Formalizing the Subject (Session 3)

Hello and welcome to formalizing the subject, Dialectics and Cybernetics in Cahiers pour l'Ainamise and the CCRU. This is the third session of our seminar and I will now pass the mic to Danielle. Danielle, please take it away. Thank you. Welcome everybody. So today we have a clear agenda. We have a little bit of catching up to do, but in the interest of time and in the interest of not lagging any further in the weeks to come, what I have done is try to integrate some of the responses that we read for this week into some of the commentary that we're reading.

So what I will try to do is pick up where we left off. We basically ended up speaking of Miller's Souture. There were two texts from Miller that, of course, we read. One was Souture and the other is the action of structure. So I will begin by speaking a little bit about the action of structure, then Mark and Lac. Then what I will do is jump to Badiou's retrospective and Zizek's retrospective, which is, of course, very much relevant to that particular debate. And I'm sorry about the autofocus. It's, again, it's back. And then I'll leave the Renault for the end. And at the very end, we can speak a little bit about Petten's overall retrospective, which is more holistic and synoptic.

The Badiou is really just more like an interview, which gives you some context. And I just want to take a few things from that piece, because I think it helps us trace Buddy's work after that. We have a presentation by Daryl. And who's responding to Daryl? I'm not responding, but I was also on the line for the presentation. So Daryl and I, we both present today. Okay, so you both are presented today. Okay. So just to get a feel of it, Eric, are you presenting on any specific material? or are you doing something more holistic? No, I just have some more general questions that I think we can try to connect with more specific positions, but no specific text.

Okay, and what about you, Daryl? I think you're hitting the Badiou hard, right? Yeah, I was going to dive a little closer into the interview with Badiou. Great. So, okay. So what I think I'll do is I'll, I'll keep moving forward until the Badiou parts. And when we're in that territory, I'll hand it over to you. And then Eric, we can, once we open it up for discussion after, you know, going through the motions, we can, we can, and this is so annoying. I'm sorry about the autofocus, but once we get to the PowerPoint, you don't have to see my ugly face. So, all right. So let me just get started without further ado. Is that, is that minimal anything anybody wants to say before we get started all right great so project well well fantastic are you guys seeing formalizing the subject 3

the kayak to science in the subject yes we see it great thank you okay so I need to minimize the chat bar, because this is trash. Oh, crap. Sorry. So starting with Miller's The Action of Structure. So this essay is obviously an attempt to extend on the earlier framework that he elaborated in Souture. And in this essay, he sets out specifically to think of the connection between psychoanalysis and Marxism. And really here, you get a much more elaborate actually the first time we get an elaborate you know the sort of you know meditation on the

concept of structure and a kind of nuancing of the concept of structure and one of the things that he begins by saying straight off the bat is that whereas structuralism and the concept of structure has generally been understood in a mechanistic framework in which you are basically looking at a series of elements in the relationships, it is important to understand how it is that structure is generated. So the production of structure, right? So this is presumably what will be distinctive of psychoanalytic practice and of Marxism as well, because they do not just are concerned with structure as this kind of atemporal static order, but some, you know, they're thinking of a structuralist frame in which the conditions of production of structure are thought within a structuralist frame. And this, as you know, leads Miller to distinguish between

two levels of structure. One is what he calls structuring structure, and the other is structured structure. And this distinction between, you know, structuring structure and structured structure is really the distinction between something like a function or a process or an operation and an output, right? He coordinates this to a virtual dimension of structure and an actual product. So the virtual production is kind of like the, let's say, transcendental conditions of the process, the functional dimension of the process, and the actual product is the structure that results of this process. And then there's the second dimension that needs to be accounted for, which is subjectivity, which is a correlate of this structuration process as something that is

left out of the process, but which emerges as a result of it. And how it is that subjectivity emerges out of structure and structure and structure, structure out of structuration is precisely what needs to be explained. And that's what Sartor is going to explain. And as you know, the whole theory here is going to be that subjectivity emerges insofar as there is an insertion of something that is called a reflexive object. And we'll get to that in short notice. But here's the essential quote from very early on in the essay. Obviously, I don't have pagination because it's an EPUB and there's no numbers assigned, but whatever. So the quote is, structure no more subtracts an empirical content from a natural object than it adds the intelligible to it. If we remain content with articulating objects within the dimension of a network in order

to describe how its elements are combined, then we isolate the product from its production. We establish between them a relation of exteriority, and in order to pay attention to the cause, we end up understanding it nearly as the expedient guardian of its effects. Only mechanistic thought authorizes such an approach. Structure, then, that which puts in place an experience for the subject that it includes. And it is that last locution. So we have to get beyond the mechanistic thought, understand the production of structure, and thus the place of the subject within structure. So the question that really guides this meditation, which I think Zizek condenses really beautifully in his essay, which was obviously the heftier piece of the whole sort of retrospective that we read, but it's why is there a remainder or how does the subject that Marx lack show its presence in structuration?

And as I was just mentioning, this happens because there is an insertion in structure of what is a quote-unquote reflexive element in discourse. That is to say, an element in the structure which redoubles itself and in doing so distorts this kind of purely relational framework. It is a kind of like a positive feedback process whereby the product of a virtual operation or structuring procedure is something that conceals the operation which produces. Now, that's very verbose. So let me just try to say it in as plain as English as I possibly can, which is so every structure as a every structured structure, every product is obviously the result of an operation of structuring structure.

Now, this reflexive element is peculiar insofar as it does not only generate a output, but in doing so, it redoubles itself. It keeps iterating itself. So it's a kind of positive feedback process where this thing just keeps sort of multiplying itself time and time again. And in doing so, it hides or it conceals the operation that generates it. So this is the reflexive object, which of course is another way to speak of the impossible object of desire and the way it becomes internal to the structure. So this reflexive object is empty, and it's a purely self-reiterative point within the discursive order, which then gets quilted, that's Miller's word, or filled in by the imaginary.

So this is the way the inscription, hold on, I think there's a commentary, let me just make sure. It would be quite nice to disturb the Satoris Redoublin versus Deridean Doublin. that'd be cool uh if anybody knows how to make how to speak about that i don't know how to uh make much sense of the derridean doubling but we can we can talk about that when we get a little bit further down so the the whole point is that through the insertion of this reflective element which is iterative again you have something like lack becomes structure and structure that's actually you know miller's own production which is a way to say that what is what generates new structure, i.e. this virtual procedure, is something that is withdrawn from the possibility of deduction or knowledge. So this is the constitution precisely of experience, of this

gap between truth and knowledge, which of course was Lacan's own framework, right? That the truth of the subject insofar as it is marked or inscribed by the impossible object of desire is never retrievable or appropriable into knowledge. So what Miller is doing here is he's completely flattening this into the dimension of structure to say that the virtual structuring procedure by virtue of which this reflexive element inscribes itself in the order of structure is inaccessible to knowledge. It is not something that is bound to deduction or to apprehension in natural language or discourse. So one question directly concerning this being withdrawn from deduction or not a

possible object of knowledge and so on. Right. What so structure or the structured structure that and not not the excluded object this is a possible object of knowledge and of deduction formula is this is this the underlying claim i just wanted to get this clear so and why that is the case why he thinks so uh well so it's so this object is empty it has no no content on itself so what happens is you have this object inscribed in the structure whose entire point is that it is uh self-generated right and so it just redoubles itself what the

subject does is try to quilt this empty point around a battery of representations or imaginary sort of substitutes to compensate for the lack of this object. So this object is a pure empty marker. It is something that is just, it has a pure formal presence. It's like a pure mark for lack in an order, in a discursive order. And what the subject does then, it tries to to appropriate or fill in this pure empty marker with a whole system of, you know, imaginary representations. So this is what gives the illusion of a possibility of, you know, of a match between knowing and the object. But this fails necessarily, which is why desire lingers on

despite, you know, any fantasy that would join on. And the reason why he says this, it's, I mean, intuitively, right? Because this is all very Baroque. But there's something which Miller and Lacan are trying to get after, which is that desire is never satiated. Insofar as you're alive, you're a desiring subject. Insofar as you are traversed by language, you're a desiring subject. And whatever it is that you think that you want, when you identify your desire with anything particular, I want to know how to read Lacan. I want to, you know, be in love and find the love whatever it is. The fact of the matter is that when you get knowledge, when you get love, whatever it is that you think you want doesn't eradicate desire. So this is an attempt to speak

of this reflexive element of desire. It's like the generic point in the order of your discourse, which just keeps this machinery going and going and going so that there's always something else that you're pursuing. So what happens at every point in the way, right, is that you thought that you knew what you wanted, but of course, desire lingers on. You're never quite happy. You're never quite realized or fulfilled. And desire just keeps repeating itself or keeps returning, which is why the object of desire proper is impossible. It's something that you cannot ever appropriate. It is something that when you think you got it, just lips out again and becomes, you know an empty marker for something that you need to fill in with something else um that's a very crass way to put it but i think it's something of that ilk maybe somebody i mean

valentin here is the um the is this about the quilting object or the floating signifier in my mind these are so the floating signifier is it's it's it's different because that's that's part of a non-scientific discourse as far as i'm concerned the quilting object is simply a way in which miller talks about how it is that one fills in so there's three things actually there's the reflexive object which is the pure formal empty object of desire then there's the way this empty object gets quilted by a battery of representations or imaginary decoys that's actually miller's own uh locution and then there are there is how it is that this specific operation, which of course, as you know, eventually Miller will actually identify with over-determination,

how it is that this has different manifestations in scientific and non-scientific discourse. So Sartor is specifically in the case of non-scientific discourse and foreclosure in the case of scientific discourse. I think that's roughly how it works. But Valentin, maybe you can clarify the distinction as you see it and that can help us. Just what I want to say is I can understand what would be a floating signifier. Like when you say empty object, null object, I mean like object is on the side of things and then there is like side of signifiers and it's kind of, I don't know, it sounds a little bit exomoronic. Now when Lacan talks about object A, he's not talking about an empty object.

because it's a very specific object. It's an object cause of desire. Now, the reason why- But it doesn't have a quality, right? What is- The reason why it's something you want, like, no, it's something, it can be something specific. I don't know, I can be really turned on by like red tomatoes. Now, the reason why this object has such an effect on me is because of signify. But this is like the object itself is very real. It's not like an empty space itself. It's just some kind of object in the world, which for some reason generates desire in me. And it's real. It's very distinct from other objects, which I don't really want. Now, it can be like different objects at different times, which can be all these kind of things. But I mean, just like, I mean, you know, objects, you look at objects, there's objects, and then you say empty object, it kind of, I don't know.

I don't really understand what it can be. But. well i mean i as i understand so i i just i guess i i understand lecon differently um because what i understand is yes i mean there is always something that takes the place of object a but it's not like if you destroy the object okay voila there's no object a anymore in relationship to the subject every there's it's always going to repeat itself so in a certain way the the place of object a what whatever it becomes incarnate in or as you know when it becomes manifest it's accidental held to its generic iterative structure. Now you're right that there's a distinction between the signifier and the object. The object is on the side of things, the signifier is on the side of discourse or language or the signifying chain. But the point is that there is a signifier within the structure, i.e. the signifying chain, which is this purely formal empty node in the signifying

chain, which comes to be the surrogate or the placeholder for lack, right? So that's where in the chain of discourse, you would be able to localize this signifier that doesn't just simply differentiate itself from all the others in a relational nexus like signifiers do, but which is precisely this kind of extrinsic center of the whole order of the signifier, which is precisely where you can localize the fixation of the subject into object A. But then the point is, and this is where where you know object a becomes specific this point or this nodal this reflexive element in the chain of discourse or signifying chain becomes then quilted this is well this is miller right and by quilted he says he explicitly says this that you know it becomes uh sort of

substantialized or filled in by um the imaginary so what you get actually is a kind of decoy something which you know takes the appearance or gives the impression of totalization or realize realizability but this is destined to be frustrated or disappointed right like it's only a temporary surrogate and actually i have a quote uh down there that that that talks about this but um but do you want to uh i have a question on this lines um yeah does the subject the unconscious subject, the one that cannot be accessed? Or does it coincide in some way with this reflexive object? I mean, it's eccentric. It's outside of the structure.

