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ADRIAN R. PRICE
this name of Inconstancy, which hath so much been poisoned with slanders,
ought to be changed into variety, for which the world is so delightfull
John Donne
The real, the same that we meet at every turn in the oeuvre that stands as a
testimony to Freuds enquiry, is undisputed in its status as the the crux of the
psychoanalytic experience. Nevertheless, as it took on a more dominant place
in psychoanalytic doctrine it proved necessary to account for this real in logical
and structural terms. So it was that the teaching of Jacques Lacan followed the
requirements of an effort that aims above and beyond that which is immediately
manifest in the day-to-day course of an analysis, targeting a formalisation that
would hold the status of a demonstration in the mathematical sense. However,
the very condition of this effort is the fact that the psychoanalytic real, to be
understood as the real of the symptom and, more widely, the real of jouissance,
pitched as it is between the ontological and the discursive, has consistently proven 131
to be incompatible with the real of science that readily allows of a description
in mathematical laws and algorithms. This is precisely what led to Jacques-Alain
Millers assertion that the effort of formalisation in psychoanalysis tends rather
in the direction of a demonstration of the absence of knowledge in the real (Miller, 2012,
pp. 115-16), a project that is neither of capital importance to the scientist, nor
certain of achieving its aim, since demonstrating an absence is no easy matter.
Voices in the fields of logic and philosophy were making themselves heard
in the 1970s to refute the notion that the relation between the real and its
I start off from the limit
The hypothesis that Lacan introduces here in the first chapter of Seminar XX is
that one can indeed treat and circumscribe the structure of sexual jouissance on
the basis of a closed topology in which one proceeds incrementally, step by step
as it were. The snag is how to get this process under way when one can foresee
neither the nature nor the number of the steps that will be necessary for this
treatment to carry through.
Lacan opens his examination on the logical status of jouissance here in Semi-
nar XX by specifying that the jouissance of the others body, the enjoyment one
witnesses in the body of ones other, is neither a necessary nor a sufficient response.
The overriding evidence of this is that love demands more, and what comes in
response is more love. Love is able to constitute a response for the subject. It
133
constitutes a sign for the subject. To say that jouissance does not meet these
conditions of a necessary and sufficient response is already a logical approach.
The jouissance of the others body is indeed a response, only the response of
love, if it is effectively present, is more concrete, more palpable for the subject
to the extent that it enters the play of representations. This distinction between
the sign of love and a potential anonymity of jouissance is a critical point of
entry into this seminar. It signposts one of Lacans hypotheses that can be read
between the lines throughout the seminar: jouissance is determined by language,
by speech, but it is not fully articulated as such in distinct and precise signifiers.
I start off from the limit
This demarcates the fault-line in the Other from which the demand for love
sets out. Lacan further proclaims that if this fault-line does carry a proper name,
if it is liable to nomination, then this name is Encore. In other words, it may be
possible to surmount the intrinsic condition of anonymity, but only through the
intermediary of a name that tells you: not enough, dont stop, keep going,
encore
Thus, we have a space: the fault-line; which bears a name: Encore; and which
possesses at least one limit point: the point from which the demand for love
sets out. Lacan will even identify this limit point with the wall of amur, defining
the corporeal aspect of this amur in opposition to the biological body. What
interests Lacan is the body inasmuch as it symbolises the Other. That the body
symbolises the Other and not vice-versa is a somewhat surprising formula that
when first uttered in this opening lesson could give rise to some doubt as to just
how deliberate it is, were it not repeated in a more categorical fashion in the les-
sons of 19 December (Lacan, 1975, p. 21, p. 26) and 16 January (p. 39). Here,
the locus of the Other is a logical fault-line that requires symbolisation in order
to be tangible, and the body provides this symbolic material.
We have underlined the term faille. On page 12 of the Seuil edition we meet
the term bance in reference to the gap between the One and Being. Behind this
Being lies jouissance.
134
One Being
Just afterwards, Lacan will qualify this Being as the jouissance of the body as
an asexuated body. Meanwhile, on the side of the One, we would meet sexual
difference properly speaking, were there a relation by which this dimension could
be established and confirmed.
One Being
(sexual relation) (asexuated)
Lacunae | issue 11 | November 2015
Here, Lacan asserts that a woman, just like men, is subject to the condition
of not being able to reach the limit. The limit is set as a limit point, but on no
account can it be reached.
In the French text, on page 14, we find faille [comma] bance. This
I start off from the limit
time the two terms, fault and gap, stand side by side. This is the fault-line
that is named Encore inasmuch as jouissance is neither necessary nor sufficient.
Where previously Lacan was speaking of the fault-line in the Other, now he is
referring to the fault-line in jouissance. On the one hand, we can lay the empha-
sis on the correspondence between Other and jouissance, whilst on the other,
we can foreground the notion of a locus. The locus of the Other was a staple
of Lacans classical teaching. Here he is speaking of a locus of jouissance that
entails a certain dimensionality, a certain architecture, which arises not from a
physical organic structure, but from a topology. We have a potential anonymity
at the level of jouissance, and then we have the proper name that treats it at the
level of the demand addressed to the Other, but ultimately what is at stake is
the same fault-line. This is where we pass from a fault-line in jouissance to the
fault-line itself, as a fault-line of jouissance. What jouissance is at issue now that
it has been localised in this fault-line?
