There Are Four Discourses

One of the questions that I’ve been pursuing concerns ‘foreclosure and the four discourses’ within the Lacanian orientation. Here are some points of departure extracted from a short text by Lacan titled “The Four Discourses” which was published in Culture/Clinic No 1:

1. Foreclosure is not exclusive to psychosis for Lacan. Foreclosure occurs in all clinical structures. I read somewhere by a commentator that there is foreclosure of the name of the father for psychotics and foreclosure of the woman for all speaking-beings. Another way to think about it, from the very last teaching of Lacan, is to say that there is foreclosure of the hole for all speaking-beings (whereby the ‘all’ situates this foreclosure at the level of being inside discourse rather than foreclosure of the possibility of discourse as in psychosis).
2. Discourse begins therefore from foreclosure of the woman and the hole, which means that it is a defense against the real. This makes the psychoanalytic discourse particularly strange because it does not aim to defend against the real but to confront it.
3. Lacan begins his thinking on the four discourses within the context of 1968, when student and professor revolutionaries were in the streets. He reminds them that structures do indeed walk in the streets, which means, in this case, that there are defenses against the real, hysteria being a foremost defense against the real. In 1978, ten years later, Lacan returns to the topic of discourse, at a time when he is thinking about the loss of the Other, and so on. He says: “there are four discourses.” The question therefore transforms into: what foreclosure is at stake within discourse? What is foreclosed by being inside of discourse?
4. Lacan opened with this statement in 1978: “there are four discourses.” He did not say that there were five discourses, even though, by this time, he had already established the capitalist discourse. For example, in 1972, which is six years earlier, he explicitly mentions it. So, why does he maintain that there are four discourses, while admitting, what many people call his fifth, that of the capitalist? This introduces a new question that is worth pursuing. One answer is the following: the capitalist discourse is a discourse which is not of the All and not of the “are,” or “is,” by which I mean, not of “being” but of “existence.”
5. He continued: “each one thinks it is the truth.” It implies that each discourse begins with its own version of the truth which it claims ought to be generalized. Each of the three discourses, then — whether master, university, or hysteric — are implicated in the ‘All.’ Yet, it is a new ‘All,’ one that Lacan situates within another register: that of the particular which is sealed in upon itself. Each discourse thinks that it is the truth, thinks that it expresses something of the world. Yet, the All is a fraud, a delusion. So, each one thinks it is the truth of a world beyond itself.
6. Lacan adds: “The only exception is the analytic discourse.” The analytic discourse does not dominate, by which I think he means that it does not begin from the standpoint of the master, S1. Each of the three discourses are variations on the master’s discourse in the sense that each responds, in one way or another, to S1. In the first case, there is a call for a response to S1, since the master calls upon an S2: S1 →S2, whereby → indicates a call. In the second case, the university, there is for S2 an unacknowledged S1 as truth which motivates the entire enterprise: S2/S1. In the hysteric’s discourse, as is popularly known, there is an intervention, directly, with the master, S1, from the position of the beautiful victim, $: $ →S1. In the case of the analyst’s discourse, the S1 is revealed, or produced, out of the interaction, but nothing is done with it: a →$/S1.
7. Lacan links domination to teaching. This is a period of his work when he is becoming extremely critical of teaching, transforming teaching into something a bit more than simply an ‘impossible profession,’ into a delusional practice as such. Anyone who teaches is mad. Does this mean that anyone who wants to be taught is also mad? It is an open question since we are also taught by our analysands. Lacan was up against the dissolution of his School based upon the problem with teaching psychoanalytic experience. As for the analytic discourse, it teaches nothing. It became a question of teaching what cannot be taught. I quote Lacan: “We would be better off if it did dominate, people will conclude, but in point of fact this discourse excludes domination; in other words, it teaches nothing. There is nothing universal about it, which is precisely why it cannot be taught.”