And it's the suture that relates them. But where is the, I mean, yeah, that's my question, basically. I won't go further. Yeah. So, I mean, I can have a small comment before. Sure. Because when Lacan talks about A, he's not talking about an object we want as an object, it's a kind of like the specific object we want. It's an object cause of desire. It's an object we see, which starts the whole design process in us, but it's not by itself the thing we can. It's like you see some kind of like, I don't know, some people like blue eyes, right? So this is the object cause of desire. It doesn't mean that object is the thing we want to tear apart from the eye. this is the object which kind of erupts this whole thing for us.

Well, that's the point. That's why it's a specific object, and that's why it's okay for it to be very specific and very normal because the actual lack is not what creates the lack itself. It's what makes us aware of it. Right, the specificity of this object when we represent it is the quilting that Daniel mentions, if I'm not. I mean, Lacan associates explicitly this with the Freudian thing. And so, I mean, this is what doesn't make sense, right? Because on the one hand, you're saying object is specific, but it's never identical to that which you think you want.

So what is object art then? It's not the eyes. It's not the blue eyes and the person that you're looking at. So then what is it? It's the object cause of desire. It's what generates desire for sure, right? But it's never identical to the thing that your imaginary system of representations might tell you, oh, that's what I want. This is what I crave or whatever, right? Obviously. So then what is it, right? If it's not a pair of eyes or knowledge or anything like that, then it can only be something that doesn't have any qualitative determination. And its nature is such that you could get the eyes, you can get the beard or whatever, but it lingers on.

It's impossible in this simple sense, right? So it's purely formal in a way. It's generic, right? It might be specific in the sense that it becomes localized specifically at any given point, which is why it's always a node also with it. It's also marked by a node within the signifying chain, but it's never objectively corresponding to something in the world. I mean, you can't say object is, you know, a something that is qualitatively determined. and how would that come back what to the to the definition of this unknowable subject i mean the truth of the subject that divided one that cannot be known right is it lying there out there you know i mean so so so i think so there's two two parts to this and again this is like this is i

mean there's two things right there's lacan and then there's miller's systematization or reconstruction of lacan in in this framework that that miller is is laying for us uh there's two parts at least to to what we can say about this kind of splitting between knowledge and the subject and the truth of the subject on the one hand there's the operation in other words the virtual operation the structuring structure right so that becomes invisible or inaccessible to knowledge that's not the first thing but the other thing is that what we are told and I don't quite know how to make perfect sense of this thing is that what results out of this iterative process is what is called the subjective subject. So what I think Miller is talking about here is that,

well of course this virtual operation is unconscious insofar as just it's not known, it just goes on without you knowing. And the point is that regardless of what the subject feels wants desires or knows whatever it does it remains nevertheless subordinated to this process of iteration of desire so it in a certain way it's always subjected to lack to to this you know it's almost like it's it's it's it's this kind of perpetual failure to to reconstitute itself or to find closure or to find you know a realization for its desire so what that's why you know i think he speaks about subjection here. But it's not entirely clear to me. I mean, what is clear

is that Miller is reiterating this distinction between truth and knowledge, truth on the side of the subject and knowledge on the side really of the ego, by saying how it is that the subject builds a system of representations, and this system of representations endows an imaginary or lift unity that compensates for lack. And this is what he calls a utopic object or quilting point, a point de capiton, which is something that is destined to be back, to be displaced, to vanish, something that you think you want, you get it. And then voila, desire just finds its way into a new point, right? You can never actually quite close the fact. Valentin, I think, just responded.

the the fact that a very particular object is such an effect to us is caused by the problem in in signifying structure but it doesn't mean it is by itself as any other magical property the moment you're able to signify it it's it escapes but not because of itself but just because the structure shifts yeah that's that's exactly what i think is going on so so the thing is the fact that it shifts is that it's not something that ontologically corresponds to anything in the world i mean of course it's like it's almost like uh you know what would be a good metaphor like think about possession but imagine like possession with that of a demon that has no name right it just keeps moving from host to host um insofar as you can exercise it you know it's something like that it's like a completely generic object that takes it become it transfixes the

subject's desire it causes it generates this it anchors these subjects but it never is uh you can never quite substantialize it object is after all this kind of it is empty in this sense right i mean the one thing i would say is just like the the subject's representations are a decoy that can never quite be equivalent to the impossible object of desire so whatever object it is transfixed upon is not itself object a i mean object a is just this displacement this the structural displacement of the object across all possible hosts it has no qualitative specificity it has no material um you know composition or or anything like that it's completely

evanescent in this regard right it's a vanishing point in the sub in the signifying chain or it's the correlate of the vanishing point in the signifying chain. Demon with no name, Neil Young's song. I actually wasn't thinking of that, but now that you say it, it is. I have a short question. Sure. What was the third element? Because you said there were three elements for Miller. One was this object of desire. The other one was the way this object gets quilted or substantialized by the imaginary and the third thing you said i i i missed it you know what it was um i don't i'm not sure uh oh oh oh yeah sorry sorry so yes there is first so think about it like

um there's uh three things one is the world the ontological level if you will quote unquote right quote unquote because of course non-ontology but uh one is the object of desire that in the world which is wherein your desire is transfixed, the object cause, okay? That's number one. Then you have the reflexive element in the signifying chain. This is an element within discourse, within the signifiers, right, which stands in as the marker within the signifying chain for the object, for the missing object, for this impossible object, which is always slippery and never, you know, which is temporarily concentrated in a point, right? But you can never quite appropriate it or get it or something.

So that's the second level, the reflexive redoubling element. And then there is, and the third part is how it is that this empty reflexive element becomes filled in by a battery of representations, which are imaginary, which precisely allow you to say, oh, this is where it is, right? So think about it this way. There's this kind of, there's an impossible object of desire. Within this, impossible object of desire is always marked by a reflexive element whose structuring operation is invisible to you. But in order to make it visible, this, you fill in this empty signifier

with a battery of imaginary representations. So what you do is rather than saying, oh, I just desire this impossible object, it becomes transfixed onto something specific in the world. The blue eyes, the this, the that. And so this is also correlative to this quilting or this utopic object that the imaginary produces as a decoy is correlated to how it is that the object cost of desire becomes temporarily transfixed in the world in something specific. The eyes, the this, the that. I actually like the metaphor of the suture a little better than the quilt. I mean, I like to think about, you know, you can imagine an actual wound that has been kind of stitched up.

So what does it mean to suture a wound, right? It's basically the suture is just the wound plus the stitches. But once it's been stitched up, you don't view it as being a wound anymore. You view it as being a suture. And that's what makes it virtual. And then the stitches, I like to think of this kind of iterative, symbolic act as just kind of continuing in this kind of horror evacuated kind of way, continuing to reproduce further and further stitches. But the real purpose of the stitches is to pull the skin somewhat taut and create a kind of tension. And it's the force that's in that tension that is the real phantom of the virtual wound that you can't let escape.

So that's how I like to think of it. It's something that you're kind of a torsion that you're creating and you have to keep it kind of stretched. because if you let it go then you'll have this realization that the virtual suture that you've created is actually just the wound that you started with right i mean that's that's exactly the metaphor i mean suture is like a kind of artificial stitching of something that is at the end of the day still open right so it is it is something that keeps that closes this gap between you and the impossible object of desire that really can never be reconstituted it can only be sort of held together by this system of imaginary representation. So the stitches are the imaginary, right? The quilting, exactly. Yes, I think, Daryl, you're right.

So the stitches are the operation by virtue of which you keep this wound, which is constitutive, and it never heals, as it were. Daniel, but quilting is the last step of it, but the suture is the entire process. Yes, you're right. And that's the distinction. Yes. Suture is the whole thing. So it's basically, yes, you're completely right. But so, yeah, yeah. I mean, suture is just how it is that the reflexive object becomes iterated and you compensate for it by a system of a lack of representations. And this is the quilting point. this whole process, however, not quite because, as you know, in this essay,

Miller will draw this distinction between foreclosure and sature. So sature involves this production of a utopic object, right? Sature is something that occurs in regular discourse. Science does not operate this way. Foreclosure does not operate. It does not have a utopic object as such, right? It doesn't produce a decoy in the same way that non-scientific discourse does. So actually, I think that the generic term would be over-determination here. And then over-determination has two species, suture for non-scientific discourse and foreclosure for scientific discourse. At least that's how I think Miller develops this. But can we, I mean, we need to

move on or else we'll crash. So let me just keep moving forward. This will keep coming back, so we'll keep talking about this. I just want us to move a little bit. The quote, the representations are put into play by what they conceal, but what they have the function of concealing so that they exist only in order to hide the reason for their existence. It is their own structure and structure that they conceal, the virtual operation which generates this, you know, object. For what structure, for what structures reality structures them, that their reflection in subjectivity grants them a coherence, another name for their inertia, constitutes them in systems, and incessantly work to make them independent of the action

of the structuring process, implies that it is inwardly that the lack which they ward off summons them so this is another one of these look like impossibly convoluted lacanese sentences right but the whole point is that this uh this this concealment of what of the object and of the structuring process that occurs them keeps drawing the subject into this object at the same time so this is what you know there's this part of what's a sick in this like reflexive object is that of course it is the object cause of you know it corresponds to the object cause of desire so it's it keeps the subject coming back right to to in this chain of desire um so true non-scientific

discourse what's the term that correspond foreclosure yes it can yes foreclosure is the one that corresponds so we'll see this in actually the next slide um so hold on so so this is the thing so here is where miller really begins to to try to work uh the psychoanalysis and the Marxism together, and he does so by forging a concept of overdetermination, reworking the concept of overdetermination within the structuralist frame. And so overdetermination is just basically the generic term, I believe, for Miller, that describes how it is that the imaginary order represses lack by instituting a system of representations, through which this kind of reflexive object or point in the signifying chain is given a temporary consistency by the imaginary.

And this occurs both in science and non-scientific discourse, but it occurs differently. And one of the things that Miller anticipates is that, you know, this is all part of what he will call a theory of discourse. But this kind of, this process of overdetermination, which occurs across all discourse in general, is going, can give way to a theory of intersubjectivity that is not beholden to phenomenological, psychological, humanist, liberal, or even Hegelian notions of subjectivity and of alienation. because uh miller tells us right that even hegel who you know describes uh you know the relationship

between the subject and the other as one of alienation as one of you know a split nevertheless there is a possibility of reconstitution or or you know like a moment of assises in knowledge right absolute knowledge is possible it's possible to stitch the wound of alienation whether this is a good reading of Hegel or not of course I'm sure Dijek disagrees in this one but the point is he thinks or I'm not sure that Dijek would disagree in that case but but what's clear is that he thinks okay we have to think of a notion of intersubjectivity which gives room to alienation and the way the subject is sort of alienated from the other without you know inculcating this fiction of the possibility of a, you know, reintegration or overcoming of lack

or alienation in this case. So you see the obvious alignment of Marx and Lacan here, lack and alienation, respectively. Alienation on the side of the intersubjective and by extension political or social, lack on the side of the subject of desire, right? The subject in this of like individual psyche sense right but the the whole point is that over determination is the generic term that allows you to cover the field of discourse and how this you know how lack and the subjectivation occurs and inter subjectivation occurs in in in all kinds of discourse and one question regarding the relation between psychoanalysis and marx yes and um where we have have marks, alienation, psychoanalysis, lack.

