Two thinkers, two hundred years apart, discovered the role metaphor played in cultural and individual formation: Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) and Jacques Lacan (1901–1981). The fact that their theories are original and distinct from other scholars’ accounts of metaphor was indicated by Paul Ricœur’s opus magnum, a virtual compendium of theories of metaphor, which failed to mention either Vico or Lacan.

This project takes aim at a biographical void. Lacan was aware of Vico’s work and reputation but  made no definitive study. His followers have taken even less notice of Vico. On Vico’s side, the absurd opposite seems to be true. Vico seems to have “appreciated” Lacan’s structure of the subject and signifier by anticipating the role of the unconscious some two hundred years before Freud, and Vico, following in the tradition of Tacitus and anticipating Toybee and Spengler, theorized civilization’s “discontents” as a function of the signifier and the barred subject, $.

Lacan’s topology is an ethno-topology. The Real began with the first truly human perception of the world as oracular. Even with successive secularization, divination is both repressed and preserved in successive cultural formations, to the point that there is no chance whose resistance to necessity is entirely unfamiliar. Vico and Lacan are both attracted to antiquity on this account. And, Vico’s express articulation of “the Cyclopean” — a stage of culture barely recognized by either anthropology or linguistics — reads like a handbook of the Lacanian subject.

guide to study materials

Lacan’s natural perspective, which all humans carry about with them as subjects who use signifiers and signifiers who use subjects, is about the visible and invisible in the most general sense. Girard Desargues developed a means of theorizing our sense experience by means of projective geometry, a prism confirming the use of a universal subjective perspectival sense by all speaking beings. This perspective is created by the interaction of two aspects of metaphor — sublation, when one signifier takes the place of another within a structure of dilation, and metonymic chaining, which creates a sequential order of objects, agencies, and ideas by means of an idealized void.

• Introduction to a New Lacanian Criticism (text).

• YouTube video: A New Lacanian Criticism, Part I.

• YouTube video: A New Lacanian Criticism, Part II.

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Giambattista Vico‘s writings, especially his magnum opus, The New Science, are not just as equally difficult as Lacan’s texts; they recreate Lacan’s puzzling mi-dire instruction, that the reader complete his half-finished theories. Vico also invited the reader to become the writer. Those already confused by his logical circularities or confounded by the universale fantastico or “ideal eternal history” were to remedy their perplexities by becoming Vico. This makes The New Science a huge induction puzzle, where the “answer” to the logical and stylistic messes that readers typically complain about is to make more of them. This is to say, if there is method to Vico’s madness, the method is ideally tested by proving it to be portable. This condenses the problem of metaphor — how is it possible for anything to be represented by something else — into a question of agency: how it is possible for thought at its extreme edges to be replicated by someone else. Vico is saying: “If I can think this way, you can, too.” Once you do, you will see that truth is animated by jouissance (a term he picked up at the Lacanian Academy for Awful Writing).

Metaphor, chez Vico, cuts between the subject and signifier to invert human nature into an ontology — an unconscious subjectivity “out there” — but inside this inversion, universals are sequentially structured: first as “gods,” then “heroes,” then “men.” Once this sequence is depleted within the modern mentality, it returns to begin over with a rebirth (ricorso) that is both regressive and progressive: a new means of knowing-without-knowing (kenosis).

Vico’s cycles have been appreciated by diverse minds — Michelet, Hegel, Marx, Joyce — and employed less consciously by theorists and poets who encountered Vico’s structural synonyms: intersecting spirals (Spengler, Wittkower, John Dunne, Yeats), frames-in-frames (Diego Velázquez, Antonello da Messina; later David Lynch, Alfred Hitchcock, et alia), and the “knight’s move” (the unanticipated orthogonal outcome of the “perverse incentive”). Vico has been called Western thought’s most original thinker, but in fact the reverse is true. Vico’s ideas are as old as humanity itself. His greatest challenge, he wrote, was to learn the “trick” of mythic thinking despite its resistance, as a “Real” of humanity, to the “Symbolic” of modern concepts. His accomplishment was to be copied, two hundred years later, and without awareness or acknowledgement, by Jacques Lacan, whose equally impressive exposé of the psyche’s Big Other came with a topology that Vico had surveyed as an ethnology.

Despite coincidences connecting these two difficult thinkers, only a few have argued for any essential intellectual connection. Baldine Saint Girons has tied Vico’s imaginative universal to the formations of the unconscious and Paolo Heritier has found the origin of law in the emblem. Anna Signorinni has brought to light the varied scholarship required for any new understanding of the Vico-Lacan connection. In the face of what has, until now**, been a mutual rejection of Lacan by Vichians and Vico by Lacanians, these and other scholars are proposing an armistice followed by a confederation. What James Joyce intuited as a lalangue of culture will, from these insights, become a new and original field of study, where it will be impossible to say whether Lacan had (unconsciously) studied Vico or Vico had (somehow) studied Lacan.