8. This final statement brings us back to the question of the universal, of the world or ‘All.’ There are no universal pretensions in psychoanalytic discourse, and hence, to teach is not to support a delusional apparatus per se, nor is it to contribute to generalizations or a world-construction, in of itself. The analyst’s discourse is not universal. This raises a new question: does it imply that the analyst’s discourse is particular? Here, I think it would be important to distinguish the particular from the singular, as Marie-Helene Brousse often does (e.g., the particular within the all from the one-by-one without an all). Whereas today’s environment seems to be one that has elevated the not-all to the point of an ideological imperative, thereby dissolving the old logic of hegemony based upon grand narratives, the singular interrupts the infinite slippage that is prone to occur within an environment anchored by the not-all. A question, again: are we outside of discourse today, or, is discourse itself outside of discourse — not at home within its own world?
9. Lacan asks: “how does one go about teaching what cannot be taught?” The answer will not be through public lectures, reading groups, and so on. As we shall see a few years later, it will also not be through Schools or institutions unless they are qualified and one of their essential organs becomes refined and elevated to the dignity of the principal teaching apparatus. Lacan says that Freud believed “all is but a dream and that everyone is mad, that is delusional.” This statement is big. Here, Lacan is claiming that this is a Freudian principle, not a Lacanian one. It is a provocation. It is true, if you follow Freud’s reasoning, this is precisely what Freud’s teaching reveals: from dreams to symptoms, there is an exportation of the dream-world. And, as Freud maintained, the madman is the dreamer, awake.
10. Ultimately, the antipathy, for Lacan, is between the university and analytic discourses. He did not claim that it was between the hysteric’s discourse and the analytic discourse. And why? It is a useful question. Today’s hysterics, those associated with the newest social movements, operate not by attacking the master of their social order, since that would have implied integration of an S1, but rather the objet petit a, that is, the refuse of the discourse. This is what must be foreclosed during each iteration of the discursive operation: anything that is not known, is immediately rectified through presupposition: “we already know what is properly moral,” or, “my gender was already always, and historically, …” It is a rectification of the real with the imaginary, S2 →a is therefore on the top line inasmuch as it implies that the a become reduced to the delusions of the university constructions: S1 →S2, since S1 is the truth of the discourse. Therefore, for Lacan, the key site of antagonism, if I may put it that way, during this period of his teaching, was between the university and analytic discourses: “might the antipathy between the university and analytic discourses be overcome at Vincennes? Certianly not. It is being put to work there; […] it is apparent there that, by coming up against its own impossibility, teaching is refreshed.” The psychoanalytic discourse does not begin with such certainties, and yet, it is not without delusion; how to maintain the psychoanalytic discourse rather than allow the scope of delusion to overcome it? Or, another important question: does the psychoanalytic discourse, by denying the university discourse, tactically align itself with transphobic voices, or contemporary conservative orientations? Finally, is psychoanalysis the only discourse which can do without the name of the father but without at the same time foreclosing the hole?
11. This last point is a fine one: in confronting the impossible, a version of the real, the teaching — by which we now know he meant delusion — is refreshed. The teaching becomes rendered as a new consistency. This is the side of theory-building that contributes to the madness of our time. It is the side of theory that is most welcomed on the internet today through podcasts and social media feeds since it contributes to the delusional machines of contemporary scientific-capitalism. Yet, Lacan was interested in that other side of teaching, just like the other side of the symptom, which is the space where the teaching teaches what cannot be taught.
12. What does he do next? Many commentators of this text suggest that the second half is unrelated to the first, and yet, the relationship exists. For example, he says that the Department of Psychoanalysis produced “a journal, Ornicar?, that debates what is being published eveywhere in the name of psychoanalysis.” In other words, it disrupts the temptation toward teaching. The journal debates what comes under the name psychoanalysis, challenging theory. And then he names it an experiment, by which he meant, I think, something different since it challenges and debates what comes under the name psychoanalysis and a clinical section which restores the experience of psychoanalysis that is singular to each one.