Is it, my impression is that there is that, okay, lack is not something you can get rid of. It's like the human condition. It's the way you are subject. That at the, so that there is kind of a parallel structure to the psyche, how human subjects emerge. and alienation in the societal sense, and that they are both not contingent, but historical conditions of possibility of subjectivity, you cannot get rid of them. You're exactly right. OK. OK. So that's a really good way to put it. Yeah, I'm sorry. Please go on.

So no, so they, yeah, they position against any kind of political position, political Marxism, which would have as goal to get rid of alienation. Because they think, okay, if you want to get rid of alienation, you would have to keys to be a subject, like destroy language or the symbolic or something. Exactly. That also follows, even though Millard doesn't say so explicitly, but of course that's built into this. So I guess what he would say to the classical sort of Marxist narrative is that insofar as Marx is still too beholden to Hegel, right, there is still the possibility of reconstituting.

the, you know, that alienation is, in other words, not just simply a matter of class division, for example, or class inequality or something like that, but that even in the ideal scenario of like, I don't know, communism or something, alienation is not eliminable. So of course, what does this mean if once you translate it into a concrete form of social organization or economic model of production or mode of production, sorry, we don't know. I mean, Miller doesn't go into that. But what he definitely does, and you're absolutely right, I mean, I think a really clever way to think of this is in terms of transcendental conditions, right? So just like the object cause of desire, this whole battery of concepts that we have been, and that Lacan and psychoanalysis is concerned with, give you something like an invariant set of conditions for the constitution of the subject of desire.

So you can extrapolate this, the theory, you can tap this account into a theory of intersubjectivity that would also be an account of the conditions of possibility for the constitution of the local, of the social, sorry, insofar as it is punctured by alienation, insofar as it's invariably punctured by alienation. So yes, I mean, I think that is exactly what he's trying to do. He's basically trying to just simply bloat or transpose the, the structuralist or the psychoanalytic appropriation of structuralism and try to see what, how this can help you help us reforge the essential conceptions of dialectical materialism. Of course, that's the bigger project.

That's a stake in the CA, right? Obviously, the different members of the different sects or groups have their own take on this. So Baidu himself is obviously part of this movement as Reynald is and Mjolnir and everyone. But yeah, that's his own take. Now, this is very interesting because, okay, here we start to get why there is this necessity for a theory of discourse, which is, of course, also going to be part of what would take the place, I presume, in the Marxist end of the spectrum in ideology critique. because the reason why science is not self-sufficient in its kind of purely formal sense, we're told, is because discourse and the logic of the signifier concerns itself with statements

rather than just purely abstract forms. And here is where Miller first draws a more clean distinction between science and non-science. So within science, you have this kind of transparent ideography, right, which is bound to obviously a deductive order or rules of deduction. You have operators that are explicitly defined, you have an alphabet, blah blah blah, every well theorem or you know of the theory can be deduced from the basic axioms and theorems and so on so forth. With discourse, with non-scientific discourse, you don't have the luxury. So you have the you You have a problem of interpretation. You have a problem of communication, right? And this includes a kind of non-eliminable mediation by the other, right?

Which is what accounts for this kind of impossible ambiguity that always afflicts language. So Miller suggests that when it comes to natural language or regular communication, you know, what goes on is that in order for this to proceed, in order for you and I to be speaking to each other, We have to create this illusion of meaning that we understand each other, that we're talking about the same thing, that our words do not have divergences of meaning. And this is part of the intersubjective imaginary sort of fantasy that we need to construct in order for societal exchange and intersubjective exchange to function. Now, it's different in science, right, or for the subject of science. um now the fact that there is no that that science of course is not subject to this kind of uh

ambiguity it doesn't mean that it isn't subject to repression i mean this already we know because of of suture right but here is where you know um miller wants to distinguish between suture and at this point and for foreclosure so the whole point is that in foreclosure is the operation right the structuring operation by virtue of which in science lack itself is repressed so you have this kind of double negation or lack of lack whereas in sature as we have seen what you have is rather a placeholder in the signifying change chain which is an imaginary utopic object which is a vanishing point so the whole idea is this long story short this kind of closure that science

that scientific discourse has on itself, the fact that it is an order of identity that is purely deductive and immunized against lack, must operate on a kind of alienation or foreclosure, sorry, of anything that's non-identical, that's not subjected to this order of pure identity. And it is in this, it is in alienating this point of non-identity that you find the marker for lack or the exclusion of lack from its own space. In the case, we already saw this last time, of course, in the case of the way Frege, for example, grounds the sequence of natural numbers, right, in his foundations of arithmetic, it is zero. Zero, which corresponds to the predicate, you know, that which is non-identical to itself and thus has an empty extension.

that is for miller the point in the signifying chain of the scientific discourse of natural numbers in which you have the explicit foreclosure of lack in other words where lack is forbidden it's exactly what is shut down from admissibility and this is precisely the point in which uh but you will jump in and this is the big crux of their debate of course um now i'll just read this quote, the closure property science therefore operates a redistribution between a closed field on the one hand, of which one perceives no limit if one considers it from the inside, and a foreclosed space. So the inside is, of course, just the imminent order of, you know, identity and, you know, the play of deduction and, you know, and operations that

you get within mathematics. But then there's this foreclosed space, i.e. non-identity in the case of the natural numbers. So foreclosure is the other side of closure. This term will suffice to indicate that every science is structured like a psychosis. The foreclosed returns under the form of the impossible, right? So non-identity is that which is impossible or inadmissible within the order or the closed discursive order that is science itself. There's a comment, but just let me take a look at here. Stefano just asked, Danielle, what do they mean by science? The scientific method? the whole scientific framework, but you have many concerns with you. Well, you know, this is one of the things that the retrospective lays a lot of emphasis on,

that, you know, the Kehyea uses science with a capital S. So there's this idea of going back to what Eric said, something like the transcendental conditions of possibility for the constitution of scientific discourse. In other words, trying to describe invariant structures or invariant conditions for what counts as science in any case. So yes, this is supposed to be a characterization that will hold across any form of at least formalized science, scientific discourse, physics being, mathematical physics being the paradigm, but also the formal sciences, i.e. pure mathematics, formal logic, you name it. So of course the question, of course, I mean, anybody would want to ask, all right, but what about chemistry?

What about the social sciences? and that might work insofar as some of the social sciences as we have seen of course were the harbingers of a structuralist approach linguistics uh anthropology well psychoanalysis if you can even call it a social science but well okay what about biology right um there's a famous quote by from this period where you know he he of course is equating like all of these people scientificity with mathematization or formalization. And then Badiou says something like when he is pondering upon the status of biology, he just simply dismisses it and calls it a wild empiricism, cult science between brackets. That's almost saying it's not a science, right?

The only, like the standard of scientificity is mathematical formalization. Daniel, can you clear something up? This has been a bit of a point of debate in our chat. Perhaps you saw this. Zero here, the way that Miller uses it, it grounds natural numbers. And so zero is that which corresponds to the predicate and that which is not identical to itself. So it's an asymmetrical order. It's of an asymmetrical order. but is there from badio i mean of at least non-identity let's not say non-symmetry because that would impose that zero could double or redouble and that's not the case there's no

such argument but of non uh non-imminent uh zero equals zero type of permanent well hold on one second because yeah you're right zero does not redouble itself but what you get is every number in the sequence of natural numbers one two three four are metanemic displacements which just are higher order concealments of this original right right but does badio because in my reading and understanding of his essay he does not do such a thing but does badio make the decision that uh that zero is the signifier of lack or uh that's a signifier of uh symmetry because this is what someone would bounce and I have been a point of our debate is the way that

Badiou uses zero and this is you know different way that maybe we're reading but I didn't get I mean I don't understand the the way symmetry is being used here I suppose I mean the way this is actually where we're going in the next couple of slides where I'm going to talk about Mark and Leck a little bit, what exactly, how does, but do you read the zero in the, you know, in the Fregean operation and also Gödel's incompleteness theorem? Because you got to remember, I mean, and with the Gödel, both Lacan and Miller are just waxing lyrical basically, right? Like we know that they just basically think, oh yeah, Gödel's incompleteness theorem gives support to the idea that there is a kind of fissure in the order of formal discourse or

science so it supports our case and but you will jump in and say no no no no no no like don't get don't get too lacanian let's let's calm down and um you know his big claim will be like no that this this this idea that zero is this uh exceptional point is is it's just simply to confuse the different levels of stratification so i think that the essential break that you get with Badiou and we'll I mean I might as well just change this light because you know we're getting there but um so the I mean the essential operation that Badiou will will or rejoinder that Badiou will make to Miller is to say the the the sense in which the non-identical to itself is excluded

is from the level of derivation but not from the second level which is the third level so Badiou Okay, I mean, I'm jumping ahead of myself, so this will only become clear once we have it in front of our eyes and look at it with clarity. But you will basically say, we'll try to describe in more precise detail what is estratification. That's the central concept. So instead of the logic of the signifier, what Badiou will try to make explicit is how mathematics and mathematical logic operate by an imminent logic of estratification. and a stratification is tripartite can you repeat imminent order of stratification that how bad you instead of the logic of the signifier what bad you makes clear is how the imminent order of

stratification operates exactly and and stratification is complex it's it's well it's tiered there's three levels to it and we'll see what those three levels are very very soon um so hopefully i mean i'll we'll return to this in short notice because because because that's like very much ahead of ours and like within the next few minutes okay and I will also like interrupt to I'll be stopping soon enough to to to to make Daryl give his presentation okay but let me just move forward for a little bit so again so just to to make clear that Baidu wants to reject the subordination of mathematical logic to the logic of the signifier and at this at this stage he agrees with Althusser and deplores the idea that the subject of science appears as the mark of a

constitutive lack in scientific discourse. So at this point, Badiou is completely hostile to the idea that there is a subject of science, that science has a subject, or that science is marked by lack. He's completely with Althusser on this point. He identifies the subject at this point still with a category proper to ideology, in other words. So the logic of the signifier for Badiou is actually an ideological distortion of what's going on in science. It's an ideological attempt to read scientific discourse or to interpret scientific discourse when scientific discourse, and this is like Badiou's sort of cheat, like wants to have his cake and eat it, is completely imminent upon itself. It doesn't have, it doesn't require

any kind of conceptual operation to interpret it or to give it, you know, to explain what it does. It's completely a subjective. Now, this is, of course, this begs the question, well, then what are you doing, darling? What is Badiou doing? What is this conceptual metal language that you're producing? And this is a question that Badiou would, in my opinion, haunts Badiou's project from beginning to end. the status of philosophy vis-a-vis mathematics and vis-a-vis formalization. At this stage, of course, he wants to say something like, well, you know, yes, philosophical concepts or notions are of the same order as ideological notions, but there is this kind of imminent interplay between mathematics or science,

you know, because mathematics is science, after all, for Badiou, and uh philosophy and ideology which is you know science stratifies its materials it produces a new formal you know order then comes the philosopher or the ideologue and tries to interpret this by producing a battery of concepts and then voila of course the the science science stratifies itself again and becomes non-interpretable so it sheds off its conceptual envelopment and thus ideological envelopment. And then this keeps just happening again and again. And this is part of a dialectic of science that you draw us, not in the essay that we read, but in other places. But that's basically the way that he wants to negotiate with this. But to go to our own thing. So the way that he rejects this malaria interpretation of Frege's

grounding of arithmetic. So this is the basic idea. Non-identity is not the exception in the ground of number, it's not an exceptional point, to the ground of number as identity, as the absolutely excluded. It should be as, not is. Non-identity is what is absolutely excluded. Self-identity is ubiquitous for Badiou. There is no possibility of the non-identical being part of a formal language. So non-identity is, in fact, absolutely excluded, and it is not marked or by an exception i0 in the order of discourse. So this is where things get a little bit tricky,

but here's where we're going to have to understand what Badiou means by stratification. So here is the essential quote, science as a whole takes self-identity to be a predicate of Marx rather than of the object. This is another way to say that science is a discourse without an object, right? It's a pure manipulation of symbols or signifiers, well not signifiers for Badiou, but just marks, right? Signifiers to load it for Badiou. Just pure marks bound by the principle of identity, so A equals A in every case, right? And it has no denotation. So there's no question of what does it refer to in the world. The whole problematic that we were just looking with Muller of how it is that science coordinates itself to this kind of extrinsic center, which is

its outside, the impossible object costs whatever you want. That is something that science forecloses from the get-go, which of course raises the question, well, but then if science is not just a play of abstract syntax, a purely syntactical machinery, then how are you going to explain the the way that science and the material world, which is presumably not a discursive concoction of Marx, how is it the materiality and science relate to each other? How, in other words, do you ascend from the syntactic level to the semantic level? And Badiou, this is what, we didn't read this, of course, but this is what he will develop in the concept of model in which he tries to give it kind of imminent theory

of a purely mathematical formal theory of semantics, which gets rid of any notion of exteriority proper. But at this level, he's only concerned with describing the constitution of scientific theories. So at the level of syntax. So here is where we're going to get the kind of account of a stratification. And this is the basic idea, right? that there are three essential operations that define a certification, and this is the second bullet point in the slide. So first, level A, you have a concatenation of symbols into strings. So this is what is called an alphabet or a syntactic base.

