Imagining Structure, Thingly Structure — Class 5, Lacan’s 24th Seminar Notes
I have found that Jacques-Alain Miller, in “Les Trumains,” provides a nice compass for seminar 24 and its relationship to seminar 25: “the very last” Lacan.
First, turning in circles. It is the torus, also structure.
Miller: “[Lacan] explores what turning in circles has of structure. The turning in circles has a structure. We see this in the Borromean knot, which brings together several turning in circles. As for the torus, it brings together turning in circles and the hole. Tori are disposed to coming together in a Borromean manner.” What is structure? Miller says that it is “what allows you to get out of the dizziness” of turning in circles. That seems great — but has it been the fantasy of psychoanalysis, structure? If there is no waking up during this period of Lacan’s teaching then it is because the symptom can never be dissolved, even during the end of analysis — when interpretation is supposed to soak it up. A real in the symptom, sinthome.
Lacan calls into question the “fantasy of structure.” Which structure? The one of his earlier teaching, the Freudian one even: “we grasp the distance that Lacan takes from the fantasy of structure.” It is the structure of linguistics as a pre-given, as always already established, as natural. Is language a timeless structure? It is a question — we suppose it to be true that language has no beginning, it is without origin. And yet, there is, within science, the ‘big bang.’ And yet, within Freud, there is ‘birth trauma.’ Miller says: “[it is] the fantasy of structure [that] explicitly brings with it the assumption that language is already there, rather than the emphasis on learning, on apprenticeship.” I quite like this statement: if language is timeless, it is because there is something before language, in my hypothesis: not the arche-fossil of post-continental philosophy, but something else, something missing; there is no such thing as meta-language, claimed Lacan, but he also added, somewhere, because it there is only meta-language, “props of language,” by which he means, I think — we have never entered the structure of language.
Lacan seems to me to be suggesting the contrary of language as pre-given: one is always outside of language, and this becomes generalized (rather than there is no outside to the structure of language). It becomes a question of how one can imagine a structure, the Borromean knot. This has something to do with existence, ex-sistence, I think — as NW suggested (plus one from a cartel I am in on 24th seminar). Miller continued: “one learns to speak […] and this leaves traces, it has consequences. These consequences are what we call sinthome.”
In the very last teaching — seminar 24 and 25 — there is an exploration of the “inadequacy of the symbolic” (Miller). One gets the sense that Lacan is taking it very serious, going to the end with it: one cannot speak of the name as the murder of the thing. It leads Lacan to an emphasis on the imaginary: “[Lacan’s earlier] delusion with linguistics consisted precisely in emphasizing the primacy of the word over the thing, to attribute to words the power to make things.” One cannot help but turn in circles within the structure that is real. One turns around in the Borromean knot, as in a torus. I find it funny that Lacan reduces all of the rings of string to Tori — it is like a joke. But are names words? Does the name precede the thing, or is that part of the fantasy of structure? It is a confusion for me because structure is no longer symbolic here because what consists is the real: “if I put forward a notion of the real, it’s insofar as it is consistent” (Lacan, 27; my own translation). It is no longer a symbolic structure, held together by the name, but that of the real: a real structure, or what Miller calls a “thingly structure.” So, the Borromean knot is now inside of the thing, rather than then thing inside of the Borromean knot — how to bring it outside? It is a question of the cut, I think. But it implies also that the word or the name is not the murder of the thing — it is the thing itself.
Miller says that the key to this period of Lacan’s teaching is that the imaginary is the means through which a pact is being made with the real rather than the symbolic (since the latter is now completely inadequate to the task). It is through the imaginary that one finds a way out of the dizziness of turning in circles, even if one does nothing but turn in circles. On the one hand, there is the consistency of imaginary and real, the imaginary being a continuation with the real. On the other hand, there is the incoherence of the real, even in some imaginary form which is the Borromean knot. Incoherence is the real without meaning in the imaginary.
Why does Lacan reject Dante’s “names are a consequence of things?” There is for Lacan no longer any power to the name — is there? Lacan says: “that means that the real, at least as I believe that I can represent that real, is only held together by structure” (my translation). The structure is what Lacan imagines of the real, without meaning. Does it give the real consistency while foregoing coherence? Lacan: “the real is incoherent precisely inasmuch as it is the structure.” A final thought, then. Lacan: “long ago, [the Borromean knot was related to structure and] that used to mean that if a family withdrew, a withdrawal from a group of three, the other two would at the same time find themselves free not to get along anymore.” Is Lacan suggesting that he does not find this true anymore? In the fraternity, discussed in seminar …Or Worse, is there not evidence of the depreciation of the symbolic with siblings, brothers, comrades, who would nonetheless cohere? Lacan continues: “not only are names not the consequence of things, but we can claim the exact opposite.” Okay, but what is, precisely, the opposite? Is it that things are a consequence of names? I’m not entirely convinced: the name is depreciated, and there is only the structure, imagined.
