eyers - lacan bachelard and formalization

7/23/2019 Eyers - Lacan Bachelard and Formalization

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Bachelard Lacan and the Im purity

of Scientific Formalization

T O M

E Y E R S

Abstract:

This essay examines the conjunction of French historical epistemology

and L acanian the ory in postwar France. In particular, Lacan s acco unt o

scientific formalization is scrutinized insofar as it develops aspects of the

prior epistemological research of Gaston Bachelard, whose innovative approach

to the problem of the nature and limits of scientific knowledge proved so

influential o n the subsequent field of French structuralism . Lacan s reflection

on formalization will be shown, in contrast to Bachelard, to place an emphasi

on the constitutive and limiting role of language in its interaction with logica

and scientific projects. In asking how Lacan s structural psychoanalysis ex tends

and subverts the rationalist emphasis of French philosophy of science, I hope to

provide a new optic th rough whic h to assess the role of formalization in critica

theory today.

Keywords:

epistemology, psychoanalysis, philosophy of science, Lacan,

Bachelard, French philosophy i

Th is article explores Lacan s co nc ep tio n of scientific form alization

in its relationship to his wider reconstruction of psychoanalytic

theory. Lacan approached the question of formalization via a certain

conception of language and writing, and his ideas are implicated in

the broader project, conceived in post-war France and associated with

the early work of Alain Badiou, Jacques-Alain Miller and others,

to synthesize the insights of rationalist philosophy of science with

the concept of the subject of the unconscious as developed by

psychoanalysis. Th e w ork o f the French ph ilosopher Gaston B achelard

is interrog ated as a key precurs or to Lacan s ep istemological innova tions

and to the post-Lacanian structuralism that, for a t ime, exerted a


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Bachelard La can and Sdentifc Form alization

3 2 1

defining influence on French thought.^ In recent years, the work of

Alain Badiou in particular has resurrected many, of the questions that

underlay French structuralism, and attention to the early exchange

between French epistemology and psychoanalysis may help to clarify

the continuing centrality of such debates in theory today.

Bachelard held the inaugural chair of the History and Philosophy

of Science at the Sorbonne until his death in Paris in 1960, and his

legacy can be read as a crucial variable in the rethinking of questions

of scientific legitimacy in the years after the waning of existentialism

in France. If, for post-Heideggerian phenomenology and Sartrean

existentialism, the techn ical objectifications of scientific practice

formed an object of critique, for the parallel field of French philosophy

of science it was the phenomenological emphasis on experience and

consciousness that represented a block to clear thinking. In particular,

Bachelard s influence can be said to have reinstalled at the very centre

of French intellectual life a rationalist concern for formalization.

Michel Foucault, and Bachelard s successors in the philosophy of

science, including Alexandre Koyr and Georges Canguilhem, all

took different things from Bachelard s rationalist theory of scientific

knowledge, but all three followed Bachelard in rejecting an empirical

or experiential account of the formation of knowledge. Instead, an

emphasis was placed on the constitutive role of theory in rendering

objects proper to the epistemological structures that different sciences

construct and reconstruct in perpetuity.

W hile reference is frequently made to A lthusser s borrowing of

Bachelard s idea of the epistemological ruptu re , my focus here is

on the less-interrogated relation of Bachelard to Lacan. My aim is

to understand bo th the inheritance of Bachelard s rationalism within

the revision of psychoanalysis proposed by Lacan, and the new model

of formalization that emerges with Lacan out of that inheritance, a

model that provides a retrospective critique of Bachelard s insistence on

a rigid distinction between the ordinary language of communication,

and conceptuality and formalization as best rendered within the terms

of mathematics.

References to Bachelard, and particularly to his successors

Canguilhem and Koyr, pepper Lacan s seminar, and Lacan s increasing

concern in the 1950s and 1960s with the mathematical formalization


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3 2 2 Paragraph

a necessary coexistence between the progressive rationalization o

analytic concepts, and an account of how both language and the

subject ground, and perhaps

disrupt

that process of rationalizatio

In w hat follows, I will explore Jacques-Alain Miller s own, post-

Lacanian attempt to encompass the psychoanalytic subject within

the formalism of structure, while also signalling an alternative way,

present in the very late Lacan, to complicate the inviolability of

the conceptual surface of scientific knowledge so often imputed to

Bachelard, an inviolability that would find its first points of doubt

within Bachelard s own recognition of the impurity of scientific

objects. First, however, it is necessary to gain a firm grip on the

powerful ambiguities of Bachelard s epistemology, ambiguities that

provide the route through which Lacan could both appropriate and

subvert the model of formalization therein.