So you have a series of symbols or marks, right, in the case, A, B, C, D, whatever, one, two, three, four, whatever your syntactic base might be, then you can form strings with these symbols, right? At this level, you do not have a distinction between well-formed expressions or non-well-formed expressions. You only have an alphabet and a general implicit principle that regulates the fact that you can form strings with these symbols. So this is like the most basic thing that you need in order to have a science, okay? A concatenation of symbol strings. At the second level, L2, let's call it, We have, well, M2, he calls it, so let's go with M2. You have a formation of these symbol strings into statements. This is the level of grammar properly.

This is where you have something like a syntactical system of rules of formation that allows you to distinguish between well-formed expressions and non-well-formed expressions. So something like, you know, 1 plus 1 equals 2 is well-formed. 1 plus plus 1 is not. There's a little bit of a discussion going on here in the chat room. Let me just make sure. Science, science. That's interesting given that the contemporary standard of quantum mechanics is formalized, but it seems to resist conceptual interpretation capturing. This whole thing is a myth. Nobody ever does science like this. Well, again, okay. What do you mean? How is science has to be approached as a closed system? Of course, every scientist looks at science exactly in this way.

i mean how do you not even if you understand it as an ideal yeah i mean this is one of the things that in the retrospective some people will say okay we were wrong about this one right like renault renault says specifically you know after reading fair band and others i got sort of like or you know locatos this this idea of science as operating in this kind of close manner or imminent manner started to to to to weighing down some others like badu never quite got over this even though of course badu also has his own little sort of malarian relapse or something with the whole event thing but we'll get there um but we can get to that discussion in a little bit let's just like make sure let me complete this kind of tripartite uh exposition of of stratification

because it's important so and so okay so formation is grandma syntactical rules do distinguish well formed expressions from not well formed expressions. So far, so good. Hopefully that's clear. Finally, M3, the highest level, derivation, which is when you sort out your well formed expressions in procedures of proof, i.e. derivation. So which, and this is regulated by a system of axioms and rules of inference, right? So obviously here, Badiou is very much operating within a kind of classical Hilbertian conception of what constitutes a theory, right? A theory is, you know, it's an alphabet, it's a system of symbols, which has some basic grammatical rules of formation. And then

there are axioms and rules of deduction, which enable you to basically determine or to deduce, to derive every well-formed expression in the language imminently, right? Now, of course, this all gets sent into whack with Godot. But the whole point that he wants, that Badiou wants to say is non-identity, the predicate non-identical with itself, is impossible only in the sense that you cannot derive something that is non-identical with itself. But it's a perfectly well-formed statement, predicate. So there's nothing iffy or weird about it. There's nothing, you know, impossible or exception, something that is an exception to this order of the stratification,

or yes, the stratification. It's only, it's just like, Miller does not distinguish between these levels, right? So he doesn't distinguish between the grammatical level and the sort of logical deductive level. So what he takes, so the impossibility of deriving a non-self-identical element as a result of formal coherence, he mistakes as a grounding sort of exception to the order of stratification. But the predicate is perfectly grammatical, it's perfectly admissible, it's just empty, it's just an empty extension in the sense that you cannot derive anything to quite, you know, you'll never get a predicate, you'll never get anything to quite corresponds to this. So that's, that's Bedeus essential claim.

I've never met. Okay. So we're getting a whole, did he concatenate much to science? Oh, come on guys. Well, I mean, you got to remember, this is not, this is a very, yes, I agree with Valentin in that first of all, look, this is a very, this is an extremely formalist conception of science that basically reduces it to formal axiomatized systems, right? And most practicing science is not done in this way insofar as it has to do with not just manipulation of abstract symbols within a formal ideography, but it has to do with all kinds of stuff. You know, most people, if you ask them, what is a Hildebrandt system? They don't know what the Hildebrandt, you know, ask a biologist any day of the week, ask a chemist,

you know, tell me what a science is in this sense and they won't know what to say. This is a very, very reductive conception of science that's beholden to the ideal of mathematization or formalization, right? So again, this undecidability that presumably is proper to the predicate non-identical with itself or to any undecidable statement in the sense that it's not provable, Badiou is going to say that just simply means that you cannot prove it in the sense that you cannot deduce it from the axioms or rules of inference that compose the discourse. So this quote at the bottom pretty much condenses it. An undecidable element is not the remainder of a cut

or separation, but a statement such that neither it is nor its negation is derivable or provable. And that's basically Badiou. So from this, Badiou goes on and says that there is nothing in the order of the signifier that can completely sterilize this process of strictification. In other words, you cannot subordinate the stratifying of scientific discourse under the logic of the signifier. No signifying order can envelop the strata of its discourse. Strata being the way in which science keeps, again, producing ever more rich layers of axioms and rules and alphabetical symbols.

It just keeps sort of building upon its own syntactical material. and again this is a very formal narrow conception and this is the the big quote which i presume we all at this point know there is no so accordingly there's no subject of science infinitely stratified regulating its passages of science is pure space without inverse or mark or place of what it excludes for closure but of nothing science may be called the psychosis of no subject and hence of all congenitally universal shared delirium one is only to maintain oneself within it in order to be no one anonymously dispersed in the hierarchy of orders science is the outside without a blind spot that's a beautiful quote um whether it's persuasive or not you know who knows but uh

of course but you himself uh this is the the really the the the kind of irony in history is that we all know that later he will actually gravitate much closer to miller's position right because what for those of you who are even vaguely familiar with uh but used mathematical ontology in being an event it's not only that there is a subject at work there in fact that you would progressively rehabilitate the notion of the subject since the 70s but so suddenly you also have the subject as something that is exceptional or something that's that sends the ontological order out of whack so there's already a kind of concession to miller although of course he's thinking more of a subject in this kind of altusserian mode of interpolation something

that sort of is a calling or something like a fidelity to a truth event blah blah blah we don't have to get into that right now but the the other side of it that also just echoes miller or that that Badiou definitely gets familiar is this kind of way in which for Badiou you have a grounding of set theory in the axiom of the void which is precisely the point in you know in set theoretical intelligence or mellow frankel axiomatization of set theory where you presumably ground this system of you know mathematical formalization in inconsistent multiplicity so rather than having the inconsistency of the thing, which is never self-identical, you have inconsistent multiplicity

and the axiom of Voigt sartoring, Badiou uses actually the word, sartoring the discourse of science to the Voigt, i.e. to the multiple. So it's a strange thing how, as Badiou sort of gravitates apart from Althusser and goes back to, you know, he goes back to Miller in a way, Even if he doesn't abide to the subject of science, the whole subject of lack rhetoric, he nevertheless, he ontologizes this in his own way. There's a comment, and what I will do is I'll stop here for Daryl's presentation because I'm going to make sure I'm not running out of time as well. Let me see. Daryl, are you ready? Yeah, because we have a debate going on in the site, but I'm sorry.

We're going to – and just Alan has a quick question. Has anyone read Theory of the Subject? Is it worth it? Yes, it is. Alan, I think that in a certain way, it's Badiou's best work in a way. It's the most beautiful work he ever wrote for sure. And it's one of his boldest, it's not as majestic as being an event, but it is fire. It's one of the best, it's one of my favorite books actually. Absolutely amazing. Yeah, Daryl, do you want to jump in? Yeah, sure. I can start. Thank you. I'll just do the sharing. Not quite. Okay, does that work?

Yes. Yes. Okay. Sorry, Daniel, I'm ripping up your theme in PowerPoint here. And just a little bit of time before you begin, Daniel, how much time should we give? 15 let's keep it on 15 or 100 but remember that i have to present also i know i know okay uh well it would be lovely if we can make it 12 it would if possible 12. okay is that okay i know that's a little rushed but but we have two yes i'll try to move fairly fast here uh okay i probably i probably can do that because i was i was just gonna build i was gonna do a look at the interview with Badu and then sort of out of that it merges into what my explorations might be.

So we begin by assuming, a quote from his interview, we begin by assuming the formal construction as such, the general system of structures, but we then try to see at what breach and what crack and what destruction of the system the subject and freedom might possibly spring up. So I guess I'm arguing here that there probably is a consistency to Medu's writings over time. I would say that that last portion that Daniel presented of the under underivable probably can still be thought of as an extension of this basic idea.

So the subject then is introduced. The great difference comparing the Sartre is that for Lacan and for us, including myself today, formal dispositions are in a position of condition for the possible development of the subjective figure. It isn't that we have formalization on one side and that which isn't formalization maintains a subjective orientation. Rather, the subject subjective position is in relation to this formalization. So the dialectic rupture is referenced in page 279 and this is the fusion between Lacanian and

Mao. I won't read this all but I guess the important part is the part here where there is internal contradictions within the system as opposed to this you know dark object from somewhere else. So Badeau's idea builds largely on this, his later work, right, is building largely on this idea of the generic extension. So the consistency I see in his work is the fact that you are always working from the situation. And then you work from the the situation to cantilever into the unknown. I might say it like, comparing it to the section

of Zizek that we read, that we read in this writing, I think there's a bit of an anomaly here in that Badiou is working with an even more radical concept of the outside, because he's getting that from Cantor and from Cohen in that the outside has an expansiveness that we probably weren't able to imagine until Cohen shows that there's a whole hierarchy of orders of infinity. But on the other hand, Badiou's has a narrower concept of the subject than Zizik slash Lacan because that exteriority is always has within it like an inverse of a object petite a it has this trace of the structure within it.

So I think that's I think one of the visions that would separate these two. So back to this problem that I think Daniel keeps referencing which I find kind of fascinating. David Kasher, Bedge you quotes here, whether it's a matter of Galileo, the art or can go on. I think I spelled it wrong. Conception of life sciences. It is axiomatic decisions and conceptual constructions that prescribe empirical experimentation and not the reverse as it stated in the mark and lack presentation. David Kasher, Bedgehog, M.O.S. Something here. Yeah, from Bachelard, the principle of identity of instruments is the true principle in experimental science.

