wondering about the conception of the outside and following the presentation of Vecchin regarding the say that the outside seems like an engine for many of these theorists to think about epistemology and science and how the outside interrupts, interrupts, let's say, the apparently smooth space of science, the smooth space of epistemology and the smooth space of subjectivity, I was thinking, let's say, what if there's, let's say, one of the connections that can be made between the CAHIRS and the CCRU

with this conception of the outside, like, how do you see this connection? Because I think that the point of the outside seems to appear whenever there's an apparent smooth space, an apparent structure that is evidently, let's say, that it doesn't have any sutures or holes. So I wanted to know, let's say, how difference appears in what is eventually formalized in a smooth space. Let's say, I'm thinking, for example, I know that we're not going to touch about the subject of Rasa yet, but I think about, let's say, the metaphor that Rasa uses in a good meal when something is very structured or whenever something is really tightened up,

difference appears in the map. Like the sort of formula that Ekin talks about, 1 plus 1 equals 2. I want to ask if you see a shared point of the outside between CCRU and interhears. Yeah, well, I guess the simplest way to answer is that it is an organizing concept for both, but in a certain way, they also have diametrically different concepts, right? In both cases, the outside is something like something that is generative for the subject, but which is also somehow you know this logic of internal exclusion is something that i think the

ccru would have no truck for in other words whereas again this kind of other which is the real object cause of desire functions within the psychoanalytic model of the subject as an internal part of the structure that is the subject right that's the structural division i think that the people in the CCRU are concerned with radical outsideness in the sense of something that cannot be subordinated or re-incorporated into structure. The classical model, of course, is the Kantian Noumenon. So just like, you know, you have a genealogy that Lacan traces for us, for the cogito, where he describes how it is that the subject becomes internally separated from knowledge in this originary moment of modern philosophy.

So Nick Land, in setting the conceptual groundwork for what would become the CCRU eventually, traces a genealogy in his first book called The Thirst for Annihilation, in which he taps everything back to the discovery of the Numenon in Kant, in modernity, as the discovery of what he calls radical outsiders, or radical young. And this is not just a radical otherness in the sense that, like, Heideggerians fetishize, right? You know, like something that delivers us into an endless pilgrimage of restoration to our historical path, well, something like that. But it's something that, on the contrary, obliterates the human, or something that cannot be tamed or be subject to a therapeutical

intervention or anything like that. But this concept of outsideness is also highly hostile, right? For Lacan, The object cause of desire is impossible, but it's structuring for the subject. You have no subject without this counterpoint, this external point. On the other hand, in the radical anti-humanist vector that you get from the CCRU, outside-ness is not only radically external to the human, but it promises, in fact, to obliterate in the due course of history. It's the advent and guarantor of an inhuman future looming onto the film. So I guess that's just my way of setting the stage,

a good way to put it. I think it's a definitely organizing concept. Now, with regards to that, just before we return, because we really do need to retake the threat, I'm sorry. But let me very briefly answer to something that Eric said, because you had a very punctual question, and I think I don't want to shortchange it because it's really a great one. Between this relationship of philosophy and anti-philosophy and how it is that, you know, it's seen differently from each side in accordance to what G.J. describes as the parallax, right? There's no neutral perspective. There's this gap. And depending on where you're standing, you're going to see a different thing. You're absolutely right. Anti-philosophy for the philosophers seems as a genre of philosophy. Of course, for the anti-philosopher, it's

experienced as its absolute other, as something that challenges philosophy. Now, what I would like to say is that more than just a synchronic distinction that is subject to a parallax change of perspectives, one also has to understand a dialectic between the two, I think. In other In other words, the anti-philosopher might appear at one point to be operating outside of philosophy, but then somebody with philosophical resources can reincorporate what the anti-philosopher said into a philosophical register and go, aha, you see, this was actually at the end of the day subject of philosophy. And similarly, then the anti-philosopher can go, aha, didn't you see, you were also, and

