Boundary Language

lacan’s seminar ix (identification)

Lacan’s Seminar IX, Identification, is one of the most difficult of his 24 seminars. The transcription/translation from Cormac Gallagher (Lacan in Ireland) differs from the French version, notably in its reproduction of the many photos and graphs that illustrate key ideas which are difficult at best in the original. More than its predecessors, this lecture brings topology to the fore, to assist in sorting out relations of the subject, the signifier, the unary trait, and negation. If it had been possible before to side-step issues of projective geometry, in this seminar projectivity is met head on; and in Lecture XVII, given on Wednesday, April 11, 1962, there is no escape. My approach, given my limitations, is unavoidably ersatz. I can only choose a random starting point (the forced choice, identified by Euler circles) and attempt to thrash a way out.

recordings of live zoom sessions

Zoom meetings with Olga Cox Cameron, Carol Owens, Dan Collins, Sarah Meehan and others were scheduled to cover Lacan’s seminar, Identification (IX), in sections of (usually) three lectures beginning November 15, 1961 and ending February 27, 1962.

list of supplemental videos

Illustrations from the French Transcript. April 9, 2022. The English translation of Seminar IX contains figures and drawings that differ considerably from the French transcript. This collection offers drawings and diagrams that may connect more usefully to the text.

The Lexis of Jacques Lacan. January 28, 2022. This examination of Session 17 of Lacan’s Seminar IX on Identification is an occasion to think about Lacan’s style, what he himself called “lexis,” the word, in contrast to “phasis,” the sentence. Dan Collins says that in Lacanian psychoanalysis, we have two forms of criticism, a criticism by the cut, and a criticism of punctuation. Lining these up with lexis and phasis shows how Lacan’s style comes to bear in lesson 17, and how style, for both Lacan and his perplexed readers, can amount to a means of thinking about the unthinkable.

Mirrors as Cuts in Space. February 17, 2022. This video considers the space of perception from the (Lacanian) point of view, that visibility implies invisibility and looking involves being looked at, AT THE LEVEL OF CONSCIOUS RECOGNITION (the “Symbolic,” in Lacan’s terms). This makes the visual field of the “speaking animal” (Lacan’s $, or barred subject) charged by the overlapping forces of the gaze and the subject of representation. A fuller understanding requires the insight that Euler circles are not the same as Venn diagram circles. A Venn diagram can depict anything in Boolean logic, but an Euler circle restricts itself to “what can happen in reality.” This makes it the perfect device to map the Real, because it produces a precise outline of the real in the case of two circles whose union does not intersect, and where there is a “symmetrical difference” that represents, simultaneously, resistance and affinity. Be sure the check the CODA for this video, explaining how the void of conjoined Euler circles creates a “symmetrical difference” that relates to the problem of “seeing implies being seen.” Escher patterns and Klein Groups point to the ever-useful model of the Borromeo knot, representing Lacan’s RSI (Real, Symbolic, Imaginary) system.

The Polish Signifier: Seminar IX, Lessons 12–23. February 26, 2022. This silent video was prepared for Lacan’s Seminar IX (“Identification”) study group, organized by Carol Owens and Sarah Meehan, featuring Olga Cox Cameron and Dan Collins. A narrative will be added by March 10, 2022. The term “The Polish Signifier” comes from Alfred Jarry’s Surrealist play, Ubu Roi: “”Gentlemen, long live Poland, because if there were no Poland there would be no Poles.” That this is a matter of lexis over phasis, style over content, is clear. When projective surfaces are immersed into the Euclidean 3-d manifold, we have the Voice from the Whirlwind commanding from the position of the Latin saying, “ex falso sequitur quodlibet” (from the false, everything is possible). This is the consequence of A=~A. Other whirlwinds (following the Biblical Job’s example) include Joel Chandler Harris’s Bre’r Rabbit, who attempts to engage the tar baby, where demand meets desire in a sticky situation. Where style and content play a zero-sum game, all eyes turn, as they always have done, to the apophasis of the zero, the blank, the black. Aufhebung forever!