So science begins with investigations, but it's always got built into it, the concept or a concept. and I think I would argue that in some sense science then is thus masking this suture to naturalism. So then we have this claim about mathematics being ontology, yet for Lacan and for the Lacanians that we are, that we were and are, in reality the center of gravity of science mathematics. As Lacan said, our aim, our ideal is formalization. So Badiou still maintains this

formalization that's at the center of his position and turns it into this interesting operation where mathematics is ontology. On that point, I guess there is a question that we could wrestle with here that I've been presented with outside of the course too is like why is there a justification for this move? So at this point in time it's sort of where I jump, that's just another quote, this is sort of where I would start to introduce and it's introduced in this text where Badiou says his response to the Anglo-Saxon critique, which I think is largely what Daniel's referencing,

is that operations of mediation that might enable the passage between the mathematical and the natural. So what are those operations? And that led to the development of Badiou's work, Logics of Worlds. so there he's building a transcendental that will make this connection between being and appearing and this largely is very creative work i think uh largely hinges on this concept of functor from within category theory and the functor's job is to is to to is to move between one category and another category with functor being really just a function that can map between the two categories. So there's this still this mathematical

conditioning when we talk when when Badiou is making this sort of apologetic move to say, okay, I will take into consideration the empirical. I'm going to do it through category theory and I'm going to use it with transcendental functor. Well, I throw out the question here is that if Badiou really wanted to demonstrate mathematics as a conditioning philosophy, then he could have permitted his system to be overturned from the new insights that are introduced with category theory. And that's sort of the where my project starts, takes off, and says you know what if logic of worlds has been written as a corrective to being an event.

So just to kind of give some idea of this, what am I at at eight minutes? So So here's a schematic that's in category categorical theory thinking. Category theory thinking loves to think with diagrams. So we can imagine the left box and the right box as being some sort of mapping between two categories. In this case, we will imagine that the left is the ontological category and on the right it's the empirical. So, and I should mention, I guess, before we go, like this is typically used within category theory to move

from a problem space in one of the sub-disciplines to another sub-discipline in mathematics, resolve the problem, and then trans, transmit the solution back to the original sub-discipline. This of course only can happen if the two categories are isomorphic to each other. So what I'd be arguing here is that in the same way that mathematicians can shift and lift their problem and resolutions from one sub-discipline to another, is what about the possibility of seeing the empirical as another category. And I think that's what Badiou does in his logics of worlds, except he's got one problem.

And that is that if he lets category theory be an event in itself, then he has to probably evolve his ontological position off of set theory, because category theory has shown that it can build a set of axioms within its language that really just can be full it can provide a fully provable set theory with itself so it changes the concept of what is the atomic level inside of ontological thinking and it's no longer just the membership property of a set it becomes something that's even more generic than that. And what I would argue then is, or

what I'd like to explore, is that if you look at these mappings between these two categories, you see the three arrows that go from the left box to the right box. Those are functors. And what happens in category theory is if you map those functors into another category, the properties of this third category do not They're not necessarily isomorphic to either of the original categories. And this is where I would now place, I would try to stay consistent with Badiou in terms of thinking that it's a formalization that sort of shows where the subjective process lives.

And I see the subjective process being in this third category that's generated or in this process that can generate a third category. The new is exposed, but it's not structured within the existing formalized categories. And I think that's basically as I can end it there. Thank you, Daryl. thank you very much um yeah i mean you touch on a lot of stuff that last uh bit uh was very suggestive i think that one of the things that we can i suppose uh ask ourselves those of us who

are more familiar with and i mean i won't i won't i won't speak much about this just because of course i know a lot of people are might not be familiar with logic worlds or anything like that but does Badiou succeed in sort of giving an account of the empirical through the category, theoretical, you know, transcendental phenomenology or logic, whatever you want to call it? And it seems like, to me at least, there's a very short but good paper by Luca Frazier from the collection Key Concepts, but Alain Badiou Key Concepts from Routledge, I believe, where she asked um it's on by the UN science and the thing is the problem is that transcendental

analysis is perfectly generic in a good way it's all about simply identifying degrees of intensity of objects right such an object appears with such degree of intensity and this applies all the same to political demonstrations galaxies the foliage on the wall you know ariotne you name it and the problem is that it doesn't really give you a way to speak about the empirical world in it doesn't give you a method to go from this very abstract ideography to anything more concrete or regional so like if i asked by you well what's the degree

of intensity of the foliage and the wall that is ultimately up to intuition you know there is no method that gets you from that question to the formal to the transcendental analysis and in fact in logics of worlds every time that he goes through an example whether it be a painting or a galaxy or Brasilia, right? The moment that you get how it is that you quantify these intensities is left to basically Badeu's discretion, right? Here the foliage appears with a maximal intensity, here with minimal, here, and so on and so forth. But that's still a little, the transit between, I think that's the price that Badeu has to pay, unfortunately,

for having been a resilient Platonist from the beginning, as he says in the interview like platonism was his heart and soul and because he never gave up on that the relationship between experience not just sensible experience but you know the empirical and the and the formal becomes very very difficult to adjudicate um now we we can return to this question as we move forward let me let me let me uh plow plow through eric i'll will you'll you'll get your response to that excuse me can i like sort of give a bit of Sure, sure, sure. Let's keep it short though because we need to move on quickly. I didn't use 15 minutes. Oh yeah, good, good. I mean, I wasn't, yeah.

No, okay, well, isn't, in my very simplistic way to solve that problem, which I've heard you mention before, is, isn't that just the work of science to just continually study, investigate and say, this empirical phenomena can be, you know, measured in this way. And I would throw out just for fun is a book by God. I'm not going to remember his, his name, but it's called Principia amoris. And it, it's a playoff of, you know, Russell's book, but it's a researcher studying love and he completely formalizes the

relationship of love. He turns it from micro movements in people's facial expressions and studying those and mapping those into a formula and says, here, I can now in 15 minutes describe with outstanding certainty the future success of this relationship between these two people. well okay so i i would say i see that in a in a baduian way like i see that as okay if you spend enough time in the science studying it as a scientist uh you probably will come up with some formalization that then can be mapped into um you know its own category and then from there

okay let's build the transcendental between the ontological and that particular field the study okay so what i would say so i i'm i'm completely on board and i think it's just correct that each domain might be liable especially in science right now once we get to politics or paintings and foliages and wall intuition might have to do some trick but let's just for the or i mean even like a science of vision could take the trick there but even if we if we assume that there is uh all these possibilities for formalizing all these things it's the part of mapping this back to the heighting algebra that that badu gives to us that's uh tricky because surely enough you might be able to map this into a category within a

the broad spectrum of category theory right but we got to remember that what badu's given us is a very very compact and generic set of tools right um which includes self-reflexivity it's it's basically a theory of the object, right? And of relation, of course, and all the things that comes with this. But this is not going to work for any category, right? I mean, this is a specific category theoretical framework that he builds for transcendental analysis. So then the question would be, how do you tap all these back into that framework, that generic framework? And my hunch is i'm on board with what badu is doing here and i think that what actually so i'm not saying that it doesn't work what i'm saying is uh i think as it is it's a little bit too austere still

and what it needs what probably needs to go on is um an enrichment of this category theoretical frame so as to precisely make itself more expressively nuanced and to be able to distinguish these different, you know, levels of determination. As a kind of generic analysis of objects, of the object, it does a good job, but it verges on triviality almost, you know, where, and this is like the impression that, you know, train mathematical, like you go, okay, yeah, I mean, this works, but, you know, it's not hard for it to work when it's so expressively impoverished. And so what we would want, step three, you know, after this phenomenological excursion, I would think, okay, but you would want to enrich these resources to make the phenomenology more robust, right, and objective analysis more robust.

I think that's, so I'm with you in that. And I think also, yeah, it's about this interplay between the empirical science, labor of formalization and experimentation and so on, and the philosophical labor of building an ever richer meta language or ontology or phenomenology or logic or whatever you want to call it, to give us the appropriate categories and transcendental analysis, right? So that interplay is still ongoing. And I think Badu's effort is laudable in any case. Right. Let me now I really do need to get keep going. So but that takes care of a lot, actually, because thank you. Thank you, Daryl. That was that was helpful also for covers a lot of the stuff that we're going to talk about soon.

And so one of the things that's that the one point that I really want to touch upon from Badeau's retrospective. So it's a long, mostly historical text that is helpful to situate, you know, the whole drama of French philosophy, psychoanalysis and intellectual life at the time. And, you know, it has this kind of interesting diagnosis of its closure in May 68, you know, then, you know, 1967 being like the golden year where all of this like took, took, you know, like reached its apotheosis. theosis but what would obviously of relevance to the concept guiding the the pairing of the course looking forward is this one passage whereby you very clearly associates this entire cluster or

this orientation of thinking with uh specifically a a rationalist and anti-empiricist trajectory And he very clearly distinguishes between these two vectors of French philosophy, at least in the 20th century, but of course it could probably be dated even back in French philosophy, between Bergson and, oh, what's his name? That's like an impossible name to Brunswick, right? I suppose that's how you pronounce it. But so that's the kind of like proto 20th century division between vitalist phenomenology, philosophies of what Foucault would call philosophies of consciousness and rationalism. And Bruchwick being the representative of the philosophy of the concept.

So Bergson on the side of life, vitalism, empiricism, Bruchwick on the side of the concept, rationalism and so on. And here's a quote. The second point that was retained was that science far from consolidating empiricism is anti-empiricist. That is the absolute break made by French epistemology from Anglo-Saxon epistemology. We see very clearly with Bachelard, but also with Kangulhem, I've never actually pronounced his name right, that not only is science not empiricist, but that it is the principal school of non-empiricism, that it forms the principal critique of empiricism itself. Whether it is a matter of Galileo, Descartes, etc., or even Cagulamian conception of the life sciences, it is axiomatic decisions and conceptual constructions that prescribe empirical experimentation and not the reverse.

That is Bachelard's theory in a nutshell. Scientific apparatuses are theory embodied, experimentation is always an artifice, the theoretical and formal hypotheses come first. The historians and philosophers of the sciences, such as Quere, come to the aid of this view. They prove that in reality, Galileo never made a single experiment, and moreover, that if they had carried any out, they would have contradicted his conceptual decisions, etc. That is the second point. Philosophy is all the closer to science for science as being theoretical and not empirical. French epistemology, in which Meijer-Saën must be included, is conceptualist and anti-empiricist. This is why it's entirely ignored and contested in Anglo-Saxon milieu, of course, which has always considered it dogmatically, typically French, that is to say, apiaristic or even idealist.