Bachelard Between O bject Con cept And Signifier

In much of Bachelard s philosophical w^ork, the question of language,

and of writing, seems secondary, if not irrelevant. Bachelard had two

intellectual projects, received as distinct contributions to discrete sets

of questions. The central project that consumed Bachelard for most of

his professional life was an historical and epistemological enquiry into

the foundations of the physical sciences, perhaps especially chemistry.

But Bachelard also concerned himself with poetic imagination,^ and

it is in these works that one would normally look for his particular

account of language. N onetheless, whilst problematic, Bachelard s

account of language in his epistemological writings has pertinence

to the conjuncture of formalization and the logic of the signifier in

Lacan.

Responses to Bachelard have often taken the form of enquiries

into his relative debt to Descartes, and the question provides a useful

way into any more general account of Bachelard s brand of rationalist

epistemology. Mary Tiles, in her important study Bachelard: ci

and Objectivity

teases ou t the implications of Bachelard s shiftin

relationship to Descartes, as when she writes:


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Bachelard Lacan and Scientific Form alization 3 2 3

perfectly transparent and non-distorting, one cannot extract from wbat one sees

information concerning tbe sbape, size, color or surface features of tbe objects

viewed tbrougb it witbout learning wbat tbe cbaracteristics of tbe medium are.-*

With necessary caveats that I shall outline below, Bachelard adopts the

second perspective, whereby the philosopher of science must account

for both the delineation of a theoretical object of knowledge

distinct from any mere empirical object and the particular lens that

provides knowledge of

it

That lens, for Bachelard and in contrast to

much Anglophone philosophy of science, is irrevocably historical and

situated. Moreover, the particular psychology of the scientist or group

of scientists, inevitably immersed as they are in the vagaries of non-

scientific influences, must also be accounted for, contributing as they

do to what Bachelard refers to as epistemological obstacles , obstacles

that may militate against the emergence of an epistemological shift or

rupture in the developm ent of a science.

If, for Descartes, the reliability of the subject of enquiry is

guaranteed by the self-transparency of thought, for Bachelard thought

is inherently mediated both by sense experience in its potential

for mystification, and by the technical and epistemological lenses

through which the scientist defines his or her object. Bachelard

emphasizes, again in sharp distinction to the purity of

post-Popperian

Anglophone epistemology, the importance of the technical media

microscopes, ever more sophisticated laboratories that allow

scientists to sharpen the contours of their objects of inquiry. Against

the empiricist assumption that best scientific practice proceeds from

the observable and the given to the development of hypotheses and

theories, Bachelard, in typically rationalist fashion, considers the job

of the scientist to lie in complexifying the empirical by rendering it

amenable to conceptual qualification.

What is less typical, however, for a rationalism so often polemically

defined through its negative relation to empiricism, is Bachelard s

insistence that the subject or object is always-already mixed in with

its ostensible opposite. That is to say, there is no clean separation

for Bachelard between the empirical object of experience and

the theoretical object of science; their dialectical articulation and

distinction is the work in progress of science

itself

Here, we get the


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3 2 4 P a r a g r a p h

the signifier that complicates the formation of any discrete object o

inquiry.

For Bachelard, nonetheless, a general dualism persists, organized, a

Tiles has most explicitly shown, around the categories of subjectivity

and objectivity. It is important to stress, nonetheless, that this duality

is not mappable on to the distinction found in Karl Popper and other

between science and pseudo-science, in so far as the latter distinction

presupposes a continuum between common sense as revealed in

experience and the dom ain of the scientific. * To reiterate, it i

rather in the break with the empirically given that the beginnings

any scientific process must be found for Bachelard. He renders thi

starkly in his Th e Form a tion of the

cientific

Mind (193 8) : Im m edia

objective knowledge is necessarily incorrect by virtue of the fact tha

it is qualitative. It produces error that must be rectified. It lays an

inevitable burden of subjective impressions on the object; objective

knowledge must be unburdened. Th ere are a num ber of intriguing

ambiguities in this short passage. For what is the status, precisely, of the

ob ject referred to here? If, as Tiles insists, the pivotal distinction in

Bachelard s contrast is not between the empirically testable (falsifiable

and the empirically irrefutable, but between subjective and objective ,^

what status does incorrect, unscientific, intuitive but nonetheles

objective knowledge have for Bachelard, knowledge described abo

as objective know ledge to be unbu rdened ? Bachelard makes thing

a little clearer w hen he adds: The object may not be designated as an

immediate objective ;