so on and so forth. So something like that goes on, obviously, when you look at Miller and Badiou. Miller is already sort of like somewhere in between the philosophers of Lacan. I mean, he's more friendly to the concept of reconciling dialectic materialism besides the analysis of Lacan, who expresses more skepticism at the very least. But there's still this kind of primacy of the logic of the signifier, which under your minds, which is based on depression, blah, blah, blah, everything we already know. But what Badiou will do in his later work after this brief, or not brief, but after this period, Althusserian period, we can call it, is he will transvalue this whole idea of the repression of

non-identity and how the order of number becomes grounded in a substitutional metonymic logic by which one changes absolute zero by zero, then zero by one, one by two, and so on and so forth, the sequence, the succession function, successor function that organizes natural number, how this becomes transvalued into philosophy, into a materialist ontology, in Baalier's account of how it is that set theory grounds itself in the void of being, an inconsistent multiplicity, and that what you have is an iteration of signs that ground themselves on the void. This is very Millerian, right?

This is a kind of transvaluation of Miller's account, which he himself owes to Frege, sort of, but this is a good example of how somebody then reappropriate something kind of anti-philosophical quote unquote register into philosophy. So there's a dialectic. Hopefully that was helpful. So allow me please to, so we have 15 minutes left, right? So that means that and you know next week we have a shorter session as well. So what I think we will have to do is I'll start talking quickly about the Miller, which we have already covered,

so we can move quickly. But the Rinald and the Vavieux, we will integrate that into our discussion of the consequences for next week. Because next week is not as dense as this week. The readings are much more manageable. And a lot of it has to do with retrospective assessment and so on. And a lot of common topics show up. So without further ado, allow me to share and just get through what we can. Okay. And I apologize. Time really fled today. Okay. Let's do Lacan all over again. Let's see where that is. No, let's not do that. Okay, so Suture, first of all, it's obviously a companion piece to Durot's Psychology and Logic, in which Durot rehearses the God of Frege's construction of natural number in the foundations of arithmetic.

And what Miller wants to do in this essay is try to, again, tap this reconstruction into and assess its effects for structural psychoanalysis. So after this corny introduction where he introduces himself, he makes his bold claim that the logic of the signifier subordinates and is actually the repressed origin or cause for the logic that is studied by a logician. And by this, I mean, of course, both propositional and mathematical logic. And this movement of repression or operation of repression is precisely becomes inscribed or described, sorry, in the logic of the signifier as the operation of lack,

which disappears palpably from its explicitation in formal logic, but which the logic of the signifier makes explicit. So you can think of the logic of the signifier as making explicit this repressed origin of formal logic. And this becomes also elaborated in the action of quotes. So here he gives this quote as like the definition of suture that he gives, at least the most convincing one. quote, So this is obviously all

real state vocabulary metaphors, but this is of course what has to do with this operation we were describing earlier, by virtue of which object the object cost of desire, which is this impossible absence or point which triggers which punctures the subject nevertheless becomes positivized, or rather it becomes quilted by the imaginary by a production of a battery of signifiers which go around it or to try to get a content and this this is the operation of suture suture is obviously

if you think of a gap or a gash or a wound it's like an attempt to to stitch it right so suture is the operation by virtue of which the imaginary attempts to stitch the constitutive alienation or internal exclusion of the subject in relation to the object's cause of desire by instituting this thing called the utopic object or vanishing form. So in the second section of this essay, he rehearses the Pergian construction of number, which is from the foundations of the rhythm section 4, and the stakes are formulated in the smaller way. Here then is the question posed in its most general form. What is it that functions in the series of whole natural numbers to which we can assign the progression?

And the answer which I shall give at once before establishing it, in the process of the constitution of the series, in the genesis of progression, the function of the subject miscognized is upward. So here he rehearses the Fregean construction in terms of three interrelated concepts or notions, as you said, because one of them happens to be concept. The relationship between concept, object, and number. And Miller's, I think, is a central contention, paraphrasing a little bit, is that a fourth element is missing which conditions this construction, which is the Freudian thing and the alienation of the Freudian thing, which is precisely by definition that which cannot be objectified or positivized

under a concept and thus cannot be numerically indexed as something that is self-identical to itself, as one thing that is identifiable or self-identical. You know, and he just goes through with emotions. For Frege, the notion of the object is already in a way circular. It's subordinated or endowed with its ontological consistency insofar as it's subordinated into a concept. And it is precisely by being subordinated into a concept that you can assign to it a discrete number, right? That you can have this kind of one-to-one correspondence between the referent of the concept and a particular number, which guides the whole construction, the substitutional construction of the series of natural elements. Right? So it is because it's because by conceptually