Now, I don't think that's fair to the Anglo-Saxon school, but to be fair, it's also, I mean, he's thinking of, of course, logical empiricism in its heyday. Bidou's actually made the claim, I've heard him make this claim, he's actually told me this, that he thinks the only consistent form of analytic philosophy is possible, which I think is ridiculous, but it's something that he holds. He's still very much in that phase of analytic philosophy or Anglo-Saxon philosophy, which is fine. Who cares? But there's this other thing, which is that you can, you know, whereas, I mean, this is the traditional division, right? Like empiricists, vitalists think that science begins with something like experience, of course, but it's also that there is experimentation or a transaction between the world and the subject.

whereas the rationalist thing that no actually you begin by constructing something like a formal framework a formal theory axioms theorems etc and then experimentation is always relative to an already constituted theoretical framework now the problem with this i want to suggest and this is something that is important to start keeping in mind for next week because this is the person this the rejoinder insofar as neckland and ccru and all the people associated there can be considered the hirers to the laws and you know to a delusian framework is that and even though they will also fall into a kind of trap in this way notice that badu keeps talking about the there's a concept here that's fishy that sticks out which is decision right now what does decision mean in a framework

in which you're presumably underwriting the valences of voluntarism. Now, I get it. Not all decision has to be beholding to a kind of crass, phenomenological, vitalist perspective. In fact, Badiou is very clear, as Bachelard is, and all the members of the CA, that when they think about experience or something like scientific practice, they have something in mind like construction, construction of theories, building. but this nevertheless leaves this question of the whose decision right if there is no subject of science of course at this point this is a retrospective so at this point but you has to accept that there is in a subject of science but you have to think about this question who is

calling pulling the strings what is your theory of action your theory of decision but you has a theory of decision. He has a theory of subjectivation that's at the heart of his ontology, but it is one that is precisely based on the kind of exception to the rule, rhetoric or dialectic, that Miller was trying to inculcate earlier on. In other words, the subject is for Badiou, and the decision that the event has taken place is for Badiou, something like an interruption of the monotony of the ontological order. Now, in the phenomenology that he draws out in Logics of Worlds, it acquires a different flavor. He has a theory of change that sort of sprawls across escalating series, culminating in what he calls

a strong singularity, but we don't have to worry about that. But regardless, this is an important thing. I do think that once the theory comes back in Badiou, also the specter of Sartre comes haunting back. And that there is this kind of fundamental act or decision that is inaugural for both science, but also for philosophy, you know, the meta-historical decision to claim that the one is not. And here, the kind of voluntarist specter of start, which was supposed to be the starting point for a structuralist conception that went beyond phenomenological existentialist and voluntarist conceptions of the subject, comes haunting this project back. So we seem to be caught between a polarity in which there is simply no subject of science,

but then you have no way of explaining its own internal dynamics. And another one in which you introduce the subject as an exception to the rule, but in which you have to sort of reify either a kind of like pure act in the sense of Badiou, or on the other hand insist that there is something like well the subject of lack inscribed in every structure which is it's fine i mean like i imagine but you could even say yeah sure there's that also going on at this point but we still need a theory of the event or of change or something like that in other words the the subject of lack is not the only subject or the predominant subject question daniel yeah i'm struggling with this argument with somebody right now but what i

don't understand is uh what is the basis on which you can then critique by juic's position because you have to be doing the very thing that you're critiquing well i know what i would say is you need a theory of decision you need a formal theory of the subject and of decision that is not simply the one that Badiou gives you, because Badiou does not accept, for example, that there isn't a philosophical subject. So who's making the ontological decision to identify mathematics and ontology? It's not the scientists. I mean, that's not the science. Science, you know, is an imminent practice that, you know, takes care of itself. But in order for you to make that claim, the one is not set theory thinks of pure multiplicity,

he has to appeal to this metontological decision well who is making this decision it's whatever you whatever you place in that position is subject to that same criticism well if you don't have a theory of decision or of the subject which so that's where i want to like say there's a gulf there in in in the account that badu gives he doesn't have a theory of how ontology constitutes itself so in other words for him it's a matter of a historical act that's just an affirmation at this point actually the early Badiou he actually said at one point I will prove one day that mathematics is ontology I'll prove it now that goes off you know off the board quickly enough because Badiou just simply never was able to to prove that

and at that point is when the whole rhetoric of the historical decision takes its place but i agree with ray brassier on this point where um this philosophical ur subject that makes the metahistorical decision and without whom you the whole series of identifications set sermelo frankelex and mediation of set theory with ontology and ontology with the theory of pure multiplicity and you know basically with the that won't go through So the coordination of this metaconceptual apparatus, presentation, multiplicity, situation, count as one, blah, blah, blah, the formalism of said theory, right, and, you know, and the world, you know, concrete situations in art, politics, science, and love can only proceed by virtue of this unthematized philosophical subject.

So what I would want to do is to have a theory of the subject that includes the conditions for ontological discourse as part of its explicitation. So I think that's the missing point. He doesn't have a theory of ontology. He has an ontological decision, but that depends on a blind philosophical subject. Daniel, I'm really sorry. I don't know if this has to do with Valentin's discussion. in the classroom. Yeah. That he actually said that well reason, logic, this would need an ontological subject at the end. Like the subject needs to be like a sort of pivot so that we can take part in logic. Logic doesn't justify purely for

itself. It needs like a sort of formalization of the subject. I think that that was a part of the what valentine said uh yeah i mean i i obviously i i we don't i don't have time to be uh like because there was a whole discussion going on on the chat but but one thing that i mean but you obviously does think that that ontology because ontology is mathematics right and at this in the in the later stages ontology has a subject so there are events there are mathematical events and there are scientific events so but that's i'm pretty sure that's not what valentine is trying to say uh i have i have the impression that he's probably more concerned with that the idea that uh in order for science to to even constitute itself as this kind of rhetoric of a closed space that is immunized to uh exteriority or non-identity or something like

that there has to be a subject or else who you know who is who's performing this construction who's closing this who's who's stratifying in other words what what does the assertification right i mean that's a question that you can ask the early buddy and i'm pretty sure he wouldn't have a very good answer to it i mean you can say well science stratifies itself it has no subject but then you go well you know math you know mathematics is a it's a human endeavor it's it's it's a discourse it's something it's a language it's it's a formal language all right but it's not something that operates autonomously as if humans didn't exist or people didn't exist so how do you account for the production the conditions of production of science A stratification gives you the mechanisms of how it is that you operate on this formal ideography.

But that doesn't tell you about, you know, what lies, you know, about the action of doing science as a practice, right? It tells you only what kind of operations are imminent to that practice. I mean, there's a way to use this. It's a way that Quentin Nassau uses it, which is contingency, the carving contingency around this. I think you're right. I think Mayasu recovers or rekindles the early Baiduian attempt to prove the continuity of mathematics and ontology without just simply appealing to an axiomatic decision or something like that. But I don't think he succeeds for reasons that are obviously too... Right, right, right. I agree with you about this, but yes. Let's just move forward really quickly. We have about 45 minutes. So let me just plow through a little bit.

I just wanted to remember that I have to present too, but we can do this at the end of the seminar. Yes, that was my idea. At the end, so I just want to plow through the Zizekian retrospective and talk very briefly about Renault, and then we'll jump immediately to your presentation and then close shop. Very interestingly, Zizek's piece, it's a mess like everything. like you know it jumps from a to b to c to it's it's it's it's you know it's jizek so but it's wonderful it's actually incredibly ripe with with you know interesting digressions and this is the interesting question that he sort of like formulates as a kind of a condensation of the

spirit of the whole structural saga that takes place in the kia its founding gesture is to assert the differential self-relational nature of structure in its formal purity, purifying it of all pathological imaginary elements. The question is then, after this purification, is there a subject to the structure? That is really the question that you can sort of repeat time and time and time again. Now, he touches upon, he begins actually by touching upon a text by Jean-Claude Milner, The Point of the Signifier, which we didn't read, but in which milner does something really clever in um in which he revisits um plato and basically tries to the parmenides in particular in which he thinks socrates reluctantly taps into the idea that you

know philosophical discourse meets a kind of point of non-totalizability so in this regard he he you The Socratic philosopher wants to diffuse the sophistry of pure opinion, but in doing so, it finds itself caught in a dialectic which shows that discourse is non-totalizable. And so there is something like the puncturing of lack lingering within the pretensions of philosophical discourse. And here's the full quote. It's a very interesting one. What Plato lacks here is a full deployment of self-referentiality in a network of relations. If the same is not different, it is then different from difference, and is difference the same with relation to itself, identical to itself?

Although Plato comes close to articulating this self-referentiality in his Parmenides, he lacked the structuralist concept of differentiality, which defines the signifying order. The first to formulate this concept was Saussure, who pointed out that the identity of a signifier resides only in a sheaf of differences, features which distinguish it from other signifiers. There is no positivity in a signifier. It is only a series of what it is not. The crucial consequence of such a differential identity is that the very absence of a feature can itself count as a feature, as a positive fact. If every presence arises only against the background of potential absence, then we can also talk about the presence of absence as such.

And of course, this is where Zizek wants to say that this presence of absence within this purely differential order of signification is what is distinctively original in Levi-Strauss' contribution to the Structural Saga, and in particular in his theory of maná. or mana, I don't actually know how you pronounce it. But the whole point is that every signifying order requires a designator or a point within itself for the whole of the structure, right? A self-reflexive element, precisely, that closes the structure and which is a surrogate for, quote, the presence of meaning as opposed to its absence. So it's a grounding exception in the

same sense that we have been uh reading by miller so so the idea is simple right because again is messy it's very simple i think actually so you know with saussure you already have this kind of purification of the signifier from any kind of substantive content you have a pure play of symbols blah blah blah right so we're the only thing that a thing is only defined by difference from others it has no internal consistency or quality right so in this differentiality it means that a thing is precisely defined internally by what it is not, right? So negation is already internal to the identity of the thing. It's differentiation from others. But then the question is, how can a subject or anything be self-identical? How can something be

identical to itself if there is only this kind of like differential economy between different signifiers you know and here the idea is that in order to be able in order for this kind of cohesiveness of identity to to take place you need a self-reflexive element or an element that's identical to itself and this is like precisely the what requires a kind of exception to this purely differential order so as to accept of an object that is self-referential or that it and in doing so in being self-referential is kind of like the the the closing point the point that enables the whole structure differential structure to to become closed upon itself

so you need this kind of exceptional element regardless and this is what levy straw um does like designate. So here's a quote from Levi-Strauss. Every signifying field thus has to be satured. No, I'm sorry. This is Jizek, not Levi-Strauss. Every signifying field has thus to be satured by a supplementary zero signifier. Here the zero is obviously making an allusion to no air. A zero symbolic value that is a sign marking the necessity of a supplementary symbolic content over and above that which the signified already contains. This signifier is a symbol in its pure state. Lacking any determinate meaning, it stands for the presence of meaning as such, in contrast to its absence, right? And then he says that this, okay, so this is Levi-Strauss,

and then there are three stages that complete the formalization of this saturing of discourse by the introduction of a reflexive element. Zizek distinguishes three operations. First, the universalization of this reflexive point. So the idea that this is not just a matter of something that occurs in, you know, say, you know, particular societies or in a particular discursive register, but that this is something that's constitutive of all discursive being, right? Second of all, it's subjectivization. In other words, how it is that this relates to a general libidinal economy. And finally, it's temporalization. How it is that it is not like this ahistorical order in which, you know, the reflexive object becomes associated with a

particular node in a signifying structure, but that this has a kind of displacement, you know, it's subject to a kind of historicity. And so this is the three things that, of course, we have seen Lacan precisely tries to do, right? And Miller, of course, that this kind of constitutive exception to the signifying order, which you get from Levi-Strauss, is both a general feature of language. It is the mark of the subject of lack in relationship to the impossible object cause of desire. And it is part of a process by virtue of which the desire keeps displacing itself across a battery of imaginary representations, which are, of course, the very nature of desire. So here we go. Once again, another quote that I think brings the point home, as it were.

All signifiers are not on the same level, since no structure is complete. There is always in every structure a lack. This lack is filled in, sustained even, remarked by a reflexive signifier, which signifies this very lack of the signifier. If we identify the subject with such lack, we can then say that the reflexive signifier of lack represents the subject for other signifiers, which is, of course, the Lacanian definition of the subject. The subject represents the subject for another signifier. Through suteur, one way or another, the threatening intrusion over the decentering other, the absent cause, is sewn up and concealed, i.e. suteur, of course. Now, I think that's one of Zizek's most clean locutions there.