in other words, a march towards the objectiv

not initially objective. ^

As Dominique Lecourt has observed, at play here is a deliberate

equivocation between different senses of the term object , betw een

the given object of experience with its burden of empirica

mystification and the object of science as it is produced through it

realization in scientific theory and praxis; or, alternatively, between

the different

aspects

of a single object, one empirical and the oth

the product of scientific and theoretical labour. And as Lecourt also

notes,

Bachelard will further underline the split in the object with the

coining of neologisms, such as super-object , defined as follows: The

super-object is the

result

of

critical objectification, of an objectivi


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Bachelard, Lacan an d Sdentific Formalization 3 2 5

objectification, even as that part of the object persists in the domain

of the objective. That persistence, m oreover, what Bachelard

considers the burdened part of objective knowledge finds an

intriguing echo in Lacan s recognition of the continuity of truth and

misrecognition.

For Lacan, the Imaginary (with its object, the ego) and the Symbolic

(defined by the movements of the signifier) are replete with necessary

illusions. The Imaginary, as the seat of specular identification, is

premised on the constitutive misrecognition of the mirror image as

evidence of the subject s self-mastery, while the Symbolic relies on

an illusory sense of wholeness in order to function as the subject s

condition of possibility. For Bachelard above however, it is the

object

rather than the subject, which is split between its potential as a

conceptually or theoretically produced nexus of scientific labour and

its burden as being situated within the domain of the empirical.

Bachelard hints as much when he com ments: It is also very difficult

to establish a hierarchy of error and to describe in an orderly way

the disorders of thought. F S M , 31) We can infer that any hierarchy

of erro r would have to presuppose a clean separation between the

empirical and theoretical object, something that Bachelard in the

quotes above seems to refuse by splitting the object, even in its

objective guise, between its rational conceptual core and its empirical

burden. Tellingly, the epistemological obstacles that Bachelard, in

the same book, argues must be overcome for the rational syntheses

of scientific knowledge to be possible, are described in a similar

language of impurity: it is the nature of epistemological obstacles

to be intermixed and polymorphous F S M , 31). I ll turn now to

Bachelard s The New cientific Spiri tto further refine the im purity

in question.

Published in 1934,

The New cientific Spiri t

seeks to interrogate

the implications for philosophy of science of the supersession of

Newtonian mechanics, among other leaps forward in geometry,

chemistry and elsewhere. Central to the book is the conviction that

developments in science pose a challenge to philosophy that should

be met by a nuancing of otherwise over-simple oppositions such as

that between rationalism and realism, between the observer and the

observed. Bachelard writes:


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Paragraph

closed system; apriori assumptions are subject to change (...). Science in effe

creates philosophy. Philosophy must therefore modify its language if it is to reflec

the subtlety and movement of contemporary thought. '

One might certainly take issue with Bachelard's simplification of the

tradition of philosophical rationalism here, a simplification that seems

set up to allow science its role of constitutive clarification. Nonetheless,

it seems clear that Bachelard is not content with advancing an a prior

rationalism unsuited to the complexity and constitutive

impurity

the scientific objects of his time. As he writes of developments in

physics, 'even notions whose essence is geometric, such as position

and simultaneity, carmot be grasped in any simple way but only in

composite (. ..) . Physics becomes a geometrical science and geometry

a physical science.' {NSS 47) Underpinning this recognition of the

intermixing of previously discrete practices is a sense, touched on

above, of the theoretical and conceptual interchange betw een differen

domains of scientific knowledge; thus, any

redu tion

of the process

scientific discovery to the constraints of empirical observation, or the

setting up of

symmetry between the theoretical and the empirical,

ill-suited to understanding the complexities of the post-Newtonian

scientific context. Such an attempt, moreover, would implicitly

subscribe to the possibility of there being a general account of Science,

rather than a theoretically attuned attention to the particular regimes

of knowledge proper to each particular scientific practice.