If we transpose the above into the language of mathematics, we shall say that
just as topological space is a pair constituted of a set, X, and a collection of
subsets that form the topology of X, we can say that the set named Encore is
comprised of a collection of subsets of jouissance. This space is constructed
such that, given an infinite collection of subsets that cover the space, one may
select a finite number that cover it adequately. To realise this, the space must meet
two criteria. It must be:
136
1. bounded, in the sense that the elements that it contains may not exceed
the limit points of this topological space, that is, the One of the signi-
fier and Being (as the Being of jouissance);
2. and closed, in the sense that these limit points are included in the space
thus defined.8
This second condition is critical. It allows Lacan to treat the fault-line of jou-
issance in terms of compactness. The space that Lacan presents is compatible
Lacunae | issue 11 | November 2015
Lacan seems to be drawing above all else on the recent reprint of Topolo-
gie gnrale by the Bourbaki group (Bourbaki, 1971) for his understanding of
compactness. There, the Borel-Lebesgue theorem is introduced by means of a
deduction via complementaries from the axiom that every family of closed sets of
X whose intersection is empty contains a finite subfamily whose intersection is empty (Bour-
baki, 1966, p. 83). It should be borne in mind that the Bourbaki presentation of
compactness that is usually read today in the 1971 volume (or the 1966 English
translation) actually dates from its first publication in 1940. It is a perfectly valid
introduction to compactness, but from todays perspective looks somewhat idi-
osyncratic. Since then, it has become far more common to begin the other way
around: with a topological space covered by an infinite number of open subsets,
from which one then seeks to establish the finite collection or family of subsets
that covers the space.
137
Lacan respects the ordering employed by Bourbaki in that he first establishes a
characterisation of a compact space with the aid of closed sets, considering their
intersection, rather than their union. Thus, when he says, the very definition of
compactness, he is referring to this axiom. Today this strikes us as more than
a little peculiar, but whether one approaches the space in terms of the union of
open subsets or in terms of the intersection of closed subsets, the result is in
fact the same: these are two dual presentations that each account for the same
infinite topological space.
I start off from the limit
The difficulties that this passage has presented to commentators over the
decades are not due solely to Lacans drawing on the idiosyncratic Bourbaki
ordering; he is imprecise in his articulation.10 When he says the intersection of
everything that is enclosed within [the faille, the fault-line] having been accepted as
existing in a finite number of sets, he is referring to the operation that consists
in selecting closed sets that possess the finite intersection property. When he says that
what results from this is that the intersection exists in an infinite number, we
have to understand that the intersection of the finite number of closed subsets
contains an infinite number of points (the points of the set that thereby proves
to be compact).
Of all Zenos paradoxes, that of Achilles and the tortoise presents as the most
difficult to resolve since the end of the racetrack, which would function as the
upper bound, in spatial terms, is more often than not omitted from the descrip-
tion, or implicitly collapsed into the notion of a temporal end.11 The terms of
139
the paradox foreground instead the point at which Achilles would catch up with
the tortoise, which cannot be materialised spatially since, according to these same
terms, their paths converge without ever intersecting. Yet, given that to catch up
with the tortoise one needs to know where she is heading, one has to take into
account the steps she takes. So, we have disregarded the temporal dimension, as
did Koyr, in order to focus solely on the spatial aspect of the paradox. Next,
we treat the spatial distances specific to the respective steps of Achilles and
the tortoise as units that we hold to be equivalent, despite the fact that they
are not equal (Koyr 1922, p. 25). Each step that Achilles takes corresponds
I start off from the limit
to a step taken by the tortoise. This is where Lacan introduces a detail that was
unheard of in previous analyses of the paradox: Achilles cannot draw level with
the tortoise (or only draws level with her at infinity, which amounts to the same
thing), he can only overtake her. Most commentators concur in supposing that the
race would end when Achilles catches up with the tortoise. Lacan, however, in
adding this detail that Achilles can overtake her, accentuates the fact that there
is no common measure between the stride of Achilles and the stride of the tor-
toise. We will never find an algorithm or any other artifice capable of rendering
them equal. Achilles sprints towards the point he believes to be the end, but
in so doing effectively overshoots the upper bound of the space to be covered.
He overtakes the tortoise in the sense that he takes larger steps at a faster pace.
Her stride, meanwhile, becomes shorter and shorter. She proceeds in much
the same fashion as Cantor in his infinite intersection, tracing her path towards
infinity by marking out ever shrinking sets. This aspect of the paradox is surely
what inspired Carrolls dialogue in which the tortoise leads Achilles into an infi-
nite regression.
140
The not-all and the problem of its existential import
familiar to Lacans audience from the previous years seminar, ou pire, and, to a
lesser extent, from Ltourdit, which had been delivered in July 1972 and was
soon to be published in the long-awaited fourth issue of Scilicet.
It has often been contended that Lacans development of the not-all was
first instigated by Jacques Brunschwigs article La proposition particulire et
les preuves de non-concluance chez Aristote, published in the tenth and final
issue of Cahier pour lAnalyse at the end of 1969, though in fact we meet an initial
elaboration of the theme in the lesson of 17 January 1962 from Seminar IX, thus
predating the Brunschwig article by a full seven years. Brunschwigs study con-
cerns the thorny problem of the existential import, in Aristotles term logic, of
particular propositions. His isolation of a minimal particular and a maximal particular
in the Prior Analytics, and their implications for two variants of the i-form and
the o-form, may indeed have provided Lacan with a fresh prompt to return to his
earlier readings, and so a brief consideration of the article will not be unhelpful.
In the first reading, the positive and the negative particular are compatible.
I start off from the limit
This allows the traditional logical square to be maintained with its customary
relations (that is, contrariety between a and e; contradiction between a and o,
and between e and i; yielding subaltern relations of implication between a and
i, and between e and o). In this version, saying that i and e are compatible means
that they may both be true, but they do not have to be. The important thing is
that they not both be false. This reading yields the particular said to be minimal:
minimally, only one of the statements i or o needs to be true.