So then he goes on into the debate between Miller and Badiou. And of course, we know that he wants to be a little bit conciliatory, but also sort of err on the side of Miller. He says that even though Miller's contribution became extraordinarily influential, really, Badeu's response was completely drowned in orthodoxy. And it moved his own discourse, as I mentioned earlier, closer to the Althusserian notion of interpolation, his own conception of the subject as it would emerge. Now, I don't think this is exactly true altogether, because there's the other side of it, which is the ontology, which is very close to Miller, to how Miller conceives of Sartre, right? That's what I just note there

in that sort of like indent. So who won the debate between Miller and Baidu? That's like the big question that he asks. And here's a very beautiful sort of like, again, retrospective assessment of the whole thing. What won out was a kind of perverted synthesis of the two positions, Althusser and Lacan's. As we have already seen, what prevailed was the Althusserian notion of the subject as the site of an imaginary or ideological misrecognition of structural necessity, and the notion of suteur was, in its predominant popular reception and use, interpreted as the very operator of this misrecognition. Suteur, in other words, designated the operation by means of which the field of ideological experience gets suteur. Suteur means that all the disturbing traces of the radical outside within the field of ideological experience are obliterated, so that this field is

neatly sewn up perceived as a seamless continuity so what you basically get is this is a this is an elegant way of saying well miller kind of got what he wanted right because miller was trying to to to to generalize the logic of suture remember to the marxist logic of alienation into the social and political field so as to precisely reforge this concept of overdetermination. So what Zizek is saying here is that the Althusserian notion of the subject as the side of like ideology, which is the Althusserian notion, and the Millerian concept of suture come together once you conceive of the social field as sutured in the sense of

how it is that ideology creates this kind of impression of a seamless continuity of discourse that's not fractured or, you know, yeah, affected by lack, right? So this is just another way to say, yeah, Miller got it. Here's another part of the quote. Again, I missed a word there, probably, just like, sorry about that. And in close, something is in close totality that successfully erases the dissentered traces of its production process. Of course, he's talking here about the virtual operator of the reflexive element, which erases its own availability for knowledge. So, Chur means that precisely such self-enclosure is a prorite impossible,

that the excluded externality always leaves its traces within, or to put it in the standard Freudian terms, that there is no repression from the scene of phenomenal self-experience without the return of the repressed. So, you know, no surprises there. Zizek is, interestingly, there just, you know, reiterating Lacanese and Miller. And Zizek is actually, I think, in a way, more Millerian than Lacanian, in a way. I mean, his own reading of Lacan is so clearly indebted to Miller, so strongly mediated by Miller, that I think it's easier to read him through Miller. now another interesting thing moving forward is this little exegesis that he takes with Deleuze because he thinks that Deleuze and this is a point that also Badiou makes in a different way

regresses into the logic of presentation and representation in his own theory of the virtual right because Deleuze as we know also has a theory of this distinction between the virtual and the actual or you know the virtual product conditions of production and individual spaces and bodies and he wants to especially in his work in anti-odipus extrapolate this general logic of individuation and subjectivation to describe capital precisely as this kind of automated self-propelling movement but according to zizek he uh de leuze that is completely um elides or rather has to introduce this kind of like quasi-causal object into the structure,

which is basically, you know, a failure to recognize how it is that there has to be a kind of reflexive element in order for the structure to go on. So that, you know, in a certain way, Deleuze will have to artificially patch up a crucial ambiguity in his ontology of the virtual by introducing this kind of quasi operator or quasi cause. But that introduction of the quasi cause in Deleuze is also where he comes closest to Lacan and to Miller, of course, because that is the moment in which there's something like Deleuze inadvertently, probably against his will, taps into the necessity that every structure needs a kind of exception, blah, blah, blah, even though he doesn't thematize it quite as such. But Zizek does the reconstructive

labor here for us. So let's just read this thing. So Deleuze refers here to the well-known passage from the first volume of Marxist Capital, which deals with the passage from money to capital, whereby money as substance becomes money as subject. The abstract universality of money, universal equivalent of all commodities, becomes concrete universality of a self-mediating and self-engendering movement. The materialist reversal of Hegel recites in breaking the self-enclosed circle of self-mediation and to admit a radical otherness not engendered by capital itself as the source of profit. It is the decentered labor force and its exploitation. In this precise sense, capital functions as a pseudo-cost. It appears to engender itself to function as a self-engendering totality, as its own cost, and this appearance obfuscates its

decentered absent cost, the labor which produces surplus value. So long story short, what he's saying here is that the self-reflexive object that satures the political and economic field of production, the production process, is precisely this, is capital insofar as the circulation of capital obliterates from this pure homogenous order of exchange the presence of labor force and the exploitation of labor force so labor force and exploitation is the excluded of the homogenous order of capital right and so this is what precisely uh you know deleuze is forced to

admit like reluctantly in his ontology of the virtual especially in in a logic of sense where you know there was this ambiguity in his account where the virtual is both said to be the condition for the actual but the actual but at the same time the virtual is only generated as a response to the actual or or in sorry in relation to the actual so then he has to introduce this extrinsic element the quasi cost the event blah blah blah um but regardless of course i mean this is this is this is the this is again trying to diagnose how it is that in this kind of macro ontology of of capital as the self self-automating machine nevertheless there is like this this marker of absence and it will be interesting to see in the weeks to come when we look at the ccru how it is that the whole

thesis of acceleration automation you know inhumanism and so on um negotiates this this point about capital right now now um here he he launches a kind of like assessment of how it is that the care more broadly and you know uh defied the kind of logic of deconstruction existentialism phenomenology and specifically deconstruction is the big bad here and this whole typical rhetoric that you're getting deconstruction against quote-unquote binary logics, right? And what Jijek says is that the lesson that the structuralist and the psychoanalytic sort of schools brought into the 4-4 philosophy is the idea that it's not just sufficient to castigate

oneness as this kind of metaphysical spook, but that oneness includes division within itself, that there is no one that's not inherently split, that is not already fractured, determined by the other, and thus marked by lack, by absence. So here's a really interesting quote, which I think gives the general feel. The predominant deconstructionist, historicist, democratically materialist, anti-philosophy extols multiplicity and abhors binary logic, seeing in the two just a mirror-like redoubling of the one. materialist dialectics by contrast knows that multiplicity without the two is just a multiplicity of ones the monotonous night of a plurality in which all the cows are black i kind of uh you know

this would be like what miller would call a mechanistic conception of a structuralism in which all you just have a kind of atomistic reduction of a plurality of signifiers all identical to themselves and distinguished from each other in a kind of uh imminent order but in which each unit is not internally split or divided. What the anti-philosophical extolling of multiplicity can't grasp, and by anti-philosophical he doesn't mean it in the Badiouian sense, he just means it in the deconstructionist-destroyist sense. Sorry, extolling of multiplicity can't grasp is the non-coincidence of the one with itself, the non-coincidence which makes the one the very form of appearance of its opposite. It is not only that the complexity of the situation undermines everyone. Much more radically, it is the very

oneness of the one, so to speak, which redoubles it, functioning as the excess over the simple one. In other words, what explodes everyone from within is not a complexity which subverts its unity, but the fact that a gap or void is a part of everyone. The signifier one, the signifier which unifies, totalizes a multiplicity, is the point of inscription into this multiplicity of its own void. So that is a kind of, you know, obviously those of you who are more familiar with Zizek's ontology, this is how he tries to sort of re-inscribe the idea of the subject of lack as a kind of general ontological logic, that anything that can be endowed with any kind of metaphysical or ontological consistency has to be inflected or sort of fractured from within

as already separated or multiple in its own nature, marked by a kind of internal void. So it's not just... Oh, sorry. Sorry? I was going to say, and thus this sort of opens a way for his politics in joy because this allows for one to be directed towards... Right? Right. Yes, it does. I mean, of course, I mean, that's where he ends in this essay. So he wants to basically take contention with the Badiouian theory of the late theory of the subject that Badiou articulates. So I think it's a very unsatisfactory discussion. I mean, this whole thing where he takes a detour through theory of the subject and this kind of like fourfold of anxiety, superego, justice,

and courage. I'm going to run a little, because I think, unfortunately, I mean, this is after that point the essay really takes a like a turn south it just loses force uh it becomes very rambly and when he wants to really get to the politics part again in a sort of like uh discussion with badu's distinction between the human animal and the subject which he claims you know this ignores that there is no human subject because you know the human animal is is well no no human animal sorry because uh the animal is already split traversed by language by the death drive and he says well there's no room in badu for the death drive right there's no like he he always like thinks of the death drive as something that's a morbid obsession or something like that i remember

there's a quote somewhere there um but i you know i'm like i'm not i'm not convinced that that is a very strong argument i mean like but you might be happy to say all right yes sure there's the death drive there's this and that but that doesn't really affect the the theory of the event as i set it out i mean you can have your cake and eat it here and actually if you read his seminar on wakan that just got published and i've been reading that uh lately um but he was happy to accept that there is you know the inscription of like the death drive and all this shit but he just doesn't call it the subject he just has a different concept so it's it's not really i think as dramatic divide. What is dramatic, though, is that there is this idea that, you know,

Zizek accuses Badiou of relapsing into a kind of voluntarism, which is something that I agree with very strongly, especially when he has to sort of adjudicate how it is that the truth event comes out of this kind of act of pure decision or, you know, kind of like affirmation in relationship to the ontological order or whatever you want, he thinks that Badu just sort of like, you know, becomes guilty of a kind of innocence where, you know, he doesn't realize that in fact, freedom involves a subjection to an order. And in this, Zizek is even more Kantian, even if he, you know, does not believe in the Kantian volunteerism. One thing he does sort of salvage from Kant is that

freedom is ironically nothing but the subjection of the subject to the order of law, right? Did you become a subject of free insofar as you become part of a normative order, right? This is like something that analytic philosophers like to fetishize time and time, like random, right? How it is that the condition for freedom is surprisingly also subordination to a normative structure. So you become free to become an adult insofar as you play into the game of, you know, language of social conventions and norms. And then he ends up with this kind of like, again, discussion of theory of the subject, the fourfold distinction of anxiety, superego, justice, and courage. And he proposes to trade justice for enthusiasm,

he rehearses uh bruno bosteel's claim that in today's life maybe the fact that we are drenched in anxiety and you know and terror is just a symptom of the fact that uh courage and justice have become pathologized or or dismissed as impossible as myths as dangerous even um you know just very very crass sort of classical sort of romanticism that i find almost like intolerable, but, but I mean, I don't know. And this is, this is like a diagram that I just borrowed from theory of the subject, which does the basic Bidouin trick here. Now I wanted to talk about Reynolds dialectics of science and what I'll do, because we have 20, 20 minutes left

and I want us to have 15 minutes. So what I'll do is very quickly because the Knox patent text is very just retrospective and it's helpful just to keep us in mind, but we don't need to like go through that systematically. But the one thing about Renault, who is the missing piece here, is that he really, so he wants to have a transcendental account, right? He wants to have a theory of science with a capital S. And what he does is something remarkable. I mean, that essay is, you know, I'm talking about, of course, Dialectique de l'Epismologie. is absolutely it's just like incredible what he does so what he does is he basically rereads or reinterprets Plato's Parmenides and what he does is he isolates you know the the classical

the nine theses that one nine variations rather or hypotheses that adorn the dialectic in that text. And he proposes a set of pairings of these hypotheses in which you can basically have a kind of generic structural mapping of every possible epistemological position, everything from absolute idealism to skepticism and so on and so forth, with crucially the third hypothesis functioning as the motor, which conditions the possible transition from one hypothesis or one position to the other. So this is the, just like very quickly, this quote, the Platonic model of it

is complete will permit the establishment of the enumeration of all possible theories of the unity or of non-unity of the concept of science. If Plato produces the theory of the one, at the same time, he produces the theory of the one proper to science, one with non-capital, the relative one. The status of epistemology follows from this. If it is a discourse on science or the sciences, it must be explicitly held to be such. The existence or non-existence unity or multiplicity of science radically commands all epistemological discourse. Roughly, there will be as many epistemologies as there will be different conceptions of this existence and of this unity. So just to cut a long story short, I've condensed the whole exposition here.

And these are the different pairings that Reynold produces. First, there is hypothesis 1 and 5, which together give the figures of absolute idealism, which is the idea that science is this totalized discourse, which is not multiple in itself. It's just this kind of monolithic totality. And by extension, this means that epistemology is within science. It is non-discernable from science. So the two central, the question and answer that determines this is, if the absolute one exists, what would it be like? Well, if the one is defined as absolutely one and not just relatively one, it is in no sense many or whole of parts.