Graphic gaps in Lacan’s Seminar IX, last sessions. April 7, 2022. In Jacques Lacan’s Seminar IX on Identification, English readers of the Gallagher text are handicapped by a striking difference between the English translation and the French transcript. The English text is missing many of the French text’s illustrations, making references in the text puzzling. But, in some cases, Gallagher’s illustrations are clearer, and the cross-comparisons required for any reading put the reader in the position of a agent-provocateur.

Lacan’s Seminar IX (Identification) • sessions 24–26. April 9, 2022. This notoriously difficult seminar is crammed with clues that are often overlooked because of Lacan’s ‘mi-dire’ style of presentation (his ‘phasis’, compared to his ‘lexis’). Persistence pays off, but also the reader should try to relax in order to allow the ‘natural parapraxis’ of ideas to form a cloud of associative meanings (introjection of kenosis vs. projection of apophrades … for fans of Harold Bloom).

The torus figures prominently in Seminar IX, making it essential to organize other concepts around its relations of two voids.

From nosubject.com: In “The agency of the letter…” the signifier is turned into an inscription in the unconscious, a seal, which in L’identification becomes the “unbroken line,” trait unaire, a symbolic term which is to produce the ego-ideal. Though this trait may originate as a sign, it becomes a signifier when incorporated into a signifying system: identification raises the question of the identical. Can it be said that A = A? No, for there already is a difference due to repetition: hence A Lacansem1b2.gif A. Against the One of totality, Lacan institutes the 1 as the single mark, the unbroken line, made by mere repetition. The signifier has a unity only insofar as it is that which all the other ones are not, insofar as it is pure difference: the One as such is the Other. There is no tautology in expressions such as “war is war” or “Lacan is Lacan.” The real thing has nothing to do with this, it is the same signifier that functions to connote pure difference, for, in repetition, the signifier represents the subject for another signifier and not for some one. The identification of the signifier and the identification with the signfier closely mingle. Formal logic, the study of the proper name, the complex grammar of negation… everything works toward defining the unbroken line as “a return, the seizing of the origin of a counting before the number.” The phallus as the symbolic mark is at the origin since “[[narcissism and incorporation should be located in the direction of the Fatherand not in the direction of the parasited mother‘s body.” Lacan‘s response to the problem of the origin (the chicken or the egg?) is the rooster, the signifier that makes the rooster, the letter or unbroken line. His project is to create “a topological structure of the subject.”

My presentation involves two components that may be visited at any time. Abbreviations of both will be the substance of a presentation to the Association of Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in Ireland, Saturday, January 29, 2002, with Olga Cox-Cameron, Dan Collins, Carol Owens, and Sarah Meehan.

• The Flex Point of Lecture 17, Seminar IX

This position paper is based on the principle of the “ersatz speculation,” where the investigator, lacking any secure knowledge or expertise, advances a thesis guaranteed to encounter “error data.” The ersatz hypothesis in this case claims that the function of idempotency connects Lacan’s employment of style (“lexis”) to induce paralysis in the audience so that the formerly resisted idea of projective geometry might become a practical intellectual reality.

Appendix. The necessity of topology to Lacan’s thinking is a critical issue. Lecture 17 is pivotal because it insists on using Euler circles rather than Venn diagrams to link the space of union (the apparent overlap between two representative circles) to the relation of demand and desire, played out as a torus surface. The key is closure, which in Euler terms cannot be brought about without “symmetrical difference.” A Venn diagram, in contrast, would “take no notice” of the diagrammatical condition corresponding to the first choice. For Euler circles, the overlap is “impossible,” and this impossibility corresponds to the domain of the Real in psychoanalysis. Because the circuit is so significant in Freud’s project of connecting the interpretive meaning aspects of psychoanalysis to neural networks of pleasure and displeasure (his essay of 1895, “The Possibility of a Scientific Psychology”), the question of this impossibility boils down to the graphic utility of the circle and “when a circle is joined but not completed,” i. e. the Möbius band. The twist of the Möbius band is virtual, but its virtuality is non-perspectival (undetectable in perception). The torus, which completely conceals its secondary virtuality, must be cut to reveal its projectivity, but once it is “cut with a twist,” the torus surface becomes two interlinking Möbius solids. The same experiment can be done algebraically, with the mathematician Louis Kauffman’s analogy of the inverter switch, which must be present as a pair to preserve circularity (the absence of inverter switches counts as even), and where A=A constitutes a circle without circulation, which Hegel articulated in The Phenomenology. Extending the concept of the inverter switch, Kauffman develops the self-intersecting paradigm of the metallic numbers (x = 1 + 1/x) to reveal the paradox of (Lacanian) extimity: that the contained and the container are equivalent and indistinguishable (Spencer-Brown‘s self-re-entering form).