The second reading introduces implication between the affirmative and the
negative particular, between i and o. In so doing, however, contradiction between
a and o, and between e and i, can only be maintained at the cost of yielding a simi-
lar relation of implication between a and e. Likewise, what were hitherto relations
of implication between a and i, and between e and o, transform into relations of
contradiction. The paradoxical result, as Brunschwig explains, is that each of
the universals cannot contradict one particular without contradicting the other
particular, which is its equivalent (Brunschwig 1969, p. 7). This reading yields
the particular said to be maximal: maximally, both statements i and o are true.
Brunschwig argues that whilst Aristotle effectively rules out the maximal in
favour of the minimal in his definition, it has nevertheless to be acknowledged
that in the concrete examples he gives of particular propositions Aristotle
regularly uses terms that are linked by a maximal relationship of belonging
(Brunschwig 1969, p. 9). The ensuing part of the article which is actually its
main thrust since the section we have paraphrased here corresponds to little more
than Brunschwigs introduction to the apparatus argues how Aristotle progres-
142
sively liquidated the maximal connotations of the particular as he worked his
way through his different proofs.
Lacan mentions the Brunschwig article just once, in Seminar XIX, paying
tribute to how it perceives with great assurance how
There you have it for the full extent of Lacans explicit reference to the Brun-
schwig article and the findings it presents. And this is where the difficulties begin.
In the key section on The Four Forms of General Statement that features
in the chapter on the Organon from their 1962 book on The Development of Logic,
William and Martha Kneale consider the inconsistencies that can arise when
one attempts to reform Aristotles logic by holding particular statements to
be equivalent to statements about existence. Furthermore, whereas particular
affirmative statements can be converted into universal negative statements with little
change in meaning, the same is not true of universal affirmatives and particular nega-
tives (Kneale & Kneale 1962 pp. 58-60). As we read in the Kneale and Kneale,
Aristotle claims (in Book I: 2, 25a) that the universal affirmative allows of partial
conversion to the particular, but this doctrine is obviously connected with his
assumption that universal statements entail their subalterns. As we have seen
from the Brunschwig article, inference to subalterns is not always valid.
In ou pire, Lacan plainly distances the negative particular from his version
of the negation on the universal, the not-all: Contrary to the function of the
particular negative, namely that there are some who are not, it is impossible to
extract such an affirmation from the not-all [du pas-toutes] (Lacan 2011, p. 46).
For Lacan, it is essentially a matter of taking into account the act of saying
no to the phallic function. In Ltourdit, he writes that this saying no is
to be grasped as a containment, a response and a rejection, rather than
143
a contradiction, a negated reprise, or a rectification (Lacan 2001, p. 453).
This implies that the position from which this act of saying no makes itself
heard has also to be modulated with respect to the positioning of the exception:
whereas the phallic function can be flatly negated in such a way as to ground an
existential position (in which case we obtain the contradiction to the universal
affirmative which is familiar to us from the male side of the table of sexuation),
the saying no at issue here is a contained act, which cannot be wholly identified
with a particular one or some who negate the phallic function.
I start off from the limit
This would seem to account for the fact that Lacan makes such scant refer-
ence to Brunschwigs 1969 article, and indeed Brunschwig himself is said to have
been somewhat bemused at commentators frequent matching of his text with
Lacans developments from the early seventies.15 At most, it might be surmised
that Lacan draws inspiration from the rearrangement of the square of opposi-
tions that Brunschwigs maximal reading of the negative particular requires, and
promotes a distribution of sexuation that is built around a relation of contra-
diction between the universal affirmative and the particular affirmative (just as
Brunschwigs second square of oppositions stipulates contradiction between a
and i, thus invalidating inference to subalterns). But a comparison between the
foursquare table that Lacan provides in Seminar XIX (Lacan 2011, p. 202, p. 207)
and the second of Brunschwigs squares shows that the coincidences end there.
For our purposes here, we shall recall that the conventional o-type proposition
allows of representation in a Venn diagram. Thus, Some A does not belong to
B would be represented as follows:
A AB B
144
with the phallic function (Lacan 2011, p. 46). This first definition anticipates the
more elaborate version seven months later in Ltourdit:
[F]or having entered as the other half through the saying of women,
the subject is determined by the fact that, since there exists no sus-
pension in the phallic function, all may here be said thereof, even that
which is of a provenance without reason. But this is an all that lies
outside the universe, which is read all at once from the quantifier as
notall. (Lacan 2001, p. 466)
Written here in one word, unhyphenated, the closing comme pastout resounds as
comme partout, like everywhere. Thus, there is a contrast between the universe
of the all and the everywhere that only belongs to the register of the all insofar
as it bears the negation that forbids it from functioning as a universal. This move
is designed to free us of any notion of a closed set of women, promoting
instead a domain that brooks no exception to the phallic function, but which
cannot be totalised as a universe. This domain is therefore a somewhere, an
anywhere, and an everywhere, but without the limit point that would ascribe
to it the property of the universal. The circles of the Venn diagram prove to be
inadequate in accounting for the domains described by the formulas of sexuation,
just as they will prove to be especially inadequate for describing the topology
of jouissance.16
Note that this somewhere is implicated by an act of saying, and not by any
form of existence. Lacan has just said that the thrust of this act of saying is
not to be understood as testifying to the existence of a subject through saying
no to the phallic function. On the contrary, as he develops it in the following 145
paragraph:
This paragraph takes us from the first negated quantifier, ( x) x (Not all
I start off from the limit
x has the property phi of x), to the second, ( x) x (There exists no x such that
not phi of x), thus introducing the negated existential implication in the final twist
to Lacans theory of sexuation. If the existence of a subject who says no to the
phallic function cannot be grounded on womans side, it is because such a subject
would constitute a limit point to the domain and thus enclose it, effectively form-
ing a universe. To say that at the level of singular existence there is no example
here of an exception to the phallic function has the consequence of forbidding
us from reading the negation of the universal as a negative particular applied
in extension to a plural proposition. It is not: some are and some arent.