I'd like to underline a certain vacillation in Bachelard here, between

his rejection of empiricism and his generally rationalist approach to

the predominance of theory on the one hand, and his complex but

suggestive account of the impurity of the objects of scientific enquiry

on the other, an impurity that points towards an ultimate rejection

of the very terms of the opposition empirical/conceptual. If nothing

else, the consequences of this vacillation render highly problematic

the reduction, made most recently by Paul Thomas in his critique of

Althusser, of Bachelard's epistemology to a thoroughgoing and easily

assimilated rationalism built on a clean opposition between science

and ideology. As Thom as sees it, 'Science according to Bachelard (...)

cannot be reached or jud ged by ideological means, and no ideological

path is ever about to lead to science, for the latter cannot be so much as


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Bachelard Lacan and Scient i f ic Formal izat ion 3 2 7

suggest, at the least, that the process of separating the two is one of

coming up against the persistent

impurity

of the objects of possible

knowledge.

B e t we e n B a c h e la r d a n d L a c a n

In a man ner formative of Lacan s later fascination with mathematical

formalization, Bachelard insists on the sovereignty of mathematics

as the basis for rational knowledge. In this sense, mathematics, for

Bachelard, should be seen less as a medium for priorly constituted

scientific inquiries, and more as that which is

f o r m a t i v e

of the

scientific as such. As he writes in Th e F o r m a t io n o f th e cientific

Mind

M athem atism is not descriptive but formative. T he science of reality is

no longer content with the phenomenological

how:

the mathematical

wh y

is what it seeks. (17) Un de r the sway of developments in physics,

and perhaps especially quantum mechanics, where the reliability of

observation was ever more under question, Bachelard emphasized the

constitutivity of mathematics over and above its role in expressing or

quantifying that which is observed.

I d like to draw an initial, tentative parallel here with Lacan s

treatment of the signifier. If, even in the structural linguistics of

Saussure, the ultimate function of the signifier is to couple with a

signified, Lacan s innovation was to insist on the material isolation of

the signifier from sense, expressed most famously in the concept of

the letter .^^ In so far as the signifier has the capacity to uncouple

from its representative function, it assumes much the same role as

Bachelard imparts to the mathematical, forming what it is only

expected to describe. For Lacan, that is, the signifier constitutes the

immovable horizon of all human activity, assuming a quasi-ontological

status, and there is, particularly in the critique of the psychological

subject comm on to Bachelard s reflections on mathematics and Lacan s

reflections on the signifier, a shared concern for the structural

constitutivity of elements previously only considered reflective of

prior experience or observation. If Lacan will most obviously absorb

Bachelard s influence through his attem pt to formalize psychoanalytic

ideas through the creation of m athem es , this broader sense of


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subject as formulated by psychology and philosophical anthropology

a critique that, for Bachelard especially, emerges around the above

mentioned question of mathematics in its relation to scientifi

knowledge. In an especially suggestive passage, Bachelard writes:

It bas been repeated endlessly tbat matbematics is a language, a mere means o

expression. People bave grow n used to tb e idea tbat matbematics is a tool w ielde

by a self-conscious mind, mistress of a set of ideas endow ed with prematbematica

clarity. (...) Tbe new science sbuns naive images, bowever, and bas in a sens

become more homogenous: It stems entirely from matbematics.

{NSS

55)

Here, perhaps, one of the most important, if underlooked, potentia

sources for what would become Lacan's critique of the subject i

crystallized. But despite this obvious common ground, Lacan will also

insist on the limits of formalization, expressed most pungently in t

20'*^

Seminar with the claim that 'The real can only be inscribe

on the basis of an impasse of formalization.' At one and the same

time, mathematical formalization is essential for Lacan in rendering

the a-priority and non-empirical status of psychoanalytic concepts

Formalization, in turn, becomes an object of psychoanalytic interes

in its very failure. What indexes this failure for Lacan is the status

of mathematical formalization as a form of

writing

as interlaced wi

the logic of the signifier. As he notes, 'That is why I thought

could provide a model of it [the real as

impass]

using mathemat

formalization, inasmuch as it is the most advanced elaboration we have

by which to produce signifierness.'^^

Here, the gulf between the thinking of the relation between

mathematization, language and knowledge as undertaken by Bachelard

and Lacan becomes clear. For while Bachelard and Lacan both explore

the non-expressivity of mathematics, its inherent complication of any

mirror model of representation, they differ in the precise relationship

of that complication to the question of language more generally

For Lacan, the signifier, as the immovable horizon of the subjec

of all knowledge, is not simply a mystifying tool of intuition. Both

mathematical formalization and the signifier, rather, reveal for Lacan

the inherent, and indeed constitutive,

impasses

that de-totalize, ren

impure, both the seeming purity of mathematical number and the grip


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worked towards, and a state implying a symmetrical rectification in