subsumed, by conceptual subsumption, that an object appears as an object, precisely as a unity, something that can be counted as a unit. In Badiouian parlance that it is counted as one. So for Miller, the real, the sleight of hand that occurs in this constructive operation is how in formal logic, Frege passes from the non-identical thing to the self-identical object via subsumption under the concept. So by this operation of exclusion or alienation of the non-identical, which is the truth of the object, that which cannot be precisely possible. So Frege indexes non-identity to

zero, the empty set. And this is where this debate reaches its sublime point. which is to say that Miller wants to say that despite the fact that formal logic excludes non-identity from its ranks, right, everything has to be identical to itself, nevertheless you can localize the way that it becomes grounded in non-identity in the concept of zero which is precisely defined as that which is not identical to itself and is by extension an empty set right it's just another way of defining the empty set so here's the the the most relevant quote it is this decisive proposition that the concept of not identical with itself is

assigned by the number zero, which satures logical mystery. In the autonomous construction of the logical through itself, it has been necessary, in order to exclude any reference to the real, to evoke the level of the concept, on the level of the concept, sorry, an object not identical with itself, to be subsequently rejected from the dimension of the truth. So here you get like the classical operation of, well, what you will call in the action of structure, foreclosure. So this is not exactly, it's not such a chore as it's understood as operating in the field of natural language or discourse, which you have this kind of utopic element.

In the case of formal languages and of logic properly, what you have is this explicit, exclusion of the non-identical by grounding itself in an empty concept, in a concept that has, by extension, no object, that denotes nothing, right? The empty set. Non-identical with itself is just a predicate which determines a set whose extension is empty and therefore corresponds to no problem. But this exclusion of the non-identical is also its constitutive grounding operation, its foundational axiom. So then Miller describes how, okay, you have this original grounding

of being on zero, or sorry, of the chain of numbers on zero. And then through the iterative operation of succession or the successor operator m plus one you then engender or generate a series of metonymies by virtue of which one substitutes a series of names for others so you have this kind of embedded series of proper names that take the place of the previous name with zero the the mark zero taking the place of absolute zero, which is, of course, non-identity, the thing, the real, in the chain of numbers. And so zero, the mark is the originary placeholder for real absence.

Then you have one taking the place of zero, two place of one, and so on and so forth. So it is this logic of nominal sequencing and substitution, which is, for Miller, an inherent metaphorical metonymic operation that is only made explicit in the logic of the self-report. I think somebody just wrote something in the chat window. Let's look to make sure it's enough to talk to myself. Well, I'm trying to maximize... Give me one second. That's a gentleman digital. Oh, there's a long...

Sorry. Let me return to this. We have about five minutes. Allow me to try to make a little haste. Are you guys seeing the slideshow again? Yes, it's brilliant. Thank you. So here's a quote. If the series of numbers, metonymy of the zero, begins with its metaphor, if the zero member of the series as number is only the standing... I mean, and this is like what I mean by convoluted. Like you can explain this so much more simply than playing hoops. It's just like so awkward wording. If the zero member of the series as number is only the standing in place securing the absence of the absolute zero,

which moves beneath the chain according to the alternation of a recrecitation and an exclusion, then what is there to stop us from seeing in the restored relation of the zero to the series of numbers the most elementary articulation of the subject's relation to the signifying change I know right like that's that's like Jesus but okay so I mean I think like what he's trying to say and keep in mind in the second essay that we read the action of structure he will actually distinguish between suture and for closure so something does change from A to B but the same the same idea holds which is in this movement from absolute zero into the chain of

signifiers which begins with the mark zero and then one to refer to infinity you have this dual movement as you look to the right so as you keep substituting numbers and names for others you have a series of iterated representations but But also, of course, you have a co-evil movement, which is you are progressively repressing this real that lies at its core, that becomes ever more remote or removed, right? But it's still there. It's still the latent basis of the whole system or the whole sequence. So what Miller is trying to say here is that in this dual relationship, this alternation of what he says, a representation and an exclusion, this two-sided movement,