Rather, not all of a woman belongs to the phallic function.
This is the moment to remind ourselves that whilst using the singular all con-
146
forms to a long-standing tradition of Aristotelian term logic in English, it may
also be remarked that Robin Smith, drawing on (Geach, 1972, p. 69), contended
that translating the affirmative as belongs to all is an unnecessary bar-
barism, with the plural form, belongs to every, being more advisable (Smith
1989, p. ix). However, this opinion runs counter to that found in the Kneale
and Kneale: in some modern versions of Aristotles doctrine the difficulties of
his account of opposition are unnecessarily aggravated by use of examples and
formulae in the plural (Kneale & Kneale, 1962, p. 61).17
Lacunae | issue 11 | November 2015
To return, then, to page 466 of Ltourdit, we have seen that Lacan has
read the negation on the existential quantifier from the angle of its consequence
on the negation on the universal quantifier. Next, he zooms in on the formula
( x) x to extrapolate the impact of the saying of woman at the singular
level of her jouissance:
What is at stake here is a domain endued with a confine. Invariably plural in 147
French, confin comes from the Latin confina, with end or with bound. Thus,
in this very deliberate use of the singular we have a tentative articulation between
what we have so far encountered only as a somewhere or an anywhere,
and the containment we saw back on page 453. Here the non-univeralisable
domain that knows no limit matches up, despite everything, with a bounded
and closed topological space.
What is the existential import of this confine? How does the not-all that defines
I start off from the limit
Aside from the afore-cited passage from page 466, Ltourdit deals very little
with the question of jouissance. Seminar XIX introduces the quantifiers of sexu-
Lacunae | issue 11 | November 2015
The domain that accounts for the feminine logic is not closed: it contains
elements that are not and shall not be specified. Just like the subsets that cover
the compact topological space, each open set may contain points that are not
included within the bounded space, which exceed this space. This offers a logical
formalisation of what Lacan writes in Ltourdit, again on page 466: a woman
is the lone one in that her jouissance goes beyond, the jouissance that is formed
from coitus. This formula is echoed shortly afterwards in the sentence: the
jouissance that one obtains from a woman divides her, making a partner of her
solitude, whilst union remains on the threshold.
This union [] on the threshold is the One of sexual relation that bounds
149
the topological space without constituting an accessible point. Within the bounds
there is sexual jouissance, beyond the bounds, not solitary jouissance, but jouis-
sance whose partner is solitude.
Constructing existence
This is the first and last time in his Seminar that Lacan will mention the theo-
rem of compactness in relation to jouissance. Nor will it find any elaboration
whatsoever in his writings. Further still, Lacans recourse to the two models of
I start off from the limit
To conclude, I would like to consider an aside that Lacan voices in this first
lesson and which from one perspective already seems to anticipate the clarifica-
tion to come in February by introducing a certain restriction on the use of the
classical theorem of compactness with respect to the not-all.
Lacan indicates that, on mans side, the jouissance of the phallic organ stands
as an obstacle to the movement towards the Other, thereby preventing sexual
relation from being realised. On womans side, however, Lacan does not specify
the existence of any such obstacle. If sexual relation is not realised for a woman,
if she does not meet this limit point, it may be because she too is impeded by the
obstacle of the organ, her partners or even her own, but perhaps instead this
means that the limit point is not included within the space of sexual jouissance,
or cannot be covered.22 Recall that to affirm that the limit point is not enclosed
within the topological space, or that it does not fall under a covering, is to affirm
that the topology cannot be conclusively characterised as a compact topology.
Lacan goes on to specify that on this side the side of the complement to
this hypothesis of compactness there is a requirement to count. Here, he is
effectively zooming in on the way that the finite family of open sets is selected
150 from the infinite series in order to form a sub-covering. He adds that, for them
to be countable, an order has to be found, and we have to pass through a prior
phase before supposing that this order can be found. This supposing is the
same that we meet in Seminar XIX to posit a Cantorian bijection, that is, to posit
a relationship of equivalence in the absence of a relation of equality, which is
what we saw in Koyrs Cantorian reading of the Achilles. Applying a bijection
establishes that the elements of a set are countable, an indispensible criterion
when dealing with an infinite set. If we accept the argument of equivalence, we
can indeed start counting, but Lacan leaves open the possibility that we do not
accept it.