the subjective. And yet, desubjectification, the total evacuation o

the subjective, is posited, in the very first sentence, as a seeming

condition of the instan t of objectification. At one and the same time

then, Bachelard seems to wish for the disappearance of the subjec

as a condition of the objective, even as the two poles are situated

in a position of mutual interdependence. We can ask of Bachelard

therefore, how the objective could persist if desubjectification were

ever fully achieved. Might this be a process without end, a perpetua

oscillation between poles that, given the comments above on the

impurity of the object of objectivity, are never finally and absolutely

distinguishable?

Bachelard, in sum, provides both a rationalist account of the

conceptual autonomy of science, and the beginnings of what I would

like to call a post-rationalist critique of the sustaining binaries o

rationalism itself It is necessary to read Bachelard against himself

to perform a symptomatic reading of his writing, in order to

extract this critical destabilization of rationalist approaches to the

justification of knowledge. It is precisely this second stream of thinking

that sets the stage for the attempt within the broader project o

French psychoanalytically informed structuralism to provide a more

theoreticaUy rigorous account of the signifier and the subject in

their disjunctive relation with the objective dom ain of scientific

know ledge. Nex t, I d like to focus on how aspects of Lacan s late

thinking significantly further, and yet subvert, the ambiguities o

Bachelard s epistemology as underlined above.

La can a nd the mp uri ty ofth Signifier

If Bachelard s partial recognition of the persistence, even constitutivity

of subjective error within the objective is und erm ined by his

reductive accounts of language and the subject, Lacan would transpose

the sense of non-contradictory and constitutive impurity into every

facet of his metapsychology. Through a reading of key passages

in his unpublished 24 seminar, I ho pe to dem onstrate here how


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Bachelard La can and Sdentifc Form alization 3 3 1

of scientific knowledge, Lacan recognizes the inevitabihty of the

interpntration of the vicissitudes of the signifier in the domain of

the objective, an interpntration that is not, in

itself

a threat to the

scientific as such.

W ha t links Lacan s reflections on the coincidence of the impasse

of the signifier and the centrality of formalization to Bachelard, and

what makes a comparison of their approaches so suggestive, is their

shared concern for the m athematical as the site of formalization. Before

drawing out the fuU implications of the comparison with Bachelard,

it is necessary to outline the ways that Lacan, in his very late work,

rethought the relationship between language, formalization and a

certain conception of writing.

Lacan s 24 seminar, one of his very last, builds upon the insights

of the previous few years, where the psychoanalytic concept of the

sym ptom as a knot of occluded meaning to be interpreted was

replaced by the sin thom e , as a material signifier lending consistency

to the subject. Early comments from the 1950s on the symptom

significantly prefigure the concept of the sinthome, emphasizing as

they do the particular problem that the symptom poses for the

production of sense. In 1957, Lacan wrote: The fact that symptoms are

symbolic is no t the whole story ( .. .) , their use s signifiers distinguishes

them from their natural meaning. * Their natural m ean ing refers to

what, elsewhere, I have called the signifier s being in-rela tion ,

s

being

in a situation of co-determination.^^ With the symptom, by contrast,

there is a certain disconnection of the signifier from its determining

others, leaving it in isolation, and thus somewhat askance from the

natural meaning that it is so often assumed it is the signifier s role

to facilitate. To recognize Lacan s insistence on the materiality of the

isolated signifier is also, crucially, to recognize his transcendence of the

influence of Saussure, whose account of the generation of linguistic

meaning relies on the idea of the signifier as only ever existing through

its relations; as Lacan com ments in the 24 seminar, what s annoying

is that all we ever do is involve linguistics. I passed that way, but I didn t

stop there. ^

In the second half of the seminar, given the title Towards a New

Signifier by Jacques-Alain Miller, this materiality of the signifier, its

disconnection from the relationality of sense, is in turn interrogated


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that, contrary to the usage that we currently make of it, would hav