So there is no possible distinction between science and epistemology. So this is like absolute idealism in not a Hegelian sense, but something much more flaccid, right? And then hypothesis five, if the absolute one exists, what about the others? Well, if the one is defined as entirely separate from the others and it's absolutely one, the others can have no unity as whole or parts and cannot be a definite plurality of other ones. So there's no others. There's no plurality. There's one and the one is one. Right. This is like the most sort of empty or monolithic account you can possibly imagine. I wonder what like a Larellian conception would say to this. I don't know. Then there is two and four, which is the position that he identifies with dogmatic materialism. And this is the idea that science is unified and has no breaks, even though it has composition, right?

if the relative one exists what would it be like well if the one has being it is one entity with both unity and being so the idea is that science is not just a discourse in the mind or something like that but it describes the world as it is and as it will as it will always be so this is this requires a kind of not only saying that science is unified that there is this one science, but the being is unified, that there is one being and the being does not change. So it's a completely ahistorical conception of materiality and of correspondence between science and being. Therefore, it's what he calls dogmatic materialism. And hypothesis four, by the same token, if the

relative one exists, what about the others? If the one is defined as one entity, which is both one and many of a whole of parts, as in hypothesis two, the others, as a plurality of ones, of other ones, form one whole, of which each part is one. So here you have the idea that, you know, you have this kind of like discourse, which is science. It includes, it's compartmentalized upon itself but again each part of this is part of this larger one right it's like science is completely unified and again it's a kind of a historical construction i presume this is something like what uh they would think espinoza is up to insofar as espinoza does not think that substance

is just purely simple but it includes a diversity within itself but that there's like a continuity between metaphysics and the world i mean it's still a kind of dogmatic materialist position or metaphysical position. The other two, okay, so then let's go to the other two pairings or variations and also very similar. So then is relative skepticism, which is hypothesis six and eight. Everything is other than it is and all epistemologies are true. So this basically means that if the relative one is not, in what way is it not? And the answer is if a one is not, it means that there is a one entity that does not exist. this non-existent entity can be known and distinguished from other things. So I think this is like the wonkiest reconstruction that he wants to draw. But the whole idea is here is that

there is no unity, there is non-existence. And since everything follows from non-existence, then you basically have every possible epistemology is adequate to something that is non-existent, something that has no unity or consistency within itself. In other words, the only thing that separates an epistemology from another or allows you to adjudicate an epistemology over another is a coherence or unity of science. But if there is no one, if there is no relative one, then there is this non-existent entity that's completely inconsistent. And so epistemology cannot be, every possible epistemology is equal to each other. And by the same token hypothesis eight if the relative one is not what happens to the others if there is no one

it means nothing that is one exists then the others can only be other than each other so again you have this kind of absolute inconsistency and finally we have eight and nine which is absolute skepticism the negation of the unity of science and where it's kind of like the up the the flip side of absolute idealism where you have this kind of simple nothingness not even these incoherent othernesses. If the absolute one is not, then in what way is not? If the one is not, that means that the one has no sort of being, the one will be a non-entity. If the absolute one is not, what happens to the others? If there is no one means there is no such thing as an entity, the others will be neither one or many, but nothing. So here you have like pure blackness, right? If absolute idealism is like nonce, completely simple unity, here you have completely simple nothingness. So

this is like the kind of exchangeability between nothingness and being that of course sets out Hegel's very beginning of logic, right? And finally, there's three, the motor. If the one exists, it is multiple and therefore contradictory. So hypothesis three is the one that enables this kind of like dialectical transition. And here's the last quote, and I'll sub right there. So there are no other positions available than those identified here. The absolute idealism implied by hypothesis one and five, the Platonism or dogmatism of participation implied by two and four, relative skepticism of six and eight, and the absolute skepticism of seven and nine, with hypothesis three serving as the name of the matricidal exercise itself. To engage in science

is to occupy one of these positions and to share it happily or reluctantly with its fellow occupants. um and then you know i mean i was going to speak about the retrospective but i think we we've basically covered what happens you know he uh he basically says yeah we were we believed in science with a capital s but i've stopped believing that because i read lakados and fair band and so i don't believe in the closure of science um and then you know there's there's there's a lot more retrospective stuff but we can talk that about later eric do you want to jump in yes hi yeah so I haven't prepared a PowerPoint so as we don't have that much time I I will just share my screen yeah let me see okay here um this one okay can you see my one note yeah

no we see well yes uh we see something we see something and the questions yeah yeah questions and text oh okay okay so can you read them is it big enough yes okay cool yes so uh i just concentrated on okay i wanted to identify very very very abstract questions which haunt me and tried to somehow connect them with the stuff we were reading so far and what we are gonna read. So, and a little bit we touched upon also in the chat and the pictures I sent from the Milner article, I think it was, or was it, yes, I'm just looking at it.

yes where it was about the different you said about you mentioned the different accounts of identity intanginal and extanginal and yes basically I'll read the questions and we see if we can make something out of it in the yeah in the course in general so basically one question that i think isn't the answer is not self-evident is what is thinkable and how do i know what is thinkable so when we go on about okay we have the relation between identity and difference and uh so how do i know when i think something that actually makes sense and how do i know if i

if I think something that's just bullshit and other people will think well yeah well that's self-contradictory and I just say okay how do I know that I cannot think something that's self-contradictory and there also we have the relation between yes as I just see here the here the non-identical the self-differential the split is is this actually thinkable or as as we had in the slide on Badiou, that Badiou says no science, just science forecloses the non-identical and excludes it and it's not thinkable for science. And as they have the whole career environment, science and formalization is deeply connected and Lacan, okay, the real is

the impossible it's the real somehow the deadlock of formalization it's we cannot really describe it and yeah so basically um to give a little bit of context um i always ask myself okay what actually is the logic of what use is logic how do i how do i know that uh logic is like the method towards truth or rationality at all and what uh i don't want to just dogmatically posit this how can i how can i reflect how can i reflect on that uh without and we will come back to that um yeah we will can we can go over this one um yeah we can go um yes this is this is deeply

here these points connect deeply with the Mille-Neur Baudieu debate and the logic of the signifier and its relation to logic. So basically my question always was to seek philosophical no man's land, to like to philosophize and try to think without presuppositions, without anything. And where do I have it? I think... Yes, yes, this one. Here it is. Here it is. Basically the question I was posing just a minute ago. Can we decide if logic is adequate to think the real, the truth, the whatever we cannot say yet how we should name it,

without presupposing that that logic is already adequate to think the real or the truth. How can we judge that logic, rationality, or something informed by this, is an adequate method for knowledge without presupposing this in this modus operandi of arguing? And because if we say, okay, is it either or is it not? this is already restricted by logic and by the law of non-contradiction and yes I think maybe it's also this pretty much buys into this logic and logic of the signifier and the relation that

yes here we have it okay no no here and it's related i will just do that these two ones these are deeply connected that rod f logic already presupposes something i think i need to read the chat there were like three uh how do i read the chat okay here we have okay i cannot go over this now but um that logic already presupposes something which it cannot express or objectify itself that when you use the method of formal logic for example

um that okay you can just think of a certain set of things but what if what is what if there is something that determines this operation of logic that logic cannot think itself basically basically repression basically repression you can't be primary repression the object of primary repression cannot cannot ever be an object of experience and maybe we can go there here keyword hyperstition and feedback I'm I'm informed here by I don't know if you know Baudrillard's accounts of the different kinds of simulation and okay where he

says yeah well some the status of the sign and there and my my thought was okay, what if certain modes of operation of thinking presuppose certain ontological conditions, like we have some kind of a reality principle. There is somehow an independent reality that you can think about and not your thoughts won't have any effect on what you think about. Because, I mean, hyperstition and cybernetic does not function in a logical manner in the CCIU. And basically, maybe I hope we can, as far as I understand it, I don't know, maybe I'm wrong with that.

But I mean, the CCIU text doesn't consist in rational arguments. And I hope we can go back on this. and yes, basically it's the same thing here, but more abstractly formulated. But it's all related again to this overall question of the course between the relation of basically philosophy and anti-philosophy, where we have is philosophy and the CCIU is anti-philosophy and So, yes, basically, the basic question, the point is, can we know if logic, rationality, that isn't actually autistic and cannot objectify what in reality determines it?

how could we know and because because we cannot know by using formal logic rationality like how could we and can we ever be sure that there isn't something that determines these mode of operations which they cannot objectify this this is basically yes this is these are my my okay it's I think the time is up also yes so yeah I mean we're basically out of time but let me very quickly simply touch to the core and I think this is something that might be helpful for everybody in case you're interested so a couple just three very simple points that I make quickly and then we can talk about this more later first

logic we should speak of logic in the plural because especially now we understand that things like the principle of non-contradiction are not necessarily constraints for logic because there are para-consistent or also called para-intuitionistic logics. So that's one thing to think about, that today we have just different kinds of logic. So logic is not this monolithic discourse that's, for example, bound to classical principles of the principle of the excluded middle, non-contradiction, and so on, right? There's intuitionism, there's para-consistency. that's point one point two is well the there's a question of what role does logic as a discourse play because in one sense you can say that insofar as natural language which is not logic in the sense

of logical theory right is bound by certain principles like you know we make inferences so there's some kind of implicit conditional operator when you say when you you know just say make a material inference like oh there's there's a car therefore you know something uh there's a car there's an object out there there you know you you go that you can say well that's that's a kind of logical operation but we have to distinguish between inference as a phenomenon of language the way we articulate expressions and performances in relationships of incompatibility and consequence and logic as a discourse that makes explicit rules of inference as such.

So what is the role that logic plays? Well, Brandon and Brassier would agree, following Sellers, says that logic is the organon of our semantic self-consciousness. In other words, the role of logic is to make explicit the kind of inferences that we endorse implicitly in our everyday parlance. So it makes explicit rules in the form of rules of formation and conditionals, blah, blah, blah, you know, just a structure that governs discourse implicitly. So what this means is that when philosophy interprets logic, we are engaged in something like a pragmatic interpretation of logic as a

discourse. And that is a philosophical endeavor. That's a conceptual endeavor. Logic, as you say, is not self-sufficient in the sense that the formalism by itself won't do. You need a conceptual meta framework to tell you what it is doing. And that's where people like Brandon and others, you know, theories of logic will play a role. that struggle and utopia at the end times of philosophy well we're out of time I'm sorry that I mean we just I forgot one thing I just want to mention it quickly and for the week on I were texting last night and we we had the idea of making a parallel

chat for all participants of the of the course which is like okay we can more the informal chat and the real discussions can still go on in the classroom but uh getting to know each other just a little bit more theoretical chat and which which is just more free than the official chat yes that sounds i'm game with with with anything and i know of course since we we had so much material to read for these first couple of weeks that i understand that we probably didn't do justice to a lot of it as well. I try to touch on the points that are going to be most pivotal moving forward. So hopefully we got, you know, the bulk of it. Now the Patton retrospective and the Renault retrospective are more of a historical nature as Badiou is. So that can

just help us contextualize the history bit. But I think we touched on the central conceptual elements in this story. I'm hearing a lot of background noise. But anyway, we're out of time. So thank you all. Sorry for having to rush so much. Next time, I'll make sure to be much more leisurely so that we can have more discussion rather than me speaking so much. I apologize again for having to rush and cram so much material quickly, and I apologize for anything that might have appeared too rushed or underdeveloped. If anybody has any questions, if anything wasn't clear or persuasive, you can write to me or write in the classroom, and I can address it hopefully in more substantive detail. Okay. It was quite good though. I learned a lot. Thank you.

Thank you. That meme like the brain. Yes. All right. Well, quite good is quite good for me. All right. Thank you, everyone. Thank you, everybody. Have a good weekend. Bye. Thank you.