Lacunae | issue 11 | November 2015
The perspective that takes shape here on the basis of this aside is confirmed
to some extent when we refer back to Ltourdit. The following passage shows
that what Lacan draws above all else from Cantor is the notion of an inaccessible:
The support of the two [deux] that twains [faire deux], which this
notall seems to tender us, forms an illusion, but the repetition that is,
in sum, the transfinite, shows that what is involved is an inaccessible,
on the basis of which, its enumerable being a sure thing, its reduction
becomes so as well. (Lacan 2001, p. 467)
(for example, in the case of the positive integers), so too are the points between
1 and 2. Thus, one sets off from the illusion to arrive at something sure:
an enumeration that can then be reduced. Reduction here seems to be a nod
to Russells axiom of reducibility, to which Gdel was more sympathetic than
many.25 In this context it would presumably entail reducing the series to the not-
all predicate. Notice, however, the curious circularity of the argument: we start
off from the sexual difference that the not-all seems to offer, and on this basis
build an interval that in turn accomodates a manifold (eux), only to conclude as
I start off from the limit
At the close of the lesson of 10 April 1973 from Encore, Lacan specifically
mentions, somewhat ambiguously, that his question pertains to a jouissance that,
with regard to everything that serves a purpose in the function of Fx, belongs
to the order of the infinite (Lacan, 1975, p. 94). He then proceeds to a more
sophisticated formulation of the not-all that contrasts with the references he was
using the previous year. He tells his audience that although conventionally one
cannot posit that the not-all entails the existence of something that is produced by
a negation or by a contradiction, one can posit it as an indeterminate existence, as
is done in intuitionistic mathematical logic. Furthermore, within this model, to
posit a there exists, one also has to be able to construct it, that is, to know how
to find out where this existence is (Lacan, 1975, p. 94). The operative word here
is construct. In appealing to a constructivist model, Lacan seems to be moving
away from the classical Cantorian model of sets bounded by transfinites.26
In a certain sense, the question is no longer as to whether the not-all set can be
ordered, because according to Cantor and Zermelo, every set has an order (if we
152
take the Axiom of Choice). Rather, the question is as to whether a not-all grouping
can even be posited as a set. This accounts for why the famous dit-femmation
that Lacan singles out (Lacan, 1975, p. 79) is not restricted to the word of hurt-
ful intent: playing spokesperson of the Athena doctrine, a more commonly met
recourse in our day, is merely the other face of the same coin.
Lacan does not develop his reference to intuitionism and constructivism any
further, but two aspects of Brouwers mathematical legacy are particularly per-
tinent to our considerations here:
1. First, Brouwer holds that choice sequences reflect the constant pres-
ence of a scheppende subject, a creating subject. This notion of a creat-
ing subject was devised as an ideal mind that would be performing and
hosting the mathematical operations, step by step, without interference
from individual psychological factors. However, the sequences are
performed contingently, in the flow of time. We might hazard an anal-
ogy between Brouwers ideal mathematician and the ideal dream
worker, Freuds unconscious subject that does not think, calculate, or
judge (Freud, 1900a, p. 507).27 The spreads are chains of signifiers that
are generated subjectively, as opposed to algorithms or data strings, and
thus, at whichever point the development of the sequence has reached
at any given moment, one finds there the subject who is responsible for
them, much like the dreamer who occupies each of the places in the
dream.28
strongly akin to this constructive model into the field of psychoanalysis when
he turns to the feminine myth of Don Juan. Here, once again, we need to be
attentive to the nuances. Many commentators have read the passage on Don Juan
as describing mans approach to woman, but this is the exact opposite of what
Lacan sets out. It concerns what the other sex, the male sex, is for women. We
are not looking at a recipe for the man in his approach to womens jouissance, as
some have chosen to read it, but at womans approach to something particular to
her, in passing via this fantasmatic character who places her among other women
in a series that can be enumerated. This is one way, and there are surely others,
of incarnating the man whom she will use as a relay, whereby she becomes this
Other unto herself, as she is for him (Lacan 1982b, p. 92).
We may note that there is nothing in this passage that contradicts or modi-
fies what Lacan had developed on Don Juan in Seminar X: as an incarnation of
this absolute object in a womans fantasy, he is, as a man, in a position of radical
imposture. It is not certain that he desires, nor even that he enjoys. Don Juan is
not the father of the horde who enjoys all the women. He is the one who, quite
to the contrary, allows jouissance to be approached by setting down names. What
we singled out earlier as cases of jouissance, a jouissance that would perhaps be
anonymous were it not for the phallus, here transform into names of women.
Each woman takes the place of a case of jouissance, and allows of a nomina-
tion. The myth of Don Juan allows for a kind of axiomatisation, just as Lacan
qualifies the fantasy as an axiom. A name is set down, which is then enumerated.
In effect, the notion of the countable sounds more like an enumerable, and
resembles far more Brouwers concepts of spread and species than the open set of
154
classical mathematics. Note that the Being that is concerned by this naming is
not some multiplicity of supposed female beings, but the singular Being of the
enumerating subject.
from the space of sexual jouissance when he takes the inroad of the not-all, the
One reaffirms its presence, in a certain sense, within the space of the interval,
as a requirement. Something similar also holds for Being, which previously
constituted the other boundary of the topology, but is now identified with a
requirement of infinity (Lacan, 1975, p. 15):
This is how one can, from the second perspective (the so-called complement
to the hypothesis of compactness), start off from the limit, despite what might
be an absence of limit point within the covering collection. Or, to figure this dif-
ferently, one uses the One in a different way: it is no longer the fusional One
that marks the place of (impossible) relation, it is the One that repeats across the
domain each time that it is enumerated under a different name. It is precisely this
rigorous requirement of naming and enumerating that distinguishes the feminine
encore from the persistent divergence met in male sexuality, with its resulting
centrifugal tendency (Lacan, 1982a, pp. 84-85), the same that according to the
terms of Ltourdit renders a man clumsy in imagining that having two of
them makes her (la) all (Lacan, 2001, p. 469).
Russell Grigg has argued that the reference to the enumeration of cases
implicitly means taking the formula ( x) x in extension, thus producing
two readings of the not-all (Grigg, 2005, p. 65). We would nuance this observa-
tion by suggesting that the enumerating subject is not to be identified with the
axiomatising operator that enables the enumeration (in the example given, the 155
fantasmatic Don Juan). As Mark van Atten has argued in his analysis of choice
sequences, we have to keep in mind the distinction between the identity of the
process and the identity of the sequence that is constituted in it, with the latter
being founded on the former (van Atten, 2007, p. 91-231). In our reading, one
singular creating subject is present across each step of the spread that is being
generated, and the condition of the subject as not-all is equivalent to the condition
of the spread itself. In other words, each case in the enumeration contributes
to the description of one single variable that is thereby defined in ( x) x.