an effect? It is crucial to note here the immanence of the signifie

especially in its dimension of meaninglessness, to the Real, as wha

Lacan elsewhere designates as the conjunction of contingency an

impossibility. Against any tendency to cleanly separate the Real from

the Symbolic, here the Real exists within the Symbolic as the signifie

in its isolated, non-sensical state. Whereas for Bachelard the subjectiv

persists within the objective as that aspect of the object bu rdened

with the empirical, the domain of contingency and non-sense not onl

persists within the objective domain of structure for Lacan but, rather

exists in a state of definitional dependence upon it. We can furnish thi

po int by underlining the con tinuum between this aspect of the signifie

and mathematics for Lacan; whereas Bachelard will posit mathematic

as a formative conceptual domain distin t from the impurity of t

subjective and the experien tial, for Lacan the signifier as it figure

in writing and the mathematical are fundamentally interlaced. As h

writes, O ne tries to reach language by writing. And writing doesn

give us anything but mathematics, where it s a matter of working b

formal logic, that is, by the extraction of certain number of thing

that we define as fundamental axioms. Thus we extract letters.

W hen read together with his attempt to articulate the impasse

of formalization with a new conception of writing as distinct from

speech, this quote emblematizes the singularity of Lacan s thinkin

on the formal linkage of formalization and language. Lacan, it seem

to me, offers here a more expansive treatment of the constitutiv

impurity of the objective/subjective distinction, bridged by a focu

on the signifier or lette r , than is present in latent form in Bachelard

reflections on the impurity of the production of objective knowledge

even as the latter s emphasis on impurity seems decisive in laying th

ground for Lacan s innovations. W he n Lacan writes of the extraction

of

certain num ber of things that we define as fundamental axioms

he raises psychoanalytic conceptuality to the level of the axiom in

mathematics, whereby any act of interpretation is grounded in

priori constructs that are particular to psychoanalysis as a domain o

knowledge. At the same time, Lacan associates this axiomatic characte

of psychoanalytic conceptuality w ith letters , or signifiers as they ar


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Bachelard, Lacan a n d Scientific Formalization

3 3 3

'new' signifier co-extensive witb a new take on tbe stakes of scientific

formalization. .

t\

Instead of subscribing to tbe either/or of formalization as the

key to any successful grounding of psycboanalytic claims, or the

alternative move away from tbe sciences in favor of a bermeneutic

or purely textual interpretivism, Lacan locates witbin the process of

formalization itself its own immanent, and constitutive, failure, indexed

to tbe signifier as its formative, and deformative, ground. In tbe

2 4*

Seminar, Lacan w^ill evoke formalization tbrougb tbe concept of

'metalanguage', or a language tbat might step outside the vicissitudes

of tbe signifier; Bacbelard's dream, we migbt say. Lacan writes: 'There

is an embryo of metalanguage, but it always goes off tbe skids for the

simple reason tbat all I know about language comes from a series of

actual

[incarnes]

languages.' Any attempt to surpass language in favour

of

pure conceptuality, tbat is to say, must contend witb tbe elements

tbat would make up tbat conceptuality, namely signifiers composing

'actual languages', tbe movements of wbicb resist any transcendental

purity.

Here, it is useful to briefly compare tbe argument made by Miller

in 'Suture'. Tbis article, published in tbe

ahiers pour l Ana lyse,

foregrounds the destabilizing yet formative insistence of tbe non-

identical subject, witb this seemingly

n o n -

ora subjective insistence on

the signifier in the Real as tbe point of impossibility in processes

of formalization. Miller argues, tbrougb a reading of Frege, tbat tbe

succession of self-identical numbers must rely on zero as its non-

identical foundation. For tbe very self-identity of numbers to be

meaningful, that is to say, tbey must refer back to a non-identical

element tbat acts to negatively determine tbem. Extrapolating from

tbis specific example. Miller writes:

In effect, wbat in Lacanian algebraiscalled tbe relation of the subjecttotbe field of

tbe Otber (as tbe locus of trutb) can be identified witb tbe relation wbicb tbe zero

entertains witb tbe identity of tbe unique as tbe support of trutb. Tbis relation,

in so far as it is matrical, cannot be integrated into any definition of objectivity

tbis being tbe doctrine of

Lacan.

Tbe engendering of tbe zero, from tbis not-

identical witb itself under wbicb no tbing of tbe world falls, illustrates tbis to

y o u .


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3 3 4

Paragraph

of tru tb ) , or tbe dom ain of tbe signifier. W bile it is certainly true

tbat, especially in tbe 11* Seminar, Lacan discusses tbe subject in tbe

terms of

n

occluded cause of tbe Symbohc, punc tuating tbe battery

of signifiers wbile forever fading before tb signifiers tbat will come

to represent it,^^ Lacan s remarks in tbe 24* Seminar seem to suggest a

displacement oftbis eccentric element onto tbe signifier

itself

wben

taken in its self-identical, abstracted, isolated guise as letter .