you get the basic formal template for what occurs more generally in the dimension of discourse or what's the logic of the signifier as a whole. That in all words, discourse, and thus the subject, constitutes itself by building these systems of imaginary representations that compensate for a primary repression. The repression of what? of the of the thing of the object cause of desire right so hopefully that's somewhat cool um so this is just to summarize this and i think this will this will have to do for today in short sutures an operation of repression where the subject substitutes a mark or an imaginary symbol or something to compensate for the lack of the thing the thing is of course object ah the

object positive desire which in this regard is now set to ground the subject of science that's Miller is no longer special. So he will expand this general conception of the exclusion of absolute zero as an instance of suture to describe science as grounded by a double lack, exclusion of exclusion or what he calls precisely foreclosure, which is different from the operation of suture that operates in non-scientific discourse. And it is precisely this point which Badiou will take issue with more precisely in his own mark and laugh. So what we'll begin, I guess, by talking next time is by very briefly going through this,

I mean, part of the Miller text, the second text, and then going quickly through the Badiou and then finally the dialectical sign. So I'm just like showing you all the stuff that we had, but we've run out of time. just a brief request so next week we're either having a shorter session or no session depending on how the organizers organize for moving forward with presentations and responses one thing that I want to say is like let's try to be keep it in time like in check like let's not go over you know 15 minutes or so because it really you know we're going to start lagging deeply behind and I don't want to

shortchange anybody's interest right so we're going to but this material needs to be dealt with we still go through the other text and I'm not going to shortchange those so we'll start there but next time I'm going to go and try to plow through the remaining materials rather quickly and then get to you know that itself okay yeah I gave it again 20 Mo and Rosman told me 15 to 20 but if you want to make it 15 just because of the volume material that we have to cover then let's do 15 yeah I mean just for the next couple of weeks and would be helpful because just so that we catch up okay then once we get into a more leisurely pace the CCRU stuff is much more much less convoluted I mean it's

difficult in its own right and it presents its own challenges but it's not as copious and it doesn't demand you know all this sort of unpacking but and then so we don't know precisely what will happen next week but regardless with regard to the next session do we know who the presenters and respondents are or I should say the presenters and respondents do you know who you are for the next session wasn't I presenting I think I oh and then in the second somebody sent an email but maybe we can split the time up and can say okay both of us are

presenting like seven minutes or so we keep our time short we don't we can discuss it on the Facebook group but I just wanted to introduce that at the end just so in prep for next week we will we will establish who is presenting and who is responding great and we and we can discuss also how we want to arrange next week I think that Mo and Roswan are in the Facebook groups we can just discuss it with them yeah well I mean we'll take care of it and I'll let you know well we'll also coordinate together it's all gonna depend on what the class as a whole can is most convenient or most appropriate but regardless I'm we're already a couple minutes over thank you very much I'm

sorry for having run out of time as I I just realized retrospectively was probably too much to chew on for one session but fortunately I mean this is really the core of it so next session we also have a theory devoted to the primary sources and um what i will do is uh make sure that we're not over overbooked also for next time in the sense that if there's some i might just like kind of text short or something if i feel that that it's just becoming a little too overloaded but i think we should be okay to be honest i mean because the miller shouldn't take more than another you know five minutes to explain and then without you the the main point i think can come across clearly and renault there's a to it that's important but we can go to that next session okay anybody wants to say well I just

wanted to thank you for for elaborating so well on these these texts I think it's a quite quite a good job thank you thank you for your presentation thank you Eric for responding and for all your questions all these interventions have been great and very perfect so and Eric it can sorry just to point out we have we have quite a few more students than we have sessions so did it have to be some doubling yeah I already arranged with that equal that there will be a double tipping down the line but for the moment we don't have to worry too much Sasha's presenting twice and so on. One thing, can you please upload your PowerPoint to the classroom? Yes, yes.

That would be really nice. Danielle, likewise, if you haven't done it. Yes, yes, I forgot to do that. So I'll do this for this week and last week. Okay? Okay. All right, enjoy your weekend and see you soon. Thank you. Have a good weekend. Thank you, everyone. Ciao, ciao. Bye-bye. Daniel, I...