I start off from the limit
Adopting the intuitionistic model with respect to the not-all brings with it the
consequence that the inscription of ( x) x will prove to be contingent, and not
necessary. Indeed, this is how Lacan approaches the transfinite the following year
in Seminar XXI, which he reads as dependent upon Cantors act of saying. And he
will add, in the lesson of 19 February 1974, that, the little bar Ive been placing
above the inverted A, which allows the not-all to be written, ought to be replaced
by the sign for the countable, namely Aleph-naught. The expression allows to
be written is not innocent here: it denotes a specific mode of inscription that
depends upon the contingency of the enumerating process as performed by a
subject in time.32 The inscription does not, however, constitute a knowable entity.
The above text is a slightly revised version of the lecture presented at Barnard College, Columbia
University, New York, on 13 November 2013, at the invitation of Maria Cristina Aguirre. It is an
expanded version of the paper delivered in French to the Pont-Freudien association in Montreal
on 11 September 2013 at the invitation of Anne Braud.
References
Allen, B. W. (2008). Zeno, Aristotle, The Racetrack and the Achilles: A Historical and
Philosophical Investigation, unpublished PhD thesis, available on UMI Microform,
2009, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers.
Badiou, A. (1992). Sujet et infini. In Conditions, Paris: Seuil, 287-305.
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Bourbaki, N. (1966). Elements of Mathematics, Book III: General Topology, London/
Palo Ito/Reading, MA, Don Mills, ON: Addison-Wesley.
Bourbaki, N. (1971). lments de mathmatique, livre III: Topologie gnrale, Chapitres
1-4, Paris: Hermann.
Brunschwig, J. (1969). La proposition particulire et les preuves de non-conclu-
ance chez Aristote. In Cahier pour lAnalyse, 10: 3-25.
Cesbron-Lavau, H. (2007). Versants masculin et fminin de la limite. Available
online at: www.mathinees-lacaniennes.net/en/articles/85-les-versants-masculin-
et-feminin-de-la-limite-par-henri-cesbron-lavau.html.
Lacunae | issue 11 | November 2015
119-127.
Putnam, H. (1995). Peirces Continuum. In Ketner, K. L. (ed.), Peirce and Con-
temporary Thought, New York: Fordham University Press, 1-22.
Recanati, F. (1973a). Intervention au sminaire du docteur Lacan. In Scilicet,
4: 55-63.
Recanati, F. (1973b). Commentaire sur lintervention en forme de lettre adresse
au docteur Lacan. In Scilicet, 4: 64-73.
Sciacchitano, A. (undated). A relationship between Lacanian theory of sexuation
and Brouwerian intuitionism, available online.
Sierpiski, W., & Tarski, A. (1930). Sur une proprit caractristique des nombres
inaccessibles. In Fundamenta mathematicae, 15(1): 292-300.
Sinclair, I. (2013). American Smoke: Journeys to the end of the light, London: Hamish
Hamilton.
Smith, R. (1989). Preface. In Aristotle, Prior Analytics, Indianapolis: Hackett.
Steen, L. A. & Seebach, J. A. (1970). Counterexamples in Topology, New York/Mon-
treal/London: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, Inc.
Striker, G. (2009). Aristotles Prior Analytics, Book I, Oxford University Press.
van Atten, M. (2007). Brouwer meets Husserl: On the Phenomenology of Choice Sequences,
Springer.
Sutherland, K. (2014). Poetry and Subjective Infinity, Critical Poetics series,
University of Sussex, audiovisual recording available online at: www.ineditfilms.
com/sussexleverhulme/.
159
1
A transcription of Kripkes lectures was published in 1971 in (Davidson & Harman, 1971). It
was reprinted in 1980 as the book Naming and Necessity (Kripke, 1980).
2
Here in the mid-seventies the vocabulary is specifically one of naming, clearly influenced by
Kripkes work to which Lacan was exposed by Franois Recanati, the French translator of Naming
and Necessity and a regular contributor to Lacans seminar between 1971 and 1973. This should
not detract from the fact that the same theme had been present in Lacans teaching from a much
earlier date, albeit couched in the vocabulary of the time. See for example Lacans 1960 letter to
Winnicott: the signifier marks the real as much and more than it represents it (Lacan 1990, p. 76).
3
Except where noted, all quotations from Seminar XX reference the French text published by
I start off from the limit
this pseudo-infinity is due to one thing alone [...] the whole number. [...] This false
infinity is linked to the kind of metonymy that, concerning the definition of the whole
number, is called recursion. Its the law we accentuated forcefully last year with regard
to the recursive One. But [...] this One, to which at the end of the day the succession
of signifying elements, insofar as they are distinct, are reduced, does not exhaust the
function of the Other (Lacan, 2014, p. 26).
In 1962, the Other embraces the One plus the object a. In 1972, the Other embraces the One plus
the fault-line that is structured in accordance with a true infinity (like the infinity of a compact
space).
8
The sole published English-language translation of Book XX lamentably offers the reader no
means of finding his bearings in this distinction, failing as it does to respect the standard math-
ematical terminology.
9
For a much fuller account of the historical development of compactness, see (Pier, 1980).