A little further on from bis comments on tbe possibility of a new

signifier apart from meaning, Lacan s remarks bear on tbis seem ing

replacement of tbe non-identical

subject

as constitutive cause and tbre

to formalization witb tbe

signifier

as it is abstracted from meaningfu

relation. Lacan writes, eUipticaUy, tbat

There s only o ne case in wh ich I risk work ing in the direction of metalanguage

The metalanguage in question consists of translating Unbewusst by une bvue.

absolutely n ot the same m ean ing. B ut it s a fact that as soon as he sleeps, man

blunders[une bvue]with all his might (...). What Freud said, and what I mean,

this there isn t, in any case, a waking u p. Science can only be invoked indirecdy

in this case. It s a waking up, but a difficult and a suspect one . O ne is only sure

that he is wo ken up if wh at is presented and represented doesn t have any m eaning

at all.

Leaving aside tbe elaborate wordplay tbat bad become a mainstay

of Lacan s seminar by tbis poin t, wbat is initially striking in tbis

passage is tbe reference to science as a waking u p , even if

difficult

and suspect one. At least superficially, Lacan is close to Bacbelard

bere, whose empbasis on tbe produc tion of scientific know ledge as a

process of unburdening tbe object of knowledge from its encrusted

mystifications bears a similar sense, perversely Heideggerian despite

tbe opposite intentions, of

waking up into trutbfulness. But Lacan

frames bis ow n account of a scientific waking up w itb a reference

to metalanguage, sometbing be bad previously deemed impossible. If

science, we infer, can be considered a metalanguage, tben it is only

balf possible, or ind irect , and subject ultimately to tbe fact tbat, as

Lacan suggests was already stated in Freud, tbere isn t (.. .) a waking

up ,

or tbere isn t any final clean break from tbe blunders of tbe

unconscious. Crucially, I think it s important to read Lacan bere not

as a standard bumanist sceptic, cautioning science in its ambitions


16/19

U - . .. -^ -s-, v s . I

Bache lard Lacan and Sden t i f i c Formal i za t ion

3 3 5

words, it recognizes simultaneously its total reliance on the signifier

that which presents, and represents and the possibility, internal to

signification, of signifiers, those axiomatic letters referred to above,

that do not have a relation to meaning as it is normally conceived.

To reiterate, Lacan s com ments here retrieve an aspect of language

for formal conceptuality in the face of Bachelard s earlier dismissal of

language, a retrieval crucial to the objectivity that Miller above argues

must rest on the non-identical subject. Here, however, it is less the

non-identical subject that might ground this conceptuality, and more

the self-enclosed lette r , an element that is, by definition, a-subjective,

even as it forms the material ground upon which the subject of the

unconscious may cohere. One year prior to the 24* Seminar and as

mentioned briefly above, Lacan had developed his striking concept of

the sinthome , as the symptom abstracted from any regime of meaning

or analytic interpretation, persisting as a knot of sense-less jouissance

at the eccentric centre of the subject. But instead of reverting to a

Freudian energetics, and thus conceiving of

t is

binding agency of/in

the subject in terms of energy or libido, Lacan insists on the role of the

signifier as it exists in isolation, detached from the psychic architecture

of meaning, in providing the vehicle for this subjective consistency.

In other words, an element, the signifier, normally associated, as

in Bachelard above, with the confusions of meaningful, empirically

directed discourse, becomes the very abstract (even objectai) condition

for the persistence of the subject itself As Lacan puts it in his 23

Seminar, this consistency can only be understood as an ex-sistence

(...) which for its part belong to the Real which is its fundamental

character . ^

The concept of the R eal, at this stage in Lacan s teaching, had

become associated with the particular kind of formalization proper

to psychoanalytic conceptuality, a formalization that recognizes the

coincidence of Symbolic consistency and its immanent tendency

towards dissolution. Lacan s concep t of the sinthome places this

coincidence of formation and deformation, of creation and potential

destruction, at the centre of the subject. A subject s sinthom e , that

is to say, coheres as a result of the isolated signifier s self-consistency,

its abstraction from relation, but that very isolation is also a condition

of great precarity; in analytic practice, by consequence, displacing a


17/19

3 3 6

Paragraph

fundamentally reintroducing thesubjectas a condition and consequenc

of formalization, in precisely the way that Bachelard, in his emphasis

on the desubjectification proper to scientific conceptuality, rejects.