• THE NARRATED VIDEO

The Yang Hui triangle, forerunner of Pascal’s binomial equation triangle. Even before Yang Hui, this triangular arrangement of numbers was described by the Persian poet and mathematician Omar Khayyam (عمر خیّام).

As a supplement for the presentation of Saturday, January 29, 2022, this extended narrated video covers the points of the lectures wit illustrations, diagrams, and animations.

A video about circuits, closure, and idempotency is in process (see Appendix, above). This will add materials about John Conway’s “look and say” constant in relation to the unary trait. In brief, this distinction is the mathematical elaboration of the distinction between S…S’ in the creation of the unary trait, the space where “the subject, $, is suspended.” The look-and-say sequence explains this sequence: 1, 11, 21, 1211, 111221, 312211 … . Each number is pronounced (“one 1”), then that “audio-active” result is converted into a numeric: 11. Audio-activity in Conway’s terms is the same as the (unconscious) presence of the voice and drive in Lacan’s graph of desire. The “pile” created by the audio-active sequence 91, 82, 73, 64, 55, 46, 37, 28, and 19 relates to Cantor’s triangle of transfinite numbers (1; 1/2, 2/1; 1/3, 2/2, 3/1; 1/4, 2/3, 3/2, 4/1 …) to reveal, through a “criticism of the cut,” the role of the palindrome and the “forced choice” of the overlap of Euler circles, where there is union without intersection. John Conway’s discovery that there is a constant in the sequence of see-and-say numbers amounts to proving the presence of a “ventriloquism of the Other” in the graph of desire, related to the unary trait. In this way, the Lying Cretan’s paradox is revealed to be a “matter of style” (lexis, Gr. λέξις), with a mark uniquely designated as katagraphein (see Jean-Daniel Causse, “L’identité et l’identification”): Gr. κατάγράφω, “to engrave, to scratch a mark deeply.” Note the way of inserting the material into the signifier, just as the acousmatic voice “inscribes” the resonance of the ventriloquistic Other. I will treat the look-and-say pile as a case of sorites: a branch of logic developed by Lewis Carroll in his “Amos Judd” puzzles, which I correlate to psychoanalysis’s clinically central function of the “blahblahblah.” The hypothesis of the video and appendix is that audio active numbers, the blahblahblah of psychoanalysis, katagraphein, and the palindromic unary trait are cut from the same cloth, the name of which is lexis (λέξις).

• A SILENT VIDEO ABOUT JOKES, TRAINS, AND EULER CIRCLES

Projective geometry is not simply about the mathematical domain of 2d surfaces of non-orientation and self-intersection. It is the useful backstage machinery of the magician, the fiction writer, and the pickpocket. This joke tells about a scam purportedly executed by Lacanians over psychologists. As Lacan was credited with saying, psychologists is the enemy of psychoanalysis. Here, the enmity is compressed into a trick that requires an intuitive grasp of the concepts of idempotency, the forced choice, and the portable space of the overlap of Gaussian circles, “impossible and therefore Real” within the Symbolic normalcy of the dupe.

• Seminar IX Illustrations from the French Transcript

Gallagher’s translation of Seminar IX is uneven in its graphic representation of materials that the French transcript reproduces in more detail. For anyone interested to follow along for illustrations covering sessions 19, 20, 21, and 22 (May 9 to May 30), this video provides snap-shots of the French version’s illustrations. To study a particular illustration, just pause the video.

visuals

 

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