It would be chronologically difficult to say that Vico “corrects” Lacan or, based on the evidence of textual references, that Lacan “repackages” Vico. It is equally useless to believe that there is some meaning in a VICOLACAN anagram. A partial anagram, “CONCLAVE” would meaningfully precipitate out an E, A, and I to confirm a connection that has already been suggested, that Vico and Lacan were both ahead of their times by suggesting that human thinking is essentially artificial to begin with — “É A.I.!” Vico was the first to provide the template for how a truly human mind would be a Large Language Learning processor, and Lacan just barely missed the cybernetics boat with his fortuitous connection of lalangue to

Adamic bi-univocal correspondance, a “truth of truth.” Had, as Aaron Schuster has already written, Lacan had tarried for a few moments longer with Norbert Wiener’s important but little read chapter in Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine on the implicit suicidal impulse of machine “thinking,” the result is to take the scare-quotes off of “thinking” and acknowledge the implicit algorithmic/aleatory quality of the first human mentation. Aaron Schuster and Paolo Heritier are fore-runners who see LLL as a productive theoretical future for both Lacan and Vico.

The Lacanian-Freudian unconscious is no less aware of the death drive as a kind of Turing Stop, or the implicit undermining of happiness by the jouissance of the inductive puzzle. Induction after all was the logical name of Lacan’s first venture into scholarly publication, with his essay on Logical Time and the Three Prisoners’ Dilemma, the first formal analysis of the inside frame to the psychoanalytical community. To make the same claim for Vico’s verum ipsum factum requires just enough imagination to qualify as a proper reading of Vico’s own induction puzzle:

This is jouissance applied, clairvoyantly, to the position of the reader who suddenly finds her/himself writing the text of The New Science, in a stripped-down version of psychoanalysis’ après coup. If, to Vico’s three universals (imaginative, heroic, and conceptual) a fourth that Donald Verene suggested as the epicenter of a new scholarly understanding, it would be a variation of the Heroic Universal where, as Vico himself explained, the thinker turns from the barbarism of conceptual thinking to “stand at the precipice” and be, simultaneously, in a center.* Vico countered Kant’s sublimity in his etymology of scientia in scitus, truth allied with and confirmed by beauty.

Just as Kant applauded Islam and Judaism for the implicit sublimity of prohibiting representational art because they saw, both beneath and before the picture, a “hieroglyphic Real,” heroic thinking embraces the beautiful not on account of its visual appeal but, rather, its anamorphosis, its anaclasm (ἀνάκλασις, retroactive recovery) as well as its (Florenskian) iconostasis: the hieroglyphic mentality that led Girard Desargues to assert the paradox of dilation and cathesis: we stand up, above the ground, to confirm the ground’s infinity by bringing it within reach, a “proof of the body.”

vico was the first to claim that all thinking was artificial

Vico as the real father of cybernetics. This claim is based on Vico’s contention that all intelligence is artificial. His argument is a part of his theory of metaphor, in particular the very Lacan-like account of the metaphor that initiates human thought. This discussion includes basic talk about the nature of AI, particularly as we encounter it in conversations with ChatGPT and with similarities of Vico’s argument about human consciousness with Norbert Wiener’s account of the inherent suicide factor in machine computation.

• Iraj Ghoochani, The Folded Machine: Why Artificial Consciousness Requires a Bar
  Artificial Consciousness as the New Era
• Don Kunze, Response in a conversation about AI

 

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* Giambattista Vico, “On the Heroic Mind,” trans. Elizabeth Sewell and Anthony C. Sirignano, Social Research 43, 4 (Winter 1976): 886–903.

** The famous Columbia University Art History Scholar, Meyer Schapiro, substantially completed a book-length manuscript on “Vico on the Visual Arts,” but this was never published. In 1997 Lillian Milgram Schapiro would revisit this manuscript with David Rosand without realizing it as a publication project. Recently, however, Anna Eleanor Signorinni (Vico sur les arts visuels) has edited and translated Schapiro’s manuscripts, adding important notes about the text and its references to Vico. Signorinni organized a conference on “Vico, Antiquity, and the Visual Arts” at MSHE Ledoux, Besançon, France, November 3–4, 2025.

*** I have replaced “God” with “Providence” to acknowledge Vico’s clever way of working around the ever-vigilant Spanish Inquisition, whereby a “divine order” could be credited to the ingenuity of human fabrication rather than imposed by the omnipotent Judeo-Christian Maestro.