10
Mention cannot be made of this passage without a brief review of the numerous and often
contradictory commentaries it has spawned. Lacan is indeed uncharacteristically rapid in his pres-
entation of the elements necessary for a clear comprehension of the mathematical theorem at
issue. Such as it is reproduced on page 14 of the Seuil edition, this passage incurred, somewhat
notoriously, the scorn of Sokal and Bricmont in 1997. Aside from what they perceived to be a
general imprecision in the argumentation of this chapter, Sokal and Bricmont attacked in particular
its ostensible definitions of an open set and a limit. Some commentators strove to reply to this part
160 of their critique by brushing up the passage, notably the mathematician and psychoanalyst Nathalie
Charraud (Charraud, 1998) and the academic Henry Krips (Krips, 2000), but in so doing they did
not manage to head off the renewed critique that Sorkal and Bricmont published in Metascience.
Indeed, Sokal and Bricmont refute Kripss commentary on open and closed sets, as well as his
elaboration on finite and countable coverings. Other commentators have tried to decipher
this passage by referring to other sources, notably the recording of this lesson of the seminar
on which one can clearly hear Lacan utter en un nombre fini densembles and not sur un nombre infini
densembles (Lacan 1975, p. 14) and on which the parenthetical remark that includes se dfinit comme
plus grand quun point, plus petit quun autre &c. (Lacan 1975, pp. 14-15) does not seem to qualify
the concept of limit, but rather that of an open set. The following readings each take this inroad:
(Krutzen, 1993), (Landmann, 2008), and (Cesbron-Lavau, 2007). Notwithstanding the fact that
the Book of Seminar XX was published by ditions du Seuil during Lacans lifetime (1975), it has
Lacunae | issue 11 | November 2015
to be admitted that Lacans words as preserved on audio tape offer a sharply divergent version of
the details that were to become the object of Sokal and Bricmonts critique. What we do take on
board in their critique is that, so long as neither the points of the space, nor the open sets, have
been defined in Lacans analogical use of them, it is hard to offer a comprehensive reading of this
application of topology to the space of sexual jouissance.
11
On this and related issues, we would refer the reader to (Allen, 2008).
12
Blanch the logician and epistemologist was seeking to formalise further Aristotelian logic,
whereas Brunschwig the historian and philologist was concerned with identifying the particularities
of Aristotles thinking in his time. Note that Blanch expanded the square of oppositions into a
logical hexagon that embraces six statements.
13
Furthermore, as Brunschwig also observes, the status of the two occurrences of the conjunc-
tion or ought not to be accorded equal weight, since the first marks the disjunction between
the affirmative particular and the negative particular, whilst the second conforms more to the
usage of the English or that we find defined in the OED, 4.a.: connecting two words denoting
the same thing, in this case denoting the negative particular. Brunschwig will add, however, that
this inference cannot be established from the grammar alone, but is dependent upon elements
developed further on in the text (Brunschwig, 1969, pp. 9-10).
14
Actually, he offers three, but the third is proffered as a recreational amusement and is imme-
diately discounted as bearing nothing that would allow it to be upheld. It consists in dispensing
with any relations of contradiction between universal and particular by transforming them into
relations of implication (Brunschwig, 1969, p. 8).
15
Regrettably, the same author who took the initiative of tracking down Brunschwig in the year
prior to the latters death, putting him to the question on this matter, saw fit in his article to blur the
boundaries between the remarks of the deceased and his own notions, for which he was seeking
higher authorisation. The reader of this Hommage (Darmon, 2010) is thus left utterly in the dark
as to Brunschwigs actual reckoning of Lacans work, with its author exposing himself in his chief
mission of debunking contemporary commentators, rather than that of transmitting any pre-
cious in extremis observations from the historian. For examples of explicit and extended matching
between Lacans not-all and the maximal reading of the negative particular, see (Le Gaufey, 2008)
and (Grigg, 2005, pp. 53-65).
16
This has not stopped them from being used for just that, by the very same surely this is no
coincidence who floundered in his born rendering.
17
Recent translators and commentators have tended to maintain the use of all, notably Gisela 161
Striker in (Striker, 2009). See also the note on Every and all from the chapter on The Orthodox
dictum Semantics in (Malink, 2013).
18
Cf. the opening lesson of Seminar XXIII:
Hence my formula about woman, which Im pegging out, as it were, for your use, by
using the , which is the opposition, dismissed by Aristotle, to the universal of
the , and which I picked out from the Organon. I havent managed to find it again, but
I did read it there, sure enough that my daughter, who is here today, put her finger on it
and swore to me earlier that she would find the place again for me (Lacan, 2005, p. 14).
19
Thomme is both tout homme, everyman, and tome, the tomos of a cut or a section, since the phal-
lic function localises jouissance at a specific site or sites in the body as the result of castration.
I start off from the limit
Womans conjoining with the man could be her sexual encounter with the man or her hysterical
performance of faire lhomme, playing the man (Lacan, 2001, p. 464).
20
A conjoint is also a spouse.
21
In the Seuil version, this definition is appended to the limit: la limite est ce qui se dfinit comme
&c. See endnote 10 above.
22
Consider, too, Lacans later reflection on Nagisa Oshimas film In the Realm of the Senses:
S of barred A is something altogether different from F. It is not that with which man
makes love. In the end, he makes love with his unconscious, and nothing more. As for
what the woman fantasises, if this is really what the film presents us with, it is something
that, either way, impedes the encounter (Lacan, 2005, p. 127).
Recall that the fantasy of the woman in the film is to kill her partner. She then cuts off his penis.
Lacan stresses that her fantasy is not the act of castration itself.
23
We refer to the Seuil text with one proviso: Lacans remark that Aleph-naught se trouve raliser le
mme cas, has been expanded to read se trouve raliser le mme cas que le 1. In our understanding, 0
realises the same case as 2.
24
In Gdels revised version of the article in 1964, the same note has been amended to include
the observation that since (non strong) accessibility is not equivalent to strong accessibility for
finite numbers, its equivalence is doubtful in the case of transfinite numbers (Gdel, 1964, p. 265).