In a theoretical move redolent of the topological complexity

that defined his seminar at the time, Lacan loops the formal

elements of psychoanalytic conceptuality, the axiomatic letters so

closely related to the matheme, back into the concept of the

subject, such that the very clean separation of the subject from

the formal movement of conceptual elements, a separation that

underlies Bachelard s epistemology, is problem atized. Miller s attem pt

to ground logical consistency on the non-identity of the subject, while

suggestive, can be supplemented by reference to this late attempt

by Lacan to theorize a formally sense-less signifier; in so doing,

Lacan recognized the self-identical, formal elements present in the

very subject

itself

thus significantly com plicating Miller s dualistic

attempt to think the reliance of self-identity on the non-identical,

and extending the productive ambiguities in Bachelard s theorization

of the impurities of the scientific object. When read critically

together, Bachelard and Lacan, and the post-Lacanian extension of

psychoanalytic ideas represented by Miller, provide an internally

heterogeneous but nonetheless related attempt to undermine clean

distinctions between formalized knowledge and its hidden subject. It

is, nonetheless, their crucial differences, especially around the relative

status of language, that pose anew the determining problems of French

structuralism.

NOT E S

1 It was the jou rna l

ahiers pourl Analyse,

published in Paris between 1966 a

1969,

that hosted much of the most experimental writing at the intersection

between psychoanalytic theory and philosophy of science, including early

wo rk by Alain Badiou, Jacques-Alain Miller, Jean-C laude MOner and others.

See http://cahiers.king ston .ac.uk for the comp lete text of the jou rna l in

French.

2 Gaston Bachelard,

The

Poetics

of

Space[1957], translated by M aria Jola

(Boston: Beacon Press, 1994) and

On

Poetic Imagination andReverie transla


18/19

Bachelard

Lacan andScientific Formalization

337

5 Gaston Bachelard,

TheFormation ofthe Sdentijk Mind : A Contribution to a

Psychoanalysis of Objective Knowledge

(1938), translated by Mary McAUester

Jones (Manchester, Clinamen, 2002), 210. Further page references are

includ ed in the tex t, nd foUow the abb reviation

FSM.

6 Tiles,Bachelard 53 .

7 Bachelard quoted in Do m inqu e Lecourt,Marxism andEpistemology: Bachelard

Canguilhem and Foucault translated by Ben Brewster (London: New Left

Books, 1975), 52.

8 Lecourt,

Marxism

andEpistemology.

9 Bachelard qu oted in Leco urt, Marxism and Epistemology, 52.

10 Gaston Bachelard,

The New

Scientific

Spirit

translated by Arthur Goldhammer

(Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 3. Further page references are included in the

text, and follow the abbreviation

NSS.

11 Paul Thom as, Marxism andScientific Socialism: From Engels to lthusser (New

York: Routledge, 2008), 117.

12 Jacques Lacan, T he Instance of the Letter in the Uncon scious, or Reaso n

Since Freud in crits, translated by Bruc e Fink (Ne w York: W. W N or to n,

2006), 4 1 2 - 4 1 .

13 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XX: Encore, edited by

Jacques-Alain M iller, translated by Russell G rigg (N ew York: W. W. N or to n,

1998), 93 .

14 Lacan, Psychoanalysis and its Teach ing in crits, 36483.

15 See my Psychoanalytic Structuralism and the Cahiers pour l Analyse in

Angelaki :Journal of theTheoreticalH umanities, forthcoming 2012.

16 Jacques Lacan, session of 7May 1977, in Seminar 24:

L insu

que sait de

I une-

bvue, s aile

mourre, edited by Jacques-A lain M iller, unofficial translation by

Dan Collins for personal use.

17 Jacques-A lain M iller, Su ture: Elem ents of the Logic of the Signifier [1966]

in

The Symptom : Online Journal for

Lacan.

Com(Winter 2 007).

18 Jacques Lacan, TheSeminar ofJacques Lacan Book XI: The FourFundamental

Concepts of Psychoanalysis, edited by Jacques-A lain M iller, translated by Alan

Sheridan (New York: W. W. No rton , 1998), 53 -6 7.

19 Lacan, session of 9 D ecem ber 1975, Seminar 23:Joyceand the Sinthome,

unofficial translation by Cormac Gallagher.


19/19

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