25
Note also that in his 1944 article on Russells mathematical logic, Gdel wrote of this trans-
finite theorem of reducibility (1944, p. 136), but removed the formula from the 1964 and 1972
reprints of the text.
26
This aspect of the not-all has also given rise to a recent disputation that is of some pertinence
here. In section IV of his Note threaded stitch by stitch in the appendix to Le sminaire livre
XXIII, Jacques-Alain Miller argues that
The Australian philosopher Russell Grigg (Grigg 2005) takes issue with this reading of the not-all,
alleging that Miller is incorrect in asserting that the universe of discourse in Aristotelian logic is
finite. Grigg does, however, side with those commentators who, like Miller, read the Lacanian not-all
as compatible with the negative particular, but he amplifies Millers diagnosis of an intuitionistic
model of a potential infinite in Lacan, contrasting it with the Cantorian model of the actual infinite.
For more on the infinite in antiquity, see (Koyr, 1949, pp. 34-5). On related issues of actualised
subjective infinity and objective infinity, see J.H. Prynnes remark to Keston Sutherland, and Sutherlands
reply, at: vimeo.com/90546839. Prynnes remark is in response to (Sutherland, 2014).
27
Brouwers creating subject has also been likened to Husserls version of the transcendental subject
Lacunae | issue 11 | November 2015
(van Atten, 2007, p. 21), but the same author shows that non-lawlike sequences in no way fit into
Husserls picture (p. 15). Lacan matches Marxs ideal worker with Freuds dream-work in Television
(Lacan, 1990, p. 14, p. 19, p. 46). We understand the absence of calculation at the inter-subjective
level: there is no calculation or judgement as to the reception of the work, only a brand of calculat-
ing that is restricted to giving things a new form (Freud, 1900a, p. 507).
28
All the places is not to be understood as all the characters, as Malcolm Lowry would say of
his Under the Volcano (quoted in Sinclair, 2013, p. 179), but as every noun, verb, adverb, preposition,
article, and so on. Cf. Lacans comment on Finnegans Wake: the dreamer is not any one character,
he is the dream itself (Lacan, 2006, p. 125), and also: I am not a poet, but a poem. A poem that
is being written, even if it looks like a subject (Lacan, 1977, p. xl).
29
For more on Brouwers fan theorem, see (Petrakis, undated).
30
Lacans reference to intuitionism features much further on in Seminar XX. However, it is interest-
ing to compare the intuitionistic critique of the Cantorian model with the critique by C. S. Peirce
that was presented by Franois Recanati in the penultimate lesson of Seminar XIX. Recanati isolates
the Peircean concept of potential, which is
the locus in which impossibilities are inscribed, it is the general possibility of non-effec-
tuated, that is, non-inscribed, impossibilities. However, in relation to the inscriptions that
are produced there, it does not entail any necessity; thus the 2 has no rational explanation
in Hegels sense, that is, it has no necessary explanation. (Recanati, 1973a, p. 58)
Recanati develops this in a letter addressed to Lacan on 18 June 1972, which Lacan published in
issue 4 of Scilicet (the same that includes Ltourdit):
A potentiality is only ever realised individually, but then its potentially is destroyed.
Only the potential embraces indistinctly all the points of a set. Thus the potential has no
common measure with the order of its individual realisations. (Recanati, 1973b, p. 64)
Recanati concludes with the observation that, the ground forms the link between the potential
and singularity. Our hypothesis is that Lacans approach to jouissance as possessing a compact
topology is an attempt to formalise this ground.
On the coincidences between Peirces notions and Brouwers, see (Putnam, 1995, pp. 15-16) and
(Mayo-Wilson, 2011).
31
Van Atten compares the unfolding of the choice sequence to the unfolding of a melody (2007, 163
pp. 93-4). Could this be the same property to which Kierkegaard demonstrated such great sensi-
tivity when he qualified the myth of Don Juan as intrinsically altogether musical (Kierkegaard,
1987, p. 57)?
32
Akihiro Kanamori has argued that a historical misrepresentation has been perpetrated that
constantly pits constructivity against Cantorian and post-Cantorian methodology. In fact, it is
somewhat ironic but also revealing that pushing the mathematical frontier of the actual infinite
past Aleph-naught, grew out of work by analysts with a definite constructive bent (Kanamori,
1996, p. 16). Alain Badiou criticised Lacans use of the not-all for what he perceived as a failure to
deduce an affirmative existential premise from the negation on the universal, and he sees this as a
result of Lacans reliance on a model that is pre-Cantorian (Badiou, 1992, p. 296). In the afore-
cited article, Grigg reponds to Badiou by making a persuasive case for Lacan as a constructivist in
his mathematics, while still remaining classical in his logic (Grigg, 2005, pp. 58-60). Our critique
I start off from the limit
of Badious article is slightly different: Badiou goes looking for the infinite field in which the not-
all operates, and finds it in feminine jouissance (Badiou, 1992, p. 293). We have shown that Lacan
uses compactness to inscribe the not-all as a covering on the bounded yet infinite locus of sexual
jouissance. Other jouissance is only implied as that which falls under the covering, though not
within the bounded interval. But not even this implication is mentioned by Lacan, who carefully
restricts his argument to the field of sexual jouissance, for which he posits two complementary
characterisations. It is Badious identification of the not-all with feminine jouissance that leads
him into his various divergences from Lacans use of the formulas of sexuation. Then, he strays
further off course by seeking to refute Lacans use of the definition of strong accessibility, seem-
ingly unaware that his quarrel is with Sierpiski, Tarski, and Cantor, and not the psychoanalyst.
164